JAMES

JOYCE

T H E
C O M P L E T E
W O R K S

... well, almost complete  ® 

Version 11.5    [January 2016]    by pynch

c o n t e n t s — j o y c e

Chamber Music   (1907)

Dubliners   (1914)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man   (1916)

Exiles   (1918)

Ulysses   (1922)

Pomes Penyeach   (1927)

Finnegans Wake   (1939)

Poems

Critical Writings

Other Writings

Letters

C H A M B E R
M U S I C

by
J  A  M  E  S     J  O  Y  C  E

published May 1907

by Elkin Mathews, London

c o n t e n t s — c h a m b e r

I    II    III    IV    V

VI    VII    VIII    IX    X

XI    XII    XIII    XIV

XV    XVI    XVII    XVIII

XIX    XX    XXI

XXII    XXIII    XXIV

XXV    XXVI    XXVII

XXVIII    XXIX    XXX

XXXI    XXXII    XXXIII

XXXIV    XXXV    XXXVI

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[The text follows the first edition: Elkin Mathews, London 1907.]

I

Strings in the earth and air

Make music sweet;

Strings by the river where

The willows meet.

There’s music along the river

For Love wanders there,

Pale flowers on his mantle,

Dark leaves on his hair.

All softly playing,

With head to the music bent,

And fingers straying

Upon an instrument.

II

The twilight turns from amethyst

To deep and deeper blue,

The lamp fills with a pale green glow

The trees of the avenue.

The old piano plays an air,

Sedate and slow and gay;

She bends upon the yellow keys,

Her head inclines this way.

Shy thoughts and grave wide eyes and hands

That wander as they list—

The twilight turns to darker blue

With lights of amethyst.

III

At that hour when all things have repose,

O lonely watcher of the skies,

Do you hear the night wind and the sighs

Of harps playing unto Love to unclose

The pale gates of sunrise?

When all things repose do you alone

Awake to hear the sweet harps play

To Love before him on his way,

And the night wind answering in antiphon

Till night is overgone?

Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,

Whose way in heaven is aglow

At that hour when soft lights come and go,

Soft sweet music in the air above

And in the earth below.

IV

When the shy star goes forth in heaven

All maidenly, disconsolate,

Hear you amid the drowsy even

One who is singing by your gate.

His song is softer than the dew

And he is come to visit you.

O bend no more in revery

When he at eventide is calling,

Nor muse: Who may this singer be

Whose song about my heart is falling?

Know you by this, the lover’s chant,

’Tis I that am your visitant.

V

Lean out of the window,

Goldenhair,

I heard you singing

A merry air.

My book was closed;

I read no more,

Watching the fire dance

On the floor.

I have left my book,

I have left my room,

For I heard you singing

Through the gloom.

Singing and singing

A merry air,

Lean out of the window,

Goldenhair.

VI

I would in that sweet bosom be

(O sweet it is and fair it is!)

Where no rude wind might visit me.

Because of sad austerities

I would in that sweet bosom be.

I would be ever in that heart

(O soft I knock and soft entreat her!)

Where only peace might be my part.

Austerities were all the sweeter

So I were ever in that heart.

VII

My love is in a light attire

Among the apple-trees,

Where the gay winds do most desire

To run in companies.

There, where the gay winds stay to woo

The young leaves as they pass,

My love goes slowly, bending to

Her shadow on the grass;

And where the sky’s a pale blue cup

Over the laughing land,

My love goes lightly, holding up

Her dress with dainty hand.

VIII

Who goes amid the green wood

With springtide all adorning her?

Who goes amid the merry green wood

To make it merrier?

Who passes in the sunlight

By ways that know the light footfall?

Who passes in the sweet sunlight

With mien so virginal?

The ways of all the woodland

Gleam with a soft and golden fire—

For whom does all the sunny woodland

Carry so brave attire?

O, it is for my true love

The woods their rich apparel wear—

O, it is for my own true love,

That is so young and fair.

IX

Winds of May, that dance on the sea,

Dancing a ring-around in glee

From furrow to furrow, while overhead

The foam flies up to be garlanded,

In silvery arches spanning the air,

Saw you my true love anywhere?

Welladay! Welladay!

For the winds of May!

Love is unhappy when love is away!

X

Bright cap and streamers,

He sings in the hollow:

Come follow, come follow,

All you that love.

Leave dreams to the dreamers

That will not after,

That song and laughter

Do nothing move.

With ribbons streaming

He sings the bolder;

In troop at his shoulder

The wild bees hum.

And the time of dreaming

Dreams is over—

As lover to lover,

Sweetheart, I come.

XI

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu,

Bid adieu to girlish days,

Happy Love is come to woo

Thee and woo thy girlish ways—

The zone that doth become thee fair,

The snood upon thy yellow hair.

When thou hast heard his name upon

The bugles of the cherubim

Begin thou softly to unzone

Thy girlish bosom unto him

And softly to undo the snood

That is the sign of maidenhood.

XII

What counsel has the hooded moon

Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet,

Of Love in ancient plenilune,

Glory and stars beneath his feet—

A sage that is but kith and kin

With the comedian Capuchin?

Believe me rather that am wise

In disregard of the divine,

A glory kindles in those eyes

Trembles to starlight. Mine, O Mine!

No more be tears in moon or mist

For thee, sweet sentimentalist.

XIII

Go seek her out all courteously,

And say I come,

Wind of spices whose song is ever

Epithalamium.

O, hurry over the dark lands

And run upon the sea

For seas and lands shall not divide us,

My love and me.

Now, wind, of your good courtesy

I pray you go,

And come into her little garden

And sing at her window;

Singing: The bridal wind is blowing

For Love is at his noon;

And soon will your true love be with you,

Soon, O soon.

XIV

My dove, my beautiful one,

Arise, arise!

The night-dew lies

Upon my lips and eyes.

The odorous winds are weaving

A music of sighs:

Arise, arise,

My dove, my beautiful one!

I wait by the cedar tree,

My sister, my love.

White breast of the dove,

My breast shall be your bed.

The pale dew lies

Like a veil on my head.

My fair one, my fair dove,

Arise, arise!

XV

From dewy dreams, my soul, arise,

From love’s deep slumber and from death,

For lo! the trees are full of sighs

Whose leaves the morn admonisheth.

Eastward the gradual dawn prevails

Where softly-burning fires appear,

Making to tremble all those veils

Of grey and golden gossamer.

While sweetly, gently, secretly,

The flowery bells of morn are stirred

And the wise choirs of faery

Begin (innumerous!) to be heard.

XVI

O cool is the valley now

And there, love, will we go

For many a choir is singing now

Where Love did sometime go.

And hear you not the thrushes calling,

Calling us away?

O cool and pleasant is the valley

And there, love, will we stay.

XVII

Because your voice was at my side

I gave him pain,

Because within my hand I held

Your hand again.

There is no word nor any sign

Can make amend—

He is a stranger to me now

Who was my friend.

XVIII

O sweetheart, hear you

Your lover’s tale;

A man shall have sorrow

When friends him fail.

For he shall know then

Friends be untrue

And a little ashes

Their words come to.

But one unto him

Will softly move

And softly woo him

In ways of love.

His hand is under

Her smooth round breast;

So he who has sorrow

Shall have rest.

XIX

Be not sad because all men

Prefer a lying clamour before you:

Sweetheart, be at peace again—

Can they dishonour you?

They are sadder than all tears;

Their lives ascend as a continual sigh.

Proudly answer to their tears:

As they deny, deny.

XX

In the dark pine-wood

I would we lay,

In deep cool shadow

At noon of day.

How sweet to lie there,

Sweet to kiss,

Where the great pine-forest

Enaisled is!

Thy kiss descending

Sweeter were

With a soft tumult

Of thy hair.

O, unto the pine-wood

At noon of day

Come with me now,

Sweet love, away.

XXI

He who hath glory lost, nor hath

Found any soul to fellow his,

Among his foes in scorn and wrath

Holding to ancient nobleness,

That high unconsortable one—

His love is his companion.

XXII

Of that so sweet imprisonment

My soul, dearest, is fain—

Soft arms that woo me to relent

And woo me to detain.

Ah, could they ever hold me there

Gladly were I a prisoner!

Dearest, through interwoven arms

By love made tremulous,

That night allures me where alarms

Nowise may trouble us;

But sleep to dreamier sleep be wed

Where soul with soul lies prisoned.

XXIII

This heart that flutters near my heart

My hope and all my riches is,

Unhappy when we draw apart

And happy between kiss and kiss;

My hope and all my riches—yes!—

And all my happiness.

For there, as in some mossy nest

The wrens will divers treasures keep,

I laid those treasures I possessed

Ere that mine eyes had learned to weep.

Shall we not be as wise as they

Though love live but a day?

XXIV

Silently she’s combing,

Combing her long hair,

Silently and graciously,

With many a pretty air.

The sun is in the willow leaves

And on the dappled grass,

And still she’s combing her long hair

Before the looking-glass.

I pray you, cease to comb out,

Comb out your long hair,

For I have heard of witchery

Under a pretty air,

That makes as one thing to the lover

Staying and going hence,

All fair, with many a pretty air

And many a negligence.

XXV

Lightly come or lightly go:

Though thy heart presage thee woe,

Vales and many a wasted sun,

Oread let thy laughter run

Till the irreverent mountain air

Ripple all thy flying hair.

Lightly, lightly—ever so:

Clouds that wrap the vales below

At the hour of evenstar

Lowliest attendants are;

Love and laughter song-confessed

When the heart is heaviest.

XXVI

Thou leanest to the shell of night,

Dear lady, a divining ear.

In that soft choiring of delight

What sound hath made thy heart to fear?

Seemed it of rivers rushing forth

From the grey deserts of the north?

That mood of thine, O timorous,

Is his, if thou but scan it well,

Who a mad tale bequeaths to us

At ghosting hour conjurable—

And all for some strange name he read

In Purchas or in Holinshed.

XXVII

Though I thy Mithridates were,

Framed to defy the poison-dart,

Yet must thou fold me unaware

To know the rapture of thy heart,

And I but render and confess

The malice of thy tenderness.

For elegant and antique phrase,

Dearest, my lips wax all too wise;

Nor have I known a love whose praise

Our piping poets solemnize,

Neither a love where may not be

Ever so little falsity.

XXVIII

Gentle lady, do not sing

Sad songs about the end of love;

Lay aside sadness and sing

How love that passes is enough.

Sing about the long deep sleep

Of lovers that are dead, and how

In the grave all love shall sleep:

Love is aweary now.

XXIX

Dear heart, why will you use me so?

Dear eyes that gently me upbraid,

Still are you beautiful—but O,

How is your beauty raimented!

Through the clear mirror of your eyes,

Through the soft sigh of kiss to kiss,

Desolate winds assail with cries

The shadowy garden where love is.

And soon shall love dissolved be

When over us the wild winds blow—

But you, dear love, too dear to me,

Alas! why will you use me so?

XXX

Love came to us in time gone by

When one at twilight shyly played

And one in fear was standing nigh—

For Love at first is all afraid.

We were grave lovers. Love is past

That had his sweet hours many a one;

Welcome to us now at the last

The ways that we shall go upon.

XXXI

O, it was out by Donnycarney

When the bat flew from tree to tree

My love and I did walk together;

And sweet were the words she said to me.

Along with us the summer wind

Went murmuring—O, happily!—

But softer than the breath of summer

Was the kiss she gave to me.

XXXII

Rain has fallen all the day.

O come among the laden trees:

The leaves lie thick upon the way

Of memories.

Staying a little by the way

Of memories shall we depart.

Come, my beloved, where I may

Speak to your heart.

XXXIII

Now, O now, in this brown land

Where Love did so sweet music make

We two shall wander, hand in hand,

Forbearing for old friendship’ sake,

Nor grieve because our love was gay

Which now is ended in this way.

A rogue in red and yellow dress

Is knocking, knocking at the tree;

And all around our loneliness

The wind is whistling merrily.

The leaves—they do not sigh at all

When the year takes them in the fall.

Now, O now, we hear no more

The vilanelle and roundelay!

Yet will we kiss, sweetheart, before

We take sad leave at close of day.

Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything—

The year, the year is gathering.

XXXIV

Sleep now, O sleep now,

O you unquiet heart!

A voice crying “Sleep now”

Is heard in my heart.

The voice of the winter

Is heard at the door.

O sleep, for the winter

Is crying “Sleep no more.”

My kiss will give peace now

And quiet to your heart—

Sleep on in peace now,

O you unquiet heart!

XXXV

All day I hear the noise of waters

Making moan,

Sad as the sea-bird is, when going

Forth alone,

He hears the winds cry to the waters’

Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing

Where I go.

I hear the noise of many waters

Far below.

All day, all night, I hear them flowing

To and fro.

XXXVI

I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.

They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,

Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?

My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

 ® 

D U B L I N E R S

by     
J  A  M  E  S     J  O  Y  C  E     

published June 15, 1914
by Grant Richards Ltd., London

c o n t e n t s — d u b l i n 

The Sisters      An Encounter

Araby      Eveline

After the Race      Two Gallants

The Boarding House

A Little Cloud      Counterparts

Clay      A Painful Case

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

A Mother      Grace

The Dead

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[The text follows the Viking Press edition, New York 1969, Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, eds.]

The Sisters

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some former remark of his:

—No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly ... but there was something queer ... there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion....

He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery.

—I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those ... peculiar cases.... But it’s hard to say....

He began to puff again at his pipe without giving us his theory. My uncle saw me staring and said to me:

—Well, so your old friend is gone, you’ll be sorry to hear.

—Who? said I.

—Father Flynn.

—Is he dead?

—Mr Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house.

I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

—The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him.

—God have mercy on his soul, said my aunt piously.

Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me but I would not satisfy him by looking up from my plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

—I wouldn’t like children of mine, he said, to have too much to say to a man like that.

—How do you mean, Mr Cotter? asked my aunt.

—What I mean is, said old Cotter, it’s bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be ... Am I right, Jack?

—That’s my principle, too, said my uncle. Let him learn to box his corner. That’s what I’m always saying to that Rosicrucian there: take exercise. Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer. And that’s what stands to me now. Education is all very fine and large.... Mr Cotter might take a pick of that leg of mutton, he added to my aunt.

—No, no, not for me, said old Cotter.

My aunt brought the dish from the safe and laid it on the table.

—But why do you think it’s not good for children, Mr Cotter? she asked.

—It’s bad for children, said old Cotter, because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect....

I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!

It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery. The drapery consisted mainly of children’s bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. A crape bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon. Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

July 1st, 1895

The Rev. James Flynn (formerly of S. Catherine’s Church, Meath Street), aged sixty-five years.

R.I.P.

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle had said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip—a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.

As I walked along in the sun I remembered old Cotter’s words and tried to remember what had happened afterwards in the dream. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange—in Persia, I thought.... But I could not remember the end of the dream.

In the evening my aunt took me with her to visit the house of mourning. It was after sunset; but the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds. Nannie received us in the hall; and, as it would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her for all. The old woman pointed upwards interrogatively and, on my aunt’s nodding, proceeded to toil up the narrow staircase before us, her bowed head being scarcely above the level of the banister-rail. At the first landing she stopped and beckoned us forward encouragingly towards the open door of the dead-room. My aunt went in and the old woman, seeing that I hesitated to enter, began to beckon to me again repeatedly with her hand.

I went in on tiptoe. The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman’s mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin.

But no. When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room—the flowers.

We blessed ourselves and came away. In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state. I groped my way towards my usual chair in the corner while Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Then, at her sister’s bidding, she poured out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us. She pressed me to take some cream crackers also but I declined because I thought I would make too much noise eating them. She seemed to be somewhat disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa where she sat down behind her sister. No one spoke: we all gazed at the empty fireplace.

My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

—Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world.

Eliza sighed again and bowed her head in assent. My aunt fingered the stem of her wine-glass before sipping a little.

—Did he ... peacefully? she asked.

—O, quite peacefully, ma’am, said Eliza. You couldn’t tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised.

—And everything...?

—Father O’Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and prepared him and all.

—He knew then?

—He was quite resigned.

—He looks quite resigned, said my aunt.

—That’s what the woman we had in to wash him said. She said he just looked as if he was asleep, he looked that peaceful and resigned. No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.

—Yes, indeed, said my aunt.

She sipped a little more from her glass and said:

—Well, Miss Flynn, at any rate it must be a great comfort for you to know that you did all you could for him. You were both very kind to him, I must say.

Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees.

—Ah, poor James! she said. God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are—we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it.

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall asleep.

—There’s poor Nannie, said Eliza, looking at her, she’s wore out. All the work we had, she and me, getting in the woman to wash him and then laying him out and then the coffin and then arranging about the Mass in the chapel. Only for Father O’Rourke I don’t know what we’d have done at all. It was him brought us all them flowers and them two candlesticks out of the chapel and wrote out the notice for the Freeman’s General and took charge of all the papers for the cemetery and poor James’s insurance.

—Wasn’t that good of him? said my aunt.

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

—Ah, there’s no friends like the old friends, she said, when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust.

—Indeed, that’s true, said my aunt. And I’m sure now that he’s gone to his eternal reward he won’t forget you and all your kindness to him.

—Ah, poor James! said Eliza. He was no great trouble to us. You wouldn’t hear him in the house any more than now. Still, I know he’s gone and all to that....

—It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him, said my aunt.

—I know that, said Eliza. I won’t be bringing him in his cup of beef-tea any more, nor you, ma’am, sending him his snuff. Ah, poor James!

She stopped, as if she were communing with the past and then said shrewdly:

—Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly. Whenever I’d bring in his soup to him there I’d find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open.

She laid a finger against her nose and frowned: then she continued:

—But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about—them with the rheumatic wheels—for the day cheap, he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that.... Poor James!

—The Lord have mercy on his soul! said my aunt.

Eliza took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with it. Then she put it back again in her pocket and gazed into the empty grate for some time without speaking.

—He was too scrupulous always, she said. The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed.

—Yes, said my aunt. He was a disappointed man. You could see that.

A silence took possession of the little room and, under cover of it, I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then returned quietly to my chair in the corner. Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep revery. We waited respectfully for her to break the silence: and after a long pause she said slowly:

—It was that chalice he broke.... That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still.... They say it was the boy’s fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him!

—And was that it? said my aunt. I heard something....

Eliza nodded.

—That affected his mind, she said. After that he began to mope by himself, talking to no one and wandering about by himself. So one night he was wanted for to go on a call and they couldn’t find him anywhere. They looked high up and low down; and still they couldn’t see a sight of him anywhere. So then the clerk suggested to try the chapel. So then they got the keys and opened the chapel and the clerk and Father O’Rourke and another priest that was there brought in a light for to look for him.... And what do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself?

She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.

Eliza resumed:

—Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself.... So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him....

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An Encounter

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo the idler held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:

—Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel.

—This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! Hardly had the day ... Go on! What day? Hardly had the day dawned ... Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.

—What is this rubbish? he said. The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched scribbler that writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were ... National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or ...

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of school-life for one day at least. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching. Each of us saved up sixpence. We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge. Mahony’s big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. Leo Dillon was afraid we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked, very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House. We were reassured: and I brought the first stage of the plot to an end by collecting sixpence from the other two, at the same time showing them my own sixpence. When we were making the last arrangements on the eve we were all vaguely excited. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:

—Till to-morrow, mates.

That night I slept badly. In the morning I was firstcomer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. I sat up on the coping of the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.

When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony’s grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Bunsen Burner. We waited on for a quarter of an hour more but still there was no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at last, jumped down and said:

—Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it.

—And his sixpence...? I said.

—That’s forfeit, said Mahony. And so much the better for us—a bob and a tanner instead of a bob.

We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road. Mahony began to play the Indian as soon as we were out of public sight. He chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult and, when two ragged boys began, out of chivalry, to fling stones at us, he proposed that we should charge them. I objected that the boys were too small, and so we walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us: Swaddlers! Swaddlers! thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark-complexioned, wore the silver badge of a cricket club in his cap. When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three. We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he would get at three o’clock from Mr Ryan.

We came then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the quays and, as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported in the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. We were serious to the point of solemnity, but once during the short voyage our eyes met and we laughed. When we landed we watched the discharging of the graceful three-master which we had observed from the other quay. Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion.... The sailors’ eyes were blue and grey and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell:

—All right! All right!

When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers’ shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live. We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster’s shop and bought a bottle of raspberry lemonade each. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a cat down a lane, but the cat escaped into a wide field. We both felt rather tired and when we reached the field we made at once for a sloping bank over the ridge of which we could see the Dodder.

It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House. We had to be home before four o’clock lest our adventure should be discovered. Mahony looked regretfully at his catapult and I had to suggest going home by train before he regained any cheerfulness. The sun went in behind some clouds and left us to our jaded thoughts and the crumbs of our provisions.

There was nobody but ourselves in the field. When we had lain on the bank for some time without speaking I saw a man approaching from the far end of the field. I watched him lazily as I chewed one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes. He came along by the bank slowly. He walked with one hand upon his hip and in the other hand he held a stick with which he tapped the turf lightly. He was shabbily dressed in a suit of greenish-black and wore what we used to call a jerry hat with a high crown. He seemed to be fairly old for his moustache was ashen-grey. When he passed at our feet he glanced up at us quickly and then continued his way. We followed him with our eyes and saw that when he had gone on for perhaps fifty paces he turned about and began to retrace his steps. He walked towards us very slowly, always tapping the ground with his stick, so slowly that I thought he was looking for something in the grass.

He stopped when he came level with us and bade us good-day. We answered him and he sat down beside us on the slope slowly and with great care. He began to talk of the weather, saying that it would be a very hot summer and adding that the seasons had changed greatly since he was a boy—a long time ago. He said that the happiest time of one’s life was undoubtedly one’s schoolboy days and that he would give anything to be young again. While he expressed these sentiments which bored us a little we kept silent. Then he began to talk of school and of books. He asked us whether we had read the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton. I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the end he said:

—Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now, he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, he is different; he goes in for games.

He said he had all Sir Walter Scott’s works and all Lord Lytton’s works at home and never tired of reading them. Of course, he said, there were some of Lord Lytton’s works which boys couldn’t read. Mahony asked why couldn’t boys read them—a question which agitated and pained me because I was afraid the man would think I was as stupid as Mahony. The man, however, only smiled. I saw that he had great gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth. Then he asked us which of us had the most sweethearts. Mahony mentioned lightly that he had three totties. The man asked me how many had I. I answered that I had none. He did not believe me and said he was sure I must have one. I was silent.

—Tell us, said Mahony pertly to the man, how many have you yourself?

The man smiled as before and said that when he was our age he had lots of sweethearts.

—Every boy, he said, has a little sweetheart.

His attitude on this point struck me as strangely liberal in a man of his age. In my heart I thought that what he said about boys and sweethearts was reasonable. But I disliked the words in his mouth and I wondered why he shivered once or twice as if he feared something or felt a sudden chill. As he proceeded I noticed that his accent was good. He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew. There was nothing he liked, he said, so much as looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her beautiful soft hair. He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not wish others to overhear. He repeated his phrases over and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice. I continued to gaze towards the foot of the slope, listening to him.

After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

—I say! Look what he’s doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:

—I say ... He’s a queer old josser!

—In case he asks us for our names, I said, let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith.

We said nothing further to each other. I was still considering whether I would go away or not when the man came back and sat down beside us again. Hardly had he sat down when Mahony, catching sight of the cat which had escaped him, sprang up and pursued her across the field. The man and I watched the chase. The cat escaped once more and Mahony began to throw stones at the wall she had escaladed. Desisting from this, he began to wander about the far end of the field, aimlessly.

After an interval the man spoke to me. He said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school. I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School boys to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent. He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again.

The man continued his monologue. He seemed to have forgotten his recent liberalism. He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.

I waited till his monologue paused again. Then I stood up abruptly. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles. When I reached the top of the slope I turned round and, without looking at him, called loudly across the field:

—Murphy!

My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer. How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.

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Araby

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gantlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times.

At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forget whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.

—And why can’t you? I asked.

While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

—It’s well for you, she said.

—If I go, I said, I will bring you something.

What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.

On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaar in the evening. He was fussing at the hallstand, looking for the hat-brush, and answered me curtly:

—Yes, boy, I know.

As he was in the hall I could not go into the front parlour and lie at the window. I left the house in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school. The air was pitilessly raw and already my heart misgave me.

When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home. Still it was early. I sat staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room. I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high cold empty gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.

When I came downstairs again I found Mrs Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old garrulous woman, a pawnbroker’s widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea-table. The meal was prolonged beyond an hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she couldn’t wait any longer, but it was after eight o’clock and she did not like to be out late, as the night air was bad for her. When she had gone I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists. My aunt said:

—I’m afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord.

At nine o’clock I heard my uncle’s latchkey in the halldoor. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.

—The people are in bed and after their first sleep now, he said.

I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically:

—Can’t you give him the money and let him go? You’ve kept him late enough as it is.

My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old saying: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. He asked me where I was going and, when I had told him a second time he asked me did I know The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed. When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt.

I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station. The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey. I took my seat in a third-class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten. In front of me was a large building which displayed the magical name.

I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I found myself in a big hall girdled at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Café Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.

Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.

—O, I never said such a thing!

—O, but you did!

—O, but I didn’t!

—Didn’t she say that?

—Yes. I heard her.

—O, there’s a ... fib!

Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:

—No, thank you.

The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.

I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

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Eveline

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field—the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

—He is in Melbourne now.

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.

—Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?

—Look lively, Miss Hill, please.

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and, when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.

—I know these sailor chaps, he said.

One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly.

The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mother’s bonnet to make the children laugh.

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:

—Damned Italians! coming over here!

As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being—that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:

—Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, to-morrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

—Come!

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

—Come!

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish!

—Eveline! Evvy!

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

 ® 

After the Race

The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed. Their sympathy, however, was for the blue cars—the cars of their friends, the French.

The French, moreover, were virtual victors. Their team had finished solidly; they had been placed second and third and the driver of the winning German car was reported a Belgian. Each blue car, therefore, received a double round of welcome as it topped the crest of the hill and each cheer of welcome was acknowledged with smiles and nods by those in the car. In one of these trimly built cars was a party of four young men whose spirits seemed to be at present well above the level of successful Gallicism: in fact, these four young men were almost hilarious. They were Charles Ségouin, the owner of the car; André Rivière, a young electrician of Canadian birth; a huge Hungarian named Villona and a neatly groomed young man named Doyle. Ségouin was in good humour because he had unexpectedly received some orders in advance (he was about to start a motor establishment in Paris) and Rivière was in good humour because he was to be appointed manager of the establishment; these two young men (who were cousins) were also in good humour because of the success of the French cars. Villona was in good humour because he had had a very satisfactory luncheon; and besides he was an optimist by nature. The fourth member of the party, however, was too excited to be genuinely happy.

He was about twenty-six years of age, with a soft, light brown moustache and rather innocent-looking grey eyes. His father, who had begun life as an advanced Nationalist, had modified his views early. He had made his money as a butcher in Kingstown and by opening shops in Dublin and in the suburbs he had made his money many times over. He had also been fortunate enough to secure some of the police contracts and in the end he had become rich enough to be alluded to in the Dublin newspapers as a merchant prince. He had sent his son to England to be educated in a big Catholic college and had afterwards sent him to Dublin University to study law. Jimmy did not study very earnestly and took to bad courses for a while. He had money and he was popular; and he divided his time curiously between musical and motoring circles. Then he had been sent for a term to Cambridge to see a little life. His father, remonstrative, but covertly proud of the excess, had paid his bills and brought him home. It was at Cambridge that he had met Ségouin. They were not much more than acquaintances as yet but Jimmy found great pleasure in the society of one who had seen so much of the world and was reputed to own some of the biggest hotels in France. Such a person (as his father agreed) was well worth knowing, even if he had not been the charming companion he was. Villona was entertaining also—a brilliant pianist—but, unfortunately, very poor.

The car ran on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth. The two cousins sat on the front seat; Jimmy and his Hungarian friend sat behind. Decidedly Villona was in excellent spirits; he kept up a deep bass hum of melody for miles of the road. The Frenchmen flung their laughter and light words over their shoulders and often Jimmy had to strain forward to catch the quick phrase. This was not altogether pleasant for him, as he had nearly always to make a deft guess at the meaning and shout back a suitable answer in the teeth of a high wind. Besides Villona’s humming would confuse anybody; the noise of the car, too.

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy’s excitement. He had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals. At the control Ségouin had presented him to one of the French competitors and, in answer to his confused murmur of compliment, the swarthy face of the driver had disclosed a line of shining white teeth. It was pleasant after that honour to return to the profane world of spectators amid nudges and significant looks. Then as to money—he really had a great sum under his control. Ségouin, perhaps, would not think it a great sum but Jimmy who, in spite of temporary errors, was at heart the inheritor of solid instincts knew well with what difficulty it had been got together. This knowledge had previously kept his bills within the limits of reasonable recklessness and, if he had been so conscious of the labour latent in money when there had been question merely of some freak of the higher intelligence, how much more so now when he was about to stake the greater part of his substance! It was a serious thing for him.

Of course, the investment was a good one and Ségouin had managed to give the impression that it was by a favour of friendship the mite of Irish money was to be included in the capital of the concern. Jimmy had a respect for his father’s shrewdness in business matters and in this case it had been his father who had first suggested the investment; money to be made in the motor business, pots of money. Moreover Ségouin had the unmistakable air of wealth. Jimmy set out to translate into days’ work that lordly car in which he sat. How smoothly it ran. In what style they had come careering along the country roads! The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses of the swift blue animal.

They drove down Dame Street. The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the Bank Ségouin drew up and Jimmy and his friend alighted. A little knot of people collected on the footpath to pay homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that evening in Ségouin’s hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers. They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain pride mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue. Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed and, as he stood in the hall giving a last equation to the bows of his dress tie, his father may have felt even commercially satisfied at having secured for his son qualities often unpurchasable. His father, therefore, was unusually friendly with Villona and his manner expressed a real respect for foreign accomplishments; but this subtlety of his host was probably lost upon the Hungarian, who was beginning to have a sharp desire for his dinner.

The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room lit by electric candle-lamps. They talked volubly and with little reserve. Jimmy, whose imagination was kindling, conceived the lively youth of the Frenchmen twined elegantly upon the firm framework of the Englishman’s manner. A graceful image of his, he thought, and a just one. He admired the dexterity with which their host directed the conversation. The five young men had various tastes and their tongues had been loosened. Villona, with immense respect, began to discover to the mildly surprised Englishman the beauties of the English madrigal, deploring the loss of old instruments. Rivière, not wholly ingenuously, undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of the French mechanicians. The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to prevail in ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Ségouin shepherded his party into politics. Here was congenial ground for all. Jimmy, under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last. The room grew doubly hot and Ségouin’s task grew harder each moment: there was even danger of personal spite. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when the toast had been drunk, he threw open a window significantly.

That night the city wore the mask of a capital. The five young men strolled along Stephen’s Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. They talked loudly and gaily and their cloaks dangled from their shoulders. The people made way for them. At the corner of Grafton Street a short fat man was putting two handsome ladies on a car in charge of another fat man. The car drove off and the short fat man caught sight of the party.

—André.

—It’s Farley!

A torrent of talk followed. Farley was an American. No one knew very well what the talk was about. Villona and Rivière were the noisiest, but all the men were excited. They got up on a car, squeezing themselves together amid much laughter. They drove by the crowd, blended now into soft colours, to a music of merry bells. They took the train at Westland Row and in a few seconds, as it seemed to Jimmy, they were walking out of Kingstown Station. The ticket-collector saluted Jimmy; he was an old man:

—Fine night, sir!

It was a serene summer night; the harbour lay like a darkened mirror at their feet. They proceeded towards it with linked arms, singing Cadet Roussel in chorus. stamping their feet at every:

—Ho! Ho! Hohé, vraiment!

They got into a rowboat at the slip and made out for the American’s yacht. There was to be supper, music, cards. Villona said with conviction:

—It is beautiful!

There was a yacht piano in the cabin. Villona played a waltz for Farley and Rivière, Farley acting as cavalier and Rivière as lady. Then an impromptu square dance, the men devising original figures. What merriment! Jimmy took his part with a will; this was seeing life, at least. Then Farley got out of breath and cried Stop! A man brought in a light supper, and the young men sat down to it for form’ sake. They drank, however: it was Bohemian. They drank Ireland, England, France, Hungary, the United States of America. Jimmy made a speech, a long speech, Villona saying Hear! hear! whenever there was a pause. There was a great clapping of hands when he sat down. It must have been a good speech. Farley clapped him on the back and laughed loudly. What jovial fellows! What good company they were!

Cards! cards! The table was cleared. Villona returned quietly to his piano and played voluntaries for them. The other men played game after game, flinging themselves boldly into the adventure. They drank the health of the Queen of Hearts and of the Queen of Diamonds. Jimmy felt obscurely the lack of an audience: the wit was flashing. Play ran very high and paper began to pass. Jimmy did not know exactly who was winning but he knew that he was losing. But it was his own fault for he frequently mistook his cards and the other men had to calculate his I.O.U.’s for him. They were devils of fellows but he wished they would stop: it was getting late. Someone gave the toast of the yacht The Belle of Newport and then someone proposed one great game for a finish.

The piano had stopped; Villona must have gone up on deck. It was a terrible game. They stopped just before the end of it to drink for luck. Jimmy understood that the game lay between Routh and Ségouin. What excitement! Jimmy was excited too; he would lose, of course. How much had he written away? The men rose to their feet to play the last tricks, talking and gesticulating. Routh won. The cabin shook with the young men’s cheering and the cards were bundled together. They began then to gather in what they had won. Farley and Jimmy were the heaviest losers.

He knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head between his hands, counting the beats of his temples. The cabin door opened and he saw the Hungarian standing in a shaft of grey light:

—Daybreak, gentlemen!

 ® 

Two Gallants

The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur.

Two young men came down the hill of Rutland Square. One of them was just bringing a long monologue to a close. The other, who walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing to his companion’s rudeness, wore an amused listening face. He was squat and ruddy. A yachting cap was shoved far back from his forehead and the narrative to which he listened made constant waves of expression break forth over his face from the corners of his nose and eyes and mouth. Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body. His eyes, twinkling with cunning enjoyment, glanced at every moment towards his companion’s face. Once or twice he rearranged the light waterproof which he had slung over one shoulder in toreador fashion. His breeches, his white rubber shoes and his jauntily slung waterproof expressed youth. But his figure fell into rotundity at the waist, his hair was scant and grey and his face, when the waves of expression had passed over it, had a ravaged look.

When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for fully half a minute. Then he said:

—Well! ... That takes the biscuit!

His voice seemed winnowed of vigour; and to enforce his words he added with humour:

—That takes the solitary, unique, and, if I may so call it, recherché biscuit!

He became serious and silent when he had said this. His tongue was tired for he had been talking all the afternoon in a public-house in Dorset Street. Most people considered Lenehan a leech but, in spite of this reputation, his adroitness and eloquence had always prevented his friends from forming any general policy against him. He had a brave manner of coming up to a party of them in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the borders of the company until he was included in a round. He was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles. He was insensitive to all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was vaguely associated with racing tissues.

—And where did you pick her up, Corley? he asked.

Corley ran his tongue swiftly along his upper lip.

—One night, man, he said, I was going along Dame Street and I spotted a fine tart under Waterhouse’s clock and said good-night, you know. So we went for a walk round by the canal and she told me she was a slavey in a house in Baggot Street. I put my arm round her and squeezed her a bit that night. Then next Sunday, man, I met her by appointment. We went out to Donnybrook and I brought her into a field there. She told me she used to go with a dairyman.... It was fine, man. Cigarettes every night she’d bring me and paying the tram out and back. And one night she brought me two bloody fine cigars—O, the real cheese, you know, that the old fellow used to smoke.... I was afraid, man, she’d get in the family way. But she’s up to the dodge.

—Maybe she thinks you’ll marry her, said Lenehan.

—I told her I was out of a job, said Corley. I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.

Lenehan laughed again, noiselessly.

—Of all the good ones ever I heard, he said, that emphatically takes the biscuit.

Corley’s stride acknowledged the compliment. The swing of his burly body made his friend execute a few light skips from the path to the roadway and back again. Corley was the son of an inspector of police and he had inherited his father’s frame and gait. He walked with his hands by his sides, holding himself erect and swaying his head from side to side. His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another. He always stared straight before him as if he were on parade and, when he wished to gaze after someone in the street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips. At present he was about town. Whenever any job was vacant a friend was always ready to give him the hard word. He was often to be seen walking with policemen in plain clothes, talking earnestly. He knew the inner side of all affairs and was fond of delivering final judgments. He spoke without listening to the speech of his companions. His conversation was mainly about himself: what he had said to such a person and what such a person had said to him and what he had said to settle the matter. When he reported these dialogues he aspirated the first letter of his name after the manner of Florentines.

Lenehan offered his friend a cigarette. As the two young men walked on through the crowd Corley occasionally turned to smile at some of the passing girls but Lenehan’s gaze was fixed on the large faint moon circled with a double halo. He watched earnestly the passing of the grey web of twilight across its face. At length he said:

—Well ... tell me, Corley, I suppose you’ll be able to pull it off all right, eh?

Corley closed one eye expressively as an answer.

—Is she game for that? asked Lenehan dubiously. You can never know women.

—She’s all right, said Corley. I know the way to get around her, man. She’s a bit gone on me.

—You’re what I call a gay Lothario, said Lenehan. And the proper kind of a Lothario, too!

A shade of mockery relieved the servility of his manner. To save himself he had the habit of leaving his flattery open to the interpretation of raillery. But Corley had not a subtle mind.

—There’s nothing to touch a good slavey, he affirmed. Take my tip for it.

—By one who has tried them all, said Lenehan.

—First I used to go with girls, you know, said Corley, unbosoming; girls off the South Circular. I used to take them out, man, on the tram somewhere and pay the tram or take them to a band or a play at the theatre or buy them chocolate and sweets or something that way. I used to spend money on them right enough, he added, in a convincing tone, as if he were conscious of being disbelieved.

But Lenehan could well believe it; he nodded gravely.

—I know that game, he said, and it’s a mug’s game.

—And damn the thing I ever got out of it, said Corley.

—Ditto here, said Lenehan.

—Only off of one of them, said Corley.

He moistened his upper lip by running his tongue along it. The recollection brightened his eyes. He too gazed at the pale disc of the moon, now nearly veiled, and seemed to meditate.

—She was ... a bit of all right, he said regretfully.

He was silent again. Then he added:

—She’s on the turf now. I saw her driving down Earl Street one night with two fellows with her on a car.

—I suppose that’s your doing, said Lenehan.

—There was others at her before me, said Corley philosophically.

This time Lenehan was inclined to disbelieve. He shook his head to and fro and smiled.

—You know you can’t kid me, Corley, he said.

—Honest to God! said Corley. Didn’t she tell me herself?

Lenehan made a tragic gesture.

—Base betrayer! he said.

As they passed along the railings of Trinity College, Lenehan skipped out into the road and peered up at the clock.

—Twenty after, he said.

—Time enough, said Corley. She’ll be there all right. I always let her wait a bit.

Lenehan laughed quietly.

—Ecod! Corley, you know how to take them, he said.

—I’m up to all their little tricks, Corley confessed.

—But tell me, said Lenehan again, are you sure you can bring it off all right? You know it’s a ticklish job. They’re damn close on that point. Eh? ... What?

His bright, small eyes searched his companion’s face for reassurance. Corley swung his head to and fro as if to toss aside an insistent insect, and his brows gathered.

—I’ll pull it off, he said. Leave it to me, can’t you?

Lenehan said no more. He did not wish to ruffle his friend’s temper, to be sent to the devil and told that his advice was not wanted. A little tact was necessary. But Corley’s brow was soon smooth again. His thoughts were running another way.

—She’s a fine decent tart, he said, with appreciation; that’s what she is.

They walked along Nassau Street and then turned into Kildare Street. Not far from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the roadway, playing to a little ring of listeners. He plucked at the wires heedlessly, glancing quickly from time to time at the face of each new-comer and from time to time, wearily also, at the sky. His harp too, heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master’s hands. One hand played in the bass the melody of Silent, O Moyle, while the other hand careered in the treble after each group of notes. The notes of the air throbbed deep and full.

The two young men walked up the street without speaking, the mournful music following them. When they reached Stephen’s Green they crossed the road. Here the noise of trams, the lights and the crowd released them from their silence.

—There she is! said Corley.

At the corner of Hume Street a young woman was standing. She wore a blue dress and a white sailor hat. She stood on the curbstone, swinging a sunshade in one hand. Lenehan grew lively.

—Let’s have a squint at her, Corley, he said.

Corley glanced sideways at his friend and an unpleasant grin appeared on his face.

—Are you trying to get inside me? he asked.

—Damn it! said Lenehan boldly, I don’t want an introduction. All I want is to have a look at her. I’m not going to eat her.

—O ... A look at her? said Corley, more amiably. Well ... I’ll tell you what. I’ll go over and talk to her and you can pass by.

—Right! said Lenehan.

Corley had already thrown one leg over the chains when Lenehan called out:

—And after? Where will we meet?

—Half ten, answered Corley, bringing over his other leg.

—Where?

—Corner of Merrion Street. We’ll be coming back.

—Work it all right now, said Lenehan in farewell.

Corley did not answer. He sauntered across the road swaying his head from side to side. His bulk, his easy pace and the solid sound of his boots had something of the conqueror in them. He approached the young woman and, without saluting, began at once to converse with her. She swung her sunshade more quickly and executed half turns on her heels. Once or twice when he spoke to her at close quarters she laughed and bent her head.

Lenehan observed them for a few minutes. Then he walked rapidly along beside the chains to some distance and crossed the road obliquely. As he approached Hume Street corner he found the air heavily scented and his eyes made a swift anxious scrutiny of the young woman’s appearance. She had her Sunday finery on. Her blue serge skirt was held at the waist by a belt of black leather. The great silver buckle of her belt seemed to depress the centre of her body, catching the light stuff of her white blouse like a clip. She wore a short black jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons and a ragged black boa. The ends of her tulle collarette had been carefully disordered and a big bunch of red flowers was pinned in her bosom, stems upwards. Lenehan’s eyes noted approvingly her stout short muscular body. Frank rude health glowed in her face, on her fat red cheeks and in her unabashed blue eyes. Her features were blunt. She had broad nostrils, a straggling mouth which lay open in a contented leer, and two projecting front teeth. As he passed Lenehan took off his cap and, after about ten seconds, Corley returned a salute to the air. This he did by raising his hand vaguely and pensively changing the angle of position of his hat.

Lenehan walked as far as the Shelbourne Hotel where he halted and waited. After waiting for a little time he saw them coming towards him and, when they turned to the right, he followed them, stepping lightly in his white shoes, down one side of Merrion Square. As he walked on slowly, timing his pace to theirs, he watched Corley’s head which turned at every moment towards the young woman’s face like a big ball revolving on a pivot. He kept the pair in view until he had seen them climbing the stairs of the Donnybrook tram; then he turned about and went back the way he had come.

Now that he was alone his face looked older. His gaiety seemed to forsake him and, as he came by the railings of the Duke’s Lawn, he allowed his hand to run along them. The air which the harpist had played began to control his movements. His softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes.

He walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green and then down Grafton Street. Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat were too dry for such a task. The problem of how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again troubled him a little. He could think of no way of passing them but to keep on walking. He turned to the left when he came to the corner of Rutland Square and felt more at ease in the dark quiet street, the sombre look of which suited his mood. He paused at last before the window of a poor-looking shop over which the words Refreshment Bar were printed in white letters. On the glass of the window were two flying inscriptions: Ginger Beer and Ginger Ale. A cut ham was exposed on a great blue dish while near it on a plate lay a segment of very light plum-pudding. He eyed this food earnestly for some time and then, after glancing warily up and down the street, went into the shop quickly.

He was hungry for, except some biscuits which he had asked two grudging curates to bring him, he had eaten nothing since breakfast-time. He sat down at an uncovered wooden table opposite two work-girls and a mechanic. A slatternly girl waited on him.

—How much is a plate of peas? he asked.

—Three halfpence, sir, said the girl.

—Bring me a plate of peas, he said, and a bottle of ginger beer.

He spoke roughly in order to belie his air of gentility for his entry had been followed by a pause of talk. His face was heated. To appear natural he pushed his cap back on his head and planted his elbows on the table. The mechanic and the two work-girls examined him point by point before resuming their conversation in a subdued voice. The girl brought him a plate of hot grocer’s peas, seasoned with pepper and vinegar, a fork and his ginger beer. He ate his food greedily and found it so good that he made a note of the shop mentally. When he had eaten all the peas he sipped his ginger beer and sat for some time thinking of Corley’s adventure. In his imagination he beheld the pair of lovers walking along some dark road; he heard Corley’s voice in deep energetic gallantries and saw again the leer of the young woman’s mouth. This vision made him feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit. He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too. Experience had embittered his heart against the world. But all hope had not left him. He felt better after having eaten than he had felt before, less weary of his life, less vanquished in spirit. He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready.

He paid twopence halfpenny to the slatternly girl and went out of the shop to begin his wandering again. He went into Capel Street and walked along towards the City Hall. Then he turned into Dame Street. At the corner of George’s Street he met two friends of his and stopped to converse with them. He was glad that he could rest from all his walking. His friends asked him had he seen Corley and what was the latest. He replied that he had spent the day with Corley. His friends talked very little. They looked vacantly after some figures in the crowd and sometimes made a critical remark. One said that he had seen Mac an hour before in Westmoreland Street. At this Lenehan said that he had been with Mac the night before in Egan’s. The young man who had seen Mac in Westmoreland Street asked was it true that Mac had won a bit over a billiard match. Lenehan did not know: he said that Holohan had stood them drinks in Egan’s.

He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street. The crowd of girls and young men had thinned and on his way up the street he heard many groups and couples bidding one another good-night. He went as far as the clock of the College of Surgeons: it was on the stroke of ten. He set off briskly along the northern side of the Green, hurrying for fear Corley should return too soon. When he reached the corner of Merrion Street he took his stand in the shadow of a lamp and brought out one of the cigarettes which he had reserved and lit it. He leaned against the lamp-post and kept his gaze fixed on the part from which he expected to see Corley and the young woman return.

His mind became active again. He wondered had Corley managed it successfully. He wondered if he had asked her yet or if he would leave it to the last. He suffered all the pangs and thrills of his friend’s situation as well as those of his own. But the memory of Corley’s slowly revolving head calmed him somewhat: he was sure Corley would pull it off all right. All at once the idea struck him that perhaps Corley had seen her home by another way and given him the slip. His eyes searched the street: there was no sign of them. Yet it was surely half-an-hour since he had seen the clock of the College of Surgeons. Would Corley do a thing like that? He lit his last cigarette and began to smoke it nervously. He strained his eyes as each tram stopped at the far corner of the square. They must have gone home by another way. The paper of his cigarette broke and he flung it into the road with a curse.

Suddenly he saw them coming towards him. He started with delight and, keeping close to his lamp-post, tried to read the result in their walk. They were walking quickly, the young woman taking quick short steps, while Corley kept beside her with his long stride. They did not seem to be speaking. An intimation of the result pricked him like the point of a sharp instrument. He knew Corley would fail; he knew it was no go.

They turned down Baggot Street and he followed them at once, taking the other footpath. When they stopped he stopped too. They talked for a few moments and then the young woman went down the steps into the area of a house. Corley remained standing at the edge of the path, a little distance from the front steps. Some minutes passed. Then the hall-door was opened slowly and cautiously. A woman came running down the front steps and coughed. Corley turned and went towards her. His broad figure hid hers from view for a few seconds and then she reappeared running up the steps. The door closed on her and Corley began to walk swiftly towards Stephen’s Green.

Lenehan hurried on in the same direction. Some drops of light rain fell. He took them as a warning and, glancing back towards the house which the young woman had entered to see that he was not observed, he ran eagerly across the road. Anxiety and his swift run made him pant. He called out:

—Hallo, Corley!

Corley turned his head to see who had called him, and then continued walking as before. Lenehan ran after him, settling the waterproof on his shoulders with one hand.

—Hallo, Corley! he cried again.

He came level with his friend and looked keenly in his face. He could see nothing there.

—Well? he said. Did it come off?

They had reached the corner of Ely Place. Still without answering Corley swerved to the left and went up the side street. His features were composed in stern calm. Lenehan kept up with his friend, breathing uneasily. He was baffled and a note of menace pierced through his voice.

—Can’t you tell us? he said. Did you try her?

Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.

 ® 

The Boarding House

Mrs Mooney was a butcher’s daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens. But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour’s house.

After that they lived apart. She went to the priest and got a separation from him with care of the children. She would give him neither money nor food nor house-room; and so he was obliged to enlist himself as a sheriff’s man. He was a shabby stooped little drunkard with a white face and a white moustache and white eyebrows, pencilled above his little eyes, which were pink-veined and raw; and all day long he sat in the bailiff’s room, waiting to be put on a job. Mrs Mooney, who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business and set up a boarding house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing woman. Her house had a floating population made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the music halls. Its resident population was made up of clerks from the city. She governed her house cunningly and firmly, knew when to give credit, when to be stern and when to let things pass. All the resident young men spoke of her as The Madam.

Mrs Mooney’s young men paid fifteen shillings a week for board and lodgings (beer or stout at dinner excluded). They shared in common tastes and occupations and for this reason they were very chummy with one another. They discussed with one another the chances of favourites and outsiders. Jack Mooney, the Madam’s son, who was clerk to a commission agent in Fleet Street, had the reputation of being a hard case. He was fond of using soldiers’ obscenities: usually he came home in the small hours. When he met his friends he had always a good one to tell them and he was always sure to be on to a good thing—that is to say, a likely horse or a likely artiste. He was also handy with the mits and sang comic songs. On Sunday nights there would often be a reunion in Mrs Mooney’s front drawing-room. The music-hall artistes would oblige; and Sheridan played waltzes and polkas and vamped accompaniments. Polly Mooney, the Madam’s daughter, would also sing. She sang:

I’m a ... naughty girl.

You needn’t sham:

You know I am.

Polly was a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a small full mouth. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna. Mrs Mooney had first sent her daughter to be a typist in a corn-factor’s office but, as a disreputable sheriff’s man used to come every other day to the office, asking to be allowed to say a word to his daughter, she had taken her daughter home again and set her to do housework. As Polly was very lively the intention was to give her the run of the young men. Besides, young men like to feel that there is a young woman not very far away. Polly, of course, flirted with the young men but Mrs Mooney, who was a shrewd judge, knew that the young men were only passing the time away: none of them meant business. Things went on so for a long time and Mrs Mooney began to think of sending Polly back to typewriting when she noticed that something was going on between Polly and one of the young men. She watched the pair and kept her own counsel.

Polly knew that she was being watched, but still her mother’s persistent silence could not be misunderstood. There had been no open complicity between mother and daughter, no open understanding but, though people in the house began to talk of the affair, still Mrs Mooney did not intervene. Polly began to grow a little strange in her manner and the young man was evidently perturbed. At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.

It was a bright Sunday morning of early summer, promising heat, but with a fresh breeze blowing. All the windows of the boarding house were open and the lace curtains ballooned gently towards the street beneath the raised sashes. The belfry of George’s Church sent out constant peals and worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanour no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands. Breakfast was over in the boarding house and the table of the breakfast-room was covered with plates on which lay yellow streaks of eggs with morsels of bacon-fat and bacon-rind. Mrs Mooney sat in the straw arm-chair and watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast things. She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help to make Tuesday’s bread-pudding. When the table was cleared, the broken bread collected, the sugar and butter safe under lock and key, she began to reconstruct the interview which she had had the night before with Polly. Things were as she had suspected: she had been frank in her questions and Polly had been frank in her answers. Both had been somewhat awkward, of course. She had been made awkward by her not wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have connived and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that kind always made her awkward but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother’s tolerance.

Mrs Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as soon as she had become aware through her revery that the bells of George’s Church had stopped ringing. It was seventeen minutes past eleven: she would have lots of time to have the matter out with Mr Doran and then catch short twelve at Marlborough Street. She was sure she would win. To begin with she had all the weight of social opinion on her side: she was an outraged mother. She had allowed him to live beneath her roof, assuming that he was a man of honour, and he had simply abused her hospitality. He was thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, so that youth could not be pleaded as his excuse; nor could ignorance be his excuse since he was a man who had seen something of the world. He had simply taken advantage of Polly’s youth and inexperience: that was evident. The question was: What reparation would he make?

There must be reparation made in such cases. It is all very well for the man: he can go his ways as if nothing had happened, having had his moment of pleasure, but the girl has to bear the brunt. Some mothers would be content to patch up such an affair for a sum of money; she had known cases of it. But she would not do so. For her only one reparation could make up for the loss of her daughter’s honour: marriage.

She counted all her cards again before sending Mary up to Mr Doran’s room to say that she wished to speak with him. She felt sure she would win. He was a serious young man, not rakish or loud-voiced like the others. If it had been Mr Sheridan or Mr Meade or Bantam Lyons her task would have been much harder. She did not think he would face publicity. All the lodgers in the house knew something of the affair; details had been invented by some. Besides, he had been employed for thirteen years in a great Catholic wine-merchant’s office and publicity would mean for him, perhaps, the loss of his sit. Whereas if he agreed all might be well. She knew he had a good screw for one thing and she suspected he had a bit of stuff put by.

Nearly the half-hour! She stood up and surveyed herself in the pier-glass. The decisive expression of her great florid face satisfied her and she thought of some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands.

Mr Doran was very anxious indeed this Sunday morning. He had made two attempts to shave but his hand had been so unsteady that he had been obliged to desist. Three days’ reddish beard fringed his jaws and every two or three minutes a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to take them off and polish them with his pocket-handkerchief. The recollection of his confession of the night before was a cause of acute pain to him; the priest had drawn out every ridiculous detail of the affair and in the end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation. The harm was done. What could he do now but marry her or run away? He could not brazen it out. The affair would be sure to be talked of and his employer would be certain to hear of it. Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business. He felt his heart leap warmly in his throat as he heard in his excited imagination old Mr Leonard calling out in his rasping voice: Send Mr Doran here, please.

All his long years of service gone for nothing! All his industry and diligence thrown away! As a young man he had sown his wild oats, of course; he had boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions in public-houses. But that was all passed and done with ... nearly. He still bought a copy of Reynolds’s Newspaper every week but he attended to his religious duties and for nine-tenths of the year lived a regular life. He had money enough to settle down on; it was not that. But the family would look down on her. First of all there was her disreputable father and then her mother’s boarding house was beginning to get a certain fame. He had a notion that he was being had. He could imagine his friends talking of the affair and laughing. She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I had’ve known. But what would grammar matter if he really loved her? He could not make up his mind whether to like her or despise her for what she had done. Of course, he had done it too. His instinct urged him to remain free, not to marry. Once you are married you are done for, it said.

While he was sitting helplessly on the side of the bed in shirt and trousers she tapped lightly at his door and entered. She told him all, that she had made a clean breast of it to her mother and that her mother would speak with him that morning. She cried and threw her arms round his neck, saying:

—O, Bob! Bob! What am I to do? What am I to do at all?

She would put an end to herself, she said.

He comforted her feebly, telling her not to cry, that it would be all right, never fear. He felt against his shirt the agitation of her bosom.

It was not altogether his fault that it had happened. He remembered well, with the curious patient memory of the celibate, the first casual caresses her dress, her breath, her fingers had given him. Then late one night as he was undressing for bed she had tapped at his door, timidly. She wanted to relight her candle at his for hers had been blown out by a gust. It was her bath night. She wore a loose open combing-jacket of printed flannel. Her white instep shone in the opening of her furry slippers and the blood glowed warmly behind her perfumed skin. From her hands and wrists too as she lit and steadied her candle a faint perfume arose.

On nights when he came in very late it was she who warmed up his dinner. He scarcely knew what he was eating, feeling her beside him alone, at night, in the sleeping house. And her thoughtfulness! If the night was anyway cold or wet or windy there was sure to be a little tumbler of punch ready for him. Perhaps they could be happy together....

They used to go upstairs together on tiptoe, each with a candle, and on the third landing exchange reluctant good-nights. They used to kiss. He remembered well her eyes, the touch of her hand and his delirium....

But delirium passes. He echoed her phrase, applying it to himself: What am I to do? The instinct of the celibate warned him to hold back. But the sin was there; even his sense of honour told him that reparation must be made for such a sin.

While he was sitting with her on the side of the bed Mary came to the door and said that the missus wanted to see him in the parlour. He stood up to put on his coat and waistcoat, more helpless than ever. When he was dressed he went over to her to comfort her. It would be all right, never fear. He left her crying on the bed and moaning softly: O my God!

Going down the stairs his glasses became so dimmed with moisture that he had to take them off and polish them. He longed to ascend through the roof and fly away to another country where he would never hear again of his trouble, and yet a force pushed him downstairs step by step. The implacable faces of his employer and of the Madam stared upon his discomfiture. On the last flight of stairs he passed Jack Mooney who was coming up from the pantry nursing two bottles of Bass. They saluted coldly; and the lover’s eyes rested for a second or two on a thick bulldog face and a pair of thick short arms. When he reached the foot of the staircase he glanced up and saw Jack regarding him from the door of the return-room.

Suddenly he remembered the night when one of the music-hall artistes, a little blond Londoner, had made a rather free allusion to Polly. The reunion had been almost broken up on account of Jack’s violence. Everyone tried to quiet him. The music-hall artiste, a little paler than usual, kept smiling and saying that there was no harm meant: but Jack kept shouting at him that if any fellow tried that sort of a game on with his sister he’d bloody well put his teeth down his throat, so he would.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Polly sat for a little time on the side of the bed, crying. Then she dried her eyes and went over to the looking-glass. She dipped the end of the towel in the water-jug and refreshed her eyes with the cool water. She looked at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear. Then she went back to the bed again and sat at the foot. She regarded the pillows for a long time and the sight of them awakened in her mind secret amiable memories. She rested the nape of her neck against the cool iron bed-rail and fell into a revery. There was no longer any perturbation visible on her face.

She waited on patiently, almost cheerfully, without alarm, her memories gradually giving place to hopes and visions of the future. Her hopes and visions were so intricate that she no longer saw the white pillows on which her gaze was fixed or remembered that she was waiting for anything.

At last she heard her mother calling. She started to her feet and ran to the banisters.

—Polly! Polly!

—Yes, mamma?

—Come down, dear. Mr Doran wants to speak to you.

Then she remembered what she had been waiting for.

 ® 

A Little Cloud

Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed. Gallaher had got on. You could tell that at once by his travelled air, his well-cut tweed suit and fearless accent. Few fellows had talents like his and fewer still could remain unspoiled by such success. Gallaher’s heart was in the right place and he had deserved to win. It was something to have a friend like that.

Little Chandler’s thoughts ever since lunch-time had been of his meeting with Gallaher, of Gallaher’s invitation and of the great city London where Gallaher lived. He was called Little Chandler because, though he was but slightly under the average stature, he gave one the idea of being a little man. His hands were white and small, his frame was fragile, his voice was quiet and his manners were refined. He took the greatest care of his fair silken hair and moustache and used perfume discreetly on his handkerchief. The half-moons of his nails were perfect and when he smiled you caught a glimpse of a row of childish white teeth.

As he sat at his desk in the King’s Inns he thought what changes those eight years had brought. The friend whom he had known under a shabby and necessitous guise had become a brilliant figure on the London Press. He turned often from his tiresome writing to gaze out of the office window. The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures—on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.

He remembered the books of poetry upon his shelves at home. He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

When his hour had struck he stood up and took leave of his desk and of his fellow-clerks punctiliously. He emerged from under the feudal arch of the King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street. The golden sunset was waning and the air had grown sharp. A horde of grimy children populated the street. They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up the steps before the gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds. Little Chandler gave them no thought. He picked his way deftly through all that minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered. No memory of the past touched him, for his mind was full of a present joy.

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name. He knew that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and he had heard that the waiters there spoke French and German. Walking swiftly by at night he had seen cabs drawn up before the door and richly dressed ladies, escorted by cavaliers, alight and enter quickly. They wore noisy dresses and many wraps. Their faces were powdered and they caught up their dresses, when they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas. He had always passed without turning his head to look. It was his habit to walk swiftly in the street even by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at night he hurried on his way apprehensively and excitedly. Sometimes, however, he courted the causes of his fear. He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf.

He turned to the right towards Capel Street. Ignatius Gallaher on the London Press! Who would have thought it possible eight years before? Still, now that he reviewed the past, Little Chandler could remember many signs of future greatness in his friend. People used to say that Ignatius Gallaher was wild. Of course, he did mix with a rakish set of fellows at that time, drank freely and borrowed money on all sides. In the end he had got mixed up in some shady affair, some money transaction: at least, that was one version of his flight. But nobody denied him talent. There was always a certain ... something in Ignatius Gallaher that impressed you in spite of yourself. Even when he was out at elbows and at his wits’ end for money he kept up a bold face. Little Chandler remembered (and the remembrance brought a slight flush of pride to his cheek) one of Ignatius Gallaher’s sayings when he was in a tight corner:

—Half time, now, boys, he used to say light-heartedly. Where’s my considering cap?

That was Ignatius Gallaher all out; and, damn it, you couldn’t but admire him for it.

Little Chandler quickened his pace. For the first time in his life he felt himself superior to the people he passed. For the first time his soul revolted against the dull inelegance of Capel Street. There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin. As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night to bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. He wondered whether he could write a poem to express his idea. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some London paper for him. Could he write something original? He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.

Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old—thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get. Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse.... A wistful sadness pervades these poems.... The Celtic note. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking. Perhaps it would be better to insert his mother’s name before the surname: Thomas Malone Chandler, or better still: T. Malone Chandler. He would speak to Gallaher about it.

He pursued his revery so ardently that he passed his street and had to turn back. As he came near Corless’s his former agitation began to overmaster him and he halted before the door in indecision. Finally he opened the door and entered.

The light and noise of the bar held him at the doorway for a few moments. He looked about him, but his sight was confused by the shining of many red and green wine-glasses. The bar seemed to him to be full of people and he felt that the people were observing him curiously. He glanced quickly to right and left (frowning slightly to make his errand appear serious), but when his sight cleared a little he saw that nobody had turned to look at him: and there, sure enough, was Ignatius Gallaher leaning with his back against the counter and his feet planted far apart.

—Hallo, Tommy, old hero, here you are! What is it to be? What will you have? I’m taking whisky: better stuff than we get across the water. Soda? Lithia? No mineral? I’m the same. Spoils the flavour.... Here, garçon, bring us two halves of malt whisky, like a good fellow.... Well, and how have you been pulling along since I saw you last? Dear God, how old we’re getting! Do you see any signs of aging in me—eh, what? A little grey and thin on the top—what?

Ignatius Gallaher took off his hat and displayed a large closely cropped head. His face was heavy, pale and clean-shaven. His eyes, which were of bluish slate-colour, relieved his unhealthy pallor and shone out plainly above the vivid orange tie he wore. Between these rival features the lips appeared very long and shapeless and colourless. He bent his head and felt with two sympathetic fingers the thin hair at the crown. Little Chandler shook his head as a denial. Ignatius Gallaher put on his hat again.

—It pulls you down, he said, Press life. Always hurry and scurry, looking for copy and sometimes not finding it: and then, always to have something new in your stuff. Damn proofs and printers, I say, for a few days. I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get back to the old country. Does a fellow good, a bit of a holiday. I feel a ton better since I landed again in dear dirty Dublin.... Here you are, Tommy. Water? Say when.

Little Chandler allowed his whisky to be very much diluted.

—You don’t know what’s good for you, my boy, said Ignatius Gallaher. I drink mine neat.

—I drink very little as a rule, said Little Chandler modestly. An odd half-one or so when I meet any of the old crowd: that’s all.

—Ah, well, said Ignatius Gallaher, cheerfully, here’s to us and to old times and old acquaintance.

They clinked glasses and drank the toast.

—I met some of the old gang to-day, said Ignatius Gallaher. O’Hara seems to be in a bad way. What’s he doing?

—Nothing, said Little Chandler. He’s gone to the dogs.

—But Hogan has a good sit, hasn’t he?

—Yes; he’s in the Land Commission.

—I met him one night in London and he seemed to be very flush.... Poor O’Hara! Boose, I suppose?

—Other things, too, said Little Chandler shortly.

Ignatius Gallaher laughed.

—Tommy, he said, I see you haven’t changed an atom. You’re the very same serious person that used to lecture me on Sunday mornings when I had a sore head and a fur on my tongue. You’d want to knock about a bit in the world. Have you never been anywhere, even for a trip?

—I’ve been to the Isle of Man, said Little Chandler.

Ignatius Gallaher laughed.

—The Isle of Man! he said. Go to London or Paris: Paris, for choice. That’d do you good.

—Have you seen Paris?

—I should think I have! I’ve knocked about there a little.

—And is it really so beautiful as they say? asked Little Chandler.

He sipped a little of his drink while Ignatius Gallaher finished his boldly.

—Beautiful? said Ignatius Gallaher, pausing on the word and on the flavour of his drink. It’s not so beautiful, you know. Of course, it is beautiful.... But it’s the life of Paris; that’s the thing. Ah, there’s no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement....

Little Chandler finished his whisky and, after some trouble, succeeded in catching the barman’s eye. He ordered the same again.

—I’ve been to the Moulin Rouge, Ignatius Gallaher continued when the barman had removed their glasses, and I’ve been to all the Bohemian cafés. Hot stuff! Not for a pious chap like you, Tommy.

Little Chandler said nothing until the barman returned with the two glasses: then he touched his friend’s glass lightly and reciprocated the former toast. He was beginning to feel somewhat disillusioned. Gallaher’s accent and way of expressing himself did not please him. There was something vulgar in his friend which he had not observed before. But perhaps it was only the result of living in London amid the bustle and competition of the Press. The old personal charm was still there under this new gaudy manner. And, after all, Gallaher had lived, he had seen the world. Little Chandler looked at his friend enviously.

—Everything in Paris is gay, said Ignatius Gallaher. They believe in enjoying life—and don’t you think they’re right? If you want to enjoy yourself properly you must go to Paris. And, mind you, they’ve a great feeling for the Irish there. When they heard I was from Ireland they were ready to eat me, man.

Little Chandler took four or five sips from his glass.

—Tell me, he said, is it true that Paris is so ... immoral as they say?

Ignatius Gallaher made a catholic gesture with his right arm.

—Every place is immoral, he said. Of course you do find spicy bits in Paris. Go to one of the students’ balls, for instance. That’s lively, if you like, when the cocottes begin to let themselves loose. You know what they are, I suppose?

—I’ve heard of them, said Little Chandler.

Ignatius Gallaher drank off his whisky and shook his head.

—Ah, he said, you may say what you like. There’s no woman like the Parisienne—for style, for go.

—Then it is an immoral city, said Little Chandler, with timid insistence—I mean, compared with London or Dublin?

—London! said Ignatius Gallaher. It’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. You ask Hogan, my boy. I showed him a bit about London when he was over there. He’d open your eye.... I say, Tommy, don’t make punch of that whisky: liquor up.

—No, really....

—O, come on, another one won’t do you any harm. What is it? The same again, I suppose?

—Well ... all right.

—François, the same again.... Will you smoke, Tommy?

Ignatius Gallaher produced his cigar-case. The two friends lit their cigars and puffed at them in silence until their drinks were served.

—I’ll tell you my opinion, said Ignatius Gallaher, emerging after some time from the clouds of smoke in which he had taken refuge, it’s a rum world. Talk of immorality! I’ve heard of cases—what am I saying?—I’ve known them: cases of ... immorality....

Ignatius Gallaher puffed thoughtfully at his cigar and then, in a calm historian’s tone, he proceeded to sketch for his friend some pictures of the corruption which was rife abroad. He summarised the vices of many capitals and seemed inclined to award the palm to Berlin. Some things he could not vouch for (his friends had told him), but of others he had had personal experience. He spared neither rank nor caste. He revealed many of the secrets of religious houses on the Continent and described some of the practices which were fashionable in high society and ended by telling, with details, a story about an English duchess—a story which he knew to be true. Little Chandler was astonished.

—Ah, well, said Ignatius Gallaher, here we are in old jog-along Dublin where nothing is known of such things.

—How dull you must find it, said Little Chandler, after all the other places you’ve seen!

—Well, said Ignatius Gallaher, it’s a relaxation to come over here, you know. And, after all, it’s the old country, as they say, isn’t it? You can’t help having a certain feeling for it. That’s human nature.... But tell me something about yourself. Hogan told me you had ... tasted the joys of connubial bliss. Two years ago, wasn’t it?

Little Chandler blushed and smiled.

—Yes, he said. I was married last May twelve months.

—I hope it’s not too late in the day to offer my best wishes, said Ignatius Gallaher. I didn’t know your address or I’d have done so at the time.

He extended his hand, which Little Chandler took.

—Well, Tommy, he said, I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you. And that’s the wish of a sincere friend, an old friend. You know that?

—I know that, said Little Chandler.

—Any youngsters? said Ignatius Gallaher.

Little Chandler blushed again.

—We have one child, he said.

—Son or daughter?

—A little boy.

Ignatius Gallaher slapped his friend sonorously on the back.

—Bravo, he said, I wouldn’t doubt you, Tommy.

Little Chandler smiled, looked confusedly at his glass and bit his lower lip with three childishly white front teeth.

—I hope you’ll spend an evening with us, he said, before you go back. My wife will be delighted to meet you. We can have a little music and—

—Thanks awfully, old chap, said Ignatius Gallaher, I’m sorry we didn’t meet earlier. But I must leave to-morrow night.

—To-night, perhaps...?

—I’m awfully sorry, old man. You see I’m over here with another fellow, clever young chap he is too, and we arranged to go to a little card-party. Only for that ...

—O, in that case....

—But who knows? said Ignatius Gallaher considerately. Next year I may take a little skip over here now that I’ve broken the ice. It’s only a pleasure deferred.

—Very well, said Little Chandler, the next time you come we must have an evening together. That’s agreed now, isn’t it?

—Yes, that’s agreed, said Ignatius Gallaher. Next year if I come, parole d’honneur.

—And to clinch the bargain, said Little Chandler, we’ll just have one more now.

Ignatius Gallaher took out a large gold watch and looked at it.

—Is it to be the last? he said. Because you know, I have an a.p.

—O, yes, positively, said Little Chandler.

—Very well, then, said Ignatius Gallaher, let us have another one as a deoc an doruis—that’s good vernacular for a small whisky, I believe.

Little Chandler ordered the drinks. The blush which had risen to his face a few moments before was establishing itself. A trifle made him blush at any time: and now he felt warm and excited. Three small whiskies had gone to his head and Gallaher’s strong cigar had confused his mind, for he was a delicate and abstinent person. The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend’s, and it seemed to him unjust. Gallaher was his inferior in birth and education. He was sure that he could do something better than his friend had ever done, or could ever do, something higher than mere tawdry journalism if he only got the chance. What was it that stood in his way? His unfortunate timidity! He wished to vindicate himself in some way, to assert his manhood. He saw behind Gallaher’s refusal of his invitation. Gallaher was only patronising him by his friendliness just as he was patronising Ireland by his visit.

The barman brought their drinks. Little Chandler pushed one glass towards his friend and took up the other boldly.

—Who knows? he said, as they lifted their glasses. When you come next year I may have the pleasure of wishing long life and happiness to Mr and Mrs Ignatius Gallaher.

Ignatius Gallaher in the act of drinking closed one eye expressively over the rim of his glass. When he had drunk he smacked his lips decisively, set down his glass and said:

—No blooming fear of that, my boy. I’m going to have my fling first and see a bit of life and the world before I put my head in the sack—if I ever do.

—Some day you will, said Little Chandler calmly.

Ignatius Gallaher turned his orange tie and slate-blue eyes full upon his friend.

—You think so? he said.

—You’ll put your head in the sack, repeated Little Chandler stoutly, like everyone else if you can find the girl.

He had slightly emphasised his tone and he was aware that he had betrayed himself; but, though the colour had heightened in his cheek, he did not flinch from his friend’s gaze. Ignatius Gallaher watched him for a few moments and then said:

—If ever it occurs, you may bet your bottom dollar there’ll be no mooning and spooning about it. I mean to marry money. She’ll have a good fat account at the bank or she won’t do for me.

Little Chandler shook his head.

—Why, man alive, said Ignatius Gallaher, vehemently, do you know what it is? I’ve only to say the word and to-morrow I can have the woman and the cash. You don’t believe it? Well, I know it. There are hundreds—what am I saying?—thousands of rich Germans and Jews, rotten with money, that’d only be too glad.... You wait a while, my boy. See if I don’t play my cards properly. When I go about a thing I mean business, I tell you. You just wait.

He tossed his glass to his mouth, finished his drink and laughed loudly. Then he looked thoughtfully before him and said in a calmer tone:

—But I’m in no hurry. They can wait. I don’t fancy tying myself up to one woman, you know.

He imitated with his mouth the act of tasting and made a wry face.

—Must get a bit stale, I should think, he said.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Little Chandler sat in the room off the hall, holding a child in his arms. To save money they kept no servant but Annie’s young sister Monica came for an hour or so in the morning and an hour or so in the evening to help. But Monica had gone home long ago. It was a quarter to nine. Little Chandler had come home late for tea and, moreover, he had forgotten to bring Annie home the parcel of coffee from Bewley’s. Of course she was in a bad humour and gave him short answers. She said she would do without any tea but when it came near the time at which the shop at the corner closed she decided to go out herself for a quarter of a pound of tea and two pounds of sugar. She put the sleeping child deftly in his arms and said:

—Here. Don’t waken him.

A little lamp with a white china shade stood upon the table and its light fell over a photograph which was enclosed in a frame of crumpled horn. It was Annie’s photograph. Little Chandler looked at it, pausing at the thin tight lips. She wore the pale blue summer blouse which he had brought her home as a present one Saturday. It had cost him ten and elevenpence; but what an agony of nervousness it had cost him! How he had suffered that day, waiting at the shop door until the shop was empty, standing at the counter and trying to appear at his ease while the girl piled ladies’ blouses before him, paying at the desk and forgetting to take up the odd penny of his change, being called back by the cashier, and, finally, striving to hide his blushes as he left the shop by examining the parcel to see if it was securely tied. When he brought the blouse home Annie kissed him and said it was very pretty and stylish; but when she heard the price she threw the blouse on the table and said it was a regular swindle to charge ten and elevenpence for that. At first she wanted to take it back but when she tried it on she was delighted with it, especially with the make of the sleeves, and kissed him and said he was very good to think of her.

Hm! ...

He looked coldly into the eyes of the photograph and they answered coldly. Certainly they were pretty and the face itself was pretty. But he found something mean in it. Why was it so unconscious and lady-like? The composure of the eyes irritated him. They repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture. He thought of what Gallaher had said about rich Jewesses. Those dark Oriental eyes, he thought, how full they are of passion, of voluptuous longing! ... Why had he married the eyes in the photograph?

He caught himself up at the question and glanced nervously round the room. He found something mean in the pretty furniture which he had bought for his house on the hire system. Annie had chosen it herself and it reminded him of her. It too was prim and pretty. A dull resentment against his life awoke within him. Could he not escape from his little house? Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallaher? Could he go to London? There was the furniture still to be paid for. If he could only write a book and get it published, that might open the way for him.

A volume of Byron’s poems lay before him on the table. He opened it cautiously with his left hand lest he should waken the child and began to read the first poem in the book:

Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom,

Not e’en a Zephyr wanders through the grove,

Whilst I return to view my Margaret’s tomb

And scatter flowers on the dust I love.

He paused. He felt the rhythm of the verse about him in the room. How melancholy it was! Could he, too, write like that, express the melancholy of his soul in verse? There were so many things he wanted to describe: his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan Bridge, for example. If he could get back again into that mood....

The child awoke and began to cry. He turned from the page and tried to hush it: but it would not be hushed. He began to rock it to and fro in his arms but its wailing cry grew keener. He rocked it faster while his eyes began to read the second stanza:

Within this narrow cell reclines her clay,

That clay where once ...

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly bending to the child’s face he shouted:

—Stop!

The child stopped for an instant, had a spasm of fright and began to scream. He jumped up from his chair and walked hastily up and down the room with the child in his arms. It began to sob piteously, losing its breath for four or five seconds, and then bursting out anew. The thin walls of the room echoed the sound. He tried to soothe it but it sobbed more convulsively. He looked at the contracted and quivering face of the child and began to be alarmed. He counted seven sobs without a break between them and caught the child to his breast in fright. If it died! ...

The door was burst open and a young woman ran in, panting.

—What is it? What is it? she cried.

The child, hearing its mother’s voice, broke out into a paroxysm of sobbing.

—It’s nothing, Annie ... it’s nothing.... He began to cry ...

She flung her parcels on the floor and snatched the child from him.

—What have you done to him? she cried, glaring into his face.

Little Chandler sustained for one moment the gaze of her eyes and his heart closed together as he met the hatred in them. He began to stammer:

—It’s nothing.... He ... he began to cry.... I couldn’t ... I didn’t do anything.... What?

Giving no heed to him she began to walk up and down the room, clasping the child tightly in her arms and murmuring:

—My little man! My little mannie! Was ’ou frightened, love? ... There now, love! There now! ... Lambabaun! Mamma’s little lamb of the world! ... There now!

Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the paroxysm of the child’s sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes.

 ® 

Counterparts

The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent:

—Send Farrington here!

Miss Parker returned to her machine, saying to a man who was writing at a desk:

—Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs.

The man muttered Blast him! under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up. When he stood up he was tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache: his eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty. He lifted up the counter and, passing by the clients, went out of the office with a heavy step.

He went heavily upstairs until he came to the second landing, where a door bore a brass plate with the inscription Mr Alleyne. Here he halted, puffing with labour and vexation, and knocked. The shrill voice cried:

—Come in!

The man entered Mr Alleyne’s room. Simultaneously Mr Alleyne, a little man wearing gold-rimmed glasses on a clean-shaven face, shot his head up over a pile of documents. The head itself was so pink and hairless that it seemed like a large egg reposing on the papers. Mr Alleyne did not lose a moment:

—Farrington? What is the meaning of this? Why have I always to complain of you? May I ask you why you haven’t made a copy of that contract between Bodley and Kirwan? I told you it must be ready by four o’clock.

—But Mr Shelley said, sir—

—Mr Shelley said, sir.... Kindly attend to what I say and not to what Mr Shelley says, sir. You have always some excuse or another for shirking work. Let me tell you that if the contract is not copied before this evening I’ll lay the matter before Mr Crosbie.... Do you hear me now?

—Yes, sir.

—Do you hear me now? ... Ay and another little matter! I might as well be talking to the wall as talking to you. Understand once for all that you get a half an hour for your lunch and not an hour and a half. How many courses do you want, I’d like to know.... Do you mind me, now?

—Yes, sir.

Mr Alleyne bent his head again upon his pile of papers. The man stared fixedly at the polished skull which directed the affairs of Crosbie & Alleyne, gauging its fragility. A spasm of rage gripped his throat for a few moments and then passed, leaving after it a sharp sensation of thirst. The man recognised the sensation and felt that he must have a good night’s drinking. The middle of the month was passed and, if he could get the copy done in time, Mr Alleyne might give him an order on the cashier. He stood still, gazing fixedly at the head upon the pile of papers. Suddenly Mr Alleyne began to upset all the papers, searching for something. Then, as if he had been unaware of the man’s presence till that moment, he shot up his head again, saying:

—Eh? Are you going to stand there all day? Upon my word, Farrington, you take things easy!

—I was waiting to see ...

—Very good, you needn’t wait to see. Go downstairs and do your work.

The man walked heavily towards the door and, as he went out of the room, he heard Mr Alleyne cry after him that if the contract was not copied by evening Mr Crosbie would hear of the matter.

He returned to his desk in the lower office and counted the sheets which remained to be copied. He took up his pen and dipped it in the ink but he continued to stare stupidly at the last words he had written: In no case shall the said Bernard Bodley be ... The evening was falling and in a few minutes they would be lighting the gas: then he could write. He felt that he must slake the thirst in his throat. He stood up from his desk and, lifting the counter as before, passed out of the office. As he was passing out the chief clerk looked at him inquiringly.

—It’s all right, Mr Shelley, said the man, pointing with his finger to indicate the objective of his journey.

The chief clerk glanced at the hat-rack but, seeing the row complete, offered no remark. As soon as he was on the landing the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety stairs. From the street door he walked on furtively on the inner side of the path towards the corner and all at once dived into a doorway. He was now safe in the dark snug of O’Neill’s shop, and, filling up the little window that looked into the bar with his inflamed face, the colour of dark wine or dark meat, he called out:

—Here, Pat, give us a g.p., like a good fellow.

The curate brought him a glass of plain porter. The man drank it at a gulp and asked for a caraway seed. He put his penny on the counter and, leaving the curate to grope for it in the gloom, retreated out of the snug as furtively as he had entered it.

Darkness, accompanied by a thick fog, was gaining upon the dusk of February and the lamps in Eustace Street had been lit. The man went up by the houses until he reached the door of the office, wondering whether he could finish his copy in time. On the stairs a moist pungent odour of perfumes saluted his nose: evidently Miss Delacour had come while he was out in O’Neill’s. He crammed his cap back again into his pocket and re-entered the office, assuming an air of absent-mindedness.

—Mr Alleyne has been calling for you, said the chief clerk severely. Where were you?

The man glanced at the two clients who were standing at the counter as if to intimate that their presence prevented him from answering. As the clients were both male the chief clerk allowed himself a laugh.

—I know that game, he said. Five times in one day is a little bit.... Well, you better look sharp and get a copy of our correspondence in the Delacour case for Mr Alleyne.

This address in the presence of the public, his run upstairs and the porter he had gulped down so hastily confused the man and, as he sat down at his desk to get what was required, he realised how hopeless was the task of finishing his copy of the contract before half past five. The dark damp night was coming and he longed to spend it in the bars, drinking with his friends amid the glare of gas and the clatter of glasses. He got out the Delacour correspondence and passed out of the office. He hoped Mr Alleyne would not discover that the last two letters were missing.

The moist pungent perfume lay all the way up to Mr Alleyne’s room. Miss Delacour was a middle-aged woman of Jewish appearance. Mr Alleyne was said to be sweet on her or on her money. She came to the office often and stayed a long time when she came. She was sitting beside his desk now in an aroma of perfumes, smoothing the handle of her umbrella and nodding the great black feather in her hat. Mr Alleyne had swivelled his chair round to face her and thrown his right foot jauntily upon his left knee. The man put the correspondence on the desk and bowed respectfully but neither Mr Alleyne nor Miss Delacour took any notice of his bow. Mr Alleyne tapped a finger on the correspondence and then flicked it towards him as if to say: That’s all right: you can go.

The man returned to the lower office and sat down again at his desk. He stared intently at the incomplete phrase: In no case shall the said Bernard Bodley be ... and thought how strange it was that the last three words began with the same letter. The chief clerk began to hurry Miss Parker, saying she would never have the letters typed in time for post. The man listened to the clicking of the machine for a few minutes and then set to work to finish his copy. But his head was not clear and his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle of the public-house. It was a night for hot punches. He struggled on with his copy, but when the clock struck five he had still fourteen pages to write. Blast it! He couldn’t finish it in time. He longed to execrate aloud, to bring his fist down on something violently. He was so enraged that he wrote Bernard Bernard instead of Bernard Bodley and had to begin again on a clean sheet.

He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office single-handed. His body ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. All the indignities of his life enraged him.... Could he ask the cashier privately for an advance? No, the cashier was no good, no damn good: he wouldn’t give an advance.... He knew where he would meet the boys: Leonard and O’Halloran and Nosey Flynn. The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

His imagination had so abstracted him that his name was called twice before he answered. Mr Alleyne and Miss Delacour were standing outside the counter and all the clerks had turned round in anticipation of something. The man got up from his desk. Mr Alleyne began a tirade of abuse, saying that two letters were missing. The man answered that he knew nothing about them, that he had made a faithful copy. The tirade continued: it was so bitter and violent that the man could hardly restrain his fist from descending upon the head of the manikin before him.

—I know nothing about any other two letters, he said stupidly.

—You—know—nothing. Of course you know nothing, said Mr Alleyne. Tell me, he added, glancing first for approval to the lady beside him, do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool?

The man glanced from the lady’s face to the little egg-shaped head and back again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous moment:

—I don’t think, sir, he said, that that’s a fair question to put to me.

There was a pause in the very breathing of the clerks. Everyone was astounded (the author of the witticism no less than his neighbours) and Miss Delacour, who was a stout amiable person, began to smile broadly. Mr Alleyne flushed to the hue of a wild rose and his mouth twitched with a dwarf’s passion. He shook his fist in the man’s face till it seemed to vibrate like the knob of some electric machine:

—You impertinent ruffian! You impertinent ruffian! I’ll make short work of you! Wait till you see! You’ll apologise to me for your impertinence or you’ll quit the office instanter! You’ll quit this, I’m telling you, or you’ll apologise to me!

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

He stood in a doorway opposite the office watching to see if the cashier would come out alone. All the clerks passed out and finally the cashier came out with the chief clerk. It was no use trying to say a word to him when he was with the chief clerk. The man felt that his position was bad enough. He had been obliged to offer an abject apology to Mr Alleyne for his impertinence but he knew what a hornet’s nest the office would be for him. He could remember the way in which Mr Alleyne had hounded little Peake out of the office in order to make room for his own nephew. He felt savage and thirsty and revengeful, annoyed with himself and with everyone else. Mr Alleyne would never give him an hour’s rest; his life would be a hell to him. He had made a proper fool of himself this time. Could he not keep his tongue in his cheek? But they had never pulled together from the first, he and Mr Alleyne, ever since the day Mr Alleyne had overheard him mimicking his North of Ireland accent to amuse Higgins and Miss Parker: that had been the beginning of it. He might have tried Higgins for the money, but sure Higgins never had anything for himself. A man with two establishments to keep up, of course he couldn’t....

He felt his great body again aching for the comfort of the public-house. The fog had begun to chill him and he wondered could he touch Pat in O’Neill’s. He could not touch him for more than a bob—and a bob was no use. Yet he must get money somewhere or other: he had spent his last penny for the g.p. and soon it would be too late for getting money anywhere. Suddenly, as he was fingering his watch-chain, he thought of Terry Kelly’s pawn-office in Fleet Street. That was the dart! Why didn’t he think of it sooner?

He went through the narrow alley of Temple Bar quickly, muttering to himself that they could all go to hell because he was going to have a good night of it. The clerk in Terry Kelly’s said A crown! but the consignor held out for six shillings; and in the end the six shillings was allowed him literally. He came out of the pawn-office joyfully, making a little cylinder of the coins between his thumb and fingers. In Westmoreland Street the footpaths were crowded with young men and women returning from business and ragged urchins ran here and there yelling out the names of the evening editions. The man passed through the crowd, looking on the spectacle generally with proud satisfaction and staring masterfully at the office-girls. His head was full of the noises of tram-gongs and swishing trolleys and his nose already sniffed the curling fumes of punch. As he walked on he preconsidered the terms in which he would narrate the incident to the boys:

—So, I just looked at him—coolly, you know, and looked at her. Then I looked back at him again—taking my time, you know. I don’t think that that’s a fair question to put to me, says I.

Nosey Flynn was sitting up in his usual corner of Davy Byrne’s and, when he heard the story, he stood Farrington a half-one, saying it was as smart a thing as ever he heard. Farrington stood a drink in his turn. After a while O’Halloran and Paddy Leonard came in and the story was repeated to them. O’Halloran stood tailors of malt, hot, all round and told the story of the retort he had made to the chief clerk when he was in Callan’s of Fownes’s Street; but, as the retort was after the manner of the liberal shepherds in the eclogues, he had to admit that it was not so clever as Farrington’s retort. At this Farrington told the boys to polish off that and have another.

Just as they were naming their poisons who should come in but Higgins! Of course he had to join in with the others. The men asked him to give his version of it, and he did so with great vivacity for the sight of five small hot whiskies was very exhilarating. Everyone roared laughing when he showed the way in which Mr Alleyne shook his fist in Farrington’s face. Then he imitated Farrington, saying, And here was my nabs, as cool as you please, while Farrington looked at the company out of his heavy dirty eyes, smiling and at times drawing forth stray drops of liquor from his moustache with the aid of his lower lip.

When that round was over there was a pause. O’Halloran had money but neither of the other two seemed to have any; so the whole party left the shop somewhat regretfully. At the corner of Duke Street Higgins and Nosey Flynn bevelled off to the left while the other three turned back towards the city. Rain was drizzling down on the cold streets and, when they reached the Ballast Office, Farrington suggested the Scotch House. The bar was full of men and loud with the noise of tongues and glasses. The three men pushed past the whining match-sellers at the door and formed a little party at the corner of the counter. They began to exchange stories. Leonard introduced them to a young fellow named Weathers who was performing at the Tivoli as an acrobat and knockabout artiste. Farrington stood a drink all round. Weathers said he would take a small Irish and Apollinaris. Farrington, who had definite notions of what was what, asked the boys would they have an Apollinaris too; but the boys told Tim to make theirs hot. The talk became theatrical. O’Halloran stood a round and then Farrington stood another round, Weathers protesting that the hospitality was too Irish. He promised to get them in behind the scenes and introduce them to some nice girls. O’Halloran said that he and Leonard would go but that Farrington wouldn’t go because he was a married man; and Farrington’s heavy dirty eyes leered at the company in token that he understood he was being chaffed. Weathers made them all have just one little tincture at his expense and promised to meet them later on at Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street.

When the Scotch House closed they went round to Mulligan’s. They went into the parlour at the back and O’Halloran ordered small hot specials all round. They were all beginning to feel mellow. Farrington was just standing another round when Weathers came back. Much to Farrington’s relief he drank a glass of bitter this time. Funds were running low but they had enough to keep them going. Presently two young women with big hats and a young man in a check suit came in and sat at a table close by. Weathers saluted them and told the company that they were out of the Tivoli. Farrington’s eyes wandered at every moment in the direction of one of the young women. There was something striking in her appearance. An immense scarf of peacock-blue muslin was wound round her hat and knotted in a great bow under her chin; and she wore bright yellow gloves, reaching to the elbow. Farrington gazed admiringly at the plump arm which she moved very often and with much grace; and when, after a little time, she answered his gaze he admired still more her large dark brown eyes. The oblique staring expression in them fascinated him. She glanced at him once or twice and, when the party was leaving the room, she brushed against his chair and said O, pardon! in a London accent. He watched her leave the room in the hope that she would look back at him, but he was disappointed. He cursed his want of money and cursed all the rounds he had stood, particularly all the whiskies and Apollinaris which he had stood to Weathers. If there was one thing that he hated it was a sponge. He was so angry that he lost count of the conversation of his friends.

When Paddy Leonard called him he found that they were talking about feats of strength. Weathers was showing his biceps muscle to the company and boasting so much that the other two had called on Farrington to uphold the national honour. Farrington pulled up his sleeve accordingly and showed his biceps muscle to the company. The two arms were examined and compared and finally it was agreed to have a trial of strength. The table was cleared and the two men rested their elbows on it, clasping hands. When Paddy Leonard said Go! each was to try to bring down the other’s hand on to the table. Farrington looked very serious and determined.

The trial began. After about thirty seconds Weathers brought his opponent’s hand slowly down on to the table. Farrington’s dark wine-coloured face flushed darker still with anger and humiliation at having been defeated by such a stripling.

—You’re not to put the weight of your body behind it. Play fair, he said.

—Who’s not playing fair? said the other.

—Come on again. The two best out of three.

The trial began again. The veins stood out on Farrington’s forehead, and the pallor of Weathers’ complexion changed to peony. Their hands and arms trembled under the stress. After a long struggle Weathers again brought his opponent’s hand slowly on to the table. There was a murmur of applause from the spectators. The curate, who was standing beside the table, nodded his red head towards the victor and said with loutish familiarity:

—Ah! that’s the knack!

—What the hell do you know about it? said Farrington fiercely, turning on the man. What do you put in your gab for?

—Sh, sh! said O’Halloran, observing the violent expression of Farrington’s face. Pony up, boys. We’ll have just one little smahan more and then we’ll be off.

A very sullen-faced man stood at the corner of O’Connell Bridge waiting for the little Sandymount tram to take him home. He was full of smouldering anger and revengefulness. He felt humiliated and discontented; he did not even feel drunk; and he had only twopence in his pocket. He cursed everything. He had done for himself in the office, pawned his watch, spent all his money; and he had not even got drunk. He began to feel thirsty again and he longed to be back again in the hot reeking public-house. He had lost his reputation as a strong man, having been defeated twice by a mere boy. His heart swelled with fury and, when he thought of the woman in the big hat who had brushed against him and said Pardon! his fury nearly choked him.

His tram let him down at Shelbourne Road and he steered his great body along in the shadow of the wall of the barracks. He loathed returning to his home. When he went in by the side-door he found the kitchen empty and the kitchen fire nearly out. He bawled upstairs:

—Ada! Ada!

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk. They had five children. A little boy came running down the stairs.

—Who is that? said the man, peering through the darkness.

—Me, pa.

—Who are you? Charlie?

—No, pa. Tom.

—Where’s your mother?

—She’s out at the chapel.

—That’s right.... Did she think of leaving any dinner for me?

—Yes, pa. I—

—Light the lamp. What do you mean by having the place in darkness? Are the other children in bed?

The man sat down heavily on one of the chairs while the little boy lit the lamp. He began to mimic his son’s flat accent, saying half to himself: At the chapel. At the chapel, if you please! When the lamp was lit he banged his fist on the table and shouted:

—What’s for my dinner?

—I’m going ... to cook it, pa, said the little boy.

The man jumped up furiously and pointed to the fire.

—On that fire! You let the fire out! By God, I’ll teach you to do that again!

He took a step to the door and seized the walking-stick which was standing behind it.

—I’ll teach you to let the fire out! he said, rolling up his sleeve in order to give his arm free play.

The little boy cried O, pa! and ran whimpering round the table, but the man followed him and caught him by the coat. The little boy looked about him wildly but, seeing no way of escape, fell upon his knees.

—Now, you’ll let the fire out the next time! said the man, striking at him viciously with the stick. Take that, you little whelp!

The boy uttered a squeal of pain as the stick cut his thigh. He clasped his hands together in the air and his voice shook with fright.

—O, pa! he cried. Don’t beat me, pa! And I’ll ... I’ll say a Hail Mary for you.... I’ll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don’t beat me.... I’ll say a Hail Mary....

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Clay

The matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out. The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea. Maria had cut them herself.

Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: Yes, my dear, and No, my dear. She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their tubs and always succeeded in making peace. One day the matron had said to her:

—Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker!

And the sub-matron and two of the Board ladies had heard the compliment. And Ginger Mooney was always saying what she wouldn’t do to the dummy who had charge of the irons if it wasn’t for Maria. Everyone was so fond of Maria.

The women would have their tea at six o’clock and she would be able to get away before seven. From Ballsbridge to the Pillar, twenty minutes; from the Pillar to Drumcondra, twenty minutes; and twenty minutes to buy the things. She would be there before eight. She took out her purse with the silver clasps and read again the words A Present from Belfast. She was very fond of that purse because Joe had brought it to her five years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast on a Whit-Monday trip. In the purse were two half-crowns and some coppers. She would have five shillings clear after paying tram fare. What a nice evening they would have, all the children singing! Only she hoped that Joe wouldn’t come in drunk. He was so different when he took any drink.

Often he had wanted her to go and live with them; but she would have felt herself in the way (though Joe’s wife was ever so nice with her) and she had become accustomed to the life of the laundry. Joe was a good fellow. She had nursed him and Alphy too; and Joe used often say:

—Mamma is mamma but Maria is my proper mother.

After the break-up at home the boys had got her that position in the Dublin by Lamplight laundry, and she liked it. She used to have such a bad opinion of Protestants but now she thought they were very nice people, a little quiet and serious, but still very nice people to live with. Then she had her plants in the conservatory and she liked looking after them. She had lovely ferns and wax-plants and, whenever anyone came to visit her, she always gave the visitor one or two slips from her conservatory. There was one thing she didn’t like and that was the tracts on the walls; but the matron was such a nice person to deal with, so genteel.

When the cook told her everything was ready she went into the women’s room and began to pull the big bell. In a few minutes the women began to come in by twos and threes, wiping their steaming hands in their petticoats and pulling down the sleeves of their blouses over their red steaming arms. They settled down before their huge mugs which the cook and the dummy filled up with hot tea, already mixed with milk and sugar in huge tin cans. Maria superintended the distribution of the barmbrack and saw that every woman got her four slices. There was a great deal of laughing and joking during the meal. Lizzie Fleming said Maria was sure to get the ring and, though Fleming had said that for so many Hallow Eves, Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either; and when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness and the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. Then Ginger Mooney lifted up her mug of tea and proposed Maria’s health while all the other women clattered with their mugs on the table, and said she was sorry she hadn’t a sup of porter to drink it in. And Maria laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin and till her minute body nearly shook itself asunder because she knew that Mooney meant well though, of course, she had the notions of a common woman.

But wasn’t Maria glad when the women had finished their tea and the cook and the dummy had begun to clear away the tea-things! She went into her little bedroom and, remembering that the next morning was a mass morning, changed the hand of the alarm from seven to six. Then she took off her working skirt and her house-boots and laid her best skirt out on the bed and her tiny dress-boots beside the foot of the bed. She changed her blouse too and, as she stood before the mirror, she thought of how she used to dress for mass on Sunday morning when she was a young girl; and she looked with quaint affection at the diminutive body which she had so often adorned. In spite of its years she found it a nice tidy little body.

When she got outside the streets were shining with rain and she was glad of her old brown raincloak. The tram was full and she had to sit on the little stool at the end of the car, facing all the people, with her toes barely touching the floor. She arranged in her mind all she was going to do and thought how much better it was to be independent and to have your own money in your pocket. She hoped they would have a nice evening. She was sure they would but she could not help thinking what a pity it was Alphy and Joe were not speaking. They were always falling out now but when they were boys together they used to be the best of friends: but such was life.

She got out of her tram at the Pillar and ferreted her way quickly among the crowds. She went into Downes’s cake-shop but the shop was so full of people that it was a long time before she could get herself attended to. She bought a dozen of mixed penny cakes, and at last came out of the shop laden with a big bag. Then she thought what else would she buy: she wanted to buy something really nice. They would be sure to have plenty of apples and nuts. It was hard to know what to buy and all she could think of was cake. She decided to buy some plumcake but Downes’s plumcake had not enough almond icing on top of it so she went over to a shop in Henry Street. Here she was a long time in suiting herself and the stylish young lady behind the counter, who was evidently a little annoyed by her, asked her was it wedding-cake she wanted to buy. That made Maria blush and smile at the young lady; but the young lady took it all very seriously and finally cut a thick slice of plumcake, parcelled it up and said:

—Two-and-four, please.

She thought she would have to stand in the Drumcondra tram because none of the young men seemed to notice her but an elderly gentleman made room for her. He was a stout gentleman and he wore a brown hard hat; he had a square red face and a greyish moustache. Maria thought he was a colonel-looking gentleman and she reflected how much more polite he was than the young men who simply stared straight before them. The gentleman began to chat with her about Hallow Eve and the rainy weather. He supposed the bag was full of good things for the little ones and said it was only right that the youngsters should enjoy themselves while they were young. Maria agreed with him and favoured him with demure nods and hems. He was very nice with her, and when she was getting out at the Canal Bridge she thanked him and bowed, and he bowed to her and raised his hat and smiled agreeably; and while she was going up along the terrace, bending her tiny head under the rain, she thought how easy it was to know a gentleman even when he has a drop taken.

Everybody said: O, here’s Maria! when she came to Joe’s house. Joe was there, having come home from business, and all the children had their Sunday dresses on. There were two big girls in from next door and games were going on. Maria gave the bag of cakes to the eldest boy, Alphy, to divide and Mrs Donnelly said it was too good of her to bring such a big bag of cakes and made all the children say:

—Thanks, Maria.

But Maria said she had brought something special for papa and mamma, something they would be sure to like, and she began to look for her plumcake. She tried in Downes’s bag and then in the pockets of her raincloak and then on the hallstand but nowhere could she find it. Then she asked all the children had any of them eaten it—by mistake, of course—but the children all said no and looked as if they did not like to eat cakes if they were to be accused of stealing. Everybody had a solution for the mystery and Mrs Donnelly said it was plain that Maria had left it behind her in the tram. Maria, remembering how confused the gentleman with the greyish moustache had made her, coloured with shame and vexation and disappointment. At the thought of the failure of her little surprise and of the two and fourpence she had thrown away for nothing she nearly cried outright.

But Joe said it didn’t matter and made her sit down by the fire. He was very nice with her. He told her all that went on in his office, repeating for her a smart answer which he had made to the manager. Maria did not understand why Joe laughed so much over the answer he had made but she said that the manager must have been a very overbearing person to deal with. Joe said he wasn’t so bad when you knew how to take him, that he was a decent sort so long as you didn’t rub him the wrong way. Mrs Donnelly played the piano for the children and they danced and sang. Then the two next-door girls handed round the nuts. Nobody could find the nutcrackers and Joe was nearly getting cross over it and asked how did they expect Maria to crack nuts without a nutcracker. But Maria said she didn’t like nuts and that they weren’t to bother about her. Then Joe asked would she take a bottle of stout and Mrs Donnelly said there was port wine too in the house if she would prefer that. Maria said she would rather they didn’t ask her to take anything: but Joe insisted.

So Maria let him have his way and they sat by the fire talking over old times and Maria thought she would put in a good word for Alphy. But Joe cried that God might strike him stone dead if ever he spoke a word to his brother again and Maria said she was sorry she had mentioned the matter. Mrs Donnelly told her husband it was a great shame for him to speak that way of his own flesh and blood but Joe said that Alphy was no brother of his and there was nearly being a row on the head of it. But Joe said he would not lose his temper on account of the night it was and asked his wife to open some more stout. The two next-door girls had arranged some Hallow Eve games and soon everything was merry again. Maria was delighted to see the children so merry and Joe and his wife in such good spirits. The next-door girls put some saucers on the table and then led the children up to the table, blindfold. One got the prayer-book and the other three got the water; and when one of the next-door girls got the ring Mrs Donnelly shook her finger at the blushing girl as much as to say: O, I know all about it! They insisted then on blindfolding Maria and leading her up to the table to see what she would get; and, while they were putting on the bandage, Maria laughed and laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin.

They led her up to the table amid laughing and joking and she put her hand out in the air as she was told to do. She moved her hand about here and there in the air and descended on one of the saucers. She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering. Somebody said something about the garden, and at last Mrs Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play. Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book.

After that Mrs Donnelly played Miss McCloud’s Reel for the children and Joe made Maria take a glass of wine. Soon they were all quite merry again and Mrs Donnelly said Maria would enter a convent before the year was out because she had got the prayer-book. Maria had never seen Joe so nice to her as he was that night, so full of pleasant talk and reminiscences. She said they were all very good to her.

At last the children grew tired and sleepy and Joe asked Maria would she not sing some little song before she went, one of the old songs. Mrs Donnelly said Do, please, Maria! and so Maria had to get up and stand beside the piano. Mrs Donnelly bade the children be quiet and listen to Maria’s song. Then she played the prelude and said Now, Maria! and Maria, blushing very much, began to sing in a tiny quavering voice. She sang I Dreamt that I Dwelt, and when she came to the second verse she sang again:

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls

With vassals and serfs at my side

And of all who assembled within those walls

That I was the hope and the pride.

I had riches too great to count, could boast

Of a high ancestral name,

But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,

That you loved me still the same.

But no one tried to show her her mistake; and when she had ended her song Joe was very much moved. He said that there was no time like the long ago and no music for him like poor old Balfe, whatever other people might say; and his eyes filled up so much with tears that he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was.

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A Painful Case

Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed with white bed-clothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at one end of the lowest shelf and a copy of the Maynooth Catechism, sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped—the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an over-ripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten.

Mr Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A mediæval doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black hair and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an unamiable mouth. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiograpical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.

He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and took his lunch—a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o’clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George’s Street where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare. His evenings were spent either before his landlady’s piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity’ sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda. The house, thinly peopled and silent, gave distressing prophecy of failure. The lady who sat next him looked round at the deserted house once or twice and then said:

—What a pity there is such a poor house to-night! It’s so hard on people to have to sing to empty benches.

He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that she seemed so little awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory. When he learned that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged her to be a year or so younger than himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fulness, struck the note of defiance more definitely.

He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort Terrace and seized the moments when her daughter’s attention was diverted to become intimate. She alluded once or twice to her husband but her tone was not such as to make the allusion a warning. Her name was Mrs Sinico. Her husband’s great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn. Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and Holland; and they had one child.

Meeting her a third time by accident he found courage to make an appointment. She came. This was the first of many meetings; they met always in the evening and chose the most quiet quarters for their walks together. Mr Duffy, however, had a distaste for underhand ways and, finding that they were compelled to meet stealthily, he forced her to ask him to her house. Captain Sinico encouraged his visits, thinking that his daughter’s hand was in question. He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her. As the husband was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr Duffy had many opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society. Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.

Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life. With almost maternal solicitude she urged him to let his nature open to the full; she became his confessor. He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen’s discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the product of a leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.

She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?

He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their evenings alone. Little by little, as their thoughts entangled, they spoke of subjects less remote. Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic. Many times she allowed the dark to fall upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room, their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them. This union exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.

Mr Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned him. He did not visit her for a week; then he wrote to her asking her to meet him. As he did not wish their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional they met in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. It was cold autumn weather but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. When they came out of the Park they walked in silence towards the tram; but here she began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. A few days later he received a parcel containing his books and music.

Four years passed. Mr Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk. One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. He kept away from concerts lest he should meet her. His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired. And still every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening walked home from the city after having dined moderately in George’s Street and read the evening paper for dessert.

One evening as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his mouth his hand stopped. His eyes fixed themselves on a paragraph in the evening paper which he had propped against the water-carafe. He replaced the morsel of food on his plate and read the paragraph attentively. Then he drank a glass of water, pushed his plate to one side, doubled the paper down before him between his elbows and read the paragraph over and over again. The cabbage began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate. The girl came over to him to ask was his dinner not properly cooked. He said it was very good and ate a few mouthfuls of it with difficulty. Then he paid his bill and went out.

He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a side-pocket of his tight reefer over-coat. On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his pace. His stick struck the ground less emphatically and his breath, issuing irregularly, almost with a sighing sound, condensed in the wintry air. When he reached his house he went up at once to his bedroom and, taking the paper from his pocket, read the paragraph again by the failing light of the window. He read it not aloud, but moving his lips as a priest does when he reads the prayers Secreto. This was the paragraph:

DEATH OF A LADY AT SYDNEY PARADE

A PAINFUL CASE

To-day at the City of Dublin Hospital the Deputy Coroner (in the absence of Mr Leverett) held an inquest on the body of Mrs Emily Sinico, aged forty-three years, who was killed at Sydney Parade Station yesterday evening. The evidence showed that the deceased lady, while attempting to cross the line, was knocked down by the engine of the ten o’clock slow train from Kingstown, thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.

James Lennon, driver of the engine, stated that he had been in the employment of the railway company for fifteen years. On hearing the guard’s whistle he set the train in motion and a second or two afterwards brought it to rest in response to loud cries. The train was going slowly.

P. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to start he observed a woman attempting to cross the lines. He ran towards her and shouted but, before he could reach her, she was caught by the buffer of the engine and fell to the ground.

A juror—You saw the lady fall?

Witness—Yes.

Police Sergeant Croly deposed that when he arrived he found the deceased lying on the platform apparently dead. He had the body taken to the waiting-room pending the arrival of the ambulance.

Constable 57E corroborated.

Dr Halpin, assistant house surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that the deceased had two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe contusions of the right shoulder. The right side of the head had been injured in the fall. The injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a normal person. Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart’s action.

Mr H. B. Patterson Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret at the accident. The company had always taken every precaution to prevent people crossing the lines except by the bridges, both by placing notices in every station and by the use of patent spring gates at level crossings. The deceased had been in the habit of crossing the lines late at night from platform to platform and, in view of certain other circumstances of the case, he did not think the railway officials were to blame.

Captain Sinico, of Leoville, Sydney Parade, husband of the deceased, also gave evidence. He stated that the deceased was his wife. He was not in Dublin at the time of the accident as he had arrived only that morning from Rotterdam. They had been married for twenty-two years and had lived happily until about two years ago when his wife began to be rather intemperate in her habits.

Miss Mary Sinico said that of late her mother had been in the habit of going out at night to buy spirits. She, witness, had often tried to reason with her mother and had induced her to join a league. She was not at home until an hour after the accident.

The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence and exonerated Lennon from all blame.

The Deputy Coroner said it was a most painful case, and expressed great sympathy with Captain Sinico and his daughter. He urged on the railway company to take strong measures to prevent the possibility of similar accidents in the future. No blame attached to anyone.

Mr Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul’s companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.

As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He put on his overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six working-men in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in County Kildare. They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory—if anyone remembered him.

It was after nine o’clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

 ® 

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into light. It was an old man’s face, very bony and hairy. The moist blue eyes blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once or twice mechanically when it closed. When the cinders had caught he laid the piece of cardboard against the wall, sighed and said:

—That’s better now, Mr O’Connor.

Mr O’Connor, a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many blotches and pimples, had just brought the tobacco for a cigarette into a shapely cylinder but when spoken to he undid his handiwork meditatively. Then he began to roll the tobacco again meditatively and after a moment’s thought decided to lick the paper.

—Did Mr Tierney say when he’d be back? he asked in a husky falsetto.

—He didn’t say.

Mr O’Connor put his cigarette into his mouth and began to search his pockets. He took out a pack of thin pasteboard cards.

—I’ll get you a match, said the old man.

—Never mind, this’ll do, said Mr O’Connor.

He selected one of the cards and read what was printed on it:

MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS

ROYAL EXCHANGE WARD

Mr Richard J. Tierney, P.L.G., respectfully solicits the favour of your vote and influence at the coming election in the Royal Exchange Ward

Mr O’Connor had been engaged by Mr Tierney’s agent to canvass one part of the ward but, as the weather was inclement and his boots let in the wet, he spent a great part of the day sitting by the fire in the Committee Room in Wicklow Street with Jack, the old caretaker. They had been sitting thus since the short day had grown dark. It was the sixth of October, dismal and cold out of doors.

Mr O’Connor tore a strip off the card and, lighting it, lit his cigarette. As he did so the flame lit up a leaf of dark glossy ivy in the lapel of his coat. The old man watched him attentively and then, taking up the piece of cardboard again, began to fan the fire slowly while his companion smoked.

—Ah, yes, he said, continuing, it’s hard to know what way to bring up children. Now who’d think he’d turn out like that! I sent him to the Christian Brothers and I done what I could for him, and there he goes boosing about. I tried to make him someway decent.

He replaced the cardboard wearily.

—Only I’m an old man now I’d change his tune for him. I’d take the stick to his back and beat him while I could stand over him—as I done many a time before. The mother, you know, she cocks him up with this and that....

—That’s what ruins children, said Mr O’Connor.

—To be sure it is, said the old man. And little thanks you get for it, only impudence. He takes th’upper hand of me whenever he sees I’ve a sup taken. What’s the world coming to when sons speaks that way to their father?

—What age is he? said Mr O’Connor.

—Nineteen, said the old man.

—Why don’t you put him to something?

—Sure, amn’t I never done at the drunken bowsy ever since he left school? I won’t keep you, I says. You must get a job for yourself. But, sure, it’s worse whenever he gets a job; he drinks it all.

Mr O’Connor shook his head in sympathy, and the old man fell silent, gazing into the fire. Someone opened the door of the room and called out:

—Hello! Is this a Freemasons’ meeting?

—Who’s that? said the old man.

—What are you doing in the dark? asked a voice.

—Is that you, Hynes? asked Mr O’Connor.

—Yes. What are you doing in the dark? said Mr Hynes, advancing into the light of the fire.

He was a tall slender young man with a light brown moustache. Imminent little drops of rain hung at the brim of his hat and the collar of his jacket-coat was turned up.

—Well, Mat, he said to Mr O’Connor, how goes it?

Mr O’Connor shook his head. The old man left the hearth and, after stumbling about the room returned with two candlesticks which he thrust one after the other into the fire and carried to the table. A denuded room came into view and the fire lost all its cheerful colour. The walls of the room were bare except for a copy of an election address. In the middle of the room was a small table on which papers were heaped.

Mr Hynes leaned against the mantelpiece and asked:

—Has he paid you yet?

—Not yet, said Mr O’Connor. I hope to God he’ll not leave us in the lurch to-night.

Mr Hynes laughed.

—O, he’ll pay you. Never fear, he said.

—I hope he’ll look smart about it if he means business, said Mr O’Connor.

—What do you think, Jack? said Mr Hynes satirically to the old man.

The old man returned to his seat by the fire, saying:

—It isn’t but he has it, anyway. Not like the other tinker.

—What other tinker? said Mr Hynes.

—Colgan, said the old man scornfully.

—Is it because Colgan’s a working-man you say that? What’s the difference between a good honest bricklayer and a publican—eh? Hasn’t the working-man as good a right to be in the Corporation as anyone else—ay, and a better right than those shoneens that are always hat in hand before any fellow with a handle to his name? Isn’t that so, Mat? said Mr Hynes, addressing Mr O’Connor.

—I think you’re right, said Mr O’Connor.

—One man is a plain honest man with no hunker-sliding about him. He goes in to represent the labour classes. This fellow you’re working for only wants to get some job or other.

—Of course, the working-classes should be represented, said the old man.

—The working-man, said Mr Hynes, gets all kicks and no halfpence. But it’s labour produces everything. The working-man is not looking for fat jobs for his sons and nephews and cousins. The working-man is not going to drag the honour of Dublin in the mud to please a German monarch.

—How’s that? said the old man.

—Don’t you know they want to present an address of welcome to Edward Rex if he comes here next year? What do we want kowtowing to a foreign king?

—Our man won’t vote for the address, said Mr O’Connor. He goes in on the Nationalist ticket.

—Won’t he? said Mr Hynes. Wait till you see whether he will or not. I know him. Is it Tricky Dicky Tierney?

—By God! perhaps you’re right, Joe, said Mr O’Connor. Anyway, I wish he’d turn up with the spondulics.

The three men fell silent. The old man began to rake more cinders together. Mr Hynes took off his hat, shook it and then turned down the collar of his coat, displaying, as he did so, an ivy leaf in the lapel.

—If this man was alive, he said, pointing to the leaf, we’d have no talk of an address of welcome.

—That’s true, said Mr O’Connor.

—Musha, God be with them times! said the old man. There was some life in it then.

The room was silent again. Then a bustling little man with a snuffling nose and very cold ears pushed in the door. He walked over quickly to the fire, rubbing his hands as if he intended to produce a spark from them.

—No money, boys, he said.

—Sit down here, Mr Henchy, said the old man, offering him his chair.

—O, don’t stir, Jack, don’t stir, said Mr Henchy.

He nodded curtly to Mr Hynes and sat down on the chair which the old man vacated.

—Did you serve Aungier Street? he asked Mr O’Connor.

—Yes, said Mr O’Connor, beginning to search his pockets for memoranda.

—Did you call on Grimes?

—I did.

—Well? How does he stand?

—He wouldn’t promise. He said: I won’t tell anyone what way I’m going to vote. But I think he’ll be all right.

—Why so?

—He asked me who the nominators were; and I told him. I mentioned Father Burke’s name. I think it’ll be all right.

Mr Henchy began to snuffle and to rub his hands over the fire at a terrific speed. Then he said:

—For the love of God, Jack, bring us a bit of coal. There must be some left.

The old man went out of the room.

—It’s no go, said Mr Henchy, shaking his head. I asked the little shoeboy, but he said: O, now, Mr Henchy, when I see the work going on properly I won’t forget you, you may be sure. Mean little tinker! ’Usha, how could he be anything else?

—What did I tell you, Mat? said Mr Hynes. Tricky Dicky Tierney.

—O, he’s as tricky as they make ’em, said Mr Henchy. He hasn’t got those little pigs’ eyes for nothing. Blast his soul! Couldn’t he pay up like a man instead of: O, now, Mr Henchy, I must speak to Mr Fanning.... I’ve spent a lot of money? Mean little shoeboy of hell! I suppose he forgets the time his little old father kept the hand-me-down shop in Mary’s Lane.

—But is that a fact? asked Mr O’Connor.

—God, yes, said Mr Henchy. Did you never hear that? And the men used to go in on Sunday morning before the houses were open to buy a waistcoat or a trousers—moya! But Tricky Dicky’s little old father always had a tricky little black bottle up in a corner. Do you mind now? That’s that. That’s where he first saw the light.

The old man returned with a few lumps of coal which he placed here and there on the fire.

—That’s a nice how-do-you-do, said Mr O’Connor. How does he expect us to work for him if he won’t stump up?

—I can’t help it, said Mr Henchy. I expect to find the bailiffs in the hall when I go home.

Mr Hynes laughed and, shoving himself away from the mantelpiece with the aid of his shoulders, made ready to leave.

—It’ll be all right when King Eddie comes, he said. Well, boys, I’m off for the present. See you later. ’Bye, ’bye.

He went out of the room slowly. Neither Mr Henchy nor the old man said anything but, just as the door was closing, Mr O’Connor, who had been staring moodily into the fire, called out suddenly:

—’Bye, Joe.

Mr Henchy waited a few moments and then nodded in the direction of the door.

—Tell me, he said across the fire, what brings our friend in here? What does he want?

—’Usha, poor Joe! said Mr O’Connor, throwing the end of his cigarette into the fire, he’s hard up like the rest of us.

Mr Henchy snuffled vigorously and spat so copiously that he nearly put out the fire which uttered a hissing protest.

—To tell you my private and candid opinion, he said, I think he’s a man from the other camp. He’s a spy of Colgan’s if you ask me. Just go round and try and find out how they’re getting on. They won’t suspect you. Do you twig?

—Ah, poor Joe is a decent skin, said Mr O’Connor.

—His father was a decent respectable man, Mr Henchy admitted. Poor old Larry Hynes! Many a good turn he did in his day! But I’m greatly afraid our friend is not nineteen carat. Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can’t understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn’t he have some spark of manhood about him?

—He doesn’t get a warm welcome from me when he comes, said the old man. Let him work for his own side and not come spying around here.

—I don’t know, said Mr O’Connor dubiously, as he took out cigarette-papers and tobacco. I think Joe Hynes is a straight man. He’s a clever chap, too, with the pen. Do you remember that thing he wrote...?

—Some of these hillsiders and fenians are a bit too clever if you ask me, said Mr Henchy. Do you know what my private and candid opinion is about some of those little jokers? I believe half of them are in the pay of the Castle.

—There’s no knowing, said the old man.

—O, but I know it for a fact, said Mr Henchy. They’re Castle hacks.... I don’t say Hynes.... No, damn it, I think he’s a stroke above that.... But there’s a certain little nobleman with a cock-eye—you know the patriot I’m alluding to?

Mr O’Connor nodded.

—There’s a lineal descendant of Major Sirr for you if you like! O, the heart’s blood of a patriot! That’s a fellow now that’d sell his country for fourpence—ay—and go down on his bended knees and thank the Almighty Christ he had a country to sell.

There was a knock at the door.

—Come in! said Mr Henchy.

A person resembling a poor clergyman or a poor actor appeared in the doorway. His black clothes were tightly buttoned on his short body and it was impossible to say whether he wore a clergyman’s collar or a layman’s because the collar of his shabby frock-coat, the uncovered buttons of which reflected the candlelight, was turned up about his neck. He wore a round hat of hard black felt. His face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of damp yellow cheese save where two rosy spots indicated the cheekbones. He opened his very long mouth suddenly to express disappointment and at the same time opened wide his very bright blue eyes to express pleasure and surprise.

—O, Father Keon! said Mr Henchy, jumping up from his chair. Is that you? Come in!

—O, no, no, no! said Father Keon quickly, pursing his lips as if he were addressing a child.

—Won’t you come in and sit down?

—No, no, no! said Father Keon, speaking in a discreet indulgent velvety voice. Don’t let me disturb you now! I’m just looking for Mr Fanning....

—He’s round at the Black Eagle, said Mr Henchy. But won’t you come in and sit down a minute?

—No, no, thank you. It was just a little business matter, said Father Keon. Thank you, indeed.

He retreated from the doorway and Mr. Henchy, seizing one of the candlesticks, went to the door to light him downstairs.

—O, don’t trouble, I beg!

—No, but the stairs is so dark.

—No, no, I can see.... Thank you, indeed.

—Are you right now?

—All right, thanks.... Thanks.

Mr Henchy returned with the candlestick and put it on the table. He sat down again at the fire. There was silence for a few moments.

—Tell me, John, said Mr O’Connor, lighting his cigarette with another pasteboard card.

—Hm?

—What is he exactly?

—Ask me an easier one, said Mr Henchy.

—Fanning and himself seem to me very thick. They’re often in Kavanagh’s together. Is he a priest at all?

—’Mmmyes, I believe so.... I think he’s what you call a black sheep. We haven’t many of them, thank God! but we have a few.... He’s an unfortunate man of some kind....

—And how does he knock it out? asked Mr O’Connor.

—That’s another mystery.

—Is he attached to any chapel or church or institution or—

—No, said Mr Henchy. I think he’s travelling on his own account.... God forgive me, he added, I thought he was the dozen of stout.

—Is there any chance of a drink itself? asked Mr O’Connor.

—I’m dry too, said the old man.

—I asked that little shoeboy three times, said Mr Henchy, would he send up a dozen of stout. I asked him again now but he was leaning on the counter in his shirt-sleeves having a deep goster with Alderman Cowley.

—Why didn’t you remind him? said Mr O’Connor.

—Well, I couldn’t go over while he was talking to Alderman Cowley. I just waited till I caught his eye, and said: About that little matter I was speaking to you about.... That’ll be all right, Mr H., he said. Yerra, sure the little hop-o’-my-thumb has forgotten all about it.

—There’s some deal on in that quarter, said Mr O’Connor thoughtfully. I saw the three of them hard at it yesterday at Suffolk Street corner.

—I think I know the little game they’re at, said Mr Henchy. You must owe the City Fathers money nowadays if you want to be made Lord Mayor. Then they’ll make you Lord Mayor. By God! I’m thinking seriously of becoming a City Father myself. What do you think? Would I do for the job?

Mr O’Connor laughed.

—So far as owing money goes....

—Driving out of the Mansion House, said Mr Henchy, in all my vermin, with Jack here standing up behind me in a powdered wig—eh?

—And make me your private secretary, John.

—Yes. And I’ll make Father Keon my private chaplain. We’ll have a family party.

—Faith, Mr Henchy, said the old man, you’d keep up better style than some of them. I was talking one day to old Keegan, the porter. And how do you like your new master, Pat? says I to him. You haven’t much entertaining now, says I. Entertaining! says he. He’d live on the smell of an oil-rag. And do you know what he told me? Now, I declare to God, I didn’t believe him.

—What? said Mr Henchy and Mr O’Connor.

—He told me: What do you think of a Lord Mayor of Dublin sending out for a pound of chops for his dinner? How’s that for high living? says he. Wisha! wisha, says I. A pound of chops, says he, coming into the Mansion House. Wisha! says I, what kind of people is going at all now?

At this point there was a knock at the door, and a boy put in his head.

—What is it? said the old man.

—From the Black Eagle, said the boy, walking in sideways and depositing a basket on the floor with a noise of shaken bottles.

The old man helped the boy to transfer the bottles from the basket to the table and counted the full tally. After the transfer the boy put his basket on his arm and asked:

—Any bottles?

—What bottles? said the old man.

—Won’t you let us drink them first? said Mr Henchy.

—I was told to ask for bottles.

—Come back to-morrow, said the old man.

—Here, boy! said Mr Henchy, will you run over to O’Farrell’s and ask him to lend us a corkscrew—for Mr Henchy, say. Tell him we won’t keep it a minute. Leave the basket there.

The boy went out and Mr Henchy began to rub his hands cheerfully, saying:

—Ah, well, he’s not so bad after all. He’s as good as his word, anyhow.

—There’s no tumblers, said the old man.

—O, don’t let that trouble you, Jack, said Mr Henchy. Many’s the good man before now drank out of the bottle.

—Anyway, it’s better than nothing, said Mr O’Connor.

—He’s not a bad sort, said Mr Henchy, only Fanning has such a loan of him. He means well, you know, in his own tinpot way.

The boy came back with the corkscrew. The old man opened three bottles and was handing back the corkscrew when Mr Henchy said to the boy:

—Would you like a drink, boy?

—If you please, sir, said the boy.

The old man opened another bottle grudgingly, and handed it to the boy.

—What age are you? he asked.

—Seventeen, said the boy.

As the old man said nothing further the boy took the bottle, said: Here’s my best respects, sir to Mr Henchy, drank the contents, put the bottle back on the table and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Then he took up the corkscrew and went out of the door sideways, muttering some form of salutation.

—That’s the way it begins, said the old man.

—The thin end of the wedge, said Mr Henchy.

The old man distributed the three bottles which he had opened and the men drank from them simultaneously. After having drunk each placed his bottle on the mantelpiece within hand’s reach and drew in a long breath of satisfaction.

—Well, I did a good day’s work to-day, said Mr Henchy, after a pause.

—That so, John?

—Yes. I got him one or two sure things in Dawson Street, Crofton and myself. Between ourselves, you know, Crofton (he’s a decent chap, of course), but he’s not worth a damn as a canvasser. He hasn’t a word to throw to a dog. He stands and looks at the people while I do the talking.

Here two men entered the room. One of them was a very fat man, whose blue serge clothes seemed to be in danger of falling from his sloping figure. He had a big face which resembled a young ox’s face in expression, staring blue eyes and a grizzled moustache. The other man, who was much younger and frailer, had a thin clean-shaven face. He wore a very high double collar and a wide-brimmed bowler hat.

—Hello, Crofton! said Mr Henchy to the fat man. Talk of the devil....

—Where did the boose come from? asked the young man. Did the cow calve?

—O, of course, Lyons spots the drink first thing! said Mr O’Connor, laughing.

—Is that the way you chaps canvass, said Mr Lyons, and Crofton and I out in the cold and rain looking for votes?

—Why, blast your soul, said Mr Henchy, I’d get more votes in five minutes than you two’d get in a week.

—Open two bottles of stout, Jack, said Mr O’Connor.

—How can I? said the old man, when there’s no corkscrew?

—Wait now, wait now! said Mr Henchy, getting up quickly. Did you ever see this little trick?

He took two bottles from the table and, carrying them to the fire, put them on the hob. Then he sat down again by the fire and took another drink from his bottle. Mr Lyons sat on the edge of the table, pushed his hat towards the nape of his neck and began to swing his legs.

—Which is my bottle? he asked.

—This lad, said Mr Henchy.

Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob. He was silent for two reasons. The first reason, sufficient in itself, was that he had nothing to say; the second reason was that he considered his companions beneath him. He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr Tierney.

In a few minutes an apologetic Pok! was heard as the cork flew out of Mr Lyons’ bottle. Mr Lyons jumped off the table, went to the fire, took his bottle and carried it back to the table.

—I was just telling them, Crofton, said Mr Henchy, that we got a good few votes to-day.

—Who did you get? asked Mr Lyons.

—Well, I got Parkes for one, and I got Atkinson for two, and I got Ward of Dawson Street. Fine old chap he is, too— regular old toff, old Conservative! But isn’t your candidate a Nationalist? said he. He’s a respectable man, said I. He’s in favour of whatever will benefit this country. He’s a big ratepayer, I said. He has extensive house property in the city and three places of business and isn’t it to his own advantage to keep down the rates? He’s a prominent and respected citizen, said I, and a Poor Law Guardian, and he doesn’t belong to any party, good, bad, or indifferent. That’s the way to talk to ’em.

—And what about the address to the King? said Mr Lyons, after drinking and smacking his lips.

—Listen to me, said Mr Henchy. What we want in this country, as I said to old Ward, is capital. The King’s coming here will mean an influx of money into this country. The citizens of Dublin will benefit by it. Look at all the factories down by the quays there, idle! Look at all the money there is in the country if we only worked the old industries, the mills, the shipbuilding yards and factories. It’s capital we want.

—But look here, John, said Mr O’Connor. Why should we welcome the King of England? Didn’t Parnell himself ...

—Parnell, said Mr Henchy, is dead. Now, here’s the way I look at it. Here’s this chap come to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He’s a man of the world, and he means well by us. He’s a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself: The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By Christ, I’ll go myself and see what they’re like. And are we going to insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? Eh? Isn’t that right, Crofton?

Mr Crofton nodded his head.

—But after all now, said Mr Lyons argumentatively, King Edward’s life, you know, is not the very ...

—Let bygones be bygones, said Mr Henchy. I admire the man personally. He’s just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He’s fond of his glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman. Damn it, can’t we Irish play fair?

—That’s all very fine, said Mr Lyons. But look at the case of Parnell now.

—In the name of God, said Mr Henchy, where’s the analogy between the two cases?

—What I mean, said Mr Lyons, is we have our ideals. Why, now, would we welcome a man like that? Do you think now after what he did Parnell was a fit man to lead us? And why, then, would we do it for Edward the Seventh?

—This is Parnell’s anniversary, said Mr O’Connor, and don’t let us stir up any bad blood. We all respect him now that he’s dead and gone—even the Conservatives, he added, turning to Mr Crofton.

Pok! The tardy cork flew out of Mr Crofton’s bottle. Mr Crofton got up from his box and went to the fire. As he returned with his capture he said in a deep voice:

—Our side of the house respects him because he was a gentleman.

—Right you are, Crofton! said Mr Henchy fiercely. He was the only man that could keep that bag of cats in order. Down, ye dogs! Lie down, ye curs! That’s the way he treated them. Come in, Joe! Come in! he called out, catching sight of Mr Hynes in the doorway.

Mr Hynes came in slowly.

—Open another bottle of stout, Jack, said Mr Henchy. O, I forgot there’s no corkscrew! Here, show me one here and I’ll put it at the fire.

The old man handed him another bottle and he placed it on the hob.

—Sit down, Joe, said Mr O’Connor, we’re just talking about the Chief.

—Ay, ay! said Mr Henchy.

Mr Hynes sat on the side of the table near Mr Lyons but said nothing.

—There’s one of them, anyhow, said Mr Henchy, that didn’t renege him. By God, I’ll say for you, Joe! No, by God, you stuck to him like a man!

—O, Joe, said Mr O’Connor suddenly. Give us that thing you wrote—do you remember? Have you got it on you?

—O, ay! said Mr Henchy. Give us that. Did you ever hear that, Crofton? Listen to this now: splendid thing.

—Go on, said Mr O’Connor. Fire away, Joe.

Mr Hynes did not seem to remember at once the piece to which they were alluding but, after reflecting a while, he said:

—O, that thing is it.... Sure, that’s old now.

—Out with it, man! said Mr O’Connor.

—’Sh, ’sh, said Mr Henchy. Now, Joe!

Mr Hynes hesitated a little longer. Then amid the silence he took off his hat, laid it on the table and stood up. He seemed to be rehearsing the piece in his mind. After a rather long pause he announced:

THE DEATH OF PARNELL

6th October 1891

He cleared his throat once or twice and then began to recite:

He is dead. Our Uncrowned King is dead.

O, Erin, O mourn with grief and woe

For he lies dead whom the fell gang

Of modern hypocrites laid low.

He lies slain by the coward hounds

He raised to glory from the mire;

And Erin’s hopes and Erin’s dreams

Perish upon her monarch’s pyre.

In palace, cabin or in cot

The Irish heart where’er it be

Is bowed with woe—for he is gone

Who would have wrought her destiny.

He would have had his Erin famed,

The green flag gloriously unfurled,

Her statesmen, bards and warriors raised

Before the nations of the World.

He dreamed (alas, ’twas but a dream!)

Of Liberty: but as he strove

To clutch that idol, treachery

Sundered him from the thing he loved.

Shame on the coward caitiff hands

That smote their Lord or with a kiss

Betrayed him to the rabble-rout

Of fawning priests—no friends of his.

May everlasting shame consume

The memory of those who tried

To befoul and smear th’ exalted name

Of one who spurned them in his pride.

He fell as fall the mighty ones,

Nobly undaunted to the last,

And death has now united him

With Erin’s heroes of the past.

No sound of strife disturb his sleep!

Calmly he rests: no human pain

Or high ambition spurs him now

The peaks of glory to attain.

They had their way: they laid him low.

But Erin, list, his spirit may

Rise, like the Phoenix from the flames,

When breaks the dawning of the day,

The day that brings us Freedom’s reign.

And on that day may Erin well

Pledge in the cup she lifts to Joy

One grief—the memory of Parnell.

Mr Hynes sat down again on the table. When he had finished his recitation there was a silence and then a burst of clapping: even Mr Lyons clapped. The applause continued for a little time. When it had ceased all the auditors drank from their bottles in silence.

Pok! The cork flew out of Mr Hynes’ bottle, but Mr Hynes remained sitting, flushed and bareheaded on the table. He did not seem to have heard the invitation.

—Good man, Joe! said Mr O’Connor, taking out his cigarette papers and pouch the better to hide his emotion.

—What do you think of that, Crofton? cried Mr Henchy. Isn’t that fine? What?

Mr Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing.

 ® 

A Mother

Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, had been walking up and down Dublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts. He had a game leg and for this his friends called him Hoppy Holohan. He walked up and down constantly, stood by the hour at street corners arguing the point and made notes; but in the end it was Mrs Kearney who arranged everything.

Miss Devlin had become Mrs Kearney out of spite. She had been educated in a high-class convent where she had learned French and music. As she was naturally pale and unbending in manner she made few friends at school. When she came to the age of marriage she was sent out to many houses where her playing and ivory manners were much admired. She sat amid the chilly circle of her accomplishments, waiting for some suitor to brave it and offer her a brilliant life. But the young men whom she met were ordinary and she gave them no encouragement, trying to console her romantic desires by eating a great deal of Turkish Delight in secret. However, when she drew near the limit and her friends began to loosen their tongues about her she silenced them by marrying Mr Kearney, who was a bootmaker on Ormond Quay.

He was much older than she. His conversation, which was serious, took place at intervals in his great brown beard. After the first year of married life Mrs Kearney perceived that such a man would wear better than a romantic person but she never put her own romantic ideas away. He was sober, thrifty and pious; he went to the altar every first Friday, sometimes with her, oftener by himself. But she never weakened in her religion and was a good wife to him. At some party in a strange house when she lifted her eyebrow ever so slightly he stood up to take his leave and, when his cough troubled him, she put the eider-down quilt over his feet and made a strong rum punch. For his part he was a model father. By paying a small sum every week into a society he ensured for both his daughters a dowry of one hundred pounds each when they came to the age of twenty-four. He sent the elder daughter, Kathleen, to a good convent, where she learned French and music and afterwards paid her fees at the Academy. Every year in the month of July Mrs Kearney found occasion to say to some friend:

—My good man is packing us off to Skerries for a few weeks.

If it was not Skerries it was Howth or Greystones.

When the Irish Revival began to be appreciable Mrs Kearney determined to take advantage of her daughter’s name and brought an Irish teacher to the house. Kathleen and her sister sent Irish picture postcards to their friends and these friends sent back other Irish picture postcards. On special Sundays when Mr Kearney went with his family to the pro-cathedral a little crowd of people would assemble after mass at the corner of Cathedral Street. They were all friends of the Kearneys—musical friends or Nationalist friends; and, when they had played every little counter of gossip, they shook hands with one another all together, laughing at the crossing of so many hands and said good-bye to one another in Irish. Soon the name of Miss Kathleen Kearney began to be heard often on people’s lips. People said that she was very clever at music and a very nice girl and, moreover, that she was a believer in the language movement. Mrs Kearney was well content at this. Therefore she was not surprised when one day Mr Holohan came to her and proposed that her daughter should be the accompanist at a series of four grand concerts which his Society was going to give in the Antient Concert Rooms. She brought him into the drawing-room, made him sit down and brought out the decanter and the silver biscuit-barrel. She entered heart and soul into the details of the enterprise, advised and dissuaded; and finally a contract was drawn up by which Kathleen was to receive eight guineas for her services as accompanist at the four grand concerts.

As Mr Holohan was a novice in such delicate matters as the wording of bills and the disposing of items for a programme Mrs Kearney helped him. She had tact. She knew what artistes should go into capitals and what artistes should go into small type. She knew that the first tenor would not like to come on after Mr Meade’s comic turn. To keep the audience continually diverted she slipped the doubtful items in between the old favourites. Mr Holohan called to see her every day to have her advice on some point. She was invariably friendly and advising—homely, in fact. She pushed the decanter towards him, saying:

—Now, help yourself, Mr Holohan!

And while he was helping himself she said:

—Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid of it!

Everything went on smoothly. Mrs Kearney bought some lovely blush-pink charmeuse in Brown Thomas’s to let into the front of Kathleen’s dress. It cost a pretty penny; but there are occasions when a little expense is justifiable. She took a dozen of two-shilling tickets for the final concert and sent them to those friends who could not be trusted to come otherwise. She forgot nothing and, thanks to her, everything that was to be done was done.

The concerts were to be on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. When Mrs Kearney arrived with her daughter at the Antient Concert Rooms on Wednesday night she did not like the look of things. A few young men, wearing bright blue badges in their coats, stood idle in the vestibule; none of them wore evening dress. She passed by with her daughter and a quick glance through the open door of the hall showed her the cause of the stewards’ idleness. At first she wondered had she mistaken the hour. No, it was twenty minutes to eight.

In the dressing-room behind the stage she was introduced to the secretary of the Society, Mr Fitzpatrick. She smiled and shook his hand. He was a little man with a white vacant face. She noticed that he wore his soft brown hat carelessly on the side of his head and that his accent was flat. He held a programme in his hand and, while he was talking to her, he chewed one end of it into a moist pulp. He seemed to bear disappointments lightly. Mr Holohan came into the dressing-room every few minutes with reports from the box-office. The artistes talked among themselves nervously, glanced from time to time at the mirror and rolled and unrolled their music. When it was nearly half-past eight the few people in the hall began to express their desire to be entertained. Mr Fitzpatrick came in, smiled vacantly at the room, and said:

—Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I suppose we’d better open the ball.

Mrs Kearney rewarded his very flat final syllable with a quick stare of contempt and then said to her daughter encouragingly:

—Are you ready, dear?

When she had an opportunity she called Mr Holohan aside and asked him to tell her what it meant. Mr Holohan did not know what it meant. He said that the Committee had made a mistake in arranging for four concerts: four was too many.

—And the artistes! said Mrs Kearney. Of course they are doing their best, but really they are no good.

Mr Holohan admitted that the artistes were no good but the Committee, he said, had decided to let the first three concerts go as they pleased and reserve all the talent for Saturday night. Mrs Kearney said nothing but, as the mediocre items followed one another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert. There was something she didn’t like in the look of things and Mr Fitzpatrick’s vacant smile irritated her very much. However, she said nothing and waited to see how it would end. The concert expired shortly before ten and everyone went home quickly.

The concert on Thursday night was better attended but Mrs Kearney saw at once that the house was filled with paper. The audience behaved indecorously as if the concert were an informal dress rehearsal. Mr Fitzpatrick seemed to enjoy himself; he was quite unconscious that Mrs Kearney was taking angry note of his conduct. He stood at the edge of the screen, from time to time jutting out his head and exchanging a laugh with two friends in the corner of the balcony. In the course of the evening Mrs Kearney learned that the Friday concert was to be abandoned and that the Committee was going to move heaven and earth to secure a bumper house on Saturday night. When she heard this she sought out Mr Holohan. She buttonholed him as he was limping out quickly with a glass of lemonade for a young lady and asked him was it true. Yes, it was true.

—But, of course, that doesn’t alter the contract, she said. The contract was for four concerts.

Mr Holohan seemed to be in a hurry; he advised her to speak to Mr Fitzpatrick. Mrs Kearney was now beginning to be alarmed. She called Mr Fitzpatrick away from his screen and told him that her daughter had signed for four concerts and that, of course, according to the terms of the contract, she should receive the sum originally stipulated for whether the society gave the four concerts or not. Mr Fitzpatrick, who did not catch the point at issue very quickly, seemed unable to resolve the difficulty and said that he would bring the matter before the Committee. Mrs Kearney’s anger began to flutter in her cheek and she had all she could do to keep from asking:

—And who is the Cometty, pray?

But she knew that it would not be ladylike to do that: so she was silent.

Little boys were sent out into the principal streets of Dublin early on Friday morning with bundles of handbills. Special puffs appeared in all the evening papers reminding the music-loving public of the treat which was in store for it on the following evening. Mrs Kearney was somewhat reassured but she thought well to tell her husband part of her suspicions. He listened carefully and said that perhaps it would be better if he went with her on Saturday night. She agreed. She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male. She was glad that he had suggested coming with her. She thought her plans over.

The night of the grand concert came. Mrs Kearney, with her husband and daughter, arrived at the Antient Concert Rooms three-quarters of an hour before the time at which the concert was to begin. By ill luck it was a rainy evening. Mrs Kearney placed her daughter’s clothes and music in charge of her husband and went all over the building looking for Mr Holohan or Mr Fitzpatrick. She could find neither. She asked the stewards was any member of the Committee in the hall and, after a great deal of trouble, a steward brought out a little woman named Miss Beirne to whom Mrs Kearney explained that she wanted to see one of the secretaries. Miss Beirne expected them any minute and asked could she do anything. Mrs Kearney looked searchingly at the oldish face which was screwed into an expression of trustfulness and enthusiasm and answered:

—No, thank you!

The little woman hoped they would have a good house. She looked out at the rain until the melancholy of the wet street effaced all the trustfulness and enthusiasm from her twisted features. Then she gave a little sigh and said:

—Ah, well! We did our best, the dear knows.

Mrs Kearney had to go back to the dressing-room.

The artistes were arriving. The bass and the second tenor had already come. The bass, Mr Duggan, was a slender young man with a scattered black moustache. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in the city and, as a boy, he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding hall. From this humble state he had raised himself until he had become a first-rate artiste. He had appeared in grand opera. One night, when an operatic artiste had fallen ill, he had undertaken the part of the king in the opera of Maritana at the Queen’s Theatre. He sang his music with great feeling and volume and was warmly welcomed by the gallery; but, unfortunately, he marred the good impression by wiping his nose in his gloved hand once or twice out of thoughtlessness. He was unassuming and spoke little. He said yous so softly that it passed unnoticed and he never drank anything stronger than milk for his voice’ sake. Mr Bell, the second tenor, was a fair-haired little man who competed every year for prizes at the Feis Ceoil. On his fourth trial he had been awarded a bronze medal. He was extremely nervous and extremely jealous of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient friendliness. It was his humour to have people know what an ordeal a concert was to him. Therefore when he saw Mr Duggan he went over to him and asked:

—Are you in it too?

—Yes, said Mr Duggan.

Mr Bell laughed at his fellow-sufferer, held out his hand and said:

—Shake!

Mrs Kearney passed by these two young men and went to the edge of the screen to view the house. The seats were being filled up rapidly and a pleasant noise circulated in the auditorium. She came back and spoke to her husband privately. Their conversation was evidently about Kathleen for they both glanced at her often as she stood chatting to one of her Nationalist friends, Miss Healy, the contralto. An unknown solitary woman with a pale face walked through the room. The women followed with keen eyes the faded blue dress which was stretched upon a meagre body. Someone said that she was Madam Glynn, the soprano.

—I wonder where did they dig her up, said Kathleen to Miss Healy. I’m sure I never heard of her.

Miss Healy had to smile. Mr Holohan limped into the dressing-room at that moment and the two young ladies asked him who was the unknown woman. Mr Holohan said that she was Madam Glynn from London. Madam Glynn took her stand in a corner of the room, holding a roll of music stiffly before her and from time to time changing the direction of her startled gaze. The shadow took her faded dress into shelter but fell revengefully into the little cup behind her collar-bone. The noise of the hall became more audible. The first tenor and the baritone arrived together. They were both well dressed, stout and complacent and they brought a breath of opulence among the company.

Mrs Kearney brought her daughter over to them, and talked to them amiably. She wanted to be on good terms with them but, while she strove to be polite, her eyes followed Mr Holohan in his limping and devious courses. As soon as she could she excused herself and went out after him.

—Mr Holohan, I want to speak to you for a moment, she said.

They went down to a discreet part of the corridor. Mrs Kearney asked him when was her daughter going to be paid. Mr Holohan said that Mr Fitzpatrick had charge of that. Mrs Kearney said that she didn’t know anything about Mr Fitzpatrick. Her daughter had signed a contract for eight guineas and she would have to be paid. Mr Holohan said that it wasn’t his business.

—Why isn’t it your business? asked Mrs Kearney. Didn’t you yourself bring her the contract? Anyway, if it’s not your business it’s my business and I mean to see to it.

—You’d better speak to Mr Fitzpatrick, said Mr Holohan distantly.

—I don’t know anything about Mr Fitzpatrick, repeated Mrs Kearney. I have my contract, and I intend to see that it is carried out.

When she came back to the dressing-room her cheeks were slightly suffused. The room was lively. Two men in outdoor dress had taken possession of the fireplace and were chatting familiarly with Miss Healy and the baritone. They were the Freeman man and Mr O’Madden Burke. The Freeman man had come in to say that he could not wait for the concert as he had to report the lecture which an American priest was giving in the Mansion House. He said they were to leave the report for him at the Freeman office and he would see that it went in. He was a grey-haired man, with a plausible voice and careful manners. He held an extinguished cigar in his hand and the aroma of cigar smoke floated near him. He had not intended to stay a moment because concerts and artistes bored him considerably but he remained leaning against the mantelpiece. Miss Healy stood in front of him, talking and laughing. He was old enough to suspect one reason for her politeness but young enough in spirit to turn the moment to account. The warmth, fragrance and colour of her body appealed to his senses. He was pleasantly conscious that the bosom which he saw rise and fall slowly beneath him rose and fell at that moment for him, that the laughter and fragrance and wilful glances were his tribute. When he could stay no longer he took leave of her regretfully.

—O’Madden Burke will write the notice, he explained to Mr Holohan, and I’ll see it in.

—Thank you very much, Mr Hendrick, said Mr Holohan. You’ll see it in, I know. Now, won’t you have a little something before you go?

—I don’t mind, said Mr Hendrick.

The two men went along some tortuous passages and up a dark staircase and came to a secluded room where one of the stewards was uncorking bottles for a few gentlemen. One of these gentlemen was Mr O’Madden Burke, who had found out the room by instinct. He was a suave elderly man who balanced his imposing body, when at rest, upon a large silk umbrella. His magniloquent western name was the moral umbrella upon which he balanced the fine problem of his finances. He was widely respected.

While Mr Holohan was entertaining the Freeman man Mrs Kearney was speaking so animatedly to her husband that he had to ask her to lower her voice. The conversation of the others in the dressing-room had become strained. Mr Bell, the first item, stood ready with his music but the accompanist made no sign. Evidently something was wrong. Mr Kearney looked straight before him, stroking his beard, while Mrs Kearney spoke into Kathleen’s ear with subdued emphasis. From the hall came sounds of encouragement, clapping and stamping of feet. The first tenor and the baritone and Miss Healy stood together, waiting tranquilly, but Mr Bell’s nerves were greatly agitated because he was afraid the audience would think that he had come late.

Mr Holohan and Mr O’Madden Burke came into the room. In a moment Mr Holohan perceived the hush. He went over to Mrs Kearney and spoke with her earnestly. While they were speaking the noise in the hall grew louder. Mr Holohan became very red and excited. He spoke volubly, but Mrs Kearney said curtly at intervals:

—She won’t go on. She must get her eight guineas.

Mr Holohan pointed desperately towards the hall where the audience was clapping and stamping. He appealed to Mr Kearney and to Kathleen. But Mr Kearney continued to stroke his beard and Kathleen looked down, moving the point of her new shoe: it was not her fault. Mrs Kearney repeated:

—She won’t go on without her money.

After a swift struggle of tongues Mr Holohan hobbled out in haste. The room was silent. When the strain of the silence had become somewhat painful Miss Healy said to the baritone:

—Have you seen Mrs Pat Campbell this week?

The baritone had not seen her but he had been told that she was very fine. The conversation went no further. The first tenor bent his head and began to count the links of the gold chain which was extended across his waist, smiling and humming random notes to observe the effect on the frontal sinus. From time to time everyone glanced at Mrs Kearney.

The noise in the auditorium had risen to a clamour when Mr Fitzpatrick burst into the room, followed by Mr Holohan, who was panting. The clapping and stamping in the hall were punctuated by whistling. Mr Fitzpatrick held a few bank-notes in his hand. He counted out four into Mrs Kearney’s hand and said she would get the other half at the interval. Mrs Kearney said:

—This is four shillings short.

But Kathleen gathered in her skirt and said: Now, Mr Bell, to the first item, who was shaking like an aspen. The singer and the accompanist went out together. The noise in the hall died away. There was a pause of a few seconds: and then the piano was heard.

The first part of the concert was very successful except for Madam Glynn’s item. The poor lady sang Killarney in a bodiless gasping voice, with all the old-fashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation which she believed lent elegance to her singing. She looked as if she had been resurrected from an old stage-wardrobe and the cheaper parts of the hall made fun of her high wailing notes. The first tenor and the contralto, however, brought down the house. Kathleen played a selection of Irish airs which was generously applauded. The first part closed with a stirring patriotic recitation delivered by a young lady who arranged amateur theatricals. It was deservedly applauded; and, when it was ended, the men went out for the interval, content.

All this time the dressing-room was a hive of excitement. In one corner were Mr Holohan, Mr Fitzpatrick, Miss Beirne, two of the stewards, the baritone, the bass, and Mr O’Madden Burke. Mr O’Madden Burke said it was the most scandalous exhibition he had ever witnessed. Miss Kathleen Kearney’s musical career was ended in Dublin after that, he said. The baritone was asked what did he think of Mrs Kearney’s conduct. He did not like to say anything. He had been paid his money and wished to be at peace with men. However, he said that Mrs Kearney might have taken the artistes into consideration. The stewards and the secretaries debated hotly as to what should be done when the interval came.

—I agree with Miss Beirne, said Mr O’Madden Burke. Pay her nothing.

In another corner of the room were Mrs Kearney and her husband, Mr Bell, Miss Healy and the young lady who had recited the patriotic piece. Mrs Kearney said that the Committee had treated her scandalously. She had spared neither trouble nor expense and this was how she was repaid.

They thought they had only a girl to deal with and that, therefore, they could ride roughshod over her. But she would show them their mistake. They wouldn’t have dared to have treated her like that if she had been a man. But she would see that her daughter got her rights: she wouldn’t be fooled. If they didn’t pay her to the last farthing she would make Dublin ring. Of course she was sorry for the sake of the artistes. But what else could she do? She appealed to the second tenor who said he thought she had not been well treated. Then she appealed to Miss Healy. Miss Healy wanted to join the other group but she did not like to do so because she was a great friend of Kathleen’s and the Kearneys had often invited her to their house.

As soon as the first part was ended Mr Fitzpatrick and Mr Holohan went over to Mrs Kearney and told her that the other four guineas would be paid after the Committee meeting on the following Tuesday and that, in case her daughter did not play for the second part, the Committee would consider the contract broken and would pay nothing.

—I haven’t seen any Committee, said Mrs Kearney angrily. My daughter has her contract. She will get four pounds eight into her hand or a foot she won’t put on that platform.

—I’m surprised at you, Mrs Kearney, said Mr Holohan. I never thought you would treat us this way.

—And what way did you treat me? asked Mrs Kearney.

Her face was inundated with an angry colour and she looked as if she would attack someone with her hands.

—I’m asking for my rights, she said.

—You might have some sense of decency, said Mr Holohan.

—Might I, indeed? ... And when I ask when my daughter is going to be paid I can’t get a civil answer.

She tossed her head and assumed a haughty voice:

—You must speak to the secretary. It’s not my business. I’m a great fellow fol-the-diddle-I-do.

—I thought you were a lady, said Mr Holohan, walking away from her abruptly.

After that Mrs Kearney’s conduct was condemned on all hands: everyone approved of what the Committee had done. She stood at the door, haggard with rage, arguing with her husband and daughter, gesticulating with them. She waited until it was time for the second part to begin in the hope that the secretaries would approach her. But Miss Healy had kindly consented to play one or two accompaniments. Mrs Kearney had to stand aside to allow the baritone and his accompanist to pass up to the platform. She stood still for an instant like an angry stone image and, when the first notes of the song struck her ear, she caught up her daughter’s cloak and said to her husband:

—Get a cab!

He went out at once. Mrs Kearney wrapped the cloak round her daughter and followed him. As she passed through the doorway she stopped and glared into Mr Holohan’s face.

—I’m not done with you yet, she said.

—But I’m done with you, said Mr Holohan.

Kathleen followed her mother meekly. Mr Holohan began to pace up and down the room, in order to cool himself for he felt his skin on fire.

—That’s a nice lady! he said. O, she’s a nice lady!

—You did the proper thing, Holohan, said Mr O’Madden Burke, poised upon his umbrella in approval.

 ® 

Grace

Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise. A thin stream of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

These two gentlemen and one of the curates carried him up the stairs and laid him down again on the floor of the bar. In two minutes he was surrounded by a ring of men. The manager of the bar asked everyone who he was and who was with him. No one knew who he was but one of the curates said he had served the gentleman with a small rum.

—Was he by himself? asked the manager.

—No, sir. There was two gentlemen with him.

—And where are they?

No one knew; a voice said:

—Give him air. He’s fainted.

The ring of onlookers distended and closed again elastically. A dark medal of blood had formed itself near the man’s head on the tessellated floor. The manager, alarmed by the grey pallor of the man’s face, sent for a policeman.

His collar was unfastened and his necktie undone. He opened his eyes for an instant, sighed and closed them again. One of the gentlemen who had carried him upstairs held a dinged silk hat in his hand. The manager asked repeatedly did no one know who the injured man was or where had his friends gone. The door of the bar opened and an immense constable entered. A crowd which had followed him down the laneway collected outside the door, struggling to look in through the glass panels.

The manager at once began to narrate what he knew. The constable, a young man with thick immobile features, listened. He moved his head slowly to right and left and from the manager to the person on the floor, as if he feared to be the victim of some delusion. Then he drew off his glove, produced a small book from his waist, licked the lead of his pencil and made ready to indite. He asked in a suspicious provincial accent:

—Who is the man? What’s his name and address?

A young man in a cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring of bystanders. He knelt down promptly beside the injured man and called for water. The constable knelt down also to help. The young man washed the blood from the injured man’s mouth and then called for some brandy. The constable repeated the order in an authoritative voice until a curate came running with the glass. The brandy was forced down the man’s throat. In a few seconds he opened his eyes and looked about him. He looked at the circle of faces and then, understanding, strove to rise to his feet.

—You’re all right now? asked the young man in the cycling-suit.

—Sha, ’s nothing, said the injured man, trying to stand up.

He was helped to his feet. The manager said something about a hospital and some of the bystanders gave advice. The battered silk hat was placed on the man’s head. The constable asked:

—Where do you live?

The man, without answering, began to twirl the ends of his moustache. He made light of his accident. It was nothing, he said: only a little accident. He spoke very thickly.

—Where do you live? repeated the constable.

The man said they were to get a cab for him. While the point was being debated a tall agile gentleman of fair complexion, wearing a long yellow ulster, came from the far end of the bar. Seeing the spectacle he called out:

—Hallo, Tom, old man! What’s the trouble?

—Sha, ’s nothing, said the man.

The new-comer surveyed the deplorable figure before him and then turned to the constable saying:

—It’s all right, constable. I’ll see him home.

The constable touched his helmet and answered:

—All right, Mr Power!

—Come now, Tom, said Mr Power, taking his friend by the arm. No bones broken. What? Can you walk?

The young man in the cycling-suit took the man by the other arm and the crowd divided.

—How did you get yourself into this mess? asked Mr Power.

—The gentleman fell down the stairs, said the young man.

—I’ ’ery ’uch o’liged to you, sir, said the injured man.

—Not at all.

—’an’t we have a little...?

—Not now. Not now.

The three men left the bar and the crowd sifted through the doors into the laneway. The manager brought the constable to the stairs to inspect the scene of the accident. They agreed that the gentleman must have missed his footing. The customers returned to the counter and a curate set about removing the traces of blood from the floor.

When they came out into Grafton Street Mr Power whistled for an outsider. The injured man said again as well as he could:

—I’ ’ery ’uch o’liged to you, sir. I hope we’ll ’eet again. ’y na’e is Kernan.

The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him.

—Don’t mention it, said the young man.

They shook hands. Mr Kernan was hoisted on to the car and, while Mr Power was giving directions to the carman, he expressed his gratitude to the young man and regretted that they could not have a little drink together.

—Another time, said the young man.

The car drove off towards Westmoreland Street. As it passed the Ballast Office the clock showed half-past nine. A keen east wind hit them blowing from the mouth of the river. Mr Kernan was huddled together with cold. His friend asked him to tell how the accident had happened.

—I ’an’t, ’an, he answered, ’y ’ongue is hurt.

—Show.

The other leaned over the well of the car and peered into Mr Kernan’s mouth but he could not see. He struck a match and, sheltering it in the shell of his hands, peered again into the mouth which Mr Kernan opened obediently. The swaying movement of the car brought the match to and from the opened mouth. The lower teeth and gums were covered with clotted blood and a minute piece of the tongue seemed to have been bitten off. The match was blown out.

—That’s ugly, said Mr Power.

—Sha, ’s nothing, said Mr Kernan, closing his mouth and pulling the collar of his filthy coat across his neck.

Mr Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street on the window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the address—London, E.C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat it forth into the grate. Then he paused to judge.

Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline but Mr Kernan’s decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character. Mr Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

The car halted before a small house on the Glasnevin road and Mr Kernan was helped into the house. His wife put him to bed while Mr Power sat downstairs in the kitchen asking the children where they went to school and what book they were in. The children—two girls and a boy, conscious of their father’s helplessness and of their mother’s absence, began some horseplay with him. He was surprised at their manners and at their accents and his brow grew thoughtful. After a while Mrs Kernan entered the kitchen, exclaiming:

—Such a sight! O, he’ll do for himself one day and that’s the holy alls of it. He’s been drinking since Friday.

Mr Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible, that he had come on the scene by the merest accident. Mrs Kernan, remembering Mr Power’s good offices during domestic quarrels as well as many small, but opportune loans, said:

—O, you needn’t tell me that, Mr Power. I know you’re a friend of his not like some of those others he does be with. They’re all right so long as he has money in his pocket to keep him out from his wife and family. Nice friends! Who was he with to-night, I’d like to know?

Mr Power shook his head but said nothing.

—I’m so sorry, she continued, that I’ve nothing in the house to offer you. But if you wait a minute I’ll send round to Fogarty’s at the corner.

Mr Power stood up.

—We were waiting for him to come home with the money. He never seems to think he has a home at all.

—O, now, Mrs Kernan, said Mr Power, we’ll make him turn over a new leaf. I’ll talk to Martin. He’s the man. We’ll come here one of these nights and talk it over.

She saw him to the door. The carman was stamping up and down the footpath and swinging his arms to warm himself.

—It’s very kind of you to bring him home, she said.

—Not at all, said Mr Power.

He got up on the car. As it drove off he raised his hat to her gaily.

—We’ll make a new man of him, he said. Good-night, Mrs Kernan.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Mrs Kernan’s puzzled eyes watched the car till it was out of sight. Then she withdrew them, went into the house and emptied her husband’s pockets.

She was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr Power’s accompaniment. In her days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money. The other children were still at school.

Mr Kernan sent a letter to his office next day and remained in bed. She made beef-tea for him and scolded him roundly. She accepted his frequent intemperance as part of the climate, healed him dutifully whenever he was sick and always tried to make him eat a breakfast. There were worse husbands. He had never been violent since the boys had grown up and she knew that he would walk to the end of Thomas Street and back again to book even a small order.

Two nights after his friends came to see him. She brought them up to his bedroom, the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them chairs at the fire. Mr Kernan’s tongue, the occasional stinging pain of which had made him somewhat irritable during the day, became more polite. He sat propped up in the bed by pillows and the little colour in his puffy cheeks made them resemble warm cinders. He apologised to his guests for the disorder of the room but at the same time looked at them a little proudly, with a veteran’s pride.

He was quite unconscious that he was the victim of a plot which his friends, Mr Cunningham, Mr M’Coy and Mr Power had disclosed to Mrs Kernan in the parlour. The idea had been Mr Power’s but its development was entrusted to Mr Cunningham. Mr Kernan came of Protestant stock and, though he had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his marriage, he had not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years. He was fond, moreover, of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism.

Mr Cunningham was the very man for such a case. He was an elder colleague of Mr Power. His own domestic life was not very happy. People had great sympathy with him for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she had pawned the furniture on him.

Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham. He was a thoroughly sensible man, influential and intelligent. His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness particularised by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy. He was well informed. His friends bowed to his opinions and considered that his face was like Shakespeare’s.

When the plot had been disclosed to her Mrs Kernan had said:

—I leave it all in your hands, Mr Cunningham.

After a quarter of a century of married life she had very few illusions left. Religion for her was a habit and she suspected that a man of her husband’s age would not change greatly before death. She was tempted to see a curious appropriateness in his accident and, but that she did not wish to seem bloody-minded, she would have told the gentlemen that Mr Kernan’s tongue would not suffer by being shortened. However, Mr Cunningham was a capable man; and religion was religion. The scheme might do good and, at least, it could do no harm. Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.

The gentlemen began to talk of the accident. Mr Cunningham said that he had once known a similar case. A man of seventy had bitten off a piece of his tongue during an epileptic fit and the tongue had filled in again so that no one could see a trace of the bite.

—Well, I’m not seventy, said the invalid.

—God forbid, said Mr Cunningham.

—It doesn’t pain you now? asked Mr M’Coy.

Mr M’Coy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had been a soprano, still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for The Irish Times and for The Freeman’s Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-Sheriff and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. His new office made him professionally interested in Mr Kernan’s case.

—Pain? Not much, answered Mr Kernan. But it’s so sickening. I feel as if I wanted to retch off.

—That’s the boose, said Mr Cunningham firmly.

—No, said Mr Kernan. I think I caught a cold on the car. There’s something keeps coming into my throat, phlegm or—

—Mucus, said Mr M’Coy.

—It keeps coming like from down in my throat; sickening thing.

—Yes, yes, said Mr M’Coy, that’s the thorax.

He looked at Mr Cunningham and Mr Power at the same time with an air of challenge. Mr Cunningham nodded his head rapidly and Mr Power said:

—Ah, well, all’s well that ends well.

—I’m very much obliged to you, old man, said the invalid.

Mr Power waved his hand.

—Those other two fellows I was with—

—Who were you with? asked Mr Cunningham.

—A chap. I don’t know his name. Damn it now, what’s his name? Little chap with sandy hair....

—And who else?

—Harford.

—Hm, said Mr Cunningham.

When Mr Cunningham made that remark people were silent. It was known that the speaker had secret sources of information. In this case the monosyllable had a moral intention. Mr Harford sometimes formed one of a little detachment which left the city shortly after noon on Sunday with the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at some public-house on the outskirts of the city where its members duly qualified themselves as bona-fide travellers. But his fellow-travellers had never consented to overlook his origin. He had begun life as an obscure financier by lending small sums of money to workmen at usurious interest. Later on he had become the partner of a very fat short gentleman, Mr Goldberg, of the Liffey Loan Bank. Though he had never embraced more than the Jewish ethical code his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest through the person of his idiot son. At other times they remembered his good points.

—I wonder where did he go to, said Mr Kernan.

He wished the details of the incident to remain vague. He wished his friends to think there had been some mistake, that Mr Harford and he had missed each other. His friends, who knew quite well Mr Harford’s manners in drinking, were silent. Mr Power said again:

—All’s well that ends well.

Mr Kernan changed the subject at once.

—That was a decent young chap, that medical fellow, he said. Only for him—

—O, only for him, said Mr Power, it might have been a case of seven days without the option of a fine.

—Yes, yes, said Mr Kernan, trying to remember. I remember now there was a policeman. Decent young fellow, he seemed. How did it happen at all?

—It happened that you were peloothered, Tom, said Mr Cunningham gravely.

—True bill, said Mr Kernan, equally gravely.

—I suppose you squared the constable, Jack, said Mr M’Coy.

Mr Power did not relish the use of his Christian name. He was not straight-laced but he could not forget that Mr M’Coy had recently made a crusade in search of valises and portmanteaus to enable Mrs M’Coy to fulfil imaginary engagements in the country. More than he resented the fact that he had been victimised he resented such low playing of the game. He answered the question, therefore, as if Mr Kernan had asked it.

The narrative made Mr Kernan indignant. He was keenly conscious of his citizenship, wished to live with his city on terms mutually honourable and resented any affront put upon him by those whom he called country bumpkins.

—Is this what we pay rates for? he asked. To feed and clothe these ignorant bostoons ... and they’re nothing else.

Mr Cunningham laughed. He was a Castle official only during office hours.

—How could they be anything else, Tom? he said.

He assumed a thick provincial accent and said in a tone of command:

—65, catch your cabbage!

Everyone laughed. Mr M’Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story. Mr Cunningham said:

—It is supposed—they say, you know—to take place in the depot where they get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. The sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and held up their plates.

He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.

—At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel. He takes up a wad of cabbage on the spoon and pegs it across the room and the poor devils have to try and catch it on their plates: 65, catch your cabbage.

Everyone laughed again: but Mr Kernan was somewhat indignant still. He talked of writing a letter to the papers.

—These yahoos coming up here, he said, think they can boss the people. I needn’t tell you, Martin, what kind of men they are.

Mr Cunningham gave a qualified assent.

—It’s like everything else in this world, he said. You get some bad ones and you get some good ones.

—O yes, you get some good ones, I admit, said Mr Kernan, satisfied.

—It’s better to have nothing to say to them, said Mr M’Coy. That’s my opinion!

Mrs Kernan entered the room and, placing a tray on the table, said:

—Help yourselves, gentlemen.

Mr Power stood up to officiate, offering her his chair. She declined it, saying she was ironing downstairs, and, after having exchanged a nod with Mr Cunningham behind Mr Power’s back, prepared to leave the room. Her husband called out to her:

—And have you nothing for me, duckie?

—O, you! The back of my hand to you! said Mrs Kernan tartly.

Her husband called after her:

—Nothing for poor little hubby!

He assumed such a comical face and voice that the distribution of the bottles of stout took place amid general merriment.

The gentlemen drank from their glasses, set the glasses again on the table and paused. Then Mr Cunningham turned towards Mr Power and said casually:

—On Thursday night, you said, Jack?

—Thursday, yes, said Mr Power.

—Righto! said Mr Cunningham promptly.

—We can meet in M’Auley’s, said Mr M’Coy. That’ll be the most convenient place.

—But we mustn’t be late, said Mr Power earnestly, because it is sure to be crammed to the doors.

—We can meet at half-seven, said Mr M’Coy.

—Righto! said Mr Cunningham.

—Half-seven at M’Auley’s be it!

There was a short silence. Mr Kernan waited to see whether he would be taken into his friends’ confidence. Then he asked:

—What’s in the wind?

—O, it’s nothing, said Mr Cunningham. It’s only a little matter that we’re arranging about for Thursday.

—The opera, is it? said Mr Kernan.

—No, no, said Mr Cunningham in an evasive tone, it’s just a little ... spiritual matter.

—O, said Mr Kernan.

There was silence again. Then Mr Power said, point-blank:

—To tell you the truth, Tom, we’re going to make a retreat.

—Yes, that’s it, said Mr Cunningham, Jack and I and M’Coy here—we’re all going to wash the pot.

He uttered the metaphor with a certain homely energy and, encouraged by his own voice, proceeded:

—You see, we may as well all admit we’re a nice collection of scoundrels, one and all. I say, one and all, he added with gruff charity and turning to Mr Power. Own up now!

—I own up, said Mr Power.

—And I own up, said Mr M’Coy.

—So we’re going to wash the pot together, said Mr Cunningham.

A thought seemed to strike him. He turned suddenly to the invalid and said:

—Do you know what, Tom, has just occurred to me? You might join in and we’d have a four-handed reel.

—Good idea, said Mr Power. The four of us together.

Mr Kernan was silent. The proposal conveyed very little meaning to his mind but, understanding that some spiritual agencies were about to concern themselves on his behalf, he thought he owed it to his dignity to show a stiff neck. He took no part in the conversation for a long while but listened, with an air of calm enmity, while his friends discussed the Jesuits.

—I haven’t such a bad opinion of the Jesuits, he said, intervening at length. They’re an educated order. I believe they mean well too.

—They’re the grandest order in the Church, Tom, said Mr Cunningham, with enthusiasm. The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope.

—There’s no mistake about it, said Mr M’Coy, if you want a thing well done and no flies about it you go to a Jesuit. They’re the boyos have influence. I’ll tell you a case in point....

—The Jesuits are a fine body of men, said Mr Power.

—It’s a curious thing, said Mr Cunningham, about the Jesuit Order. Every other order of the Church had to be reformed at some time or other but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.

—Is that so? asked Mr M’Coy.

—That’s a fact, said Mr Cunningham. That’s history.

—Look at their church, too, said Mr Power. Look at the congregation they have.

—The Jesuits cater for the upper classes, said Mr M’Coy.

—Of course, said Mr Power.

—Yes, said Mr Kernan. That’s why I have a feeling for them. It’s some of those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious—

—They’re all good men, said Mr Cunningham, each in his own way. The Irish priesthood is honoured all the world over.

—O yes, said Mr Power.

—Not like some of the other priesthoods on the continent, said Mr M’Coy, unworthy of the name.

—Perhaps you’re right, said Mr Kernan, relenting.

—Of course I’m right, said Mr Cunningham. I haven’t been in the world all this time and seen most sides of it without being a judge of character.

The gentlemen drank again, one following another’s example. Mr Kernan seemed to be weighing something in his mind. He was impressed. He had a high opinion of Mr Cunningham as a judge of character and as a reader of faces. He asked for particulars.

—O, it’s just a retreat, you know, said Mr Cunningham. Father Purdon is giving it. It’s for business men, you know.

—He won’t be too hard on us, Tom, said Mr Power persuasively.

—Father Purdon? Father Purdon? said the invalid.

—O, you must know him, Tom, said Mr Cunningham, stoutly. Fine jolly fellow! He’s a man of the world like ourselves.

—Ah, ... yes. I think I know him. Rather red face; tall.

—That’s the man.

—And tell me, Martin.... Is he a good preacher?

—Mmmno.... It’s not exactly a sermon, you know. It’s just a kind of a friendly talk, you know, in a common-sense way.

Mr Kernan deliberated. Mr M’Coy said:

—Father Tom Burke, that was the boy!

—O, Father Tom Burke, said Mr Cunningham, that was a born orator. Did you ever hear him, Tom?

—Did I ever hear him! said the invalid, nettled. Rather! I heard him....

—And yet they say he wasn’t much of a theologian, said Mr Cunningham.

—Is that so? said Mr M’Coy.

—O, of course, nothing wrong, you know. Only sometimes, they say, he didn’t preach what was quite orthodox.

—Ah! ... he was a splendid man, said Mr M’Coy.

—I heard him once, Mr Kernan continued. I forget the subject of his discourse now. Crofton and I were in the back of the ... pit, you know ... the—

—The body, said Mr Cunningham.

—Yes, in the back near the door. I forget now what.... O yes, it was on the Pope, the late Pope. I remember it well. Upon my word it was magnificent, the style of the oratory. And his voice! God! hadn’t he a voice! The Prisoner of the Vatican, he called him. I remember Crofton saying to me when we came out—

—But he’s an Orangeman, Crofton, isn’t he? said Mr Power.

—’Course he is, said Mr Kernan, and a damned decent Orangeman too. We went into Butler’s in Moore Street—faith, I was genuinely moved, tell you the God’s truth—and I remember well his very words. Kernan, he said, we worship at different altars, he said, but our belief is the same. Struck me as very well put.

—There’s a good deal in that, said Mr Power. There used always be crowds of Protestants in the chapel when Father Tom was preaching.

—There’s not much difference between us, said Mr M’Coy. We both believe in—

He hesitated for a moment.

—... in the Redeemer. Only they don’t believe in the Pope and in the mother of God.

—But, of course, said Mr Cunningham quietly and effectively, our religion is the religion, the old, original faith.

—Not a doubt of it, said Mr Kernan warmly.

Mrs Kernan came to the door of the bedroom and announced:

—Here’s a visitor for you!

—Who is it?

—Mr Fogarty.

—O, come in! come in!

A pale oval face came forward into the light. The arch of its fair trailing moustache was repeated in the fair eyebrows looped above pleasantly astonished eyes. Mr Fogarty was a modest grocer. He had failed in business in a licensed house in the city because his financial condition had constrained him to tie himself to second-class distillers and brewers. He had opened a small shop on Glasnevin Road where, he flattered himself, his manners would ingratiate him with the housewives of the district. He bore himself with a certain grace, complimented little children and spoke with a neat enunciation. He was not without culture.

Mr Fogarty brought a gift with him, a half-pint of special whisky. He inquired politely for Mr Kernan, placed his gift on the table and sat down with the company on equal terms. Mr Kernan appreciated the gift all the more since he was aware that there was a small account for groceries unsettled between him and Mr Fogarty. He said:

—I wouldn’t doubt you, old man. Open that, Jack, will you?

Mr Power again officiated. Glasses were rinsed and five small measures of whisky were poured out. This new influence enlivened the conversation. Mr Fogarty, sitting on a small area of the chair, was specially interested.

—Pope Leo XIII., said Mr Cunningham, was one of the lights of the age. His great idea, you know, was the union of the Latin and Greek Churches. That was the aim of his life.

—I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe, said Mr Power. I mean apart from his being Pope.

—So he was, said Mr Cunningham, if not the most so. His motto, you know, as Pope, was Lux upon Lux—Light upon Light.

—No, no, said Mr Fogarty eagerly. I think you’re wrong there. It was Lux in Tenebris, I think—Light in Darkness.

—O, yes, said Mr M’Coy, Tenebrae.

—Allow me, said Mr Cunningham positively, it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius IX. his predecessor’s motto was Crux upon Crux—that is, Cross upon Cross—to show the difference between their two pontificates.

The inference was allowed. Mr Cunningham continued.

—Pope Leo, you know, was a great scholar and a poet.

—He had a strong face, said Mr Kernan.

—Yes, said Mr Cunningham. He wrote Latin poetry.

—Is that so? said Mr Fogarty.

Mr M’Coy tasted his whisky contentedly and shook his head with a double intention, saying:

—That’s no joke, I can tell you.

—We didn’t learn that, Tom, said Mr Power, following Mr M’Coy’s example, when we went to the penny-a-week school.

—There was many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter, said Mr Kernan sententiously. The old system was the best: plain honest education. None of your modern trumpery....

—Quite right, said Mr Power.

—No superfluities, said Mr Fogarty.

He enunciated the word and then drank gravely.

—I remember reading, said Mr Cunningham, that one of Pope Leo’s poems was on the invention of the photograph—in Latin, of course.

—On the photograph! exclaimed Mr Kernan.

—Yes, said Mr Cunningham.

He also drank from his glass.

—Well, you know, said Mr M’Coy, isn’t the photograph wonderful when you come to think of it?

—O, of course, said Mr Power, great minds can see things.

—As the poet says: Great minds are very near to madness, said Mr Fogarty.

Mr Kernan seemed to be troubled in mind. He made an effort to recall the Protestant theology on some thorny points and in the end addressed Mr Cunningham.

—Tell me, Martin, he said. Weren’t some of the Popes—of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old Popes—not exactly ... you know ... up to the knocker?

There was a silence. Mr Cunningham said:

—O, of course, there were some bad lots.... But the astonishing thing is this. Not one of them, not the biggest drunkard, not the most ... out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine. Now isn’t that an astonishing thing?

—That is, said Mr Kernan.

—Yes, because when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, Mr Fogarty explained, he is infallible.

—Yes, said Mr Cunningham.

—O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope. I remember I was younger then.... Or was it that—?

Mr Fogarty interrupted. He took up the bottle and helped the others to a little more. Mr M’Coy, seeing that there was not enough to go round, pleaded that he had not finished his first measure. The others accepted under protest. The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

—What’s that you were saying, Tom? asked Mr M’Coy.

—Papal infallibility, said Mr Cunningham, that was the greatest scene in the whole history of the Church.

—How was that, Martin? asked Mr Power.

Mr Cunningham held up two thick fingers.

—In the sacred college, you know, of cardinals and archbishops and bishops there were two men who held out against it while the others were all for it. The whole conclave except these two was unanimous. No! They wouldn’t have it!

—Ha! said Mr M’Coy.

—And they were a German cardinal by the name of Dolling ... or Dowling ... or—

—Dowling was no German, and that’s a sure five, said Mr Power, laughing.

—Well, this great German cardinal, whatever his name was, was one; and the other was John MacHale.

—What? cried Mr Kernan. Is it John of Tuam?

—Are you sure of that now? asked Mr Fogarty dubiously. I thought it was some Italian or American.

—John of Tuam, repeated Mr Cunningham, was the man.

He drank and the other gentlemen followed his lead. Then he resumed:

—There they were at it, all the cardinals and bishops and archbishops from all the ends of the earth and these two fighting dog and devil until at last the Pope himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church ex cathedra. On the very moment John MacHale, who had been arguing and arguing against it, stood up and shouted out with the voice of a lion: Credo!

—I believe! said Mr Fogarty.

—Credo! said Mr Cunningham. That showed the faith he had. He submitted the moment the Pope spoke.

—And what about Dowling? asked Mr M’Coy.

—The German cardinal wouldn’t submit. He left the Church.

Mr Cunningham’s words had built up the vast image of the Church in the minds of his hearers. His deep raucous voice had thrilled them as it uttered the word of belief and submission. When Mrs Kernan came into the room drying her hands she came into a solemn company. She did not disturb the silence, but leaned over the rail at the foot of the bed.

—I once saw John MacHale, said Mr Kernan, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

He turned towards his wife to be confirmed.

—I often told you that?

Mrs Kernan nodded.

—It was at the unveiling of Sir John Gray’s statue. Edmund Dwyer Gray was speaking, blathering away, and here was this old fellow, crabbed-looking old chap, looking at him from under his bushy eyebrows.

Mr Kernan knitted his brows and, lowering his head like an angry bull, glared at his wife.

—God! he exclaimed, resuming his natural face, I never saw such an eye in a man’s head. It was as much as to say: I have you properly taped, my lad. He had an eye like a hawk.

—None of the Grays was any good, said Mr Power.

There was a pause again. Mr Power turned to Mrs Kernan and said with abrupt joviality:

—Well, Mrs Kernan, we’re going to make your man here a good holy pious and God-fearing Roman Catholic.

He swept his arm round the company inclusively.

—We’re all going to make a retreat together and confess our sins—and God knows we want it badly.

—I don’t mind, said Mr Kernan, smiling a little nervously.

Mrs Kernan thought it would be wiser to conceal her satisfaction. So she said:

—I pity the poor priest that has to listen to your tale.

Mr Kernan’s expression changed.

—If he doesn’t like it, he said bluntly, he can ... do the other thing. I’ll just tell him my little tale of woe. I’m not such a bad fellow—

Mr Cunningham intervened promptly.

—We’ll all renounce the devil, he said, together, not forgetting his works and pomps.

—Get behind me, Satan! said Mr Fogarty, laughing and looking at the others.

Mr Power said nothing. He felt completely outgeneralled. But a pleased expression flickered across his face.

—All we have to do, said Mr Cunningham, is to stand up with lighted candles in our hands and renew our baptismal vows.

—O, don’t forget the candle, Tom, said Mr M’Coy, whatever you do.

—What? said Mr Kernan. Must I have a candle?

—O yes, said Mr Cunningham.

—No, damn it all, said Mr Kernan sensibly, I draw the line there. I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the retreat business and confession, and ... all that business. But ... no candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!

He shook his head with farcical gravity.

—Listen to that! said his wife.

—I bar the candles, said Mr Kernan, conscious of having created an effect on his audience and continuing to shake his head to and fro. I bar the magic-lantern business.

Everyone laughed heartily.

—There’s a nice Catholic for you! said his wife.

—No candles! repeated Mr Kernan obdurately. That’s off!

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

The transept of the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street was almost full; and still at every moment gentlemen entered from the side-door and, directed by the lay-brother, walked on tiptoe along the aisles until they found seating accommodation. The gentlemen were all well dressed and orderly. The light of the lamps of the church fell upon an assembly of black clothes and white collars, relieved here and there by tweeds, on dark mottled pillars of green marble and on lugubrious canvasses. The gentlemen sat in the benches, having hitched their trousers slightly above their knees and laid their hats in security. They sat well back and gazed formally at the distant speck of red light which was suspended before the high altar.

In one of the benches near the pulpit sat Mr Cunningham and Mr Kernan. In the bench behind sat Mr M’Coy alone: and in the bench behind him sat Mr Power and Mr Fogarty. Mr M’Coy had tried unsuccessfully to find a place in the bench with the others and, when the party had settled down in the form of a quincunx, he had tried unsuccessfully to make comic remarks. As these had not been well received he had desisted. Even he was sensible of the decorous atmosphere and even he began to respond to the religious stimulus. In a whisper Mr Cunningham drew Mr Kernan’s attention to Mr Harford, the moneylender, who sat some distance off, and to Mr Fanning, the registration agent and mayor maker of the city, who was sitting immediately under the pulpit beside one of the newly elected councillors of the ward. To the right sat old Michael Grimes, the owner of three pawnbroker’s shops, and Dan Hogan’s nephew, who was up for the job in the Town Clerk’s office. Farther in front sat Mr Hendrick, the chief reporter of The Freeman’s Journal, and poor O’Carroll, an old friend of Mr Kernan’s, who had been at one time a considerable commercial figure. Gradually, as he recognised familiar faces, Mr Kernan began to feel more at home. His hat, which had been rehabilitated by his wife, rested upon his knees. Once or twice he pulled down his cuffs with one hand while he held the brim of his hat lightly, but firmly, with the other hand.

A powerful-looking figure, the upper part of which was draped with a white surplice, was observed to be struggling up into the pulpit. Simultaneously the congregation unsettled, produced handkerchiefs and knelt upon them with care. Mr Kernan followed the general example. The priest’s figure now stood upright in the pulpit, two-thirds of its bulk, crowned by a massive red face, appearing above the balustrade.

Father Purdon knelt down, turned towards the red speck of light and, covering his face with his hands, prayed. After an interval he uncovered his face and rose. The congregation rose also and settled again on its benches. Mr Kernan restored his hat to its original position on his knee and presented an attentive face to the preacher. The preacher turned back each wide sleeve of his surplice with an elaborate large gesture and slowly surveyed the array of faces. Then he said:

For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the mammon of iniquity so that when you die they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.

Father Purdon developed the text with resonant assurance. It was one of the most difficult texts in all the Scriptures, he said, to interpret properly. It was a text which might seem to the casual observer at variance with the lofty morality elsewhere preached by Jesus Christ. But, he told his hearers, the text had seemed to him specially adapted for the guidance of those whose lot it was to lead the life of the world and who yet wished to lead that life not in the manner of worldlings. It was a text for business men and professional men. Jesus Christ, with His divine understanding of every cranny of our human nature, understood that all men were not called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world and, to a certain extent, for the world: and in this sentence He designed to give them a word of counsel, setting before them as exemplars in the religious life those very worshippers of Mammon who were of all men the least solicitous in matters religious.

He told his hearers that he was there that evening for no terrifying, no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world speaking to his fellow-men. He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.

Jesus Christ was not a hard taskmaster. He understood our little failings, understood the weakness of our poor fallen nature, understood the temptations of this life. We might have had, we all had from time to time, our temptations: we might have, we all had, our failings. But one thing only, he said, he would ask of his hearers. And that was: to be straight and manly with God. If their accounts tallied in every point to say:

—Well, I have verified my accounts. I find all well.

But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the truth, to be frank and say like a man:

—Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts.

 ® 

The Dead

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for them. Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed. They would not wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane’s pupils should see him under the influence; and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to manage him. Freddy Malins always came late but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what brought them every two minutes to the banisters to ask Lily had Gabriel or Freddy come.

—O, Mr Conroy, said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night, Mrs Conroy.

—I’ll engage they did, said Gabriel, but they forget that my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself.

He stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his goloshes, while Lily led his wife to the foot of the stairs and called out:

—Miss Kate, here’s Mrs Conroy.

Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive and asked was Gabriel with her.

—Here I am as right as the mail, Aunt Kate! Go on up. I’ll follow, called out Gabriel from the dark.

He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women went upstairs, laughing, to the ladies’ dressing-room. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.

—Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy? asked Lily.

She had preceded him into the pantry to help him off with his overcoat. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her. She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll.

—Yes, Lily, he answered, and I think we’re in for a night of it.

He looked up at the pantry ceiling, which was shaking with the stamping and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano and then glanced at the girl, who was folding his overcoat carefully at the end of a shelf.

—Tell me, Lily, he said in a friendly tone, do you still go to school?

—O no, sir, she answered. I’m done schooling this year and more.

—O, then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:

—The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.

When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.

—O Lily, he said, thrusting it into her hands, it’s Christmas-time, isn’t it? Just ... here’s a little....

He walked rapidly towards the door.

—O no, sir! cried the girl, following him. Really, sir, I wouldn’t take it.

—Christmas-time! Christmas-time! said Gabriel, almost trotting to the stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation.

The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:

—Well, thank you, sir.

He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. Then he took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they could recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the ladies’ dressing-room. His aunts were two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.

They both kissed Gabriel frankly. He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.

—Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to Monkstown to-night, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate.

—No, said Gabriel, turning to his wife, we had quite enough of that last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta got out of it? Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very jolly it was. Gretta caught a dreadful cold.

Aunt Kate frowned severely and nodded her head at every word.

—Quite right, Gabriel, quite right, she said. You can’t be too careful.

—But as for Gretta there, said Gabriel, she’d walk home in the snow if she were let.

Mrs Conroy laughed.

—Don’t mind him, Aunt Kate, she said. He’s really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor child! And she simply hates the sight of it! ... O, but you’ll never guess what he makes me wear now!

She broke out into a peal of laughter and glanced at her husband, whose admiring and happy eyes had been wandering from her dress to her face and hair. The two aunts laughed heartily too, for Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke with them.

—Goloshes! said Mrs Conroy. That’s the latest. Whenever it’s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. To-night even he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn’t. The next thing he’ll buy me will be a diving suit.

Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly while Aunt Kate nearly doubled herself, so heartily did she enjoy the joke. The smile soon faded from Aunt Julia’s face and her mirthless eyes were directed towards her nephew’s face. After a pause she asked:

—And what are goloshes, Gabriel?

—Goloshes, Julia! exclaimed her sister. Goodness me, don’t you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your ... over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?

—Yes, said Mrs Conroy. Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.

—O, on the continent, murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly.

Gabriel knitted his brows and said, as if he were slightly angered:

—It’s nothing very wonderful but Gretta thinks it very funny because she says the word reminds her of Christy Minstrels.

—But tell me, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate, with brisk tact. Of course, you’ve seen about the room. Gretta was saying ...

—O, the room is all right, replied Gabriel. I’ve taken one in the Gresham.

—To be sure, said Aunt Kate, by far the best thing to do. And the children, Gretta, you’re not anxious about them?

—O, for one night, said Mrs Conroy. Besides, Bessie will look after them.

—To be sure, said Aunt Kate again. What a comfort it is to have a girl like that, one you can depend on! There’s that Lily, I’m sure I don’t know what has come over her lately. She’s not the girl she was at all.

Gabriel was about to ask his aunt some questions on this point but she broke off suddenly to gaze after her sister who had wandered down the stairs and was craning her neck over the banisters.

—Now, I ask you, she said, almost testily, where is Julia going? Julia! Julia! Where are you going?

Julia, who had gone halfway down one flight, came back and announced blandly:

—Here’s Freddy.

At the same moment a clapping of hands and a final flourish of the pianist told that the waltz had ended. The drawing-room door was opened from within and some couples came out. Aunt Kate drew Gabriel aside hurriedly and whispered into his ear:

—Slip down, Gabriel, like a good fellow and see if he’s all right, and don’t let him up if he’s screwed. I’m sure he’s screwed. I’m sure he is.

Gabriel went to the stairs and listened over the banisters. He could hear two persons talking in the pantry. Then he recognised Freddy Malins’ laugh. He went down the stairs noisily.

—It’s such a relief, said Aunt Kate to Mrs Conroy, that Gabriel is here. I always feel easier in my mind when he’s here.... Julia, there’s Miss Daly and Miss Power will take some refreshment. Thanks for your beautiful waltz, Miss Daly. It made lovely time.

A tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin, who was passing out with his partner said:

—And may we have some refreshment, too, Miss Morkan?

—Julia, said Aunt Kate summarily, and here’s Mr Browne and Miss Furlong. Take them in, Julia, with Miss Daly and Miss Power.

—I’m the man for the ladies, said Mr Browne, pursing his lips until his moustache bristled and smiling in all his wrinkles. You know, Miss Morkan, the reason they are so fond of me is—

He did not finish his sentence, but, seeing that Aunt Kate was out of earshot, at once led the three young ladies into the back room. The middle of the room was occupied by two square tables placed end to end, and on these Aunt Julia and the caretaker were straightening and smoothing a large cloth. On the sideboard were arrayed dishes and plates, and glasses and bundles of knives and forks and spoons. The top of the closed square piano served also as a sideboard for viands and sweets. At a smaller sideboard in one corner two young men were standing, drinking hop-bitters.

Mr Browne led his charges thither and invited them all, in jest, to some ladies’ punch, hot, strong and sweet. As they said they never took anything strong he opened three bottles of lemonade for them. Then he asked one of the young men to move aside, and, taking hold of the decanter, filled out for himself a goodly measure of whisky. The young men eyed him respectfully while he took a trial sip.

—God help me, he said, smiling, it’s the doctor’s orders.

His wizened face broke into a broader smile, and the three young ladies laughed in musical echo to his pleasantry, swaying their bodies to and fro, with nervous jerks of their shoulders. The boldest said:

—O, now, Mr Browne, I’m sure the doctor never ordered anything of the kind.

Mr Browne took another sip of his whisky and said, with sidling mimicry:

—Well, you see, I’m like the famous Mrs Cassidy, who is reported to have said: Now, Mary Grimes, if I don’t take it, make me take it, for I feel I want it.

His hot face had leaned forward a little too confidentially and he had assumed a very low Dublin accent so that the young ladies, with one instinct, received his speech in silence. Miss Furlong, who was one of Mary Jane’s pupils, asked Miss Daly what was the name of the pretty waltz she had played; and Mr Browne, seeing that he was ignored, turned promptly to the two young men who were more appreciative.

A red-faced young woman, dressed in pansy, came into the room, excitedly clapping her hands and crying:

—Quadrilles! Quadrilles!

Close on her heels came Aunt Kate, crying:

—Two gentlemen and three ladies, Mary Jane!

—O, here’s Mr Bergin and Mr Kerrigan, said Mary Jane. Mr Kerrigan, will you take Miss Power? Miss Furlong, may I get you a partner, Mr Bergin. O, that’ll just do now.

—Three ladies, Mary Jane, said Aunt Kate.

The two young gentlemen asked the ladies if they might have the pleasure, and Mary Jane turned to Miss Daly.

—O, Miss Daly, you’re really awfully good, after playing for the last two dances, but really we’re so short of ladies to-night.

—I don’t mind in the least, Miss Morkan.

—But I’ve a nice partner for you, Mr Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor. I’ll get him to sing later on. All Dublin is raving about him.

—Lovely voice, lovely voice! said Aunt Kate.

As the piano had twice begun the prelude to the first figure Mary Jane led her recruits quickly from the room. They had hardly gone when Aunt Julia wandered slowly into the room, looking behind her at something.

—What is the matter, Julia? asked Aunt Kate anxiously. Who is it?

Julia, who was carrying in a column of table-napkins, turned to her sister and said, simply, as if the question had surprised her:

—It’s only Freddy, Kate, and Gabriel with him.

In fact right behind her Gabriel could be seen piloting Freddy Malins across the landing. The latter, a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy. He was laughing heartily in a high key at a story which he had been telling Gabriel on the stairs and at the same time rubbing the knuckles of his left fist backwards and forwards into his left eye.

—Good-evening, Freddy, said Aunt Julia.

Freddy Malins bade the Misses Morkan good-evening in what seemed an offhand fashion by reason of the habitual catch in his voice and then, seeing that Mr Browne was grinning at him from the sideboard, crossed the room on rather shaky legs and began to repeat in an undertone the story he had just told to Gabriel.

—He’s not so bad, is he? said Aunt Kate to Gabriel.

Gabriel’s brows were dark but he raised them quickly and answered:

—O no, hardly noticeable.

—Now, isn’t he a terrible fellow! she said. And his poor mother made him take the pledge on New Year’s Eve. But come on, Gabriel, into the drawing-room.

Before leaving the room with Gabriel she signalled to Mr Browne by frowning and shaking her forefinger in warning to and fro. Mr Browne nodded in answer and, when she had gone, said to Freddy Malins:

—Now, then, Teddy, I’m going to fill you out a good glass of lemonade just to buck you up.

Freddy Malins, who was nearing the climax of his story, waved the offer aside impatiently but Mr Browne, having first called Freddy Malins’ attention to a disarray in his dress, filled out and handed him a full glass of lemonade. Freddy Malins’ left hand accepted the glass mechanically, his right hand being engaged in the mechanical readjustment of his dress. Mr Browne, whose face was once more wrinkling with mirth, poured out for himself a glass of whisky while Freddy Malins exploded, before he had well reached the climax of his story, in a kink of high-pitched bronchitic laughter and, setting down his untasted and overflowing glass, began to rub the knuckles of his left fist backwards and forwards into his left eye, repeating words of his last phrase as well as his fit of laughter would allow him.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. He liked music but the piece she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners, though they had begged Mary Jane to play something. Four young men, who had come from the refreshment-room to stand in the doorway at the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in couples after a few minutes. The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page.

Gabriel’s eyes, irritated by the floor, which glittered with beeswax under the heavy chandelier, wandered to the wall above the piano. A picture of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet hung there and beside it was a picture of the two murdered princes in the Tower which Aunt Julia had worked in red, blue and brown wools when she was a girl. Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught, for one year his mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat of purple tabinet, with little foxes’ heads upon it, lined with brown satin and having round mulberry buttons. It was strange that his mother had had no musical talent though Aunt Kate used to call her the brains carrier of the Morkan family. Both she and Julia had always seemed a little proud of their serious and matronly sister. Her photograph stood before the pierglass. She held an open book on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who, dressed in a man-o’-war suit, lay at her feet. It was she who had chosen the names for her sons for she was very sensible of the dignity of family life. Thanks to her, Constantine was now senior curate in Balbriggan and, thanks to her, Gabriel himself had taken his degree in the Royal University. A shadow passed over his face as he remembered her sullen opposition to his marriage. Some slighting phrases she had used still rankled in his memory; she had once spoken of Gretta as being country cute and that was not true of Gretta at all. It was Gretta who had nursed her during all her last long illness in their house at Monkstown.

He knew that Mary Jane must be near the end of her piece for she was playing again the opening melody with runs of scales after every bar and while he waited for the end the resentment died down in his heart. The piece ended with a trill of octaves in the treble and a final deep octave in the bass. Great applause greeted Mary Jane as, blushing and rolling up her music nervously, she escaped from the room. The most vigorous clapping came from the four young men in the doorway who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning of the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped.

Lancers were arranged. Gabriel found himself partnered with Miss Ivors. She was a frank-mannered talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes. She did not wear a low-cut bodice and the large brooch which was fixed in the front of her collar bore on it an Irish device.

When they had taken their places she said abruptly:

—I have a crow to pluck with you.

—With me? said Gabriel.

She nodded her head gravely.

—What is it? asked Gabriel, smiling at her solemn manner.

—Who is G. C.? answered Miss Ivors, turning her eyes upon him.

Gabriel coloured and was about to knit his brows, as if he did not understand, when she said bluntly:

—O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

—Why should I be ashamed of myself? asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile.

—Well, I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you’d write for a rag like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton.

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day when his teaching in the college was ended he used to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey’s on Bachelor’s Walk, to Webb’s or Massey’s on Aston’s Quay, or to O’Clohissey’s in the by-street. He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.

When their turn to cross had come he was still perplexed and inattentive. Miss Ivors promptly took his hand in a warm grasp and said in a soft friendly tone:

—Of course, I was only joking. Come, we cross now.

When they were together again she spoke of the University question and Gabriel felt more at ease. A friend of hers had shown her his review of Browning’s poems. That was how she had found out the secret: but she liked the review immensely. Then she said suddenly:

—O, Mr Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer? We’re going to stay there a whole month. It will be splendid out in the Atlantic. You ought to come. Mr Clancy is coming, and Mr Kilkelly and Kathleen Kearney. It would be splendid for Gretta too if she’d come. She’s from Connacht, isn’t she?

—Her people are, said Gabriel shortly.

—But you will come, won’t you? said Miss Ivors, laying her warm hand eagerly on his arm.

—The fact is, said Gabriel, I have already arranged to go—

—Go where? asked Miss Ivors.

—Well, you know, every year I go for a cycling tour with some fellows and so—

—But where? asked Miss Ivors.

—Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany, said Gabriel awkwardly.

—And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?

—Well, said Gabriel, it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.

—And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors.

—Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.

Their neighbours had turned to listen to the cross-examination. Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead.

—And haven’t you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country?

—O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!

—Why? asked Miss Ivors.

Gabriel did not answer for his retort had heated him.

—Why? repeated Miss Ivors.

They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss Ivors said warmly:

—Of course, you’ve no answer.

Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy. He avoided her eyes for he had seen a sour expression on her face. But when they met in the long chain he was surprised to feel his hand firmly pressed. She looked at him from under her brows for a moment quizzically until he smiled. Then, just as the chain was about to start again, she stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear:

—West Briton!

When the lancers were over Gabriel went away to a remote corner of the room where Freddy Malins’ mother was sitting. She was a stout feeble old woman with white hair. Her voice had a catch in it like her son’s and she stuttered slightly. She had been told that Freddy had come and that he was nearly all right. Gabriel asked her whether she had had a good crossing. She lived with her married daughter in Glasgow and came to Dublin on a visit once a year. She answered placidly that she had had a beautiful crossing and that the captain had been most attentive to her. She spoke also of the beautiful house her daughter kept in Glasgow, and of all the nice friends they had there. While her tongue rambled on Gabriel tried to banish from his mind all memory of the unpleasant incident with Miss Ivors. Of course the girl or woman, or whatever she was, was an enthusiast but there was a time for all things. Perhaps he ought not to have answered her like that. But she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit’s eyes.

He saw his wife making her way towards him through the waltzing couples. When she reached him she said into his ear:

—Gabriel, Aunt Kate wants to know won’t you carve the goose as usual. Miss Daly will carve the ham and I’ll do the pudding.

—All right, said Gabriel.

—She’s sending in the younger ones first as soon as this waltz is over so that we’ll have the table to ourselves.

—Were you dancing? asked Gabriel.

—Of course I was. Didn’t you see me? What words had you with Molly Ivors?

—No words. Why? Did she say so?

—Something like that. I’m trying to get that Mr D’Arcy to sing. He’s full of conceit, I think.

—There were no words, said Gabriel moodily, only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland and I said I wouldn’t.

His wife clasped her hands excitedly and gave a little jump.

—O, do go, Gabriel, she cried. I’d love to see Galway again.

—You can go if you like, said Gabriel coldly.

She looked at him for a moment, then turned to Mrs Malins and said:

—There’s a nice husband for you, Mrs Malins.

While she was threading her way back across the room Mrs Malins, without adverting to the interruption, went on to tell Gabriel what beautiful places there were in Scotland and beautiful scenery. Her son-in-law brought them every year to the lakes and they used to go fishing. Her son-in-law was a splendid fisher. One day he caught a fish, a beautiful big big fish, and the man in the hotel boiled it for their dinner.

Gabriel hardly heard what she said. Now that supper was coming near he began to think again about his speech and about the quotation. When he saw Freddy Malins coming across the room to visit his mother Gabriel left the chair free for him and retired into the embrasure of the window. The room had already cleared and from the back room came the clatter of plates and knives. Those who still remained in the drawing-room seemed tired of dancing and were conversing quietly in little groups. Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!

He ran over the headings of his speech: Irish hospitality, sad memories, the Three Graces, Paris, the quotation from Browning. He repeated to himself a phrase he had written in his review: One feels that one is listening to a thought-tormented music. Miss Ivors had praised the review. Was she sincere? Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? There had never been any ill-feeling between them until that night. It unnerved him to think that she would be at the supper-table, looking up at him while he spoke with her critical quizzing eyes. Perhaps she would not be sorry to see him fail in his speech. An idea came into his mind and gave him courage. He would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: Ladies and Gentlemen, the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack. Very good: that was one for Miss Ivors. What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women?

A murmur in the room attracted his attention. Mr Browne was advancing from the door, gallantly escorting Aunt Julia, who leaned upon his arm, smiling and hanging her head. An irregular musketry of applause escorted her also as far as the piano and then, as Mary Jane seated herself on the stool, and Aunt Julia, no longer smiling, half turned so as to pitch her voice fairly into the room, gradually ceased. Gabriel recognised the prelude. It was that of an old song of Aunt Julia’s—Arrayed for the Bridal. Her voice, strong and clear in tone, attacked with great spirit the runs which embellish the air and though she sang very rapidly she did not miss even the smallest of the grace notes. To follow the voice, without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight. Gabriel applauded loudly with all the others at the close of the song and loud applause was borne in from the invisible supper-table. It sounded so genuine that a little colour struggled into Aunt Julia’s face as she bent to replace in the music-stand the old leather-bound song-book that had her initials on the cover. Freddy Malins, who had listened with his head perched sideways to hear her better, was still applauding when everyone else had ceased and talking animatedly to his mother who nodded her head gravely and slowly in acquiescence. At last, when he could clap no more, he stood up suddenly and hurried across the room to Aunt Julia whose hand he seized and held in both his hands, shaking it when words failed him or the catch in his voice proved too much for him.

—I was just telling my mother, he said, I never heard you sing so well, never. No, I never heard your voice so good as it is to-night. Now! Would you believe that now? That’s the truth. Upon my word and honour that’s the truth. I never heard your voice sound so fresh and so ... so clear and fresh, never.

Aunt Julia smiled broadly and murmured something about compliments as she released her hand from his grasp. Mr Browne extended his open hand towards her and said to those who were near him in the manner of a showman introducing a prodigy to an audience:

—Miss Julia Morkan, my latest discovery!

He was laughing very heartily at this himself when Freddy Malins turned to him and said:

—Well, Browne, if you’re serious you might make a worse discovery. All I can say is I never heard her sing half so well as long as I am coming here. And that’s the honest truth.

—Neither did I, said Mr Browne. I think her voice has greatly improved.

Aunt Julia shrugged her shoulders and said with meek pride:

—Thirty years ago I hadn’t a bad voice as voices go.

—I often told Julia, said Aunt Kate emphatically, that she was simply thrown away in that choir. But she never would be said by me.

She turned as if to appeal to the good sense of the others against a refractory child while Aunt Julia gazed in front of her, a vague smile of reminiscence playing on her face.

—No, continued Aunt Kate, she wouldn’t be said or led by anyone, slaving there in that choir night and day, night and day. Six o’clock on Christmas morning! And all for what?

—Well, isn’t it for the honour of God, Aunt Kate? asked Mary Jane, twisting round on the piano-stool and smiling.

Aunt Kate turned fiercely on her niece and said:

—I know all about the honour of God, Mary Jane, but I think it’s not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads. I suppose it is for the good of the Church if the pope does it. But it’s not just, Mary Jane, and it’s not right.

She had worked herself into a passion and would have continued in defence of her sister for it was a sore subject with her but Mary Jane, seeing that all the dancers had come back, intervened pacifically:

—Now, Aunt Kate, you’re giving scandal to Mr Browne who is of the other persuasion.

Aunt Kate turned to Mr Browne, who was grinning at this allusion to his religion, and said hastily:

—O, I don’t question the pope’s being right. I’m only a stupid old woman and I wouldn’t presume to do such a thing. But there’s such a thing as common everyday politeness and gratitude. And if I were in Julia’s place I’d tell that Father Healy straight up to his face ...

—And besides, Aunt Kate, said Mary Jane, we really are all hungry and when we are hungry we are all very quarrelsome.

—And when we are thirsty we are also quarrelsome, added Mr Browne.

—So that we had better go to supper, said Mary Jane, and finish the discussion afterwards.

On the landing outside the drawing-room Gabriel found his wife and Mary Jane trying to persuade Miss Ivors to stay for supper. But Miss Ivors, who had put on her hat and was buttoning her cloak, would not stay. She did not feel in the least hungry and she had already overstayed her time.

—But only for ten minutes, Molly, said Mrs Conroy. That won’t delay you.

—To take a pick itself, said Mary Jane, after all your dancing.

—I really couldn’t, said Miss Ivors.

—I am afraid you didn’t enjoy yourself at all, said Mary Jane hopelessly.

—Ever so much, I assure you, said Miss Ivors, but you really must let me run off now.

—But how can you get home? asked Mrs Conroy.

—O, it’s only two steps up the quay.

Gabriel hesitated a moment and said:

—If you will allow me, Miss Ivors, I’ll see you home if you really are obliged to go.

But Miss Ivors broke away from them.

—I won’t hear of it, she cried. For goodness sake go in to your suppers and don’t mind me. I’m quite well able to take care of myself.

—Well, you’re the comical girl, Molly, said Mrs Conroy frankly.

—Beannacht libh, cried Miss Ivors, with a laugh, as she ran down the staircase.

Mary Jane gazed after her, a moody puzzled expression on her face, while Mrs Conroy leaned over the banisters to listen for the hall-door. Gabriel asked himself was he the cause of her abrupt departure. But she did not seem to be in ill humour: she had gone away laughing. He stared blankly down the staircase.

At that moment Aunt Kate came toddling out of the supper-room, almost wringing her hands in despair.

—Where is Gabriel? she cried. Where on earth is Gabriel? There’s everyone waiting in there, stage to let, and nobody to carve the goose!

—Here I am, Aunt Kate! cried Gabriel, with sudden animation, ready to carve a flock of geese, if necessary.

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

Gabriel took his seat boldly at the head of the table and, having looked to the edge of the carver, plunged his fork firmly into the goose. He felt quite at ease now for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table.

—Miss Furlong, what shall I send you? he asked. A wing or a slice of the breast?

—Just a small slice of the breast.

—Miss Higgins, what for you?

—O, anything at all, Mr Conroy.

While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes wrapped in a white napkin. This was Mary Jane’s idea and she had also suggested apple sauce for the goose but Aunt Kate had said that plain roast goose without apple sauce had always been good enough for her and she hoped she might never eat worse. Mary Jane waited on her pupils and saw that they got the best slices and Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia opened and carried across from the piano bottles of stout and ale for the gentlemen and bottles of minerals for the ladies. There was a great deal of confusion and laughter and noise, the noise of orders and counter-orders, of knives and forks, of corks and glass-stoppers. Gabriel began to carve second helpings as soon as he had finished the first round without serving himself. Everyone protested loudly so that he compromised by taking a long draught of stout for he had found the carving hot work. Mary Jane settled down quietly to her supper but Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia were still toddling round the table, walking on each other’s heels, getting in each other’s way and giving each other unheeded orders. Mr Browne begged of them to sit down and eat their suppers and so did Gabriel but they said there was time enough so that, at last, Freddy Malins stood up and, capturing Aunt Kate, plumped her down on her chair amid general laughter.

When everyone had been well served Gabriel said, smiling:

—Now, if anyone wants a little more of what vulgar people call stuffing let him or her speak.

A chorus of voices invited him to begin his own supper and Lily came forward with three potatoes which she had reserved for him.

—Very well, said Gabriel amiably, as he took another preparatory draught, kindly forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen, for a few minutes.

He set to his supper and took no part in the conversation with which the table covered Lily’s removal of the plates. The subject of talk was the opera company which was then at the Theatre Royal. Mr Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor, a dark-complexioned young man with a smart moustache, praised very highly the leading contralto of the company but Miss Furlong thought she had a rather vulgar style of production. Freddy Malins said there was a negro chieftain singing in the second part of the Gaiety pantomime who had one of the finest tenor voices he had ever heard.

—Have you heard him? he asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy across the table.

—No, answered Mr Bartell D’Arcy carelessly.

—Because, Freddy Malins explained, now I’d be curious to hear your opinion of him. I think he has a grand voice.

—It takes Teddy to find out the really good things, said Mr Browne familiarly to the table.

—And why couldn’t he have a voice too? asked Freddy Malins sharply. Is it because he’s only a black?

Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli, Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let Me Like a Soldier Fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, Dinorah, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.

—O, well, said Mr Bartell D’Arcy, I presume there are as good singers to-day as there were then.

—Where are they? asked Mr Browne defiantly.

—In London, Paris, Milan, said Mr Bartell D’Arcy warmly. I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.

—Maybe so, said Mr Browne. But I may tell you I doubt it strongly.

—O, I’d give anything to hear Caruso sing, said Mary Jane.

—For me, said Aunt Kate, who had been picking a bone, there was only one tenor. To please me, I mean. But I suppose none of you ever heard of him.

—Who was he, Miss Morkan? asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy politely.

—His name, said Aunt Kate, was Parkinson. I heard him when he was in his prime and I think he had then the purest tenor voice that was ever put into a man’s throat.

—Strange, said Mr Bartell D’Arcy. I never even heard of him.

—Yes, yes, Miss Morkan is right, said Mr Browne. I remember hearing of old Parkinson but he’s too far back for me.

—A beautiful pure sweet mellow English tenor, said Aunt Kate with enthusiasm.

Gabriel having finished, the huge pudding was transferred to the table. The clatter of forks and spoons began again. Gabriel’s wife served out spoonfuls of the pudding and passed the plates down the table. Midway down they were held up by Mary Jane, who replenished them with raspberry or orange jelly or with blancmange and jam. The pudding was of Aunt Julia’s making and she received praises for it from all quarters. She herself said that it was not quite brown enough.

—Well, I hope, Miss Morkan, said Mr Browne, that I’m brown enough for you because, you know, I’m all brown.

All the gentlemen, except Gabriel, ate some of the pudding out of compliment to Aunt Julia. As Gabriel never ate sweets the celery had been left for him. Freddy Malins also took a stalk of celery and ate it with his pudding. He had been told that celery was a capital thing for the blood and he was just then under doctor’s care. Mrs Malins, who had been silent all through the supper, said that her son was going down to Mount Melleray in a week or so. The table then spoke of Mount Melleray, how bracing the air was down there, how hospitable the monks were and how they never asked for a penny-piece from their guests.

—And do you mean to say, asked Mr Browne incredulously, that a chap can go down there and put up there as if it were a hotel and live on the fat of the land and then come away without paying a farthing?

—O, most people give some donation to the monastery when they leave, said Mary Jane.

—I wish we had an institution like that in our Church, said Mr Browne candidly.

He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for.

—That’s the rule of the order, said Aunt Kate firmly.

—Yes, but why? asked Mr Browne.

Aunt Kate repeated that it was the rule, that was all. Mr Browne still seemed not to understand. Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world. The explanation was not very clear for Mr Browne grinned and said:

—I like that idea very much but wouldn’t a comfortable spring bed do them as well as a coffin?

—The coffin, said Mary Jane, is to remind them of their last end.

As the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table during which Mrs Malins could be heard saying to her neighbour in an indistinct undertone:

—They are very good men, the monks, very pious men.

The raisins and almonds and figs and apples and oranges and chocolates and sweets were now passed about the table and Aunt Julia invited all the guests to have either port or sherry. At first Mr Bartell D’Arcy refused to take either but one of his neighbours nudged him and whispered something to him upon which he allowed his glass to be filled. Gradually as the last glasses were being filled the conversation ceased. A pause followed, broken only by the noise of the wine and by unsettlings of chairs. The Misses Morkan, all three, looked down at the tablecloth. Someone coughed once or twice and then a few gentlemen patted the table gently as a signal for silence. The silence came and Gabriel pushed back his chair and stood up.

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres.

He began:

—Ladies and Gentlemen.

—It has fallen to my lot this evening, as in years past, to perform a very pleasing task but a task for which I am afraid my poor powers as a speaker are all too inadequate.

—No, no! said Mr Browne.

—But, however that may be, I can only ask you to-night to take the will for the deed and to lend me your attention for a few moments while I endeavour to express to you in words what my feelings are on this occasion.

—Ladies and Gentlemen. It is not the first time that we have gathered together under this hospitable roof, around this hospitable board. It is not the first time that we have been the recipients—or perhaps, I had better say, the victims—of the hospitality of certain good ladies.

He made a circle in the air with his arm and paused. Everyone laughed or smiled at Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia and Mary Jane who all turned crimson with pleasure. Gabriel went on more boldly:

—I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my experience goes (and I have visited not a few places abroad) among the modern nations. Some would say, perhaps, that with us it is rather a failing than anything to be boasted of. But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one that I trust will long be cultivated among us. Of one thing, at least, I am sure. As long as this one roof shelters the good ladies aforesaid—and I wish from my heart it may do so for many and many a long year to come—the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we in turn must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us.

A hearty murmur of assent ran round the table. It shot through Gabriel’s mind that Miss Ivors was not there and that she had gone away discourteously: and he said with confidence in himself:

—Ladies and Gentlemen.

—A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening to-night to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

—Hear, hear! said Mr Browne loudly.

—But yet, continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection, there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here tonight. Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours.

—Therefore, I will not linger on the past. I will not let any gloomy moralising intrude upon us here to-night. Here we are gathered together for a brief moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine. We are met here as friends, in the spirit of good-fellowship, as colleagues, also to a certain extent, in the true spirit of camaraderie, and as the guests of —what shall I call them?—the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world.

The table burst into applause and laughter at this sally. Aunt Julia vainly asked each of her neighbours in turn to tell her what Gabriel had said.

—He says we are the Three Graces, Aunt Julia, said Mary Jane.

Aunt Julia did not understand but she looked up, smiling, at Gabriel, who continued in the same vein:

—Ladies and Gentlemen.

—I will not attempt to play to-night the part that Paris played on another occasion. I will not attempt to choose between them. The task would be an invidious one and one beyond my poor powers. For when I view them in turn, whether it be our chief hostess herself, whose good heart, whose too good heart, has become a byword with all who know her, or her sister, who seems to be gifted with perennial youth and whose singing must have been a surprise and a revelation to us all to-night, or, last but not least, when I consider our youngest hostess, talented, cheerful, hard-working and the best of nieces, I confess, Ladies and Gentlemen, that I do not know to which of them I should award the prize.

Gabriel glanced down at his aunts and, seeing the large smile on Aunt Julia’s face and the tears which had risen to Aunt Kate’s eyes, hastened to his close. He raised his glass of port gallantly, while every member of the company fingered a glass expectantly, and said loudly:

—Let us toast them all three together. Let us drink to their health, wealth, long life, happiness and prosperity and may they long continue to hold the proud and self-won position which they hold in their profession and the position of honour and affection which they hold in our hearts.

All the guests stood up, glass in hand, and, turning towards the three seated ladies, sang in unison, with Mr Browne as leader:

For they are jolly gay fellows,

For they are jolly gay fellows,

For they are jolly gay fellows,

Which nobody can deny.

Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief and even Aunt Julia seemed moved. Freddy Malins beat time with his pudding-fork and the singers turned towards one another, as if in melodious conference, while they sang, with emphasis:

Unless he tells a lie,

Unless he tells a lie.

Then, turning once more towards their hostesses, they sang:

For they are jolly gay fellows,

For they are jolly gay fellows,

For they are jolly gay fellows,

Which nobody can deny.

The acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time, Freddy Malins acting as officer with his fork on high.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

The piercing morning air came into the hall where they were standing so that Aunt Kate said:

—Close the door, somebody. Mrs Malins will get her death of cold.

—Browne is out there, Aunt Kate, said Mary Jane.

—Browne is everywhere, said Aunt Kate, lowering her voice.

Mary Jane laughed at her tone.

—Really, she said archly, he is very attentive.

—He has been laid on here like the gas, said Aunt Kate in the same tone, all during the Christmas.

She laughed herself this time good-humouredly and then added quickly:

—But tell him to come in, Mary Jane, and close the door. I hope to goodness he didn’t hear me.

At that moment the hall-door was opened and Mr Browne came in from the doorstep, laughing as if his heart would break. He was dressed in a long green overcoat with mock astrakhan cuffs and collar and wore on his head an oval fur cap. He pointed down the snow-covered quay from where the sound of shrill prolonged whistling was borne in.

—Teddy will have all the cabs in Dublin out, he said.

Gabriel advanced from the little pantry behind the office, struggling into his overcoat and, looking round the hall, said:

—Gretta not down yet?

—She’s getting on her things, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate.

—Who’s playing up there? asked Gabriel.

—Nobody. They’re all gone.

—O no, Aunt Kate, said Mary Jane. Bartell D’Arcy and Miss O’Callaghan aren’t gone yet.

—Someone is strumming at the piano, anyhow, said Gabriel.

Mary Jane glanced at Gabriel and Mr Browne and said with a shiver:

—It makes me feel cold to look at you two gentlemen muffled up like that. I wouldn’t like to face your journey home at this hour.

—I’d like nothing better this minute, said Mr Browne stoutly, than a rattling fine walk in the country or a fast drive with a good spanking goer between the shafts.

—We used to have a very good horse and trap at home, said Aunt Julia sadly.

—The never-to-be-forgotten Johnny, said Mary Jane, laughing.

Aunt Kate and Gabriel laughed too.

—Why, what was wonderful about Johnny? asked Mr Browne.

—The late lamented Patrick Morkan, our grandfather, that is, explained Gabriel, commonly known in his later years as the old gentleman, was a glue-boiler.

—O, now, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate, laughing, he had a starch mill.

—Well, glue or starch, said Gabriel, the old gentleman had a horse by the name of Johnny. And Johnny used to work in the old gentleman’s mill, walking round and round in order to drive the mill. That was all very well; but now comes the tragic part about Johnny. One fine day the old gentleman thought he’d like to drive out with the quality to a military review in the park.

—The Lord have mercy on his soul, said Aunt Kate compassionately.

—Amen, said Gabriel. So the old gentleman, as I said, harnessed Johnny and put on his very best tall hat and his very best stock collar and drove out in grand style from his ancestral mansion somewhere near Back Lane, I think.

Everyone laughed, even Mrs Malins, at Gabriel’s manner and Aunt Kate said:

—O now, Gabriel, he didn’t live in Back Lane, really. Only the mill was there.

—Out from the mansion of his forefathers, continued Gabriel, he drove with Johnny. And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue.

Gabriel paced in a circle round the hall in his goloshes amid the laughter of the others.

—Round and round he went, said Gabriel, and the old gentleman, who was a very pompous old gentleman, was highly indignant. Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? Johnny! Johnny! Most extraordinary conduct! Can’t understand the horse!

The peals of laughter which followed Gabriel’s imitation of the incident were interrupted by a resounding knock at the hall-door. Mary Jane ran to open it and let in Freddy Malins. Freddy Malins, with his hat well back on his head and his shoulders humped with cold, was puffing and steaming after his exertions.

—I could only get one cab, he said.

—O, we’ll find another along the quay, said Gabriel.

—Yes, said Aunt Kate. Better not keep Mrs Malins standing in the draught.

Mrs Malins was helped down the front steps by her son and Mr Browne and, after many manœuvres, hoisted into the cab. Freddy Malins clambered in after her and spent a long time settling her on the seat, Mr Browne helping him with advice. At last she was settled comfortably and Freddy Malins invited Mr Browne into the cab. There was a good deal of confused talk, and then Mr Browne got into the cab. The cabman settled his rug over his knees, and bent down for the address. The confusion grew greater and the cabman was directed differently by Freddy Malins and Mr Browne, each of whom had his head out through a window of the cab. The difficulty was to know where to drop Mr Browne along the route and Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane helped the discussion from the doorstep with cross-directions and contradictions and abundance of laughter. As for Freddy Malins he was speechless with laughter. He popped his head in and out of the window every moment, to the great danger of his hat, and told his mother how the discussion was progressing till at last Mr Browne shouted to the bewildered cabman above the din of everybody’s laughter:

—Do you know Trinity College?

—Yes, sir, said the cabman.

—Well, drive bang up against Trinity College gates, said Mr Browne, and then we’ll tell you where to go. You understand now?

—Yes, sir, said the cabman.

—Make like a bird for Trinity College.

—Right, sir, cried the cabman.

The horse was whipped up and the cab rattled off along the quay amid a chorus of laughter and adieus.

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man’s voice singing.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

The hall-door was closed; and Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane came down the hall, still laughing.

—Well, isn’t Freddy terrible? said Mary Jane. He’s really terrible.

Gabriel said nothing but pointed up the stairs towards where his wife was standing. Now that the hall-door was closed the voice and the piano could be heard more clearly. Gabriel held up his hand for them to be silent. The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief:

O, the rain falls on my heavy locks

And the dew wets my skin,

My babe lies cold ...

—O, exclaimed Mary Jane. It’s Bartell D’Arcy singing and he wouldn’t sing all the night. O, I’ll get him to sing a song before he goes.

—O do, Mary Jane, said Aunt Kate.

Mary Jane brushed past the others and ran to the staircase but before she reached it the singing stopped and the piano was closed abruptly.

—O, what a pity! she cried. Is he coming down, Gretta?

Gabriel heard his wife answer yes and saw her come down towards them. A few steps behind her were Mr Bartell D’Arcy and Miss O’Callaghan.

—O, Mr D’Arcy, cried Mary Jane, it’s downright mean of you to break off like that when we were all in raptures listening to you.

—I have been at him all the evening, said Miss O’Callaghan, and Mrs Conroy too and he told us he had a dreadful cold and couldn’t sing.

—O, Mr D’Arcy, said Aunt Kate, now that was a great fib to tell.

—Can’t you see that I’m as hoarse as a crow? said Mr D’Arcy roughly.

He went into the pantry hastily and put on his overcoat. The others, taken aback by his rude speech, could find nothing to say. Aunt Kate wrinkled her brows and made signs to the others to drop the subject. Mr D’Arcy stood swathing his neck carefully and frowning.

—It’s the weather, said Aunt Julia, after a pause.

—Yes, everybody has colds, said Aunt Kate readily, everybody.

—They say, said Mary Jane, we haven’t had snow like it for thirty years; and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland.

—I love the look of snow, said Aunt Julia sadly.

—So do I, said Miss O’Callaghan. I think Christmas is never really Christmas unless we have the snow on the ground.

—But poor Mr D’Arcy doesn’t like the snow, said Aunt Kate, smiling.

Mr D’Arcy came from the pantry, fully swathed and buttoned, and in a repentant tone told them the history of his cold. Everyone gave him advice and said it was a great pity and urged him to be very careful of his throat in the night air. Gabriel watched his wife who did not join in the conversation. She was standing right under the dusty fanlight and the flame of the gas lit up the rich bronze of her hair which he had seen her drying at the fire a few days before. She was in the same attitude and seemed unaware of the talk about her. At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart.

—Mr D’Arcy, she said, what is the name of that song you were singing?

—It’s called The Lass of Aughrim, said Mr D’Arcy, but I couldn’t remember it properly. Why? Do you know it?

—The Lass of Aughrim, she repeated. I couldn’t think of the name.

—It’s a very nice air, said Mary Jane. I’m sorry you were not in voice to-night.

—Now, Mary Jane, said Aunt Kate, don’t annoy Mr D’Arcy. I won’t have him annoyed.

Seeing that all were ready to start she shepherded them to the door where good-night was said:

—Well, good-night, Aunt Kate, and thanks for the pleasant evening.

—Good-night, Gabriel. Good-night, Gretta!

—Good-night, Aunt Kate, and thanks ever so much. Goodnight, Aunt Julia.

—O, good-night, Gretta, I didn’t see you.

—Good-night, Mr D’Arcy. Good-night, Miss O’Callaghan.

—Good-night, Miss Morkan.

—Good-night, again.

—Good-night, all. Safe home.

—Good-night. Good-night.

The morning was still dark. A dull yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending. It was slushy underfoot; and only streaks and patches of snow lay on the roofs, on the parapets of the quay and on the area railings. The lamps were still burning redly in the murky air and, across the river, the palace of the Four Courts stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.

She was walking on before him with Mr Bartell D’Arcy, her shoes in a brown parcel tucked under one arm and her hands holding her skirt up from the slush. She had no longer any grace of attitude but Gabriel’s eyes were still bright with happiness. The blood went bounding along his veins; and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous.

She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds were twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. It was very cold. Her face, fragrant in the cold air, was quite close to his; and suddenly she called out to the man at the furnace:

—Is the fire hot, sir?

But the man could not hear her with the noise of the furnace. It was just as well. He might have answered rudely.

A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past. He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in their room in the hotel, then they would be alone together. He would call her softly:

—Gretta!

Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in his voice would strike her. She would turn and look at him....

At the corner of Winetavern Street they met a cab. He was glad of its rattling noise as it saved him from conversation. She was looking out of the window and seemed tired. The others spoke only a few words, pointing out some building or street. The horse galloped along wearily under the murky morning sky, dragging his old rattling box after his heels, and Gabriel was again in a cab with her, galloping to catch the boat, galloping to their honeymoon.

As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said:

—They say you never cross O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse.

—I see a white man this time, said Gabriel.

—Where? asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy.

Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand.

—Good-night, Dan, he said gaily.

When the cab drew up before the hotel Gabriel jumped out and, in spite of Mr Bartell D’Arcy’s protest, paid the driver. He gave the man a shilling over his fare. The man saluted and said:

—A prosperous New Year to you, sir.

—The same to you, said Gabriel cordially.

She leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while standing at the curbstone, bidding the others good-night. She leaned lightly on his arm, as lightly as when she had danced with him a few hours before. He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage. But now, after the kindling again of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust. Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.

An old man was dozing in a great hooded chair in the hall. He lit a candle in the office and went before them to the stairs. They followed him in silence, their feet falling in soft thuds on the thickly carpeted stairs. She mounted the stairs behind the porter, her head bowed in the ascent, her frail shoulders curved as with a burden, her skirt girt tightly about her. He could have flung his arms about her hips and held her still for his arms were trembling with desire to seize her and only the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his body in check. The porter halted on the stairs to settle his guttering candle. They halted too on the steps below him. In the silence Gabriel could hear the falling of the molten wax into the tray and the thumping of his own heart against his ribs.

The porter led them along a corridor and opened a door. Then he set his unstable candle down on a toilet-table and asked at what hour they were to be called in the morning.

—Eight, said Gabriel.

The porter pointed to the tap of the electric-light and began a muttered apology but Gabriel cut him short.

—We don’t want any light. We have light enough from the street. And I say, he added, pointing to the candle, you might remove that handsome article, like a good man.

The porter took up his candle again, but slowly for he was surprised by such a novel idea. Then he mumbled good-night and went out. Gabriel shot the lock to.

A ghostly light from the street lamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door. Gabriel threw his overcoat and hat on a couch and crossed the room towards the window. He looked down into the street in order that his emotion might calm a little. Then he turned and leaned against a chest of drawers with his back to the light. She had taken off her hat and cloak and was standing before a large swinging mirror, unhooking her waist. Gabriel paused for a few moments, watching her, and then said:

—Gretta!

She turned away from the mirror slowly and walked along the shaft of light towards him. Her face looked so serious and weary that the words would not pass Gabriel’s lips. No, it was not the moment yet.

—You looked tired, he said.

—I am a little, she answered.

—You don’t feel ill or weak?

—No, tired: that’s all.

She went on to the window and stood there, looking out. Gabriel waited again and then, fearing that diffidence was about to conquer him, he said abruptly:

—By the way, Gretta!

—What is it?

—You know that poor fellow Malins? he said quickly.

—Yes. What about him?

—Well, poor fellow, he’s a decent sort of chap after all, continued Gabriel in a false voice. He gave me back that sovereign I lent him and I didn’t expect it really. It’s a pity he wouldn’t keep away from that Browne, because he’s not a bad fellow at heart.

He was trembling now with annoyance. Why did she seem so abstracted? He did not know how he could begin. Was she annoyed, too, about something? If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first. He longed to be master of her strange mood.

—When did you lend him the pound? she asked, after a pause.

Gabriel strove to restrain himself from breaking out into brutal language about the sottish Malins and his pound. He longed to cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her. But he said:

—O, at Christmas, when he opened that little Christmas-card shop in Henry Street.

He was in such a fever of rage and desire that he did not hear her come from the window. She stood before him for an instant, looking at him strangely. Then, suddenly raising herself on tiptoe and resting her hands lightly on his shoulders, she kissed him.

—You are a very generous person, Gabriel, she said.

Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing for it she had come to him of her own accord. Perhaps her thoughts had been running with his. Perhaps she had felt the impetuous desire that was in him and then the yielding mood had come upon her. Now that she had fallen to him so easily he wondered why he had been so diffident.

He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly:

—Gretta dear, what are you thinking about?

She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:

—Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?

She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

—O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

—What about the song? Why does that make you cry?

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

—Why, Gretta? he asked.

—I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.

—And who was the person long ago? asked Gabriel, smiling.

—It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother, she said.

The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.

—Someone you were in love with? he asked ironically.

—It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate.

Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.

—I can see him so plainly, she said after a moment. Such eyes as he had: big dark eyes! And such an expression in them—an expression!

—O then, you were in love with him? said Gabriel.

—I used to go out walking with him, she said, when I was in Galway.

A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.

—Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl? he said coldly.

She looked at him and asked in surprise:

—What for?

Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:

—How do I know? To see him perhaps.

She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.

—He is dead, she said at length. He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?

—What was he? asked Gabriel, still ironically.

—He was in the gasworks, she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

—I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta, he said.

—I was great with him at that time, she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

—And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?

—I think he died for me, she answered.

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not respond to his touch but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning.

—It was in the winter, she said, about the beginning of the winter when I was going to leave my grandmother’s and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn’t be let out and his people in Oughterard were written to. He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly.

She paused for a moment and sighed.

—Poor fellow, she said. He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.

—Well; and then? asked Gabriel.

—And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I wrote a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer and hoping he would be better then.

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control and then went on:

—Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’ Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn’t see so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.

—And did you not tell him to go back? asked Gabriel.

—I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree.

—And did he go home? asked Gabriel.

—Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!

She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

She was fast asleep.

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merrymaking when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

 ® 

A PORTRAIT
OF THE
ARTIST
AS A
YOUNG MAN

by   J A M E S  J O Y C E

published December 29, 1916

by B. W. Huebsch, New York

c o n t e n t s — p o r t r a i t

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

 ® 

[The text follows the Viking Press edition, New York 1964, corrected from the Dublin holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann. (2nd printing, January 1965.)]

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188

I

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms

On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

Tralala lala

Tralala tralaladdy

Tralala lala

Tralala lala.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.

Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

—O, Stephen will apologise.

Dante said:

—O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.

Pull out his eyes,

Apologise,

Apologise,

Pull out his eyes.

Apologise,

Pull out his eyes,

Pull out his eyes,

Apologise.

*   *   *

The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.

Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket. And one day he had asked:

—What is your name?

Stephen had answered:

—Stephen Dedalus.

Then Nasty Roche had said:

—What kind of a name is that?

And when Stephen had not been able to answer Nasty Roche had asked:

—What is your father?

Stephen had answered:

—A gentleman.

Then Nasty Roche had asked:

—Is he a magistrate?

He crept about from point to point on the fringe of his line, making little runs now and then. But his hands were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the sidepockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow had said to Cantwell:

—I’d give you such a belt in a second.

Cantwell had answered:

—Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I’d like to see you. He’d give you a toe in the rump for yourself.

That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two fiveshilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:

—Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

—Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawton’s yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. Soon they would be going home for the holidays. After supper in the studyhall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from seventyseven to seventysix.

It would be better to be in the studyhall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the haha and had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers’ slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of shortbread that the community ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.

Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey

Where the abbots buried him.

Canker is a disease of plants,

Cancer one of animals.

It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those sentences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Wells’s seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on the fender and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell! Dante knew a lot of things. She had taught him where the Mozambique Channel was and what was the longest river in America and what was the name of the highest mountain in the moon. Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest but both his father and uncle Charles said that Dante was a clever woman and a wellread woman. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then put up her hand to her mouth: that was heartburn.

A voice cried far out on the playground:

—All in!

Then other voices cried from the lower and third lines:

—All in! All in!

The players closed around, flushed and muddy, and he went among them, glad to go in. Rody Kickham held the ball by its greasy lace. A fellow asked him to give it one last: but he walked on without even answering the fellow. Simon Moonan told him not to because the prefect was looking. The fellow turned to Simon Moonan and said:

—We all know why you speak. You are McGlade’s suck.

Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.

And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song. Always the same: and when the fellows stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it.

It was the hour for sums. Father Arnall wrote a hard sum on the board and then said:

—Now then, who will win? Go ahead, York! Go ahead, Lancaster!

Stephen tried his best but the sum was too hard and he felt confused. The little silk badge with the white rose on it that was pinned on the breast of his jacket began to flutter. He was no good at sums but he tried his best so that York might not lose. Father Arnall’s face looked very black but he was not in a wax: he was laughing. Then Jack Lawton cracked his fingers and Father Arnall looked at his copybook and said:

—Right. Bravo Lancaster! The red rose wins. Come on now, York! Forge ahead!

Jack Lawton looked over from his side. The little silk badge with the red rose on it looked very rich because he had a blue sailor top on. Stephen felt his own face red too, thinking of all the bets about who would get first place in elements, Jack Lawton or he. Some weeks Jack Lawton got the card for first and some weeks he got the card for first. His white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked at the next sum and heard Father Arnall’s voice. Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the corridors towards the refectory. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on his plate but could not eat the damp bread. The tablecloth was damp and limp. But he drank off the hot weak tea which the clumsy scullion, girt with a white apron, poured into his cup. He wondered whether the scullion’s apron was damp too or whether all white things were cold and damp. Nasty Roche and Saurin drank cocoa that their people sent them in tins. They said they could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash. Their fathers were magistrates, the fellows said.

All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother’s lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.

He drank another cup of hot tea and Fleming said:

—What’s up? Have you a pain or what’s up with you?

—I don’t know, Stephen said.

—Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white. It will go away.

—O yes, Stephen said.

But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.

Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory, Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap. And then the lower line tables and the tables of the third line. And every single fellow had a different way of walking.

He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominos and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The prefect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He was telling them something about Tullabeg.

Then he went away from the door and Wells came over to Stephen and said:

—Tell us, Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?

Stephen answered:

—I do.

Wells turned to the other fellows and said:

—O, I say, here’s a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed.

The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said:

—I do not.

Wells said:

—O, I say, here’s a fellow says he doesn’t kiss his mother before he goes to bed.

They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar. He tried to think of Wells’s mother but he did not dare to raise his eyes to Wells’s face. He did not like Wells’s face. It was Wells who had shouldered him into the square ditch the day before because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Wells’s seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It was a mean thing to do; all the fellows said it was. And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.

The cold slime of the ditch covered his whole body; and, when the bell rang for study and the lines filed out of the playrooms, he felt the cold air of the corridor and staircase inside his clothes. He still tried to think what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

Sitting in the studyhall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventyseven to seventysix. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.

There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography: a big ball in the middle of clouds. Fleming had a box of crayons and one night during free study he had coloured the earth green and the clouds maroon. That was like the two brushes in Dante’s press, the brush with the green velvet back for Parnell and the brush with the maroon velvet back for Michael Davitt. But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours. Fleming had done it himself.

He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America. Still they were all different places that had those different names. They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could think only of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.

It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big. He turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned. It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold they were first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep. It was lovely to be tired. He yawned again. Night prayers and then bed: he shivered and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. He felt a warm glow creeping up from the cold shivering sheets, warmer and warmer till he felt warm all over, ever so warm; ever so warm and yet he shivered a little and still wanted to yawn.

The bell rang for night prayers and he filed out of the studyhall after the others and down the staircase and along the corridors to the chapel. The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would be dark and sleeping. There was cold night air in the chapel and the marbles were the colour the sea was at night. The sea was cold day and night: but it was colder at night. It was cold and dark under the seawall beside his father’s house. But the kettle would be on the hob to make punch.

The prefect of the chapel prayed above his head and his memory knew the responses:

O Lord, open our lips

And our mouth shall announce Thy praise.

Incline unto our aid, O God!

O Lord, make haste to help us!

There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. They breathed behind him on his neck and sighed as they prayed. They lived in Clane, a fellow said: there were little cottages there and he had seen a woman standing at the halfdoor of a cottage with a child in her arms, as the cars had come past from Sallins. It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy. But, O, the road there between the trees was dark! You would be lost in the dark. It made him afraid to think of how it was.

He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayer. He prayed it too against the dark outside under the trees.

Visit, we beseech Thee, O Lord, this habitation and drive away from it all the snares of the enemy. May Thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace and may Thy blessing be always upon us through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

His fingers trembled as he undressed himself in the dormitory. He told his fingers to hurry up. He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers and be in bed before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died. He rolled his stockings off and put on his nightshirt quickly and knelt trembling at his bedside and repeated his prayers quickly quickly, fearing that the gas would go down. He felt his shoulders shaking as he murmured:

God bless my father and my mother and spare them to me!

God bless my little brothers and sisters and spare them to me!

God bless Dante and uncle Charles and spare them to me!

He blessed himself and climbed quickly into bed and, tucking the end of the nightshirt under his feet, curled himself together under the cold white sheets, shaking and trembling. But he would not go to hell when he died; and the shaking would stop. A voice bade the boys in the dormitory goodnight. He peered out for an instant over the coverlet and saw the yellow curtains round and before his bed that shut him off on all sides. The light was lowered quietly.

The prefect’s shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end? He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as carriagelamps? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironingroom above the staircase. It was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there but the hall was still dark. A figure came up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw their master’s face and cloak and knew that he had received his deathwound. But only the dark was where they looked: only dark silent air. Their master had received his deathwound on the battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.

O how cold and strange it was to think of that! All the dark was cold and strange. There were pale strange faces there, great eyes like carriagelamps. They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of marshals who had received their deathwound on battlefields far away over the sea. What did they wish to say that their faces were so strange?

Visit, we beseech Thee, O Lord, this habitation and drive away from it all …

Going home for the holidays! That would be lovely: the fellows had told him. Getting up on the cars in the early wintry morning outside the door of the castle. The cars were rolling on the gravel. Cheers for the rector!

Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!

The cars drove past the chapel and all caps were raised. They drove merrily along the country roads. The drivers pointed with their whips to Bodenstown. The fellows cheered. They passed the farmhouse of the Jolly Farmer. Cheer after cheer after cheer. Through Clane they drove, cheering and cheered. The peasant women stood at the halfdoors, the men stood here and there. The lovely smell there was in the wintry air: the smell of Clane: rain and wintry air and turf smouldering and corduroy.

The train was full of fellows: a long long chocolate train with cream facings. The guards went to and fro opening, closing, locking, unlocking the doors. They were men in dark blue and silver; they had silvery whistles and their keys made a quick music: click, click: click, click.

And the train raced on over the flat lands and past the Hill of Allen. The telegraphpoles were passing, passing. The train went on and on. It knew. There were coloured lanterns in the hall of his father’s house and ropes of green branches. There were holly and ivy round the pierglass and holly and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers. There were red holly and green ivy round the old portraits on the walls. Holly and ivy for him and for Christmas.

Lovely …

All the people. Welcome home, Stephen! Noises of welcome. His mother kissed him. Was that right? His father was a marshal now: higher than a magistrate. Welcome home, Stephen!

Noises …

There was a noise of curtainrings running back along the rods, of water being splashed in the basins. There was a noise of rising and dressing and washing in the dormitory: a noise of clapping of hands as the prefect went up and down telling the fellows to look sharp. A pale sunlight showed the yellow curtains drawn back, the tossed beds. His bed was very hot and his face and body were very hot.

He got up and sat on the side of his bed. He was weak. He tried to pull on his stocking. It had a horrid rough feel. The sunlight was queer and cold.

Fleming said:

—Are you not well?

He did not know; and Fleming said:

—Get back into bed. I’ll tell McGlade you’re not well.

—He’s sick.

—Who is?

—Tell McGlade.

—Get back into bed.

—Is he sick?

A fellow held his arms while he loosened the stocking clinging to his foot and climbed back into the hot bed.

He crouched down between the sheets, glad of their tepid glow. He heard the fellows talk among themselves about him as they dressed for mass. It was a mean thing to do, to shoulder him into the square ditch, they were saying.

Then their voices ceased; they had gone. A voice at his bed said:

—Dedalus, don’t spy on us, sure you won’t?

Wells’s face was there. He looked at it and saw that Wells was afraid.

—I didn’t mean to. Sure you won’t?

His father had told him, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. He shook his head and answered no and felt glad. Wells said:

—I didn’t mean to, honour bright. It was only for cod. I’m sorry.

The face and the voice went away. Sorry because he was afraid. Afraid that it was some disease. Canker was a disease of plants and cancer one of animals: or another different. That was a long time ago then out on the playgrounds in the evening light, creeping from point to point on the fringe of his line, a heavy bird flying low through the grey light. Leicester Abbey lit up. Wolsey died there. The abbots buried him themselves.

It was not Wells’s face, it was the prefect’s. He was not foxing. No, no: he was sick really. He was not foxing. And he felt the prefect’s hand on his forehead; and he felt his forehead warm and damp against the prefect’s cold damp hand. That was the way a rat felt, slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of. Sleek slimy coats, little little feet tucked up to jump, black shiny eyes to look out of. They could understand how to jump. But the minds of rats could not understand trigonometry. When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things.

The prefect was there again and it was his voice that was saying that he was to get up, that Father Minister had said he was to get up and dress and go to the infirmary. And while he was dressing himself as quickly as he could the prefect said:

—We must pack off to Brother Michael because we have the collywobbles! Terrible thing to have the collywobbles! How we wobble when we have the collywobbles!

He was very decent to say that. That was all to make him laugh. But he could not laugh because his cheeks and lips were all shivery: and then the perfect [prefect] had to laugh by himself.

The prefect cried:

—Quick march! Hayfoot! Strawfoot!

They went together down the staircase and along the corridor and past the bath. As he passed the door he remembered with a vague fear the warm turfcoloured bogwater, the warm moist air, the noise of plunges, the smell of the towels, like medicine.

Brother Michael was standing at the door of the infirmary and from the door of the dark cabinet on his right came a smell like medicine. That came from the bottles on the shelves. The prefect spoke to Brother Michael and Brother Michael answered and called the prefect sir. He had reddish hair mixed with grey and a queer look. It was queer that he would always be a brother. It was queer too that you could not call him sir because he was a brother and had a different kind of look. Was he not holy enough or why could he not catch up on the others?

There were two beds in the room and in one bed there was a fellow: and when they went in he called out:

—Hello! It’s young Dedalus! What’s up?

—The sky is up, Brother Michael said.

He was a fellow out of the third of grammar and, while Stephen was undressing, he asked Brother Michael to bring him a round of buttered toast.

—Ah, do! he said.

—Butter you up! said Brother Michael. You’ll get your walking papers in the morning when the doctor comes.

—Will I? the fellow said. I’m not well yet.

Brother Michael repeated:

—You’ll get your walking papers, I tell you.

He bent down to rake the fire. He had a long back like the long back of a tramhorse. He shook the poker gravely and nodded his head at the fellow out of third of grammar.

Then Brother Michael went away and after a while the fellow out of third of grammar turned in towards the wall and fell asleep.

That was the infirmary. He was sick then. Had they written home to tell his mother and father? But it would be quicker for one of the priests to go himself to tell them. Or he would write a letter for the priest to bring.

Dear Mother

I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me home. I am in the infirmary.

Your fond son,   
Stephen

How far away they were! There was cold sunlight outside the window. He wondered if he would die. You could die just the same on a sunny day. He might die before his mother came. Then he would have a dead mass in the chapel like the way the fellows had told him it was when Little had died. All the fellows would be at the mass, dressed in black, all with sad faces. Wells too would be there but no fellow would look at him. The rector would be there in a cope of black and gold and there would be tall yellow candles on the altar and round the catafalque. And they would carry the coffin out of the chapel slowly and he would be buried in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. And Wells would be sorry then for what he had done. And the bell would toll slowly.

He could hear the tolling. He said over to himself the song that Brigid had taught him.

Dingdong! The castle bell!

Farewell, my mother!

Bury me in the old churchyard

Beside my eldest brother.

My coffin shall be black,

Six angels at my back,

Two to sing and two to pray

And two to carry my soul away.

How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old churchyard! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!

The cold sunlight was weaker and Brother Michael was standing at his bedside with a bowl of beeftea. He was glad for his mouth was hot and dry. He could hear them playing on the playgrounds. And the day was going on in the college just as if he were there.

Then Brother Michael was going away and the fellow out of third of grammar told him to be sure and come back and tell him all the news in the paper. He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of the paper they got every day up in the castle. There was every kind of news in the paper: accidents, shipwrecks, sports and politics.

—Now it is all about politics in the paper, he said. Do your people talk about that too?

—Yes, Stephen said.

—Mine too, he said.

Then he thought for a moment and said:

—You have a queer name, Dedalus, and I have a queer name too, Athy. My name is the name of a town. Your name is like Latin.

Then he asked:

—Are you good at riddles?

Stephen answered:

—Not very good.

Then he said:

—Can you answer me this one? Why is the county Kildare like the leg of a fellow’s breeches?

Stephen thought what could be the answer and then said:

—I give it up.

—Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke? Athy is the town in the county Kildare and a thigh is the other thigh.

—O, I see, Stephen said.

—That’s an old riddle, he said.

After a moment he said:

—I say!

—What? asked Stephen.

—You know, he said, you can ask that riddle another way?

—Can you? said Stephen.

—The same riddle, he said. Do you know the other way to ask it?

—No, said Stephen.

—Can you not think of the other way? he said.

He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back on the pillow and said:

—There is another way but I won’t tell you what it is.

Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a magistrate too like Saurin’s father and Nasty Roche’s father. He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys’ fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them? But his father had told him that he would be no stranger there because his granduncle had presented an address to the liberator there fifty years before. You could know the people of that time by their old dress. It seemed to him a solemn time: and he wondered if that was the time when the fellows in Clongowes wore blue coats with brass buttons and yellow waistcoats and caps of rabbitskin and drank beer like grownup people and kept greyhounds of their own to course the hares with.

He looked at the window and saw that the daylight had grown weaker. There would be cloudy grey light over the playgrounds. There was no noise on the playgrounds. The class must be doing the themes or perhaps Father Arnall was reading a legend out of the book.

It was queer that they had not given him any medicine. Perhaps Brother Michael would bring it back when he came. They said you got stinking stuff to drink when you were in the infirmary. But he felt better now than before. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.

He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under the moonless night. A tiny light twinkled at the pierhead where the ship was entering: and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the waters’ edge to see the ship that was entering their harbour. A tall man stood on the deck, looking out towards the flat dark land: and by the light at the pierhead he saw his face, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.

He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters:

—He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque.

A wail of sorrow went up from the people.

—Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!

They fell upon their knees, moaning in sorrow.

And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders walking proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the waters’ edge.

*   *   *

A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the ivytwined branches of the chandelier the Christmas table was spread. They had come home a little late and still dinner was not ready: but it would be ready in a jiffy, his mother had said. They were waiting for the door to open and for the servants to come in, holding the big dishes covered with their heavy metal covers.

All were waiting: uncle Charles, who sat far away in the shadow of the window, Dante and Mr Casey, who sat in the easychairs at either side of the hearth, Stephen, seated on a chair between them, his feet resting on the toasted boss. Mr Dedalus looked at himself in the pierglass above the mantelpiece, waxed out his moustache-ends and then, parting his coattails, stood with his back to the glowing fire: and still, from time to time, he withdrew a hand from his coattail to wax out one of his moustache-ends. Mr Casey leaned his head to one side and, smiling, tapped the gland of his neck with his fingers. And Stephen smiled too for he knew now that it was not true that Mr Casey had a purse of silver in his throat. He smiled to think how the silvery noise which Mr Casey used to make had deceived him. And when he had tried to open Mr Casey’s hand to see if the purse of silver was hidden there he had seen that the fingers could not be straightened out: and Mr Casey had told him that he had got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria.

Mr Casey tapped the gland of his neck and smiled at Stephen with sleepy eyes: and Mr Dedalus said to him:

—Yes. Well now, that’s all right. O, we had a good walk, hadn’t we, John? Yes … I wonder if there’s any likelihood of dinner this evening. Yes…. [...] O, well now, we got a good breath of ozone round the Head today. Ay, bedad.

He turned to Dante and said:

—You didn’t stir out at all, Mrs Riordan?

Dante frowned and said shortly:

—No.

Mr Dedalus dropped his coattails and went over to the sideboard. He brought forth a great stone jar of whisky from the locker and filled the decanter slowly, bending now and then to see how much he had poured in. Then replacing the jar in the locker he poured a little of the whisky into two glasses, added a little water and came back with them to the fireplace.

—A thimbleful, John, he said, just to whet your appetite.

Mr Casey took the glass, drank, and placed it near him on the mantelpiece. Then he said:

—Well, I can’t help thinking of our friend Christopher manufacturing …

He broke into a fit of laughter and coughing and added:

—… manufacturing that champagne for those fellows.

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly.

—Is it Christy? he said. There’s more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack foxes.

He inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely, began to speak with the voice of the hotelkeeper.

—And he has such a soft mouth when he’s speaking to you, don’t you know. He’s very moist and watery about the dewlaps, God bless him.

Mr Casey was still struggling through his fit of coughing and laughter. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotelkeeper through his father’s face and voice, laughed.

Mr Dedalus put up his eyeglass and, staring down at him, said quietly and kindly:

—What are you laughing at, you little puppy, you?

The servants entered and placed the dishes on the table. Mrs Dedalus followed and the places were arranged.

—Sit over, she said.

Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said:

—Now, Mrs Riordan, sit over. John, sit you down, my hearty.

He looked round to where uncle Charles sat and said:

—Now then, sir, there’s a bird here waiting for you.

When all had taken their seats he laid his hand on the cover and then said quickly, withdrawing it:

—Now, Stephen.

Stephen stood up in his place to say the grace before meals:

Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which through Thy bounty we are about to receive through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.

Stephen looked at the plump turkey which had lain, trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table. He knew that his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn’s of D’Olier Street and that the man had prodded it often at the breastbone to show how good it was: and he remembered the man’s voice when he had said:

—Take that one, sir. That’s the real Ally Daly.

Why did Mr Barrett in Clongowes call his pandybat a turkey? But Clongowes was far away: and the warm heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery rose from the plates and dishes and the great fire was banked high and red in the grate and the green ivy and red holly made you feel so happy and when dinner was ended the big plumpudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and springs [sprigs] of holly, with bluish fire running around it and a little green flag flying from the top.

It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the nursery, as he had often waited, till the pudding came. The deep low collar and the Eton jacket made him feel queer and oldish: and that morning when his mother had brought him down to the parlour, dressed for mass, his father had cried. That was because he was thinking of his own father. And uncle Charles had said so too.

Mr Dedalus covered the dish and began to eat hungrily. Then he said:

—Poor old Christy, he’s nearly lopsided now with roguery.

—Simon, said Mrs Dedalus, you haven’t given Mrs Riordan any sauce.

Mr Dedalus seized the sauceboat.

—Haven’t I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind.

Dante covered her plate with her hands and said:

—No, thanks.

Mr Dedalus turned to uncle Charles.

—How are you off, sir?

—Right as the mail, Simon.

—You, John?

—I’m all right. Go on yourself.

—Mary? Here, Stephen, here’s something to make your hair curl.

He poured sauce freely over Stephen’s plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full but he nodded that it was.

—That was a good answer our friend made to the canon. What? said Mr Dedalus.

—I didn’t think he had that much in him, said Mr Casey.

—I’ll pay you your dues, father, when you cease turning the house of God into a pollingbooth.

—A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to his priest.

—They have only themselves to blame, said Mr Dedalus suavely. If they took a fool’s advice they would confine their attention to religion.

—It is religion, Dante said. They are doing their duty in warning the people.

—We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all humility to pray to our Maker and not to hear election addresses.

—It is religion, Dante said again. They are right. They must direct their flocks.

—And preach politics from the altar, is it? asked Mr Dedalus.

—Certainly, said Dante. It is a question of public morality. A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong.

Mrs Dedalus laid down her knife and fork, saying:

—For pity’s sake and for pity sake let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year.

—Quite right, ma’am, said uncle Charles. Now, Simon, that’s quite enough now. Not another word now.

—Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus quickly.

He uncovered the dish boldly and said:

—Now then, who’s for more turkey?

Nobody answered. Dante said:

—Nice language for any catholic to use!

—Mrs Riordan, I appeal to you, said Mrs Dedalus, to let the matter drop now.

Dante turned on her and said:

—And am I to sit here and listen to the pastors of my church being flouted?

—Nobody is saying a word against them, said Mr Dedalus, so long as they don’t meddle in politics.

—The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed.

—Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone.

—You hear? said Dante turning to Mrs Dedalus.

—Mr Casey! Simon! said Mrs Dedalus. Let it end now.

—Too bad! Too bad! said uncle Charles.

—What? cried Mr Dedalus. Were we to desert him at the bidding of the English people?

—He was no longer worthy to lead, said Dante. He was a public sinner.

—We are all sinners and black sinners, said Mr Casey coldly.

—Woe be to the man by whom the scandal cometh! said Mrs Riordan. It would be better for him that a millstone were tied about his neck and that he were cast into the depth of the sea rather than that he should scandalise one of these, my least little ones. That is the language of the Holy Ghost.

—And very bad language if you ask me, said Mr Dedalus coolly.

—Simon! Simon! said uncle Charles. The boy.

—Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus. I meant about the … I was thinking about the bad language of that railway porter. Well now, that’s all right. Here, Stephen, show me your plate, old chap. Eat away now. Here.

He heaped up the food on Stephen’s plate and served uncle Charles and Mr Casey to large pieces of turkey and splashes of sauce. Mrs Dedalus was eating little and Dante sat with her hands in her lap. She was red in the face. Mr Dedalus rooted with the carvers at the end of the dish and said:

—There’s a tasty bit here we call the pope’s nose. If any lady or gentleman …

He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carvingfork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate, saying:

—Well, you can’t say but you were asked. I think I had better eat it myself because I’m not well in my health lately.

He winked at Stephen and, replacing the dishcover, began to eat again.

There was a silence while he ate. Then he said:

—Well now, the day kept up fine after all. There were plenty of strangers down too.

Nobody spoke. He said again:

—I think there were more strangers down than last Christmas.

He looked round at the others whose faces were bent towards their plates and, receiving no reply, waited for a moment and said bitterly:

—Well, my Christmas dinner has been spoiled anyhow.

—There could be neither luck nor grace, Dante said, in a house where there is no respect for the pastors of the church.

Mr Dedalus threw his knife and fork noisily on his plate.

—Respect! he said. Is it for Billy with the lip or for the tub of guts up in Armagh? Respect!

—Princes of the church, said Mr Casey with slow scorn.

—Lord Leitrim’s coachman, yes, said Mr Dedalus.

—They are the Lord’s anointed, Dante said. They are an honour to their country.

—Tub of guts, said Mr Dedalus coarsely. He has a handsome face, mind you, in repose. You should see that fellow lapping up his bacon and cabbage of a cold winter’s day. O Johnny!

He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping noise with his lips.

—Really, Simon, said Mrs Dedalus, you should not speak that way before Stephen. It’s not right.

—O, he’ll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly—the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home.

—Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests’ pawns broke Parnell’s heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows up.

—Sons of bitches! cried Mr Dedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Lowlived dogs! And they look it! By Christ, they look it!

—They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their priests. Honour to them!

—Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free from these dreadful disputes!

Uncle Charles raised his hands mildly and said:

—Come now, come now, come now! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper and this bad language? It is too bad surely.

Mrs Dedalus spoke to Dante in a low voice but Dante said loudly:

—I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on by renegade catholics.

Mr Casey pushed his plate rudely into the middle of the table and, resting his elbows before him, said in a hoarse voice to his host:

—Tell me, did I tell you that story about a very famous spit?

—You did not, John, said Mr Dedalus.

—Why then, said Mr Casey, it is a most instructive story. It happened not long ago in the county Wicklow where we are now.

He broke off and, turning towards Dante, said with quiet indignation:

—And I may tell you, ma’am, that I, if you mean me, am no renegade catholic. I am a catholic as my father was and his father before him and his father before him again when we gave up our lives rather than sell our faith.

—The more shame to you now, Dante said, to speak as you do.

—The story, John, said Mr Dedalus smiling. Let us have the story anyhow.

—Catholic indeed! repeated Dante ironically. The blackest protestant in the land would not speak the language I have heard this evening.

Mr Dedalus began to sway his head to and fro, crooning like a country singer.

—I am no protestant, I tell you again, said Mr Casey flushing.

Mr Dedalus, still crooning and swaying his head, began to sing in a grunting nasal tone:

O, come all you Roman catholics

That never went to mass.

He took up his knife and fork again in good humour and set to eating, saying to Mr Casey:

—Let us have the story, John. It will help us to digest.

Stephen looked with affection at Mr Casey’s face which stared across the table over his joined hands. He liked to sit near him at the fire, looking up at his dark fierce face. But his dark eyes were never fierce and his slow voice was good to listen to. But why was he then against the priests? Because Dante must be right then. But he had heard his father say that she was a spoiled nun and that she had come out of the convent in the Alleghanies when her brother had got the money from the savages for the trinkets and the chainies. Perhaps that made her severe against Parnell. And she did not like him to play with Eileen because Eileen was a protestant and when she was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then? And he remembered the evening in the infirmary in Clongowes, the dark waters, the light at the pierhead and the moan of sorrow from the people when they had heard.

Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.

—The story is very short and sweet, Mr Casey said. It was one day down in Arklow, a cold bitter day, not long before the chief died. May God have mercy on him!

He closed his eyes wearily and paused. Mr Dedalus took a bone from his plate and tore some meat from it with his teeth, saying:

—Before he was killed, you mean.

Mr Casey opened his eyes, sighed and went on:

—It was down in Arklow one day. We were down there at a meeting and after the meeting was over we had to make our way to the railway station through the crowd. Such booing and baaing, man, you never heard. They called us all the names in the world. Well there was one old lady, and a drunken old harridan she was surely, that paid all her attention to me. She kept dancing along beside me in the mud bawling and screaming into my face: Priesthunter! The Paris Funds! Mr Fox! Kitty O’Shea!

—And what did you do, John? asked Mr Dedalus.

—I let her bawl away, said Mr Casey. It was a cold day and to keep up my heart I had (saving your presence, ma’am) a quid of Tullamore in my mouth and sure I couldn’t say a word in any case because my mouth was full of tobacco juice.

—Well, John?

—Well. I let her bawl away, to her heart’s content, Kitty O’Shea and the rest of it till at last she called that lady a name that I won’t sully this Christmas board nor your ears, ma’am, nor my own lips by repeating.

He paused. Mr Dedalus, lifting his head from the bone, asked:

—And what did you do, John?

—Do! said Mr Casey. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. I bent down to her and Phth! says I to her like that.

He turned aside and made the act of spitting.

—Phth! says I to her like that, right into her eye.

He clapped a hand to his eye and gave a hoarse scream of pain.

—O Jesus, Mary and Joseph! says she. I’m blinded! I’m blinded and drownded!

He stopped in a fit of coughing and laughter, repeating:

—I’m blinded entirely.

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly and lay back in his chair while uncle Charles swayed his head to and fro.

Dante looked terribly angry and repeated while they laughed:

—Very nice! Ha! Very nice!

It was not nice about the spit in the woman’s eye. But what was the name the woman had called Kitty O’Shea that Mr Casey would not repeat? He thought of Mr Casey walking through the crowds of people and making speeches from a wagonette. That was what he had been in prison for and he remembered that one night Sergeant O’Neill had come to the house and had stood in the hall, talking in a low voice with his father and chewing nervously at the chinstrap of his cap. And that night Mr Casey had not gone to Dublin by train but a car had come to the door and he had heard his father say something about the Cabinteely road.

He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God save the Queen at the end.

Mr Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.

—Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.

Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:

—A bad business! A bad business!

Mr Dedalus repeated:

—A priestridden Godforsaken race!

He pointed to the portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his right.

—Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany.

Dante broke in angrily:

—If we are a priestridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God’s eye. Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the apple of My eye.

—And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead us?

—A traitor to his country! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.

—Were they, faith? said Mr Casey.

He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another.

—Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn’t the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confessionbox? And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus?

His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.

—O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!

Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr Casey:

—Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first.

Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her:

—Mrs Riordan, don’t excite yourself answering them.

—God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world!

Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.

—Very well, then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!

—John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coatsleeve.

Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.

—No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!

—Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.

Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating:

—Away with God, I say!

Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easychair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:

—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!

The door slammed behind her.

Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.

—Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!

He sobbed loudly and bitterly.

Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.

*   *   *

The fellows talked together in little groups.

One fellow said:

—They were caught near the Hill of Lyons.

—Who caught them?

—Mr Gleeson and the minister. They were on a car.

The same fellow added:

—A fellow in the higher line told me.

Fleming asked:

—But why did they run away, tell us?

—I know why, Cecil Thunder said. Because they had fecked cash out of the rector’s room.

—Who fecked it?

—Kickham’s brother. And they all went shares in it.

But that was stealing. How could they have done that?

—A fat lot you know about it, Thunder! Wells said. I know why they scut.

—Tell us why.

—I was told not to, Wells said.

—O, go on, Wells, all said. You might tell us. We won’t let it out.

Stephen bent forward his head to hear. Wells looked round to see if anyone was coming. Then he said secretly:

—You know the altar wine they keep in the press in the sacristy?

—Yes.

—Well, they drank that and it was found out who did it by the smell. And that’s why they ran away, if you want to know.

And the fellow who had spoken first said:

—Yes, that’s what I heard too from the fellow in the higher line.

The fellows were all silent. Stephen stood among them, afraid to speak, listening. A faint sickness of awe made him feel weak. How could they have done that? He thought of the dark silent sacristy. There were dark wooden presses there where the crimped surplices lay quietly folded. It was not the chapel but still you had to speak under your breath. It was a holy place. He remembered the summer evening he had been there to be dressed as boatbearer, the evening of the procession to the little altar in the wood. A strange and holy place. The boy that held the censer had swung it gently to and fro near the door with the silvery cap lifted by the middle chain to keep the coals lighting. That was called charcoal: and it had burned quietly as the fellow had swung it gently and had given off a weak sour smell. And then when all were vested he had stood holding out the boat to the rector and the rector had put a spoonful of incense in it and it had hissed on the red coals.

The fellows were talking together in little groups here and there on the playground. The fellows seemed to him to have grown smaller: that was because a sprinter had knocked him down the day before, a fellow out of second of grammar. He had been thrown by the fellow’s machine lightly on the cinderpath and his spectacles had been broken in three pieces and some of the grit of the cinders had gone into his mouth.

That was why the fellows seemed to him smaller and farther away and the goalposts so thin and far and the soft grey sky so high up. But there was no play on the football grounds for cricket was coming: and some said that Barnes would be the prof and some said it would be Flowers. And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricketbats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl.

Athy, who had been silent, said quietly:

—You are all wrong.

All turned towards him eagerly.

—Why?

—Do you know?

—Who told you?

—Tell us, Athy.

Athy pointed across the playground to where Simon Moonan was walking by himself kicking a stone before him.

—Ask him, he said.

The fellows looked there and then said:

—Why him?

—Is he in it?

—Tell us, Athy. Go on. You might if you know.

Athy lowered his voice and said:

—Do you know why those fellows scut? I will tell you but you must not let on you know.

He paused for a moment and then said mysteriously:

—They were caught with Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle in the square one night.

The fellows looked at him and asked:

—Caught?

—What doing?

Athy said:

—Smugging.

All the fellows were silent: and Athy said:

—And that’s why.

Stephen looked at the faces of the fellows but they were all looking across the playground. He wanted to ask somebody about it. What did that mean about the smugging in the square? Why did the five fellows out of the higher line run away for that? It was a joke, he thought. Simon Moonan had nice clothes and one night he had shown him a ball of creamy sweets that the fellows of the football fifteen had rolled down to him along the carpet in the middle of the refectory when he was at the door. It was the night of the match against the Bective Rangers and the ball was made just like a red and green apple only it opened and it was full of the creamy sweets. And one day Boyle had said that an elephant had two tuskers instead of two tusks and that was why he was called Tusker Boyle but some fellows called him Lady Boyle because he was always at his nails, paring them.

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl. They were like ivory; only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it. One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds. A waiter was running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and a fox terrier was scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn. She had put her hand into his pocket where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hand was. She had said that pockets were funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold. By thinking of things you could understand them.

But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something. It was all thick slabs of slate and water trickled all day out of tiny pinholes and there was a queer smell of stale water there. And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:

Balbus was building a wall.

Some fellows had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard. And on the wall of another closet there was written in backhand in beautiful writing:

Julius Cæsar wrote The Calico Belly.

Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod. But all the same it was queer what Athy said and the way he said it. It was not a cod because they had run away. He looked with the others in silence across the playground and began to feel afraid.

At last Fleming said:

—And we are all to be punished for what other fellows did?

—I won’t come back, see if I do, Cecil Thunder said. Three days’ silence in the refectory and sending us up for six and eight every minute.

—Yes, said Wells. And old Barrett has a new way of twisting the note so that you can’t open it and fold it again to see how many ferulæ you are to get. I won’t come back too.

—Yes, said Cecil Thunder, and the prefect of studies was in second of grammar this morning.

—Let us get up a rebellion, Fleming said. Will we?

All the fellows were silent. The air was very silent and you could hear the cricketbats but more slowly than before: pick, pock.

Wells asked:

—What is going to be done to them?

—Simon Moonan and Tusker are going to be flogged, Athy said, and the fellows in the higher line got their choice of flogging or being expelled.

—And which are they taking? asked the fellow who had spoken first.

—All are taking expulsion except Corrigan, Athy answered. He’s going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson.

—Is it Corrigan that big fellow? said Fleming. Why, he’d be able for two of Gleeson!

—I know why, Cecil Thunder said. He is right and the other fellows are wrong because a flogging wears off after a bit but a fellow that has been expelled from college is known all his life on account of it. Besides Gleeson won’t flog him hard.

—It’s best of his play not to, Fleming said.

—I wouldn’t like to be Simon Moonan and Tusker, Cecil Thunder said. But I don’t believe they will be flogged. Perhaps they will be sent up for twice nine.

—No, no, said Athy. They’ll both get it on the vital spot.

Wells rubbed himself and said in a crying voice:

—Please, sir, let me off!

Athy grinned and turned up the sleeves of his jacket, saying:

It can’t be helped;

It must be done.

So down with your breeches

And out with your bum.

The fellows laughed; but he felt that they were a little afraid. In the silence of the soft grey air he heard the cricketbats from here and from there: pock. That was a sound to hear but if you were hit then you would feel a pain. The pandybat made a sound too but not like that. The fellows said it was made of whalebone and leather with lead inside: and he wondered what was the pain like. There were different kinds of pains for all the different kinds of sounds. A long thin cane would have a high whistling sound and he wondered what was that pain like. It made him shivery to think of it and cold: and what Athy said too. But what was there to laugh at in it? It made him shivery: but that was because you always felt like a shiver when you let down your trousers. It was the same in the bath when you undressed yourself. He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy himself. O how could they laugh about it that way?

He looked at Athy’s rolledup sleeves and knuckly inky hands. He had rolled up his sleeves to show how Mr Gleeson would roll up his sleeves. But Mr Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed. Perhaps he pared them too like Lady Boyle. But they were terribly long and pointed nails. So long and cruel they were though the white fattish hands were not cruel but gentle. And though he trembled with cold and fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high whistling sound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle. And he thought of what Cecil Thunder had said; that Mr Gleeson would not flog Corrigan hard. And Fleming had said he would not because it was best of his play not to. But that was not why.

A voice from far out on the playground cried:

—All in!

And other voices cried:

—All in! All in!

During the writing lesson he sat with his arms folded, listening to the slow scraping of the pens. Mr Harford went to and fro making little signs in red pencil and sometimes sitting beside the boy to show him how to hold the pen. He had tried to spell out the headline for himself though he knew already what it was for it was the last of the book. Zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift. But the lines of the letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital.

But Mr Harford was very decent and never got into a wax. All the other masters got into dreadful waxes. But why were they to suffer for what fellows in the higher line did? Wells had said that they had drunk some of the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been found out who had done it by the smell. Perhaps they had stolen a monstrance to run away with it and sell it somewhere. That must have been a terrible sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at both sides as the fellow swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But God was not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and a great sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence when the pens scraped lightly. But to drink the altar wine out of the press and [and to] be found out by the smell was a sin too: but it was not terrible and strange. It only made you feel a little sickish on account of the smell of the wine. Because on the day when he had made his first holy communion in the chapel he had shut his eyes and opened his mouth and put out his tongue a little: and when the rector had stooped down to give him the holy communion he had smelt a faint winy smell off the rector’s breath after the wine of the mass. The word was beautiful: wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples. But the faint smell off the rector’s breath had made him feel a sick feeling on the morning of his first communion. The day of your first communion was the happiest day of your life. And once a lot of generals had asked Napoleon what was the happiest day of his life. They thought he would say the day he won some great battle or the day he was made an emperor. But he said:

—Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made my first holy communion.

Father Arnall came in and the Latin lesson began and he remained still, leaning on the desk with his arms folded. Father Arnall gave out the themebooks and he said that they were scandalous and that they were all to be written out again with the corrections at once. But the worst of all was Fleming’s theme because the pages were stuck together by a blot: and Father Arnall held it up by a corner and said it was an insult to any master to send him up such a theme. Then he asked Jack Lawton to decline the noun mare and Jack Lawton stopped at the ablative singular and could not go on with the plural.

—You should be ashamed of yourself, said Father Arnall sternly. You, the leader of the class!

Then he asked the next boy and the next and the next. Nobody knew. Father Arnall became very quiet, more and more quiet as each boy tried to answer and could not. But his face was blacklooking and his eyes were staring though his voice was so quiet. Then he asked Fleming and Fleming said that that word had no plural. Father Arnall suddenly shut the book and shouted at him:

—Kneel out there in the middle of the class. You are one of the idlest boys I ever met. Copy out your themes again the rest of you.

Fleming moved heavily out of his place and knelt between the two last benches. The others [other] boys bent over their themebooks and began to write. A silence filled the classroom and Stephen, glacing [glancing] timidly at Father Arnall’s dark face, saw that it was a little red from the wax he was in.

Was that a sin for Father Arnall to be in a wax or was he allowed to get into a wax when the boys were idle because that made them study better or was he only letting on to be in a wax? It was because he was allowed because a priest would know what a sin was and would not do it. But if he did it one time by mistake what would he do to go to confession? Perhaps he would go to confession to the minister. And if the minister did it he would go to the rector: and the rector to the provincial: and the provincial to the general of the jesuits. That was called the order: and he had heard his father say that they were all clever men. They could all have become highup people in the world if they had not become jesuits. And he wondered what Father Arnall and Paddy Barrett would have become and what Mr McGlade and Mr Gleeson would have become if they had not become jesuits. It was hard to think what because you would have to think of them in a different way with different coloured coats and trousers and with beards and moustaches and different kinds of hats.

The door opened quietly and closed. A quick whisper ran through the class: the prefect of studies. There was an instant of dead silence and then the loud crack of a pandybat on the last desk. Stephen’s heart leapt up in fear.

—Any boys want flogging here, Father Arnall? cried the prefect of studies. Any lazy idle loafers that want flogging in this class?

He came to the middle of the class and saw Fleming on his knees.

—Hoho! he cried. Who is this boy? Why is he on his knees? What is your name, boy?

—Fleming, sir.

—Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. I can see it in your eye. Why is he on his knees, Father Arnall?

—He wrote a bad Latin theme, Father Arnall said, and he missed all the questions in grammar.

—Of course he did! cried the prefect of studies. Of course he did! A born idler! I can see it in the corner of his eye.

He banged his pandybat down on the desk and cried:

—Up, Fleming! Up, my boy!

Fleming stood up slowly.

—Hold out! cried the prefect of studies.

Fleming held out his hand. The pandybat came down on it with a loud smacking sound: one, two, three, four, five, six.

—Other hand!

The pandybat came down again in six loud quick smacks.

—Kneel down! cried the prefect of studies.

Fleming knelt down squeezing his hands under his armpits, his face contorted with pain, but Stephen knew how hard his hands were because Fleming was always rubbing rosin into them. But perhaps he was in great pain for the noise of the pandies was terrible. Stephen’s heart was beating and fluttering.

—At your work, all of you! shouted the prefect of studies. We want no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little schemers. At your work, I tell you. Father Dolan will be in to see you every day. Father Dolan will be in tomorrow.

He poked one of the boys in the side with the pandybat, saying:

—You, boy! When will Father Dolan be in again?

—Tomorrow, sir, said Tom Furlong’s voice.

—Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, said the prefect of studies. Make up your minds for that. Every day Father Dolan. Write away. You, boy, who are you?

Stephen’s heart jumped suddenly.

—Dedalus, sir.

—Why are you not writing like the others?

—I … my …

He could not speak with fright.

—Why is he not writing, Father Arnall?

—He broke his glasses, said Father Arnall, and I exempted him from work.

—Broke? What is this I hear? What is this your name is? said the prefect of studies.

—Dedalus, sir.

—Out here, Dedalus. Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses?

Stephen stumbled into the middle of the class, blinded by fear and haste.

—Where did you break your glasses? repeated the prefect of studies.

—The cinderpath, sir.

—Hoho! The cinderpath! cried the prefect of studies. I know that trick.

Stephen lifted his eyes in wonder and saw for a moment Father Dolan’s whitegrey not young face, his baldy whitegrey head with fluff at the sides of it, the steel rims of his spectacles and his nocoloured eyes looking through the glasses. Why did he say he knew that trick?

—Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your hand this moment!

Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards. He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry that scalded his throat.

—Other hand! shouted the prefect of studies.

Stephen drew back his maimed and quivering right arm and held out his left hand. The soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning pain made his hand shrink together with the palms and fingers in a livid quivering mass. The scalding water burst forth from his eyes and, burning with shame and agony and fear, he drew back his shaking arm in terror and burst out into a whine of pain. His body shook with a palsy of fright and in shame and rage he felt the scalding cry come from his throat and the scalding tears falling out of his eyes and down his flaming cheeks.

—Kneel down! cried the prefect of studies.

Stephen knelt down quickly pressing his beaten hands to his sides. To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else’s that he felt sorry for. And as he knelt, calming the last sobs in his throat and feeling the burning tingling pain pressed [pressing] in to his sides, he thought of the hands which he had held out in the air with the palms up and of the firm touch of the prefect of studies when he had steadied the shaking fingers and of the beaten swollen reddened mass of palm and fingers that shook helplessly in the air.

—Get at your work, all of you, cried the prefect of studies from the door. Father Dolan will be in every day to see if any boy, any lazy idle little loafer wants flogging. Every day. Every day.

The door closed behind him.

The hushed class continued to copy out the themes. Father Arnall rose from his seat and went among them, helping the boys with gentle words and telling them the mistakes they had made. His voice was very gentle and soft. Then he returned to his seat and said to Fleming and Stephen:

—You may return to your places, you two.

Fleming and Stephen rose and, walking to their seats, sat down. Stephen, scarlet with shame, opened a book quickly with one weak hand and bent down upon it, his face close to the page.

It was unfair and cruel because the doctor had told him not to read without glasses and he had written home to his father that morning to send him a new pair. And Father Arnall had said that he need not study till the new glasses came. Then to be called a schemer before the class and to be pandied when he always got the card for first or second and was the leader of the Yorkists! How could the prefect of studies know that it was a trick? He felt the touch of the prefect’s fingers as they had steadied his hand and at first he had thought he was going to shake hands with him because the fingers were soft and firm: but then in an instant he had heard the swish of the soutane sleeve and the crash. It was cruel and unfair to make him kneel in the middle of the class then: and Father Arnall had told them both that they might return to their places without making any difference between them. He listened to Father Arnall’s low and gentle voice as he corrected the themes. Perhaps he was sorry now and wanted to be decent. But it was unfair and cruel. The prefect of studies was a priest but that was cruel and unfair. And his whitegrey face and the nocoloured eyes behind the steelrimmed spectacles were cruel looking because he had steadied the hand first with his firm soft fingers and that was to hit it better and louder.

—It’s a stinking mean thing, that’s what it is, said Fleming in the corridor as the classes were passing out in file to the refectory, to pandy a fellow for what is not his fault.

—You really broke your glasses by accident, didn’t you? Nasty Roche asked.

Stephen felt his heart filled by Fleming’s words and did not answer.

—Of course he did! said Fleming. I wouldn’t stand it. I’d go up and tell the rector on him.

—Yes, said Cecil Thunder eagerly, and I saw him lift the pandybat over his shoulder and he’s not allowed to do that.

—Did they hurt much? Nasty Roche asked.

—Very much, Stephen said.

—I wouldn’t stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldyhead or any other Baldyhead. It’s a stinking mean low trick, that’s what it is. I’d go straight up to the rector and tell him about it after dinner.

—Yes, do. Yes, do, said Cecil Thunder.

—Yes, do. Yes, go up and tell the rector on him, Dedalus, said Nasty Roche, because he said that he’d come in tomorrow again to pandy you.

—Yes, yes. Tell the rector, all said.

And there were some fellows out of second of grammar listening and one of them said:

—The senate and the Roman people declared that Dedalus had been wrongly punished.

It was wrong; [wrong:] it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel and unfair.

He could not eat the blackish fish fritters they got on Wednesdays in Lent and one of his potatoes had the mark of the spade in it. Yes, he would do what the fellows had told him. He would go up and tell the rector that he had been wrongly punished. A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history, by some great person whose head was in the books of history. And the rector would declare that he had been wrongly punished because the senate and the Roman people always declared that the men who did that had been wrongly punished. Those were the great men whose names were in Richmal Magnall’s Questions. History was all about those men and what they did and that was what Peter Parley’s Tales about Greece and Rome were all about. Peter Parley himself was on the first page in a picture. There was a road over a heath with grass at the side and little bushes: and Peter Parley had a broad hat like a protestant minister and a big stick and he was walking fast along the road to Greece and Rome.

It was easy what he had to do. All he had to do was when the dinner was over and he came out in his turn to go on walking but not out to the corridor but up the staircase on the right that led to the castle. He had nothing to do but that: to turn to the right and walk fast up the staircase and in half a minute he would be in the low dark narrow corridor that led through the castle to the rector’s room. And every fellow had said that [said] it was unfair, even the fellow out of second of grammar who had said that about the senate and the Roman people.

What would happen? He heard the fellows of the higher line stand up at the top of the refectory and heard their steps as they came down the matting: Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard and the Portuguese and the fifth was big Corrigan who was going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson. That was why the prefect of studies had called him a schemer and pandied him for nothing: and, straining his weak eyes, tired with the tears, he watched big Corrigan’s broad shoulders and big hanging black head passing in the file. But he had done something and besides Mr Gleeson would not flog him hard: and he remembered how big Corrigan looked in the bath. He had skin the same colour as the turfcoloured bogwater in the shallow end of the bath and when he walked along the side his feet slapped loudly on the wet tiles and at every step his thighs shook a little because he was fat.

The refectory was half empty and the fellows were still passing out in file. He could go up the staircase because there was never a priest or a prefect outside the refectory door. But he could not go. The rector would side with the prefect of studies and think it was a schoolboy trick and then the prefect of studies would come in every day the same only it would be worse because he would be dreadfully waxy at any fellow going up to the rector about him. The fellows had told him to go but they would not go themselves. They had forgotten all about it. No, it was best to forget all about it and perhaps the prefect of studies had only said he would come in. No, it was best to hide out of the way because when you were small and young you could often escape that way.

The fellows at his table stood up. He stood up and passed out among them in the file. He had to decide. He was coming near the door. If he went on with the fellows he could never go up to the rector because he could not leave the playground for that. And if he went and was pandied all the same all the fellows would make fun and talk about young Dedalus going up to the rector to tell on the prefect of studies.

He was walking down along the matting and he saw the door before him. It was impossible: he could not. He thought of the baldy head of the prefect of studies with the cruel nocoloured eyes looking at him and he heard the voice of the prefect of studies asking him twice what his name was. Why could he not remember the name when he was told the first time? Was he not listening the first time or was it to make fun out of the name? The great men in the history had names like that and nobody made fun of them. It was his own name that he should have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. Dolan: it was like the name of a woman that washed clothes.

He had reached the door and, turning quickly up to the right, walked up the stairs and, before he could make up his mind to come back, he had entered the low dark narrow corridor that led to the castle. And as he crossed the threshold of the door of the corridor he saw, without turning his head to look, that all the fellows were looking after him as they went filing by.

He passed along the narrow dark corridor, passing little doors that were the doors of the rooms of the community. He peered in front of him and right and left through the gloom and thought that those must be portraits. It was dark and silent and his eyes were weak and tired with tears so that he could not see. But he thought they were the portraits of the saints and great men of the order who were looking down on him silently as he passed: saint Ignatius Loyola holding an open book and pointing to the words Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam in it, saint Francis Xavier pointing to his chest, Lorenzo Ricci with his berretta on his head like one of the prefects of the lines, the three patrons of holy youth, saint Stanislaus Kostka, saint Aloysius Gonzaga and blessed John Berchmans, all with young faces because they died when they were young, and Father Peter Kenny sitting in a chair wrapped in a big cloak.

He came out on the landing above the entrance hall and looked about him. That was where Hamilton Rowan had passed and the marks of the soldiers’ slugs were there. And it was there that the old servants had seen the ghost in the white cloak of a marshal.

An old servant was sweeping at the end of the landing. He asked him where was the rector’s room and the old servant pointed to the door at the far end and looked after him as he went on to it and knocked.

There was no answer. He knocked again more loudly and his heart jumped when he heard a muffled voice say:

—Come in!

He turned the handle and opened the door and fumbled for the handle of the green baize door inside. He found it and pushed it open and went in.

He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the room like the old leather of chairs.

His heart was beating fast on account of the solemn place he was in and the silence of the room: and he looked at the skull and at the rector’s kindlooking face.

—Well, my little man, said the rector, what is it?

Stephen swallowed down the thing in his throat and said:

—I broke my glasses, sir.

The rector opened his mouth and said:

—O!

Then he smiled and said:

—Well, if we broke our glasses we must write home for a new pair.

—I wrote home, sir, said Stephen, and Father Arnall said I am not to study till they come.

—Quite right! said the rector.

Stephen swallowed down the thing again and tried to keep his legs and his voice from shaking.

—But, sir …

—Yes?

—Father Dolan came in today and pandied me because I was not writing my theme.

The rector looked at him in silence and he could feel the blood rising to his face and the tears about to rise to his eyes.

The rector said:

—Your name is Dedalus, isn’t it?

—Yes, sir.

—And where did you break your glasses?

—On the cinderpath, sir. A fellow was coming out of the bicycle house and I fell and they got broken. I don’t know the fellow’s name.

The rector looked at him again in silence. Then he smiled and said:

—O, well, it was a mistake; I am sure Father Dolan did not know.

—But I told him I broke them, sir, and he pandied me.

—Did you tell him that you had written home for a new pair? the rector asked.

—No, sir.

—O well then, said the rector, Father Dolan did not understand. You can say that I excuse [excused] you from your lessons for a few days.

Stephen said quickly for fear his trembling would prevent him:

—Yes, sir, but Father Dolan said he will come in tomorrow to pandy me again for it.

—Very well, the rector said, it is a mistake and I shall speak to Father Dolan myself. Will that do now?

Stephen felt the tears wetting his eyes and murmured:

—O yes sir, thanks.

The rector held his hand across the side of the desk where the skull was and Stephen, placing his hand in it for a moment, felt a cool moist palm.

—Good day now, said the rector, withdrawing his hand and bowing.

—Good day, sir, said Stephen.

He bowed and walked quietly out of the room, closing the doors carefully and slowly.

But when he had passed the old servant on the landing and was again in the low narrow dark corridor he began to walk faster and faster. Faster and faster he hurried on through the gloom excitedly. He bumped his elbow against the door at the end and, hurrying down the staircase, walked quickly through the two corridors and out into the air.

He could hear the cries of the fellows on the playgrounds. He broke into a run and, running quicker and quicker, ran across the cinderpath and reached the third line playground, panting.

The fellows had seen him running. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one against another to hear.

—Tell us! Tell us!

—What did he say?

—Did you go in?

—What did he say?

—Tell us! Tell us!

He told them what he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung their caps spinning up into the air and cried:

—Hurroo!

They caught their caps and sent them up again spinning skyhigh and cried again:

—Hurroo! Hurroo!

They made a cradle of their locked hands and hoisted him up among them and carried him along till he struggled to get free. And when he had escaped from them they broke away in all directions, flinging their caps again into the air and whistling as they went spinning up and crying:

—Hurroo!

And they gave three groans for Baldyhead Dolan and three cheers for Conmee and they said he was the decentest rector that was ever in Clongowes.

The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free: but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do something kind for him to show him that he was not proud.

The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming. There was the smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips to peel them and eat them when they went out for a walk to Major Barton’s, the smell there was in the little wood beyond the pavilion where the gallnuts were.

The fellows were practising long shies and bowing [bowling] lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

 ® 

II

Uncle Charles smoked such black twist that at last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke in a little outhouse at the end of the garden.

—Very good, Simon. All serene, Simon, said the old man tranquilly. Anywhere you like. The outhouse will do me nicely: it will be more salubrious.

—Damn me, said Mr Dedalus frankly, if I know how you can smoke such villainous awful tobacco. It’s like gunpowder, by God.

—It’s very nice, Simon, replied the old man. Very cool and mollifying.

Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had creased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat. While he smoked the brim of his tall hat and the bowl of his pipe were just visible beyond the jambs of the outhouse door. His arbour, as he called the reeking outhouse which he shared with the cat and the garden tools, served him also as a soundingbox: and every morning he hummed contentedly one of his favourite songs: O, twine me a bower or Blue eyes and golden hair or The Groves of Blarney while the grey and blue coils of smoke rose slowly from his pipe and vanished in the pure air.

During the first part of the summer in Blackrock uncle Charles was Stephen’s constant companion. Uncle Charles was a hale old man with a welltanned skin, rugged features and white side whiskers. On week days he did messages between the house in Carysfort Avenue and those shops in the main street of the town with which the family dealt. Stephen was glad to go with him on these errands for uncle Charles helped him very liberally to handfuls of whatever was exposed in open boxes and barrels outside the counter. He would seize a handful of grapes and sawdust or three or four American apples and thrust them generously into his grandnephew’s hand while the shopman smiled uneasily; and, on Stephen’s feigning reluctance to take them, he would frown and say:

—Take them, sir. Do you hear me, sir? They’re good for your bowels.

When the order list had been booked the two would go on to the park where an old friend of Stephen’s father, Mike Flynn, would be found seated on a bench, waiting for them. Then would begin Stephen’s run round the park. Mike Flynn would stand at the gate near the railway station, watch in hand, while Stephen ran round the track in the style Mike Flynn favoured, his head high lifted, his knees well lifted and his hands held straight down by his sides. When the morning practice was over the trainer would make his comments and sometimes illustrate them by shuffling along for a yard or so comically in an old pair of blue canvas shoes. A small ring of wonderstruck children and nursemaids would gather to watch him and linger even when he and uncle Charles had sat down again and were talking athletics and politics. Though he had heard his father say that Mike Flynn had put some of the best runners of modern times through his hands Stephen often glanced with mistrust at his trainer’s flabby stubblecovered face, as it bent over the long stained fingers through which he rolled his cigarette, and with pity at the mild lustreless blue eyes which would look up suddenly from the task and gaze vaguely into the blue distance while the long swollen fingers ceased their rolling and grains and fibres of tobacco fell back into the pouch.

On the way home uncle Charles would often pay a visit to the chapel and, as the font was above Stephen’s reach, the old man would dip his hand and then sprinkle the water briskly about Stephen’s clothes and on the floor of the porch. While he prayed he knelt on his red handkerchief and read above his breath from a thumbblackened prayerbook wherein catchwords were printed at the foot of every page. Stephen knelt at his side respecting, though he did not share, his piety. He often wondered what his granduncle prayed for so seriously. Perhaps he prayed for the souls in purgatory or for the grace of a happy death or perhaps he prayed that God might send him back a part of the big fortune he had squandered in Cork.

On Sundays Stephen with his father and his granduncle took their constitutional. The old man was a nimble walker in spite of his corns and often ten or twelve miles of the road were covered. The little village of Stillorgan was the parting of the ways. Either they went to the left towards the Dublin mountains or along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum, coming home by Sandyford. Trudging along the road or standing in some grimy wayside publichouse his elders spoke constantly of the subjects nearer their hearts, of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen lent an avid ear. Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him [him,] the nature of which he only dimly apprehended.

His evenings were his own; [own:] and he pored over a ragged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The figure of that dark avenger stood forth in his mind for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible. At night he built up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped. When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseilles, of sunny trellisses [trellises] and of Mercedes. Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. Both on the outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this landmark: and in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself, towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying:

—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He became the ally of a boy named Aubrey Mills and founded with him a gang of adventurers in the avenue. Aubrey carried a whistle dangling from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs. Stephen, who had read of Napoleon’s plain style of dress, chose to remain unadorned and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with his lieutenant before giving orders. The gang made forays into the gardens of old maids or went down to the castle and fought a battle on the shaggy weedgrown rocks, coming home after it weary stragglers with the stale odours of the foreshore in their nostrils and the rank oils of the seawrack upon their hands and in their hair.

Aubrey and Stephen had a common milkman and often they drove out in the milkcar to Carrickmines where the cows were at grass. While the men were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable mare round the field. But when autumn came the cows were driven home from the grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming brantroughs sickened Stephen’s heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded.

The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to be sent back to Clongowes. The practice in the park came to an end when Mike Flynn went into hospital. Aubrey was at school and had only an hour or two free in the evening. The gang fell asunder and there were no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks. Stephen sometimes went round with the car which delivered the evening milk: and these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cowhairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat. Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of a wellscrubbed kitchen or of a softlylighted hall and to see how the servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door. He thought it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every evening to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at his trainer’s flabby stubblecovered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. For some time he had felt the slight changes in his house; and these changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare’s hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.

He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

*   *   *

Two great yellow caravans had halted one morning before the door and men had come tramping into the house to dismantle it. The furniture had been hustled out through the front garden which was strewn with wisps of straw and rope ends and into the huge vans at the gate. When all had been safetly [safely] stowed the vans had set off noisily down the avenue: and from the window of the railway carriage, in which he had sat with his redeyed mother, Stephen had seen them lumbering heavily along the Merrion Road.

The parlour fire would not draw that evening and Mr Dedalus rested the poker against the bars of the grate to attract the flame. Uncle Charles dozed in a corner of the half furnished uncarpeted room and near him the family portraits leaned against the wall. The lamp on the table shed a weak light over the boarded floor, muddied by the feet of the vanmen. Stephen sat on a footstool beside his father listening to a long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at first but he became slowly aware that his father had enemies and that some fight was going to take place. He felt too that he was being enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid upon his shoulders. The sudden flight from the comfort and revery of Blackrock, the passage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare cheerless house in which they were now to live made his heart heavy: and again an intuition or foreknowledge of the future came to him. He understood also why the servants had often whispered together in the hall and why his father had often stood on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, talking loudly to uncle Charles who urged him to sit down and eat his dinner.

—There’s a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr Dedalus, poking at the dull fire with fierce energy. We’re not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) nor half dead.

Dublin was a new and complex sensation. Uncle Charles had grown so witless that he could no longer be sent out on errands and the disorder in settling in the new house left Stephen freer than he had been in Blackrock. In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighbouring square or, at most, going half way down one of the side streets: but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his mind he followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the customhouse. He passed unchallenged among the docks and along the quays wondering at the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the surface of the water in a thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay porters and the rumbling carts and the illdressed bearded policeman. The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales of merchandise stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds of steamers wakened again in him the unrest which had sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes. And amid this new bustling life he might have fancied himself in another Marseilles but that he missed the bright sky and the sunwarmed trellisses [trellises] of the wineshops. A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies and yet he continued to wander up and down day after day as if he really sought someone that eluded him.

He went once or twice with his mother to visit their relatives: and, though they passed a jovial array of shops lit up and adorned for Christmas, his mood of embittered silence did not leave him. The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing [tasting] its mortifying flavour in secret.

He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt’s kitchen. A lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace and by its light his aunt was reading the evening paper that lay on her knees. She looked a long time at a smiling picture that was set in it and said musingly:

—The beautiful Mabel Hunter!

A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly:

—What is she in, mud?

—In the pantomime, love.

The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother’s sleeve, gazing on the picture, and murmured as if fascinated:

—The beautiful Mabel Hunter!

As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting eyes and she murmured again devotedly:

—Isn’t she an exquisite creature?

And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his stone of coal, heard her words. He dropped his load promptly on the floor and hurried to her side to see. But she did not raise her easeful head to let him see. He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and complaining that he could not see.

He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old darkwindowed house. The firelight flickered on the wall and beyond the window a spectral dusk was gathering upon the river. Before the fire an old woman was busy making tea and, as she bustled at her task, she told in a low voice of what the priest and the doctor had said. She told too of certain changes she had seen in her of late and of her odd ways and sayings. He sat listening to the words and following the ways of adventure that lay open in the coals, arches and vaults and winding galleries and jagged caverns.

Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway. A feeble creature like a monkey was there, drawn thither by the sound of voices at the fire. A whining voice came from the door, asking:

—Is that Josephine?

The old bustling woman answered cheerily from the fireplace:

—No, Ellen. It’s Stephen.

—O … O, good evening, Stephen.

He answered the greeting and saw a silly smile break over the face in the doorway.

—Do you want anything, Ellen? asked the old woman at the fire.

But she did not answer the question and said:

—I thought it was Josephine. I thought you were Josephine, Stephen.

And, repeating this several times, she fell to laughing feebly.

He was sitting in the midst of a children’s party at Harold’s Cross. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers, danced and romped noisily and, though he tried to share their merriment, he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and sunbonnets.

But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was like a soothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart.

In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their things: the party was over. She had thrown a shawl about her and, as they went together towards the tram, sprays of her fresh warm breath flew gaily above her cowled head and her shoes tapped blithely on the glassy road.

It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.

They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or in revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, [grounds] watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him.

—She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That’s why she came with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.

But he did neither: and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted tram, he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the corrugated footboard.

The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. From force of habit he had written at the top of the first page the initial letters of the jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to write: To E—— C——. He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath he fell into a daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinnertable, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates:

Roderick Kickham

John Lawton

Anthony MacSwiney

Simon Moonan

Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint of brooding on the incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all these elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. After this the letters L.D.S. were written at the foot of the page and, having hidden the book, he went into his mother’s bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressingtable.

But his long spell of leisure and liberty was drawing to its end. One evening his father came home full of news which kept his tongue busy all through dinner. Stephen had been awaiting his father’s return for there had been mutton hash that day and he knew that his father would make him dip his bread in the gravy. But he did not relish the hash for the mention of Clongowes had coated his palate with a scum of disgust.

—I walked bang into him, said Mr Dedalus for the fourth time, just at the corner of the square.

—Then [Then,] I suppose, said Mrs Dedalus, he will be able to arrange it. I mean about Belvedere.

—Of course he will, said Mr Dedalus. Don’t I tell you he’s provincial of the order now?

—I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers myself, said Mrs Dedalus.

—Christian brothers be damned! said Mr Dedalus. Is it with Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud? No, let him stick to the jesuits in God’s name since he began with them. They’ll be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position.

—And they’re a very rich order, aren’t they, Simon?

—Rather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes. Fed up, by God, like gamecocks.

Mr Dedalus pushed his plate over to Stephen and bade him finish what was on it.

—Now then, Stephen, he said, you must put your shoulder to the wheel, old chap. You’ve had a fine long holiday.

—O, I’m sure he’ll work very hard now, said Mrs Dedalus, especially when he has Maurice with him.

—O, Holy Paul, I forgot about Maurice, said Mr Dedalus. Here, Maurice! Come here, you thickheaded ruffian! Do you know I’m going to send you to a college where they’ll teach you to spell c.a.t. cat. And I’ll buy you a nice little penny handkerchief to keep your nose dry. Won’t that be grand fun?

Maurice grinned at his father and then at his brother. Mr Dedalus screwed his glass into his eye and stared hard at both his sons. Stephen mumbled his bread without answering his father’s gaze.

—By the bye, said Mr Dedalus at length, the rector, or provincial, rather, was telling me that story about you and Father Dolan. You’re an impudent thief, he said.

—O, he didn’t, Simon!

—Not he! said Mr Dedalus. But he gave me a great account of the whole affair. We were chatting, you know, and one word borrowed another. And, by the way, who do you think he told me will get that job in the corporation? But I’ll tell you that after. Well, as I was saying, we were chatting away quite friendly and he asked me did our friend here wear glasses still and then he told me the whole story.

—And was he annoyed, Simon?

—Annoyed! Not he! Manly little chap! he said.

Mr Dedalus imitated the mincing nasal tone of the provincial.

—Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father Dolan and I had a great laugh over it. You better mind yourself, Father Dolan, said I, or young Dedalus will send you up for twice nine. We had a famous laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Mr Dedalus turned to his wife and interjected in his natural voice:

—Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there. O, a jesuit for your life, for diplomacy!

He reassumed the provincial’s voice and repeated:

—I told them all at dinner about it and Father Dolan and I and all of us we had a hearty laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha!

*   *   *

The night of the Whitsuntide play had come and Stephen from the window of the dressingroom looked out on the small grassplot across which lines of Chinese lanterns were stretched. He watched the visitors come down the steps from the house and pass into the theatre. Stewards in evening dress, old Belvedereans, loitered in groups about the entrance to the theatre and ushered in the visitors with ceremony. Under the sudden glow of a lantern he could recognise the smiling face of a priest.

The Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the tabernacle and the first benches had been driven back so as to leave the dais of the altar and the space before it free. Against the walls stood companies of barbells and Indian clubs; the dumbbells were piled in one corner: and in the midst of countless hillocks of gymnasium shoes and sweaters and singlets in untidy brown parcels there stood the stout leatherjacketed vaulting horse waiting its turn to be carried up on the stage. A large bronze shield, tipped with silver, leaned against the panel of the altar also waiting its turn to be carried up on the stage and set in the middle of the winning team at the end of the gymnastic display.

Stephen, though in deference to his reputation for essay-writing he had been elected secretary to the gymnasium, had had no part in the first section of the programme but in the play which formed the second section he had the chief part, that of a [the] farcical pedagogue. He had been cast for it on account of his stature and grave manners for he was now at the end of his [a] second year at Belvedere and in number two.

A score of the younger boys in white knickers and singlets came pattering down from the stage, through the vestry and into the chapel. The vestry and chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys. The plump bald sergeantmajor was testing with his foot the springboard of the vaulting horse. The lean young man in a long overcoat, who was to give a special display of intricate club swinging, stood near watching with interest, his silvercoated clubs peeping out of his deep sidepockets. The hollow rattle of the wooden dumbbells was heard as another team made ready to go up on the stage: and in another moment the excited prefect was hustling the boys through the vestry like a flock of geese, flapping the wings of his soutane nervously and crying to the laggards to make haste. A little troop of Neapolitan peasants were practising their steps at the end of the chapel, some circling their arms above their heads, some swaying their baskets of paper violets and curtseying. In a dark corner of the chapel at the gospel side of the altar a stout old lady knelt amid her copious black skirts. When she stood up a pinkdressed figure, wearing a curly golden wig and an oldfashioned straw sunbonnet, with black pencilled eyebrows and cheeks delicately rouged and powdered, was discovered. A low murmur of curiosity ran round the chapel at the discovery of this girlish figure. One of the prefects, smiling and nodding his head, approached the dark corner and, having bowed to the stout old lady, said pleasantly:

—Is this a beautiful young lady or a doll that you have here, Mrs Tallon?

Then, bending down to peer at the smiling painted face under the leaf of the bonnet, he exclaimed:

—No! Upon my word I believe it’s little Bertie Tallon after all!

Stephen at his post by the window heard the old lady and the priest laugh together and heard the boys’ murmur of admiration behind him as they passed forward to see the little boy who had to dance the sunbonnet dance by himself. A movement of impatience escaped him. He let the edge of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel.

He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden. From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers’ band. The light spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. A sidedoor of the theatre opened suddenly and a shaft of light flew across the grassplots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when the sidedoor closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day’s unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement. It was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumbbell team on the stage.

At the far end of the shed near the street a speck of pink light showed in the darkness and as he walked towards it he became aware of a faint aromatic odour. Two boys were standing in the shelter of a doorway, smoking, and before he reached them he had recognised Heron by his voice.

—Here comes the noble Dedalus! cried a high throaty voice. Welcome to our trusty friend!

This welcome ended in a soft peal of mirthless laughter as Heron salaamed and then began to poke the ground with his cane.

—Here I am, said Stephen, halting and glancing from Heron to his friend.

The latter was a stranger to him but in the darkness, by the aid of the glowing cigarettetips, he could make out a pale dandyish face, over which a smile was travelling slowly, a tall overcoated figure and a hard hat. Heron did not trouble himself about an introduction but said instead:

—I was just telling my friend Wallis what a lark it would be tonight if you took off the rector in the part of the schoolmaster. It would be a ripping good joke.

Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector’s pedantic bass and then, laughing at his failure, asked Stephen to do it.

—Go on, Dedalus, he urged, you can take him off rippingly. He that will not hear the churcha let him be to theea as the heathena and the publicana.

The imitation was prevented by a mild expression of anger from Wallis in whose mouthpiece the cigarette had become too tightly wedged.

—Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth and smiling and frowning upon it tolerantly. It’s always getting stuck like that. Do you use a holder?

—I don’t smoke, answered Stephen.

—No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt and he doesn’t damn anything or damn all.

Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival’s flushed and mobile face, beaked like a bird’s. He had often thought it strange that Vincent Heron had a bird’s face as well as a bird’s name. A shock of pale hair lay on the forehead like a ruffled crest: the forehead was narrow and bony and a thin hooked nose stood out between the closeset prominent eyes which were light and inexpressive. The rivals were school friends. They sat together in class, knelt together in the chapel, talked together after beads over their lunches. As the fellows in number one were undistinguished dullards Stephen and Heron had been during the year the virtual heads of the school. It was they who went up to the rector together to ask for a free day or to get a fellow off.

—O by the way, said Heron suddenly, I saw your governor going in.

The smile waned on Stephen’s face. Any allusion made to his father by a fellow or by a master put his calm to rout in a moment. He waited in timorous silence to hear what Heron might say next. Heron, however, nudged him expressively with his elbow and said:

—You’re a sly dog, Dedalus!

—Why so? said Stephen.

—You’d think butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, said Heron. But I’m afraid you’re a sly dog.

—Might I ask you what you are talking about? said Stephen urbanely.

—Indeed you might, answered Heron. We saw her, Wallis, didn’t we? And deucedly pretty she is too. And so inquisitive! And what part does Stephen take, Mr Dedalus? And will Stephen not sing, Mr Dedalus? Your governor was staring at her through that eyeglass of his for all he was worth so that I think the old man has found you out too. I wouldn’t care a bit, by Jove. She’s ripping, isn’t she, Wallis?

—Not half bad, answered Wallis quietly as he placed his holder once more in the corner of his mouth.

A shaft of momentary anger flew through Stephen’s mind at these indelicate allusions in the hearing of a stranger. For him there was nothing amusing in a girl’s interest and regard. All day he had thought of nothing but their leavetaking on the steps of the tram at Harold’s Cross, the stream of moody emotions it had made to course through him, and the poem he had written about it. All day he had imagined a new meeting with her for he knew that she was to come to the play. The old restless moodiness had again filled his breast as it had done on the night of the party but had not found an outlet in verse. The growth and knowledge of two years of boyhood stood between then and now, forbidding such an outlet: and all day the stream of gloomy tenderness within him had started forth and returned upon itself in dark courses and eddies, wearying him in the end until the pleasantry of the prefect and the painted little boy had drawn from him a movement of impatience.

—So you may as well admit, Heron went on, that we’ve fairly found you out this time. You can’t play the saint on me any more, that’s one sure five.

A soft peal of mirthless laughter escaped from his lips and, bending down as before, he struck Stephen lightly across the calf of the leg with his cane, as if in jesting reproof.

Stephen’s movement of anger had already passed. He was neither flattered nor confused but simply wished the banter to end. He scarcely resented what had seemed to him at first a silly indelicateness for he knew that the adventure in his mind stood in no danger from their words: and his face mirrored his rival’s false smile.

—Admit! repeated Heron, striking him again with his cane across the calf of the leg.

The stroke was playful but not so lightly given as the first one had been. Stephen felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and almost painlessly; and bowing submissively, as if to meet his companion’s jesting mood, began to recite the Confiteor. The episode ended well for both Heron and Wallis laughed indulgently at the irreverence.

The confession came only from Stephen’s lips and, while they spoke the words, a sudden memory had carried him to another scene called up, as if by magic, at the moment when he had noted the faint cruel dimples at the corners of Heron’s smiling lips and had felt the familiar stroke of the cane against his calf and had heard the familiar word of admonition:

—Admit.

It was towards the close of his first term in the college when he was in number six. His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years’ spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes [gibes] and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.

The essay was for him the chief labour of his week and every Tuesday, as he marched from home to the school, he read his fate in the incidents of the way, pitting himself against some figure ahead of him and quickening his pace to outstrip it before a certain goal was reached or planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath and telling himself that he would be first and not first in the weekly essay.

On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:

—This fellow has heresy in his essay.

A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his hand between his crossed thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about his neck and wrists. Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.

A short loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease.

—Perhaps you didn’t know that, he said.

—Where? asked Stephen.

Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.

—Here. It’s about the Creator and the soul. Rrm … rrm … rrm…. [rrm_…] Ah! without a possibility of ever approaching nearer. That’s heresy.

Stephen murmured:

—I meant without a possibility of ever reaching.

It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and passed it across to him, saying:

—O … Ah! ever reaching. That’s another story.

But the class was not so soon appeased. Though nobody spoke to him of the affair after class he could feel about him a vague general malignant joy.

A few nights after this public chiding he was walking with a letter along the Drumcondra Road when he heard a voice cry:

—Halt!

He turned and saw three boys of his own class coming towards him in the dusk. It was Heron who had called out and, as he marched forward between his two attendants, he cleft the air before him with a thin cane, in time to their steps. Boland, his friend, marched beside him, a large grin on his face, while Nash came on a few steps behind, blowing from the pace and wagging his great red head.

As soon as the boys had turned into Clonliffe Road together they began to speak about books and writers, saying what books they were reading and how many books there were in their fathers’ bookcases at home. Stephen listened to them in some wonderment for Boland was the dunce and Nash the idler of the class. In fact after some talk about their favourite writers Nash declared for Captain Marryat who, he said, was the greatest writer.

—Fudge! said Heron. Ask Dedalus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus?

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

—Of prose do you mean?

—Yes.

—Newman, I think.

—Is it Cardinal Newman? asked Boland.

—Yes, answered Stephen.

The grin broadened on Nash’s freckled face as he turned to Stephen and said:

—And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus?

—O, many say that Newman has the best prose style, Heron said to the other two in explanation. Of course he’s not a poet.

—And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland.

—Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron.

—O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a book.

At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out:

—Tennyson a poet! Why, he’s only a rhymester!

—O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet.

—And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbour.

—Byron, of course, answered Stephen.

Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh.

—What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.

—You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He’s only a poet for uneducated people.

—He must be a fine poet! said Boland.

—You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, turning on him boldly. All you know about poetry is what you wrote up on the slates in the yard and were going to be sent to the loft for.

Boland, in fact, was said to have written on the slates in the yard a couplet about a classmate of his who often rode home from the college on a pony:

As Tyson was riding into Jerusalem

He fell and hurt his Alec Kafoozelum.

This thrust put the two lieutenants to silence but Heron went on:

—In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too.

—I don’t care what he was, cried Stephen hotly.

—You don’t care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash.

—What do you know about it? shouted Stephen. You never read a line of anything in your life except a trans or Boland either.

—I know that Byron was a bad man, said Boland.

—Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out.

In a moment Stephen was a prisoner.

—Tate made you buck up the other day, Heron went on, about the heresy in your essay.

—I’ll tell him tomorrow, said Boland.

—Will you? said Stephen. You’d be afraid to open your lips.

—Afraid?

—Ay. Afraid of your life.

—Behave yourself! cried Heron, cutting at Stephen’s legs with his cane.

It was the signal for their onset. Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence.

—Admit that Byron was no good.

—No.

—Admit.

—No.

—Admit.

—No. No.

At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His tormentors set off towards Jones’s Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, torn and flushed and panting, stumbled after them half blinded with tears, clenching his fists madly and sobbing.

While he was still repeating the Confiteor amid the indulgent laughter of his hearers and while the scenes of that malignant episode were still passing sharply and swiftly before his mind he wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones’s Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that suddenwoven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel.

He remained standing with his two companions at the end of the shed, listening idly to their talk or to the bursts of applause in the theatre. She was sitting there among the others perhaps waiting for him to appear. He tried to recall her appearance but could not. He could remember only that she had worn a shawl about her head like a cowl and that her dark eyes had invited and unnerved him. He wondered had he been in her thoughts as she had been in his. Then in the dark and unseen by the other two he rested the tips of the fingers of one hand upon the palm of the other hand, scarcely touching it and yet pressing upon it lightly. But the pressure of her fingers had been lighter and steadier: and suddenly the memory of their touch traversed his brain and body like an invisible warm wave.

A boy came towards them, running along under the shed. He was excited and breathless.

—O, Dedalus, he cried, Doyle is in a great bake about you. You’re to go in at once and get dressed for the play. Hurry up, you better.

—He’s coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl, when he wants to.

The boy turned to Heron and repeated:

—But Doyle is in an awful bake.

—Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes? answered Heron.

—Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of honour.

—I wouldn’t, said Heron, damn me if I would. That’s no way to send for one of the senior boys. In a bake, indeed! I think it’s quite enough that you’re taking a part in his bally old play.

This spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in his rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the turbulence and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship which seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood. The question of honour here raised was, like all such questions, trivial to him. While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him [him to] be true to his country and help to raise up her fallen language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.

In the vestry a plump freshfaced jesuit and an elderly man, in shabby blue clothes, were dabbling in a case of paints and chalks. The boys who had been painted walked about or stood still awkwardly, touching their faces in a gingerly fashion with their furtive fingertips. In the middle of the vestry a young jesuit, who was then on a visit to the college, stood rocking himself rhythmically from the tips of his toes to his heels and back again, his hands thrust well forward into his sidepockets. His small head set off with glossy red curls and his newly shaven face agreed well with the spotless decency of his soutane and with his spotless shoes.

As he watched this swaying form and tried to read for himself the legend of the priest’s mocking smile there came into Stephen’s memory a saying which he had heard from his father before he had been sent to Clongowes, that you could always tell a jesuit by the style of his clothes. At the same moment he thought he saw a likeness between his father’s mind and that of this smiling welldressed priest: and he was aware of some desecration of the priest’s office or of the vestry itself, whose silence was now routed by loud talk and joking and its air pungent with the smells of the gasjets and the grease.

While his forehead was being wrinkled and his jaws painted black and blue by the elderly man he listened distractedly to the voice of the plump young jesuit which bade him speak up and make his points clearly. He could hear the band playing The Lily of Killarney and knew that in a few moments the curtain would go up. He felt no stage fright but the thought of the part he had to play humiliated him. A remembrance of some of his lines made a sudden flush rise to his painted cheeks. He saw her serious alluring eyes watching him from among the audience and their image at once swept away his scruples, leaving his will compact. Another nature seemed to have been lent him: the infection of the excitement and youth about him entered into and transformed his moody mistrustfulness. For one rare moment he seemed to be clothed in the real apparel of boyhood: and, as he stood in the wings among the other players, he shared the common mirth amid which the drop scene was hauled upwards by two ablebodied priests with violent jerks and all awry.

A few moments after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void. It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void filled with applause and, through a rift in the side scene, saw the simple body before which he had acted magically deformed, the void of faces breaking at all points and falling asunder into busy groups.

He left the stage quickly and rid himself of his mummery and passed out through the chapel into the college garden. Now that the play was over his nerves cried for some further adventure. He hurried onwards as if to overtake it. The doors of the theatre were all open and the audience had emptied out. On the lines which he had fancied the moorings of an ark a few lanterns swung in the night breeze, flickering cheerlessly. He mounted the steps from the garden in haste, eager that some prey should not elude him, and forced his way through the crowd in the hall and past the two jesuits who stood watching the exodus and bowing and shaking hands with the visitors. He pushed onward nervously, feigning a still greater haste and faintly conscious of the smiles and stares and nudges which his powdered head left in its wake.

When he came out on the steps he saw his family waiting for him at the first lamp. In a glance he noted that every figure of the group was familiar and ran down the steps angrily.

—I have to leave a message down in George’s Street, he said to his father quickly. I’ll be home after you.

Without waiting for his father’s questions he ran across the road and began to walk at breakneck speed down the hill. He hardly knew where he was walking. Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clear and cold again.

A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought his steps to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.

—That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

*   *   *

Stephen was once again seated beside his father in the corner of a railway carriage at Kingsbridge. He was traveling [travelling] with his father by the night mail to Cork. As the train steamed out of the station he recalled his childish wonder of years before and every event of his first day at Clongowes. But he felt no wonder now. He saw the darkening lands slipping past him, the silent telegraphpoles passing his window swiftly every four seconds, the little glimmering stations, manned by a few silent sentries, flung by the mail behind her and twinkling for a moment in the darkness like fiery grains flung backwards by a runner.

He listened without sympathy to his father’s evocation of Cork and of scenes of his youth, a tale broken by sighs or draughts from his pocketflask whenever the image of some dead friend appeared in it or whenever the evoker remembered suddenly the purpose of his actual visit. Stephen heard but could feel no pity. The images of the dead were all strange to him save that of uncle Charles, an image which had lately been fading out of memory. He knew, however, that his father’s property was going to be sold by auction and in the manner of his own dispossession he felt the world give the lie rudely to his phantasy.

At Maryborough he fell asleep. When he awoke the train had passed out of Mallow and his father was stretched asleep on the other seat. The cold light of the dawn lay over the country, over the unpeopled fields and the closed cottages. The terror of sleep fascinated his mind as he watched the silent country or heard from time to time his father’s deep breath or sudden sleepy movement. The neighbourhood of unseen sleepers filled him with strange dread as though they could harm him; [him:] and he prayed that the day might come quickly. His prayer, addressed neither to God nor saint, began with a shiver, as the chilly morning breeze crept through the chink of the carriage door to his feet, and ended in a trail of foolish words which he made to fit the insistent rhythm of the train; and silently, at intervals of four seconds, the telegraphpoles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars. This furious music allayed his dread and, leaning against the windowledge, he let his eyelids close again.

They drove in a jingle across Cork while it was still early morning and Stephen finished his sleep in a bedroom of the Victoria Hotel. The bright warm sunlight was streaming through the window and he could hear the din of traffic. His father was standing before the dressingtable, examining his hair and face and moustache with great care, craning his neck across the waterjug and drawing it back sideways to see the better. While he did so he sang softly to himself with quaint accent and phrasing:

’Tis youth and folly

Makes young men marry,

So here, my love, I’ll

No longer stay.

What can’t be cured, sure,

Must be injured, [endured,] sure,

So I’ll go to

Amerikay.

My love she’s handsome,

My love she’s bonny:

She’s like good whisky

When it is new;

But when ’tis old

And growing cold

It fades and dies like

The mountain dew.

The consciousness of the warm sunny city outside his window and the tender tremors with which his father’s voice festooned the strange sad happy air, drove off all the mists of the night’s ill humour from Stephen’s brain. He got up quickly to dress and, when the song had ended, said:

—That’s much prettier than any of your other come-all-yous.

—Do you think so? asked Mr Dedalus.

—I like it, said Stephen.

—It’s a pretty old air, said Mr Dedalus, twirling the points of his moustache. Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lacy sing it! Poor Mick Lacy! He had little turns for it, grace notes he used to put in that I haven’t got. That was the boy who could sing a come-all-you, if you like.

Mr Dedalus had ordered drisheens for breakfast and during the meal he crossexamined the waiter for local news. For the most part they spoke at crosspurposes when a name was mentioned, the waiter having in mind the present holder and Mr Dedalus his father or perhaps his grandfather.

—Well, I hope they haven’t moved the Queen’s College anyhow, said Mr Dedalus, for I want to show it to this youngster of mine.

Along the Mardyke the trees were in bloom. They entered the grounds of the college and were led by the garrulous porter across the quadrangle. But their progress across the gravel was brought to a halt after every dozen or so paces by some reply of the porter’s.

—Ah, do you tell me so? And is poor Pottlebelly dead?

—Yes, sir. Dead, sir.

During these halts Stephen stood awkwardly behind the two men, weary of the subject and waiting restlessly for the slow march to begin again. By the time they had crossed the quadrangle his restlessness had risen to fever. He wondered how his father, whom he knew for a shrewd suspicious man, could be duped by the servile manners of the porter; and the lively southern speech which had entertained him all the morning now irritated his ears.

They passed into the anatomy theatre where Mr Dedalus, the porter aiding him, searched the desks for his initials. Stephen remained in the background, depressed more than ever by the darkness and silence of the theatre and by the air it wore of jaded and formal study. On the desk before him he read the word Fœtus cut several times in the dark stained wood. The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the absent students of the college about him and to shrink from their company. A vision of their life, which his father’s words had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the desk. A broadshouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jackknife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had tan boots.

Stephen’s name was called. He hurried down the steps of the theatre so as to be as far away from the vision as he could be and, peering closely at his father’s initials, hid his flushed face.

But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he walked back across the quadrangle and towards the college gate. It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His recent monstrous reveries came thronging into his memory. They too had sprung up before him, suddenly and furiously, out of mere words. He had soon given in to [into] them and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and always weak and humble towards others, restless and sickened of himself when they had swept over him.

—Ay, bedad! And there’s the Groceries sure enough! cried Mr Dedalus. You often heard me speak of the Groceries, didn’t you, Stephen. Many’s the time we went down there when our names had been marked, a crowd of us, Harry Peard and little Jack Mountain and Bob Dyas and Maurice Moriarty, the Frenchman, and Tom O’Grady and Mick Lacy that I told you of this morning and Joey Corbet and poor little good hearted Johnny Keevers of the Tantiles.

The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicketbag. In a quiet bystreet a German band of five players in faded uniforms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs and leisurely messenger boys. A maid in a white cap and apron was watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone in the warm glare. From another window open to the air came the sound of a piano, scale after scale rising into the treble.

Stephen walked on at his father’s side, listening to stories he had heard before, hearing again the names of the scattered and dead revellers who had been the companions of his father’s youth. And a faint sickness sighed in his heart. He recalled his own equivocal position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind. The letters cut in the stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily weakness and futile enthusiasms and making him loathe himself for his own mad and filthy orgies. The spittle in his throat grew bitter and foul to swallow and the faint sickness climbed to his brain so that for a moment he closed his eyes and walked on in darkness.

He could still hear his father’s voice.

—When you kick out for yourself, Stephen—as I daresay you will one of those [these] days—remember, whatever you do, to mix with gentlemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racketplayer, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. But we were all gentlemen, Stephen—at least I hope we were—and bloody good honest Irishmen too. That’s the kind of fellows I want you to associate with, fellows of the right kidney. I’m talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I don’t believe in playing the stern father. I don’t believe a son should be afraid of his father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son. I’ll never forget the first day he caught me smoking. I was standing at the end of the South Terrace one day with some maneens like myself and sure we thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes stuck in the corners of our mouths. Suddenly the governor passed. He didn’t say a word, or stop even. But the next day, Sunday, we were out for a walk together and when we were coming home he took out his cigar case and said: By the bye, Simon, I didn’t know you smoked: or something like that. Of course I tried to carry it off as best I could. If you want a good smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An American captain made me a present of them last night in Queenstown.

Stephen heard his father’s voice break into a laugh which was almost a sob.

—He was [heard] the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was! The women used to stand to look after him in the street.

He heard the sob passing loudly down his father’s throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognise as his his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:

—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.

The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names: Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college. In the college he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricketcap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe! It was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy in a grey belted suit. His hands were in his sidepockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.

On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed his father meekly about the city from bar to bar. To the sellers in the market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the beggars who importuned him for a lob Mr Dedalus told the same tale, that he was an old Corkonian, that he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of his Cork accent up in Dublin and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was his eldest son but that he was only a Dublin jackeen.

They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe’s coffeehouse where Mr Dedalus’ cup had rattled noisily against its saucer, and Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father’s drinkingbout [drinking bout] of the night before by moving his chair and coughing. One humiliation had succeeded another: the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvettings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father’s friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness. They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech and made him admit that the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey. One of them in order to put his Latin to the proof had made him translate short passages from Dilectus and asked him whether it was correct to say: Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis or Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr Dedalus called Johnny Cashman, had covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls.

—He’s not that way built, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him alone. He’s a levelheaded thinking boy who doesn’t bother his head about that kind of nonsense.

—Then he’s not his father’s son, said the little old man.

—I don’t know, I’m sure, said Mr Dedalus, smiling complacently.

—Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the city of Cork in his day. Do you know that?

Stephen looked down and studied the tiled floor of the bar into which they had drifted.

—Now don’t be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him to his Maker.

—Yerra, sure I wouldn’t put any ideas into his head. I’m old enough to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said the little old man to Stephen. Do you know that?

—Are you? asked Stephen.

—Bedad I am, said the little old man. I have two bouncing grandchildren out at Sunday’s Well. Now then! What [what] age do you think I am? And I remember seeing your grandfather in his red coat riding out to hounds. That was before you were born.

—Ay, or thought of, said Mr Dedalus.

—Bedad I did, repeated the little old man. And, more than that, I can remember even your greatgrandfather, old John Stephen Dedalus, and a fierce old fireeater he was. Now then! There’s a memory for you!

—That’s three generations—four generations, said another of the company. Why, Johnny Cashman, you must be nearing the century.

—Well, I’ll tell you the truth, said the little old man. I’m just twentyseven years of age.

—We’re as old as we feel, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus. And just finish what you have there, and we’ll have another. Here, Tim or Tom or whatever your name is, give us the same again here. By God, I don’t feel more than eighteen myself. There’s that son of mine there not half my age and I’m a better man than he is any day of the week.

—Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it’s time for you to take a back seat, said the gentleman who had spoken before.

—No, by God! asserted Mr Dedalus. I’ll sing a tenor song against him or I’ll vault a fivebarred gate against him or I’ll run with him after the hounds across the country as I did thirty years ago along with the Kerry Boy and the best man for it.

—But he’ll beat you here, said the little old man, tapping his forehead and raising his glass to drain it.

—Well, I hope he’ll be as good a man as his father. That’s all I can say, said Mr Dedalus.

—If he is, he’ll do, said the little old man.

—And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.

—But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless …?

He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley’s fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectualness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.

*   *   *

Stephen’s mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps and along the colonnade where the highland sentry was parading. When they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen drew forth his orders on the governor of the bank of Ireland for thirty and three pounds; and these sums, the moneys of his exhibition and essay prize, were paid over to him rapidly by the teller in notes and in coin respectively. He bestowed them in his pockets with feigned composure and suffered the friendly teller, to whom his father chatted, to take his hand across the broad counter and wish him a brilliant career in after life. He was impatient of their voices and could not keep his feet at rest. But the teller still deferred the serving of others to say he was living in changed times and that there was nothing like giving a boy the best education that money could buy. Mr Dedalus lingered in the hall gazing about him and up at the roof and telling Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they were standing in the house of commons of the old Irish parliament.

—God help us! he said piously, to think of the men of those times, Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and Charles Kendal Bushe, and the noblemen we have now, leaders of the Irish people at home and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn’t be seen dead in a tenacre field with them. No, Stephen, old chap, I’m sorry to say that they are only as I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet July.

A keen October wind was blowing round the bank. The three figures standing at the edge of the muddy path had pinched cheeks and watery eyes. Stephen looked at his thinly clad mother and remembered that a few days before he had seen a mantle priced at twenty guineas in the windows of Barnardo’s.

—Well that’s done, said Mr Dedalus.

—We had better go to dinner, said Stephen. Where?

—Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what?

—Some place that’s not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.

—Underdone’s?

—Yes. Some quiet place.

—Come along, said Stephen quickly. It doesn’t matter about the dearness.

He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness.

—Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We’re not out for the half mile, are we?

For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through Stephen’s fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for the family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre to see Ingomar or The Lady of Lyons. In his coat pockets he carried squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers’ pockets bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for everyone, overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists, drew up a form of commonwealth for the household by which every member of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he could do no more he drove up and down the city in trams. Then the season of pleasure came to an end. The pot of pink enamel paint gave out and the wainscot of his bedroom remained with its unfinished and illplastered coat.

His household returned to its usual way of life. His mother had no further occasion to upbraid him for squandering his money. He too returned to his old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell to pieces. The commonwealth fell, the loan bank closed its coffers and its books on a sensible loss, the rules of life which he had drawn about himself fell into desuetude.

How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that divided him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.

He burned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realise the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.

He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting him gave room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the garden of rosebushes on the road that led to the mountains and he remembered the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of estrangement and adventure. At those moments the soft speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and, in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, undismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gasflames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.

He stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring against his bosom in a tumult. A young woman dressed in a long pink gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face. She said gaily:

—Good night, Willie dear!

Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easychair beside the bed. He tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, noting the proud conscious movements [movement] of her perfumed head.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced him gaily and gravely. Her round arms held him firmly to her and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his lips parted though they would not speak.

She passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little rascal.

—Give me a kiss, she said.

His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her.

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

 ® 

III

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

It would be a gloomy secret night. After early nightfall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner. The whores would be just coming out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily after their sleep and settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair. He would pass by them calmly waiting for a sudden movement of his own will or a sudden call to his sinloving soul from their soft perfumed flesh. Yet as he prowled in quest of that call, his senses, stultified only by his desire, would note keenly all that wounded or shamed them; his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph of two soldiers standing to attention or a gaudy playbill; his ears, the drawling jargon of greeting:

—Hello, Bertie, any good in your mind?

—Is that you, pigeon?

—Number ten. Fresh Nelly is waiting on you.

—Goodnight, husband! Coming in to have a short time?

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded: and no part of body or soul had been maimed but a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul. At most, by an alms given to a beggar whose blessing he fled from, he might hope wearily to win for himself some measure of actual grace. Devotion had gone by the board. What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night though he knew it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homage to the Allseeing and Allknowing.

—Well now, Ennis, I declare you have a head and so has my stick! Do you mean to say that you are not able to tell me what a surd is?

The blundering answer stirred the embers of his contempt of his fellows. Towards others he felt neither shame nor fear. On Sunday mornings as he passed the churchdoor he glanced coldly at the worshippers who stood bareheaded, four deep, outside the church, morally present at the mass which they could neither see nor hear. Their dull piety and the sickly smell of the cheap hairoil with which they had anointed their heads repelled him from the altar they prayed at. He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily.

On the wall of his bedroom hung an illuminated scroll, the certificate of his prefecture in the college of the sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On Saturday mornings when the sodality met in the chapel to recite the little office his place was a cushioned kneelingdesk at the right of the altar from which he led his wing of boys through the responses. The falsehood of his position did not pain him. If at moments he felt an impulse to rise from his post of honour and, confessing before them all his unworthiness, to leave the chapel, a glance at their faces restrained him. The imagery of the psalms of prophecy soothed his barren pride. The glories of Mary held his soul captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolising the preciousness of God’s gifts to her soul, rich garments, symbolising her royal lineage, her emblems, the lateflowering plant and lateblossoming tree, symbolising the agelong gradual growth of her cultus among men. When it fell to him to read the lesson towards the close of the office he read it in a veiled voice, lulling his conscience to its music.

Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libanon et quasi cupressus in monte Sion. Quasi palma exaltata sum in Gades et quasi plantatio rosae in Jericho. Quasi uliva speciosa in campis et quasi platanus exaltata sum juxta aquam in plateis. Sicut cinnamomum et balsamum aromatizans odorem dedi et quasi myrrha electa dedi suavitatem odoris.

His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners. Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who approached her. If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent the impulse that moved him was the wish to be her knight. If ever his soul, reentering her dwelling shyly after the frenzy of his body’s lust had spent itself, was turned towards her whose emblem is the morning star, bright and musical, telling of heaven and infusing peace, it was when her names were murmured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a lewd kiss.

That was strange. He tried to think how it could be but the dusk, deepening in the schoolroom, covered over his thoughts. The bell rang. The master marked the sums and cuts to be done for the next lesson and went out. Heron, beside Stephen, began to hum tunelessly.

My excellent friend Bombados.

Ennis, who had gone to the yard, came back, saying:

—The boy from the house is coming up for the rector.

A tall boy behind Stephen rubbed his hands and said:

—That’s game ball. We can scut the whole hour. He won’t be in till after half two. Then you can ask him questions on the catechism, Dedalus.

Stephen, leaning back and drawing idly on his scribbler, listened to the talk about him which Heron checked from time to time by saying:

—Shut up, will you. Don’t make such a bally racket!

It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation. The sentence of saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasure, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

As he sat in his bench gazing calmly at the rector’s shrewd harsh face his mind wound itself in and out of the curious questions proposed to it. If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to amass a huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had stolen only or the pound together with the compound interest accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism pour the water before saying the words is the child baptised? Is baptism with a mineral water valid? How comes it that while the first beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart the second beatitude promises also to the meek that they shall possess the land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

—Here he is! Here he is!

A boy from his post at the window had seen the rector come from the house. All the catechisms were opened and all heads bent upon them silently. The rector entered and took his seat on the dais. A gentle kick from the tall boy in the bench behind urged Stephen to ask a difficult question.

The rector did not ask for a catechism to hear the lesson from. He clasped his hands on the desk and said:

—The retreat will begin on Wednesday afternoon in honour of saint Francis Xavier whose feast day is Saturday. The retreat will go on from Wednesday to Friday. On Friday confession will be heard all the afternoon after beads. If any boys have special confessors perhaps it will be better for them not to change. Mass will be on Saturday morning at nine o’clock and general communion for the whole college. Saturday will be a free day. Sunday of course. But Saturday and Sunday being free days some boys might be inclined to think that Monday is a free day also. Beware of making that mistake. I think you, Lawless, are likely to make that mistake.

—I, sir? Why, sir?

A little wave of quiet mirth broke forth over the class of boys from the rector’s grim smile. Stephen’s heart began slowly to fold and fade with fear like a withering flower.

The rector went on gravely:

—You are all familiar with the story of the life of saint Francis Xavier, I suppose, the patron of your college. He came of an old and illustrious Spanish family and you remember that he was one of the first followers of saint Ignatius. They met in Paris where Francis Xavier was professor of philosophy at the university. This young and brilliant nobleman and man of letters entered heart and soul into the ideas of our glorious founder, and you know that he, at his own desire, was sent by saint Ignatius to preach to the Indians. He is called, as you know, the apostle of the Indies. He went from country to country in the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptising the people. He is said to have baptised as many as ten thousand idolaters in one month. It is said that his right arm had grown powerless from having been raised so often over the heads of those whom he baptised. He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God but he died of fever on the island of Sancian. A great saint, saint Francis Xavier! A great soldier of God!

The rector paused and then, shaking his clasped hands before him, went on:

—He had the faith in him that moves mountains. Ten thousand souls won for God in a single month! That is a true conqueror, true to the motto of our order: ad majorem Dei gloriam! A saint who has great power in heaven, remember: power to intercede for us in our grief, power to obtain whatever we pray for if it be for the good of our souls, power above all to obtain for us the grace to repent if we be in sin. A great saint, saint Francis Xavier! A great fisher of souls!

He ceased to shake his clasped hands and, resting them against his forehead, looked right and left of them keenly at his listeners out of his dark stern eyes.

In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a tawny glow. Stephen’s heart had withered up like a flower of the desert that feels the simoom coming from afar.

*   *   *

—Remember only thy last things and thou shalt not sin for ever—words taken, my dear little brothers in Christ, from the book of Ecclesiastes, seventh chapter, fortieth verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel. Father Arnall sat at a table to the left of the altar. He wore about his shoulders a heavy cloak; his pale face was drawn and his voice broken with rheum. The figure of his old master, so strangely rearisen, brought back to Stephen’s mind his life at Clongowes: the wide playgrounds, swarming with boys, the square ditch, the little cemetery off the main avenue of limes where he had dreamed of being buried, the firelight on the wall of the infirmary where he lay sick, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael. His soul, as these memories came back to him, became again a child’s soul.

—We are assembled here today, my dear little brothers in Christ, for one brief moment far away from the busy bustle of the outer world to celebrate and to honour one of the greatest of saints, the apostle of the Indies, the patron saint also of your college, saint Francis Xavier. Year after year for much longer than any of you, my dear little boys, can remember or than I can remember the boys of this college have met in this very chapel to make their annual retreat before the feast day of their patron saint. Time has gone on and brought with it its changes. Even in the last few years what changes can most of you not remember? Many of the boys who sat in those front benches a few years ago are perhaps now in distant lands, in the burning tropics or immersed in professional duties or in seminaries or voyaging over the vast expanse of the deep or, it may be, already called by the great God to another life and to the rendering up of their stewardship. And still as the years roll by, bringing with them changes for good and bad, the memory of the great saint is honoured by the boys of his college who make every year their annual retreat on the days preceding the feast day set apart by our holy mother the church to transmit to all the ages the name and fame of one of the greatest sons of catholic Spain.

—Now what is the meaning of this word retreat and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for a while from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this world. During these few days I intend to put before you some thoughts concerning the four last things. They are, as you know from your catechism, death, judgment, hell and heaven. We shall try to understand them fully during these few days so that we may derive from the understanding of them a lasting benefit to our souls. And remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God’s holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless. One thing alone is needful, the salvation of one’s soul. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul? Ah, my dear boys, believe me there is nothing in this wretched world that can make up for such a loss.

—I will ask you therefore, my dear boys, to put away from your minds during these few days all worldly thoughts, whether of study or pleasure or ambition, and to give all your attention to the state of your souls. I need hardly remind you that during the days of the retreat all boys are expected to preserve a quiet and pious demeanour and to shun all loud unseemly pleasure. The elder boys, of course, will see that this custom is not infringed and I look especially to the prefects and officers of the sodality of Our Blessed Lady and of the sodality of the holy angels to set a good example to their fellowstudents.

—Let us try therefore to make this retreat in honour of saint Francis with our whole heart and our whole mind. God’s blessing will then be upon all your year’s studies. But, above and beyond all, let this retreat be one to which you can look back in after years when maybe you are far from this college and among very different surroundings, to which you can look back with joy and thankfulness and give thanks to God for having granted you this occasion of laying the first foundation of a pious honourable zealous christian life. And if, as may so happen, there be at this moment in these benches any poor soul who has had the unutterable misfortune to lose God’s holy grace and to fall into grievous sin I fervently trust and pray that this retreat may be the turningpoint in the life of that soul. I pray to God through the merits of its [his] zealous servant Francis Xavier that such a soul may be led to sincere repentance and that the holy communion on saint Francis’ day of this year may be a lasting covenant between God and that soul. For just and unjust, for saint and sinner alike, may this retreat be a memorable one.

—Help me, my dear little brothers in Christ. Help me by your pious attention, by your own devotion, by your outward demeanour. Banish from your minds all worldly thoughts and think only of the last things, death, judgment, hell and heaven. He who remembers these things, says Ecclesiastes, shall not sin for ever. He who remembers the last things will act and think with them always before his eyes. He will live a good life and die a good death, believing and knowing that, if he has sacrificed much in this earthly life, it will be given to him a hundredfold and a thousandfold more in the life to come, in the kingdom without end—a blessing, my dear boys, which I wish you from my heart, one and all, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

As he walked home with silent companions a thick fog seemed to compass his mind. He waited in stupor of mind till it should lift and reveal what it had hidden. He ate his dinner with surly appetite and, when the meal was over and the greasestrewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips. So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat. This was the end; and a faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the fog of his mind. He pressed his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street. Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life. The letters of the name of Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and thither with slow boorish insistence. His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk, while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed and human for a bovine god to stare upon.

The next day brought death and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help! He, he himself, his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it! Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse. Carry it out of the house on the shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men’s sight into a long hole in the ground, into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be devoured by scuttling plumpbellied rats.

And while the friends were still standing in tears by the bedside the soul of the sinner was judged. At the last moment of consciousness the whole earthly life passed before the vision of the soul and, ere it had time to reflect, the body had died and the soul stood terrified before the judgmentseat. God, who had long been merciful, would then be just. He had long been patient, pleading with the sinful soul, giving it time to repent, sparing it yet awhile. But that time had gone. Time was to sin and to enjoy, time was to scoff at God and at the warnings of His holy church, time was to defy His majesty, to disobey His commands, to hoodwink one’s fellow men, to commit sin after sin and sin after sin and to hide one’s corruption from the sight of men. But that time was over. Now it was God’s turn: and He was not to be hoodwinked or deceived. Every sin would then come forth from its lurkingplace, the most rebellious against the divine will and the most degrading to our poor corrupt nature, the tiniest imperfection and the most heinous atrocity. What did it avail then to have been a great emperor, a great general, a marvellous inventor, the most learned of the learned? All were as one before the judgmentseat of God. He would reward the good and punish the wicked. One single instant was enough for the trial of a man’s soul. One single instant after the body’s death, the soul had been weighed in the balance. The particular judgment was over and the soul had passed to the abode of bliss or to the prison of purgatory or had been hurled howling into hell.

Nor was that all. God’s justice had still to be vindicated before men: after the particular there still remained the general judgment. The last day had come. Doomsday was at hand. The stars of heaven were falling upon the earth like the figs cast by the figtree which the wind has shaken. The sun, the great luminary of the universe, had become as sackcloth of hair. The moon was bloodred. The firmament was as a scroll rolled away. The archangel Michael, the prince of the heavenly host, appeared glorious and terrible against the sky. With one foot on the sea and one foot on the land he blew from the archangelical trumpet the brazen death of time. The three blasts of the angel filled all the universe. Time is, time was but time shall be no more. At the last blast the souls of universal humanity throng towards the valley of Jehosephat, [Jehoshaphat,] rich and poor, gentle and simple, wise and foolish, good and wicked. The soul of every human being that has ever existed, the souls of all those who shall yet be born, all the sons and daughters of Adam, all are assembled on that supreme day. And lo the supreme judge is coming! No longer the lowly Lamb of God, no longer the meek Jesus of Nazareth, no longer the Man of Sorrows, no longer the Good Shepherd, He is seen now coming upon the clouds, in great power and majesty, attended by nine choirs of angels, angels and archangels, principalities, powers and virtues, thrones and dominations, cherubim and seraphim, God Omnipotent, God Everlasting. He speaks: and His voice is heard even at the farthest limits of space, even in the bottomless abyss. Supreme Judge, from His sentence there will be and can be no appeal. He calls the just to His side, bidding them enter into the kingdom, the eternity of bliss, prepared for them. The unjust He casts from Him, crying in His offended majesty: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. O what agony then for the miserable sinners! Friend is torn apart from friend, children are torn from their parents, husbands from their wives. The poor sinner holds out his arms to those who were dear to him in this earthly world, to those whose simple piety perhaps he made a mock of, to those who counselled him and tried to lead him on the right path, to a kind brother, to a loving sister, to the mother and father who loved him so dearly. But it is too late: the just turn away from the wretched damned souls which now appear before the eyes of all in their hideous and evil character. O you hypocrites, O you whited sepulchres, O you who present a smooth smiling face to the world while your soul within is a foul swamp of sin, how will it fare with you in that terrible day?

And this day will come, shall come, must come; the day of death and the day of judgment. It is appointed unto man to die and after death the judgment. Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether from long disease or from some unexpected accident; the Son of God cometh at an hour when you little expect Him. Be therefore ready every moment, seeing that you may die at any moment. Death is the end of us all. Death and judgment, brought into the world by the sin of our first parents, are the dark portals that close our earthly existence, the portals that open into the unknown and the unseen, portals through which every soul must pass, alone, unaided save by its good works, without friend or brother or parent or master to help it, alone and trembling. Let that thought be ever before our minds and then we cannot sin. Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path, fulfilling the duties of his station in life, attending to his morning and evening prayers, approaching the holy sacrament frequently and performing good and merciful works. For the pious and believing catholic, for the just man, death is no cause of terror. Was it not Addison, the great English writer, who, when on his deathbed, sent for the wicked young earl of Warwick to let him see how a christian can meet his end. He it is and he alone, the pious and believing christian, who can say in his heart:

O grave, where is thy victory?

O death, where is thy sting?

Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher’s knife had probed deeply into his diseased conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in sin. Yes, the preacher was right. God’s turn had come. Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its own filth but the blasts of the angel’s trumpet had driven him forth from the darkness of sin into the light. The words of doom cried by the angel shattered in an instant his presumptuous peace. The wind of the last day blew through his mind; his sins, the jeweleyed harlots of his imagination, fled before the hurricane, squeaking like mice in their terror and huddled under a mane of hair.

As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpetblast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and, under her eyes, the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils: the sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; his monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly. Mad! Mad! Was it possible he had done these things? A cold sweat broke out upon his forehead as the foul memories condensed within his brain.

When the agony of shame had passed from him he tried to raise his soul from its abject powerlessness. God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy. But he imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve.

In the wide land under a tender lucid evening sky, a cloud drifting westward amid a pale green sea of heaven, they stood together, children that had erred. Their error had offended deeply God’s majesty though it was the error of two children, but it had not offended her whose beauty is not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon, but like the morning star which is its emblem, bright and musical. The eyes were not offended which she turned upon them nor reproachful. She placed their hands together, hand in hand, and said, speaking to their hearts:

—Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be happy together and your hearts will love each other.

The chapel was flooded by the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds; and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the battleworn mail armour of angels.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain for ever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the face of the earth.

It might be. Why not?

—Hell has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth without any limits—words taken, my dear little brothers in Christ Jesus, from the book of Isaias, fifth chapter, fourteenth verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The preacher took a chainless watch from a pocket within his soutane and, having considered its dial for a moment in silence, placed it silently before him on the table.

He began to speak in a quiet tone.

—Adam and Eve, my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents and you will remember that they were created by God in order that the seats in heaven left vacant by the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels might be filled again. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning, a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell and there fell with him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his rebellious angels into hell. What his sin was we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his ruin. He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God cast him out of heaven into hell for ever.

—Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the plain of Damascus, that lovely garden resplendent with sunlight and colour, teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The fruitful earth gave them her bounty: beasts and birds were their willing servants: they knew not the ills our flesh is heir to, disease and poverty and death: all that a great and generous God could do for them was done. But there was one condition imposed on them by God: obedience to His word. They were not to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree.

—Alas, my dear little boys, they too fell. The devil, once a shining angel, a son of the morning, now a foul fiend, came in the shape of a serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field. He envied them. He, the fallen great one, could not bear to think that man, a being of clay, should possess the inheritance which he by his sin had forfeited for ever. He came to the woman, the weaker vessel, and poured the poison of his eloquence into her ear, promising her—O, the blasphemy of that promise!—that if she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit they would become as gods, nay as God Himself. Eve yielded to the wiles of the archtempter. She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her. The poison tongue of Satan had done its work. They fell.

—And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His creature man to account: and Michael, prince of the heavenly host, with a sword of flame in his hand appeared before the guilty pair and drove them forth from Eden into the world, the world of sickness and striving, of cruelty and disappointment, of labour and hardship, to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. But even then how merciful was God! He took pity on our poor degraded parents and promised that in the fulness of time He would send down from heaven One who would redeem them, make them once more children of God and heirs to the kingdom of heaven: and that One, that Redeemer of fallen man, was to be God’s onlybegotten [only begotten] Son, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Word.

—He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He was born in a poor cowhouse in Judea and lived as a humble carpenter for thirty years until the hour of His mission had come. And then, filled with love for men, He went forth and called to men to hear the new gospel.

—Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He was seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble and the Roman soldiery, stripped of His garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side was pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of Our Lord water and blood issued continually.

—Yet even then, in that hour of supreme agony, Our Merciful Redeemer had pity for mankind. Yet even there, on the hill of Calvary, He founded the holy catholic church against which, it is promised, the gates of hell shall not prevail. He founded it upon the rock of ages and endowed it with His grace, with sacraments and sacrifice, and promised that if men would obey the word of His church they would still enter into eternal life but if, after all that had been done for them, they still persisted in their wickedness there remained for them an eternity of torment: hell.

The preacher’s voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

—Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prisonhouse is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a neverending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs was smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone too which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellowcreatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the suphurous [sulphurous] brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration: but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever.

—Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent: but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up in an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

—And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.

—Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that even the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned: there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellowsufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey and a serpent. The intention of those lawgivers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hateful and hurtful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.

—Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of fiends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who [Who] only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field for they, at least, are but brutes and have not reason to guide them: time was but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those illgotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.

—O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels!

He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging headlong through space.

He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening one of his books at random and poring over it. Every word for him! It was true. God was almighty. God could call him now, call him as he sat at his desk, before he had time to be conscious of the summons. God had called him. Yes? What? Yes? His flesh shrank together as [as if] it felt the approach of the ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it felt about it the swirl of stifling air. He had died. Yes. He was judged. A wave of fire swept through his body: the first. Again a wave. His brain began to glow. Another. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull. Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla, shrieking like voices:

—Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!

Voices spoke near him:

—On hell.

—I suppose he rubbed it into you well.

—You bet he did. He put us all into a blue funk.

—That’s what you fellows want: and plenty of it to make you work.

He leaned back weakly in his desk. He had not died. God had spared him still. He was still in the familiar world of the school. Mr Tate and Vincent Heron stood at the window, talking, jesting, gazing out at the bleak rain, moving their heads.

—I wish it would clear up. I had arranged to go for a spin on the bike with some fellows out by Malahide. But the roads must be kneedeep.

—It might clear up, sir.

The voices that he knew so well, the common words, the quiet of the classroom when the voices paused and the silence was filled by the sound of softly browsing cattle as the other boys munched their lunches tranquilly, lulled his aching soul.

There was still time. O Mary, refuge of sinners, intercede for him! O Virgin Undefiled, save him from the gulf of death!

The English lesson began with the hearing of the history. Royal persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of names. All had died: all had been judged. What did it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul? At last he had understood: and human life lay around him, a plain of peace whereon antlike men laboured in brotherhood, their dead sleeping under quiet mounds. The elbow of his companion touched him and his heart was touched: and when he spoke to answer a question of his master he heard his own voice full of the quietude of humility and contrition.

His soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able to suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth, as she sank, a faint prayer. Ah yes, he would still be spared; he would repent in his heart and be forgiven; and then those above, those in heaven, would see what he would do to make up for the past: a whole life, every hour of life. Only wait.

—All, God! All, all!

A messenger came to the door to say that confessions were being heard in the chapel. Four boys left the room; and he heard others passing down the corridor. A tremulous chill blew round his heart, no stronger than a little wind, and yet, listening and suffering silently, he seemed to have laid an ear against the muscle of his own heart, feeling it close and quail, listening to the flutter of its ventricles.

No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had done and thought, sin after sin. How? How?

—Father, I …

The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession. But not there in the chapel of the college. He would confess all, every sin of deed and thought, sincerely: but not there among his school companions. Far away from there in some dark place he would murmur out his own shame: and he besought God humbly not to be offended with him if he did not dare to confess in the college chapel: and in utter abjection of spirit he craved forgiveness mutely of the boyish hearts about him.

Time passed.

He sat again in the front bench of the chapel. The daylight without was already failing and, as it fell slowly through the dull red blinds, it seemed that the sun of the last day was going down and that all souls were being gathered for the judgment.

—I am cast away from the sight of Thine eyes: words taken, my dear little brothers in Christ, from the Book of Psalms, thirtieth chapter, twentythird verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone. His face was kind and he joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a frail cage by the union of their tips.

—This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the mind, in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the physical torments which all who are in hell endure. This evening we shall consider for a few moments the nature of the spiritual torments of hell.

—Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the promptings of our corrupt nature to the lower instincts, to that which is gross and beastlike; and it is also a turning away from the counsel of our higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God Himself. For this reason mortal sin is punished in hell by two different forms of punishment, physical and spiritual.

—Now of all these spiritual pains by far the greatest is the pain of loss, so great, in fact, that in itself it is a torment greater than all the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the angelic doctor, as he is called, says that the worst damnation consists in this that the understanding of man is totally deprived of divine light and his affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of God. God, remember, is a being infinitely good and therefore the loss of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful. In this life we have not a very clear idea of what such a loss must be but the damned in hell, for their greater torment, have a full understanding of that which they have lost and understand that they have lost it through their own sins and have lost it for ever. At the very instant of death the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the soul at once flies towards God. The soul tends towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my dear little boys, our souls long to be with God. We come from God, we live by God, we belong to God: we are His, inalienably His. God loves with a divine love every human soul and every human soul lives in that love. How could it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought of our brain, every instant of life proceed from God’s inexhaustible goodness. And if it be pain for a mother to be parted from her child, for a man to be exiled from hearth and home, for friend to be sundered from friend, O think what pain, what anguish, it must be for the poor soul to be spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving Creator Who has called that soul into existence from nothingness and sustained it in life and loved it with an immeasurable love. This, then, to be separated for ever from its greatest good, from God, and to feel the anguish of that separation, knowing full well that it is unchangeable, this is the greatest torment which the created soul is capable of bearing, pœna damni, the pain of loss.

—The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is the pain of conscience. Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by putrefaction so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. The first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of past pleasures. O what a dreadful memory will that be! In the lake of alldevouring flame the proud king will remember the pomps of his court, the wise but wicked man his libraries and instruments of research, the lover of artistic pleasures his marbles and pictures and other art treasures, he who delighted in the pleasures of the table his gorgeous feasts, his dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice wines; the miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his illgotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled, the impure and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they delighted. They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their sins. For how miserable will all those pleasures seem to the soul condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages. How they will rage and fume to think that they have lost the bliss of heaven for the dross of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for bodily comforts, for a tingling of the nerves. They will repent indeed: and this is the second sting of the worm of conscience, a late and fruitless sorrow for sins committed. Divine justice insists that the understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the sins of which they were guilty and moreover, as saint Augustine points out, God will impart to them His own knowledge of sin so that sin will appear to them in all its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of God Himself. They will behold their sins in all their foulness and repent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good occasions which they neglected. This is the last and deepest and most cruel sting of the worm of conscience. The conscience will say: You had time and opportunity to repent and would not. You were brought up religiously by your parents. You had the sacraments and graces and indulgences of the church to aid you. You had the minister of God to preach to you, to call you back when you had strayed, to forgive you your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if only you had confessed and repented. No. You would not. You flouted the ministers of holy religion, you turned your back on the confessional, you wallowed deeper and deeper in the mire of sin. [Sin.] God appealed to you, threatened you, entreated you to return to Him. O what shame, what misery! The Ruler of the universe entreated you, a creature of clay, to love Him Who made you and to keep His law. No. You would not. And now, though you were to flood all hell with your tears if you could still weep, all that sea of repentance would not gain for you what a single tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would have gained for you. You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent: in vain. That time is gone: gone for ever.

—Such is the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the very heart’s core of the wretches in hell so that filled with hellish fury they curse themselves for their folly and curse the evil companions who have brought them to such ruin and curse the devils who tempted them in life and now mock them and torture them in eternity and even revile and curse the Supreme Being Whose goodness and patience they scorned and slighted but Whose justice and power they cannot evade.

—The next spiritual pain to which the damned are subjected is the pain of extension. Man, in this earthly life, though he be capable of many evils, is not capable of them all at once inasmuch as one evil corrects and counteracts another just as one poison frequently corrects another. In hell on the contrary one torment, instead of counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and moreover as the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so are they more capable of suffering. Just as every sense is afflicted with a fitting torment so is every spiritual faculty; the fancy with horrible images, the sensitive faculty with alternate longing and rage, the mind and understanding with an interior darkness more terrible even than the exterior darkness which reigns in that dreadful prison. The malice, impotent though it be, which possesses these demon souls is an evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state of wickedness which we can scarcely realise unless we bear in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred God bears to it.

—Opposed to this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have the pain of intensity. Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell. Nay, things which are good in themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort to the afflicted, will be there a continual torment: knowledge, so much longed for as the chief good of the intellect, will there be hated worse than ignorance: light, so much coveted by all creatures from the lord of creation down to the humblest plant in the forest, will be loathed intensely. In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit. For while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and reendowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame. Nor can nature escape from these intense and various tortures by succumbing to them for the soul is sustained and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the greater. Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering, unceasing variety of torture—this is what the divine majesty, so outraged by sinners, demands, this is what the holiness of heaven, slighted and set aside for the lustful and low pleasures of the corrupt flesh, requires, this is what the blood of the innocent Lamb of God, shed for the redemption of sinners, trampled upon by the vilest of the vile, insists upon.

—Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And, remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are yet they would become infinite as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness: and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain: and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.

—A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great clock. The ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the words: ever, never; ever, never. Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage, the mind filled with darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the foul demons who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of respite from such awful agony, never to receive, even for an instant, God’s pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy; ever to be damned, never to be saved; ever, never; ever, never. O what a dreadful punishment! An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony limitless in extent, limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely lasting, infinitely varied, of torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish that everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity, every instant of which is itself an eternity, and that eternity an eternity of woe. Such is the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an almighty and a just God.

—Yes, a just God! Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that God should mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment in the fires of hell for a single grievous sin. They reason thus because, blinded by the gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable to comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin. They reason thus because they are unable to comprehend that even venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature that even if the omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the world, the wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders, on condition that He allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of wilful sloth, He, the great omnipotent God, could not do so because sin, be it in thought or deed, is a transgression of His law and God would not be God if He did not punish the transgressor.

—A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer and a third part of the cohorts of angels fall from their glory. A sin, an instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death and suffering into the world. To retrieve the consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to earth, lived and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for three hours on the cross.

—O, my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, will we then offend that good Redeemer and provoke His anger? Will we trample again upon that torn and mangled corpse? Will we spit upon that face so full of sorrow and love? Will we too, like the cruel jews and the brutal soldiers, mock that gentle and compassionate Saviour Who trod alone for our sake the awful winepress of sorrow? Every word of sin is a wound in His tender side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing His head. Every impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a keen lance transfixing that sacred and loving heart. No, no. It is impossible for any human being to do that which offends so deeply the divine majesty, that which is punished by an eternity of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God and makes a mockery of Him.

—I pray to God that my poor words may have availed today to confirm in holiness those who are in a state of grace, to strengthen the wavering, to lead back to the state of grace the poor soul that has strayed if any such be among you. I pray to God, and do you pray with me, that we may repent of our sins. I will ask you now, all of you, to repeat after me the act of contrition, kneeling here in this humble chapel in the presence of God. He is there in the tabernacle burning with love for mankind, ready to comfort the afflicted. Be not afraid. No matter how many or how foul the sins if only you repent of them they will be forgiven you. Let no worldly shame hold you back. God is still the merciful Lord Who wishes not the eternal death of the sinner but rather that he be converted and live.

—He calls you to Him. You are His. He made you out of nothing. He loved you as only a God can love. His arms are open to receive you even though you have sinned against Him. Come to Him, poor sinner, poor vain and erring sinner. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the hour.

The priest rose and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon the step before the tabernacle in the fallen gloom. He waited till all in the chapel had knelt and every least noise was still. Then, raising his head, he repeated the act of contrition, phrase by phrase, with fervour. The boys answered him phrase by phrase. Stephen, his tongue cleaving to his palate, bowed his head, praying with his heart.

—O my God!—

—O my God!—

—I am heartily sorry—

—I am heartily sorry—

—for having offended Thee—

—for having offended Thee—

—and I detest my sins—

—and I detest my sins—

—above every other evil—

—above every other evil—

—because they displease Thee, my God—

—because they displease Thee, my God—

—Who art so deserving—

—Who art so deserving—

—of all my love—

—of all my love—

—and I firmly purpose—

—and I firmly purpose—

—by Thy holy grace—

—by Thy holy grace—

—never more to offend Thee—

—never more to offend Thee—

—and to amend my life—

—and to amend my life—

*   *   *

He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul: and at every step his soul seemed to sigh: at every step his soul mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom.

He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the porcelain knob, opened the door quickly. He waited in fear, his soul pining within him, praying silently that death might not touch his brow as he passed over the threshold, that the fiends that inhabit darkness might not be given power over him. He waited still at the threshold as at the entrance to some dark cave. Faces were there; eyes: they waited and watched.

—We knew perfectly well of course that although it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try to induce himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary and so we knew of course perfectly well—

Murmuring faces waited and watched; murmurous voices filled the dark shell of the cave. He feared intensely in spirit and in flesh but, raising his head bravely, he strode into the room firmly. A doorway, a room, the same room, same window. He told himself calmly that those words had absolutely no sense which had seemed to rise murmurously from the dark. He told himself that it was simply his room with the door open.

He closed the door and, walking swiftly to the bed, knelt beside it and covered his face with his hands. His hands were cold and damp and his limbs ached with chill. Bodily unrest and chill and weariness beset him, routing his thoughts. Why was he kneeling there like a child saying his evening prayers? To be alone with his soul, to examine his conscience, to meet his sins face to face, to recall their times and manners and circumstances, to weep over them. He could not weep. He could not summon them to his memory. He felt only an ache of soul and body, his whole being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary.

That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and overcloud his conscience, assailing him at the gates of the cowardly and sincorrupted flesh: and, praying God timidly to forgive him his weakness, he crawled up on to the bed and, wrapping the blankets closely about him, covered his face again with his hands. He had sinned. He had sinned so deeply against heaven and before God that he was not worthy to be called God’s child.

Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His conscience sighed in answer. Yes, he had done them, secretly, filthily, time after time, and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to wear the mask of holiness before the tabernacle itself while his soul within was a living mass of corruption. How came it that God had not struck him dead? The leprous company of his sins closed about him, breathing upon him, bending over him from all sides. He strove to forget them in an act of prayer, huddling his limbs closer together and binding down his eyelids: but the senses of his soul would not be bound and, though his eyes were shut fast, he saw the places where he had sinned and, though his ears were tightly covered, he heard. He desired with all his will not to hear or see. He desired till his frame shook under the strain of his desire and until the senses of his soul closed. They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw.

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggled upwards from all the ordure through the bristling greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.

Creatures were in the field; one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as indiarubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terriffic [terrific] faces …

Help!

He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. That was his hell. God had allowed him to see the hell reserved for his sins: stinking, bestial, malignant, a hell of lecherous goatish fiends. For him! For him!

He sprang from the bed, the reeking odour pouring down his throat, clogging and revolting his entrails. Air! The air of heaven! He stumbled towards the window, groaning and almost fainting with sickness. At the washstand a convulsion seized him within; and, clasping his cold forehead wildly, he vomited profusely in agony.

When the fit had spent itself he walked weakly to the window and, lifting the sash, sat in a corner of the embrasure and leaned his elbow upon the sill. The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers: and amid peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with his heart.

He prayed:

—He once had meant to come on earth in heavenly glory but we sinned: and then He could not safely visit us but with a shrouded majesty and a bedimmed radiance for He was God. So He came Himself in weakness not in power and He sent thee, a creature in His stead, with a creature’s comeliness and lustre suited to our state. And now thy very face and form, dear mother, speak to us of the Eternal; not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon, but like the morning star which is thy emblem, bright and musical, breathing purity, telling of heaven and infusing peace. O harbinger of day! O light of the pilgrim! Lead us still as thou hast led. In the dark night, across the bleak wilderness guide us on to our Lord Jesus, guide us home.

His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

When evening had fallen he left the house and the first touch of the damp dark air and the noise of the door as it closed behind him made ache again his conscience, lulled by prayer and tears. Confess! Confess! It was not enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a prayer. He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell over his hidden sins truly and repentantly. Before he heard again the footboard of the housedoor trail over the threshold as it opened to let him in, before he saw again the table in the kitchen set for supper he would have knelt and confessed. It was quite simple.

The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the dark streets. There were so many flagstones on the footpath of that street and so many streets in that city and so many cities in the world. Yet eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin. Even once was a mortal sin. It could happen in an instant. But how so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see the thing, without having wished first to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field. It must understand when it desires in one instant and then prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully. It feels and understands and desires. What a horrible thing! Who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul than his soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was that so? O why?

He cowered in the shadow of the thought, abasing himself in the awe of God Who had made all things [things,] and all men. Madness. Who could think such a thought? And, cowering in darkness and abject, he prayed mutely to his angel guardian to drive away with his sword the demon that was whispering to his brain.

The whisper ceased and he knew then clearly that his own soul had sinned in thought and word and deed wilfully through his own body. Confess! He had to confess every sin. How could he utter in words to the priest what he had done? Must, must. Or how could he explain without dying of shame? Or how could he have done such things without shame? A madman, a loathsome madman! Confess! O he would indeed to be free and sinless again! Perhaps the priest would know. O dear God!

He walked on and on through illlit streets, fearing to stand still for a moment lest it might seem that he held back from what awaited him, fearing to arrive at that towards which he still turned with longing. How beautiful must be a soul in the state of grace when God looked upon it with love!

Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets. Their dank hair hung trailed over their brows. They were not beautiful to see as they crouched in the mire. But their souls were seen by God; and if their souls were in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God loved them, seeing them.

A wasting breath of humiliation blew bleakly over his soul to think of how he had fallen, to feel that those souls were dearer to God than his. The wind blew over him and passed on to the myriads and myriads of other souls on whom God’s favour shone now more and now less, stars now brighter and now dimmer, sustained and failing. And the glimmering souls passed away, sustained and failing, merged in a moving breath. One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost. The end: black cold void waste.

Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time unlit, unfelt, unlived. The squalid scene composed itself around him; the common accents, the burning gasjets in the shops, odours of fish and spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women. An old woman was about to cross the street, an oilcan in her hand. He bent down and asked her was there a chapel near.

—A chapel, sir? Yes, sir. Church Street chapel.

—Church?

She shifted the can to her other hand and directed him: and, as she held out her reeking withered right hand under its fringe of shawl, he bent lower towards her, saddened and soothed by her voice.

—Thank you.

—You are quite welcome, sir.

The candles on the high altar had been extinguished but the fragrance of incense still floated down the dim nave. Bearded workmen with pious faces were guiding a canopy out through a sidedoor, the sacristan aiding them with quiet gestures and words. A few of the faithful still lingered, praying before one of the sidealtars or kneeling in the benches near the confessionals. He approached timidly and knelt at the last bench in the body, thankful for the peace and silence and fragrant shadow of the church. The board on which he knelt was narrow and worn and those who knelt near him were humble followers of Jesus. Jesus too had been born in poverty and had worked in the shop of a carpenter, cutting boards and planing them, and had first spoken of the kingdom of God to poor fishermen, teaching all men to be meek and humble of heart.

He bowed his head upon his hands, bidding his heart be meek and humble that he might be like those who knelt beside him and his prayer as acceptable as theirs. He prayed beside them but it was hard. His soul was foul with sin and he dared not ask forgiveness with the simple trust of those whom Jesus, in the mysterious ways of God, had called first to His side, the carpenters, the fishermen, poor and simple people following a lowly trade, handling and shaping the wood of trees, mending their nets with patience.

A tall figure came down the aisle and the penitents stirred: and at the last moment, glancing up swiftly, he saw a long grey beard and the brown habit of a capuchin. The priest entered the box and was hidden. Two penitents rose and entered the confessional at either side. The wooden slide was drawn back and the faint murmur of a voice troubled the silence.

His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of men. They stirred, waking from sleep, troubled by the heated air.

The slide was shot back. The penitent emerged from the side of the box. The farther slide was drawn. A woman entered quietly and deftly where the first penitent had knelt. The faint murmur began again.

He could still leave the chapel. He could stand up, put one foot before the other and walk out softly and then run, run, run swiftly through the dark streets. He could still escape from the shame. Had it been any terrible crime but that one sin! Had it been murder! Little fiery flakes fell and touched him at all points, shameful thoughts, shameful words, shameful acts. Shame covered him wholly like fine glowing ashes falling continually. To say it in words! His soul, stifling and helpless, would cease to be.

The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the box. The near slide was drawn. A penitent entered where the other penitent had come out. A soft whispering noise floated in vaporous cloudlets out of the box. It was the woman: [woman;] soft whispering cloudlets, soft whispering vapour, whispering and vanishing.

He beat his breast with his fist humbly, secretly under cover of the wooden armrest. He would be at one with others and with God. He would love his neighbour. He would love God Who had made and loved him. He would kneel and pray with others and be happy. God would look down on him and on them and would love them all.

It was easy to be good. God’s yoke was sweet and light. It was better never to have sinned, to have remained always a child, for God loved little children and suffered them to come to Him. It was a terrible and a sad thing to sin. But God was merciful to poor sinners who were truly sorry. How true that was! That was indeed goodness.

The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next. He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box.

At last it had come. He knelt in the silent gloom and raised his eyes to the white crucifix suspended above him. God could see that he was sorry. He would tell all his sins. His confession would be long, long. Everybody in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Let them know. It was true. But God had promised to forgive him if he was sorry. He was sorry. He clasped his hands and raised them towards the white form, praying with his darkened eyes, praying with all his trembling body, swaying his head to and fro like a lost creature, praying with whimpering lips.

—Sorry! Sorry! O sorry!

The slide clicked back and his heart bounded in his breast. The face of an old priest was at the grating, averted from him, leaning upon a hand. He made the sign of the cross and prayed of the priest to bless him for he had sinned. Then, bowing his head, he repeated the Confiteor in fright. At the words my most grievous fault he ceased, breathless.

—How long is it since your last confession, my child?

—A long time, father.

—A month, my child?

—Longer, father.

—Three months, my child?

—Longer, father.

—Six months?

—Eight months, father.

He had begun. The priest asked:

—And what do you remember since that time?

He began to confess his sins: masses missed, prayers not said, lies.

—Anything else, my child?

Sins of anger, envy of others, gluttony, vanity, disobedience.

—Anything else, my child?

—Sloth.

—Anything else, my child?

There was no help. He murmured:

—I … committed sins of impurity, father.

The priest did not turn his head.

—With yourself, my child?

—And … with others.

—With women, my child?

—Yes, father.

—Were they married women, my child?

He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.

The priest was silent. Then he asked:

—How old are you, my child?

—Sixteen, father.

The priest passed his hand several times over his face. Then, resting his forehead against his hand, he leaned towards the grating and, with eyes still averted, spoke slowly. His voice was weary and old.

—You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Give it up, my child, for God’s sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you or where it will come against you. As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one farthing to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I am sure you do. And you will promise God now that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more by that wicked sin. You will make that solemn promise to God, will you not?

—Yes, father.

The old and weary voice fell like sweet rain upon his quaking parching heart. How sweet and sad!

—Do so, my poor child. The devil has led you astray. Drive him back to hell when he tempts you to dishonour your body in that way—the foul spirit who hates Our Lord. Promise God now that you will give up that sin, that wretched wretched sin.

Blinded by his tears and by the light of God’s mercifulness he bent his head and heard the grave words of absolution spoken and saw the priest’s hand raised above him in token of forgiveness.

—God bless you, my child. Pray for me.

He knelt to say his penance, praying in a corner of the dark nave: and his prayers ascended to heaven from his purified heart like perfume streaming upwards from a heart of white rose.

The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.

It would be beautiful to die if God so willed. It was beautiful to live if God so willed, to live in grace a life of peace and virtue and forbearance with others.

He sat by the fire in the kitchen, not daring to speak for happiness. Till that moment he had not known how beautiful and peaceful life could be. The green square of paper pinned round the lamp cast down a tender shade. On the dresser was a plate of sausages and white pudding and on the shelf there were eggs. They would be for the breakfast in the morning after the communion in the college chapel. White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea. How simple and beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him.

In a dream he fell asleep. In a dream he rose and saw that it was morning. In a waking dream he went through the quiet morning towards the college.

The boys were all there, kneeling in their places. He knelt among them, happy and shy. The altar was heaped with fragrant masses of white flowers: and in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among the white flowers were clear and silent as his own soul.

He knelt before the altar with his classmates, holding the altar cloth with them over a living rail of hands. His hands were trembling, and his soul trembled as he heard the priest pass with the ciborium from communicant to communicant.

—Corpus Domini nostri.

Could it be? He knelt there sinless and timid: and he would hold upon his tongue the host and God would enter his purified body.

—In vitam eternam. Amen.

Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past.

—Corpus Domini nostri.

The ciborium had come to him.

 ® 

IV

Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to the Guardian Angels, Wednesday to Saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to the Suffering Jesus, Saturday to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and with an early mass. The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety; and often as he knelt among the few worshippers at the sidealtar, following with his interleaved prayerbook the murmur of the priest, he glanced up for an instant towards the vested figure standing in the gloom between the two candles which were the old and the new testaments and imagined that he was kneeling at mass in the catacombs.

His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted by way of suffrage for the agonising souls: and, fearful lest in the midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from the infernal only in that it was not everlasting, his penance might avail no more than a drop of moisture, he drove his soul daily through an increasing circle of works of supererogation.

Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his station in life, circled about its own centre of spiritual energy. His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity; every thought, word and deed, every instance of consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in heaven: and at times his sense of such immediate repercussion was so lively that he seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven, not as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender flower.

The rosaries too which he said constantly—for he carried his beads loose in his trousers’ pockets that he might tell them as he walked the streets—transformed themselves into coronals of flowers of such vague unearthly texture that they seemed to him as hueless and odourless as they were nameless. He offered up each of his three daily chaplets that his soul might grow strong in each of the three theological virtues, in faith in the Father, Who had created him, in hope in the Son Who had redeemed him, and in love of the Holy Ghost Who had sanctified him, and this thrice triple prayer he offered to the Three persons [Persons] through Mary in the name of her joyful and sorrowful and glorious mysteries.

On each of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out of it day by day the seven deadly sins which had defiled it in the past; and he prayed for each gift on its appointed day, confident that it would descend upon him, though it seemed strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart from the others. Yet he believed that at some future stage of his spiritual progress this difficulty would be removed when his sinful soul had been raised up from its weakness and enlightened by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. He believed this all the more, and with trepidation, because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness, the eternal, mysterious secret Being to Whom, as God, the priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of the tongues of fire.

The imagery through which the nature and kinship of the Three Persons of the Trinity were darkly shadowed forth in the books of devotion which he read—the Father contemplating from all eternity as in a mirror His Divine Perfections and thereby begetting eternally the Eternal Son and the Holy Spirit proceeding out of Father and Son from all eternity—were easier of acceptance by his mind by reason of their august incomprehensibility than was the simple fact that God had loved his soul from all eternity, for ages before he had been born into the world, for ages before the world itself had existed.

He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit, had found them set forth solemnly in books, and had wondered why his soul was unable to harbour them for any time or to force his lips to utter their names with conviction. A brief anger had often invested him but he had never been able to make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself passing out of it as if his very body were being divested with ease of some outer skin or peel. He had felt a subtle, dark and murmurous presence penetrate his being and fire him with a brief iniquitous lust: it too had slipped beyond his grasp leaving his mind lucid and indifferent. This, it seemed, was the only love and that the only hate his soul would harbour.

But he could no longer disbelieve in the reality of love since God Himself had loved his individual soul with divine love from all eternity. Gradually, as his soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God’s power and love. Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver. The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality. So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary that he should continue to live. Yet that was part of the divine purpose and he dared not question its use, he above all others who had sinned so deeply and so foully against the divine purpose. Meek and abased by this consciousness of the one eternal omnipresent perfect reality his soul took up again her burden of pieties, masses and prayers and sacraments and mortifications, and only then for the first time since he had brooded on the great mystery of love did he feel within him a warm movement like that of some newly born life or virtue of the soul itself. The attitude of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as of one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer, humiliated and faint before her Creator.

But he had been forewarned of the dangers of spiritual exaltation and did not allow himself to desist from even the least or lowliest devotion, striving also by constant mortification to undo the sinful past rather than to achieve a saintliness fraught with peril. Each of his senses was brought under a rigorous discipline. In order to mortify the sense of sight he made it his rule to walk in the street with downcast eyes, glancing neither to right nor left and never behind him. His eyes shunned every encounter with the eyes of women. From time to time also he balked them by a sudden effort of the will, as by lifting them suddenly in the middle of an unfinished sentence and closing the book. To mortify his hearing he exerted no control over his voice which was then breaking, neither sang nor whistled and made no attempt to flee from noises which caused him painful nervous irritation such as the sharpening of knives on the knifeboard, the gathering of cinders on the fireshovel and the twigging of the carpet. To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odours, whether they were the odours of the outdoor world such as those of dung and tar or the odours of his own person among which he had made many curious comparisons and experiments. He found in the end that the only odour against which his sense of smell revolted was a certain stale fishy stink like that of longstanding urine: and whenever it was possible he subjected himself to this unpleasant odour. To mortify the taste he practised strict habits at table, observed to the letter all the fasts of the church and sought by distraction to divert his mind from the savours of different foods. But it was to the mortification of touch that he brought the most assiduous ingenuity of inventiveness. He never consciously changed his position in bed, sat in the most uncomfortable positions, suffered patiently every itch and pain, kept away from the fire, remained on his knees all through the mass except at the gospels, left parts of his neck and face undried so that air might sting them and, whenever he was not saying his beads, carried his arms stiffly at his sides like a runner and never in his pockets or clasped behind him.

He had no temptations to sin mortally. It surprised him however to find that at the end of his course of intricate piety and selfrestraint he was so easily at the mercy of childish and unworthy imperfections. His prayers and fasts availed him little for the suppression of anger at hearing his mother sneeze or at being disturbed in his devotions. It needed an immense effort of his will to master the impulse which urged him to give outlet to such irritation. Images of the outbursts of trivial anger which he had often noted among his masters, their twitching mouths, closeshut lips and flushed cheeks, recurred to his memory, discouraging him, for all his practice of humility, by the comparison. To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer, and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dried up sources. His confession became a channel for the escape of scrupulous and unrepented imperfections. His actual reception of the eucharist did not bring him the same dissolving moments of virginal selfsurrender as did those spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with the communicant’s prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the soul, telling her names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal and come away, bidding her look forth, a spouse, from Amana and from the mountains of the leopards; and the soul seemed to answer with the same inaudible voice, surrendering herself: Inter ubera mea commorabitur.

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to be waiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then, almost at the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standing far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the flood far away and beginning again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfaction shook his soul to know that he had not yielded nor undone all.

When he had eluded the flood of temptation many times in this way he grew troubled and wondered whether the grace which he had refused to lose was not being filched from him little by little. The clear certitude of his own immunity grew dim and to it succeeded a vague fear that his soul had really fallen unawares. It was with difficulty that he won back his old consciousness of his state of grace by telling himself that he had prayed to God at every temptation and that the grace which he had prayed for must have been given to him inasmuch as God was obliged to give it. The very frequency and violence of temptations showed him at last the truth of what he had heard about the trials of the saints. Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

Often when he had confessed his doubts and scruples, some momentary inattention at prayer, a movement of trivial anger in his soul or a subtle wilfulness in speech or act, he was bidden by his confessor to name some sin of his past life before absolution was given him. He named it with humility and shame and repented of it once more. It humiliated and shamed him to think that he would never be freed from it wholly, however holily he might live or whatever virtues or perfections he might attain. A restless feeling of guilt would always be present with him: he would confess and repent and be absolved, confess and repent again and be absolved again, fruitlessly. Perhaps that first hasty confession wrung from him by the fear of hell had not been good? Perhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not had sincere sorrow for his sin? But the surest sign that his confession had been good and that he had had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the amendment of his life.

—I have amended my life, have I not? he asked himself.

*   *   *

The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly dangling and looping the cord of the other blind. Stephen stood before him, following for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylight above the roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers. The priest’s face was in total shadow but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull. Stephen followed also with his ears the accents and intervals of the priest’s voice as he spoke gravely and cordially of indifferent themes, the vacation which had just ended, the colleges of the order abroad, the transference of masters. The grave and cordial voice went on easily with its tale, and in the pauses Stephen felt bound to set it on again with respectful questions. He knew that the tale was a prelude and his mind waited for the sequel. Ever since the message of summons had come for him from the director his mind had struggled to find the meaning of the message; and during the long restless time he had sat in the college parlour waiting for the director to come in his eyes had wandered from one sober picture to another around the walls and his mind wandered from one guess to another until the meaning of the summons had almost become clear. Then, just as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might prevent the director from coming, he had heard the handle of the door turning and the swish of a soutane.

The director had begun to speak of the dominican and franciscan orders and of the friendship between saint Thomas and saint Bonaventure. The capuchin dress, he thought, was rather too …

Stephen’s face gave back the priest’s indulgent smile and, not being anxious to give an opinion, he made a slight dubitative movement with his lips.

—I believe, continued the director, that there is some talk now among the capuchins themselves of doing away with it and following the example of the other franciscans.

—I suppose they would retain it in the cloister, said Stephen.

—O, certainly, said the director. For the cloister it is all right but for the street I really think it would be better to do away with, don’t you?

—It must be troublesome, I imagine?

—Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was in Belgium I used to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up about their knees! It was really ridiculous. Les jupes, they call them in Belgium.

The vowel was so modified as to be indistinct.

—What do they call them?

—Les jupes.

—O.

Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he could not see on the priest’s shadowed face, its image or spectre only passing rapidly across his mind as the low discreet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed calmly before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening and the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon his cheek.

The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy he had imagined the reins by which horses are driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him to feel at Stradbrook the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him too when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremulous fingers the brittle texture of a woman’s stocking for, retaining nothing of all he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own state, it was only amid softworded phrases or within rosesoft stuffs that he dared to conceive of the soul or body of a woman moving with tender life.

But the phrase on the priest’s lips was disingenuous for he knew that a priest should not speak lightly on that theme. The phrase had been spoken lightly with design and he felt that his face was being searched by the eyes in the shadow. Whatever he had heard or read of the craft of jesuits he had put aside frankly as not borne out by his own experience. His masters, even when they had not attracted him, had seemed to him always intelligent and serious priests, athletic and highspirited prefects. He thought of them as men who washed their bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold linen. During all the years he had lived among them in Clongowes and in Belvedere he had received only two pandies and, though these had been dealt him in the wrong, he knew that he had often escaped punishment. During all those years he had never heard from any of his masters a flippant word: it was they who had taught him christian doctrine and urged him to live a good life and, when he had fallen into grievous sin, it was they who had led him back to grace. Their presence had made him diffident of himself when he was a muff in Clongowes and it had made him diffident of himself also while he had held his equivocal position in Belvedere. A constant sense of this had remained with him up to the last year of his school life. He had never once disobeyed or allowed turbulent companions to seduce him from his habit of quiet obedience: and, even when he doubted some statement of a master, he had never presumed to doubt openly. Lately some of their judgments had sounded a little childish in his ears and had made him feel a regret and pity as though he were slowly passing out of an accustomed world and were hearing its language for the last time. One day when some boys had gathered round a priest under the shed near the chapel, he had heard the priest say:

—I believe that Lord Macaulay was a man who probably never committed a mortal sin in his life, that is to say, a deliberate mortal sin.

Some of the boys had then asked the priest if Victor Hugo were not the greatest French writer. The priest had answered that Victor Hugo had never written half so well when he had turned against the church as he had written when he was a catholic.

—But there are many eminent French critics, said the priest, who consider that even Victor Hugo, great as he certainly was, had not so pure a French style as Louis Veuillot.

The tiny flame which the priest’s allusion had kindled upon Stephen’s cheek had sunk down again and his eyes were still fixed calmly on the colorless [colourless] sky. But an unresting doubt flew hither and thither before his mind. Masked memories passed quickly before him: he recognised scenes and persons yet he was conscious that he had failed to perceive some vital circumstance in them. He saw himself walking about the grounds watching the sports in Clongowes and eating slim jim out of his cricketcap. Some jesuits were walking round the cycletrack in the company of ladies. The echoes of certain expressions used in Clongowes sounded in remote caves of his mind.

His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the parlour when he became aware that the priest was addressing him in a different voice.

—I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a very important subject.

—Yes, sir.

—Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?

Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly. The priest waited for the answer and added:

—I mean have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join the order. Think.

—I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen.

The priest let the blindcord fall to one side and, uniting his hands, leaned his chin gravely upon them, communing with himself.

—In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life. Such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he shows to others. He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as prefect by his fellow sodalists. And you, Stephen, have been such a boy in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady’s sodality. Perhaps you are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself.

A strong note of pride reinforcing the gravity of the priest’s voice made Stephen’s heart quicken in response.

—To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself has the power of a priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them, the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen’s cheek as he heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silentmannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it. In that dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various priests. He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had swung open like that of such another as he had turned to the altar again after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its folds, or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant Ite, missa est. If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the pictures of the mass in his child’s massbook, in a church without worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare altar and served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality: and it was partly the absence of an appointed rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had allowed silence to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an embrace he longed to give.

He listened in reverent silence now to the priest’s appeal and through the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach, offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He would know then what was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. He would know obscure things, hidden from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath. He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women and of girls: but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition of hands his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would linger upon the hands with which he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink damnation to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord. He would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent: and he would be a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedec.

—I will offer up my mass tomorrow morning, said the director, that Almighty God may reveal to you His holy will. And let you, Stephen, make a novena to your holy patron saint, the first martyr, who is very powerful with God, that God may enlighten your mind. But you must be quite sure, Stephen, that you have a vocation because it would be terrible if you found afterwards that you had none. Once a priest always a priest, remember. Your catechism tells you that the sacrament of Holy Orders is one of those which can be received only once because it imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark which can never be effaced. It is before you must weigh well, not after. It is a solemn question, Stephen, because on it may depend the salvation of your eternal soul. But we will pray to God together.

He held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a companion in the spiritual life. Stephen passed out on to the wide platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild evening air. Towards Findlater’s church a quartet of young men were striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads and stepping to the agile melody of their leader’s concertina. The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children. Smiling at the trivial air he raised his eyes to the priest’s face and, seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day, detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in that companionship.

As he descended the steps the impression which effaced his troubled selfcommunion was that of a mirthless mask reflecting a sunken day from the threshold of the college. The shadow, then, of the life of the college passed gravely over his consciousness. It was a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life without material cares. He wondered how he would pass the first night in the novitiate and with what dismay he would wake the first morning in the dormitory. The troubling odour of the long corridors of Clongowes came back to him and he heard the discreet murmur of the burning gasflames. At once from every part of his being unrest began to irradiate. A feverish quickening of his pulses followed and a din of meaningless words drove his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly. His lungs dilated and sank as if he were inhaling a warm moist unsustaining air and he smelt again the warm moist air which hung in the bath in Clongowes above the sluggish turfcoloured water.

Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with his prayers against the fainting sickness of his stomach. He saw himself sitting at dinner with the community of a college. What, then, had become of that deeprooted shyness of his which had made him loth to eat or drink under a strange roof? What had come of the pride of his spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?

The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J.

His name in that new life leaped into characters before his eyes and to it there followed a mental sensation of an undefined face or colour of a face. The colour faded and became strong like a changing glow of pallid brick red. Was it the raw reddish glow he had so often seen on wintry mornings on the shaven gills of the priests? The face was eyeless and sourfavoured and devout, shot with pink tinges of suffocated anger. Was it not a mental spectre of the face of one of the jesuits whom some of the boys called Lantern Jaws and others Foxy Campbell?

He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street, and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom. The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory. His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.

He crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka and turned his eyes coldly for an instant towards the faded blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin which stood fowlwise on a pole in the middle of a hamshaped encampment of poor cottages. Then, bending to the left, he followed the lane which led up to his house. The faint sour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchengardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul. Then a short laugh broke from his lips as he thought of that solitary farmhand in the kitchengardens behind their house whom they had nicknamed the man with the hat. A second laugh, taking rise from the first after a pause, broke from him involuntarily as he thought of how the man with the hat worked, considering in turn the four points of the sky and then regretfully plunging his spade in the earth.

He pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen. A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glassjars and jampots which did service for teacups. Discarded crusts and lumps of sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been poured over them, lay scattered on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and there on the board and a knife with a broken ivory handle was stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover.

The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen’s heart. All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest: but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour.

He sat near them at the table and asked where his father and mother were. One answered:

—Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro.

Still another removal! A boy named Fallon in Belvedere had often asked him with a silly laugh why they moved so often. A frown of scorn darkened quickly his forehead as he heard again the silly laugh of the questioner.

He asked:

—Why are we on the move again, if it’s a fair question?

The same sister answered:

—Becauseboro theboro landboro lordboro willboro putboro usboro outboro.

The voice of his youngest brother from the farther side of the fireplace began to sing the air Oft in the Stilly Night. One by one the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing. They would sing so for hours, melody after melody, glee after glee, till the last pale light died down on the horizon, till the first dark nightclouds came forth and night fell.

He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.

He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children: and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it. And he remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil giving utterance, like the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children in every time.

*   *   *

He could wait no longer.

From the door of Byron’s publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel, from the gate of Clontarf Chapel to the door of Byron’s publichouse and then back again to the chapel and then back again to the publichouse he had paced slowly at first, planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath, then timing their fall to the fall of verses. A full hour had passed since his father had gone in with Dan Crosby, the tutor, to find out for him something about the university. For a full hour he had paced up and down, waiting: but he could wait no longer.

He set off abruptly for the Bull, walking rapidly lest his father’s shrill whistle might call him back; and in a few moments he had rounded the curve at the police barrack and was safe.

Yes, his mother was hostile to the idea, as he had read from her listless silence. Yet her mistrust pricked him more keenly than his father’s pride and he thought coldly how he had watched the faith which was fading down in his soul aging and strengthening in her eyes. A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

The university! So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries who had stood as guardians of his boyhood and had sought to keep him among them that he might be subject to them and serve their ends. Pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves. The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path: and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him. It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triplebranching flames leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from under the boughs and grasses wild creatures racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves. Their feet passed in pattering tumult over his mind, the feet of hares and rabbits, the feet of harts and hinds and antelopes, until he heard them no more and remembered only a proud cadence from Newman: Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms.

The pride of that dim image brought back to his mind the dignity of the office he had refused. All through his boyhood he had mused upon that which he had so often thought to be his destiny and when the moment had come for him to obey the call he had turned aside, obeying a wayward instinct. Now time lay between: the oils of ordination would never anoint his body. He had refused. Why?

He turned seaward from the road at Dollymount and as he passed on to the thin wooden bridge he felt the planks shaking with the tramp of heavily shod feet. A squad of christian brothers was on its way back from the Bull and had begun to pass, two by two, across the bridge. Soon the whole bridge was trembling and resounding. The uncouth faces passed him two by two, stained yellow or red or livid by the sea, and as he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to his own face. Angry with himself he tried to hide his face from their eyes by gazing down sideways into the shallow swirling water under the bridge but he still saw a reflection therein of their topheavy silk hats, and humble tapelike collars and loosely hanging clerical clothes.

—Brother Hickey.

Brother Quaid.

Brother MacArdle.

Brother Keogh.

Their piety would be like their names, like their faces, like their clothes, and it was idle for him to tell himself that their humble and contrite hearts, it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion than his had ever been, a gift tenfold more acceptable than his elaborate adoration. It was idle for him to move himself to be generous towards them, to tell himself that if he ever came to their gates, stripped of his pride, beaten and in beggar’s weeds, that they would be generous towards him, loving him as themselves. Idle and embittering, finally, to argue, against his own dispassionate certitude, that the commandment of love bade us not to love our neighbour as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

He passed from the trembling bridge on to firm land again. At that instant, as it seemed to him, the air was chilled and looking askance towards the water he saw a flying squall darkening and crisping suddenly the tide. A faint click at his heart, a faint throb in his throat told him once more of how his flesh dreaded the cold infrahuman odour of the sea: yet he did not strike across the downs on his left but held straight on along the spine of rocks that pointed against the river’s mouth.

A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slowflowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote.

Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slowdrifting clouds, dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the deserts of the sky, a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high over Ireland, westward bound. The Europe they had come from lay out there beyond the Irish Sea, Europe of strange tongues and valleyed and woodbegirt and citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races. He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling.

—Hello, Stephanos!

—Here comes The Dedalus!

—Ao! … Eh, give it over, Dwyer, I’m telling you or I’ll give you a stuff in the kisser for yourself…. Ao!

—Good man, Towser! Duck him!

—Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

—Duck him! Guzzle him now, Towser!

—Help! Help! … Ao!

He recognised their speech collectively before he distinguished their faces. The mere sight of that medley of wet nakedness chilled him to the bone. Their bodies, corpsewhite or suffused with a pallid golden light or rawly tanned by the suns, [sun,] gleamed with the wet of the sea. Their divingstone, poised on its rude supports and rocking under their plunges, and the roughhewn stones of the sloping breakwater over which they scrambled in their horseplay, gleamed with cold wet lustre. The towels with which they smacked their bodies were heavy with cold seawater: and drenched with cold brine was their matted hair.

He stood still in deference to their calls and parried their banter with easy words. How characterless they looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless sidepockets! It was a pain to see them and a swordlike pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness. Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body.

—Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

—One! Two! … Look out!

—O, cripes, I’m drownded!

—One! Two! Three and away!

—Me next! Me next!

—One! … Uk!

—Stephaneforos!

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

—Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without—cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stoneblock for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide, and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad gayclad figures, wading and delving.

In a few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders: and, picking a pointed salteaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand: and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the highdrifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him; and the grey warm air was still: and a new wild life was singing in his veins.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he?

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures, of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder [wonder of] mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than [than the] other.

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

 ® 

V

He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole and the pool under it brought back to his memory the dark turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes. The box of pawntickets at his elbow had just been rifled and he took up idly one after another in his greasy fingers the blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and creased and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.

1 Pair Buskins.

1 D. Coat.

3 Articles and White.

1 Man’s Pants.

Then he put them aside and gazed thoughtfully at the lid of the box, speckled with lousemarks, and asked vaguely:

—How much is the clock fast now?

His mother straightened the battered alarmclock that was lying on its side in the middle of the kitchen mantelpiece until its dial showed a quarter to twelve and then laid it once more on its side.

—An hour and twentyfive minutes, she said. The right time now is twenty past ten. The dear knows you might try to be in time for your lectures.

—Fill out the place for me to wash, said Stephen.

—Katey, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.

—Boody, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.

—I can’t, I’m going for blue. Fill it out, you, Maggie.

When the enamelled basin had been fitted into the well of the sink and the old washingglove flung on the side of it he allowed his mother to scrub his neck and root into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of his nose.

—Well, it’s a poor case, she said, when a university student is so dirty that his mother has to wash him.

—But it gives you pleasure, said Stephen calmly.

An earsplitting whistle was heard from upstairs and his mother thrust a damp overall into his hands, saying:

—Dry yourself and hurry out for the love of goodness.

A second shrill whistle, prolonged angrily, brought one of the girls to the foot of the staircase.

—Yes, father?

—Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?

—Yes, father.

—Sure?

—Yes, father.

—Hm!

The girl came back making signs to him to be quick and go out quietly by the back. Stephen laughed and said:

—He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine.

—Ah, it’s a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you’ll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how it has changed you.

—Good morning, everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of his fingers in adieu.

The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it slowly, choosing his steps amid heaps of wet rubbish, he heard a mad nun screeching in the nuns’ madhouse beyond the wall.

—Jesus! O Jesus! Jesus!

He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness. His father’s whistle, his mother’s mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth. He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration: but, as he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning light falling about him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries.

The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman, that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile, that as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty, and that passing a grimy marinedealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson which begins:

I was not wearier where I lay.

His mind, when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas, turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk, stood often in shadow under the windows of that age, to hear the grave and mocking music of the lutenists or the frank laughter of waistcoateers until a laugh too low, a phrase, tarnished by time, of chambering and false honour, stung his monkish pride and drove him on from his lurkingplace.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt him from the companionships of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a Synopsis Philosophiæ Scholastiæ ad mentem divi Thomæ. His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in revery at least he had been acquainted with nobility. But, when this brief pride of silence upheld him no longer, he was glad to find himself still in the midst of common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth of the city fearlessly and with a light heart.

Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive man with the doll’s face and the brimless hat coming towards him down the slope of the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him like a diviningrod. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a dairy to see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him, but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He laughed as he heard it for it made him think of MacCann and he saw him a squat figure in a shooting jacket and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing in the wind at Hopkins’ corner, and heard him say:

—Dedalus, you’re an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I’m not. I’m a democrat: and I’ll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future.

Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture too. What day of the week was it? He stopped at a newsagent’s to read the headline of a placard. Thursday. Ten to eleven, English; eleven to twelve, French; twelve to one, physics. He fancied to himself the English lecture and felt, even at that distance, restless and helpless. He saw the heads of his classmates meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points they were bidden to note, nominal definitions, essential definitions and examples or dates of birth or death, chief works, a favourable and an unfavourable criticism side by side. His own head was unbent for his thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class of students or out of the window across the desolate gardens of the green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellardamp and decay. Another head than his, right before him in the first benches, was poised squarely above its bending fellows like the head of a priest appealing without [about] humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about him. Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never raise before his mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the head and face? Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head or deathmask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an iron crown. It was a priestlike face, priestlike in its pallor, in the widewinged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the jaws, priestlike in the lips that were long and bloodless and faintly smiling: and Stephen, remembering swiftly how he had told Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend’s listening silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend’s listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:

The ivy whines upon the wall

And whines and twines upon the wall

The ivy whines upon the wall

The yellow ivy on the wall

Ivy, ivy up the wall.

Did any one ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy: that was all right. Yellow ivory also. And what about ivory ivy?

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants. Ivory, ivoire, avorio, ebur. One of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run: India mittit ebur; and he recalled the shrewd northern face of the rector who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon. He had learnt what little he knew of the laws of Latin verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest.

Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.

The crises and victories and secessions in Roman history were handed on to him in the trite words in tanto discrimine and he had tried to peer into the social life of the city of cities through the words implere ollam denariorum which the rector had rendered sonorously as the filling of a pot with denaries. The pages of his timeworn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold: they were human pages: and fifty years before they had been turned by the human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm Inverarity. Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender and vervain; but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a great dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward; and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet from the fetters of the reformed conscience he came upon the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland.

He looked at it without anger: for, though sloth of the body and of the soul crept over it like unseen vermin, over the shuffling feet and up the folds of the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly conscious of its indignity. It was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian; and he thought of his friend Davin, the peasant student. It was a jesting name between them but the young peasant bore with it lightly saying:

—Go on, Stevie, I have a hard head, you tell me. Call me what you will.

The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched Stephen pleasantly when first heard for he was as formal in speech with others as they were with him. Often, as he sat in Davin’s rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friend’s wellmade boots that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend’s simple ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill—for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael—repelling swiftly and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a bluntness of feeling or by a dull stare of terror in the eyes, the terror of soul of a starving Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear.

Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland. The gossip of his fellowstudents which strove to render the flat life of the college significant at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian. His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards this myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password: and of the world that lay beyond England he knew only the foreign legion of France in which he spoke of serving.

Coupling this ambition with the young man’s humour Stephen had often called him one of the tame geese: and there was even a point of irritation in the name pointed against that very reluctance of speech and deed in his friend which seemed so often to stand between Stephen’s mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of Irish life.

One night the young peasant, his spirit stung by the violent or luxurious language in which Stephen escaped from the cold silence of intellectual revolt, had called up before Stephen’s mind a strange vision. The two were walking slowly towards Davin’s room through the dark narrow streets of the poorer jews.

—A thing happened to myself, Stevie, last autumn, coming on winter, and I never told it to a living soul and you are the first person now I ever told it to. I disremember if it was October or November. It was October because it was before I came up here to join the matriculation class.

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friend’s face, flattered by his confidence and won over to sympathy by the speaker’s simple accent.

—I was away all that day from my own place over in Buttevant—I don’t know if you know where that is—at a hurling match between the Croke’s Own Boys and the Fearless Thurles and by God, Stevie, that was the hard fight. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to his buff that day minding cool for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the time and shouting like mad. I never will forget that day. One of the Crokes made a woeful wipe at him one time with his camann [camaun] and I declare to God he was within an aim’s ace of getting it at the side of the temple. Oh, honest to God, if the crook of it caught him that time he was done for.

—I am glad he escaped, Stephen had said with a laugh, but surely that’s not the strange thing that happened you?

—Well, I suppose that doesn’t interest you but leastways there was such noise after the match that I missed the train home and I couldn’t get any kind of a yoke to give me a lift for, as luck would have it, there was a mass meeting that same day over in Castletownroche and all the cars in the country were there. So there was nothing for it only to stay the night or to foot it out. Well, I started to walk and on I went and it was coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura hills; that’s better than ten miles from Kilmallock and there’s a long lonely road after that. You wouldn’t see the sign of a christian house along the road or hear a sound. It was pitch dark almost. Once or twice I stopped by the way under a bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew was thick I’d have stretched out there and slept. At last, after a bend of the road, I spied a little cottage with a light in the window. I went up and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was there and I answered I was over at the match in Buttevant and was walking back and that I’d be thankful for a glass of water. After a while a young woman opened the door and brought me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed as if she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging; and I thought by her figure and by something in the look of her eyes that she must be carrying a child. She kept me in talk a long while at the door and I thought it strange because her breast and her shoulders were bare. She asked me was I tired and would I like to stop the night there. She said [said that] she was all alone in the house and that her husband had gone that morning to Queenstown with his sister to see her off. And all the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her eyes fixed on my face and she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. When I handed her back the mug at last she took my hand to draw me in over the threshold and said: Come in and stay the night here. You’ve no call to be frightened. There’s no one in it but ourselves…. I didn’t go in, Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in a fever. At the first bend of the road I looked back and she was standing at the door.

The last words of Davin’s story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth, reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the college cars drove by, as a type of her race and his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed.

A hand was laid on his arm and a young voice cried:

—Ah, gentleman, your own girl, sir! The first handsel today, gentleman. Buy that lovely bunch. Will you, gentleman?

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to him at that instant images of guilelessness; and he halted till the image had vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and hoydenish face.

—Do, gentleman! Don’t forget your own girl, sir!

—I have no money, said Stephen.

—Buy them lovely ones, will you, sir? Only a penny.

—Did you hear what I said? asked Stephen, bending towards her. I told you I had no money. I tell you again now.

—Well, sure, you will some day, sir, please God, the girl answered after an instant.

—Possibly, said Stephen, but I don’t think it likely.

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to gibing and wishing to be out of the way before she offered her ware to another, a tourist from England or a student of Trinity. Grafton Street, along which he walked, prolonged that moment of discouraged poverty. In the roadway at the head of the street a slab was set to the memory of Wolfe Tone and he remembered having been present with his father at its laying. He remembered with bitterness that scene of tawdry tribute. There were four French delegates in a brake and one, a plump smiling young man, held, wedged on a stick, a card on which were printed the words: Vive l’Irlande!

But the trees in Stephen’s Green were fragrant of rain and the rainsodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts. The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a moment when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. He crossed the hall and took the corridor to the left which led to the physics theatre. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the jesuit house extraterritorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly and approached the fireplace.

—Good morning, sir! Can I help you?

The priest looked up quickly and said:

—One moment now, Mr Dedalus, and you will see. There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.

—I will try to learn it, said Stephen.

—Not too much coal, said the dean, working briskly at his task, that is one of the secrets.

He produced four candlebutts from the sidepockets of his soutane and placed them deftly among the coals and twisted papers. Stephen watched him in silence. Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and busied with the disposition of his wisps of paper and candlebutts he seemed more than ever a humble server making ready the place of sacrifice in an empty temple, a levite of the Lord. Like a levite’s robe of plain linen the faded worn soutane draped the kneeling figure of one whom the canonicals or the bellbordered ephod would irk and trouble. His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lord—in tending the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden—and yet had remained ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty. Nay, his very soul had waxed old in that service without growing towards light and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity—a mortified will no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than was to the thrill of love or combat his aging body, spare and sinewy, greyed with a silverpointed down.

The dean rested back on his hunkers and watched the sticks catch. Stephen, to fill the silence, said:

—I am sure I could not light a fire.

—You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty.

—Can you solve that question now? he asked.

—Aquinas, answered Stephen, says pulcra [Pulcra] sunt quæ visa placent.

—This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will it therefore be beautiful?

—In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell however it is an evil.

—Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head.

He rose nimbly and went towards the door, set it ajar and said:

—A draught is said to be a help in these matters.

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’ enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience, back upon themselves: and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. Similiter atque senis baculus, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be left in a corner, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

—When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

—From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

—These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

—If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws.

—Ha!

—For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.

—I see. I quite see your point.

—I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.

—Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by. You know Epictetus?

—An old gentleman, said Stephen coarsely, who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.

—He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the character of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp next day instead of the iron lamp.

A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean’s candle butts [candlebutts] and fused itself in Stephen’s consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest’s voice too had a hard jingling tone. Stephen’s mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest’s face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?

—I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.

—Undoubtedly, said the dean.

—One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.

—Not in the least, said the dean politely.

—No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean …

—Yes, yes: I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: detain.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.

—To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

—What funnel? asked Stephen.

—The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

—That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

—What is a tundish?

—That. The … the funnel.

—Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

—It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen laughing, where they speak the best English.

—A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false, and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all but given through—a late comer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden in winding up to the end like a reel of cotton some finespun line of reasoning upon insufflation or the imposition of hands or the procession of the Holy Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zincroofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence?

The dean repeated the word yet again.

—Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!

—The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth, said Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

—And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean added. To distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts. These are some interesting points we might take up.

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean’s firm dry tone, was silent. The dean also was silent: and through the silence a distant noise of many boots and confused voices came up the staircase.

—In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is however the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking. It may be uphill pedalling at first. Take Mr Moonan. He was a long time before he got to the top. But he got there.

—I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.

—You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in us. I most certainly should not be despondent. Per aspera ad astra.

He left the hearth quickly and went towards the landing to oversee the arrival of the first arts’ class.

Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet briskly and impartially every student of the class and could almost see the frank smiles of the coarser students. A desolating pity began to fall like a dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful servingman of the knightly Loyola, for this halfbrother of the clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he would never call his ghostly father: and he thought how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during all their history, at the bar of God’s justice for the souls of the lax and the lukewarm and the prudent.

The entry of the professor was signalled by a few rounds of Kentish fire from the heavy boots of those students who sat on the highest tier of the gloomy theatre under the grey cobwebbed windows. The calling of the roll began and the responses to the names were given out in all tones until the name of Peter Byrne was reached.

—Here!

A deep base [bass] note in response came from the upper tier, followed by coughs of protest along the other benches.

The professor paused in his reading and called the next name:

—Cranly!

No answer.

—Mr Cranly!

A smile flew across Stephen’s face as he thought of his friend’s studies.

—Try Leopardstown! said a voice from the bench behind.

Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihan’s snoutish face, outlined on [in] the grey light, was impassive. A formula was given out. Amid the rustling of the notebooks Stephen turned back again and said:

—Give me some paper for God’s sake.

—Are you as bad as that? asked Moynihan with a broad grin.

He tore a sheet from his scribbler and passed it down, whispering:

—In case of necessity any layman or woman can do it.

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of paper, the coiling and uncoiling calculations of the professor, the spectrelike symbols of force and velocity fascinated and jaded Stephen’s mind. He had heard some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason. O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable.

—So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal. Perhaps some of you gentlemen may be familiar with the works of Mr W. S. Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks of the billiard sharp who is condemned to play:

On a cloth untrue

With a twisted cue

And elliptical billiard balls.

—He means a ball having the form of the ellipsoid of the principal axes of which I spoke a moment ago.

Moynihan leaned down towards Stephen’s ear and murmured:

—What price ellipsoidal balls! Chase me, ladies, I’m in the cavalry!

His fellowstudent’s rude humour ran like a gust through the cloister of Stephen’s mind, shaking into gay life limp priestly vestments that hung upon the walls, setting them to sway and caper in a sabbath of misrule. The forms of the community emerged from the gustblown vestments, the dean of studies, the portly florid bursar with his cap of grey hair, the president, the little priest with feathery hair who wrote devout verses, the squat peasant form of the professor of economics, the tall form of the young professor of mental science discussing on the landing a case of conscience with his class like a giraffe cropping high leafage among a herd of antelopes, the grave troubled prefect of the sodality, the plump roundheaded professor of Italian with his rogue’s eyes. They came ambling and stumbling, tumbling and capering, kilting their gowns for leap frog, holding one another back, shaken with deep fast laughter, smacking one another behind and laughing at their rude malice, calling to one another by familiar nicknames, protesting with sudden dignity at some rough usage, whispering two and two behind their hands.

The professor had gone to the glass cases on the sidewall from a shelf of which he took down a set of coils, blew away the dust from many points and, bearing it carefully to the table, held a finger on it while he proceeded with his lecture. He explained that the wires in modern coils were of a compound called platinoid lately discovered by F. W. Martino.

He spoke clearly the initials and surname of the discoverer. Moynihan whispered from behind:

—Good old Fresh Water Martin!

—Ask him, Stephen whispered back with weary humour, if he wants a subject for electrocution. He can have me.

Moynihan, seeing the professor bend over the coils, rose in his bench and, clacking noiselessly the fingers of his right hand, began to call with the voice of a slobbering urchin:

—Please, teacher! Please, teacher! This boy is after saying a bad word, teacher.

—Platinoid, the professor said solemnly, is preferred to German silver because it has a lower coefficient of resistance variation by changes of temperature. The platinoid wire is insulated and the covering of silk that insulates it is wound on the ebonite bobbins just where my finger is. If it were wound single an extra current would be induced in the coils. The bobbins are saturated in hot paraffin wax …

A sharp Ulster voice said from the bench below Stephen:

—Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?

The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and applied science. A heavybuilt student wearing gold spectacles stared with some wonder at the questioner. Moynihan murmured from behind in his natural voice:

—Isn’t MacAlister a devil for his pound of flesh?

Stephen looked down coldly on the oblong skull beneath him overgrown with tangled twinecoloured hair. The voice, the accent, the mind of the questioner offended him and he allowed the offence to carry him towards wilful unkindness, bidding his mind think that the student’s father would have done better had he sent his son to Belfast to study and have saved something on the train fare by so doing.

The oblong skull beneath did not turn to meet this shaft of thought and yet the shaft came back to its bowstring: for he saw in a moment the student’s wheypale face.

—That thought is not mine, he said to himself quickly. It came from the comic Irishman in the bench behind. Patience. Can you say with certitude by whom the soul of your race was bartered and its elect betrayed—by the questioner or by the mocker? Patience. Remember Epictetus. It is probably in his character to ask such a question at such a moment in such a tone and to pronounce the word science as a monosyllable.

The droning voice of the professor continued to wind itself slowly round and round the coils it spoke of, doubling, trebling, quadrupling its somnolent energy as the coil multiplied its ohms of resistance.

Moynihan’s voice called from behind in echo to a distant bell:

—Closing time, gents!

The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk. On a table near the door were two photographs in frames and between them a long roll of paper bearing an irregular tail of signatures. MacCann went briskly to and fro among the students, talking rapidly, answering rebuffs and leading one after another to the table. In the inner hall the dean of studies stood talking to a young professor, stroking his chin gravely and nodding his head.

Stephen, checked by the crowd at the door, halted irresolutely. From under the wide falling leaf of a soft hat Cranly’s dark eyes were watching him.

—Have you signed? Stephen asked.

Cranly closed his long thinlipped mouth, communed with himself an instant and answered:

—Ego habeo.

—What is it for?

—Quod?

—What is it for?

Cranly turned his pale face to Stephen and said blandly and bitterly:

—Per pax universalis.

Stephen pointed to the Csar’s photograph and said:

—He has the face of a besotted Christ.

The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly’s eyes back from a calm survey of the walls of the hall.

—Are you annoyed? he asked.

—No, answered Stephen.

—Are you in bad humour?

—No.

—Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendax estis, said Cranly, quia facies vostra monstrat ut vos in damno malo humore estis.

Moynihan, on his way to the table, said in Stephen’s ear:

—MacCann is in tiptop form. Ready to shed the last drop. Brandnew world. No stimulants and votes for the bitches.

Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had passed, turned again to meet Cranly’s eyes.

—Perhaps you can tell me, he said, why he pours his soul so freely into my ear. Can you?

A dull scowl appeared on Cranly’s forehead. He stared at the table where Moynihan had bent to write his name on the roll, and then said flatly:

—A sugar!

—Quis est in malo humore, said Stephen, ego aut vos?

Cranly did not take up the taunt. He brooded sourly on his judgment and repeated with the same flat force:

—A flaming bloody sugar, that’s what he is!

It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same tone over his memory. The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly’s speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly by a Wicklow pulpit.

The heavy scowl faded from Cranly’s face as MacCann marched briskly towards them from the other side of the hall.

—Here you are! said MacCann cheerily.

—Here I am! said Stephen.

—Late as usual. Can you not combine the progressive tendency with a respect for punctuality?

—That question is out of order, said Stephen. Next business.

His smiling eyes were fixed on a silverwrapped tablet of milk chocolate which peeped out of the propagandist’s breastpocket. A little ring of listeners closed round to hear the war of wits. A lean student with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the two, glancing from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying phrase in his open moist mouth. Cranly took a small grey handball from his pocket and began to examine it closely, turning it over and over.

—Next business? said MacCann. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the strawcoloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin.

—The next business is to sign the testimonial.

—Will you pay me anything if I sign? asked Stephen.

—I thought you were an idealist, said MacCann.

The gipsylike student looked about him and addressed the onlookers in an indistinct bleating voice.

—By hell, that’s a queer notion. I consider that notion to be a mercenary notion.

His voice faded into silence. No heed was paid to his words. He turned his olive face, equine in expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to speak again.

MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Csar’s rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament, arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.

The gipsy student responded to the close of the period by crying:

—Three cheers for universal brotherhood!

—Go on, Temple, said a stout ruddy student near him. I’ll stand you a pint after.

—I’m a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark, oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod.

Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily, and repeated:

—Easy, easy, easy!

Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a thin foam:

—Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers for John Anthony Collins!

A thin voice from the verge of the ring replied:

—Pip! pip!

Moynihan murmured beside Stephen’s ear:

—And what about John Anthony’s poor little sister:

Lottie Collins lost her drawers;

Won’t you kindly lend her yours?

Stephen laughed and Moynihan, pleased with the result, murmured again:

—We’ll have five bob each way on John Anthony Collins.

—I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly.

—The affair doesn’t interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily. You know that well. Why do you make a scene about it?

—Good! said MacCann, smacking his lips. You are a reactionary then?

—Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword?

—Metaphors! said MacCann bluntly. Come to facts.

Stephen blushed and turned aside. MacCann stood his ground and said with hostile humour:

—Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the question of universal peace.

Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students by way of a peaceoffering, saying:

—Pax super totum sanguinarium globum.

Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the direction of the Csar’s image, saying:

—Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus, let us have a legitimate Jesus.

—By hell, that’s a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him. That’s a fine expression. I like that expression immensely.

He gulped down the spittle in his throat as if he were gulping down the phrase and, fumbling at the peak of his tweed cap, turned to Stephen, saying:

—Excuse me, sir, what do you mean by that expression you uttered just now?

Feeling himself jostled by the students near him, he said to them:

—I am curious to know now what he meant by that expression.

He turned again to Stephen and said in a whisper:

—Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man. Of course, I don’t know if you believe in man. I admire you, sir. I admire the mind of man independent of all religions. Is that your opinion about the mind of Jesus?

—Go on, Temple, said the stout ruddy student, returning, as was his wont, to his first idea, that pint is waiting for you.

—He thinks I’m an imbecile, Temple explained to Stephen, because I’m a believer in the power of mind.

Cranly linked his arms into those of Stephen and his admirer and said:

—Nos ad manum ballum jocabimus.

Stephen, in the act of being led away, caught sight of MacCann’s flushed bluntfeatured face.

—My signature is of no account, he said politely. You are right to go your way. Leave me to go mine.

—Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe you’re a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.

A voice said:

—Intellectual crankery is better out of this movement than in it.

Stephen, recognizing [recognising] the harsh tone of MacAlister’s voice, did not turn in the direction of the voice. Cranly pushed solemnly through the throng of students, linking Stephen and Temple like a celebrant attended by his ministers on his way to the altar.

Temple bent eagerly across Cranly’s breast and said:

—Did you hear MacAlister what he said? That youth is jealous of you. Did you see that? I bet Cranly didn’t see that. By hell, I saw that at once.

As they crossed the inner hall the dean of studies was in the act of escaping from the student with whom he had been conversing. He stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding his head often and repeating:

—Not a doubt of it, Mr Hackett! Very fine! Not a doubt of it!

In the middle of the hall the prefect of the college sodality was speaking earnestly, in a soft querulous voice, with a boarder. As he spoke he wrinkled a little his freckled brow and bit, between his phrases, at a tiny bone pencil.

—I hope the matric men will all come. The first arts men are pretty sure. Second arts too. We must make sure of the newcomers.

Temple bent again across Cranly, as they were passing through the doorway, and said in a swift whisper:

—Do you know that he is a married man? He was a married man before they converted him. He has a wife and children somewhere. By hell, I think that’s the queerest notion I ever heard! Eh?

His whisper trailed off into sly cackling laughter. The moment they were through the doorway Cranly seized him rudely by the neck and shook him, saying:

—You flaming floundering fool! I’ll take my dying bible there isn’t a bigger bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody world!

Temple wriggled in his grip, laughing still with sly content, while Cranly repeated flatly at every rude shake:

—A flaming flaring bloody idiot!

They crossed the weedy garden together. The president, wrapped in a heavy loose cloak, was coming towards them along one of the walks, reading his office. At the end of the walk he halted before turning and raised his eyes. The students saluted, Temple fumbling as before at the peak of his cap. They walked forward in silence. As they neared the alley Stephen could hear the thuds of the players’ hands and the wet smacks of the ball and Davin’s voice crying out excitedly at each stroke.

The three students halted round the box on which Davin sat to follow the game. Temple, after a few moments, sidled across to Stephen and said:

—Excuse me, I wanted to ask you do you believe that Jean Jacques Rousseau was a sincere man?

Stephen laughed outright. Cranly, picking up the broken stave of a cask from the grass at his foot, turned swiftly and said sternly:

—Temple, I declare to the living God if you say another word, do you know, to anybody on any subject I’ll kill you super spottum.

—He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man.

—Blast him, curse him! said Cranly broadly. Don’t talk to him at all. Sure, you might as well be talking, do you know, to a flaming chamberpot as talking to Temple. Go home, Temple. For God’s sake, go home.

—I don’t care a damn about you, Cranly, answered Temple, moving out of reach of the uplifted stave and pointing at Stephen. He’s the only man I see in this institution that has an individual mind.

—Institution! Individual! cried Cranly. Go home, blast you, for you’re a hopeless bloody man.

—I’m an emotional man, said Temple. That’s quite rightly expressed. And I’m proud that I’m an emotionalist.

He sidled out of the alley, smiling slily. Cranly watched him with a blank expressionless face.

—Look at him! he said. Did you ever see such a go-by-the-wall?

His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes. The laugh, pitched in a high key and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the whinny of an elephant. The student’s body shook all over and, to ease his mirth, he rubbed both his hands delightedly, over his groins.

—Lynch is awake, said Cranly.

Lynch, for answer, straightened himself and thrust forward his chest.

—Lynch puts out his chest, said Stephen, as a criticism of life.

Lynch smote himself sonorously on the chest and said:

—Who has anything to say about my girth?

Cranly took him at the word and the two began to tussle. When their faces had flushed with the struggle they drew apart, panting. Stephen bent down towards Davin who, intent on the game, had paid no heed to the talk of the others.

—And how is my little tame goose? he asked. Did he sign too?

Davin nodded and said:

—And you, Stevie?

Stephen shook his head.

—You’re a terrible man, Stevie, said Davin, taking the short pipe from his mouth. Always alone.

—Now that you have signed the petition for universal peace, said Stephen, I suppose you will burn that little copybook I saw in your room.

As Davin did not answer Stephen began to quote:

—Long pace, fianna! Right incline, fianna! Fianna, by numbers, salute, one, two!

—That’s a different question, said Davin. I’m an Irish nationalist, first and foremost. But that’s you all out. You’re a born sneerer, Stevie.

—When you make the next rebellion with hurleysticks, said Stephen, and want the indispensable informer, tell me. I can find you a few in this college.

—I can’t understand you, said Davin. One time I hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk against the Irish informers. What with your name and your ideas … Are you Irish at all?

—Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of my family, said Stephen.

—Then be one of us, said Davin. Why don’t you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson?

—You know one reason why, answered Stephen.

Davin tossed his head and laughed.

—O, come now, he said. Is it on account of that certain young lady and Father Moran? But that’s all in your own mind, Stevie. They were only talking and laughing.

Stephen paused and laid a friendly hand upon Davin’s shoulder.

—Do you remember, he said, when we knew each other first? The first morning we met you asked me to show you the way to the matriculation class, putting a very strong stress on the first syllable. You remember? Then you used to address the jesuits as father, you remember? I ask myself about you: Is he as innocent as his speech?

—I’m a simple person, said Davin. You know that. When you told me that night in Harcourt Street those things about your private life, honest to God, Stevie, I was not able to eat my dinner. I was quite bad. I was awake a long time that night. Why did you tell me those things?

—Thanks, said Stephen. You mean I am a monster.

—No, said Davin, but I wish you had not told me.

A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen’s friendliness.

—This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

—Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.

—My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

—For our freedom, said Davin.

—No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first.

—They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me.

Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant.

—The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.

—Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a man’s country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or mystic after.

—Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly. But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing with Cranly and the two players who had finished their game. A match of four was arranged, Cranly insisting, however, that his ball should be used. He let it rebound twice or thrice to his hand and struck it strongly and swiftly towards the base of the alley, exclaiming in answer to its thud:

—Your soul!

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. Then he plucked him by the sleeve to come away. Lynch obeyed, saying:

—Let us eke go, as Cranly has it.

Stephen smiled at this sidethrust. They passed back through the garden and out through the hall where the doddering porter was pinning up a notice in the frame. At the foot of the steps they halted and Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it to his companion.

—I know you are poor, he said.

—Damn your yellow insolence, answered Lynch.

This second proof of Lynch’s culture made Stephen smile again.

—It was a great day for European culture, he said, when you made up your mind to swear in yellow.

They lit their cigarettes and turned to the right. After a pause Stephen began:

—Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say …

Lynch halted and said bluntly:

—Stop! I won’t listen! I am sick. I was out last night on a yellow drunk with Horan and Goggins.

Stephen went on:

—Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

—Repeat, said Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.

—The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?

—I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.

Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets.

—O I did! I did! he cried.

Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at him for a moment boldly in the eyes. Lynch, recovering from his laughter, answered his look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull beneath the long pointed cap brought before Stephen’s mind the image of a hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and selfembittered.

—As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are all animals. I also am an animal.

—You are, said Lynch.

—But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

—Not always, said Lynch critically.

—In the same way, said Stephen, your flesh responded to the stimulus of a naked statue but it was, I say, simply a reflex action of the nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

—What is that exactly? asked Lynch.

—Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

—If that is rhythm, said Lynch, let me hear what you call beauty: and, please remember, though I did eat a cake of cowdung once, that I admire only beauty.

Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing slightly, he laid his hand on Lynch’s thick tweed sleeve.

—We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.

They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water, and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the course of Stephen’s thought.

—But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. What is art? What is the beauty it expresses?

—That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepyheaded wretch, said Stephen, when I began to try to think out the matter for myself. Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk about Wicklow bacon.

—I remember, said Lynch. He told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs.

—Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You remember the pigs and forget that. You are a distressing pair, you and Cranly.

Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and said:

—If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least another cigarette. I don’t care about it. I don’t even care about women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You can’t get me one.

Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. Lynch took the last one that remained, saying simply:

—Proceed!

—Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases.

Lynch nodded.

—I remember that, he said. Pulcra sunt quæ visa placent.

—He uses the word visa, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces also a stasis of the mind. You would not write your name in pencil across the hypothenuse of a rightangled triangle.

—No, said Lynch, give me the hypothenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles.

—Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I don’t think that it has a meaning but the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle’s entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connection belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. Is that clear?

—But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and Aquinas can do?

—Let us take woman, said Stephen.

—Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.

—The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see however two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lectureroom where MacCann, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours.

—Then MacCann is a sulphuryellow liar, said Lynch energetically.

—There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.

—To wit? said Lynch.

—This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of sir Patrick Dun’s hospital covering the end of Stephen’s speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion’s illhumour had had its vent.

—This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas for another pennyworth of wisdom.

Lynch laughed.

—It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after time like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve?

—MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends Aquinas will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience.

—Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about the new personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and finish the first part.

—Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand me better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with the words Pange lingua gloriosi. They say it is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing hymn. I like it: but there is no hymn that can be put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the Vexilla Regis of Venantius Fortunatus.

Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass [base] voice:

Impleta sunt quæ concinit

David fideli carmine

Dicendo nationibus

Regnavit a ligno Deus.

—That’s great! he said, well pleased. Great music!

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped.

—Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was plucked. Halpin and O’Flynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. O’Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clarke’s gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry.

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had advanced through his tidings of success, his small fatencircled eyes vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.

In reply to a question of Stephen’s his eyes and his voice came forth again from their lurkingplaces.

—Yes, MacCullagh and I, he said. He’s taking pure mathematics and I’m taking constitutional history. There are twenty subjects. I’m taking botany too. You know I’m a member of the field club.

He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion and placed a plump woollengloved hand on his breast, from which muttered wheezing laughter at once broke forth.

—Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you go out, said Stephen drily, to make a stew.

The fat student laughed indulgently and said:

—We are all highly respectable people in the field club. Last Saturday we went out to Glenmalure, seven of us.

—With women, Donovan? said Lynch.

Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said:

—Our end is the acquisition of knowledge.

Then he said quickly:

—I hear you are writing some essay about esthetics.

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

—Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic, German, ultraprofound.

Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of them urbanely.

—I must go, he said softly and benevolently. I have a strong suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that my sister intended to make pancakes today for the dinner of the Donovan family.

—Goodbye, Stephen said in his wake. Don’t forget the turnips for me and my mate.

Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face resembled a devil’s mask:

—To think that that yellow pancakeeating excrement can get a good job, he said at length, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes!

They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went on for a little in silence.

—To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

—Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher’s boy had slung inverted on his head.

—Look at that basket, he said.

—I see it, said Lynch.

—In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.

—Bull’s eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

—Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result [results] of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.

—Bull’s eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar.

—The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalisation which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thoughtenchanted silence.

—What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition. In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the second sense of the term our judgment is influenced in the first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others.

—That you told me a few nights ago, said Lynch, and we began the famous discussion.

—I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to explain. Here are some questions I set myself: Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical or dramatic? Can excrement or a child or a louse be a work of art? If not, why not?

—Why not, indeed? said Lynch, laughing.

—If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?

—That’s a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true scholastic stink.

—Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn, to reach the national library before the shower came.

—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.

The rain fell faster. When they passed through the passage beside the royal Irish academy they found many students sheltering under the arcade of the library. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth with a sharpened match, listening to some companions. Some girls stood near the entrance door. Lynch whispered to Stephen:

—Your beloved is here.

Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of students, heedless of the rain which fell fast, turning his eyes towards her from time to time. She too stood silently among her companions. She has no priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was right. His mind, emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.

He heard the students talking among themselves. They spoke of two friends who had passed the final medical examination, of the chances of getting places on ocean liners, of poor and rich practices.

—That’s all a bubble. An Irish country practice is better.

—Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same. A frightful hole he said it was. Nothing but midwifery cases. Half a crown cases.

—Do you mean to say it is better to have a job here in the country than in a rich city like that? I know a fellow …

—Hynes has no brains. He got through by stewing, pure stewing.

—Don’t mind him. There’s plenty of money to be made in a big commercial city.

—Depends on the practice.

—Ego credo ut vita pauperum est simpliciter atrox, simpliciter sanguinarius atrox, in Liverpoolio.

Their voices reached his ears as if from a distance in interrupted pulsation. She was preparing to go away with her companions.

The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation was breathed forth by the blackened earth. Their trim boots prattled as they stood on the steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and gaily, glancing at the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning angles against the few last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts demurely.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird’s life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird’s heart?

*   *   *

Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet. Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet music. His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning knowledge, a morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him! His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant of enchantment only or long hours and days and years and ages?

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy circumstance of what had happened or of what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strange that no man had known or would know, wilful from before the beginning of the world: and lured by that ardent roselike glow the choirs of the seraphim were falling from heaven.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,

Lure of the fallen seraphim?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them. The roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze

And you have had your will of him.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move and beat. And then? Smoke, incense ascending from the altar of the world.

Above the flame the smoke of praise

Goes up from ocean rim to rim.

Tell no more of enchanted days.

Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury oceans, smoke of her praise. The earth was like a swinging smoking swaying censer, a ball of incense, an ellipsoidal ball. The rhythm died out at once; the cry of his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over and over; then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and baffled; then stopped. The heart’s cry was broken.

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked window the morning light was gathering. A bell beat faintly very far away. A bird twittered; two birds, three. The bell and the bird ceased: and the dull white light spread itself east and west, covering the world, covering the roselight in his heart.

Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look for paper and pencil. There was neither on the table; only the soupplate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the candlestick with its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame. He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed, groping with his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. His fingers found a pencil and then a cigarette packet. He lay back and, tearing open the packet, placed the last cigarette on the windowledge and began to write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters on the rough cardboard surface.

Having written them out he lay back on the lumpy pillow, murmuring them again. The lumps of knotted flock under his head reminded him of the lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour on which he used to sit, smiling or serious, asking himself why he had come, displeased with her and with himself, confounded by the print of the Sacred Heart above the untenanted sideboard. He saw her approach him in a lull of the talk and beg him to sing one of his curious songs. Then he saw himself sitting at the old piano, striking chords softly from its speckled keys and singing, amid the talk which had risen again in the room, to her who leaned beside the mantelpiece a dainty song of the Elizabethans, a sad and sweet loth to depart, the victory chant of Agincourt, the happy air of Greensleeves. While he sang and she listened, or feigned to listen, his heart was at rest but when the quaint old songs had ended and he heard again the voices in the room he remembered his own sarcasm: the house where young men are called by their christian names a little too soon.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him but he had waited in vain. She passed now dancing lightly across his memory as she had been that night at the carnival ball, her white dress a little lifted, a white spray nodding in her hair. She danced lightly in the round. She was dancing towards him and, as she came, her eyes were a little averted and a faint glow was on her cheek. At the pause in the chain of hands her hand had lain in his an instant, a soft merchandise.

—You are a great stranger now.

—Yes. I was born to be a monk.

—I am afraid you are a heretic.

—Are you much afraid?

For answer she had danced away from him along the chain of hands, dancing lightly and discreetly, giving herself to none. The white spray nodded to her dancing and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on her cheek.

A monk! His own image started forth a profaner of the cloister, a heretic Franciscan, [franciscan,] willing and willing not to serve, spinning like Gherardino da Borgo San Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and whispering in her ear.

No, it was not his image. It was like the image of the young priest in whose company he had seen her last, looking at him out of dove’s eyes, toying with the pages of her Irish phrasebook.

—Yes, yes, the ladies are coming round to us. I can see it every day. The ladies are with us. The best helpers the language has.

—And the church, Father Moran?

—The church too. Coming round too. The work is going ahead there too. Don’t fret about the church.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the library. He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the scullerymaid of christendom.

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of ecstasy from his soul. It broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his memory: the flowergirl in the ragged dress with damp coarse hair and a hoyden’s face who had called herself his own girl and begged his handsel, the kitchengirl in the next house who sang over the clatter of her plates with the drawl of a country singer the first bars of By Killarney’s Lakes and Fells, a girl who had laughed gaily to see him stumble when the iron grating in the footpath near Cork Hill had caught the broken sole of his shoe, a girl he had glanced at, attracted by her small ripe mouth as she passed out of Jacob’s biscuit factory, who had cried to him over her shoulder:

—Do you like what you seen of me, straight hair and curly eyebrows?

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his anger was also a form of homage. He had left the classroom in disdain that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow. He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild lover and leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest. His anger against her found vent in coarse railing at her paramour, whose name and voice and features offended his baffled pride: a priested peasant, with a brother a policeman in Dublin and a brother a potboy in Moycullen. To him she would unveil her soul’s shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to him, a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving.

Our broken cries and mournful lays

Rise in one eucharistic hymn.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise

The chalice flowing to the brim,

Tell no more of enchanted days.

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence; [indulgence:] then copied them painfully to feel them the better by seeing them; then lay back on his bolster.

The full morning light had come. No sound was to be heard: but he knew that all around him life was about to awaken in common noises, hoarse voices, sleepy prayers. Shrinking from that life he turned towards the wall, making a cowl of the blanket and staring at the great overblown scarlet flowers of the tattered wallpaper. He tried to warm his perishing joy in their scarlet glow, imagining a roseway from where he lay upwards to heaven all strewn with scarlet flowers. Weary! Weary! He too was weary of ardent ways.

A gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed over him, descending along his spine from his closely cowled head. He felt it descend and, seeing himself as he lay, smiled. Soon he would sleep.

He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before she had worn her shawl cowlwise about her head, sending sprays of her warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy road. It was the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. They stood on the steps of the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. She came up to his step many times between their phrases and went down again and once or twice remained beside him forgetting to go down and then went down. Let be! Let be!

Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If he sent her the verses? They would be read out at breakfast amid the tapping of eggshells. Folly indeed! The brothers would laugh and try to wrest the page from each other with their strong hard fingers. The suave priest, her uncle, seated in his armchair, would hold the page at arm’s length, read it smiling and approve of the literary form.

No, no: that was folly. Even if he sent her the verses she would not show them to others. No, no: she could not.

He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense of her innocence moved him almost to pity her, an innocence he had never understood till he had come to the knowledge of it through sin, an innocence which she too had not understood while she was innocent or before the strange humiliation of her nature had first come upon her. Then first her soul had begun to live as his soul had when he had first sinned: and a tender compassion filled his heart as he remembered her frail pallor and her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark shame of womanhood.

While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor where had she been? Might it be, in the mysterious ways of spiritual life, that her soul at those same moments had been conscious of his homage? It might be.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his body. Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep, the temptress of his villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with a look of languor, were opening to his eyes. Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm, odorous and lavishlimbed, enfolded him like a shining cloud, enfolded him like water with a liquid life: and like a cloud of vapour or like waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,

Lure of the fallen seraphim?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze

And you have had your will of him.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise

Goes up from ocean rim to rim.

Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays

Rise in one eucharistic hymn.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise

The chalice flowing to the brim,

Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze

With languorous look and lavish limb!

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

*   *   *

What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the library to look at them, leaning wearily on his ashplant. They flew round and round the jutting shoulder of a house in Molesworth Street. The air of the late March evening made clear their flight, their dark darting quivering bodies flying clearly against the sky as against a limphung cloth of smoky tenuous blue.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.

He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mother’s sobs and reproaches murmured insistently and the dark frail quivering bodies wheeling and fluttering and swerving round an airy temple of the tenuous sky soothed his eyes which still saw the image of his mother’s face.

Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the porch, hearing their shrill twofold cry, watching their flight? For an augury of good or evil? A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and have not perverted that order by reason.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the god’s image for it made him think of a bottlenosed judge in a wig, putting commas into a document which he held at arm’s length and he knew that he would not have remembered the god’s name but that it was like an Irish oath. It was folly. But was it for this folly that he was about to leave for ever the house of prayer and prudence into which he had been born and the order of life out of which he had come?

They came back with shrill cries over the jutting shoulder of the house, flying darkly against the fading air. What birds were they? He thought that they must be swallows who had come back from the south. Then he was to go away for they were birds ever going and coming, building ever an unlasting home under the eaves of men’s houses and ever leaving the homes they had built to wander.

Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel,

I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes

Upon the nest under the eave before

He wander the loud waters.

A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters.

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly.

Symbol of departure or of loneliness? The verses crooned in the ear of his memory composed slowly before his remembering eyes the scene of the hall on the night of the opening of the national theatre. He was alone at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scenecloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps of the stage. A burly policeman sweated behind him and seemed at every moment about to act. The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts round the hall from his scattered fellowstudents.

—A libel on Ireland!

—Made in Germany!

—Blasphemy!

—We never sold our faith!

—No Irish woman ever did it!

—We want no amateur atheists.

—We want no budding buddhists.

A sudden swift hiss fell from the windows above him and he knew that the electric lamps had been switched on in the reader’s [readers’] room. He turned into the pillared hall, now calmly lit, went up the staircase and passed in through the clicking turnstile.

Cranly was sitting over near the dictionaries. A thick book, opened at the frontispiece, lay before him on the wooden rest. He leaned back in his chair, inclining his ear like that of a confessor to the face of the medical student who was reading to him a problem from the chess page of a journal. Stephen sat down at his right and the priest at the other side of the table closed his copy of The Tablet with an angry snap and stood up.

Cranly gazed after him blandly and vaguely. The medical student went on in a softer voice:

—Pawn to king’s fourth.

—We had better go, Dixon, said Stephen in warning. He has gone to complain.

Dixon folded the journal and rose with dignity, saying:

—Our men retired in good order.

—With guns and cattle, added Stephen, pointing to the titlepage of Cranly’s book on which was printed Diseases of the Ox.

As they passed through a lane of the tables Stephen said:

—Cranly, I want to speak to you.

Cranly did not answer or turn. He laid his book on the counter and passed out, his wellshod feet sounding flatly on the floor. On the staircase he paused and gazing absently at Dixon repeated:

—Pawn to king’s bloody fourth.

—Put it that way [way,] if you like, Dixon said.

He had a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his plump clean hand he displayed at moments a signet ring.

As they crossed the hall a man of dwarfish stature came towards them. Under the dome of his tiny hat his unshaven face began to smile with pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were melancholy as those of a monkey.

—Good evening, captain, said Cranly, halting.

—Good evening, gentlemen, said the stubblegrown monkeyish face.

—Warm weather for March, said Cranly. They have the windows open upstairs.

Dixon smiled and turned his ring. The blackish monkey-puckered face pursed its human mouth with gentle pleasure: and its voice purred:

—Delightful weather for March. Simply delightful.

—There are two nice young ladies upstairs, captain, tired of waiting, Dixon said.

Cranly smiled and said kindly:

—The captain has only one love: sir Walter Scott. Isn’t that so, captain?

—What are you reading now, captain? Dixon asked. The Bride of Lammermoor?

—I love old Scott, the flexible lips said. I think he writes something lovely. There is no writer can touch sir Walter Scott.

He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the air in time to his praise and his thin quick eyelids beat often over his sad eyes.

Sadder to Stephen’s ear was his speech: a genteel accent, low and moist, marred by errors: and listening to it he wondered was the story true and was the thin blood that flowed in his shrunken frame noble and come of an incestuous love?

The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with their greenwhite slime. They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans. They embraced without joy or passion, his arm about his sister’s neck. A grey woollen cloak was wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her waist: and her fair head was bent in willing shame. He had loose redbrown hair and tender shapely strong freckled hands. Face. There was no face seen. The brother’s face was bent upon her fair rainfragrant hair. The hand freckled and strong and shapely and caressing was Davin’s hand.

He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the shrivelled mannikin who had called it forth. His father’s gibes at the Bantry gang leaped out of his memory. He held them at a distance and brooded uneasily on his own thought again. Why were they not Cranly’s hands? Had Davin’s simplicity and innocence stung him more secretly?

He walked on across the hall with Dixon, leaving Cranly to take leave elaborately of the dwarf.

Under the colonnade Temple was standing in the midst of a little group of students. One of them cried:

—Dixon, come over till you hear. Temple is in grand form.

Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes.

—You’re a hypocrite, O’Keeffe, he said, and Dixon’s a smiler. By hell, I think that’s a good literary expression.

He laughed slily, looking in Stephen’s face, repeating:

—By hell, I’m delighted with that name. A smiler.

A stout student who stood below them on the steps said:

—Come back to the mistress, Temple. We want to hear about that.

—He had, faith, Temple said. And he was a married man too. And all the priests used to be dining there. By hell, I think they all had a touch.

—We shall call it riding a hack to spare the hunter, said Dixon.

—Tell us, Temple, O’Keeffe said, how many quarts of porter have you in you?

—All your intellectual soul is in that phrase, O’Keeffe, said Temple with open scorn.

He moved with a shambling gait round the group and spoke to Stephen.

—Did you know that the Forsters are the kings of Belgium? he asked.

Cranly came out through the door of the entrance hall, his hat thrust back on the nape of his neck and picking his teeth with care.

—And here’s the wiseacre, said Temple. Do you know that about the Forsters?

He paused for an answer. Cranly dislodged a figseed from his teeth on the point of his rude toothpick and gazed at it intently.

—The Forster family, Temple said, is descended from Baldwin the First, king of Flanders. He was called the Forester. Forester and Forster are the same name. A descendant of Baldwin the First, captain Francis Forster, settled in Ireland and married the daughter of the last chieftain of Clanbrassil. Then there are the Blake Forsters. That’s a different branch.

—From Baldhead, king of Flanders, Cranly repeated, rooting again deliberately at his gleaming uncovered teeth.

—Where did you pick up all that history? O’Keeffe asked.

—I know all the history of your family too, Temple said, turning to Stephen. Do you know what Giraldus Cambrensis says about your family?

—Is he descended from Baldwin too? asked a tall consumptive student with dark eyes.

—Baldhead, Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice in his teeth.

—Pernobilis et pervetusta familia, Temple said to Stephen.

The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him saying in a soft voice:

—Did an angel speak?

Cranly turned also and said vehemently but without anger:

—Goggins, you’re the flamingest dirty devil I ever met, do you know.

—I had it on my mind to say that, Goggins answered firmly. It did no one any harm, did it?

—We hope, Dixon said suavely, that it was not of the kind known to science as a paulo post futurum.

—Didn’t I tell you he was a smiler? said Temple, turning right and left. Didn’t I give him that name?

—You did. We’re not deaf, said the tall consumptive.

Cranly still frowned at the stout student below him. Then, with a snort of disgust, he shoved him violently down the steps.

—Go away from here, he said rudely. Go away, you stinkpot. And you are a stinkpot.

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with good humour. Temple turned back to Stephen and asked:

—Do you believe in the law of heredity?

—Are you drunk or what are you or what are you trying to say? asked Cranly, facing round on him with an expression of wonder.

—The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death.

He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said eagerly:

—Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?

Cranly pointed his long forefinger.

—Look at him! he said with scorn to the others. Look at Ireland’s hope!

They laughed at his words and gesture. Temple turned on him bravely, saying:

—Cranly, you’re always sneering at me. I can see that. But I am as good as you any day. Do you know what I think about you now as compared with myself?

—My dear man, said Cranly urbanely, you are incapable, do you know, absolutely incapable of thinking.

—But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself compared together?

—Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps. Get it out in bits!

Temple turned right and left, making sudden feeble gestures as he spoke.

—I’m a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair. I am. And I know I am. And I admit it that I am.

Dixon patted him lightly on the shoulder and said mildly:

—And it does you every credit, Temple.

—But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly. He is a ballocks too like me. Only he doesn’t know it. And that’s the only difference, [difference] I see.

A burst of laughter covered his words. But he turned again to Stephen and said with a sudden eagerness:

—That word is a most interesting word. That’s the only English dual number. Did you know?

—Is it? Stephen said vaguely.

He was watching Cranly’s firmfeatured suffering face, lit up now by a smile of false patience. The gross name had passed over it like foul water poured over an old stone image, patient of injuries: and, as he watched him, he saw him raise his hat in salute and uncover the black hair that stood up stiffly from his forehead like an iron crown.

She passed out from the porch of the library and bowed across Stephen in reply to Cranly’s greeting. He also? Was there not a slight flush on Cranly’s cheek? Or had it come forth at Temple’s words? The light had waned. He could not see.

Did that explain his friend’s listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden intrusions of rude speech with which he had shattered so often Stephen’s ardent wayward confessions? Stephen had forgiven freely for he had found this rudeness also in himself towards himself. And he remembered an evening when he had dismounted from a borrowed creaking bicycle to pray to God in a wood near Malahide. He had lifted up his arms and spoken in ecstasy to the sombre nave of the trees, knowing that he stood on holy ground and in a holy hour. And when two constabularymen had come into sight round a bend in the gloomy road he had broken off his prayer to whistle loudly an air from the last pantomime.

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar. Had Cranly not heard him? Yet he could wait. The talk about him ceased for a moment: and a soft hiss fell again from a window above. But no other sound was in the air and the swallows whose flight he had followed with idle eyes were sleeping.

She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the air was silent save for one soft hiss that fell. And therefore the tongues about him had ceased their babble. Darkness was falling.

Darkness falls from the air.

A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?

He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the colonnade, beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his revery from the students whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back to itself the age of Dowland and Byrd and Nash.

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan: and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the poxfouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again.

The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure. They were secret and enflaming but her image was not entangled by them. That was not the way to think of her. It was not even the way in which he thought of her. Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases, sweet only with a disinterred sweetness like the figseeds Cranly rooted out of his gleaming teeth.

It was not thought nor vision though he knew vaguely that her figure was passing homeward through the city. Vaguely first and then more sharply he smelt her body. A conscious unrest seethed in his blood. Yes, it was her body he smelt: a wild and languid smell: the tepid limbs over which his music had flowed desirously and the secret soft linen upon which her flesh distilled odour and a dew.

A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and forefinger deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it. He rolled its body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die. There came to his mind a curious phrase from Cornelius a Lapide which said that the lice born of human sweat were not created by God with the other animals on the sixth day. But the tickling of the skin of his neck made his mind raw and red. The life of his body, illclad, illfed, louseeaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair: and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell. Yes; and it was not darkness that fell from the air. It was brightness.

Brightness falls from the air.

He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.

He came back quickly along the colonnade towards the group of students. Well then, let her go and be damned to her. She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her.

Cranly had taken another dried fig from the supply in his pocket and was eating it slowly and noisily. Temple sat on the pediment of a pillar, leaning back, his cap pulled down on his sleepy eyes. A squat young man came out of the porch, a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit. He marched towards the group, striking the flags with the heels of his boots and with the ferule of his heavy umbrella. Then, raising the umbrella in salute, he said to all:

—Good evening, sirs.

He struck the flags again and tittered while his head trembled with a slight nervous movement. The tall consumptive student and Dixon and O’Keeffe were speaking in Irish and did not answer him. Then, turning to Cranly, he said:

—Good evening, particularly to you.

He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered again. Cranly, who was still chewing the fig, answered with loud movements of his jaws.

—Good? Yes. It is a good evening.

The squat student looked at him seriously and shook his umbrella gently and reprovingly.

—I can see, he said, that you are about to make obvious remarks.

—Um, Cranly answered, holding out what remained of the halfchewed fig and jerking it towards the squat student’s mouth in sign that he should eat.

The squat student did not eat it but, indulging his special humour, said gravely, still tittering and prodding his phrase with his umbrella:

—Do you intend that …

He broke off, pointed bluntly to the munched pulp of the fig and said loudly:

—I allude to that.

—Um, Cranly said as before.

—Do you intend that now, the squat student said, as ipso facto or, let us say, as so to speak?

Dixon turned aside from his group, saying:

—Goggins was waiting for you, Glynn. He has gone round to the Adelphi to look for you and Moynihan. What have you there? he asked, tapping the portfolio under Glynn’s arm.

—Examination papers, Glynn answered. I give them monthly examinations to see that they are profiting by my tuition.

He also tapped the portfolio and coughed gently and smiled.

—Tuition! said Cranly rudely. I suppose you mean the barefooted children that are taught by a bloody ape like you. God help them!

He bit off the rest of the fig and flung away the butt.

—I suffer little children to come unto me, Glynn said amiably.

—A bloody ape, Cranly repeated with emphasis, and a blasphemous bloody ape!

Temple stood up and, pushing past Cranly, addressed Glynn:

—That phrase you said now, he said, is from the new testament about suffer the children to come to me.

—Go to sleep again, Temple, said O’Keeffe.

—Very well, then, Temple continued, still addressing Glynn, and if Jesus suffered the children to come why does the church send them all to hell if they die unbaptised? Why is that?

—Were you baptised yourself, Temple? the consumptive student asked.

—But why are they sent to hell if Jesus said they were all to come? Temple said, his eyes searching in Glynn’s eyes.

Glynn coughed and said gently, holding back with difficulty the nervous titter in his voice and moving his umbrella at every word:

—And, as you remark, if it is thus I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

—Because the church is cruel like all old sinners, Temple said.

—Are you quite orthodox on that point [point,] Temple? Dixon said suavely.

—Saint Augustine says that about unbaptised children going to hell, Temple answered, because he was a cruel old sinner too.

—I bow to you, Dixon said, but I had the impression that limbo existed for such cases.

—Don’t argue with him, Dixon, Cranly said brutally. Don’t talk to him or look at him. Lead him home with a sugan the way you’d lead a bleating goat.

—Limbo! Temple cried. That’s a fine invention too. Like hell.

—But with the unpleasantness left out, Dixon said.

He turned smiling to the others and said:

—I think I am voicing the opinions of all present in saying so much.

—You are, Glynn said in a firm tone. On that point Ireland is united.

He struck the ferule of his umbrella on the stone floor of the colonnade.

—Hell, Temple said. I can respect that invention of the grey spouse of Satan. Hell is Roman, like the walls of the Romans, strong and ugly. But what is limbo?

—Put him back into the perambulator, Cranly, O’Keeffe called out.

Cranly made a swift step towards Temple, halted, stamping his foot, crying as if to a fowl:

—Hoosh!

Temple moved away nimbly.

—Do you know what limbo is? he cried. Do you know what we call a notion like that in Roscommon?

—Hoosh! Blast you! Cranly cried, clapping his hands.

—Neither my arse nor my elbow! Temple cried out scornfully. And that’s what I call limbo.

—Give us that stick here, Cranly said.

He snatched the ashplant roughly from Stephen’s hand and sprang down the steps: but Temple, hearing him move in pursuit, fled through the dusk like a wild creature, nimble and fleetfooted. Cranly’s heavy boots were heard loudly charging across the quadrangle and then returning heavily, foiled and spurning the gravel at each step.

His step was angry and with an angry abrupt gesture he thrust the stick back into Stephen’s hand. Stephen felt that his anger had another cause but, feigning patience, touched his arm slightly and said quietly:

—Cranly, I told you I wanted to speak to you. Come away.

Cranly looked at him for a few moments and asked:

—Now?

—Yes, now, Stephen said. We can’t speak here. Come away.

They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking. The birdcall from Siegfried whistled softly followed them from the steps of the porch. Cranly turned: and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:

—Where are you fellows off to? What about that game, Cranly?

They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards to be played in the Adelphi hotel. [Hotel.] Stephen walked on alone and out into the quiet of Kildare Street. Opposite Maple’s hotel [Hotel] he stood to wait, patient again. The name of the hotel, a colourless polished wood, and its colourless quiet front stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm. They thought of army commissions and land agents: peasants greeted them along the roads in the country: they knew the names of certain French dishes and gave orders to jarvies in highpitched provincial voices which pierced through their skintight accents.

How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes, under trees by the edges of streams and near the poolmottled bogs. A woman had waited in the doorway as Davin had passed by at night and, offering him a cup of milk, had all but wooed him to her bed; for Davin had the mild eyes of one who could be secret. But him no woman’s eyes had wooed.

His arm was taken in a strong grip and Cranly’s voice said:

—Let us eke go.

They walked southward in silence. Then Cranly said:

—That blithering idiot Temple! I swear to Moses, do you know, that I’ll be the death of that fellow one time.

But his voice was no longer angry and Stephen wondered was he thinking of her greeting to him under the porch.

They turned to the left and walked on as before. When they had gone on so for some time Stephen said:

—Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening.

—With your people? Cranly asked.

—With my mother.

—About religion?

—Yes, Stephen answered.

After a pause Cranly asked:

—What age is your mother?

—Not old, Stephen said. She wishes me to make my easter duty.

—And will you?

—I will not, Stephen said.

—Why not? Cranly said.

—I will not serve, answered Stephen.

—That remark was made before, Cranly said calmly.

—It is made behind now, said Stephen hotly.

Cranly pressed Stephen’s arm, saying:

—Go easy, my dear man. You’re an excitable bloody man, do you know.

He laughed nervously as he spoke and, looking up into Stephen’s face with moved and friendly eyes, said:

—Do you know that you are an excitable man?

—I daresay I am, said Stephen, laughing also.

Their minds, lately estranged, seemed suddenly to have been drawn closer, one to the other.

—Do you believe in the eucharist? Cranly asked.

—I do not, Stephen said.

—Do you disbelieve then?

—I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it, Stephen answered.

—Many persons have doubts, even religious persons, yet they overcome them or put them aside, Cranly said. Are your doubts on that point too strong?

—I do not wish to overcome them, Stephen answered.

Cranly, embarrassed for a moment, took another fig from his pocket and was about to eat it when Stephen said:

—Don’t, please. You cannot discuss this question with your mouth full of chewed fig.

Cranly examined the fig by the light of a lamp under which he halted. Then he smelt it with both nostrils, bit a tiny piece, spat it out and threw the fig rudely into the gutter. Addressing it as it lay, he said:

—Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!

Taking Stephen’s arm, he went on again and said:

—Do you not fear that those words may be spoken to you on the day of judgment?

—What is offered me on the other hand? Stephen asked. An eternity of bliss in the company of the dean of studies?

—Remember, Cranly said, that he would be glorified.

—Ay, [Ah,] Stephen said somewhat bitterly, bright, agile, impassible and, above all, subtle.

—It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.

—I did, Stephen answered.

—And were you happier then? Cranly asked softly. Happier than you are now, for instance?

—Often happy, Stephen said, and often unhappy. I was someone else then.

—How someone else? What do you mean by that statement?

—I mean, said Stephen, that I was not myself as I am now, as I had to become.

—Not as you are now, not as you had to become, Cranly repeated. Let me ask you a question. Do you love your mother?

Stephen shook his head slowly.

—I don’t know what your words mean, he said simply.

—Have you never loved anyone? Cranly asked.

—Do you mean women?

—I am not speaking of that, Cranly said in a colder tone. I ask you if you ever felt love towards anyone or anything.

Stephen walked on beside his friend, staring gloomily at the footpath.

—I tried to love God, he said at length. It seems now I failed. It is very difficult. I tried to unite my will with the will of God instant by instant. In that I did not always fail. I could perhaps do that still …

Cranly cut him short by asking:

—Has your mother had a happy life?

—How do I know? Stephen said.

—How many children had she?

—Nine or ten, Stephen answered. Some died.

—Was your father…. Cranly interrupted himself for an instant: and then said: I don’t want to pry into your family affairs. But was your father what is called well-to-do? I mean when you were growing up?

—Yes, Stephen said.

—What was he? Cranly asked after a pause.

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes.

—A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephen’s arm, and said:

—The distillery is damn good.

—Is there anything else you want to know? Stephen asked.

—Are you in good circumstances at present?

—Do I look it? Stephen asked bluntly.

—So then, Cranly went on musingly, you were born in the lap of luxury.

He used the phrase broadly and loudly as he often used technical expressions as if he wished his hearer to understand that they were used by him without conviction.

—Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said then. Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if … or would you?

—If I could, Stephen said. That would cost me very little.

—Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set her mind at rest.

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:

—Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:

—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

—Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.

—Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said.

—And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

—The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

—I don’t care a flaming damn what anyone calls him, Cranly said rudely and flatly. I call him a pig.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

—Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has apologised for him.

—Did the idea ever occur to you, Cranly asked, that Jesus was not what he pretended to be?

—The first person to whom that idea occurred, Stephen answered, was Jesus himself.

—I mean, Cranly said, hardening in his speech, did the idea ever occur to you that he was himself a conscious hypocrite, what he called the jews of his time, a whited sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly, that he was a blackguard?

—That idea never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?

He turned towards his friend’s face and saw there a raw smile which some force of will strove to make finely significant.

Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone:

—Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?

—Somewhat, Stephen said.

—And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?

—I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.

—And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host too may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?

—Yes, Stephen said quietly. I feel that and I also fear it.

—I see, Cranly said.

Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once by saying:

—I fear many things: dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night.

—But why do you fear a bit of bread?

—I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.

—Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

—The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

—Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?

—I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

They had walked on towards the township of Pembroke and now, as they went on slowly along the avenues, the trees and the scattered lights in the villas soothed their minds. The air of wealth and repose diffused about them seemed to comfort their neediness. Behind a hedge of laurel a light glimmered in the window of a kitchen and the voice of a servant was heard singing as she sharpened knives. She sang, in short broken bars, Rosie O’Grady.

Cranly stopped to listen, saying:

—Mulier cantat.

The soft beauty of the Latin word [words] touched with an enchanting touch the dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch of music or of a woman’s hand. The strife of their minds was quelled. The figure of woman as she appears in the liturgy of the church passed silently through the darkness: a whiterobed figure, small and slender as a boy and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail and high as a boy’s, was heard intoning from a distant choir the first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first chanting of the passion:

—Et tu cum Jesu Galilæo eras.

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a young star, shining clearer as the voice intoned the proparoxyton and more faintly as the cadence died.

The singing ceased. They went on together, Cranly repeating in strongly stressed rhythm the end of the refrain:

And when we are married,

O, how happy we’ll be

For I love sweet Rosie O’Grady

And Rosie O’Grady loves me.

—There’s real poetry for you, he said. There’s real love.

He glanced sideways at Stephen with a strange smile and said:

—Do you consider that poetry? Or do you know what the words mean?

—I want to see Rosie first, said Stephen.

—She’s easy to find, Cranly said.

His hat had come down on his forehead. He shoved it back: and in the shadow of the trees Stephen saw his pale face, framed by the dark, and his large dark eyes. Yes. His face was handsome: and his body was strong and hard. He had spoken of a mother’s love. He felt then the sufferings of women, the weaknesses of their bodies and souls: and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to them.

Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he would go. He could not strive against another. He knew his part.

—Probably I shall go away, he said.

—Where? Cranly asked.

—Where I can, Stephen said.

—Yes, Cranly said. It might be difficult for you to live here now. But is it that that makes you go?

—I have to go, Stephen answered.

—Because, Cranly continued, you need not look upon yourself as driven away if you do not wish to go or as a heretic or an outlaw. There are many good believers who think as you do. Would that surprise you? The church is not the stone building nor even the clergy and their dogmas. It is the whole mass of those born into it. I don’t know what you wish to do in life. Is it what you told me the night we were standing outside Harcourt Street station?

—Yes, Stephen said, smiling in spite of himself at Cranly’s way of remembering thoughts in connection with places. The night you spent half an hour wrangling with Doherty about the shortest way from Sallygap to Larras.

—Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. What does he know about the way from Sallygap to Larras? Or what does he know about anything for that matter? And the big slobbering washingpot head of him!

He broke out into a loud long laugh.

—Well? Stephen said. Do you remember the rest?

—What you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes, I remember it. To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

Stephen raised his hat in acknowledgment.

—Freedom! Cranly repeated. But you are not free enough yet to commit a sacrilege. Tell me, would you rob?

—I would beg first, Stephen said.

—And if you got nothing, would you rob?

—You wish me to say, Stephen answered, that the rights of property are provisional and that in certain circumstances it is not unlawful to rob. Everyone would act in that belief. So I will not make you that answer. Apply to the jesuit theologian Juan Mariana de Talavera who will also explain to you in what circumstances you may lawfully kill your king and whether you had better hand him his poison in a goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or his saddlebow. Ask me rather would I suffer others to rob me or, if they did, would I call down upon them what I believe is called the chastisement of the secular arm?

—And would you?

—I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be robbed.

—I see, Cranly said.

He produced his match and began to clean the crevice between two teeth. Then he said carelessly:

—Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin?

—Excuse me, Stephen said politely, is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?

—What then is your point of view? Cranly asked.

His last phrase, soursmelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening, excited Stephen’s brain, over which its fumes seemed to brood.

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

Cranly seized his arm and steered him round so as to head back towards Leeson Park. He laughed almost slily and pressed Stephen’s arm with an elder’s affection.

—Cunning indeed! he said. Is it you? You poor poet, you!

—And you made me confess to you, Stephen said, thrilled by his touch, as I have confessed to you so many other things, have I not?

—Yes, my child, Cranly said, still gaily.

—You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

Cranly, now grave again, slowed his pace and said:

—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.

—I will take the risk, said Stephen.

—And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

His words seemed to have struck some deep chord in his own nature. Had he spoken of himself, of himself as he was or wished to be? Stephen watched his face for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there. He had spoken of himself, of his own loneliness which he feared.

—Of whom are you speaking? Stephen asked at length.

Cranly did not answer.

*   *   *

20 March: Long talk with Cranly on the subject of my revolt. He had his grand manner on. I supple and suave. Attacked me on the score of love for one’s mother. Tried to imagine his mother: cannot. Told me once, in a moment of thoughtlessness, his father was sixtyone when he was born. Can see him. Strong farmer type. Pepper and salt suit. Square feet. Unkempt grizzled beard. Probably attends coursing matches. Pays his dues regularly but not plentifully to Father Dwyer of Larras. Sometimes talks to girls after nightfall. But his mother? Very young or very old? Hardly the first. If so, Cranly would not have spoken as he did. Old then. Probably, and neglected. Hence Cranly’s despair of soul: the child of exhausted loins.

21 March, morning: Thought this in bed last night but was too lazy and free to add it. Free, yes. The exhausted loins are those of Elisabeth and Zachary. Then he is the precursor. Item: he eats chiefly belly bacon and dried figs. Read locusts and wild honey. Also, when thinking of him, saw always a stern severed head or deathmask as if outlined on a grey curtain or veronica. Decollation they call it in the fold. Puzzled for the moment by saint John at the Latin gate. What do I see? A decollated precursor trying to pick the lock.

21 March, night: Free. Soulfree and fancyfree. Let the dead bury the dead. Ay. And let the dead marry the dead.

22 March: In company with Lynch followed a sizable hospital nurse. Lynch’s idea. Dislike it. Two lean hungry greyhounds walking after a heifer.

23 March: Have not seen her since that night. Unwell? Sits at the fire perhaps with mamma’s shawl on her shoulders. But not peevish. A nice bowl of gruel? Won’t you now?

24 March: Began with a discussion with my mother. Subject: B.V.M. Handicapped by my sex and youth. To escape held up relations between Jesus and Papa against those between Mary and her son. Said religion was not a lying-in hospital. Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less. Then she said I would come back to faith because I had a restless mind. This means to leave church by backdoor of sin and reenter through the skylight of repentance. Cannot repent. Told her so and asked for sixpence. Got threepence.

Then went to college. Other wrangle with little roundhead rogue’seye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan. Began in Italian and ended in pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me recipe for what he calls risotto alla bergamasca. When he pronounces a soft o he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel. Has he? And could he repent? Yes, he could: and cry two round rogue’s tears, one from each eye.

Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green, remembered that his countrymen and not mine had invented what Cranly the other night called our religion. A quartet of them, soldiers of the ninetyseventh infantry regiment, sat at the foot of the cross and tossed up dice for the overcoat of the crucified.

Went to library. Tried to read three reviews. Useless. She is not out yet. Am I alarmed? About what? That she will never be out again.

Blake wrote:

I wonder if William Bond will die

For assuredly he is very ill.

Alas, poor William!

I was once at a diorama in Rotunda. At the end were pictures of big nobs. Among them William Ewart Gladstone, just then dead. Orchestra played O, Willie, we have missed you.

A race of clodhoppers!

25 March, morning: A troubled night of dreams. Want to get them off my chest.

A long curving gallery. From the floor ascend pillars of dark vapours. It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Their hands are folded upon their knees in token of weariness and their eyes are darkened for the errors of men go up before them for ever as dark vapours.

Strange figures advance from a cave. They are not as tall as men. One does not seem to stand quite apart from another. Their faces are phosphorescent, with darker streaks. They peer at me and their eyes seem to ask me something. They do not speak.

30 March: This evening Cranly was in the porch of the library, proposing a problem to Dixon and her brother. A mother let her child fall into the Nile. Still harping on the mother. A crocodile seized the child. Mother asked it back. Crocodile said all right if she told him what he was going to do with the child, eat it or not eat it.

This mentality, Lepidus would say, is indeed bred out of your mud by the operation of your sun.

And mine? Is it not too? Then into Nilemud with it!

1 April: Disapprove of this last phrase.

2 April: Saw her drinking tea and eating cakes in Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien’s. Rather, lynxeyed Lynch saw her as we passed. He tells me Cranly was invited there by brother. Did he bring his crocodile? Is he the shining light now? Well, I discovered him. I protest I did. Shining quietly behind a bushel of Wicklow bran.

3 April: Met Davin at the cigar shop opposite Findlater’s church. He was in a black sweater and had a hurleystick. Asked me was it true I was going away and why. Told him the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead. Just then my father came up. Introduction. Father, polite and observant. Asked Davin if he might offer him some refreshment. Davin could not, was going to a meeting. When we came away father told me he had a good honest eye. Asked me why I did not join a rowingclub. [rowing club.] I pretended to think it over. Told me then how he broke Pennyfeather’s heart. Wants me to read law. Says I was cut out for that. More mud, more crocodiles.

5 April: Wild spring. Scudding clouds. O life! Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which appletrees have cast down their delicate flowers. Eyes of girls among the leaves. Girls demure and romping. All fair or auburn: no dark ones. They blush better. Houp-la!

6 April: Certainly she remembers the past. Lynch says all women do. Then she remembers the time of her childhood—and mine if I was ever a child. The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future. Statues of women, if Lynch be right, should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling regretfully her own hinder parts.

6 April, later: Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

10 April: Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road. Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge: and in a moment as they pass the darkened windows the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow. They are heard now far away, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems, hurrying beyond the sleeping fields to what journey’s end—what heart?—bearing what tidings?

11 April: Read what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague emotion. Would she like it? I think so. Then I should have to like it also.

13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!

14 April: John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. (European and Asiatic papers please copy.) He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said:

—Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world.

I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till … Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean him no harm.

15 April: Met her today pointblank in Grafton Street. The crowd brought us together. We both stopped. She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us. She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said.

Now I call that friendly, don’t you?

Yes, I liked her today. A little or much? Don’t know. I liked her and it seems a new feeling to me. Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before now, in fact … O, give it up, old chap! Sleep it off!

16 April: Away! Away!

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

26 April: Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

27 April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

Dublin 1904
Trieste 1914

 ® 

E  X  I  L  E  S

A   P L A Y   I N   T H R E E   A C T S

by

J  A  M  E  S     J  O  Y  C  E

published May 25, 1918
by Grant Richards Ltd., London

c o n t e n t s — e x i l e s

Characters.

First Act.

Second Act.

Third Act.

 ® 

[The text follows the Egoist Press edition, London 1921.]

Characters

Richard Rowan, a writer.

Bertha.

Archie, their son, aged eight years.

Robert Hand, journalist.

Beatrice Justice, his cousin, music teacher.

Brigid, an old servant of the Rowan family.

A Fishwoman.

At Merrion and Ranelagh, suburbs of Dublin.

Summer of the year 1912.

First Act

The drawingroom in Richard Rowan’s house at Merrion, a suburb of Dublin. On the right, forward, a fireplace, before which stands a low screen. Over the mantelpiece a giltframed glass. Further back in the right wall, folding doors leading to the parlour and kitchen. In the wall at the back to the right a small door leading to a study. Left of this a sideboard. On the wall above the sideboard a framed crayon drawing of a young man. More to the left double doors with glass panels leading out to the garden. In the wall at the left a window looking out on the road. Forward in the same wall a door leading to the hall and the upper part of the house. Between the window and door a lady’s davenport stands against the wall. Near it a wicker chair. In the centre of the room a round table. Chairs, upholstered in faded green plush, stand round the table. To the right, forward, a smaller table with a smoking service on it. Near it an easychair and a lounge. Cocoanut mats lie before the fireplace, beside the lounge and before the doors. The floor is of stained planking. The double doors at the back and the folding doors at the right have lace curtains, which are drawn halfway. The lower sash of the window is lifted and the window is hung with heavy green plush curtains. The blind is pulled down to the edge of the lifted lower sash. It is a warm afternoon in June and the room is filled with soft sunlight which is waning.

[Brigid and Beatrice Justice come in by the door on the left. Brigid is an elderly woman, lowsized, with irongrey hair. Beatrice Justice is a slender dark young woman of 27 years. She wears a wellmade navyblue costume and an elegant simply trimmed black straw hat, and carries a small portfolioshaped handbag.]

Brigid.

The mistress and Master Archie is at the bath. They never expected you. Did you send word you were back, Miss Justice?

Beatrice.

No. I arrived just now.

Brigid.

[Points to the easychair.] Sit down and I’ll tell the master you are here. Were you long in the train?

Beatrice.

[Sitting down.] Since morning.

Brigid.

Master Archie got your postcard with the views of Youghal. You’re tired out, I’m sure.

Beatrice.

O no. [She coughs rather nervously.] Did he practise the piano while I was away?

Brigid.

[Laughs heartily.] Practise, how are you! Is it Master Archie? He is mad after the milkman’s horse now. Had you nice weather down there, Miss Justice?

Beatrice.

Rather wet, I think.

Brigid.

[Sympathetically.] Look at that now. And there is rain overhead too. [Moving towards the study.] I’ll tell him you are here.

Beatrice.

Is Mr Rowan in?

Brigid.

[Points.] He is in his study. He is wearing himself out about something he is writing. Up half the night he does be. [Going.] I’ll call him.

Beatrice.

Don’t disturb him, Brigid. I can wait here till they come back if they are not long.

Brigid.

And I saw something in the letterbox when I was letting you in. [She crosses to the study door, opens it slightly and calls.] Master Richard, Miss Justice is here for Master Archie’s lesson.

[Richard Rowan comes in from the study and advances towards Beatrice, holding out his hand. He is a tall athletic young man of a rather lazy carriage. He has light brown hair and a moustache and wears glasses. He is dressed in loose lightgrey tweed.]

Richard.

Welcome.

Beatrice.

[Rises and shakes hands, blushing slightly.] Good afternoon, Mr Rowan. I did not want Brigid to disturb you.

Richard.

Disturb me? My goodness!

Brigid.

There is something in the letterbox, Sir.

Richard.

[Takes a small bunch of keys from his pocket and hands them to her.] Here.

[Brigid goes out by the door at the left and is heard opening and closing the box. A short pause. She enters with two newspapers in her hands.]

Richard.

Letters?

Brigid.

No, sir. Only them Italian newspapers.

Richard.

Leave them on my desk, will you?

[Brigid hands him back the keys, leaves the newspapers in the study, comes out again and goes out by the folding doors on the right.]

Richard.

Please, sit down. Bertha will be back in a moment.

[Beatrice sits down again in the easychair. Richard sits beside the table.]

Richard.

I had begun to think you would never come back. It is twelve days since you were here.

Beatrice.

I thought of that too. But I have come.

Richard.

Have you thought over what I told you when you were here last?

Beatrice.

Very much.

Richard.

You must have known it before. Did you? [She does not answer.] Do you blame me?

Beatrice.

No.

Richard.

Do you think I have acted towards you—badly? No? Or towards anyone?

Beatrice.

[Looks at him with a sad puzzled expression.] I have asked myself that question.

Richard.

And the answer?

Beatrice.

I could not answer it.

Richard.

If I were a painter and told you I had a book of sketches of you you would not think it so strange, would you?

Beatrice.

It is not quite the same case, is it?

Richard.

[Smiles slightly.] Not quite. I told you also that I would not show you what I had written unless you asked to see it. Well?

Beatrice.

I will not ask you.

Richard.

[Leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his hands joined.] Would you like to see it?

Beatrice.

Very much.

Richard.

Because it is about yourself?

Beatrice.

Yes. But not only that.

Richard.

Because it is written by me? Yes? Even if what you would find there is sometimes cruel?

Beatrice.

[Shyly.] That is part of your mind, too.

Richard.

Then it is my mind that attracts you? Is that it?

Beatrice.

[Hesitating, glances at him for an instant.] Why do you think I come here?

Richard.

Why? Many reasons. To give Archie lessons. We have known one another so many years, from childhood, Robert, you and I—haven’t we? You have always been interested in me, before I went away and while I was away. Then our letters to each other about my book. Now it is published. I am here again. Perhaps you feel that some new thing is gathering in my brain; perhaps you feel that you should know it. Is that the reason?

Beatrice.

No.

Richard.

Why, then?

Beatrice.

Otherwise I could not see you.

[She looks at him for a moment and then turns aside quickly.]

Richard.

[After a pause repeats uncertainly.] Otherwise you could not see me?

Beatrice.

[Suddenly confused.] I had better go. They are not coming back. [Rising.] Mr Rowan, I must go.

Richard.

[Extending his arms.] But you are running away. Remain. Tell me what your words mean. Are you afraid of me?

Beatrice.

[Sinks back again.] Afraid? No.

Richard.

Have you confidence in me? Do you feel that you know me?

Beatrice.

[Again shyly.] It is hard to know anyone but oneself.

Richard.

Hard to know me? I sent you from Rome the chapters of my book as I wrote them; and letters for nine long years. Well, eight years.

Beatrice.

Yes, it was nearly a year before your first letter came.

Richard.

It was answered at once by you. And from that on you have watched me in my struggle. [Joins his hands earnestly.] Tell me, Miss Justice, did you feel that what you read was written for your eyes? Or that you inspired me?

Beatrice.

[Shakes her head.] I need not answer that question.

Richard.

What then?

Beatrice.

[Is silent for a moment.] I cannot say it. You yourself must ask me, Mr Rowan.

Richard.

[With some vehemence.] Then that I expressed in those chapters and letters, and in my character and life as well, something in your soul which you could not—pride or scorn?

Beatrice.

Could not?

Richard.

[Leans towards her.] Could not because you dared not. Is that why?

Beatrice.

[Bends her head.] Yes.

Richard.

On account of others or for want of courage—which?

Beatrice.

[Softly.] Courage.

Richard.

[Slowly.] And so you have followed me with pride and scorn also in your heart?

Beatrice.

And loneliness.

[She leans her head on her hand, averting her face. Richard rises and walks slowly to the window on the left. He looks out for some moments and then returns towards her, crosses to the lounge and sits down near her.]

Richard.

Do you love him still?

Beatrice.

I do not even know.

Richard.

It was that that made me so reserved with you—then—even though I felt your interest in me, even though I felt that I too was something in your life.

Beatrice.

You were.

Richard.

Yet that separated me from you. I was a third person, I felt. Your names were always spoken together, Robert and Beatrice, as long as I can remember. It seemed to me, to everyone ...

Beatrice.

We are first cousins. It is not strange that we were often together.

Richard.

He told me of your secret engagement with him. He had no secrets from me; I suppose you know that.

Beatrice.

[Uneasily.] What happened—between us—is so long ago. I was a child.

Richard.

[Smiles maliciously.] A child? Are you sure? It was in the garden of his mother’s house. No? [He points towards the garden.] Over there. You plighted your troth, as they say, with a kiss. And you gave him your garter. Is it allowed to mention that?

Beatrice.

[With some reserve.] If you think it worthy of mention.

Richard.

I think you have not forgotten it. [Clasping his hands quietly.] I do not understand it. I thought, too, that after I had gone ... Did my going make you suffer?

Beatrice.

I always knew you would go some day. I did not suffer; only I was changed.

Richard.

Towards him?

Beatrice.

Everything was changed. His life, his mind, even, seemed to change after that.

Richard.

[Musing.] Yes. I saw that you had changed when I received your first letter after a year; after your illness, too. You even said so in your letter.

Beatrice.

It brought me near to death. It made me see things differently.

Richard.

And so a coldness began between you, little by little. Is that it?

Beatrice.

[Half closing her eyes.] No. Not at once. I saw in him a pale reflection of you: then that too faded. Of what good is it to talk now?

Richard.

[With a repressed energy.] But what is this that seems to hang over you? It cannot be so tragic.

Beatrice.

[Calmly.] O, not in the least tragic. I shall become gradually better, they tell me, as I grow older. As I did not die then they tell me I shall probably live. I am given life and health again—when I cannot use them. [Calmly and bitterly.] I am convalescent.

Richard.

[Gently.] Does nothing then in life give you peace? Surely it exists for you somewhere.

Beatrice.

If there were convents in our religion perhaps there. At least, I think so at times.

Richard.

[Shakes his head.] No, Miss Justice, not even there. You could not give yourself freely and wholly.

Beatrice.

[Looking at him.] I would try.

Richard.

You would try, yes. You were drawn to him as your mind was drawn towards mine. You held back from him. From me, too, in a different way. You cannot give yourself freely and wholly.

Beatrice.

[Joins her hands softly.] It is a terribly hard thing to do, Mr Rowan—to give oneself freely and wholly—and be happy.

Richard.

But do you feel that happiness is the best, the highest that we can know?

Beatrice.

[With fervour.] I wish I could feel it.

Richard.

[Leans back, his hands locked together behind his head.] O, if you knew how I am suffering at this moment! For your case, too. But suffering most of all for my own. [With bitter force.] And how I pray that I may be granted again my dead mother’s hardness of heart! For some help, within me or without, I must find. And find it I will.

[Beatrice rises, looks at him intently, and walks away toward the garden door. She turns with indecision, looks again at him and, coming back, leans over the easychair.]

Beatrice.

[Quietly.] Did she send for you before she died, Mr Rowan?

Richard.

[Lost in thought.] Who?

Beatrice.

Your mother.

Richard.

[Recovering himself, looks keenly at her for a moment.] So that, too, was said of me here by my friends—that she sent for me before she died and that I did not go?

Beatrice.

Yes.

Richard.

[Coldly.] She did not. She died alone, not having forgiven me, and fortified by the rites of holy church.

Beatrice.

Mr Rowan, why do you speak to me in such a way?

Richard.

[Rises and walks nervously to and fro.] And what I suffer at this moment you will say is my punishment.

Beatrice.

Did she write to you? I mean before ...

Richard.

[Halting.] Yes. A letter of warning, bidding me break with the past, and remember her last words to me.

Beatrice.

[Softly.] And does death not move you, Mr Rowan? It is an end. Everything else is so uncertain.

Richard.

While she lived she turned aside from me and from mine. That is certain.

Beatrice.

From you and from ...

Richard.

From Bertha and from me and from our child. And so I waited for the end as you say; and it came.

Beatrice.

[Covers her face with her hands.] O no. Surely no.

Richard.

[Fiercely.] How can my words hurt her poor body that rots in the grave? Do you think I do not pity her cold blighted love for me? I fought against her spirit while she lived to the bitter end. [He presses his hand to his forehead.] It fights against me still—in here.

Beatrice.

[As before.] O, do not speak like that.

Richard.

She drove me away. On account of her I lived years in exile and poverty too, or near it. I never accepted the doles she sent me through the bank. I waited, too, not for her death but for some understanding of me, her own son, her own flesh and blood; that never came.

Beatrice.

Not even after Archie...?

Richard.

[Rudely.] My son, you think? A child of sin and shame! Are you serious? [She raises her face and looks at him.] There were tongues here ready to tell her all, to embitter her withering mind still more against me and Bertha and our godless nameless child. [Holding out his hands to her.] Can you not hear her mocking me while I speak? You must know the voice, surely, the voice that called you the black protestant, the pervert’s daughter. [With sudden selfcontrol.] In any case a remarkable woman.

Beatrice.

[Weakly.] At least you are free now.

Richard.

[Nods.] Yes, she could not alter the terms of my father’s will nor live for ever.

Beatrice.

[With joined hands.] They are both gone now, Mr Rowan. They both loved you, believe me. Their last thoughts were of you.

Richard.

[Approaching, touches her lightly on the shoulder, and points to the crayon drawing on the wall.] Do you see him there, smiling and handsome? His last thoughts! I remember the night he died. [He pauses for an instant and then goes on calmly.] I was a boy of fourteen. He called me to his bedside. He knew I wanted to go to the theatre to hear Carmen. He told my mother to give me a shilling. I kissed him and went. When I came home he was dead. Those were his last thoughts as far as I know.

Beatrice.

The hardness of heart you prayed for ... [She breaks off.]

Richard.

[Unheeding.] That is my last memory of him. Is there not something sweet and noble in it?

Beatrice.

Mr Rowan, something is on your mind to make you speak like this. Something has changed you since you came back three months ago.

Richard.

[Gazing again at the drawing, calmly, almost gaily.] He will help me, perhaps, my smiling handsome father.

[A knock is heard at the hall door on the left.]

Richard.

[Suddenly.] No, no. Not the smiler, Miss Justice. The old mother. It is her spirit I need. I am going.

Beatrice.

Someone knocked. They have come back.

Richard.

No, Bertha has a key. It is he. At least, I am going, whoever it is.

[He goes out quickly on the left and comes back at once with his straw hat in his hand.]

Beatrice.

He? Who?

Richard.

O, probably Robert. I am going out through the garden. I cannot see him now. Say I have gone to the post. Goodbye.

Beatrice.

[With growing alarm.] It is Robert you do not wish to see?

Richard.

[Quietly.] For the moment, yes. This talk has upset me. Ask him to wait.

Beatrice.

You will come back?

Richard.

Please God.

[He goes out quickly through the garden. Beatrice makes as if to follow him. and then stops after a few paces. Brigid enters by the folding doors on the right and goes out on the left. The hall door is heard opening. A few seconds after Brigid enters with Robert Hand. Robert Hand is a middlesized, rather stout man between thirty and forty. He is cleanshaven, with mobile features. His hair and eyes are dark and his complexion sallow. His gait and speech are rather slow. He wears a dark blue morning suit and carries in his hand a large bunch of red roses wrapped in tissue paper.]

Robert.

[Coming toward her with outstretched hand which she takes.] My dearest coz! Brigid told me you were here. I had no notion. Did you send mother a telegram?

Beatrice.

[Gazing at the roses.] No.

Robert.

[Following her gaze.] You are admiring my roses. I brought them to the mistress of the house. [Critically.] I am afraid they are not mine.

Brigid.

O, they are lovely, sir. The mistress will be delighted with them.

Robert.

[Lays the roses carelessly on a chair out of sight.] Is nobody in?

Brigid.

Yes, sir. Sit down, sir. They’ll be here now any moment. The master was here.

[She looks about her and with a half curtsey goes out on the right.]

Robert.

[After a short silence.] How are you, Beatty? And how are all down in Youghal? As dull as ever?

Beatrice.

They were well when I left.

Robert.

[Politely.] O, but I’m sorry I did not know you were coming. I would have met you at the train. Why did you do it? You have some queer ways about you, Beatty, haven’t you?

Beatrice.

[In the same tone.] Thank you, Robert. I am quite used to getting about alone.

Robert.

Yes, but I mean to say ... O, well, you have arrived in your own characteristic way.

[A noise is heard at the window and a boy’s voice is heard calling, “Mr Hand!” Robert turns.]

By Jove, Archie, too, is arriving in a characteristic way!

[Archie scrambles into the room through the open window on the left and then rises to his feet, flushed and panting. Archie is a boy of eight years, dressed in white breeches, jersey and cap. He wears spectacles, has a lively manner and speaks with the slight trace of a foreign accent.]

Beatrice.

[Going towards him.] Goodness gracious, Archie! What is the matter?

Archie.

[Rising, out of breath.] Eh! I ran all the avenue.

Robert.

[Smiles and holds out his hand.] Good evening, Archie. Why did you run?

Archie.

[Shakes hands.] Good evening. We saw you on the top of the tram, and I shouted Mr Hand! But you did not see me. But we saw you, mamma and I. She will be here in a minute. I ran.

Beatrice.

[Holding out her hand.] And poor me!

Archie.

[Shakes hands somewhat shyly.] Good evening, Miss Justice.

Beatrice.

Were you disappointed that I did not come last Friday for the lesson?

Archie.

[Glancing at her, smiles.] No.

Beatrice.

Glad?

Archie.

[Suddenly.] But today it is too late.

Beatrice.

A very short lesson?

Archie.

[Pleased.] Yes.

Beatrice.

But now you must study, Archie.

Robert.

Were you at the bath?

Archie.

Yes.

Robert.

Are you a good swimmer now?

Archie.

[Leans against the davenport.] No. Mamma won’t let me into the deep place. Can you swim well, Mr Hand?

Robert.

Splendidly. Like a stone.

Archie.

[Laughs.] Like a stone! [Pointing down.] Down that way?

Robert.

[Pointing.] Yes, down; straight down. How do you say that over in Italy?

Archie.

That? Giù. [Pointing down and up.] That is giù and this is sù. Do you want to speak to my pappie?

Robert.

Yes. I came to see him.

Archie.

[Going towards the study.] I will tell him. He is in there, writing.

Beatrice.

[Calmly, looking at Robert.] No; he is out. He is gone to the post with some letters.

Robert.

[Lightly.] O, never mind. I will wait if he is only gone to the post.

Archie.

But mamma is coming. [He glances towards the window.] Here she is!

[Archie runs out by the door on the left. Beatrice walks slowly towards the davenport. Robert remains standing. A short silence. Archie and Bertha come in through the door on the left. Bertha is a young woman of graceful build. She has dark grey eyes, patient in expression, and soft features. Her manner is cordial and self-possessed. She wears a lavender dress and carries her cream gloves knotted round the handle of her sunshade.]

Bertha.

[Shaking hands.] Good evening, Miss Justice. We thought you were still down in Youghal.

Beatrice.

[Shaking hands.] Good evening, Mrs Rowan.

Bertha.

[Bows.] Good evening, Mr Hand.

Robert.

[Bowing.] Good evening, signora! Just imagine, I didn’t know either she was back till I found her here.

Bertha.

[To both.] Did you not come together?

Beatrice.

No. I came first. Mr Rowan was going out. He said you would be back any moment.

Bertha.

I’m sorry. If you had written or sent over word by the girl this morning ...

Beatrice.

[Laughs nervously.] I arrived only an hour and a half ago. I thought of sending a telegram but it seemed too tragic.

Bertha.

Ah? Only now you arrived?

Robert.

[Extending his arms, blandly.] I retire from public and private life. Her first cousin and a journalist, I know nothing of her movements.

Beatrice.

[Not directly to him.] My movements are not very interesting.

Robert.

[In the same tone.] A lady’s movements are always interesting.

Bertha.

But sit down, won’t you? You must be very tired.

Beatrice.

[Quickly.] No, not at all. I just came for Archie’s lesson.

Bertha.

I wouldn’t hear of such a thing, Miss Justice, after your long journey.

Archie.

[Suddenly to Beatrice.] And, besides, you didn’t bring the music.

Beatrice.

[A little confused.] That I forgot. But we have the old piece.

Robert.

[Pinching Archie’s ear.] You little scamp. You want to get off the lesson.

Bertha.

O, never mind the lesson. You must sit down and have a cup of tea now. [Going towards the door on the right.] I’ll tell Brigid.

Archie.

I will, mamma. [He makes a movement to go.]

Beatrice.

No, please Mrs Rowan. Archie! I would really prefer ...

Robert.

[Quietly.] I suggest a compromise. Let it be a half-lesson.

Bertha.

But she must be exhausted.

Beatrice.

[Quickly.] Not in the least. I was thinking of the lesson in the train.

Robert.

[To Bertha.] You see what it is to have a conscience, Mrs Rowan?

Archie.

Of my lesson, Miss Justice?

Beatrice.

[Simply.] It is ten days since I heard the sound of a piano.

Bertha.

O, very well. If that is it ...

Robert.

[Nervously, gaily.] Let us have the piano by all means. I know what is in Beatty’s ears at this moment. [To Beatrice.] Shall I tell?

Beatrice.

If you know.

Robert.

The buzz of the harmonium in her father’s parlour. [To Beatrice.] Confess.

Beatrice.

[Smiling.] Yes. I can hear it.

Robert.

[Grimly.] So can I. The asthmatic voice of protestantism.

Bertha.

Did you not enjoy yourself down there, Miss Justice?

Robert.

[Intervenes.] She did not, Mrs Rowan. She goes there on retreat, when the protestant strain in her prevails—gloom, seriousness, righteousness.

Beatrice.

I go to see my father.

Robert.

[Continuing.] But she comes back here to my mother, you see. The piano influence is from our side of the house.

Bertha.

[Hesitating.] Well, Miss Justice, if you would like to play something ... But please don’t fatigue yourself with Archie.

Robert.

[Suavely.] Do, Beatty. That is what you want.

Beatrice.

If Archie will come?

Archie.

[With a shrug.] To listen.

Beatrice.

[Takes his hand.] And a little lesson, too. Very short.

Bertha.

Well, afterwards you must stay to tea.

Beatrice.

[To Archie.] Come.

[Beatrice and Archie go out together by the door on the left. Bertha goes towards the davenport, takes off her hat and lays it with her sunshade on the desk. Then taking a key from a little flowervase, she opens a drawer of the davenport, takes out a slip of paper and closes the drawer again. Robert stands watching her.]

Bertha.

[Coming towards him with the paper in her hand.] You put this into my hand last night. What does it mean?

Robert.

Do you not know?

Bertha.

[Reads.] There is one word which I have never dared to say to you. What is the word?

Robert.

That I have a deep liking for you.

[A short pause. The piano is heard faintly from the upper room.]

Robert.

[Takes the bunch of roses from the chair.] I brought these for you. Will you take them from me?

Bertha.

[Taking them.] Thank you. [She lays them on the table and unfolds the paper again.] Why did you not dare to say it last night?

Robert.

I could not speak to you or follow you. There were too many people on the lawn. I wanted you to think over it and so I put it into your hand when you were going away.

Bertha.

Now you have dared to say it.

Robert.

[Moves his hands slowly past his eyes.] You passed. The avenue was dim with dusky light. I could see the dark green masses of the trees. And you passed beyond them. You were like the moon.

Bertha.

[Laughs.] Why like the moon?

Robert.

In that dress, with your slim body, walking with little even steps. I saw the moon passing in the dusk till you passed and left my sight.

Bertha.

Did you think of me last night?

Robert.

[Comes nearer.] I think of you always—as something beautiful and distant—the moon or some deep music.

Bertha.

[Smiling.] And last night which was I?

Robert.

I was awake half the night. I could hear your voice. I could see your face in the dark. Your eyes ... I want to speak to you. Will you listen to me? May I speak?

Bertha.

[Sitting down.] You may.

Robert.

[Sitting beside her.] Are you annoyed with me?

Bertha.

No.

Robert.

I thought you were. You put away my poor flowers so quickly.

Bertha.

[Takes them from the table and holds them close to her face.] Is this what you wish me to do with them?

Robert.

[Watching her.] Your face is a flower too—but more beautiful. A wild flower blowing in a hedge. [Moving his chair closer to her.] Why are you smiling? At my words?

Bertha.

[Laying the flowers in her lap.] I am wondering if that is what you say—to the others.

Robert.

[Surprised.] What others?

Bertha.

The other women. I hear you have so many admirers.

Robert.

[Involuntarily.] And that is why you too...?

Bertha.

But you have, haven’t you?

Robert.

Friends, yes.

Bertha.

Do you speak to them in the same way?

Robert.

[In an offended tone.] How can you ask me such a question? What kind of a person do you think I am? Or why do you listen to me? Did you not like me to speak to you in that way?

Bertha.

What you said was very kind. [She looks at him for a moment.] Thank you for saying it—and thinking it.

Robert.

[Leaning forward.] Bertha!

Bertha.

Yes?

Robert.

I have the right to call you by your name. From old times—nine years ago. We were Bertha—and Robert—then. Can we not be so now, too?

Bertha.

[Readily.] O yes. Why should we not?

Robert.

Bertha, you knew. From the very night you landed on Kingstown pier. It all came back to me then. And you knew it. You saw it.

Bertha.

No. Not that night.

Robert.

When?

Bertha.

The night we landed I felt very tired and dirty. [Shaking her head.] I did not see it in you that night.

Robert.

[Smiling.] Tell me what did you see that night—your very first impression.

Bertha.

[Knitting her brows.] You were standing with your back to the gangway, talking to two ladies.

Robert.

To two plain middleaged ladies, yes.

Bertha.

I recognized you at once. And I saw that you had got fat.

Robert.

[Takes her hand.] And this poor fat Robert—do you dislike him then so much? Do you disbelieve all he says?

Bertha.

I think men speak like that to all women whom they like or admire. What do you want me to believe?

Robert.

All men, Bertha?

Bertha.

[With sudden sadness.] I think so.

Robert.

I too?

Bertha.

Yes, Robert. I think you too.

Robert.

All then—without exception? Or with one exception? [In a lower tone.] Or is he too—Richard too—like us all—in that at least? Or different?

Bertha.

[Looks into his eyes.] Different.

Robert.

Are you quite sure, Bertha?

Bertha.

[A little confused, tries to withdraw her hand.] I have answered you.

Robert.

[Suddenly.] Bertha, may I kiss your hand? Let me. May I?

Bertha.

If you wish.

[He lifts her hand to his lips slowly. She rises suddenly and listens.]

Bertha.

Did you hear the garden gate?

Robert.

[Rising also.] No.

[A short pause. The piano can be heard faintly from the upper room.]

Robert.

[Pleading.] Do not go away. You must never go away now. Your life is here. I came for that too today—to speak to him—to urge him to accept this position. He must. And you must persuade him to. You have a great influence over him.

Bertha.

You want him to remain here.

Robert.

Yes.

Bertha.

Why?

Robert.

For your sake because you are unhappy so far away. For his too because he should think of his future.

Bertha.

[Laughing.] Do you remember what he said when you spoke to him last night?

Robert.

About...? [Reflecting.] Yes. He quoted the Our Father about our daily bread. He said that to take care for the future is to destroy hope and love in the world.

Bertha.

Do you not think he is strange?

Robert.

In that, yes.

Bertha.

A little—mad?

Robert.

[Comes closer.] No. He is not. Perhaps we are. Why, do you...?

Bertha.

[Laughs.] I ask you because you are intelligent.

Robert.

You must not go away. I will not let you.

Bertha.

[Looks full at him.] You?

Robert.

Those eyes must not go away. [He takes her hands.] May I kiss your eyes?

Bertha.

Do so.

[He kisses her eyes and then passes his hand over her hair.]

Robert.

Little Bertha!

Bertha.

[Smiling.] But I am not so little. Why do you call me little?

Robert.

Little Bertha! One embrace? [He puts his arm around her.] Look into my eyes again.

Bertha.

[Looks.] I can see the little gold spots. So many you have.

Robert.

[Delighted.] Your voice! Give me a kiss, a kiss with your mouth.

Bertha.

Take it.

Robert.

I am afraid. [He kisses her mouth and passes his hand many times over her hair.] At last I hold you in my arms!

Bertha.

And are you satisfied?

Robert.

Let me feel your lips touch mine.

Bertha.

And then you will be satisfied?

Robert.

[Murmurs.] Your lips, Bertha!

Bertha.

[Closes her eyes and kisses him quickly.] There. [Puts her hands on his shoulders.] Why don’t you say: thanks.

Robert.

[Sighs.] My life is finished—over.

Bertha.

O don’t speak like that now, Robert.

Robert.

Over, over. I want to end it and have done with it.

Bertha.

[Concerned but lightly.] You silly fellow!

Robert.

[Presses her to him.] To end it all—death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea.

Bertha.

Please, Robert ...

Robert.

Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love—the sea, music and death.

Bertha.

[Looks at him for a moment.] The woman you love?

Robert.

[Hurriedly.] I want to speak to you, Bertha—alone—not here. Will you come?

Bertha.

[With downcast eyes.] I too want to speak to you.

Robert.

[Tenderly.] Yes, dear, I know. [He kisses her again.] I will speak to you; tell you all, then. I will kiss you, then, long long kisses—when you come to me—long long sweet kisses.

Bertha.

Where?

Robert.

[In the tone of passion.] Your eyes. Your lips. All your divine body.

Bertha.

[Repelling his embrace, confused.] I meant where do you wish me to come.

Robert.

To my house. Not my mother’s over there. I will write the address for you. Will you come?

Bertha.

When?

Robert.

Tonight. Between eight and nine. Come. I will wait for you tonight. And every night. You will?

[He kisses her with passion, holding her head between his hands. After a few instants she breaks from him. He sits down.]

Bertha.

[Listening.] The gate opened.

Robert.

[Intensely.] I will wait for you.

[He takes the slip from the table. Bertha moves away from him slowly. Richard comes in from the garden.]

Richard.

[Advancing, takes off his hat.] Good afternoon.

Robert.

[Rises, with nervous friendliness.] Good afternoon, Richard.

Bertha.

[At the table, taking the roses.] Look what lovely roses Mr Hand brought me.

Robert.

I am afraid they are overblown.

Richard.

[Suddenly.] Excuse me for a moment, will you?

[He turns and goes into his study quickly. Robert takes a pencil from his pocket and writes a few words on the slip; then hands it quickly to Bertha.]

Robert.

[Rapidly.] The address. Take the tram at Lansdowne Road and ask to be let down near there.

Bertha.

[Takes it.] I promise nothing.

Robert.

I will wait.

[Richard comes back from the study.]

Bertha.

[Going.] I must put these roses in water.

Richard.

[Handing her his hat.] Yes, do. And please put my hat on the rack.

Bertha.

[Takes it.] So I will leave you to yourselves for your talk. [Looking round.] Do you want anything? Cigarettes?

Richard.

Thanks. We have them here.

Bertha.

Then I can go?

[She goes out on the left with Richard’s hat, which she leaves in the hall, and returns at once; she stops for a moment at the davenport, replaces the slip in the drawer, locks it, and replaces the key, and, taking the roses, goes towards the right. Robert precedes her to open the door for her. She bows and goes out.]

Richard.

[Points to the chair near the little table on the right.] Your place of honour.

Robert.

[Sits down.] Thanks. [Passing his hand over his brow.] Good Lord, how warm it is today! The heat pains me here in the eye. The glare.

Richard.

The room is rather dark, I think, with the blind down but if you wish ...

Robert.

[Quickly.] Not at all. I know what it is—the result of night work.

Richard.

[Sits on the lounge.] Must you?

Robert.

[Sighs.] Eh, yes. I must see part of the paper through every night. And then my leading articles. We are approaching a difficult moment. And not only here.

Richard.

[After a slight pause.] Have you any news?

Robert.

[In a different voice.] Yes. I want to speak to you seriously. Today may be an important day for you—or rather, tonight. I saw the vicechancellor this morning. He has the highest opinion of you, Richard. He has read your book, he said.

Richard.

Did he buy it or borrow it?

Robert.

Bought it, I hope.

Richard.

I shall smoke a cigarette. Thirtyseven copies have now been sold in Dublin.

[He takes a cigarette from the box on the table, and lights it.]

Robert.

[Suavely, hopelessly.] Well, the matter is closed for the present. You have your iron mask on today.

Richard.

[Smoking.] Let me hear the rest.

Robert.

[Again seriously.] Richard, you are too suspicious. It is a defect in you. He assured me he has the highest possible opinion of you, as everyone has. You are the man for the post, he says. In fact, he told me that, if your name goes forward, he will work might and main for you with the senate and I ... will do my part, of course, in the press and privately. I regard it as a public duty. The chair of romance literature is yours by right, as a scholar, as a literary personality.

Richard.

The conditions?

Robert.

Conditions? You mean about the future?

Richard.

I mean about the past.

Robert.

[Easily.] That episode in your past is forgotten. An act of impulse. We are all impulsive.

Richard.

[Looks fixedly at him.] You called it an act of folly, then—nine years ago. You told me I was hanging a weight about my neck.

Robert.

I was wrong. [Suavely.] Here is how the matter stands, Richard. Everyone knows that you ran away years ago with a young girl ... How shall I put it? ... with a young girl not exactly your equal. [Kindly.] Excuse me, Richard, that is not my opinion nor my language. I am simply using the language of people whose opinions I don’t share.

Richard.

Writing one of your leading articles, in fact.

Robert.

Put it so. Well, it made a great sensation at the time. A mysterious disappearance. My name was involved too, as best man, let us say, on that famous occasion. Of course, they think I acted from a mistaken sense of friendship. Well, all that is known. [With some hesitation.] But what happened afterwards is not known.

Richard.

No?

Robert.

Of course, it is your affair, Richard. However, you are not so young now as you were then. The expression is quite in the style of my leading articles, isn’t it?

Richard.

Do you, or do you not, want me to give the lie to my past life?

Robert.

I am thinking of your future life—here. I understand your pride and your sense of liberty. I understand their point of view also. However, there is a way out; it is simply this. Refrain from contradicting any rumours you may hear concerning what happened ... or did not happen after you went away. Leave the rest to me.

Richard.

You will set these rumours afloat?

Robert.

I will. God help me.

Richard.

[Observing him.] For the sake of social conventions?

Robert.

For the sake of something else too—our friendship, our lifelong friendship.

Richard.

Thanks.

Robert.

[Slightly wounded.] And I will tell you the whole truth.

Richard.

[Smiles and bows.] Yes. Do, please.

Robert.

Not only for your sake. Also for the sake of—your present partner in life.

Richard.

I see.

[He crushes his cigarette softly on the ashtray and then leans forward, rubbing his hands slowly.]

Richard.

Why for her sake?

Robert.

[Also leans forward, quietly.] Richard, have you been quite fair to her? It was her own free choice, you will say. But was she really free to choose? She was a mere girl. She accepted all that you proposed.

Richard.

[Smiles.] That is your way of saying that she proposed what I would not accept.

Robert.

[Nods.] I remember. And she went away with you. But was it of her own free choice? Answer me frankly.

Richard.

[Turns to him, calmly.] I played for her against all that you say or can say; and I won.

Robert.

[Nodding again.] Yes, you won.

Richard.

[Rises.] Excuse me for forgetting. Will you have some whisky?

Robert.

All things come to those who wait.

[Richard goes to the sideboard and brings a small tray with the decanter and glasses to the table where he sets it down.]

Richard.

[Sits down again, leaning back on the lounge.] Will you please help yourself?

Robert.

[Does so.] And you? Steadfast? [Richard shakes his head.] Lord, when I think of our wild nights long ago—talks by the hour, plans, carouses, revelry ...

Richard.

In our house.

Robert.

It is mine now. I have kept it ever since though I don’t go there often. Whenever you like to come let me know. You must come some night. It will be old times again. [He lifts his glass and drinks.] Prosit!

Richard.

It was not only a house of revelry; it was to be the hearth of a new life. [Musing.] And in that name all our sins were committed.

Robert.

Sins! Drinking and blasphemy [he points] by me. And drinking and heresy, much worse, [he points again] by you—are those the sins you mean?

Richard.

And some others.

Robert.

[Lightly, uneasily.] You mean the women. I have no remorse of conscience. Maybe you have. We had two keys on those occasions. [Maliciously.] Have you?

Richard.

[Irritated.] For you it was all quite natural?

Robert.

For me it is quite natural to kiss a woman whom I like. Why not? She is beautiful for me.

Richard.

[Toying with the lounge cushion.] Do you kiss everything that is beautiful for you?

Robert.

Everything—if it can be kissed. [He takes up a flat stone which lies on the table.] This stone, for instance. It is so cool, so polished, so delicate, like a woman’s temple. It is silent, it suffers our passion; and it is beautiful. [He places it against his lips.] And so I kiss it because it is beautiful. And what is a woman? A work of nature, too, like a stone or a flower or a bird. A kiss is an act of homage.

Richard.

It is an act of union between man and woman. Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?

Robert.

[Pressing the stone to his forehead.] You will give me a headache if you make me think today. I cannot think today. I feel too natural, too common. After all, what is most attractive in even the most beautiful woman?

Richard.

What?

Robert.

Not those qualities which she has and other women have not but the qualities which she has in common with them. I mean ... the commonest. [Turning over the stone, he presses the other side to his forehead.] I mean how her body develops heat when it is pressed, the movement of her blood, how quickly she changes by digestion what she eats into—what shall be nameless. [Laughing.] I am very common today. Perhaps that idea never struck you?

Richard.

[Drily.] Many ideas strike a man who has lived nine years with a woman.

Robert.

Yes. I suppose they do.... This beautiful cool stone does me good. Is it a paperweight or a cure for headache?

Richard.

Bertha brought it home one day from the strand. She, too, says that it is beautiful.

Robert.

[Lays down the stone quietly.] She is right.

[He raises his glass and drinks. A pause.]

Richard.

Is that all you wanted to say to me?

Robert.

[Quickly.] There is something else. The vicechancellor sends you, through me, an invitation for tonight—to dinner at his house. You know where he lives? [Richard nods.] I thought you might have forgotten. Strictly private, of course. He wants to meet you again and sends you a very warm invitation.

Richard.

For what hour?

Robert.

Eight. But, like yourself, he is free and easy about time. Now, Richard, you must go there. That is all. I feel tonight will be the turningpoint in your life. You will live here and work here and think here and be honoured here—among our people.

Richard.

[Smiling.] I can almost see two envoys starting for the United States to collect funds for my statue a hundred years hence.

Robert.

[Agreeably.] Once I made a little epigram about statues. All statues are of two kinds. [He folds his arms across his chest.] The statue which says: How shall I get down? and the other kind [he unfolds his arms and extends his right arm, averting his head] the statue which says: In my time the dunghill was so high.

Richard.

The second one for me, please.

Robert.

[Lazily.] Will you give me one of those long cigars of yours?

[Richard selects a Virginia cigar from the box on the table and hands it to him with the straw drawn out.]

Robert.

[Lighting it.] These cigars Europeanize me. If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European. And that is what you are here for, Richard. Some day we shall have to choose between England and Europe. I am a descendant of the dark foreigners: that is why I like to be here. I may be childish. But where else in Dublin can I get a bandit cigar like this or a cup of black coffee? The man who drinks black coffee is going to conquer Ireland. And now I will take just a half measure of that whisky, Richard, to show you there is no ill feeling.

Richard.

[Points.] Help yourself.

Robert.

[Does so.] Thanks. [He drinks and goes on as before.] Then you yourself, the way you loll on that lounge: then your boy’s voice and also—Bertha herself. Do you allow me to call her that, Richard? I mean as an old friend of both of you.

Richard.

O why not?

Robert.

[With animation.] You have that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift. You have fallen from a higher world, Richard, and you are filled with fierce indignation when you find that life is cowardly and ignoble. While I ... shall I tell you?

Richard.

By all means.

Robert.

[Archly.] I have come up from a lower world and I am filled with astonishment when I find that people have any redeeming virtue at all.

Richard.

[Sits up suddenly and leans his elbows on the table.] You are my friend, then?

Robert.

[Gravely.] I fought for you all the time you were away. I fought to bring you back. I fought to keep your place for you here. I will fight for you still because I have faith in you, the faith of a disciple in his master. I cannot say more than that. It may seem strange to you ... Give me a match.

Richard.

[Lights and offers him a match.] There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master.

Robert.

And that is?

Richard.

The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him.

Robert.

The church lost a theologian in you, Richard. But I think you look too deeply into life. [He rises, pressing Richard’s arm slightly.] Be gay. Life is not worth it.

Richard.

[Without rising.] Are you going?

Robert.

Must. [He turns and says in a friendly tone.] Then it is all arranged. We meet tonight at the vicechancellor’s. I shall look in at about ten. So you can have an hour or so to yourselves first. You will wait till I come?

Richard.

Good.

Robert.

One more match and I am happy.

[Richard strikes another match, hands it to him and rises also. Archie comes in by the door on the left, followed by Beatrice.]

Robert.

Congratulate me, Beatty. I have won over Richard.

Archie.

[Crossing to the door on the right, calls.] Mamma, Miss Justice is going.

Beatrice.

On what are you to be congratulated?

Robert.

On a victory, of course. [Laying his hand lightly on Richard’s shoulder.] The descendant of Archibald Hamilton Rowan has come home.

Richard.

I am not a descendant of Hamilton Rowan.

Robert.

What matter?

[Bertha comes in from the right with a bowl of roses.]

Beatrice.

Has Mr. Rowan...?

Robert.

[Turning towards Bertha.] Richard is coming tonight to the vicechancellor’s dinner. The fatted calf will be eaten: roast, I hope. And next session will see the descendant of a namesake of etcetera, etcetera in a chair of the university. [He offers his hand.] Good afternoon, Richard. We shall meet tonight.

Richard.

[Touches his hand.] At Philippi.

Beatrice.

[Shakes hands also.] Accept my best wishes, Mr Rowan.

Richard.

Thanks. But do not believe him.

Robert.

[Vivaciously.] Believe me, believe me. [To Bertha.] Good afternoon, Mrs Rowan.

Bertha.

[Shaking hands, candidly.] I thank you, too. [To Beatrice.] You won’t stay to tea, Miss Justice?

Beatrice.

No, thank you. [Takes leave of her.] I must go. Good afternoon. Goodbye, Archie [going].

Robert.

Addio, Archibald.

Archie.

Addio.

Robert.

Wait, Beatty. I shall accompany you.

Beatrice.

[Going out on the right with Bertha.] Oh, don’t trouble.

Robert.

[Following her.] But I insist—as a cousin.

[Bertha, Beatrice, and Robert go out by the door on the left. Richard stands irresolutely near the table. Archie closes the door leading to the hall and, coming over to him, plucks him by the sleeve.]

Archie.

I say, pappie!

Richard.

[Absently.] What is it?

Archie.

I want to ask you a thing.

Richard.

[Sitting on the end of the lounge, stares in front of him.] What is it?

Archie.

Will you ask mamma to let me go out in the morning with the milkman?

Richard.

With the milkman?

Archie.

Yes. In the milkcar. He says he will let me drive when we get on to the roads where there are no people. The horse is a very good beast. Can I go?

Richard.

Yes.

Archie.

Ask mamma now can I go. Will you?

Richard.

[Glances towards the door.] I will.

Archie.

He said he will show me the cows he has in the field. Do you know how many cows he has?

Richard.

How many?

Archie.

Eleven. Eight red and three white. But one is sick now. No, not sick. But it fell.

Richard.

Cows?

Archie.

[With a gesture.] Eh! Not bulls. Because bulls give no milk. Eleven cows. They must give a lot of milk. What makes a cow give milk?

Richard.

[Takes his hand.] Who knows? Do you understand what it is to give a thing?

Archie.

To give? Yes.

Richard.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you.

Archie.

By robbers? No?

Richard.

But when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. [He bends his head and presses his son’s hand against his cheek.] It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

Archie.

But, pappie?

Richard.

Yes?

Archie.

How could a robber rob a cow? Everyone would see him. In the night, perhaps.

Richard.

In the night, yes.

Archie.

Are there robbers here like in Rome?

Richard.

There are poor people everywhere.

Archie.

Have they revolvers?

Richard.

No.

Archie.

Knives? Have they knives?

Richard.

[Sternly.] Yes, yes. Knives and revolvers.

Archie.

[Disengages himself.] Ask mamma now. She is coming.

Richard.

[Makes a movement to rise.] I will.

Archie.

No, sit there, pappie. You wait and ask her when she comes back. I won’t be here. I’ll be in the garden.

Richard.

[Sinking back again.] Yes. Go.

Archie.

[Kisses him swiftly.] Thanks.

[He runs out quickly by the door at the back leading into the garden. Bertha enters by the door on the left. She approaches the table and stands beside it, fingering the petals of the roses, looking at Richard.]

Richard.

[Watching her.] Well?

Bertha.

[Absently.] Well. He says he likes me.

Richard.

[Leans his chin on his hand.] You showed him his note?

Bertha.

Yes. I asked him what it meant.

Richard.

What did he say it meant?

Bertha.

He said I must know. I said I had an idea. Then he told me he liked me very much. That I was beautiful—and all that.

Richard.

Since when!

Bertha.

[Again absently.] Since when—what?

Richard.

Since when did he say he liked you?

Bertha.

Always, he said. But more since we came back. He said I was like the moon in this lavender dress. [Looking at him.] Had you any words with him—about me?

Richard.

[Blandly.] The usual thing. Not about you.

Bertha.

He was very nervous. You saw that?

Richard.

Yes. I saw it. What else went on?

Bertha.

He asked me to give him my hand.

Richard.

[Smiling.] In marriage?

Bertha.

[Smiling.] No, only to hold.

Richard.

Did you?

Bertha.

Yes. [Tearing off a few petals.] Then he caressed my hand and asked would I let him kiss it. I let him.

Richard.

Well?

Bertha.

Then he asked could he embrace me—even once? ... And then ...

Richard.

And then?

Bertha.

He put his arm round me.

Richard.

[Stares at the floor for a moment, then looks at her again.] And then?

Bertha.

He said I had beautiful eyes. And asked could he kiss them. [With a gesture.] I said: Do so.

Richard.

And he did?

Bertha.

Yes. First one and then the other. [She breaks off suddenly.] Tell me, Dick, does all this disturb you? Because I told you I don’t want that. I think you are only pretending you don’t mind. I don’t mind.

Richard.

[Quietly.] I know, dear. But I want to find out what he means or feels just as you do.

Bertha.

[Points at him.] Remember, you allowed me to go on. I told you the whole thing from the beginning.

Richard.

[As before.] I know, dear ... And then?

Bertha.

He asked for a kiss. I said: Take it.

Richard.

And then?

Bertha.

[Crumpling a handful of petals.] He kissed me.

Richard.

Your mouth?

Bertha.

Once or twice.

Richard.

Long kisses?

Bertha.

Fairly long. [Reflects.] Yes, the last time.

Richard.

[Rubs his hands slowly; then.] With his lips? Or ... the other way?

Bertha.

Yes, the last time.

Richard.

Did he ask you to kiss him?

Bertha.

He did.

Richard.

Did you?

Bertha.

[Hesitates, then looking straight at him.] I did. I kissed him.

Richard.

What way?

Bertha.

[With a shrug.] O simply.

Richard.

Were you excited?

Bertha.

Well, you can imagine. [Frowning suddenly.] Not much. He has not nice lips ... Still I was excited, of course. But not like with you, Dick.

Richard.

Was he?

Bertha.

Excited? Yes, I think he was. He sighed. He was dreadfully nervous.

Richard.

[Resting his forehead on his hand.] I see.

Bertha.

[Crosses towards the lounge and stands near him.] Are you jealous?

Richard.

[As before.] No.

Bertha.

[Quietly.] You are, Dick.

Richard.

I am not. Jealous of what?

Bertha.

Because he kissed me.

Richard.

[Looks up.] Is that all?

Bertha.

Yes, that’s all. Except that he asked me would I meet him.

Richard.

Out somewhere?

Bertha.

No. In his house.

Richard.

[Surprised.] Over there with his mother, is it?

Bertha.

No, a house he has. He wrote the address for me.

[She goes to the desk, takes the key from the flower vase, unlocks the drawer and returns to him with the slip of paper.]

Richard.

[Half to himself.] Our cottage.

Bertha.

[Hands him the slip.] Here.

Richard.

[Reads it.] Yes. Our cottage.

Bertha.

Your...?

Richard.

No, his. I call it ours. [Looking at her.] The cottage I told you about so often—that we had the two keys for, he and I. It is his now. Where we used to hold our wild nights, talking, drinking, planning—at that time. Wild nights; yes. He and I together. [He throws the slip on the couch and rises suddenly.] And sometimes I alone. [Stares at her.] But not quite alone. I told you. You remember?

Bertha.

[Shocked.] That place?

Richard.

[Walks away from her a few paces and stands still, thinking, holding his chin.] Yes.

Bertha.

[Taking up the slip again.] Where is it?

Richard.

Do you not know?

Bertha.

He told me to take the tram at Lansdowne road and to ask the man to let me down there. Is it ... is it a bad place?

Richard.

O no, cottages. [He returns to the lounge and sits down.] What answer did you give?

Bertha.

No answer. He said he would wait.

Richard.

Tonight?

Bertha.

Every night, he said. Between eight and nine.

Richard.

And so I am to go tonight to interview—the professor. About the appointment I am to beg for. [Looking at her.] The interview is arranged for tonight by him—between eight and nine. Curious, isn’t it? The same hour.

Bertha.

Very.

Richard.

Did he ask you had I any suspicion?

Bertha.

No.

Richard.

Did he mention my name?

Bertha.

No.

Richard.

Not once?

Bertha.

Not that I remember.

Richard.

[Bounding to his feet.] O yes! Quite clear!

Bertha.

What?

Richard.

[Striding to and fro.] A liar, a thief, and a fool! Quite clear! A common thief! What else? [With a harsh laugh.] My great friend! A patriot too! A thief—nothing else! [He halts, thrusting his hands into his pockets.] But a fool also!

Bertha.

[Looking at him.] What are you going to do?

Richard.

[Shortly.] Follow him. Find him. Tell him. [Calmly.] A few words will do. Thief and fool.

Bertha.

[Flings the slip on the couch.] I see it all!

Richard.

[Turning.] Eh!

Bertha.

[Hotly.] The work of a devil.

Richard.

He?

Bertha.

[Turning on him.] No, you! The work of a devil to turn him against me as you tried to turn my own child against me. Only you did not succeed.

Richard.

How? In God’s name, how?

Bertha.

[Excitedly.] Yes, yes. What I say. Everyone saw it. Whenever I tried to correct him for the least thing you went on with your folly, speaking to him as if he were a grownup man. Ruining the poor child, or trying to. Then, of course, I was the cruel mother and only you loved him. [With growing excitement.] But you did not turn him against me—against his own mother. Because why? Because the child has too much nature in him.

Richard.

I never tried to do such a thing, Bertha. You know I cannot be severe with a child.

Bertha.

Because you never loved your own mother. A mother is always a mother, no matter what. I never heard of any human being that did not love the mother that brought him into the world, except you.

Richard.

[Approaching her quietly.] Bertha, do not say things you will be sorry for. Are you not glad my son is fond of me?

Bertha.

Who taught him to be? Who taught him to run to meet you? Who told him you would bring him home toys when you were out on your rambles in the rain, forgetting all about him—and me? I did. I taught him to love you.

Richard.

Yes, dear. I know it was you.

Bertha.

[Almost crying.] And then you try to turn everyone against me. All is to be for you. I am to appear false and cruel to everyone except to you. Because you take advantage of my simplicity as you did—the first time.

Richard.

[Violently.] And you have the courage to say that to me?

Bertha.

[Facing him.] Yes, I have! Both then and now. Because I am simple you think you can do what you like with me. [Gesticulating.] Follow him now. Call him names. Make him be humble before you and make him despise me. Follow him!

Richard.

[Controlling himself.] You forget that I have allowed you complete liberty—and allow you it still.

Bertha.

[Scornfully.] Liberty!

Richard.

Yes, complete. But he must know that I know. [More calmly.] I will speak to him quietly. [Appealing.] Bertha, believe me, dear! It is not jealousy. You have complete liberty to do as you wish—you and he. But not in this way. He will not despise you. You don’t wish to deceive me or to pretend to deceive me—with him, do you?

Bertha.

No, I do not. [Looking full at him.] Which of us two is the deceiver?

Richard.

Of us? You and me?

Bertha.

[In a calm decided tone.] I know why you have allowed me what you call complete liberty.

Richard.

Why?

Bertha.

To have complete liberty with—that girl.

Richard.

[Irritated.] But, good God, you knew about that this long time. I never hid it.

Bertha.

You did. I thought it was a kind of friendship between you—till we came back, and then I saw.

Richard.

So it is, Bertha.

Bertha.

[Shakes her head.] No, no. It is much more; and that is why you give me complete liberty. All those things you sit up at night to write about [pointing to the study] in there—about her. You call that friendship?

Richard.

Believe me, Bertha dear. Believe me as I believe you.

Bertha.

[With an impulsive gesture.] My God, I feel it! I know it! What else is between you but love?

Richard.

[Calmly.] You are trying to put that idea into my head, but I warn you that I don’t take my ideas from other people.

Bertha.

[Hotly.] It is, it is! And that is why you allow him to go on. Of course! It doesn’t affect you. You love her.

Richard.

Love! [Throws out his hands with a sigh and moves away from her.] I cannot argue with you.

Bertha.

You can’t because I am right. [Following him a few steps.] What would anyone say?

Richard.

[Turns to her.] Do you think I care?

Bertha.

But I care. What would he say if he knew? You, who talk so much of the high kind of feeling you have for me, expressing yourself in that way to another woman. If he did it, or other men, I could understand because they are false pretenders. But you, Dick! Why do you not tell him then?

Richard.

You can if you like.

Bertha.

I will. Certainly I will.

Richard.

[Coolly.] He will explain it to you.

Bertha.

He doesn’t say one thing and do another. He is honest in his own way.

Richard.

[Plucks one of the roses and throws it at her feet.] He is, indeed! The soul of honour!

Bertha.

You may make fun of him as much as you like. I understand more than you think about that business. And so will he. Writing those long letters to her for years, and she to you. For years. But since I came back I understand it—well,

Richard.

You do not. Nor would he.

Bertha.

[Laughs scornfully.] Of course. Neither he nor I can understand it. Only she can. Because it is such a deep thing!

Richard.

[Angrily.] Neither he nor you—nor she either! Not one of you!

Bertha.

[With great bitterness.] She will! She will understand it! The diseased woman!

[She turns away and walks over to the little table on the right. Richard restrains a sudden gesture. A short pause.]

Richard.

[Gravely.] Bertha, take care of uttering words like that!

Bertha.

[Turning, excitedly.] I don’t mean any harm! I feel for her more than you can because I am a woman. I do, sincerely. But what I say is true.

Richard.

Is it generous? Think.

Bertha.

[Pointing towards the garden.] It is she who is not generous. Remember now what I say.

Richard.

What?

Bertha.

[Comes nearer; in a calmer tone.] You have given that woman very much, Dick. And she may be worthy of it. And she may understand it all, too. I know she is that kind.

Richard.

Do you believe that?

Bertha.

I do. But I believe you will get very little from her in return—or from any of her clan. Remember my words, Dick. Because she is not generous and they are not generous. Is it all wrong what I am saying? Is it?

Richard.

[Darkly.] No. Not all.

[She stoops and, picking up the rose from the floor, places it in the vase again. He watches her. Brigid appears at the folding doors on the right.]

Brigid.

The tea is on the table, ma’am.

Bertha.

Very well.

Brigid.

Is Master Archie in the garden?

Bertha.

Yes. Call him in.

[Brigid crosses the room and goes out into the garden. Bertha goes towards the doors on the right. At the lounge she stops and takes up the slip.]

Brigid.

[In the garden.] Master Archie! You are to come in to your tea.

Bertha.

Am I to go to this place?

Richard.

Do you want to go?

Bertha.

I want to find out what he means. Am I to go?

Richard.

Why do you ask me? Decide yourself.

Bertha.

Do you tell me to go?

Richard.

No.

Bertha.

Do you forbid me to go?

Richard.

No.

Brigid.

[From the garden.] Come quickly, Master Archie! Your tea is waiting on you.

[Brigid crosses the room and goes out through the folding doors. Bertha folds the slip into the waist of her dress and goes slowly towards the right. Near the door she turns and halts.]

Bertha.

Tell me not to go and I will not.

Richard.

[Without looking at her.] Decide yourself.

Bertha.

Will you blame me then?

Richard.

[Excitedly.] No, no! I will not blame you. You are free. I cannot blame you.

[Archie appears at the garden door.]

Bertha.

I did not deceive you.

[She goes out through the folding doors. Richard remains standing at the table. Archie, when his mother has gone, runs down to Richard.]

Archie.

[Quickly.] Well, did you ask her?

Richard.

[Starting.] What?

Archie.

Can I go?

Richard.

Yes.

Archie.

In the morning? She said yes?

Richard.

Yes. In the morning.

[He puts his arm round his son’s shoulders and looks down at him fondly.]

 ® 

Second Act

A room in Robert Hand’s cottage at Ranelagh. On the right, forward, a small black piano, on the rest of which is an open piece of music. Farther back a door leading to the street door. In the wall, at the back, folding doors, draped with dark curtains, leading to a bedroom. Near the piano a large table, on which is a tall oil lamp with a wide yellow shade. Chairs, upholstered, near this table. A small cardtable more forward. Against the back wall a bookcase. In the left wall, back, a window looking out into the garden, and, forward, a door and porch, also leading to the garden. Easychairs here and there. Plants in the porch and near the draped folding doors. On the walls are many framed black and white designs. In the right corner, back, a sideboard; and in the centre of the room, left of the table, a group consisting of a standing Turkish pipe, a low oil stove, which is not lit, and a rocking-chair. It is the evening of the same day.

[Robert Hand, in evening dress, is seated at the piano. The candles are not lit but the lamp on the table is lit. He plays softly in the bass the first bars of Wolfram’s song in the last act of “Tannhäuser.” Then he breaks off and, resting an elbow on the ledge of the keyboard, meditates. Then he rises and, pulling out a pump from behind the piano, walks here and there in the room ejecting from it into the air sprays of perfume. He inhales the air slowly and then puts the pump back behind the piano. He sits down on a chair near the table and, smoothing his hair carefully, sighs once or twice. Then, thrusting his hands into his trousers pockets, he leans back, stretches out his legs, and waits. A knock is heard at the street door. He rises quickly.]

Robert.

[Exclaims.] Bertha!

[He hurries out by the door on the right. There is a noise of confused greeting. After a few moments Robert enters, followed by Richard Rowan, who is in grey tweeds as before but holds in one hand a dark felt hat and in the other an umbrella.]

Robert.

First of all let me put these outside.

[He takes the hat and umbrella, leaves them in the hall and returns.]

Robert.

[Pulling round a chair.] Here you are. You are lucky to find me in. Why didn’t you tell me today? You were always a devil for surprises. I suppose my evocation of the past was too much for your wild blood. See how artistic I have become. [He points to the walls.] The piano is an addition since your time. I was just strumming out Wagner when you came. Killing time. You see I am ready for the fray. [Laughs.] I was just wondering how you and the vicechancellor were getting on together. [With exaggerated alarm.] But are you going in that suit? O well, it doesn’t make much odds, I suppose. But how goes the time? [He takes out his watch.] Twenty past eight already, I declare!

Richard.

Have you an appointment?

Robert.

[Laughs nervously.] Suspicious to the last!

Richard.

Then I may sit down?

Robert.

Of course, of course. [They both sit down.] For a few minutes, anyhow. Then we can both go on together. We are not bound for time. Between eight and nine, he said, didn’t he? What time is it, I wonder? [Is about to look again at his watch; then stops.] Twenty past eight, yes.

Richard.

[Wearily, sadly.] Your appointment also was for the same hour. Here.

Robert.

What appointment?

Richard.

With Bertha.

Robert.

[Stares at him.] Are you mad?

Richard.

Are you?

Robert.

[After a long pause.] Who told you?

Richard.

She.

[A short silence.]

Robert.

[In a low voice.] Yes. I must have been mad. [Rapidly.] Listen to me, Richard. It is a great relief to me that you have come—the greatest relief. I assure you that ever since this afternoon I have thought and thought how I could break it off without seeming a fool. A great relief! I even intended to send word ... a letter, a few lines. [Suddenly.] But then it was too late ... [Passes his hand over his forehead.] Let me speak frankly with you; let me tell you everything.

Richard.

I know everything. I have known for some time.

Robert.

Since when?

Richard.

Since it began between you and her.

Robert.

[Again rapidly.] Yes, I was mad. But it was merely lightheadedness. I admit that to have asked her here this evening was a mistake. I can explain everything to you. And I will. Truly.

Richard.

Explain to me what is the word you longed and never dared to say to her. If you can or will.

Robert.

[Looks down, then raises his head.] Yes. I will. I admire very much the personality of your ... of ... your wife. That is the word. I can say it. It is no secret.

Richard.

Then why did you wish to keep secret your wooing?

Robert.

Wooing?

Richard.

Your advances to her, little by little, day after day, looks, whispers. [With a nervous movement of the hands.] Insomma, wooing.

Robert.

[Bewildered.] But how do you know all this?

Richard.

She told me.

Robert.

This afternoon?

Richard.

No. Time after time, as it happened.

Robert.

You knew? From her? [Richard nods.] You were watching us all the time?

Richard.

[Very coldly.] I was watching you.

Robert.

[Quickly.] I mean, watching me. And you never spoke! You had only to speak a word—to save me from myself. You were trying me. [Passes his hand again over his forehead.] It was a terrible trial: now also. [Desperately.] Well, it is past. It will be a lesson to me for all my life. You hate me now for what I have done and for ...

Richard.

[Quietly, looking at him.] Have I said that I hate you?

Robert.

Do you not? You must.

Richard.

Even if Bertha had not told me I should have known. Did you not see that when I came in this afternoon I went into my study suddenly for a moment?

Robert.

You did. I remember.

Richard.

To give you time to recover yourself. It made me sad to see your eyes. And the roses too. I cannot say why. A great mass of overblown roses.

Robert.

I thought I had to give them. Was that strange? [Looks at Richard with a tortured expression.] Too many, perhaps? Or too old or common?

Richard.

That was why I did not hate you. The whole thing made me sad all at once.

Robert.

[To himself.] And this is real. It is happening—to us.

[He stares before him for some moments in silence, as if dazed; then, without turning his head, continues.]

Robert.

And she, too, was trying me; making an experiment with me for your sake!

Richard.

You know women better than I do. She says she felt pity for you.

Robert.

[Brooding.] Pitied me, because I am no longer ... an ideal lover. Like my roses. Common, old.

Richard.

Like all men you have a foolish wandering heart.

Robert.

[Slowly] Well, you spoke at last. You chose the right moment.

Richard.

[Leans forward.] Robert, not like this. For us two, no. Years, a whole life, of friendship. Think a moment. Since childhood, boyhood ... No, no. Not in such a way—like thieves—at night. [Glancing about him.] And in such a place. No, Robert, that is not for people like us.

Robert.

What a lesson! Richard, I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me that you have spoken—that the danger is passed. Yes, yes. [Somewhat diffidently.] Because ... there was some danger for you, too, if you think. Was there not?

Richard.

What danger?

Robert.

[In the same tone.] I don’t know. I mean if you had not spoken. If you had watched and waited on until ...

Richard.

Until?

Robert.

[Bravely.] Until I had come to like her more and more (because I can assure you it is only a lightheaded idea of mine), to like her deeply, to love her. Would you have spoken to me then as you have just now? [Richard is silent. Robert goes on more boldly.] It would have been different, would it not? For then it might have been too late while it is not too late now. What could I have said then? I could have said only: You are my friend, my dear good friend. I am very sorry but I love her. [With a sudden fervent gesture.] I love her and I will take her from you, however I can, because I love her.

[They look at each other for some moments in silence.]

Richard.

[Calmly.] That is the language I have heard often and never believed in. Do you mean by stealth or by violence? Steal you could not in my house because the doors were open; nor take by violence if there were no resistance.

Robert.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

Richard.

[Smiling.] Go on.

Robert.

[Diffidently, but bravely.] Do you think you have rights over her—over her heart?

Richard.

None.

Robert.

For what you have done for her? So much! You claim nothing?

Richard.

Nothing.

Robert.

[After a pause strikes his forehead with his hand.] What am I saying? Or what am I thinking? I wish you would upbraid me, curse me, hate me as I deserve. You love this woman. I remember all you told me long ago. She is yours, your work. [Suddenly.] And that is why I, too, was drawn to her. You are so strong that you attract me even through her.

Richard.

I am weak.

Robert.

[With enthusiasm.] You, Richard! You are the incarnation of strength.

Richard.

[Holds out his hands.] Feel those hands.

Robert.

[Taking his hands.] Yes. Mine are stronger. But I meant strength of another kind.

Richard.

[Gloomily.] I think you would try to take her by violence.

[He withdraws his hands slowly.]

Robert.

[Rapidly.] Those are moments of sheer madness when we feel an intense passion for a woman. We see nothing. We think of nothing. Only to possess her. Call it brutal, bestial, what you will.

Richard.

[A little timidly.] I am afraid that that longing to possess a woman is not love.

Robert.

[Impatiently.] No man ever yet lived on this earth who did not long to possess—I mean to possess in the flesh—the woman whom he loves. It is nature’s law.

Richard.

[Contemptuously.] What is that to me? Did I vote it?

Robert.

But if you love ... What else is it?

Richard.

[Hesitatingly.] To wish her well.

Robert.

[Warmly.] But the passion which burns us night and day to possess her. You feel it as I do. And it is not what you said now.

Richard.

Have you...? [He stops for an instant.] Have you the luminous certitude that yours is the brain in contact with which she must think and understand and that yours is the body in contact with which her body must feel? Have you this certitude in yourself?

Robert.

Have you?

Richard.

[Moved.] Once I had it, Robert: a certitude as luminous as that of my own existence—or an illusion as luminous.

Robert.

[Cautiously.] And now?

Richard.

If you had it and I could feel that you had it—even now ...

Robert.

What would you do?

Richard.

[Quietly.] Go away. You, and not I, would be necessary to her. Alone as I was before I met her.

Robert.

[Rubs his hands nervously.] A nice little load on my conscience!

Richard.

[Abstractedly.] You met my son when you came to my house this afternoon. He told me. What did you feel?

Robert.

[Promptly.] Pleasure.

Richard.

Nothing else?

Robert.

Nothing else. Unless I thought of two things at the same time. I am like that. If my best friend lay in his coffin and his face had a comic expression I should smile. [With a little gesture of despair.] I am like that. But I should suffer too, deeply.

Richard.

You spoke of conscience ... Did he seem to you a child only—or an angel?

Robert.

[Shakes his head.] No. Neither an angel nor an Anglo-Saxon. Two things, by the way, for which I have very little sympathy.

Richard.

Never then? Never even ... with her? Tell me. I wish to know.

Robert.

I feel in my heart something different. I believe that on the last day (if it ever comes), when we are all assembled together, that the Almighty will speak to us like this. We will say that we lived chastely with one other creature ...

Richard.

[Bitterly.] Lie to Him?

Robert.

Or that we tried to. And He will say to us: Fools! Who told you that you were to give yourselves to one being only? You were made to give yourselves to many freely. I wrote that law with My finger on your hearts.

Richard.

On woman’s heart, too?

Robert.

Yes. Can we close our heart against an affection which we feel deeply? Should we close it? Should she?

Richard.

We are speaking of bodily union.

Robert.

Affection between man and woman must come to that. We think too much of it because our minds are warped. For us today it is of no more consequence than any other form of contact—than a kiss.

Richard.

If it is of no consequence why are you dissatisfied till you reach that end? Why were you waiting here tonight?

Robert.

Passion tends to go as far as it can; but, you may believe me or not, I had not that in my mind—to reach that end.

Richard.

Reach it if you can. I will use no arm against you that the world puts in my hand. If the law which God’s finger has written on our hearts is the law you say I too am God’s creature.

[He rises and paces to and fro some moments in silence. Then he goes towards the porch and leans against the jamb. Robert watches him.]

Robert.

I always felt it. In myself and in others.

Richard.

[Absently.] Yes?

Robert.

[With a vague gesture.] For all. That a woman, too, has the right to try with many men until she finds love. An immoral idea, is it not? I wanted to write a book about it. I began it ...

Richard.

[As before.] Yes?

Robert.

Because I knew a woman who seemed to me to be doing that—carrying out that idea in her own life. She interested me very much.

Richard.

When was this?

Robert.

O, not lately. When you were away.

[Richard leaves his place rather abruptly and again paces to and fro.]

Robert.

You see, I am more honest than you thought.

Richard.

I wish you had not thought of her now—whoever she was, or is.

Robert.

[Easily.] She was and is the wife of a stockbroker.

Richard.

[Turning.] You know him?

Robert.

Intimately.

[Richard sits down again in the same place and leans forward, his head on his hands.]

Robert.

[Moving his chair a little closer.] May I ask you a question?

Richard.

You may.

Robert.

[With some hesitation.] Has it never happened to you in these years—I mean when you were away from her, perhaps, or travelling—to ... betray her with another. Betray her, I mean, not in love. Carnally, I mean ... Has that never happened?

Richard.

It has.

Robert.

And what did you do?

Richard.

[As before.] I remember the first time. I came home. It was night. My house was silent. My little son was sleeping in his cot. She, too, was asleep. I wakened her from sleep and told her. I cried beside her bed; and I pierced her heart.

Robert.

O, Richard, why did you do that?

Richard.

Betray her?

Robert.

No. But tell her, waken her from sleep to tell her. It was piercing her heart.

Richard.

She must know me as I am.

Robert.

But that is not you as you are. A moment of weakness.

Richard.

[Lost in thought.] And I was feeding the flame of her innocence with my guilt.

Robert.

[Brusquely.] O, don’t talk of guilt and innocence. You have made her all that she is. A strange and wonderful personality—in my eyes, at least.

Richard.

[Darkly.] Or I have killed her.

Robert.

Killed her?

Richard.

The virginity of her soul.

Robert.

[Impatiently.] Well lost! What would she be without you?

Richard.

I tried to give her a new life.

Robert.

And you have. A new and rich life.

Richard.

Is it worth what I have taken from her—her girlhood, her laughter, her young beauty, the hopes in her young heart?

Robert.

[Firmly.] Yes. Well worth it. [He looks at Richard for some moments in silence.] If you had neglected her, lived wildly, brought her away so far only to make her suffer ...

[He stops. Richard raises his head and looks at him.]

Richard.

If I had?

Robert.

[Slightly confused.] You know there were rumours here of your life abroad—a wild life. Some persons who knew you or met you or heard of you in Rome. Lying rumours.

Richard.

[Coldly.] Continue.

Robert.

[Laughs a little harshly.] Even I at times thought of her as a victim. [Smoothly.] And of course, Richard, I felt and knew all the time that you were a man of great talent—of something more than talent. And that was your excuse—a valid one in my eyes.

Richard.

Have you thought that it is perhaps now—at this moment—that I am neglecting her? [He clasps his hands nervously and leans across toward Robert.] I may be silent still. And she may yield to you at last—wholly and many times.

Robert.

[Draws back at once.] My dear Richard, my dear friend, I swear to you I could not make you suffer.

Richard.

[Continuing.] You may then know in soul and body, in a hundred forms, and ever restlessly, what some old theologian, Duns Scotus, I think, called a death of the spirit.

Robert.

[Eagerly.] A death. No; its affirmation! A death! The supreme instant of life from which all coming life proceeds, the eternal law of nature herself.

Richard.

And that other law of nature, as you call it: change. How will it be when you turn against her and against me; when her beauty, or what seems so to you now, wearies you and my affection for you seems false and odious?

Robert.

That will never be. Never.

Richard.

And you turn even against yourself for having known me or trafficked with us both?

Robert.

[Gravely.] It will never be like that, Richard. Be sure of that.

Richard.

[Contemptuously.] I care very little whether it is or not because there is something I fear much more.

Robert.

[Shakes his head.] You fear? I disbelieve you, Richard. Since we were boys together I have followed your mind. You do not know what moral fear is.

Richard.

[Lays his hand on his arm.] Listen. She is dead. She lies on my bed. I look at her body which I betrayed—grossly and many times. And loved, too, and wept over. And I know that her body was always my loyal slave. To me, to me only she gave ... [He breaks off and turns aside, unable to speak.]

Robert.

[Softly.] Do not suffer, Richard. There is no need. She is loyal to you, body and soul. Why do you fear?

Richard.

[Turns towards him, almost fiercely.] Not that fear. But that I will reproach myself then for having taken all for myself because I would not suffer her to give to another what was hers and not mine to give, because I accepted from her her loyalty and made her life poorer in love. That is my fear. That I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers, between her and you, between her and anyone, between her and anything. I will not do it. I cannot and I will not. I dare not.

[He leans back in his chair breathless, with shining eyes. Robert rises quietly, and stands behind his chair.]

Robert.

Look here, Richard. We have said all there is to be said. Let the past be past.

Richard.

[Quickly and harshly.] Wait. One thing more. For you, too, must know me as I am—now.

Robert.

More? Is there more?

Richard.

I told you that when I saw your eyes this afternoon I felt sad. Your humility and confusion, I felt, united you to me in brotherhood. [He turns half round towards him.] At that moment I felt our whole life together in the past, and I longed to put my arm around your neck.

Robert.

[Deeply and suddenly touched.] It is noble of you, Richard, to forgive me like this.

Richard.

[Struggling with himself.] I told you that I wished you not to do anything false and secret against me—against our friendship, against her; not to steal her from me, craftily, secretly, meanly—in the dark, in the night—you, Robert, my friend.

Robert.

I know. And it was noble of you.

Richard.

[Looks up at him with a steady gaze.] No. Not noble. Ignoble.

Robert.

[Makes an involuntary gesture.] How? Why?

Richard.

[Looks away again; in a lower voice.] That is what I must tell you too. Because in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be ...

Robert.

[Bending down, places his hands over Richard’s mouth.] Enough. Enough. [He takes his hands away.] But no. Go on.

Richard.

To be for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame.

Robert.

And that is why you wished that she ...

Richard.

[With calm.] She has spoken always of her innocence, as I have spoken always of my guilt, humbling me.

Robert.

From pride, then?

Richard.

From pride and from ignoble longing. And from a motive deeper still.

Robert.

[With decision.] I understand you.

[He returns to his place and begins to speak at once, drawing his chair closer.]

Robert.

May it not be that we are here and now in the presence of a moment which will free us both—me as well as you—from the last bonds of what is called morality. My friendship for you has laid bonds on me.

Richard.

Light bonds, apparently.

Robert.

I acted in the dark, secretly. I will do so no longer. Have you the courage to allow me to act freely?

Richard.

A duel—between us?

Robert.

[With growing excitement.] A battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world. A battle of your soul against the spectre of fidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship. All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, Richard? Have you the courage? Even if it shatters to atoms the friendship between us, even if it breaks up for ever the last illusion in your own life? There was an eternity before we were born: another will come after we are dead. The blinding instant of passion alone—passion, free, unashamed, irresistible—that is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life. Is not this the language of your own youth that I heard so often from you in this very place where we are sitting now? Have you changed?

Richard.

[Passes his hand across his brow.] Yes. It is the language of my youth.

Robert.

[Eagerly, intensely.] Richard, you have driven me up to this point. She and I have only obeyed your will. You yourself have roused these words in my brain. Your own words. Shall we? Freely? Together?

Richard.

[Mastering his emotion.] Together no. Fight your part alone. I will not free you. Leave me to fight mine.

Robert.

[Rises, decided.] You allow me, then?

Richard.

[Rises also, calmly.] Free yourself.

[A knock is heard at the hall door.]

Robert.

[In alarm.] What does this mean?

Richard.

[Calmly.] Bertha, evidently. Did you not ask her to come?

Robert.

Yes, but ... [Looking about him.] Then I am going, Richard.

Richard.

No. I am going.

Robert.

[Desperately.] Richard, I appeal to you. Let me go. It is over. She is yours. Keep her and forgive me, both of you.

Richard.

Because you are generous enough to allow me?

Robert.

[Hotly.] Richard, you will make me angry with you if you say that.

Richard.

Angry or not, I will not live on your generosity. You have asked her to meet you here tonight and alone. Solve the question between you.

Robert.

[Promptly.] Open the door. I shall wait in the garden. [He goes towards the porch.] Explain to her, Richard, as best you can. I cannot see her now.

Richard.

I shall go, I tell you. Wait out there if you wish.

[He goes out by the door on the right. Robert goes out hastily through the porch but comes back the same instant.]

Robert.

An umbrella! [With a sudden gesture.] O!

[He goes out again through the porch. The hall door is heard to open and close. Richard enters, followed by Bertha, who is dressed in a dark-brown costume and wears a small dark red hat. She has neither umbrella nor waterproof.]

Richard.

[Gaily.] Welcome back to old Ireland!

Bertha.

[Nervously, seriously.] Is this the place?

Richard.

Yes, it is. How did you find it?

Bertha.

I told the cabman. I didn’t like to ask my way. [Looking about her curiously.] Was he not waiting? Has he gone away?

Richard.

[Points towards the garden.] He is waiting. Out there. He was waiting when I came.

Bertha.

[Selfpossessed again.] You see, you came after all.

Richard.

Did you think I would not?

Bertha.

I knew you could not remain away. You see, after all you are like all other men. You had to come. You are jealous like the others.

Richard.

You seem annoyed to find me here.

Bertha.

What happened between you?

Richard.

I told him I knew everything, that I had known for a long time. He asked how. I said from you.

Bertha.

Does he hate me?

Richard.

I cannot read in his heart.

Bertha.

[Sits down helplessly.] Yes. He hates me. He believes I made a fool of him—betrayed him. I knew he would.

Richard.

I told him you were sincere with him.

Bertha.

He does not believe it. Nobody would believe it. I should have told him first—not you.

Richard.

I thought he was a common robber, prepared to use even violence against you. I had to protect you from that.

Bertha.

That I could have done myself.

Richard.

Are you sure?

Bertha.

It would have been enough to have told him that you knew I was here. Now I can find out nothing. He hates me. He is right to hate me. I have treated him badly, shamefully.

Richard.

[Takes her hand.] Bertha, look at me.

Bertha.

[Turns to him.] Well?

Richard.

[Gazes into her eyes and then lets her hand fall.] I cannot read in your heart either.

Bertha.

[Still looking at him.] You could not remain away. Do you not trust me? You can see I am quite calm. I could have hidden it all from you.

Richard.

I doubt that.

Bertha.

[With a slight toss of her head.] O, easily if I had wanted to.

Richard.

[Darkly.] Perhaps you are sorry now that you did not.

Bertha.

Perhaps I am.

Richard.

[Unpleasantly.] What a fool you were to tell me! It would have been so nice if you had kept it secret.

Bertha.

As you do, no?

Richard.

As I do, yes. [He turns to go.] Goodbye for a while.

Bertha.

[Alarmed, rises.] Are you going?

Richard.

Naturally. My part is ended here.

Bertha.

To her, I suppose?

Richard.

[Astonished.] Who?

Bertha.

Her ladyship. I suppose it is all planned so that you may have a good opportunity. To meet her and have an intellectual conversation!

Richard.

[With an outburst of rude anger.] To meet the devil’s father!

Bertha.

[Unpins her hat and sits down.] Very well. You can go. Now I know what to do.

Richard.

[Returns, approaches her.] You don’t believe a word of what you say.

Bertha.

[Calmly.] You can go. Why don’t you?

Richard.

Then you have come here and led him on in this way on account of me. Is that how it is?

Bertha.

There is one person in all this who is not a fool. And that is you. I am though. And he is.

Richard.

[Continuing.] If so you have indeed treated him badly and shamefully.

Bertha.

[Points at him.] Yes. But it was your fault. And I will end it now. I am simply a tool for you. You have no respect for me. You never had because I did what I did.

Richard.

And has he respect?

Bertha.

He has. Of all the persons I met since I came back he is the only one who has. And he knows what they only suspect. And that is why I liked him from the first and like him still. Great respect for me she has! Why did you not ask her to come away with you nine years ago?

Richard.

You know why, Bertha. Ask yourself.

Bertha.

Yes, I know why. You knew the answer you would get. That is why.

Richard.

That is not why. I did not even ask you.

Bertha.

Yes. You knew I would go, asked or not. I do things. But if I do one thing I can do two things. As I have the name I can have the gains.

Richard.

[With increasing excitement.] Bertha, I accept what is to be. I have trusted you. I will trust you still.

Bertha.

To have that against me. To leave me then. [Almost passionately.] Why do you not defend me then against him? Why do you go away from me now without a word? Dick, my God, tell me what you wish me to do?

Richard.

I cannot, dear. [Struggling with himself.] Your own heart will tell you. [He seizes both her hands.] I have a wild delight in my soul, Bertha, as I look at you. I see you as you are yourself. That I came first in your life or before him then—that may be nothing to you. You may be his more than mine.

Bertha.

I am not. Only I feel for him, too.

Richard.

And I do too. You may be his and mine. I will trust you, Bertha, and him too. I must. I cannot hate him since his arms have been around you. You have drawn us near together. There is something wiser than wisdom in your heart. Who am I that I should call myself master of your heart or of any woman’s? Bertha, love him, be his, give yourself to him if you desire—or if you can.

Bertha.

[Dreamily.] I will remain.

Richard.

Goodbye.

[He lets her hand fall and goes out rapidly on the right. Bertha remains sitting. Then she rises and goes timidly towards the porch. She stops near it and, after a little hesitation, calls into the garden.]

Bertha.

Is anyone out there?

[At the same time she retreats towards the middle of the room. Then she calls again in the same way.]

Bertha.

Is anyone there?

[Robert appears in the open doorway that leads in from the garden. His coat is buttoned and the collar is turned up. He holds the doorposts with his hands lightly and waits for Bertha to see him.]

Bertha.

[Catching sight of him, starts back: then, quickly.] Robert!

Robert.

Are you alone?

Bertha.

Yes.

Robert.

[Looking towards the door on the right.] Where is he?

Bertha.

Gone. [Nervously.] You startled me. Where did you come from?

Robert.

[With a movement of his head.] Out there. Did he not tell you I was out there—waiting?

Bertha.

[Quickly.] Yes, he told me. But I was afraid here alone. With the door open, waiting. [She comes to the table and rests her hand on the corner.] Why do you stand like that in the doorway?

Robert.

Why? I am afraid too?

Bertha.

Of what?

Robert.

Of you.

Bertha.

[Looks down.] Do you hate me now?

Robert.

I fear you. [Clasping his hands at his back, quietly but a little defiantly.] I fear a new torture—a new trap.

Bertha.

[As before.] For what do you blame me?

Robert.

[Comes forward a few steps, halts: then impulsively.] Why did you lead me on? Day after day, more and more. Why did you not stop me? You could have—with a word. But not even a word! I forgot myself and him. You saw it. That I was ruining myself in his eyes, losing his friendship. Did you want me to?

Bertha.

[Looking up.] You never asked me.

Robert.

Asked you what?

Bertha.

If he suspected—or knew.

Robert.

And would you have told me?

Bertha.

Yes.

Robert.

[Hesitatingly.] Did you tell him—everything?

Bertha.

I did.

Robert.

I mean—details.

Bertha.

Everything.

Robert.

[With a forced smile.] I see. You were making an experiment for his sake. On me. Well, why not? It seems I was a good subject. Still, it was a little cruel of you.

Bertha.

Try to understand me, Robert. You must try.

Robert.

[With a polite gesture.] Well, I will try.

Bertha.

Why do you stand like that near the door? It makes me nervous to look at you.

Robert.

I am trying to understand. And then I am afraid.

Bertha.

[Holds out her hand.] You need not be afraid.

[Robert comes towards her quickly and takes her hand.]

Robert.

[Diffidently.] Used you to laugh over me—together? [Drawing his hand away.] But now I must be good or you may laugh over me again—tonight.

Bertha.

[Distressed, lays her hand on his arm.] Please listen to me, Robert ... But you are all wet, drenched! [She passes her hand over his coat.] O, you poor fellow! Out there in the rain all that time! I forgot that.

Robert.

[Laughs.] Yes, you forgot the climate.

Bertha.

But you are really drenched. You must change your coat.

Robert.

[Takes her hands.] Tell me, it is pity then that you feel for me, as he—as Richard—says?

Bertha.

Please change your coat, Robert, when I ask you. You might get a very bad cold from that. Do, please.

Robert.

What would it matter now?

Bertha.

[Looking round her.] Where do you keep your clothes here?

Robert.

[Points to the door at the back.] In there. I fancy I have a jacket here. [Maliciously.] In my bedroom.

Bertha.

Well, go in and take that off.

Robert.

And you?

Bertha.

I will wait here for you.

Robert.

Do you command me to?

Bertha.

[Laughing.] Yes, I command you.

Robert.

[Promptly.] Then I will. [He goes quickly towards the bedroom door; then turns round.] You won’t go away?

Bertha.

No, I will wait. But don’t be long.

Robert.

Only a moment.

[He goes into the bedroom, leaving the door open. Bertha looks curiously about her and then glances in indecision towards the door at the back.]

Robert.

[From the bedroom.] You have not gone?

Bertha.

No.

Robert.

I am in the dark here. I must light the lamp.

[He is heard striking a match, and putting a glass shade on a lamp. A pink light comes in through the doorway. Bertha glances at her watch at her wristlet and then sits at the table.]

Robert.

[As before.] Do you like the effect of the light?

Bertha.

O, yes.

Robert.

Can you admire it from where you are?

Bertha.

Yes, quite well.

Robert.

It was for you.

Bertha.

[Confused.] I am not worthy even of that.

Robert.

[Clearly, harshly.] Love’s labour lost.

Bertha.

[Rising nervously.] Robert!

Robert.

Yes?

Bertha.

Come here, quickly! Quickly, I say!

Robert.

I am ready.

[He appears in the doorway, wearing a darkgreen velvet jacket. Seeing her agitation, he comes quickly towards her.]

Robert.

What is it, Bertha?

Bertha.

[Trembling.] I was afraid.

Robert.

Of being alone?

Bertha.

[Catches his hands.] You know what I mean. My nerves are all upset.

Robert.

That I ...?

Bertha.

Promise me, Robert, not to think of such a thing. Never. If you like me at all. I thought that moment ...

Robert.

What an idea?

Bertha.

But promise me if you like me.

Robert.

If I like you, Bertha! I promise. Of course, I promise. You are trembling all over.

Bertha.

Let me sit down somewhere. It will pass in a moment.

Robert.

My poor Bertha! Sit down. Come.

[He leads her towards a chair near the table. She sits down. He stands beside her.]

Robert.

[After a short pause.] Has it passed?

Bertha.

Yes. It was only a moment. I was very silly. I was afraid that ... I wanted to see you near me.

Robert.

That ... that you made me promise not to think of?

Bertha.

Yes.

Robert.

[Keenly.] Or something else?

Bertha.

[Helplessly.] Robert, I feared something. I am not sure what.

Robert.

And now?

Bertha.

Now you are here. I can see you. Now it has passed.

Robert.

[With resignation.] Passed. Yes. Love’s labour lost.

Bertha.

[Looks up at him.] Listen, Robert. I want to explain to you about that. I could not deceive Dick. Never. In nothing. I told him everything—from the first. Then it went on and on; and still you never spoke or asked me. I wanted you to.

Robert.

Is that the truth, Bertha?

Bertha.

Yes, because it annoyed me that you could think I was like ... like the other women I suppose you knew that way. I think that Dick is right too. Why should there be secrets?

Robert.

[Softly.] Still, secrets can be very sweet. Can they not?

Bertha.

[Smiles.] Yes, I know they can. But, you see, I could not keep things secret from Dick. Besides, what is the good? They always come out in the end. Is it not better for people to know?

Robert.

[Softly and a little shyly.] How could you, Bertha, tell him everything? Did you? Every single thing that passed between us?

Bertha.

Yes. Everything he asked me.

Robert.

Did he ask you—much?

Bertha.

You know the kind he is. He asks about everything. The ins and outs.

Robert.

About our kissing, too?

Bertha.

Of course. I told him all.

Robert.

[Shakes his head slowly.] Extraordinary little person! Were you not ashamed?

Bertha.

No.

Robert.

Not a bit?

Bertha.

No. Why? Is that terrible?

Robert.

And how did he take it? Tell me. I want to know everything, too.

Bertha.

[Laughs.] It excited him. More than usual.

Robert.

Why? Is he excitable—still?

Bertha.

[Archly.] Yes, very. When he is not lost in his philosophy.

Robert.

More than I?

Bertha.

More than you? [Reflecting.] How could I answer that? You both are, I suppose?

[Robert turns aside and gazes towards the porch, passing his hand once or twice thoughtfully over his hair.]

Bertha.

[Gently.] Are you angry with me again?

Robert.

[Moodily.] You are with me.

Bertha.

No, Robert. Why should I be?

Robert.

Because I asked you to come to this place. I tried to prepare it for you. [He points vaguely here and there.] A sense of quietness.

Bertha.

[Touching his jacket with her fingers.] And this, too. Your nice velvet coat.

Robert.

Also. I will keep no secrets from you.

Bertha.

You remind me of someone in a picture. I like you in it ... But you are not angry, are you?

Robert.

[Darkly.] Yes. That was my mistake. To ask you to come here. I felt it when I looked at you from the garden and saw you—you, Bertha—standing here. [Hopelessly.] But what else could I have done?

Bertha.

[Quietly.] You mean because others have been here?

Robert.

Yes.

[He walks away from her a few paces. A gust of wind makes the lamp on the table flicker. He lowers the wick slightly.]

Bertha.

[Following him with her eyes.] But I knew that before I came. I am not angry with you for it.

Robert.

[Shrugs his shoulders.] Why should you be angry with me after all? You are not even angry with him—for the same thing—or worse.

Bertha.

Did he tell you that about himself?

Robert.

Yes. He told me. We all confess to one another here. Turn about.

Bertha.

I try to forget it.

Robert.

It does not trouble you?

Bertha.

Not now. Only I dislike to think of it.

Robert.

It is merely something brutal, you think? of little importance?

Bertha.

It does not trouble me—now.

Robert.

[Looking at her over his shoulder.] But there is something that would trouble you very much and that you would not try to forget?

Bertha.

What?

Robert.

[Turning towards her.] If it were not only something brutal with this person or that—for a few moments. If it were something fine and spiritual—with one person only—with one woman. [Smiles.] And perhaps brutal too. It usually comes to that sooner or later. Would you try to forget and forgive that?

Bertha.

[Toying with her wristlet.] In whom?

Robert.

In anyone. In me.

Bertha.

[Calmly.] You mean in Dick.

Robert.

I said in myself. But would you?

Bertha.

You think I would revenge myself? Is Dick not to be free too?

Robert.

[Points at her.] That is not from your heart, Bertha.

Bertha.

[Proudly.] Yes, it is; let him be free too. He leaves me free also.

Robert.

[Insistently.] And you know why? And understand? And you like it? And you want to be? And it makes you happy? And has made you happy? Always? This gift of freedom which he gave you—nine years ago?

Bertha.

[Gazing at him with wide open eyes.] But why do you ask me such a lot of questions, Robert?

Robert.

[Stretches out both hands to her.] Because I had another gift to offer you then—a common simple gift—like myself. If you want to know it I will tell you.

Bertha.

[Looking at her watch.] Past is past, Robert. And I think I ought to go now. It is nine almost.

Robert.

[Impetuously.] No, no. Not yet. There is one confession more and we have the right to speak.

[He crosses before the table rapidly and sits down beside her.]

Bertha.

[Turning towards him, places her left hand on his shoulder.] Yes, Robert. I know that you like me. You need not tell me. [Kindly.] You need not confess any more tonight.

[A gust of wind enters through the porch, with a sound of moving leaves. The lamp flickers quickly.]

Bertha.

[Pointing over his shoulder.] Look! It is too high.

[Without rising, he bends towards the table, and turns down the wick more. The room is half dark. The light comes in more strongly through the doorway of the bedroom.]

Robert.

The wind is rising. I will close that door.

Bertha.

[Listening.] No, it is raining still. It was only a gust of wind.

Robert.

[Touches her shoulder.] Tell me if the air is too cold for you. [Half rising.] I will close it.

Bertha.

[Detaining him.] No. I am not cold. Besides, I am going now, Robert. I must.

Robert.

[Firmly.] No, no. There is no must now. We were left here for this. And you are wrong, Bertha. The past is not past. It is present here now. My feeling for you is the same now as it was then, because then—you slighted it.

Bertha.

No, Robert. I did not.

Robert.

[Continuing.] You did. And I have felt it all these years without knowing it—till now. Even while I lived—the kind of life you know and dislike to think of—the kind of life to which you condemned me.

Bertha.

I?

Robert.

Yes, when you slighted the common simple gift I had to offer you—and took his gift instead.

Bertha.

[Looking at him.] But you never ...

Robert.

No. Because you had chosen him. I saw that. I saw it on the first night we met, we three together. Why did you choose him?

Bertha.

[Bends her head.] Is that not love?

Robert.

[Continuing.] And every night when we two—he and I—came to that corner to meet you I saw it and felt it. You remember the corner, Bertha?

Bertha.

[As before.] Yes.

Robert.

And when you and he went away for your walk and I went along the street alone I felt it. And when he spoke to me about you and told me he was going away—then most of all.

Bertha.

Why then most of all?

Robert.

Because it was then that I was guilty of my first treason towards him.

Bertha.

Robert, what are you saying? Your first treason against Dick?

Robert.

[Nods.] And not my last. He spoke of you and himself. Of how your life would be together—free and all that. Free, yes! He would not even ask you to go with him. [Bitterly.] He did not. And you went all the same.

Bertha.

I wanted to be with him. You know ... [Raising her head and looking at him.] You know how we were then—Dick and I.

Robert.

[Unheeding.] I advised him to go alone—not to take you with him—to live alone in order to see if what he felt for you was a passing thing which might ruin your happiness and his career.

Bertha.

Well, Robert. It was unkind of you towards me. But I forgive you because you were thinking of his happiness and mine.

Robert.

[Bending closer to her.] No, Bertha. I was not. And that was my treason. I was thinking of myself—that you might turn from him when he had gone and he from you. Then I would have offered you my gift. You know what it was now. The simple common gift that men offer to women. Not the best perhaps. Best or worse—it would have been yours.

Bertha.

[Turning away from him.] He did not take your advice.

Robert.

[As before.] No. And the night you ran away together—O, how happy I was!

Bertha.

[Pressing his hands.] Keep calm, Robert. I know you liked me always. Why did you not forget me?

Robert.

[Smiles bitterly.] How happy I felt as I came back along the quays and saw in the distance the boat lit up going down the black river, taking you away from me! [In a calmer tone.] But why did you choose him? Did you not like me at all?

Bertha.

Yes. I liked you because you were his friend. We often spoke about you. Often and often. Every time you wrote or sent papers or books to Dick. And I like you still, Robert. [Looking into his eyes.] I never forgot you.

Robert.

Nor I you. I knew I would see you again. I knew it the night you went away—that you would come back. And that was why I wrote and worked to see you again—here.

Bertha.

And here I am. You were right.

Robert.

[Slowly.] Nine years. Nine times more beautiful!

Bertha.

[Smiling.] But am I? What do you see in me?

Robert.

[Gazing at her.] A strange and beautiful lady.

Bertha.

[Almost disgusted.] O, please don’t call me such a thing!

Robert.

[Earnestly.] You are more. A young and beautiful queen.

Bertha.

[With a sudden laugh.] O, Robert!

Robert.

[Lowering his voice and bending nearer to her.] But do you not know that you are a beautiful human being? Do you not know that you have a beautiful body? Beautiful and young?

Bertha.

[Gravely.] Some day I will be old.

Robert.

[Shakes his head.] I cannot imagine it. Tonight you are young and beautiful. Tonight you have come back to me. [With passion.] Who knows what will be tomorrow? I may never see you again or never see you as I do now.

Bertha.

Would you suffer?

Robert.

[Looks round the room, without answering.] This room and this hour were made for your coming. When you have gone—all is gone.

Bertha.

[Anxiously.] But you will see me again, Robert ... as before.

Robert.

[Looks full at her.] To make him—Richard—suffer.

Bertha.

He does not suffer.

Robert.

[Bowing his head.] Yes, yes. He does.

Bertha.

He knows we like each other. Is there any harm, then?

Robert.

[Raising his head.] No, there is no harm. Why should we not? He does not know yet what I feel. He has left us alone here at night, at this hour, because he longs to know it—he longs to be delivered.

Bertha.

From what?

Robert.

[Moves closer to her and presses her arm as he speaks.] From every law, Bertha, from every bond. All his life he has sought to deliver himself. Every chain but one he has broken and that one we are to break, Bertha—you and I.

Bertha.

[Almost inaudibly.] Are you sure?

Robert.

[Still more warmly.] I am sure that no law made by man is sacred before the impulse of passion. [Almost fiercely.] Who made us for one only? It is a crime against our own being if we are so. There is no law before impulse. Laws are for slaves. Bertha, say my name! Let me hear your voice say it. Softly!

Bertha.

[Softly.] Robert!

Robert.

[Puts his arm about her shoulder.] Only the impulse towards youth and beauty does not die. [He points towards the porch.] Listen!

Bertha.

[In alarm.] What?

Robert.

The rain falling. Summer rain on the earth. Night rain. The darkness and warmth and flood of passion. Tonight the earth is loved—loved and possessed. Her lover’s arms around her; and she is silent. Speak, dearest!

Bertha.

[Suddenly leans forward and listens intently.] Hush!

Robert.

[Listening, smiles.] Nothing. Nobody. We are alone.

[A gust of wind blows in through the porch, with a sound of shaken leaves. The flame of the lamp leaps.]

Bertha.

[Pointing to the lamp.] Look!

Robert.

Only wind. We have light enough from the other room.

[He stretches his hand across the table and puts out the lamp. The light from the doorway of the bedroom crosses the place where they sit. The room is quite dark.]

Robert.

Are you happy? Tell me.

Bertha.

I am going now, Robert. It is very late. Be satisfied.

Robert.

[Caressing her hair.] Not yet, not yet. Tell me, do you love me a little?

Bertha.

I like you, Robert. I think you are good. [Half rising.] Are you satisfied?

Robert.

[Detaining her, kisses her hair.] Do not go, Bertha! There is time still. Do you love me too? I have waited a long time. Do you love us both—him and also me? Do you, Bertha? The truth! Tell me. Tell me with your eyes. Or speak!

[She does not answer. In the silence the rain is heard falling.]

 ® 

Third Act

The drawingroom of Richard Rowan’s house at Merrion. The folding doors at the right are closed and also the double doors leading to the garden. The green plush curtains are drawn across the window on the left. The room is half dark. It is early in the morning of the next day. Bertha sits beside the window, looking out between the curtains. She wears a loose saffron dressing gown. Her hair is combed loosely over the ears and knotted at the neck. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her face is pale and drawn.

[Brigid comes in through the folding doors on the right with a featherbroom and duster. She is about to cross but, seeing Bertha, she halts suddenly and blesses herself instinctively.]

Brigid.

Merciful hour, ma’am. You put the heart across me. Why did you get up so early?

Bertha.

What time is it?

Brigid.

After seven, ma’am. Are you long up?

Bertha.

Some time.

Brigid.

[Approaching her.] Had you a bad dream that woke you?

Bertha.

I didn’t sleep all night. So I got up to see the sun rise.

Brigid.

[Opens the double doors.] It’s a lovely morning now after all the rain we had. [Turns round.] But you must be dead tired, ma’am. What will the master say at your doing a thing like that? [She goes to the door of the study and knocks.] Master Richard!

Bertha.

[Looks round.] He is not there. He went out an hour ago.

Brigid.

Out there, on the strand, is it?

Bertha.

Yes.

Brigid.

[Comes towards her and leans over the back of a chair.] Are you fretting yourself, ma’am, about anything?

Bertha.

No, Brigid.

Brigid.

Don’t be. He was always like that, meandering off by himself somewhere. He is a curious bird, Master Richard, and always was. Sure there isn’t a turn in him I don’t know. Are you fretting now maybe because he does be in there [pointing to the study] half the night at his books? Leave him alone. He’ll come back to you again. Sure he thinks the sun shines out of your face, ma’am.

Bertha.

[Sadly.] That time is gone.

Brigid.

[Confidentially.] And good cause I have to remember it—that time when he was paying his addresses to you. [She sits down beside Bertha: In a lower voice.] Do you know that he used to tell me all about you and nothing to his mother, God rest her soul? Your letters and all.

Bertha.

What? My letters to him?

Brigid.

[Delighted.] Yes. I can see him sitting on the kitchen table, swinging his legs and spinning out of him yards of talk about you and him and Ireland and all kinds of devilment—to an ignorant old woman like me. But that was always his way. But if he had to meet a grand highup person he’d be twice as grand himself. [Suddenly looks at Bertha.] Is it crying you are now? Ah, sure, don’t cry. There’s good times coming still.

Bertha.

No, Brigid, that time comes only once in a lifetime. The rest of life is good for nothing except to remember that time.

Brigid.

[Is silent for a moment: then says kindly:] Would you like a cup of tea, ma’am? That would make you all right.

Bertha.

Yes, I would. But the milkman has not come yet.

Brigid.

No. Master Archie told me to wake him before he came. He’s going out for a jaunt in the car. But I’ve a cup left overnight. I’ll have the kettle boiling in a jiffy. Would you like a nice egg with it?

Bertha.

No, thanks.

Brigid.

Or a nice bit of toast?

Bertha.

No, Brigid, thanks. Just a cup of tea.

Brigid.

[Crossing to the folding doors.] I won’t be a moment. [She stops, turns back and goes towards the door on the left.] But first I must waken Master Archie or there’ll be ructions.

[She goes out by the door on the left. After a few moments Bertha rises and goes over to the study. She opens the door wide and looks in. One can see a small untidy room with many bookshelves and a large writingtable with papers and an extinguished lamp and before it a padded chair. She remains standing for some time in the doorway, then closes the door again without entering the room. She returns to her chair by the window and sits down. Archie, dressed as before, comes in by the door on the right, followed by Brigid.]

Archie.

[Comes to her and, putting up his face to be kissed, says:] Buon giorno, mamma!

Bertha.

[Kissing him.] Buon giorno, Archie! [To Brigid.] Did you put another vest on him under that one?

Brigid.

He wouldn’t let me, ma’am.

Archie.

I’m not cold, mamma.

Bertha.

I said you were to put it on, didn’t I?

Archie.

But where is the cold?

Bertha.

[Takes a comb from her head and combs his hair back at both sides.] And the sleep is in your eyes still.

Brigid.

He went to bed immediately after you went out last night, ma’am.

Archie.

You know he’s going to let me drive, mamma.

Bertha.

[Replacing the comb in her hair, embraces him suddenly.] O, what a big man to drive a horse!

Brigid.

Well, he’s daft on horses, anyhow.

Archie.

[Releasing himself.] I’ll make him go quick. You will see from the window, mamma. With the whip. [He makes the gesture of cracking a whip and shouts at the top of his voice.] Avanti!

Brigid.

Beat the poor horse, is it?

Bertha.

Come here till I clean your mouth. [She takes her handkerchief from the pocket of her gown, wets it with her tongue and cleans his mouth.] You’re all smudges or something, dirty little creature you are.

Archie.

[Repeats, laughing.] Smudges! What is smudges?

[The noise is heard of a milkcan rattled on the railings before the window.]

Brigid.

[Draws aside the curtains and looks out.] Here he is!

Archie.

[Rapidly.] Wait. I’m ready. Goodbye, mamma! [He kisses her hastily and turns to go.] Is pappie up?

Brigid.

[Takes him by the arm.] Come on with you now.

Bertha.

Mind yourself, Archie, and don’t be long or I won’t let you go any more.

Archie.

All right. Look out of the window and you’ll see me. Goodbye.

[Brigid and Archie go out by the door on the left. Bertha stands up and, drawing aside the curtains still more, stands in the embrasure of the window looking out. The hall door is heard opening: then a slight noise of voices and cans is heard. The door is closed. After a moment or two Bertha is seen waving her hand gaily in a salute. Brigid enters and stands behind her, looking over her shoulder.]

Brigid.

Look at the sit of him! As serious as you like.

Bertha.

[Suddenly withdrawing from her post.] Stand out of the window. I don’t want to be seen.

Brigid.

Why, ma’am, what is it?

Bertha.

[Crossing towards the folding doors.] Say I’m not up, that I’m not well. I can’t see anyone.

Brigid.

[Follows her.] Who is it, ma’am?

Bertha.

[Halting.] Wait a moment.

[She listens. A knock is heard at the hall door.]

Bertha.

[Stands a moment in doubt, then.] No, say I’m in.

Brigid.

[In doubt.] Here?

Bertha.

[Hurriedly.] Yes. Say I have just got up.

[Brigid goes out on the left. Bertha goes towards the double doors and fingers the curtains nervously, as if settling them. The hall door is heard to open. Then Beatrice Justice enters and, as Bertha does not turn at once, stands in hesitation near the door on the left. She is dressed as before and has a newspaper in her hand.]

Beatrice.

[Advances rapidly.] Mrs Rowan, excuse me for coming at such an hour.

Bertha.

[Turns.] Good morning, Miss Justice. [She comes towards her.] Is anything the matter?

Beatrice.

[Nervously.] I don’t know. That is what I wanted to ask you.

Bertha.

[Looks curiously at her.] You are out of breath. Won’t you sit down?

Beatrice.

[Sitting down.] Thank you.

Bertha.

[Sits opposite her, pointing to her paper.] Is there something in the paper?

Beatrice.

[Laughs nervously: opens the paper.] Yes.

Bertha.

About Dick?

Beatrice.

Yes. Here it is. A long article, a leading article, by my cousin. All his life is here. Do you wish to see it?

Bertha.

[Takes the paper, and opens it.] Where is it?

Beatrice.

In the middle. It is headed: A Distinguished Irishman.

Bertha.

Is it ... for Dick or against him?

Beatrice.

[Warmly.] O, for him! You can read what he says about Mr Rowan. And I know that Robert stayed in town very late last night to write it.

Bertha.

[Nervously.] Yes. Are you sure?

Beatrice.

Yes. Very late. I heard him come home. It was long after two.

Bertha.

[Watching her.] It alarmed you? I mean to be awakened at that hour of the morning.

Beatrice.

I am a light sleeper. But I knew he had come from the office and then ... I suspected he had written an article about Mr Rowan and that was why he came so late.

Bertha.

How quick you were to think of that?

Beatrice.

Well, after what took place here yesterday afternoon—I mean what Robert said, that Mr Rowan had accepted this position. It was only natural I should think ...

Bertha.

Ah, yes. Naturally.

Beatrice.

[Hastily.] But that is not what alarmed me. But immediately after I heard a noise in my cousin’s room.

Bertha.

[Crumples together the paper in her hands, breathlessly.] My God! What is it? Tell me.

Beatrice.

[Observing her.] Why does that upset you so much?

Bertha.

[Sinking back, with a forced laugh.] Yes, of course, it is very foolish of me. My nerves are all upset. I slept very badly, too. That is why I got up so early. But tell me what was it then?

Beatrice.

Only the noise of his valise being pulled along the floor. Then I heard him walking about his room, whistling softly. And then locking it and strapping it.

Bertha.

He is going away!

Beatrice.

That was what alarmed me. I feared he had had a quarrel with Mr Rowan and that his article was an attack.

Bertha.

But why should they quarrel? Have you noticed anything between them?

Beatrice.

I thought I did. A coldness.

Bertha.

Lately?

Beatrice.

For some time past.

Bertha.

[Smoothing the paper out.] Do you know the reason?

Beatrice.

[Hesitatingly.] No.

Bertha.

[After a pause.] Well, but if this article is for him, as you say, they have not quarrelled. [She reflects a moment.] And written last night, too.

Beatrice.

Yes. I bought the paper at once to see. But why, then, is he going away so suddenly? I feel that there is something wrong. I feel that something has happened between them.

Bertha.

Would you be sorry?

Beatrice.

I would be very sorry. You see, Mrs Rowan, Robert is my first cousin and it would grieve me very deeply if he were to treat Mr Rowan badly, now that he has come back, or if they had a serious quarrel especially because ...

Bertha.

[Toying with the paper.] Because?

Beatrice.

Because it was my cousin who urged Mr Rowan always to come back. I have that on my conscience.

Bertha.

It should be on Mr Hand’s conscience, should it not?

Beatrice.

[Uncertainly.] On mine, too. Because—I spoke to my cousin about Mr Rowan when he was away and, to a certain extent, it was I ...

Bertha.

[Nods slowly.] I see. And that is on your conscience. Only that?

Beatrice.

I think so.

Bertha.

[Almost cheerfully.] It looks as if it was you, Miss Justice, who brought my husband back to Ireland.

Beatrice.

I, Mrs Rowan?

Bertha.

Yes, you. By your letters to him and then by speaking to your cousin as you said just now. Do you not think that you are the person who brought him back?

Beatrice.

[Blushing suddenly.] No. I could not think that.

Bertha.

[Watches her for a moment; then turning aside.] You know that my husband is writing very much since he came back.

Beatrice.

Is he?

Bertha.

Did you not know? [She points towards the study.] He passes the greater part of the night in there writing. Night after night.

Beatrice.

In his study?

Bertha.

Study or bedroom. You may call it what you please. He sleeps there, too, on a sofa. He slept there last night. I can show you if you don’t believe me.

[She rises to go towards the study. Beatrice half rises quickly and makes a gesture of refusal.]

Beatrice.

I believe you, of course, Mrs Rowan, when you tell me.

Bertha.

[Sitting down again.] Yes. He is writing. And it must be about something which has come into his life lately—since we came back to Ireland. Some change. Do you know that any change has come into his life? [She looks searchingly at her.] Do you know it or feel it?

Beatrice.

[Answers her look steadily.] Mrs Rowan, that is not a question to ask me. If any change has come into his life since he came back you must know and feel it.

Bertha.

You could know it just as well. You are very intimate in this house.

Beatrice.

I am not the only person who is intimate here.

[They both look at each other coldly in silence for some moments. Bertha lays aside the paper and sits down on a chair nearer to Beatrice.]

Bertha.

[Placing her hand on Beatrice’s knee.] So you also hate me, Miss Justice?

Beatrice.

[With an effort.] Hate you? I?

Bertha.

[Insistently but softly.] Yes. You know what it means to hate a person?

Beatrice.

Why should I hate you? I have never hated anyone.

Bertha.

Have you ever loved anyone? [She puts her hand on Beatrice’s wrist.] Tell me. You have?

Beatrice.

[Also softly.] Yes. In the past.

Bertha.

Not now?

Beatrice.

No.

Bertha.

Can you say that to me—truly. Look at me.

Beatrice.

[Looks at her.] Yes, I can.

[A short pause. Bertha withdraws her hand, and turns away her head in some embarrassment.]

Bertha.

You said just now that another person is intimate in this house. You meant your cousin ... Was it he?

Beatrice.

Yes.

Bertha.

Have you not forgotten him?

Beatrice.

[Quietly.] I have tried to.

Bertha.

[Clasping her hands.] You hate me. You think I am happy. If you only knew how wrong you are!

Beatrice.

[Shakes her head.] I do not.

Bertha.

Happy! When I do not understand anything that he writes, when I cannot help him in any way, when I don’t even understand half of what he says to me sometimes! You could and you can. [Excitedly.] But I am afraid for him, afraid for both of them. [She stands up suddenly and goes towards the davenport.] He must not go away like that. [She takes a writing pad from the drawer and writes a few lines in great haste.] No, it is impossible! Is he mad to do such a thing? [Turning to Beatrice.] Is he still at home?

Beatrice.

[Watching her in wonder.] Yes. Have you written to him to ask him to come here?

Bertha.

[Rises.] I have. I will send Brigid across with it. Brigid!

[She goes out by the door on the left rapidly.]

Beatrice.

[Gazing after her, instinctively.] It is true, then!

[She glances toward the door of Richard’s study and catches her head in her hands. Then, recovering herself, she takes the paper from the little table, opens it, takes a spectacle case from her handbag and, putting on a pair of spectacles, bends down, reading it. Richard Rowan enters from the garden. He is dressed as before but wears a soft hat and carries a thin cane.]

Richard.

[Stands in the doorway, observing her for some moments.] There are demons [he points out towards the strand] out there. I heard them jabbering since dawn.

Beatrice.

[Starts to her feet.] Mr Rowan!

Richard.

I assure you. The isle is full of voices. Yours also, Otherwise I could not see you, it said. And her voice. But, I assure you, they are all demons. I made the sign of the cross upside down and that silenced them.

Beatrice.

[Stammering.] I came here, Mr Rowan, so early because ... to show you this ... Robert wrote it ... about you ... last night.

Richard.

[Takes off his hat.] My dear Miss Justice, you told me yesterday, I think, why you came here and I never forget anything. [Advancing towards her, holding out his hand.] Good morning.

Beatrice.

[Suddenly takes off her spectacles and places the paper in his hands.] I came for this. It is an article about you. Robert wrote it last night. Will you read it?

Richard.

[Bows.] Read it now? Certainly.

Beatrice.

[Looks at him in despair.] O, Mr Rowan, it makes me suffer to look at you.

Richard.

[Opens and reads the paper.] Death of the Very Reverend Canon Mulhall. Is that it?

[Bertha appears at the door on the left and stands to listen.]

Richard.

[Turns over a page.] Yes, here we are! A Distinguished Irishman. [He begins to read in a rather loud hard voice.] Not the least vital of the problems which confront our country is the problem of her attitude towards those of her children who, having left her in her hour of need, have been called back to her now on the eve of her longawaited victory, to her whom in loneliness and exile they have at last learned to love. In exile, we have said, but here we must distinguish. There is an economic and there is a spiritual exile. There are those who left her to seek the bread by which men live and there are others, nay, her most favoured children, who left her to seek in other lands that food of the spirit by which a nation of human beings is sustained in life. Those who recall the intellectual life of Dublin of a decade since will have many memories of Mr Rowan. Something of that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart ...

[He raises his eyes from the paper and sees Bertha standing in the doorway. Then he lays aside the paper and looks at her. A long silence.]

Beatrice.

[With an effort.] You see, Mr Rowan, your day has dawned at last. Even here. And you see that you have a warm friend in Robert, a friend who understands you.

Richard.

Did you notice the little phrase at the beginning: those who left her in her hour of need?

[He looks searchingly at Bertha, turns and walks into his study, closing the door behind him.]

Bertha.

[Speaking half to herself.] I gave up everything for him, religion, family, my own peace.

[She sits down heavily in an armchair. Beatrice comes towards her.]

Beatrice.

[Weakly.] But do you not feel also that Mr Rowan’s ideas ...

Bertha.

[Bitterly.] Ideas and ideas! But the people in this world have other ideas or pretend to. They have to put up with him in spite of his ideas because he is able to do something. Me, no. I am nothing.

Beatrice.

You stand by his side.

Bertha.

[With increasing bitterness.] Ah, nonsense, Miss Justice! I am only a thing he got entangled with and my son is—the nice name they give those children. Do you think I am a stone? Do you think I don’t see it in their eyes and in their manner when they have to meet me?

Beatrice.

Do not let them humble you, Mrs Rowan.

Bertha.

[Haughtily.] Humble me! I am very proud of myself, if you want to know. What have they ever done for him? I made him a man. What are they all in his life? No more than the dirt under his boots! [She stands up and walks excitedly to and fro.] He can despise me, too, like the rest of them—now. And you can despise me. But you will never humble me, any of you.

Beatrice.

Why do you accuse me?

Bertha.

[Going to her impulsively.] I am in such suffering. Excuse me if I was rude. I want us to be friends. [She holds out her hands.] Will you?

Beatrice.

[Taking her hands.] Gladly.

Bertha.

[Looking at her.] What lovely long eyelashes you have! And your eyes have such a sad expression!

Beatrice.

[Smiling.] I see very little with them. They are very weak.

Bertha.

[Warmly.] But beautiful.

[She embraces her quietly and kisses her. Then withdraws from her a little shyly. Brigid comes in from the left.]

Brigid.

I gave it to himself, ma’am.

Bertha.

Did he send a message?

Brigid.

He was just going out, ma’am. He told me to say he’d be here after me.

Bertha.

Thanks.

Brigid.

[Going.] Would you like the tea and the toast now, ma’am?

Bertha.

Not now, Brigid. After perhaps. When Mr Hand comes show him in at once.

Brigid.

Yes, ma’am.

[She goes out on the left.]

Beatrice.

I will go now, Mrs Rowan, before he comes.

Bertha.

[Somewhat timidly.] Then we are friends?

Beatrice.

[In the same tone.] We will try to be. [Turning.] Do you allow me to go out through the garden? I don’t want to meet my cousin now.

Bertha.

Of course. [She takes her hand.] It is so strange that we spoke like this now. But I always wanted to. Did you?

Beatrice.

I think I did, too.

Bertha.

[Smiling.] Even in Rome. When I went out for a walk with Archie I used to think about you, what you were like, because I knew about you from Dick. I used to look at different persons, coming out of churches or going by in carriages, and think that perhaps they were like you. Because Dick told me you were dark.

Beatrice.

[Again nervously.] Really?

Bertha.

[Pressing her hand.] Goodbye then—for the present.

Beatrice.

[Disengaging her hand.] Good morning.

Bertha.

I will see you to the gate.

[She accompanies her out through the double doors. They go down through the garden. Richard Rowan comes in from the study. He halts near the doors, looking down the garden. Then he turns away, comes to the little table, takes up the paper and reads. Bertha, after some moments, appears in the doorway and stands watching him till he has finished. He lays down the paper again and turns to go back to his study.]

Bertha.

Dick!

Richard.

[Stopping.] Well?

Bertha.

You have not spoken to me.

Richard.

I have nothing to say. Have you?

Bertha.

Do you not wish to know—about what happened last night?

Richard.

That I will never know.

Bertha.

I will tell you if you ask me.

Richard.

You will tell me. But I will never know. Never in this world.

Bertha.

[Moving towards him.] I will tell you the truth, Dick, as I always told you. I never lied to you.

Richard.

[Clenching his hands in the air, passionately.] Yes, yes. The truth! But I will never know, I tell you.

Bertha.

Why, then, did you leave me last night?

Richard.

[Bitterly.] In your hour of need.

Bertha.

[Threateningly.] You urged me to it. Not because you love me. If you loved me or if you knew what love was you would not have left me. For your own sake you urged me to it.

Richard.

I did not make myself. I am what I am.

Bertha.

To have it always to throw against me. To make me humble before you, as you always did. To be free yourself. [Pointing towards the garden.] With her! And that is your love! Every word you say is false.

Richard.

[Controlling himself.] It is useless to ask you to listen to me.

Bertha.

Listen to you! She is the person for listening. Why would you waste your time with me? Talk to her.

Richard.

[Nods his head.] I see. You have driven her away from me now, as you drove everyone else from my side—every friend I ever had, every human being that ever tried to approach me. You hate her.

Bertha.

[Warmly.] No such thing! I think you have made her unhappy as you have made me and as you made your dead mother unhappy and killed her. Woman-killer! That is your name.

Richard.

[Turns to go.] Arrivederci!

Bertha.

[Excitedly.] She is a fine and high character. I like her. She is everything that I am not—in birth and education. You tried to ruin her but you could not. Because she is well able for you—what I am not. And you know it.

Richard.

[Almost shouting.] What the devil are you talking about her for?

Bertha.

[Clasping her hands.] O, how I wish I had never met you! How I curse that day!

Richard.

[Bitterly.] I am in the way, is it? You would like to be free now. You have only to say the word.

Bertha.

[Proudly.] Whenever you like I am ready.

Richard.

So that you could meet your lover—freely?

Bertha.

Yes.

Richard.

Night after night?

Bertha.

[Gazing before her and speaking with intense passion.] To meet my lover! [Holding out her arms before her.] My lover! Yes! My lover!

[She bursts suddenly into tears and sinks down on a chair, covering her face with her hands. Richard approaches her slowly and touches her on the shoulder.]

Richard.

Bertha! [She does not answer.] Bertha, you are free.

Bertha.

[Pushes his hand aside and starts to her feet.] Don’t touch me! You are a stranger to me. You do not understand anything in me—not one thing in my heart or soul. A stranger! I am living with a stranger!

[A knock is heard at the halldoor. Bertha dries her eyes quickly with her handkerchief and settles the front of her gown. Richard listens for a moment, looks at her keenly and, turning away, walks into his study. Robert Hand enters from the left. He is dressed in dark brown and carries in his hand a brown Alpine hat.]

Robert.

[Closing the door quietly behind him.] You sent for me.

Bertha.

[Rises.] Yes. Are you mad to think of going away like that—without even coming here—without saying anything?

Robert.

[Advancing towards the table on which the paper lies, glances at it.] What I have to say I said here.

Bertha.

When did you write it? Last night—after I went away?

Robert.

[Gracefully.] To be quite accurate I wrote part of it—in my mind—before you went away. The rest—the worst part—I wrote after. Much later.

Bertha.

And you could write last night!

Robert.

[Shrugs his shoulders.] I am a welltrained animal. [He comes closer to her.] I passed a long wandering night after ... in my office, at the vicechancellor’s house, in a nightclub, in the streets, in my room. Your image was always before my eyes, your hand in my hand. Bertha, I will never forget last night. [He lays his hat on the table and takes her hand.] Why do you not look at me? May I not touch you?

Bertha.

[Points to the study.] Dick is in there.

Robert.

[Drops her hand.] In that case children be good.

Bertha.

Where are you going?

Robert.

To foreign parts. That is, to my cousin, Jack Justice, alias Doggy Justice, in Surrey. He has a nice country place there and the air is mild.

Bertha.

Why are you going?

Robert.

[Looks at her in silence.] Can you not guess one reason?

Bertha.

On account of me?

Robert.

Yes. It is not pleasant for me to remain here just now.

Bertha.

[Sits down helplessly.] But this is cruel of you, Robert. Cruel to me and to him also.

Robert.

Has he asked ... what happened?

Bertha.

[Joining her hands in despair.] No. He refuses to ask me anything. He says he will never know.

Robert.

[Nods gravely.] Richard is right there. He is always right.

Bertha.

But, Robert, you must speak to him.

Robert.

What am I to say to him?

Bertha.

The truth! Everything!

Robert.

[Reflects.] No, Bertha. I am a man speaking to a man. I cannot tell him everything.

Bertha.

He will believe that you are going away because you are afraid to face him after last night.

Robert.

[After a pause.] Well, I am not a coward any more than he. I will see him.

Bertha.

[Rises.] I will call him.

Robert.

[Catching her hands.] Bertha! What happened last night? What is the truth that I am to tell? [He gazes earnestly into her eyes.] Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it?

Bertha.

[Smiles faintly.] Remember your dream of me. You dreamed that I was yours last night.

Robert.

And that is the truth—a dream? That is what I am to tell?

Bertha.

Yes.

Robert.

[Kisses both her hands.] Bertha! [In a softer voice.] In all my life only that dream is real. I forget the rest. [He kisses her hands again.] And now I can tell him the truth. Call him.

[Bertha goes to the door of Richard’s study and knocks. There is no answer. She knocks again.]

Bertha.

Dick! [There is no answer.] Mr Hand is here. He wants to speak to you, to say goodbye. He is going away. [There is no answer. She beats her hand loudly on the panel of the door and calls in an alarmed voice.] Dick! Answer me!

[Richard Rowan comes in from the study. He comes at once to Robert but does not hold out his hand.]

Richard.

[Calmly.] I thank you for your kind article about me. Is it true that you have come to say goodbye?

Robert.

There is nothing to thank me for, Richard. Now and always I am your friend. Now more than ever before. Do you believe me, Richard?

[Richard sits down on a chair and buries his face in his hands. Bertha and Robert gaze at each other in silence. Then she turns away and goes out quietly on the right. Robert goes towards Richard and stands near him, resting his hands on the back of a chair, looking down at him. There is a long silence. A Fishwoman is heard crying out as she passes along the road outside.]

The Fishwoman.

Fresh Dublin bay herrings! Fresh Dublin bay herrings! Dublin bay herrings!

Robert.

[Quietly.] I will tell you the truth, Richard. Are you listening?

Richard.

[Raises his face and leans back to listen.] Yes.

[Robert sits on the chair beside him. The Fishwoman is heard calling out farther away.]

The Fishwoman.

Fresh herrings! Dublin bay herrings!

Robert.

I failed, Richard. That is the truth. Do you believe me?

Richard.

I am listening.

Robert.

I failed. She is yours, as she was nine years ago, when you met her first.

Richard.

When we met her first, you mean.

Robert.

Yes. [He looks down for some moments.] Shall I go on?

Richard.

Yes.

Robert.

She went away. I was left alone—for the second time. I went to the vicechancellor’s house and dined. I said you were ill and would come another night. I made epigrams new and old—that one about the statues also. I drank claret cup. I went to my office and wrote my article. Then ...

Richard.

Then?

Robert.

Then I went to a certain nightclub. There were men there—and also women. At least, they looked like women. I danced with one of them. She asked me to see her home. Shall I go on?

Richard.

Yes.

Robert.

I saw her home in a cab. She lives near Donnybrook. In the cab took place what the subtle Duns Scotus calls a death of the spirit. Shall I go on?

Richard.

Yes.

Robert.

She wept. She told me she was the divorced wife of a barrister. I offered her a sovereign as she told me she was short of money. She would not take it and wept very much. Then she drank some melissa water from a little bottle which she had in her satchel. I saw her enter her house. Then I walked home. In my room I found that my coat was all stained with the melissa water. I had no luck even with my coats yesterday: that was the second one. The idea came to me then to change my suit and go away by the morning boat. I packed my valise and went to bed. I am going away by the next train to my cousin, Jack Justice, in Surrey. Perhaps for a fortnight. Perhaps longer. Are you disgusted?

Richard.

Why did you not go by the boat?

Robert.

I slept it out.

Richard.

You intended to go without saying goodbye—without coming here?

Robert.

Yes.

Richard.

Why?

Robert.

My story is not very nice, is it?

Richard.

But you have come.

Robert.

Bertha sent me a message to come.

Richard.

But for that...?

Robert.

But for that I should not have come.

Richard.

Did it strike you that if you had gone without coming here I should have understood it—in my own way?

Robert.

Yes, it did.

Richard.

What, then, do you wish me to believe?

Robert.

I wish you to believe that I failed. That Bertha is yours now as she was nine years ago, when you—when we—met her first.

Richard.

Do you want to know what I did?

Robert.

No.

Richard.

I came home at once.

Robert.

Did you hear Bertha return?

Richard.

No. I wrote all the night. And thought. [Pointing to the study.] In there. Before dawn I went out and walked the strand from end to end.

Robert.

[Shaking his head.] Suffering. Torturing yourself.

Richard.

Hearing voices about me. The voices of those who say they love me.

Robert.

[Points to the door on the right.] One. And mine?

Richard.

Another still.

Robert.

[Smiles and touches his forehead with his right forefinger.] True. My interesting but somewhat melancholy cousin. And what did they tell you?

Richard.

They told me to despair.

Robert.

A queer way of showing their love, I must say! And will you despair?

Richard.

[Rising.] No.

[A noise is heard at the window. Archie’s face is seen flattened against one of the panes. He is heard calling.]

Archie.

Open the window! Open the window!

Robert.

[Looks at Richard.] Did you hear his voice, too, Richard, with the others—out there on the strand? Your son’s voice. [Smiling.] Listen! How full it is of despair!

Archie.

Open the window, please, will you?

Robert.

Perhaps, there, Richard, is the freedom we seek—you in one way, I in another. In him and not in us. Perhaps ...

Richard.

Perhaps...?

Robert.

I said perhaps. I would say almost surely if ...

Richard.

If what?

Robert.

[With a faint smile.] If he were mine.

[He goes to the window and opens it. Archie scrambles in.]

Robert.

Like yesterday—eh?

Archie.

Good morning, Mr Hand. [He runs to Richard and kisses him.] Buon giorno, babbo.

Richard.

Buon giorno, Archie.

Robert.

And where were you, my young gentleman?

Archie.

Out with the milkman. I drove the horse. We went to Booterstown. [He takes off his cap and throws it on a chair.] I am very hungry.

Robert.

[Takes his hat from the table.] Richard, goodbye. [Offering his hand.] To our next meeting!

Richard.

[Rises, touches his hand.] Goodbye.

[Bertha appears at the door on the right.]

Robert.

[Catches sight of her: to Archie.] Get your cap. Come on with me. I’ll buy you a cake and I’ll tell you a story.

Archie.

[To Bertha.] May I, mamma?

Bertha.

Yes.

Archie.

[Takes his cap.] I am ready.

Robert.

[To Richard and Bertha.] Goodbye to pappa and mamma. But not a big goodbye.

Archie.

Will you tell me a fairy story, Mr Hand?

Robert.

A fairy story? Why not? I am your fairy godfather.

[They go out together through the double doors and down the garden. When they have gone Bertha goes to Richard and puts her arm round his waist.]

Bertha.

Dick, dear, do you believe now that I have been true to you? Last night and always.

Richard.

[Sadly.] Do not ask me, Bertha.

Bertha.

[Pressing him more closely.] I have been, dear. Surely you believe me. I gave you myself—all. I gave up all for you. You took me—and you left me.

Richard.

When did I leave you?

Bertha.

You left me: and I waited for you to come back to me. Dick, dear, come here to me. Sit down. How tired you must be!

[She draws him towards the lounge. He sits down, almost reclining, resting on his arm. She sits on the mat before the lounge, holding his hand.]

Bertha.

Yes, dear. I waited for you. Heavens, what I suffered then—when we lived in Rome! Do you remember the terrace of our house?

Richard.

Yes.

Bertha.

I used to sit there, waiting, with the poor child with his toys, waiting till he got sleepy. I could see all the roofs of the city and the river, the Tevere. What is its name?

Richard.

The Tiber.

Bertha.

[Caressing her cheek with his hand.] It was lovely, Dick, only I was so sad. I was alone, Dick, forgotten by you and by all. I felt my life was ended.

Richard.

It had not begun.

Bertha.

And I used to look at the sky, so beautiful, without a cloud and the city you said was so old: and then I used to think of Ireland and about ourselves.

Richard.

Ourselves?

Bertha.

Yes. Ourselves. Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that. Was I not true to you all that time?

Richard.

[Sighs deeply.] Yes, Bertha. You were my bride in exile.

Bertha.

Wherever you go, I will follow you. If you wish to go away now I will go with you.

Richard.

I will remain. It is too soon yet to despair.

Bertha.

[Again caressing his hand.] It is not true that I want to drive everyone from you. I wanted to bring you close together—you and him. Speak to me. Speak out all your heart to me. What you feel and what you suffer.

Richard.

I am wounded, Bertha.

Bertha.

How wounded, dear? Explain to me what you mean. I will try to understand everything you say. In what way are you wounded?

Richard.

[Releases his hand and, taking her head between his hands, bends it back and gazes long into her eyes.] I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul.

Bertha.

[Motionless.] Doubt of me?

Richard.

Yes.

Bertha.

I am yours. [In a whisper.] If I died this moment, I am yours.

Richard.

[Still gazing at her and speaking as if to an absent person.] I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness—for this I longed. And now I am tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me.

[He stretches himself out wearily along the lounge. Bertha holds his hand still, speaking very softly.]

Bertha.

Forget me, Dick. Forget me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick. O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again!

[She closes her eyes.]

 ® 

U  L  Y  S  S  E  S

by

J  A  M  E  S     J  O  Y  C  E

published February 2, 1922
by Shakespeare & Co., Paris

c o n t e n t s — u l y s s e s

I  :  [The Telemachiad]

[Telemachus]  [Nestor]  [Proteus]

II  :  [The Odyssey]    [Calypso]

[Lotus Eaters]    [Hades]

[Aeolus]    [Lestrygonians]

[Scylla and Charybdis]

[Wandering Rocks]    [Sirens]

[Cyclops]    [Nausicaa]

[Oxen of the Sun]    [Circe]

III  :  [The Nostos]

[Eumeus]    [Ithaca]    [Penelope]

 ® 

[The text follows the Dover Publications facsimile of the 1922 Shakespeare & Co. edition.]

Tous droits de reproduction, de traduction et d’adaptation réservés pour tous les pays y compris la Russie.

Copyright by James Joyce.

this edition is limited to 1000 copies: 100 copies (signed) on Dutch handmade paper numbered from 1 to 100 ; 150 copies on vergé d’Arches numbered from 101 to 250 ; 750 copies on handmade paper numbered from 251 to 1000.

          N° ₀₀₀₀

The publisher asks the reader’s indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances.

S. B.

I

[3] Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

— Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

— Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

— Back to barracks, he said sternly.

He added in a preacher’s tone:

— For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

— Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

[4] He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

— The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on.

— My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

— Will he come? The jejune jesuit.

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

— Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

— Yes, my love?

— How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

— God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knifeblade.

He shaved warily over his chin.

— He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?

— A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

— I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razor blade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

[5] — Scutter, he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen’s upper pocket, said:

— Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

— The bard’s noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can’t you?

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.

— God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown.

— Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.

— The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

— Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

— You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you…

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

— But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all.

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the [6] threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

— Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

— They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

— The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You’ll look spiffing in them. I’m not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you’re dressed.

— Thanks, Stephen said. I can’t wear them if they are grey.

— He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

— That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan says you have g. p. i. He’s up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. Genera paralysis of the insane.

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.

— Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard.

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

— I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.

— The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you.

[7] Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

— It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

— It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them.

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen.

— Cracked lookingglass of a servant. Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and thinks you’re not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.

Cranly’s arm. His arm.

— And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I’m the only one that knows what you are. Why don’t you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I’ll bring down Seymour and we’ll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.

Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe’s rooms. Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another, O, I shall expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor’s shears. A scared calf’s face gilded with marmalade. I don’t want to be debagged! Don’t you play the giddy ox with me!

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold’s face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

To ourselves… new paganism… omphalos.

— Let him stay, Stephen said. There’s nothing wrong with him except at night.

— Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I’m quite frank with you. What have you against me now?

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.

[8] — Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.

— Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don’t remember anything.

He looked in Stephen’s face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.

Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:

— Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s death?

Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:

— What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?

— You were making tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawing room. She asked you who was in your room.

— Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.

— You said, Stephen answered, O, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead.

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan’s cheek.

— Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?

He shook his constraint from him nervously.

— And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it’s over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don’t whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette’s. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn’t mean to offend the memory of your mother.

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:

— I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

— Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked.

[9] — Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

— O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly:

— Are you up there, Mulligan?

— I’m coming, Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said:

— Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof:

— Don’t mope over it all day, he said. I ’m inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead:

And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery

For Fergus rules the brazen cars.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it above in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.

Where now?

[10] Her secrets: old feather fans, tassled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomine of Turko the terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

I am the boy

That can enjoy

Invisibility.

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

And no more turn aside and brood.

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother. Let me be and let me live.

— Kinch ahoy!

Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.

— Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It’s all right.

— I’m coming, Stephen said, turning.

— Do, for Jesus’ sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our sakes.

[11] His head disappeared and reappeared.

— I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it’s very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.

— I get paid this morning, Stephen said.

— The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

— If you want it, Stephen said.

— Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We’ll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of tune with a Cockney accent:

O, won’t we have a merry time,

Drinking whisky, beer and wine,

On coronation

Coronation day?

O, won’t we have a merry time

On coronation day?

Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone, forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan’s gowned form moved briskly about the hearth to and fro, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

— We’ll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors.

— Have you the key? a voice asked.

— Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I’m choked.

[12] He howled without looking up from the fire:

— Kinch!

— It’s in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily and sighed with relief.

— I’m melting, he said, as the candle remarked when… But hush. Not a word more on that subject. Kinch, wake up. Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where’s the sugar? O, jay, there’s no milk.

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.

— What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.

— We can drink it black, Stephen said. There’s a lemon in the locker.

— O, damn you and your Paris fads, Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove milk.

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:

— That woman is coming up with the milk.

— The blessings of God on you, Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I can’t go fumbling at the damned eggs. He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying:

— In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

— I’m giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don’t you?

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf said in an old woman’s wheedling voice:

— When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

— By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:

— So I do, Mrs Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.

[13] He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.

— That’s folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows:

— Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan’s tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?

— I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.

— Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?

— I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the Mabinogion, Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.

Buck Mulligan’s face smiled with delight.

— Charming, he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming.

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:

—For old Mary Ann

She doesn’t care a damn,

But, hising up her petticoats…

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

— The milk, sir.

— Come in, ma’am, Mulligan said, Kinch, get the jug.

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen’s elbow.

— That’s a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.

— To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure.

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces.

— How much, sir? asked the old woman.

— A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white [14] milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.

— It is indeed, ma’am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

— Taste it, sir, she said.

He drank at her bidding.

— If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits.

— Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.

— I am, ma’am, Buck Mulligan answered.

Stephen listened in scornful silence.She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman’s unclean loins, of man’s flesh made not in God’s likeness the serpent’s prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

— Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

— Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

— Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

— I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from west, sir?

— I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

— He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.

— Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.

— Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma’am?

[15] — No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her:

— Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn’t we?

Stephen filled again the three cups.

— Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at two pence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.

Buck Mulligan sighed and having filled his mouth with a crust thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets.

— Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him smiling.

Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his fingers and cried:

— A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

— Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

— We’ll owe twopence, he said.

— Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning, sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan’s tender chant:

—Heart of my heart, were it more,

More would be laid at your feet.

He turned to Stephen and said:

— Seriously, Dedalus. I’m stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.

— That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your national library today.

— Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

— Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?

Then he said to Haines:

— The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

[16] — All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

— I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here’s a spot.

— That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen’s foot under the table and said with warmth of tone:

— Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.

— Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

— Would I make money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of the hammock, said:

— I don’t know, I’m sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said with coarse vigour:

— You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

— Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the milkwoman or from him. It’s a toss up, I think.

— I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

— I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen’s arm.

— From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

— To tell you the God’s truth I think you’re right. Damn all else they are good for. Why don’t you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying resignedly:

— Mulligan is stripped of his garments.

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

— There’s your snotrag, he said.

[17] And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. Agenbite of inwit. God, we’ll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands.

— And there’s your Latin quarter hat, he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway:

— Are you coming, you fellows?

— I’m ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out, Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

— And going forth he met Butterly.

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

— Did you bring the key?

— I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

— Down, sir. How dare you, sir.

Haines asked:

— Do you pay rent for this tower?

— Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

— To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

— Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

— Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos.

— What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

— No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat:

[18] — You couldn’t manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

— It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

— You pique my curiosity, Haines said aimiably. Is it some paradox?

— Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

— What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen’s ear:

— O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!

— We’re always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

— The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

— I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o’er his base into the sea, isn’t it?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

— It’s a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas’ ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline, and a sail tacking by the Muglins.

— I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll’s head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

—I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.

My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird.

With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,

So here’s to disciples and Calvary.

[19] He held up a forefinger of warning.

—If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine

He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine

But have to drink water and wish it were plain

That I make when the wine becomes water again.

He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

—Goodbye, now, goodbye. Write down all I said

And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.

What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly

And Olivet’s breezy… Goodbye, now, goodbye.

He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdlike cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said:

— We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn’t it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

— The ballad of Joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

— O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

— Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

— You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.

— There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

— Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it [20] open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

— Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it? Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose?

— You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling Steeeeeeeeeeeephen. A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine, I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.

— After all, Haines began…

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind.

— After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.

— I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

— Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

— And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

— Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

— The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke.

— I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers [21] of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ’s terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael’s host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.

Hear, hear. Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu!

— Of course I’m a Britisher, Haine’s voice said, and I feel as one. I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.

Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman.

— She’s making for Bullock harbour.

The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.

— There’s five fathoms out there, he said. It’ll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It’s nine days today.

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, salt white. Here I am.

They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

— Is the brother with you, Malachi?

— Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.

— Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.

— Shapshot, eh? Brief exposure.

Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.

Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and breastbone.

[22] — Seymour’s back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.

— Ah, go to God, Buck Mulligan said.

— Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?

— Yes.

— Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotten with money.

— Is she up the pole?

— Better ask Seymour that.

— Seymour a bleeding officer, Buck Mulligan said.

He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely:

— Redheaded women buck like goats.

He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

— My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I’m the Uebermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen.

He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay.

— Are you going in here, Malachi?

— Yes. Make room in the bed.

The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a stone, smoking.

— Are you not coming in, Buck Mulligan asked.

— Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.

Stephen turned away.

— I’m going, Mulligan, he said.

— Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.

Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes.

— And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.

Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:

— He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.

[23] His plump body plunged.

— We’ll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path and smiling at wild Irish.

Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.

— The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.

— Good, Stephen said.

He walked along the upwardcurving path.

Liliata rutilantium.

Turma circumdet.

Jubilantium te virginum

The priest’s grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.

A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.

Usurper.

 ® 

[24] — You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

— Tarentum, sir.

— Very good. Well?

— There was a battle, sir.

— Very good. Where?

The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?

— I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.

— Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book.

— Yes, sir. And he said: Another victory like that and we are done for.

That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers, leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.

— You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?

— End of Pyrrhus, sir?

— I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.

— Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?

A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong’s satchel. He curled them between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to the tissues of his lips. A sweetened boy’s breath. Welloff people, proud that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico Road, Dalkey.

— Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.

All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round [25] at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.

— Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy’s shoulder with the book, what is a pier.

— A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the waves. A kind of bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.

Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent. All. With envy he watched their faces. Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering in the struggle.

— Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.

The words troubled their gaze.

— How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.

For Haines’s chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.

— Tell us a story, sir.

— Oh, do, sir. A ghoststory.

— Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.

— Weep no more, Comyn said.

— Go on then, Talbot.

— And the history, sir?

— After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.

A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text:

—[26] Weep no more, woful shepherd, weep no more

For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor…

It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

Talbot repeated:

—Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,

Through the dear might…

— Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don’t see anything.

— What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.

His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church’s looms. Ay.

Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.

My father gave me seeds to sow.

Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.

— Have I heard all? Stephen asked.

— Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.

— Half day, sir. Thursday.

— Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.

They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling. Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling gaily:

[27] — A riddle, sir. Ask me, sir.

— O, ask me, sir.

— A hard one, sir.

— This is the riddle, Stephen said:

The cock crew

The sky was blue:

The bells in heaven

Were striking eleven.

’Tis time for this poor soul

To go to heaven.

What is that?

— What, sir?

— Again, sir. We didn’t hear.

Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence Cochrane said:

— What is it, sir? We give it up.

Stephen, his throat itching, answered:

— The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.

He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries echoed dismay.

A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:

— Hockey!

They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues.

Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent and damp as a snail’s bed.

He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.

— Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them to you, sir.

Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.

[28] — Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.

— Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.

— Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.

— No, sir.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled under foot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

— Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?

— Yes, sir.

In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both [29] our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

The sum was done.

— It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.

— Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.

He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his copybook back to his desk.

— You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said as he followed towards the door the boy’s graceless form.

— Yes, sir.

In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.

— Sargent!

— Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and Mr Deasy came stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him. He turned his angry white moustache.

— What is it now? he cried continually without listening.

— Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen cried.

— Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore order here.

And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man’s voice cried sternly:

— What is the matter? What is it now?

Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed round him, the garish sushine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.

Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins, base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the gentiles: world without end.

A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.

— First, our little financial settlement, he said.

He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid them carefully on the table strapping and

[30] — Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.

And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen’s embarrassed hand moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir’s turban, and this, the scallop of Saint James. An old pilgrim’s hoard, dead treasure, hollow shells.

A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.

— Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand. These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings, sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.

He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.

— Three twelve, he said. I think you’ll find that’s right.

— Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.

— No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.

Stephen’s hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery.

— Don’t carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You’ll pull it out somewhere and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You’ll find them very handy.

Answer something.

— Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.

The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well. I can break them in this instant if I will.

— Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

— Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man’s stare.

— He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet. but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?

The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

— That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

[31] — Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that.

He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

— I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way.

Goood man, good man.

— I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Köhler, three guineas, Mrs McKernan, five weeks’ borard. [board.] The lump I have is useless.

— For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.

— I knew you couldn’t, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it. We are a generous people but we must also be just.

— I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the shapely bulk of a man in tartan fillibegs: Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.

— You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O’Connell’s time. I remember the famine. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O’Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.

Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the planters covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie down.

Stephen sketched a brief gesture.

— I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are all Irish, all kings’ sons.

— Alas, Stephen said.

— Per vias rectas, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do so.

Lal the ral the ra

The rocky road to Dublin.

[32] A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John. Soft, day, your honour… Day… Day… Two topboots jog dangling on to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra, lal the ral the raddy.

— That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus, with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press. Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.

He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.

— Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, the dictates of common sense. Just a moment.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, some times blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek heads poised in air: lord Hastings’ Repulse, the duke of Westminster’s Shotover, the duke of Beaufort’s Ceylon, prix de Paris, 1866. Elfin riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds, backing king’s colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.

— Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this important question…

Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek of the canteen, over the motley slush. Even money Fair Rebel: ten to one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher’s dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.

Shouts rang shrill from the boys’ playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother’s darling who seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.

— Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.

He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.

— I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It’s about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions on the matter.

[33] May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.

— I don’t mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.

Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch’s preparation. Serum and virus. Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor’s horses at Mürzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns.

— I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with the department. Now I’m going to try publicity. I am surrounded by difficulties, by… intrigues by… backstairs influence by…

He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.

— Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying.

He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.

— Dying, he said, if not dead by now.

The harlot’s cry from street to street

Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.

His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted.

[34] — A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?

— They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes bellied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

— Who has not? Stephen said.

— What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.

— History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave a you a back kick?

— The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

— That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

— What? Mr Deasy asked.

— A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Mr Deasy looked down and held for a while the wings of his nose tweaked between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.

— I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but [35] not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will fight for the right till the end.

For Ulster will fight

And Ulster will be right.

Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.

— Well, sir, he began.

— I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.

— A learner rather, Stephen said.

— And here what will you learn more?

Mr Deasy shook his head.

— Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Stephen rustled the sheets again.

— As regards these, he began.

— Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them published at once.

Telegraph. Irish Homestead.

— I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two editors slightly.

— That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field, M. P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders’ association today at the City Arms Hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?

— The Evening Telegraph…

— That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to answer that letter from my cousin.

— Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket. Thank you.

— Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I like to break a lance with you, old as I am.

— Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.

He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate; toothless [36] terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.

— Mr Dedalus!

Running after me. No more letters, I hope.

— Just one moment.

— Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.

Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.

— I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

— Why, sir, Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

— Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.

— She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

 ® 

[37] Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane[.]  But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominic Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs march ing. No, agallop: deline the mare.

[38] Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy’s terrace prudently, Frauenzimmer: and down the shelving shore flabbily their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife’s bag, the other’s gamp poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence Mac Cabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting[.]  Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too. [too,] made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.

Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.

I mustn’t forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile. Yes, I must.

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Aunt Sara’s or not? My consubstantial father’s voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother [39] Stephen lately? No? Sure he’s not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn’t he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si? O weeping God, the things I married into. De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers. And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less. Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.

I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

— It’s Stephen, sir.

— Let him in. Let Stephen in.

A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

— We thought you were someone else.

In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the upper moiety.

— Morrow, nephew.

He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the eyes of Master Goff and Master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and common searches and a writ of Duces Tecum. A bogoak frame over his bald head: Wilde’s Requiescat. The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back.

— Yes, sir?

— Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?

— Bathing Crissie, sir.

Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love.

— No, uncle Richie…

— Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!

— Uncle Richie, really…

— Sit down or by the law. Harry I’ll knock you down.

Walter squints vainly for a chair.

— He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

— He has nowhere put  toit, you mug. Bring in our Chippendale chair. Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs here; the rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.

All’erta!

He drones bars of Ferrando’s aria di sortita. The grandest number, Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.

[40] His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

This wind is sweeter.

Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay, of Marsh’s library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lantern jaws. Abbas father, furious dean what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! Descende, calve, ut ne nimium decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (descende), clutching a monstrance, basliskeyed. Get down, bald poll! A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx. Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that, invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and, rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang in diphthong.

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain: naked women! What about that, eh?

What about what? what else were they invented for?

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his [41] F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.

He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara’s. Am I not going there? Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.

— Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?

— C’est le pigeon, Joseph.

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father’s a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny’s face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win in the gros lots. About the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me La Vie de Jésus by M. Léo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.

— C’est tordant, vous savez. Moi je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas en l’existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire à mon père.

— Il croit?

— Mon père, oui.

Schluss. He laps.

My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested [42] you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes. Look clock. Must get. Fermé. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that’s all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that’s all right. Shake a shake. O, that’s all only all right.

You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt from their pintpots, loudlatinlanghing: Euge! Euge! Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across the slimy pier at Newhaven. Comment? Rich booty you brought back; Le Tutu, five tattered numbers of Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge, a blue French telegram, curiosity to show:

— Mother dying come home father.

The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That’s why she won’t.

Then here’s a health to Mulligan’s aunt

And I’ll tell you the reason why.

She always kept things decent in

The Hannigan famileye.

His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hands. In Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake there tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan bréton. Faces of Paris men go by, their well pleased pleasers, curled conquistadores.

[43] Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est Irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux Irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez? Ah, oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slainte! Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. You’re your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, La Patrie, M. Millevoye, Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, bonne à tout faire, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. Moi faire, she said. Tous les messieurs not this Monsieur, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.

The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobacco shreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat. How the head centre got away, authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.

Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you. [you,] I’ll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day’s stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d’Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame, in rue Git-le-Cœur, [44] canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing’s. Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won’t you? I wanted to get poor Pat a job one time. Mon fils, soldier of France. I taught him to sing. The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow’s castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.

O, O the boys of

Kilkenny…

Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.

He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots. The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back.

Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower entombing their blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon’s midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood.

The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a grike.

A bloated carcase of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablé, Louis Veuillot called Gautier’s prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And there, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it[.]  You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout’s toys. Mind you don’t get one bang on the ear. I’m the bloody well gigant rolls all [45] them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman.

A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand. Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures, two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes. Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.

The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. Terribilia meditans. A primrose doublet, fortune’s knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The Bruce’s brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York’s false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned. All kings’ sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping. But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of… We don’t want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden’s rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t see! who’s behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sands quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I… With him together down… I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

[46] A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcase lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

— Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn’t see me. Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. He trotted forward and, lifting his hindleg, pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead.

After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.

[47] Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet. A bout her windraw face her hair trailed. Behind her lord his helpmate, bing awast, to Romeville. When night hides her body’s flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in O’Loughlin’s of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogue’s rum lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping dell. A shefiend’s whiteness under her rancid rags. Fumbally’s lane that night: the tanyard smells.

White thy fambles, red thy gan

And thy quarrons dainty is.

Couch a hogshead with me then.

In the darkmans clip and kiss.

Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, frate porcospino. Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: thy quarrons dainty is. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads jabber on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.

Passing now.

A side-eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss. No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy’s letter. Here. Thanking you for hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the [48] sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter.

His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that’s right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now: Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.

She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park, with a grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to some one else, Stevie: a pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings, piuttosto. Where are your wits?

Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.

He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his eyes. That is Kevin Egan’s movement I made nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep. Et vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona. Alo! Bonjour, welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan’s hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.

[49] And no more turn aside and brood.

His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs nebeneinander. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another’s foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petit pied! Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering green[-]goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foam[-]pool, flower unfurling.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered: vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths [50] known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum. No. My cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.

He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già. For the old hag with the yellow teeth. And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. Già. My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder? Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. Toothless Kinch, the superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?

My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?

His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn’t. Better buy one.

He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

 ® 

II

[53] Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

— Mkgnao!

— O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

— Milk for the pussens, he said.

— Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

[54] — Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chook[-]chooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.

— Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

— Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can’t mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.

He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough? To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round him. No.

On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.

He said softly in the bare hall:

— I am going round the corner. Be back in a minute.

And when he had heard his voice say it he added:

— You don’t want anything for breakfast?

A sleepy soft grunt answered:

— Mn.

No. She did not want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer, as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled. Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar. Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for it. Old style. Ah yes, of course. Bought it at the governor’s auction. Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I’m proud of it. Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was farseeing.

[55] His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat and his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps: stickyback pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do. The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto’s high grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip of paper. Quite safe.

On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over rhe threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I come back anyhow.

He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church. Be a warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn’t go in that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as he walked in happy warmth. Boland’s breadvan delivering with trays our daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot. Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn, travel round in front of the sun steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old Tweedy’s big moustaches leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged smoking a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet. Wander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques along the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky moon, violet, colour of Molly’s new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.

Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest.

[56] He approached Larry O’Rourke’s. From the cellar grating floated up the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the end of the city traffic. For instance M’Auley’s down there: n. g. as position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from the cattle market to the quays value would go up like a shot.

Bald head over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching the aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him off to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I’m going to tell you? What’s that, Mr O’Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians, they’d only be an eight o’ clock breakfast for the Japanese.

Stop and say a word: about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor Dignam, Mr O’Rourke.

Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the doorway:

— Good day, Mr O’Rourke.

— Good day to you.

— Lovely weather, sir.

— ’Tis all that.

Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the country Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then think of the competition.General thirst.Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub. Save it they can’t. Off the drunks perhaps. Put down three and carry five. What is that? A bob here and there, dribs and drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the town travellers. Square it with the boss and we’ll split the job, see?

How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Ten. Fifteen. He passed Saint Joseph’s, National school. Brats’ clamour. Windows open. Fresh air helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee double you. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.

He halted before Dlugacz’s window, staring at the hanks of sausages, polonies, black and white. Fifty multiplied by. The figures whitened in his mind unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links packed with [57] forcemeat fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pig’s blood.

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand. Chapped: washing soda. And a pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack.

The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there like a stallfed heifer.

He took up a page from the pile of cut sheets. The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting: read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket the beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there’s a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging whack by whack by whack.

The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime sausages and made a red grimace.

— Now, my miss, he said.

She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.

— Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,please?

Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways. The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For another: a constable off duty cuddled her in Eccles’ Lane. They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I’m lost in the wood.

— Threepence, please.

[58] His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket. Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers’ pocket and laid them on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid, disc by disc, into the till.

— Thank you, sir. Another time.

A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze after an instant. No: better not: another time.

— Good morning, he said, moving away.

— Good morning, sir.

No sign. Gone. What matter?

He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim: planters’ company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W, 15.

Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.

He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silvered powdered olive[-]trees. Quiet long days: pruning ripening. Olives are packed in jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still alive in Saint Kevin’s parade. And Mastiansky with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron’s basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times. Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them in soiled dungarees. There’s whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn’t see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that Norwegian captain’s. Wonder if I’ll meet him today. Watering cart. To provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.

A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far.

[59] No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gommorah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Grey horror seared his ftesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned into Eccles’ Street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that? Valuation is only twentyeight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.

Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind.

Two letters and a card lay on ihe hallfloor. He stooped and gathered them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quick heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion.

— Poldy!

Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm yellow twilight towards her tousled head.

— Who are the letters for?

He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.

— A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And a letter for you.

He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of her knees.

— Do you want the blind up?

Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.

— That do? he asked, turning.

She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.

[60] — She got the things, she said.

He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back slowly with a snug sigh.

— Hurry up with that tea, she said.I’m parched.

— The kettle is boiling, he said.

But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.

As he went down the kitchen stairs she called:

— Poldy!

— What?

— Scald the teapot.

On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting the kettle then to let water flow in. Having set it to draw, he took off the kettle and crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won’t mouse. Say they won’t eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He sprinkled it through his fingers, ringwise, from the chipped eggcup.

Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks: new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan’s seaside girls.

The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown Derby, smiling. Silly Milly’s birthday gift. Only five she was then. No, wait: four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.

O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.

You are my looking glass from night to morning.

I’d rather have you without a farthing

Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.

Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into the parlour. O, [61] look what I found in professor Goodwin’s hat! All we laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.

He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over: then fitted the teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on it? Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.

Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it on the chair by the bedhead.

— What a time you were? she said.

She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder. The warmth of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the tea she poured.

A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.

— Who was the letter from? he asked.

Bold hand. Marion.

— O, Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme.

— What are you singing?

— Là ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love’s Old Sweet Song.

Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves next day. Like foul flowerwater.

— Would you like the window open a little?

She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking:

— What time is the funeral?

— Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn’t see the paper.

Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.

— No: that book.

Other stocking. Her petticoat.

— It must have fell down, she said.

He felt here and there. Voglio e non vorrei. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of the orangekeyed chamberpot.

[62] — Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There’s a word I wanted to ask you.

She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and, having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the text with the hairpin till she reached the word.

— Met him what? he asked.

— Here, she said. What does that mean?

He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.

— Metempsychosis?

— Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?

— Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.

— O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eye. The same young eyes. The first night after the charades. Dolphin’s Barn. He turned over the smudged pages. Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler’s. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your neck and we’ll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so they metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man’s soul after he dies. Dignam’s soul…

— Did you finish it? he asked.

— Yes, she said. There’s nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the first fellow all the time?

— Never read it. Do you want another?

— Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock’s. Nice name he has.

She poured more tea into her cup, watching its flow sideways.

Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they’ll write to Kearney, my garantor. Reincarnation: that’s the word.

— Some people believe, he said, that we go on on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives.

The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Better remind her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An example?

The Bath of the Nymph over the bed. Given away with the Easter number [63] of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.

He turned the pages back.

— Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs, for example.

Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her, inhaling through her arched nostrils.

— There’s a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?

— The kidney! he cried suddenly.

He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs. Pungent smoke shot up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back. Only a little burned. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it.

Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf. He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread, sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that about some young student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his side, reading it slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in the gravy and raising it to his mouth.

Dearest Papli,

Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me splendid. Everyone says I’m quite the belle in my new tam. I got mummy’s lovely box of creams and am writing, They are lovely. I am getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me and Mrs will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day and all the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel on Monday with a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano downstairs. There is to be a concert in the [64] Greville Arms on Saturday. There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells he sings Boylan’s (I was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s) song about those seaside girls. Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects. Must now close with fondest love.

Your fond daughter,

Milly.

P. S. Excuse bad writing, am in a hurry. Byby.

M.

Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too. Her first birthday away from home. Separation. Remember the summer morning she was born, running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly old woman. Lots of babies she must have helped into the world. She knew from the first poor little Rudy wouldn’t live. Well, God is good, sir. She knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.

His vacant face stared pitying at the postscript. Excuse bad writing. Hurry. Piano downstairs. Coming out of her shell. Row with her in the XL Café about the bracelet. Wouldn’t eat her cakes or speak or look. Saucebox. He sopped other dies of bread in the gravy and ate piece after piece of kidney. Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she might do worse. Music hall stage. Young student. He drank a draught of cooler tea to wash down his meal. Then he read the letter again: twice.

O well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny. Ripening now. Vain: very.

He smiled with troubled affection at the kitchen window. Day I caught her in the street pinching her cheeks to make them red. Anemic a little. Was given milk too long. On the Erin’s King that day round the Kish. Damned old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue scarf loose in the wind with her hair.

All dimpled cheeks and curls,

Your head it simply swirls.

Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers’ pockets, jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says. Pier with lamps, summer evening, band,

[65] Those girls, those girls,

Those lovely seaside girls.

Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion. Reading lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling, braiding.

A soft qualm regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can’t move. Girl’s sweet light lips. Will happen too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing kissed. Full gluey woman’s lips.

Better where she is down there: away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass the time. Might take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two and six return. Six weeks off however. Might work a press pass. Or through M’Coy.

The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the meatstained paper, nosed at it and stalked to the door. She looked back at him, mewing. Wants to go out. Wait before a door sometime it will open. Let her wait. Has the fidgets. Electric. Thunder in the air. Was washing at her ear with her back to the fire too.

He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up, undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.

— Miaow! he said in answer. Wait till I’m ready.

Heaviness: hot day coming. Too much trouble to fag up the stairs to the landing.

A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as I’m.

In the table drawer he found an old number of Titbits. He folded it under his armpit, went to the door and opened it. The cat went up in soft bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.

Listening, he heard her voice:

— Come, come, pussy. Come.

He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.

He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall. Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that [66] without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies’ kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.

He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny, I don’t remember that. Hallstand too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters. Drago’s shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox there got away James Stephens they say. O’Brien.

Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agenda what is it? Now, my miss. Enthusiast.

He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered through a chink up at the nextdoor window. The king was in his countinghouse. Nobody.

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit. Matcham’s Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers’ club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds thirteen and six.

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing Witch Who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling [67] his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six.

Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for some proverb which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. 9.15. Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23. What possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I’m swelled after that cabbage. A speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.

Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stocking calf. Morning after the bazaar dance when May’s band played Ponchielli’s dance of the hours. Explain that morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money. Why? I noticed he had a good smell off his breath dancing. No use humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes. It wouldn’t pan out somehow.

Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers and eyemasks. Poetical idea pink, then golden, then grey, then black. Still true to life also. Day, then the night.

He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air.

In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully his black trousers, the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What time is the funeral? Better find out in the paper.

A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George’s church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.

Heigho! Heigho!

Heigho! Heigho!

Heigho! Heigho!

Quarter to. There again: the overtone following through the air. A third.

Poor Dignam!

 ® 

[68] By lorries along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher’s, the postal telegraph office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors’ home. He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street. By Brady’s cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell him if he smokes he won’t grow. O let him! His life isn’t such a bed of roses! Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da. Slack hour: won’t be many there. He crossed Townsend street, passed the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth. And past Nichols’ the undertaker’s. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny Kelleher bagged that job for O’Neill’s. Singing with his eyes shut. Corny. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout. Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay. O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumay call. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.

In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend, finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom Kernan. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning. Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.

So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over again: choice [69] blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn’t sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the. Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It’s a law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per second, per second. Law of falling bodies: per second, per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It’s the force of gravity of the earth is the weight.

He turned away and sauntered across the road. How did she walk with her sausages? Like that something. As he walked he took the folded Freeman from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a baton and tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg. Careless air: just drop in to see. Per second, per second. Per second for every second it means. From the curbstone he darted a keen glance through the door of the postoffice. Too late box. Post here. No-one. In.

He handed the card through the brass grill.

— Are there any letters for me? he asked.

While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting poster with soldiers of all arms on parade: and held the tip of his baton against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper. No answer probably. Went too far last time.

The postmistress handed him back through the grill his card with a letter. He thanked and glanced rapidly at the typed envelope.

Henry Flower, Esq,

c/o P. O. Westland Row,

City.

[70] Answered anyhow. He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket, reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where’s old Tweedy’s regiment? Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he’s a grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats. Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to enlist and drill. Maud Gonne’s letter about taking them off O’ Connell street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith’s paper is on the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or halfseasover empire. Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front. Mark time. Table: able. Bed: ed. The King’s own. Never see him dressed up as a fireman or a bobby. A mason, yes.

He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk: as if that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks. Women will pay a lot of heed, I don’t think. His fingers drew forth the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No.

M’Coy. Get rid of him quickly. Take me out of my way. Hate company when you.

— Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to?

— Hello, M’Coy. Nowhere in particular.

— How’s the body?

— Fine. How are you?

— Just keeping alive, M’Coy said.

His eyes on the black tie and clothes he asked with low respect:

— Is there any… no trouble I hope? I see you’re…

— O no, Mr Bloom said. Poor Dignam, you know. The funeral is today.

— To be sure, poor fellow. So it is. What time?

A photo it isn’t. A badge maybe[.]

— E…eieven, Mr Bloom answered.

— I must try to get out there, M’Coy said. Eleven, is it? I only heard it last night. Who was telling me? Holohan[.]  You know Hoppy?

— I know.

Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her, searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless stand of her with her hands in those patch [71] pockets. Like that haughty creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot. Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch out of her.

— I was with Bob Doran, he’s on one of his periodical bends, and what do you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway’s we were.

Doran, Lyons in Conway’s. She raised a gloved hand to her hair. In came Hoppy. Having a wet. Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare, the braided drums. Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight perhaps. Talking of one thing or another. Lady’s hand. Which side will she get up?

— And he said: Sad thing about our poor friend Paddy! What Paddy? I said. Poor little Paddy Dignam, he said.

Off to the country: Broadstone probably. High brown boots with laces dangling. Wellturned foot. What is he fostering over that change for? Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. Good fallback. Two strings to her bow.

— Why? I said. What’s wrong with him? I said.

Proud: rich: silk stockings.

— Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He moved a little to the side of M’Coy’s talking head. Getting up in a minute.

— What’s wrong with him, he said. He’s dead, he said. And, faith, he filled up. Is it Paddy Dignam? I said. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it in the Arch. Yes, he said. He’s gone. He died on Monday, poor fellow.

Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!

A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.

Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering the display of. Esprit de corps. Well, what are you gaping at?

— Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.

— One of the best, M’Coy said.

The tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her hat in the sun: flicker, flick.

[72] — Wife well, I suppose? M’Coy’s changed voice said.

— O yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks.

He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly:

What is home without

Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

— My missus has just got an engagement. At least it’s not settled yet.

Valise tack again. By the way no harm. I’m off that, thanks.

Mr Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness:

— My wife too, he said. She’s going to sing at a swagger affair in the Ulster hall, Belfast, on the twentyfifth.

— That so? M’Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who’s getting it up?

Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.

Love’s

Old

Sweet

Song

Comes lo-ve’s old…

— It’s a kind of a tour, don’t you see? Mr Bloom said thoughtfully. Sweeeet song. There’s a committee formed. Part shares and part profits.

M’Coy nodded, picking at his moustache stubble.

— O well, he said. That’s good news.

He moved to go.

— Well, glad to see you looking fit, he said. Meet you knocking around.

— Yes, Mr Bloom said.

— Tell you what, M’Coy said. You might put down my name at the funeral, will you? I’d like to go but I mightn’t be able, you see. There’s a drowning case at Sandycove may turn up and then the coroner and myself would have to go down if the body is found. You just shove in my name if I’m not there, will you?

[73] — I’ll do that, Mr Bloom said, moving to get off. That’ll be all right.

— Right, M’Coy said brightly. Thanks, old man. I’d go if I possibly could. Well, tolloll. Just C. P. M’Coy will do.

— That will be done, Mr Bloom answered firmly.

Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I’d like my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped corners, rivetted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of it from that good day to this.

Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has just got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don’t you know? In the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can’t he hear the difference? Think he’s that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that smallpox up there doesn’t get worse. Suppose she wouldn’t let herself be vaccinated again. Your wife and my wife.

Wonder is he pimping after me?

Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane’s Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery’s summer sale. No, he’s going on straight. Hello. Leah tonight: Mrs Bandman Palmer. Like to see her in that again. Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide? Poor papa! How he used to talk about Kate Bateman in that! Outside the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was always talking about where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice and puts his fingers on his face.

— Nathan’s voice! His son’s voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and left the God of his father.

Every word is so deep, Leopold.

Poor papa! Poor man! I’m glad. I didn’t go into the room to look at his face. That day! O dear! O dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was the best for him.

Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn’t met that M’Coy fellow.

[74] He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they look. Still their neigh can be very irritating.

He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.

He passed the cabman’s shelter. Curious the life of drifting cabbies, all weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own. Voglio e non. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a few flying syllables as they pass. He hummed:

Là ci darem la mano

La la lala la la.

He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade’s timberyard. Piled balks. Ruins and tenements. With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch court with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it. And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame’s school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis’s. And Mr? He opened the letter within the newspaper.

A flower. I think it’s a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not annoyed then? What does she say?

Dear Henry,

I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real [75] meaning of that word. Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you. Please tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the beautiful name you have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you so often you have no idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you[.]  So now you know what I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are exhausted. Then I will tell you all. Goodbye now, naughty darling. I have such a bad headache today and write by return to your longing

Martha.

P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to know.

He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then, walking slowly forward, he read the letter again, murmuring here and there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don’t please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha’s perfume. Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his sidepocket.

Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder did she wrote it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me, respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the rosary. Thank you: not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running round corners. Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course. Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.

Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it. Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere: pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses without thorns.

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the Coombe, linked together in the rain.

[76] O, Mairy lost the pin of her drawers.

She didn’t know what to do

To keep it up

To keep it up.

It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your wife use? Now could you make out a thing like that.

To keep it up.

Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious. Also the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.

To keep it up.

Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there: quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been, strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper: fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of the well stonecold like the hole in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.

Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter then all sank.

Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart, eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter. One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions of barrels of porter.

What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.

An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach. Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside. The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.

[77] He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the porch he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work M’Coy for a pass to Mullingar.

Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S. J. on saint Peter Claver and the African mission Save China’s millions. Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for them. Prayers for the conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The protestants the same. Convert Dr William. J. Walsh D. D. to the true religion. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Home. Crown of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks? Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguished looking. Sorry I didn’t work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn’t. They’re taught that. He’s not going out in bluey specs whit the sweat rolling off him to baptise blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.

The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps, pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.

Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Women knelt in the benches with crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch knelt at the altar rails. The priest went along by them, murmuring, holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one: a small old woman. The priest bent down to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one. Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don’t seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse why the cannibals cotton to it.

He stood aside watching their blind masks pass down the aisle, one by one, and seek their places. He approached a bench and seated himself in its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear. We ought [78] to have hats modelled on our heads. They were about him here and there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for it to melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth: it’s that sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it’s called. There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I’m sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep near that confession box. Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year.

He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back I. N. R. I? No: I. H. S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen’s evidence on the invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion every morning. This very church. Peter Carey. No, Peter Claver I am thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers, now that’s a good name for them, there’s always something shiftylooking about them. They’re not straight men of business either. O no she’s not here: the flower: no, no. By the way did I tear up that envelope? Yes: under the bridge.

The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guinness’s porter or some temperance beverage Wheatley’s Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane’s ginger ale (aromatic). Doesn’t give them any of it: show wine: only the other. Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they’d have one old booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer the whole atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.

[79] Mr Bloom looked back towards the choir. Not going to be any music. Pity. Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that instrument talk, the vibrato: fifty pounds a year they say he had in Gardiner street. Molly was in fine voice that day, the Stabat Mater of Rossini. Father Bernard Vaughan’s sermon first. Christ or Pilate? Christ, but don’t keep us all night over it. Music they wanted. Footdrill stopped. Could hear a pin drop. I told her to pitch her voice against that corner. I could feel the thrill in the air, the full, the people looking up:

Quis est homo!

Some of that old sacred music is splendid. Mercadante: seven last words. Mozart’s twelfth mass: the Gloria in that. Those old popes were keen on music, on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for example too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too chanting, regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse. Still, having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit thick. What kind of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own strong basses. Connoisseurs. Suppose they wouldn’t feel anything after. Kind of a placid. No worry. Fall into flesh don’t they? Gluttons, tall, long legs. Who knows? Eunuch. One way out of it.

He saw the priest bend down and kiss the altar and then face about and bless all the people. All crossed themselves and stood up. Mr Bloom glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand up at the gospel of course. Then all settled down on their knees again and he sat back quietly in his bench. The priest came down from the altar, holding the thing out from him, and he and the massboy answered each other in Latin. Then the priest knelt down and began to read off a card:

— O God, our refuge and our strength…

Mr Bloom put his face forward to catch the words. English. Throw them the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass? Gloria and immaculate virgin Joseph her spouse. Peter and Paul. More interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears. Husband learn to his surprise. God’s little joke. Then out she comes. Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. [80] Hail Mary and Holy Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes. Salvation army blatant imitation. Reformed prostitute will address the meeting. How I found the Lord. Squareheaded chaps those must be in Rome: they work the whole show. And don’t they rake in the money too? Bequests also: to the P. P. for the time being in his absolute discretion. Masses for the repose of my soul to be said publicly with open doors. Monasteries and convents. The priest in the Fermanagh will case in the witness box. No browbeating him. He had his answer pat for everything. Liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. The doctors of the church: they mapped out the whole theology of it.

The priest prayed:

— Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil (may God restrain him, we humbly pray): and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.

The priest and the massboy stood up and walked off. All over. The women remained behind: thanksgiving.

Better be shoving along. Brother Buzz. Come around with the plate perhaps. Pay your Easter duty.

He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the time. Woman enjoy it. Annoyed if you don’t. Why didn’t you tell me before. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there’s a (whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked. Glimpses of the moon. Still like you better untidy. Good job it wasn’t farther south. He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the main door into rhe light. He stood a moment unseeing by the cold black marble bowl while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive hands in the low tide of holy water. Trams: a car of Prescott’s dyeworks: a widow in her weeds. Notice because I’m in mourning myself. He covered himself. How goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet. Better get that lotion made up. Where is this? Ah yes, the last time. Sweny’s in Lincoln place. Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir. Hamilton Long’s, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard near there. Visit some day.

He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair. O well, poor fellow, it’s not his fault[.]  When was it I got it made up last? Wait. [81] I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it must have been or the second. O he can look it up in the prescriptions book.

The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have, Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid. Smell almost cure you like the dentist’s doorbell. Doctor whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature.

— About a fortnight ago, sir?

— Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He waited by the counter, inhaling the keen reek of drugs, the dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling your aches and pains.

— Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then orangeflower water…

It certainly did make her skin so delicate white like wax.

— And white wax also, he said.

Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to her eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links in my cuffs. Those homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk. Skinfood. One of the old queen’s sons, duke of Albany was it? had only one skin. Leopold, yes. Three we have. Warts, bunions and pimples to make it worse. But you want a perfume too. What perfume does your? Peau d’Espagne. That orangeflower. Pure curd soap. Water is so fresh. Nice smell these soaps have. Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam. Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for massage. Feel fresh then all day. Funeral be rather glum.

— Yes, sir, the chemist said. That was two and nine. Have you brought a bottle?

[82] — No, Mr Bloom said. Make it up, please. I’ll call later in the day and I’ll take one of those soaps. How much are they?

— Fourpence, sir.

Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.

— I’ll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.

— Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you come back.

— Good, Mr Bloom said.

He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the coolwrappered soap in his left hand.

At his armpit Bantam Lyons’ voice and hand said:

— Hello, Bloom, what’s the best news? Is that today’s? Show us a minute.

Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am.

Bantam Lyons’ yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears’ soap. Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.

— I want to see about that French horse that’s running today, Bantam Lyons’ said. Where the bugger is it?

He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar. Barber’s itch. Tight collar he’ll lose his hair. Better leave him the paper and get shut of him.

— You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.

— Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the second.

— I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.

Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.

— What’s that? his sharp voice said.

— I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away that moment.

Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread sheets back on Mr Bloom’s arms.

— I’ll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.

He sped off towards Conway’s corner. God speed scut.

Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large tender turkey. [83] Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now. They never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt.

He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a mosque redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college. Something to catch the eye.

There’s Hornblower standing at the porter’s lodge. Keep him on hands: might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower? How do you do, sir?

Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Buller broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M’Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

 ® 

[84] Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after him, curving his height with care.

— Come on, Simon.

— After you, Mr Bloom said.

Mr Dedalus covered himself quickly and got in, saying:

— Yes, yes.

— Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.

Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to after him and slammed it tight till it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman peeping. Nose white[-]flattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them. Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he’d wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making the bed. Pull it more to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grow all the same after. Unclean job.

All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap in my hip pocket. Better shift it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.

All waited. Then wheels were heard from in front, turning: then nearer: then horses’ hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking and swaying. [85] Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. The blinds of the avenue passed and number ten with its craped knocker, door ajar. At walking pace.

They waited still, their knees jogging, till they had turned and were passing along the tramtracks. Tritonville road. Quicker. The wheels rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook rattling in the doorframes.

— What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.

— Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.

Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.

— That’s a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died out.

All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat.

— There’s a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.

— Who is that?

— Your son and heir.

— Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over, across.

The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and, swerving back to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus fell back, aying:

— Was that Mulligan cad with him? His fidus Achates!

— No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone.

— Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa’s little lump of dung, the wise child that knows her own father.

Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros the bottle[-]works. Dodder bridge.

Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he calls the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was. Waltzing in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the landlady’s two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night. Beginning to tell on him now: that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing his back. Thinks he’ll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are. About six hundred per cent profit.

— He’s in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks all [86] over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I’ll make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate. I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.

He cried above the clatter of the wheels.

— I won’t have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counterjumper’s son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M’Swiney’s. Not likely.

He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power’s mild face and Martin Cunningham’s eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window, watching the two dogs at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins.

Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her. I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too.

— Are we late? Mr Power asked.

— Ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, looking at his watch.

Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O jumping Jupiter! Ye gods and little fishes! Still, she’s a dear girl. Soon be a woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too. Life. Life.

The carriage heeled over and back, their four trunks swaying.

— Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.

— He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn’t that squint troubling him. Do you follow me?

He closed his left eye. Martin Cunningham began to brush away crust[-]crumbs from under his thighs.

— What is this? he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?

— Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately, Mr Power said.

All raised their thighs, eyed with disfavour the mildewed buttonless leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned downward and said:

— Unless I’m greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?

[87] — It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom set his thigh down. Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet quite clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better.

Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly.

— After all, he said, it’s the most natural thing in the world.

— Did Tom Kernan turn up? Martin Cunningham asked, twirling the peak of his beard gently.

— Yes, Mr Bloom answered. He’s behind with Ned Lambert and Hynes.

— And Corny Kelleher himself? Mr Power asked.

— At the cemetery, Martin Cunningham said.

— I met M’Coy this morning, Mr Bloom said. He said he’d try to come.

The carriage halted short.

— What’s wrong?

— We’re stopped.

— Where are we?

Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.

— The grand canal, he said.

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor children! Doubles then up black and blue in convulsions. Shame really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.

A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower spray dots over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a colander. I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now.

— The weather is changing, he said quietly.

— A pity it did not keep up fine, Martin Cunningham said.

— Wanted for the country, Mr Power said. There’s the sun again coming out.

Mr Dedalus, peering through his glasses towards the veiled sun, hurled a mute curse at the sky.

— It’s as uncertain as a child’s bottom, he said.

— We’re off again.

The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.

[88] — Tom Kernan was immense last night, he said. And Paddy Leonard taking him off to his face.

— O draw him out, Martin, Mr Power said eagerly. Wait till you hear him, Simon, on Ben Dollard’s singing of The Croppy Boy.

— Immense, Martin Cunningham said pompously. His singing of that simple ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the whole course of my experience.

— Trenchant, Mr Power said laughing. He’s dead nuts on that. And the retrospective arrangement.

— Did you read Dan Dawson’s speech? Martin Cunningham asked.

— I did not then, Mr Dedalus said. Where is it?

— In the paper this morning.

Mr Bloom took the paper from his inside pocket. That book I must change for her.

— No, no, Mr Dedalus said quickly. Later on, please.

Mr Bloom’s glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the deaths. Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne’s? no, Sexton, Urbright. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper. Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief of his. Aged 88 after a long and tedious illness. Month’s mind Quinlan. On whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy.

It is now a month since dear Henry fled

To his home up above in the sky

While his family weeps and mourns his loss

Hoping some day to meet him on high.

I tore up the envelope? Yes. Where did I put her letter after I read it in the bath? He patted his waistcoat pocket. There all right. Dear Henry fled. Before my patience are exhausted.

National school. Meade’s yard. The hazard. Only two there now. Nodding. Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting round with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised their hats.

A pointsman’s back straightened itself upright suddenly against a tramway standard by Mr Bloom’s window. Couldn’t they invent something automatic [89] so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention?

Antient concert rooms. Nothing on there. A man in a buff suit with a crape armlet. Not much grief there. Quarter mourning. People in law, perhaps.

They went past the bleak pulpit of Saint Mark’s, under the railway bridge, past the Queen’s theatre: in silence. Hoardings. Eugene Stratton. Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see Leah tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney? Elster Grimes Opera company. Big powerful change. Wet bright bills for next week. Fun on the Bristol. Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a drink or two. As broad as it’s long.

He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs.

Plasto’s. Sir Philip Crampton’s memorial fountain bust. Who was he?

— How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in salute.

— He doesn’t see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?

— Who? Mr Dedalus asked.

— Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.

Just that moment I was thinking.

Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: passed.

Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body getting a bit softy. I would notice that from remembering. What causes that I suppose the skin can’t contract quickly enough when the flesh falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders. Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind.

He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant glance over their faces.

Mr Power asked:

— How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?

— O very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It’s a good idea, you see…

— Are you going yourself?

[90] — Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.

— Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now.

— Have you good artists?

— Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we’ll have all topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in fact.

— And Madame, Mr Power said, smiling. Last but not least.

Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and clasped them. Smith O’Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there. Woman. Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage wheeling by Farrell’s statue united noiselessly their unresisting knees.

Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his mouth opening: oot.

— Four bootlaces for a penny.

Wonder why he was struck off the rolls. Had his office in Hume street. Same house as Molly’s namesake. Tweedy, crown solicitor for Waterford. Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning too. Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at a wake. O’Callaghan on his last legs.

And Madame. Twenty past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean. Doing her hair, humming: voglio e non vorrei. No: vorrei e non. Looking at the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. Mi trema un poco il. Beautiful on that tre her voice is: weeping tone. A thrush. A throstle. There is a word throstle that expresses that.

His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power’s goodlooking face. Greyish over the ears. Madame: smiling. I smiled back. A smile goes a long way. Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her a pound of rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s. Or the Moira, was it?

They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator’s form.

Martin Cunningham nudged Mr Power.

— Of the tribe of Reuben, he said.

A tall blackbearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner of Elvery’s elephant house showed them a curved hand open on his spine.

[91] — In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.

Mr Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:

— The devil break the hasp of your back!

Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as the carriage passed Gray’s statue.

— We have all been there, Martin Cunningham said broadly.

His eyes met Mr Bloom’s eyes. He caressed his beard, adding:

— Well, nearly all of us.

Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions’ faces.

— That’s an awfully good one that’s going the rounds about Reuben J. and the son.

— About the boatman? Mr Power asked.

— Yes. Isn’t it awfully good?

— What is that? Mr Dedalus asked, I didn’t hear it.

— There was a girl in the case, Mr Bloom began, and he determined to send him to the isle of Man out of harm’s way but when they were both…..

— What? Mr Dedalus asked. That confirmed bloody hobbledehoy is it?

— Yes, Mr Bloom said. They were both on the way to the boat and he tried to drown…..

— Drown Barabbas! Mr Dedalus cried. I wish to Christ he did!

Mr Power sent a long laugh down his shaded nostrils.

— No, Mr Bloom said, the son himself…..

Martin Cunningham thwarted his speech rudely.

— Reuben J. and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on their way to the isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got loose and over the wall with him into the Liffey.

— For God’ sake! Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead?

— Dead! Martin Cunningham cried. Not he! A boatman got a pole and fished him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the father on the quay. More dead than alive. Half the town was there.

— Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is…..

— And Reuben J., Martin Cunningham said, gave the boatman a florin for saving his son’s life.

A stifled sigh came from under Mr Power’s hand.

— O, he did, Martin Cunningham affirmed. Like a hero. A silver florin.

— Isn’t it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly.

— One and eightpence too much, Mr Dedalus said drily.

[92] Mr Power’s choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage.

Nelson’s pillar.

— Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!

— We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Dedalus sighed.

— Ah then indeed, he said, poor little Paddy wouldn’t grudge us a laugh. Many a good one he told himself.

— The Lord forgive me! Mr Power said, wiping his wet eyes with his fingers. Poor Paddy! I little thought a week ago when I saw him last and he was in his usual health that I’d be driving after him like this. He’s gone from us.

— As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said. He went very suddenly.

— Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart.

He tapped his chest sadly.

Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose. Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent colouring it.

Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension.

— He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.

— The best death, Mr Bloom said.

Their wide open eyes looked at him.

— No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.

No-one spoke.

Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents, temperance hotel, Falconer’s railway guide, civil service college, Gill’s, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the late Father Matew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.

White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tinycoffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun.

— Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.

A dwarf’s face mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant nothing. Mistake of nature. If it’s healthy it’s from the mother. If not the man. Better luck next time.

[93] — Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It’s well out of it.

The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.

— In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.

— But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own life.

Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.

— The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.

— Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We must take a charitable view of it.

— They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.

— It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham’s large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like Shakespeare’s face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn’t broken already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the riverbed clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of a wife of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the life of the damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning start afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have looked a sight that night, Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about the place and capering with Martin’s umbrella:

—And they call me the jewel of Asia,

Of Asia, 

The geisha. 

He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.

That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blinds. The coroner’s ears, big and hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed. Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son Leopold.

No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.

The carriage rattled swiftly along Blessington street. Over the stones.

[94] — We are going the pace, I think, Martin Cunningham said.

— God grant he doesn’t upset us on the road, Mr Power said.

— I hope not, Martin Cunningham said. That will be a great race tomorrow in Germany. The Gordon Bennett.

— Yes, by Jove, Mr Dedalus said. That will be worth seeing, faith.
  As they turned into Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent over and after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls. Has anybody here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy. Dead march from Saul. He’s as bad as old Antonio. He left me on my ownio. Pirouette! The Mater Misericordiæ. Eccles street. My house down there. Big place. Ward for incurables there. Very encouraging. Our Lady’s Hospice for the dying. Deadhouse handy underneath. Where old Mrs Riordan died. They look terrible the women. Her feeding cup and rubbing her mouth with the spoon. Then the screen round her bed for her to die. Nice young student that was dressed that bite the bee gave me. He’s gone over to the lying-in hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other.

The carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.

— What’s wrong now?

A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing, slouching by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating their fear.

— Emigrants, Mr Power said.

— Huuuh! the drover’s voice cried, his switch sounding on their flanks. Huuuh! out of that!

Thursday of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold them about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roast beef for old England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter is lost: all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns. Comes to a big thing in a year. Dead meat trade. Byproducts of the slaughterhouses for tanneries, soap, margarine. Wonder if that dodge works now getting dicky meat off the train at Clonsilla.

The carriage moved on through the drove.

— I can’t make out why the corporation doesn’t run a tramline from the parkgate to the quays, Mr Bloom said. All those animals could be taken in trucks down to the boats.

— Instead of blocking up the thoroughfare, Martin Cunningham said. Quite right. They ought to.

— Yes, Mr Bloom said, and another thing I often thought is to have [95] municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage and all. Don’t you see what I mean?

— O that be damned for a story, Mr Dedalus said. Pullman car and saloon diningroom.

— A poor lookout for Corny, Mr Power added.

— Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn’t it be more decent than galloping two abreast?

— Well, there’s something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.

— And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn’t have scenes like that when the hearse capsized round Dunphy’s and upset the coffin on to the road.

— That was terrible, Mr Power’s shocked face said, and the corpse fell about the road. Terrible!

— First round Dunphy’s, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup.

— Praises be to God! Martin Cunningham said piously.

Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too large for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what’s up now. Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides decompose quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also. With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all.

— Dunphy’s, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.

Dunphy’s corner. Mourning coaches drawn up drowning their grief. A panse by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.

But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in the knocking about? He would and he wouldn’t, I suppose. Depends on where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It would be better to bury them in red: a dark red.

In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse trotted by, coming from the cemetery: looks relieved.

Crossguns bridge: the royal canal.

Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his dropping barge between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a slacktethered horse. Aboard of the Bugabu.

Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of reeds, [96] over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar, Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at the auction but a lady’s. Developing waterways. James M’Cann’s hobby to row me o’er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats. Camping out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without writing. Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down, lock by lock to Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his brown straw hat, saluting Paddy Dignam.

They drove on. past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.

— I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.

— Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.

— How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping I suppose.

— Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter’s yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary the sexton’s, an old tramp sat, grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown yawning boot. After life’s journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by, one by one: gloomy houses.

Mr Power pointed.

— That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

— So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.

— The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.

— Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham said. That’s the maxim ot the law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

They looked. Murderer’s ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder. The murderer’s image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about it. Man’s head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large. Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.

[97] Cramped in this carriage. She mightn’t like me to come that way without letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once with their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.

The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.

The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped. Martin Cunningham put out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the door open with his knee. He stepped out. Mr Power and Mr Dedalus followed.

Change that soap now. Mr Bloom’s hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket. He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand still held.

Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages. It’s all the same, Pallbearers gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death. Beyond the hind carriage a hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and fruit. Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits. Who ate them? Mourners coming out.

He followed his companions. Mr Kernan and Ned Lambert followed, Hynes walking after them. Corny Kelleher stood by the opened hearse and took out the two wreaths. He handed one to the boy.

Where is that child’s funeral disappeared to?

A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread, dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a granite block. The waggoner marching at their head saluted.

Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at it with his plume skeowways. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing on a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out here every day. Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.

Mourners came out through the gates: woman and a girl. Leanjawed harpy, hard woman at a bargain, her bonnet awry. Girl’s face stained with dirt and tears, holding the woman’s arm looking up at her for a sign to cry. Fish’s face, bloodless and livid.

The mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the gates. So much [98] dead weight. Felt heavier myself steping out of that bath. First the stiff: then the friends of the stiff. Corny Kelleher and the boy followed with their wreaths. Who is that beside them? Ah, the brother-in-law.

All walked after.

Martin Cunningham whispered:

— I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.

— What? Mr Power whispered. How so?

— His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the Queen’s hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare. Anniversary.

— O God! Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself!

He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes followed towards the cardinal’s mausoleum. Speaking.

— Was he insured? Mr Bloom asked.

— I believe so, Mr Kernan answered, but the policy was heavily mortgaged. Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane.

— How many children did he leave?

— Five. Ned Lambert says he’ll try to get one of the girls into Todd’s.

— A sad case, Mr Bloom said gently. Five young children.

— A great blow to the poor wife, Mr Kernan added.

— Indeed yes, Mr Bloom agreed.

Has the laugh at him now.

He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had outlived him, lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you’ll soon follow him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who knows after? Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back, waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in her warm bed.

— How are you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands. Haven’t seen you for a month of Sundays.

— Never better. How are all in Cork’s own town?

[99] — I was down there for the, Cork park races on Easter Monday, Ned Lambert said. Same old six and eightpence. Stopped with Dick Tivy.

— And how is Dick, the solid man?

— Nothing between himself and heaven, Ned Lambert answered.

— By the holy Paul! Mr Dedalus said in subdued wonder. Dick Tivy bald?

— Martin is going to get up a whip for the youngsters, Ned Lambert said, pointing ahead. A few bob a skull. Just to keep them going till the insurance is cleared up.

— Yes, yes, Mr Dedalus said dubiously. Is that the eldest boy in front?

— Yes, Ned Lambert said, with the wife’s brother. John Henry Menton is behind. He put down his name for a quid.

— I’ll engage he did, Mr Dedalus said. I often told poor Paddy he ought to mind that job. John Henry is not the worst in the world.

— How did he lose it? Ned Lambert asked. Liquor, what?

— Many a good man’s fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.

They halted about the door of the mortuary chapel. Mr Bloom stood behind the boy with the wreath, looking down at his sleek combed hair and the slender furrowed neck inside his brandnew collar. Poor boy! Was he there when the father? Both unconscious. Lighten up at the last moment and recognise for the last time. All he might have done. I owe three shillings to O’Grady. Would he understand? The mutes bore the coffin into the chapel. Which end is his head?

After a moment he followed the others in, blinking in the screened light. The coffin lay on its bier before the chancel four tall yellow candles at its corners. Always in front of us. Corny Kelleher, laying a wreath at each fore corner, beckoned to the boy to kneel. The mourners knelt here and there in praying desks. Mr Bloom stood behind near the font and, when all had knelt dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. He fitted his black hat gently on his left knee and, holding its brim, bent over piously.

A server, bearing a brass bucket with something in it, came out through a door. The whitesmocked priest came after him tidying his stole with one hand, balancing with the other a little book against his toad’s belly. Who’ll read the book? I, said the rook.

They halted by the bier and the priest began to read out of his book with a fluent croak.

[100] Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin. Dominenamine. Bully about the muzzle he looks. Bosses the show. Muscular christian. Woe betide anyone that looks crooked at him: priest. Thou art Peter. Burst sideways like a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will. With a belly on him like a poisoned pup. Most amusing expressions that man finds. Hhhn: burst sideways.

— Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo, Domine.

Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin. Requiem mass. Crape weepers. Black edged notepaper. Your name on the altarlist. Chilly place this. Want to feed well, sitting in there all the morning in the gloom kicking his heels waiting for the next please. Eyes of a toad too. What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after cabbage. Air of the place maybe. Looks full of up bad gas. Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the place. Butchers for instance: they get like raw beefsteaks. Who was telling me? Mervyn Brown. Down in the vaults of saint Werburgh’s lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a hole in the coffins sometimes to let out the bad gas and burn it. Out it rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you’re a goner.

My kneecap is hurting me. Ow. That’s better.

The priest took a stick with a knob at the end of it out of the boy’s bucket and shook it over the coffin. Then he walked to the other end and shook it again. Then he came back and put it back in the bucket. As you were before you rested. It’s all written down: he has to do it.

— Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.

The server piped the answers in the treble. I often thought it would be better to have boy servants. Up to fifteen or so. After that of course…

Holy water that was, I expect. Shaking sleep out of it. He must be fed up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses they trot up. What harm if he could see what he was shaking it over. Every mortal day a fresh batch: middleaged men, old women, children, women dead in childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded business men, consumptive girls with little sparrows’ breasts. All the year round he prayed the same thing over them all and shook water on top of them: sleep. On Dignam now.

— In paradisum.

Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.

The priest closed his book and went off, followed by the server. Corny [101] Kelleher opened the sidedoors and the gravediggers came in, hoisted the coffin again, carried it out and shoved it on their cart. Corny Kelleher gave one wreath to the boy and one to the brother-in-law. All followed them out of the sidedoors into the mild grey air. Mr Bloom came last, folding his paper again into his pocket. He gazed gravely at the ground till the coffin[-]cart wheeled off to the left. The metal wheels ground the gravel with a sharp grating cry and the pack of blunt boots followed the barrow along a lane of sepulchres.

The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn’t lilt here.

— The O’Connell circle, Mr Dedalus said about him.

Mr Power’s soft eyes went up to the apex of the lofty cone.

— He’s at rest, he said, in the middle of his people, old Dan O’. But his heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here, Simon!

— Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr Dedalus said. I’ll soon be stretched beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.

Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little in his walk. Mr Power took his arm.

— She’s better where she is, he said kindly.

— I suppose so, Mr Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in heaven if there is a heaven.

Corny Kelleher stepped aside from his rank and allowed the mourners to plod by.

— Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.

Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.

— The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I suppose we can do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a treacherous place.

They covered their heads.

— The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don’t you think? Mr Kernan said with reproof.

Mr Bloom nodded gravely, looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret eyes, secret searching eyes. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope he’ll say something else.

Mr Kernan added:

— The service of the Irish church, used in Mount Jerome, is simpler, more impressive, I must say.

Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing.

Mr Kernan said with solemnity:

[102] — I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart.

— It does, Mr Bloom said.

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.

Corny Kelleher fell into step at their side.

— Everything went off A I, he said. What?

He looked on them from his drawling eye. Policeman’s shoulders. With your tooraloom tooraloom.

— As it should be, Mr Kernan said.

— What? Eh? Corny Kelleher said.

Mr Kernan assured him.

— Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan? John Henry Menton asked. I know his face.

Ned Lambert glanced back.

— Bloom, he said Madam Marion Tweedy that was, is, I mean, the soprano. She’s his wife.

— O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven’t seen her for some time. She was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen seventeen golden years ago, at Mat Dillon’s, in Roundtown. And a good armful she was.

He looked behind through the others.

— What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn’t he in the stationery line? I fell foul of him one evening, I remember, at bowls.

Ned Lambert smiled.

— Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.

— In God’s name, John Henry Menton said, what did she marry a coon like that for? She had plenty of game in her then.

— Has still, Ned Lambert said. He does some canvassing for ads.

John Henry Menton’s large eyes stared ahead.

[103] The barrow turned into a side lane. A portly man, ambushed among the grasses, raised his hat in homage. The gravediggers touched their caps.

— John O’Connell, Mr Power said, pleased. He never forgets a friend.

Mr O’Connell shook all their hands in silence. Mr Dedalus said:

— I am come to pay you another visit.

— My dear Simon, the caretaker answered in a low voice. I don’t want your custom at all.

Saluting Ned Lambert and John Henry Menton he walked on at Martin Cunningham’s side, puzzling two keys at his back.

— Did you hear that one, he asked them, about Mulcahy from the Coombe?

— I did not, Martin Cunningham said.

They bent their silk hats in concert and Hynes inclined his ear. The caretaker hung his thumbs in the loops of his gold watch chain and spoke in a discreet tone to their vacant smiles.

— They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave, sure enough. One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of our Saviour the widow had got put up.

The caretaker blinked up at one of the sepulchres they passed. He resumed:

— And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he. That’s not Mulcahy, says he, whoever done it.

Rewarded by smiles he fell back and spoke with Corny Kelleher, accepting the dockets given him, turning them over and scanning them as he walked.

— That’s all done with a purpose, Martin Cunningham explained to Hynes.

— I know, Hynes said, I know that.

— To cheer a fellow up, Martin Cunningham said. It’s pure good[-]heartedness: damn the thing else.

Mr Bloom admired the caretaker’s prosperous bulk. All want to be on good terms with him. Decent fellow, John O’Connell, real good sort. Keys: like Keyes’s ad: no fear of anyone getting out, no passout checks. Habeat corpus. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me writing to Martha? Hope it’s not chucked [104] in the dead letter office. Be the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That’s the first sign when the hairs come out grey and temper getting cross. Silver threads among the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder how he had the gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It might thrill her first. Courting death.. Shades of night hovering here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when churchyards yawn and Daniel O’Connell must be a descendant I suppose who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the same like a big giant in the dark. Will o’ the wisp. Gas of graves. Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so touchy. Tell her a ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever seen a ghost? Well, I have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on the stroke of twelve. Still they ’d kiss all right if properly keyed up. Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to the starving gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.

He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing. Sitting or kneeling you couldn’t. Standing? His head might come up some day above ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed the ground must be: oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too, trim grass and edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It’s the blood sinking in the earth gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every man his price. Well preserved fat corpse gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcase of William Wilkinson, auditor and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six. With thanks.

I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh, nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth lean. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.

[105] But they must breed a devil of a lot of maggots. Soil must be simply swirling with them. Your head it simply swurls. Those pretty little seaside gurls. He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense of power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he looks at life. Cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of his heart. The one about the bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven 4 a. m. this morning. 11 p. m. (closing time). Not arrived yet. Peter. The dead themselves the men anyhow would like to hear an odd joke or the women to know what’s in fashion. A juicy pear or ladies’ punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep out the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way. Gravediggers in Hamlet. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart. Daren’t joke about the dead for two years at least. De mortuis nil nisi prius. Go out of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral. Seems a sort of a joke. Read your own obituary notice they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

— How many have you for tomorrow? the caretaker asked.

— Two, Corny Kelleher said. Half ten and eleven.

The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.

Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He doesn’t know who is here nor care.

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he’d have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

O, poor Robinson Crusoe,

How could you possibly do so?

Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding let it down that way. Ay but [106] they might object to be buried out of another fellow’s. They’re so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The Irishman’s house is his coffin. Embalming in catacombs, mummies, the same idea.

Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I’m thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death’s number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.

Nice soft tweed Ned Lambert has in that suit. Tinge of purple. I had one like that when we lived in Lombard street west. Dressy fellow he was once. Used to change three suits in the day. Must get that grey suit of mine turned by Mesias. Hello. It’s dyed. His wife I forgot he’s not married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him.

The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles. They struggled up and out: and all uncovered. Twenty.

Pause.

If we were all suddenly somebody else.

Far away a donkey brayed. Rain. No such ass. Never see a dead one, they say. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went away.

Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker. Well cut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next. Well it is a long rest. Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he’s doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner’s death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don’t forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.

[107] We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you’re well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of purgatory.

Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself? They say you do when you shiver in the sun. Someone walking over it. Callboy’s warning. Near you. Mine over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma, poor mamma, and little Rudy.

The gravediggers took up their spades and flung heavy clods of clay in on the coffin. Mr Bloom turned his face. And if he was alive all the time? Whew! By Jingo, that would be awful! No, no: he is dead, of course. Of course he is dead. Monday he died. They ought to have some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or a telephone in the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of distress. Three days. Rather long to keep them in summer. Just as well to get shut of them as soon as you are sure there’sns.

The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.

The caretaker moved away a few paces and put on his hat. Had enough of it. The mourners took heart of grace, one by one, covering themselves without show. Mr Bloom put on his hat and saw the portly figure make its way deftly through the maze of graves. Quietly, sure of his ground, he traversed the dismal fields.

Hynes jotting down something in his notebook. Ah, the names. But he knows them all. No: coming to me.

— I am just taking the names, Hynes said below his breath. What is your christian name? I’m not sure.

— L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold. And you might put down M’Coy’s name too. He asked me to.

— Charley, Hynes said writing. I know. He was on the Freeman once.

So he was before he got the job in the morgue under Louis Byrne. Good idea a postmortem for doctors. Find out what they imagine they know. He died of a Tuesday. Got the run. Levanted with the cash of a few ads. Charley, you’re my darling. That was why he asked me to. O well, does no harm. I saw to that. [that,] M’Coy. Thanks, old chap: much obliged. Leave him under an obligation: costs nothing.

— And tell us, Hynes said, do you know that fellow in the, fellow was over there in the…

He looked around.

— Macintosh. [Macintosh,] Yes I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now?

[108] — M’Intosh, Hynes said, scribbling. I don’t know who he is. Is that his name?

He moved away, looking about him.

— No, Mr Bloom began, turning and stopping. I say, Hynes!

Didn’t hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of all the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good Lord, what became of him?

A seventh gravedigger came beside Mr Bloom to take up an idle spade.

— O, excuse me!

He stepped aside nimbly.

Clay, brown, damp, began to be seen in the hole. It rose. Nearly over. A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped his wreath against a corner: the brother-in-law his on a lump. The gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates, walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing. Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord. The brother-in-law, turning away, placed something in his free hand. Thanks in silence. Sorry, sir: trouble. Headshake. I know that. For yourselves just.

The mourners moved away slowly, without aim, by devious paths, staying awhile to read a name on a tomb.

— Let us go round by the chief’s grave, Hynes said. We have time.

— Let us, Mr Power said.

They turned to the right, following their slow thoughts. With awe Mr Power’s blank voice spoke:

— Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled with stones. That one day he will come again.

Hynes shook his head.

— Parnell will never come again, he said. He’s there, all that was mortal of him. Peace to his ashes.

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together [109] to save time. All souls’ day. Twentyseventh I’ll be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death’s door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and so, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman’s with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it. Old Dr Murren’s. The great physician called him home. Well it’s God’s acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the Church Times. Marriage ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles.

A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hu! Not a budge out of him. Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder. Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.

The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve. Ought to be sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart. Ireland was dedicated to it or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with the basket of fruit but he said no because they ought to have been afraid of the boy. Apollo that was.

How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.

Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohello amarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn’t remember the face after fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some fellow that died when I was in Wisdom Hely’s.

Rtststr! A rattle of pebbles. Wait. Stop.

He looked down intently into a stone crypt. Some animal. Wait. There he goes.

[110] An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wriggled itself in under it. Good hidingplace for treasure.

Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert Emmet was buried here by torchlight, wasn’t he? Making his rounds.

Tail gone now.

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime fever pits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can’t bury in the air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn’t be surprised. Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he’s well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn’t care about the smell of it. Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white turnips.

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I was here was Mrs Sinico’s funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills. And even scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case I read of to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied with running gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit. I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after death. There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.

Martin Cunningham emerged from a sidepath, talking gravely.

Solicitor, I think. I know his face. Menton. John Henry, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits. Dignam used to be in his office. Mat Dillon’s long ago. Jolly Mat convivial evenings. Cold fowl, cigars, the Tantalus glasses. Heart of gold really. Yes, Menton. Got his rag out that evening on [111] the bowling green because I sailed inside him. Pure fluke of mine: the bias. Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate at first sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree, laughing. Fellow always like that mortified if women are by.

Got a dinge in the side of his hat. Carriage probably.

— Excuse me, sir, Mr Bloom said beside them.

They stopped.

— Your hat is a little crushed, Mr Bloom said, pointing.

John Henry Menton stared at him for an instant without moving.

— There, Martin Cunningham helped, pointing also.

John Henry Menton took off his hat, bulged out the dinge and smoothed the nap with care on his coatsleeve. He clapped the hat on his head again.

— It’s all right now, Martin Cunningham said.

John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgment.

— Thank you, he said shortly.

They walked on towards the gates. Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind a few paces so as not to overhear. Martin laying down the law. Martin could wind a sappyhead like that round his little finger without his seeing it.

Oyster eyes. Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on him. Get the pull over him that way.

Thank you. How grand we are this morning!

 ® 

[112] IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount, Green Rathmines, Ringsend, and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off:

— Rathgar and Terenure!

— Come on, Sandymount Green!

Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.

— Start, Palmerston park!

THE WEARER OF THE CROWN

Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. Parked in North Prince’s street His Majesty’s vermilion mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettecards, parcels, insured and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery.

GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS

Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores.

— There it is, Red Murray said. Alexander Keyes.

[113] — Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I’ll take it round to the Telegraph office.

The door of Ruttledge’s office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute in a large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out with a roll of papers under his cape, a king’s courier.

Red Murray’s long shears sliced out the advertisement from the newspaper in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.

— I’ll go through the printing works, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut square.

— Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind his ear, we can do him one.

— Right, Mr Bloom said with a nod. I’ll rub that in.

We.

WILLIAM BRAYDEN, ESQUIRE, OF OAKLANDS, SANDYMOUNT

Red Murray touched Mr Bloom’s arm with the shears and whispered:

— Brayden.

Mr Bloom turned and saw the liveried porter raise his lettered cap as a stately figure entered between the newsboards of the Weekly Freeman and National Press and the Freeman’s Journal and National Press. Dullthudding Guinness’s barrels. It passed stately up the staircase steered by an umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back ascended each step: back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck, Simon Dedalus says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat, neck.

— Don’t you think his face is like Our Saviour? Red Murray whispered.

The door of Ruttledge’s office whispered: ee: cree. They always build one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.

Our Saviour: beardframed oval face: talking in the dusk Mary, Martha. Steered by an umbrella sword to the footlights: Mario the tenor.

— Or like Mario, Mr Bloom said.

— Yes, Red Murray agreed. But Mario was said to be the picture of Our Saviour.

Jesus Mario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Hand on his heart. In Martha.

Co-ome thou lost one,

Co-ome thou dear one

[114] THE CROZIER AND THE PEN

— His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely.

They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck.

A telegram boy stepped in nimbly, threw an envelope on the counter and stepped off posthaste with a word.

— Freeman!

Mr Bloom said slowly:

— Well, he is one of our saviours also.

A meek smile accompanied him as he lifted the counterflap, as he passed in through the sidedoor and along the warm dark stairs and passage, along the now reverberating boards. But will he save the circulation? Thumping, thumping.

He pushed in the glass swingdoor and entered, stepping over strewn packing paper. Through a lane of clanking drums he made his way towards Nannetti’s reading closet.

WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE DISSOLUTION OF A MOST RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS

Hynes here too: account of the funeral probably. Thumping thump. This morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.

HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT

Mr Bloom halted behind the foreman’s spare body, admiring a glossy crown.

Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country. Member for Collegegreen. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth. It’s the ads and side features sell a weekly not the stale news in the official gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the year one thousand and. [115] Demesne situate in the townland of Rosenallis, barony of Tinnachinch. To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to statute showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina. Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake’s weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle Toby’s page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin’s queries. Dear Mr Editor, what is a good cure for flatulence? I’d like that part. Learn a lot teaching others. The personal note M. A. P. Mainly all pictures. Shapely bathers on golden strand. World’s biggest balloon. Double marriage of sisters celebrated. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at each other. Cuprani too, printer. More Irish than the Irish.

The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he got paralysed there and no one knew how to stop them they’d clank on and on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the whole thing. Want a cool head.

— Well, get it into the evening edition, councillor,Hynes said.

Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Long John is backing him they say.

The foreman, without answering, scribbled press on a corner of the sheet and made a sign to a typesetter. He handed the sheet silently over the dirty glass screen.

— Right: thanks, Hynes said moving off.

Mr Bloom stood in his way.

— If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said, pointing backward with his thumb.

— Did you? Hynes asked.

— Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you’ll catch him.

— Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I’ll tap him too.

He hurried on eagerly towards the Freeman’s Journal.

Three bob I lent him in Meagher’s. Three weeks. Third hint.

WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK

Mr Bloom laid his cutting on Mr Nannetti’s desk.

— Excuse me, councillor, he said. This ad, you see. Keyes, you remember.

Mr Nannetti considered the cutting a while and nodded.

— He wants it in for July, Mr Bloom said.

He doesn’t hear it. Nannan. Iron nerves.

The foreman moved his pencil towards it.

— But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants two keys at the top.

[116] Hell of a racket they make. Maybe he understands what I.

The foreman turned round to hear patiently and, lifting an elbow, began to scratch slowly in the armpit of his alpaca jacket.

— Like that, Mr Bloom said, crossing his forefingers at the top.

Let him take that in first.

Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the cross he had made, saw the foreman’s sallow face, think he has a touch of jaundice, and beyond the obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles of it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels: various uses, thousand and one things.

Slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the clanking he drew swiftly on the scarred woodwork.

HOUSE OF KEY(E)S

— Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. So on.

Better not teach him his own business.

— You know yourself, councillor, just what he wants. Then round the top in leaded: the house of keys. You see? Do you think that’s a good idea?

The foreman moved his scratching hand to his lower ribs and scratched there quietly.

— The idea, Mr Bloom said, is the house of keys. You know, councillor, the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the isle of Man. Catches the eye, you see. Can you do that?

I could ask him perhaps about how to pronounce that voglio. But then if he didn’t know only make it awkward for him. Better not.

— We can do that, the foreman said. Have you the design?

— I can get it, Mr Bloom said. It was in a Kilkenny paper. He has a house there too. I’ll just run out and ask him. Well, you can do that and just a little par calling attention. You know the usual. High class licensed premises. Longfelt want. So on.

The foreman thought for an instant.

— We can do that, he said. Let him give us a three months’ renewal.

A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching the silent typesetters at their cases.

[117] ORTHOGRAPHICAL

Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn’t it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry.

I could have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought to have said something about an old hat or something. No, I could have said. Looks as good as new now. See his phiz then.

Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.

NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR

The foreman handed back the galleypage suddenly, saying:

— Wait. Where’s the archbishop’s letter? It’s to be repeated in the Telegraph. Where’s what’s his name?

He looked about him round his loud unanswering machines.

— Monks, sir? a voice asked from the castingbox.

— Ay. Where’s Monks?

— Monks!

Mr Bloom took up his cutting. Time to get out.

— Then I’ll get the design, Mr Nannetti, he said, and you’ll give it a good place I know.

— Monks!

— Yes, sir.

Three months’ renewal. Want to get some wind off my chest first. Try it anyhow. Rub in August: good idea: horseshow month. Ballsbridge. Tourists over for the show.

[118] A DAYFATHER

He walked on through the caseroom, passing an old man, bowed, spectacled, aproned. Old Monks, the dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must have put through his hands in his time: obituary notices, pubs’ ads, speeches, divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing the end of his tether now. Sober serious man with a bit in the savingsbank I’d say. Wife a good cook and washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour. Plain Jane, no damn nonsense.

AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER

He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that. mangiD. kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that’s the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob’s sons. And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher and then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice makes perfect. Seems to see with his fingers.

Mr Bloom passed on out of the clanking noises through the gallery on to the landing. Now am I going to tram it out all the way and then catch him out perhaps. Better phone him up first. Number? Same as Citron’s house. Twentyeight. Twentyeight double four.

ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP

He went down the house staircase. Who the deuce scrawled all over these walls with matches? Looks as if they did it for a bet. Heavy greasy smell there always is in those works. Lukewarm glue in Thom’s next door when I was there.

He took out his handkerchief to dab his nose. Citronlemon? Ah, the soap I put there. Lose it out of that pocket. Putting back his handkerchief he took out the soap and stowed it away, buttoned, into the hip pocket of his trousers.

[119] What perfume does your wife use? I could go home still: tram: something I forgot. Just to see before dressing. No. Here. No.

A sudden screech of laughter came from the Evening Telegraph office. Know who that is. What’s up? Pop in a minute to phone. Ned Lambert it is.

He entered softly.

ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA

— The ghost walks, professor Mac Hugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the dusty windowpane.

Mr Dedalus, staring from the empty fireplace at Ned Lambert’s quizzing face, asked of it sourly:

— Agonising Christ, wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse?

Ned Lambert, seated on the table, read on:

— Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles on its way, fanned by gentlest zephyrs tho’ quarelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling waters of Neptune’s blue domain, mid mossy banks, played on by the glorious sunlight or ’neath the shadows cast o’er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest. What about that, Simon? he asked over the fringe of his newspaper. How’s that for high?

— Changing his drink, Mr Dedalus said.

Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper on his knees, repeating:

— The pensive bosom and the overarsing leafage. O boys! O, boys!

— And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again on the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea.

— That will do, professor Mac Hugh cried from the window. I don’t want to hear any more of the stuff.

He ate off the crescent of water biscuit he had been nibbling and, hungered, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand.

High falutin stuff. Bladderbags. Ned Lambert is taking a day off I see. Rather upsets a man’s day a funeral does. He has influence they say. Old Chatterton, the vice-chancellor is his granduncle or his greatgranduncle. Close on ninety they say. Subleader for his death written this long time perhaps. Living to spite them. Might go first himself. Johnny, make room for your uncle. The right honourable Hedges Eyre Chatterton. Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on gale days. Windfall when he kicks out. Alleluia.

— Just another spasm, Ned Lambert said.

[120] — What is it? Mr Bloom asked.

— A recently discovered fragment of Cicero’s, professor Mac Hugh answered with pomp of tone. Our lovely land.

SHORT BUT TO THE POINT

— Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply.

— Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an accent on the whose.

— Dan Dawson’s land, Mr Dedalus said.

— Is it his speech last night? Mr Bloom asked.

Ned Lambert nodded.

— But listen to this, he said.

The doorknob hit Mr Bloom in the small of the back as the door was pushed in.

— Excuse me, J. J. O’Molloy said, entering.

Mr Bloom moved nimbly aside.

— I beg yours, he said.

— Good day, Jack.

— Come in. Come in.

— Good day.

— How are you, Dedalus?

— Well. And yourself?

J. J. O’Molloy shook his head.

SAD

Cleverest fellow at the junior bar he used to be. Decline poor chap. That hectic flush spells finis for a man. Touch and go with him. What’s in the wind, I wonder. Money worry.

— Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks.

— You’re looking extra.

— Is the editor to be seen? J. J. O’Molloy asked, looking towards the inner door.

— Very much so, professor MacHugh said. To be seen and heard. He’s in his sanctum with Lenehan.

[121] J. J. O’Molloy strolled to the sloping desk and began to turn back the pink pages of the file.

Practice dwindling. A mighthavebeen. Losing heart. Gambling. Debts of honour. Reaping the whirlwind. Used to get good retainers from D. and T. Fitzgerald. Their wigs to show their grey matter. Brains on their sleeve like the statue in Glasnevin. Believe he does some literary work for the Express with Gabriel Conroy. Wellread fellow. Myles Crawford began on the Independent. Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn’t know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over. Hailfellow well met the next moment.

— Ah, listen to this for God’ sake, Ned Lambert pleaded. Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks…

— Bombast! the professor broke in testily. Enough of the inflated windbag!

— Peaks, Ned Lambert went on, towering high on high, to bathe our souls, as it were…

— Bathe his lips, Mr Dedalus said. Blessed and eternal God! Yes? Is he taking anything for it.

— As ’twere, in the peerless panorama of Ireland’s portfolio, unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize regions for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight…

HIS NATIVE DORIC

— The moon, professor Mac Hugh said. He forgot Hamlet.

— That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of the moon shines forth to irradiate her silver effulgence.

— O! Mr Dedalus cried, giving vent to to a hopeless groan, shite and onions! That’ll do, Ned. Life is too short.

He took off his silk hat and, blowing out impatiently his bushy moustache, welshcombed his hair with raking fingers.

Ned Lambert tossed the newspaper aside, chuckling with delight. An instant after a hoarse bark of laughter burst over professor Mac Hugh’s unshaven blackspectacled face.

— Doughy Daw! he cried.

[122] WHAT WETHERUP SAID

All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot cake that stuff. He was in the bakery line too wasn’t he? Why they call him Doughy Daw. Feathered his nest well anyhow. Daughter engaged to that chap in the inland revenue office with the motor. Hooked that nicely. Entertainments open house. Big blow out. Wetherup always said that. Get a grip of them by the stomach.

The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face, crested by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes stared about them and the harsh voice asked:

— What is it?

— And here comes the sham squire himself, professor Mac Hugh said grandly.

— Getououthat, you bloody old pedagogue! the editor said in recognition.

— Come, Ned, Mr Dedalus said, putting on his hat. I must get a drink after that.

— Drink! the editor cried. No drinks served before mass.

— Quite right too, Mr Dedalus said, going out. Come on, Ned.

Ned Lambert sidled down from the table. The editor’s blue eyes roved towards Mr Bloom’s face, shadowed by a smile.

— Will you join us, Myles? Ned Lambert asked.

MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED

— North Cork militia! the editor cried, striding to the mantelpiece. We won every time! North Cork and Spanish officers!

— Where was that, Myles? Ned Lambert asked with a reflective glance at his toecaps.

— In Ohio! the editor shouted.

— So it was, begad, Ned Lambert agreed.

Passing out, he whispered to J. J. O’Molloy:

— Incipient jigs. Sad case.

— Ohio! the editor crowed in high treble from his uplifted scarlet face. My Ohio!

— A perfect cretic! the professor said. Long, short and long.

[123] O, HARP EOLIAN!

He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant unwashed teeth.

— Bingbang, bangbang.

Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made for the inner door.

— Just a moment, Mr Crawford, he said. I just want to phone about an ad.

He went in.

— What about that leader this evening? professor Mac Hugh asked, coming to the editor and laying a firm hand on his shoulder.

— That’ll be all right, Myles Crawford said more calmly. Never you fret. Hello, Jack. That’s all right.

— Good day, Myles, J. J. O’Molloy said, letting the pages he held slip limply back on the file. Is that Canada swindle case on today?

The telephone whirred inside.

— Twenty eight… No, twenty… Double four… Yes.

SPOT THE WINNER

Lenehan came out of the inner office with Sport’s tissues.

— Who wants a dead cert for the Gold cup? he asked. Sceptre with O. Madden up.

He tossed the tissues on to the table.

Screams of newsboys barefoot in the hall rushed near and the door was flung open.

— Hush, Lenehan said. I hear feetstoops.

Professor Mac Hugh strode across the room and seized the cringing urchin by the collar as the others scampered out of the hall and down the steps. The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air blue scrawls and under the table came to earth.

— It wasn’t me, sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir.

— Throw him out and shut the door, the editor said. There’s a hurricane blowing.

Lenehan began to paw the tissues up from the floor, grunting as he stooped twice.

[124] — Waiting for the racing special, sir, the newsboy said. It was Pat Farrell shoved me, sir.

He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe.

— Him, sir.

— Out of this with you, professor Mac Hugh said gruffly.

He hustled the boy out and banged the door to.

J. J. O’Molloy turned the files crackingly over, murmuring, seeking:

— Continued on page six, column four.

— Yes… Evening Telegraph here, Mr Bloom phoned from the inner office. Is the boss…? Yes, Telegraph… To where?… Aha! Which auction rooms?… Aha! I see… Right. I’ll catch him.

A COLLISION ENSUES

The bell whirred again as he rang off. He came in quickly and bumped against Lenehan who was struggling up with the second tissue.

— Pardon, monsieur, Lenehan said, clutching him for an instant and making a grimace.

— My fault, Mr Bloom said, suffering his grip. Are you hurt? I’m in a hurry.

— Knee, Lenehan said.

He made a comic face and whined, rubbing his knee:

— The accumulation of the anno Domini.

— Sorry, Mr Bloom said.

He went to the door and, holding it ajar, paused. J. J. O’Molloy slapped the heavy pages over. The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan, echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps:

We are the boys of Wexford

Who fought with heart and hand.

EXIT BLOOM

— I’m just running round to Bachelor’s walk, Mr Bloom said, about this ad of Keyes’s. Want to fix it up. They tell me he’s round there in Dillon’s.

He looked indecisively for a moment at their faces. The editor who, [125] leaning against the mantelshelf, had propped his head on his hand suddenly stretched forth an arm amply.

— Begone! he said. The world is before you.

— Back in no time, Mr Bloom said, hurrying out.

J. J. O’Molloy took the tissues from Lenehan’s hand and read them, blowing them apart gently, without comment.

— He’ll get that advertisement, the professor said, staring through his blackrimmed spectacles over the crossblind. Look at the young scamps after him.

— Show. Where? Lenehan cried, running to the window.

A STREET CORTÈGE

Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr Bloom’s wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a tail of white bowknots.

— Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said, and you’ll kick. O, my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks.

He began to mazurka in swift caricature cross the floor on sliding feet past the fireplace to J. J. O’Molloy who placed the tissues in his receiving hands.

— What’s that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two gone?

— Who? the professor said, turning. They’re gone round to the Oval for a drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.

— Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where’s my hat?

He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his jacket, jingling his keys in his back pocket. They jingled then in the air and against the wood as he locked his desk drawer.

— He’s pretty well on, professor Mac Hugh said in a low voice.

— Seems to be, J. J. O’Molloy said, taking out a cigarette case in murmuring meditation, but it is not always as it seems. Who has the most matches?

THE CALUMET OF PEACE

He offered a cigarette to the professor and took one himself. Lenehan promptly struck a match for them and lit their cigarettes in turn. J.J.O’Molloy opened his case again and offered it.

[126] — Thanky vous, Lenehan said, helping himself.

The editor came from the inner office, a straw hat awry on his brow. He declaimed in song, pointing sternly at professor Mac Hugh:

’Twas rank and fame that tempted thee,

’Twas empire charmed thy heart.

The professor grinned, locking his long lips.

— Eh? You bloody old Roman empire? Myles Crawford said.

He took a cigarette from the open case. Lenehan, lighting it for him with quick grace, said:

— Silence for my brandnew riddle!

— Imperium romanum, J. J. O’Molloy said gently. It sounds nobler than British or Brixton. The word reminds one somehow of fat in the fire.

Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the ceiling.

— That’s it, he said. We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire. We haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell.

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME

— Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative.

He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing:

— What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: Is it meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.

— Which they accordingly did do, Lenehan said, Our old ancient ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness’s, were partial to the running stream.

— They were nature’s gentlemen, J. J. O’Molloy murmured. But we have also Roman law.

— And Pontius Pilate is its prophet, professor MacHugh responded.

[127] — Do you know that story about chief baron Palles? J. J. O’Molloy asked. It was at the royal university dinner. Everything was going swimmingly…

— First my riddle, Lenehan said. Are you ready?

Mr O’Madden Burke, tall in copious grey of Donegal tweed, came in from the hallway. Stephen Dedalus, behind him, uncovered as he entered.

— Entrez, mes enfants! Lenehan cried.

— I escort a suppliant, M. O’Madden Burke said melodiously. Youth led by Experience visits Notoriety.

— How do you do? the editor said, holding out a hand. Come in. Your governor is just gone.

???

Lenehan said to all:

— Silence! What opera resembles a railway line? Reflect, ponder, excogitate, reply.

Stephen handed over the typed sheets, pointing to the title and signature.

— Who? the editor asked.

Bit torn off.

— Mr Garrett Deasy, Stephen said.

— That old pelters, the editor said. Who tore it? Was he short taken?

On swift sail flaming

From storm and south

He comes, pale vampire,

Mouth to my mouth.

— Good day, Stephen, the professor said, coming to peer over their shoulders. Foot and mouth.? Are you turned…?

Bullockbefriending bard.

SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT

— Good day, sir, Stephen answered, blushing. The letter is not mine. Mr Garrett Deasy asked me to…

— O, I know him, Myles Crawford said, and knew his wife too. The bloodiest old tartar God ever made. By Jesus, she had the foot and mouth [128] disease and no mistake! The night she threw the soup in the waiter’s face in the Star and Garter. Oho!

A woman brought sin into the world. For Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks. O’Rourke, prince of Breffni.

— Is he a widower? Stephen asked.

— Ay, a grass one, Myles Crawford said, his eye running down the typescript. Emperor’s horses. Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on the ramparts of Vienna. Don’t you forget! Maximilian Karl O’Donnell, graf von Tirconnel in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild geese. O yes, every time. Don’t you forget that!

— The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O’Molloy said quietly, turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank you job.

Professor MacHugh turned on him.

— And if not? he said.

— I’ll tell you how it was, Myles Crawford began. A Hungarian it was one day…

LOST CAUSES
NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED

— We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus! Lord Salisbury. A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek!

KYRIE ELEISON!

A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long lips.

— The Greek! he said again. Kyrios! Shining word! The vowels the Semite and the Saxon know not. Kyrie! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind. Kyrie eleison! The closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We are liege subjects of [129] the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an imperium, that went under with the Athenian fleets at Ægospotami. Yes, yes. They went under. Pyrrhus, misled by an oracle, made a last attempt to retrieve the fortunes of Greece. Loyal to a lost cause.

He strode away from them towards the window.

— They went forth to battle, Mr O’Madden Burke said greyly, but they always fell.

— Boohoo! Lenehan wept with a little noise. Owing to a brick received in the latter half of the matinée. Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus!

He whispered then near Stephen’s ear:

LENEHAN’S LIMERICK

—There’s a ponderous pundit MacHugh

Who wears goggles of ebony hue.

As he mostly sees double

To wear them why trouble?

I can’t see the Joe Miller. Can you?

In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says. Whose mother is beastly dead.

Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.

— That’ll be all right, he said. I’ll read the rest after. That’ll be all right.

Lenehan extended his hands in protest.

— But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line?

— Opera? Mr O’Madden Burke’s sphinx face reriddled.

Lenehan announced gladly:

— The Rose of Castille. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!

He poked Mr O Madden [O’Madden] Burke mildly in the spleen. Mr O’Madden Burke fell back with grace on his umbrella, feigning a gasp.

— Help! he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.

Lenehan, rising to tiptoe, fanned his face rapidly with the rustling tissues.

The professor, returning by way of the files, swept his hand across Stephen’s and Mr O’Madden Burke’s loose ties.

— Paris, past and present, he said. You look like communards.

— Like fellows who had blown up the Bastille, J. J. O’Molloy said in quiet mockery. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between you? You look as though you had done the deed. General Bobrikoff.

[130] OMNIUM GATHERUM

— We were only thinking about it, Stephen said.

— All the talents, Myles Crawford said. Law, the classics…

— The turf, Lenehan put in.

— Literature, the press.

— If Bloom were here, the professor said. The gentle art of advertisement.

— And Madam Bloom, Mr O’Madden Burke added. The vocal muse. Dublin’s prime favourite.

Lenehan gave a loud cough.

— Ahem! he said very softly. O, for a fresh of breath air! I caught a coldin the park. The gate was open.

« YOU CAN DO IT! »

The editor laid a nervous hand on Stephen’s shoulder.

— I want you to write something for me, he said. Something with a bite in it. You can do it. I see it in your face. In the lexicon of youth…

See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.

— Foot and mouth disease! the editor cried in scornful invective. Great nationalist meeting in Borris-in-Ossory. All balls! Bulldosing the public! Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M’ Carthy.

— We can all supply metanl pabulum, Mr O’Madden Burke said.

Stephen raised his eyes to the bold unheeding stare.

— He wants you for the pressgang, J. J. O’Molloy said.

THE GREAT GALLAHER

— You can do it, Myles Crawford repeated, clenching his hand in emphasis. Wait a minute. We’ll paralyse Europe as Ignatius Gallaher used to say when he was on the shaughraun, doing billiardmarking in the Clarence. Gallaher, that was a pressman for you. That was a pen. You know how he made his mark? I’ll tell you. That was the smartest piece of journalism ever known. That was in eightyone, sixth of May, time of the invincibles, murder in the Phoenix park, before you were born, I suppose. I’ll show you.

He pushed past them to the files.

[131] — Look at here, he said, turning. The New York World cabled for a special. Remember that time?

Professor MacHugh nodded.

— New York World, the editor said, excitedly pushing back his straw hat, Where it took place. Tim Kelly, or Kavanagh I mean, Joe Brady and the rest of them. Where Skin-the-goat drove the car. Whole route, see?

— Skin-the-goat, Mr O’Madden Burke said. Fitzharris. He has that cabman’s shelter, they say, down there at Butt bridge. Holohan told me. You know Holehan?

— Hop and carry one, is it? Myles Crawford said.

— And poor Gumley is down there too, so he told me, minding stones for the corporation. A night watchman.

Stephen turned in surprise.

— Gumley? he said. You don’t say so? A friend of my father’s, is he?

— Never mind Gumley, Myles Crawford cried angrily. Let Gumley mind the stones, see they don’t run away. Look at here. What did Ignatius Gallaher do? I’ll tell you. Inspiration of genius. Cabled right away. Have you Weekly Freeman of 17 March? Right. Have you got that?

He flung back pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point.

— Take page four, advertisement for Bransome’s coffee let us say. Have you got that? Right.

The telephone whirred.

A DISTANT VOICE

— I’ll answer it, the professor said going.

— B is parkgate. Good.

His finger leaped and struck point after point, vibrating.

— T is viceregal lodge. C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon gate.

The loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock’s wattles. An illstarched dicky jutted up and with a rude gesture he thrust it back into his waistcoat.

— Hello? Evening Telegraph here… Hello?… Who’s there?… Yes… Yes… Yes…

— F to P is the route Skin-the-goat drove the car for an alibi. Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F. A. B. P. Got that? X is Davy’s publichouse in upper Leeson street.

[132] The professor came to the inner door.

— Bloom is at the telephone, he said.

— Tell him go to hell, the editor said promptly. X is Burke’s public house, see?

CLEVER, VERY

— Clever, Lenehan said. Very.

— Gave it to them on a hot plate, Myles Crawford said, the whole bloody history.

Nightmare from which you will never awake.

— I saw it, the editor said proudly. I was present, Dick Adams, the besthearted bloody Corkman the Lord ever put the breath of life in, and myself.

Lenehan bowed to a shape of air, announcing:

— Madam, I’m Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba.

— History! Myles Crawford cried. The Old Woman of Prince’s street was there first. Thee was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that. Out of an advertisement. Gregor Grey made the design for it. That gave him the leg up. Then Paddy Hooper worked Tay Pay who took him on to the Star. Now he’s got in with Blumenfeld. That’s press. That’s talent. Pyatt! He was all their daddies.

— The father of scare journalism, Lenehan confirmed, and the brother-in-law of Chris Callinan.

— Hello?… Are you there?… Yes, he’s here still. Come across yourself.

— Where do you find a pressman like that now, eh? the editor cried.

He flung the pages down.

— Clamn dever, Lenehan said to Mr O’Madden Burke.

— Very smart, Mr O’Madden Burke said.

Professor MacHugh came from the inner office.

— Talking about the invincibles, he said, did you see that some hawkers were up before the recorder…

— O yes, J. J. O’Molloy said eagerly. Lady Dudley was walking home through the park to see all the trees that were blown down by that cyclone last year and thought she’d buy a view of Dublin. And it turned out to be a commemoration postcard of Joe Brady or Number One or Skin-the-goat. Right outside the viceregal lodge, imagine!

— They’re only in the hook and eye department, Myles Crawford said. [133] Psha! Press and the bar! Where have you a man now at the bar like those fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O’Hagan? Eh? Ah, bloody nonsense! Only in the halfpenny place!

His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.

Would anyone wish that mouth for her kiss? How do you know? Why did you write it then?

RHYMES AND REASONS

Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth? Must be some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. Rhymes: two men dressed the same, looking the same, two by two.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . la tua pace

. . . . . . . . . . . che parlar ti piace

. . . . mentreche il vento, come fa, si tace.

He saw them three by three, approaching girls, in green, in rose, in russet, entwining, per l’aer perso in mauve, in purple, quella pacifica oriafiamma, in gold of oriflamme, di rimirar fè più ardenti. But I old men, penitent, leadenfooted, underdarkneath the night: mouth south: tomb womb.

— Speak up for yourself, Mr O’Madden Burke said.

SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY…

J. J. O’Molloy, smiling palely, took up the gage.

— My dear Myles, he said, flinging his cigarette aside, you put a false construction on my words. I hold no brief, as at present advised, for the third profession qua profession but your Cork legs are running away with you. Why not bring in Henry Grattan and Flood and Demosthenes and Edmund Burke? Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss, Harmsworth of the farthing press, and his American cousin of the Bowery gutter sheet not to mention Paddy Kelly’s Budget, Pue’s Occurrences and our watchful friend The Skibereen Eagle. Why bring in a master of forensic eloquence like Whiteside? Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof.

[134] LINKS WITH BYGONE DAYS OF YORE

— Grattan and Flood wrote for this very paper, the editor cried in his face. Irish volunteers. Where are you now? Established 1763. Dr Lucas. Who have you now like John Philpot Curran? Psha!

— Well, J. J. O’Molloy said, Bushe K. C., for example.

— Bushe? the editor said. Well, yes. Bushe, yes. He has a strain of it in his blood. Kendal Bushe or I mean Seymour Bushe.

— He would have been on the bench long ago, the professor said, only for… But no matter.

J. J. O’Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:

— One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide, the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him.

And in the porches of mine ear did pour.

By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the other story, beast with two backs?

— What was that? the professor asked.

ITALIA, MAGISTRA ARTIUM

— He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O’Molloy said, of Roman justice as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the lex talionis. And he cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the Vatican.

— Ha.

— A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. Silence!

Pause. J. J. O’Mollooy too kout his cigarette case.

False lull. Something quite ordinary.

Messenger took out his match box thoughtfully and lit his cigar.

I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives.

A POLISHED PERIOD

J. J. O’Molloy resumed, moulding his words:

— He said of it: that stony effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and prophecy which, if aught [135] that the imagination or the hand of sculptor has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live, deserves to live.

His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.

— Fine! Myles Crawford said at once.

— The divine afflatus, Mr O’Madden Burke said.

— You like it? J. J. O’Molloy asked Stephen.

Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. He took a cigarette from the case. J. J. O’Molloy offered his case to Myles Crawford. Lenehan lit their cigarettes as before and took his trophy, saying:

— Muchibus thankibus.

A MAN OF HIGH MORALE

— Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O’Molloy said to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal hush poets: A. E. the master mystic? That Blavatsky woman started it. She was a nice old bag of tricks. A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to ask him about planes of consciousness. Magennis thinks you must have been pulling A. E. ’s leg. He is a man of the very highest morale, Magennis.

Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say about me? Don’t ask.

— No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarette case aside. Wait a moment. Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I ever heard was a speech made by John F. Taylor at the college historical society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days), advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.

He turned towards Myles Crawford and said:

— You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Then you can imagine the style of his discourse.

— He is sitting withim T Healy, J. J. O’Molloy said, rumour has it, on the Trinity college estates commission.

— He is sitting with a sweet thing in a child’s frock, Myles Crawford said. Go on. Well?

— It was the speech, mark you, the professor said, of a finished orator, [136] full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction, I will not say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man’s contumely upon the new movement. It was then a new movement. We were weak, therefore worthless.

He closed his long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new focus.

IMPROMPTU

In ferial tone he addressed J. J. O’Molloy:

— Taylor had come there, you must know, from a sick bed. That he had prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one shorthandwriter in the hall. His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy beard round it. He wore a loose neckcloth and altogether he looked (though he was not) a dying man.

His gaze turned at once but slowly from J. J. O’Molloy’s towards Stephen’s face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking. His unglazed linen collar appeared behind his bent head,soiled by his withering hair. Still seeking, he said:

— When Fitzgibbon’s speech had ended John F. Taylor rose to reply. Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these.

He raised his head firmly. His eyes bethought themselves once more. Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet.

He began:

— Mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It senned to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.

His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?

— And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.

FROM THE FATHERS

It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good, could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.

[137] — Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, tireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.

Nile.

Child, man, effigy.

By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.

— You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.

A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:

— But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.

He ceased and looked at them, enjoying silence.

OMINOUS — FOR HIM!

J. J. O’Molloy said not without regret:

— And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.

— A - sudden - at - the - moment - though - from - lingering - illness - often - previously - expectorated - demise, Lenehan said. And with a great future behind him.

The troop of bare feet was heard rushing along the hallway and pattering up the staircase.

— That is oratory, the professor said, uncontradicted.

Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. [138] Miles of ears of porches. The tribune’s words howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.

I have money.

— Gentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I suggest that the house do now adjourn?

— You take my breath away. It is not perchance a French compliment? Mr O’Madden Burke asked. ’Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug, metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry.

— That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved. All who are in favour say ay, Lenehan announced. The contrary no. I declare it carried. To which particular boosing shed…? My casting vote is: Mooney’s!

He led the way, admonishing:

— We will sternly refuse to partake of strong waters, will we not? Yes, we will not. By no manner of means.

Mr O’Madden Burke, following close, said with an ally’s lunge of his umbrella:

— Lay on, Macduff!

— Chip of the old block! the editor cried, slapping Stephen on the shoulder. Let us go. Where are those blasted keys?

He fumbled in his pocket, pulling out the crushed typesheets.

— Foot and mouth. I know. That’ll be all right. That’ll go in. Where are they? That’s all night.

He thrust the sheets back and went into the inner office.

LET US HOPE

J. J. O’Molloy, about to follow him in, said quietly to Stephen:

— I hope you will live to see it published. Myles, one moment.

He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him.

— Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn’t it? It has the prophetic vision. Fuit Ilium! The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.

The first newsboy came pattering down the stairs at their heels and rushed out into the street, yelling:

— Racing special!

[139] Dublin. I have much, much to learn.

They turned to the left along Abbey street.

— I have a vision too, Stephen said.

— Yes, the professor said, skipping to get into step. Crawford will follow.

Another newsboy shot past them, yelling as he ran:

— Racing special!

DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN

Dubliners.

— Two Dublin vestals, Stephen said, elderly and pious, have lived fifty and fiftythree years in Fumbally’s lane.

— Where is that? the professor asked.

— Off Blackpitts.

Damp night reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face glistening tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records. Quicker, darlint!

On now. Dare it. Let there be life.

— They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson’s pillar. They save up three and in tenpence a red tin letterbox moneybox. They shake out the threepenny bits and a sixpence and coax out the pennies with the blade of a knife. Two and three in silver and one and seven in coppers. They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain.

— Wise virgins, professor Mac Hugh said.

LIFE ON THE RAW

— They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at the north city dining rooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins, proprietress… They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl at the foot of Nelson’s pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down, peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that high.

Their names are Anne Kearns and Florence Mac Cabe. Anne Kearns has the lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water given her by a lady who got a [140] bottleful from a passionist father. Florence Mac Cabe takes a crubeen and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday.

— Antithesis, the professor said, nodding twice. Vestal virgins. I can see them. What’s keeping our friend?

He turned.

A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the steps, scampering in all directions, yelling, their white papers fluttering. Hard after them Myles Crawford appeared on the steps, his hat aureoling his scarlet face, talking with J. J. O’Molloy.

— Come along, the professor cried, waving his arm.

He set off again to walk by Stephen’s side.

RETURN OF BLOOM

— Yes, he said. I see them.

Mr Bloom, breathless, caught in a whirl of wild newsboys near the offices of the Irish Catholic and Dublin Penny Journal, called:

— Mr Crawford! A moment!

— Telegraph! Racing spécial!

— What is it? Myles Crawford said, falling back a pace.

A newsboy cried in Mr Bloom’s face:

— Terrible tragedy in Rathmines! A child bit by a bellows!

INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR

— Just this ad, Mr Bloom said, pushing through towards the steps, puffing, and taking the cutting from his pocket. I spoke with Mr Keyes just now. He’ll give a renewal for two months, he says. After he’ll see. But he wants a par to call attention in the Telegraph too, the Saturday pink. And he wants it if it’s not too late I told councillor Nannetti from the Kilkenny People. I can have access to it in the national library. House of keys, don’t you see? His name is Keyes. It’s a play on the name. But he practically promised he’d give the renewal. But he wants just a little puff. What will I tell him, Mr Crawford?

K. M. A.

— Will you tell him he can kiss my arse? Myles Crawford said, throwing out his arm for emphasis. Tell him that straight from the stable.

[141] A bit nervy. Look out for squalls. All off for a drink. Arm in arm. Lenehan’s yachting cap on the cadge beyond. Usual blarney. Wonder is that young Dedalus the moving spirit. Has a good pair of boots on him today. Last time I saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in muck somewhere. Careless chap. What was he doing in Irishtown?

— Well, Mr Bloom said, his eyes returning, if I can get the design I suppose it’s worth a short par. He’d give the ad I think. I’ll tell him…

K. M. R. I. A.

— He can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles Crawford cried loudly over his shoulder. Any time he likes, tell him.

While Mr Bloom stood weighing the point and about to smile he strode on jerkily.

RAISING THE WIND

— Nulla bona, Jack, he said, raising his hand to his chin. I’m up to here. I’ve been through the hoop myself. I was looking for a fellow to back a bill for me no later than last week. You must take the will for the deed. Sorry, Jack. With a heart and a half if I could raise the wind anyhow.

J. J. O’Molloy pulled a long face and walked on silently. They caught up on the others and walked abreast.

— When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in, they go nearer to the railings.

— Something for you, the professor explained to Myles Crawford. Two old Dublin women on the top of Nelson’s pillar.

SOME COLUMN! — THAT’S WHAT WADDLER ONE SAID

— That’s new, Myles Crawford said. That’s copy. Out for the waxies’ Dargle. Two old trickies, what?

— But they are afraid the pillar will fall, Stephen went on. They see the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines’blue dome, Adam and Eve’s, saint Laurence O’Toole’s. But it makes them giddy to look so they pull up their skirts…

[142] THOSE SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES

— Easy all, Myles Crawford said, no poetic licence. We’re in the archdiocese here.

— And settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue of the onehandled adulterer.

— Onehandled adulterer! the professor cried. I like that. I see the idea. I see what you mean.

DAMES DONATE DUBLIN’S CITS SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, BELIEF

— It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.

He gave a sudden loud young laugh as a close. Lenehan and Mr O’Madden Burke, hearing, turned, beckoned and led on across towards Mooney’s.

— Finished? Myles Crawford said. So long as they do no worse.

SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.

— You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.

Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich.

They made ready to cross O’Connell street.

HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!

At various points along the eight lines tramcars with motionless trolleys stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines, Rathfarnham, Kingstown, [143] Blackrock and Dalkey, Sandymount Green, Ringsend and Sandymount tower Donnybrook, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines, all still, becalmed in short circuit. Hackney cars, cabs, delivery waggons, mailvans, private broughams, aerated mineral water floats with rattling crates of bottles, rattled, rolled, horsedrawn, rapidly.

WHAT? — AND LIKEWISE — WHERE?

— But what do you call it? Myles Crawford asked. Where did they get the plums?

VIRGILIAN, SAYS PEDAGOGUE. SOPHOMORE PLUMPS FOR OLD MAN MOSES

— Call it, wait, the professor said, opening his long lips wide to reflect. Call it, let me see. Call it: deus nobis hæc otia fecit.

— No, Stephen said, I call it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of The Plums.

— I see, the professor said.

He laughed richly.

— I see, he said again with new pleasure. Moses and the promised land. We gave him that idea, he added to J. J. O’Molloy.

HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FAIR JUNE DAY

J. J. O’Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue and held his peace.

— I see, the professor said.

He halted on sir John Gray’s pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson through the meshes of his wry smile.

DIMINISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES, FLO WANGLES — YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?

— Onehandled adulterer, he said grimly. That tickles me I must say.

— Tickled the old ones too, Myles Crawford said, if the God Almighty’s truth was known.

 ® 

[144] Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white.

A sombre Y. M. C. A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon’s, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.

Heart to heart talks.

Bloo… Me? No.

Blood of the Lamb.

His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie, restorer of the church in Zion, is coming.

Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!!

All heartily welcome.

Paying game. Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will put the stopper on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the luminous crucifix? Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see him on the wall, hanging. Pepper’s ghost idea. Iron nails ran in.

Phosphorous it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the pantry in the kitchen. Don’t like all the smells in it waiting to rush out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of Spain. Before Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good for the brain.

From Butler’s monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor’s walk. [145] Dedalus’ daughter there still outside Dillon’s auctionrooms. Must be selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father. Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That’s in their theology or the priest won’t give the poor woman the confession, the absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the fat of the land. Their butteries and larders. I’d like to see them do the black fast Yom Kippur. Crossbuns. One meal and a collation for fear he’d collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of those fellows if you could pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting L. s. d. out of him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one. Watching his water. Bring your own bread and butter. His reverence mum’s the word.

Good Lord, that poor child’s dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It’s after they feel it. Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution.

As he set foot on O’Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from the parapet. Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours it, I heard. Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see the brewery. Regular world in itself. Vats of porter, wonderful. Rats get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians. Imagine drinking that! Rats: vats. Well of course if we knew all the things.

Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quay walls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down? Reuben J’s son must have swallowed a good bellyful of that sewage. One and eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It’s the droll way he comes out with the things. Knows how to tell a story too.

They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait.

He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of swells, floated under by the bridge piers. Not such damn fools. Also the day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin’s King picked it up in the wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping.

The hungry famished gull.

Flaps o’er the waters dull.

[146] That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.

Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit

Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth.

— Two apples a penny! Two for a penny!

His gaze passed over the glazed apples serried on her stand. Australians they must be this time of year. Shiny peels: polishes them up with a rag or a handkerchief.

Wait. Those poor birds.

He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently two, then all, from their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.

Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fishy flesh they have to, all sea birds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from Anna Liffey swim down here sometimes to preen themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonder what kind is swanmeat. Robinson Crusoe had to live on them.

They wheeled, flapping weakly. I’m not going to throw any more. Penny quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot and mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey, say, on chestnut meal it tastes like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are not salty? How is that?

His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.

Kino’s

11/—.

Trousers.

Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All kinds of places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks. Didn’t cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Fly by night. Just the place too. post no bills. post iio pills. Some chap with a dose burning him.

[147] If he…

O!

Eh?

No… No.

No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely?

No, no.

Mr Bloom moved forward raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Time ball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of Sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pikehoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks!

Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballast office. She’s right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound. She’s not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking, Still I don’t know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you’d think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn’t that wit? They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at storing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.

A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely’s. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are not Boyl: no: M’Glade’s men. Doesn’t bring in any business either. I suggested to him about a transparent show cart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she’s writing. Get twenty of them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn’t have it of course because he didn’t think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree’s potted under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can’t lick ’em. What? Our envelopes. Hello! Jones, where are you going? Can’t stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser [148] Kansell, sold by Hely’s Ltd, 85 Dame Street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent. That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of woman. I disturbed her at her devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world. Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name too: caramel. She knew, I think she knew by the way she. If she had married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for them. My heart’s broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the pawnbroker’s daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.

He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait, was in Thom’s. Got the job in Wisdom Hely’s year we married. Six years. Ten years ago: ninetyfour he died, yes that’s right, the big fire at Arnott’s. Val Dillon was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alterman Robert O’Reilly emptying the port into his soup before the flag fell, Bobbob lapping it for the inner alderman. Couldn’t hear what the band played. For what we have already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with selcovered buttons. She didn’t like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old Goodwin’s tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies’ picnic too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulder and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbit pie we had that day. People looking after her.

Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red wallpaper, Dockrell’s, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly’s tubbing night. American soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa’s daguerrotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.

He walked along the curbstone.

Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in Citron’s saint Kevin’s parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen…? of course it’s years ago. Noise of the trams probably. Well, if he couldn’t remember the dayfather’s name that he sees every day.

[149] Bartell d’Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home after practice. Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her that song Winds that blow from the south.

Windy night that was I went to fetch her there was that lodge meeting on about those lottery tickets after Goodwin’s concert in the supper room or oakroom of the mansion house. He and I behind. Sheet of her music blew out of my hand against the high school railings. Lucky it didn’t. Thing like that spoils the effect of a night for her. Professor Goodwin linking her in front. Shaky on his pins, poor old sot. His farewell concerts. Positively last appearance on any stage. May be for months and may be for never. Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard collar up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that gust? Brrfoo! Blew up all her skirts and her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed in the wind. Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up those pieces of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she liked. And the mulled rum. Could see her in the bedroom from the hearth unclamping the busk of her stays. White.

Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from her. Always liked to let herself out. Sitting there after till near two, taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy. That was the night…

— O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?

— O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?

— No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven’t seen her for ages.

— In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily, Milly has a position down in Mullingar, you know.

— Go away! Isn’t that grand for her?

— Yes, in a photographer’s there. Getting on like a house on fire. How are all your charges?

— All on the baker’s list, Mrs Breen said.

How many has she? No other in sight.

— You’re in black I see. You have no…

— No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.

Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who’s dead, when and what did he die of? Turn up like a bad penny.

— O dear me, Mrs Breen said, I hope it wasn’t any near relation.

May as well get her sympathy.

— Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly, poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.

[150] Your funeral’s tomorrow

While you’re coming through the rye.

Diddlediddle dumdum

Diddlediddle…

— Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen’s womaneyes said melancholily.

Now that’s quite enough about that. Just quietly: husband.

— And your lord and master?

Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn’t lost them anyhow.

— O, don’t be talking, she said. He’s a caution to rattlesnakes. He’s in there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me heartscalded. Wait till I show you.

Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured out from Harrison’s. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom’s gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar, or they’d taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork chained to the table.

Opening her handbag, chipped leather hatpin: ought to have a guard on those things. Stick it in a chap’s eye in the tram. Rummaging. Open. Money. Please take one. Devils if they lose sixpence. Raise Cain. Husband barging. Where’s the ten shillings I gave you on Monday? Ave you feeding your little brother’s family? Soiled handkerchief: medicinebottle. Pastille that was fell. What is she?…

— There must be a new moon out, she said. He’s always bad then. Do you know what he did last night?

Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him, wide in alarm, yet smiling.

— What? Mr Bloom asked.

Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.

— Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare.

Indiges.

— Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs

— The ace of spades! Mr Bloom said.

She took a folded postcard from her handbag.

— Read that, she said. He got it this morning.

— What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U. P.?

[151] — U. P.: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It’s a great shame for them whoever he is.

— Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.

She took back the card, sighing.

— And now he’s going round to Mr Menton’s office. He’s going to take an action for ten thousand pounds, he says.

She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch.

Same blue serge dress she had two years ago, the nap bleaching. Seen its best days. Wispish hair over her ears. And that dowdy toque, three old grapes to take the harm out of it. Shabby genteel. She used to be a tasty dresser. Lines round her mouth. Only a year or so older than Molly.

See the eye that woman gave her, passing. Cruel. The unfair sex.

He looked still at her, holding back behind his look his discontent. Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny. I’m hungry too. Flakes of pastry on the gusset of her dress: daub of sugary flour stuck to her cheek. Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior. Josie Powell that was. In Luke Doyle’s long’ ago, Dolphin’s Barn, the charades. U. P.: up.

Change the subject.

— Do you ever see anything of Mrs Beaufoy, Mr Bloom asked.

— Mina Purefoy? she said.

Philip Beaufoy I was thinking. Playgoers’ club. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke. Did I pull the chain? Yes. The last act.

— Yes.

— I just called to ask on the way in is she over it. She’s in the lying-in hospital in Holles street. Dr Horne got her in. She’s three days bad now.

— O, Mr Bloom said. I’m sorry to hear that.

— Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It’s a very stiff birth, the nurse told me.

— O, Mr Bloom said.

His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in compassion. Dth! Dth!

— I’m sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing! Three days! That’s terrible for her.

Mrs Breen nodded.

— She was taken bad on the Tuesday…..

Mr Bloom touched her funnybone gently, warning her.

— Mind! Let this man pass.

[152] A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river, staring with a rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavy stringed glass. Tight as a skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat, a stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.

— Watch him, Mr Bloom said. He always walks outside the lampposts. Watch!

— Who is he if it’s a fair question. Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?

— His name is Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Mr Bloom said, smiling. Watch!

— He has enough of them, she said. Denis will be like that one of these days.

She broke off suddenly.

— There he is, she said. I must go after him. Good bye. Remember me to Molly, won’t you?

— I will, Mr Bloom said.

He watched her dodge through passers towards the shopfronts. Denis Breen in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison’s, hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke earnestly.

Meshuggah. Off his chump.

Mr Bloom walked on again easily, seeing ahead of him in sunlight the tight skullpiece, the dangling stick, umbrella, dustcoat. Going the two days. Watch him! Out he goes again. One way of getting on in the world. And that other old mosey lunatic in those duds. Hard time she must have with him.

U. P: up. I’ll take my oath that’s Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding. Wrote it for a lark in the Scotch house, I bet anything. Round to Menton’s office. His oyster eyes staring at the postcard. Be a feast for the gods.

He passed the Irish Times. There might be other answers lying there. Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their lunch now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn’t know me. O, leave them there to simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them. Wanted smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work. I called you naughty darling because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the meaning. Please tell me what perfume does your wife. Tell me who made the world. The way they spring those questions on you. And the other one Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good fortune to meet with the approval of the eminent [153] poet A. E. (Mr Geo Russell). No time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry.

Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook and general, exc cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit counter. Resp. girl (R. C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop. James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made a big deal on Coates’s shares. Ca’ canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the Irish Field now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement and rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement yesterday at Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects juices make it tender enough for them. Riding astride. Sit her horse like a man, Weightcarrying huntress. No sidesaddle or pillion for her, not for Joe. First to the meet and in at the death. Strong as a brood mare some of those horsey women. Swagger around livery stables. Toss off a glass of brandy neat while you’d say knife. That one at the Grosvenor this morning. Up with her on the car: wishswish. Stonewall or fivebarred gate put her mount to it. Think that pugnosed driver did it out of spite. Who is this she was like? O yes! Mrs Miriam Dandrade that sold me her old wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel. Divorced Spanish American. Didn’t take a feather out of her my handling them. As if I was her clotheshorse. Saw her in the viceregal party when Stubbs the park ranger got me in with Whelan of the Express. Scavening what the quality left. High tea. Mayonnaise I poured on the plums thinking it was custard. Her ears ought to have tingled for a few weeks after. Want to be a bull for her. Born courtesan. No nursery work for her, thanks.

Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness. Saffron bun and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Eating with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. Still his muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore’s cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family. Hardy annuals he presents her with. Saw him out at the Three Jolly Topers marching along bareheaded and his eldest boy carrying one in a marketnet. The squallers[.]  Poor thing! Then having to give the breast year after year all hours of the night[.]  Selfish those t.t’s are. Dog in the manger. Only one lump of sugar in my tea, if you please.

He stood at Fleet street crossing. Luncheon interval a sixpenny at Rowe’s? Must look up that ad in the national library. An eightpenny in the Burton. Better. On my way.

[154] He walked on past Bolton’s Westmoreland house. Tea. Tea. Tea. I forgot to tap Tom Kernan.

Sss.Dth, dth, dth! Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out! Phew! Dreadful simply! Child’s head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me that would. Lucky Molly got over hers lightly. They ought to invent something to stop that. Life with hard labour. Twilightsleep idea: queen Victoria was given that. Nine she had. A good layer. Old woman that lived in a shoe she had so many children. Suppose he was consumptive. Time someone thought about it instead of gassing about the what was it the pensive bosom of the silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to feed fools on. They could easily have big establishments. Whole thing quite painless out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at compound interest up to twentyone, five per cent is a hundred shillings and five tiresome pounds, multiply by twenty decimal system, encourage people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum, more than you think.

Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for nothing.

Funny sight two of them together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs Moisel. Mothers’ meeting. Phthisis retires for the time being, then returns. How flat they look after all of a sudden! Peaceful eyes. Weight off their minds. Old Mrs Thornton was a jolly old soul. All my babies, she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed them. O, that’s nyumyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall’s son. His first bow to the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren. People knocking them up at all hours. For God’sake, doctor. Wife in her throes. Then keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance on your wife. No gratitude in people. Humane doctors, most of them.

Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I pick the fellow in black. Here goes[.]  Here’s good luck. Must be thrilling from the air. Apjohn, myself and Owen Goldberg up in the trees near Goose green playing the monkeys. Mackerel they called me.

A squad of constables debouched from College street, marching in Indian file. Goose step. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their truncheons. After their feed with a good load of fat soup under their belts. Policeman’s lot is oft a happy one. They split up into groups and scattered, saluting towards [155] their beats. Let out to graze. Best moment to attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A squad of others, marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings, making for the station. Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare to receive soup.

He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. There is not in this wide world a vallee. Great song of Julia Morkan’s. Kept her voice up to the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe’s, wasn’t she?

He gazed after the last broad tunic. Nasty customers to tackle. Jack Power could a tale unfold: father a G man. If a fellow gave them trouble being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the bridewell. Can’t blame them after all with the job they have especially the young hornies. That horse policeman the day Joe Chamberlain was given his degree in Trinity he got a run for his money. My word he did! His horse’s hoofs clattering after us down Abbey street. Luck I had the presenee of mind to dive into Manning’s or I was souped. He did come a wallop, by George. Must have cracked his skull on the cobblestones. I oughtn’t to have got myself swept along with those medicals. And the Trinity jibs in their mortarboards. Looking for trouble. Still I got to know that young Dixon who dressed that sting for me in the Mater and now he’s in Holles street where Mrs Purefoy. Wheels within wheels. Police whistle in my ears still. All skedaddled. Why he fixed on me. Give me in charge. Right here it began.

— Up the Boers!

— Three cheers for De Wet!

— We’ll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree.

Silly billies: mob of young cubs yelling their guts out. Vinegar hill. The Butter exchange band. Few years time half of them magistrates and civil servants. War comes on: into the army helterskelter: same fellows used to whether on the scaffold high.

Never know who you’re talking to. Corny Kelleher he has Harvey Duff in his eye. Like that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the gaff on the invincibles. Member of the corporation too. Egging raw youths on to get in the know. All the time drawing secret service pay from the castle. Drop him like a hot potato. Why those plain clothes men are always courting slaveys. Easily twig a man used to uniform. Squarepushing up against a backdoor. Maul her a bit. Then the next thing on the menu. And who is the gentleman [156] does be visiting there? Was the young master saying anything? Peeping Tom through the keyhole. Decoy duck. Hotblooded young student fooling round her fat arms ironing.

— Are those yours, Mary?

— I don’t wear such things… Stop or I’ll tell the missus on you. Out half the night.

— There are great times coming, Mary. Wait till you see.

— Ah, get along with your great times coming.

Barmaids too. Tobacco shopgirls.

James Stephens’ idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so that a fellow couldn’t round on more than his own ring. Sinn Fein. Back out you get the knife. Hidden hand. Stay in. The firing squad. Turkney’s daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses. Garibaldi.

You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Want to gas about our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company’s tearoom. Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government. That the language question should take precedence of the economic question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house. Stuff them up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose. Here’s a good lump of thyme seasoning under the apron for you. Have another quart of goosegrease before it gets too cold. Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk with the band. No grace for the carver. The thought that the other chap pays best sauce in the world. Make themselves thoroughly at home. Show us over those apricots, meaning peaches. The not far distant day. Home Rule sun rising up in the northwest.

His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same; day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, [157] piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt, Kerwan’s mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.

Provost’s house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in there. Wouldn’t live in it if they paid me. Hope they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.

The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silver ware in Walter Sexton’s window opposite by which John Howard Parnell passed, unseeing.

There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that’s a coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don’t meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal’s uniform since he got the job. Charley Boulger used to come out on his high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a pain. Great man’s brother: his brother’s brother. He’d look nice on the city charger. Drop into the D. B. C. probably for his coffee, play chess there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That’s the fascination: the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other sister Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright like surgeon M’Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath. Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The patriot’s banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said when they put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and lead him out of the House of Commons by the arm.

— Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with a Scotch accent. The tentacles…

They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle. Young woman.

[158] And there he is too. Now that’s really a coincidence: secondtime. Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the eminent poet Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A. E.: What does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur Edmund, Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the world with a Scotch accent. Tentacles: octopus. Something occult: symbolism. Holding forth. She’s taking it all in. Not saying a word. To aid gentleman in literary work.

His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only weggebobbles and fruit. Don’t eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it’s healthier. Wind and watery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as a bloater. Dreams all night. Why do they call that thing they gave me nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating rumpsteak. Absurd. Salty too. They cook in soda. Keep you sitting by the tap all night.

Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless. Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy, symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn’t be surpised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts; you couldn’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don’t know what poetry is even. Must be in a certain mood.

The dreamy cloudy gull

Waves o’er the waters dull.

He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates and Son, pricing the field glasses. Or will I drop into old Harris’s and have a chat with young Sinclair? Wellmannered fellow. Probably at his lunch. Must get those old glasses of mine set right. Gœrz lenses, six guineas. Germans making their way everywhere. Sell on easy terms to capture trade. Undercutting. Might chance on a pair in the railway lost property office. Astonishing the things people leave behind them in trains and cloak rooms. What do they be thinking about? Women too. Incredible. Last year travelling to Ennis had to pick up that farmer’s daughter’s bag and hand it to her at Limerick junction. Unclaimed money too. There’s a little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test those glasses by.

[159] His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can’t see it. If you imagine it’s there you can almost see it. Can’t see it.

He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right hand at arm’s length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes: completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun’s disk. Must be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses. Interesting. There was a lot of talk about those sunspots when we were in Lombard street west. Terrific explosions they are. There will be a total eclipse this year: autumn some time.

Now that I come to think of it, that ball falls at Greenwich time. It’s the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to: man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman proud to be descended from some king’s mistress. His foremother. Lay it on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt out what you know you’re not to: what’s parallax? Show this gentleman the door.

Ah.

His hand fell again to his side.

Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas, then solid, then world, then cold, then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. I believe there is.

He went on by la Maison Claire.

Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly there is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview moon. She was humming: The young May moon she’s beaming, love. He other side of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm’s la-amp is gleaming, love. Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.

Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.

Mr Bloom, quick breathing, slowlier walking, passed Adam court.

With a keep quiet relief, his eyes took note: this is street here middle of the day Bob Doran’s bottle shoulders. On his annual bend, M’Coy said. They drink in order to say or do something or cherchez la femme. Up in the Coombe with chummies and streetwalkers and then the rest of the year as sober as a judge.

Yes. Thought so. Sloping into the Empire. Gone. Plain soda would do [160] him good. Where Pat Kinsella had, his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the Queen’s. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with his harvestmoon face in a poky bonnet. Three Purty Maids from School. How time flies eh? Showing long red pantaloons under his skirts. Drinkers, drinking, laughed spluttering, their drink against their breath. More power, Pat. Coarse red: fun for drunkards: guffaw and smoke. Take off that white hat. His parboiled eyes. Where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp that once did starve us all.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree when we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy. Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you? Are you not happy in your home, you poor little naughty boy? Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library.

Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints, silk,dames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the baking causeway. Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings. Hope the rain mucks them up on her. Country bred chawbacon. All the beef to the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out of plumb.

He passed, dallying the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers. Cascades of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. A tilted urn poured from its mouth a flood of bloodhued poplin: lustrous blood. The huguenots brought that here. La causa è santa! Tara tara. Great chorus that. Tara. Must be washed in rainwater. Meyerbeer. Tara: bom bom bom.

Pincushions. I’m a long time threatening to buy one. Stick them all over the place. Needles in window curtains.

He bared slightly his left forearm. Scrape: nearly gone. Not today anyhow. Must go back for that lotion. For her birthday perhaps. Junejuly augseptember eighth. Nearly three months off. Then she mightn’t like it. Women won’t pick up pins. Say it cuts lo.

Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk stockings.

Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all.

High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home and houses, silk webs, silver, rich fruits, spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim. Wealth of the world.

A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.

[161] Duke street. Here we are. Must eat. The Burton. Feel better then.

He turned Combridge’s corner, still pursued. Jingling hoofthuds. Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas, creaking beds.

— Jack, love!

— Darling!

— Kiss me, Reggy!

— My boy!

— Love!

His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slop of greens. See the animals feed.

Men, men, men.

Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser’s eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don’t! O! A bone! That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn’t swallow it all however.

— Roast beef and cabbage.

— One stew.

Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment.

Couldn’t eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork, to eat all before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it off the plate, man! Get out of this.

He gazed round the stooled and tabled eaters, tightening the wings of his nose.

[162] — Two stouts here.

— One corned and cabbage.

That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life depended on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. Safer to eat from his three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a silver knife in his mouth. That’s witty, I think. Or no. Silver means born rich. Born with a knife. But then the allusion is lost.

An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard. Well up: it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright, elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlift across his stained square of news-paper. Other chap telling him something with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un thu Unchster Bunck un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?

Mr Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips. His eyes said:

— Not here. Don’t see him.

Out. I hate dirty eaters.

He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne’s. Stopgap. Keep me going[.]  Had a good breakfast.

— Roast and mashed here.

— Pint of stout.

Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.

He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!

Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every mother’s son don’t talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women and children, cabmen, priests, parsons, fieldmarshals, archbishops. From Ailesbury road, Clyde road, artisans’ dwellings, north Dublin union, lord mayor in his gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My plate’s empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir Philip Crampton’s fountain. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief. Next chap rubs on a new batch with his. Father O’Flynn would make hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a soup pot as big as the Phoenix Park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it. Hate people all round you. City Arms hotel table d’hôte she called it. Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing. Then who’d wash up [163] all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.

After all there’s a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth garlic, of course, it stinks Italian organgrinders crisp of onions, mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers’ buckets wobble lights. Give us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don’t maul them pieces, young one.

Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious. Lick it up, smoking hot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.

Ah, I’m hungry.

He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?

— Hello, Bloom! Nosey Flynn said from his nook.

— Hello, Flynn.

— How’s things?

— Tiptop… Let me see. I’ll take a glass of burgundy and… let me see.

Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is home without Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect. There was a right royal old nigger. Who ate or something the somethings of the reverend Mr Mac Trigger. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and war depend on some fellow’s digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat, drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mighty cheese.

— Have you a cheese sandwich?

[164] — Yes, sir.

Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of burgundy; take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber. Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.

— Wife well?

— Quite well, thanks… A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?

— Yes, sir.

Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.

— Doing any singing those times?

Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match. Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him. Does no harm. Free ad.

— She’s engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard perhaps.

— No. O, that’s the style. Who’s getting it up?

The curate served.

— How much is that?

— Seven d., sir… Thank you, sir.

Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. Mr Mac Trigger. Easier than the dreamy creamy stuff. His five hundred wives. Had the time of their lives.

— Mustard, sir?

— Thank you.

He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. Their lives. I have it. It grew bigger and bigger and bigger.

— Getting it up? he said. Well, it’s like a company idea, you see. Part shares and part profits.

— Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket to scratch his groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn’t Blazes Boylan mixed up in it?

A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on Mr Bloom’s heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.

His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly, longingly.

Wine.

[165] He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to speed it, set his wineglass delicately down.

— Yes, he said. He’s the organiser in point of fact.

No fear. No brains.

Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.

— He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that boxing match Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he was telling me…

Hope that dewdrop doesn’t come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up.

— For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God till further orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap.

Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirt sleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring’s blush. Whose smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat on the parsnips.

— And here’s himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give us a good one for the Gold cup?

— I’m off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a horse.

— You’re right there, Nosey Flynn said.

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.

Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.

— I wouldn’t do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined many a man the same horses.

Vintners’ sweepstake. Licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits for consumption on the premises. Heads I win tails you lose.

— True for you, Nosey Flynn said. Unless you’re in the know. There’s no straight sport going now. Lenehan gets some good ones. He’s giving Sceptre today. Zinfandel’s the favourite, lord Howard de Walden’s, won at Epsom. Morny Cannon is riding him. I could have got seven to one against Saint Amant a fortnight before.

— That so? Davy Byrne said…

[166] He went towards the window and, taking up the petty cash book, scanned its pages.

— I could, faith, Nosey Flynn said snuffling. That was a rare bit of horseflesh. Saint Frusquin was her sire. She won in a thunderstorm, Rothschild’s filly, with wadding in her ears[.]  Blue jacket and yellow cap. Bad luck to big Ben Dollard and his John O’Gaunt. He put me off it. Ay.

He drank resignedly from his tumbler, running his fingers down the flutes.

— Ay, he said, sighing.

Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sigh. Nosey numskull. Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? He knows already. Better let him forget. Go and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down again. Cold nose he’d have kissing a woman. Still they might like. Prickly beards they like. Dogs’ cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the rumbling stomach’s Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling him in her lap. O the big doggybowwowsywowsy!

Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I’m not thirsty. Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o’clock I can. Six, six. Time will be gone then. She…

Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins, sardines, gaudy lobsters’ claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing in a thousand years. If you didn’t know risky putting anything into your mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good. Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit. Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed[.]  No. June has no ar no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it? No. Yes, or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? [167] Or who was it used to eat the scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course, aristocrats. Then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour. Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in the sea to keep up the price. Cheap. No one would buy. Caviare. Do the grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The élite. Crème de la crème. They want special dishes to pretend they’ re. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon. High sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls’ kitchen area. Whitehatted chef like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage à la duchesse de Parme. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you can know what you’ve eaten too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards’ desiccated soup. Geese stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan. Wouldn’t mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress, halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney I remember. Du, de, la, French. Still it’s the same fish, perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped the guts out of making money, hand over first, finger in fishes’ gills, can’t write his name on a cheque, think he was painting the landscape with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha. Ignorant as a kish of brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.

Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun’s heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion’s head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities, Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. [168] Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Stuck, the flies buzzed.

His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. Can seen them library museum standing in the round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don’t care what man looks. All to see. Never speaking. I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal! Put you in your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods, golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods’ food. Lovely forms of woman sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking au engine. They have no. Never looked. I’ll look today. Keeper won’t see. Bend down let something fall see if she.

Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to do there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard.

When the sound of his boots had ceased Davy Byrne said from his book:

— What is this he is? Isn’t he in the insurance line?

— He’s out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said. He does canvassing for the Freeman.

— I know him well to see, Davy Byrne said. Is he in trouble?

— Trouble? Nosey Flynn said. Not that I heard of. Why?

— I noticed he was in mourning.

— Was he? Nosey Flynn said. So he was, faith. I asked him how was all at home. You’re right, by God. So he was.

— I never broach the subject, Davy Byrne said humanely, if I see a gentleman is in trouble that way. It only brings it up fresh in their minds.

— It’s not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before [169] yesterday and he coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan’s wife has in Henry street with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home to his better half. She’s well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.

— And is he doing for the Freeman? Davy Byrne said.

Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.

— He doesn’t buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of that.

— How so? Davy Byrne asked, coming from his book.

Nosey Flynn made swift passes in the air with juggling fingers. He winked.

— He’s in the craft, he said.

— Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said.

— Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg up. I was told that by a, well, I won’t say who.

— Is that a fact?

— O, it’s a fine order, Nosey Flynn said. They stick to you when you’re down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it, but they’re as close as damn it. By God they did right to keep the women out of it.

Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one:

— Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!

— There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and swore her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the Saint Legers of Doneraile.

Davy Byrne, sated after his yawn, said with tearwashed eyes:

— And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. I often saw him in here and I never once saw him, you know, over the line.

— God Almighty couldn’t make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips off when the fun gets too hot. Didn’t you see him look at his watch? Ah, you weren’t there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he does.

— There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He’s a safe man, I’d say.

— He’s not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He has been known to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O, Bloom has his good points. But there’s one thing he’ll never do.

His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.

— I know, Davy Byrne said.

[170] — Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.

Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in. Tom Rochford followed, a plaining hand on his claret waistcoat.

— Day, Mr Byrne.

— Day, gentlemen.

They paused at the counter.

— Who’s standing? Paddy Leonard asked.

— I’m sitting anyhow, Nosey Flynn answered.

— Well, what’ll it be? Paddy Leonard asked.

— I’ll take a stone ginger, Bantam Lyons said.

— How much? Paddy Leonard cried[.]  Since when, for God’ sake? What’s yours, Tom?

— How is the main drainage? Nosey Flynn asked, sipping.

For answer Tom Rochford pressed his hand to his breastbone and hiccupped.

— Would I trouble you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said.

— Certainly, sir.

Paddy Leonard eyed his alemates.

— Lord love a duck, he said, look at what I’m standing drinks to! Cold water and gingerpop! Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg. He has some bloody horse up his sleeve for the Gold cup. A dead snip.

— Zinfandel is it? Nosey Flynn asked.

Tom Rochford spilt powder from a twisted paper into the water set before him.

— That cursed dyspepsia, he said before drinking.

— Breadsoda is very good, Davy Byrne said.

Tom Rochford nodded and drank.

— Is it Zinfandel?

— Say nothing, Bantam Lyons winked. I’m going to plunge five bob on my own.

— Tell us if you’ re worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy Leonard said. Who gave it to you?

Mr Bloom on his way out raised three fingers in greeting.

— So long, Nosey Flynn said.

The others turned.

— That’s the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.

[171] — Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we’ll take two of your small Jamesons after that and a…

— Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.

— Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.

Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach say. Then with those Röntgen rays searchlight you could.

At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the cobble stones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move. Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his. Wasting time explaining it to Flynn’s mouth. Lean people long mouths. Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent free. Course then you’d have all the cranks pestering.

He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo, the closes of the bars:

Don Giovanni, a cenar teco

M’invitasti.

Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap in the blues. Dutch courage. That Kilkenny People in the national library now I must.

Bare clean closestools, waiting, in the window of William Miller, plumber, turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way down, swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the body, changing biliary duct, spleen squirting liver, gastric juice coils of intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the time with his insides entrails on show. Science.

— A cenar teco.

What does that teco mean? Tonight perhaps.

Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited

To come to supper tonight,

The rum the rumdum.

Doesn’t go properly.

[172] Keyes: two months if I get Nannetti to. That’ll be two pounds ten, about two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Presscott’s ad. Two fifteen. Five guineas about. On the pig’s back.

Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new garters.

Today. Today. Not think.

Tour the south then. What about English watering places? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside girls. Against John Long’s a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy thought, gnawing a crusted kunckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages. Will eat anything.

Mr Bloom turned at Gray’s confectioner’s window of unbought tarts and passed the reverend Thomas Connellan’s bookstore. Why I left the church of Rome? Bird’s Nest. Women run him. They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same bait. Why we left the church of Rome?

A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No tram in sight. Wants to cross.

— Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.

The blind stripling did not answer. His wall face frowned weakly. He moved his head uncertainly.

— You’re in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite. Do you want to cross? There’s nothing in the way.

The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom’s eye followed its line and saw again the dyeworks’ van drawn up before Drago’s. Where I saw his brillantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in John Long’s. Slaking his drouth.

— There’s a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it’s not moving. I’ll see you across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?

— Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.

— Come, Mr Bloom said.

He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to guide it forward.

Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust what you tell them. Pass a common remark.

— The rain kept off.

No answer.

[173] Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food I suppose. Tastes all different for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child’s hand his hand. Like Milly’s was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder if he has a name. Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse’s legs tired drudge get his doze. That’s right. Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a horse.

— Thanks, sir.

Knows I’m a man. Voice.

— Right now? First turn to the left.

The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing his cane back, feeling again.

Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there? Must have felt it. See things in their foreheads perhaps. Kind of sense of volume. Weight would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk in a beeline if he hadn’t that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow going in to be a priest.

Penrose! That was that chap’s name.

Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers. Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say. Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People ought to help. Work basket I could buy Molly’s birthday. Hates sewing. Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.

Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides bunched together. Each person too. Then the spring, the summer: smells. Tastes. They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his mind’s eye. The voice, temperature when he touches her with his fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair, for instance. Say it was black for instance. Good. We call it black. Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of white.

Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer’s just here too. Wait. Think over it.

[174] With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough. The belly is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick street. Perhaps to Levenston’s dancing academy piano. Might be settling my braces.

Walking by Doran’s public house he slid his hand between waistcoat and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of his belly. But I know it’s whiteyellow. Want to try in the dark to see.

He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.

Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way. All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration for sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pikehoses. Dear, dear, dear. Pity of course: but somehow you can’t cotton on to them someway.

Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons’ hall. Solemn as Troy. After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking a magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat school. I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he’d turn up his nose at that stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a dusty bottle. Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder’s court. Wellmeaning old man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their percentage manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J a great straw[-]calling. Now he’s really what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His excellency the lord lieutenant. Sixteenth today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital. The Messiah was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out there. Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.

Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.

Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.

His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right.

Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Not see. Get on.

[175] Making for the museum gate with long windy strides he lifted his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.

The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

No, didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate.

My heart!

His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture.

Look for something I.

His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded Agendath Netaim. Where did I?

Busy looking for.

He thrust back quickly Agendath.

Afternoon she said.

I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Purse. Potato. Where did I?

Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.

His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah, soap there! Yes. Gate.

Safe!

 ® 

[176] Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:

— And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister? A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.

He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

A noiseless attendant, setting open the door but slightly, made him a noiseless beck.

— Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always feels that Goethe’s judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.

Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door he gave his large ear all to the attendant’s words: heard them: and was gone.

Two left.

— Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before his death.

— Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with elder’s gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan he calls it.

Smile. Smile Cranly’s smile.

First he tickled her

Then he patted her

Then he passed the female catheter.

For he was a medical

Jolly old medi…

[177] — I feel you would need one more for Hamlet. Seven is dear to the mystic mind. The shining seven W. B. calls them.

Glittereyed, his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the face, bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low: a sizar’s laugh of Trinity: unanswered.

Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood

Tears such as angels weep.

Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

He holds my follies hostage.

Cranly’s eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house. And one more to hail him: ave, rabbi. The Tinahely twelve. In the shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul’s youth I gave him, night by night. Godspeed. Good hunting.

Mulligan has my telegram.

Folly. Persist.

— Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

— All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike me!

— The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely. Aristotle was once Plato’s schoolboy.

— And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.

[178] He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.

Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.

Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A. E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight, K. H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of en ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O. P. must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H. P. B’s elemental.

O, fie! Out on’t! Pfuiteufel! You naughtn’t to look, missus, so you naughtn’t when a lady’s ashowing of her elemental.

Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

— That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet’s musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato’s.

John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:

— Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.

— Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

— Haines is gone, he said.

— Is he?

— I was showing him Jubainville’s book. He’s quite enthusiastic, don’t you know, about Hyde’s Lovesongs of Connacht. I couldn’t bring him in to hear the discussion. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy it.

[179] Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick

To greet the callous public.

Writ, I ween, ’twas not my wish

In lean unlovely English.

— The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

— People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the music[-]hall song, France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phæacians.

From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

— Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen Mac Kenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don’t you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don’t you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

Hamlet

ou

Le Distrait

Pièce de Shakespeare

He repeated to John Eglinton’s newgathered frown:

— Pièce de Shakespeare, don’t you know. It’s so French, the French point of view. Hamlet ou…

— The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.

John Eglinton laughed.

— Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

[180] — A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palm. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one, Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none

But we had spared…

Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

— He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr Best’s behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep.

List! List! O list!

My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

If thou didst ever…

— What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is king Hamlet?

John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.

Lifted.

— It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings.

Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.

— Shakespeare has left the huguenot’s house in Silver street and walks by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has other thoughts.

Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

[181] — The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name:

Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit

bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin) is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossesed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?

— But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently.

Art thou there, truepenny?

— Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living, our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l’Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.

Mr Best’s face appealed to, agreed.

Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan,

Mananaan  MacLir…..

How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?

Marry, I wanted it.

Take thou this noble.

Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter. Agenbite of inwit.

[182] Do you intend to pay it back?

O, yes.

When? Now?

Well… no.

When, then?

I paid my way. I paid my way.

Steady on. He’s from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe it.

Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.

Buzz. Buzz.

But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever[-]changing forms.

I that sinned and prayed and fasted.

A child Conmee saved from pandies.

I, I and I. I.

A.E.I.O.U.

— Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries? John Eglinton’s carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

— She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed.

Mother’s deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. Liliata rutilantium.

I wept alone.

John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.

— The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly and as best he could.

— Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian, softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.

— A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn from Xanthippe?

[183] — Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (absit nomen!) Socratididion’s Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know. But neither the midwife’s lore nor the caudlelectures saved him from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.

— But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best’s quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

His look went from brooder’s beard to carper’s skull, to remind, to chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guitless though maligned.

— He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling The girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it we should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus and Adonis, lay in the bechamber of every light-of-love in London. Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful. Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal. Good: he left her and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.

And my turn? When?

Come!

— Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly, brightly.

He murmured then with blond delight for all:

Between the acres of the rye

These pretty countryfolk would lie.

Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.

[184] A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its cooperative watch.

— I am afraid I am due at the Homestead.

Whither away? Exploitable ground.

— Are you going, John Eglinton’s active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you at Moore’s tonight? Piper is coming.

— Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?

Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.

— I don’t know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get away in time.

Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled. Their Pali book we tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i’the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.

In quintessential triviality

For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

— They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together a sheaf of our younger poets’ verses. We are all looking forward anxiously.

Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.

See this. Remember.

Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplant[-]handle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.

Listen.

Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part. Longworth will give it a good puff in the Express. O, will he? I liked Colum’s Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer thing, genius. Do you think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian vase. Did he? [185] I hope you’ll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it? They remind one of don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.

Cordelia. Cordoglio. Lir’s loneliest daughter.

Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.

— Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman…..

— O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much correspondence.

— I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.

God ild you. The pigs’ paper. Bullockbefriending.

Synge has promised me an article for Dana too. Are we going to be read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.

Stephen sat down.

The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing his mask said:

— Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.

He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:

— Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

— Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.

— Yes.

Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.

— Yes. So you think…

The door closed behind the outgoer.

[186] Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and brooding air.

A vestal’s lamp.

Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he lived among women.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.

They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.

— Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.

— But Hamlet is so personal, isn’t it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind of private paper, don’t you know, of his private life. I mean I don’t care a button, don’t you know, who is killed or who is guilty…

He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his defiance. His private papers in the original. Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim imo shagart. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.

Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:

— I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.

Bear with me.

Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes, glinting stern under wrinkled brows. A basilisk. E quando vede l’uomo l’attosca. Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.

— As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see [187] myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.

— Yes, Mr Best said youngly, I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the son.

Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.

— That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.

John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

— If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan admired so much breathe another spirit.

— The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.

— There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.

Said that.

— If you want to know what are the events which casttheir shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?

Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.

— A child, a girl placed in his arms. Marina.

— The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town.

Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon’s wild oats. Cypherjugglers going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good masters? Mummed in names: A. E, eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west of the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved.

How many miles to Dublin?

Three score and ten, sir.

Will we be there by candlelight?

— Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing period.

— Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus, as some aver his name is, say of it?

— Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s child. [188] My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?

— The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’art d’être grand…

— His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or repeat himself.

The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.

— I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of the public  And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on Shakespeare in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant. Oddly enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the sonnets. The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own that if the poet must be rejected, such a rejection would seem more in harmony with — what shall I say? — our notions of what ought not to have been.

Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk’s egg, prize of their fray.

He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost love thy man?

— That may be too, Stephen said. There is a saying of Goethe’s which Mr Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba, a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and had written Romeo and Juliet. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman’s invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.

They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.

— The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the [189] porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it king Hamlet’s ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.

— Amen! responded from the doorway.

Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

Entr’acte.

A ribald face, sullen as a dean’s, Buck Mulligan came forward, then blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.

— You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he asked of Stephen.

Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble.

They make him welcome. Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen.

Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.

He Who Himself begot, middler the Holy Ghost, and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.

[190] He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells aquiring.

— Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion. Mr Mulligan, I’ll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.

He smiled on all sides equally.

Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:

— Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.

A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.

— To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like Synge.

Mr Best turned to him:

— Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He’ll see you after at the D. B. C. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy Hyde’s Lovesongs of Connacht.

— I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?

— The bard’s fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.

— The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde’s, Mr Best said, lifting his brilliant notebook. That Portrait of Mr W. H. where he proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.

— For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.

Or Hughie Wills. Mr William Himself. W. H : who am I?

— I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know, Hughes and hews and hues the colour, but it’s so typical the way he works it out. It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know. The light touch.

His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame essence of Wilde.

You’re darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy’s ducats.

How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.

For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.

Wit. You would give your five wits for youth’s proud livery he pranks in. Lineaments of gratified desire.

[191] There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime send them. Yea, turtledove her.

Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A shake coils her, fang in’s kiss.

— Do you think it is only a paradox, the quaker librarian was asking. The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

They talked seriously of mocker’s seriousness.

Buck Mulligan’s again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.

— Telegram! He said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!

He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:

— The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Signed: Dedalus. Where did you launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram! Malachi Mulligan, the Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer! O, you priestified kinchite!

Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in querulous brogue:

— It’s what I’m telling you, mister honey, it’s queer and sick we were, Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. ’Twas murmur we did for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp with leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery’s sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

He wailed:

— And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.

Stephen laughed.

Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down:

— The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He’s out in pampooties to murder you.

— Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.

Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping ceiling.

— Murder you! he laughed.

Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of [192] lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words, palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle. C’est vendredi saint! Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i’ the forest.

— Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.

—… in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his Diary of Master Silence has found the hunting terms… Yes? What is it?

— There’s a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and offering a card. From the Freeman. He wants to see the files of the Kilkenny People for last year.

— Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?…

He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down, unglanced, looked, asked, creaked, asked:

— Is he?… O, there!

Brisk in a galliard he was off and out. In the daylit corridor he talked with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most honest broadbrim.

— This gentleman? Freeman’s Journal? Kilkenny People? To be sure. Good day, sir. Kilkenny… We have certainly…

A patient silhouette waited, listening.

— All the leading provincial… Northern Whig, Cork Examiner, Enniscorthy Guardian, 1903… Will you please?… Evans, conduct this gentleman… If you just follow the atten… Or please allow me… This way… Please, sir…

Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing dark figure following his hasty heels.

The door closed.

— The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried,

He jumped up and snatched the card.

— What’s his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.

He rattled on.

— Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the museum when I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her. Life of life, thy lips enkindle.

Suddenly he turned to Stephen:

— He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. Venus [193] Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! The god pursuing the maiden hid.

— We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best’s approval. We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.

— Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham’s story of the burgher’s wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon ’s blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.

Cours-la-Reine. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. Minette? Tu veux?

— The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford’s mother with her cup of canary for every cockcanary.

Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:

— Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!

— And Harry of six wives’ daughter and other lady friends from neighbour seats, as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind the diamond panes?

Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter Lane of Gerard, herbalist, he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno’s eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

[194] Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton’s desk sharply.

— Whom do you suspect? he challenged.

— Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.

Love that dare not speak its name.

— As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord.

Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.

— It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are rank in that ghost’s mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband’s brother. Sweet Ann I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer.

Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

— The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said, frowning. If you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with infamy, tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan, her husband too while Susan’s daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy’s words, wed her second, having killed her first.

O yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father’s shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has commended her to posterity.

He faced their silence.

To whom thus Eglinton:

You mean the will.

That has been explained, I believe, by jurists.

She was entitled to her widow’s dower

At common law. His legal knowledge was great

Our judges tell us.

[195] Him Satan fleers,

Mocker:

And therefore he left out her name

From the first draft but he did not leave out

The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,

For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford

And in London. And therefore when he was urged,

As I believe, to name her

He left her his

Secondbest

Bed.

Punkt

Leftherhis

Secondbest

Leftherhis

Bestabed

Secabest

Leftabed.

Woa!

— Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

— He was a rich countrygentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?

— It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr Secondbest Best said finely.

— Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan and was smiled on.

— Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling, Let me think.

— Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don’t forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.

[196] — Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean…

— He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!

— What? asked Besteglinton.

William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people’s William. For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house…..

— Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. Lovely!

Catamite.

— The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton.

Steadfast John replied severe:

— The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake and have it.

Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?

— And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love’s Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sydney’s. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

I think you’re getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.

[197] — Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean of studies holds he was a holy Roman.

Sufflaminandus sum.

— He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French polisher of Italian scandals.

— A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadminded.

Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos.

— Saint Thomas, Stephen began…

— Ora pro nobis, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.

There he keened a wailing rune.

— Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!

All smiled their smiles.

— Saint Thomas, Stephen, smiling, said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

— Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.

— Gentle will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.

— Which will! gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.

— The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s widow, is the will to die.

— Requiescat! Stephen prayed.

[198] What of all the will to do?

It has vanished long ago…

— She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches and The Most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

— History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man’s worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.

Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy supping with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there’s a gentleman to see you. Me? Says he’s your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.

Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.

Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.

— A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience is the beardless undergraduate from Wittemberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, [199] disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten[.]  On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood, Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

What the hell are you driving at?

I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons.

Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.

Are you condemned to do this?

— They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male: his growth is his father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.

— What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

Am I a father? If I were?

Shrunken uncertain hand.

— Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.

[200] Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.

— Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play’s the thing! Let me parturiate!

He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.

— As for his family, Stephen said, his mother’s name lives in the forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in Coriolanus. His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter’s Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.

— The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.

The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack.

Door closed. Cell. Day.

They list. Three. They.

I you he they.

Come, mess.

Stephen

He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on’s back. The playhouse sausage filled Gilbert’s soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in the works of sweet William.

Mageeglinjohn

Names! What’s in a name?

Best

That is my name, Richard, don’t you know. I hope you are going to say a good word for Richard, don’t you know, for my sake.

(Laughter.)

[201] Buck Mulligan

(Piano, diminuendo.)

Then outspoke medical Dick

To his comrade medical Davy…

Stephen

In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles’ names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.

Best

I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don’t want Richard, my name…

(Laughter.)

Quakerlyster

(A tempo.) But he that filches from me my good name…

Stephen

(Stringendo.) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John O’ Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat of arms he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.

Both satisfied. I too.

Don’t tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.

[202] And from her arms.

Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?

Read the skies. Autontimerumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos. Where’s your configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: sua donna. Già: di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amar S. D.

— What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a celestial phenomenon?

— A star by night, Stephen said, a pillar of the cloud by day.

What more’s to speak?

Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.

Stephanos, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.

— You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.

Me, Magee and Mulligan.

Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.

Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:

— That’s very interesting because that brother motive, don’t you know, we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don’t you know, the fairytales. The third brother that marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.

Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.

The quaker librarian springhalted near.

— I should like to know, he said, which brother you… I understand you to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers… But perhaps I am anticipating?

He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.

An attendant from the doorway called:

— Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants…

— O! Father Dineen! Directly.

Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.

John Eglinton touched the foil.

— Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn’t you?

— In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie [203] and nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

Lapwing.

Where is your brother? Apothecaries’ hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.

Lapwing.

I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.

On.

— You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others? Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what’s in a name?), woos and wins her. [her,] a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare’s reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?

— That was Will’s way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. Que voulez-vous? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.

— Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentleman of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth-an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in [204] infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.

Judge Eglinton summed up.

— The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all.

— He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

— Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

— And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

— Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep, If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and [205] cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

— Eureka!, Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton’s desk.

— May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

— Those who are married, Mr Best, douce, herald, said, all save one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

— You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?

— No, Stephen said promptly.

— Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue, don’t you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.

John Eclection doubly smiled.

— Well, in that case, he said, I don’t see why you should expect payment for it since you don’t believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some mystery in Hamlet but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap.

— You are the only contributor to Dana who asks for pieces of silver. Then I don’t know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an article on economics.

Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.

— For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.

Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then gravely said, honeying malice:

[206] — I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.

He broke away.

— Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Ængus of the birds.

Come, Kinch, you have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts and offals.

Stephen rose.

Life is many days. This will end.

— We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. Notre ami Moore says Malachi Mulligan must be there.

Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.

— Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of Ireland. I’ll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk straight?

Laughing he…

Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.

Lubber…

Stephen followed a lubber…

One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After his lub back I followed. I gall his kibe.

Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of no thoughts.

What have I learned? Of them? Of me?

Walk like Haines now.

The constant readers’ room. In the readers’ book Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet mad? The quaker’s pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.

— O please do, sir… I shall be most pleased…

Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding:

— A pleased bottom.

The turnstile.

Is that?… Blueribboned hat… Idly writing… What? Looked?…

The curving balustrade; smoothsliding Mincius.

[207] Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:

John Eglinton, my jo, John.

Why won’t you wed a wife?

He spluttered to the air:

— O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers’ hall. Our players are creating a new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey theatre! I smell the public sweat of monks.

He spat blank.

Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And left the femme de trente ans. And why no other children born? And his first child a girl?

Afterwit. Go back.

The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling, minion of pleasure, Phedo’s toyable fair hair.

Eh… I just eh… wanted… I forgot… he…

— Longworth and M’Curdy Atkinson were there…

Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:

I hardly hear the purlieu cry

Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by

Before my thoughts begin to run

On F. M’Curdy Atkinson,

The same that had the wooden leg

And that filibustering filibeg

That never dared to slake his drouth,

Magee that had the chinless mouth.

Being afraid to marry on earth

They masturbated for all they were worth.

Jest on. Know thyself.

Halted below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.

— Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.

A laugh tripped over his lips.

[208] — Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jew jesuit! She gets you a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn’t you do the Yeats’ touch?

He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:

— The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time. One thinks of Homer.

He stopped at the stairfoot.

— I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.

The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men’s morrice with caps of indices.

In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:

Everyman His Own Wife

or

A Honeymoon in the Hand

(a national immorality in three orgasms)

by

Ballocky Mulligan

He turned a happy patch’s smirk to Stephen, saying:

— The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.

He read, marcato:

— Characters:

Toby Tostoff (a ruined Pole).

Crab (a bushranger).

Medical Dick

}

(two birds with one stone).

 and

Medical Davy

Mother Grogan (a watercarrier).

Fresh Nelly

and

Rosalie (the coalquay whore)

He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen: and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:

— O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to lift [209] their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!

— The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted them.

About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.

Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today, if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably.

My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.

A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.

— Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.

The portico.

Here I watched the birds for augury. Ængus of the birds. They go, they come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.

— The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown’s awe. Did you see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.

Manner of Oxenford.

Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.

A dark back went before them. Step of a pard, down, out by the gateway, under portcullis barbs.

They followed.

Offend me still. Speak on.

Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown.

Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline, hierophantic: from wide earth an altar.

Laud we the gods

And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils

From our bless’d altars.

 ® 

[210] The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J. reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that that boy’s name again? Dignam, yes. Vere dignum et iustum est. Brother Swan was the person to see. Mr Cunningham’s letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good practical catholic: useful at mission time.

A onlegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his purse held, he knew, one silver crown.

Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey’s words: If I had served my God as I had served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old days. He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking leaves and towards him come the wife of Mr David Sheehy. M. P.

— Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?

Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really.

[211] Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P. looking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheedy M. P. Yes, he would certainly call.

— Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.

Father Conmee doffed his silk hat, as he took leave, at the jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again in going. He had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.

Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father Bernard Vaughan’s droll eyes and cockney voice.

— Pilate! Wy don’t you old back that owlin mob?

A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish. Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?

O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.

Father Conmee stropped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house: Aha. And were they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man? His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.

Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to master Brunny Lynam and pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.

— But mind you don’t post yourself into the box, little man, he said.

The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed.

— O, sir.

— Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.

Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee’s letter to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox, Father Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square east.

Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing, &c. in silk hat, slate frock coat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of Dignam’s court.

Was that not Mrs M’Guinness?

Mrs M’Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the farther footpath along which she sailed. And Father Conmee smiled and saluted. How did she do?

A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to [212] think that she was a pawnbroker. Well, now! Such a… what should he say?… such a queenly mien.

Father Conmee walked down Great Charles Street and glanced at the shutup free church on his left. The reverend T. R Greene B. A. will (D. V.) speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say a few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They acted according to their lights.

Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an important thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.

A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly. Christian brother boys.

Father Conmee smelled incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint Joseph’s church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females. Father Conmee raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but occasionally they were also badtempered.

Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift nobleman. And now it was an office or something.

Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came from bacon[-]flitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan’s the tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition.

Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin’s publichouse against the window of which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.

Father Conmee passed H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay. A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted the constable. In Youkstetter’s, the porkbutcher’s, Father Conmee observed pig’s puddings, white and black and red, lying neatly curled in tubes.

Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made [213] turf to be in bogs where men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.

On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of saint Francis Xavier’s church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound tram.

Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of saint Agatha’s church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.

At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.

Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a sixpence and five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his purse. Passing the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector usually made his visit when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.

It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly.

Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the seat.

Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.

At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and a marketnet: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and basket down: and Father Conmee thought that, as she had nearly passed the end of the penny fare, she was one of those good souls who had always to be told twice bless you, my child, that they have been absolved, pray for me. But they had so many worries in life, so many cares, poor creatures.

From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grinned with thick niggerlips at Father Conmee.

Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men and of his sermon of saint Peter Claver S. J. and the African mission and of [214] the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last hour came like a thief in the night. That book by the Belgian jesuit, Le Nombre des Élus, seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those were millions of human souls created by God in His Own likeness to whom the faith had not (D. V.) been brought. But they were God’s souls created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all be lost, a waste, if one might say.

At the Howth road stop Father Conmee alighted, was saluted by the conductor and saluted in his turn.

The Malahide road was quiet. It pleased Father Conmee, road and name. The joybells were ringing in gay Malahide. Lord Talbot de Malahide, immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining. Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow in one day. Those were old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old times in the barony.

Father Conmee, walking, thought of his little book Old Times in the Barony and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and of Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere.

A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel, Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening, not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed adultery fully, eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris, with her husband’s brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband’s brother.

Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for men’s race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways.

Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble, were impalmed by don John Conmee.

It was a charming day.

The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages, curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of small white clouds going slowly down the wind. Moutonner, the French said. A homely and just word.

[215] Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning clouds over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of Clongowes field[.]  He walked there, reading in the evening and heard the cries of the boys’ lines at their play, young cries in the quiet evening. He was their rector: his reign was mild.

Father Conmee drew off his gloves and took his rededged breviary out. An ivory bookmark told him the page.

Nones. He should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had come.

Father Conmee read in secret Pater and Ave and crossed his breast. Deus in adiutorium.

He walked calmly and read mutely the nones, walking and reading till he came to Res in Beati immaculati: Principium verborum tuotum veritas: in eternum omnia iudicia iustitiæ tuæ.

A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man raised his hat abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his breviary. Sin: Principes persecuti sunt me gratis: et a verbis tuis formidavit cor meum.

***

Corny Kelleher closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping eye at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner. He pulled himself erect, went to it and, spinning it on its axle, viewed its shape and brass furnishings. Chewing his blade of hay he laid the coffinlid by and came to the doorway. There he tilted his hatbrim to give shade to his eyes and leaned against the doorcase, looking idly out.

Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge.

Corny Kelleher locked his largefooted boots and gazed, his hat downtilted, chewing his blade of hay.

Constable 57 C, on his beat, stood to pass the time of day.

— That’s a fine day, Mr Kelleher.

— Ay, Corny Kelleher said.

— It’s very close, the constable said.

[216] Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin.

— What’s the best news? he asked.

— I seen that particular party last evening, the constable said with bated breath.

***

A onelegged sailor crutched himself round Mac Connell’s corner, skirting Rabaiotti’s icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street. Towards Larry O’Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, he growled unamiably.

— For England…

He swung himself violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus, halted and growled:

— home and beauty.

J. J. O’Molloy’s white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was in the warehouse with a visitor.

A stout lady stopped, took a copper coin from her purse and dropped it into the cap held out to her. The sailor grumbled thanks and glanced sourly at the unheeding windows, sank his head and swung himself forward four strides.

He halted and growled angrily:

— For England…

Two barefoot urchins, sucking long liquorice laces, halted near him, gaping at his stump with their yellowslobbered mouths.

He swung himself forward in vigorous jerks, halted, lifted his head towards a window and bayed deeply.

— home and beauty.

The gay sweet chirping whistling within went on a bar or two, ceased. The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card Unfurnished Apartments slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A woman’s hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It fell on the path.

One of the urchins ran to it, picked it up and dropped it into the minstrel’s cap, saying:

— There, sir.

***

[217] Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the close steaming kitchen.

— Did you put in the books? Boody asked.

Maggy at the range rammed down a greyish mass beneath bubbling suds twice with her potstick and wiped her brow.

— They wouldn’t give anything on them, she said.

Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked ankles tickled by stubble.

— Where did you try? Boody asked.

— M’Guinness’s.

Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table.

— Bad cess to her big face! she cried.

Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes.

— What’s in the pot? she asked.

— Shirts, Maggy said.

Boody cried angrily:

— Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?

Katey, lifting the kettlelid in a pad of her stained skirt, asked:

— And what’s in this?

A heavy fume gushed in answer.

— Peasoup, Maggy said.

— Where did you get it? Katey asked.

— Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.

The lacquey rang his bell.

— Barang!

Boody sat down at the table and said hungrily:

— Give us it here!

Maggy poured yellow thick soup from the kettle into a bowl. Katey, sitting opposite Boody, said quietly, as her fingertip lifted to her mouth random crumbs.

— A good job we have that much. Where’s Dilly?

— Gone to meet father, Maggy said.

Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added:

— Our father who art not in heaven.

Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey’s bowl, exclaimed:

[218] — Boody! For shame!

A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains, between the Customhouse old dock and George’s quay.

***

The blond girl in Thornton’s bedded the wicker basket with rustling fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper and a small jar.

— Put these in first, will you? he said.

— Yes, sir, the blond girl said, and the fruit on top.

— That’ll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.

She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe shamefaced peaches.

Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes, sniffing smells.

H. E. L. Y’ S. filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane, plodding towards their goal.

He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch from his fob and held it at its chain’s length.

— Can you send them by tram? Now?

A darkbacked figure under Merchant’s arch scanned books on the hawker’s car.

— Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?

— O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.

The blond girl handed him a docket and pencil.

— Will you write the address, sir?

Blazes Boylan at the counter wrote and pushed the docket to her.

— Send it at once, will you? he said. It’s for an invalid.

— Yes, sir. I will, sir.

Blazes Boylan rattled merry money in his trousers’ pocket.

— What’s the damage? he asked.

The blond girl’s slim fingers reckoned the fruits.

[219] Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took a red carnation from the tall stemglass.

— This for me? he asked gallantly.

The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie a bit crooked, blushing.

— Yes, sir, she said.

Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.

Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the red flower between his smiling teeth.

— May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly.

***

— Ma! Almidano Artifoni said.

He gazed over Stephen’s shoulder at Goldsmith’s knobby poll.

Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore, gripping frankly the handrests. Pale faces. Men’s arms frankly round their stunted forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed.

— Anch’io ho avuto di queste idee, Almidano Artifoni said quand’ ero giovine come Lei. Eppoi mi sono convinto che il mondo è una bestia. E peccato. Perchè la sua voce… sarebbe un cespite di rendita, via. Invece, Lei si sacrifica.

— Sacrifizio incruento, Stephen said smiling, swaying his ashplant in slow swingswong from its midpoint, lightly.

— Speriamo, the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. Ma, dia retta a me. Ci rifletta.

By the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band.

— Ci rifletteró, Stephen said, glancing down the solid trouserleg.

— Ma, sul serio, eh? Almidano Artifoni said.

His heavy hand took Stephen’s firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.

— Eccolo, Almidano Artifoni said in friendly haste. Venga a trovarmi e ci pensi. Addio, caro.

— Arrivederla, maestro, Stephen said, raising his hat when his hand was freed. E grazie.

[220] — Di che? Almidano Artifano said. Scusi, eh? Tante belle cose!

Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal, trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted, signalling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling implements of music through Trinity gates.

***

Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of The Woman in White far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her typewriter.

Too much mystery business in it? Is he in love with that one, Marion? Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.

The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them: six.

Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:

— 16 June 1904.

Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny’s corner and the slab where Wolfe Tone’s statue was not, eeled themselves turning H. E. L. Y’S. and plodded back as they had come.

Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, and listlessy lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens and capital esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She’s not nicelooking, is she? The way she is holding up her bit of a skirt. Wonder will that fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker to make a concertina skirt like Susy Nagle’s. They kick out grand. Shannon and all the boatclub swells never took his eyes off her. Hope to goodness he won’t keep me here till seven.

The telephone rang rudely by her ear.

— Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll ring them up after five. Only those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can go after six if you’re not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and six. I’ll tell him. Yes: one, seven, six.

She scribbled three figures on an envelope.

— Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from Sport was in looking for you. Mr Lenehan, yes. He said he’ll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll ring them up after five.

***

[221] Two pink faces turned in the flare of the tiny torch.

— Who’s that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?

— Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied, groping for foothold.

— Hello, Jack, is that yourself? Ned Lambert said, raising in salute his pliant lath among the flickering arches. Come on. Mind your steps there.

The vesta in the clergyman’s uplifted hand consumed itself in a long soft flame and was let fall. At their feet its red speck died: and mouldy air closed round them.

— How interesting! a refined accent said in the gloom.

— Yes, sir, Ned Lambert said heartily. We are standing in the historic council chamber of saint Mary’s abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin. O ’Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days. The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and the original jews’ temple was here too before they built their synagogue over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?

— No, Ned.

— He rode down through Dame walk, the refined accent said, if my memory serves me. The mansion of the Kildares was in Thomas court.

— That’s right, Ned Lambert said. That’s quite right, sir.

— If you will be so kind then, the clergyman said, the next time to allow me perhaps…

— Certainly, Ned Lambert said. Bring the camera whenever you like. I’ll get those bags cleared away from the windows. You can take it from here or from here.

In the still faint light he moved about, tapping with his lath the piled seedbags and points of vantage on the floor.

From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.

— I’m deeply obliged, Mr Lambert, the clergyman said. I won’t trespass on your valuable time…

— You’re welcome, sir, Ned Lambert said. Drop in whenever you like. Next week, say. Can you see?

— Yes, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Lambert. Very pleased to have met you.

— Pleasure is mine, sir, Ned Lambert answered.

[222] His followed his guest to the outlet and then whirled his lath away among the pillars. With J. J. O’Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary’s abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palm nut meal, O’Connor, Wexford.

He stood to read the card in his hand.

— The reverend Hugh C. Love, Rathcoffey. Present address: Saint Michael’s, Sallins. Nice young chap he is. He’s writing a book about the Fitzgeralds he told me. He’s well up in history, faith.

The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

— I thought you were at a new gunpowder plot, J. J. O’Molloy said.

Ned Lambert cracked his fingers in the air.

— God! he cried. I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? I’m bloody sorry I didit, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside. He mightn’t like it, though. What? God, I’ll tell him anyhow. That was the great earl, the Fitzgerald Mor. Hot members they were all of them, the Geraldines.

The horses he passed started nervously under their slack harness. He slapped a piebald haunch quivering near him and cried:

— Woa, sonny!

He turned to J. J. O’Molloy and asked:

— Well, Jack. What is it? What’s the trouble? Wait a while. Hold hard.

With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an instant, sneezed loudly.

— Chow! he said. Blast you!

— The dust from those sacks, J. J. O’Molloy said politely.

— No, Ned Lambert gasped, I caught a… cold night before… blast your soul… night before last… and there was a hell of a lot of draught…

He held his handkerchief ready for the coming…

— I was… this morning… poor little… what do you call him… Chow!… Mother of Moses!

***

Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his claret waistcoat.

— See? he said. Say it’s turn six. In here, see. Turn Now On.

[223] He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased, ogling them: six.

Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the admiralty division of king’s bench to the court of appeal an elderly female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of great amplitude.

— See? he said. See now the last one I put in is over here: Turns Over. The impact. Leverage, see?

He showed them the rising column of disks on the right.

— Smart idea, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. So a fellow coming in late can see what turn is on and what turns are over.

— See? Tom Rochford said.

He slid in a disk for himself: and watched it shoot, wobble, ogle, stop: four. Turn Now On.

— I’ll see him now in the Ormond, Lenehan said, and sound him. One good turn deserves another.

— Do, Tom Rochford said. Tell him I’m Boylan with impatience.

— Goodnight, M’Coy said abruptly, when you two begin…

Nosey Flynn stooped towards the lever, snuffling at it.

— But how does it work here, Tommy? he asked.

— Tooraloo, Lenehan said, see you later.

He followed M’Coy out across the tiny square of Crampton court.

— He’s a hero, he said simply.

— I know, M’Coy said. The drain, you mean.

— Drain? Lenehan said. It was down a manhole.

They passed Dan Lowry’s musichall where Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile.

Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall Lenehan showed M’Coy how the whole thing was. One of those manholes like a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it half choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky’s vest and all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope round the poor devil and the two were hauled up.

— The act of a hero, he said.

At the Dolphin they halted to allow the ambulance car to gallop past them for Jervis street.

[224] — This way, he said, walking to the right. I want to pop into Lynam’s to see Sceptre’s starting price. What’s the time by your gold watch and chain?

M’Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses’ sombre office, then at O’Neill’s clock.

— After three, he said. Who’s riding her?

— O. Madden, Lenehan said. And a game filly she is.

While he waited in Temple bar M’Coy dodged a banana peel with gentle pushes of his toe from the path to the gutter. Fellow might damn easy get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark.

The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal cavalcade.

— Even money, Lenehan said returning. I knocked against Bantam Lyons in there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn’t an earthly. Through here.

They went up the steps and under Merchants’ arch. A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker’s cart.

— There he is, Lenehan said.

— Wonder what he is buying, M’Coy said, glancing behind.

— Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye, Lenehan said.

— He’s dead nuts on sales, M’Coy said. I was with him one day and he bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.

Lenehan laughed.

— I’ll tell you a damn good one about comet’s tails, he said. Come over in the sun.

They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the river wall.

Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.

— There was a big spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said eagerly. The annual dinner you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and Sir Charles Cameron and Dan Dawson spoke and there was music. Bartell D’Arcy sang and Benjamin Dollard…

— I know, M’Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.

— Did she? Lenehan said.

A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street.

[225] He checked his tale a moment but broke out in a wheezy laugh.

— But wait till I tell you, he said, Delahunt of Camden street had the catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curacoa to which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies…

— I know, M’Coy said. The year the missus was there…

Lenehan linked his arm warmly.

— But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o’clock the morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter’s night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing glees and duets: Lo, the early beam of morning. She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under her bellyband. Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.

He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:

— I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?

His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.

— The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that’s only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.

Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.

— I’m weak, he gasped.

M’Coy’s white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave. Lenehan walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his hindhead rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M’Coy.

— He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.

***

[226] Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.

He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.

— That I had, he said, pushing it by.

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

— Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O ’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.

He opened it. Thought so.

A woman’s voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen: The man.

No: she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once.

He read the other title: Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.

He read where his finger opened.

— All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!

Yes. This. Here. Try.

— Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé.

Yes. Take this. The end.

— You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.

The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.

Mr Bloom read again: The beautiful woman.

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded [227] amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him! For Raoul!) Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!). Feel! Press! Crished! Sulphur dung of lions!

Young! Young!

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy curtains. The shopman’s uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, spat phlegm on the floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.

Mr Bloom beheld it.

Mastering his troubled breath, he said:

— I’ll take this one.

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.

— Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

***

The lacquey by the door of Dillon’s auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.

Dilly Dedalus, listening by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.

The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:

— Barang!

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College Library.

[228] Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams’s row. He halted near his daughter.

— It’s time for you, she said.

— Stand up straight for the love of the Lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said. Are you trying to imitate your uncle John the cornetplayer, head upon shoulders? Melancholy God!

Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them and held them back.

— Stand up straight, girl, he said. You’ll get curvature of the spine. Do you know what you look like?

He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulders and dropping his underjaw.

— Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.

Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.

— Did you get any money? Dilly asked.

— Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is no-one in Dublin would lend me fourpence.

— You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.

— How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.

Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James’s street.

— I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?

— I was not then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns taught you to be so saucy? Here.

He handed her a shilling.

— See if you can do anything with that, he said.

— I suppose you got five. Dilly said. Give me more than that.

— Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You’re like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died. But wait awhile. You’ll all get a short shrift and a long day from me. Low blackguardism! I’m going to get rid of you. Wouldn’t care if I was stretched out stiff. He’s dead. The man upstairs is dead.

He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.

— Well, what is it? he said, stopping.

The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.

— Barang!

— Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.

[229] The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell: but feebly:

— Bang!

Mr Dedalus stared at him.

— Watch him ,he said. It’s instructive. I wonder will he allow us to talk.

— You got more than that, father, Dilly said.

— I’m going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I’ll leave you all where Jesus left the jews. Look, that’s all I have. I got two shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the funeral.

He drew forth a handful of copper coins nervously.

— Can’t you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.

Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.

— I will, he said gravely, I looked all along the gutter in O’Connell street. I’ll try this one now.

— You’re very funny, Dilly said, grinning.

— Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk for yourself and a bun or a something. I’ll be home shortly.

He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.

The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of Parkgate.

— I’m sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.

The lacquey banged loudly.

Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a pursing mincing mouth:

— The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn’t do anything! O, sure they wouldn’t really! Is it little sister Monica!

***

From the sundial towards James’s Gate walked Mr Kernan pleased with the order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James’s street, past Shackleton’s offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive. Lovely weather we are having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those farmers are always grumbling. I’ll just take a thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, [230] terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion: most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can’t understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that… Now you are talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palmoil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here.

I smiled at him. America, I said, quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn’t that true? That’s a fact.

Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there’s money going there’s always someone to pick it up.

Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy appearance. Bowls them over.

— Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?

— Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.

Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street club toff had it probably. John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian bank, gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he remembered me.

Aham! Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road. Gentleman. And now, Mr Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying has it.

North wall and sir John Rogerson’s quay, with hulls and anchorchains, sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the ferry[-]wash, Elijah is coming.

Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course. Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officier. Bravely he bore his stumpy body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Lambert’s brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He’s as like it as damn it. No, The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn like him.

Aham! Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his fat strut.

Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope. [231] Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant’s wife drove by in her noddy.

Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan’s? Or no, there was a midnight burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the wall. Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn down here. Make a detour.

Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by the corner of Guinness’s visitors’ waitingroom. Outside the Dublin Distillers Company’s stores an outside ear without fare or jarvey stood, the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse.

Denis Breen with his tomes, weary of having waited an hour in John Henry Menton’s office, led his wife over O’Connell bridge, bound for the office of Messrs Collis and Ward.

Mr Kernan approached Island street.

Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all now in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly’s. No cardsharping then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the table by a dagger. Somewhere here Lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from major Sirr. Stables behind Moira house.

Damn good gin that was.

Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that sham squire, with his violet gloves, gave him away. Course they were on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad touchingly. Masterly rendition.

At the siege of Ross did my father fall.

A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades.

Mr Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily.

His Excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! What a pity!

***

Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary’s fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull [232] coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.

Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.

She dances in a foul gloom where gum burns with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.

Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned it and held it at the point of his Moses’ beard. Grandfather ape gloating on a stolen hoard.

And you who wrest old images from the burial earth! The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting.

Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded umbrella, one with a midwife’s bag in which eleven cockles rolled.

The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can. Bawd and butcher, were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A look around.

Yes, quite true. Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time. You say right, sir. A Monday morning, ’twas so, indeed.

Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against his shoulderblade. In Clohissey’s window a faded 1860 print of Heenan boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in light loincloths proposed gently each to other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing: heroes’ hearts.

He turned and halted by the slanted bookcart.

— Twopence each, the huckster said. Four for sixpence.

Tattered pages. The Irish Beekeeper. Life and Miracles of the Curé of Ars. Pocket Guide to Killarney.

I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes. Stephano Dedalo, alumno optimo, palmam ferenti.

[233] Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.

Binding too good probably, what is this? Eighth and ninth book of Moses. Secret of all secrets. Seal of King David. Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me? How to soften chapped hands. Recipe for white wine vinegar. How to win a woman’s love. For me this. Say the following talisman three times with hands folded:

— Se el yilo nebrakada femininum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen.

Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter Salanka to all true believers divulged. As good as any other abbot’s charms, as mumbling Joachim’s. Down, baldynoddle, or we’ll wool your wool.

— What are you doing here, Stephen?

Dilly’s high shoulders and shabby dress.

Shut the book quick. Don’t let see.

— What are you doing? Stephen said.

A Stuart face of nonesuch Charles, lank locks falling at its sides. It glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots. I told her of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly’s token. Nebrakada femininum.

— What have you there? Stephen asked.

— I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing nervously. Is it any good?

My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring. Shadow of my mind.

He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.

— What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

— Here, Stephen said. It’s all right. Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.

— Some, Dilly said. We had to.

She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

We.

Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite.

Misery! Misery!

***

[234] — Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?

— Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.

They clasped hands loudly outside Reddy and Daughter’s. Father Cowley brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand.

— What’s the best news? Mr Dedalus said.

— Why then not much, Father Cowley said. I’m barricaded up, Simon, with two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance.

— Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it?

— O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.

— With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.

— The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I’m just waiting for Ben Dollard. He’s going to say a word to Long John to get him to take those two men off. All I want is a little time.

He looked with vague hope up and down the quay, a big apple bulging in his neck.

— I know, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Poor old bockedy Ben! He’s always doing a good turn for someone. Hold hard!

He put on his glasses and gazed towards the metal bridge an instant.

— There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.

Ben Dollard’s loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops crossed the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. He came towards them at an amble, scratching actively behind his coattails.

As he came near Mr Dedalus greeted:

— Hold that fellow with the bad trousers.

— Hold him now, Ben Dollard said.

Mr Dedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben Dollard’s figure. Then, turning to Fathes Cowley with a nod, he muttered sneeringly:

— That’s a pretty garment, isn’t it, for a summer’s day?

— Why, God eternally curse your soul, Ben Dollard growled furiously, I threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw.

He stood beside them beaming on them first and on his roomy clothes from points of which Mr Dedalus flicked fluff, saying:

— They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow.

[235] — Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to God he’s not paid yet.

— And how is that basso profondo, Benjamin, Father Cowley asked.

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.

Ben Dollard frowned and, making suddenly a chanter’s mouth, gave forth a deep note.

— Aw! he said.

— That’s the style, Mr Dedalus said, nodding to its drone.

— What about that? Ben Dollard said. Not too dusty? What?

He turned to both.

— That’ll do, Father Cowley said, nodding also.

The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old Chapterhouse of saint Mary’s abbey past James and Charles Kennedy’s, rectifiers, attended by Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the Ford of Hurdles.

Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward, his joyful fingers in the air.

— Come along with me to the subsheriff’s office, he said. I want to show you the new beauty Rock has for a bailiff. He’s a cross between Lobengula and Lynchehaun. He’s well worth seeing, mind you. Come along. I saw John Henry Menton casually in the Bodega just now and it will cost me a fall if I don’t… wait awhile… We’re on the right lay, Bob, believe you me.

— For a few days tell him, Father Cowley said anxiously.

Ben Dollard halted and stared, his loud orifice open, a dangling button of his coat wagging brightbacked from its thread as he wiped away the heavy shraums that clogged his eyes to hear aright.

— What few days? he boomed. Hasn’t your landlord distrained for rent?

— He has, Father Cowley said.

— Then our friend’s writ is not worth the paper it’s printed on, Ben Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the particulars. 29 Windsor avenue. Love is the name?

— That’s right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He’s a minister in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that?

— You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts.

He led Father Cowley boldly forward linked to his bulk.

[236] — Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his glasses on his coatfront, following them.

***

— The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they passed out of the Castleyard gate.

The policeman touched his forehead.

— God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily.

He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on towards Lord Edward street.

Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.

— Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father Conmee and laid the whole case before him.

— You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward.

— Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not.

John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them quickly down Cork hill.

On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.

The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street.

— Look here Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the Mail office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.

— Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the five shillings too.

— Without a second word either, Mr Power said.

— Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added.

John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.

— I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted elegantly.

They went down Parliament street.

— There’s Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh’s.

— Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes.

Outside la Maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brother-in-law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties.

John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham [237] took the elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit who walked uncertainly with hasty steps past Micky Anderson’s watches.

— The assistant town clerk’s corns are giving him some trouble, John Wyse Nolan told Mr Power.

They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh’s winerooms. The empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham, speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not glance.

— And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as life.

The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood.

— Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and greeted.

Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all their faces.

— Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he said, with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk.

Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly, about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted to know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the macebearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order, no quorum even and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little Lorcan Sherlock doing locum tenens for him. Damned Irish language, language of our forefathers.

Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips.

Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to the assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wise Nolan held his peace.

— What Dignam was that? Long John Fanning asked.

Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot.

— O, my corns! he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness’ sake till I sit down somewhere. Uff! Ooo! Mind!

Testily he made room for himself beside Long John Fanning’s flank and passed in and up the stairs.

— Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don’t think you knew him or perhaps you did, though.

With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in.

— Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of Long John Fanning ascending towards Long John Fanning in the mirror.

[238] — Rather lowsized, Dignam of Menton’s office that was, Martin Cunningham said.

Long John Fanning could not remember him.

Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air.

— What’s that? Martin Cunningham said.

All turned where they stood; John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street, harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went past before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the leaders, leaping leaders, rode outriders.

— What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the staircase.

— The lord lieutenant general and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse Nolan answered from the stairfoot.

***

As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his Panama to Haines,

— Parnell’s brother. There in the corner.

They chose a small table near the window opposite a longfaced man whose beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.

— Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.

— Yes, Mulligan said. That’s John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.

John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw went up again to his forehead whereat it rested.

An instant after, under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell once more upon a working corner.

— I’ll take a mélange, Haines said to the waitress.

— Two mélanges, Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and butter and some cakes as well.

When she had gone he said, laughing:

— We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet.

Haines opened his newbought book.

[239] — I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street:

— England expects…

Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.

— You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Ængus I call him.

— I am sure he has an idée fixe, Haines said, pinching his chin thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. How I am speculating what it would be likely to be. Such persons always have.

Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.

— They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet. The joy of creation…

— Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It’s rather interesting because Professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an interesting point out of that.

Buck Mulligan’s watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to unload her tray.

— He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does he write anything for your movement?

He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.

— Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something in ten years.

— Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon. Still, I shouldn’t wonder if he did after all.

He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.

— This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don’t want to be imposed on.

Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past [240] Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgewater with bricks.

***

Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell’s yard. Behind him Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fiztmaurice Tisdall Farrell with stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith’s house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College Park.

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.

At the corner of Wilde’s he halted, frowned at Elijah’s name announced on the Metropolitan Hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of duke’s lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth bared he muttered:

— Coactus volui.

He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word.

As he strode past Mr Bloom’s dental windows the sway of his dustcoat brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards, having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly face after the striding form.

— God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!

***

Opposite Ruggy O’Donohoe’s Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the pound and a half of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, porksteaks he had been sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs Mac Dowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney’s. And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruit cake jawing the whole blooming time and sighing.

After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, court dress milliner, stopped him  He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to their pelts and [241] putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin’s pet lamb, will meet sergeant major Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of fifty sovereigns. Gob, that’d be a good pucking match to see. Myler Keogh, that’s the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master Dignam on his left turned as he turned. That’s me in mourning. When is it? May the twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry, his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out.

Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker going for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow would knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker for science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out of him, dodging and all.

In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff’s mouth and a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was telling him and grinning all the time.

No Sandymount tram.

Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I’m not going tomorrow either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice I’m in mourning? Uncle Barney said he’d get it into the paper tonight. Then they’ll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa’s name.

His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were bringing it downstairs.

Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth [242] trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to father Conroy on Saturday night.

***

William Humble, earl of Dudley, and Lady Dudley, accompanied by lieutenantcolonel Hesseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs Paget, Miss de Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. in attendance.

The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix Park saluted by obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern quays. The viceroy was most cordially greated on his way through the metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted him vainly from afar. Between Queen’s and Whitworth bridges Lord Dudley’s viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley White, B. L., M. A., who stood on Arran Quay outside Mrs M. E. White’s, the pawnbroker’s, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose with his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costsbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the doorstep of the office of Reuben J. Dodd, solicitor, agent for the Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed her plan and retracing her steps by King’s windows smiled credulously on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond Hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired. On Ormond quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse for the subsheriff’s office, stood still in midstreet and brought his hat low. His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus’ greeting. From Cahill’s corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M. A., made obeisance unperceived, mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant had held of yore rich advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M’Coy, taking leave of each other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger Greene’s office and Dollard’s big red printinghouse Gerty Mac Dowell, carrying the Catesby’s cork lino letters for her father who was laid up, knew by the style [243] it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn’t see what Her Excellency had on because the tram and Spring’s big yellow furniture van had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord lieutenant. Beyond Lundy Foot’s from the shaded door of Kavanagh’s winerooms John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness towards the lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The Right Honourable William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed Micky Anderson’s all times ticking watches and Henry and James’s wax smartsuited freshcheeked models, the gentleman Henry, dernier cri James. Over against Dame gate Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the approach of the cavalcade. Tom Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley fixed on him, took his thumbs quickly out of the pockets of his claret waistcoat and doffed his cap to her. A charming soubrette, great Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and lifted skirt, smiled daubily from her poster upon William Humble, earl of Dudley, and upon lieutenantcolonel H. G. Hesseltine and also upon the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. From the window of the D. B. C. Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely, gazed down on the viceregal equipage over the shoulders of eager guests, whose mass of forms darkened the chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently. In Fownes’s street, Dilly Dedalus, straining her sight upward from Chardenal’s first French primer, saw sunshades spanned and wheelspokes spinning in the glare. John Henry Menton, filling the doorway of Commercial Buildings, stared from winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold hunter watch not looked at in his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the foreleg of King Billy’s horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband back from under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted in his ear the tidings. Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left breast and saluted the second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C., agreeably surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby’s corner a jaded white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind him, E. L. Y’. S., while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite Pigott’s music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni professor of dancing &c, gaily apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved. By the provost’s wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tanned shoes and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of My girl’s a Yorkshire girl.

Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders’ skyblue frontlets and high action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and the red flower between his lips. As [244] they drove along Nassau street His Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of music which was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen highland laddies blared and drumthumped after the cortège:

But though she’s a factory lass

And wears no fancy clothes.

Baraabum.

Yet I’ve a sort of a

Yorkshire relish for

My little Yorkshire rose

Baraabum.

Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H. Thrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson, C. Adderly, and W. C. Huggard started in pursuit. Striding past Finn’s hotel, Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster street, by Trinity’s postern, a loyal king’s man, Hornblower, touched his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent with the topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital, drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind stripling opposite Broadbent’s. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

 ® 

[245] Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.

Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the

Gold pinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castile.

Trilling, trilling: Idolores.

Peep! Who’s in the… peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castile. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked.

Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!

Jingle. Bloo

Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.

A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.

Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

Horn. Hawhorn.

When first he saw. Alas!

Full tup. Full throb.

Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.

Martha! Come!

Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.

[246] Goodgod henev erheard inall

Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.

A moonlit nightcall: far: far.

I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.

Listen!

The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each and for other plash and silent roar.

Pearls: when she. Liszt’s rhapsodies. Hissss.

You don’t?

Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.

Black.

Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.

Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.

But wait!

Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.

Naminedamine. All gone. All fallen.

Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.

Amen! He gnashed in fury.

Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.

Bronzelydia by Minagold.

By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.

One rapped, one tapped with a carra, with a cock.

Pray for him! Pray, good people!

His gouty fingers nakkering.

Big Benaben. Big Benben.

Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.

Pwee! Little wind piped wee.

True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay, Like you men. Will lift your tschink with tschunk.

Fff! Oo!

Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?

Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.

Then, not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.

Done.

Begin!

Bronze by gold, Miss Douce’s head by Miss Kennedy’s head, over the [247] crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel.

— Is that her? asked Miss Kennedy.

Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and eau de Nil.

— Exquisite contrast, Miss Kennedy said.

When all agog Miss Douce said eagerly:

— Look at the fellow in the tall silk.

— Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.

— In the second carriage, Miss Douce’s wet lips said, laughing in the sun. He’s looking. Mind till I see.

She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against the pane in a halo of hurried breath.

Her wet lips tittered:

— He’s killed looking back.

She laughed:

— O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots?

With sadness.

Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.

— It’s them has the fine times, sadly then she said.

A man.

Bloowho went by by Moulang’s pipes, bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine’s antiques in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll’s dusky battered plate, for Raoul.

The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china. And

— There’s your teas, he said.

Miss Kennedy with manners transposed the teatray down to an upturned lithia crate, safe from eyes, low.

— What is it? loud boots unmannerly asked.

— Find out, Miss Douce retorted, leaving her spyingpoint.

— Your beau, is it?

A haughty bronze replied:

— I’ll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your impertinent insolence.

— Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootsnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as she threatened as he had come.

[248] Bloom.

On her flower frowning Miss Douce said:

— Most aggravating that young brat is. If he doesn’t conduct himself I’ll wring his ear for him a yard long.

Ladylike in exquisite contrast.

— Take no notice, Miss Kennedy rejoined.

She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned, waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and two and seven.

Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.

— Am I awfully sunburnt?

Miss bronze unbloused her neck.

— No, said Miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with the cherry laurel water?

Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their midst a shell.

— And leave it to my hands, she said.

— Try it with the glycerine, Miss Kennedy advised.

Bidding her neck and hands adieu Miss Douce

— Those things only bring out a rash, replied, reseated. I asked that old fogey in Boyd’s for something for my skin.

Miss Kennedy, pouring now fulldrawn tea, grimaced and prayed:

— O, don’t remind me of him for mercy’sake!

— But wait till I tell you, Miss Douce entreated.

Sweet tea Miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears with little fingers.

— No, don’t, she cried.

— I won’t listen, she cried.

But Bloom?

Miss Douce grunted in snuffy fogey’s tone:

— For your what? says he.

Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak: but said, but prayed again:

— Don’t let me think of him or I’ll expire. The hideous old wretch! That night in the Antient Concert Rooms.

[249] She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped sweet tea.

— Here he was, Miss Douce said, cocking her bronze head three quarters, ruffling her nosewings. Hufa! Hufa!

Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from Miss Kennedy’s throat. Miss Douce huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like a shout in quest.

— O! shrieking, Miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?

Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting:

— And your other eye!

Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner’s name. Why do I always think Figather? Gathering figs I think. And Prosper Loré’s huguenot name. By Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white under, come to me. God they believe she is: or goddess. Those today. I could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus’son. He might be Mulligan. All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of fellows in: her white.

By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.

Of sin.

In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each other, high piercing notes.

Ah, panting, sighing. Sighing, ah, fordone their mirth died down.

Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and gigglegiggled. Miss Douce, bending again over the teatray, ruffled again her nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again Kennygiggles, stooping her fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed, spluttered out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter, coughing with choking, crying:

— O greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that, she cried. With his bit of beard!

Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman, delight, joy, indignation.

— Married to the greasy nose! she yelled.

Shrill, with deep laughter, after bronze in gold, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I knows. Exhausted, breathless their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!), panting, sweating (O!), all breathless.

Married to Bloom, to greaseaseabloom.

[250] — O saints above! Miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I wished I hadn’t laughed so much. I feel all wet.

— O, Miss Douce! Miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing!

And flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly.

By Cantwell’s offices roved Greaseabloom, by Ceppi’s virgins, bright of their oils. Nannetti’s father hawked those things about, wheedling at doors as I. Religion pays. Must see him about Keyes’s par. Eat first. I want. Not yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On. Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On. For Raoul. Eat. If I net five guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The sweets of sin.

Flushed less, still less, goldenly paled.

Into their bar strolled Mr Dedalus. Chips, picking chips off one of his rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled.

— O welcome back, Miss Douce.

He held her hand. Enjoyed her holidays?

— Tiptop.

He hoped she had nice weather in Rostrevor.

— Gorgeous, she said. Look at the holy show I am. Lying out on the strand all day.

Bronze whiteness.

— That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed her hand indulgently. Tempting poor simple males.

Miss Douce of satin douced her arm away.

— O go away, she said. You’re very simple, I don’t think.

He was.

— Well now, I am, he mused. I looked so simple in the cradle they christened me simple Simon.

— You must have been a doaty, Miss Douce made answer. And what did the doctor order today?

— Well now, he mused, whatever you say yourself. I think I’ll trouble you for some fresh water and a half glass of whisky.

Jingle.

— With the greatest alacrity, Miss Douce agreed.

With grace of alacrity towards the mirror gilt Cantrell and Cochrane’s she turned herself. With grace she tapped a measure of gold whisky from her crystal keg. Forth from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus brought pouch and pipe. Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two husky fifenotes.

[251] — By Jove, he mused. I often wanted to see the Mourne moutains. Must be a great tonic in the air down there. But a long threatening comes at last, they say. Yes, yes.

Yes. He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid’s, into the bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute.

None not said nothing. Yes.

Gaily Miss Douce polished a tumbler, trilling:

— O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas!

— Was Mr Lidwell in today?

In came Lenehan. Round him peered Lenehan. Mr Bloom reached Essex bridge. Yes, Mr Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. To Martha I must write. Buy paper. Daly’s. Girl there civil. Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue Bloom is on the rye.

— He was in at lunchtime, Miss Douce said.

Lenehan came forward.

— Was Mr Boylan looking for me?

He asked. She answered:

— Miss Kennedy, was Mr Boylan in while I was upstairs?

She asked. Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised, her gaze upon a page.

— No. He was not.

Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard not seen, read on. Lenehan round the sandwichbell wound his round body round.

— Peep! Who’s in the corner?

No glance of Kennedy rewarding him he yet made overtures. To mind her stops. To read only the black ones: round o and crooked ess.

Jingle jaunty jingle.

Girlgold she read and did not glance. Take no notice. She took no notice while he read by rote a solfa fable for her, plappering flatly:

— Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox too thee stork: Will you put your bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?

He droned in vain. Miss Douce turned to her tea aside.

He sighed, aside:

— Ah me! O my!

He greeted Mr Dedalus and got a nod.

— Greetings from the famous son of a famous father.

[252] — Who may he be? Mr Dedalus asked.

Lenehan opened most genial arms. Who?

— Who may he be? he asked. Can you ask? Stephen, the youthful bard.

Dry.

Mr Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.

— I see, he said. I didn’t recognise him for the moment. I hear he is keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?

He had.

— I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In Mooney’s en ville and in Mooney’s sur mer. He had received the rhino for the labour of his muse.

He smiled at bronze’s teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes.

— The élite of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit. Hugh MacHugh, Dublin’s most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the O’Madden Burke.

After an interval Mr Dedalus raised his grog and

— That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.

He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down his glass.

He looked towards the saloon door.

— I see you have moved the piano.

— The tuner was in today, Miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking concert and I never heard such an exquisite player.

— Is that a fact?

— Didn’t he, Miss Kennedy? The real classical, you know. And blind too, poor fellow. Not twenty I’m sure he was.

— Is that a fact? Mr Dedalus said.

He drank and strayed away.

— So sad to look at his face, Miss Douce condoled.

God’s curse on bitch’s bastard.

Tink to her pity cried a diner’s bell. To the door of the diningroom came bald Pat, came bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of Ormond. Lager for diner. Lager without alacrity she served.

With patience Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for jingle jaunty blazes boy.

Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling a triple of keys to sees the thicknesses of felt advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action.

[253] Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in Wisdom Hely’s wise Bloom in Daly’s Henry Flower bought. Are you not happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is. Respectable girl meet after mass. Tanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man. For Raoul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jauntingcar. It is. Third time. Coincidence.

Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond quay. Follow. Risk it. Go quick. At four. Near now. Out.

— Twopence, sir, the shopgirl dared to say.

— Aha… I was forgetting… Excuse…

— And four.

At four she. Winsomely she on Bloohimwhom smiled. Bloo smi qui go. Ternoon. Think you’re the only pebble on the beach? Does that to all. For men.

 In drowsy silence gold bent on her page.

From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.

Pat paid for diner’s popcorked bottle: and over tumbler tray and popcorked bottle ere he went he whispered, bald and bothered, with Miss Douce.

— The bright stars fade…

A voiceless song sang from within, singing:

— … the morn is breaking.

A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love’s leavetaking, life’s, love’s morn.

— The dewdrops pearl…

Lenehan’s lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy.

— But look this way, he said, rose of Castile.

Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped.

She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile. Fretted forlorn, dreamily rose.

— Did she fall or was she pushed? he asked her.

She answered, slighting:

[254] — Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.

Like lady, ladylike.

Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode. Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and hailed him:

— See the conquering hero comes.

Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered hero. See me he might. The seat he sat on: warm. Black wary hecat walked towards Richie Goulding’s legal bag, lifted aloft saluting.

— And I from thee…

— I heard you were round, said Blazes Boylan.

He touched to fair Miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer hair, a bosom and a rose.

Boylan bespoke potions.

— What’s your cry? Glass of bitter? Glass of bitter, please, and a sloegin for me. Wire in yet?

Not yet. At four he. All said four.

Cowley’s red lugs and Adam’s apple in the door of the sheriff’s office. Avoid. Goulding a chance. What is he doing in the Ormond? Car waiting. Wait.

Hello. Where off to? Something to eat? I too was just. In here. What, Ormond? Best value in Dublin. Is that so? Diningroom. Sit tight there. See, not be seen. I think I’ll join you. Come on. Richie led on. Bloom followed bag. Dinner fit for a prince.

Miss Douce reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm, her bust, that all but burst, so high.

— O! O! jerked Lenehan, gasping at each stretch. O!

But easily she seized her prey and led it low in triumph.

— Why don’t you grow? asked Blazes Boylan.

Shebronze, dealing from her jar thick syrupy liquor for his lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and syrupped with her voice:

— Fine goods in small parcels.

That is to say she. Neatly she poured slowsyrupy sloe.

— Here’s fortune, Blazes said.

He pitched a broad coin down. Coin rang.

— Hold on, said Lenehan, till I…

[255] — Fortune, he wished, lifting his bubbled ale.

— Sceptre will win in a canter, he said.

— I plunged a bit, said Boylan winking aud drinking. Not on my own, you know. Fancy of a friend of mine.

Lenehan still drank and grinned at his tilted ale and at Miss Douce’s lips that all but hummed, not shut, the oceansong her lips had trilled. Idolores. The eastern seas.

Clock whirred. Miss Kennnedy passed their way (flower, wonder who gave), bearing away teatray. Clock clacked.

Miss Douce took Boylan’s coin, struck boldly the cashregister. It clanged. Clock clacked. Fair one of Egypt teased and sorted in the till and hummed and handed coins in change. Look to the west. A clack. For me.

— What time is that? asked Blazes Boylan. Four?

O’clock.

Lenehan, small eyes ahunger on her humming, bust ahumming, tugged Blazes Boylan’s elbowsleeve.

— Let’s hear the time, he said.

The bag of Goulding, Colles, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered tables. Aimless he chose with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near the door. Be near. At four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not come: whet appetite. I couldn’t do. Wait, wait. Pat, waiter, waited.

Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure’s skyblue bow and eyes.

— Go on, pressed Lenehan. There’s no-one. He never heard.

— …to Flora’s lips did hie.

High, a high note, pealed in the treble, clear.

Bronzedouce, communing with her rose that sank and rose sought Blazes Boylan’s flower and eyes.

— Please, please.

He pleaded over returning phrases of avowal.

— I could not leave thee…

— Afterwits, Miss Douce promised coyly.

— No, now, urged Lenehan. Sonnez la cloche! O do!There’s no-one.

She looked. Quick. Miss Kenn out of earshot. Sudden bent. Two kindling faces watched her bend.

Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord, and lost and found it faltering.

— Go on! Do! Sonnez!

[256] Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.

— Sonnez!

Smack. She let free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable a woman’s warmhosed thigh.

— La cloche! cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust there.

She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren’t men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.

— You’re the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.

Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drankoff his tiny, chalice, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze.

Yes, bronze from anearby.

— …Sweetheart, goodbye!

— I’m off, said Boylan with impatience.

He slid his chalice brisk away, grasped his change.

— Wait a shake, begged Lenehan, drinking quickly. I wanted to tell you. Tom Rochford…

— Come on to blazes, said Blazes Boylan, going.

Lenehan gulped to go.

— Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I’m coming.

He followed the hasty creaking shoes but stood by nimbly by the threshold, saluting forms, a bulky with a slender.

— How do you do, Mr Dollard?

— Eh? How do? How do? Ben Dollard’s vague bass answered, turning an instant from Father Cowley’s woe. He won’t give you any trouble, Bob. Alf Bergan will speak to the long fellow. We’ll put a barleystraw in that Judas Iscariot’s ear this time.

Sighing, Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing an eyelid.

— Hoho, we will, Ben Dollard yodled jollily. Come on, Simon, give us a ditty. We heard the piano.

Bald Pat, bothered waiter, waited for drink orders, Power for Richie. And Bloom? Let me see. Not make him walk twice. His corns. Four now. How warm this black is. Course nerves a bit. Refracts (is it?) heat. Let me see. Cider. Yes, bottle of cider.

[257] — What’s that? Mr Dedalus said. I was only vamping, man.

— Come on, come on, Ben Dollard called. Begone, dull care. Come, Bob.

He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them (hold that fellow with the: hold him now) into the saloon. He plumped him Dollard on the stool. His gouty paws plumped chords. Plumped stopped abrupt.

Bald Pat in the doorway met tealess gold returning. Bothered he wanted Power and cider. Bronze by the window watched, bronze from afar.

Jingle a tinkle jaunted.

Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He’s off. Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He’s gone. Jingle. Hear.

— Love and war, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. God be with old times.

Miss Douce’s brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten by sunlight. Gone. Pensive (who knows?), smitten (the smiting light), she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down pensive (why did he go so quick when I?) about her bronze, over the bar where bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, eau de Nil.

— Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the Collard grand.

There was.

— A symposium all his own, Mr Dedalus said. The devil wouldn’t stop him. He was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of drink.

— God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment.

They laughed all three. He had no wed. All trio laughed. No wedding garment.

— Our friend Bloom turned in handy that night, Mr Dedalus said. Where’s my pipe by the way?

He wandered back to the bar to the lost chord pipe. Bald Pat carried two diners’ drinks, Richie and Poldy. And Father Cowley laughed again.

— I saved the situation, Ben, I think.

— You did, averred Ben Dollard. I remember those tight trousers too. That was a brilliant idea, Bob.

Father Cowley blushed to his brilliant purply lobes. He saved the situa. Tight trou. Brilliant ide.

— I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano [258] in the coffee palace on Saturdays for a yery trifling consideration and who was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business? Do you remember? We had to search all Holles street to find them till the chap in Keogh’s gave us the number. Remember?

Ben remembered, his broad visage wondering.

— By God she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there.

Mr Dedalus wandered back, pipe in hand.

— Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses. He wouldn’t take any money either. What? Any God’s quantity of cocked hats and boleros and trunkhose. What?

— Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions.

Jingle jaunted down the quays. Blazes sprawled on bounding tyres.

Liver and bacon. Steak and kidney pie. Right, sir. Right, Pat.

Mrs Marrion met him pike hoses. Smell of burn of Paul de Kock. Nice name he.

— What’s this her name was? A buxom lassy. Marion…

— Tweedy.

— Yes. Is she alive?

— And kicking.

— She was a daughter of…

— Daughter of the regiment.

— Yes, begad. I remember the old drummajor.

Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after

— Irish? I don’t know, faith. Is she, Simon?

Puff after stiff, a puff, strong, savoury, crackling.

— Buccinator muscle is… What?… Bit rusty… O, she is… My Irish Molly, O.

He puffed a pungent plumy blast.

— From the rock of Gibraltar… all the way.

They pined in depth of ocean shadow, gold by the beerpull, bronze by maraschino, thoughtful all two, Mina Kennedy, 4 Lismore terrace, Drumcondra with Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent.

Pat served uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said before he ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods’roes while Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney, bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.

[259] Bloom with Goulding, married in silence, ate. Dinners fit for princes.

By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot. [atrot,] with flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the? Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.

Over their voices Dollard bassooned attack, booming over bombarding chords:

— When love absorbs my ardent soul…

Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes.

— War! War! cried Father Cowley. You’re the warrior.

— So I am, Ben Warrior laughed. I was thinking of your landlord. Love or money.

He stopped. He wagged huge beard, huge face over his blunder huge.

— Sure, you’d burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours.

In bearded abundant laughter Dollard shook upon the keyboard. He would.

— Not to mention another membrane, Father Cowley added. Half time, Ben. Amoroso ma non troppo. Let me there.

Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather. They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going? And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn’t say. But it would be in the paper. O, she needn’t trouble. No trouble. She waved about her outspread Independent, searching, the lord lieutenant, her pinnacles of hair slowmoving, lord lieuten. Too much trouble, first gentleman said. O, not in the least. Way he looked that. Lord lieutenant. Gold by bronze heard iron steel.

—. . . . . . . . . . . . my ardent soul

I care not foror the morrow.

In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and war someone is. Ben Dollard’s famous. Night he ran round to us to borrow a dress suit for that concert. Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers. Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed, screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O, saints above, I’m drenched! O, the women in the front row! O, I never laughed so many! Well, of course, that’s what gives him the base barreltone. For instance eunuchs. Wonder who’s playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical. Knows whatever note you play. Bad breath he has, poor chap. Stopped.

[260] Miss Douce, engaging, Lydia Douce, bowed to suave solicitor, George Lidwell, gentleman, entering. Good afternoom. She gave her moist, a lady’s, hand to his firm clasp. Afternoon. Yes, she was back. To the old dingdong again.

— Your friends are inside, Mr Lidwell.

George Lidwell, suave, solicited, held a lydiahand.

Bloom ate liv as said before. Clean here at least. That chap in the Burton, gummy with gristle. No-one here: Goulding and I. Clean tables, flowers, mitres of napkins. Pat to and fro, bald Pat. Nothing to do. Best value in Dub.

Piano again. Cowley it is. Way he sits in to it, like one together, mutual understanding. Tiresome shapers scraping fiddles, eye on the bowend, sawing the’cello, remind you of toothache. Her high long snore. Night we were in the box. Trombone under blowing like a grampus, between the acts, other brass chap unscrewing, emptying spittle. Conductor’s legs too, bagstrousers, jiggedy jiggedy. Do right to hide them.

Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty.

Only the harp. Lovely gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a lovely. Gravy’s rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their harps. I. He. Old. Young.

— Ah, I couldn’t, man, Mr Dedalus said, shy, listless.

Strongly.

— Go on, blast you, Ben Dollard growled. Get it out in bits.

— M’appari, Simon, Father Cowley said.

Down stage he strode some paces, grave, tall in affliction, his long arms outheld. Hoarsely the apple of his throat hoarsed softly. Softly he sang to a dusty seascape there: A Last Farewell. A headland, a ship, a sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the wind upon the headland wind around her.

Cowley sang:

—M’appari tutt’amor:

Il mio sguardo l’incontr…

She waved, unhearing Cowley, her veil to one departing, dear one, to wind, love, speeding sail, return.

— Go on, Simon.

— Ah, sure my dancing days are done, Ben… Well…

Mr Dedalus laid his pipe to rest beside the tuningfork and, sitting, touched the obedient keys.

[261] — No, Simon, Father Cowley turned. Play it in the original. One flat.

The keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused.

Up stage strode Father Cowley.

— Here, Simon. I’ll accompany you, he said. Get up.

By Graham Lemon’s pineapple rock, by Elvery’s elephant jingle jogged. Steak, kidney, liver, mashed at meat fit for princes sat princes Bloom and Goulding. Princes at meat they raised and drank Power and cider.

Most beautiful tenor air ever written, Richie said: Sonambula. He heard Joe Maas sing that one night. Ah, what M’Guckin! Yes. In his way. Choirboy style. Maas was the boy. Massboy. A lyrical tenor if you like. Never forget it. Never.

Tenderly Bloom over liverless bacon saw the tightened features strain. Backache he. Bright’s bright eye. Next item on the programme. Paying the piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile. Sings too: Down among the dead men. Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to the. Not making much hand of it. Best value in. Characteristic of him. Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry water. Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign in dribs and drabs. And when he’s wanted not a farthing. Screwed refusing to pay his fare. Curious types.

Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived, never. In the gods of the old Royal with little Peake. And when the first note.

Speech paused on Richie’s lips.

Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all. Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good memory.

— Which air is that? asked Leopold Bloom.

— All is lost now.

Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost.

Bloom bent leopold ear, turning a fringe of doyley down under the vase. Order. Yes, I remember. Lovely air. In sleep she went to him. Innocence in the moon Still hold her back. Brave, don’t know their danger. Call name. [262] Touch water. Jingle jaunty. Too late. She longed to go. That’s why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost.

— A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.

Never in all his life had Richie Goulding.

He knows it well too. Or he feels. Still harping on his daughter. Wise child that knows her father, Dedalus said. Me?

Bloom askance over liverless saw. Face of the all is lost. Rollicking Richie once. Jokes old stale now. Wagging his ear. Napkinring in his eye. Now begging letters he sends his son with. Crosseyed Walter sir I did sir. Wouldn’t trouble only I was expecting some money. Apologise.

Piano again. Sounds better than last time I heard. Tuned probably. Stopped again.

Dollard and Cowley still urged the lingering singer out with it.

— With it, Simon.

— It, Simon.

— Ladies and gentlemen, I am most deeply obliged by your kind solicitations.

— It, Simon.

— I have no money but if you will lend me your attention I shall endeavour to sing to you of a heart bowed down.

By the sandwichbell in screening shadow, Lydia her bronze and rose, a lady’s grace, gave and withheld: as in cool glaucous eau de Nil Mina to tankards two her pinnacles of gold.

The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord longdrawn, expectant drew a voice away.

— When first I saw that form endearing.

Richie turned.

— Si Dedalus’ voice, he said.

Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.

— Sorrow from me seemed to depart.

Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered [263] lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw, lost Richie, Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn’t expect it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.

Love that is singing: love’s old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. Love’s old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.

— Full of hope and all delighted…

Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at his feet when will we meet? My head it simply. Jingle all delighted. He can’t sing for tall hats. Your head it simply swurls. Perfumed for him. What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last look at mirror always before she answers the door. The hall. There? How do you? I do well. There? What? Or? Phial of cachous, kissing comfits, in her satchel. Yes? Hands felt for the opulent.

Alas! The voice rose, sighing, changed: loud, full, shining, proud.

— But alas, ’twas idle dreaming…

Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out his wife: now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he doesn’t break down. Keep a trot for the avenue. His hands and feet sing too. Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.

Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling, Full it throbbed. That’s the chat. Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.

Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind.

Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.

Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o’er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love.

— … ray of hope…

Beaming. Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse unsqueaked a ray of hopk.

Martha it is. Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel’s song. Lovely [264] name you have. Can’t write. Accept my little pres. Play on her heartstrings pursestrings too. She’s a. I called you naughty boy. Still the name: Martha. How strange! Today.

The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to wait. How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part, how look, form, word charmed him Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom’s heart.

Wish I could see his face, though. Explain better. Why the barber in Drago’s alway’s looked my face when I spoke his face in the glass. Still hear it better here than in the bar though farther.

— Each graceful look…

First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon’s in Terenure. Yellow, black lace she wore. Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her. Fate. Round and round slow. Quick round. We two. All looked. Halt. Down she sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.

— Charmed my eye…

Singing. Waiting she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat warbling. First I saw. She thanked me. Why did she me? Fate. Spanishy eyes. Under a peartree alone patio this hour in old Madrid one side in shadow Dolores shedolores. At me. Luring. Ah, alluring.

— Martha! Ah, Martha!

Quitting all langour Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony. In cry of lionel loneliness that she should know, must Martha feel. For only her he waited. Where? Here there try there here all try where. Somewhere.

—Co-me, thou lost one!

Co-me thou dear one!

Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort me. Martha, chestnote, return.

— Come!

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of [265] the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…

— To me!

Siopold!

Consumed.

Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her, you too, me, us.

— Bravo! Clapclap. Goodman, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said, cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley, first gent with tank and bronze Miss Douce and gold Miss Mina.

Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before. Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Matthew, jaunted as said before just now. Atrot, in heat, heatseated. Cloche. Sonnez la. Cloche. Sonnez la. Slower the mare went up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare.

An afterclang of Cowley’s chords closed, died on the air made richer.

And Richie Goulding drank his Power and Leopold Bloom his cider drank, Lidwell his Guinness, second gentleman said they would partake of two more tankards if she did not mind. Miss Kennedy smirked, disserving, coral lips, at first, at second. She did not mind.

— Seven days in jail, Ben Dollard said, on bread and water. Then you’d sing, Simon, like a garden thrush.

Lionel Simon, singer, laughed. Father Bob Cowley played. Mina Kennedy served. Second gentleman paid. Tom Kernan strutted in Lydia, admired, admired. But Bloom sang dumb.

Admiring.

Richie, admiring, descanted on that man’s glorious voice. He remembered one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang ’Twas rank and fame: in Ned Lambert’s ’twas. Good God he never heard in all his life a note like that he never did then false one we had better part so clear so God he never heard since love lives not a clinking voice ask Lambert he can tell you too.

Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the night, Si in Ned Lambert’s, Dedalus house, sang ’Twas rank and fame.

He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, [266] of the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing ’Twas rank and fame in his, Ned Lambert’s house.

Brothers-in-law: relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more. The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky cords. Wonderful, more than all the others.

That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It’s in the silence you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.

Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hands and with slack fingers plucked the slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged. While Goulding talked of Barraclough’s voice production, while Tom Kernan, harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement, talked to listening Father Cowley who played a voluntary, who nodded as he played. While big Ben Dollard talked with Simon Dedalus lighting, who nodded as he smoked, who smoked.

Thou lost one. All songs on that theme. Yet more Bloom stretched his string. Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat. Human life. Dignam. Ugh, that rat’s tail wriggling! Five bob I gave. Corpus paradisum. Corncrake croaker: belly like a poisoned pup. Gone. They sing. Forgotten. I too. And one day she with. Leave her: get tired. Suffer then. Snivel. Big Spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair un comb: ’d.

Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not happy in your? Twang. It snapped.

Jingle into Dorset street.

Miss Douce withdrew her satiny arm, reproachful, pleased.

— Don’t make half so free, said she, till we are better acquainted.

George Lidwell told her really and truly: but she did not believe.

First gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him was that so. And second tankard told her so. That that was so.

Miss Douce, Miss Lydia, did not believe: Miss Kennedy, Mina, did not believe: George Lidwell, no: Miss Dou did not: the first, the first: gent with the tank: believe, no, no: did not, Miss Kenn: Lidlydiawell: the tank.

Better write it here. Quills in the postoffice chewed and twisted.

Bald Pat at a sign drew nigh. A pen and ink. He went. A pad. He went. A pad to blot. He heard, deaf Pat.

— Yes, Mr Bloom, said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is. [267] Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper, envelope: unconcerned. It’s so characteristic.

— Grandest number in the whole opera. Goulding said.

— It is, Bloom said.

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is.

Instance he’s playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like till you hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right: then hear chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks over barrels, through wirefences, obstacle race. Time makes the tune. Question of mood you’re in. Still always nice to hear. Except scales up and down, girls learning. Two together nextdoor neighbours. Ought to invent dummy pianos for that. Blumenlied I bought for her. The name. Playing it slow, a girl, night I came home, the girl. Door of the stables near Cecilia street. Milly no taste. Queer because we both I mean.

Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went.

It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben. He heard them as a boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles. Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.

Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying.

Down the edge of his Freeman baton ranged Bloom’s your other eye, scanning for where did I see that. Callan, Coleman, Dignam Patrick. Heigho! Heigho! Fawcett. Aha! Just I was looking…

Hope he’s not looking, cute as a rat. He held unfurled his Freeman. Can’t see now. Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur: dear sir. Dear Henry wrote: dear Mady. Got your lett and flow. Hell did I put? Some pock or oth. It is utterl imposs. Underline imposs. To write today.

[268] Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting fingers on flat pad Pat brought.

On. Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accept my poor little pres enclos. Ask her no answ. Hold on. Five Dig. Two about here. Penny the gulls. Elijah is com. Seven Davy Byrne’s. Is eight about. Say half a crown. My poor little pres: p. o. two and six. Write me a long. Do you despise? Jingle, have you the? So excited. Why do you call me naught? You naughty too? O, Mairy lost the pin of her. Bye for today. Yes, yes, will tell you. Want to. To keep it up. Call me that other. Other world she wrote. My patience are exhaust. To keep it up. You must believe. Believe. The tank. It. Is. True.

Folly am I writing? Husbands don’t. That’s marriage does, their wives. Because I’m away from. Suppose. But how? She must. Keep young. If she found out. Card in my high grade ha. No, not tell all. Useless pain. If they don’t see. Woman. Sauce for the gander.

A hackney car, number three hundred and twentyfour, driver Barton James of number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, on which sat a fare, a young gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by George Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and wearing a straw hat very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one Great Brunswick street, hatter. Eh? This is the jingle that joggled and jingled. By Dlugacz’ porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a gallantbuttocked mare.

— Answering an ad? keen Richie’s eyes asked Bloom.

— Yes, Mr Bloom said. Town traveller. Nothing doing, I expect.

Bloom mur: best references. But Henry wrote: it will excite me. You know now. In haste. Henry. Greek ee. Better add postcript. What is he playing now? Improvising intermezzo. P. S. The rum tum tum. How will you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want to. Know. O. Course if I didn’t I wouldn’t ask. La la la ree. Trails off there sad in minor. Why minor sad? Sign H. They like sad tail at end. P. P. S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today. La ree. So lonely. Dee.

He blotted quick on pad of Pat. Envel. Address. Just copy out of paper. Murmured: Messrs Callan, Coleman and Co, limited. Henry wrote:

Miss Martha Clifford

c/o P. O.

Dolphin’s barn lane

Dublin.

[269] Blot over the other so he can’t read. Right. Idea prize titbit. Something detective read off blottingpad. Payment at the rate of guinea per col. Matcham often thinks the laughing witch. Poor Mrs Purefoy. U. p.: up.

Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.

In Gerard’s rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.

Done anyhow. Postal order stamp. Postoffice lower down. Walk now. Enough. Barney Kiernan’s I promised to meet them. Dislike that job. House of mourning. Walk. Pat! Doesn’t hear. Deaf beetle he is.

Car near there now. Talk. Talk. Pat! Doesn’t. Settling those napkins. Lot of ground he must cover in the day. Paint face behind on him then he’d be two. Wish they’d sing more. Keep my mind off.

Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.

Douce now. Douce Lydia. Bronze and rose.

She had a gorgeous, simply gorgeous, time. And look at the lovely shell she brought.

To the end of the bar to him she bore lightly the spiked and winding seahorn that he, George Lidwell, solicitor, might hear.

— Listen! she bade him.

Under Tom Kernan’s ginhot words the accompanist wove music slow. Authentic fact. How Walter Bapty lost his voice. Well, sir, the husband took him by the throat. Scoundrel, said he. You’ll sing no more lovesongs. He did, sir Tom. Bob Cowley wove. Tenors get wom. Cowley lay back.

Ah, now he heard, she holding it to his ear. Hear! He heard. Wonderful. She held it to her own and through the sifted light pale gold in contrast glided. To hear.

Tap.

Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.

Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.

[270] Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside. Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream first make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn’t forget. Fever near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over: shell with seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks their mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet, a yashmak. Find the way in. A cave. No admittance except on business.

The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it’s a sea. Corpuscule islands.

Wonderful really. So distinct. Again. George Lidwell held its murmur, hearing: then laid it by, gently.

— What are the wild waves saying? he asked her, smiled.

Charming, seasmiling and unanswering Lydia on Lidwell smiled.

Tap.

By Larry O’Rourke’s, by Larry, bold Larry O’, Böylan swayed and Boylan turned.

From the forsaken shell Miss Mina glided to her tankard waiting. No, she was not so lonely archly Miss Douce’s head let Mr Lidwell know. Walks in the moonlight by the sea. No, not alone. With whom? She nobly answered: with a gentleman friend.

Bob Cowley’s twinkling fingers in the treble played again. The landlord has the prior. A little time. Long John. Big Ben. Lightly he played a light bright tinkling measure for tripping ladies, arch and smiling, and for their gallants, gentlemen friends. One: one, one, one: two, one, three, four.

Sea. [Sea,] wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattle market, cocks, hens don’t crow, snakes hissss. There’s music everywhere. Ruttledge’s door: ee creaking. No, that’s noise. Minuet of Don Giovanni he’s playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, look: you look at us.

That’s joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows you are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then know.

M’Coy valise. My wife and your wife. Squealing cat. Like tearing silk. When she talks like the clapper of a bellows. They can’t manage men’s intervals. Gap in their voices too. Fill me. I’m warm, dark, open. Molly in quis est homo: Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear. Want a woman who can deliver the goods.

[271] Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue clocks came light to earth.

O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hiss. Now. Maybe now. Before.

One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock.

Tap.

— Qui sdegno, Ben, said Father Cowley.

— No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered, The Croppy Boy. Our native Doric.

— Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. Good men and true.

— Do, do, they begged in one.

I’ll go. Here, Pat, return. Come. He came, he came, he did not stay. To me. How much?

— What key? Six sharps?

— F sharp major, Ben Dollard said.

Bob Cowley’s outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords.

Must go prince Bloom told Richie prince. No, Richie said. Yes, must. Got money somewhere. He’s on for a razzle backache spree. Much? He seehears lipspeech. One and nine. Penny for yourself. Here. Give him twopence tip. Deaf, bothered. But perhaps he has wife and family waiting, waiting Patty come home. Hee hee hee hee. Deaf wait while they wait.

But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic.

The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth’s fatigue made grave approach, and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men and true. The priest he sought, with him would he speak a word.

Tap.

Ben Dollard’s voice base barreltone. Doing his level best to say it. Croak of vast manless moonless womoonless marsh. Other comedown. Big ships’ chandler’s business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships’ lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him.

[272] The priest’s at home. A false priest’s servant bade him welcome. Step in. The holy father. Curlycues of chords.

Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days in. Hushaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die.

The voice of warning, solemn warning, told them the youth had entered a lonely hall, told them how solemn fell his footstep there, told them the gloomy chamber, the vested priest sitting to shrive.

Decent soul. Bit addled now. Thinks he’ll win in Answers poets’ picture puzzle. We hand you crisp five pound note. Bird sitting hatching in a nest. Lay of the last minstrel he thought it was. See blank tee what domestic animal? Tee dash ar most courageous mariner. Good voice he has still. No eunuch yet with all his belongings.

Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened.

The chords harped slower.

The voice of penance and of grief came slow, embellished tremulous. Ben’s contrite beard confessed: in nomine Domini, in God’s name. He knelt. He beat his hand upon his breast, confessing: mea culpa.

Latin again. That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the communion corpus for those women. Chap in the mortuary, coffin or coffey, corpusnomine. Wonder where that rat is by now. Scrape.

Tap.

They listened: tankards and Miss Kennedy, George Lidwell eyelid well expressive, fullbusted satin. Kernan, Si.
  The sighing voice of sorrow sang. His sins. Since easter he had cursed three times. You bitch’s bast. And once at masstime he had gone to play. Once by the churchyard he had passed and for his mother’s rest he had not prayed. A boy. A croppy boy.

Bronze, listening by the beerpull, gazed far away. Soulfully. Doesn’t half know I’m. Molly great dab at seeing anyone looking.

Bronze gazed far sideways. Mirror there. Is that best side of her face? They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate.

Cockcarracarra.

What do they think when they hear music. Way to catch rattlesnakes. Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too. Custom his country perhaps. That’s music too. Not as bad as it sounds. Tootling. [273] Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses, helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin’s name.

She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore, lowcut, belongings on show. Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question. Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle, staring down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. Beauty of music you must hear twice. Nature woman half a look. God made the country man the tune. Met him pike hoses. Philosophy. O rocks!

All gone. All fallen. At the siege of Ross his father, at Gorey all his brothers fell To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he would. Last of his name and race.

I too, last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?

He bore no hate.

Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old.

Big Ben his voice unfolded. Great voice Richie Goulding said, a flush struggling in his pale, to Bloom, soon old but when was young.

Ireland comes now. My country above the king. She listens. Who fears to speak of nineteen four? Time to be shoving. Looked enough.

— Bless me, father, Dollard the croppy cried. Bless me and let me go.

Tap.

Bloom looked, unblessed to go. Got up to kill: on eighteen bob a week. Fellows shell out the dibs. Want to keep your weathereye open. Those girls, those lovely. By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl’s romance. Letters read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy’s own Mumpsypum. Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you.

Low sank the music, air and words. Then hastened. The false priest rustling soldier from his cassock. A yeoman captain. They know it all by heart. The thrill they itch for. Yeoman cap.

Tap. Tap.

Thrilled, she listened, bending in sympathy to hear.

Blank face. Virgin should say: or fingered only. Write something on it: page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young. Even admire themselves. See. Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman, a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes all women. Goddess I didn’t see. [274] They want it: not too much polite. That’s why he gets them. Gold in your pocket, brass in your face. With look to look: songs without words. Molly that hurdygurdy boy. She knew he meant the monkey was sick. Or because so like the Spanish. Understand animals too that way. Solomon did. Gift of nature.

Ventriloquise. My lips closed. Think in my stom. What?

Will? You? I. Want. You. To.

With hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed. Swelling in apoplectic bitch’s bastard. A good thought, boy, to come. One hour’s your time to live, your last.

Tap. Tap.

Thrill now. Pity they feel. To wipe away a tear for martyrs. For all things dying, want to, dying to, die. For that all things born. Poor Mrs Purefoy. Hope she’s over. Because their wombs.

A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom’s wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly, sank red rose. Heartbeats her breath: breath that is life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.

But look. The bright stars fade. O rose! Castile. The morn. Ha. Lidwell. For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her from here though. Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties.

On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, repassed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring.

With a cock with a carra.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing.

The chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be.

Get out before the end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where’s my hat. Pass by her. Can leave that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk, walk, walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisntdall Farrell. Waaaaaaalk.

Well, I must be. Are you off? Yrfmstbyes. Blmstup. O’er ryehigh blue. Bloom stood up. Ow. Soap feeling rather sticky behind. Must have sweated: music[.]  That lotion, remember. Well, so long. High grade. Card inside, yes.

[275] By deaf Pat in the doorway, straining ear, Bloom passed.

At Geneva barrack that young man died. At Passage was his body laid. Dolor! O, he dolores! The voice of the mournful chanter called to dolorous prayer.

By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties, by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom, soft Bloom, I feel so lonely Bloom.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Pray for him, prayed the bass of Dollard. You who hear in peace. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear, good men, good people. He was the croppy boy.

Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway heard growls and roars of bravo, fat blackslapping, their boots all treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to wash it down. Glad I avoided.

— Come on, Ben, Simon Dedalus said. By God, you’re as good as ever you were.

— Better, said Tomgin Kernan. Most trenchant rendition of that ballad, upon my soul and honour it is.

— Lablache, said Father Cowley.

Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes in the air.

Big Benaben Dollard. Big Benben. Big Benben.

Rrr.

And deepmoved all, Simon trumping compassion from foghorn nose, all laughing, they brought him forth, Ben Dollard, in right good cheer.

— You’re looking rubicund, George Lidwell said.

Miss Douce composed her rose to wait.

— Ben machree, said Mr Dedalus, clapping Ben’s fat back shoulderblade. Fit as a fiddle only he has a lot of adipose tissue concealed about his person.

Rrrrrrsss.

— Fat of death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled.

Richie rift in the lute alone sat: Goulding, Collis, Ward. Uncertainly he waited. Unpaid Pat too.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Miss Mina Kennedy brought near her lips to ear of tankard one.

— Mr Dollard, they murmured low.

[276] — Dollard, murmured tankard.

Tank one believed: Miss Kenn when she: that doll he was: she doll: the tank.

He murmured that he knew the name. The name was familiar to him, that is to say. That was to say he had heard the name of Dollard, was it? Dollard, yes.

Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard. He sang that song lovely, murmured Mina. And The last rose of summer was a lovely song. Mina loved that song. Tankard loved the song that Mina.

’Tis the last rose of summer dollard left Bloom felt wind wound round inside.

Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J’s one and eightpence too. Get shut of it. Dodge round by Greek street. Wish I hadn’t promised to meet. Freer in air. Music. Gets on your nerves. Beerpull. Her hand that rocks the cradle rules the. Ben Howth. That rules the world.

Far. Far. Far. Far.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady, with sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses went Poldy on.

Tap blind walked tapping by the tap the curbstone tapping, tap by tap.

Cowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. Better give way only half way the way of a man with a maid. Instance enthusiasts. All ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty. You daren’t budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop. Fiddlefaddle about notes.

All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you never know exac. Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year. Queer up there in the cockloft alone with stops and locks and keys. Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing (want to have wadding or something in his no don’t she cried), then all of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.

Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom’s little wee.

— Was he? Mr Dedalus said, returning, with fetched pipe. I was with him this morning at poor little Paddy Dignam’s…

— Ay, the Lord have mercy on him.

[277] — By the bye there’s a tuningfork in there on the…

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

— The wife has a fine voice. Or had. What? Lidwell asked.

— O, that must be the tuner, Lydia said to Simonlionel first I saw, forgot it when he was here.

Blind he was she told George Lidwell second I saw. And played so exquisitely, treat to hear. Exquisite contrast: bronzelid minagold.

— Shout! Ben Dollard shouted, pouring[.]  Sing out!

— ’lldo! cried Father Cowley.

Rrrrrr.

I feel I want…

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

— Very, Mr Dedalus said, staring hard at a headless sardine.

Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last sardine of summer. Bloom alone.

— Very, he stared. The lower register, for choice.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Bloom went by Barry’s. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had. Twentyfour solicitors in that one house. Litigation. Love one another. Piles of parchment. Messrs Pick and Pocket have power of attorney. Goulding, Collis, Ward.

But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Micky Rooney’s band. Wonder how it first struck him. Sitting at home after pig’s cheek and cabbage nursing it in the armchair[.]  Rehearsing his band part. Pom. Pompedy. Jolly for the wife. Asses’ skins. Welt them through life, then wallop after death. Pom. Wallop. Seems to be what you call yashmak or I mean kismet. Fate.

Tap. Tap. A stripling, blind, with a tapping cane, came taptaptapping by Daly’s window where a mermaid, hair all streaming (but he couldn’t see), blew whiffs of a mermaid (blind couldn’t), mermaid coolest whiff of all.

Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its own, don’t you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? Cloche. Sonnez la! Shepherd his pipe. Policeman a whistle. Locks and keys! Sweep! Four o’clock’s all’s well! Sleep! All is lost now. Drum? Pompedy. Wait, I know. Towncrier, bumbailiff. Long John. Waken the dead. Pom. Dignam. Poor little nominedomine. Pom. [278] It is music, I mean of course it’s all pom pom pom very much what they call da capo. Still you can hear. As we march, we march along, march along. Pom.

I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of custom shah of Persia. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same he must have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap. Muffled up. Wonder who was that chap at the grave in the brown macin. O, the whore of the lane!

A frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the day along the quay towards Mr Bloom. When first he saw that form endearing. Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane. Horn. Who had the? Heehaw. Shesaw. Off her beat here. What is she? Hope she. Psst! Any chance of your wash. Knew Molly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be with you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke. That appointment we made. Knowing we’d never, well hardly ever. Too dear too near to home sweet home. Sees me, does she? Looks a fright in the day. Face like dip. Damn her! O, well, she has to live like the rest. Look in here.

In Lionel Marks’s antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel Leopold dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged candlestick melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags. Bargain: six bob. Might learn to play. Cheap. Let her pass. Course everything is dear if you don’t want it. That’s what good salesman is. Make you buy what he wants to sell. Chap sold me the Swedish razor he shaved me with. Wanted to charge me for the edge he gave it. She’s passing now. Six bob.

Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund.

Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia’s tempting last rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth: Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and Big Ben Dollard.

Tap. A youth entered a lonely Ormond hall.

Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks’s window. Robert Emmet’s last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.

— True men like you men.

— Ay, ay, Ben.

— Will lift your glass with us.

They lifted.

Tschink. Tschunk.

Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee[.]  He did not see.

[279] Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her place among.

Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff. Oo. Rrpr.

Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaaaa. Written. I have.

Pprrpffrrppfff.

Done.

 ® 

[280] I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.

— Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?

— Soot’s luck, says Joe. Who’s the old ballocks you were taking to?

— Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I’m on two minds not to give that fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and ladders.

— What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.

— Devil a much, says I. There is a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the garrison church at the corner of Chicken Lane — old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him — lifted any God’s quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a hop of my thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury street.

— Circumcised! says Joe.

— Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I’m hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can’t get a penny out of him.

— That the lay you’re on now? says Joe.

— Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful debts. But that’s the most notorious bloody robber you’d meet in a day’s walk and the face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain. Tell him, says he, I dare him, says he and I doubledare him to send you round here again or if he does, says he, I’ll have him summonsed up before the court, so I will, for trading [281] without a licence. And he after stuffing himself till he’s fit to burst! Jesus, I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. He drink me my teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys?

For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin’s parade, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty, Esquire, of 29 Arbour Hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings per pound avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal, at three pence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the said vendor of one pound five shillings and six pence sterling for value received which amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no pence sterling: and the said nonperishable goods shall not be pawned or pledged or sold or otherwise alienated by the said purchaser but shall be and remain and be held to be the sole and exclusive property of the said vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the said amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser to the said vendor in the manner herein set forth as this day hereby agreed between the said vendor his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the one part and the said purchaser, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the other part.

— Are you a strict t. t.? says Joe.

— Not taking anything between drinks, says I.

— What about paying our respects to our friend? says Joe.

— Who? says I. Sure, he’s in John of God’s off his head, poor man.

— Drinking his own stuff? says Joe.

— Ay, says I. Whisky and water on the brain.

— Come around to Barney Kiernan’s, says Joe. I want to see the citizen.

— Barney mavourneen’s be it, says I. Anything strange or wonderful, Joe?

— Not a word, says Joe. I was up at that meeting in the City Arms

— What was that, Joe? says I.

— Cattle traders, says Joe, about the foot and mouth disease. I want to give the citizen the hard word about it.

So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the courthouse talking of one thing or another. Decent fellow Joe when he has it but sure like that he never has it. Jesus, I couldn’t get over that bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber. For trading without a licence, says he.

[282] In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings, creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth sleek Leinster and of Cruachan’s land and of Armagh the splendid and of the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.

And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for that purpose and thither come all herds and fatlings and first fruits of that land for O’Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, a chieftain descended from chieftains. Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of irridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and pumets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.

I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him. Come out here, Geraghty, you notarious bloody hill and dale robber!

And by that way wend the herds innumerable of bellwethers and flushed ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium steers and roaring mares and polled calves and longwools and storesheep and Cuffe’s prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and the various different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus heifers and polly bullocks of immaculate [283] pedigree together with prime premiated milchcows and beeves: and there is ever heard a trampling, cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting, champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs and heavyhooved kine from pasturelands of Lush and Rush and Carrickmines and from the streamy vales of Thomond, from M’Gillicuddy’s reeks the inaccessible and lordly Shannon the unfathomable, and from the gentle declivities of the place of the race of Kiar, their udders distended with superabundance of milk and butts of butter and rennets of cheese and farmer’s firkins and targets of lamb and crannocks of corn and oblong eggs, in great hundreds, various in size, the agate with the dun.

So we turned into Barney Kiernan’s and there sure enough was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink.

— There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.

The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I’m told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a licence.

— Stand and deliver, says he.

— That’s all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.

— Pass, friends, says he.

Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:

— What’s your opinion of the times?

Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to the occasion.

— I think the markets are on a rise, say he, sliding his hand down his fork.

So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:

— Foreign wars is the cause of it.

And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:

— It’s the Russians wish to tyrannise.

— Arrah, give over your bloody codding Joe, says I, I’ve a thirst on me I wouldn’t sell for half a crown.

— Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.

— Wine of the country, says he.

— What’s yours? says Joe.

[284] — Ditto Mac Anaspey, says I.

— Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how’s the old heart, citizen? says he.

— Never better, a chara, says he. What Garry? Are we going to win? Eh?

And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.

He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by a girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beast. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the Ardri Malachi, Art Mac Murragh, Shane O’Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Red Jim Mac Dermott, Soggarth Eoghan O’Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M’Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal Mac Mahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, [285] the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn’t, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo, Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Coileen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O’Sullivan Beare. A couched spear of acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone.

So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid. O, as true as I’m telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.

— And there’s more where that came from, says he.

— Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? say I?

— Sweat of my brow, says Joe. ’Twas the prudent member gave me the wheeze.

— I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and Greek street with his cod’s eye counting up all the guts of the fish.

Who comes through Michan’s land, bedight in sable armour? O’Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory’s son: he of the prudent soul.

— For the old woman of Prince’s street, says the citizen, the subsidised organ. The pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this blasted rag, says he. Look at this, says he. The Irish Independent, if you please, founded by Parnell to be the workingman’s friend. Listen to the births and deaths in the Irish all for Ireland Independent and I’ll thank you and the marriages.

And he starts reading them out:

[286] — Gordon, Barnfield Crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne’s on Sea, the wife of William T. Redmayne, of a son. How’s that, eh? Wright and Flint, Vincent and Gillett to Rotha Marion daughter of Rosa and the late George Alfred Gillett 179 Clapham Road, Stockwell, Playwood and Ridsdale at Saint Jude’s Kensington by the very reverend Dr Forrest, Dean of Worcester, eh? Deaths. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr, Stoke Newington of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat house, Chepstow…

— I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.

— Cockburn. Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of the admiralty: Miller, Tottenham, aged eightyfive: Welsh, June 12, at 35 Canning Street, Liverpool, Isabella Helen. How’s that for a national press, eh, my brown son! How’s that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?

— Ah, well, says Joe, handing round the boose. Thanks be to God they had the start of us. Drink that, citizen.

— I will, says he, honourable person.

— Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.

Ah! Ow! Don’t be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.

And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife, a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race.

Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door aud hid behind Barney’s snug, squeezed up with the laughing, and who was sitting up there in the corner that I hadn’t seen snoring drunk, blind to the world, only Bob Doran. I didn’t know what was up and Alf kept making signs out of the door. And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bath slippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman trotting like a poodle. I thought Alf would split.

— Look at him, says he. Breen. He’s traipsing all round Dublin with a postcard someone sent him with u. p.: up on it to take a li…

And he doubled up.

— Take a what? says I.

— Libel action, says he, for ten thousand pounds.

— O hell! says I.

[287] The bloody mongrel began to growl that’d put the fear of God in you seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs.

— Bi i dho husht, says he.

— Who? says Joe.

— Breen, says Alf. He was in John Henry Menton’s and then he went round to Collis and Ward’s and then Tom Rochford met him and sent him round to the subsheriff’s for a lark. O God, I’ve a pain laughing. U. p: up. The long fellow gave him an eye as good as a process and now the bloody old lunatic is gone round to Green Street to look for a G. man.

— When is long John going to hang that fellow in Mountjoy? says Joe.

— Bergan, says Bob Doran, waking up. Is that Alf Bergan?

— Yes, says Alf. Hanging? Wait till I show you. Here, Terry, give us a pony. That bloody old fool! Ten thousand pounds. You should have seen long John’s eye. U. p…

And he started laughing.

— Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran? Is that Bergan?

— Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.

Terence O’Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born, that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals.

But he, the young chief of the O’Bergan’s, could ill brook to be outdone in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon of costliest bronze. Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen the image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of Brunswick, Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions beyond the sea, queen, defender of the faith, Empress of India, even she, who bore rule, a victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for they knew and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, the pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop.

[288] — What’s that bloody freemason doing, says the citizen, prowling up and down outside?

— What’s that? says Joe.

— Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. Talking about hanging. I’ll show you something you never saw. Hangmens’ letters. Look at here.

So he took a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes out of his pocket.

— Are you codding? say I.

— Honest injun, says Alf. Read them.

So Joe took up the letters.

— Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran.

So I saw there was going to be a bit of a dust Bob’s a queer chap when the porter’s up in him so says I just to make talk:

— How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf?

— I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel Street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that…

— You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

— With Dignam, says Alf.

— Is it Paddy? says Joe.

— Yes, says Alf. Why?

— Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe.

— Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf.

— Ay, says Joe.

— Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.

— Who’s dead? says Bob Doran.

— You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

— What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five… What?… and Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s… What? Dignam dead?

— What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who’s talking about…?

— Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are.

— Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.

— Paddy? says Alf.

— Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.

— Good Christ! says Alf.

Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.

[289] In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus. Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he stated that he was now on the path of prālāyā or return but was still submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the lower astral levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations in the great divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities of atmic development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped with every modern home comfort such as tālāfānā, ālāvātār, hātākāldā, wātāklāsāt and that the highest adepts were steeped in waves of volupcy of the very purest nature. Having requested a quart of buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the wrong side of Māyā to acknowledge the true path for it was reported in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the eastern angle where the ram has power. It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C. K. doesn’t pile it on. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O’Neill’s popular funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been responsible for the carrying out of the interment arrangements. Before departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen’s to be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known.

Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was intimated that this had given satisfaction.

He is gone from mortal haunts: O’Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.

[290] — There he is again, says the citizen, staring out.

— Who? says I.

— Bloom, says he. He’s on point duty up and down there for the last ten minutes.

And, begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slidder off again.

Little Alf was knocked bawways. Faith, he was.

— Good Christ! says he. I could have sworn it was him.

And says Bob Doran, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest blackguard in Dublin when he’s under the influence.

— Who said Christ is good?

— I beg your parsnips, says Alf.

— Is that a good Christ, says Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy Dignam?

— Ah, well, says Alf, trying to pass it off. He’s over all his troubles.

But Bob Doran shouts out of him.

— He’s a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.

Terry came down and tipped him the wink to keep quiet, that they didn’t want that kind of talk in a respectable licensed premises. And Bob Doran starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you’re there.

— The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character.

The tear is bloody near your eye. Talking through his bloody hat. Fitter for him to go home to the little sleepwalking bitch he married, Mooney, the bumbailiff’s daughter, Mother kept a kip in Hardwicke street that used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that was stopping there at two in the morning without a stitch on her, exposing her person, open to all comers, fair field and no favour.

— The noblest, the truest, says he. And he’s gone, poor little Willy, poor little Paddy Dignam.

And mournful and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that beam of heaven.

Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round the door.

— Come in, come on, he won’t eat you, says the citizen.

So Bloom slopes in with his cod’s eye on the dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there.

— O, Christ M’Keown, says Joe, reading one of the letters. Listen to this, will you?

[291] And he starts reading out one.

7, Hunter Street,

Liverpool.

To the High Sheriff of Dublin,

Dublin.

Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of Febuary 1900 and i hanged…

— Show us, Joe, says I.

— … private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in Pentonville prison and i was assistant when…

— Jesus, says I.

— … Billington executed the awful murderer Toad Smith…

The citizen made a grab at the letter.

— Hold hard, says Joe, i have a special nack of putting the noose once in he can’t get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my terms is five ginnees.

H. Rumbold,

Master Barber.

— And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.

— And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe. Here, says he, take them to hell out of my sight, Alf. Hello, Bloom, says he, what will you have?

So they started arguing about the point, Bloom saying he wouldn’t and couldn’t and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well he’d just take a cigar. Gob, he’s a prudent member and no mistake.

— Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe.

And Alf was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card with a black border round it.

— There all barbers, says he, from the black country that would hang their own fathers for five quid down and travelling expenses.

And he was telling us there’s two fellows waiting below to pull his heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob a skull.

In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Their deadly coil they grasp: yea, and therein they lead to Erebus whatsoever wight hath done a deed of blood for I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.

[292] So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business and the old dog smelling him all the time I’m told those Jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don’t know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.

— There’s one thing it hasn’t a deterrent effect on, says Alf.

— What’s that? says Joe.

— The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged, says Alf.

— That so? says Joe.

— God’s truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker.

— Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said.

— That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It’s only a natural phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the…

And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.

The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved traditions of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres, causing the pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenetive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis.

So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninetyeight and Joe with him about all the fellows that were hanged, drawn and transported for the cause by drumhead courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that and the other. Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new dog so he ought. Mangy ravenous brute sniffling and sneezing all round the place and scratching his scabs and round be goes to Bob Doran that was standing Alf a half one sucking up for what he could get. So of course Bob Doran starts doing the bloody fool with him:

[293] — Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy. Give us the paw here! Give us the paw!

Arrah! bloody end to the paw he’d paw and Alf trying to keep him from tumbling off the bloody stool atop of the bloody old dog and he talking all kinds of drivel about training by kindness and thoroughbred dog and intelligent dog: give you the bloody pip. Then he starts scraping a few bits of old biscuit out of the bottom of a Jacob’s tin he told Terry to bring. Gob, he golloped it down like old boots and his tongue hanging out of him a yard long for more. Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody mongrel.

And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and she’s far from the land. And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon! The fat heap he married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley. Time they were stopping up in the City Arms Pisser Burke told me there was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking the lout out for a walk. And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and, by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of alcohol and by herrings if the three women didn’t near roast him it’s a queer story, the old one, Bloom’s wife and Mrs O’Dowd that kept the hotel. Jesus, I had to laugh at Pisser Burke taking them off chewing the fat and Bloom with his but don’t you see? and but on the other hand. And sure, more be token, the lout I’m told was in Power’s after, the blender’s, round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five times in the week after drinking his way through all the samples in the bloody establishment. Phenomenon!

— The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom.

— Ay, ay, says Joe.

— You don’t grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is…

— Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us.

The last farewell was affecting in the extreme. From the belfries far and near the funereal deathbell tolled unceasingly while all around the gloomy [294] precincts rolled the ominous warning of a hundred muffled drums punctuated by the hollow booming of pieces of ordnance. The deafening claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle. A torrential rain poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the bared heads of the assembled multitude which numbered at the lowest computation five hundred thousand persons. A posse of Dublin Metropolitan police superintended by the Chief Commissioner in person maintained order in the vast throng for whom the York Street brass and reed band whiled away the intervening time by admirably rendering on their blackdraped instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from the cradle by Speranza’s plaintive muse. Special quick excursion trains and upholstered charabancs had been provided for the comfort of our country cousins of whom there were large contingents. Considerable amusement was caused by the favourite Dublin streetsingers L-⁠n-⁠h-⁠n and M-⁠ll-⁠g-⁠n who sang The Night before Larry was stretched in their usual mirthprovoking fashion. Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade with their broadsheets among lovers of the comedy element and nobody who has a corner in his heart for real Irish fun without vulgarity will grudge them their hardearned pennies. The children of the Male and Female Foundling Hospital who thronged the windows overlooking the scene were delighted with this unexpected addition to the day’s entertainment and a word of praise is due to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their excellent idea of affording the poor fatherless and motherless children a genuinely instructive treat. The viceregal houseparty which included many wellknown ladies was chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most favourable positions on the grand stand while the picturesque foreign delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle was accommodated on a tribune directly opposite. The delegation, present in full force, consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed doyen of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi, Hiram. Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi, Señor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps, Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, [295] Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli, Nationalgymnasium-museumsanatoriumand-suspensoriumsordinary-privatdocentgeneralhistoryspecial-professordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein. All the delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which they had been called upon to witness. An animated altercation (in which all took part) ensued among the F. O. T. E. I. as to whether the eighth or the ninth of March was the correct date of the birth of Ireland’s patron saint. In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged. The baby policeman, Constable Mac Fadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending parties. The readywitted ninefooter’s suggestion at once appealed to all and was unanimously accepted. Constable Mac Fadden was heartily congratulated by all the F. O. T. E. I., several of whom were bleeding profusely. Commendatore Beninobenone having been extricated from underneath the presidential armchair, it was explained by his legal adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their senses. The objects (which included several hundred ladies’ and gentlemen’s gold and silver watches) were promptly restored to their rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.

Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the scaffold in faultless morning dress and wearing his favourite flower the Gladiolus Cruentus. He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate — short, painstaking yet withal so characteristic of the man. The arrival of the worldrenowned headsman was greeted by a roar of acclamation from the huge concourse, the viceregal ladies waving their handkerchiefs in their excitement while the even more excitable foreign delegates cheered vociferously in a medley of cries, hoch, banzai, eljen, zivio, chinchin, polla kronia, hiphip, vive, Allah, amid which the ringing evviva of the delegate of the land of song (a high double F recalling those piercingly lovely notes with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured our greatgreatgrandmothers) was easily distinguishable. It was exactly seventeen o’clock. The signal for prayer was then promptly given by megaphone and in an instant all heads were bared, [296] the commendatore’s patriarchal sombrero, which has been in the possession of his family since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser in attendance, Dr Pippi. The learned prelate who administered the last comforts of holy religion to the hero martyr when about to pay the death penalty knelt in a most christian spirit in a pool of rainwater, his cassock above his hoary head, and offered up to the throne of grace fervent prayers of supplication. Hard by the block stood the grim figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered furiously. As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary office. On a handsome mahogany table near him were neatly arranged the quartering knife, the various finely tempered disembowelling appliances (specially supplied by the worldfamous firm of cutlers, Messrs John Round and Sons, Sheffield) a terracotta saucepan for the reception of the duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix etc when successfully extracted and two commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most precious blood of the most precious victim. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats’ and dogs’ home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished to that beneficent institution. Quite an excellent repast consisting of rashers and eggs, fried steak and onions, done to a nicety, delicious hot breakfast rolls and invigorating tea had been considerately provided by the authorities for the consumption of the central figure of the tragedy who was in capital spirits when prepared for death and evinced the keenest interest in the proceedings from beginning to end but he, with an abnegation rare in these our times, rose nobly to the occasion and expressed the dying wish (immediately acceded to) that the meal should be divided in aliquot parts among the members of the sick and indigent roomkeepers’ association as a token of his regard and esteem. The nec and non plus ultra of emotion were reached when the blushing bride elect burst her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders and flung herself upon the muscular bosom of him who was about to be launched into eternity for her sake. The hero folded her willowy form in a loving embrace murmuring fondly Sheila, my own. Encouraged by this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb permitted her ardour to reach. She swore to him as they mingled the salt streams of their tears that she would cherish his memory, that she would never [297] forget her hero boy who went to his death with a song on his lips as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk park. She brought back to his recollection the happy days of blissful childhood together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they had indulged in the innocent pastimes of the young and, oblivious of the dreadful present, they both laughed heartily, all the spectators, including the venerable pastor, joining in the general merriment. That monster audience simply rocked with delight. But anon they were overcome with grief and clasped their hands for the last time. A fresh torrent of tears burst from their lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people, touched to the inmost core, broke into heartrending sobs, not the least affected being the aged prebendary himself. Big strong men, officers of the peace and genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary, were making frank use of their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say that there was not a dry eye in that record assemblage. A most romantic incident occurred when a handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook and genealogical tree solicited the hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot. Every lady in the audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion in the shape of skull and crossbones brooch, a timely and generous act which evoked a fresh outburst of emotion: and when the gallant young Oxonian (the bearer, by the way, of one of the most timehonoured names in Albion’s history) placed on the finger of his blushing fiancée an expensive engagement ring with emeralds set in the form of a fourleaved shamrock excitement knew no bounds. Nay, even the stern provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson, who presided on the sad occasion, he who had blown a considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching, could not now restrain his natural emotion. With his mailed gauntlet he brushed away a furtive tear and was overheard by those privileged burghers who happened to be in his immediate entourage to murmur to himself in a faltering undertone:

— God blimey if she aint a clinker, that there bleeding tart. Blimey it makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it does, when I sees her cause I thinks of my old mashtub what’s waiting for me down Limehouse way.

So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the corporation meeting and all to that and the shoneens that can’t speak their own language and Joe chipping in because he stuck someone for a quid and Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump that he cadged off of Joe and [298] talking about the Gaelic league and the antitreating league and drink, the curse of Ireland. Antitreating is about the size of it. Gob, he’d let you pour all manner of drink down his throat till the Lord would call him before you’d ever see the froth of his pint. And one night I went in with a fellow into one of their musical evenings, song and dance about she could get up on a truss of hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a fellow with a Ballyhooly blue ribbon badge spiffing out of him in Irish and a lot of colleen bawns going about with temperance beverages and selling medals and oranges and lemonade and a few old dry buns, gob, flahoolagh entertainment, don’t be talking. Ireland sober is Ireland free. And then an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of. And one or two sky pilots having an eye around that there was no goings on with the females, hitting below the belt.

So howandever, as I was saying, the old dog seeing the tin was empty starts mousing around by Joe and me. I’d train him by kindness, so I would, if he was my dog. Give him a rousing fine kick now and again where it wouldn’t blind him.

— Afraid he’ll bite you? says the citizen, sneering.

— No, says I. But he might take my leg for a lamppost.

So he calls the old dog over.

— What’s on you, Garry? says he.

Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and the old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera. Such growling you never heard as they let off between them. Someone that has nothing better to do ought to write a letter pro bono publico to the papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of that. Growling and grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the hydrophobia dropping out of his jaws.

All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red wolfdog setter formerly known by the sobriquet of Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and acquaintances Owen Garry. The exhibition which is the result of years of training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system, comprises, among other achievements, the recitation of verse. Our greatest living phonetic expert (wild horses shall not drag it from us!) has left no stone unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare the verse recited and has found it bears a striking resemblance [299] (the italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards. We are not speaking so much of those delightful lovesongs with which the writer who conceals his identity under the graceful pseudonym of the Little Sweet Branch has familiarised the bookloving world but rather (as a contributor D. O. C. points out in an interesting communication published by an evening contemporary) of the harsher and more personal note which is found in the satirical effusions of the famous Raftery and of Donald Mac Considine to say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present very much in the public eye. We subjoin a specimen which has been rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly increased if Owen’s verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in a tone suggestive of suppressed rancour.

The curse of my curses

Seven days every day

And seven dry Thursdays

On you, Barney Kiernan,

Has no sup of water

To cool my courage,

And my guts red roaring

After Lowry’s lights.

So he told Terry to bring some water for the dog and, gob, you could hear him lapping it up a mile off. And Joe asked him would he have another.

— I will, says he, a chara, to show there’s no ill feeling.

Gob, he’s not as green as he’s cabbagelooking. Arsing around from one pub to another, leaving it to your own honour, with old Giltrap’s dog and getting fed up by the ratepayers and corporators. Entertainment for man and beast.And says Joe:

— Could you make a hole in another pint?

[300] — Could a swim duck? says I.

— Same again, Terry, says Joe. Are you sure you won’t have anything in the way of liquid refreshment? says he.

— Thank you, no, says Bloom. As a matter of fact I just wanted to meet Martin Cunningham, don’t you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam’s. Martin asked me to go to the house. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, didn’t serve any notice of the assignment on the company at the time and nominally under the act the mortgagee can’t recover on the policy.

— Holy Wars, says Joe laughing, that’s a good one if old Shylock is landed. So the wife comes out top dog, what?

— Well, that’s a point, says Bloom, for the wife’s admirers.

— Whose admirers? says Joe.

— The wife’s advisers, I mean, says Bloom.

Then he starts all confused mucking it up about the mortgagor under the act like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit of the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow contested the mortgagee’s right till he near had the head of me addled with his mortgagor under the act. He was bloody safe he wasn’t run in himself under the act that time as a rogue and vagabond only he had a friend in court. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it royal Hungarian privileged lottery. True as you’re there. O, commend me to an israelite! Royal and privileged Hungarian robbery.

So Bob Doran comes lurching around asking Bloom to tell Mrs Dignam he was sorry for her trouble and he was very sorry about the funeral and to tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that there was never a truer, a finer than poor little Willy that’s dead to tell her. Choking with bloody foolery. And shaking Bloom’s hand doing the tragic to tell her that. Shake hands, brother. You’re a rogue and I’m another.

— Let me, said he, so far presume upon our acquaintance which, however slight it may appear if judged by the standard of mere time, is founded, as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem, as to request of you this favour. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness.

— No, rejoined the other, I appreciate to the full the motives which actuate your conduct and I shall discharge the office you entrust to me consoled by the reflection that, though the errand be one of sorrow, this proof of your confidence sweetens in some measure the bitterness of the cup.

[301] — Then suffer me to take your hand, said he. The goodness of your heart, I feel sure, will dictate to you better than my inadequate words the expressions which are most suitable to convey an emotion whose poignancy, were I to give vent to my feelings, would deprive me even of speech.

And off with him and out trying to walk straight. Boosed at five o’clock. Night he was near being lagged only Paddy Leonard knew the bobby L, 14 A. Blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking porter out of teacups. And calling himself a Frenchy for the shawls, Joseph Manuo, and talking against the catholic religion and he serving mass in Adam and Eve’s when he was young with his eyes shut who wrote the new testament and the old testament and hugging and smugging. And the two shawls killed with the laughing, picking his pockets the bloody fool and he spilling the porter all over the bed and the two shawls screeching laughing at one another. How is your testament? Have you got an old testament? Only Paddy was passing there, I tell you what. Then see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife, and she wagging her tail up the aisle of the chapel, with her patent boots on her, no less, and her violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady. Jack Mooney’s sister. And the old prostitute of a mother procuring rooms to street couples. Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn’t patch up the pot, Jesus, he’d kick the shite out of him.

So Terry brought the three pints.

— Here, says Joe, doing the honours. Here, citizen.

— Slan leat, says he.

— Fortune, Joe, says I. Good health, citizen.

Gob, he had his mouth half way down the tumbler already. Want a small fortune to keep him in drinks.

— Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf? says Joe.

— Friend of yours, says Alf.

— Nannan? says Joe. The mimber?

— I won’t mention any names, says Alf.

— I thought so, says Joe. I saw him up at that meeting now with William Field, M. P., the cattle traders.

— Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of all countries and the idol of his own.

So Joe starts telling the citizen about the foot and mouth disease and the cattle traders and taking action in the matter and the citizen sending them all [302] to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the guaranteed remedy for timber tongue. Because he was up one time in a knacker’s yard. Walking about with his book and pencil here’s my head and my heels are coming till Joe Cuffe gave him the order of the boot for giving lip to a grazier. Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks. Pisser Burke was telling me in the hotel the wife used to be in rivers of tears sometimes with Mrs O’Dowd crying her eyes out with her eight inches of fat all over her. Couldn’t loosen her farting strings but old cod’s eye was waltzing around her showing her how to do it. What’s your programme today? Ay. Humane methods. Because the poor animals suffer and experts say and the best known remedy that doesn’t cause pain to the animal and on the sore spot administer gently. Gob, he’d have a soft hand under a hen.

Ga Ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Black Liz is our hen. She lays eggs for us. When she lays her egg she is so glad. Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Then comes good uncle Leo. He puts his hand under black Liz and takes her fresh egg, Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook.

— Anyhow, says Joe. Field and Nannetti are going over tonight to London to ask about it on the floor of the House of Commons.

— Are you sure, says Bloom, the councillor is going. I wanted to see him, as it happens.

— Well, he’s going off by the mailboat, says Joe, tonight.

— That’s too bad, says Bloom. I wanted particularly. Perhaps only Mr Field is going. I couldn’t phone. No. You’re sure?

— Nannan’s going too, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the park. What do you think of that, citizen? The Sluagh na h-Eireann.

Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right honourable gentleman whether the Government has issued orders that these animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming as to their pathological condition?

Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the honourable member’s question is in the affirmative.

Mr Orelli O’Reilly (Montenotte. Nat.): Have similar orders been issued [303] for the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the Phoenix park?

Mr Allfours: The answer is in the negative.

Mr Cowe Conacre: Has the right honourable gentleman’s famous Mitchelstown telegram inspired the policy of gentlemen on the treasury bench? (O! O!)

Mr Allfours: I must have notice of that question.

Mr Staylewit (Buncombe. Ind.): Don’t hesitate to shoot.

(Ironical opposition cheers.)

The speaker: Order! Order!

(The house rises. Cheers.)

— There’s the man, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. There he is sitting there. The man that got away James Stephens. The champion of all Ireland at putting the sixteen pound shot. What was your best throw, citizen?

— Na bacleis, says the citizen, letting on to be modest. There was a time I was as good as the next fellow anyhow.

— Put it there, citizen, says Joe. You were and a bloody sight better.

— Is that really a fact? says Alf.

— Yes, says Bloom. That’s well known. Do you not know that?

So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of the lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower’s heart violent exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.

A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of Brian O’Ciarnain’s in Sraid na Bretaine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race. The venerable president of this noble order was in the chair and the attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed, a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of the ancient games and sports of our ancient panceltic forefathers. [304] The wellknown and highly respected worker in the cause of our old tongue, Mr Joseph M’Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening by Finn Mac Cool, as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly strength and powers handed down to us from ancient ages. L. Bloom, who met with a mixed reception of applause and hisses, having espoused the negative the vocalist chairman brought the discussion to a close, in response to repeated requests and hearty plaudits from all parts of a bumper house house, by a remarkably noteworthy rendering of the immortal Thomas Osborne Davis’ evergreen verses (happily too familiar to need recalling here) A nation once again in the execution of which the veteran patriot champion may be said without fear of contradiction to have fairly excelled himself. The Irish Caruso-Garibaldi was in superlative form and his stentorian notes were heard to the greatest advantage in the timehonoured anthem sung as only our citizen can sing it. His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously applauded by the large audience amongst which were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press and the bar and the other learned professions. The proceedings then terminated.

Amongst the clergy present were the very rev. William Delany, S. J., L. L. D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D.; the rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S. Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C. C.; the rev. John M. Ivers, P. P.; the rev. P. J. Cleary, O. S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P.; the very rev. Fr. Nicholas, O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C.; the rev. T. Maher. S. J.; the very rev. James Murphy, S. J.; the rev. John Lavery, V. F.; the very rev. William Doherty, D. D.; the rev. Peter Fagan, O. M.; the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Flavin, C. C.; the rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C., the rt rev. Mgr M’Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I.; the very rev. M. D. Scally, P. P.; the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy canon Gorman, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C.; The laity included P. Fay, T. Quirke, etc., etc.

— Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, were you at that Keogh-Bennett match?

— No, says Joe.

— I heard So and So made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf.

— Who? Blazes? says Joe.

And says Bloom:

[305] — What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training of the eye.

— Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up the odds and he swatting all the time.

— We know him, says the citizen. The traitor’s son. We know what put English gold in his pocket.

— True for you, says Joe.

And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the blood, asking Alf:

— Now don’t you think, Bergan?

— Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. Heenan and Sayers was only a bloody fool to it. Handed him the father and mother of a beating. See the little kipper not up to his navel and the big fellow swiping. God, he gave him one last puck in the wind. Queensberry rules and all, made him puke what he never ate.

It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were scheduled to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns. Handicapped as he was by lack of poundage, Dublin’s pet lamb made up for it by superlative skill in ringcraft. The final bout of fireworks was a gruelling for both champions. The welterweight sergeantmajor had tapped some lively claret in the previous mixup during which Keogh had been receivergeneral of rights and lefts, the artilleryman putting in some neat work on the pet’s nose, and Myler came on looking groggy. The soldier got to business leading off with a powerful left jab to which the Irish gladiator retaliated by shooting out a stiff one flush to the point of Bennett’s jaw. The redcoat ducked but the Dubliner lifted him with a left hook, the body punch being a fine one. The men came to handigrips. Myler quickly became busy and got his man under, the bout ending with the bulkier man on the ropes, Myler punishing him. The Englishman, whose right eye was nearly closed, took his corner where he was liberally drenched with water and when the bell went, came on gamey and brimful of pluck, confident of knocking out the fistic Eblanite in jigtime. It was a fight to a finish and the best man for it[.]  The two fought like tigers and excitement ran fever high. The referee twice cautioned Pucking Percy for holding but the pet was tricky and his footwork a treat to watch. After a brisk exchange of courtesies during which a smart upper cut of the military man brought blood freely from his opponent’s mouth the lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and landed a terrific left to Battling Bennett’s stomach, flooring him flat. It was a knockout clean and [306] clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello bruiser was being counted out when Bennett’s second Ole Pfotts Wettstein threw in the towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied cheers of the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him with delight.

— He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he’s running a concert tour now up in the north.

— He is, says Joe. Isn’t he?

— Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That’s quite true. Yes, a kind of summer tour, you see. Just a holiday.

— Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn’t she? says Joe.

— My wife? say Bloom. She’s singing, yes. I think it will be a success too. He’s an excellent man to organise. Excellent.

Hoho begob, says I to myself, says I. That explains the milk in the cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal’s chest. Blazes doing the tootle on the flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the dodgers’s son off Island bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight the Boers. Old Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr Boylan. You what? The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat? That’s the bucko that’ll organise her, take my tip. ’Twixt me and you Caddereesh.

Pride of Calpe’s rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy. There grew she to peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air. The gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed. The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.

And lo, there entered one of the clan of the O’Molloy’s, a comely hero of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty’s counsel learned in the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble line of Lambert.

— Hello, Ned.

— Hello, Alf.

— Hello, Jack.

— Hello, Joe.

— God save you, says the citizen.

— Save you kindly, says J. J. What’ll it be, Ned?

— Half one, says Ned.

So J. J. ordered the drinks.

— Were you round at the court? says Joe.

— Yes, says J. J. He’ll square that, Ned, says he.

— Hope so, says Ned.

[307] Now what were those two at? J. J. getting him off the grand jury list and the other give him a leg over the stile. With his name in Stubbs’s. Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their eye, drinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders. Pawning his gold watch in Cummins of Francis street where no-one would know him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing his boots out of the pop. What’s your name, sir? Dunne, says he. Ay, and done says I. Gob, he’ll come home by weeping cross one of these days, I’m thinking.

— Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there, says Alf. U. p. up.

— Yes, says J. J. Looking for a private detective.

— Ay, says Ned, and he wanted right go wrong to address the court only Corny Kelleher got round him telling him to get the handwriting examined first.

— Ten thousand pounds, says Alf, laughing. God I’d give anything to hear him before a judge and jury.

— Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson.

— Me? says Alf. Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character.

— Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence against you.

— Of course an action would lie, says J. J. It implies that he is not compos mentis. U. p. up.

— Compos your eye? says Alf, laughing. Do you know that he’s balmy? Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat on with a shoehorn.

— Yes, says J. J., but the truth of a libel is no defence to an indictment for publishing it in the eyes of the law.

— Ha, ha, Alf, says Joe.

— Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.

— Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half and half.

— How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he…

— Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that’s neither fish nor flesh.

— Nor good red herring, says Joe.

— That what’s I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what that is.

Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explained he meant [308] on account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him, bringing down the rain. And she with her nose cockahoop after she married him because a cousin of his old fellow’s was pew opener to the pope. Picture of him on the wall with his smashall sweeney’s moustaches. The signor Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal zouave to the Holy Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. And who was he, tell us? A nobody, two pair back and passages, at seven shillings a week, and he covered with al kinds of breastplates bidding defiance to the world.

— And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is publication. It was held to be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my opinion an action might lie.

Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink our pints in peace. Gob, we won’t be let even do that much itself.

— Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.

— Good health, Ned, says J. J.

— There he is again, says Joe.

— Where? says Alf.

And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking in as they went passed, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a secondhand coffin.

— How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.

— Remanded, says J. J.

One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers saying he’d give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see any green in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What? Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and his own kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew Zaretsky or something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him, swearing by the holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.

— Who tried the case? says Joe.

— Recorder, says Ned.

— Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.

— Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears [309] of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he’ll dissolve in tears on the bench.

— Ay, says Alf. Reuben J. was bloody lucky he didn’t clap him in the dock the other day for suing poor little Gumley that’s minding stones for the corporation there near Butt bridge.

And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:

— A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children? Ten, did you say?

— Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid!

— And a wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court immediately, sir. No, sir, I’ll make no order for payment. How dare you, sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking industrious man! I dismiss the case.

And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave his rede and master Justice Andrews sitting without a jury in the probate court, weighed well and pondered the claims of the first chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and final testamentary disposition in re the real and personal estate of the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone, an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there about the hour of five o’clock to administer the law of the brehons at the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book. And they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by the name of Him who is [310] from everlasting that they would do His rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge against him for he was a malefactor.

— Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs.

So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe, telling him he needn’t trouble about that little matter till the first but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high and holy by this and by that he’d do the devil and all.

— Because you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have repetition. That’s the whole secret.

— Rely on me, says Joe.

— Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house.

— O I’m sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It’s just that Keyes, you see.

— Consider that done, says Joe.

— Very kind of you, says Bloom.

— The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought them. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here.

— Decree nisi, says J. J.

And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider’s web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and when.

— A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that’s what the cause of all our misfortunes.

— And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the Police Gazette with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.

— Give us a squint at her, says I.

And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her bloomers misconducting herself and her fancy man feeling for her tickles and Norman W. Tupper [311] bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.

— O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is!

— There’s hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off of that one, what?

So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a face on him as long as a late breakfast.

— Well, says the citizen, what’s the latest from the scene of action? What did those tinkers in the cityhall at their caucus meeting decide about the Irish language?

O’Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.

— It’s on the march, says the citizen.To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois.

So J. J. puts in a word doing the toff about one story was good till you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy putting your blind eye to the telescope and drawing un a bill of attainder to impeach a nation and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and their colonies and their civilisation.

— Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of bastards’ ghosts.

— The European family, says J. J…

— There’re not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin Egan of Paris. You wouldn’t see a trace of them or their language anywhere in Europe except in a cabinet d’aisance.

And says John Wyse:

— Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:

— Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion!

[312] He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan Lamh Dearg Abu, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster silent as the deathless gods.

— What’s up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had lost a bob and found a tanner.

— Gold cup, says he.

— Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.

— Throwaway, says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest nowhere.

— And Bass’s mare? says Terry.

— Still running, says he. We ’re all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid on my tip Sceptre for himself and a lady friend.

— I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on Zinfandel that Mr Flynn gave me. Lord Howard de Walden’s.

— Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. Throwaway, says he. Takes the biscuit and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name is Sceptre.

So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his luck with his mangy snout up. Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.

— Not there, my child, says he.

— Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She’d have won the money only for the other dog.

And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom sticking in an odd word.

— Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own.

— Raimeis, says the citizen. There’s no-one as blind as the fellow that won’t see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, [313] the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis, Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won’t deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption.

— As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland with its one tree if something is not to reafforest the land. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was reading a report of lord Castletown’s…

— Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.

— Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.

The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by her father, the M’Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty motif of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously [314] in the jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral. Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played a new and striking arrangement of Woodman, spare that tree at the conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.

— And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.

— And will again, says Joe.

— And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the citizen, clapping his thigh. Our harbours that are empty will be full again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O’Reillys and the O’Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to the fore, none of your Henry Tudor’s harps, no, the oldest flag afloat, the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue field, the three sons of Milesius.

And he took the last swig out of the pint, Moya. All wind and piss like a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled multitude in Shanagolden where he daren’t show his nose with the Molly Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant.

— Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?

— An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.

— Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you asleep?

— Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.

Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead of attending to the general public[.]  Picture of a butting match, trying to crack their [315] bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his head down like a bull at a gate. And another one: Black Beast Burned in Omaha. Ga. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a sambo strung up on a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and crucify him to make sure of their job.

— But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at bay?

— I’ll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is. Read the revelations that’s going on in the papers about flogging on the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself Disgusted One.

So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of a gun.

— A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John Beresford called if but the modern God’s Englishman calls it caning on the breech.

And says John Wyse:

— ’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad till he yells meila murder.

— That’s your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on the face of God’s earth and their land in the hands of a dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That’s the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs.

— On which the sun never rises, says Joe.

— And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The unfortunate yahoos believe it.
  They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.

— But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere[.]  I mean wouldn’t it be the same here if you put force against force?

[316] Didn’t I tell you? As true as I’m drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.

— We’ll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid low by the batteringram and the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. Ay, they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in the coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan.

— Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was…

— We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at Killala.

— Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the wild geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O’Donnell, duke of Tetuan in Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?

— The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters? Do you know what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Aren’t they trying to make an Entente cordiale now at Tay Pay’s dinnerparty with perfidious Albion? Firebrands of Europe and they always were.

— Conspuez les Français, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.

— And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven’t we had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that’s dead?

Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one with the winkers on her blind drunk in her royal palace every night of God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about Ehren on the Rhine and come where the boose is cheaper.

[317] — Well! says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.

— Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!

— And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in his Satanic Majesty’s racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.

— They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little Alf.

And says J. J.:

— Considerations of space influenced their lordships’ decision.

— Will you try another, citizen? says Joe.

— Yes, sir, says he, I will.

— You? says Joe.

— Beholden to you, Joe, says I. May your shadow never grow less.

— Repeat that dose, says Joe.

Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.

— Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.

— But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

— Yes, says Bloom.

— What is it? says John Wyse.

— A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

— By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:

— Or also living in different places.

— That covers my case, says Joe.

— What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.

— Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.

— After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to swab himself dry.

[318] — Here you are, citizen, says Joe. Take that in your right hand and repeat after me the following words.

The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og Mac Donogh, authors of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully produced and called forth prolonged admiration. No need to dwell on the legendary beauty of the cornerpieces, the acme of art, wherein one can distinctly discern each of the four evangelists in turn presenting to each of the four masters his evangelical symbol a bogoak sceptre, a North American puma (a far nobler king of beasts than the British article, be it said in passing), a Kerry calf and a golden eagle from Carrantuohill. The scenes depicted on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney, the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins, Ireland’s Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, the brewery of Messrs Arthur Guinness, Son and Company (Limited), Lough Neagh’s banks, the vale of Ovoca, Isolde’s tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick Dun’s hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch’s castle, the Scotch house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail, Castleconnel rapids, Kilballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice, Jury’s Hotel, S. Patrick’s Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college refectory, Curley’s hole, the three birthplaces of the first duke of Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street Warehouse, Fingal’s Cave, — all these moving scenes are still there for us today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time.

— Show us over the drink? says I. Which is which?

— That’s mine, says Joe, as the devil said to the dead policeman.

— And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.

Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.

— Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction off in Morocco like slaves or cattle.

— Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.

— I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.

[319] — Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.

That’s an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse’s apron on him. And then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag.

— But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

— What? says Alf.

— Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes just say I’ll be back in a second. Just a moment.

Who’s hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.

— A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.

— Well, says John Wyse. Isn’t that what we’re told. Love your neighbours.

— That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love, Moya! He’s a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14 A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty Mac Dowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.

— Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power, citizen.

— Hurrah, there, says Joe.

— The blessing of God and Mary and Patrick on you, says the citizen.

And he ups with his pint to wet his whistle.

— We know those canters, says he, preaching and picking your pocket What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text God is love pasted round the mouth of his cannon? The bible! Did you read that skit in the United Irishman today about that Zulu chief that’s visiting England?

[320] — What’s that? says Joe.

So the citizen takes up one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts reading out:

— A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting, Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his dominions. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech, freely translated by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones, tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasized the cordial relations existing between Abeakuta and the British Empire, stating that he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible, the volume of the word of God and the secret of England’s greatness, graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the Royal Donor. The Alaki then drank a lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the toast Black and White from the skull of his immediate predecessor in the dynasty Kakachakachak, surnamed Forty Warts, after which he visited the chief factory of Cottonopolis and signed his mark in the visitors’ book, subsequently executing an old Abeakutic wardance, in the course of which he swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious applause from the girl hands.

— Widow woman, says Ned, I wouldn’t doubt her. Wonder did he put that bible to the same use as I would.

— Same only more so, says Lenehan. And thereafter in that fruitful land the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.

— Is that by Griffith? says John Wyse.

— No, says the citizen. It’s not signed Shanganagh. It’s only initialled: P.

— And a very good initial too, says Joe.

— That’s how it’s worked, says the citizen. Trade follows the flag.

— Well, says J. J., if they’re any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man what’s this his name is?

— Casement, says the citizen. He’s an Irishman.

— Yes, that’s the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.

— I know where he’s gone, says Lenehan, cracking his fingers.

— Who? says I.

[321] — Bloom, says he, the courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob on Throwaway and he’s gone to gather in the shekels.

— Is it that whiteeyed kaffir? says the citizen, that never backed a horse in anger in his life.

— That’s where he’s gone, says Lenehan. I met Bantam Lyons going to back that horse only I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the tip. Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on. He’s the only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse.

— He’s a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe.

— Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance out.

— There you are, says Terry.

Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort. So I just went round to the back of the yard to pumpship and begob (hundred shillings to five) while I was letting off my (Throwaway twenty to) letting off my load gob says I to myself I knew he was uneasy in his (two pints off of Joe and one in Slattery’s off) in his mind to get off the mark to (hundred shillings is five quid) and when they were in the (dark horse) Pisser Burke was telling me card party and letting on the child was sick (gob, must have done about a gallon) flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube she’s better or she’s (ow!) all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if he won or (Jesus, full up I was) trading without a licence (ow!) Ireland my nation says he (hoik! phthook!) never be up to those bloody (there’s the last of it) Jerusalem (ah!) cuckoos.

So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the idea for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the Government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gob, that puts the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show. Give us a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes of that bloody mouseabout. Mr Bloom with his argol bargol. And his old fellow before him perpetrating frauds, old Methusalem Bloom, the robbing bagman, that poisoned himself with the prussic acid after he swamping the country with his baubles and his penny diamonds. Loans by post on easy terms. Any amount of money advanced on note of hand. Distance no object. No security. Gob he’s like Lanty Mac Hale’s goat that’d go a piece of the road with every one.

— Well, it’s a fact, says John Wyse. And there’s the man now that’ll tell you all about it, Martin Cunningham.

[322] Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of the collector general’s, an orangeman Blackburn does have on the registration and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the country at the king’s expense.

Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their palfreys.

— Ho, varlet! cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party. Saucy knave! To us!

So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.

Mine host came forth at the summons girding him with his tabard.

— Give you good den, my masters, said he with an obsequious bow.

— Bestir thyself, sirrah! cried he who had knocked. Look to our steeds. And for ourselves give us of your best for ifaith we need it.

— Lackaday, good masters, said the host, my poor house has but a bare larder. I know not what to offer your lordships.

— How now, fellow? cried the second of the party, a man of pleasant countenance, so servest thou the king’s messengers, Master Taptun?

An instantaneous change overspread the landlord’s visage.

— Cry you mercy, gentlemen, he said humbly. An you be the king’s messengers (Gold shield His Majesty!) you shall not want for aught. The king’s friends (God bless His Majesty!) shall not go afasting in my house I warrant me.

— Then about! cried the traveller who had not spoken, a lusty trencherman by his aspect. Hast aught to give us?

Mine host bowed again as he made answer:

— What say you, good masters, to a squab pigeon pasty, some collops of venison, a saddle of veal, widgeon with crisp hog’s bacon, a boar’s head with pistachios, a bason of jolly custard, a medlar tansy and a flagon of old Rhenish?

— Gadzooks! cried the last speaker. That likes me well. Pistachios!

— Aha! cried he of the pleasant countenance. A poor house and a bare larder, quotha! ’Tis a merry rogue.

So in comes Martin asking where was Bloom.

— Where is he? says Lenehan. Defrauding widows and orphans.

— Isn’t that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen about Bloom and the Sinn Fein?

— That’s so, says Martin. Or so they allege.

— Who made those allegations? says Alf.

[323] — I, says Joe. I’m the alligator.

— And after all, says John Wyse, why can’t a jew love his country like the next fellow?

— Why not? says J. J., when he’s quite sure which country it is.

— Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he? says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton.

— We don’t want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.

— Who is Junius? says J. J.

— He’s a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle.

— Isn’t he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.

— Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag. The father’s name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the father did.

— That’s the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen. Island of saints and sages!

— Well, they’re still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that matter so are we.

— Yes, says J. J., and every male that’s born they think it may be their Messiah. And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till he knows if he’s a father or a mother.

— Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.

— O, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his that died was born. I met him one day in the south city markets buying a tin of Neave’s food six weeks before the wife was delivered.

— En ventre sa mère, says J. J.

— Do you call that a man? says the citizen.

— I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.

— Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.

— And who does he suspect? says the citizen.

Gob, there’s many a true word spoken in jest. One of those mixed middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a month with headache like a totty with her courses. Do you know what I’m telling you? It’d be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it would. Then sloping off with his five quid without putting up a pint of stuff like a man. Give us your blessing. Not as much as would blind your eye.

[324] — Charity to the neighbour, says Martin. But where is he? We can’t wait.

— A wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen. That’s what he is. Virag from Hungary! Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God.

— Have you time for a brief libation, Martin? says Ned.

— Only one, says Martin. We must be quick. J. J. and S.

— You, Jack? Crofton? Three half ones, Terry.

— Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us, says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our shores.

— Well, says Martin, rapping for his glass. God bless all here is my prayer.

— Amen, says the citizen.

— And I’m sure he will, says Joe.

And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with acolytes, thurifers, boatbearers, readers, ostiarii, deacons and subdeacons, the blessed company drew nigh of mitred abbots and priors and guardians and monks and friars: the monks of Benedict of Spoleto, Carthusians and Camaldolesi, Cistercians and Olivetans, Oratorians and Vallombrosans, and the friars of Augustine, Brigittines, Premonstratesians, Servi, Trinitarians, and the children of Peter Nolasco: and therewith from Carmel mount the children of Elijah prophet led by Albert bishop and by Teresa of Avila, calced and other: and friars brown and grey, sons of poor Francis, capuchins, cordeliers, minimes and observants and the daughters of Clara: and the sons of Dominic, the friars preachers, and the sons of Vincent: and the monks of S. Wolstan: and Ignatius his children: and the confraternity of the christian brothers led by the reverend brother Edmund Ignatius Rice. And after came all saints and martyrs, virgins and confessors: S. Cyr and S. Isidore Arator and S. James the Less and S. Phocas of Sinope and S. Julian Hospitator and S. Felix de Cantalice and S. Simon Stylites and S. Stephen Protomartyr and S. John of God and S. Ferreol and S. Leugarde and S. Theodotus and S. Vulmar and S. Richard and S. Vincent de Paul and S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence and S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous and S. Laurence O’ Toole and S. James of Dingle and Compostella and S. Columcille and S. Columba and S. Celestine and S. Colman and S. Kevin and S. Brendan and S. Frigidian and S. Senan and S. Fachtna and S. Columbanus and S. Gall and S. Fursey and [325] S. Fintan and S. Fiacre and S. John Nepomuc and S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Ives of Brittany and S. Michan and S. Herman-Joseph and the three patrons of holy youth S. Aloysius Gonzaga and S. Stanislaus Kostka and S. John Berchmans and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S. Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S. Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. And all came with nimbi and aureoles and gloriae, bearing palms and harps and swords and olive crowns, in robes whereon were woven the blessed symbols of their efficacies, inkhorns, arrows, loaves, cruses, fetters, axes, trees, bridges, babes in a bathtub, shells, wallets, shears, keys, dragons, lilies, buckshot, beards, hogs, lamps, bellows, beehives, soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline, bells, crutches, forceps, stags’ horns, watertight boots, hawks, millstones, eyes on a dish, wax candles, aspergills, unicorns. And as they wended their way by Nelson’s Pillar, Henry Street, Mary Street, Capel Street, Little Britain Street, chanting the introit in Epiphania Domini which beginneth Surge, illuminare and thereafter most sweetly the gradual Omnes which saith de Saba venient they did divers wonders such as casting out devils, raising the dead to life, multiplying fishes, healing the halt and the blind, discovering various articles which had beed mislaid, interpreting and fulfilling the scriptures, blessing and prophesying. And last, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold came the reverend Father O’Flynn attended by Malachi and Patrick. And when the good fathers had reached the appointed place, the house of Bernard Kiernan and Co, limited, 8,9 and 10 little Britain street, wholesale grocers, wine and brandy shippers, licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits for consumption on the premises, the celebrant blessed the house and censed the mullioned windows and the groynes and the vaults and the arrises and the capitals and the pediments and the cornices and the engrailed arches and the spires and the cupolas and sprinkled the lintels thereof with blessed water and prayed that God might bless that house as he had blessed the house of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and make the angels of His light to inhabit therein. And entering he blessed the viands and the beverages and the company of all the blessed answered his prayers.

— Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.

[326] — Qui fecit cœlum et terram.

— Dominus vobiscum.

— Et cum spiritu tuo.

And he laid his hands upon that he blessed and gave thanks and he prayed and they all with him prayed:

— Deus, cuius verbo sanctificantur omnia, benedictionem tuam effunde super creaturas istas: et praesta ut quisquis eis secundum legem et voluntatem Tuam cum gratiarum actione usus fuerit per invocationem sanctissimi nominis Tui corporis sanitatem et animæ tutelam Te auctore percipiat per Christum Dominum nostrum.

— And so say all of us, says Jack.

— Thousand a year, Lambert, says Crofton or Crawford.

— Right, says Ned, taking up his John Jameson. And butter for fish.

I was just looking round to see who the happy thought would strike when be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry.

— I was just round at the courthouse. says he, looking for you. I hope I’m not…

— No, says Martin, we’re ready.

Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver. Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There’s a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to five.

— Don’t tell anyone, says the citizen.

— Beg your pardon, says he.

— Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.

— Don’t tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It’s a secret.

And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.

— Bye bye all, says Martin.

And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.

— Off with you, says Martin to the jarvey.

The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop, the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet [327] of men whenas they ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the waves.

But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.

— Let me alone, says he.

And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and be bawls out of him:

— Three cheers for Israel!

Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ’ sake and don’t be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there’s always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about bloody nothing. Gob, it’d turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would.

And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew and a slut shouts out of her:

— Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!

And says he:

— Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

— He had no father, says Martin. That’ll do now. Drive ahead.

— Whose God! says the citizen.

— Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.

Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

— By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

— Stop! stop! says Joe.

A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid farewell to [328] Nagyaságos uram Lipóti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander Thom’s, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure for the distant clime of Százharminczbrojúgulyás-Dugulás (Meadow of Murmuring Waters). The ceremony which went off with great éclat was characterised by the most affecting cordiality. An illuminated scroll of ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists, was presented to the distinguished phenomenologist on behalf on a large section of the community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects every credit on the makers, Messrs Jacob agus Jacob. The departing guest was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those who were present being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes struck up the wellknown strains of Come Back to Erin, followed immediately by Rakóczsy’s March. Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted along the coastline of the four seas on the summits of the Hill of Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf, Bray Head, the mountains of Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and Sperrin peaks, the Nagles and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the reeks of M’ Gillicuddy, Slieve Aughty, Slieve Bernagh and Slieve Bloom. Amid cheers that rent the welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big muster of henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the mastodontic pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final floral tribute from the representatives of the fair sex who were present in large numbers while, as it proceeded down the river, escorted by a flotilla of barges, the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute as were also those of the electrical power station at the Pigeonhouse. Visszontlátásra, kedvés barátom! Visszontlátásra! Gone but not forgotten.

Gob, the devil wouldn’t stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play, in the Queen’s royal theatre.

— Where is he till I murder him?

And Ned and J. G. paralysed with the laughing.

— Bloody wars, says I, I’ll be in for the last gospel.

But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag’s head round the other way and off with him.

— Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!

Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he’d have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel after [329] the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.

The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn’s Quay ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in the vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself, in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be feared all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. An article of headgear since ascertained to belong to the much respected clerk of the crown and peace Mr George Fottrell and a silk umbrella with gold handle with the engraved initials, coat of arms and house number of the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter sessions sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, have been discovered by search parties in remote parts of the island respectively, the former on the third basaltic ridge of the giant’s causeway, the latter embedded to the extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach of Holeopen bay near the old head of Kinsale. Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has been graciously pleased to decree that a special missa pro defunctis shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every cathedral church of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual authority of the Holy See in suffrage of the souls of those faithful departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst. The work of salvage, removal of débris, human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son 159, Great Brunswick Street, and Messrs T. & C. Martin 77, 78, 79 and 80. [80,] North Wall, assisted by the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry under the general supervision of H. R. H., rear admiral, the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K. C. B., [330] M. P., J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B. L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D., F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I., and F. R. C. S. I.

You never saw the like of it in all your born puff. Gob, if he got that lottery ticket on the side of his poll he’d remember the gold cup, he would so, but begob the citizen would have been lagged for assault and battery and Joe for aiding and abetting. The jarvey saved his life by furious driving as sure as God made Moses. What? O, Jesus, he did. And he let a volley of oaths after him.

— Did I kill him, says he, or what?

And he shouting to the bloody dog:

— After him, Garry! After him, boy!

And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old sheepsface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb. Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise you.

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.

 ® 

[331] The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine, Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman with the baby in the pushcar and Tommy and Jacky Caffrey, two little curlyheaded boys, dressed in sailor suits with caps to match and the name H. M. S. Belleisle printed on both. For Tommy and Jacky Caffrey were twins, scarce four years old and very noisy and spoiled twins sometimes but for all that darling little fellows with bright merry faces and endearing ways about them. They were dabbling in the sand with their spades and buckets, building castles as children do, or playing with their big coloured ball, happy as the day was long. And Edy Boardman was rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar while that young gentleman fairly chuckled with delight. He was but eleven months and nine days old and, though still a tiny toddler, was just beginning to lisp his first babyish words. Cissy Caffrey bent over him to tease his fat little plucks and the dainty dimple in his chin.

— Now, baby, Cissy Caffrey said. Say out big, big. I want a drink of water.

[332] And baby prattled after her:

— A jink a jink a jawbo.

Cissy Caffrey cuddled the wee chap for she was awfully fond of children, so patient with little sufferers and Tommy Caffrey could never be got to take his castor oil unless it was Cissy Caffrey that held his nose and promised him the scatty heel of the loaf or brown bread with golden syrup on. What a persuasive power that girl had! But to be sure baby was as good as gold, a perfect little dote in his new fancy bib. None of your spoilt beauties, Flora Mac Flimsy sort, was Cissy Caffrey. A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme. And Edy Boardman laughed too at the quaint language of little brother.

But just then there was a slight altercation between Master Tommy and Master Jacky. Boys will be boys and our two twins were no exception to this golden rule. The apple of discord was a certain castle of sand which Master Jacky had built and Master Tommy would have it right go wrong that it was to be architecturally improved by a frontdoor like the Martello tower had. But if Master Tommy was headstrong Master Jacky was selfwilled too and, true to the maxim that every little Irishman’s house is his castle, he fell upon his hated rival and to such purpose that the wouldbe assailant came to grief and (alas to relate!) the coveted castle too. Needless to say the cries of discomfited Master Tommy drew the attention of the girl friends.

— Come here, Tommy, his sister called imperatively, at once! And you, Jacky, for shame to throw poor Tommy in the dirty sand. Wait till I catch you for that.

His eyes misty with unshed tears Master Tommy came at her call for their big sister’s word was law with the twins. And in a sad plight he was after his misadventure. His little man-o’-war top and unmentionables were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing over life’s tiny troubles and and very quickly not one speck of sand was to be seen on his smart little suit. Still the blue eyes were glistening with hot tears that would well up so she kissed away the hurtness and shook her hand at Master Jacky the culprit and said if she was near him she wouldn’t be far from him, her eyes dancing in admonition.

— Nasty bold Jacky! she cried.

She put an arm round the little mariner and coaxed winningly:

— What’s your name? Butter and cream?

[333] — Tell us who is your sweetheart, spoke Edy Boardman. Is Cissy your sweetheart?

— Nao, tearful Tommy said.

— Is Edy Boardman your sweetheart? Cissy queried.

— Nao, Tommy said.

— I know, Edy Boardman said none too amiably with an arch glance from her shortsighted eyes. I know who is Tommy’s sweetheart, Gerty is Tommy’s sweetheart.

— Nao, Tommy said on the verge of tears.

Cissy’s quick motherwit guessed what was amiss and she whispered to Edy Boardman to take him there behind the pushcar where the gentlemen couldn’t see and to mind he didn’t wet his new tan shoes.

But who was Gerty?

Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was in very truth as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemon juice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she’d never speak to her again. No. Honour where honour is due. There wasan innate refinement, a languid queenly hauteur about Gerty which was unmistakably evidenced in her delicate hands and higharched instep. Had kind fate but willed her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right and had she only received the benefit of a good education Gerty MacDowell might easily have held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to [334] her. Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning, that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm few could resist. Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty’s were of the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkilyseductive. It was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height and you have a beautiful face but your nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because she had a button one. But Gerty’s crowning glory was her wealth of wonderful hair. It was dark brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut it that very morning on account of the new moon and it nestled about her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant clusters and pared her nails too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at Edy’s words as a telltale flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God’s fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.

For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue. Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent. The pretty lips pouted a while but then she glanced up and broke out into a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May morning. She knew right well, no-one better, what made squinty Edy say that because of him cooling in his attentions when it was simply a lover’s quarrel. As per usual somebody’s nose was out of joint about the boy that had the bicycle always riding up and down in front of her window. Only now his father kept him in the evenings studying hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was on and he was going to Trinity college to study for a doctor when he left the high school like his brother W. E. Wylie who was racing in the bicycle races in Trinity college university. Little recked he perhaps for what she felt, that dull aching void in her heart sometimes, piercing to the core. Yet he was young and perchance he might learn to love her in time. They were protestants in his family and of course Gerty knew Who came first and after Him the blessed Virgin and then Saint Joseph. But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere [335] something off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at the lamp with his hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those good cigarettes and besides they were both of a size and that was why Edy Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because he didn’t go and ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.

Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of Dame Fashion for she felt that there was just a might that he might be out. A neat blouse of electric blue, selftinted by dolly dyes (because it was expected in the Lady’s Pictorial that electric blue would be worn), with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy threequarter skirt cut to the strideshowed off her slim graceful figure to perfection. She wore a coquettish little love of a hat of wideleaved nigger straw contrast trimmed with an underbrim of eggblue chenille and at the side a butterfly bow to tone. All Tuesday week afternoon she was hunting to match that chenille but at last she found what she wanted at Clery’s summer sales, the very it, slightly shopsoiled but you would never notice, seven fingers two and a penny. She did it up all by herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then, smiling at the lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her! And when she put it on the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that would take the shine out of some people she knew. Her shoes were the newest thing in footwear (Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very petite but she never had a foot like Gerty MacDowell, a five, and never would ash, oak or elm) with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle at her higharched instep. Her wellturned ankle displayed its perfect proportions beneath her skirt and just the proper amount and no more of her shapely limbs encased in finespun hose with highspliced heels and wide garter tops. As for undies they were Gerty’s chief care and who that knows the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen (though Gerty would never see seventeen again) can find it in his heart to blame her? She had four dinky sets, with awfully pretty stitchery, three garments and nighties extra, and each set slotted with different coloured ribbons, rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen and she aired them herself and blued them when they came home from the wash and ironed them and she had a brickbat to keep the iron on because she wouldn’t trust those washerwomen as far as she’d see them scorching the things. She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour and the lucky colour too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on [336] her because the green she wore that day week brought grief because his father brought him in to study for the intermediate exhibition and because she thought perhaps he might be out because when she was dressing that morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on her inside out and that was for luck and lovers’ meetings if you put those things on inside out so long as it wasn’t of a Friday.

And yet and yet! That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup feelings. Though not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said. The paly light of evening falls upon a face infinitely sad and wistful. Gerty Mac Dowell yearns in vain. Yes, she had known from the first that her daydream of a marriage has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggy Wylie T. C. D. (because the one who married the elder brother would be Mrs Wylie) and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was wearing a sumptuous confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox was not to be. He was too young to understand. He would not believe in love, a woman’s birthright. The night of the party long ago in Stoers’ (he was still in short trousers) when they were alone and he stole an arm round her waist she went white to the very lips. He called her little one in a strangely husky voice and snatched a half kiss (the first!) but it was only the end of her nose and then he hastened from the room with a remark about refreshments. Impetuous fellow! Strength of character had never been Reggy Wylie’s strong point and he who would woo and win Gerty Mac Dowell must be a man among men. But waiting, always waiting to be asked and it was leap year too and would soon be over. No prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long long kiss. It would be like heaven. For such a one she yearns this balmy summer eve. With all the heart of her she longs to be his only, his affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death us two part, from this to this day forward.

And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she was just thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself [337] his little wife to be. Then they could talk about her till they went blue in the face, Bertha Supple too, and Edy, the spitfire, because she would be twentytwo in November. She would care for him with creature comforts too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that feeling of hominess. Her griddlecakes done to a goldenbrown hue and queen Ann’s pudding of delightful creaminess had won golden opinions from all because she had a lucky hand also for lighting a fire, dredge in the fine selfraising flour and always stir in the same direction then cream the milk and sugar and whisk well the white of eggs though she didn’t like the eating part when there were any people that made her shy and often she wondered why you couldn’t eat something poetical like violets or roses and they would have a beautifully appointed drawingroom with pictures and engravings and the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked, it was so human, and chintz covers for the chairs and that silver toastrack in Clery’s summer jumble sales like they have in rich houses. He would be tall with broad shoulders (she had always admired tall men for a husband) with glistening white teeth under his carefully trimmed sweeping moustache and they would go on the continent for their honeymoon (three wonderful weeks!) and then, when they settled down in a nice snug and cosy little homely house, every morning they would both have brekky, simple but perfectly served, for their own two selves and before he went out to business he would give his dear little wifey a good hearty hug and gaze for a moment deep down into her eyes.

Edy Boardman asked Tommy Caffrey was he done and he said yes, so then she buttoned up his little knickerbockers for him and told him to run off and play with Jacky and to be good now and not to fight. But Tommy said he wanted the ball and Edy told him no that baby was playing with the ball and if he took it there’d be wigs on the green but Tommy said it was his ball and he wanted his ball and he pranced on the ground, if you please. The temper of him! O, he was a man already was little Tommy Caffrey since he was out of pinnies. Edy told him no, no and to be off now with him and she told Cissy Caffrey not to give in to him.

— You’re not my sister, naughty Tommy said. It’s my ball.

But Cissy Caffrey told baby Boardman to look up, look up high at her finger and she snatched the ball quickly and threw it along the sand and Tommy after it in full career, having won the day.

— Anything for a quiet life, laughed Ciss.

And she tickled tiny tot’s two cheeks to make him forget and played here’s [338] the lord mayor, here’s his two horses, here’s his gingerbread carriage and here he walks in, chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper chin. But Edy got as cross as two sticks about hin getting him own way like that from everyone always petting him.

— I’d like to give him something, she said, so I would, where I won’t say.

— On the beeoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily.

Gerty Mac Dowell bent down her head and crimsoned at the idea of Cissy saying an unladylike thing like that out loud she’d be ashamed of her life to say, flushing a deep rosy red, and Edy Boardman said she was sure the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared Ciss.

— Let him! she said with a pert toss of her head and a piquant tilt of her nose. Give it to him too on the same place as quick as I’d look at him.

Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her sometimes. For instance when she asked you would you have some more Chinese tea and jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men’s faces on her nails with red ink make you split your sides or when she wanted to go where you know she said she wanted to run and pay a visit to the Miss White. That was just like Cissycums. O, and will you ever forget the evening she dressed up in her father’s suit and hat and the burned cork moustache and walked down Tritonville road, smoking a cigarette. There was none to come up to her for fun. But she was sincerity itself, one of the bravest and truest hearts heaven ever made, not one of your twofaced things, too sweet to be wholesome.

And then there came out upon the air the sound of voices and the pealing anthem of the organ. It was the men’s temperance retreat conducted by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S. J. rosary, sermon and benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. They were there gathered together without distinction of social class (and a most edifying spectacle it was to see) in that simple fane beside the waves, after the storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of the immaculate, reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto, beseeching her to intercede for them, the old familiar words, holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins. How sad to poor Gerty’s ears! Had her father only avoided the clutches of the demon drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit cured in Pearson’s Weekly, she might now be rolling in her carriage, second to none. Over and over had she told herself that as she mused by the dying embers in a brown study without the lamp because she hated [339] two lights or oftentimes gazing out of the window dreamily by the hour at the rain falling on the rusty bucket, thinking. But that vile decoction which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cast its shadow over her childhood days. Nay, she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of violence caused by intemperance and had seen her own father, a prey to the fumes of intoxication, forget himself completely for if there was one thing of all things that Gerty knew it was the man who lifts his hand to a woman save in the way of kindness deserves to be branded as the lowest of the low.

And still the voices sang in supplication to the Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful. And Gerty, wrapt in thought, scarce saw or heard her companions or the twins at their boyish gambols or the gentleman off Sandymount green that Cissy Caffrey called the man that was so like himself passing along the strand taking a short walk. You never saw him anyway screwed but still and for all that she would not like him for a father because he was too old or something or on account of his face (it was a palpable case of doctor Fell) or his carbuncly nose with the pimples on it and his sandy moustache a bit white under his nose. Poor father! With all his faults she loved him still when he sang Tell me, Mary, how to woo thee or My love and cottage near Rochelle and they had stewed cockles and lettuce with Lazenby’s salad dressing for supper and when he sang The moon hath raised with Mr Dignam that died suddenly and was buried, God have mercy on him, from a stroke. Her mother’s birthday that was and Charley was home on his holidays and Tom and Mr Dignam and Mrs and Patsy and Freddy Dignam and they were to have had a group taken. No-one would have thought the end was so hear. Now he was laid to rest. And her mother said to him to let that be a warning to him for the rest of his days and he couldn’t even go to the funeral on account of the gout and she had to go into town to bring him the letters and samples from his office about Catesby’s cork lino, artistic standard designs, fit for a palace, gives tiptop wear and always bright and cheery in the home.

A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in gold. And when her mother had those raging splitting headaches who was it rubbed on the menthol cone on her forehead but Gerty though she didn’t like her mother taking pinches of snuff and that was the only single thing they ever had words about, taking snuff. Everyone thought the world of her for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at the main every night and it was Gerty [340] who tacked up on the wall of that place where she never forgot every fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr Tunney the grocer’s christmas almanac the picture of halcyon days where a young gentleman in the costume they used to wear then with a threecornered hat was offering a bunch of flowers to his ladylove with oldtime chivalry through her lattice window. You could see there was a story behind it. The colours were done something lovely. She was in a soft clinging white in a studied attitude and the gentleman was in chocolate and he looked a thorough aristocrat. She often looked at them dreamily when she went there for a certain purpose and felt her own arms that were white and soft just like hers with the sleeves back and thought about those times because she had found out in Walker’s pronouncing dictionary that belonged to grandpapa Giltrap about the halcyon days what they meant.

The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion, till at last Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was no getting behind that deliberately kicked the ball as hard as ever he could down towards the seaweedy rocks. Needless to say poor Tommy was not slow to voice his dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was sitting there by himself came gallantly to the rescue and intercepted the ball. Our two champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries and to avoid trouble Cissy Caffrey called to the gentleman to throw it to her please. The gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw it up the strand towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope and stopped right under Gerty’s skirt near the little pool by the rock. The twins clamoured again for it and Cissy told her to kick it away and let them fight for it so Gerty drew back her foot but she wished their stupid ball hadn’t come rolling down to her and she gave a kick but she missed and Edy and Cissy laughed.

— If you fail try again, Edy Boardman said.

Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip. A delicate pink crept into her pretty cheek but she was determined to let them see so she just lifted her skirt a little but just enough and took good aim and gave the ball a jolly good kick and it went ever so far and the two twins after it down towards the shingle. Pure jealousy of course it was nothing else to draw attention on account of the gentleman opposite looking. She felt the warm flush, a danger signal always with Gerty Mac Dowell, surging and flaming into her cheeks. Till then they had only exchanged glances of the most casual but now under the brim of her new hat she ventured a look at him and the face that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan and strangely drawn, seemed to her the saddest she had ever seen.

[341] Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. And careworn hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many who had erred and wandered, their eyes wet with contrition but for all that bright with hope for the reverend father Hughes had told them what the great saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the most pious Virgin’s intercessory power that it was not recorded in any age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned by her.

The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy played with baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word, didn’t the little chap enjoy that! And then she told him to say papa.

— Say papa, baby. Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa.

And baby did his level best to say it for he was very intelligent for eleven months everyone said and big for his age and the picture of health, a perfect little bunch of love, and he would certainly turn out to be something great, they said.

— Haja ja ja haja.

Cissy wiped his little mouth with the dribbling bib and wanted him to sit up properly and say pa pa pa but when she undid the strap she cried out, holy saint Denis, that he was possing wet and to double the half blanket the other way under him. Of course his infant majesty was most obstreperous at such toilet formalities and he let everyone know it:

— Habaa baaaahabaaa baaaa.

And two great big lovely big tears coursing down his cheeks. It was all no use soothering him with no, nono, baby, no and telling him about the geegee and where was the puffpuff but Ciss, always, readywitted, gave him in his mouth the teat of the suckingbottle and the young heathen was quickly appeased.

Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out of that and not get on her nerves no hour to be out and the little brats of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds coming [342] out and the Bailey light on Howth and to hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went pitapat. Yes, it was her he was looking at and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. She could see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matinée idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she wasn’t stagestruck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always dress the same on account of a play but she could not see whether he had an aquiline nose or a slightly retroussé from where he was sitting. He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what it was. He was looking up so intently, so still and he saw her kick the ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles of her shoes if she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down. She was glad that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband. because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a womanly woman not like other flighty girls, unfeminine, he had known, those cyclists showing off what they hadn’t got and she just yearned to know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her, make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie, for herself alone.

Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. Ora pro nobis. Well has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced her own heart. Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue banners of the blessed Virgin’s sodality and Father [343] Conroy was helping Canon O’Hanlon at the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes cast down. He looked almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to the convent for the novena of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when she told him about that in confession crimsoning up to the roots of her hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the voice of nature and we were all subject to nature’s laws, he said, in this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of woman instituted by God, he said, and that Our Blessed Lady herself said to the archangel Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word. He was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and thought could she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral design for him as a present or a clock but they had a clock she noticed on the mantelpiece white and gold with a canary bird that came out of a little house to tell the time the day she went there about the flowers for the forty hours’ adoration because it was hard to know what sort of a present to give or perhaps an album of illuminated views of Dublin or some place.

The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little monkeys common as ditchwater. Someone ought to take them and give them a good hiding for themselves to keep them in their places, the both of them. And Cissy and Edy shouted after them to come back because they were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned.

— Jacky! Tommy!

Not they! What a great notion they had! So Cissy said it was the very last time she’d ever bring them out. She jumped up and called them and she ran down the slope past him, tossing her hair behind her which had a good enough colour if there had been more of it but with all the thingamerry she was always rubbing into it she couldn’t get it to grow long because it wasn’t natural so she could just go and throw her hat at it. She ran with long gandery strides it was a wonder she didn’t rip up her skirt at the side that was too tight on her because there was a lot of the tomboy about Cissy Caffrey and she was a forward piece whenever she thought she had a good opportunity to show off and just because she was a good runner she ran like that so that he could see all the end of her petticoat running and her skinny shanks up as far as possible. It would have served her just right if she had tripped up over something accidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to make her look tall and [344] got a fine tumble. Tableau! That would have been a very charming exposé for a gentleman like that to witness.

Queen of angels, queen of patriarchs, queen of prophets, of all saints, they prayed, queen of the most holy rosary and then Father Conroy handed the thurible to Canon O’ Hanlon and he put in the incense and censed the Blessed Sacrament and Cissy Caffrey caught the two twins and she was itching to give them a ringing good clip on the ear but she didn’t because she thought he might be watching but she never made a bigger mistake in all her life because Gerty could see without looking that he never took his eyes off of her and then Canon O’Hanlon handed the thurible back to Father Conroy and knelt down looking up at the Blessed Sacrament and the choir began to sing Tantum ergo and she just swung her foot in and out in time as the music rose and fell to the Tantumer gosa cramen tum. Three and eleven she paid for those stockings in Sparrow’s of Ceorge’s street on the Tuesday, no the Monday before Easter and there wasn’t a brack on them and that was what he was looking at, transparent, and not at her insignificant ones that had neither shape nor form (the cheek of her!) because he had eyes in his head to see the difference for himself.

Cissy came up along the strand with the two twins and their ball with her hat anyhow on her to one side after her run and she did look a streel tugging the two kids along with the flimsy blouse she bought only a fortnight before like a rag on her back and a bit of her petticoat hanging like a caricature. Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to settle her hair and a prettier, a daintier head of nutbrown tresses was never seen on a girl’s shoulders, a radiant little vision, in sooth, almost maddening in its sweetness. You would have to travel many a long mile before you found a head of hair the like of that. She could almost see the swift answering flush of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a snake eyes its prey. Her woman’s instinct told her that she had raised the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose.

Edy Boardman was noticing it too because she was squinting at Gerty, half smiling, with her specs, like an old maid, pretending to nurse the baby. Irritable little gnat she was and always would be and that was why no-one could get on with her, poking her nose into what was no concern of hers. And she said to Gerty:

[345] — A penny for your thoughts.

— What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth. I was only wondering was it late.

Because she wished to goodness they’d take the snottynosed twins and their baby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because they were told to be in early.

— Wait, said Cissy, I’ll ask my uncle Peter over there what’s the time by his conundrum.

So over she went and when he saw her coming she could see him take his hand out of his pocket, getting nervous, and beginning to play with his watchchain, looking at the church. Passionate nature though he was Gerty could see that he had enormous control over himself. One moment he had been there, fascinated by a loveliness that made him gaze and the next moment it was the quiet gravefaced gentleman, selfcontrol expressed in every line of his distinguishedlooking figure.

Cissy said to excuse her would he mind telling her what was the right time and Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the sun was set. His voice had a cultured ring in it and though he spoke in measured accents there was a suspicion of a quiver in the mellow tones. Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said his waterworks were out of order.

Then they sang the second verse of the Tantum ergo and Canon O’Hanlon got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she could see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands back into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over her and she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against her stays that that thing must be coming on because the last time too was when she clipped her hair on account of the moon. His dark eyes fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, [346] literally worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man’s passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man’s face. It is for you, Gertrude Mac Dowell, and you know it.

Edy began to get ready to go and it was high time for her and Gerty noticed that that little hint she gave had the desired effect because it was a long way along the strand to where there was the place to push up the pushcar and Cissy took off the twins’ caps and tidied their hair to make herself attractive of course and Canon O’Hanlon stood up with his cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the card to read off and he read out Panem de coelo praestitisti eis and Edy and Cissy were talking about the time all the time and asking her but Gerty could pay them back in their own coin and she just answered with scathing politeness when Edy asked her was she heartbroken about her best boy throwing her over. Gerty winced sharply. A brief cold blaze shone from her eyes that spoke volumes of scorn immeasurable. It hurt. O yes, it cut deep because Edy had her own quiet way of saying things like that she knew would wound like the confounded little cat she was. Gerty’s lips parted swiftly to frame the word but she fought back the sob that rose to her throat, so slim, so flawless, so beautifully moulded it seemed one an artist might have dreamed of. She had loved him better than he knew. Lighthearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex he would never understand what he had meant to her and for an instant there was in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. Their eyes were probing her mercilessly but with a brave effort she sparkled back in sympathy as she glanced at her new conquest for them to see.

— O, responded Gerty, quick as lightning, laughing, and the proud head flashed up. I can throw my cap at who I like because it’s leap year.

Her words rang out crystalclear, more musical than the cooing of the ringdove but they cut the silence icily. There was that in her young voice that told that she was not a one to be lightly trifled with. As for Mr Reggy with his swank and his bit of money she could just chuck him aside as if he was so much filth and never again would she cast as much as a second thought on him and tear his silly postcard into a dozen pieces. And if ever after he dared to presume she could give him one look of measured scorn that would make him shrivel up on the spot. Miss puny little Edy’s countenance fell to no slight extent and Gerty could see by her looking as black as thunder that she was simply in a towering rage though she hid it, the little kinnatt, because that shaft had struck home for her petty jealousy and they both knew that she was something aloof, apart in another sphere, that she was not of them and there [347] was somebody else too that knew it and saw it so they could put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Edy straightened up baby Boardman to get ready to go and Cissy tucked in the ball and the spades and buckets and it was high time too because the sandman was on his way for Master Boardman junior and Cissy told him too that Billy Winks was coming and that baby was to go deedaw and baby looked just too ducky, laughing up out of his gleeful eyes, and Cissy poked him like that out of fun in his wee fat tummy and baby, without as much as by your leave, sent up his compliments on to his brandnew dribbling bib.

— O my! Puddeny pie! protested Ciss. He has his bib destroyed.

The slight contretemps claimed her attention but in two twos she set that little matter to rights.

Gerty stifled a smothered exclamation and gave a nervous cough and Edy asked what and she was just going to tell her to catch it while it was flying but she was ever ladylike in her deportment so she simply passed it off with consummate tact by saying that that was the benediction because just then the bell rang out from the steeple over the quiet seashore because Canon O’Hanlon was up on the altar with the veil that Father Conroy put round him round his shoulders giving the benediction with the Blessed Sacrament in his hands.

How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the lamp near her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like she read in that book The Lamplighter by Miss Cummins, author of Mabel Vaughan and other tales. For Gerty had her dreams that no-one knew of. She loved to read poetry and when she got a keepsake from Bertha Supple of that lovely confession album with the coralpink cover to write her thoughts in she laid it in the drawer of her toilettable which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously neat and clean. It was there she kept her girlish treasures trove, the tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change when her things came home from the wash and there were some beautiful thoughts written in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely’s [348] of Dame Street for she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. Art thou real, my ideal? it was called by Louis J. Walsh, Magherafelt, and after there was something about twilight, wilt thou ever? and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears that the years were slipping by for her, one by one, and but for that one shortcoming she knew she need fear no competition and that was an accident coming down Dalkey hill and she always tried to conceal it. But it must end she felt. If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there would be no holding back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths. She would make the great sacrifice. Her every effort would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even if — what then? Would it make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men, with no respect for a girl’s honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess. Perhaps it was an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall. She thought she understood. She would try to understand him because men were so different. The old love was waiting, waiting with little white hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would follow her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.

Canon O’Hanlon put the Blessed Sacrament back into the tabernacle and the choir sang Laudate Dominum omnes gentes and then he locked the tabernacle door because the benediction was over and Father Conroy handed him his hat to put on and crosscat Edy asked wasn’t she coming but Jacky Caffrey called out:

— O, look, Cissy!

And they all looked was it sheet lightning but Tommy saw it too over the trees beside the church, blue and then green and purple.

[349] — It’s fireworks, Cissy Caffrey said.

And they all ran down the strand to see over the houses and the church, helterskelter, Edy with the pushcar with baby Boardman in it and Cissy holding Tommy and Jacky by the hand so they wouldn’t fall running.

— Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It’s the bazaar fireworks.

But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave and it had made her his. At last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremour went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she’d never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn’t do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors’ photographs and besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did.

And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and they all saw it and shouted to look, look there it was and she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was flying about through the air, a soft thing to and fro, dark. And she saw a long Roman candle going up over [350] the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft!

Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl. He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been. He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell.

Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show what a great person she was: and then she cried:

— Gerty! Gerty! We’re going. Come on. We can see from farther up.

Gerty had an idea, one of love’s little ruses. She slipped a hand into her [351] kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he’s too far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged on tears, and then they parted.

Slowly without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy, to Edy, to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because, because Gerty Mac Dowell was…..

Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O!

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That’s why she’s left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. Wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate. Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such a bad headache today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All kinds of crazy longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent that nun told me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I suppose. Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something in the air. That’s the moon. But then why don’t all women menstruate at the same time with same moon, I mean? Depends on the time they were born, I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of step. Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that. Damned glad I didn’t do it in the bath this morning over her silly I will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That gouger M’Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife engagement in the country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small mercies. Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices. Reserve better. Don’t want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O. Pity they can’t see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom. Willy’s hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those girls or is it all a [352] fake. Lingerie does it. Felt for the curves inside her deshabillé. Excites them also when they’re. I’m all clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice. Milly delighted with Molly’s new blouse. At first. Put them all on to take them all off. Molly. Why I bought her the violet garters. Us too: the tie he wore, his lovely socks and turnedup trousers. He wore a pair of gaiters the night that first we met. His lovely shirt was shining beneath his what? of jet. Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out. Pinned together. O Mairy lost the pin of her. Dressed up to the nines for somebody. Fashion part of their charm. Just changes when you’re on the track of the secret. Except the east: Mary, Martha: now as then. No reasonable offer refused. She wasn’t in a hurry either. Always off to a fellow when they are. They never forget an appointment. Out on spec probably. They believe in chance because like themselves. And the others inclined to give her an odd dig. Girl friends at school, arms round each other’s necks or with ten fingers locked, kissing and whispering secrets about nothing in the convent garden. Nuns with whitewashed faces, cool coif and their rosaries going up and down, vindictive too for what they can’t get. Barbed wire. Be sure now and write to me. And I’ll write to you. Now won’t you? Molly and Josie Powell. Till Mr Right comes, along then meet once in a blue moon. Tableau! O, look who it is for the love of God! How are you at all? What have you been doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss, to see you. Picking holes in each other’s appearance. You’re looking splendid. Sister souls showing their teeth at one another. How many have you left? Wouldn’t lend each other a pinch of salt.

Ah!

Devils they are when that’s coming on them. Dark devilish appearance. Molly often told me feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of my foot. O that way! O, that’s exquisite! Feel it myself too. Good to rest once in a way. Wonder if it’s bad to go with them then. Safe in one way. Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I read in a garden. Besides they say if the flower withers she wears she’s a flirt. All are. Daresay she felt I. When you feel like that you often meet what you feel. Liked me or what? Dress they look at. Always know a fellow courting: collars and cuffs. Well cocks and lions do the same and stags. Same time might prefer a tie undone or something. Trousers? Suppose I when I was? No. Gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kiss in the dark and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner have me as I am than some poet [353] chap with bearsgrease plastery hair, lovelock over his dexter optic. To aid gentleman in literary. Ought to attend to my appearance my age. Didn’t let her see me in profile. Still, you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying. Beauty and the beast. Besides I can’t be so if Molly. Took off her hat to show her hair. Wide brim bought to hide her face, meeting someone might know her, bend down or carry a bunch of flowers to smell. Hair strong in rut. Ten bob I got for Molly’s combings when we were on the rocks in Holles street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money. Why not? All a prejudice. She’s worth ten, fifteen, more a pound. What? I think so. All that for nothing. Bold hand. Mrs Marion. Did I forget to write address on that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn. And the day I went to Drimmie’s without a necktie. Wrangle with Molly it was put me off. No, I remember. Richie Goulding. He’s another. Weighs on his mind. Funny my watch stopped at half past four. Dust. Shark liver oil they use to clean could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she?

O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.

Ah!

Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. After effect not pleasant. Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don’t care. Complimented perhaps. Go home to nicey bread and milky and say night prayers with the kiddies. Well, aren’t they. See her as she is spoil all. Must have the stage setting, the rouge, costume, position, music. The name too. Amours of actresses. Nell Gwynn, Mrs Bracegirdle, Maud Branscombe. Curtain up. Moonlight silver effulgence. Maiden discovered with pensive bosom. Little sweetheart come and kiss me. Still I feel. The strength it gives a man. That’s the secret of it. Good job I let off there behind coming out of Dignam’s. Cider that was. Otherwise I couldn’t have. Makes you want to sing after. Lacaus esant taratara. Suppose I spoke to her. What about? Bad plan however of you don’t know how to end the conversation. Ask them a question they ask you another. Good idea if you’re in a cart. Wonderful of course if you say: good evening, and you see she’s on for it: good evening. O but the dark evening in the Appian way I nearly spoke to Mrs Clinch O thinking she was. Whew! Girl in Meath street that night. All the dirty things I made her say all wrong of course. My arks she called it. It’s so hard to find one who. Aho! If you don’t answer when they solicit must be horrible for them till they harden. And kissed my hand when I gave her the extra two shillings. Parrots. Press the [354] button and the bird will squeak. Wish she hadn’t called me sir. O, her mouth in the dark! And you a married man with a single girl! That’s what they enjoy. Taking a man from another woman. Or even hear of it. Different with me. Glad to get away from other chap’s wife. Eating off his cold plate. Chap in the Burton today spitting back gumchewed gristle. French letter still in my pocketbook. Cause of half the trouble. But might happen sometime, I don’t think. Come in. All is prepared. I dreamt. What? Worst is beginning. How they change the venue when it’s not what they like. Ask you do you like mushrooms because she once knew a gentleman who. Or ask you what someone was going to say when he changed his mind and stopped. Yet if I went the whole hog, say: I want to, something like that. Because I did. She too. Offend her. Then make it up. Pretend to want something awfully, then cry off for her sake. Flatters them. She must have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm? Must since she came to the use of reason, he, he and he. First kiss does the trick. The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop. Mushy like, tell by their eye, on the sly. First thoughts are best. Remember that till their dying day. Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the Moorish wall beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me. But her breasts were developed. Fell asleep then. After Glencree dinner that was when we drove home the featherbed mountain. Gnashing her teeth in sleep. Lord mayor had his eye on her too. Val Dillon. Apoplectic.

There she is with them down there for the fireworks. My fireworks. Up like a rocket, down like a stick. And the children, twins they must be, waiting for something to happen. Want to be grownups. Dressing in mother’s clothes. Time enough, understand all the ways of the world. And the dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth. I knew she could whistle. Mouth made for that. Like Molly. Why that high class whore in Jammet’s wore her veil only to her nose. Would you mind, please, telling me the right time? I’ll tell you the right time up a dark lane. Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips. Caressing the little boy too. Onlookers see most of the game. Of course they understand birds, animals, babies. In their line.

Didn’t look back when she was going down the strand. Wouldn’t give that satisfaction. Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls. Fine eyes she had, clear[.]  It’s the white of the eye brings that out not so much the pupil. Did she know what I? Course. Like a cat sitting beyond a dog’s jump. Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that innocence? Poor idiot! His wife [355] has her work cut out for her. Never see them sit on a bench marked Wet Paint. Eyes all over them. Look under the bed for what’s not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives. Sharp as needles they are. When I said to Molly the man at the corner of Cuffe street was goodlooking, thought she might like, twigged at once he had a false arm. Had too. Where do they get that? Typist going up Roger Greene’s stairs two at a time to show her understandings. Handed down from father to mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the bone. Milly for example drying her handkerchief on the mirror to save the ironing. Best place for an ad to catch a woman’s eye on a mirror. And when I sent her for Molly’s Paisley shawl to Presscott’s, by the way that ad I must, carrying home the change in her stocking. Clever little minx! I never told her. Neat way she carries parcels too. Attract men, small thing like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it, to let the blood flow back when it was red. Who did you learn that from? Nobody. Something the nurse taught me. O, don’t they know? Three years old she was in front of Molly’s dressingtable just before we left Lombard street west. Me have a nice pace. Mullingar. Who knows? Ways of the world. Young student. Straight on her pins anyway not like the other. Still she was game. Lord, I am wet. Devil you are. Swell of her calf. Transparent stockings, stretched to breaking point. Not like that frump today. A. E. Rumpled stockings. Or the one in Grafton street. White. Wow! Beef to the heel.

A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy ran out to see and Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the rocks. Will she? Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling, I saw your. I saw all.

Lord!

Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan’s, Dignam’s. For this relief much thanks. In Hamlet, that is. Lord! It was all things combined. Excitement. When she leaned back felt an ache at the butt of my tongue. Your head it simply swirls. He’s right. Might have made a worse fool of myself however. Instead of talking about nothing. Then I will tell you all. Still it was a kind of language between us. It couldn’t be? No, Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like my and the address Dolphin’s barn a blind.

Her maiden name was Jemima Brown

And she lived with her mother in Irishtown.

[356] Place made me think of that I suppose. All tarred with the same brush. Wiping pens in their stockings. But the ball rolled down to her as if it understood. Every bullet has its billet. Course I never could throw anything straight at school. Crooked as a ram’s horn. Sad however because it lasts only a few years till they settle down to potwalloping and papa’s pants will soon fit Willy and fullers’ earth for the baby when they hold him out to do ah ah. No soft job. Saves them. Keeps them out of harm’s way. Nature. Washing child, washing corpse. Dignam. Children’s hands always round them. Cocoanut skulls, monkeys, not even closed at first, sour milk in their swaddles and tainted curds. Oughtn’t to have given that child an empty teat to suck. Fill it up with wind. Mrs Beaufoy, Purefoy. Must call to the hospital. Wonder is nurse Callan there still. She used to look over some nights when Molly was in the Coffee Palace. That young doctor O’Hare I noticed her brushing his coat. And Mrs Breen and Mrs Dignam once like that too, marriageable. Worst of all at night Mrs Duggan told me in the City Arms. Husband rolling in drunk, stink of pub off him like a polecat. Have that in your nose in the dark, whiff of stale boose. Then ask in the morning: was I drunk last night? Bad policy however to fault the husband. Chickens come home to roost. They stick by one another like glue. Maybe the women’s fault also. That’s where Molly can knock spots off them. It is the blood of the south. Moorish. Also the form, the figure. Hands felt for the opulent. Just compare for instance those others. Wife locked up at home, skeleton in the cupboard. Allow me to introduce my. Then they trot you out some kind of a nondescript, wouldn’t know what to call her. Always see a fellow’s weak point in his wife. Still there’s destiny in it, falling in love. Have their own secrets between them. Chaps that would go to the dogs if some woman didn’t take them in hand. Then little chits of girls, height of a shilling in coppers, with little hubbies. As God made them He matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought makes one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May and repent in December. This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the foreskin is not back. Better detach.

Ow!

Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket. Long and the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch. Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic influence between the person because that was about the time he. Yes, I suppose at once. Cat’s away the mice will play. I remember looking in Pill lane. Also that now is magnetism. [357] Back of everything magnetism. Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement. And time? Well that’s the time the movement takes. Then if one thing stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it’s all arranged. Magnetic needle tells you what’s going on in the sun, the stars. Little piece of steel iron. When you hold out the fork. Come. Come. Tip. Woman and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up and look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you’re a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you have any guts in you. Tip. Have to let fly.

Wonder how is she feeling in that region. Shame all put on before third person. More put out about a hole in her stocking. Molly, her underjaw stuck out, head back, about the farmer in the ridingboots and spurs at the horse show. And when the painters were in Lombard street west. Fine voice that fellow had. How Giuglini began. Smell that I did, like flowers. It was too. Violets. Came from the turpentine probably in the paint. Make their own use of everything. Same time doing it scraped her slipper on the floor so they wouldn’t hear. But lots of them can’t kick the beam, I think. Keep that thing up for hours. Kind of a general all round over me and half down my back.

Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That’s her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave you this to think of me when I’m far away on the pillow. What is it? Heliotrope? No, Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She’d like scent of that kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her with a little jessamine mixed[.]  Her high notes and her low notes. At the dance night she met him. [him,] dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. She was wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before. Good conductor, is it? Or bad? Light too. Suppose there’s some connection. For instance if you go into a cellar where it’s dark. Mysterious thing too. Why did I smell it only now? Took its time in coming like herself, slow but sure. Suppose it’s ever so many millions of tiny grains blown across. Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this morning, smell them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It’s like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer and they’re always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything she takes off. Vamp of her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers: little kick, taking them off. Byby till next time. Also the cat likes to sniff in her shift on the bed[.]  Know her smell in a thousand. Bathwater too. Reminds me of strawberries and cream. Wonder where it is really. There or the armpits or under the neck. Because [358] you get it out of all holes and corners. Hyacinth perfume made of oil or ether or something. Muskrat. Bag under their tails one grain pour off odour for years. Dogs at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm. Very well, thank you. Animals go by that. Yes now, look at it that way. We’re the same. Some women for instance warn you off when they have their period. Come near. Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on. Like what? Potted herrings gone stale or. Boof! Please keep off the grass.

Perhaps they get a man smell off us. What though? Cigary gloves Long John had on his desk the other. Breath? What you eat and drink gives that. No. Mansmell, I mean. Must be connected with that because priests that are supposed to be are different. Women buzz round it like flies round treacle. Railed off the altar get on to it at any cost. The tree of forbidden priest. O father, will you? Let me be the first to. That diffuses itself all through the body, permeates. Source of life and it’s extremely curious the smell. Celery sauce. Let me.

Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his waistcoat. Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that’s the soap.

O by the by that lotion. I knew there was something on my mind. Never went back and the soap not paid. Dislike carrying bottles like that hag this morning. Hynes might have paid me that three shillings. I could mention Meagher’s just to remind him. Still if he works that paragraph. Two and nine. Bad opinion of me he’ll have. Call tomorrow. How much do I owe you? Three and nine? Two and nine, sir. Ah. Might stop him giving credit another time. Lose your customers that way. Pubs do. Fellows run up a bill on the slate and then slinking around the back streets into somewhere else.

Here’s this nobleman passed before. Blown in from the bay. Just went as far as turn back. Always at home at dinnertime. Looks mangled out: had a good tuck in. Enjoying nature now. Grace after meals. After supper walk a mile. Sure he has a small bank balance somewhere, government sit. Walk after him now make him awkward like those newsboys me today. Still you learn something. See ourselves as others see us. So long as women don’t mock what matter? That’s the way to find out. Ask yourself who is he now. The Mystery Man on the Beach, prize titbit story by Mr Leopold Bloom. Payment at the rate of one guinea per column. And that fellow today at the graveside in the brown macintosh. Corns on his kismet however. Healthy perhaps absorb all the. Whistle brings rain they say. Must be some somewhere. Salt in the [359] Ormond damp. The body feels the atmosphere. Old Betty’s joints are on the rack. Mother Shipton’s prophecy that is about ships around they fly in the twinkling. No. Signs of rain it is. The royal reader. And distant hills seem coming nigh.

Howth. Bailey light. Two, four, six, eight, nine. See. Has to change or they might think it a house. Wreckers. Grace darling. People afraid of the dark. Also glowworms, cyclists: lightingup time. Jewels diamonds flash better. Light is a kind of reassuring. Not going to hurt you. Better now of course than long ago. Country roads. Run you through the small guts for nothing. Still two types there are you bob against. Scowl or smile. Pardon! Not at all. Best time to spray plants too in the shade after the sun. Some light still. Red rays are longest. Roygbiv Vance taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A star I see. Venus? Can’t tell yet. Two, when three it’s night. Were those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No. Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land, goodnight.

Dew falling. Bad for you, dear, to sit on that stone. Brings on white fluxions. Never have little baby then less he was big strong fight his way up through. Might get piles myself. Sticks too like a summer cold, sore on the mouth. Cut with grass or paper worst, Friction of the position. Like to be that rock she sat on. O sweet little, you don’t know how nice you looked. I begin to like them at that age. Green apples. Grab at all that offer. Suppose it’s the only time we cross legs, seated. Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs under them. But it’s the evening influence. They feel all that. Open like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, in ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps. Nightstock in Mat Dillon’s garden where I kissed her shoulder. Wish I had a full length oilpainting of her then. June that was too I wooed. The year returns. History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I’m with you once again. Life, love, voyage round your own little world. And now? Sad about her lame of course but must be on your guard not to feel too much pity. They take advantage.

All quiet on Howth now. The distant hills seem. Where we. The rhododendrons. I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums and I the plumstones. Where I come in. All that old hill has seen. Names change: that’s all. Lovers: yum yum.

Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch. She kissed me. My youth. Never again. Only once it comes. [360] Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing new under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin’s barn. Are you not happy in your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin’s barn charades in Luke Doyle’s house. Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old major partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an only child. So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in Henny Doyle’s overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the drew.

Ba. What is that flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I’m a tree, so blind. Have birds no smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief. Weeping willow. Ba. There he goes. Funny little beggar. Wonder where he lives. Belfry up there. Very likely. Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity. Bell scared him out, I suppose. Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us. Yes, there’s the light in the priest’s house. Their frugal meal. Remember about the mistake in the valuation when I was in Thom’s. Twentyeight it is. Two houses they have. Gabriel Conroy’s brother is curate. Ba. Again. Wonder why they come out at night like mice. They’re a mixed breed. Birds are like hopping mice. What frightens them, light or noise? Better sit still. All instinct like the bird in drouth got water out of the end of a jar by throwing in pebbles. Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands. Weeny bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white. Colours depend on the light you see. Stare the sun for example like the eagle then look at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish. Wants to stamp his trademark on everything. Instance, that cat this morning on the staircase. Colour of brown turf. Say you never see them with three colours. Not true. That half tabbywhite tortoiseshell in the City Arms with the letter em on her forehead. Body fifty different colours. Howth a while ago amethyst. Glass flashing. That’s how that wise man what’s his name with the burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire. It can’t be tourists’ matches. What? Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the [361] wind and light. Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun. Archimedes. I have it! My memory’s not so bad.

Ba. Who knows what they’re always flying for. Insects? That bee last week got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling. Might be the one bit me, come back to see. Birds too never find out what they say. Like our small talk. And says she and says he. Nerve they have to fly over the ocean and back. Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph wires. Dreadful life sailors have too. Big brutes of oceangoing steamers floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows. Faugh a ballagh. Out of that, bloody curse to you. Others in vessels, bit of a handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy winds do blow. Married too. Sometimes away for years at the ends of the earth somewhere. No ends really because it’s round. Wife in every port they say. She has a good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching home again. If ever he does. Smelling the tail end of ports. How can they like the sea? Yet they do. The anchor’s weighed. Off he sails with a scapular or a medal on him for luck. Well? And the tephilim no what’s this they call it poor papa’s father had on his door to touch. That brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage. Something in all those superstitions because when you go out never know what dangers. Hanging on to a plank or astride of a beam for grim life, lifebelt round round him, gulping salt water, and that’s the last of his nibs till the sharks catch hold of him. Do fish ever get seasick?

Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid, crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones’ locker. Moon looking down. Not my fault, old cockalorum.

A lost long candle wandered up the sky from Mirus bazaar in search of funds for Mercer’s hospital and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster of violet but one white stars. They floated, fell: they faded. The shepherd’s hour: the hour of folding: hour of tryst. From house to house, giving his everwelcome double knock, went the nine o’clock postman, the glowworm’s lamp at his belt gleaming here and there through the laurel hedges. And among the five young trees a hoisted lintstock lit the lamp at Leahy’s terrace. By screens of lighted windows, by equal gardens a shrill voice went crying, wailing: Evening Telegraph, stop press edition! Result of the Gold Cup races! and from the door of Dignam’s house a boy ran out and called. Twittering the bat flew here, flew there. Far out over the sands the coming surf crept, grey. Howth settled for slumber tired of long days, of yumyum rhododendrons (he was old) and felt [362] gladly the night breeze lift, ruffle his fell of ferns. He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing, slumberous but awake. And far on Kish bank the anchored lightship twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom.

Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot. Irish Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and breeches buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in the Erin’s King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo. Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard to feed the herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces. Milly, no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don’t know what death is at that age. And then their stomachs clean. But being lost they fear. When we hid behind the tree at Crumlin. I didn’t want to. Mamma! Mamma! Babes in the wood. Frightening them with masks too. Throwing them up in the air to catch them. I’ll murder you. Is it only half fun? Or children playing battle. Whole earnest. How can people aim guns at each other. Sometimes they go off. Poor kids. Only troubles wildfire and nettlerash. Calomel purge I got her for that. After getting better asleep with Molly. Very same teeth she has. What do they love? Another themselves? But the morning she chased her with the umbrella. Perhaps so as not to hurt. I felt her pulse. Ticking. Little hand it was: now big. Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you touch. Loved to count my waistcoat buttons. Her first stays I remember. Made me laugh to see. Little paps to begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think. Mine too. Nearer the heart. Padding themselves out if fat is in fashion. Her growing pains at night, calling, wakening me. Frightened she was when her nature came on her first. Poor child! Strange moment for the mother too. Brings back her girlhood. Gibraltar. Looking from Buena Vista. O’Hara’s tower. The seabirds screaming. Old Barbary ape that gobbled all his family. Sundown, gunfire for the men to cross the lines. Looking out over the sea she told me. Evening like this, but clear, no clouds. I always thought I’d marry a lord or a gentleman with a private yacht. Buenas noches, señorita. El hombre ama la muchaha hermosa. Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others.

Better not stick here all night like a limpet. This weather makes you dull. Must be getting on for nine by the light. Go home. Too late for Leah, Lily of Killarney. No. Might be still up. Call to the hospital to see. Hope she’s over. Long day I’ve had. Martha, the bath, funeral, house of keys, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus’ song. Then that bawler in Barney Kiernan’s. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters. What I said about his God made him wince. [363] Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant. Three cheers for Israel. Three cheers for the sister-in-law he hawked about, three fangs in her mouth. Same style of beauty. Particularly nice old party for a cup of tea. The sister of the wife of the wild man of Borneo has just come to town. Imagine that in the early morning at close range. Everyone to his taste as Morris said when he kissed the cow. But Dignam’s put the boots on it. Houses of mourning so depressing because you never know. Anyhow she wants the money. Must call to those Scottish widows as I promised. Strange name. Takes it for granted we’re going to pop off first. That widow on Monday was is outside Cramer’s that looked at me. Buried the poor husband but progressing favourably on the premium. Her widow’s mite. Well? What do you expect her to do? Must wheedle her way along. Widower I hate to see. Looks so forlorn. Poor man O’Connor wife and five children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage. Hopeless. Some good matronly woman in a porkpie hat to mother him. Take him in tow, platter face and a large apron. Ladies’ grey flanelette bloomers, three shillings a pair, astonishing bargain. Plain and loved, loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we die. See him sometimes walking about trying to find out who played the trick. U. p: up. Fate that is. He, not me. Also a shop often noticed. Curse seems to dog it. Dreamt last night? Wait. Something confused. She had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches. Suppose she does. Would I like her in pyjamas? Damned hard to answer. Nannetti’s gone. Mailboat. Near Holyhead by now. Must nail that ad of Keyes’s. Work Hynes and Crawford. Petticoats for Molly. She has something to put in them. What’s that? Might be money.

Mr Bloom stooped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Can’t read. Better go. Better. I’m tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle with story of a treasure in it thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Children always want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the waters. What’s this? Bit of stick.

O! Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now. Will she come here tomorrow? Wait for her somewhere for ever. Must come back. Murderers do. Will I?

[364] Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a message for her. Might remain. What?

I.

Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide comes here a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don’t know. What is the meaning of that other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not like.

AM. A.

No room. Let it go.

Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand. Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels coming up here. Except Guinness’s barges. Round the Kish in eighty days. Done half by design.

He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in silted sand, stuck. Now if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn’t. Chance. We’ll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made me feel so young.

Short snooze now if I had. Must be near nine. Liverpool boat long gone. Not even the smoke. And she can do the other. Did too. And Belfast. I won’t go. Race there, race back to Ennis. Let him. Just close my eyes a moment. Won’t sleep though. Half dream. It never comes the same. Bat again. No harm in him. Just a few.

O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife black hair heave under embon señorita young eyes Mulvey plump years dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next.

A bat flew. Here. There. Here. Far in the grey a bell chimed. Mr Bloom with open mouth, his left boot sanded sideways, leaned, breathed. Just for a few

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

The clock on the mantelpiece in the priest’s house cooed where Canon O’Hanlon and Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S. J. were taking [365] tea and sodabread and butter and fried mutton chops with catsup and talking about

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

Because it was a little canarybird bird that came out of its little house to tell the time that Gerty Mac Dowell noticed the time she was there because she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty Mac Dowell, and she noticed at once that that foreign gentleman that was sitting on the rocks looking was

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

 ® 

[366] Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy hoopsa.

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone so is there inilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature’s boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be [367] than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution’s menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever irrevocably enjoined?

It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians relate, among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature admirable admired, the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured. Not to speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves, their greatest doctors, the O’Shiels, the O’Hickeys, the O’Lees, have sedulously set down the divers methods by which the sick and the relapsed found again health whether the malady had been the trembling withering or loose boyconnell flux. Certainly in every public work which in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient in that allhardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for an inconsiderable emolument was provided.

To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the case was so having itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her to be received into that domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that they her by anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly to be about to be cherished had been begun she felt!

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with wholesome food reposeful cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine and human, the cogitation of which by [368] sejunct females is to tumescence conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her thereto to lie in, her term up.

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming. Of Israel’s folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.

Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God’s angel to Mary quoth. Watchers twey there walk, white sisters in ward sleepless. Smarts they still sickness soothing: in twelve moons thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding wariest ward.

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s westward welkin! Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ’s rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne’s house.

Loth to irk in Horne’s hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine years had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes his word winning.

As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was[.]  Her he asked if O’Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O’Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God’s rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men’s oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust [369] that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.

The man that was come into the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed. The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman’s birth. Then she set it forth all to him that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder women’s woe in the travail that they have of motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a young face for any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learning knight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should go into that castle for to make merry with them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtle. Also the lady was of his avis and reproved the learning knight though she trowed well that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But the learning knight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers lands and sometimes venery.

And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white flames that they fix in the horns of buffalos and stags that there abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of Mahound out of seasand and the [370] air by a warlock with his breath that he blares into them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olive press. And also it was a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of fecund wheat kidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits that they do into it swells up wondrously like to a vast moutain. And they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a brewage like to mead.

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his neighbour nist not of his wile. And he sat down in that castle with them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.

This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege lord to leave their wassailing for there was above one quick with child a gentle dame, whose time hied fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long. And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both’s health for he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars’ hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion [371] service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman’s woe with wonder pondering.

Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable’s with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of medicine, and the franklin that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa, one Crotthers, and young Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at head of the board and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long of a mastery of him erewhile gested (and of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the most drunken that demanded still of more mead) and beside the meek sir Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to have come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke his avow. And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast friendship to sir Simon and to this his son young Stephen and for that his langour becalmed him there after longest wanderings insomuch as they feasted him for that time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love led on with will to wander, loth to leave.

For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne’s house that now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And they said farther she should live because in the beginning they said the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole affair and when he said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen [372] had these words following, Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purge fire. But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we. Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi’s praise of that beast the unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn the other all this while pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might be or wheresoever. Then spoke young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgillius saith, by the influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, effectu secuto, or peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God’s greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to bring forth beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life. A wariness of mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand to jaw, he said dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who had ever loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also with his experience of so seldom seen an accident it was good for that Mother Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such sort deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth, pardy, said Dixon, and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor lendeth [373] to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.

But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb’s wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his friend’s son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.

About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray. Now drink we, quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel of my body but my soul’s bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them that live by bread alone. Be not afeard neither for any want for this will comfort more than the other will dismay. See ye here. And he showed them glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmiths’ notes the worth of two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he writ. They all admired to see the foresaid riches in such dearth of money as was herebefore. His words were then these as followeth: Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. Omnis caro ad te veniet. No question but her name is puissant who aventried the dear corse of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd, our mighty mother and mother most venerable and Bernardus saith aptly that she hath an omnipotentiam deiparae supplicem, that is to wit, an almightiness of petition because she is the second Eve and she won us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are linked [374] up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all, seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin. But here is the matter now. Or she knew him, that second I say, and was but creature of her creature, vergine madre figlia di tuo figlio or she knew him not and then stands she in the one denial or ignorancy with Peter Piscator who lives in the house that Jack built and with Joseph the Joiner patron of the happy demise of all unhappy marriages parce que M. Leo Taxil nous a dit que qui l’avait mise dans cette fichue position c’était le sacré pigeon, ventre de Dieu! Entweder transsubstantiality oder consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality. And all cried out upon it for a very scurvy word. A pregnancy without joy, he said, a birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness. Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. With will will we withstand, withsay.

Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would sing a bawdy catch Staboo Stabella about a wench that was put in pod of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did now attack: The first three months she was not well, Staboo, when here nurse Quigley from the door angerly bid them hist ye should shame you nor was it not meet as she remembered them being her mind was to have all orderly against lord Andrew came for because she was jealous that no gasteful turmoil might shorten the honour of her guard. It was an ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage, nor did her hortative want of it effect for incontinently Punch Costello was of them all embraided and they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and with menace of blandishments others whiles all chode with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in the peasestraw thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the time’s occasion as most sacred and most worthy to be most sacred. In Horne’s house rest should reign.

To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he had not cided to take friar’s vows and he answered him obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days. Master Lenehan at this made return that he had heard of those nefarious deeds and how, as he heard hereof counted, he had besmirched the lily virtue of a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all intershowed it too, waxing merry [375] and toasting to his fathership. But he said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was the eternal son and ever virgin. Thereat mirth grew in them the more and they rehearsed to him his curious rite of wedlock for the disrobing and deflowering of spouses, as the priests use in Madagascar island, she to be in guise of white and saffron, her groom in white and grain, with burning of nard and tapers, on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and the anthem Ut novetur sexus omnis corporis mysterium till she was there unmaided. He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is in their Maid’s Tragedy that was writ for a like twining of lovers: To bed, to bed, was the burden of it to be played with accompanable concent upon the virginals. An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, joyed, but, harkee, young sir, better were they named Beau Mount and Lecher for, by my troth, of such a mingling much might come. Young Stephen said indeed to his best remembrance they had but the one doxy between them and she of the stews to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran very high in those days and the custom of the country approved with it. Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom mankind was more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will go hard but thou wilt have the secondbest bed. Orate, fratres, pro memetipso. And all the people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by my word and broughtest in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou sinned against the light and hast made me, thy lord to be the slave of servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for a merchant of jalaps and didst deny me to the Roman and the Indian of dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now, my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes [376] hast thou kissed my mouth. This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say, hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as mentioned for the Orient from on high which brake hell’s gates visited a darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt’s plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their most proper ubi and quomodo. And as the ends and ultimates of all things accords in some mean and measure with their inceptions and originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First saved from water of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage. And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.

Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly Etienne chanson but he loudly bid them lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator all in applepie order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

Behold the mansion reared by dedal Jack,

See the malt stored in many a refluent sack,

In the proud cirque of Jackjohn’s bivouac.

A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled, back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed pale as they might all mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which Master [377] Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as cowed he crouched in Horne’s hall. He drank indeed at one draught to pluck up a heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the braggart’ side spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed not for Grace was not there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he and make more shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon has commanded them to do by the book Law. Then wotted he nought of that other land which is called Believe-on-Me, that is the land of promise which behoves to the king Delightful and shall be for ever where there is no death and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall come as many as believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and Chaste had pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she said, is Bird-in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true path by her flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, turn aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.

This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore Bird-in-the-Hand [378] (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and know her. For regarding Believe-on-Me they said it was nought else but notion and they could conceive no thought of it for, first, Two-in-the-Bush whither she ticed them was the very goodliest grot and in it were four pillows on which were four tickets with these word printed on them, Pickaback and Topsyturvy and Shameface and Cheek by Jowl and, second, for that foul plague Allpox and the monsters they cared not for them for Preservative had given them a stout shield of oxengut and, third, that they might take no hurt neither from Offspring that was that wicked devil by virtue of this same shield which was named Killchild. So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon, Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer. Wherein, O wretched company were ye all deceived for that was the voice of the god that was in a very grievous rage that he would presently lift his arm and spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings done by them contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly biddeth.

So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too. Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag and faggots that would catch at first fire[.]  All the world saying, for aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness. But by and by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the pour came. In Ely place, Baggot street, Duke’s lawn, thence through Merrion green up to Holles street a swash of water running that was before bonedry and not one chair or coach or fiacre seen about but no more crack after that first. Over against the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon’s door (that is to sit with Mr Healy the lawyer upon the college lands) Mal. Mulligan a gentleman’s gentleman that had but come from [379] Mr Moore’s the writer’s (that was a papish but is now, folk say, a good Williamite) chanced against Alec. Bannon in a cut bob (which are now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green) that was new got to town from Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M’s brother will stay a month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does there, he bound home and he to Andrew Horne’s being stayed for to crush a cup of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel and all this while poured with rain and so both together on to Horne’s. There Leop. Bloom of Crawford’s journal sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad for a racinghorse he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom there for a langour he had but was now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red slippers on in a pair of Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken to be for a change and Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put to it and can’t deliver, she queasy for a bowl of riceslop that is a shrewd drier up of the insides and her breath very heavy more than good and should be a bullyboy from the knocks they say, but God give her soon issue. ’Tis her ninth chick to live, I hear, and Lady day bit off her last chick’s nails that was then a twelvemonth and with other three all breastfed that died written out in a fair hand in the king’s bible. Her hub fifty odd and a methodist but takes the Sacrament and is to be seen any fair sabbath with a pair of his boys off Bullock harbour dapping on the sound with a heavybraked reel or in a punt he has trailing for flounder and pollock and catches a fine bag, I hear. In sum an infinite great fall of rain and all refreshed and will much increase the harvest yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come for a prognostication of Malachi’s almanac (and I hear that Mr Russell has done a prophetical charm of the same gist out of the Hindustanish for his farmer’s gazette) to have three things in all but this a mere fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.

With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter was in that night’s gazette and he made a show to find it about him (for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on Stephen’s persuasion he gave over to search and was bidden to sit near by which he did mighty brisk. He was a kind of sport gentleman that went for a merryandrew [380] or honest pickle and what belonged of women, horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies. [bookies,] Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose gossip. He took his ordinary at a boilingcook’s and if he had but gotten into him a mess of broken victuals or a platter of tripes with a bare tester in his purse he could always bring himself off with his tongue, some randy quip he had from a punk or whatnot that every mother’s son of them would burst their sides. The other, Costello, that is, hearing this talk asked was it poetry or a tale. Faith, no, he says, Frank (that was his name) ’tis all about Kerry cows that are to be butchered along of the plague. But they can go hang, says he with a wink, for me with their bully beef, a pox on it. There’s as good fish in this tin as ever came out of it and very friendly he offered to take of some salty sprats that stood by which he had eyed wishly in the meantime and found the place which was indeed the chief design of his embassy as he was sharpset. Mort aux vaches, says Frank then in the French language that had been indentured to a brandy shipper that has a winelodge in Bordeaux and he spoke French like a gentleman too. From a child this Frank had been a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor, then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to foot it on the roads with the Romany folk, kidnapping a squire’s heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids’ linen or choking chickens behind a hedge. He had been off as many times as a cat has lives and back again with naked pockets as many more to his father the headborough who shed a pint of tears as often as he saw him. What, says Mr Leopold with his hands across, that was earnest to know the drift of it, will they slaughter all? I protest I saw them but this day morning going to the Liverpool boats, says he. I can scarce believe ’tis so bad, says he. And he had experience of the like brood beasts and of springers, greasy hoggets and wether wools having been some years before actuary for Mr Joseph Cuffe, a worthy salesmaster that drove his trade for live stock and meadow auctions hard by Mr Gavin Low’s yard in Prussia street. I question with you there, says he. More [381] like ’tis the hoose or the timber tongue. Mr Stephen, a little moved but very handsomely, told him no such matter and that he had dispatches from the emperor’s chief tailtickler thanking him for the hospitality, that was sending over Doctor Rinderpest, the bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy with a bolus or two of physic to take the bull by the horns. Come, come, says Mr Vincent, plain dealing. He’ll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a bull that’s Irish, says he. Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about. An Irish bull in an English chinashop. I conceive you, says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull that was sent to our island by farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattle breeder of them all with an emerald ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr Vincent cross the table, and a bullseye into the bargain, says he, and a plumper and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock. He had horns galore, a coat of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out of his nostrils so that the women of our island, leaving doughballs and rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains. What for that, says Mr Dixon, but before he came over farmer Nicholas that was a eunuch had him properly gelded by a college of doctors who were no better off than himself. So be off now, says he, and do all my cousin german the Lord Harry tells you and take a farmer’s blessing, and with that he slapped his posteriors very soundly. But the slap and the blessing stood him friend, says Mr Vincent, for to make up he taught him a trick worth two of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper in his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his long holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in the four fields of all Ireland. Another then put in his word: And they dressed him, says he in a point shift and petticoat with a tippet and girdle and ruffles on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him all over with spermacetic oil and built stables for him at every turn of the road with a gold manger in each full of the best hay in the market so that he could doss and dung to his heart’s content. By this time the father of the faithful (for so they called him) was grown so heavy that he could scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and damsels brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his belly was full he would rear up on his hind quarters to show their ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls’ language and they all after him. Ay, says another, and so pampered was he that he would suffer nought to grow in all the land but green grass for himself (for that was the only colour to his mind) and there was a board put up on a hillock in the middle of the [382] island with a printed notice, saying: By the lord Harry green is the grass that grows on the ground. And, says Mr Dixon, if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or the wilds of Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much as a handful of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he run amok over half the countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all by lord Harry’s orders. There was bad blood between them at first says Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks in the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house and I’ll meddle in his matters, says he. I’ll make that animal smell hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry he found sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous champion bull of the Romans, Bos Bovum, which is good bog Latin for boss of the show. After that, says Mr Vincent, the lord Harry put his head into a cow’s drinkingtrough in the presence of all his courtiers and pulling it it out again told them all his new name. Then, with the water running off him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had belonged to his grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls’ language to study but he could never learn a a word of it except the first personal pronoun which he copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went out for a walk he filled his pockets with chalk to write it up on what took his fancy, the side of rock or a teahouse table or a bale of cotton or a corkfloat. In short he and the bull of Ireland were soon as fast friends as an arse and a shirt. They were, says Mr Stephen, and the end was that the men of the island, seeing no help was toward as the ungrate women were all of one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded themselves and their bundles of chattels on shipboard, set all masts erect, manned the yards, sprang their luff, heaved to, spread three sheets in the wind, put her head between wind and water, weighed anchor, ported her helm, ran up the jolly Roger, gave three times three, let the bullgine run, pushed off in their bumboat and put to sea to recover the main of America. Which was the occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the composing by a boatswain of that rollicking chanty:

— Pope Peter’s but a pissabed.

A man’s a man for a’ that.

Our worthy acquaintance, Mr Malachi Mulligan, now appeared in the [383] doorway as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon, who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched on. Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan, Fertiliser and Incubator, Lambay Island. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well, let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. ’Tis as cheap sitting as standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating on his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivites acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey for the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in a uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this inconvenient (which he concluded due to a suppression of latent heat) having advised with certain counsellors of worth and inspected into this matter, he had resolved to purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay island from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of note much in favour with our ascendancy party. He proposed to set up there a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he take a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchenwench no less than the opulent lady of fashion, if so be their constructions and their tempers [384] were warm persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man. For his nutriment he shewed how he would feed himself exclusively upon a diet of savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the flesh of these latter prolific rodents being highly recommended for his purpose, both broiled and stewed with a blade of mace and a pod or two of capsicum chillies. After this homily which he delivered with much warmth of asseveration Mr Mulligan in a trice put off from his hat a kerchief with which he had shielded it. They both, it seems, had been overtaken by the rain and for all their mending their pace had taken water, as might be observed by Mr Mulligan’s smallclothes of a hodden grey which was now somewhat piebald. His project meanwhile was very favourably entertained by his auditors and won hearty eulogies from all though Mr Dixon of Mary’s excepted to it, asking with a finicking air did he purpose also to carry coals to Newcastle. Mr Mulligan however made court to the scholarly by an apt quotation from the classics which, as it dwelt upon his memory seemed to him a sound and tasteful support of his contention: Talis ac tanta depravatio hujus seculi, O quirites, ut matres familiarum nostrae lascivas cujuslibet semiviri libici titillationes testibus ponderosis atque excelsis erectionibus centurionum Romanorum magnopere anteponunt while for those of ruder wit he drove home his point by analogies of the animal kingdom more suitable to their stomach, the buck and doe of the forest glade, the farmyard drake and duck.

Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of his person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had advanced. The young gentleman, his friend, overjoyed as he was at a passage that had befallen him, could not forbear to tell it his nearest neighbour. Mr Mulligan, now perceiving the table, asked for whom were those loaves and fishes and, seeing the stranger, he made him a civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional assistance we could give? Who, upon his offer, thanked him very heartily, though preserving his proper distance, and replied that he was come there about a lady, now an inmate of Horne’s house, that was in an interesting condition, poor lady, from woman’s woe (and here he fetched a deep sigh) to know if her happiness had yet taken place. Mr Dixon, to turn the table, took on to ask of Mr Mulligan himself whether his incipient ventripotence, upon which he rallied him, betokened an ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due as with the noted physician, Mr Austin Meldon, to a wolf in the stomach. For answer Mr Mulligan, in a gale of laughter at his [385] smalls, smote himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll mimic of Mother Grogan (the most excellent creature of her sex though ’tis pity she’s a trollop): There’s a belly that never bore a bastard. This was so happy a conceit that it renewed the storms of mirth and threw the whole room into the most violent agitations of delight. The spry rattle had run on in the same vein of mimicry but for some larum in the antechamber.

Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by a questioning poise of the head (a whole century of polite breading had not achieved so nice a gesture) to which was united an equivalent but contrary balance of the head asked the narrator as plainly as was ever done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it. Mais bien sûr, noble stranger, said he cheerily, et mille compliments. That you may and very opportunely. There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my felicity. But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet and a cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and find it in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to the powers above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good things. With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a complacent draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his bosom, out popped a locket that hung from a silk riband that very picture which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein. Gazing upon those features with a world of tenderness, Ah, Monsieur, he said, had you but beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting instant with her dainty tucker and her new coquette cap (a gift for her feast day as she told me) in such an artless disorder, of so melting a tenderness, ’pon my conscience, even you, Monsieur, had been impelled by generous nature to deliver yourself wholly into the hands of such an enemy or to quit the field for ever. I declare, I was never so touched in all my life. God I thank thee as the Author of my days! Thrice happy will he be whom so amiable a creature will bless with her favours. A sigh of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having replaced the locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again. Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how greatand universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb, the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer years. But [386] indeed, sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and imperfect are all our sublunary joys. Maledicity! Would to God that foresight had remembered me to take my cloak along! I could weep to think of it. Then, though it had poured seven showers we were neither of us a penny the worse. But beshrew me, he cried, clapping hand to his forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and, thousand thunders, I know of a marchand de capotes, Monsieur Poyntz, from whom I can have for a livre as snug a cloak of the French fashion as ever kept a lady from wetting. Tut, tut! cries Le Fécondateur, tripping in, my friend Monsieur Moore, that most accomplished traveller (I have just cracked a half bottle avec lui in a circle of the best wits of the town) is my authority that in Cape Horn, ventre biche, they have a rain that will wet through any, even the stoutest cloak. A drenching of that violence, he tells me, sans blague, has sent more than one luckless fellow in good earnest posthaste to another world. Pooh! A livre! cries Monsieur Lynch. The clumsy things are dear at a sou. One umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is worth ten such stopgaps. No woman of any wit would wear one. My dear Kitty told me today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she would starve in such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me (blushing piquantly and whispering in my ear though there was none to snap her words but giddy butterflies) dame Nature, by the divine blessing, has implanted it in our heart and it has become a household word that il y a deux choses for which the innocence of our original garb, in other circumstances a breach of the proprieties, is the fittest, nay the only garment. The first, said she (and here my pretty philosopher, as I handed her to her tilbury, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her tongue the outer chamber of my ear) the first is a bath… but at this point a bell tinkling in the hall cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for the enrichment of our store of knowledge.

Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and while all were conjecturing what might be the cause Miss Callan entered and, having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with a profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a party of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled. A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I’ll be sworn she has rendezvoused you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad’s bud. Immensely so, said Mr Lynch. The bedside manner it [387] is that they use in the Mater hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O’Gargle chuck the nuns there under the chin. As I look to be saved I had it from my Kitty who has been wardmaid there any time these seven months. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young blood in the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and immodest squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body! Drat the man! Bless me, I’m all of a wibblywobbly. Why, you’re as bad as dear little Father Cantekissem that you are! May this pot of four half choke me, cried Costello, if she ain’t in the family way. I knows a lady what’s got a white swelling quick as I claps eyes on her. The young surgeon, however, rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was enceinte which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had given birth to a bouncing boy. I want patience, said he, with those who without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling profession which, saving the reverence due to the Deity, is the greatest power for happiness upon the earth. I am positive when I say that if need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a glorious incentive in the human breast. I cannot away with them. What? Malign such an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the lustre of her own sex and the astonishment of ours and at an instant the most momentous that can befall a puny child of clay? Perish the thought! I shudder to think of the future of a race where the seeds of such malice have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered to mother and maid in house of Horne. Having delivered himself of this rebuke he saluted those present on the by and repaired to the door. A murmur of approval arose from all and some were for ejecting the low soaker without more ado, a design which would have been effected nor would he have received more than his bare deserts had he not abridged his transgression by affirming with a horrid imprecation (for he swore a round hand) that he was as good a son of the true fold as ever drew breath. Stap my vitals, said he, them was always the sentiments of honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most particular to honour thy father and thy mother that had the best hand to a rolypoly or a hasty pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on with a loving heart.

To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry had been conscious of some impudent mocks which he, however, had born with being the fruits of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity. The young [388] sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and outrageous mots were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were they scrupuluosly sensible of the proprieties though their fund of strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr Costello was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity born out of wedlock and thrust like a crookback teethed and feet first into the world, which the dint of the surgeon’s pliers in his skill lent indeed a colour to, so as it put him in thought of that missing link of creation’s chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of a rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. To those who create themselves wits at the cost of feminine delicacy (a habit of mind which be never did hold with) to them he would concede neither to bear the name nor to herit the tradition of a proper breeding: while for such that, having lost all forbearance can lose no more, there remained the sharp antidote of experience to cause their insolency to beat a precipitate and inglorious retreat. Not but what he could feel with mettlesome youth which, caring nought for the mows of dotards or the gruntlings of the severe, is ever (as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer expresses it) for eating of the tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to pretermit humanity upon any condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she was about her lawful occasions. To conclude, while from the sister’s words he had reckoned upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be owned, not a little alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so ausspicated after an ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the mercy as well as to the bounty of the Supreme Being.

Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy young blade said it was her husband’s that put her in that expectation or at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, [389] clapping on the table so as to evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujerum was round again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon. ’Slife, I’ll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of the old bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell to praising of it, each after his own fashion, though the same young blade held with his former view that another than her conjugial had been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every household. Singular, communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But, he further added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in common oppress them for I have more than once observed that birds of a feather laugh together.

But with what fitness, let it be asked, of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civil rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant at will while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is, if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman she has been too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata of society! Nay, had the hussy’s scouringbrush not been her tutelary angel it had gone with her as hard as with [390] Hagar, the Egyptian! In the question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe’s hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of a ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobium in middle life. If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his practice consist better with the doctrines that now engross him. His marital breast is the repository of secrets which decorum is reluctant to adduce. The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for a consort neglected and debauched but this new exponent of morals and healer of ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid and inoperative.

The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usages of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation that an heir had been born. When he had betaken himself to the women’s apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and officer rendered the easier broke out at once into a strife of tongues[.]  In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring to urge, to mollify, to restrain. The moment was too propitious for the display of that discursiveness which seemed the only band of union among tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the rights of primogeniture and king’s bounty touching twins and triplets, miscarriages and infanticides, simulated and dissimulated, acardiac foetus in foetu, aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnatia of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in consequence of [391] defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolungation of labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the species in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt, the recorded instances of multigeminal, twikindled and monstruous births conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents — in a word all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a country stile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation. The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro’s inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as a primafacie and natural hypothetical explanation of swineheaded (the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish delegate sustained against both these views with such heat as almost carried conviction the theory of copulation between women and the males of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of fables such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression made by his words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily as it had been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in that vein of pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect, postulating as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man. Contemporaneously, a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological dilemma in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other, [392] the difficulty by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom for instant submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he delivered briefly, and as some thought perfunctorily, the ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has joined.

But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and in the recess appeared… Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh creep! He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial marked Poison. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghastly grin. I anticipated some such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems, history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland’s, is in this life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language (he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope… Ah! Destruction! The black panther! With a cry he suddenly vanished and the panel slid back. An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite and said: Meet me at Westland row station at ten past eleven. He was gone! Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mannanaun! The sage repeated Lex talionis. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of [393] reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey. [hey,] presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas, a thing now of the past!), and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile but more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm seated with Jacob’s pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, to a tiny speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny) together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever remember the night, first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath ’twas done but — hold! Back! It must not be! In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold! Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial [394] dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim. [Netaim,] the golden, is no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous, revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven’s own magnitude till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And, lo, wonder of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer! It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus.

Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father. All who wish you well hope this for [395] you. All desire to see you bring forth the work you meditate. I heartily wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent, Lenehan said, laying a hand on the shoulder near him, have no fear. He could not leave his mother an orphan. The young man’s face grew dark. All could see how hard it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss. He would have withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices allayed the smart. Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a whim of the rider’s name: Lenehan as much more. He told them of the race. The flag fell and, huuh, off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with O. Madden up. She was leading the field: all hearts were beating. Even Phyllis could not contain herself. She waved her scarf and cried: Huzzah! Sceptre wins! But in the straight on the run home when all were in close order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her. All was lost now. Phyllis was silent: her eyes were sad anemones. Juno, she cried, I am undone. But her lover consoled her and brought her a bright casket of gold in which lay some oval sugarplums which she partook. A tear fell: one only. A whacking fine whip, said Lenehan, is W. Lane. Four winners yesterday and three today. What rider is like him? Mount him on the camel or the boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack canter is still his. But let us bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy on the luckless! Poor Sceptre! he said with a light sigh. She is not the filly that she was. Never, by this hand, shall we behold such another. By gad. [gad,] sir, a queen of them. Do you remember her. [her,] Vincent? I wish you could have seen my queen today, Vincent said, how young she was and radiant (Lalage were scarce fair beside her) in her yellow shoes and frock of muslin, I do not know the right name of it. The chestnuts that shaded us were in bloom: the air drooped with their persuasive odour and with pollen floating by us. In the sunny patches one might easily have cooked on a stone a batch of those buns with Corinth fruit in them that Periplepomenos sells in his booth near the bridge. But she had nought for her teeth but the arm with which I held her and in that she nibbled mischievously when I pressed too close. A week ago she lay ill, four days on the couch, but today she was free, blithe, mocked at peril. She is more taking then. Her posies too! Mad romp that it is, she had pulled her fill as we reclined together. And in your ear, my friend, you will not think who met us as we left the field. Conmee himself! He was walking by the hedge, reading. [reading,] I think a brevier book with, I doubt not. [not,] a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to keep the page. The sweet creature turned all colours in her confusion, feigning to reprove a slight disorder in her dress: a slip of [396] underwood clung there for the very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she glanced at her lovely echo in the little mirror she carries. But he had been kind. In going by he had blessed us. The gods too are ever kind, Lenehan said. If I had poor luck with Bass’s mare perhaps this draught of his may serve me more propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar: Malachi saw it and withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the scarlet label. Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen? Theosophos told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence Egyptian priests initiated into the mysteries of karmic law. The lords of the moon, Theosophos told me, an orangefiery shipload from planet Alpha of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these were therefore incarnated by the rubycoloured egos from the second constellation.

However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above was going on, were at this juncture commencing to exibit symptoms of animation, was as astute if not astuter than any man living and anybody that conjectured the contrary would have found themselves pretty speedily in the wrong shop. During the past four minutes or thereabouts he had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled by Messrs Bass and Co at Burton-on-Trent which happened to be situated amongst a lot of others right opposite to where he was and which was certainly calculated to attract anyone’s remark on account of its scarlet appearance. He was simply and solely, as it subsequently transpired for reasons best known to himself, which put quite an altogether different complexion on the proceedings, after the moment before’s observations about boyhood days and the turf, recollecting two or three private transactions of his own which the other two were as mutually innocent of as the babe unborn. Eventually, however, both their eyes met and, as soon as it began to dawn on him that the other was endeavouring to help himself to the thing, he involontarily determined to help him himself and so he accordingly took hold of the mediumsized glass recipient which contained the fluid sought after and made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of it out with, also at the same time however, however, a considerable degree of attentiveness in order not to upset any of the beer that was in it about the place.

[397] The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne’s house had never beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopaedic. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him was Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant before the hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in explorer’s kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted sharply with the primrose elegance and and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while to right and left of him were accomodated the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages yet to come.

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questons which science cannot answer — at present — such as the first problem submitted by Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex. Must we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary (the postmenstrual period, assert others) is responsible for the birth of males or are the too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the differentiating factors or is it, as most embryologists incline to opine, such as Culpepper, Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig, Leopold and Valenti, a mixture of both. This would be tantamount to a cooperation [398] (one of nature’s favourite devices) between the nisus formativus of the nemasperm on the one hand and on the other a happily chosen position, succubitus felix, of the passive element. The other problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways. Mr M. Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleges, and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspened carcases of dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas — these, he said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or official, culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former (we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which often balk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained. Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the [399] same marriage do not) must certainly in the poet’s words, give us pause. Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement, which, though productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal) is nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?) that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous femoules emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns might possibly find gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to. For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in the vile parlance of our lower class licensed victuallers signifies the cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took place in the commons’ hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat into the bag (an esthetic allusion, presumably, to one of the most complicated and marvellous of all nature’s processes, the act of sexual congress) she must let it out again or give it life, as he phrased it, to save her own. At the risk of her own was the telling rejoinder of his interlocutor none the less effective for the moderate and measured tone in which it was delivered.

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone before, are happy [400] too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching scene. Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight in her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty sight it is to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that mite of God’s clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older now (you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady, loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she recalls those days. God, how beautiful now across the mist of years! But their children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers and his, Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy, Budgy (Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy (called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs of Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a Purefoy if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful will be christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of Mr Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer’s office, Dublin Castle. And so time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low and so with a tranquil heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man’s part. Sir, to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant!

There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies [401] under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.

The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an unhealthiness, a flair, for the cruder things of life. A scene disengages itself in the observer’s memory, evoked, it would seem, by a word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey, Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey (blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of danger but must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the piazzetta giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness or of reproach (alles vergängliche) in her glad look.

Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of custody rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long ago. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended, compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the Word.

Burke’s! Outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail [402] of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not. A dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full pound if a milligramme. They hark him on. The door! It is open? Ha! They are out tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it, Burke’s of Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal. Dixon follows, giving them sharp language but raps out an oath, he too, and on. Bloom stays with nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy mother and nurseling up there. Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too not other now? Ward of watching in Horne’s house has told its tale in that washedout pallor. Then all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he whispers close in going: Madam, when come the storkbird for thee?

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistering on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man’s work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher’s bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod’s slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music. Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, [403] and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathusthra? Deine Kuh Truebsal melkest Du. Nun trinkst Du die suesse Milch des Euters. See! It displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother’s milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars overhead, rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzlingden, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan’s land. Thy cow’s dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!

All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward the ribbon counter. Where’s Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal? Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius. A make, mister. The Denzille lane boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the bleeding limelight. Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou heap good man. Allee samee this bunch. En avant, mes enfants! Fire away number one on the gun. Burke’s! Thence they advanced five parasangs. Slattery’s mounted foot where’s that bleeding awfur? Parson Steve, apostates’ creed! No, no. Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead. Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mullee! What’s on you? Ma mère m’a mariée. British Beatitudes! Retamplan Digidi Boum Boum. Ayes have it. To be printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time. Silentium! Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest canteen and there annex liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are (atitudes!) parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beerbeef trample the bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers. Thunderation! Keep the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops boosebox. Halt! Heave to. Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You hurt? Most amazingly sorry!

Query. Who’s astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the Uebermensch. Dittoh. Five number ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby’s caudle. Stimulate the [404] caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go again when the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? Caramba! Have an eggnog or a prairie oyster. Enemy? Avuncular’s got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated awful. Don’t mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got bet be a boomblebee whenever he wus settin sleepin in hes bit garten. Digs up near the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin, I do. Full of a dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey lovekin. None of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love. Two Ardilauns. Same here. Look slippery. If you fall don’t wait to get up. Five, seven, nine. Fine! Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And her take me to rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed. Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O gluepot. Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you’ll scuse me saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert wool. Well, doc? Back fro Lapland? Your corporosity sagaciating O K? How’s the squaws and papooses? Womanbody after going on the straw? Stand and deliver. Password. There’s hair. Ours the white death and the ruddy birth. Hi! Spit in your own eye, boss. Mummer’s wire. Cribbed out of Meredith. Jesified orchidised polycimical jesuit! Aunty mine’s writing Pa Kinch. Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.

Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw Hielentman’s your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot boil! My tipple. Merci. Here’s to us. How’s that? Leg before wicket. Don’t stain my brandnew sitinems. Give’s a shake of pepper, you there. Catch aholt. Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of silence. Every cove to his gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. Les petites femmes. Bold bad girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing at her. Hauding Sara by the wame. On the road to Malahide. Me? If she who seduced me had left but the name. What do you want for ninepence. Machree, Macruiskeen. Smutty Moll for a mattress jig. And a pull altogether. Ex!

Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like seeing as how no shiners is acoming, Underconstumble? He’ve got the chink ad lib. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn. Us come right in on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the oof. Two bar and a wing. You larn that go off of they there Frenchy bilks? Won’t wash here for nuts nohow. Lil chile velly solly. Ise de cutest colour coon down our side. Gawds teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou. We’re nae the fou. Au reservoir, Mossoo. Tanks you.

[405] ’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam, two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a glint, do. Gum, I’m jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for words. With a railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he’d like? Rose of Castile. Rows of cast. Police! Some H₂O for a gent fainted. Look at Bantam’s flowers. Gemini, he’s going to holler. The colleen bawn, my colleen bawn. O, cheese it! Shut his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand. Had the winner today till I tipped him a dead cert. The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen Hand as give me the jady coppaleen. He strike a telegramboy paddock wire big bug Bass to the depot. Shove him a joey and grahamise. Mare on form hot order. Guinea to a goosegog. Tell a cram, that. Gospeltrue. Criminal diversion? I think that yes. Sure thing. Land him in chokeechokee if the harman beck copped the game. Madden back Madden’s a maddening back. O, lust, our refuge and our strength. Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy. Stand by. Hide my blushes someone. All in if he spots me. Comeahome, our Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo. Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel. Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt? Pal to pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her spouse. No fake, old man Leo. S’elp me, honest injun. Shiver my timbers if I had. There’s a great big holy friar. Vyfor you no me tell? Vel, I ses, if that aint a sheeny nachez, vel, I vil get misha mishinnah. Through yerd our lord, Amen.

You move a motion? Steve boy, you’re going it some. More bluggy drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation? Give’s a breather. Landlord, landlord, have you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, wee drap to pree. Cut and come again. Right Boniface! Absinthe the lot. Nos omnes biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostria. Closingtime, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say onions? Bloo? Cadges ads? Photo’s papli, by all that’s gorgeous. Play low, pardner. Slide. Bonsoir la compagnie. And snares of the poxfiend. Where’s the buck and Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e’en gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann will yu help, yung man hoose frend tuk bungalo kee to find plais whear to lay crown off his hed 2 night. Crickey, I’m about sprung. Tarnally dog gone my shins if this beent the bestest puttiest longbreak yet. Item, curate, couple of cookies for this child. Cot’s plood and prandypalls, none! Not a pite of sheeses? Thrust syphilis down to hell and with him those other licensed spirits. Time. Who wander through the world. Health all. A la vôtre!

[406] Golly, whatten tunket’s you guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What’s he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril. [Bovril,] by James. Wants it real bad. D’ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis. Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies. Pardon? See him today at a runefal? Chum o yourn passed in his checks? Ludamassy! Pore piccanninies! Thou’ll no be telling me thot, Pold veg! Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos frien Padney was took off in black bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like since I was born. Tiens, tiens, but it is well sad, that, my faith, yes. O get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped. Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor any Rooshian. Time all. There’s eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward, woozy wobblers! Night. Night. May Allah, the Excellent One, your soul this night ever tremendously conserve.

Your attention! We’re nae the fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my thrue love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blase on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up. Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is. Righto, any old time. Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis. You coming long? Whisper, who the sooty hell’s the johnny in the black duds? Hush! Sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Ut implerentur scripturae. Strike up a ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy. Christicle, who’s this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Come on, you winefizzling ginsizzling booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that’s yanked to glory most [407] half this planet from ’Frisco Beach to Vladivostok. The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he’s on the square and a corking fine business propostion. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.

 ® 

[408] (The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the wisps and danger signals. Rows of flimsy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti’s halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coal and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly. Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer.)

the calls

Wait, my love, and I’ll be with you.

the answers

Round behind the stable.

(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus’ dance. A chain of children’s hands imprisons him.)

the children

Kithogue! Salute!

the idiot

(Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles.) Grhahute!

the children

Where’s the great light?

[409] the idiot

(Gobbling.) Ghaghahest.

(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung between the railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat moves, groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oil lamp rams the last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a papershuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shoulder capes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes; a woman screams; a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair of a scrufulous child. Cissy Caffrey’s voice, still young, sings shrill from a lane.)

cissy caffrey

I gave it to Molly

Because she was jolly,

The leg of the duck

The leg of the duck.

(Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters, as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths a volleyed fart. Laughter of men from the lane. A hoarse virago retorts.)

the virago

Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.

cissy caffrey

More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. (She sings.)

[410] I gave it to Nelly

To stick in her belly

The leg of the duck

The leg of the duck.

(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the redcoats.)

private compton

(Jerks his finger.) Way for the parson.

private carr

(Turns and calls.) What ho, parson!

cissy caffrey

(Her voice soaring higher.)

She has it, she got it,

Wherever she put it

The leg of the duck.

(Stephen flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy the introit for paschal time. Lynch, his jockey cap low on his brow, attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)

stephen

Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia.

(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protude from a doorway.)

the bawd

(Her voice whispering huskily.) Sst! Come, here till I tell you. Maidenhead inside. Sst.

stephen

(Altius aliquantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista.

[411] the bawd

(Spits in their trail her jet of venom.) Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.

(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with Bertha Supple, draws her shawl across her nostrils.)

edy boardman

(Bickering.) And says the one: I seen you up Faithful place with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his cometobed hat. Did you, says I. That’s not for you to say, says I. You never seen me in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The likes of her! Stag that one is. Stubborn as a mule! And her walking with two fellows the one time, Kildbride the enginedriver, and lancecorporal Oliphant.

stephen

(Triumphaliter.) Salvi facti i sunt.

(He flourishes his ashplant shivering the lamp image, shattering light over the world. A liver and white spaniel on the prowl slinks after him, growling. Lynch scares it with a kick.)

lynch

So that?

stephen

(Looks behind.) So that gesture, not music not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.

lynch

Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!

stephen

We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.

[412] lynch

Ba!

stephen

Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug! This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread and wine in Omar. Hold my stick.

lynch

Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?

stephen

Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat juventutem meam.

(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down turned in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left being higher.)

lynch

Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch and walk.

(They pass. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a gaslamp and, clasping, climbs in spasms. From the top spur he slides down. Jacky Caffrey clasps to climb. The navvy lurches against the lamp. The twins scuttle off in the dark. The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot. Shouldering the lamp he staggers away through the crowd with his flaring cresset.

Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south beyond the seaward reaches of the river. The navvy staggering forward cleaves the crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding. On the farther side under the railway bridge Bloom appears flushed, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a side pocket. From Gillen’s hairdresser’s window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson’s image. A concave mirror [413] at the side presents to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

At Antonio Rabaiotti’s door Bloom halts, sweated under the bright arclamps. He disappears. In a moment he reappears and hurries on.)

bloom

Fish and taters. N. g. Ah!

(He disappears into Olhousen’s, the pork butcher’s, under the downcoming rollshutter. A few moments later he emerges from under the shutter, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In each hand he holds a parcel, one containing a lukewarm pig’s crubeen, the other a cold sheep’s trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper. He gasps, standing upright. Then bending to one side he presses a parcel against his rib and groans.)

bloom

Stitch in my side. Why did I run?

(He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the lampset siding. The glow leaps again.)

bloom

What is that? A flasher? Searchlight.

(He stands at Cormack’s corner, watching.)

bloom

Aurora borealis or a steel foundry? Ah, the brigade, of course. South side anyhow. Big blaze. Might be his house. Beggar’s bush. We’re safe. (He hums cheerfully.) London’s burning, London’s burning! On fire, on fire! (He catches sight of the navvy lurching through the crowd at the farther side of Talbot street.) I’ll miss him. Run. Quick. Better cross here.

(He darts to cross the road. Urchins shout.)

[414] the urchins

Mind out, mister!

(Two cyclists, with lighted paper lanterns awsing, swim by him, grazing him, their bells rattling.)

the bells

Haltyaltyaltyall.

bloom

(Halts erect stung by a spasm.) Ow.

(He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Through rising fog a dragon sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon him, its huge red headlight winking, its trolley hissing on the wire. The motorman bangs his footgong.)

the gong

Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.

(The brake cracks violently. Bloom, raising a policeman’s whitegloved hand, blunders stifflegged, out of the track. The motorman thrown forward, pugnosed, on the guidewheel, yells as he slides past over chains and keys.)

the motorman

Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hattrick?

bloom

(Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand.)

No thoroughfare. Close shave that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow’s exerciser again. On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential. (He feels his trouser pocket.) Poor mamma’s panacea. Heel easily catch in tracks or bootlace in a cog. Day, the wheel of the black Maria, peeled off my shoe at Leonard’s corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick. Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous. Might [415] be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. Same style of beauty. Quick of him all he same. The stiff walk. True word spoken in jest. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Something poisonous I ate. Emblem of luck. Why? Probably lost cattle. Mark of the beast. (He closes his eyes an instant.) Bit light in the head. Monthly or effect of the other. Brainfogfag. That tired feeling. Too much for me now. Ow!

(A sinister figure leans on plaited legs against O’Beirne’s wall, a visage unknown, injected with dark mercury. From under a wideleaved sombrero the figure regards him with evil eye.)

bloom

Bueñas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta?

the figure

(Impassive, raises a signal arm.) Password. Sraid Mabbot.

bloom

Haha. Merci. Esperanto. Slan leath. (He mutters.) Gaelic league spy, sent by that fireeater.

(He steps forward. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. He steps left, ragsackman left.)

bloom

I beg.

(He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on.)

bloom

Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a fingerpost planted by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who lost my way and contributed to the columns of the Irish Cyclist the letter headed, In darkset Stepaside. Keep, keep, keep to the right. Rags and bones, at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer makes for. Wash off his sins of the world.

(Jacky Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against Bloom.)

[416] bloom

O.

(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there. Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch, fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoke, sweets of sin, potato soap.)

bloom

Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves dodge. Collide. Then snatch your purse.

(The retriever approches sniffling, nose to the ground. A sprawled form sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smoking cap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face.)

rudolph

Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with drunken goy ever. So. You catch no money.

bloom

(Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat.) Ja, ich weiss, papachi.

rudolph

What you making down this place? Have you no soul? (With feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom.) Are you not my son Leopold, the grand son of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?

bloom

(With precaution.) I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that’s left of him.

rudolph

(Severely.) One night they bring you home drunk as dog after spend your [417] good money. What you call them running chaps?

bloom

(In youth’s smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent’s sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud.) Harriers, father. Only that once.

rudolph

Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make you kaput, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.

bloom

(Weakly.) They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped.

rudolph

(With contempt.) Goim nachez  Nice spectacles for your poor mother!

bloom

Mamma!

ellen bloom

(In pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, crinoline and bustle, widow Twankey’s blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her hair plaited in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand and cries out in shrill alarm.) O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all, at all?

(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast begins to bestow his parcels in his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)

a voice

(Sharply.) Poldy!

bloom

Who? (He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily.) At your service.

(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet [418] trousers and jacket slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)

bloom

Molly!

marion

Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me. (Satirically.) Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?

bloom

(Shifts from foot to foot.) No, no. Not the least little bit.

(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions, hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuses, desire, spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of innumerable rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with disgruntled hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)

marion

Nebrakada! Feminimum!

(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a large mango fruit, offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof then droops his head and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops his back for leapfrog.)

bloom

I can give you… I mean as your business menagerer… Mrs Marion… if you…

marion

So you notice some change? (Her hands passing slowly over her trinketed stomacher. A slow friendly mockery in her eyes.) O Poldy, Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the wide world.

[419] bloom

I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning. (He pats divers pockets.) This moving kidney. Ah!

(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)

the soap

We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I

He brightens the earth, I polish the sky.

(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun.)

sweny

Three and a penny, please.

bloom

Yes. For my wife, Mrs Marion. Special recipe.

marion

(Softly.) Poldy!

bloom

Yes, ma’am?

marion

Ti trema un poco il cuore?

(In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni.)

bloom

Are you sure about that Voglio? I mean the pronunciati…

(He follows, followed by the sniffing terrier. The elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, the bristles of her chinmole glittering.)

[420] the bawd

Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched. Fifteen. There’s no-one in it only her old father that’s dead drunk.

(She points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled Bridie Kelly stands.)

bridie

Hatch street. Any good in your mind?

(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)

the bawd

(Her wolfeyes shining.) He’s getting his pleasure. You won’t get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don’t be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.

(Leering, Gerty Mac Dowell limps forward. She draws from behind, ogling, and shows coyly her bloodied clout.)

gerty

With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. (She murmurs.) You did that. I hate you.

bloom

I? When? You’re dreaming. I never saw you.

the bawd

Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.

gerty

(To Bloom.) When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer. (She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.

(She slides away crookedly. Mrs Breen in man’s frieze overcoat with loose [421] bellows pockets, stands in the causeway, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)

mrs breen

Mr…

bloom

(Coughs gravely.) Madam, when we last had this pleasure by letter dated the sixteenth instant…

mrs breen

Mr Bloom! You down here in the haunts of sin! I caught you nicely! Scamp!

bloom

(Hurriedly.) Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think me? Don’t give me away. Walls have hears. How do you do? It’s ages since I. You’re looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having this time of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting quarter. Rescue of fallen women Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary…

mrs breen

(Holds up a finger.) Now don’t tell a big fib! I know somebody won’t like that. O just wait till I see Molly! (Slily.) Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you!

bloom

(Looks behind.) She often said she’d like to visit. Slumming. The exotic, you see. Negro servants too in livery if she had money. Othello black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at the Livermore christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.

(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)

[422] tom and sam

There’s someone in the house with Dina

There’s someone in the house, I know,

There’s someone in the house with Dina

Playing on the old banjo.

(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)

bloom

(With a sour tenderish smile.) A little frivol, shall we, if you are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a fraction of a second?

mrs breen

(Screams gaily.) O, you ruck! You ought to see yourself!

bloom

For old sake’ sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft corner for you. (Gloomily.) ’Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear gazelle.

mrs breen

Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Killing simply. (She puts out her hand inquisitively.) What are you hiding behind your back? Tell us, there’s a dear.

bloom

(Seizes her wrist with his free hand.) Josie Powell that was, prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by! Do you remember, harking back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night Georgina Simpson’s housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading! Subject, what is in this snuffbox!

mrs breen

You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic recitation and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the ladies.

[423] bloom

(Squire of dames, in dinner jacket with watered silkfacings, blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pear studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand.) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ireland, home and beauty.

mrs breen

The dear dead days beyond recall. Love’s old sweet song.

bloom

(Meaningfully dropping his voice.) I confess I’m teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person’s something is a little teapot at present.

mrs breen

(Gushingly.) Tremendously teapot! London’s teapot and I’m simply teapot all over me. (She rubs sides with him.) After the parlour mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.

bloom

(Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his fingers and thumb passing slowly down to her soft moist meaty palm which she surrenders gently.) The witching hour of night. I took the splinter out of this hand, carefully, slowly. (Tenderly, as he slips on her finger a ruby ring.) Là ci darem la mano.

mrs breen

(In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a tinsel sylph’s diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly.) Voglio e non. You’re hot! You’re scalding! The left hand nearest the heart.

bloom

When you made your present choice they said it was beauty and the beast. I can never forgive you for that. (His clenched fist at his brow.) Think what it means. All you meant to me then. (Hoarsely.) Woman, it’s breaking me!

(Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with Wisdom Hely’s sandwichboard, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his dull beard thrust out, muttering to [424] right and left. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the pall of the ace of spades dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter.)

alf bergan

(Points jeering at the sandwich boards.) U. p: Up.

mrs breen

(To Bloom.) High jinks below stairs. (She gives him the glad eye.) Why didn’t you kiss the spot to make it well! You wanted to.

bloom

(Shocked.) Molly’s best friend! Could you?

mrs breen

(Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss.) Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?

bloom

(Offhandedly.) Kosher. A snack for supper. The home without potted meat is incomplete. I was at Leah, Mrs Bandman Palmer. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. Unfortunately threw away the programme. Rattling good place round there for pig’s feet. Feel.

(Richie Goulding, three ladies’ hats pinned on his head, appears weighted to one side by the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which a skull and crossbones are painted in white limewash. He opens it and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills.)

richie

Best value in Dub.

(Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands on the curbstone, folding his napkin, waiting to wait.)

pat

(Advances with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy.) Steak and kidney. Bottle of lager. Hee hee hee. Wait till I wait.

[425] richie

Goodgod. Inev erate inall…

(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. The navvy, lurching by, gores him with his flaming pronghorn.)

richie

(With a cry of pain, his hand to his back.) Ah! Bright’s! Lights!

bloom

(Points to the navvy.) A spy. Don’t attract attention. I hate stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament.

mrs breen

Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your cock and bull story.

bloom

I want to tell you a little secret about how I came to be here. But you must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a most particular reason.

mrs breen

(All agog.) O, not for worlds.

bloom

Let’s walk on. Shall us?

mrs breen

Let’s.

(The bawd makes an unheeded sign. Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen. The terrier follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail.)

the bawd

Jewman’s melt!

bloom

(In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sprig of woodbine in the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd’s plaid Saint Andrew’s cross scarftie, white spats, fawn dustcoat on his [426] arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a grey billycock hat.) Do you remember a long long time, years and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?

mrs breen

(In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and spider veil.) Leopardstown.

bloom

I mean, Leopardstown. And Molly won seven shillings on a three year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old fiveseater shanderadan of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and you had on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur that Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and eleven, a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and I’ll lay you what you like she did it on purpose…

mrs breen

She did, of course, the cat! Don’t tell me! Nice adviser!

bloom

Because it didn’t suit you one quarter as well as the other ducky little tammy toque with the bird of paradise wing in it that I admired on you and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was a pity to kill it, you cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

mrs breen

(Squeezes his arm, simpers.) Naughty cruel I was.

bloom

(Low, secretly, ever more rapidly.) And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher’s lunch basket. Frankly, though she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her style. She was…

mrs breen

Too…

bloom

Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O’Reilly were [427] mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses, the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I ever heard or read or knew or came across…

mrs breen

(Eagerly.) Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

(She fades from his side. Followed by the whining dog he walks on towards hellsgates. In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her feet apart, pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to a tale which their broken snouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden playfight.)

the gaffer

(Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout.) And when Cairns came down from the scaffolding in Beaver Street what was he after doing it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the shavings for Derwan’s plasterers.

the loiterers

(Guffaw with cleft palates.) O jays!

(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Spattered with size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him.)

bloom

Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.

the loiterers

Jays, that’s a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the men’s porter.

(Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.)

[428] the whores

Are you going far, queer fellow?

How’s your middle leg?

Got a match on you?

Eh, come her till I stiffen it for you.

(He plodges through their sump towards the lighted street beyond. From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk. In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the navvy and the two redcoats.)

the navvy

(Belching.) Where’s the bloody house?

the shebeenkeeper

Purdon street. Shilling a bottle of stout. Respectable woman.

the navvy

(Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward with them.) Come on, you British army!

private carr

(Behind his back.) He aint half balmy.

private compton

(Laughs.) What ho!

private carr

(To the navvy.) Portobello barracks canteen. You ask for Carr. Just Carr.

the navvy

(Shouts.)

We are the boys. Of Wexford.

private compton

Say! What price the sergeantmajor?

[429] private carr

Bennett? He’s my pal. I love old Bennett.

the navvy

(Shouts.)

The galling chain.

And free our native land.

(He staggers forward, dragging them with him. Bloom stops, at fault. The dog approches, his tongue outlolling, panting.)

bloom

Wildgoose chase this. Disorderly houses. Lord knows where they are gone. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nice mixup. Scene at Westland row. Then jump in first class with third ticket. Then too far. Train with engine behind. Might have taken me to Malahide or a siding for the night or collision. Second drink does it. Once is a dose. What am I following him for? Still, he’s the best of that lot. If I hadn’t heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn’t have gone and wouldn’t have met. Kismet. He’ll lose that cash. Relieving office here. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs. What do ye lack? Soon got, soon gone. Might have lost my life too with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of mind. Can’t always save you, though. If I had passed Truelock’s window that day two minutes later would have been shot. Absence of body. Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages for shock, five hundred pounds. What was he? Kildare street club toff. God help his gamekeeper.

(He gazes ahead reading on the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a phallic design.)

Odd! Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown. What’s that like? (Gaudy dollwomen loll in the lighted doorways, in window embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes. The odour of the sicksewet weed floats towards him in slow round ovalling wreaths.)

the wreaths

Sweet are the sweets. Sweets of sin.

bloom

My spine’s a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get all [430] pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eight pence too much. (The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand, wagging his tail.) Strange how they take to me. Even that brute today. Better speak to him first. Like women they like rencontres. Stinks like a polecat. Chacun son goût. He might be mad. Fido. Uncertain in his movements. Good fellow! Garryowen! (The wolfdog sprawls on his back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his long black tongue lolling out.) Influence of his surroundings. Give and have done with it. Provided nobody. (Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a furtive poacher’s tread, dogged by the setter into a dark stalestunk corner. He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the crubeen softly but holds back and feels the trotter.) Sizeable for threepence. But then I have it in my left hand. Calls for more effort. Why? Smaller from want of use. O, let it slide. Two and six.

(With regret he lets unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed, crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant. They murmur together.)

the watch

Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.

(Each lays hand on Blooms shoulder.)

first watch

Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.

bloom

(Stammers.) I am doing good to others.

(A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their beaks.)

the gulls

Kaw kave kankury kake.

bloom

The friend of man. Trained by kindness.

(He points. Bob Doran, toppling from a high barstool, sways over the munching spaniel.)

[431] bob doran

Towser. Give us the paw. Give the paw.

(The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pig’s knuckle between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles. Bob Doran falls silently into an area.)

second watch

Prevention of cruelty to animals.

bloom

(Enthusiastically.) A noble work! I scolded that tramdriver on Harold’s cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his harness scab. Bad French I got for my pains. Of course it was frosty and the last tram. All tales of circus life are highly demoralising.

(Signor Maffei, passion pale, in liontamer’s costume with diamonds studs in his shirtfront steps forward, holding a circus paper hoop, a curling carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the gorging boarhound.

signor maffei

(With a sinister smile.) Ladies and gentlemen, my educated greyhound. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted thong. Block tackle and a strangling pully will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the Libyan maneater. A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. (He glares.) I possess the Indian sign. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. (With a bewitching smile.) I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride of the ring.

first watch

Come. Name and address.

bloom

I have forgotten for the moment. Ah, yes! (He takes off his high grade hat, saluting.) Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard of von Bloom Pasha. Umpteen millions. Donnerwetter! Owns half Austria. Egypt. Cousin.

[432] first watch

Proof.

(A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom’s hat.)

bloom

(In red fez, cadi’s dress coat with broad green sash, wearing a false badge of the Legion of Honour, picks up the card hastily and offers it.) Allow me. My club is the Junior Army and Navy. Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor’s Walk.

first watch

(Reads.) Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Unlawfully watching and besetting.

second watch

An alibi. You are cautioned.

bloom

(Produces from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower.) This is the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don’t know his name. (Plausibly.) You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Bloom. The change of name. Virag. (He murmurs privately and confidentially.) We are engaged you see, sergeant. Lady in the case. Love entanglement. (He shoulders the second watch gently.) Dash it all. It’s a way we gallants have in the navy. Uniform that does it. (He turns gravely to the first watch.) Still, of course, you do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in some evening and have a glass of old Burgundy. (To the second watch gaily.) I’ll introduce you, inspector. She’s game. Do it in the shake of a lamb’s tail.

(A dark mercurialised face appears, leading a veiled figure.)

the dark mercury

The Castle is looking for him. He was drummed out of the army.

martha

(Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck, a copy of the Irish Times in her hand, in tone of reproach, pointing.) Henry! Leopold! Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.

[433] first watch

(Sternly.) Come to the station.

bloom

(Scared, hats himself, steps back then, plucking at his heart and lifting his right forearm on the square, he gives the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) No, no, worshipful master, light of love. Mistaken identity. The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember the Childs fratricide case. We medical men. By striking him dead with a hatchet, I am wrongfully accused. Better one guilty escape than ninetynine wrongfully condemned.

martha

(Sobbing behind her veil.) Breach of promise. My real name is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I’ll tell my brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.

bloom

(Behind his hand.) She’s drunk. The woman is inebriated. (He murmurs vaguely the past of Ephraim.) Shitbroleeth.

second watch

(Tears in his eyes, to Bloom.) You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.

bloom

Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare’s nest. I am a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street. My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain’s fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift.

first watch

Regiment.

bloom

(Turns to the gallery.) The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the earth[,]  known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms up there [434] among you. The R. D. F. With our own Metropolitan police, guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men, as physique, in the service of our sovereign.

a voice

Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?

bloom

(His hand on the shoulder of the first watch.) My old dad too was a J. P. I’m as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could. (With quiet feeling.) Jim Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.

first watch

Profession or trade.

bloom

Well, I follow a literary occupation. Author-journalist. In fact we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected with the British and Irish press. If you ring up…

(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his ear.)

myles crawford

(His cock’s wattles wagging.) Hello, seventyseven eightfour. Hello. Freeman’s Urinal and Weekly Arsewiper here. Paralyse Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?

(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers and patent boots. He carries a large portfolio labelled Matcham’s Masterstrokes.)

[435] beaufoy

(Drawls.) No, you aren’t, not by a long shot if I know it. I don’t see it, that’s all. No born gentleman, no one with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak masquerading as a literateur. It’s perfectly obvious that with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling books, really gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions with which your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the kingdom.

bloom

(Murmurs with hangdog meekness.) That bit about the laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may…

beaufoy

(His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court.) You funny ass, you! You’re too beastly awfully weird for words! I don’t think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard. My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses’ fees, shan’t we! We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university.

bloom

(Indistinctly.) University of life. Bad art.

beaufoy

(Shouts.) It’s a damnably foul lie showing the moral rottenness of the man! (He extends his portfolio.) We have here damning evidence the corpus delicti, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the beast.

a voice from the gallery

Moses, Moses, king of the jews,

Wiped his arse in the Daily News.

[436] bloom

(Bravely). Overdrawn.

beaufoy

You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you rotter! (To the court.) Why look at the man’s private life! Leading a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be mentioned in mixed society. The arch conspirator of the age.

bloom

(To the court.) And he, a bachelor, how…

first watch

The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.

the crier

Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!

(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl approaches. She has a bucket on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)

second watch

Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?

mary driscoll

(Indignantly.) I’m not a bad one. I bear a respectable character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation, six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave owing to his carryings on.

first watch

What do you tax him with?

mary driscoll

He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself as poor as I am.

bloom

(In housejacket of ripplecloth flannel trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled softly.) I treated you white. I gave you mementos, smart emerald [437] garters far above your station. Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering. There’s a medium in all things. Play cricket.

mary driscoll

(Excitedly.) As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oylsters!

first watch

The offence complained of? Did something happen?

mary driscoll

He surprised me in the rere of the premises, your honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he interfered twict with my clothing.

bloom

She counterassaulted.

mary driscoll

(Scornfully.) I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, your lord, and he remarked: Keep it quiet!

(General laughter.)

georges fottrell

(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly.) Order in court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.

(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in his stirring address to the grandjury. He was down and out but, through branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal. A seven months child he had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the affectionate [438] surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell’s wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums, model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Brittania metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever…)

(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that they cannot hear.)

longhand and shorthand

(Without looking up from their notebooks.) Loosen his boots.

professor machugh

(From the presstable, coughs and calls.)

Cough it up, man. Get it out in bits.

(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A large bucket. Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street. Gripe, yes. Quite bad. A plasterer’s bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery. Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment. He did not look in the bucket. Nobody. Rather a mess. Not completely. A Titbits back number.)

(Uproar and cat calls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of stickingplaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.)

j. j. o’molloy

(In barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest.) This is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this [439] a travesty of justice. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being quite permitted in my client’s native place, the land of the Pharaoh. Prima facie, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client’s family. If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from cobbler’s weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.

bloom

(Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar’s vest and trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole’s eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.) Him makee velly muchee fine night. (He begins to lilt simply.)

Li li poo lil chile.

Blingee pigfoot evly night.

Payee two shilly…

(He is howled down.)

j. j. o’molloy

(Hotly to the populace.) This is a lonehand fight. By Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused, was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered with. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own daughter. (Bloom takes J. J. O’Molloy’s hand and raises it to his lips.) I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to [440] or cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard, responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. He wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown. (To Bloom.) I suggest that you will do the handsome thing.

bloom

A penny in the pound.

(The mirage of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected ou the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino, in blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an orange citron and a pork kidney.)

dlugacz

(Hoarsely.) Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W, 13.

(J. J. O’Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with sunken eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F. Taylor. He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood.

j. j. o’molloy

(Almost voicelessly.) Excuse me, I am suffering from a severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words. (He assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour Bushe.) When the angel’s book comes to be opened if aught that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar the sacred benefit of the doubt. (A paper with something written on it is handed into court.)

bloom

(In court dress.) Can give best references. Messrs Callan, Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr. V. B. Dillon, ex-lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest… Queens of Dublin Society. (Carelessly.) I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal, at the levee. Sir Bob, I said…

[441] mrs yelverton barry

(In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brick quilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair.) Arrest him, constable. He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p. m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.

mrs bellingham

(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.) Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker’s one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the wastepipe and ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was a blossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the model farm.

mrs yelverton barry

Shame on him!

(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward.)

the sluts and ragamuffins

(Screaming.) Stop thief! Hurrah there, Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!

second watch

(Produces handcuffs.) Here are the darbies.

mrs bellingham

He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome compliments as a [442] Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and ffeecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a buck’s head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit and eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up. He urged me, stating that he felt it his mission in life to urge me, to defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.

the honourable mrs mervyn talboys

(In amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly.) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Phœnix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature) practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.

mrs bellingham

Me too.

mrs yelverton barry

Me too.

(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.)

[443] the honourable mrs mervyn talboys

(Stamps her jingling spurs in a sudden paroxysm of sudden fury.) I will, by the God above me. I’ll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I’ll flay him alive.

bloom

(His eyes closing, quails expectantly.) Here? (He squirms.) Again! (He pants cringing.) I love the danger.

the honourable mrs mervyn talboys

Very much so! I’ll make it hot for you. I’ll make you dance Jack Latten for that.

mrs bellingham

Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and stripes on it!

mrs yeluerton barry

Disgraceful! There’s no excuse for him! A married man!

bloom

All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.

the honourable mrs mervyn talboys

(Laughs derisively.) O, did you, my fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you’ll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.

mrs bellingham

(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.

bloom

(Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands with hangdog mien.) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the other cheek.)

[444] mrs yelverton barry

(Severely.) Don’t do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!

the honourable mrs mervyn talboys

(Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently.) I’ll do no such thing. Pig dog and always was ever since he was pupped! To dare address me! I’ll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I’ll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. (She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air.) Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick! Ready?

bloom

(Trembling, beginning to obey.) The weather has been so warm.

(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)

davy stephens

Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick’s Day Supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin.

(The very reverend Canon O’Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S. J. bend low.)

the timepiece

(Unportalling.)

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

Cuckoo.

(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)

the quoits

Jigjag, Jigajiga. Jigjag.

(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M’Coy and the featureless face of a Nameless One.)

[445] the nameless one

Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised her.

the jurors

(All their heads turned to his voice.) Really?

the nameless one

(Snarls.) Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.

the jurors

(All their heads lowered in assent.) Most of us thought as much.

first watch

He is a marked man. Another girl’s plait cut. Wanted: Jack the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.

second watch

(Awed, whispers.) And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.

the crier

(Loudly.) Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most honourable…

(His Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his arms an umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.)

the recorder

I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! (He dons the black cap.) Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty’s pleasure and there be hanged by the neck until he [446] is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. (A black skullcap descends upon his head.)

(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay.)

long john fanning

Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance.) Who’ll hang Judas Iscariot?

(H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner’s apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)

rumbold

(To the recorder with sinister familiarity.) Hanging Harry, your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or nothing.

(The bells of George’s church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)

the bells

Heigho! Heigho!

bloom

(Desperately.) Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence. Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzees. (Breathlessly.) Pelvic basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. (Overcome with emotion.) I left the precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing.) Hynes, may I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you want a little more…

hynes

(Coldly.) You are a perfect stranger.

second watch

(Points to the corner.) The bomb is here.

first watch

Infernal machine with a time fuse.

[447] bloom

No, no. Pig’s feet. I was at a funeral.

first watch

(Draws his truncheon.) Liar!

(The beagle lift his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)

paddy dignam

(In a hollow voice.) It is true. it was my funeral. Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes.

(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)

bloom

(In triumph.) You hear?

paddy dignam

Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam’s spirit. List, list, O list!

bloom

The voice is the voice of Esau.

second watch

(Blesses himself.) How is that possible?

first watch

It is not in the penny catechism.

paddy dignam

By metempsychosis. Spooks.

a voice

O rocks.

[448] paddy dignam

(Earnestly.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor’s Walk. Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that bottle of sherry. (He looks round him.) A lamp. I must satisfy an animal need. That buttermilk didn’t agree with me.

(The portly figure of John O’Connell, caretaker stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff of twisted poppies.)

father coffey

(Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak.) Namine. Jacobs Vobiscuits. Amen.

john o’connell

(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone.) Dignam, Patrick T, deceased.

paddy dignam

(With pricked up ears, winces.) Overtones. (He wriggles forward, places an ear to the ground.) My master’s voice!

john o’connell

Burial docket letter number U. P. Eightyfive thousand. Field seventeen. House of Keys, Plot, one hundred and one.

(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail stiffpointed, his ears cocked.)

paddy dignam

Pray for the repose of his soul.

(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam’s voice, muffled, is heard baying under ground: Dignam’s dead and gone below. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned machine.)

[449] tom rochford

(A hand to his breastbone, bows.) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare.) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow.

(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble eyes of nought. All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.)

the kisses

(Warbling.) Leo! (Twittering.) Icky licky micky sticky for Leo! (Cooing.) Coo coocoo! Yummyumm Womwom! (Warbling.) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (Twittering.) Leeolee! (Warbling.) O Leo!

(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)

bloom

A man’s touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.

(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts him.)

zoe

Are you looking for someone? He’s inside with his friend.

bloom

Is this Mrs Mack’s?

zoe

No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen’s. You might go farther and fare worse. Mother Slipperslapper. (Familiarly.) She’s on the job herself tonight with the vet, her tipster, that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck’s turned today. (Suspiciously.) You’re not his father, are you?

[450] bloom

Not I!

zoe

You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?

(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand slides over his left thigh.)

zoe

How’s the nuts?

bloom

Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier I suppose. One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.

zoe

(In sudden alarm.) You’ve a hard chancre.

bloom

Not likely.

zoe

I feel it.

(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips[.] )

bloom

A talisman. Heirloom.

zoe

For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?

(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket, then links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)

zoe

You’ll know me the next time.

[451] bloom

(Forlornly.) I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to…

(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)

zoe

(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.)

Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim.

bloom

(Fascinated.) I thought you were of good stock by your accent.

zoe

And you know what thought did?

(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth sending on him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)

bloom

(Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat awkward hand.) Are you a Dublin girl?

zoe

(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil.) No bloody fear. I’m English. Have you a swaggerroot?

bloom

(As before.) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish device. (Lewdly.) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.

[452] zoe

Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.

bloom

(In workman’s corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say, he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!

(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)

the chimes

Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!

bloom

(In alderman’s gown and chain.) Electors of Arran Quay, Inns Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock better run a tramline, I say, from the cattlemarket to the river. That’s the music of the future. That’s my programme. Cui bono? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom ship of finance…

an elector

Three times three for our future chief magistrate!

(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)

the torchbearers

Hooray!

(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. They nod vigorously in agreement.)

[453] late lord mayor harrington

(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large white silk scarf.) That alderman, sir Leo Bloom’s speech be printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which he was born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the thoroughfare hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth designated Boulevard Bloom.

councillor lorcan sherlock

Carried unanimously.

bloom

(Impassionedly.) These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they? Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev…

(Prolonged applause. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up. A streamer bearing the legends Cead Mile Failte and Mah Ttob Melek Israel spans the street. All the windows are thronged with sightseers, chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the royal Dublin fusiliers, the King’s own Scottish borderers, the Cameron Highlanders and the Welsh Fusiliers, standing to attention keep back the crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering. The pillar of the cloud appears. A fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the civic flāg. The van of the procession appears headed hy John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, [454] Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimney sweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, understakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. After them march gentlemen of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the master of horse, the lord great chamberlain, the earl marshal, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen’s iron crown, the chalice and bible. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet. Beefeaters reply, winding clarions of welcome. Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears bareheaded, in a crimson velvet mantletrimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward’s staff, the orb and sceptre with the dove, the curtana. He is seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly poparisoned,[?] with golden headstall. Wild excitement. The ladies from their balconies throw down rosepetals. The air is perfumed with essences. The men cheer. Bloom’s boys run amid the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.)

bloom’s boys

The wren, the wren,

The king of all birds,

Saint Stephen’s his day

Was caught in the furze.

[455] a blacksmith

(Murmurs.) For the honour of God! And is that Bloom? He scarcely looks thirtyone.

a pavior and flagger

That’s the famous Bloom now, the world’s greatest reformer. Hats off!

(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)

a millionairess

(Richly.) Isn’t he simply wonderful?

a noblewoman

(Nobly.) All that man has seen!

a feminist

(Masculinely.) And done!

a bellhanger

A classic face! He has the forehead of a thinker.

(Bloom’s weather. A sunburst appears in the northwest.)

the bishop of down and connor

I here present your undoubted emperor president and king chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

all

God save Leopold the First!

bloom

(In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and Connor, with dignity.) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.

william, archbishop of armagh

(In purple stock and shovel hat.) Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

[456] bloom

(Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears.) So may the Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.

michael, archbishop of armagh

(Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom’s head.) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem. Leopold, Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!

(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick’s, George’s and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.)

the peers

I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly worship.

(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message.)

bloom

My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the splendour of night.

(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of cheering.)

john howard parnell

(Raises the royal standard.) Illustrious Bloom! Successor to my famous brother!

bloom

(Embraces John Howard Parnell.) We thank you from our heart, John, [457] for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of our common ancestors.

(The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows all that he is wearing green socks.)

tom kernan

You deserve it, your honour.

bloom

On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do we yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering thier warcry, Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.

the chapel of freeman typesetters

Hear! Hear!

john wyse nolan

There’s the man that got away James Stephens.

a bluecoat schoolboy

Bravo!

an old resident

You’re a credit to your country, sir, that’s what you are.

an applewoman

He’s a man like Ireland wants.

bloom

My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.

(Thirty two workmen wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland, [458] under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem. It is a colossal edifice, with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L. B. Several paupers fall from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin crowded with loyal sightseers, collapses.)

the sightseers

(Dying.) Morituri te salutant. (They die.)

(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated figure at Bloom.)

the man in the macintosh

Don’t you believe a word he says. That man is Leopold M’Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.

bloom

Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M’Intosh!

(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disppears. Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported. Bloom’s bodyguard distribute Maundy money, commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives, in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes’ Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days’ indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, season tickets available for all tram lines, coupons of the royal and prvileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the World’s Twelve Worst Books: Froggy and Fritz (politic), Care of the Baby (infantilic), 50 Meals for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth? (historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant’s Compendium of the [459] Universe (cosmic), Let’s All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser’s Vade Mecum (journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who’s Who in Space (astric), Songs that Reached ’Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise’s Way to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward to touch the hem of Bloom’s robe. The lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken. Babes and sucklings are held up.)

the women

Little father! Little father

the babes and sucklings

Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,

Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.

(Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the stomach.)

baby boardman

(Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his mouth.) Hajajaja.

bloom

(Shaking hands with a blind stripling.) My more than Brother! (Placing his arms round the shoulders of an old couple.) Dear old friends! (He playes pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls.) Peep! Bopeep! (He wheels twins in a perambulator.) Ticktacktwo wouldyousetashoe? (He performs juggler’s tricks, draws red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet silk haudherchiefs from his mouth.) Roygbiv. 32 feet per second. (He consoles a widow.) Absence makes the heart grow younger. (He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics.) Leg it, ye devils! (He kisses the bedsores of a palsied veteran.) Honourable wounds! (He trips up a fat policeman.) U. p: up. U. p: up. (He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly.) Ah, naughty, naughty! (He eats a raw turnip offered him by Maurice Butterly, farmer.) Fine! Splendid! (He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Hynes, journalist.) My dear fellow, not at all! (He gives his coat to a beggar.) Please accept. (He takes part in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples.) Come on, boys! Wriggle it, girls!

[460] the citizen

(Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald muffler.) May the good God bless him!

(The ram’s horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)

bloom

(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and reads solemnly.) Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith.

(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.)

jimmy henry

The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic Majesty will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems. All cordially invited. Given at this our loyal city of Dublin in the year 1 of the Paradisiacal Era.

paddy leonard

What am I to do about my rates and taxes?

bloom

Pay them, my friend.

paddy leonard

Thank you.

nosey flynn

Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?

bloom

(Obdurately.) Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five pounds.

j. j. o’molloy

A Daniel did I say? Nay! A Peter O’Brien!

nosey flynn

Where do I draw the five pounds?

[461] pisser burke

For bladder trouble?

bloom

Acid. nit. hydrochlor dil, 20 minims

Tinct. mix. vom, 5 minims

Extr. taraxel. lig. 30 minims.

Aq. dis. ter in die.

chris callinan

What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran?

bloom

Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. 11.

joe hynes

Why aren’t you in uniform?

bloom

When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the Austrian despot in a dank prison where was yours?

ben dollard

Pansies?

bloom

Embellish (beautify) suburban gardens.

ben dollard

When twins arrive?

bloom

Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.

larry o’rourke

An eight day licence for my new premises. You remember me, sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I’m sending around a dozen of stout for the missus.

[462] bloom

(Coldly.) You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no presents.

crofton

This is indeed a festivity.

bloom

(Solemnly.) You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.

alexander keyes

When will we have our own house of keys?

bloom

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival, with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.

o’madden burke

Free fox in a free henroost.

davy byrne

(Yawning.) Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!

bloom

Mixed races and mixed marriage.

lenehan

What about mixed bathing?

(Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked [463] goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)

father farley

He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith.

mrs riordan

(Tears up her will.) I’m disappointed in you! You bad man!

mother grogan

(Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) You beast! You abominable person!

nosey flynn

Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.

bloom

(With rollicking humour.)

I vowed that I never would leave her,

She turned out a cruel deceiver.

With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.

hoppy holohan

Good old Bloom! There’s nobody like him after all.

paddy leonard

Stage Irishman!

bloom

What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of Casteele (Laughter.)

lenehan

Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!

[464] the veiled sibyl

(Enthusiastically.) I’m a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I’d give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.

bloom

(Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she’s a bonny lassie.

theodore purefoy

(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.

the veiled sibyl

(Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.)

(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson’s Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness’s brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gas ovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)

alexander j. dowie

(Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of hisnostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban!

the mob

Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was. Mr. Fox!

(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheeps’tails, odd pieces of fat.)

[465] bloom

(Excitedly.) This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin’s Barn. Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf.

dr mulligan

(In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow.) Dr Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace’s private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him to be more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be virgo intacta.

(Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.)

dr madden

Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in spirits of wine in the national teratological museum.

dr crotthers

I have examined the patient’s urine. It is albuminoid. Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.

dr punch costello

The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.

dr dixon

(Reads a bill of health.) Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have found [466] him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests Protection Society which clears up everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer’s peas. He wears a hairshirt winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is about to have a baby.

(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I. O. U’s, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.)

bloom

O, I so want to be a mother.

mrs thornton

(In nursetender’s gown.) Embrace me tight, dear. You’ll be soon over it. Tight, dear.

(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants. All are handsome, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Each has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindorée, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros. They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vice chairmen of hotel syndicates.)

a voice

Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?

[467] bloom

(Darkly.) You have said it.

brother buzz

Then perform a miracle.

bantam lyons

Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger[.]

(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from king’s evil, contracts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)

brini, papal nuncio

(In papal zouave’s uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre.)

Leopoldi autem generatio. Moses begat Noah and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O’Halloran and O’Halloran begat Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat O’Donnell Magnus and O’Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.

[468] a deadhand

(Writes on the wall.) Bloom is a cod.

crab

(In bushranger’s kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?

a female infant

(Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge?

a hollybush

And in the devil’s glen?

bloom

(Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears falling from his left eye.) Spare my past.

the irish evicted tenants

(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs.) Sjambok him!

(Bloom with asses’ ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms, his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gat Mission, joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)

the artane orphans

You hig, you hog, you dirty dog!

You think the ladies love you!

the prison gate girls

If you see kay

Tell him he may

See you in tea

Tell him from me.

hornblower

(In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) And he shall carry the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to Lilith, the [469] nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.

(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks, They wag their beards at Bloom.)

mastiansky and citron

Belial! Laemlein of Istria! the false Messiah! Abulafia!

(George S. Mesias, Bloom’s tailor, appears, a tailor’s goose under his arm, presenting a bill.)

mesias

To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.

bloom

(Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom!

(Reuben J. Dodd, blackbearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)

reuben j.

(Whispers hoarsely.) The squeak is out. A split is gone for the flatties. Nip the first rattler.

the fire brigade

Pflaap!

brother buzz

(Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands him over to the civil power, sayping.) Forgive him his trespasses.

(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)

the citizen

Thank heaven!

[470] bloom

(In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid phoenix flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.

(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of Erin, in black garments with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands, kneel down and pray.)

the daughters of erin

Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.

Flower of the Bath, pray for us.

Mentor of Menton, pray for us.

Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us.

Charitable Mason, pray for us.

Wandering Soap, pray for us.

Sweets of Sin, pray for us.

Music without Words, pray for us.

Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us.

Friend of all Frillies, pray for us.

Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us.

Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.

(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Mr Vincent O’Brien, sings the Alleluia chorus, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonised.)

zoe

Talk away till you’re black in the face.

bloom

(In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dsuty brogues, an emigrant’s red handkerchief bundle in his hand leading a black bogoak pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye.) Let me be going now, woman of the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I’m after having the father and mother of a bating. (With a tear in his eye.) All insanity. Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life’s dream is o’er. End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away mournfully.) I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.

[471] zoe

(Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.) Honest? Till the next time. (She sneers.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts.

bloom

(Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.

zoe

(In sudden sulks.) I hate a rotter that’s insincere. Give a bleeding whore a chance.

bloom

(Repentantly.) I am very disagreable. You are a necessary evil. Where are you from? London?

zoe

(Glibly.) Hog’s Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I’m Yorkshire born (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.) I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short time? Ten shillings?

bloom

(Smiles, nods slowly.) More, houri, more.

zoe

And more’s mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I’ll peel off.

bloom

(Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed monster (Earnestly.) You know how difficult it is. I needn’t tell you.

zoe

(Flattered.) What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for (She pats him.) Come.

bloom

Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.

[472] zoe

Babby!

bloom

(In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair, fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby finger, his moist tongue lolling and lisping.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo tlone.

the buckles

Love me. Love me not. Love me.

zoe

Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.

(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)

the male brutes

(Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good!

(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)

zoe

(Her lucky hand instantly saving him.) Hoopsa! Don’t fall upstairs.

bloom

The just man falls seven times (He stands aside at the threshold.) After you is good manners.

zoe

Ladies first, gentlemen after.

(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out her hands, [473] draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall hang a man’s hat and waterproof, Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is thrown open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers brownsocked, passes with an ape’s gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantlepiece. A tag of her corset lace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the piano.)

kitty

(Coughs behind her hand.) She’s a bit imbecillic. (She signs with a waggling forefinger.) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and white petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly.) Respect yourself. (She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her hair glows, red with henna.) O, excuse!

zoe

More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the gas full cock.)

kitty

(Peers at the gasjet.) What ails it tonight?

[474] lynch

(Deeply.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.

zoe

Clap on the back for Zoe.

(The wand in Lynch’s hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry lolls spreadeagle in the sofa corner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)

kitty

(Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot.) O, excuse!

zoe

(Promptly.) Your boy’s thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.

(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled catterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)

stephen

As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet’s rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Cœla enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David’s that is Circe’s or what am I saying Ceres’ altar and David’s tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightiness of his almightiness. Mais, nom de nom, that is another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at Lynch’s cap, smiles, laughs.) Which side is your knowledge bump?

the cap

(With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!

[475] stephen

You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!

the cap

Bah!

stephen

Here’s another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which…

the cap

Which? Finish. You can’t.

stephen

(With an effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible elipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.

the cap

Which?

(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)

stephen

(Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!

lynch

(With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe Higgins.) What a learned speech, eh?

zoe

(Briskly.) God help your head, he knows more than you have forgotten.

(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)

[476] florry

They say the last day is coming this summer.

kitty

No!

zoe

(Explodes in laughter.) Great unjust God!

florry

(Offended.) Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my foot’s tickling.

(Ragged barefoot newsboys jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, yelling.)

the newsboys

Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.

(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)

stephen

A time, times and half a time.

(Reuben J. Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim’s wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters hangs from the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognatic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.)

all

What?

the hobgoblin

(His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping, with outstretched clutching arms then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C’est moi! L’homme qui rit! [477] L’homme primigène! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien n’va plus. (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)

florry

(Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly.) The end of the world!

(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs and feetshuffling.)

the gramophone

Jerusalem!

Open your gates and sing

Hosanna…

(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.)

the end of the world

(With a Scotch accent.) Wha’ll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row?

(Over the passing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah’s voice, harsh as a corncrakes, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)

elijah

No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dave Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God’s time is 12.25. Tell mother you’ll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here! [478] Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It’s a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It’s the whole pie with jam in. It’s just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy have you got that? O. K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That’s it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts.) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings.) Jeru…

the gramophone

(Drowning his voice.)

Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh… (The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)

the three whores

(Covering their ears, squawk.) Ahhkkk!

elijah

(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top of his voice, his arms uplifted.) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don’t never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. (He winks at his audience.) Our Mr President, he twig the whole lot and he ain’t saying nothing.

kitty-kate

I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on [479] Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop. My mother’s sister married a Montmorency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.

zoe-fanny

I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.

florry-teresa

It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy’s three stars. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the bed.

stephen

In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.

(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students’ gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching.)

the beatitudes

(Incoherently.) Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop.

lyster

(In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says discreetly.) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the light.

(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser attire, shinily laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin’s kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda hat.)

best

(Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know, Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.

john eglinton

(Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it towards a corner; with carping accent.) Esthetics and cosmetics are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. [480] Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.

(In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananann Mac Lir broods, chin on knees. He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two talons.)

mhananann mac lir

(With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won’t have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of stormbirds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! (He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.) Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter.

(A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)

the gasjet

Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!

(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.)

zoe

Who has a fag as I’m here?

lynch

(Tossing a cigarette on to the table.) Here.

zoe

(Her head perched aside in mock pride.) Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady? (She stretches up to light the cigarette over the flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie’s green. She puffs calmly at her cigarette.) Can you see the beauty spot of my behind?

[481] lynch

I’m not looking.

zoe

(Makes sheep’s eyes.) No? You wouldn’t do a less thing. Would you suck a lemon?

(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.)

virag

(Heels together, bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely. (He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good.

bloom

Granpapachi. But…

virag

Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of gopherwood is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a word. Hippogriff. Am I right?

bloom

She is rather lean.

[482] virag

(Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.) Did you hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax!

bloom

(An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek.) She seems sad.

virag

(Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left eye wilh a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor’s button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially.) Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.

bloom

(Regretfully.) When you come out without your gun.

virag

We can do you all brands mlld, medium and strong. Pay your money, take your choice. How happy caould you be with either…

bloom

With?…

virag

(His tongue upcurling.) Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. Sbe is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. [483] Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in it. Lycopodium. (His throat twitches.) Slapbang! There he goes again.

bloom

The stye I dislike.

virag

(Arches his eyebrows.) Contact with a goldring, they say. Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosaurus. For the rest Eve’s sovereign remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. (He twitches.) It is a funny sound. (He coughs encouragingly.) But possibly it is only a wart. I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.

bloom

(Reflecting.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said…

virag

(Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking.) Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten. Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa è santa. Tara. Tara. (Aside.) He will surely remember.

bloom

Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand cures. Mnemo?

virag

(Excitedly.) I say so. I say so. E’en so. Technic. (He taps his parchment roll energetically.) This book tells you how to act with all descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about amputation. Our old friend caustic. [484] They must be starved. Snip off with horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in male habiliments. (With a dry snigger.) You intended to devote an entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer months of 1882 to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate! From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say? Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case, those complicated combinations, camiknickers? (He crows derisively.) Keekeereekee!

(Bloom surveys incertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)

bloom

I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.

virag

(Prompts into his ear in a pig’s whisper.) Insects of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal verve in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear’s buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L. B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley! Buzz!

bloom

Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I…

[485] virag

(His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key.) Splendid! Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gabbles gluttonously with turkey wattles.) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we? Open Sesame! Cometh forth! (He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his glowworm’s nose running backwards over the letters which he claws.) Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will shortly be upon us. I’m the best o’cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. (He wags his head with cackling raillery.) Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular.

bloom

(Absently[.] ) Ocularly woman’s bivalve case is worse. Always open sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and the serpent contradict. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman’s milk. Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.

virag

(His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) That the cows with their those distended udders that they have been the known…

bloom

I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. (He repeats.) Spontaneously to seek out the saurian’s lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. (Profoundly.) Instinct rules the world. In life. In death.

virag

(Head askew, arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries.) Who’s Ger Ger? Who’s dear Gerald? O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin? (He mews.) Luss puss puss puss! (He sighs, draws back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw.) Well, well. He doth rest anon.

[486] the moth

I’m a tiny tiny thing

Ever flying in the spring

Round and round a ringaring.

Long ago I was a king,

Now I do this kind of thing

On the wing, on the wing!

Bing!

(He rushes against the mauve shade flapping noisily). Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.

(From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob’s pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour’s face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.)

henry

(In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.) There is a flower that bloometh.

(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards Zoe’s neck. Henry gallant turns with pendant dewlap to the piano.)

stephen

(To himself.) Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my. Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I’m partially drunk, by the way. (He touches the keys again.) Minor chord comes now. Yes. Not much however.

(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.)

[487] artifoni

Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto.

florry

Sing us something. Love’s old sweet song.

stephen

No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you the letter about the lute?

florry

(Smirking.) The bird that can sing and won’t sing.

(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew Arnold’s face.)

philip sober

Take a fool’s advice. All is not well. Work it out with the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve you got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney’s en ville, Mooney’s sur mer, the Moira, Larchet’s, Holles street hospital, Burke’s. Eh? I am watching you.

philip drunk

(Impatiently.) Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way. If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who was it told me his name? (His lawnmower begins to purr.) Aha, yes. Zoe mou sas agapo. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his card I have somewhere. Mac somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, no?

florry

And the song?

stephen

Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

florry

Are you out of Maynooth? You’re like someone I knew once.

[488] stephen

Out of it now (To himself.) Clever.

philip drunk and philip sober

(Their lawnmowers purring with a rigadoon of grasshalms). Clever ever. Out of it. Out of it. By the bye have you the book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in condition. Do like us.

zoe

There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up. You needn’t try to hide, I says to him. I know you’ve a Roman collar.

virag

Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his pupils waxing.) To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I am the Virag who disclosed the sex secrets of monks and maidens. Why I left the Church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man’s lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. (He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman’s wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman’s fat yadgana. (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!

lynch

I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for shooting a bishop.

zoe

(Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) He couldn’t get a connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.

bloom

Poor man!

[489] zoe

(Lightly.) Only for what happened him.

bloom

How?

virag

(A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchias, a Lybian eunuch, the pope’s bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a whore. Apocalypse.

kitty

And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn’t swallow and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all suscribed for the funeral.

philip drunk

(Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe?

philip sober

(Gaily.) C’était le sacré pigeon, Philippe.

(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair. And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whore’s shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)

lynch

(Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.

florry

(Nods.) Locomotor ataxy.

zoe

(Gaily.) O, my dictionary.

[490] lynch

Three wise virgins.

virag

(Agueschaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres. [lovephiltres,] whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon’s cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!

(Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.)

ben dollard

(Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone.) When love absorbs my ardent soul.

(The virgins, Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)

the virgins

(Gushingly.) Big Ben! Ben Mac Chree!

a voice

Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.

ben dollard

(Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) Hold him now.

henry

(Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine heart, mine love. (He pluks his lutestrings.) When first I saw…

virag

(Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats! (He yawns, showing a coalblack throat and closes his jaws by an upward push of his parchment [491] roll.) After having said which I took my departure. Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!

(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb and gives a cow’s lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)

the flybill

K. 11. post no bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.

henry

All is lost now.

(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)

virag’s head

Quack!

(Exeunt severally.)

stephen

(Over his shoulder to Zoe.) You would have preferred the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet.

lynch

All one and the same God to her.

stephen

(Devoutly.) And Sovereign Lord of all things.

florry

(To Stephen.) I’m sure you are a spoiled priest. Or a monk.

lynch

He is. A cardinal’s son.

[492] stephen

Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.

(His Eminence, Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His thumbs are stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross. Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from on high with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp.)

the cardinal

Conservio lies captured

He lies in the lowest dungeon

With manacles and chains around his limbs

Weighing upwards of three tons.

(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and fro, arms akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour.)

O, the poor little fellow

Hi-hi-hi-hi-his legs they were yellow

He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake

But some bloody savage

To graize his white cabbage

He murdered Nell Flaherty’s duckloving drake.

(A multitude of midges swarms over his robe. He scratches himself with crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims.)

I’m suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they’d walk me off the face of the bloody globe.

(His head aslant, he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easter- [493] kissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar, merciful, male, melodious.)

Shall carry my heart to thee,

Shall carry my heart to thee,

And the breath of the balmy night

Shall carry my heart to thee.

(The trick doorhandle turns.)

the doorhandle

Theeee.

zoe

The devil is in that door.

(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.)

zoe

(Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hum. Thank your mother for the rabbits. I’m very fond of what I like.

bloom

(Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep, pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event?

zoe

(Tears open the silverfoil.) Fingers was made before forks. (She breaks off and nibbles a piece, gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then turns kittenishly to Lynch.) No objection to French lozenges? (He nods. She taunts him.) Have it now or wait till you get it? (He opens his mouth, his head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head follows. She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.)

Catch.

(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it through with a crack.)

[494] kitty

(Chewing.) The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady. The gas we had on the Toft’s hobbyhorses. I’m giddy still.

bloom

(In Svengali’s fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the door. Then, rigid, with left foot advanced, he makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master drawing his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.) Go, go, go, I conjure you, whoever you are.

(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside. Bloom’s features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.)

bloom

(Solemnly.) Thanks.

zoe

Do as you’re bid. Here.

(A firm heelclacking is heard on the stairs.)

bloom

(Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? But I bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus. Colours affect women’s characters, any they have. This black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.

(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge and cools herself, flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)

[495] bella

My word! I’m all of a mucksweat.

(She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)

the fan

(Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see.

bloom

Yes… Partly, I have mislaid…

the fan

(Half opening, then closing.) And the missus is master. Petticoat government.

bloom

(Looks down with a sheepish grin.) That is so.

the fan

(Folding together, rests against her eardrop.) Have you forgotten me?

bloom

Nes. Yo.

the fan

(Folded akimbo against her waist.) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we?

(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)

bloom

(Wincing.) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love.

the fan

(Tapping.) We have met. You are mine. It is fate.

[496] bloom

(Cowed.) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A dog’s spittle, as you probably… (He winces.) Ah!

richie goulding

(Bagweighted, passes the door.) Mocking is catch. Best value in Dub. Fit for a prince’s liver and kidney.

the fan

(Tapping.) All things end. Be mine. Now.

bloom

(Undecided.) All now? I should not have parted with my talisman. Rain, exposure at dewfall on the sea rocks, a peccadillo at my time of life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.

the fan

(Points downwards slowly.) You may.

bloom

(Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace.) We are observed.

the fan

(Points downwards quickly.) You must.

bloom

(With desire, with reluctance.) I can make a true black knot. Learned when [497] I served my time and worked the mail order line for Kellett’s. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy. I knelt once before today. Ah!

(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked. Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers draws out and in her laces.)

bloom

(Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Mansfield’s was my love’s young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn in Paris.

the hoof

Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.

bloom

(Crosslacing.) Too tight?

the hoof

If you bungle, Handy Andy, I’ll kick your football for you.

bloom

Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar dance. Bad luck. Nook in wrong tache of her… person you mentioned. That night she met… Now!

(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in midbrow. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)

bloom

(Mumbles.) Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen…

bello

(With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of dishonour!

bloom

(Infatuated.) Empress!

[498] bello

(His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump!

bloom

(Plaintively.) Hugeness!

bello

Dungdevourer!

bloom

(With sinews semiflexed.) Magnificence!

bello

Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!

bloom

(Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing.) Truffles!

(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming dead with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.)

bello

(With bobbed hair, purple gills, fat moustache rings ronnd his shaven mouth, in mountaineer’s puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moorcock’s feather, his hands stuck deep in his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in.) Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot’s glorious heels, so glistening in their proud erectness.

bloom

(Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey.

bello

(Laughs loudly.) Holy smoke! You little know what’s in store for you. I’m the tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I’ll bet Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym costume.

(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)

[499] zoe

(Widening her slip to screen her.) She’s not here.

bloom

(Closing her eyes.) She’s not here.

florry

(Hiding her with her gown.) She didn’t mean it, Mr Bello. She’ll be good, sir.

kitty

Don’t be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won’t, ma’amsir.

bello

(Coaxingly.) Come, ducky dear. I want a word with you, darling, just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety. (Bloom puts out her timid head.) There’s a good girly now. (Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward.) I only want to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How’s that tender behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready.

bloom

(Fainting.) Don’t tear my…

bello

(Savagely.) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I’ll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You’re in for it this time. I’ll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.) I shall sit on your ottomansaddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson’s fat ham rashers and a bottle of Guinness’s porter. (He belches.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler’s Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you.

(He twists her arm. Bloom squeaks, turning turtle.)

bloom

Don’t be cruel, nurse! Don’t!

[500] bello

(Twisting.) Another!

bloom

(Screams.) O, it’s hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches like mad!

bello

(Shouts.) Good, by the rumping jumping general! That’s the best bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don’t keep me waiting, damn you. (He slaps her face.)

bloom

(Whimpers.) You’re after hitting me. I’ll tell…

bello

Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.

zoe

Yes. Walk on him! I will.

florry

I will. Don’t be greedy.

kitty

No, me. Lend him to me.

(The brothel cook, Mrs Keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men’s grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)

mrs keogh

(Ferociously.) Can I help? (They hold and pinion Bloom.)

bello

(Squats, with a grunt on Bloom’s upturned face, puffing cigarsmoke, nursing a fat leg.) I see Keating Clay is elected chairman of the Richmond Asylum and bytheby Guinness’s preference shares are at sixteen three quarters. Curse me for a fool that I didn’t buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty [501] to one. (He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom’s ear.) Where’s that Goddamned cursed ashtray?

bloom

(Goaded, buttocksmothered.) O! O! Monsters! Cruel one!

bello

Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg, pray for it as you never prayed before. (He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar.) Here, kiss that. Both. Kiss. (He throws a leg astride and, pressing with horseman’s knees, calls in a hard voice.) Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I’ll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. (He bends sideways and squeezes his mount’s testicles roughly, shouting.) Ho! off we pop! I’ll nurse you in proper fashion. (He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the, in the saddle.) The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop.

florry

(Pulls at Bello.) Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked before you.

zoe

(Pulling at Florry.) Me[.]  Me. Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress?

bloom

(Stifling.) Can’t.

bello

Well, I’m not. Wait. (He holds in his breath.) Curse it. Here. This bung’s about burst. (He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting his features, farts loudly.) Take that! (He recorks himself.) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters.

bloom

(A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.) Woman.

bello

(Stands up.) No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and shoulders and quickly too.

[502] bloom

(Shrinks.) Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I tiptouch it with my nails?

bello

(Points to his whores.) As they are now, so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille, with whalebone busk, to the diamond trimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you…

bloom

(A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth.) I tried her things on only once, a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hardup I washed them to save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.

bello

(Jeers.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh! and showed off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat’s udders, in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! Ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and short trunk leg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne Hotel, eh?

bloom

Miriam. Black. Demimondaine.

bello

(Guffaws.) Christ Almighty, it’s too tickling, this! You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade, about to be violated by Lieutenant [503] Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell, M. P., Signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henry Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Crœsus, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. (He guffaws again.) Christ, wouldn’t it make a Siamese cat laugh?

bloom

(Her hands and features working.) It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister’s stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.

bello

(With wicked glee.) Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn throne.

bloom

Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.) and really it’s better the position… because often I used to wet…

bello

(Sternly.) No insubordination. The sawdust is there in the corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn’t I? Do it standing, sir! I’ll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans’ you’ll find I’m a martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.

the sins of the past

(In a medley of voices.) He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black Church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in d’Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and [504] how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?

bello

(Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out. Be candid for once.

(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny. Cassidy’s hag, blind stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other, the…)

bloom

Don’t ask me: Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the… I swear on my sacred oath…

bello

(Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing. Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr…!

bloom

(Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant…

bello

(Imperiously.) O get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak when you’re spoken to.

bloom

(Bows.) Master! Mistress! Mantamer!

(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.)

bello

(Satirically.) By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes, also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail, Won’t that be nice? (He places a ruby ring on her finger.) And there now! With this ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress.

bloom

Thank you, mistress.

[505] bello

You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh’s the cook’s, a sandy one. Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping hot. Hop! you will dance attendance or I’ll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush. You’ll be taught the error of your ways. At night your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives (He chuckles.) My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heels. First, I’ll have a go at you myself. A man I know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? (He points.) For that lot trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!

a bidder

A florin.

(Dillon’s lacquey rings his handbell.)

a voice

One and eightpence too much.

the lacquey

Barang!

charles alberta marsh.

Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.

bello

(Gives a rap with his gavel.) Two bar. Rockbottom figure and cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine shis points. Handle hrim. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day. A pure [506] stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His sire’s milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa, my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! (He brands his initial C on Bloom’s croup.) So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen?

a darkvisaged man

(In disguised accent.) Hoondert punt sterlink.

voices

(Subdued.) For the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid.

bello

(Gaily.) Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantelette, is a potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts of the blasé man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.

bloom

(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) O, I know what you’re hinting at now.

bello

What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds of Bloom’s haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where’s your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It’s as limp a boy of six’s doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man’s job?

bloom

Eccles Street…

bello

(Sarcastically.) I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world but there’s a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his [507] bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He’s no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it’s kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don’t it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon!

bloom

I was indecently treated, I… inform the police. Hundred pounds. Unmentionable. I…

bello

Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your drizzle.

bloom

To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll!… We… Still…

bello

(Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman’s will since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return and see.

(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)

sleepy hollow

Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!

bloom

(In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoing, fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes, cries out.) I see her! It’s she! The first night at Mat Dillon’s! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he…

bella

(Laughs mockingly.) That’s your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar student.

(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)

milly

My! It’s Papli! But, O Papli, how old you’ve grown!

[508] bello

Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writing table where we never wrote, Aunt Hegarty’s armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and his menfriends are living there in clover. The Cuckoos’ Rest! Why not? How many women had you, say? Following them up dark streets,, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts. What, you male prostitute? Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander, O.

bloom

They… I…

bello

(Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren’s auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art’ sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom’s.

bloom

Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return. I will prove…

a voice

Swear!

(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowie knife between his teeth.)

bello

As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You are down and out and don’t you forget it, old bean.

bloom

Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody…?

(He bites his thumb.)

bello

Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace [509] about you. I can give you a rare old wine that’ll send you skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have. If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We’ll bury you in our shrubbery jakes where you’ll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever the buggers’ names were, suffocated in the one cesspool. (He explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh.) We’ll manure you, Mr Flower! (He pipes scoffingly.) Byby, Poldy! Byby. Papli!

bloom

(Clasps his head.) My will power! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff…

(He weeps tearlessly.)

bello

(Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears!

(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, O. Mastiansky, the Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the recreant Bloom.)

the circumcised

(In a dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, no flowers.) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.

voices

(Sighing.) So he’s gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There’s the widow. That so? Ah, yes.

(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oak frame a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown art colours, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews, stands over Bloom.)

the yews

(Their leaves whispering.) Sister. Our sister. Ssh.

[510] the nymph

(Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest!

bloom

(Crawls jellily forward under the bought, streaked by sunlight, with dignity.) This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit.

the nymph

Mortal! You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnic makers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in flesh tights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youth, adsf or transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the married.

bloom

(Lifts a turtle head towards her lap.) We have met before. On another star.

the nymph

(Sadly.) Rubber goods. Neverrip. Brand as supplied to the aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited testimonials for Professor Waldmann’s wonderful chest exuber. My bust developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.

bloom

You mean Photo Bits?

the nymph

I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame.

bloom

(Humbly kisses her long hair.) Your classic curves, beautiful immortal. I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to pray.

the nymph

During dark nights I heard your praise.

[511] bloom

(Quickly.) Yes, yes. You mean that I… Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of my bed or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless inoffensive vent. (He sighs.) ’Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.

the nymph

(Her fingers in her ears.) And words. They are not in my dictionary.

bloom

You understood them?

the yews

Ssh.

the nymph

(Covers her face with her hand.) What have I not seen in that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?

bloom

(Apologetically.) I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea, long ago.

the nymph

(Bends her head.) Worse! Worse!

bloom

(Reflects precautiously.) That antiquated commode. It wasn’t her weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.

(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)

the waterfall

Poulaphouca Poulaphouca

Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.

the yews

(Mingling their boughs.) Listen. Whisper. She is right, our sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous summer days.

[512] john wyse nolan

(In the background, in Irish National Forester’s uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) Prosper! Give shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland!

the yews

(Murmuring.) Who came to Poulaphouca with the high school excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?

bloom

(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript juvenile grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops, and a red school cap with badge.) I was in my tens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies’ cloakroom and lavatory, the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs for they love crushes, instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice. Even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.

(Halcyon Days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.)

the halcyon days

Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray! (They cheer.)

bloom

(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, stunned with spent snowballs, struggles to rise.) Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let’s ring all the bells in Montague Street (He cheers feebly.) Hurray for the High School!

the echo

Fool!

the yews

(Rustling.) She is right, our sister. Whisper. (Whispered kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from the boles and among the leaves and break blossoming into bloom.) Who profaned our silent shade?

[513] the nymph

(Coyly through parting fingers.) There! In the open air?

the yews

(Sweeping downward.) Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.

the waterfall

Poulaphouca Poulaphouca

Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.

the nymph

(With wide fingers.) O! Infamy!

bloom

I was precocious. Youth. The fauns. I sacrificed to the god of the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette trough illclosed curtains, with poor papa’s operaglasses. The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled downhill at Rialto Bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their crooked tree and I… A saint couldn’t resist it. The demon possessed me. Besides, who saw?

(Staggering Bob, a white polled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with humid nostrils through the foliage.)

staggering bob

Me. Me see.

bloom

Simply satisfying a need. (With pathos.) No girl would when I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn’t play…

(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.)

the nannygoat

(Bleats.) Megegaggegg! Nannannanny!

bloom

(Hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsepine.) Regularly [514] engaged. Circumstances alter cases. (He gazes intently downwards on the water.) Thirtytwo head over heels per second. Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government printer’s clerk. (Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, rolled in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the Lion’s Head cliff into the purple waiting waters.)

the dummymummy

Bbbbblllllbbbbblblobschbg!

(Far out in the bay between Bailey and Kish lights the Erin’s King sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards the land.)

councillor nannetti

(Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellow kitefaced, his hand in his waistcoat, opening, declaims.) When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have…

bloom

Done. Prff!

the nymph

(Loftily.) We immortals, as you saw today have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light. (She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in her mouth.) Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then could you…?

bloom

(Pacing the heather abjectly.) O, I have been a perfect pig. Enemas too, I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long’s syringe, the ladies’ friend.

the nymph

In my presence. The powderpuff. (She blushes and makes a knee.) And the rest.

bloom

(Dejected.) Yes. Peccavi! I have paid homage on that living altar where the [515] back changes name. (With sudden fervour.) For why should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules…?

(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems, cooeeing.)

the voice of kitty

(In the thicket.) Show us one of them cushions.

the voice of florry

Here.

(A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.)

the voice of lynch

(In the thicket.) Whew! Piping hot!

the voice of zoe

(From the thicket.) Came from a hot place.

the voice of virag

(A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull!

bloom

It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. So womanly full. It fills me full.

the waterfall

Phillaphulla Poulaphouca

Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.

the yews

Ssh! Sister, speak!

the nymph

(Eyeless, in nun’s white habit, coif and huge winged wimple, softly, with remote [516] eyes.) Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount Carmel, the apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. (She reclines her head, sighing.) Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o’er the waters dull.

(Bloom half rises. His back trousers’ button snaps.)

the button

Bip!

(Two sluts of the Coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)

the sluts

O Leopold lost the pin of his drawers

He didn’t know what to do,

To keep it up,

To keep it up.

bloom

(Coldly.) You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an ass pissing.

the yews

(Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms aging and swaying.) Deciduously!

the nymph

Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! (A large moist stain appears on her robe.) Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman. (She clutches in her robe.) Wait, Satan. You’ll sing no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. (She draws a poniard and, clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his loins.) Nekum!

bloom

(Starts up, seizes her hand.) Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat of nine lives! Fair play, madam. No pruning knife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What do we lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? (He clutches her veil.) A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier or good Mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard?

[517] the nymph

(With a cry, flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks.) Poli…!

bloom

(Calls after her.) As if you didn’t get it on the double yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it. Your strength our weakness. What’s our studfee? What will you pay on the nail? You fee men dancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a keen.) Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony to morrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me. (He sniffs.) But, Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.

(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)

bella

You’ll know me the next time.

bloom

(Composed, regards her.) Passée. Mutton dressed as lamb. Long in the tooth and superflous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your eyes are as vapid as the glass eyes of your stuffed fox. They have the dimensions of your other features, that’s all. I’m not a triple screw propeller.

bella

(Contemptuously.) You’re not game, in fact. (Her sowcunt barks).Fohracht!

bloom

(Contemptuously.) Clean your nailless middle finger first, the cold spunk o your bully is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself.

bella

I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!

bloom

I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!

[518] bella

(Turns to the piano.) Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul?

zoe

Me. Mind your cornflowers. (She darts to the piano and bangs chords on it with crossed arms.) The cat’s ramble through the slag. (She glances back.) Eh? Who’s making love to my sweeties? (She darts back to the table.) What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own.

(Kitty disconcerted coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom approaches Zoe.)

bloom

(Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you?

zoe

Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.

bloom

(With feeling.) It is nothing but still a relic of poor mamma.

zoe

Give a thing and take it back

God’ll ask you where is that

You’ll say you don’t know

God’ll send you down below.

bloom

There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.

stephen

To have or not to have, that is the question.

zoe

Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking.) Those that hides knows where to find.

[519] bella

(Frowns.) Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here?

(She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.)

stephen

(With exagerated politeness.) This silken purse I made out of the sow’s ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. (He indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom.) We are all in the same sweepstake, Kinch and Lynch. Dans ce bordel où tenons nostre état.

lynch

(Calls from the hearth.) Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me.

stephen

(Hands Bella a coin.) Gold. She has it.

bella

(Looks at the money, then at Zoe, Florrie and Kitty.) Do you want three girls? It’s ten shillings here.

stephen

(Delightedly.) A hundred thousand apologies. (He fumbles again and takes out and hands her two crowns.) Permit, brevi manu, my sight is somewhat troubled.

(Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to himself in monosyllabbes. Zoe bounds over to the table. Kitty leans over Zoe’s neck, Lynch gets up, rights his cap and clasping Kitty’s waist, adds his head to the group.)

florry

(Strives heavily to rise.) Ow! My foot’s asleep. (She limps over to the table. Bloom approaches.)

bella, zoe, kitty, lynch, bloom

(Chattering and squabbling.) The gentleman… ten shillings… paying for the three… allow me a moment… this gentleman pays separate… who’s touching it?… ow … mind who you’re pinching… are you staying the night or a [520] short time?… who did?… you’re a liar, excuse me… the gentleman paid down like a gentleman… drink… it’s long after eleven.

stephen

(At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence.) No bottles! What, eleven? A riddle.

zoe

(Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the top of her stocking.) Hard earned on the flat of my back.

lynch

(Lifting Kitty from the table.) Come!

kitty

Wait. (She clutches the two crowns.)

florry

And me?

lynch

Hoopla!

(He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the sofa.)

stephen

The fox crew, the cocks flew,

The bells in heaven

Were striking eleven.

’Tis time for her poor soul

To get out of heaven.

bloom

(Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between Bella and Florry.) So. Allow me. (He takes up the poundnote.) Three times ten. We’re square.

bella

(Admiringly.) You’re such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss you.

[521] zoe

(Points.) Hum? Deep as a drawwell. (Lynch bends Kitty back over the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.)

bloom

This is yours.

stephen

How is that? Le distrait or absentminded beggar. (He fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object falls.) That fell.

bloom

(Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches.) This.

stephen

Lucifer. Thanks.

bloom

(Quietly.) You had better hand over that cash to me to take care of. Why pay more?

stephen

(Hands him all his coins.) Be just before you are generous.

bloom

I will but is it wise? (He counts.) One, seven, eleven, and five. Six. Eleven. I don’t answer for what you may have lost.

stephen

Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next Lessing says. Thirsty fox. (He laughs loudly.) Burying his grandmother. Probably he killed her.

bloom

That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.

stephen

Doesn’t matter a rambling damn.

bloom

No, but…

[522] stephen

(Comes to the table.) Cigarette, please. (Lynch tosses a cigarette from the sofa to the table.) And so Georgina Johnson is dead and married. (A cigarette appears on the table Stephen looks at it.) Wonder. Parlour magic. Married. Hm. (He strikes a match and proceeds to light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy.)

lynch

(Watching him.) You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

stephen

(Brings the match nearer his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. (He frowns mysteriously.) Hm. Sphinx. The beast that has two backs at midnight. Married.

zoe

It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with him.

florry

(Nods.) Mr Lambe from London.

stephen

Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.

lynch

(Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply.) Dona nobis pacem.

(The cigarette slips from Stephen’s fingers. Bloom picks it up and throws it into the gate.)

bloom

Don’t smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. (To Zoe.) You have nothing?

zoe

Is he hungry?

[523] stephen

(Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the bloodoath in the Dusk of the Gods.)

Hangende Hunger,

Fragende Frau,

Macht uns alle kaput.

zoe

(Tragically.) Hamlet, I am thy father’s gimlet! (She takes his hand.) Blue eyes beauty I’ll read your hand. (She points to his forehead.) No wit, no wrinkles (She counts.) Two, three, Mars, that’s courage. (Stephen shakes his head.) No kid.

lynch

Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and shake. (To Zoe.) Who taught you palmistry?

zoe

(Turns.) Ask my ballocks that I haven’t got. (To Stephen.) I see it in your face. The eye, like that. (She frowns with lowered head.)

lynch

(Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice.) Like that. Pandy bat.

(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open, the bald tittle round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.)

father dolan

Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little schemer. See it in your eye.

(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Connee rises from the pianola coffin.)

don john connee

Now, Father Dolan! Now. I’m sure that Stephen is a very good little boy.

zoe

(Examining Stephen’s palm.) Woman’s hand.

[524] stephen

(Murmurs.) Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.

zoe

What day were you born?

stephen

Thursday. Today.

zoe

Thursday’s child has far to go. (She traces lines on his hand.) Line of fate. Influential friends.

florry

(Pointing.) Imagination.

zoe

Mount of the moon. You’ll meet with a… (She peers at his hands abruptly.) I won’t tell you what’s not good for you. Or do you want to know?

bloom

(Detaches her fingers and offers his palm.) More harm than good. Here. Read mine.

bella

Show. (She turns up Bloom’s hand.) I thought so. Knobby knuckles, for the women.

zoe

(Peering at Bloom’s palm.) Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and marry money.

bloom

Wrong.

zoe

(Quickly.) O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That wrong?

(Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises, stretches her wings and clucks.)

[525] black liz

Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.

(She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off.)

bloom

(Points to his hand.) That weal there is an accident. Fell and cut it twenty two years age. I was sixteen.

zoe

I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.

stephen

See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled, twentytwo years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse (He winces.) Hurt my hand somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?

(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)

florry

What?

(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallant buttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)

the boots

(Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers.) Haw, haw, have you the horn?

(Bronze by gold they whisper.).

zoe

(To Florry.) Whisper.

(They whisper again.)

(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw, set sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan, in a yachtsman’s cap and [526] white shoes, officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan’s shoulder.)

lenehan

Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims?

boylan

(Sated, smiles.) Plucking a turkey.

lenehan

A good night’s work.

boylan

(Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks.) Blazes Kate! Up to sample or your money back. (He holds out a forefinger.) Smell that.

lenehan

(Smells gleefully.) Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!

zoe and florry

(Laugh together.) Ha ha ha ha.

boylan

(Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear.) Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom up yet?

bloom

(In a flunkey’s plum plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig.) I’m afraid not, sir, the last articles…..

boylan

(Tosses him sixpence.) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom’s autlered head.) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife. You understand?

bloom

Thank you, sir. Yes, sir, Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.

[527] marion

He ought to feel himself highly honoured. (She plops splashing out of the water.) Raoul, darling, come and dry me. I’m in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge.

boylan

(A merry twinkle in his eye.) Topping!

bella

What? What is it?

(Zoe whispers to her.)

marion

Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I’ll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt.

bella

(Laughing.) Ho ho ho ho.

boylan

(To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.

bloom

Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower?… Lukewarm water?…

kitty

(From the sofa.) Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What…

(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)

mina kennedy

(Her eyes upturned.) O, it must be like the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her! Stuck together! Covered with kisses!

[528] lydia douce

(Her mouth opening.) Yumyum. O, he’s carrying her round the room doing it! Ride a cock horse. You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.

kitty

(Laughing.) Hee hee hee.

boylan’s voice

(Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach.) Ah! Gooblazeqruk brukarchkrasht!

marion’s voice

(Hoarsely, sweetly rising to her throat.) O! Weeshwashtkissimapooisthnapoohuck!

bloom

(His eyes wildy dilated, clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!

bella, zoe, florry, kitty

Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!

lynch

(Points.) The mirror up to nature. (He laughs.) Hu hu hu hu hu.

(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)

shakespeare

(In dignified ventriloquy.) ’Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (To Bloom.) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (He crows with a black capon’s laugh.) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!

bloom

(Smiles yellowly at the whores.) When will I hear the joke?

[529] zoe

Before you’re twice married and once a widower.

bloom

Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon, when measurements were taken near the skin after his death…

(Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, fears and Tunny’s tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds, her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late husband’s everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. She holds a Scottish widow’s insurance policy and large marqueeumbrella under which her brood runs with her, Patsy, hopping on one short foot, his collar loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, Freddy, whimpering, Susy with a crying cods’ mouth, Alice, struggling with the baby. She cuffs them on, her streamers flaunting aloft.)

freddy

Ah, ma, you’re dragging me along!

susy

Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!

shakespeare

(With paralytic rage.) Weda seca whokilla farst.

(The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare’s beardless face. The marqueeumbrella sways drunkenly, the children run aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twisting japanesily.)

mrs cunningham

(Sings.)

And they call me the jewel of Asia.

martin cunningham

(Gazes on her impassive.) Immense! Most bloody awful demirep!

[530] stephen

Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti. Queens lay with prize bulls. Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was open.

bella

None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.

lynch

Let him alone. He’s back from Paris.

zoe

(Runs to Stephen and links him.) O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.

(Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the fireplace, where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile on his face.)

lynch

(Pommelling on the sofa.) Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmmm.

stephen

(Gabbles, with marionette jerks.) Thousand places of entertainment to expenses your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhaps her heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous. Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night. Perfectly shocking terrific of religion’s things mockery seen in universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants. (He clacks his tongue loudly.) Ho, la la! Ce pif qu’il a!

lynch

Vive le vampire!

[531] the whores

Bravo! Parleyvoo!

stephen

(Grimacing with head back, laughs loudly, clapping himself.) Great success of laughing. Angels much prostitutes like and holy apostles big damn ruffians. Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed. Or do you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? (He points about him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the whores reply to.) Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptoms virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter gentlemen to see in mirrors every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher’s boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlette on the belly pièce de Shakespeare.

bella

(Clapping her belly sinks back on the sofa with a shout of laughter.) An omelette on the… Ho! ho! ho! ho!… Omelette on the…

stephen

(Mincingly.) I love you, Sir darling. Speak you englishman tongue for double entente cordiale. O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset. (He ceases suddenly and holds up a forefinger.)

bella

(Laughing.) Omelette…

the whores

(Laughing.) Encore! Encore!

stephen

Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.

zoe

Go abroad and love a foreign lady.

lynch

Across the world for a wife.

[532] florry

Dreams go by contraries.

stephen

(Extending his arms.) It was here. Street of harlots. In Serpentine Avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where’s the red carpet spread?

bloom

(Approaching Stephen.) Look…

stephen

No, I flew  My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end. (He cries.) Pater! Free!

bloom

I say, look…

stephen

Break my spirit, will he? O merde alors! (He cries, his vulture talons sharpened.) Hola! Hillyho!

(Simon Dedalus’ voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready.)

simon

That’s all right. (He swoops uncertainly through the air, wheeling, uttering cries of hearkening, on strong ponderous buzzard wings.) Ho, boy! Are you going to win? Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those halfcastes. Wouldn’t let them within the bawl of an ass. Head up! Keep our flag flying! An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed. Ulster king at arms! hai hoop! (He makes the beagle’s call giving tongue.) Bulbul! Burblblbrurblbl! Hai, boy!

(The fronds and spaces of the wall paper file rapidly across country. A stout fox drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs swift, for the open brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the leaves. The pack of staghounds follows, nose to the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded. Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, hot for a kill. From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, [533] bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, grey negroes waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.)

the crowd

Card of the races. Racing card!

Ten to one the field!

Tommy on the clay here! Tommy on the clay!

Ten to one bar one. Ten to one bar one.

Try your luck on spinning Jenny!

Ten to one bar one!

Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey!

I’ll give ten to one!

Ten to one bar one!

(A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost, his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars. The field follows, a bunch of bucking mounts. Skeleton horses: Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the Duke of Westminster’s Shotover, Repulse, The Duke of Beaufort’s Ceylon, prix de Paris. Dwarfs ride them, rusty armoured, leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles. Last in a drizzle of rain, on a broken[-]winded isabelle nag. Cock of the North, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a hockey stick at the ready. His nag, stumbling on whitegaitered feet, jogs along the rocky road.)

the orange lodges

(Jeering.) Get down and push, mister. Last lap! You’ll be home the night!

ganett deary

(Bolt upright, his nailscraped face plastered with postage stamps, brandishes his hockeystick, his blue eyes flashing in the prism of the chandelier as his mount lopes by at schooling gallop.)

Per vias rectas!

(A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his rearing nag, a torrent of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes.)

[534] the green lodges

Soft day, sir John! Soft day, your honour!

(Private Carr, Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows, singing in discord.)

stephen

Hark! Our friend, noise in the street!

zoe

(Holds up her hand.) Stop!

private carr, private compton and cissy caffrey

Yet I’ve a sort a

Yorkshire relish for …

zoe

That’s me. (She claps her hands.) Dance! Dance! (She runs to the pianola.) Who has twopence?

bloom

Who’ll?…

lynch

(Handing her coins.) Here.

stephen

(Cracking his fingers impatiently.) Quick! Quick! Where’s my augur’s rod? (He runs to the piano and takes his ashplant, beating his foot in tripudium.)

zoe

(Turns the drumhandle.) There.

(She drops two pennies in the slot. Gold pink and violet lights start forth. The drum turns purring in low hesitation waltz. Professor Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room, his hands fluttering. He sits tinily on the piano stool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel’s grace, his bowknot bobbing.)

[535] zoe

(Twirls around herself, heeltapping.) Dance. Anybody here for there? Who’ll dance?

(The pianola, with changing lights plays in waltz time the prelude of My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl. Stephen throws his ashplant on the table and seizes Zoe around the waist. Florry and Bella push the table towards the fireplace. Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to waltz her around the room. Her sleeve, falling from gracing arms, reveals a white fleshflower of vaccination. Bloom stands aside. Between the curtains, Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat. With a deft kick, he sends it spinning to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcoat, stock collar with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves. In his buttonhole is a dahlia. He twirls in reversed directions a clouded cane, then wedges it tight in his oxter. He places a hand limply on his breastbone, bows and fondles his flower and buttons.)

maginni

The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. No connection with Madam Legget Byrne’s or Levinstone’s. Fancy dress balls arranged. Deportment. The Katty Lanner steps. So. Watch me! My terpsichorean abilities. (He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee’s feet.) Tout le monde en avant! Reverence! Tout le monde en place!

(The prelude ceases. Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms, shrivels, shrinks, his live cape falling about the stool. The air, in firmer waltz time, pounds. Stephen and Zoe circle freely. The lights change, glow, fade, gold, rose, violet.)

the pianola

Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls,

Sweethearts they’d left behind…

(From a corner the morning hours run out, goldhaired, slim, in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance, twirling their skipping ropes. The hours of noon follow in amber gold. Laughing [536] linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting their arms.)

maginni

(Clipclaps glovesilent hands.) Carré! Avant deux! Breathe evenly! Balance!

(The morning and noon hours waltz in their places, turning, advancing to each other, shaping their curves, bowing vis a vis. Cavaliers behind them arch and suspend their arms, with hands descending to, touching, rising from their shoulders.)

hours

You may touch my…

cavaliers

May I touch your?

hours

O, but lightly!

cavaliers

O, so lightly!

the pianola

My little shy little lass has a waist.

(Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing. The twilight hours advance, from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. They are in grey gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.)

maginni

Avant huit! Traversé! Salut! Cours de mains! Croisé!

(The night hours steal to the last place. Morning, noon and twilight hours retreat before them. They are masked, with daggered hair and bracelets of dull bells. Weary, they curchycurchy under veils.)

the bracelets

Heigho! Heigho!

[537] zoe

(Twisting, her hand to her brow.) O!

maginni

Les tiroirs! Chaîne de dames! La corbeille! Dos à dos!

(Arabesquing wearily, they weave a pattern on the floor, weaving, unweaving, curtseying, twisting, simply swirling.)

zoe

I’m giddy.

(She frees herself, droops on a chair, Stephen seizes Florry and turns with her.)

maginni

Boulangère! Les ronds! Les ponts! Chevaux de bois! Escargots!

(Twining, receding, with interchanging hands, the night hours link, each with arching arms, in a mosaic of movements, Stephen and Florry turn cumbrously.)

maginni

Dansez avec vos dames! Changez de dames! Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame! Remerciez!

the pianola

Best, best of all,

Baraabum!

kitty

(Jumps up.) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus bazaar!

(She runs to Stephen. He leaves Florry brusquely and seizes Kitty. A screaming bittern’s harsh high whistle shrieks. Groangrousegurgling Toft’s cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the room.)

the pianola

My girl’s a Yorkshire girl.

[538] zoe

Yorkshire through and through.

Come on all!

(She seizes Florry and waltzes her.)

stephen

Pas seul!

(He wheels Kitty into Lynch’s arms, snatches up his ashplant from the table and takes the floor. All wheel, whirl, waltz, twirl. Bloombella, Kittylynch, Florryzoe, jujuby women. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under thigh, with clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft’s cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.)

the pianola

Though she’s a factory lass

And wears no fancy clothes.

(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scotlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)

tutti

Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!

simon

Think of your mother’s people!

stephen

Dance of death.

(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey’s bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings. Conmee on Christass lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through, Baraabum! On nags, hogs, bellhorses, Gadarene swine, Corny in coffin. Steel shark stone onehandled Nelson, two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram falling bawling. Gum, he’s a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev. evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind [539] coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last wiswitchback lumbering up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)

(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes closed, he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn roundabout. Bright midges dance on wall. He stops dead.)

stephen

Ho!

(Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor in leper grey with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)

the choir

Liliata rutilantium te confessorum…

Jubilantium te virginum…

(From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)

buck mulligan

She’s beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother. (He upturns his eyes.) Mercurial Malachi.

the mother

(With the subtle smile of death’s madness.) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

stephen

(Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman’s trick is this?

buck mulligan

(Shakes his curling capbell.) The mockery of it! Kinch killed her dogsbody [540] bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (Tears of molten butter fall from his eyes into the scone.) Our great sweet mother! Epi oinopa ponton.

the mother

(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes.) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world. You too. Time will come.

stephen

(Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) They said I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.

the mother

(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You sang that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery.

stephen

(Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

the mother

Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

stephen

The ghoul! Hyena!

the mother

I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brain work. Years and years I loved you, O my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.

zoe

(Fanning herself with the grate fan.) I’m melting!

florry

(Points to Stephen.) Look! He’s white.

[541] bloom

(Goes to the window to open it more.) Giddy.

the mother

(With smouldering eyes.) Repent! O, the fire of hell!

stephen

(Panting.) The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones!

the mother

(Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen breath.) Beware! (She raises her blackened, withered right arm slowly towards Stephen’s breast with outstretched fingers.) Beware! God’s hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart.)

stephen

(Strangled with rage.) Shite! (His features grow drawn and grey and old.)

bloom

(At the window.) What?

stephen

Ah non, par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!

florry

Give him some cold water. Wait. (She rushes out.)

the mother

(Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately.) O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O divine Sacred Heart!

stephen

No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I’ll bring you all to heel!

the mother

(In the agony of her deathrattle.) Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my [542] sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary.

stephen

Nothung!

(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)

the gasjet

Pwfungg!

bloom

Stop!

lynch

(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen’s hand.) Here! Hold on! Don’t run amok!

bella

Police!

(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark, beats the ground and flees from the room past the whores at the door.)

bella

(Screams.) After him!

(The two whores rush to the halldoors. Lynch and Kitty and Zoe stampede from the room. They talk excitedly. Bloom follows, returns.)

the whores

(Jammed in the doorway, pointing.) Down there.

zoe

(Pointing.) There. There’s something up.

bella

Who pays for the lamp? (She seizes Bloom’s coattail.) There. You were with him. The lamp’s broken.

[543] bloom

(Rushes to the hall, rushes back.) What lamp, woman?

a whore

He tore his coat.

bella

(Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points.) Who’s to pay for that? Ten shillings. You’re a witness.

bloom

(Snatches up Stephen’s ashplant.) Me? Ten shillings? Haven’t you lifted enough off him? Didn’t he…!

bella

(Loudly.) Here, none of your tall talk. This isn’t a brothel. A ten shilling house.

bloom

(His hand under the lamp, pulls the chain. Pulling, the gasjet lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.) Only the chimney’s broken. Here is all he…

bella

(Shrinks back and screams.) Jesus! Don’t!

bloom

(Warding off a blow). To show you how he hit the paper. There’s not a sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings!

florry

(With a glass of water, enters.) Where is he?

bella

Do you want me to call the police?

bloom

O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he’s a Trinity student. Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. (He makes a masonic [544] sign.) Know what I mean? Nephew of the vicechancellor. You don’t want a scandal.

bella

(Angrily.) Trinity. Coming down here ragging after the boat races and paying nothing. Are you my commander here? Where is he? I’ll charge him. Disgrace him, I will. (She shouts.) Zoe! Zoe!

bloom

(Urgently.) And if it were your own son in Oxford! (Warningly.) I know.

bella

(Almost speechless.) Who are you incog?

zoe

(In the doorway.) There’s a row on.

bloom

What? Where? (He throws a shilling on the table and shouts.) That’s for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air.

(He hurries out through the hall. The whores point. Florry follows, spilling water from her tilted tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the fog has cleared off. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. It slows to in front of the house. Bloom at the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher who is about to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He averts his face. Bella from within the hall urges on her whores. They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghostly lewd smile. The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Zoe and Kitty still point right. Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws his caliph’s hood and poncho and hurries down the steps with sideways face. Incog Haroun al Raschid, he flits behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the railings with fleet step of a pard strewing the drag behind him, torn envelopes drenched in aniseed. The ashplant marks his stride. A pack of bloodhounds led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in tallyho cap, and an old pair of grey trousers, follows from far, picking up the scent, nearer, baying, panting, at fault, breaking away, throwing their tongues, biting his heels, leaping at his tail. He walks, runs, zigzags, [545] gallops, lugs laid back. He is pelted with gravel, cabbagestumps, biscuitboxes, eggs, potatoes, dead codfish, womans slipperslappers. After him, freshfound, the hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C 66 C night watch, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V. B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry O’Rourke, Joe Cuffe, Mrs O’Dowd, Pisser Burke, The Nameless One, Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whatdoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatslike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwith, Chris Callinan, sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Bartell d’Arcy, Joe Hynes, red Murray, editor Brayden, T. M. Healy, Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, John Howard Parnell, the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Breen, Denis Breen, Theodore Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the Westland Row postmistress, C. P. McCoy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, man in the street, other man in the street, Footballboots, pugnosed driver, rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Ellen Mc Guinness, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Collector General’s, Dan Dawson, dental surgeon Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Bob Doran, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwidebehindin[-]Clonskea tram, the bookseller of Sweets of Sin, Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck, the managing clerk of Drimmie’s, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky, Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E. Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Galbraith, the constable off Eccles Street corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the mystery man on the beach, a retriever, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.)

the hue and cry

(Helterskelterpelterwelter.) He’s Bloom! Stop Bloom! Stopabloom! Stopperrobber! Hi! Hi! Stop him on the corner!

(At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the scaffolding Bloom panting stops on the fringe of the noisy quarelling knot, a lot not knowing a jot what hi! hi! row and wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether.)

stephen

(With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly.) You are my guests. [546] The uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh of Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory.

private carr

(To Cissy Caffrey.) Was he insulting you?

stephen

Addressed her in vocative feminine. Probably neuter. Ungenitive.

voices

No, he didn’t. The girl’s telling lies. He was in Mrs Cohen’s. What’s up? Soldiers and civilians.

cissy caffrey

I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do — you know and the young man ran up behind me. But I’m faithful to the man that’s treating me though I’m only a shilling whore.

stephen

(Catches sight of Kitty’s and Lynch’s heads.) Hail, Sisyphus. (He points to himself and the others.) Poetic. Neopoetic.

voices

She’s faithfultheman.

cissy caffrey

Yes, to go with him. And me with a soldier friend.

private compton

He doesn’t half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff him one, Harry.

private carr

(To Cissy.) Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?

lord tennyson

(In Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded.) Their’s not to reason why.

private compton

Biff him, Harry.

[547] stephen

(To Private Compton.) I don’t know your name but you are quite right. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their shirts. Shirt is synechdoche. Part for the whole.

cissy caffrey

(To the crowd.) No, I was with the private.

stephen

(Amiably.) Why not? The bold soldier boy. In my opinion every lady for example…

private carr

(His cap awry, advancing to Stephen.) Say, how would it be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?

stephen

(Looks up in the sky.) How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of selfpretence. Personally, I detest action. (He waves his hand.) Hand hurts me slightly. Enfin, ce sont vos oignons. (To Cissy Caffrey.) Some trouble is on here. What is it, precisely?

dolly gray

(From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving the sign of the heroine of Jericho.) Rahab. Cook’s son, goodbye. Safe home to Dolly. Dream of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.

(The soldiers turn their swimming eyes.)

bloom

(Elbowing through the crowd, plucks Stephen’s sleeve vigorously.) Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.

stephen

(Turns.) Eh? (He disengages himself.) Why should I not speak to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? (He points his finger.) I’m not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye. Retaining the perpendicular.

(He staggers a pace back.)

[548] bloom

(Propping him.) Retain your own.

stephen

(Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but modern philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

biddy the clap

Did you hear what the professor said? He’s a professor out of the college

cunty kate

I did. I heard that.

biddy the clap

He expresses himself with much marked refinement of phraseology.

cunty kate

Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite trenchancy.

private carr

(Pulls himself free and comes forward.) What’s that you’re saying about my king?

(Edward the Seventh appears in an archway. He wears a white jersey on which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched, with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner’s and Probyn’s horse, Lincoln’s Inns’ bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachussets. He sucks a red jujube. He is robed as a grand elect perfect and sublime mason with trowel and apron, marked made in Germany. In his left hand he holds a plasterer’s bucket on which is printed: Défense d’uriner. A roar of welcome greets him.)

edward the seventh

(Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly.) Peace, perfect peace. For identification bucket in my hand. Cheerio, boys. (He turns to his subjects.) We have come [549] here to witness a clean straight fight and we heartily wish both men the best of good luck. Mahak makar a back.

(He shakes hands with Private Carr, Private Compton, Stephen, Bloom and Lynch. General applause. Edward the Seventh lifts the bucket graciously in acknowledgement.)

private carr

(To Stephen.) Say it again.

stephen

(Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up.) I understand your point of view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of patent medicine. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the point. You die for your country, suppose. (He places his arm on Private Carr’s sleeve.) Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I don’t want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!

edward the seventh

(Levitates over heaps of slain in the garb and with the halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent face.)

My methods are new and are causing surprise.

To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes.

stephen

Kings and unicorns! (He falls back a pace.) Come somewhere and we’ll… What was that girl saying?…

private compton

Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the knackers. Stick one into Jerry.

bloom

(To the privates, softly.) He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Taking a little more than is good for him. Absinthe, the greeneyed monster. I know him. He’s a gentleman, a poet. It’s all right.

stephen

(Nods, smiling and laughing.) Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of impostors.

[550] private carr

I don’t give a bugger who he is.

private compton

We don’t give a bugger who he is.

stephen

I seem to annoy them. Green rag to a bull.

(Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o’-day boy’s hat signs to Stephen.)

kevin egan

H’lo! Bonjour! The vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes.

(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his rabbit face nibbling a quince leaf.)

patrice

Socialiste!

don emile patrizio franz rupert pope hennessy

(In medieval hauberk, two wild geese valant on his helm, with noble indignation points a mailed hand against the privates.) Werf those eykes to footboden, big grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!

bloom

(To Stephen.) Come home. You’ll get into trouble.

stephen

(Swaying.) I don’t avoid it. He provokes my intelligence.

biddy the clap

One immediately observes that he is of patrician lineage.

the virago

Green above the red, says he. Wolfe Tone.

the bawd

The red’s as good as the green, and better. Up the soldiers! Up King Edward!

[551] a rough

(Laughs.) Ay! Hands up to De Wet.

the citizen

(With a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls.)

May the God above

Send down a dove

With teeth as sharp as razors

To slit the throat

Of the English dogs

That hanged our Irish leaders.

the croppy boy

(The rope noose round his neck, gripes in his issuing bowels with both hands.)

I bear no hate to a living thing,

But I love my country beyond the king.

rumbold, demon barber

(Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants, advances with a gladstone bag which he opens.) Ladies and gents, cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg. Knife with which Voisin dismembered the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a sheet in the cellar, the unfortunate female’s throat being cut from ear to ear. Phial containing arsenic retrieved from the body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon to the gallows.

(He jerks the rope, the assistants leap at the victim’s legs and drag him downward, grunting: the croppy boy’s tongue protrudes violently.)

the croppy boy

Horhot ho hray ho rhother’s hest

(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his death clothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervy Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)

rumbold

I’m near it myself. (He undoes the noose.) Rope which hanged the awful [552] rebel. Ten shillings a time as applied to His Royal Highness. (He plunges his head into the gaping belly of the hanged and draws out his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails.) My painful duty has now been done. God save the king!

edward the seventh

(Dances slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket and sings with soft contentment.)

On coronation day, on coronation day,

O, won’t we have a merry time,

Drinking whisky, beer and wine!

private carr

Here. What are you saying about my king?

stephen

(Throws up his hands.) O, this is too monotonous! Nothing. He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for some brutish empire of his. Money I haven’t. (He searches his pockets vaguely.) Gave it to someone.

private carr

Who wants your bleeding money?

stephen

(Tries to move off.) Will some one tell me where I am least likely to meet these necessary evils? Ça se voit aussi à Paris. Not that I… But by Saint Patrick!…

(The women’s heads coalesce. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast.)

stephen

Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats her farrow!

old gummy granny

(Rocking to and fro.) Ireland’s sweetheart, the king of Spain’s daughter, alanna. Strangers im my house, bad manners to them! (She keens with banshee [553] woe.) Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! (She wails.) You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?

stephen

How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where’s the third person of the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.

cissy caffrey

(Shrill.) Stop them from fighting!

a rough

Our men retreated.

private carr

(Tugging at his belt.) I’ll wring the neck of any bugger says a word against my fucking king.

bloom

(Terrified.) He said nothing. Not a word. A pure misunderstanding.

the citizen

Erin go hragh!

(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Both salute with fierce hostility.)

private compton

Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye. He’s a proboer.

stephen

Did I? When?

bloom

(To the redcoats.) We fought for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. Isn’t that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by our monarch.

the navvy

(Staggering past.) O, yes. O, God, yes! O, make the kwawr a krowawr! O! Bo!

(Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted spear points. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin [554] cap with hackle plume and accoutrements, with epaulette, gilt chevrons and sabretache, his breast bright with medals, toes the line. He gives the pilgrim warrior’s sign of the knights templars.)

major tweedy

(Growls gruffly.) Rorke’s Drift! Up, guards, and at them! Mahal shalal hashbaz.

private carr

I’ll do him in.

private compton

(Waves the crowd back.) Fair play, here. Make a bleeding butcher’s shop of the bugger.

(Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the king.)

cissy caffrey

They’re going to fight. For me!

cunty kate

The brave and the fair.

biddy the clap

Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.

cunty kate

(Blushing deeply.) Nay, Madam. The gules doublet and merry Saint George for me!

stephen

The harlot’s cry from street to street

Shall weave old Ireland’s windingsheet.

private carr

(Loosening his belt, shouts.) I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.

bloom

(Shakes Cissy Caffrey’s shoulders.) Speak, you! Are you struck dumb? You [555] are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman, sacred life giver!

cissy caffrey

(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr’s sleeve.) Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? Cissy’s your girl. (She cries.) Police!

stephen

(Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey.)

White thy fambles, red thy gan

And thy quarrons dainty is.

voices

Police!

distant voices

Dublin’s burning! Dublin’s burning! On fire, on fire!

(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noisless yawn. Tom Rochford, winner in athlete’s singlet and breeches, arrives at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void. He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect themselves. Laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. It rains dragon’s teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows. They exchange in amity [556] the pass of knights of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tome against Henry Grattan, Smith O’Brien against Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M’Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John O’Leary against Lear O’Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The O’Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the field altar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O’Flynn in a long petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortar board, his head and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrant’s head an open umbrella.)

father malachi o’flynn

Introibo ad altare diaboli.

the reverend mr haines love

To the devil which hath made glad my young days.

father malachi o’flynn

(Takes from the chalice and elevates a blooddripping host.) Corpus Meum.

the reverend mr haines love

(Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoats, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.

the voice of all the damned

Htengier Lnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!

(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)

adonai

Dooooooooooog!

[557] the voice of all the blessed

Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!

(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)

adonai

Goooooooooood!

(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.)

private carr

(With ferocious articulation.) I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!

old gummy granny

(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen’s hand.) Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (She prays.) O good God, take him!

bloom

(Runs to Lynch.) Can’t you get him away?

lynch

He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! (To Bloom.) Get him away, you. He won’t listen to me.

(He drags Kitty away.)

stephen

(Points.) Exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit.

bloom

(Runs to Stephen.) Come along with me now before worse happens. Here’s your stick.

stephen

Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.

cissy caffrey

(Pulling Private Carr.) Come on, you’re boosed. He insulted me but I forgive him. (Shouting in his ear.) I forgive him for insulting me.

[558] bloom

(Over Stephen’s shoulder.) Yes, go. You see he’s incapable.

private carr

(Breaks loose.) I’ll insult him.

(He rushes towards Stephen, fists outstretched, and strikes him in the face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls stunned. He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it up.)

major tweedy

(Loudly.) Carbine in bucket! Cease fire! Salute!

the retriever

(Barking furiously.) Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute.

the crowd

Let him up! Don’t strike him when he’s down! Air! Who? The soldier hit him. He’s a professor. Is he hurted? Don’t manhandle him! he’s fainted!

(The retriever, nosing on the fringe of the crowd, barks noisily.)

a hag

What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under the influence. Let them go and fight the Boers!

the bawd

Listen to who’s talking! Hasn’t the soldier a right to go with his girl? He gave him the coward’s blow.

(They grab at each other’s hair, claw at each other and spit.)

the retriever

(Barking.) Wow wow wow.

bloom

(Shoves them back, loudly.) Get back, stand back!

[559] private compton

(Tugging his comrade.) Here bugger off, Harry. There’s the cops! (Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in the group.)

first watch

What’s wrong here?

private compton

We were with this lady and he insulted us and assaulted my chum. (The retriever barks.) Who owns the bleeding tyke?

cissy caffrey

(With expectation.) Is he bleeding?

a man

(Rising from his knees.) No. Gone off. He’ll come to all right.

bloom

(Glances sharply at the man.) Leave him to me. I can easily…

second watch

Who are you? Do you know him?

private carr

(Lurches towards the watch.) He insulted my lady friend.

bloom

(Angrily.) You hit him without provocation. I’m a witness. Constable, take his regimental number.

second watch

I don’t want your instructions in the discharge of my duty.

private compton

(Pulling his comrade.) Here, bugger off, Harry. Or Bennett’ll have you in the lockup.

[560] private carr

(Staggering as he is pulled away.) God fuck old Bennett! He’s a whitearsed bugger. I don’t give a shit for him.

first watch

(Taking out his notebook.) What’s his name?

bloom

(Peering over the crowd.) I just see a car there. If you give me a hand a second, sergeant…

first watch

Name and address.

(Corny Kelleher, weepers round his hat, a death wreath in his hand, appears among the bystanders.)

bloom

(Quickly.) O, the very man! (He whispers.) Simon Dedalus’ son. A bit sprung. Get those policemen to move those loafers back.

second watch

Night, Mr Kelleher.

corny kelleher

(To the watch, with drawling eye.) That’s all right. I know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. (He laughs.) Twenty to one. Do you follow me?

first watch

(Turns to the crowd.) Here, what are you all gaping at? Move on out of that.

(The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down the lane.)

corny kelleher

Leave it to me, sergeant. That ’ll be all right. (He laughs, shaking his head.) We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse. What? Eh, what?

first watch

(Laughs.) I suppose so.

[561] corny kelleher

(Nudges the second watch.) Come and wipe your name off the slate. (He lilts, wagging his head.) With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?

second watch

(Genially.) Ah, sure we were too.

corny kelleher

(Winking.) Boys will be boys. I’ve a car round there.

second watch

All right, Mr Kelleher. Good night.

corny kelleher

I’ll see to that.

bloom

(Shakes hands with both of the watch in turn.) Thank you very much, gentlemen, thank you. (He mumbles confidentially.) We don’t want any scandal, you understand. Father is a well known, highly respected citizen. Just a little wild oats, you understand.

first watch

O, I understand, sir.

second watch

That’s all right, sir.

first watch

It was only in case of corporal injuries I’d have to report it at the station.

bloom

(Nods rapidly.) Naturally. Quite right. Only your bounden duty.

second watch

It’s our duty.

corny kelleher

Good night, men.

[562] the watch

(Saluting together.) Night, gentlemen. (They move off with slow heavy tread.)

bloom

(Blows.) Providential you came on the scene. You have a car?…

corny kelleher

(Laughs, pointing his thumb over his right shoulder to the car brought up against the scaffolding.) Two commercials that were standing fizz in Jammet’s. Like princes, faith. One of them lost two quid on the race. Drowning his grief and were on for a go with the jolly girls. So I landed them up on Behan’s car and down to nighttown.

bloom

I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to…

corny kelleher

(Laughs.) Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots. No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. (He laughs again and leers with lacklustre eye.) Thanks be to God we have it in the house what, eh, do you follow me? Hah! hah! hah!

bloom

(Tries to laugh.) He, he, he! Yes. Matter of fact I was just visiting an old friend of mine there, Virag, you don’t know him (poor fellow he’s laid up for the past week) and we had a liquor together and I was just making my way home…

(The horse neighs.)

the horse

Hohohohohohoh! Hohohohome!

corny kelleher

Sure it was Behan, our jarvey there, that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen’s and I told him to pull up and got off to see. (He laughs.) Sober hearsedrivers a specialty. Will I give him a lift home? Where does he hang out? Somewhere in Cabra, what?

[563] bloom

No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.

(Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the horse. Bloom in gloom, looms down.)

corny kelleher

(Scratches his nape.) Sandycove! (He bends down and calls to Stephen.) Eh! (He calls again.) Eh! He’s covered with shavings anyhow. Take care they didn’t lift anything off him.

bloom

No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.

corny kelleher

Ah. [Ah,] well he’ll get over it. No bones broken. Well, I’ll shove along. (He laughs.) I’ve a rendezvous in the morning. Burying the dead. Safe home!

the horse

(Neighs.) Hohohohohome.

bloom

Good night. I’ll just wait and take him along in a few…

(Corny Kelleher returns to the outside car and mounts it. The horse harness jingles.)

corny kelleher

(From the car, standing.) Night.

bloom

Night.

(The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly. The car and horse back slowly, awkwardly and turn. Corny Kelleher on the sideseat sways his head to and fro in sign of mirth at Bloom’s plight. The jarvey joins in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the farther seat. Bloom shakes his head in mute mirthful reply. With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow [564] nod Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. The car jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay. Bloom, holding in his hand Stephen’s hat festooned with shavings and ashplant, stands irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder.)

bloom

Eh! Ho! (There is no answer; he bends again.) Mr Dedalus! (There is no answer.) The name if you call. Somnambulist. (He bends again and, hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate form.) Stephen! (There is no answer. He calls again.) Stephen!

stephen

(Groans.) Who? Black panther vampire. (He sighs and stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels.)

Who… drive… Fergus now.

And pierce… wood’s woven shade?…

(He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.)

bloom

Poetry. Well educated. Pity. (He bends again and undoes the buttons of Stephen’s waistcoat.) To breathe. (He brushes the woodshavings from Stephen’s clothes with light hands and fingers.) One pound seven. Not hurt anyhow. (He listens.) What!

stephen

(Murmurs.)

…shadows… the woods.

…white breast… dim…

(He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom holding his hat and ashplant stands erect. A dog barks in the distance. Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on Stephen’s face and form.)

[565] bloom

(Communes with the night.) Face reminds me of his poor mother. In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him… (He murmurs.)… swear that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts… (He murmurs.)… in the rough sands of the sea… a cabletow’s length from the shore… where the tide ebbs… and flows…

(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)

bloom

(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!

rudy

(Gazes unseeing into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambskin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

 ® 

III

[569] Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed. His (Stephen’s) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom, in view of the hour it was and there being no pumps of Vartry water available for their ablutions, let alone drinking purposes, hit upon an expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman’s shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt Bridge where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral. But how to get there was the rub. For the nonce he was rather nonplussed but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him to take some measures on the subject he pondered suitable ways and means during which Stephen repeatedly yawned. So far as he could see he was rather pale in the face so that it occurred to him as highly advisable to get a conveyance of some description which would answer in their then condition, both of them being e. d. ed, particularly Stephen, always assuming that there was such a thing to be found. Accordingly, after a few such preliminaries, as, in spite of his having forgotten to take up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman service in the shaving line, brushing they both walked together along Beaver Street, or, more properly, lane, as far as the farrier’s and the distinctly fetid atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of Montgomery street where they made tracks to the left from thence debouching into Amiens Street round by the corner of Dan Bergin’s. But, as he confidently anticipated, there was not a sign of a Jehu plying for hire anywhere to be seen except a fourwheeler, probably engaged by some fellows inside on the spree, outside the North Star Hotel and there was no symptom of its budging a quarter of an inch when Mr Bloom, who was anything but a professional whistler, endeavoured to hail it by emitting a kind of a whistle, holding his arms arched over his head, twice.

[570] This was a quandary but, bringing commonsense to bear on it, evidently there was nothing for it but put a good face on the matter and foot it which they accordingly did. So, bevelling around by Mullet’s and the Signal House, which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the direction of Amiens Street railway terminus, Mr Bloom being handicapped by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had, to vary the timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons, though, entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he heroically made light of the mischance. So as neither of them were particularly pressed for time, as it happened, and the temperature refreshing since it cleared up after the recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius, they dandered along past by where the empty vehicle was waiting without a fare or a jarvey. As it so happened a Dublin United Tramways Company’s sandstrewer happening to be returning and the elder man recounted to his companion à propos of the incident his own truly miraculous escape of some little while back. They passed the main entrance of the Great Northern railway station, the starting point for Belfast, where of course all traffic was suspended at that late hour, and passing the back door of the morgue (a not very enticing locality, not to say gruesome to a degree, more especially at night), ultimately gained the Dock Tavern and in due course turned into Store Street, famous for its C division police station. Between this point and the high, at present unlit, warehouses of Beresford Place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird’s, the stonecutter’s in his mind somehow in Talbot Place, first turning on the right, while the other, who was acting as his fidus Achates inhaled with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke’s city bakery, situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me where is fancy bread? At Rourke’s the baker’s, it is said.

En route, to his taciturn, and, not to put too fine a point on it, not yet perfectly sober companion, Mr Bloom, who at all events, was in complete possession of his faculties, never more so, in fact disgustingly sober, spoke a word of caution re the dangers of nighttown, women of ill fame and swell mobsmen, which, barely permissible once in a while, though not as a habitual practice, was of the nature of a regular deathtrap for young fellows of his age particularly if they had acquired drinking habits under the influence of liquor unless you knew a little juijitsu for every contingency as even a fellow on the broad of his back could administer a nasty kick if you didn’t look out. Highly providential was the appearance on the scene of Corny Kelleher when Stephen [571] was blissfully unconscious that, but for that man in the gap turning up at the eleventh hour, the finis might have been that he might have been a candidate for the accident ward, or, failing that, the bridewell and an appearance in the court next day before Mr Tobias, or, he being the solicitor, rather old Wall, he meant to say, or Malony which simply spelt ruin for a chap when it got bruited about. The reason he mentioned the fact was that a lot of those policemen, whom he cordially disliked, were admittedly unscrupulous in the service of the Crown and, as Mr Bloom put it, recalling a case or two in the A Division in Clanbrassil Street, prepared to swear a hole through a ten gallon pot. Never on the spot when wanted but in quiet parts of the city, Pembroke Road, for example, the guardians of the law were well in evidence, the obvious reason being they were paid to protect the upper classes. Another thing he commented on was equipping soldiers with firearms or sidearms of any description, liable to go off at any time which was tantamount to inciting them against civilians should by any chance they fall out over anything. You frittered away your time, he very sensibly maintained, and health and also character besides which the squandermania of the thing, fast women of the demimonde ran away with a lot of £. s. d. into the bargain and the greatest danger of all was who you got drunk with though, touching the much vexed question of stimulants he relished a glass of choice old wine in season as both nourishing and bloodmaking and possessing aperient virtues (notably a good burgundy which he was a staunch believer in) still never beyond a certain point where he invariably drew the line as it simply led to trouble all round to say nothing of your being at the tender mercy of others pratically. Most of all he commented adversely on the desertion of Stephen by all his pubhunting confrères but one, a most glaring piece of ratting on the part of his brother medicos under all the circs.

— And that one was Judas, said Stephen, who up to then had said nothing whatsoever of any kind.

Discussing these and kindred topics they made a beeline across the back of the Customhouse and passed under the Loop Line bridge when a brazier of coke burning in front of a sentrybox, or something like one, attracted their rather lagging footsteps. Stephen of his own accord stopped for no special reason to look at the heap of barren cobblestones and by the light emanating from the brazier he could just make out the darker figure of the corporation watchman inside the gloom of the sentrybox. He began to remember that this had happened, or had been mentioned as having happened, before but it cost [572] him no small effort before he remembered that he recognised in the sentry a quondam friend of his father’s, Gumley. To avoid a meeting he drew nearer to the pillars of the railway bridge.

— Someone saluted you, Mr Bloom said.

A figure of middle height on the prowl, evidently, under the arches saluted again, calling: Night! Stephen, of course, started rather dizzily and stopped to return the compliment. Mr Bloom, actuated by motives of inherent delicacy, inamsuch as he always believed in minding his own business, moved off but nevertheless remained on the qui vive with just a shade of anxiety though not funkyish in the least. Although unusual in the Dublin area, he knew that it was not by any means unknown for desperadoes who had next to nothing to live on to be about waylaying and generally terrorising peaceable pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head in some secluded spot outside the city proper, famished loiterers of the Thames embankment category they might be hanging about there or simply marauders ready to decamp with whatever boodle they could in one fell swoop at a moment’s notice, your money or your life, leaving you there to point a moral, gagged and garrotted.

Stephen, that is when the accosting figure came to close quarters, though he was not in any over sober state himself, recognised Corley’s breath redolent of rotten cornjuice. Lord John Corley, some called him, and his genealogy came about in this wise. He was the eldest son of Inspector Corley of the G Division, lately deceased, who had married a certain Katherine Brophy, the daughter of a Louth farmer. His grandfather, Patrick Michael Corley, of New Ross, had married the widow of a publican there whose maiden name had been Katherine (also) Talbot. Rumour had it, though not proved, that she descended from the house of the Lords Talbot de Malahide, in whose mansion, really an unquestionably fine residence of its kind and well worth seeing, her mother or aunt or some relative had enjoyed the distinction of being in service in the washkitchen. This, therefore, was the reason why the still comparatively young though dissolute man who now addressed Stephen was spoken of by some with facetious proclivities as Lord John Corley.

Taking Stephen on one side he had the customary doleful ditty to tell. Not as much as a farthing to purchase a night’s lodgings. His friends had all deserted him. Furthermore, he had a row with Leneban and called him to Stephen a mean bloody swab with a sprinkling of other uncalledfor expressions. He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to tell him where on God’s earth he could get something, anything at all to do. No, it was the daughter of the [573] mother in the washkitchen that was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected through the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same time if the whole thing wasn’t a complete fabrication from start to finish. Anyhow, he was all in.

— I wouldn’t ask you, only, pursued he, on my solemn oath and God knows I’m on the rocks.

— There’ll be a job to morrow or the next day, Stephen told him, in a boys’ school at Dalkey for a gentleman usher. Mr Garrett Deasy. Try it. You may mention my name.

— Ah, God, Corley replied, sure I couldn’t teach in a school, man. I was never one of your bright ones, he added with a half laugh, Got stuck twice in the junior at the Christian Brothers.

— I have no place to sleep myself, Stephen informed him.

Corley, at the first go-off, was inclined to suspect it was something to do with Stephen being fired out of his digs for bringing in a bloody tart off the street. There was a dosshouse in Marlborough Street, Mrs Maloney’s, but it was only a tanner touch and full of undesirables but M’Conachie told him you got a decent enough do in the Brazen Head over in Winetavern Street (which was distantly suggestive to the person addressed of friar Bacon) for a bob. He was starving too though he hadn’t said a word about it.

Though this sort of thing went on every other night or very near it still Stephen’s feelings got the better of him in a sense though he knew that Corley’s brandnew rigmarole, on a par with the others, was hardly deserving of much credence. However, haud ignarus malorum miseris succurrere disco, etcetera, as the Latin poet remarks, especially as luck would have it he got paid his screw after every middle of the month on the sixteenth which was the date of the month as a matter of fact though a good bit of the wherewithal was demolished. But the cream of the joke was nothing would get it out of Corley’s head that he was living in affluence and hadn’t a thing to do but hand out the needful — whereas. He put his hand in a pocket anyhow, not with the idea of finding any food there, but thinking he might lend him anything up to a bob or so in lieu so that he might endeavour at all events and get sufficient to eat. But the result was in the negative for, to his chagrin, he found his cash missing. A few broken biscuits were all the result of his invetiongstia. He tried his hardest to recollect for the moment whether he had lost, as well he might have, or left, because in that contingency it was not a pleasant lookout, very much the reverse, in fact. He was altogether too fagged out to institute a thorough search though [574] he tried to recollect about biscuits he dimly remembered. Who now exactly gave them, or where was, or did he buy? However, in another pocket he came across what he surmised in the dark were pennies, erroneously, however, as it turned out.

— Those are halfcrowns, man, Corley corrected him.

And so in point of fact they turned out to be. Stephen lent him one of them.

— Thanks, Corley answered. You’re a gentleman. I’ll pay you back some time. Who’s that with you? I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse in Camden street with Boylan the billsticker. You might put in a good word for us to get me taken on there. I’d carry a sandwichboard only the girl in the office told me they’re full up for the next three weeks, man. God, you’ve to book ahead, man, you’d think it was for the Carl Rosa. I don’t give a shite anyway so long as I get a job even as a crossing sweeper.

Subsequently, being not quite so down in the mouth after the two-and-six he got, he informed Stephen about a fellow by the name of Bags Comisky that he said Stephen knew well out of Fullam’s, the shipchandler’s, bookkeeper there, that used to be often round in Nagle’s back with O’Mara and a little chap with a stutter the name of Tighe. Anyhow, he was lagged the night before last and fined ten bob for a drunk and disorderly and refusing to go with the constable.

Mr Bloom in the meanwhile kept dodging about in the vicinity of the cobblestones near the brazier of coke in front of the corporation watchman’s sentrybox, who, evidently a glutton for work, it struck him, was having a quiet forty winks for all intents and purposes on his own private account while Dublin slept. He threw an odd eye at the same time now and then at Stephen’s anything but immaculately attired interlocutor as if he had seen that nobleman somewhere or other though where he was not in a position to truthfully state nor had he the remotest idea when. Being a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in point of shrewd observation, he also remarked on his very dilapidated hat and slouchy wearing apparel generally, testifying to a chronic impecuniosity. Probably he was one of his hangerson but for the matter of that it was merely a question of one preying on his nextdoor neighbour all round, in every deep, so to put it, a deeper depth and for the matter of that if the man in the street chanced to be in the dock himself penal servitude, with or without the option of a fine, would be a very rara avis altogether. In any case he had a consummate amount of cool assurance [575] intercepting people at that hour of the night or morning. Pretty thick that was certainly.

The pair parted company and Stephen rejoined Mr Bloom, who with his practised eye, was not without perceiving that he had succumbed to the blandiloquence of the other parasite. Alluding to the encounter he said, laughingly, Stephen, that is:

— He’s down on his luck. He asked me to ask you to ask somebody named Boylan, a billsticker, to give him a job as a sandwichman.

At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the direction of a bucket dredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana, moored alongside Customhouse Quay and quite possibly out of repair, whereupon he observed evasively:

— Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say. Now you mention it his face was familiar to me. But leaving that for the moment, how much did you part with, he queried, if I am not too inquisitive?

— Half-a-crown, Stephen responded. I daresay he needs it to sleep somewhere.

— Needs, Mr Bloom ejaculated, professing not the least surprise at the intelligence, I can quite credit the assertion and I guarantee he invariably does. Everyone according to his needs and everyone according to his deeds. But talking about things in general, where, added he with a smile, will you sleep yourself? Walking to Sandycove is out of the question and, even supposing you did, you won’t get in after what occurred at Westland Row station. Simply fag out there for nothing. I don’t mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father’s house?

— To seek misfortune, was Stephen’s answer.

— I met your respected father on a recent occasion, Mr Bloom diplomatically returned, Today, in fact, or, to be strictly accurate, on yesterday. Where does he live at present? I gathered in the course of conversation that he had moved.

— I believe he is in Dublin somewhere, Stephen answered unconcernedly. Why?

— A gifted man, Mr Bloom said of Mr Dedalus senior, in more respects than one and a born raconteur if ever there was one. He takes great pride, quite legitimately, out of you. You could go back, perhaps, he hazarded, still thinking of the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row terminus when it [576] was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan, that is, and that English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred their third companion, were patently trying. [trying,]as if the whole bally stationbelonged to them, to give Stephen the slip in the confusion.

There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion, however, such as it was, Stephen’s mind’s eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his family hearth the last time he saw it, with his sister Dilly sitting by the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he could drink it with the oatmeal water for milk after the Friday herrings they had eaten at two a penny, with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper in accordance with the third precept of the church to fast and abstain on the days commanded, it being quarter tense or, if not, ember days or something like that.

— No, Mr Bloom repeated again, I wouldn’t personally repose much trust in that boon companion of yours who contributes the humorous element, Dr Mulligan, as a guide, philosopher, and friend, if I were in your shoes. He knows which side his bread is buttered on through in all probability he never realised what it is to be without regular meals. Of course you didn’t notice as much as I did but it wouldn’t occasion me the least surprise to learn that a pinch of tobacco or some narcotic was put in your drink for some ulterior object.

He understood, however, from all he heard, that Dr Mulligan was a versatile allround man, by no means confined to medicine only, who was rapidly coming to the fore in his line and, if the report was verified, bade fair to enjoy a flourishing practice in the not too distant future as a tony medical practitioner drawing a handsome fee for his services in addition to which professional status his rescue of that man from certain drowning by artificial respiration and what they call first aid at Skerries, or Malahide was it? was, he was bound to admit, an exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness or jealousy, pure and simple.

— Except it simply amounts to one thing and he is what they call picking your brains, he ventured to throw out.

The guarded glance of half solicitude, half curiosity, augmented by friendliness which he gave at Stephen’s at present morose expression of features [577] did not throw a flood of light, none at all in fact, on the problem as to whether he had let himself be badly bamboozled, to judge by two or three lowspirited remarks he let drop, or, the other way about, saw through the affair, and, for some reason or other best known to himself, allowed matters to more or less… Grinding poverty did have that effect and he more than conjectured that, high educational abilities though he possessed, he experienced no little difficulty in making both ends meet.

Adjacent to the men’s public urinal he perceived an icecream car round which a group of presumably Italians in heated altercation were getting rid of voluble expressions in their vivacious language in a particularly animated way, there being some little differences between the parties.

— Putanna madonna, che ci dia i quattrini! Ho ragione? Culo rotto!

— Intendiamoci. Mezzo sovrano più…

— Dice lui, però.

— Farabutto! Mortacci sui!

Mr Bloom and Stephen entered the cabman’s shelter, an unpretentious wooden structure, where, prior to then, he had rarely, if ever, been before; the former having previously whispered to the latter a few hints anent the keeper of it, said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris, the invincible, though he wouldn’t vouch for the actual facts, which quite possibly there was not one vestige of truth in. A few moments later saw our two noctambules safely seated in a discreet corner, only to be greeted by stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collection of waifs and strays and other nondescript specimens of the genus homo, already there engaged in eating and drinking, diversified by conversation, for whom they seemingly formed an object of marked curiosity.

— Now touching a cup of coffee, Mr Bloom ventured to plausibly suggest to break the ice, it occurs to me you ought to sample something in the shape of solid food, say a roll of some description.

Accordingly his first act was with characteristic sangfroid to order these commodities quietly. The hoi polloi of jarvies or stevedores, or whatever they were, after a cursory examinatiou, turned their eyes, apparently dissatisfied, away, though one redbearded bibulous individual, portion of whose hair was greyish, a sailor, probably, still stared for some appreciable time before transferring his rapt attention to the floor.

Mr Bloom, availing himself of the right of free speech, he having just a bowing acquaintance with the language in dispute though, to be sure, rather in a quandary over voglio, remarked to his protégé in an audible tone of voice, [578] apropos of the battle royal in the street which was still raging fast and furious:

— A beautiful language. I mean for singing purposes. Why do you not write your poetry in that language? Bella Poetria! it is so melodious and full. Belladonna voglio.

Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn, if he could, suffering from dead lassitude generally, replied:

— To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money.

— Is that so? Mr Bloom asked. Of course, he subjoined pensively, at the inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were absolutely necessary, it may be only the southern glamour that surrounds it.

The keeper of the shelter in the middle of this tête-à-tête put a boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed, after which he beat a retreat to his counter. Mr Bloom determining to have a good square look at him later on so as not to appear to… for which reason he encouraged Stephen to proceed with his eyes while he did the honours by surreptitiously pushing the cup of what was temporarily supposed to be called coffee gradually nearer him.

— Sounds are impostures, Stephens aid after a pause of some little time. Like names, Cicero, Podmore, Napoleon, Mr Goodbody, Jesus, Mr Doyle, Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What’s in a name?

— Yes, to be sure, Mr Bloom unaffectedly concurred. Of course. Our name was changed too, he added, pushing the socalled roll across.

The redbearded sailor, who had his weather eye on the newcomers, boarded Stephen, whom he had singled out for attention in particular, squarely by asking:

— And what might your name be?

Just in the nick of time Mr Bloom touched his companion’s boot but Stephen, apparently disregarding the warm pressure, from an unexpected quarter, answered:

— Dedalus.

The sailor stared at him heavily from a pair of drowsy baggy eyes, rather bunged up from excessive use of boose, preferably good old Hollands and water.

— You know Simon Dedalus? he asked at length.

— I’ve heard of him, Stephen said.

[579] Mr Bloom was all at sea for a moment, seeing the others evidently eavesdropping too.

— He’s Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same way and nodding. All Irish.

— All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.

As for Mr Bloom he could neither make head or tail of the whole business and he was just asking himself what possible connection when the sailor, of his own accord, turned to the other occupants of the shelter with the remark:

— I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his shoulder. The left hand dead shot.

Though he was slightly hampered by an occasional stammer and his gestures being also clumsy as it was still he did his best to explain.

— Bottle out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles. Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.

He turned his body half round, shut up his right eye completely, then he screwed his features up some way sideways and glared out into the night with an unprepossessing cast of countenance.

— Pom, he then shouted once.

The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there being still a further egg.

— Pom, he shouted twice.

— Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding bloodthirstily:

—Buffalo Bill shoots to kill,

Never missed nor he never will.

A silence ensued till Mr Bloom for agreeableness’ sake just felt like asking him whether it was for a marksmanship competition like the Bisley.

— Beg pardon, the sailor said.

— Long ago? Mr Bloom pursued without flinching a hairsbreadth.

— Why, the sailor replied, relaxing to a certain extent under the magic influence of diamond cut diamond, it might be a matter of ten years. He toured the wide world with Hengler’s Royal Circus. I seen him do that in Stockholm.

— Curious coincidence, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen unobtrusively.

— Murphy’s my name, the sailor continued, W. B. Murphy, of Carrigaloe. Know where that is?

[580] — Queenstown Harbour, Stephen replied.

— That’s right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That’s where I hails from. My little woman’s down there. She’s waiting for me, I know. For England, home and beauty. She’s my own true wife I haven’t seen for seven years now, sailing about.

Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene — the homecoming to the mariner’s roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones — a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic. [topic,] Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc O’Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece, by the way, of poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way. Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the absentee. The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he finelly did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but I’ve come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grass widow, at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead. Rocked in the cradle of the deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and onions. No chair for father. Boo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, post mortem child. With a high ro! and a randy ro! and my galloping tearing tandy O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain with much love your brokenhearted husband, W. B. Murphy.

The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one of the jarvies with the request:

— You don’t happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you, do you?

The jarvey addressed, as it happened, had not but the keeper took a die of plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was passed from hand to hand.

— Thank you, the sailor said.

He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing, and with some slow stammers, proceeded:

— We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon. There’s my discharge. See? W. B. Murphy, A. B. S.

In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket and handed to his neighbours a not very cleanlooking folded document.

[581] — You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked, leaning on the counter.

— Why, the sailor answered, upon reflection upon it, I’ve circumnavigated a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and North America and South America. I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea, the Dardanelles, under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. Gospodi pomilooy. That’s how the Russians prays.

— You seen queer sights, don’t be talking, put in a jarvey.

— Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug, I seen queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor same as I chew that quid.

He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his teeth, bit ferociously.

— Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.

He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket, which seemed to be in its way a species of repository, and pushed it along the table. The printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.

All focussed their attention on the scene exhibited, at a group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping, amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.

— Chews coca all day long, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can’t bear no more children. See them there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse’s liver raw.

His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for several minutes, if not more.

— Know how to keep them off? he inquired genially.

Nobody volunteering a statement, he winked, saying:

— Glass. That boggles ’em. Glass.

Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran as follows: Tarjeta Postal. Señor A. Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago, Chile. There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice. Though not an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the eggsniping transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the Lazarillo – Don Cesar de Bazan incident [582] depicted in Maritana on which occasion the former’s ball passed through the latter’s hat) having detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q. t. somewhere), and the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some suspicions of our friend’s bona fides nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest. Martin Cunningham frequently said he would work a pass through Egan but some deuced hitch or other eternally cropped up with the net result that the scheme fell through. But even suppose it did come to planking down the needful and breaking Boyd’s heart it was not so dear, purse permitting, a few guineas at the ouside, considering the fare to Mullingar where he figured on going was five and six there and back. The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton and so on, culminating in an instructive tour of the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon where doubtless he would see the greatest improvement tower, abbey, wealth of Park Lane to renew acquaintance with. Another thing just struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert tour of summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts, Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne, Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative. Not, of course, with a hole and corner scratch company or local ladies on the job, witness Mrs C. P. M’Coy type — lend me your valise and I’ll post you the ticket. No, something top notch, an all star Irish caste, the Tweedy-Flower grand opera company with his own legal consort as leading lady as a sort of counterblast to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners, perfectly simple matter and he was quite sanguine of success, providing puffs in the local papers could be managed by some fellow with a bit of bounce who could pull the indispensable wires and thus combine business with pleasure. But who? That was the rub.

[583] Also, without being actually positive, it struck him a great field was to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the tapis in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i. e. Brown, Robinson and Co.

It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the system really needed toning up, for a matter of a couple of paltry pounds, was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead of being always cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum months of it and merited a radical change of venue after the grind of city life in the summertime, for choice, when Dame Nature is at her spectacular best, constituting nothing short of a new lease of life. There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around Dublin and its picturesque environs, even, Poulaphouca, to which there was a steam tram, but also farther away from the madding crowd, in Wicklow, rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly wheelmen, so long as it didn’t come down, and in the wilds of Donegal where, if report spoke true, the coup d’œil was exceedingly grand, though the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the signal benefits to be derived from it, while Howth with its historic associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O’Malley, George IV, rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men, especially in the spring when young men’s fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour’s run from the pillar. Because of course uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely in its infancy, so to speak, and the accommodation left much to be desired. Interesting to fathom, it seemed to him, from a motive of curiosity pure and simple, was whether it was the traffic that created the route or viceversa or the two sides in fact. He turned back the other side of the card picture and passed it along to Stephen.

[584] — I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened, and every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house, another was a flower. Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added, the Chinese does.

Possibly perceiving an expression of dubiosity on their faces, the globetrotter went on adhering to his adventures.

— And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his back. Knife like that.

Whilst speaking he produced a dangerous looking claspknife, quite in keeping with his character, and held it in the striking position.

— In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers. Fellow hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. Prepare to meet your God, says he. Chuk! It went into his back up to the butt.

His heavy glance, drowsily roaming about, kind of defied their further questions even should they by any chance want to. That’s a good bit of steel, repeated he, examining his formidable stiletto.

After which harrowing dénouement sufficient to appal the stoutest he snapped the blade to and stowed the weapon in question away as before in his chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket.

— They’re great for the cold steel, somebody who was evidently quite in the dark said for the benefit of them all. That was why they thought the park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of them using knives.

At this remark, passed obviously in the spirit of where ignorance is bliss, Mr Bloom and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both instinctively exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the strictly entre nous variety however, towards where Skin-the-Goat, alias the keeper, was drawing spurts of liquid from his boiler affair. His inscrutable face, which was really a work of art, a perfect study in itself, beggaring description, conveyed the impression that he didn’t understand one jot of what was going on. Funny, very.

There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading by fits and starts a stained by coffee evening journal; another, the card with the natives choza de; another, the seaman’s discharge. Mr Bloom, so far as he was personally concerned, was just pondering in pensive mood. He vividly recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well as yesterday, some score of years previously, in the days of the land troubles when it took the civilised world [585] by storm, figuratively speaking, early in the eighties, eightyone to be correct, when he was just turned fifteen.

— Ay, boss, the sailor broke in. Give us back them papers.

The request being complied with, he clawed them up with a scrape.

— Have you seen the Rock of Gibraltar? Mr Bloom inquired.

The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay, or no.

— Ah, you’ve touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking he had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but he failed to do so, simply letting spurt a jet of spew into the sawdust, and shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn.

— What year would that be about? Mr Bloom interpolated. Can you recall the boats?

Our soi-disant sailor munched heavily awhile, hungrily, before answering.

— I’m tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships. Salt junk all the time.

Tired, seemingly, he ceased. His questioner, perceiving that he was not likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer, fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the globe. Suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed, it covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly what it meant, to rule the waves. On more than one occasion — a dozen at the lowest — near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a superannuated old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the not particularly redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obviously at it and it at him, dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone somewhere sings. And it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to find out the secret for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes and all that sort of thing and over and under — well, not exactly under — tempting the fates. And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no secret about it at all. Nevertheless, without going into the minutiae of the business, the eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though it merely went to show how people usually contrived to load that sortof onus on to the other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and insurance, which were run on identically the same lines so that for that very reason, if no other, lifeboat Sunday was a very laudable institution to which the public at large, no matter where living, inland or seaside, as the case might be, having it brought home to them like that, should extend its [586] gratitude also to the harbourmasters and coastguard service who had to man the rigging and push off and out amid the elements, whatever the season, when duty called Ireland expects that every man and so on, and sometimes had a terrible time of it in the wintertime not forgetting the Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to capsize at any moment rounding which he once with his daughter had experienced some remarkably choppy, not to say stormy, weather.

— There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog, himself a rover, proceeded. Went ashore and took up a soft job as gentleman’s valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I’ve on me and he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife. I’m game for that job, shaving and brushup. I hate roaming about. There’s my son now, Danny, run off to sea and his mother got him took in a draper’s in Cork where he could be drawing easy money.

— What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away from the carking cares of office, unwashed, of course, and in a seedy getup and a a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage.

— Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance. My son Danny? He’d be about eighteen now, way I figure it.

The Skibereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to be seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink, intended to represent an anchor.

— There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked. Sure as nuts. I must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It’s them black lads I objects to. I hate those buggers. Sucks your blood dry, they does.

Seeing they were all looking at his chest, he accomodatingly dragged his shirt more open so that, on top of the timehonoured symbol of the mariner’s hope and rest, they had a full view of the figure 16 and a young man’s sideface looking frowningly rather.

— Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were lying becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow the name of Antonio done that. There he is himself, a Greek.

— Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.

That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the someway in his. Squeezing or…

— See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is, cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added. The same fellow, pulling the skin with his fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.

[587] And in point of fact the young man named Antonio’s livid face did actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the unreserved admiration of everybody, including Skin-the-Goat who this time stretched over.

— Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He’s gone too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.

He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression of before.

— Neat bit of work, longshoreman one said.

— And what’s the number for? loafer number two queried.

— Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.

— Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this time, with some sort of a half smile, for a brief duration only, in the direction of the questioner about the number. A Greek he was.

And then he added, with rather gallowsbird humour, considering his alleged end:

—As bad as old Antonio,

For he left me on my ownio.

The face of a streetwalker, glazed and haggard under a black straw hat, peered askew round the door of the shelter, palpably reconnoitring on her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment, flusterfied but outwardly calm, and picking up from the table the pink sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though why pink? His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that afternoon on Ormond Quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the lane, who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.), and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing, which seemed rather vague than not?

Your washing. Still, candour compelled him to admit that he had washed his wife’s undergarments when soiled in Holles Street and women would and did too a man’s similar garments initialled with Bewley and Draper’s marking ink (hers were, that is) if they really loved him, that is to say. Love me, love my dirty shirt. Still, just then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female’s room more than her company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude sign to take herself off. Round the side of the [588] Evening Telegraph he just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round Skipper Murphy’s nautical chest and then there was no more of her.

— The gunboat, the keeper said.

— It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking, how a wretched creature like that from the Lock Hospital, reeking with disease, can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of course, I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition. Still no matter what the cause is from…

Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely remarking:

— In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.

The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude, said that it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a stop to instanter to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from any oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil, were not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing he could truthfully state he, as a paterfamilias, was a stalwart advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of the sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a lasting boon on everybody concerned.

— You. [You,] as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such, as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup? I believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?

Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try and concentrate and remember before he could say.

— They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause, Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, corruptio per se and corruptio per accidens both being excluded by court etiquette.

[589] Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly rejoining:

— Simple? I shouldn’t think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for instance to invent those rays Röngten did, or the telescope like Edison, though I believe it was before his time, Galileo was the man I mean. The same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural phenomenon such as electricity but it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.

— O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several of the best known passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial evidence.

On this knotty point, however, the views of the pair, poles apart as they were, both in schooling and everything else, with the marked difference in their respective ages, clashed.

— Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his original point. I’m not so sure about that. That’s a matter of every man’s opinion and, without dragging in the sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you in toto there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it’s the big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them, like Hamlet and Bacon, as you who know your Shakespeare infinitely better than I, of course I needn’t tell you. Can’t you drink that coffee, by the way? Let me stir it and take a piece of that bun. It’s like one of our skipper’s bricks disguised. Still, no one can give what he hasn’t got. Try a bit.

— Couldn’t, Stephen contrived to get out, his mentlal organs for the moment refusing to dictate further.

Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat, Mr Bloom thought well to stir, or try to, the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with something approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance (and lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or nay did a world of good. Shelters such as the present one they were in run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings, and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the lower orders. On the other hand, he had a distinct and painful recollection they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently associated with it at one time, a [590] very modest remuneration indeed for her pianoplaying. The idea. he was strongly inclined to believe, was to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak of. Sulphate of copper poison, S O₄ or something in some dried peas he remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he couldn’t remember when it was or where. Anyhow, inspection, medical inspection, of all eatables, seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibble’s Vi-Cocoa on account of the medical analysis involved.

— Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being stirred.

Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it, Stephen lifted the heavy mug from the brown puddle — it clopped out of it when taken up — by the handle and took a sip of the offending beverage.

— Still, it’s solid food, his good genius urged, I’m a stickler for solid food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but regular meals as the sine qua non for any kind of proper work, mental or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different man.

— Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But oblige me by taking away that knife. I can’t look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article, a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least conspicuous point about it.

— Our mutual friend’s stories are like himself, Mr Bloom, apropos of knives, remarked to his confidante sotto voce. Do you think they are genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and lie like old boots. Look at him.

Yet still, though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air, life was full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel.

He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlockholmesing him up, ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness, there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity. [591] He might even have done for his man, supposing it was his own case he told, as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself and had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to the dramatic personage of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet) who expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness, because meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting news from abroad, would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean seas to draw the long bow about the schooner Hesperus and etcetera. And when all was said and done, the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

— Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s all a pure invention, he resumed. Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants, though, that is rather a far cry you see once in a way. Marcella, the midget queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged. They couldn’t straighten their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he proceeded, indicating on his companion the brief outline, the sinews, or whatever you like to call them, behind the right knee, were utterly powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as gods. There’s an example again of simple souls.

However, reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures (who reminded him a bit of Ludwig, alias Ledwidge, when he occupied the boards of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the management in the Flying Dutchman, a stupendous success, and his host of admirers came in large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him though ships of any sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually fell a bit flat as also did trains), there was nothing intrinsically incompatible about it, he conceded. On the contrary, that stab in the back touch was quite in keeping with those Italianos, though candidly he was none the less free to admit those ice creamers and friers in the fish way, not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth, over in little Italy there, near the Coombe, were sober thrifty hardworking fellows except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good old succulent tuckink with garlic de rigueur off him or her next day on the quiet and, he added,on the cheap.

— Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like [592] that, impetuous as Old Nick, are given to taking the law into their own hands and give you your quietus double quick with those poignards they carry in the abdomen. It comes from the great heat, climate generally. My wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half, that is. Point of fact she could actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in (technically) Spain, i. e. Gibraltar. She has the Spanish type. Quite dark, regular brunette, black. I, for one, certainly believe climate accounts for character. That’s why I asked you if you wrote your poetry in Italian.

— The temperaments at the door, Stephen interposed with, were very passionate about ten shillings. Roberto ruba roba sua.

— Quite so, Mr Bloom dittoed.

— Then, Stephen said, staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles triangle, Miss Portinari, he fell in love with and Leonardo and san Tommaso Mastino.

— It’s in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the blood of the sun. Coincidence, I just happened to be in the Kildare Street Museum today, shortly prior to our meeting, if I can so call it, and I was just looking at those antique statues there. The splendid proportions of hips, bosom. You simply don’t knock against those kind of women here. An exception here and there. Handsome, yes, pretty in a way you find, but what I’m talking about is the female form. Besides, they have so little taste in dress, most of them, which greatly enhances a woman’s natural beauty, no matter what you say. Rumpled stockings — it may be, possibly is, a foible of mine, but still it’s a thing I simply hate to see.

Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and the others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog, collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing. Shipahoy, of course, had his own say to say. He had doubled the Cape a few odd times and weathered a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all those perils of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him, or words to that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him.

So then after that they drifted on to the wreck of Daunt’s rock, wreck of that illfated Norwegian barque — nobody could think of her name for the moment till the jarvey who had really quite a look of Henry Campbell remembered it, Palme, on Booterstown Strand, that was the talk of the town that year (Albert William Quill wrote a fine piece of original verse of distinctive merit [593] on the topic for the Irish Times) breakers running over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in commotion petrified with horror. Then someone said something about the case of the s. s. Lady Cairns of Swansea, run into by the Mona, which was on an opposite tack, in rather muggyish weather and lost with all hands on deck. No aid was given. Her master, the Mona’s, said he was afraid his collision bulkhead would give way. She had no water, it appears, in her hold.

At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him to unfurl a reef, the sailor vacated his seat.

— Let me cross your bows, mate, he said to his neighbour, who was just gently dropping off into a peaceful doze.

He made tracks heavily, slowly, with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door, stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings, Mr Bloom, who noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship’s rum sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it, or unscrew, and, applying its nozzle to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a shrewd suspicion that the old stager went out on a manœuvre after the counterattraction in the shape of a female, who, however, had disappeared to all intents and purposes, could, by straining, just perceive him, when duly refreshed, by his rum puncheon exploit, gazing up at the piers and girders of the Loop Line, rather out of his depth, as of course it was all radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but, after a brief space of time during which silence reigned supreme, the sailor, evidently giving it a wide berth, eased himself close at hand, the noise of his bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where it apparently woke a horse of the cabrank.

A hoof scooped anyway for new foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his sentrybox by the brazier of live coke, the watcher of the corporation, who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human probability, from dictates of humanity, knowing him before — shifted about and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in the arms [594] of Morpheus. A truly amazing piece of hard times in its most virulent form on a fellow most respectably connected and familiarised with decent home comforts all his life who came in for a cool £ 100 a year at one time which of course the doublebarrelled ass proceeded to make general ducks and drakes of. And there he was at the end of his tether after having often painted the town tolerably pink, without a beggarly stiver. He drank, needless to be told, and it pointed only once more a moral when he might quite easily be in a large way of business if — a big if, however — he had contrived to cure himself of his particular partiality.

All. meantime, were loudly lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping, coastwise and foreign as well, which was all part and parcel of the same thing. A Palgrave Murphy boat was put off the ways at Alexandra Basin, the only launch that year. Right enough the harbours were there only no ships ever called.

There were wrecks and wrecks, the keeper said, who was evidently au fait.

What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only rock in Galway Bay when the Galway Harbour scheme was mooted by a Mr Worthington or some name like that, eh? Ask her captain, he advised them, how much palmoil the British Government gave him for that day’s work. Captain John Lever of the Lever line.

— Am I right, skipper? he queried of the sailor now returning after his private potation and the rest of his exertions.

That worthy, picking up the scent of the fagend of the song or words, growled in wouldbe music, but with great vim, some kind of chanty or other in seconds or thirds. Mr Bloom’s sharp ears heard him then expectorate the plug probably (which it was), so that he must have lodged it for the time being in his fist while he did the drinking and making water jobs and found it a bit sour after the liquid fire in question. Anyhow in he rolled after his successful libation — cum — potation, introducing an atmosphere of drink into the soirée, boisterously trolling, like a veritable son of a seacook:

—The biscuits was as hard as brass,

And the beef as salt as Lot’s wife’s arse.

O Johnny Lever!

Johnny Lever, O!

After which effusion the redoutable specimen duly arrived on the [595] scene and, regaining his seat, he sank rather than sat heavily on the form provided.

Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland, or something of that sort, which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God’s earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in large quantities, six million pounds’ worth of pork exported every year, ten millions between butter and eggs, and all the riches drained out of it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the nose always, and gobbling up the best meat in the market, and a lot more surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was Colonel Everard down there in Cavan growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated crescendo with no uncertain voice — thoroughly monopolising all the conversation — was in store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on account of her crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history. The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel, which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the Greek hero — a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.

Silence all round marked the termination of his finale. The impervious navigator heard these lurid tidings undismayed.

— Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.

To which cold douche, referring to downfall and so on, the keeper concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.

— Who’s the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and generals we’ve got? Tell me that.

— The Irish for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial blemishes apart.

[596] — That’s right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic peasant. He’s the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?

While allowing him his individual opinions, as every man, the keeper added he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few irascible words, when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing to the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long as they didn’t indulge in recriminations and come to blows.

From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for, pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel, unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years the coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as time went on, that turned out to be how the cat jumped all he could personally say on the matter was that as a host of contingencies, equally relevant to the isssue, might occur ere then it was highly advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both countries, even though poles apart. Another littleinteresting point, the amours of whores and chummies, to put it in common parlance, reminded him Irish soldiers had as often fought for England as against her, more so, in fact. And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee of the place, rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as being on all fours with the confidence trick, supposing, that is, it was prearranged, as the lookeron, a student of the human soul, if anything, the others seeing least of the game. And as for the lessee or keeper, who probably wasn’t the other person at all, he (Bloom) couldn’t help feeling, and most properly, it was better to give people like that the goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether and refuse to have anything to do with them as a golden rule in private life and their felonsetting. [felonsetting,] there always being the offchance of a Dannyman coning forward and turning queen’s evidence — or king’s, now — like Denis or Peter Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from that, he disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any shape or form, he certainly did feel, and no denying it (while inwardly remaining what he was), a certain [597] kind of admiration for a man who had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his political convictions though, personally, he would never be a party to any such thing, off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south — have her or swing for her — when the husband frequently, after some words passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky mortal (he man having had the pair watched) inflicted fatal injuries on his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial liaison by plunging his knife into her until it just struck him that Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed, actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some legal luminary saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient history by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcetera, he had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought to have either died naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell — positively last performance — then come up smiling again. Generous to a fault, of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort, always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some £. s. d. in the course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere of the Old Ireland tavern, come back to Erin and so on. Then as for the others, he had heard not so long before the same identical iingo, [lingo,] as he told Stephen how he simply but effectually silenced the offender.

— He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the whole eventempored person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew, and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too, and all his family, like me, though in reality I’m not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath. He hadn’t a word to say for himself as everyone saw. Am I not right?

He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride at the soft impeachment, with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to glean in a kind of a way that it wasn’t all exactly…

— Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommital accent, their two or four eyes conversing. Christus or Bloom his name is, or, after all, any other, secundum carnem.

— Of course, Mr Bloom proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right [598] and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality? I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak.

— Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes’ war, Stephen assented, between Skinner’s alley and Ormond market.

— Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that was overwhelmingly right and the whole world was overwhelmingly full of that sort of thing.

— You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn’t remotely…

All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood — bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, — were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything, greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.

— They accuse — remarked he audibly. He turned away from the others, who probably… and spoke nearer to, so as the others… in case they…

— Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen’s ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, — would you be surprised to learn? — proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the Inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian, who, in other respects has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are practical and are proved to be so. I don’t want to indulge in any… because you know the standard works on the subject, and then, orthodox as you are… But in the economic, not touching religion, domain, the priest spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead America. Turks, it’s in the dogma. Because if they didn’t believe they’d go straight to heaven when they die they’d try to live better — at least, so I think. That’s the juggle on which the p. p.’s raise the wind on false pretences. I’m, he resumed, with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see [599] everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of £ 300 per annum. That’s the vital issue at stake and it’s feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man. At least that’s my idea for what it’s worth. I call that patriotism. Ubi patria, as we learned a small smattering of in our classical day in Alma Mater, vita beni. Where you can live well, the sense is, if you work.

Over his untasteable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular. He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning, burrowing quickly into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or didn’t say the words the voice he heard said — if you work.

— Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning to work.

The eyes were surprised at this observation, because as he, the person who owned them pro. tem. observed, or rather, his voice speaking did: All must work, have to, together.

— I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest possible sense. Also literary labour, not merely for the kudos of the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel nowadays. That’s work too. Important work. After all, from the little I know of you, after all the money expended on your education, you are entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is equally important.

— You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short.

— I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.

— But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.

— What belongs? queried Mr Bloom, bending, fancying he was perhaps under some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the latter portion. What was it you?…

Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee, or whatever you like to call it, none too politely, adding:

— We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject.

[600] At this pertinent suggestion, Mr Bloom, to change the subject, looked down, but in a quandary, as he couldn’t tell exactly what construction to put on belongs to which sounded rather a far cry. The rebuke of some kind was clearer than the other part. Needless to say, the fumes of his recent orgy spoke then which some asperity in a curious bitter way, foreign to his sober state. Probably the home life, to which Mr Bloom attached the utmost importance, had not been all that was needful or he hadn’t been familiarised with the the right sort of people. With a touch of fear for the young man beside him, whom he furtively scrutinised with an air of some consternation, remembering he had just come back from Paris, the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister, failing to throw much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly, nipped in the bud of premature decay, and nobody to blame but themselves. For instance, there was the case of O’Callaghan, for one, the half crazy faddist, respectably connected, though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries, among whose other gay doings when rotto and making himself a nuisance to everybody all round he was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in public a suit of brown paper (a fact). And then the usual dénouement after the fun had gone on fast and furious he got landed into hot water and had to be spirited away by a few friends, after a strong hint to a blind horse from John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard, so as not to be made amenable under section two of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, certain names of those subpœnaed being handed in but not divulged, for reasons which will occur to anyone with a pick of brains. Briefly, putting two and two together, six sixteen, which he pointedly turned a deaf ear to, Antonio and so forth, jockeys and esthetesand the tattoo which was all the go in the seventies or thereabouts, even in the House of Lords, because early in life the occupant of the throne, then heir apparent, the other members of the upper ten and other high personages simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected about the errors of notorieties and crowned heads running counter to morality such as the Cornwall case a number of years before under their veneer in a way scarcely intended by nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy as the law stands, was terribly down on, though not for the reason they thought they were probably, whatever it was, except women chiefly, who were always fiddling more or less at one another, it being largely a matter of dress and all the rest of it. Ladies who like distinctive underclothing should, and every [601] welltailored man must, trying to make the gap wider between them by innuendo and give more of a genuine filip to acts of impropriety between the two, she unbuttoned his and then he untied her, mind the pin, whereas savages in the cannibal islands, say, at ninety degrees in the shade not caring a continental. However, reverting to the original, there were on the other hand others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.

For which and further reasons he felt it was interest and duty even to wait on and profit by the unlookedfor occasion, though why, he could not exactly tell, being, as it was, already several shillings to the bad, having, in fact, let himself in for it. Still, to cultivate the acquaintance of someone of no uncommon calibre who could provide food for reflection would amply repay any small… Intellectual stimulation as such was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind. Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row, old salt, of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the world we live in, especially as the lives of the submerged tenth, viz.. [viz.,] coalminers, divers, scavengers etc., were very much under the microscope lately. To improve the shining hour he wondered whether he might meet with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken down in writing. Suppose he were to pen something out of the common groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per column. [column,] My Experiences, let us say, in a Cabman’s Shelter.

The pink edition, extra sporting, of the Telegraph, tell a graphic lie, lay, as luck would have it. [it,] beside his elbow and as he was just puzzling again, far from satisfied, over a country belonging to him and the preceding rebus the vessel came from Bridgwater and the postcard was addressed to A. Boudin, find the captain’s age, his eyes went aimlessly over the respective captions which came under his special province, the allembracing give us this day our daily press. First he got a bit of a start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H. du Boyes, agent for typewriters or something like that. Great battle Tokio. Lovemaking in Irish £ 200 damages. Gordon Bennett. Emigration swindle. Letter from His Grace William +. Ascot Throwaway recalls Derby of ’92 when Captain Marshall’s dark horse, Sir Hugo, captured the blue ribband at long odds. New-York disaster, thousand lives lost. Foot and Mouth. Funeral of the late Mr Patrick Dignam.

[602] So to change the subject he read about Dignam, R. I. P., which, he reflected, was anything but a gay sendoff.

— This morning (Hynes put in, of course), the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, n° 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise, after a brief illness, came as great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out (certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge from Corny) by Messrs. H. J. O’Neill & Son, 164 North Strand road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), John Henry Menton, solr., Martin Cunningham, John Power eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather about Keyes’s ad.) Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, B. A., Edward J. Lambert, Cornelius Kelleher, Joseph M C. Hynes, L. Bloom, C. P. M’Coy, — M’Intosh, and several others.

Nettled not a little by L. Boom (as it incorrectly stated) and the line of bitched type, but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M’Coy and Stephen Dedalus. [Dedalus,] B. A., who were conspicuous, needless to say. [say,] by their total absence (to say nothing of M’Intosh), L. Boom pointed it out to his companion B. A., engaged in stifling another yawn, half nervousness, not forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers of misprints.

— Is that first epistle to the Hebrews, he asked, as soon as his bottom jaw would let him, in? Text: open thy mouth and put thy foot in it.

— It is, really, Mr Bloom said (though first he fancied he alluded to the archbishop till he added about foot and mouth with which there could be no possible connection) overjoyed to set his mind at rest and a bit flabbergasted at Myles Crawford’s after all managing the thing, there.

While the other was reading it on page two Boom (to give him for the nonce his new misnomer) whiled away a few odd leisure moments in fits and starts with the account of the third event at Ascot on page three, his side-value 1,000 sovs., with 3,000 sovs. in specie added for entire colts and fillies. Mr F. Alexander’s Throwaway, b. h. by Rightaway, 5 yrs, 9 st 4 lbs, Thrale (W. Lane) 1. Lord Howard de Walden’s Zinfandel (M. Cannon) 2. Mr W. Bass’s Sceptre, 3. Bettings 5 to 4 on Zinfandel, 20 to 1 Throwaway (off). Throwaway and Zinfandel stood close order. It was anybody’s race then the rank outsider drew to the fore got long lead, beating lord Howard de Walden’s chestnut colt and Mr W. Bass’s bay filly Sceptre on a 2 1/2 mile course. Winner [603] trained by Braine so that Lenehan’s version of the business was all pure buncombe. Secured the verdict cleverly by a length. 1,000 sovs. with 300 in specie. Also ran J. de Bremond’s (French horse Bantam Lyons was anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) Maximum II. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left. Of course, gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing though, as the event turned out, the poor fool hadn’t much reason to congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced itself to eventually.

— There was every indication they would arrive at that, Mr Bloom said.

— Who? the other, whose hand by the way was hurt, said.

— One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read, Return of Parnell. He bet them what they liked. A Dublin fusilier was in that shelter one night and said he saw him in South Africa. Pride it was killed him. He ought to have done away with himself or lain low for a time after Committee Room n° 15 until he was his old self again with no-one to point a fiinger at him. Then they would all to a man have gone down on their marrowbones to him to come back when he had recovered his senses. Dead he wasn’t. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they brought over was full of stones. He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer general. He made a mistake to fight the priests. And so forth and so on.

All the same Bloom (properly so dubbed) was rather surprised at their memories for in nine cases out of ten it was a case of tarbarrels, and not singly but in their thousands, and then complete oblivion because it was twenty odd years. Highly unlikely, of course, there was even a shadow of truth in the stones and, even supposing, he thought a return highly inadvisable, all things considered. Something evidently riled them in his death. Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when his various different political arrangements were nearing completion or whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to change his boots and clothes after a wetting when a cold resulted and failing to consult a specialist he being confined to his room till he eventually died of it amid widespread regret before a fortinght was at an end or quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken out of their hands. Of course nobody being acquainted with his movements even before, there was absolutely no clue as to his whereabouts which were decidedly of the Alice, where art thou order even prior to his starting to go under several aliases such as Fox and Stewart, so the [604] remark which emanated from friend cabby might be within the bounds of possibility. Naturally then, it would prey on his mind as a born leader of men, which undoubtedly he was, and a commanding figure, a sixfooter or at any rate five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet, whereas Messrs. So-and-So who, though they weren’t even a patch on the former man, ruled the roost after their redeeming features were very few and far between. It certainly pointed a moral, the idol with feet of clay. And then seventytwo of his trusty henchmen rounding on him with mutual mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come back — that haunting sense kind of drew you — to show the understudy in the title rôle how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said Thank you, excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid expression notwithstanding the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip, — what’s bred in the bone. Still, as regards return, you were a lucky dog if they didn’t set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of shillyshally usually followed. Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to produce your credentials, like the claimant in the Tichborne case, Roger Charles Tichborne, Bella was the boat’s name to the best of his recollection he, the heir, went down in, as the evidence went to show, and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, Lord Bellew, was it? As he might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce himself with, Excuse me, my name is So-and-So or some such commonplace remark. A more prudent course, Mr Bloom said to the not over effusive, in fact like the distinguished personage under discussion beside him, would have been to sound the lie of the land first.

— That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor commented. She put the first nail in his coffin.

— Fine lump of a woman, all the same, the soi-disant townclerk, Henry Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. I seen her picture in a barber’s. Her husband was a captain or an officer.

— Ay, Skin-the-Goat amusingly added. He was, and a cottonball one.

This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair amount of laughter among his entourage. As regards Bloom, he, without the faintest suspicion of a smile, merely gazed in the direction of the door and reflected [605] upon the historic story which had aroused extraordinary interest at the time when the facts, to make matters worse, were made public with the usual affectionate letters that passed between them, full of sweet nothings. First, it was strictly platonic till nature intervened and an attachment sprang up between them, till it bit by bit matters came to a climax and the matter became the talk of the town till the staggering blow came as a welcome intelligence to not a few evildisposed however, who were resolved upon encouraging his downfal though the thing was public property all along though not to anything like the sensational extent that it subsequently blossomed into. Since their names were coupled, though, since he was her declared favorite, where was the particular necessity to proclaim it to the rank and file from the housetops, the fact namely, that he had shared her bedroom, which came out in the witnessbox on oath when a thrill went through the packed court literally electrifying everybody in the shape of witnesses swearing to having witnessed him on such and such a particular date in the act of scrambling out of an upstairs apartment with the assistance of a ladder in night apparel, having gained admittance in the same fashion, a fact that the weeklies, addicted to the lubric a little, simply coined shoals of money out of. Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch with nothing in common between them beyond the name and then a real man arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties. The usual sequel, to bask in the loved one’s smiles. The eternal question of the life connubial, needless to say, cropped up. Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in the case, exist between married folk? Though it was no concern of theirs absolutely if he regarded her with affection carried away by a wave of folly. A magnificent specimen of manhood he was truly, augmented obviously by gifts of a high order as compared with the other military supernumerary, that is (who was just the usual everyday farewell, my gallant captain kind of an individual in the light dragoons, the 18th hussars to be accurate), and inflammable doubtless (the fallen leader, that is not the other) in his own peculiar way which she of course, woman, quickly perceived as highly likely to carve his way to fame, which he almost bid fair to do till the priests and ministers of the gospel as a whole, his erstwhile staunch adherents and his beloved evicted tenants for whom he had done yeoman service in the rural parts of the country by taking up the cudgels on their behalf in a way that exceeded their most sanguine expectations, very effectually cooked his matrimonial goose, thereby heaping [606] coals of fire on his head-much in the same way as the fabled ass’s kick. Looking back now in a retrospective kind of arrangement, all seemed a kind of dream. And the coming back was the worst thing you ever did because it went without saying you would feel out of place as things always moved with the times. Why, as he reflected, Irishtown Strand, a locality he had not been in for quite a number of years, looked different somehow since, as it happened, he went to reside on the north side. North or south however, it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and simple, upsetting the applecart with a vengeance and just bore out the very thing he was saying, as she also was Spanish or half so, types that wouldn’t do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds.

— Just bears out what I was saying, he, with glowing bosom said to Stephen. And, if I don’t greatly mistake, she was Spanish too.

— The king of Spain’s daughter, Stephen answered, adding something or other rather muddled about farewell and adieu to you Spanish onions and the first land called the Deadman and from Ramhead to Scilly was so and so many…

— Was she? Bloom ejaculated surprised, though not astonished by any means. I never heard that rumour before. Possible, especially there it was, as she lived there. So, Spain.

Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket Sweets of, which reminded him by the by of that Capel street library book out of date, he took out his pocketbook and, turning over the various contents rapidly, finally he…

— Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?

Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large sized lady, with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion, as she was in the full bloom of womanhood, in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than vision of breasts, her full lips parted, and some perfect teeth, standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano, on the rest of which was In old Madrid, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her (the lady’s) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin’s premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic execution.

— Mrs Bloom, my wife the prima donna, Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ’96. Very like her then.

[607] Beside the young man he looked also at the photo of the lady now his legal wife who, he intimated, was the accomplished daughter of Major Brian Tweedy and displayed at an early age remarkable proficiency as a singer having even made her bow to the public when her years numbered barely sweet sixteen. As for the face, it was a speaking likeness in expression but it did not do justice to her figure, which came in for a lot of notice usually and which did not come out to the best advantage in that getup. She could without difficulty, he said, have posed for the ensemble, not to dwell on certain opulent curves of the… He dwelt, being a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female form in general developmentally because, as it so happened, no later than that afternoon, he had seen those Grecian statues, perfectly developed as works of art, in the National Museum. Marble could give the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry. All the rest, yes, Puritanism. It does though, St Joseph’s sovereign… whereas no photo could, because it simply wasn’t art, in a word.

The spirit moving him, he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar’s good example and leave the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for itself on the plea he… so that the other could drink in the beauty for himself, her stage presence being, frankly, a treat in itself which the camera could not at all do justice to. But it was scarcely professional etiquette so, though it was a warm pleasant sort of a night now yet wonderfully cool for the season considering, for sunshine after storm… And he did feel a kind of need there and then to follow suit like a kind of inward voice and satisfy a possible need by moving a motion. Nevertheless, he sat tight, just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased by opulent curves, none the worse for wear, however, and looked away thoughfully with the intention of not further increasing the other’s possible embarrassement while gauging her symmetry of heaving embonpoint. In fact, the slight soiling was only an added charm, like the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better, in fact, with the starch out. Suppose she was gone when he?… I looked for the lamp which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (sic) in it which must have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot with apologies to Lindley Murray.

The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated, distingué, and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the bunch, though you wouldn’t think he had it in him… yet you would. Besides he said the [608] picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was, though at the moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur with the usual splash page of letterpress about the same old matrimonial tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest stage favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up between the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and compromising expressions, leaving no loophole, to show that they openly cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course intimate. Then the decree nisi and the King’s Proctor to show cause why and, he failing to quash it, nisi was made absolute. But as for that, the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor, who filed a petition for the party wronged in due course. He, Bloom, enjoyed the distinction of being close to Erin’s uncrowned king in the flesh when the thing occurred on the historic fracas when the fallen leader’s — who notoriously stuck to his guns to the last drop even when clothed in the mantle of adultery — (leader’s) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or possibly even more than that penetrated into the prinitng worsk of the Insuppressible or no it was United Ireland (a by no means, by the by appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from the facile pens of the O’Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging occuaption, reflecting on the erstwhile tribune’s private morals. Though palpably a radically altered man, he was still a commanding figure, though carelessly garbed as usual, with that look of settled purpose which went a long way with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast discomfiture that their idol had feet of clay, after placing him upon a pedestal, which she, however, was the first to perceive. As those were particularly hot times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a minor injury from a nasty prod of some chap’s elbow in the crowd that of course congregated lodging some place about the pit of the stomach, fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell’s), was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush after witnesssing the occurrence meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost [609] celerity) who, panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away from his hat at the time, being a gentleman born with a stake in the country, he, as a matter of fact, having gone into it more for the kudos of the thing than anything else, what’s bred in the bone, instilled into him in infancy at his mother’s knee in the shape of knowing what good form was came out at once because he turned round to the donor and thanked him with perfect aplomb, saying: Thank you, sir though in a very different tone of voice from the ornament of the legal profession whose headgear Bloom also set to rights earlier in the course of the day, history repeating itself with a difference, after the burial of a mutual friend when they had left him alone in his glory after the grim task of having committed his remains to the grave.

On the other hand what incensed him more inwardly was the blatant jokes of the cabmen and so on, who passed it all off as a jest, laughing immoderately, pretending to understand everything, the why and the wherefore, and in reality not knowing their own minds, it being a case for the two parties themselves unless it ensued that the legitimate husband happened to be a party to it owing to some anonymous letter from the usual boy Jones, who happened to come across them at the crucial moment in a loving position locked in one another’s arms drawing attention to their illicit proceedings and leading up to a domestic rumpus and the erring fair one begging forgiveness of her lord and master upon her knees and promising to sever the connection and not receive his visits any more if only the aggrieved husband would overlook the matter and let bygones be bygones, with tears in her eyes, though possibly with her tongue in her fair cheek at the same time, as quite possibly there were several others. He personally, being of a sceptical bias, believed, and didn’t make the smallest bones about saying so either, that man, or men in the plural, were always hanging around on the waiting list about a lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world and they got on fairly well together for the sake of argument, when, neglecting her duties, she chose to be tired of wedded life, and was on for a little flutter in polite debauchery to press their attentions on her with improper intent, the upshot being that her affections centred on another, the cause of many liaisons between still attractive married women getting on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as several famous cases of feminine infatuation proved up to the hilt.

It was a thousand pities a young fellow blessed with an allowance of brains, as his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time with profligate women, who might present him with a nice dose to last him his lifetime. In [610] the nature of single blessedness he would one day take unto himself a wife when when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim ladies’ society was a conditio sine qua non though he had the gravest possible doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen about Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular lodestar who brought him down to Irishtown so early in the morning), as to whether he would find much satisfaction basking in the boy and girl courtship idea and the company of smirking misses without a penny to their names bi-or tri-weekly with the orthodox preliminary canter of complimentpaying and walking out leading up to fond lovers’ ways and flowers and chocs. To think of him house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any stepmother, was really too bad at his age. The queer suddenly things he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the other’s senior or like his father. But something substantial he certainly ought to eat, were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal nutriment or. [or,] failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled.

— At what o’clock did you dine? he questioned of the slim form and tired though unwrinkled face.

— Some time yesterday, Stephen said.

— Yesterday, exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow, Friday. Ah, you mean it’s after twelve!

— The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself.

Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence Bloom, reflected. Though they didn’t see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly some score of years previously when he had been a quasi aspirant to parliamentary honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in retrospect (which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself) he had a sneaking regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance, when the evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in people’s mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper or pinning his faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn’t exactly hold water, he at the outset in principle, at all events, was in thorough sympathy with peasant possession, as voicing the trend of modern opinion, a partiality, however, which, realising his mistake, he was subsequently partially cured of, and even was twitted with going a step further than Michael Davitt in the striking views he at one time inculcated as a backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly resented the innuendo put upon him in so barefaced a fashion [611] at the gathering of the clans in Barney Kiernan’s so that he, though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties invariably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity and the misery and suffering it entailed as a foregone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word.

Anyhow, upon weighing the pros and cons, getting on for one as it was, it was high time to be retiring for the night. The crux was it was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue (somebody having a temper of her own sometimes) and spoil the hash altogether as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed unknown) with a lame paw, not that the cases were either identical or the reverse, though he had hurt his hand too, to Ontario Terrace, as he very distinctly remembered, having been there, so to speak. On the other hand it was altogether far and away too late for the Sandymount or Sandycove suggestion so that he was in some perplexity as to which of the two alternatives… Everything pointed to the fact that it behoved him to avail himself to the full of the opportunity, all things considered. His initial impression was that he was a bit standoffish or not over effusive but it grew on him someway. For one thing he mightn’t what you call jump at the idea, if approached, and what mostly worried him was he didn’t know how to lead up to it or word it exactly, supposing he did entertain the proposal, as it would afford him very great personal pleasure if he would allow him to help to pu coin in his way or some wardrobe, if found suitable. At all events he wound up by concluding, eschewing for the nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epps’s cocoa and a shakedown for the night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat doubled into a pillow. At least he would be in safe hands and as warm as a toast on a trivet. He failed top erceive any very vast amount of harm in that always with the proviso no rumpus of any sort was kicked up. A move had to be made because that merry old soul, the grasswidower in question who appeared to be glued to the spot, didn’t appear in any particular hurry to wend his way home to his dearly beloved Queenstown and it was highly likely some sponger’s bawdyhouse of retired beauties off Sheriff street lower would be the best clue to that equivocal character’s whereabouts for a few days to come, alternately racking their feelings (the mermaids’) with sixchamber revolver anecdotes verging on the tropical calculated to freeze the marrow of anybody’s bones and mauling their largesized charms between whiles with rough and tumble gusto to the [612] accompaniment of large potations of pottheen and the usual blarney about himself for as to who he in reality was let XX equal my right name and address, as Mr Algebra remarks passim. At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his God being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles, your God was a jew, because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhere abouts in the county Sligo.

— I propose, our hero eventually suggested, after mature reflection, while prudently pocketing her photo, as it’s rather stuffy here, you just come home with me and talk things over. My diggings are quite close in the vicinity. You can’t drink that stuff. Wait, I’ll just pay this lot.

The best plan clearly being to clear out, the remainder being plain sailing, he beckoned, while prudently pocketing the photo, to the keeper, of the shanty, who didn’t seem to…

— Yes, that’s the best, he assured Stephen, to whom for the matter of that Brazen Head or him or anywhere else was all more or less…

All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing through his (Bloom’s) busy brain. Education (the genuine article), literature, journalism, prize titbits, up to date billing, hydros and concert tours in English watering resorts packed with theatres, turning money away, duets in Italian with the accent perfectly true to nature and a quantity of other things, no necessity of course to tell the world and his wife from the housetops about it and a slice of luck. An opening was all was wanted. Because he more than suspected he had his father’s voice to bank his hopes on which it was quite on the cards he had so it would be just as well, by the way no harm, to trail the conversation in the direction of that particular red herring just to…

The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former viceroy, Earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers’ association dinner in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this thrilling announcement. Then the old specimen in the corner who appeared to have some spark of vitality left read out that Sir Anthony MacDonnell had left Euston for the chief secretary’s lodge or words to that effect. To which absorbing piece of intelligence echo answered why.

— Give us a squint at that literature, grandfather, the ancient mariner put in, manifesting some natural impatience.

— And welcome, answered the elderly party thus addressed.

[613] The sailor lugged out from a case he had a pair of greenish goggles which he very slowly hooked over his nose and both ears.

— Are you bad in the eyes? the sympathetic personage like the town clerk queried.

— Why, answered the seafarer with the tartan beard,who seemingly was a bit of a literary cove in his own small way, staring out of seagreen portholes as you might well describe them as, I uses goggles reading. Sand in the Red Sea done that. One time I could read a book in the dark, manner of speaking, The Arabian Nights Entertainment was my favourite and Red as a Rose is She.

Thereupon he pawed the journal open and pored upon Lord only knows what, found drowned or the exploits of King Willow, Iremonger having made a hundred and something second wicket not out for Notts, during which time (completely regardless of Ire) the keeper was intensely occupied loosening an apparently new or secondhand boot which manifestly pinched him, as he muttered against whoever it was sold it, all of them who were sufficiently awake enough to be picked out by their facial expressions, that is to say, either simply looking on glumly or passing a trivial remark.

To cut a long story short Bloom, grasping the situation, was the first to rise from his feet so as not to outstay their welcome having first and foremost, being as good as his word that he would foot the bill for the occasion, taken the wise precaution to unobtrusively motion to mine host as a parting shot a scarcely perceptible sign when the others were not looking to the effect that the amount due was forthcoming, making a grand total of fourpence (the amount he deposited unobtrusively in four coppers, literally the last of the Mohicans) he having previously spotted on the printed pricelist for all who ran to read opposite to him in unmistakable figures, coffee 2d., confectionery d°, and honestly well worth twice the money once in a way, as Wetherup used to remark.

— Come, he counselled, to close the séance.

Seeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear, they left the shelter or shanty together and the élite society of oilskin and company whom nothing short of an earthquake would move out of their dolce far niente. Stephen, who confessed to still feeling poorly and fagged out, paused at the, for a moment… the door to…

— One thing I never understood, he said, to be original on the spur of the moment, why they put tables upside down at night, I mean chairs upside down on the tables in cafés.

[614] To which impromptu the neverfailing Bloom replied without a moment’s hesitation, saying straight off:

— To sweep the floor in the morning.

So saying he skipped around nimbly, considering frankly, at the same time apologetic, to get on his companion’s right, a habit of his, by the bye the right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit weak on his pins.

— It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in a moment. The only thing is to walk then you’ll feel a different man. It’s not far. Lean on me.

Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen’s right and led him on accordingly.

— Yes, Stephen said uncertainly, because he thought he felt a strange kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all that.

Anyhow, they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier, etc. where the municipal supernumerary, ex-Gumley, was still to all intents and purposes wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh fields and pastures new. And apropos of coffin of stones, the analogy was not at all bad, as it was in fact a stoning to death on the part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the selfsame evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.

So they passed on to chatting about music, a form of art for which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made tracks arm-in-arm across Beresford Place. Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante’s Huguenots, Meyerbeer’s Seven Last Words on the Cross, and Mozart’s Twelfth Mass, he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being to his mind the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as those Moody and Sankey hymns or Bid me to live and I will live thy protestant to be. He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say greatly adding to her other laurels and putting the others totally in the [615] shade in the jesuit fathers’ church in Upper Gardiner Street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the doors to hear her with virtuosos, or virtuosi rather. There was the unanimous opinion that there was none to come up to her and, suffice it to say in a place of worship for music of a sacred character, there was a generally voiced desire for an encore. On the whole, though favouring preferably light opera of the Don Giovanni description, and Martha, a gem in its line, he had a penchant, though with only a surface knowledge, for the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn. And talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about the old favourites, he mentioned par excellence Lionel’s air in Martha, M’appari, which, curiously enough, he heard, or overheard, to be more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the lips of Stephen’s respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in reply to a politely put query, said he didn’t but launched out into praises of Shakespeare’s songs, at least of in or about that period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter Lane near Gerard the herbalist, who anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus, an instrument he was contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom Bloom did not quite recall, though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas and Farnaby and son with their dux and comes conceits and Byrd (William), who played the virginals, he said, in the Queen’s Chapel or anywhere else he found them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and John Bull.

On the roadway which they were approaching whilst still speaking beyond the swing chain, a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground, brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive guineas and John Bull. He inquired if it was John Bull the political celebrity of that ilk, as it struck him, the two identical names, as a striking coincidence.

By the chains, the horse slowly swerved to turn, which perceiving, Bloom, who was keeping a sharp lookout as usual plucked the other’s sleeve gently, jocosely remarking:

— Our lives are in peril to night. Beware of the steamroller.

They thereupon stopped. Bloom looked at the head of a horse not worth anything like sixtyfive guineas, suddenly in evidence in the dark quite near, so that it seemed new, a different grouping of bones and even flesh, because palpably it was a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a taildangler, a headhanger, putting his hind foot foremost the while the lord of his creation [616] sat on the perch, busy with his thoughts. But such a good poor brute, he was sorry he hadn’t a lump of sugar but, as he wisely reflected, you could scarcely be prepared for every emergency that might crop up. He was just a big foolish nervous noodly kind of a horse, without a second care in the world. But even a dog, he reflected, take that mongrel in Barney Kiernan’s, of the same size, would be a holy horror to face. But it was no animal’s fault in particular if he was built that way like the camel, ship of the desert, distilling grapes into potheen in his hump. Nine tenths of them all could be caged or trained, nothing beyond the art of man barring the bees; whale with a harpoon hairpin, alligator, tickle the small of his back and he sees the joke; chalk a circle for a rooster; tiger, my eagle eye. These timely reflections anent the brutes of the field occupied his mind, somewhat distracted from Stephen’s words, while the ship of the street was manœuvring and Stephen went on about the highly interesting old…

— What’s this I was saying? Ah, yes! My wife, he intimated, plunging in medias res, would have the greatest of pleasure in making your acquaintance as she is passionately attached to music of any kind.

He looked sideways in a friendly fashion at the sideface of Stephen, image of his mother, which was not quite the same as the usual blackguard type they unquestionably had an indubitable hankering after as he was perhaps not that way built.

Still, supposing he had his father’s gift, as he more than suspected, it opened up new vistas in his mind, such as Lady Fingall’s Irish industries concert on the preceding Monday, and aristocracy in general.

Exquisite variations he was now describing on a air Youth here has End by Jans Pieter Sweelinck, a Dutchman of Amsterdam where the frows come from. Even more he liked an old German song of Johannes Jeep about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men, which boggled Bloom a bit:

Von der Sirenen Listigkeit

Tun die Poeten dichten.

These opening bars he sang and translated extempore. Bloom, nodding, said he perfectly understood and begged him to go on by all means, which he did.

A phenomenally beautiful tenor voice like that, the rarest of boons, which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out, could easily, if properly [617] handled by some recognised authority on voice production such as Barraclough and being able to read music into the bargain, command its own price where baritones were ten a penny and procure for its fortunate possessor in the near future an entrée into fashionable houses in the best residential quarters of financial magnates in a large way of business and titled people where, with his university degree of B. A. (a huge ad in its way) and gentlemanly bearing to all the more influence the good impression he would infallibly score a distinct success, being blessed with brains which also could be utilised for the purpose and other requisites, if his clothes were properly attended to, so as to the better worm his way into their good graces as he, a youthful tyro in society’s sartorial niceties, hardly understood how a little thing like that could militate against you. It was in fact only a matter of months and he could easily foresee him participating in their musical and artistic conversaziones during the festivities of the Christmas season, for choice, causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes of the fair sex and being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation, cases of which, as he happened to know, were on record, in fact, without giving the show away, he himself once upon a time, if he cared to, could easily have… Added to which of course, would be the pecuniar y emolument by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy space of time but a step in the required direction it was, beyond yea or nay, and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to be handed a cheque at a muchneeded moment when every little helped. Besides, though taste latterly had deteriorated to a degree, original music like that, different from the conventional rut, would rapidly have a great vogue, as it would be a decided novelty for Dublin’s musical world after the usual hackneyed run of catchy tenor solos foisted on a confiding public by Ivan St Austell and Hilton St Just and their genus omne. Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he could, with all the cards in his hand and he had a capital opening to make a name for himself and win a high place in the city’s esteem where he could command a stiff figure and, booking ahead, give a grand concert for the patrons of the King Street house, given a backer-up, if one were forthcoming to kick him upstairs, so to speak, — a big if, however — with some impetus of the goahead sort to obviate the inevitable procrastination which often tripped up a too much fêted prince of good fellows and it need not detract from the [618] other by one iota as, being his own master, he would have heaps of time to practise literature in his spare moments when desirous of so doing without its clashing with his vocal career or containing anything derogatory what soever as it was a matter for himself alone. In fact, he had the ball at his feet and that was the very reason why the other, possessed of a remarkably sharp nose for smelling a rat of any sort, hung on to him at all.

The horse was just then… and later on, at a propitious opportunity he purposed (Bloom did), without anyway prying into his private affairs on the fools step in where angels principle advising him to sever his connection with a certain budding practitioner, who, he noticed, was prone to disparage, and even, to a slight extent, with some hilarious pretext, when not present, deprecate him, or whatever you like to call it, which, in Bloom’s humble opinion, threw a nasty sidelight on that side of a person’s character — no pun intended.

The horse, having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted, and, rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on the floor, which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking globes of turds. Slowly, three times, one after another, from a full crupper, he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had ended, patient in his scythed car.

Side by side Bloom, profiting by the contretemps, with Stephen passed through the gap of the chains, divided by the upright, and, stepping over a strand of mire, went across towards Gardiner Street lower, Stephen singing more boldly, but not loudly, the end of the ballad:

Und alle Schiffe brücken.

The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent. He merely watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black — one full, one lean — walk towards the railway bridge, to be married by Father Maher. As they walked, they at times stopped and walked again, continuing their tête à tête (which of course he was utterly out of), about sirens, enemies of man’s reason, mingled with a number of other topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the sleeper car who in any case couldn’t possibly hear because they were too far simply sat in his sest near the end of lower Gardiner street and looked after their lowbacked car.

 ® 

[619] What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford Place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner’s place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street, north: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George’s church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.

Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?

Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religions, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.

[620] Were their views on some points divergent?

Stephen dissented openly from Bloom’s views on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom assently covertly to Stephen’s rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus, son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac Mac Art († 266 A. D.) suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty and interred at Rossnaree. The collapse which Bloom ascribed to gastric inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere. [atmosphere,] Stephen attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points of observation, Sandycove and Dublin), at first no bigger than a woman’s hand.

Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?

The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees.

Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in the past?

In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard’s corner and Leonard’s corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield Avenue. In 1885 with Percy Apjohn in the evenings, reclined against the wall between Gibraltar villa and Bloomfield house in Crumlin, barony of Uppercross. In 1886 occusionally with casual acquaintances and prospective purchasers on doorsteps, in front parlours, in third class railway carriages of suburban lines. In 1888 frequently with major Brian Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy, together and separately on the lounge in Matthew Dillon’s house in Roundtown. Once in 1892 and once in 1893 with Julius Mastiansky, on both occasions in the parlour of his (Bloom’s) house in Lombard street, west.

What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?

[621] He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.

As in what ways?

From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.

What did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?

At the housesteps of the 4th of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number 7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.

Was it there?

It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on the day but one preceding.

Why was he doubly irritated?

Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget.

What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?

To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.

Bloom’s decision?

A stratagem. Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the area pavement, and allowed his body to move freely in space by separating himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for the impact of the fall.

Did he fall?

By his body’s known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Frœdman, pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the [622] bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era, (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indication 2, Julian period 6617, mxmiv.

Did he rise uninjured by concussion?

Regaining new stable equilibrium he rose uninjured though concussed by the impact, raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied at its fulcrum gained retarded access to the kitchen through the subadjacent scullery, ignited a lucifer match by friction, set free inflammable coal gas by turning on the ventcock, lit a high flame which, by regulating, he reduced to quiescent candescence and lit finally a portable candle.

What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?

Reclined against the area railings he perceived through the transparent kitchen panes a man regulating a gasflame of 14 C P, a man lighting a candle, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man leaving the kitchen holding a candle of 1 C P.

Did the man reappear elsewhere?

After a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.

Did Stephen obey his sign?

Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed softly along the hallway the man’s back and listed feet and lighted candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom’s house.

What did Bloom do?

He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M’Donald of 14 D’Olier [623] street, kindled it at three projecting points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.

Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?

Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two, had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street: of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss Julia Morkan at 15 Usher’s Island: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of Saint Francis-Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the physics’ theatre of university College, 16 Stephen’s Green, north: of his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father’s house in Cabra.

What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies’ grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.

What did Bloom see on the range?

On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left (larger) hob a black iron kettle.

What did Bloom do at the range?

He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow.

Did it flow?

Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity [624] of 2.400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filtre mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of £ 5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of the waterworks committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of recourse being had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals as in 1893) particulary as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch meter had been convicted of a wastage of 20.000 gallons per night by a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers, solvent, sound.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8.000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteosfulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental [625] lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air; distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infaillibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, ifnavigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?

To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington’s lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?

That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of [626] October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?

Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.

Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?

Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and recuperation.

What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the agency of fire?

The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat (radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the course of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal units needed to raise 1 pound of water from 50° to 212° Fahrenheit.

[627] What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?

A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at both sides simultaneously.

For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?

To shave himself.

What advantages attended shaving by night?

A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman’s double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.

Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?

Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine feminine passive active hand.

What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting influence?

The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human blood even when the end justified the means, preferring, in their natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic surgery.

What lay under exposure on the lower middle and upper shelves of the kitchen dresser opened by Bloom?

On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse dispaying coins, mostly copper, and a phial of aromatic violet comfits. On the middle shelf a chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four conglomerated black olivesin oleaginous paper, an empty pot of [628] Plumtree’s potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co’s white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper, a packet of Epps’s soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch’s choice tea at 2/- per lb. in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy’s cream, a jug of brown crockery containing a naggin and a quarter of soured adulterated milk, converted by heat into water, acidulous serum and semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity subtracted for Mr Bloom’s and Mrs Fleming’s breakfasts made one imperial pint, the total quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of jamjars of various sizes and proveniences.

What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?

Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets, numbered 8 87, 8 86.

What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?

Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction, preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official and definitive result of which he had read in the Evening Telegraph, late pink edition, in the cabman’s shelter, at Butt bridge.

Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him?

In Bernard Kiernan’s licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street: in David Byrne’s licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O’Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon’s when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F. W Sweny and Co (Limited), dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman’s Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental [629] edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.

What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?

The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding originally from a successful interpretation.

His mood?

He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied.

What satisfied him?

To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others. Light to the gentiles.

How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?

He poured into two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps’s soluble cocoa and proceeded according to the directions for use printed on the label, to each adding after sufficient time for infusion the prescribed ingredients for diffusion in the manner and in the quantity prescribed.

What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his guest?

Relinquishing his symposiarchal right to the moustache cup of imitation Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent (Milly), he substituted a cup identical with that of his guest and served extraordinarily to his guest and, in reduced measure, to himself, the viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion (Molly).

Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of hospitality?

His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely and he accepted them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps’s massproduct, the creature cocoa.

[630] Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed, reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to complete the act begun?

The reparation of a fissure of the length of 1 1/2 inches in the right side of his guest’s jacket. A gift to his guest of one of the four lady’s handkerchiefs, if and when ascertained to be in a presentable condition.

Who drank more quickly?

Bloom, having the advantage of ten seconds at the initiation and taking, from the concave surface of a spoon along the handle of which a steady flow of heat was conducted, three sips to his opponent’s one, six to two, nine to three.

What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?

Concluding by inspection but erroneously that his silent companion was engaged in mental composition he reflected on the pleasures derived from literature of instruction rather than of amusement as he himself had applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.

Had he found their solution?

In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages, aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text, the answers not bearing in all points.

What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him, potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering of three prizes of 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively by the Shamrock, a weekly newspaper?

An ambition to squint

At my verses in print

Makes me hope that for these you’ll find room

If you so condescend

Then please place at the end

The name of yours truly, L. Bloom.

Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?

Name, age, race, creed.

[631] What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?

Leopold Bloom

Ellpodbomool

Molldopeloob

Bollopedoom

Old Ollebo, M. P.

What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic poet) sent to Miss Marion Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?

Poets oft have sung in rhyme

Of music sweet their praise divine.

Let them hymn it nine times nine.

Dearer far than song or wine.

You are mine. The world is mine.

What had prevented him from completing a topical song (music by R. G. Johnston) on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years, entitled If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin now, commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the valley of diamonds, of the second edition (30 January 1893) of the grand annual Christmas pantomime Sinbad the Sailor (written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George A. Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan produced by R. Shelton 26 December 1892 under the personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir, harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal girl?

Firstly, oscillation between events of imperial and of local interest, the anticipatep diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria (born 1820,acceded 1837) and the posticipated opening of the new municipal fish market: secondly, apprehension of opposition from extreme circles on the questions of the respective visits of Their Royal Highnesses, the duke and duchess of York (real), and of His Majesty King Brian Boru (imaginary): thirdly, a conflict between professional etiquette and professional emulation concerning the recent erections of the Grand Lyric Hall on Burgh Quay and the Theatre Royal in Hawkins Street: fourthly, distraction resultant from compassion for Nelly Bouverist’s non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical expression of countenance and concupiscence caused by Nelly [632] Bouverist’s revelations of white articles of non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical underclothing while she (Nelly Bouverist) was in the articles: fifthly, the difficulties of the selection of appropriate music and humorous allusions from Everybody’s Book of Jokes (1000 pages and a laugh in every one): sixthly, the rhymes homophonous and cacophonous, associated with the names of the new lord mayor, Daniel Tallon, the new high sheriff, Thomas Pile and the new sollicitorgeneral, Dunbar Plunket Barton.

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen’s present age Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom’s present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according arbitrary as future years were added for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A. D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B. C.

What events might nullify these calculations?

The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable.

How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?

Two. The first in the lilacgarden of Matthew Dillon’s house. Medina Villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown, in 1887, in the company of Stephen’s mother, Stephen being then of the age of 5 and reluctant to give his hand in salutation. The second in the cofferoom of Breslin’s hotel on a rainy Sunday in the January of 1892, in the company of Stephen’s father and Stephen’s granduncle, Stephen being then 5 years older.

[633] Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father?

Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a third connecting link between them?

Mrs Riordan, a widow of independent means, had resided in the house of Stephen’s parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms Hotel owned by Elizabeth O’Dowd of 54 Prussia street where during parts of the years 1893 and 1894 she had been a constant informant of Bloom who resided also in the same hotel, being at that time a clerk in the employment of Joseph Cuffe of 5 Smithfield for the superintendence of sales in the adjacent Dublin Cattle market on the North Circular road.

Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?

He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow of independent, if limited means, in her convalescent bathchair with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low’s place of business where she had remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles, equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems, private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.

Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?

Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel of bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with continual changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds, velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round and round the rim of a round precipitous globe.

What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years deceased?

The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient catarrhal deafness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue of the Immaculate Conception, [634] her green and maroon brushes for Charles Stewart Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.

Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the more desirable?

The indoor exercices, formerly intermittently practised, subsequently abandoned, prescribed in Eugen Sandow’s Physical Strength and How To Obtain It which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of muscles and produce successively a pleasant relaxation and the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.

Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?

Though ringweight lifting had been beyond his strength and the full circle gyration beyond his courage yet as a High School scholar he had excelled in his stable and protracted execution of the half lever movement on the parallel bars in consequence of his abnormally developed abdominal muscles.

Did either openly allude to their racial difference?

Neither.

What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen?

He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective parentages?

Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently Rudolf Bloom) of Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and Dublin and of Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins (born Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty). Stephen, eldest surviving male consubstantial heir of Simon Dedalus of Cork and Dublin and of Mary, daughter of Richard and Christina Goulding (born Grier).

[635] Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or layman?

Bloom (three times) by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A. alone in the protestant church of Saint Nicolas Without, Coombe, by James O’Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. Stephen (once) by the reverend Charles Malone, C. C. alone, in the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar.

Did they find their educational careers similar?

Substituting Stephen for Bloom Stoom would have passed successively through a dame’s school and the high school. Substituting Bloom for Stephen Blephen would have passed successively through the preparatory, junior, middle and senior grades of the intermediate and through the matriculation, first arts second arts and arts degree courses of the royal university.

Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university of life?

Because of his fluctuating incertitude as to whether this observation had or had not been already made by him to Stephen or by Stephen to him.

What two temperaments did they individually represent?

The scientific. The artistic.

What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?

Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once revolutionary, for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump.

Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of kindergarten?

Yes, rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard, catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the twelve [636] constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls.

What also stimulated him in his cogitations?

The financial success achieved by Ephraim Marks and Charles A. James, the former by his 1d. bazaar at 42 George’s Street, South, the latter at his 6 1/2 d. shop and world’s fancy fair and waxwork exhihition at 30 Henry Street, admission 2d., children 1d.; and the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed in triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility (divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince, to decide.

Such as?

K. 11. Kino’s 11/- Trousers.

House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.

Such as not?

Look at this long candle. Calculate when it burns out and you receive gratis 1 pair of our special non-compo boots, guaranteed 1 candle power. Address: Barclay and Cook, 18 Talbot Street.

Bacilikil (Insect Powder).

Veribest (Boot Blacking).

Uwantit (Combined pocket twoblade penknife with corkscrew, nailfile and pipecleaner).

Such as never?

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchant’s quay, Dublin, put up in 4 oz.. pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke Street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot, registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Montpat. Plamtroo.

[637] Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably conduce to success?

His own ideated and rejected project of an illuminated showcart, drawn by a beast of burden, in which two smartly dressed girls were to be seated engaged in writing.

What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?

Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.

What?

In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen’s hotel, Queen’s hotel Queen’s Ho…

What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?

The Queen’s Hotel, Ennis, County Clare where Rudolph Bloom (Rudolf Virag) died on the evening of the 27 June 1886, at some hour unstated, in consequence of an overdose of monkshood (aconite) selfadministered in the form of a neuralgic liniment, composed of 2 parts of aconite liniment to 1 of chloroform liniment (purchased by him at 10. 20 a. m. on the morning of 27 June 1886 at the medical hall of Francis Dennehy, 17 Church street, Ennis) after having, though not in consequence of having, purchased at 3. 15 p. m. on the afternoon of 27 June 1886 a new boater straw hat, extra smart (after having, though not in consequence of having, purchased at the hour and in the place aforesaid), the toxin aforesaid, at the general drapery store of James Cullen, 4 Main street, Ennis.

Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or intuition?

Coincidence.

Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?

He preferred himself to see another’s face and listen to another’s words by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament relieved.

[638] Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to him, described by the narrator as A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums?

It, with the preceding scene and with others unnarrated but existent by implication, to which add essays on various subjects or moral apothegms (e. g. My Favourite Hero or Procrastination is the Thief of Time) composed during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and in conjunction with the personal equation certain possibilities of financial, social, personal and sexual success, whether specially collected and selected as model pedagogie themes (of cent per cent merit) for the use of preparatory and junior grade students or contributed in printed form, following the precedent of Philip Beaufoy or Doctor Dick or Heblon’s Studies in Blue, to a publication of certified circulation and solvency or employed verbally as intellectual stimulation for sympathetic auditors, tacitly appreciative of successful narrative and confidently augurative of successful achievement, during the increasingly longer nights gradually following the summer solstice on the day but three following, videlicet, Tuesday, 21 June (S. Aloysius Gonzaga), sunrise, 3.33 a. m., sunset 8.29 p. m.

Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind?

What to do with our wives.

What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?

Parlour games (dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball, nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts, chess or backgammon): embroidery, darning or knitting for the policeaided clothing society: musical duets, mandoline and guitar, piano and flute, guitar and piano: legal scrivenery or envelope addressing: biweekly visits to variety entertainments: commercial activity as pleasantly commanding and pleasingly obeyed mistress proprietress in a cool dairy shop or warm cigar divan: the clandestine satisfaction of erotic irritation in masculine brothels, state inspected and medically controlled: social visits, at regular infrequent prevented intervals and with regular frequent preventive superintendence, to and from female acquaintances of recognised respectability in the vicinity: courses of evening instruction specially designed to render liberal instruction agreeable.

What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?

[639] In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and Hebrew characters. She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of a city in Canada, Quebec. She understood little of political complications, internal, or balance of power, external. In calculating the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid. After completion of laconic epistolary compositions she abandoned the implement of calligraphy in the encaustic pigment exposed to the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), alias (a mendacious person mentioned in sacred Scripture).

What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?

The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.

How had he attemped to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?

Variously. By leaving in a conspicuous place a certain book open at a certain page: by assuming in her, when alluding explanatorily, latent knowledge: by open ridicule in her presence of some absent other’s ignorant lapse.

With what success had he attempted direct instruction?

She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error.

What system had proved more effective?

Indirect suggestion implicating self-interest.

Example?

She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat. [hat,] he bought new hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat.

[640] Accepting the analogy implied in his guest’s parable which examples of postexilic eminence did he adduce?

Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, author of More Nebukim (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there arose none like Moses (Maimonides).

What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by Stephen?

That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher, name uncertain.

Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a selected or rejected race mentioned?

Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (composer), Baruch Spinoza (philosopher), Mendoza (pugilist), Ferdinand Lassalle (reformer, duellist).

What fragment of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts by guest to host and by host to guest?

By Stephen: suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus suil go cuin (walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care).

By Bloom: Kifeloch, harimon rakatejch m’baad l’zamatejch (thy temple amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate).

How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages made in substantiation of the oral comparison?

On the penultimate blank page of a book entituled of inferior literary style, Sweets of Sin (produced by Bloom and so manipulated that its front cover came in contact with the surface of the table) with a pencil (supplied by Stephen) Stephen wrote the Irish characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and (in the absence of mem) a substituted goph, explaining their arithmetical values as ordinal and cardinal numbers, videlicet 3, 1, 4 and 100.

[641] Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?

Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary.

What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?

The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel, and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland: their archeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homilectic, toponomastic, historical and religious literatures comprising the works of rabbis and culdees, Torah, Talmud (Mischna and Ghemara) Massor, Pentateuch, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Ballymote, Garland of Howth, Book of Kells: their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S. Mary’s Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve’s tavern): the proscription of their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts: the restoration in Chanan David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution.

What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple, ethnically irreducible consummation?

Kolod balejwaw pnimah

Nefesch, jehudi, homijah.

Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?

In consequence of defective mnemotechnic.

How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?

By a periphrastic version of the general text.

In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?

The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions (Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic).

[642] Did the guest comply with his host’s request?

Doubly, by appending his signature in Irish and Roman characters.

What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?

He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.

What was Bloom’s visual sensation?

He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.

What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?

Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.

Auditively, Bloom’s: The Traditionnal accent af the ecstasy of catastrophe.

What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with what exemplars?

In the church, Roman, Anglican, or Nonconformist: exemplars, the very reverend John Conmee S.J., the reverend T. Salmon, D.D, [D.D.,] provost of Trinity college, Dr Alexander J. Dowie. At the bar, English or Irish: exemplars, Seymour Bushe, K. C., Rufus Isaacs, K. C. On the stage, modern or Shakespearean: examplars Charles Wyndham, high comedian, Osmond Tearle († 1901), exponent of Shakespeare.

Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange legend on an allied theme?

Reassuringly, their place where none could hear them talk being secluded, reassured, the decocted beverages, allowing for subsolid residual sediment of a mechianacal mixture, water plus sugar plus cream plus cocoa, having been consumed.

[643] Recite the first (major) part of this chanted legend?

Little Harry Hughes and his schoolfellows all

Went out for to play ball.

And the very first ball little Harry Hughes played

He drove it ow’er the je’s garden wall.

And the very second ball little Harry Hughes played

He broke the jew’s windows all.

How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?

With unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew, he heard with pleasure and saw the unbroken kitchen window.

[644] Recite the second part (minor) of the legend.

Then out came the jew’s daughter

And she all dressed in green.

« Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,

And play your ball again. »

« I can’t come back and I won’t come back

Without my schoolfellows all.

For if my master he did hear

He’d make it a sorry ball. »

She took him by the lilywhite hand

And led him along the hall

Until she led him to a room

Where none could hear him call.

She took a penknife out of her pocket

And cut off his little head

And now he’ll play his ball no more

For he lies among the dead.

How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?

With mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew’s daughter, all dressed in green.

[645] Condense Stephen’s commentary.

One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by inadvertence, twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an apparition of hope and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation, to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him, consenting.

Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?

He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told.

Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?

In accordance with the law of the conservation of energy.

Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?

He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the incitation of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.

From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not totally immune?

From hypnotic suggestion: once, waking, he had not recognised his sleeping apartment: more than once, waking, he had been for an indefinite time incapable ofmovingor uttering sounds. From somnambulism: once, sleeping, his body had risen, crouched and crawled in the direction of a heatless fire and, having attained its destination, there, curled, unheated, in night attire had lain, sleeping.

Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member of his family?

Twice, in Holles street and in Ontario terrace, his daughter Millicent (Milly) at the ages of 6 and 8 years had uttered in sleep an exclamation of terror and had replied to the interrogations of two figures in night attire with a vacant mute expression.

[646] What other infantile memories had he of her?

15 June 1889. A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons one, tloo, tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark, she had blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau, Austrian army, proximate, ahallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British navy.

What endemic characteristics were present?

Conversely the nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant intervals to its most distant intervals.

What memories had he of her adolescence?

She relegated her hoop and skippingrope to a recess. On the duke’s lawn entreated by an English visitor, she declined to permit him to make and take away her photographic image (objection not stated). On the South Circular road in the company of Elsa Potter, followed by an individual of sinister aspect, she went half way down Stamer street and turned abruptly back (reason of change not stated). On the vigil of the 15th anniversary of her birth she wrote a letter from Mullingar, county Westmeath, making a brief allusion to a local student (faculty and year not stated).

Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?

Less than he had imagined, more than he had hoped.

What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly if differently?

A temporary departure of his cat.

Why similarly, why differently?

Similarly, because actuated by a secret purpose the quest of a new male (Mullingar student) or of a healing herb (valerian). Differently, because of different possible returns to the inhabitants or to the habitation.

In other respects were their differences similar?

In passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in unexpectedness.

[647] As?

Inasmuch as leaning she sustained her blond hair for him to ribbon it for her (cf. neckarching cat). Moreover, on the free surface of the lake in Stephen’s green amid inverted reflections of trees her uncommented spit, describing concentric circles of waterrings, indicated by the constancy of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish (cf. mousewatching cat). Again, in order to remember the date, combatants, issue and consequences of a famous military engagement she pulled a plait of her hair (cf. earwashing cat). Furthermore, silly Milly, she dreamed of having had an unspoken unremembered conversation with a horse whose name had been Joseph to whom (which) she had offered a tumblerful of lemonade which it (he) had appeared to have accepted (cf. hearthdreaming cat). Hence, in passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in unexpectedness, were differences were similar.

In what way had he utilised gifts 1) an owl, 2) a clock), given as matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?

As object lessons to explain: 1) the nature and habits of oviparous animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions clockwise of moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour, when the longer and the shorter indicator were at the same angle of inclination, videlicet, 5 5/11 minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression.

In what manners did she reciprocate?

She remembered: on the 27th anniversary of his birth she presented to him a breakfast moustachecup of imitation crown Derby porcelain ware. She provided: at quarter day or thereabouts if or when purchases had been made by him not for her she showed herself attentive to his necessities, anticipating his desires. She admired: a natural phenomenon having been explained by him not for her she expressed the immediate desire to possess without gradual acquisition a fraction of his science, the moiety, the quarter, a thousandth part.

[648] What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist?

To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately above the kitchen and immediateiy adjacent to the sleeping apartment of his host and hostess.

What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolungation of such extemporisation?

For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian pronunciation.

Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew’s daughter?

Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother through daughter.

To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest return a monosyllabic negative answer?

If he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney Parade railway station, 14 October 1903.

What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the host?

A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment of Mrs Mary Goulding, 26 June 1903, vigil of the anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).

Was the proposal of asylum accepted?

Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.

What exchange of money took place between host and guest?

The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money (£ 1-7-0), one pound seven shilling, advanced by the latter to the former.

[649] What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified, declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate a series of static, semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues, places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in the same place) the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, a public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line drawn between their residences (if both speakers were resident in different places).

What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually selfexcluding propositions?

The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert Hengler’s circus in the Rotunda, Rutland Square, Dublin, anintuitive parti coloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his (the clown’s) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches on the milled edge and tendered it in payment of an account due to and received by J. and T. Davy,family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.

Was the clown Bloom’s son?

No.

Had Bloom’s coin returned?

Never.

Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?

Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and international animosity.

[650] He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole; the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation, of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause; inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclyms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through maturity to decay.

Why did he desist from speculation?

Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed.

Did Stephen participate in his dejection?

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

Was this affimation apprehended by Bloom?

Not verbally. Substantially.

What comforted his misapprehension?

That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.

In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?

Lighted Candle in Stick borne by

Bloom

Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by

Stephen.

[651] With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?

The 113 th, modus peregrinus: In exitu Israël de Egypto: domus Jacob de populo barbaro.

What did each so at the door of egress?

Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.

For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

For a cat.

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellation?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57, 000, 000, 000, 000, miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threscore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single [652] pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of so many places, e. g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that, the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000 pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.

Did he find the problem of the inhabitability of the planets and their satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?

Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism, normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons, when elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as the line of demarcation between troposphere and statosphere was approximated, from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo, when proposing this problem for solution, he had conjectured as a working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms wiih finite différences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to vanities, to vanities of vanities and to all that is vanity.

[653] And the problem of possible redemption?

The minor was proved by the major.

Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?

The various colours significant of various degrees of vitality (white, yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar): their degrees of brilliancy: their magnitudes revealed up to and including the 7th: their positions: the waggoner’s star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular cinctures of Saturn: the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns: the interdependant gyrations of double suns: the independent synchronous discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel, Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth of the younger satroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, 10 August): the monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms: the posited influence of celestial on human bodies: the appearance of a star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns) about the period of the birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star (2nd magnitude) of similar origin but lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and dissapeared from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period of the birth of Leopold Bloom and of other stars of (presumably) similar origin which had (effectively or presumably) appeared in and disappeared from the constellation of Andromeda about the period of the birth of Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the constellation of Auriga some years after the birth and death of Rudolph Bloom, junior, and in and from other constellations some years before or after the birth or death of other persons, the attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar, from immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow, taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or crepuscular animals, persistance of infernal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters, pallor of human beings.

[654] His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?

That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast. [heavenbeast,] not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity, renderable equally finite by the suppositious probable apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its spectators had entered actual present existence.

Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?

Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the satellite of their planet.

Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological influences upon sublunary disasters?

It seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

[655] What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom’s, who attracted Stephen’s gaze?

In the second storey (rere) of his (Bloom’s) house the light of a paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller blind supplied by Frank O’Hara, window blind, curtain pole and revolving shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier street.

How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?

With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued affection and admiration: with description; with impediment; with suggestion.

Both then were silent?

Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.

Were they indefinitely inactive?

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Similarly?

The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vescical pressure.

What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass [656] and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.

What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?

A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.

How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal departer?

By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.

How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.

What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?

The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells in the church of Saint George.

What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?

By Stephen:

Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet.

Jubilantium te virginum. Chorus excipiat.

By Bloom:

Heigho, heigho,

Heigho, heigho.

[657] Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to Glasnevin in the north?

Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Ned Lambert (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed), Paddy Dignam (in the grave).

Alone, what did Bloom hear?

The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the double vibration of a jew’s harp in the resonant lane.

Alone, what did Bloom feel?

The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind him?

Of companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River) Philip Gilligan (phthisis, Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury street) Michael Hart (phthisis, Mater Misericordiæ hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy, Sandymount).

What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?

The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the apparition of a new solar disk.

Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?

Once, in 1887 after a protracted performance of charades in the house of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction of Mizrach, the east.

He remembered the initial paraphenomena?

More active air, a matutinal distant cock, ecclesiastical clocks at various points, avine music, the isolated tread of an early wayfarer, the visible diffusion [658] of the light of an invisible luminous body, the first golden limb of the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon.

Did he remain?

With deep inspiration he returned, retraversing the garden, reentering the passage, reclosing the door. With brief suspiration he reassumed the candle, reascended the stairs, reapproached the door of the front room, hallfloor, and reentered.

What suddenly arrested his ingress?

The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in consequence of anetcedent sensations transmitted and registered.

Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of furniture?

A sofa upholstered in prune plush had been translocated from opposite the door to the ingleside near the compactly furled Union Jack (an alteration which he had frequently intended to execute): the blue and white checker inlaid majolicatopped table had been placed opposite the door in the place vacated by the prune plush sofa: the walnut sideboard (a projecting angle of which had momentarily arrested his ingress) had been moved from its position beside the door to a more advantageous but more perilous position in front of the door: two chairs had been moved from right and left of the ingleside to the position originally occupied by the blue and white checker inlaid majolicatopped table.

Describe them.

One: a squat stuffed easychair with stout arms extended and back slanted to the rere, which, repelled in recoil, had then upturned an irregular fringe of a rectangular rug and now displayed on its amply upholstered seat a centralised diffusing and diminishing discolouration. The other: a slender splayfoot chair of glossy cane curves, placed directly opposite the former, its frame from top to seat and from seat to base being varnished dark brown, its seat being a bright circle of white plaited rush.

What significances attached to these two chairs?

Significances of similitude, of posture, of symbolism, of circumstantial evidence, of testimonial supermanence.

[659] What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?

A vertical piano (Cadby) with exposed keyboard, its closed coffin supporting a pair of long yellow ladies’ gloves and an emerald ashtray containing four consumed matches, a partly consumed cigarette and two discoloured ends of cigarettes, its musicrest supporting the music in the key of G natural for voice and piano of Love’s Old Sweet Song (words by G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Molloy, sung by Madam Antoinette Sterling) open at the last page with the final indications ad libitum, forte, pedal, animato, sustained, pedal, ritirando, close.

With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?

With strain, elevating a candlestick: with pain, feeling on his right temple a contused tumescence: with attention, focussing his gaze on a large dull passive and slender bright active: with solicitation, bending and downturning the upturned rugfringe: with amusement, remembering Dr Malachi Mulligan’s scheme of colour containing the gradation of green: with pleasure, repeating the words and antecedent act and perceiving through various channels of internal sensibility the consequent and concomitant tepid pleasant diffusion of gradual discolouration.

His next proceeding?

From an open box on the majolicatopped table he extracted a black diminutive cone, one inch in height, placed it on its circular base on a small tin plate, placed his candlestick on the right corner of the mantelpiece, produced from his waistcoat a folded page of prospectus (illustrated) entitled Agendath Netaim, unfolded the same, examined it superficially, rolled it into a thin cylinder, ignited it in the candleflame, applied it when ignited to the apex of the cone till the latter reached the stage of rutilance, placed the cylinder in the basin of the candlestick disposing its unconsumed part in such a manner as to facilitate total combustion.

What followed this operation?

That truncated conical crater summit of the diminutive volcano emitted a vertical and serpentine fume redolent of aromatic oriental incense.

What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the mantelpiece?

[660] A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of 4.46 a. m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon: a dwarf tree of glacial arborescence under at ransparent bellshade, matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle: an embalmed owl, matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper.

What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and Bloom?

In the mirror of the giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before the mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with a clear melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded Bloom while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless compassionated gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle.

What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his attention?

The image of a solitary (ipsorelative) mutable (aliorelative) man.

Why solitary (ipsorelative)?

Brothers and sisters had he none.

Yet that man’s father was his grandfather’s son.

Why mutable (aliorelative)?

From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix. From maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal procreator.

What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?

The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles on the two bookshelves opposite.

Catalogue these books.

Thom’s Dublin Post Office Directory, 1886.

[661] Denis Florence M’Carthy’s Poetical Works (copper beechleaf bookmark at p. 5).

Shakespeare’s Works (dark crimson morocco, goldtooled).

The Useful Ready Reckoner (brown cloth).

The Secret History of the Court of Charles II (red cloth, tooled binding).

The Child’s Guide (blue cloth).

When We Were Boys by William O’Brien M. P. (green cloth, slightly faded, envelope bookmark at p. 217).

Thoughts from Spinoza (maroon leather).

The Story of the Heavens by Sir Robert Ball (blue cloth).

Ellis’s Three Trips to Madagascar (brown cloth, title obliterated).

The Stark-Munro Letters by A. Conan Doyle, property of the City of Dublin Public Library, 106 Capel Street, lent 21 May (Whitsun Eve) 1904, due 4 June 1904, 13 days overdue (black cloth binding, bearing white letternumber ticket).

Voyages in China by « Viator » (recovered with brown paper, red ink title).

Philosophy of the Talmud (sewn pamphlet).

Lockart’s Life of Napoleon (cover wanting, marginal annotations, minimising victories, aggrandising defeats of the protagonist).

Soll und Haben by Gustav Freytag (black boards, Gothic characters, cigarette coupon bookmark at p. 24).

Hozier’s History of the Russo-Turkish War (bronw cloth, 2 volumes, with gummed label, Garrison Library Governor’s Parade, Gibraltar, on verso of cover).

Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland by William Allingham (second edition, green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner’s name on recto of flyleaf erased).

A Handbook of Astronomy (cover, brown leather, detached, 5 plates, antique letterpress long primer, author’s footnotes nonpareil, marginal clues brevier, captions small pica).

The Hidden Life of Christ (black boards).

[662] In the Track of the Sun (yellow cloth, titlepage missing recurrent title intestation).

Physical Strength and How to Obtain It by Eugen Sandow (red cloth).

Short but yet Plain Elements of Geometry written in French by F. Ignat. Pardies and rendered into Engſlih by John Harris D. D. London, printed for R. Knaplock at the Biſhop’s Head MDCCXI, with dedicatory epiſtle to his worthy friend Charles Cox, eſquire, Member of Parliament for the burgh of Southwark and having ink calligraphed statement on the flyleaf certifying that the book was the property of Michael Gallagher, dated this 10th day of May 1822 and requeſting the perſon who should find it, if the book should be loſt or go aſtray, to reſtore it to Michael Gallagher, carpenter, Dufery Gate, Enniſcorthy, county Wicklow, the fineſt place in the world.

What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of the inverted volumes?

The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its place: the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females: the incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella inclined in a closestool: the insecurity of hiding any secret document behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.

Which volume was the largest in bulk?

Hozier’s History of the Russo-Turkish War.

What among other data did the second volume of the work in question contain?

The name of a decisive battle (forgotten), frequently remembered by a decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy (remembered).

Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?

Firstly, in order to exercise mnemotechnic: secondly, because after an interval of amnesia, when seated at the central table, about to consult the work [663] in question, he remembered by mnemotechnic the name of the military engagement, Plevna.

What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?

The candour, nudity, pose, tranquillity, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased by auction from P. A. Wren, 9 Bachelor’s Walk.

What caused him irritation in his sitting posture?

Inhibitory pressure of collar (size 17) and waistcoat (5 buttons), two articles of clothing superfluous in the costume of mature males and inelastic to alterations of mass by expansion.

How was the irritation allayed?

He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hairs extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae, thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete.

What involuntary actions followed?

He compressed between 2 fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting inflicted 2 weeks and 3 days previously (23 May 1904) by a bee. He scratched imprecisely with his right hand, though insensible of prurition, various points and surfaces of his partly exposed, wholly abluted skin. He inserted his left hand into the left lower pocket of his waistcoat and extracted and replaced a silver coin (1 shilling), placed there (presumably) on the occasion (10 October 1903) of the interment of Mrs Emily Sinico, Sydney Parade.

[664] Compile the budget for 16 June 1904.

Debit

Credit

£.  s.  d.

£.  s.  d.

1

Pork kidney

0.  0.  3 

Cash in hand

0.  4.  9

1

Copy Freeman’s Journal

0.  0.  1

Commission recd. Freeman’s Journal

1.  7.  6

1

Bath and gratification

0.  1.  6

Loan (Stephen Dedalus)

1.  7.  0

Tramfare

0.  0.  1

1

In Memoriam Patrick Dignam

0.  5.  0

2

Banbury cakes

0.  0.  1

1

Lunch

0.  0.  7

1

Renewal fee for book

0.  1.  0

1

Packet notepaper and envelopes

0.  0.  2

1

Dinner and gratification

0.  2.  0

1

Postal order and stamp

0.  2.  8

Tramfare

0.  0.  1

1

Pig’s Foot

0.  0.  4

1

Sheep’s Trotter

0.  0.  3

1

Cake Fry’s plain chocolate

0.  0.  1

1

Square soda bread

0.  0.  4

1

Coffee and bun

0.  0.  4

Loan (Stephen Dedalus) refunded

1.  7.  0

Balance

0.16.  6

— ——

— ——

£ 

2.19.  3

£ 

2.19.  3

Did the process of divestiture continue?

Sensible of a benignant persistant ache in his footsoles he extended his foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots, unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the fore part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised his right and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender, took off his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin of the seat of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the odour of the quick, then with satisfaction threw away the lacerated unguial fragment.

[665] Why with satisfaction?

Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other unguial fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs Ellis’s juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation.

In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions now coalesced?

Not to inherit by right of primogeniture, gavelkind or borough English, or possess in perpetuity an extensive demesne of a sufficient number of acres, roods and perches, statute land measure (valuation £ 42), of grazing turbary surrounding a baronial hall with gatelodge and carriage drive nor, on the other hand, a terracehouse or semidetached villa, described as Rus in Urbe or Qui Si Sana, but to purchase by private treaty in fee simple a thatched bungalowshaped 2 storey dwellinghouse of southerly aspect, surmounted by vane and lightning conductor, connected with the earth, with porch covered by parasitic plants (ivy or Virginia creeper), halldoor, olive green, with smart carriage finish and neat doorbrasses, stucco front with gilt tracery at eaves and gable, rising, if possible, upon a gentle eminence with agreeable prospect from balcony with stone pillar parapet over unoccupied and unoccupyable interjacent pastures and standing in 5 or 6 acres of its own ground, at such a distance from the nearest public thoroughfare as to render its houselights visible at night above and through a quickset hornbeam hedge of topiary cutting, situate at a given point not less than 1 statute mile from the periphery of the metropolis, within a time limit of not more than 5 minutes from tram or train line, (e. g. Dundrum, south, or Sutton, north, both localities equally reported by trial to ressemble the terrestrial poles in being favourable climates for phthisical subjects), the premises to be held under feefarmgrant, lease 999 years, the messuage to consist of 1 drawingroom with baywindow (2 lancets), thermometer affixed, 1 sittingroom, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants’ rooms, tiled kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, handtufted Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with pillar and claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer with hygrographic chart, [666] comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments, upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three banner Japanese screen and cuspidors (club style, rich winecoloured leather, gloss renewable with a minimum of labour by use of linseed oil and vinegar) and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre, bentwood perch with a fingertame parrot (expurgated language), embossed mural paper at 10/- per dozen with transverse swags of carmine floral design and top crown frieze, staircase, three continuous flights at successive right angles, of varnished cleargrained oak, treads and risers, newel, balusters and handrail, with steppedup panel dado, dressed with camphorated wax, bathroom, hot and cold supply, reclining and shower: water closet on mezzanine provided with opaque singlepane oblong window, tipup seat, bracket lamp, brass tierod brace, armrests, footstool and artistic oleograph on inner face of door: ditto, plain: servants’ apartments with separate sanitary and hygienic necessaries for cook, general and betweenmaid (salary, rising by biennial unearned increments of £ 2, with comprehensive fidelity insurance, annual bonus (£ 1) and retiring allowance (based on the 65 system) after 30 years’ service, pantry, buttery, larder, refrigerator, outoffices, coal and wood cellarage with winebin (still and sparkling vintages) for distinguished guests, if entertained to dinner (evening dress), carbon monoxide gas supply throughout.

What additional attractions might the grounds contain?

As addenda, a tennis and fives court, a shrubbery, a glass summerhouse with tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner, a rockery with waterspray, a beehive arranged on humane principles, oval flowerbeds in rectangular grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of scarlet and chrome tulips blue scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet William, sweet pea, lily of the valley, [bulbs obtainable, from sir James W. Mackey (Limited)] wholesale and retail seed and bulb merchant and nurseryman, agent for chemical manures, 23 Sackville Street, upper), an orchard, kitchen garden and vinery, protected against illegal trespassers by glasstopped mural enclosures, a lumbershed with padlock for various inventoried implements.

As?

Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone, clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder, 10 tooth rake, washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot, brush, hoe and so on.

[667] What improvements might be subsquently introduced?

A rabbitry and fowlrun, a dovecote, a botanical conservatory, 2 hammocks (lady’s and gentleman’s), a sundial shaded and sheltered by laburnum or lilac trees, an exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle gatebell affixed to left lateral gatepost, a capacious waterbutt, a lawnmower with side delivery and grassbox, a lawnsprinkler with hydraulic hose.

What facilities of transit were desirable?

When citybound frequent connection by train or tram from their respective intermediate station or terminal. When countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14h).

What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?

Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold’s. Flowerville.

Could Bloom of 7 Eccles Street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?

In loose allwool garments with Harris tweed cap, price 8/6, and useful garden boots with elastic gussets and wateringcan, planting aligned young firtrees, syringing, pruning, staking, sowing hayseed, trundling a weedladen wheelbarrow without excessive fatigue at sunset amid the scent of newmown hay, ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving longevity.

What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?

Snapshot photography, comparative study of religions, folklore relative to various amatory and superstitious practices, contemplation of the celestial constellations.

What lighter recreations?

Outdoor: garden and fieldwork, cycling on level macadamised causeways, ascents of moderately high hills, natation in secluded fresh water and unmolested river boating in secure wherry or light curricle with kedge anchor on reaches free from weirs and rapids (period of estivation), vespertinal perambulation or equestrian circumprocession with inspection of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable cottagers’ fires of smoking peat turves (period of hibernation). Indoor discussion in tepid security of unsolved historical and [668] criminal problems: lecture of unexpurgated exotic erotic masterpieces: house carpentry with toolbox containing hammer, awl, nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet, tweezers, bullnose plane and turnscrew.

Might he become a gentleman farmer of field produce and live stock?

Not impossibly, with 1 or 2 stripper cows, 1 pike of upland hay and requisite farming implements, e. g., an end-to-end churn, a turnip pulper etc.

What would be his civic functions and social status among the county families and landed gentry?

Arranged successively in ascending powers of hierarchical order, that of gardener, groundsman, cultivator, breeder, and at the zenith of his career, resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest and coat of arms and appropriate classical moto (Semper paratus), duly recorded in the court directory (Bloom, Leopold P., M. P., P. C., K. P., L. L. D. honoris causa, Bloomville, Dundrum) and mentioned in court and fashionable intelligence (Mr and Mrs Leopold Bloom have left Kingstown for England).

What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?

A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour: the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes, incessantly rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality, of unbiassed homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown. Loyal to the highest constituted power in the land, actuated by an innate love of rectitude his aims would be the strict maintenance of public order, the repression of many abuses though not of all simultaneously (every measure of reform or retrenchment being a preliminary solution to be contained by fluxion in the final solution) the upholding of the letter of the law (common, statute and law merchant) against all traversers in covin and trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations, all resuscitators (by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings) of venville rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators of international persecution, all perpetuators of international animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all recalcitrant violators of domestic connubiality.

[669] Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth?

To Master Percy Apjohn at High School in 1880 he had divulged his disbelief in the tenets of the Irish (protestant) church (to which his father Rudolf Virag, later Rudolph Bloom, had been converted from the Israelitic faith and communion in 1865 by the Society for promoting Christianity among the jews) subsequently abjured by him in favour of Roman catholicism at the epoch of and with a view to his matrimony in 1888. To Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade in 1882 during a juvenile friendship (terminated by the premature emigration of the former) he had advocated during nocturnal perambulations the political theory of colonial (e. g. Canadian) expansion and the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, expounded in The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species. In 1885 he had publicly expressed his adherence to the collective and national economic programme advocated by James Fintan Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel, J. F. X. O’Brien and others, the agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional agitation of Charles Stewart Parnell (M. P. for Cork City), the programme of peace, retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone (M. P. for Midlothian, N. B.) and, in support of his political convictions, had climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 Febuary 1888) into the capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20.000 torchbearers, divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2.000 torches in escort of the marquess of Ripon and John Morley.

How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?

As per prospectus of the Industrious Foreign Acclimatised Nationalised Friendly Stateaided Building Society (incorporated 1874), a maximum of £ 60 par annum, being 1/6 of an assured income, derived from giltedged securities, representing at 5 % simple interest on capital of £ 1.200 (estimate of price at 20 years purchase) of which 1/3 to be paid on acquisition and the balance in the form of annual rent, viz. £ 800 plus 2 1/2 % interest on the same, repayable quarterly in equal annual instalments until extinction by amortisation of loan advanced for purchase within a period of 20 years, amounting to an annual rental of £ 64, headrent included, the titledeeds to remain in possession of the lender or lenders with a saving clause envisaging forced sale, foreclosure and mutual compensation in the event of protracted failure to pay the terms assigned, otherwise the messuage to become [670] the absolute property of the tenant occupier upon expiry of the period of years stipulated.

What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate purchase?

A private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system the result of a national equine handicap (flat or steeplechase) of 1 or more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of 50 to 1 at 3 hr. 8 m. p. m. at Ascot (Greenwich time) the message being received and available for betting purposes in Dublin at 2.59 p. m. (Dunsink time). The unexpected discovery of an object of great monetary value (precious stone, valuable adhesive or unpressed posrage stamps (7 shilling, mauve, imperforate, Hamburg, 1866: 4 pence, rose, blue paper, perforate, Great Britain, 1855: 1 franc, stone, official, rouletted, diagonal surcharge, Luxemburg, 1878, antique dynastical ring, unique relic) in unusual repositories or by unusual means: from the air (dropped by an eagle in flight), by fire (amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated edifice), in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict), on earth (in the gizzard of a commestible fowl). A Spanish prisoner’s donation of a distant treasure of valuables or specie or bullion lodged with a solvent banking corporation 100 years previously at 5 % compound interest of the collective worth of £ 5.000.000 stg (five million pounds sterling). A contract with an inconsiderate contractee for the delivery of 32 consignments of some given commodity in consideration of cash payment on delivery at the initial rate of 1/4 d. to be increased constantly in the geometrical progression of 2 (1/4, 1/2, 1 d., 2 d., 4 d., 8 d., 1 s. 4 d., 2 s. 8 d. to 32 terms). A prepared scheme based on a study of the laws of probability to break the bank at Monte Carlo. A solution of the secular problem of the quadrature of the circle, government premium £ 1.000.000 sterling.

Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?

The reclamation of dunams of waste arenary soil, proposed in the prospectus of Agendath Netaim, Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 15, by the cultivation of orange plantations and melonfields and reafforestation. The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third, every normal human being of average vitality and appetite producing annually, cancelling byproducts [671] of water, a sum total of 80 lbs. (mixed animal and vegetable diet), to be multiplied by 4.386.035 the total population of Ireland according the census returns of 1901.

Were there schemes of wider scope?

A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour commissioners for the exploitation of white coal (hydraulic power), obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at head of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt or catchment basins of main streams for the economic production of 500.000 W. H. P. of electricity. A scheme to enclose the peninsular delta of the North Bull at Dollymount and erect on the space of the foreland, used for golf links and rifle ranges, an asphalted esplanade with casinos, booths, shooting galleries, hotels, boardinghouses, readingrooms, establishments for mixed bathing. A scheme for the use of dogvans and goatvans for the delivery of early morning milk. A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation [10/- per person per day, guide (trilingual) included]. A scheme for the repristination of passenger and goods traffics over Irish waterways, when freed from weedbeds. A scheme to connect by tramline the Cattle Market (North Circular road and Prussia Street) with the quays (Sheriff street, lower and East Wall), parallel with the Link line railway laid (in conjunction with the Great Southern and Western railway line) between the cattle park, Liffey junction, and terminus of Midland Great Western railway 43 to 45 North Wall, in proximity to the terminal stations or Dublin branches of Great Central Railway, Midland Railway of England, City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, Lancashire Yorkshire Railway Company, Dublin and Glasgow Steam Packet Company, Glasgow Dublin and Londonderry Steam Packet Company (Laird line) British and Irish Steam Packet Company, Dublin and Morecambe Steamers, London and North Western Railway Company, Dublin Port and Docks Board Landing Sheds and transit sheds of Palgrave, Murphy and Company, steamship owners, agents for steamers from Mediterranean, Spain, Portugal, France. [France,] Belgium and Holland and for Liverpool Underwriters’Association, the cost of acquired rolling stock for animal transport and of additional mileage operated by the Dublin United Tramways Company, limited, to be covered by graziers’ fees.

[672] Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes become a natural and necessary apodosis?

Given a guarantee equal to the sum sought, the support, by deed of gift and transfer vouchers during donor’s lifetime or by bequest after donor’s painless extinction, of eminent financiers (Blum Pasha, Rothschild, Guggenheim, Hirsch, Montefiore, Morgan, Rockefeller) possessing fortunes in 6 figures, amassed during a successful life, and joining capital with opportunity the thing required was done.

What eventually would render him independent of such wealth?

The independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore.

For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?

It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for the night allievated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and renovated vitality.

His justifications?

As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human life at least 2/7, viz., 20 years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part of any person’s desires has been realised. As a physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant agencies chiefly operative during somnolence.

What did he fear?

The commital of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence situated in the cerebral convolutions.

What were habitually his final meditations?

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonders a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.

[673] What did the first drawer unlocked contain?

A Vere Foster’s handwriting copybook, property of Milly (Millicent) Bloom, certain pages of which bore diagram drawings marked Papli, which showed a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot: 2 fading photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe, actress and professional beauty: a Yuletide card, bearing on it a pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend Mizpah, the date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr and Mrs M. Comerford, the versicle: May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome glee: a butt of red partly liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the stores department of Messrs Hely’s, Ltd., 89, 90 and 91 Dame street: a box containing the remainder of a gross of gilt « J » pennibs, obtained from same department of same firm: an old sandglass which rolled containing sand which rolled: a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of the passing into law of William Ewart Gladstone’s Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed into law): a bazaar ticket N° 2004, of S. Kevin’s Charity Fair, price 6 d. 100 prizes: an infantile epistle, dated, small em monday, reading: capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation capital eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with flourishes capital em Milly no stop: a cameo brooch, property of Ellen Bloom (born Higgins), deceased: 3 typewritten letters, addressee, Henry Flower, c/o P. O. Westland Row, addresser, Martha Clifford, c/o P. O. Dolphin’s Barn: the transliterated name and address of the addresser of the 3 letters in reversed alphabetic boustrephodontic punctated quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed) N. IGS./WI. UU. OX /W. OKS. MH/Y. IM: a press cutting from an English weekly periodical Modern Society, subject corporal chastisement in girls’ schools: a pink ribbon which had festooned an Easter egg in the year 1899: two partly uncoiled rubber preservatives with reserve pockets, purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: 1 pack of 1 dozen creamlaid envelopes and feintruled notepaper, watermarked, now reduced by 3: some assorted Austrian-Hungarian coins: 2 coupons of the Royal and Privileged Hungarian Lottery. a lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards showing. a) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation, superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior position). b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: a press cutting [674] of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a1d. ad hesive stamp, lavender, of the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled, before, during and after 2 months of consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser (men’s 15/-, athlete’s 20/-) viz., chest 28 in and 29 1/2 in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8 1/2 and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf, 11 in and 12 in: 1 prospectus of the Wonderworker, the world’s greatest remedy for rectal complaints, direct from Wonderworker, Coventry House, South Place, London E. C., addressed to Mrs L. Bloom with brief accompanying note commencing: Dear Madam.

Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for this thaumaturgic remedy.

It heals and soothes while you sleep, in case of trouble in breaking wind, assists nature in the most formidable way insuring,instant relief in discharge of gases, keeping parts clean and free natural action,an initial outlay of 7/6 making a new man of you and life worth living. Ladies find Wonderworker especially useful, a pleasant surprise when they note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on a sultry summer’s day. Recommend it to your lady and gentlemen friends, lasts a lifetime. Insert long round end. Wonderworker.

Were there testimonials?

Numerous. From clergyman, British naval officer, wellknown author, city man, hospital nurse, lady, mother of five, absentminded beggar.

How did absentminded beggar’s concluding testimonial conclude?

What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers during the South African campaign! What a relief it would have been!

What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?

A 4th typewritten letter received by Henry Flower (let H. F. be L. B.) from Martha Clifford (find M. C.)

What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?

The reflection that, apart from the letter in question, his magnetic face, form and address had been favourably received during the course of the preceding day by a wife (Mrs Josephine Breen, born Josie Powell); a nurse, Miss Callan (Christian name unknown) a maid, Gertrude (Gerty, family name unkown).

[675] What possibility suggested itself?

The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the most immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in the company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.

What did the 2nd drawer contain?

Documents: the birth certificate of Leopold Paula Bloom: an endowment assurance policy of £ 500 in the Scottish Widow’s Assurance Society intestated Millcent (Milly) Bloom, coming into force at 25 years as with profit policy of £ 430, £ 462 - 10 - 0 and £ 500 at 60 years or death, 65 years or death and death, respectively, or with profit policy (paidup) of £ 299 - 10 - 0 together with cash payment of £ 133 - 10 - 0, at option: a bank passbook issued by the Ulster Bank, College Green branch showing statement of a/c for halfyear ending 31 December 1903, balance in depositor’s favour: £ 18 - 14 - 6 (eighteen pounds, fourteen shillings and sixpence, sterling), net personalty: certificate of possession of £ 900, Canadian 4 % (inscribed) government stock (free of stamp duty): dockets of the Catholic Cemeteries’ (Glasnevin) Committee, relative to a graveplot purchased: a local press cutting concerning change of name by deedpoll.

Quote the textual terms of this notice.

I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at n° 52 Clanbrassil street, Dublin, formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom.

What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the 2nd drawer?

An indistinct daguerrotype of Rudolph Virag and his father Leopold Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their (respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary. An ancient hagadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex spectacles inserted marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual prayers for Pessach (Passover): a photocard of the Queen’s Hotel, Ennis, proprietor, Rudolph Bloom: an envelope addressed: To My Dear Son Leopold.

[676] What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those four whole words evoke?

Tomorrow will be a week that I received… it is no use Leopold to be… with your dear mother… that is not more to stand… to her… all for me is out… be kind to Athos, Leopold… my dear son… always… of me… das Herz… Gott… dein…

What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?

An old man widower, unkempt hair, in bed, with head covered, sighing: an infirm dog, Athos: aconite, resorted to by increasing doses of grains and scruples as a palliative of recrudescent neuralgia: the face in death of a septuagenarian suicide by poison.

Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?

Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain beliefs and practices.

As?

The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal, the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammation: the sanctity of the sabbath.

How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than other beliefs and practices now appeared.

What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom (deceased)?

Rudolph Bloom (deceased) narrated to his son Leopold Bloom (aged 6) a retrospective arrangement of migrations and settlements in and between Dublin, London, Florence, Milan, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely with statements of satisfaction (his grandfather having seen Maria Theresia, empress of Austria, queen of Hungary), with commercial advice (having taken care of pence, the pounds having taken care of themselves). Leopold Bloom (aged 6) had accompanied these narrations by constant consultation of a geographical map [677] of Europe (political) and by suggestions for the establishment of affiliated business premises in the various centres mentioned.

Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these migrations in narrator and listener?

In narrator by the access of years and in consequence of the use of narcotic toxin: in listener by the access of years and in consequence of the action of distraction upon vicarious experiences.

What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of amnesia?

Occasionally he ate without having previously removed his hat. Occasionally he drank voraciously the juice of grooseberry fool from an inclined plate. Occasionally he removed from his lips the traces of food by means of a lacerated envelope or other accessible fragment of paper.

What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?

The myopic digital calculation of coins, eructation consequent upon repletion.

What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?

The endowment policy, the bank passbook, the certificate of the possession of scrip.

Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.

Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1/4d in the £, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiff’s man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man’s House (Royal Hospital), Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson’s Hospital for reduced but respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of [678] misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper.

With which attendant indignities?

The unsympathetic indifference of previously amiable females, the contempt of muscular males, the acceptance of fragments of bread, the simulated ignorance of casual acquaintances, the latration of illegitimate unlicensed vagabond dogs, the infantile discharge of decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing, nothing or less than nothing.

By what could such a situation be precluded?

By decease (change of state), by departure (change of place).

Which preferably?

The latter, by the line of least resistance.

What considerations rendered it not entirely undesirable?

Constant cohabitation impeding mutual toleration of personal defects. The habit of independent purchase increasingly cultivated. The necessity to counteract by impermanent sojourn the permanence of arrest.

What considerations rendered it not irrational?

The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied, which being done, offspring produced and educed to maturity, the parties, if not disunited were obliged to reunite, for increase and multiplication which was absurd, to form by reunion the original couple of uniting parties, which was impossible.

What considerations rendered it desirable?

The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad, as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and hachures.

In Ireland?

The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with submerged petrified city, the Giant’s Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tiperrary, the islands of Aran, the pastures of royal Meath, Brigid’s elm in Kildare, the Queen’s Island shipyard in Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.

[679] Abroad?

Ceylon, (with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C, 5 Dame Street, Dublin), Jerusalem, tbe holy city (with mosque of Omar and gate of Damascus, goal of aspiration), the straits of Gibraltar (the unique birthplace of Marion Tweedy), the Parthenon (containing statues, nude Grecian divinities) the Wall street money market (which controlled international finance), the Plaza de Toros at La Linea, Spain (where O’Hara of the Camerons had slain the bull), Niagara (over which no human being had passed with impunity), the land of the Eskimos (eaters of soap), the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller returns), the bay of Naples (to see which was to die), the Dead Sea.

Under what guidance, following what signs?

At sea, septentrional, by night the polestar, located at the point of intersection of the right line from beta to alpha in Ursa Major produced and divided externally at omega and the hypotenuse of the rightangled triangle formed by the line alpha omega so produced and the line alpha delta of Ursa Major. On land, meridional, a bispherical moon, reveated in imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice of the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating female, a pillar of the cloud by day.

What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?

£ 5 reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom Leopold (Poldy), height 5 ft., 9 1/2 inches, full build, olive complexion, may have since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above sum will be paid for information leading to his discovery.

What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.

What tributes his?

Honour and gifts of strangers, the friends of Everyman. A nymph immortal, beauty, the bride of Noman.

[680] Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?

Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly hea would her and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.

What would render such return irrational?

An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.

What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?

The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory: the obscurity of the night, rendering invisible the uncertainty of thoroughfares, rendering perilous the necessity for repose, obviating movement: the proximity of an occupied bed, obviating research: the anticipation of warmth (human) tempered with coolness (linen) obviating desire and rendering desirable: the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo, desired desire.

What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an unoccupied bed?

The removal of nocturnal solitude, the superior quality of human (mature female) to inhuman (hotwaterjar) calefaction, the stimulation of matutinal contact, the economy of mangling done on the premises in the case of trousers accurately folded and placed lengthwise between the spring mattress (striped) and the woollen mattress (biscuit section).

What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?

The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and [681] Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the visit to museum and national library (holy place): the bookhunt along Bedford row, Merchants Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte in Bernard Kiernan’s premises (holocaust): a blank period of time including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking (wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering): the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone street, lower, and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street (Armageddon): nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman’s shelter, Butt Bridge (atonement).

What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?

The cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by the insentient material of a strainveined timber table.

What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform mutitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?

Who was M’Intosh?

What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?

Where was Moses when the candle went out?

What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, silently, successively, enumerate?

A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement, to obtain a certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan (agent for Pulbrook, Robertson and C°, 5 Dame Street, Dublin, and 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C.), to certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in the case of Hellenic female divinities, to obtain admission (gratuitous or paid) to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandmann Palmer at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street.

[682] What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?

The face of her father, the late Major Brian Cooper Tweedy, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, of Gibraltar and Rehoboth, Dolphin’s Barn.

What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?

Retreating, at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, Amiens street, with constant uniform acceleration, along parallel lines meeting at infinity, if produced: along parallel lines, reproduced from infinity, with constant uniform retardation, at the terminus of the Great Nothern Railway Amiens street, returning.

What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were perceived by him?

A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies’ hose, a pair of new violet garters, a pair of outsize ladies’ drawers of India mull, cut on generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti’s Turkish cigarettes and containing a long bright steel safety pin, folded curvilinear, a camisole of batiste with thin lace border, a accordion underskirt of blue silk moirette, all these objects being disposed irregularly on the top of a rectangular trunk, quadruple battened, having capped corners, with multicoloured labels, initialled on its fore side in white lettering B. C. T. (Brian Cooper Tweedy).

What impersonal objects were perceived?

A commode, one leg fractured, totally covered by square cretonne cutting, apple design, on which rested a lady’s black straw hat. Orangekeyed ware, bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware and ironmongery manufacturer, 21, 22, 23 Moore Street, disposed irregularly on the washstand and floor, and consisting of basin, soapdish and brushtray (on the washstand, together), pitcher and night article (on the floor, separate).

Bloom’s acts?

He deposited the articles of clothing on a chair, removed his remaining articles of clothing, took from beneath the bolster at the head of the bed a folded long white nightshirt, inserted his head and arms into the proper apertures of the nightshirt, removed a pillow from the head to the foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the bed.

[683] How?

With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode (his own or not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress being old, the brass quoits and pendent viper radii loose and tremulous under stress and strain: prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of lust or adders: lightly, the less to disturb: reverently, the bed of conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of marriage, of sleep and of death.

What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.

If he had smiled why would he have smiled?

To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas, he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

What preceding series?

Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell d’Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society’s Horse Show, Maggot O’Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder, an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John Hooper, Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack at the General Post Office, Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so on to no last term.

What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and late occupant of the bed?

Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporal proportion (a billsticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a boaster).

[684] Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal proportion and commercial ability?

Because he had observed with augmenting frequency in the preceding members of the same series the same concupiscence, inflammably transmitted first with alarm, then with understanding, then with desire, finally with fatigue, with alternating symptoms of epicene comprehension and apprehension.

With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections affected?

Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.

Envy?

Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of a constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental female organism, passive but not obtuse.

Jealousy?

Because a nature full and volatile in its free state, was alternately the agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agents and reagents at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of increase and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial reentrance. Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure.

Abnegation?

In virtue of a) acquaintance initiated in September 1903 in the establishment of George Mesias, merchant tailor and outfitter, 5 Eden Quay, b) hospitality extended and received in kind, reciprocated and reappropriated in person, c) comparative youth subject to impulses of ambition and magnanimity,colleagual altruism and amorous egoism, d) extraracial attraction, intraracial inhibition, supraracial prerogative, e) an imminent provincial musical tour, common current expenses, net proceeds divided.

Equanimity?

As natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance with [685] his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity. As not as calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king’s enemies, impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated murder. As not more abnormal than all other altered processes of adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal equilibrium between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances, foods, beverages, acquired habits, indulged inclinations, significant disease. As more than inevitable, irreparable.

Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?

From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the adulterously violated.

What retribution, if any?

Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses), not yet. Suit for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of injuries sustained (selfinflicted), not impossibly. If any, positively, connivance, introduction of emulation (material, a prosperous rival agency of publicity: moral, a successful rival agent of intimacy), depreciation, alienation, humiliation, separation protecting the one separated from the other, protecting separator from both.

By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?

The preordained frangibility of the hymen, the presupposed intangibility of the thing in itself: the incongruity and disproportion between the selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the selfabbreviating [686] relaxation of the thing done: the fallaciously inferred debility of the female, the muscularity of the male: the variations of ethical codes: the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopœic transitive verb with direct feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb and quasimonosyllabic onomatopœic past participle with complementary masculine agent) in the passive voice: the continued product of seminators by generation: the continual production of semen by distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars.

In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored (the land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of Greece, the land of promise) of adipose posterior female hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude, insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression, expressive of mute immutable mature animality.

The visible signs of antesatisfaction?

An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a tentative revelation; a silent contemplation.

Then?

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

The visible signs of postsatisfaction?

A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a solicitous aversion: a proximate erection.

What followed this silent action?

Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation, catechetical interrogation.

[687] With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation?

Negative: he omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and in the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and C°, Limited, 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street, the erotic provocation and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude (Gerty), surname unknown. Positive: he included mention of a performance by Mrs Bandmann Palmer of Leah at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street, an invitation to supper at Wynn’s (Murphy’s) Hotel 35, 36 and 37 Lower Abbey street, a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency entituled Sweets of Sin, anonymous, author a gentlemen of fashion, a temporary concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the course of a postcenal gymnastic display, the victim (since completely recovered) being Stephen Dedalus, professor and author, eldest surviving son of Simon Dedalus, of no fixed occupation, an aeronautical feat executed by him (narrator) in the presence of a witness, the professor and author aforesaid, with promptitude of decision and gymnastic flexibility.

Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?

Absolutely.

Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?

Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.

What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration?

By the listener a limitation of fertility inasmuch as marriage had been celebrated 2 calendar months after the 18th anniversary of her birth (8 September 1870), viz. 8 October, and consummated on the same date with female issue born 15 June 1889, having been anticipatorily consummated on the 10 September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last taken place 5 weeks previous, viz. 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29 December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1895, aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the [688] natural female organ. By the narrator a limitation of activity, mental and corporal, inasmuch as complete mental intercourse between himself and the listener had not taken place since the consummation of puberty, indicated by catamenic hemorrhage, of the female issue of narrator and listener, 15 September 1903, there remained a period of 9 months and 1 day during which in consequence of a preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension between the consummated females (listener and issue), complete corporal liberty of action had been circumscribed.

How?

By various reiterated feminine interrogation concerning the masculine destination whither, the place where, the time at which, the duration for which, the object with which in the case of temporary absences, projected or effected.

What moved visibly above the listener’s and the narrator’s invisible thoughts?

The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.

In what directions did listener and narrator lie?

Listener: S. E. by E.: Narrator N. W. by W.: on the 53rd parallel of latitude, N. and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an angle of 45° to the terrestrial equator.

In what state of rest or motion?

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.

In what posture?

Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator: reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted on a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn. [Apjohn,] the childman weary, the manchild in the womb.

[689] Womb? Weary?

He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s eggin the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

 ® 

[690] Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them to go into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to dring it into him for a month yes and then wed have a hospital nurse next thing on the carpet have him staying there till they throw him out or a nun maybe like the smutty photo he has shes as much a nun as Im not yes because theyre so weak and puling when theyre sick they want a woman to get well if his nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic and that dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloof Mountain the day I wore that dress Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with her old maids voice [691] trying to imagine he was dying on account of her to never see thy face again though he looked more like a man with his beard a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I hate bandaging and dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his corns afraid hed get blood poisoning but if it was a thing I was sick then wed see what attention only of course the woman hides it not to give all the trouble they do yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway love its not or hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel story he made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who did I meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me see that big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting with a young girl at Pooles Myriorana and turned my back on him when he slinked out looking quite conscious what harm but he had the impudence to make up to me one time well done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of all the big stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor only for I hate having a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some little bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the sly if they only knew him as well as I do yes because the day before yesterday he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the front room for the matches to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking about business so very probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she can out of him no fool like an old fool and then the usual kissing my bottom was to hide it not that I care two straws who he does it with or knew before that way though Id like to find out so long as I dont have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut that Mary we had in Ontario Terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad enough to get the smell of those painted women off him once or twice I had a suspicion by getting him to come near me when I found the long hair on his coat without that one when I went into the kitchen pretending he was drinking water 1 woman is not enough for them it was all his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she could eat at our table on Christmas if you please O no thank you not in my house stealing my potatoes and the oysters 2/6 per doz going out to see her aunt if you please common robbery so it was but I was sure he had something on with that one it takes me to find out a thing like that he said you have no proof it was her proof O yes her aunt was very fond [692] of oysters but I told her what I thought of her suggesting me to go out to be alone with her I wouldnt lower myself to spy on them the garters I found in her room the Friday she was out that was enough for me a little bit too much I saw to that her face swelled up on her with temper when I gave her her weeks notice better do without them altogether do out the rooms myself quicker only for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt I gave it to him anyhow either she or me leaves the house I couldnt even touch him if I thought he was with a dirty barefaced liar and sloven like that one deuying it up to my face and singing about the place in the W C too because she knew she was too well off yes because he couldnt possibly do without it that long so he must do it somewhere and the last time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a great squeeze going along by the Tolka in my hand there steals another I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back singing the young May Moon shes beaming love because he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case God knows hes change in a way not to be always and ever wearing the same old hat unless I paid some nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do it myself a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone with him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down on their cheek doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour question and answer would you do this that and the other with the coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some Dean or Bishop was sitting beside me in the jews Temples gardens when I was knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the German Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all [693] over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking of his father I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of a drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick their bills up with some liquor Id like to sip those richlooking green and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera hats I tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the last time we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up as if the world was coming to an end God be merciful to us I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish when I blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar and then they come and tell you theres no God what could you do if it was running and rushing about nothing only make an act of contrition the candle I lit that evening in Whitefriars street chapel for the month of May see it brought its luck though hed scoff if he heard because he never goes to church [694] burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year as regular as the clock always with a smell of children off her the one they called budgers or something like a nigger with a shock of hair on it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I was there a squad of them falling over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ears supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they have us swollen out like elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked having another not off him though still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly I suppose it was meeting Josie Powell and the funeral and thinking about me and Boylan set him off well he can think what he likes now if thatll do him any good I know they were spooning a bit when I came on the scene he was dancing and sitting out with her the night of Georgina Simpsons housewarming and then he wanted to ram it down my neck on account of not liking to see her a wallflower that was why we had the standup row over politics he began it not me when he said about Our Lord being a carpenter at last he made me cry of course a woman is so sensitive about every thing I was fuming with myself after for giving in only for I knew he was gone on me and the first socialist he said He was he annoyed me so much I couldnt put him into a temper still he knows a lot of mixed up things especially about the body and the insides I often wanted to study up that myself what we have inside us in that family physician I could always hear his voice talking when the room was crowded and watch him after that I pretended I had on a coolness with her over him [695] mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to because he used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he asked who are you going to and I said over to Floey and he made me the present of lord Byrons poems and the three pairs of gloves so that finished that I could quite easily get him to make it up any time I know how Id even supposing he got in with her again and was going out to see her somewhere Id know if he refused to eat the onions I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves on going out 1 kiss then wouldsend them all spinning however alright well see then let him go to her she of course would only be too delighted to pretend shes mad in love with him that I wouldnt so much mind Id just go to her and ask her do you love him and look her square in the eyes she couldnt fool me but he might imagine he was and make a declaration with his plabbery kind of a manner to her like he did to me though I had the devils own job to get it out of him though I liked him for that it showed he could hold in and wasnt to be got for the asking he was on the pop of asking me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling the potato cake theres something I want to say to you only for I put him off letting on I was in a temper with my hands and arms full of pasty flour in any case I let out too much the night before talking of dreams so I didnt want to let him know more than was good for him she used to be always embracing me Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course glauming me over and when I said I washed up and down as far as possible asking me did you wash possible the women are always egging on to that putting it on thick when hes there they know by his sly eye blinking a bit putting on the indifferent when they come out with something the kind he is what spoils him I dont wonder in the least because he was very handsome at that time trying to look like lord Byron I said I liked though he was too beautiful for a man and he was a little before we got engaged afterwards though she didnt like it so much the day I was in fits of laughing with the giggles I couldnt stop about all my hairpins falling one after another with the mass of hair I had youre always in great humour she said yes because it grigged her because she knew what it meant because I used to tell her a good bit of what went on between us not all but just enough to make her month water but that wasnt my fault she didnt darken the door much after we were married I wonder what shes got like now [696] after living with that dotty husband of hers she had her face beginning to look drawn and run down the last time I saw her she must have been just after a row with him because I saw on the moment she was edging to draw down a conversation about husbands and talk about him to run him down what was it she told me O yes that sometimes he used to go to bed with his muddy boots on when the maggot takes him just imagine having to get into bed with a thing like that that might murder you any moment what a man well its not the one way everyone goes mad Poldy anyway whatever he does always wipes his feet on the mat when he comes in wet or shine and always blacks his own boots too and he always takes off his hat when he comes up in the street like that and now hes going about in his slippers to look for £ 10000 for a postcard up up O Sweetheart May wouldnt a thing like that simply bore you stiff to extinction actually too stupid even to take his boots off now what could you make of a man like that Id rather die 20 times over than marry another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do know me come sleep with me yes and he knows that too at the bottom of his heart take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned her husband for what I wonder in love with some other man yes it was found out on her wasnt she the downright villain to go and do a thing like that of course some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad and always the worst word in the world what do they ask us to marry them for if were so bad as all that comes to yes because they cant get on without us white Arsenic she put in his tea of flypaper wasnt it I wonder why they call it that if I asked him hed say its from the Greek leave us as wise as we were before she must have been madly in love with the other fellow to run the chance of being hanged O she didnt care if that was her nature what could she do besides theyre not brutes enough to go and hang a woman surely are they

theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up and asked the girl where it was what do I care with it dropping out of me and that black closed breeches he made me buy takes you half an hour to let them down wetting all myself always with some brandnew fad every other week such a long one I did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind that I never got after some robber of a woman and he wanted me to put it in the Irish Times lost in the ladies lavatory D B C Dame street [697] finder return to Mrs Marion Bloom and I saw his eyes on my feet going out through the turning door he was looking when I looked back and I went there for tea 2 days after in the hope but he wasnt now how did that excite him because I was crossing them when we were in the other room first he meant the shoes that are too tight to walk in my hand is nice like that if I only had a ring with the stone for my mouth a nice aquamarine Ill stick him for one and a gold bracelet I dont like my foot so much still I made him spend once with my foot the night after Goodwins botchup of a concert so cold and windy it was well we had that rum in the house to mull and the fire wasnt black out when he asked to take off my stockings lying on the hearthrug in Lombard street well and another time it was my muddy boots hed like me to walk in all the horses dung I could find but of course hes not natural like the rest of the world that I what did he say I could give 9 points in 10 to Katty Lanner and beat her what does that mean I asked him I forget what he said because the stoppress edition just passed and the man with the curly hair in the Lucan dairy thats so polite I think I saw his face before somewhere I noticed him when I was tasting the butter so I took my time Bartell dArcy too that he used to make fun of when he commenced kissing me on the choir stairs after I sang Gounods Ave Maria what are we waiting for O my heart kiss me straight on the brow and part which is my brown part he was pretty hot for all his tinny voice too my low notes he was always raving about if you can believe him I liked the way he used his mouth singing then he said wasnt it terrible to do that there in a place like that I dont see anything so terrible about it Ill tell him about that some day not now and surprise him ay and Ill take him there and show him the very place too we did it so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was 10 times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth Square he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions is it permitted to inquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right against the [698] sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket O Maria Santisima he did look a big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth he had made me hungry to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat I had on with sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel down in the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new raincoat you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so savage for it if anyone was passing so I lifted them a bit and touched his trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after with my ring hand to keep him from doing worse where it was too public I was dying to find out was he circumcised he was shaking like a jelly all over they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it and father waiting all the time for his dinner he told me to say I left my purse in the butchers and had to go back for it what a Deceiver then he wrote me that letter with all those words in it how could he have the face to any woman after his company manners making it so awkward after when we met asking me have I offended you with my eyelids down of course he saw I wasnt he had a few brains not like that other fool Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky man and if I knew what it meant of course I had to say no for form sake dont understand you I said and wasnt it natural so it is of course it used to be written up with a picture of a womans on that wall in Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere only for children seeing it too young then writing a letter every morning sometimes twice a day I liked the way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine [699] was the 8th then I wrote the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth but he never knew how to embrace well like Gardner I hope hell come on Monday as he said at the same time four I hate people who come at all hours answer the door you think its the vegetables then its somebody and you all undressed or the door of the filthy sloppy kitchen blows open the day old frostyface Goodwin called about the concert in Lombard street and I just after dinner all flushed and tossed with boiling old stew dont look at me professor I had to say Im a fright yes but he was a real old gent in his way it was impossible to be more respectful nobody to say youre out you have to peep out through the blind like the messengerboy today I thought it was a putoff first him sending the port and the peaches first and I was just beginning to yawn with nerves thinking he was trying to make a fool of me when I knew his tattarrattat at the door he must have been a bit late because it was 1/4 after 3 when I saw the 2 Dedalus girls coming from school I never know the time even that watch he gave me never seems to go properly Id want to get it looked after when I threw the penny to that lame sailor for England home and beauty when I was whistling there is a charming girl I love and I hadnt even put on my clean shift or powdered myself or a thing then this day week were to go to Belfast just as well he has to go to Ennis his fathers anniversary the 27 th it wouldnt be pleasant if he did suppose our rooms at the hotel were beside each other and any fooling went on in the new bed I couldnt tell him to stop and not bother me with him in the next room or perhaps some protestant clergyman with a cough knocking on the wall then he wouldnt believe next day we didnt do something its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover after me telling him we never did anything of course he didnt believe me no its better hes going where he is besides something always happens with him the time going to the Mallow Concert at Maryborough ordering boiling soup for the two of us then the bell rang out he walks down the platform with the soup splashing about taking spoonfuls of it hadnt he the nerve and the waiter after him making a holy show of us screeching and confusion for the engine to start but he wouldnt pay till he finished it the two gentlemen in the 3rd class carriage said he was quite right so he was too hes so pigheaded sometimes when he gets a thing into his head a good job he was able to open the carriage door with his knife or theyd have taken us on to Cork I suppose that was done out of revenge on him O I love jaunting in a train or a car with lovely soft cushions I wonder will he take a 1st class for me he might want to do it [700] in the train by tipping the guard well O I suppose there’ll be the usual idiots of men gaping at us with their eyes as stupid as ever they can possibly be that was an exceptional man that common workman that left us alone in the carriage that day going to Howth Id like to find out something about him 1 or 2 tunnels perhaps then you have to look out of the window all the nicer then coming back suppose I never came back what would they say eloped with him that gets you on on the stage the last concert I sang at where its over a year ago when was it St Teresas hall Clarendon St little chits of missies they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her like on account of father being in the army and my singing the absentminded beggar and wearing a brooch for lord Roberts when I had the map of it all and Poldy not Irish enough was it him managed it this time I wouldnt put it past him like he got me on to sing in the Stabat Mater by going around saying he was putting Lead Kindly Light to music I put him up to that till the jesuits found out he was a freemason thumping the piano lead Thou me on copied from some old opera yes and he was going about with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves talking his usual trash and nonsense he says that little man he showed me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffith is he well he doesnt look it thats all I can say still it must have been him he knew there was a boycott I hate the mention of politics after the war that Pretoria and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein where Gardner Lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt of enteric fever he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty he was pale with excitement about going away or wed be seen from the road he couldnt stand properly and I so hot as I never felt they could have made their peace in the beginning or old oom Paul and the rest of the old Krugers go and fight it out between them instead of dragging on for years killing any finelooking men there were with their fever if he was even decently shot it wouldnt have been so bad I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely after looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies or those sham battles on the 15 acres the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela his father made his money over selling the horses for the cavalry well he could buy me a nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him theyve [701] lovely linen up there or one of those nice kimono things I must buy a mothball like I had before to keep in the drawer with them it would be exciting going around with him shopping buying those things in a new city better leave this ring behind want to keep turning and turning to get it over the knuckle there or they might bell it round the town in their papers or tell the police on me but theyd think were married O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care he has plenty of money and hes not a marrying man so somebody better get it out of him if I could find out whether he likes me I looked a bit washy of course when I looked close in the handglass powdering a mirror never gives you the expression besides scrooching down on me like that all the time with his big hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat always having to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and stick out her tongue as far as ever she could and he so quiet and mild with his tingating cither can you ever be up to men the way it takes them lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish tie and socks with the skyblue silk things on them hes certainly welloff I know by the cut his clothes have and his heavy watch but he was like a perfect devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stop press tearing up the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits that sponger he was making free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me with his dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have picked every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it it was so tasty and browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into my muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to be thankful for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment to be noticed the way the world is divided in any case if its going to go on I want at least two other good chemises for one thing and but I dont know what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didnt make much secret of what she hadnt yes and the [702] second pair of silkette stockings is laddered after one days wear I could have brought them back to Lewers this morning and kick up a row and made that one change them only not to upset myself and run the risk of walking into him and ruining the whole thing and one of those kidfitting corsets Id want advertised cheap in the Gentlewoman with elastic gores on the hips he saved the one I have but thats no good what did they say they give a delightful figure line 11 6 obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to reduce flesh my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner or am I getting too fond of it the last they sent from O Rourkes was as flat as a pancake he makes his money easy Larry they call him the old mangy parcel he sent at Xmas a cottage cake and a bottle of hogwash he tried to palm off as claret that he couldnt get anyone to drink God spare his spit for fear hed die of the drouth or I must do a few breathing exercises I wonder is that antifat any good might overdo it thin ones are not so much the fashion now garters that much I have the violet pair I wore today thats all he bought me out of the cheque he got on the first O no there was the face lotion I finished the last of yesterday that made my skin like new I told him over and over again get that made up in the same place and dont forget it God only knows whether he did after all I said to him Ill know by the bottle anyway if not I suppose Ill only have to wash in my piss like beeftea or chickensoup with some of that opoponax and violet I thought it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit the skin underneath is much finer where it peeled off there on my finger after the burn its a pity it isnt all like that and the four paltry handerchiefs about 6/- in all sure you cant get on in this world without style all going in food and rent when I get it Ill lash it around I tell you in fine style I always want to throw a handful of tea into the pot measuring and mincing if I buy a pair of old brogues itself do you like those new shoes yes how much were they Ive no clothes at all the brown costume and the skirt and jacket and the one at the cleaners 3 whats that for any woman cutting up this old hat and patching up the other the men wont look at you and women try to walk on you because they know youve no man then with all the things getting dearer every day for the 4 years more I have of life up to 35 no Im what am I at all Ill be 33 in September will I what O well look at that Mrs Galbraith shes much older than me I saw her when I was out last week her beautys on the wane she was a lovely woman magnificent head of hair on her down to her waist tossing it back like that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street 1st thing I did every morning [703] to look across see her combing it as if she loved it and was full of it pity I only got to know her the day before we left and that Mrs Langtry the Jersey Lily the prince of Wales was in love with I suppose hes like the first man going the roads only for the name of a king theyre all made the one way only a black mans Id like to try a beauty up to what was she 45 there was some funny story about the jealous old husband what was it at all and an oyster knife he went no he made her wear a kind of a tin thing around her and the prince of Wales yes he had the oyster knife cant be true a thing like that like some of those books he brings me the works of Master Francois somebody supposed to be a priest about a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out a nice word for any priest to write and her a — e as if any fool wouldnt know what that meant I hate that pretending of all things with the old blackguards face on him anybody can see its not true and that Ruby and Fair Tyrants he brought me that twice I remember when I came to page 50 the part about where she hangs him up out of a hook with a cord flagellate sure theres nothing for a woman in that all invention made up about he drinking the champagne out of her slipper after the ball was over like the infant Jesus in the crib at Inchicore in the Blessed Virgins arms sure no woman could have a child that big taken out of her and I thought first it came out of her side because how could she go to the chamber when she wanted to and she a rich lady of course she felt honoured H. R. H. he was in Gibraltar the year I was born I bet he found lilies there too where he planted the tree he planted more than that in his time he might have planted me too if hed come a bit sooner then I wouldnt be here as I am he ought to chuck that Freeman with the paltry few shillings he knocks out of it and go into an office or something where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count the money all the day of course he prefers plottering about the house so you cant stir with him any side whats your programme today I wish hed even smoke a pipe like father to get the smell of a man or pretending to be mooching about for advertisements when he could have been in Mr Cuffes still only for what he did then sending me to try and patch it up I could have got him promoted there to be the manager he gave me a great mirada once or twice first he was as stiff as the mischief really and truly Mrs Bloom only I felt rotten simply with the old rubbishy dress that I lost the leads out of the tails with no cut in it but theyre coming into fashion again I bought it simply to please him I knew it was no good by the finish pity I changed my mind of going to Todd and [704] Burns as I said and not Lees it was just like the shop itself rummage sale a lot of trash I hate those rich shops get on your nerves nothing kills me altogether only he thinks he knows a great lot about a womans dress and cooking mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it if I went by his advices every blessed hat I put on does that suit me yes take that thats alright the one like a wedding cake standing up miles off my head he said suited me or the dishcover one coming down on my backside on pins and needles about the shop girl in that place in Grafton street I had the misfortune to bring him into and she as insolent as ever she could be with her smirk saying Im afraid were giving you too much trouble whats she there for but I stared it out of her yes he was awfully stiff and no wonder but he changed the second time he looked Poldy pigheaded as usual like the soup but I could see him looking very hard at my chest when he stood up to open the door for me it was nice of him to show me out in any case Im extremely sorry Mrs Bloom believe me without making it too marked the first time after him being insulted and me being supposed to be his wife I just half smiled I know my chest was out that way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and Im sure you were

yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf the woman is beauty of course thats admitted when he said I could pose for a picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street when he lost the job in Helys and I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only shes younger or Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has the nymphs used they go about like that I asked him that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market or that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side the Queens own [705] they were a nice lot its well the Surreys relieved them theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to try some fellow or other trying to catch my eye or if it was 1 of the 7 wonders of the world O and the stink of those rotten places the night coming home with of those rotten places the night coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade to make you feel nice and watery I went into 1 of them it was so biting cold I couldnt keep it when was that 93 the canal was frozen yes it was a few months after a pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see me squatting in the mens place meadero I tried to draw a picture of it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang of something there and that word met something with hoses in it and he came out with some jawbreakers about the incarnation he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand then he goes and burns the bottom out of the pan all for his Kidney this one not so much theres the mark of his teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple I had to scream out arent they fearful trying to hurt you I had a great breast of milk with Milly enough for two what was the reason of that he said I could have got a pound a week as a wet nurse all swelled out the morning that delicate looking student that stopped in n° 28 with the Citrons Penrose nearly caught me washing through the window only for I snapped up the towel to my face that was his studenting hurt me they used to weaning her till he got doctor Brady to give me the Belladonna prescription I had to get him to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember the one half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes and its so much smoother the skin much an hour he was at them Im sure by the clock like some kind of a big infant I had at me they want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a woman I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look ugly or those lines ftom the strain who knows the way hed take it you want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like him thank God some of [706] them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the contrast he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday

frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweet sonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo bits leaving things like that lying around hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C Ill get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall making the place hotter than it is the rain was lovely just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared with their 3 Rock mountain they think is so great with the red sentries here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the mosquito nets and the smell of the rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from the B Marche paris what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on what she was very nice whats this her other name was just a P C to tell you I sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear you sing in old Madrid or Waiting Concone is the name of those exercises he bought me one of those new some word I couldnt make out shawls amusing things but tear for the least thing still there lovely I think dont you will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out regards to your father also Captain Grove with love yes affly x x x x x she didnt look a bit married just like a girl he was years older than her wogger he was awfully fond of me when he held down the wire with his foot for me to step over at the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way [707] thats why I was afraid when that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the banderilleros with the sashes and the 2 things in their hats and the brutes of men shouting bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their nice white mantillas ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses I never heard of such a thing in all my life yes he used to break his heart at me taking off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it sick what became of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them its like all through a mist makes you feel so old I made the scones of course I had everything all to myself then a girl Hester we used to compare our hair mine was thicker than hers she showed me how to settle it at the back when I put it up and whats this else how to make a knot on a thread with the one hand we were like cousins what age was I then the night of the storm I slept in her bed she had her arms round me then we were fighting in the morning with lhe pillow what fun he was watching me whenever he got an opportunity at the band on the Alameda esplanade when I was with father and Captain Grove I looked up at the church first and then at the windows then down and our eyes met I felt something go through me like all needles my eyes were dancing I remember after when I looked at myself in the glass hardly recognized myself the change I had a splendid skin from the sun and the excitement like a rose I didnt get a wink of sleep it wouldnt have been nice on account of her but I could have stopped it in time she gave me the Moonstone to read that was the first I read of Wilkie Collins East Lynne I read and the shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry Dunbar by that other woman I lent him afterwards with Mulveys photo in it so as he see I wasnt without and Lord Lytton Eugene Aram Molly bawn she gave me by Mrs Hungerford on account of the name I dont like books with a Molly in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore always shopifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it this blanket is too heavy on me thats better I havent even one decent nightdress this thing gets all rolled up under me besides him and his fooling thats better I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair when I stood up they were so fattish and firm when I got up on the sofa cushions to see with my clothes up and the bugs tons of them at night and the mosquito nets I couldnt read a line Lord how long ago it seems centuries of course they never come back and she didnt put her address right on it either she may have noticed her wogger people were always going away and we never I remember that day with the waves and the boats [708] with their high heads rocking and the swell of the ship those Officers uniforms on shore leave made me seasick he didnt say anything he was very serious I had the high buttoned boots on and my skirt was blowing she kissed me six or seven times didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near it my lips were taittering when I said goodbye she had a Gorgeous wrap of some special kind of blue colour on her for the voyage made very peculiarly to one side like and it was extremely pretty it got as dull as the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out of it somewhere were never easy where we are father or aunt or marriage waiting always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting nor speeeed his flying feet their damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop especially the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all directions of you didnt open the windows when general Ulysses Grant whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the ship and old Sprague the codsul that was there from before the flood dressed up poor man and he in mourning for the son then the same old reveille in the morning and drums rolling and the unfortunate poor devils of soldiers walking about with messtins smelling the place more than the old longbearded jews in their jellibees and levites assembly and sound clear and gunfire for the men to cross the lines and the warden marching with his keys to lock the gates and the bagpipes and only Captain Groves and father talking about Rorkes drift and Plevna and sir Garnet Wolseley and Gordon at Khartoum lighting their pipes for them everytime they went out drunken old devil with his grog on the windowsill catch him leaving any of it picking his nose trying to think of some other dirty story to tell up in a corner but he never forgot himself when I was there sending me out of the room on some blind excuse paying his compliments the Bushmills whisky talking of course but hed do the same to the next woman that came along I supposed he died of galloping drink ages ago the days like years not a letter from a living soul except the odd few I posted to myself with bits of paper in them so bored sometimes I could fight with my nails listening to that old Arab with the one eye and his heass of an instrument singing his heah heah heah aheah all my compriments on your hotchapotch of your heass as bad as now with the hands hanging off me looking out of the window if there was a nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them not even if you shake [709] hands twice with the left he didnt recognise me either when I half frowned at him outside Westland row chapel where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me those country gougers up in the City Arms intelligence they had a damn sight less than the bulls and cows they were selling the meat and the coalmans bell that noisy bugger trying to swindle me with the wrong bill he took out of his hat what a pair of paws and pots and pans and kettles to mend any broken bottles for a poor man today and no visitors or post ever except his cheques or some advertisement like that wonderworker they sent him addressed dear Madam only his letter and the card from Milly this morning see she wrote a letter to him who did I get the last letter from O Mrs Dwenn now whatever possessed her to write after so many years to know the recipe I had for pisto madrileno Floey Dillon since she wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect if Im to believe all I hear with a villa and eight rooms her father was an awfully nice man he was near seventy always good humour well now Miss Tweedy or Miss Gillespie theres the pyannyer that was a solid silver coffee service he had too on the mahogany sideboard then dying so far away I hate people that have always their poor story to tell everybody has their own troubles that poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute pneumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend more than mine its a bother having to answer he always tells me the wrong things and no stops to say like making a speech your sad bereavement symphathy I always make that mistake and newphew with 2 double yous in I hope hell write me a longer letter the next time if its a thing he really likes me O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no chances at all in this place like you used long ago I wish somebody would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan in Old Madrid silly women believe love is sighing I am dying still if he wrote it I suppose thered be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all around you like a new world I could write the answer in bed to let him imagine me short just a few words not those long crossed letters Atty Dillon used to write to the fellow that was something in the four courts that jilted her after out of the ladies letterwriter when I told her to say a few simple words he could twist how he liked not acting with precipit precipitancy with equal candour the greatest earthly happiness answer to a gentlemans proposal affirmatively my goodness theres nothing else its all very fine for them [710] but as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.

Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her in the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a 100 her face a mass of wrinkles with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress and the sun dancing 3 times on Easter Sunday morning and when the priest was going by with the bell bringing the vatican to the dying blessing herself for his Majestad an admirer he signed it I near jumped out of my skin I wanted to pick him up when I saw him following me along the Calle Real in the shop window then he tipped me just in passing I never thought hed write making an appointment I had it inside my petticoat bodice all day reading it up in every hole and corner while father was up at the drill instructing to find out by the handwriting or the language of stamps singing I remember shall I wear a white rose and I wanted to put on the old stupid clock to near the time he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young I put my knee up to him a few times to learn the way what did I tell him I was engaged for fun to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he believed that I was to be married to him in 3 years time theres many a true word spoken in jest there is a flower that bloometh a few things I told him true about myself just for him to be imagining the Spanish girls he didnt like I suppose one of them wouldnt have him I got him excited he crushed all the flowers on my bosom he brought me he couldnt count the pesetas and the perragordas till I taught him Cappoquin he came from he said on the Blackwater but it was too short then the day before he left may yes it was May when the infant king of Spain was born Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year up on the tiptop under the rockgun near OHaras tower I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old [711] Barbary apes they sent to Clapham without a tail careering all over the show on each others back Mrs Rubio said she was a regular old rock scorpion robbing the chickens out of Inces farm and throw stones at you if you went anear he was looking at me I had that white blouse on open at the front to encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just beginning to be plump I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down and ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the way down the monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing yes the sea and the sky you could do what you liked lie there for ever he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white ricestraw hat to take the newness out of it the left side of my face the best my blouse open for his last day transparent kind of shirt he had I could see his chest pink he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldnt let him he was awfully put out first for fear your never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere yes because they once took something down out of a woman that was up there for years covered with limesalts theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never get far enough up and then theyre done with you in a way till the next time yes because theres a wonderful feeling there all the time so tender how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat I had a skirt opening up the side I tortured the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel rrrsssst awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that morning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice so I went around to the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit moustache had he he said hed come back Lord its just like yesterday to me and if I was married hed do it to me and I promised him yes faithfully Id let him block [712] me now flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a Captain or admiral its nearly 20 years if I said firtree cove he would if he came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes to guess who I might recognize him hes young still about 40 perhaps hes married some girl on the black water and is quite changed they all do they havent half the character a woman has she little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt of her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you might say they could have put an article about it in the Chronicle I was a bit wild after when I blew out the old bag the biscuits were finrom Benady Bros and exploded it Lord what a bang all the woodcocks and pigeons screaming coming back the same way that we went over middle hill round by the old guardhouse and the jews burialplace pretending to read out the Hebrew on them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he didnt know what to make of me with his peaked cap on that he always wore crooked as often as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money I suppose theyre called after him I never tho ught that would be my name Bloom when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a visiting card or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre looking blooming Josie used to say after I married him well its better than Breen or Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan my mother whœver she was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely one she had Lunita Laredo the fun we had running along Willis road to Europe point twisting in and out all round the other side of Jersey they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them I was jumping up at the pepper trees and the white poplars pulling the leaves off and throwing them at him he went to India he was to write the voyages those men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be drowned or blown up somewhere I went up windmill hill to the flats that Sunday morning with Captain Rubios that was dead spyglass like the sentry had he said hed have one or two from on board I wore that frock from the B Marche Paris and the coral necklace the straits shining I could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier [713] white and the Atlas mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear Harry Molly Darling I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at mass when my petticoat began to slip down at the elevation weeks and weeks I kept the handerchief under my pillow for the smell of him there was no decent perfume to be got in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau despagne that faded and left a stink on you more than anything else I wanted to give him a memento he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck that I gave Gardner going to South Africa where those Boers killed him with their war and fever but they were well beaten all the same as if it brought its bad luck with it like an opal or pearl must have been pure 16 carat gold because it was very heavy I can see his face clean shaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train again weeping tone once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world the mists began I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet ssooooooong Ill let that out full when I get in front of the footlights again Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside anything in the world to make themselves someway interesting Irish homenade beauties soldiers daughter am I ay and whose are you bootmakers and publicasn I beg your pardon coach I thought you were a wheelbarrow theyd die down dead off their feet if ever they got a chance of walking down the Alameda on an officers arm like me on the bandnight my eyes flash my bust that they havent passion God help their poor head I knew more about men and life when I was 15 than theyll all know at 50 they dont know how to sing a song like that Gardner said no man could look at my mouth and teeth smiling like that and not think of it I was afraid he mightnt like my accent first he so English all father left me in spite of his stamps Ive my mothers eyes and figure anyhow he always said theyre so snotty about themselves some of those cads he wasnt a bit like that he was dead gone on my lips let them get a husband first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine or see if they can excite a swell with money that can pick and choose whoever he wants like Boylan to do it 4 or 5 times locked in each others arms or the voice either I could have been a prima donna only I married him comes looooves old deep down chin back not too much make it double My Ladys Bower is too long for an encore about the moated grange at twilight and vaunted rooms yes Ill sing Winds that blow from the south that he gave after the choirstairs performance Ill change that lace on my black dress to show off my bubs and Ill yes by [714] God Ill get that big fan mended make them burst with envy my hole is itching me always when I think of him I feel I want to I feel some wind in me better go easy not wake him have him at it again slobbering after washing every bit of myself back belly and sides if we had even a bath itself or my own room anyway I wish hed sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that a bit on my sidep iano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeeeeee one more song

that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night I couldnt rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see why am I so damned nervous about that though I like it in the winter its more company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was only about ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes dressing her up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those mountains the something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with the little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing about in it then make a race back into bed Im sure that fellow opposite used to be there the whole time watching with the lights out in the summer and I in my skin hopping around I used to love myself then stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming only when it came to the chamber performance I put out the light too so then there were 2 of us Goodbye to my sleep for this night anyhow I hope hes not going to get in with those medicals leading him astray to imagine hes young again coming in at 4 in the morning it must be if not more still he had the manners not to wake me what do they find to gabber about all night squandering money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water then he starts giving us his orders for eggs and tea Findon haddy and hot buttered toast I suppose well have him sitting up like the king of the country pumping the wrong end of the spoon up and down in his egg wherever he learned that from and I love to hear him falling up the stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray and then play with the cat she rubs up against you for her own sake I wonder has she fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking but I hate their claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening as I wait always [715] what a robber too that lovely fresh place I bought I think Ill get a bit of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some blancmange with black currant jam like long ago not those 2 lb pots of mixed plum and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and Woods goes twice as far only for the bones I hate those eels cod yes Ill get a nice piece of cod Im always getting enough for 3 forgetting anyway Im sick of that everlasting butchers meat from Buckleys loin chops and leg beef and rib steak and scrag of mutton and calfs pluck the very name is enough or a picnic suppose we all gave 5/ each and or let him pay and invite some other woman for him who Mrs Fleming and drove out to the furry glen or the strawberry beds wed have him examining all the horses toenails first like he does with the letters no not with Boylan there yes with some cold veal and ham mixed sandwiches there are little houses down at the bottom of the banks there on purpose but its as hot as blazes he says not a bank holiday anyhow I hate those ruck of Mary Ann coalboxes out for the day Whit Monday is a cursed day too no wonder that bee bit him better the seaside but Id never again in this life get into a boat with him after him at Bray telling the boatmen he knew how to row if anyone asked could he ride the steeplechase for the gold cup hed say yes then it came on to get rough the old thing crookeding about and the weight all down my side telling me to pull the right reins now pull the left and the tide all swamping in floods in through through the bottom and his oar slipping out of the stirrup its a mercy we werent all drowned he can swim of course me no theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm in his flannel trousers Id like to have tattered them down off him before all the people and give him what that one calls flagellate till he was black and blue do him all the good in the world only for that longnosed chap I dont know who he is with that other beauty Burke out of the City Arms hotel was there spying around as usual on the slip always where he wasnt wanted if there was a row on youd vomit a better face there was no love lost between us thats 1 consolation I wonder what kind is that book he brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de Kock I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his tube from one woman to another I couldnt even change my new white shoes all ruined with the saltwater and the hat I had with that feather all blowy and tossed on me how annoying and provoking because the smell of the sea excited me of course the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay round the back of the rock they were fine all silver in the fishermens baskets old Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa and the tall old chap with [716] the earrings I dont like a man you have to climb up to to get at I suppose theyre all dead and rotten long ago besides I dont like being alone in this big barracks of a place at night I suppose Ill have to put up with it I never brought a bit of salt in even when we moved in the confusion musical academy he was going to make on the first floor drawingroom with a brassplate or Blooms private hotel he suggested go and ruin himself altogether the way his father did down in Ennis like all the things he told father he was going to do and me but I saw through him telling me all the lovely places we could go for the honeymoon Venice by moonlight with the gondolas and the lake of Como he had a picture cut out of some paper of and mandolines and lanterns O how nice I said whatever I liked he was going to do immediately if not sooner will you be my man will you carry my can he ought to get a leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving us here all day youd never know what old beggar at the door for a crust with his long story might be a tramp and put his foot in the way to prevent me shutting it like that picture of that hardened criminal he was called in Lloyd’s Weekly News 20 years in jail then he comes out and murders an old woman for her money imagine his poor wife or mother or whoever she is such a face youd run miles away from I couldnt rest easy till I bolted all the doors and windows to make sure but its worse again being locked up like in a prison or a madhouse they ought to be all shot or the cat of nine tails a big brute like that that would attack a poor old woman to murder her in her bed Id cut them off him so I would not that hed be much use still better than nothing the night I was sure I heard burglars in the kitchen and he went down in his shirt with a candle and a poker as if he was looking for a mouse as white as a sheet frightened out of his wits making as much noise as he possibly could for the burglars benefit there isnt much to steal indeed the Lord knows still its the feeling especially now with Milly away such an idea for him to send the girl down there to learn to take photographs on account of his grandfather instead of sending her to skerrys academy where shed have to learn not like me getting all at school only hed do a thing like that all the same on account of me and Boylan thats why he did it Im certain the way he plots and plans everything out I couldnt turn round with her in the place lately unless I bolted the door first gave me the fidgets coming in without knocking first when I put the chair against the door just as I was washing myself there below with the glove get on your nerves then doing the loglady all day put her in a glasscase with two at a time to look at her it he knew she broke off the hand off that little gimcrack statue with her roughness and carelessness before she left that I got that little Italian [717] boy to mend so that you cant see the join for 2 shillings wouldnt even teem the potatoes for you of course shes right not to ruin her hands I noticed he was always talking to her lately at the table explaining things in the paper and she pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his side of the house and helping her into her coat but if there was anything wrong with her its meshed tell not him he cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a matter of fact I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it well see well see now shes well on for flirting too with Tom Devans two sons imitating me whistling with those romps of Murray girls calling for her can Milly come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out of her round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night its as well he sent her where she is she was just getting out of bounds wanting to go on the skatingrink and smoking their cigarettes through their nose I smelt it off her dress when I was biting off the thread of the button I sewed on to the bottom of her jacket she couldnt hide much from me I tell you only I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a parting and the last plumpudding too split in 2 halves see it comes out no matter what they say her tongue is a bit too long for my taste your blouse is open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle blackbottom and I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age of course any old rag looks well on you then a great touchmenot too in her own way at the Only Way in the Theatre royal take your foot away out of that I hate people touching me afraid of her life Id crush her skirt with the pleats a lot of that touching must go in theatres in the crush in the dark theyre always trying to wiggle up to you that fellow in the pit at the pit at the Gaiety for Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the last time Ill ever go there to be squashed like that for any Trilby or her barebum every two minutes tipping me there and looking away hes a bit daft I think I saw him after trying to get near two stylish dressed ladies outside Switzers window at the same little game I recognised him on the moment the face and everything but he didnt remember me and she didnt even want me to kiss her at the Broadstone going away well I hope shell get someone to dance attendance on her the way I did when she was down with the mumps and her glands swollen wheres this and wheres that of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place always only the usual girls nonsense and giggling that Conny Connolly writing to her in white ink on black paper sealed with sealingwax though she clapped [718] when the curtain came down because he looked so handsome then we had Martin Harvey for breakfast dinner and supper I thought to myself afterwards it must be real love if a man gives up his life for her that way for nothing I suppose there are few men like that left its hard to believe in it though unless it really happened to me the majority of them with not a particle of love in their natures to find two people like that nowadays full up of each other that would feel the same way as you do theyre usually a bit foolish in the head his father must have been a bit queer to go and poison himself after her still poor old man I suppose he felt lost always making love to my things too the few old rags I have wanting to put her hair up at 15 my powder too only ruin her skin on her shes time enough for that all her life after of course shes restless knowing shes pretty with her lips so red a pity they wont stay that way I was too but theres no use going to the fair with the thing answering me like a fishwoman when I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes the day we met Mrs Joe Gallaher at the trottingmatches and she pretended not to see us in her trap with Friery the solicitor we werent grand enough till I gave her 2 damn fine cracks across the ear for herself take that now for answering me like that and that for your impudence she had me that exasperated of course contradicting I was badtempered too because how was it there was a weed in the tea or I didnt sleep the night before cheese I ate was it and I told her over and over again not to leave knives crossed like that because she has nobody to command her as she said herself well if he doesnt correct her faith I will that was the last time she turned on the teartap I was just like that myself they darent order me about the place its his fault of course having the two of us slaving here instead of getting in a woman long ago am I ever going to have a proper servant again of course then shed see him coming Id have to let her know or shed revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs Flemming you have to be walking round after her putting the things into her hands sneezing and farting into the pots well of course shes old she cant help it a good job I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got lost behind the dresser I knew there was something and opened the window to let out the smell bringing in his friends to entertain them like the night he walked home with a dog if you please that might have been mad especially Simon Dedalus son his father such a criticiser with his glasses up with his tall hat on him at the cricket match and a great big hole in his sock one thing laughing at the other and his son that got all those prizes for whatever he won them in the intermediate imagine climbing over the railings if [719] anybody saw him that knew us wonder he didnt tear a big hole in his grand funeral trousers as if the one nature gave wasnt enough for anybody hawking him down into the dirty old kitchen now is he right in his head I ask pity it wasnt washing day my old pair of drawers might have been hanging up too on the line on exhibition for all hed ever care with the ironmould mark the stupid old bundle burned on them he might think was something else and she never even rendered down the fat I told her and now shes going such as she was on account of her paralysed husband getting worse theres always something wrong with them disease or they have to go under an operation or if its not that its drink and he beats her Ill have to hunt around again for someone every day I get up theres some new thing on sweet God sweet God well when Im stretched out dead in my grave I suppose Ill have some peace I want to get up a minute if Im let wait O Jesus wait yes that thing has come on me yes now wouldnt that afflicty ou of course all the poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me now what am I to do Friday Saturday Sunday wouldnt that pester the soul out of a body unless he likes it some men do God knows theres always something wrong with us 5 days every 3 or 4 weeks usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening that night it came on me like that the one and only tim ewe were in a box that Michael Gunn gave him to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety something he did about insurance for him Drimmies I was fit to be tied though I wouldnt give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I could all in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to sit it out then to the last tag I wont forget that wife of Scarli in a hurry supposed to be a fast play about adultery that idiot in the gallery hissing the woman adulteress he shouted I suppose he went and had a woman in the next lane running round all the back ways after to make up for it I wish he had what I had then hed boo I bet the cat itself is better off than us have we too much blood up in us or what O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make me pregnant as big as he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn it and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice no thats too purply O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of sin whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and cooking and children this [720] damned old bed too jingling like the dickens I suppose they could hear us away over the other side of the park till I suggested to put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom I wonder is it nicer in the day I think it is easy I think Ill cut all this hair off me there scalding me I might look like a young girl wouldnt he get the great suckin the next time he turned up my clothes on me Id give anything to see his face wheres the chamber gone easy Ive a holy horror of its breaking under me after that old commode I wonder was I too heavy sitting on his knee I made him sit on the easychair purposely when I took off only my blouse and skirt first in the other room he was so busy where he oughtnt to be he never felt me I hope my breath was sweet after those kissing comfits easy God I remember one time I could scout it out straight whistling like a man almost easy O Lord how noisy I hope theyre bubbles on it for a wad of money from some fellow Ill have to perfume it in the morning dont forget I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the smoothest place is right there between this bit here how soft like a peach easy God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman O Lord what a row youre making like the jersey lily easy easy O how the waters come down at Lahore

who knows is there anything the matter with my insides or have I something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was it last I Whit Monday yes its only about 3 weeks I ought to go to the doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in the world besides theres something queer about their children always smelling around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold maybe what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face for him with all my compriment I suppose hed know then and could you pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of Gibraltar the way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the way only I like letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can squeeze and pull the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles still theres something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys when she was a child whether she had worms or not still all the same paying him for that how much [721] is that doctor one guinea please and asking me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O anything no matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot that of course that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at myself 4 or 5 times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure O yes I said I am quite sure in a way that shut him up I knew what was coming next only natural weakness it was he excited me I dont know how the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as if we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother he used to amuse me the things he said with the half sloothering smile on him and all the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament O wasnt I the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule and the land league sending me that long strool of a song out of the Huguenots to sing in French to be more classy O beau pays de la Touraine that I never even sang once explaining and rigmaroling about religion and persecution he wont let you enjoy anything naturally then might he as a great favour the very 1st opportunity he got a chance in Brighton square running into my bedroom pretending the ink got on his hands to wash it off with the Albion milk and sulphur soap I used to use and the gelatine still round it O I laughed myself sick at him that day I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly he kneels down to do it I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits he has look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he without a hard bolster its well he doesnt kick or he might knock out all my teeth breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare street all yellow in a pinafore lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes sticking out that he said was a bigger religion than the jews and Our Lords both put together all over Asia imitating him as hes always imitating everybody I suppose he used to sleep at the foot of the bed too with his big square feet up in his wifes mouth damn this stinking thing anyway wheres this those napkins [722] are ah yes I know I hope the old press doesnt creak ah I knew it would hes sleeping hard had a good time somewhere still she must have given him great value for his money of course he has to pay for it from her O this nuisance of a thing I hope theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves up God help us thats all right for tonight now the lumpy old jingly bed always reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he scratched himself in it often enough and he thinks father bought it form Lord Napier that I used to admire when I was a little girl because I told him easy piano O I like my bed God here we are as bad as ever after 16 years how many houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard street and Holles street and he goes about whistling every time were on the run again his huguenots or the frogs march pretending to help the men with our 4 sticks of furniture and then the City Arms hotel worse and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them always know who was in there last every time were just getting on right something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies either hes going to be run into prison over his old lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and gives impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the Freeman too like the rest on account of those Sinner Fein or the freemasons then well see if the little man he showed me dribbling along in the wet all by himself round by Coadys lane will give him much consolation that he says is so capable and sincerely Irish he is indeed judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him wait theres Georges church bells wait 3 quarters the hour wait 2 oclock well thats a nice hour of the night for him to be coming home at to anybody climbing down into the area if anybody saw him Ill knock him off that little habit tomorrow first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if he has that French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies then why should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you then tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in their empty heads they ought to get slow poison the half of them then tea and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose Im nothing any [723] more when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one night man man tyrant as ever for the one thing he slept on the floor half the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged to them and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to be petted so I thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again if he doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the coalcellar with the blackbeetles I wonder was it her Josie off her head with my castoffs hes such a born liar too no hed never have the courage with a married woman thats why he wants me and Boylan though as for her Denis as she calls him that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call him a husband yes its some little bitch hes got in with even when I was with him with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with the childs bonnet on the top of his nob let us into by the back way he was throwing his sheeps eyes at those two doing skirt duty up and down I tried to wink at him first no use of course and thats the way his money goes this is the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral in the paper Boylan brought in if they saw a real officers funeral thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse walking behind in black L Boom and Tom Kernan that drunken little barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk in some place or other and Martin Cunningham and the two Dedaluses and Fanny M Coys husband white head of cabbage skinny thing with a turn in her eye trying to sing my songs shed want to be born all over again and her old green dress with the lowneck as she cant attract them any other way like dabbling on a rainy day I see it all now plainly and they call that friendship killing and then burying one another and they all with their wives and families at home more especially Jack Power keeping that barmaid he does of course his wife is always sick or going to be sick or just getting better of it and hes a goodlooking man still though hes getting a bit grey over the ears theyre a nice lot all of them well theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a way for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was insured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub corner and her or her son waiting Bill [724] Bailey wont you please come home her widows weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming though if youre goodloking what men wasnt he yes he was at the Glencree dinner and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the swallowtail to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs botty didnt he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for that to see him and Simon Dedalus too he was always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the old love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the hawthorn bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana with him at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious voice Phoebe dearest goodbye sweetheart he always sang it not like Bartell D’Arcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of the voice so there was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath O Maritana wildwood flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too high for my register even transposed and he was married at the time to May Goulding but then hed say or do something to knock the good out of it hes a widower now I wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author and going to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons what is he driving at now showing him my photo its not good of me I ought to have got it taken in drapery that never looks out of fashion still I look young in it I wonder he didnt make him a present of it altogether and me too after all why not I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats 11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other of course he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage when I saw him at Mat Dillons he liked me too I remember they all do wait by God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after that the 10 of spades for a Journey by laud then there was a letter on its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about poetry in it I hope he hasnt long greasy hair hanging [725] into his eyes or standing up like a red Indian what do they go about like that for only getting themselves and their poetry laughed at I always liked poetry when I was a girl first I thought he was a poet like Byron and not an ounce of it in his composition I thought he was quite different I wonder is he too young hes about wait 88 I was married 88 Milly is 15 yesterday 89 what age was he then at Dillons 5 or 6 about 88 I suppose hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24 I hope hes not that stuck up university student sort no otherwise he wouldnt go sitting down in the old kitchen with him taking Eppss cocoa and talking of course he pretended to understand it all probably he told him he was out of Trinity college hes very young to be a professor I hope hes not a professor like Goodwin was he was a patent professor of John Jameson they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar where poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point the guitar that fellow played was so expressive will I ever go back there again all new faces two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that for him theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly bright as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star itll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk to about yourself not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad and Keyess ad and Tom the Devils ad then if anything goes wrong in their business we have to suffer Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathing place from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looked with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides hed be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of washing it from 1 years end to the other the most of them only thats what gives the women the moustaches Im sure itll be grand if I can only get in with a handsome young poet at my age Ill throw them the [726] 1st thing in the morning till I see if the wishcard come out or Ill try pairing the lady herself and see if he comes out Ill read and study all I can find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints nnder me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous O but then what am I going to do about him though

no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because I didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something better to say for himself an old Lion would O well I suppose its because they were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling upon you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it my uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying passing the corner of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle in a sweepingbrush men again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear once I start I tell you for stupid husbands jealousy why cant we all remain friends over it instead of quarrelling her husband found it out what they did together well naturally and if he did can he undo it hes coronado anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other mad extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants of course the man never even casts a 2nd thought on the husband or wife either its the woman he wants and he gets her what else were we given [727] all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent 1 atom of any kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes the mere thought is enough I kiss the feet of you senorita theres some sense in that didnt he kiss our halldoor yes he did what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the Lord God I was thinking would I go around by the quays there some dark evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was only to do it off up in a gate somewhere or one of those wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their camp pitched near the Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if they could I only sent mine there a few times for the name model laundry sending me back over and over some old ones odd stockings that blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody what they do themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats that K. C. lives up somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the night he gave us the fish supper on account of winning over the boxing match of course it was for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and the walk and when I turned round a minute after just to see there was a woman after coming out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes home to his wife after that only I suppose the half of those sailors are rotten again with disease O move over your big carcass out of that for the love of Mike listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so well he may sleep and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if he knew how he came out on the cards this morning hed have something to sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in prison for Lord knows what he does that I dont know and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and [728] killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young hardly 20 of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vial plana of Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y O’Reilly in the Calle las Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent forgotten it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the name of any person place [729] or thing pity I never tried to read that novel cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all upside down the two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not so ignorant what a pity he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead tired and wanted a good sleep badly I could have brought him in his breakfast in bed with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on the knife for bad luck or if the woman was going her rounds with the watercress and something nice and tasty there are a few olives in the kitchen he might like I never could bear the look of them in Abrines I could do the criada the room looks all right since I changed it the other way you see something was telling me all the time Id have to introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very funny wouldnt it Im his wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half awake without a Gods notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2 Im sure Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if he takes a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a nice semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom dressing jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6 Ill just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the 1st man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used to say they are and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the in the longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream too I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son più forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked [730] yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldn’t have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want £ 1 or perhaps 30/ Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes then if he gives me that well he wont be too bad I dont want to soak it all out of him like other women do I could often have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his name on it for a couple of pounds a few times he forgot to lock it up besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do the indifferent 1 or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes O wait now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple no Ill have to wear the old things so much the better itll be more pointed hell never know whether he did it or not there thats good enough for you any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the ceiling where is she gone now make him want me thats the only way a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside [731] Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2 d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11 d a couple of lbs of course a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish [732] girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris,
1914-1921.

PRINTED
for
SYLVIA BEACH
by
MAURICE DARANTIERE
at
DIJON, FRANCE

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P O M E S
P E N Y E A C H

by
J  A  M  E  S     J  O  Y  C  E

published July 7, 1927
by Shakespeare & Co., Paris

c o n t e n t s — p o m e s

Tilly

Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba

A Flower Given to My Daughter

She Weeps over Rahoon

Tutto è sciolto

On the Beach at Fontana

Simples      Flood

Nightpiece      Alone

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight

Bahnhofstrasse      A Prayer

 ® 

[The text follows the first edition: Shakespeare & Co., Paris 1927.]

Tilly

He travels after a winter sun,

Urging the cattle along a cold red road,

Calling to them, a voice they know,

He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.

They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.

He drives them with a flowering branch before him,

Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Boor, bond of the herd,

Tonight stretch full by the fire!

I bleed by the black stream

For my torn bough!

Dublin 1904

Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba

I heard their young hearts crying

Loveward above the glancing oar

And heard the prairie grasses sighing:

No more, return no more!

O hearts, O sighing grasses,

Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!

No more will the wild wind that passes

Return, no more return.

Trieste 1912

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are

Her hands that gave

Whose soul is sere and paler

Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair—yet frailest

A wonder wild

In gentle eyes thou veilest,

My blueveined child.

Trieste 1913

She Weeps over Rahoon

Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,

Where my dark lover lies.

Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,

At grey moonrise.

Love, hear thou

How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,

Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,

Then as now.

Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold

As his sad heart has lain

Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould

And muttering rain.

Trieste 1913

Tutto è sciolto

A birdless heaven, seadusk, one lone star

Piercing the west,

As thou, fond heart, love’s time, so faint, so far,

Rememberest.

The clear young eyes’ soft look, the candid brow,

The fragrant hair,

Falling as through the silence falleth now

Dusk of the air.

Why then, remembering those shy

Sweet lures, repine

When the dear love she yielded with a sigh

Was all but thine?

Trieste 1914

On the Beach at Fontana

Wind whines and whines the shingle,

The crazy pierstakes groan;

A senile sea numbers each single

Slimesilvered stone.

From whining wind and colder

Grey sea I wrap him warm

And touch his trembling fineboned shoulder

And boyish arm.

Around us fear, descending

Darkness of fear above

And in my heart how deep unending

Ache of love!

Trieste 1914

Simples

O bella bionda,
Sei come l’onda!

Of cool sweet dew and radiance mild

The moon a web of silence weaves

In the still garden where a child

Gathers the simple salad leaves.

A moondew stars her hanging hair

And moonlight kisses her young brow

And, gathering, she sings an air:

Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!

Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear

To shield me from her childish croon

And mine a shielded heart for her

Who gathers simples of the moon.

Trieste 1915

Flood

Goldbrown upon the sated flood

The rockvine clusters lift and sway,

Vast wings above the lambent waters brood

Of sullen day.

A waste of waters ruthlessly

Sways and uplifts its weedy mane

Where brooding day stares down upon the sea

In dull disdain.

Uplift and sway, O golden vine,

Your clustered fruits to love’s full flood,

Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine

Incertitude!

Trieste 1915

Nightpiece

Gaunt in gloom,

The pale stars their torches,

Enshrouded, wave.

Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume,

Arches on soaring arches,

Night’s sindark nave.

Seraphim,

The lost hosts awaken

To service till

In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,

Raised when she has and shaken

Her thurible.

And long and loud,

To night’s nave upsoaring,

A starknell tolls

As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,

Voidward from the adoring

Waste of souls.

Trieste 1915

Alone

The moon’s greygolden meshes make

All night a veil,

The shorelamps in the sleeping lake

Laburnum tendrils trail.

The sly reeds whisper to the night

A name—her name—

And all my soul is a delight,

A swoon of shame.

Zurich 1916

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight

They mouth love’s language. Gnash

The thirteen teeth

Your lean jaws grin with. Lash

Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.

Love’s breath in you is stale, worded or sung,

As sour as cat’s breath,

Harsh of tongue.

This grey that stares

Lies not, stark skin and bone.

Leave greasy lips their kissing. None

Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.

Dire hunger holds his hour.

Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears,

Pluck and devour!

Zurich 1917

Bahnhofstrasse

The eyes that mock me sign the way

Whereto I pass at eve of day,

Grey way whose violet signals are

The trysting and the twining star.

Ah star of evil! star of pain!

Highhearted youth comes not again

Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know

The signs that mock me as I go.

Zurich 1918

A Prayer

Again!

Come, give, yield all your strength to me!

From far a low word breathes on the breaking brain

Its cruel calm, submission’s misery,

Gentling her awe as to a soul predestined.

Cease, silent love! My doom!

Blind me with your dark nearness, O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!

I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.

Draw from me still

My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,

Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying

Him who is, him who was!

Again!

Together, folded by the night, they lay on earth. I hear

From far her low word breathe on my breaking brain.

Come! I yield. Bend deeper upon me! I am here.

Subduer, do not leave me! Only joy, only anguish,

Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!

Paris 1924

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F I N N E G A N S

W A K E

by

J  A  M  E  S     J  O  Y  C  E

published May 4, 1939

by Faber & Faber Limited, London

c o n t e n t s — f i n n e g a n

I

[I.1]      [I.2]      [I.3]      [I.4]

[I.5]      [I.6]      [I.7]      [I.8]

II

[II.1]      [II.2]      [II.3]      [II.4]

III

[III.1]      [III.2]      [III.3]      [III.4]

IV

[IV.1]       ® 

I

[p.003] riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

The fall (bababadalgharaghta-kamminarronn-konnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarr-hounawnskawntoo-hoohoordenenthur-nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.

[p.004] What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries partisans are still out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons catapelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie Head. Assiegates and boomeringstroms. Sod’s brood, be me fear! Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykillkilly: a toll, a toll. What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired and ventilated! What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers! What true feeling for their’s hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup! O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! But waz iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers? The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers or Helviticus committed deuteronomy (one yeastyday he sternely struxk his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly stook it out again, by the might of moses, the very water was eviparated and all the guenneses had met their exodus so that ought to show you what a pentschanjeuchy chap he was!) and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper’s Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso. He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher. Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ’twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from [p.005] next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tombles a’buckets clottering down.

Of the first was he to bare arms and a name: Wassaily Booslaeugh of Riesengeborg. His crest of huroldry, in vert with ancillars, troublant, argent, a hegoak, poursuivant, horrid, horned. His scutschum fessed, with archers strung, helio, of the second. Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe. Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven. Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed and in the night and at the fading of the stars! For a nod to the nabir is better than wink to the wabsanti. Otherways wesways like that provost scoffing bedoueen the jebel and the jpysian sea. Cropherb the crunchbracken shall decide. Then we’ll know if the feast is a flyday. She has a gift of seek on site and she allcasually ansars helpers, the dreamydeary. Heed! Heed! It may half been a missfired brick, as some say, or it mought have been due to a collupsus of his back promises, as others looked at it. (There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same). But so sore did abe ite ivvy’s holired abbles, (what with the wallhall’s horrors of rollsrights, carhacks, stonengens, kisstvanes, tramtrees, fargobawlers, autokinotons, hippohobbilies, streetfleets, tournintaxes, megaphoggs, circuses and wardsmoats and basilikerks and aeropagods and the hoyse and the jollybrool and the peeler in the coat and the mecklenburk bitch bite at his ear and the merlinburrow burrocks and his fore old porecourts, the bore the more, and his [p.006] blightblack workingstacks at twelvepins a dozen and the noobibusses sleighding along Safetyfirst Street and the derryjellybies snooping around Tell-No-Tailors’ Corner and the fumes and the hopes and the strupithump of his ville’s indigenous romekeepers, homesweepers, domecreepers, thurum and thurum in fancymud murumd and all the uproor from all the aufroofs, a roof for may and a reef for hugh butt under his bridge suits tony) wan warning Phill filt tippling full. His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see.

Shize? I should shee! Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie? of a trying thirstay mournin? Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain’s chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation and their duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too. And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality. Agog and magog and the round of them agrog. To the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhunigan’s extermination! Some in kinkin corass, more, kankan keening. Belling him up and filling him down. He’s stiff but he’s steady is Priam Olim! ’Twas he was the dacent gaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap up his bier! E’erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? With their deepbrow fundigs and the dusty fidelios. They laid him brawdawn alanglast bed. With a bockalips of finisky fore his feet. And a barrowload of guenesis hoer his head. Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O!

Hurrah, there is but young gleve for the owl globe wheels in view which is tautaulogically the same thing. Well, Him a being so on the flounder of his bulk like an overgrown babeling, let wee peep, see, at Hom, well, see peegee ought he ought, platterplate. C Hum! From Shopalist to Bailywick or from ashtun to baronoath or from Buythebanks to Roundthehead or from the foot of the bill to ireglint’s eye he calmly extensolies. And all the way (a horn!) from fjord to fjell his baywinds’ oboboes shall wail him [p.007] rockbound (hoahoahoah!) in swimswamswum and all the livvylong night, the delldale dalppling night, the night of bluerybells, her flittaflute in tricky trochees (O carina! O carina!) wake him. With her issavan essavans and her patterjackmartins about all them inns and ouses. Tilling a teel of a tum, telling a toll of a teary turty Taubling. Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs à gross if we are, about to believe. So pool the begg and pass the kish for crawsake. Omen. So sigh us. Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord. Whase on the joint of a desh? Finfoefom the Fush. Whase be his baken head? A loaf of Singpantry’s Kennedy bread. And whase hitched to the hop in his tayle? A glass of Danu U’Dunnell’s foamous olde Dobbelin ayle. But, lo, as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey behold of him as behemoth for he is noewhemoe. Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene. Almost rubicund Salmosalar, ancient fromout the ages of the Agapemonides, he is smoltenin our mist, woebecanned and packt away. So that meal’s dead off for summan, schlook, schlice and goodridhirring.

Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on. Hiccubat edilis. Apud libertinam parvulam. Whatif she be in flags or flitters, reekierags or sundyechosies, with a mint of mines or beggar a pinnyweight. Arrah, sure, we all love little Anny Ruiny, or, we mean to say, lovelittle Anna Rayiny, when unda her brella, mid piddle med puddle, she ninnygoes nannygoes nancing by. Yoh! Brontolone slaaps, yoh snoores. Upon Benn Heather, in Seeple Isout too. The cranic head on him, caster of his reasons, peer yuthner in yondmist. Whooth? His clay feet, swarded in verdigrass, stick up starck where he last fellonem, by the mund of the magazine wall, where our maggy seen all, with her sisterin shawl. While over against this belles’ alliance beyind Ill Sixty, ollollowed ill! bagsides of the fort, bom, tarabom, tarabom, lurk the ombushes, the site of the lyffing-in-wait of the upjock and hockums. Hence when the clouds roll by, jamey, a proudseye view is [p.008] enjoyable of our mounding’s mass, now Wallinstone national museum, with, in some greenish distance, the charmful waterloose country and the two quitewhite villagettes who hear show of themselves so gigglesomes minxt the follyages, the prettilees! Penetrators are permitted into the museomound free. Welsh and the Paddy Patkinses, one shelenk! Redismembers invalids of old guard find poussepousse pousseypram to sate the sort of their butt. For her passkey supply to the janitrix, the mistress Kathe. Tip.

This the way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in! Now yiz are in the Willingdone Museyroom. This is a Prooshious gunn. This is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the flag of the Prooshious, the Cap and Soracer. This is the bullet that byng the flag of the Prooshious. This is the ffrinch that fire on the Bull that bang the flag of the Prooshious. Saloos the Crossgunn! Up with your pike and fork! Tip. (Bullsfoot! Fine!) This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum. Tip. Lipoleumhat. This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape. This is the big Sraughter Willingdone, grand and magentic in his goldtin spurs and his ironed dux and his quarterbrass woodyshoes and his magnate’s gharters and his bangkok’s best and goliar’s goloshes and his pulluponeasyan wartrews. This is his big wide harse. Tip. This is the three lipoleum boyne grouching down in the living detch. This is an inimyskilling inglis, this is a scotcher grey, this is a davy, stooping. This is the bog lipoleum mordering the lipoleum beg. A Gallawghurs argaumunt. This is the petty lipoleum boy that was nayther bag nor bug. Assaye, assaye! Touchole Fitz Tuomush. Dirty MacDyke. And Hairy O’Hurry. All of them arminus-varminus. This is Delian alps. This is Mont Tivel, this is Mont Tipsey, this is the Grand Mons Injun. This is the crimealine of the alps hooping to sheltershock the three lipoleums. This is the jinnies with their legahorns feinting to read in their handmade’s book of stralegy while making their war undisides the Willingdone. The jinnies is a cooin her hand and the jinnies is a ravin her hair and the Willingdone git the band up. This is big Willingdone mormorial tallowscoop Wounderworker obscides on the flanks of the jinnies. Sexcaliber hrosspower. Tip. This [p.009] is me Belchum sneaking his phillippy out of his most Awful Grimmest Sunshat Cromwelly. Looted. This is the jinnies’ hastings dispatch for to irrigate the Willingdone. Dispatch in thin red lines cross the shortfront of me Belchum. Yaw, yaw, yaw! Leaper Orthor. Fear siecken! Fieldgaze thy tiny frow. Hugacting. Nap. That was the tictacs of the jinnies for to fontannoy the Willingdone. Shee, shee, shee! The jinnies is jillous agincourting all the lipoleums. And the lipoleums is gonn boycottoncrezy onto the one Willingdone. And the Willingdone git the band up. This is bode Belchum, bonnet to busby, breaking his secred word with a ball up his ear to the Willingdone. This is the Willingdone’s hurold dispitchback. Dispitch desployed on the regions rare of me Belchum. Salamangra! Ayi, ayi, ayi! Cherry jinnies. Figtreeyou! Damn fairy ann, Voutre. Willingdone. That was the first joke of Willingdone, tic for tac. Hee, hee, hee! This is me Belchum in his twelvemile cowchooks, weet, tweet and stampforth foremost, footing the camp for the jinnies. Drink a sip, drankasup, for he’s as sooner buy a guinness than he’d stale store stout. This is Rooshious balls. This is a ttrinch. This is mistletropes. This is Canon Futter with the popynose. After his hundred days’ indulgence. This is the blessed. Tarra’s widdars! This is jinnies in the bonny bawn blooches. This is lipoleums in the rowdy howses. This is the Willingdone, by the splinters of Cork, order fire. Tonnerre! (Bullsear! Play!) This is camelry, this is floodens, this is the solphereens in action, this is their mobbily, this is panickburns. Almeidagad! Arthiz too loose! This is Willingdone cry. Brum! Brum! Cumbrum! This is jinnies cry. Underwetter! Goat strip Finnlambs! This is jinnies rinning away to their ousterlists dowan a bunkersheels. With a nip nippy nip and a trip trippy trip so airy. For their heart’s right there. Tip. This is me Belchum’s tinkyou tankyou silvoor plate for citchin the crapes in the cool of his canister. Poor the pay! This is the bissmark of the marathon merry of the jinnies they left behind them. This is the Willingdone branlish his same marmorial tallowscoop Sophy-Key-Po for his royal divorsion on the rinnaway jinnies. Gambariste della porca! Dalaveras fimmieras! This is the pettiest [p.010] of the lipoleums, Toffeethief, that spy on the Willingdone from his big white harse, the Capeinhope. Stonewall Willingdone is an old maxy montrumeny. Lipoleums is nice hung bushellors. This is hiena hinnessy laughing alout at the Willingdone. This is lipsyg dooley krieging the funk from the hinnessy. This is the hinndoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy. Tip. This is the wixy old Willingdone picket up the half of the threefoiled hat of lipoleums fromoud of the bluddle filth. This is the hinndoo waxing ranjymad for a bombshoob. This is the Willingdone hanking the half of the hat of lipoleums up the tail on the buckside of his big white harse. Tip. That was the last joke of Willingdone. Hit, hit, hit! This is the same white harse of the Willingdone, Culpenhelp, waggling his tailoscrupp with the half of a hat of lipoleums to insoult on the hinndoo seeboy. Hney, hney, hney! (Bullsrag! Foul!) This is the seeboy, madrashattaras, upjump and pumpim, cry to the Willingdone: Ap Pukkaru! Pukka Yurap! This is the Willingdone, bornstable ghentleman, tinders his maxbotch to the cursigan Shimar Shin. Basucker youstead! This is the dooforhim seeboy blow the whole of the half of the hat of lipoleums off of the top of the tail on the back of his big wide harse. Tip (Bullseye! Game!) How Copenhagen ended. This way the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out.

Phew!

What a warm time we were in there but how keling is here the airabouts! We nowhere she lives but you mussna tell annaone for the lamp of Jig-a-Lanthern! It’s a candlelittle houthse of a month and one windies. Downadown, High Downadown. And nummered quaintlymine. And such reasonable weather too! The wagrant wind’s awalt’zaround the piltdowns and on every blasted knollyrock (if you can spot fifty I spy four more) there’s that gnarlybird ygathering, a runalittle, doalittle, preealittle, pouralittle, wipealittle, kicksalittle, severalittle, eatalittle, whinealittle, kenalittle, helfalittle, pelfalittle gnarlybird. A verytableland of bleakbardfields! Under his seven wrothschields lies one, Lumproar. His glav toside him. Skud ontorsed. Our pigeons pair are flewn for northcliffs. [p.011] The three of crows have flapped it southenly, kraaking of de baccle to the kvarters of that sky whence triboos answer; Wail, ’tis well! She niver comes out when Thon’s on shower or when Thon’s flash with his Nixy girls or when Thon’s blowing toomcracks down the gaels of Thon. No nubo no! Neblas on you liv! Her would be too moochy afreet. Of Burymeleg and Bindmerollingeyes and all the deed in the woe. Fe fo fom! She jist does hopes till byes will be byes. Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody’s bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts’ huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy. But it’s the armitides toonigh, militopucos, and toomourn we wish for a muddy kissmans to the minutia workers and there’s to be a gorgeups truce for happinest childher everwere. Come nebo me and suso sing the day we sallybright. She’s burrowed the coacher’s headlight the better to pry (who goes cute goes siocur and shoos aroun) and all spoiled goods go into her nabsack: curtrages and rattlin buttins, nappy spattees and flasks of all nations, clavicures and scampulars, maps, keys and woodpiles of haypennies and moonled brooches with bloodstaned breeks in em, boaston nightgarters and masses of shoesets and nickelly nacks and foder allmicheal and a lugly parson of cates and howitzer muchears and midgers and maggets, ills and ells with loffs of toffs and pleures of bells and the last sigh that come fro the hart (bucklied!) and the fairest sin the sunsaw (that’s cearc!). With Kiss. Kiss Criss. Cross Criss. Kiss Cross. Undo lives ’end. Slain.

How bootifull and how truetowife of her, when strengly forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordyheirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. She is livving in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for us (her birth is uncontrollable), with a naperon for her mask and her sabboes kickin arias (so sair! so solly!) if yous ask me and I saack you. Hou! Hou! Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall (there being two sights for ever a picture) [p.012] for in the byways of high improvidence that’s what makes lifework leaving and the world’s a cell for citters to cit in. Let young wimman run away with the story and let young min talk smooth behind the butteler’s back. She knows her knight’s duty while Luntum sleeps. Did ye save any tin? says he. Did I what? with a grin says she. And we all like a marriedann because she is mercenary. Though the length of the land lies under liquidation (floote!) and there’s nare a hairbrow nor an eyebush on this glaubrous phace of Herrschuft Whatarwelter she’ll loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat and she’ll do all a turfwoman can to piff the business on. Paff. To puff the blaziness on. Poffpoff. And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care. So true is it that therewhere’s a turnover the tay is wet too and when you think you ketch sight of a hind make sure but you’re cocked by a hin.

Then as she is on her behaviourite job of quainance bandy, fruting for firstlings and taking her tithe, we may take our review of the two mounds to see nothing of the himples here as at elsewhere, by sixes and sevens, like so many heegills and collines, sitton aroont, scentbreeched ant somepotreek, in their swishawish satins and their taffetaffe tights, playing Wharton’s Folly, at a treepurty on the planko in the purk. Stand up, mickos! Make strake for minnas! By order, Nicholas Proud. We may see and hear nothing if we choose of the shortlegged bergins off Corkhill or the bergamoors of Arbourhill or the bergagambols of Summerhill or the bergincellies of Miseryhill or the countrybossed bergones of Constitutionhill though every crowd has its several tones and every trade has its clever mechanics and each harmonical has a point of its own, Olaf’s on the rise and Ivor’s on the lift and Sitric’s place’s between them. But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life’s robulous rebus, hopping round his middle like kippers on a griddle, O, as he lays dormont from the macroborg of Holdhard to the microbirg of Pied de Poudre. Behove this [p.013] sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One sovereign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!

So This Is Dyoublong?

Hush! Caution! Echoland!

How charmingly exquisite! It reminds you of the outwashed engravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall of his innkempt house. Used they? (I am sure that tiring chabelshoveller with the mujikal chocolat box, Miry Mitchel, is listening) I say, the remains of the outworn gravemure where used to be blurried the Ptollmens of the Incabus. Used we? (He is only pretendant to be stugging at the jubalee harp from a second existed lishener, Fiery Farrelly.) It is well known. Lokk for himself and see the old butte new. Dbln. W. K. O. O. Hear? By the mausolime wall. Fimfim fimfim. With a grand funferall. Fumfum fumfum. ’Tis optophone which ontophanes. List! Wheatstone’s magic lyer. They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves.

Four things therefore, saith our herodotary Mammon Lujius in his grand old historiorum, wrote near Boriorum, bluest book in baile’s annals, f.t. in Dyfflinarsky ne’er sall fail tilheathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s ile sall pall. And here now they are, the fear of um. T. Totities! Unum. (Adar.) A bulbenboss surmounted upon an alderman. Ay, ay! Duum. (Nizam.) A shoe on a puir old wobban. Ah, ho! Triom. (Tamuz.) An auburn mayde, o’brine a’bride, to be desarted. Adear, adear! Quodlibus. (Marchessvan.) A penn no weightier nor a polepost. And so. And all. (Succoth.)

So, how idlers’ wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how.

1132 a.d. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.

566 a.d. On Baalfire’s night of this year after deluge a crone that [p.014] hadde a wickered Kish for to hale dead turves from the bog lookit under the blay of her Kish as she ran for to sothisfeige her cowrieosity and be me sawl but she found hersell sackvulle of swart goody quickenshoon and small illigant brogues, so rich in sweat. Blurry works at Hurdlesford.

(Silent.)

566 a.d. At this time it fell out that a brazenlockt damsel grieved (sobralasolas!) because that Puppette her minion was ravisht of her by the ogre Puropeus Pious. Bloody wars in Ballyaughacleeaghbally.

1132 a.d. Two sons at an hour were born until a goodman and his hag. These sons called themselves Caddy and Primas. Primas was a santryman and drilled all decent people. Caddy went to Winehouse and wrote o peace a farce. Blotty words for Dublin.

Somewhere, parently, in the ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant the copyist must have fled with his scroll. The billy flood rose or an elk charged him or the sultrup worldwright from the excelsissimost empyrean (bolt, in sum) earthspake or the Dannamen gallous banged pan the bliddy duran. A scribicide then and there is led off under old’s code with some fine covered by six marks or ninepins in metalmen for the sake of his labour’s dross while it will be only now and again in our rear of o’er era, as an upshoot of military and civil engagements, that a gynecure was let on to the scuffold for taking that same fine sum covertly by meddlement with the drawers of his neighbour’s safe.

Now after all that farfatch’d and peragrine or dingnant or clere lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness, from the tome of Liber Lividus and, (toh!), how paisibly eirenical, all dimmering dunes and gloamering glades, selfstretches afore us our fredeland’s plain! Lean neath stone pine the pastor lies with his crook; young pricket by pricket’s sister nibbleth on returned viridities; amaid her rocking grasses the herb trinity shams lowliness; skyup is of evergrey. Thus, too, for donkey’s years. Since the bouts of Hebear and Hairyman the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, [p.015] the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown’s hedges, twolips have pressed togatherthem by sweet Rush, townland of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the redthorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon, and, though for rings round them, during a chiliad of perihelygangs, the Formoreans have brittled the tooath of the Danes and the Oxman has been pestered by the Firebugs and the Joynts have thrown up jerrybuilding to the Kevanses and Little on the Green is childsfather to the City (Year! Year! And laughtears!), these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles as, on the eve of Killallwho.

The babbelers with their thangas vain have been (confusium hold them!) they were and went; thigging thugs were and houhnhymn songtoms were and comely norgels were and pollyfool fiansees. Menn have thawed, clerks have surssurhummed, the blond has sought of the brune: Elsekiss thou may, mean Kerry piggy?: and the duncledames have countered with the hellish fellows: Who ails tongue coddeau, aspace of dumbillsilly? And they fell upong one another: and themselves they have fallen. And still nowanights and by nights of yore do all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lovers say only: Cull me ere I wilt to thee!: and, but a little later: Pluck me whilst I blush! Well may they wilt, marry, and profusedly blush, be troth! For that saying is as old as the howitts. Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn’t it the truath I’m tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmycan timped hir, tampting Tam. Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow!

Hop!

In the name of Anem this carl on the kopje in pelted thongs a parth a lone who the joebiggar be he? Forshapen his pigmaid hoagshead, shroonk his plodsfoot. He hath locktoes, this shortshins, and, Obeold that’s pectoral, his mammamuscles most mousterious. It is slaking nuncheon out of some thing’s brain pan. Me seemeth a dragon man. He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the ramping riots of pouriose and [p.016] froriose. What a quhare soort of a mahan. It is evident the michindaddy. Lets we overstep his fire defences and these kraals of slitsucked marrogbones. (Cave!) He can prapsposterus the pillory way to Hirculos pillar. Come on, fool porterfull, hosiered women blown monk sewer? Scuse us, chorley guy! You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! ’Tis a Jute. Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks.

Jute.—Yutah!

Mutt.—Mukk’s pleasurad.

Jute.—Are you jeff?

Mutt.—Somehards.

Jute.—But you are not jeffmute?

Mutt.—Noho. Only an utterer.

Jute.—Whoa? Whoat is the mutter with you?

Mutt.—I became a stun a stummer.

Jute.—What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! How, Mutt?

Mutt.—Aput the buttle, surd.

Jute.—Whose poddle? Wherein?

Mutt.—The Inns of Dungtarf where Used awe to be he.

Jute.—You that side your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you.

Mutt.—Has? Has at? Hasatency? Urp, Boohooru! Booru Usurp! I trumple from rath in mine mines when I rimimirim!

Jute.—One eyegonblack. Bisons is bisons. Let me fore all your hasitancy cross your qualm with trink gilt. Here have sylvan coyne, a piece of oak. Ghinees hies good for you.

Mutt.—Louee, louee! How wooden I not know it, the intellible greytcloak of Cedric Silkyshag! Cead mealy faulty rices for one dabblin bar. Old grilsy growlsy! He was poached on in that eggtentical spot. Here [p.017] where the liveries, Monomark. There where the missers moony, Minnikin passe.

Jute.—Simply because as Taciturn pretells, our wrongstoryshortener, he dumptied the wholeborrow of rubbages on to soil here.

Mutt.—Just how a puddinstone inat the brookcells by a riverpool.

Jute.—Load Allmarshy! Wid wad for a norse like?

Mutt.—Somular with a bull on a clompturf. Rooks roarum rex roome! I could snore to him of the spumy horn, with his woolseley side in, by the neck I am sutton on, did Brian d’ of Linn.

Jute.—Boildoyle and rawhoney on me when I can beuraly forsstand a weird from sturk to finnic in such a patwhat as your rutterdamrotter. Onheard of and umscene! Gut aftermeal! See you doomed.

Mutt.—Quite agreem. Bussave a sec. Walk a dunblink roundward this albutisle and you skull see how olde ye plaine of my Elters, hunfree and ours, where wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o’er the saltings, where wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory, icefloe was from his Inn the Byggning to whose Finishthere Punct. Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr. Mearmerge two races, swete and brack. Morthering rue. Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize!

Jute.—’Stench!

Mutt.—Fiatfuit! Hereinunder lyethey. Llarge by the smal an’ everynight life olso th’estrange, babylone the greatgrandhotelled with tit tit tittlehouse, alp on earwig, drukn on ild, likeas equal to anequal in this sound seemetery which iz leebez luv.

[p.018] Jute.—’Zmorde!

Mutt.—Meldundleize! By the fearse wave behoughted. Despond’s sung. And thanacestross mound have swollup them all. This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns. He who runes may rede it on all fours. O’c’stle, n’wc’stle, tr’c’stle, crumbling! Sell me sooth the fare for Humblin! Humblady Fair. But speak it allsosiftly, moulder! Be in your whisht!

Jute.—Whysht?

Mutt.—The gyant Forficules with Amni the fay.

Jute.—Howe?

Mutt.—Here is viceking’s graab.

Jute.—Hwaad!

Mutt.—Ore you astoneaged, jute you?

Jute.—Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud.

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin. Thy thingdome is given to the Meades and Porsons. The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth. In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality. But with a rush out of his navel reaching the reredos of Ramasbatham. A terricolous vivelyonview this; queer and it continues to be quaky. A hatch, a celt, an earshare the pourquose of which was to cassay the earthcrust at all of hours, furrowards, bagawards, like yoxen at the turnpaht. Here say figurines billycoose arming and mounting. Mounting and arming bellicose figurines see here. Futhorc, this liffle effingee is for a firefing called a flintforfall. Face at the eased! O I fay! Face at the waist! Ho, you fie! Upwap and dump em, Face to Gace! When a [p.019] part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. Here (please to stoop) are selveran cued peteet peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make the tomtummy’s pay roll. Right rank ragnar rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that’s thuck in its thoil like thumfool’s thraitor thrust for vengeance. What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects! Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies, alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons. Owlets’ eegs (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from age and all now quite epsilene, and oldwolldy wobblewers, haudworth a wipe o grass. Sss! See the snake wurrums everyside! Our durlbin is sworming in sneaks. They came to our island from triangular Toucheaterre beyond the wet prairie rared up in the midst of the cargon of prohibitive pomefructs but along landed Paddy Wippingham and the his garbagecans cotched the creeps of them pricker than our whosethere outofman could quick up her whatsthats. Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. Racketeers and bottloggers.

Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise. One by one place one be three dittoh and one before. Two nursus one make a plausible free and idim behind. Starting off with a big boaboa and threelegged calvers and ivargraine jadesses with a message in their mouths. And a hundreadfilled unleavenweight of liberorumqueue to con an we can till allhorrors eve. What a meanderthalltale to unfurl and with what an end in view of squattor and anntisquattor and postproneauntisquattor! To say too us to be every tim, nick and larry of us, sons of the sod, sons, littlesons, yea and lealittlesons, when usses not to be, every sue, siss and sally of us, dugters of Nan! Accusative ahnsire! Damadam to infinities!

True there was in nillohs dieybos as yet no lumpend papeer in the waste and mightmountain Penn still groaned for the micies to let flee. All was of ancientry. You gave me a boot (signs on it!) and I ate the wind. I quizzed you a quid (with for what?) and you went to the quod. But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall [p.020] under the ban of our infrarational senses fore the last milchcamel, the heartvein throbbing between his eyebrowns, has still to moor before the tomb of his cousin charmian where his date is tethered by the palm that’s hers. But the horn, the drinking, the day of dread are not now. A bone, a pebble, a ramskin; chip them, chap them, cut them up allways; leave them to terracook in the muttheringpot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor.

Cry not yet! There’s many a smile to Nondum, with sytty maids per man, sir, and the park’s so dark by kindlelight. But look what you have in your handself! The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for every busy eerie whig’s a bit of a torytale to tell. One’s upon a thyme and two’s behind their lettice leap and three’s among the strubbely beds. And the chicks picked their teeths and the dombkey he begay began. You can ask your ass if he believes it. And so cuddy me only wallops have heels. That one of a wife with folty barnets. For then was the age when hoops ran high. Of a noarch and a chopwife; of a pomme full grave and a fammy of levity; or of golden youths that wanted gelding; or of what the mischievmiss made a man do. Malmarriedad he was reversogassed by the frisque of her frasques and her prytty pyrrhique. Maye faye, she’s la gaye this snaky woman! From that trippiery toe expectungpelick! Veil, volantine, valentine eyes. She’s the very besch Winnie blows Nay on good. Flou inn, flow ann. Hohore! So it’s sure it was her not we! But lay it easy, gentle [p.021] mien, we are in rearing of a norewhig. So weenybeenyveenyteeny. Comsy see! Hetwis if ee newt. Lissom! lissom! I am doing it. Hark, the corne entreats! And the larpnotes prittle.

It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybuddy to his lovesaking eyes and everybilly lived alove with everybiddy else, and Jarl van Hoother had his burnt head high up in his lamphouse, laying cold hands on himself. And his two little jiminies, cousins of ourn, Tristopher and Hilary, were kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse. And, be dermot, who come to the keep of his inn only the niece-of-his-in-law, the prankquean. And the prankquean pulled a rosy one and made her wit foreninst the dour. And she lit up and fireland was ablaze. And spoke she to the dour in her petty perusienne: Mark the Wans, why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease? And that was how the skirtmisshes began. But the dour handworded her grace in dootch nossow: Shut! So her grace o’malice kidsnapped up the jiminy Tristopher and into the shandy westerness she rain, rain, rain. And Jarl van Hoother warlessed after her with soft dovesgall: Stop deef stop come back to my earin stop. But she swaradid to him: Unlikelihud. And there was a brannewail that same sabboath night of falling angles somewhere in Erio. And the prankquean went for her forty years’ walk in Tourlemonde and she washed the blessings of the lovespots off the jiminy with soap sulliver suddles and she had her four owlers masters for to tauch him his tickles and she convorted him to the onesure allgood and he became a luderman. So then she started to rain and to rain and, be redtom, she was back again at Jarl van Hoother’s in a brace of samers and the jiminy with her in her pinafrond, lace at night, at another time. And where did she come but to the bar of his bristolry. And Jarl von Hoother had his baretholobruised heels drowned in his cellarmalt, shaking warm hands with himself and the jimminy Hilary and [p.022] the dummy in their first infancy were below on the tearsheet, wringing and coughing, like brodar and histher. And the prankquean nipped a paly one and lit up again and redcocks flew flackering from the hillcombs. And she made her witter before the wicked, saying: Mark the Twy, why do I am alook alike two poss of porterpease? And: Shut! says the wicked, handwording her madesty. So her madesty a forethought set down a jiminy and took up a jiminy and all the lilipath ways to Woeman’s Land she rain, rain, rain. And Jarl von Hoother bleethered atter her with a loud finegale: Stop domb stop come back with my earring stop. But the prankquean swaradid: Am liking it. And there was a wild old grannewwail that laurency night of starshootings somewhere in Erio. And the prankquean went for her forty years’ walk in Turnlemeem and she punched the curses of cromcruwell with the nail of a top into the jiminy and she had her four larksical monitrix to touch him his tears and she provorted him to the onecertain allsecure and he became a tristian. So then she started raining, raining, and in a pair of changers, be dom ter, she was back again at Jarl von Hoother’s and the Larryhill with her under her abromette. And why would she halt at all if not by the ward of his mansionhome of another nice lace for the third charm? And Jarl von Hoother had his hurricane hips up to his pantrybox, ruminating in his holdfour stomachs (Dare! O dare!), and the jiminy Toughertrees and the dummy were belove on the watercloth, kissing and spitting, and roguing and poghuing, like knavepaltry and naivebride and in their second infancy. And the prankquean picked a blank and lit out and the valleys lay twinkling. And she made her wittest in front of the arkway of trihump, asking: Mark the Tris, why do I am alook alike three poss of porter pease? But that was how the skirtmishes endupped. For like the campbells acoming with a fork lance of lightning, Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxangloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his fur- [p.023] framed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill. And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop, dappy. And the duppy shot the shutter clup (Per-kodhuskurunbarggruauyagok-gorlayorgromgremmitghundhurth-rumathunaradidillifaiti-tillibumullunukkunun!) And they all drank free. For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts. And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world. How kirssy the tiler made a sweet unclose to the Narwhealian captol. Saw fore shalt thou sea. Betoun ye and be. The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up. Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis.

O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum. Hill, rill, ones in company, billeted, less be proud of. Breast high and bestride! Only for that these will not breathe upon Norronesen or Irenean the secrest of their soorcelossness. Quarry silex, Homfrie Noanswa! Undy gentian festyknees, Livia Noanswa? Wolkencap is on him, frowned; audiurient, he would evesdrip, were it mous at hand, were it dinn of bottles in the far ear. Murk, his vales are darkling. With lipth she lithpeth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow. She he she ho she ha to la. Hairfluke, if he could bad twig her! Impalpabunt, he abhears. The soundwaves are his buffeteers; they trompe him with their trompes; the wave of roary and the wave of hooshed and the wave of hawhawhawrd and the wave of neverheedthemhorseluggarsandlistletomine. Landloughed by his neaghboormistress and perpetrified in his offsprung, sabes and suckers, the moaning pipers could tell him to his faceback, the louthly one whose loab we are devorers of, how butt for his hold halibutt, or her to her pudor puff, the lipalip one whose libe we drink at, how biff for her tiddywink of a windfall, our breed and washer givers, there would not be a holey spier on the town nor a vestal flouting in the dock, nay to make plein avowels, nor a yew nor an eye [p.024] to play cash cash in Novo Nilbud by swamplight nor a’ toole o’ tall o’ toll and noddy hint to the convaynience.

He dug in and dug out by the skill of his tilth for himself and all belonging to him and he sweated his crew beneath his auspice for the living and he urned his dread, that dragon volant, and he made louse for us and delivered us to boll weevils amain, that mighty liberator, Unfru-Chikda-Uru-Wukru and begad he did, our ancestor most worshipful, till he thought of a better one in his windower’s house with that blushmantle upon him from earsend to earsend. And would again could whispring grassies wake him and may again when the fiery bird disembers. And will again if so be sooth by elder to his youngers shall be said. Have you whines for my wedding, did you bring bride and bedding, will you whoop for my deading is a? Wake? Usqueadbaugham!

Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink me doornail?

Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don’t be walking abroad. Sure you’d only lose yourself in Healiopolis now the way your roads in Kapelavaster are that winding there after the calvary, the North Umbrian and the Fivs Barrow and Waddlings Raid and the Bower Moore and wet your feet maybe with the foggy dew’s abroad. Meeting some sick old bankrupt or the Cottericks’ donkey with his shoe hanging, clankatachankata, or a slut snoring with an impure infant on a bench. ’Twould turn you against life, so ’twould. And the weather’s that mean too. To part from Devlin is hard as Nugent knew, to leave the clean tanglesome one lushier than its neighbour enfranchisable fields but let your ghost have no grievance. You’re better off, sir, where you are, primesigned in the full of your dress, bloodeagle waistcoat and all, remembering your shapes and sizes on the pillow of your babycurls under your sycamore by the keld water where the Tory’s clay will scare the varmints and have all you want, pouch, gloves, flask, bricket, kerchief, ring and amberulla, the whole treasure of the pyre, in the land of souls with Homin and Broin Baroke and pole ole Lonan and Nobucketnozzler and the Guinnghis Khan. And we’ll be coming here, the ombre players, to rake your gravel and bringing [p.025] you presents, won’t we, fenians? And it isn’t our spittle we’ll stint you of, is it, druids? Not shabbty little imagettes, pennydirts and dodgemyeyes you buy in the soottee stores. But offerings of the field. Mieliodories, that Doctor Faherty, the madison man, taught to gooden you. Poppypap’s a passport out. And honey is the holiest thing ever was, hive, comb and earwax, the food for glory, (mind you keep the pot or your nectar cup may yield too light!) and some goat’s milk, sir, like the maid used to bring you. Your fame is spreading like Basilico’s ointment since the Fintan Lalors piped you overborder and there’s whole households beyond the Bothnians and they calling names after you. The menhere’s always talking of you sitting around on the pig’s cheeks under the sacred rooftree, over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow, with a pledge till the drengs, in the Salmon House. And admiring to our supershillelagh where the palmsweat on high is the mark of your manument. All the toethpicks ever Eirenesians chewed on are chips chepped from that battery block. If you were bowed and soild and letdown itself from the oner of the load it was that paddyplanters might pack up plenty and when you were undone in every point fore the laps of goddesses you showed our labourlasses how to free was easy. The game old Gunne, they do be saying, (skull!) that was a planter for you, a spicer of them all. Begog but he was, the G.O.G! He’s duddandgunne now and we’re apter finding the sores of his sedeq but peace to his great limbs, the buddhoch, with the last league long rest of him, while the millioncandled eye of Tuskar sweeps the Moylean Main! There was never a warlord in Great Erinnes and Brettland, no, nor in all Pike County like you, they say. No, nor a king nor an ardking, bung king, sung king or hung king. That you could fell an elmstree twelve urchins couldn’t ring round and hoist high the stone that Liam failed. Who but a Maccullaghmore the reise of our fortunes and the faunayman at the funeral to compass our cause? If you was hogglebully itself and most frifty like you was taken waters still what all where was your like to lay the cable or who was the batter could better Your Grace? Mick Mac Magnus MacCawley can take you off to [p.026] the pure perfection and Leatherbags Reynolds tries your shuffle and cut. But as Hopkins and Hopkins puts it, you were the pale eggynaggy and a kis to tilly up. We calls him the journeyall Buggaloffs since he went Jerusalemfaring in Arssia Manor. You had a gamier cock than Pete, Jake or Martin and your archgoose of geese stubbled for All Angels’ Day. So may the priest of seven worms and scalding tayboil, Papa Vestray, come never anear you as your hair grows wheater beside the Liffey that’s in Heaven! Hep, hep, hurrah there! Hero! Seven times thereto we salute you! The whole bag of kits, falconplumes and jackboots incloted, is where you flung them that time. Your heart is in the system of the Shewolf and your crested head is in the tropic of Copricapron. Your feet are in the cloister of Virgo. Your olala is in the region of sahuls. And that’s ashore as you were born. Your shuck tick’s swell. And that there texas is tow linen. The loamsome roam to Laffayette is ended. Drop in your tracks, babe! Be not unrested! The headboddylwatcher of the chempel of Isid, Totumcalmum, saith: I know thee, metherjar, I know thee, salvation boat. For we have performed upon thee, thou abramanation, who comest ever without being invoked, whose coming is unknown, all the things which the company of the precentors and of the grammarians of Christpatrick’s ordered concerning thee in the matter of the work of thy tombing. Howe of the shipmen, steep wall!

Everything’s going on the same or so it appeals to all of us, in the old holmsted here. Coughings all over the sanctuary, bad scrant to me aunt Florenza. The horn for breakfast, one o’gong for lunch and dinnerchime. As popular as when Belly the First was keng and his members met in the Diet of Man. The same shop slop in the window. Jacob’s lettercrackers and Dr Tipple’s Vi-Cocoa and the Eswuards’ desippated soup beside Mother Seagull’s syrup. Meat took a drop when Reilly-Parsons failed. Coal’s short but we’ve plenty of bog in the yard. And barley’s up again, begrained to it. The lads is attending school nessans regular, sir, spelling beesknees with hathatansy and turning out tables by mudapplication. Allfor the books and never pegging smashers [p.027] after Tom Bowe Glassarse or Timmy the Tosser. ’Tisraely the truth! No isn’t it, roman pathoricks? You were the doublejoynted janitor the morning they were delivered and you’ll be a grandfer yet entirely when the ritehand seizes what the lovearm knows. Kevin’s just a doat with his cherub cheek, chalking oghres on walls, and his little lamp and schoolbelt and bag of knicks, playing postman’s knock round the diggings and if the seep were milk you could lieve his olde by his ide but, laus sake, the devil does be in that knirps of a Jerry sometimes, the tarandtan plaidboy, making encostive inkum out of the last of his lavings and writing a blue streak over his bourseday shirt. Hetty Jane’s a child of Mary. She’ll be coming (for they’re sure to choose her) in her white of gold with a tourch of ivy to rekindle the flame on Felix Day. But Essie Shanahan has let down her skirts. You remember Essie in our Luna’s Convent? They called her Holly Merry her lips were so ruddyberry and Pia de Purebelle when the redminers riots was on about her. Were I a clerk designate to the Williamswoodsmenufactors I’d poster those pouters on every jamb in the town. She’s making her rep at Lanner’s twicenightly. With the tabarine tamtammers of the whirligigmagees. Beats that cachucha flat. ’Twould dilate your heart to go.

Aisy now, you decent man, with your knees and lie quiet and repose your honour’s lordship! Hold him here, Ezekiel Irons, and may God strengthen you! It’s our warm spirits, boys, he’s spooring. Dimitrius O’Flagonan, cork that cure for the Clancartys! You swamped enough since Portobello to float the Pomeroy. Fetch neahere, Pat Koy! And fetch nouyou, Pam Yates! Be nayther angst of Wramawitch! Here’s lumbos. Where misties swaddlum, where misches lodge none, where mystries pour kind on, O sleepy! So be yet!

I’ve an eye on queer Behan and old Kate and the butter, trust me. She’ll do no jugglywuggly with her war souvenir postcards to help to build me murial, tippers! I’ll trip your traps! Assure a sure there! And we put on your clock again, sir, for you. Did or didn’t we, sharestutterers? So you won’t be up a stump entirely. Nor shed your remnants. The sternwheel’s crawling strong. I [p.028] seen your missus in the hall. Like the queenoveire. Arrah, it’s herself that’s fine, too, don’t be talking! Shirksends? You storyan Harry chap longa me Harry chap storyan grass woman plelthy good trout. Shakeshands. Dibble a hayfork’s wrong with her only her lex’s salig. Boald Tib does be yawning and smirking cat’s hours on the Pollockses’ woolly round tabouretcushion watching her sewing a dream together, the tailor’s daughter, stitch to her last. Or while waiting for winter to fire the enchantement, decoying more nesters to fall down the flue. It’s an allavalonche that blows nopussy food. If you only were there to explain the meaning, best of men, and talk to her nice of guldenselver. The lips would moisten once again. As when you drove with her to Findrinny Fair. What with reins here and ribbons there all your hands were employed so she never knew was she on land or at sea or swooped through the blue like Airwinger’s bride. She was flirtsome then and she’s fluttersome yet. She can second a song and adores a scandal when the last post’s gone by. Fond of a concertina and pairs passing when she’s had her forty winks for supper after kanekannan and abbely dimpling and is in her merlin chair assotted, reading her Evening World. To see is it smarts, full lengths or swaggers. News, news, all the news. Death, a leopard, kills fellah in Fez. Angry scenes at Stormount. Stilla Star with her lucky in goingaways. Opportunity fair with the China floods and we hear these rosy rumours. Ding Tams he noise about all same Harry chap. She’s seeking her way, a chickle a chuckle, in and out of their serial story, Les Loves of Selskar et Pervenche, freely adapted to The Novvergin’s Viv. There’ll be bluebells blowing in salty sepulchres the night she signs her final tear. Zee End. But that’s a world of ways away. Till track laws time. No silver ash or switches for that one! While flattering candles flare. Anna Stacey’s how are you! Worther waist in the noblest, says Adams and Sons, the wouldpay actionneers. Her hair’s as brown as ever it was. And wivvy and wavy. Repose you now! Finn no more!

For, be that samesake sibsubstitute of a hooky salmon, there’s already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises of his [p.029] haunt of the hungred bordles, as it is told me. Shop Illicit, flourishing like a lordmajor or a buaboabaybohm, litting flop a deadlop (aloose!) to lee but lifting a bennbranch a yardalong (ivoeh!) on the breezy side (for showm!), the height of Brewster’s chimpney and as broad below as Phineas Barnum; humphing his share of the showthers is senken on him he’s such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that’s a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle. And aither he cursed and recursed and was everseen doing what your fourfootlers saw or he was never done seeing what you coolpigeons know, weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses, and that’ll do now about the fairyhees and the frailyshees. Though Eset fibble it to the zephiroth and Artsa zoom it round her heavens for ever. Creator he has created for his creatured ones a creation. White monothoid? Red theatrocrat? And all the pinkprophets cohalething? Very much so! But however ’twas ’tis sure for one thing, what sherif Toragh voucherfors and Mapqiq makes put out, that the man, Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet a worthy of the naym, came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another, with a bumrush in a hull of a wherry, the twin turbane dhow, The Bey for Dybbling, this archipelago’s first visiting schooner, with a wicklowpattern waxenwench at her prow for a figurehead, the deadsea dugong updipdripping from his depths, and has been repreaching himself like a fishmummer these siktyten years ever since, his shebi by his shide, adi and aid, growing hoarish under his turban and changing cane sugar into sethulose starch (Tuttut’s cess to him!) as also that, batin the bulkihood he bloats about when innebbiated, our old offender was humile, commune and ensectuous from his nature, which you may gauge after the bynames was put under him, in lashons of languages, (honnein suit and praisers be!) and, totalisating him, even hamissim of himashim that he, sober serious, he is ee and no counter he who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough.

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[p.030] Now (to forebare for ever solittle of Iris Trees and Lili O’Rangans), concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen (we are back in the presurnames prodromarith period, of course just when enos chalked halltraps) and discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham in the Hundred of Manhood or proclaim him offsprout of vikings who had founded wapentake and seddled hem in Herrick or Eric, the best authenticated version, the Dumlat, read the Reading of Hofed-ben-Edar, has it that it was this way. We are told how in the beginning it came to pass that like cabbaging Cincinnatus the grand old gardener was saving daylight under his redwoodtree one sultry sabbath afternoon, Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of mobhouse, ye olde marine hotel, when royalty was announced by runner to have been pleased to have halted itself on the highroad along which a leisureloving dogfox had cast followed, also at walking pace, by a lady pack of cocker spaniels. Forgetful of all save his vassal’s plain fealty to the ethnarch Humphrey or Harold stayed not to yoke or saddle but stumbled out hotface as he was (his sweatful bandanna loose from his pocketcoat) hasting to the forecourts of his public in topee, surcingle, solascarf and plaid, plus fours, puttees and bulldog boots ruddled cinnabar with [p.031] flagrant marl, jingling his turnpike keys and bearing aloft amid the fixed pikes of the hunting party a high perch atop of which a flowerpot was fixed earthside hoist with care. On his majesty, who was, or often feigned to be, noticeably longsighted from green youth and had been meaning to inquire what, in effect, had caused yon causeway to be thus potholed, asking substitutionally to be put wise as to whether paternoster and silver doctors were not now more fancied bait for lobstertrapping honest blunt Haromphreyld answered in no uncertain tones very similarly with a fearless forehead: Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers. Our sailor king, who was draining a gugglet of obvious adamale, gift both and gorban, upon this, ceasing to swallow, smiled most heartily beneath his walrus moustaches and indulging that none too genial humour which William the Conk on the spindle side had inherited with the hereditary whitelock and some shortfingeredness from his greataunt Sophy, turned towards two of his retinue of gallowglasses, Michael, etheling lord of Leix and Offaly and the jubilee mayor of Drogheda, Elcock, (the two scatterguns being Michael M. Manning, protosyndic of Waterford and an Italian excellency named Giubilei according to a later version cited by the learned scholarch Canavan of Canmakenoise), in either case a triptychal religious family symbolising puritas of doctrina, business per usuals and the purchypatch of hamlock where the paddish preties grow and remarked dilsydulsily: Holybones of Saint Hubert how our red brother of Pouringrainia would audibly fume did he know that we have for surtrusty bailiwick a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger! For he kinned Jom Pill with his court so gray and his haunts in his house in the mourning. (One still hears that pebble crusted laughta, japijap cheerycherrily, among the roadside tree the lady Holmpatrick planted and still one feels the amossive silence of the cladstone allegibelling: Ive mies outs ide Bourn.) Comes the question are these the facts of his nominigentilisation as recorded and accolated in both or either of the collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives. Are those their fata which we read in sibylline between the fas and its nefas? No dung [p.032] on the road? And shall Nohomiah be our place like? Yea, Mulachy our kingable khan? We shall perhaps not so soon see. Pinck poncks that bail for seeks alicence where cumsceptres with scentaurs stay. Bear in mind, son of Hokmah, if so be you have metheg in your midness, this man is mountain and unto changeth doth one ascend. Heave we aside the fallacy, as punical as finikin, that it was not the king kingself but his inseparable sisters, uncontrollable nighttalkers, Skertsiraizde with Donyahzade, who afterwards, when the robberers shot up the socialights, came down into the world as amusers and were staged by Madame Sudlow as Rosa and Lily Miskinguette in the pantalime that two pitts paythronosed, Miliodorus and Galathee. The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hungerlean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation, every time he continually surveyed, amid vociferatings from in front of Accept these few nutties! and Take off that white hat!, relieved with Stop his Grog and Put It in the Log and Loots in his (bassvoco) Boots, from good start to happy finish the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in that king’s treat house of satin alustrelike above floats and footlights from their assbawlveldts and oxgangs unanimously to clapplaud (the inspiration of his lifetime and the hits of their careers) Mr Wallenstein Washington Semperkelly’s immergreen tourers in a command performance by special request with the courteous permission for pious purposes the homedromed and enliventh performance of problem passion play of the millentury, running strong since creation, A Royal Divorce, then near the approach towards the summit of its climax, with ambitious interval band selections from The Bo’ Girl and The Lily on all horserie show command nights from his viceregal booth (his bossaloner is ceil- [p.033] inged there a cuckoospit less eminent than the redritualhoods of Maccabe and Cullen) where, a veritable Napoleon the Nth, our worldstage’s practical jokepiece and retired cecelticocommediant in his own wise, this folksforefather all of the time sat, having the entirety of his house about him, with the invariable broadstretched kerchief cooling his whole neck, nape and shoulderblades and in a wardrobe panelled tuxedo completely thrown back from a shirt well entitled a swallowall, on every point far outstarching the laundered clawhammers and marbletopped highboys of the pit stalls and early amphitheatre. The piece was this: look at the lamps. The cast was thus: see under the clock. Ladies circle: cloaks may be left. Pit, prommer and parterre, standing room only. Habituels conspicuously emergent.

A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers (the stinks of Mohorat are in the nightplots of the morning), that he suffered from a vile disease. Athma, unmanner them! To such a suggestion the one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one should like to hope to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors, who, an imperfectly warmblooded race, apparently conceive him as a great white caterpillar capable of any and every enormity in the calendar recorded to the discredit of the Juke and Kellikek families, mended their case by insinuating that, alternately, he lay at one time under the ludicrous imputation of annoying Welsh fusiliers in the people’s park. Hay, hay, hay! Hoq, hoq, hoq! Faun and Flora on the lea love that little old joq. To anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous. Truth, beard on prophet, compels one to add that there is said to have been quondam (pfuit! pfuit!) some case of the kind implicating, it is interdum believed, a quidam (if he did not exist it would be necessary quoniam to invent him) abhout that time stambuling ha- [p.034] round Dumbaling in leaky sneakers with his tarrk record who has remained topantically anonymos but (let us hue him Abdullah Gamellaxarksky) was, it is stated, posted at Mallon’s at the instance of watch warriors of the vigilance committee and years afterwards, cries one even greater, Ibid, a commender of the frightful, seemingly, unto such as were sulhan sated, tropped head (pfiat! pfiat!) waiting his first of the month froods turn for thatt chopp pah kabbakks alicubi on the old house for the chargehard, Roche Haddocks off Hawkins Street. Lowe, you blondy liar, Gob scene you in the narked place and she what’s edith ar home defileth these boyles! There’s a cabful of bash indeed in the homeur of that meal. Slander, let it lie its flattest, has never been able to convict our good and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker, that homogenius man, as a pious author called him, of any graver impropriety than that, advanced by some woodwards or regarders, who did not dare deny, the shomers, that they had, chin Ted, chin Tam, chinchin Taffyd, that day consumed their soul of the corn, of having behaved with ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow whither, or so the two gown and pinners pleaded, dame nature in all innocency had spontaneously and about the same hour of the eventide sent them both but whose published combinations of silkinlaine testimonies are, where not dubiously pure, visibly divergent, as wapt from wept, on minor points touching the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison which was admittedly an incautious but, at its wildest, a partial exposure with such attenuating circumstances (garthen gaddeth green hwere sokeman brideth girling) as an abnormal Saint Swithin’s summer and, (Jesses Rosasharon!) a ripe occasion to provoke it.

We can’t do without them. Wives, rush to the restyours! Ofman will toman while led is the lol. Zessid’s our kadem, villapleach, vollapluck. Fikup, for flesh nelly, el mundo nov, zole flen! If she’s a lilyth, pull early! Pauline, allow! And malers abushed, keep black, keep black! Guiltless of much laid to him he was clearly for once at least he clearly expressed himself as being with still a trace of his erstwhile burr and hence it has been received of [p.035] us that it is true. They tell the story (an amalgam as absorbing as calzium chloereydes and hydrophobe sponges could make it) how one happygogusty Ides-of-April morning (the anniversary, as it fell out, of his first assumption of his mirthday suit and rights in appurtenance to the confusioning of human races) ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour when the tried friend of all creation, tigerwood roadstaff to his stay, was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park in his caoutchouc kepi and great belt and hideinsacks and his blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberised inverness, he met a cad with a pipe. The latter, the luciferant not the oriuolate (who, the odds are, is still berting dagabout in the same straw bamer, carryin his overgoat under his schulder, sheepside out, so as to look more like a coumfry gentleman and signing the pledge as gaily as you please) hardily accosted him with: Guinness thaw tool in jew me dinner ouzel fin? (a nice how-do-you-do in Poolblack at the time as some of our olddaisers may still tremblingly recall) to ask could he tell him how much a clock it was that the clock struck had he any idea by cock’s luck as his watch was bradys. Hesitency was clearly to be evitated. Execration as cleverly to be honnisoid. The Earwicker of that spurring instant, realising on fundamental liberal principles the supreme importance, nexally and noxally, of physical life (the nearest help relay being pingping K. O. Sempatrick’s Day and the fenian rising) and unwishful as he felt of being hurled into eternity right then, plugged by a softnosed bullet from the sap, halted, quick on the draw, and replyin that he was feelin tipstaff, cue, prodooced from his gunpocket his Jurgensen’s shrapnel waterbury, ours by communionism, his by usucapture, but, on the same stroke, hearing above the skirling of harsh Mother East old Fox Goodman, the bellmaster, over the wastes to south, at work upon the ten ton tonuant thunderous tenor toller in the speckled church (Couhounin’s call!) told the inquiring kidder, by Jehova, it was twelve of em sidereal and tankard time, adding, buttall, as he bended deeply with smoked sardinish breath to give more pondus to the copperstick he presented, (though this seems in some cumfusium with the chap- [p.036] stuck ginger which, as being of sours, acids, salts, sweets and bitters compompounded, we know him to have used as chawchaw for bone, muscle, blood, flesh and vimvital,) that whereas the hakusay accusation againstm had been made, what was known in high quarters as was stood stated in Morganspost, by a creature in youman form who was quite beneath parr and several degrees lower than yore triplehydrad snake. In greater support of his word (it, quaint anticipation of a famous phrase, has been reconstricted out of oral style into the verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics, in quiritary quietude, and toosammenstucked from successive accounts by Noah Webster in the redaction known as the Sayings Attributive of H. C. Earwicker, prize on schillings, postlots free), the flaxen Gygas tapped his chronometrum drumdrum and, now standing full erect, above the ambijacent floodplain, scene of its happening, with one Berlin gauntlet chopstuck in the hough of his ellboge (by ancientest signlore his gesture meaning: E!) pointed at an angle of thirtytwo degrees towards his duc de Fer’s overgrown milestone as fellow to his gage and after a rendypresent pause averred with solemn emotion’s fire: Shsh shake, co-comeraid! Me only, them five ones, he is equal combat. I have won straight. Hence my nonation wide hotel and creamery establishments which for the honours of our mewmew mutual daughters, credit me, I am woowoo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption, any hygienic day to this hour and to make my hoath to my sinnfinners, even if I get life for it, upon the Open Bible and before the Great Taskmaster’s (I lift my hat!) and in the presence of the Deity Itself andwell of Bishop and Mrs Michan of High Church of England as of all such of said my immediate withdwellers and of every living sohole in every corner wheresoever of this globe in general which useth of my British to my backbone tongue and commutative justice that there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications.

Gaping Gill, swift to mate errthors, stern to checkself, (diagnosing through eustacetube that it was to make with a markedly [p.037] postpuberal hypertituitary type of Heidelberg mannleich cavern ethics) lufted his slopingforward, bad Sweatagore good murrough and dublnotch on to it as he was greedly obliged, and like a sensible ham, with infinite tact in the delicate situation seen the touchy nature of its perilous theme, thanked um for guilders received and time of day (not a little token abock all the same that that was owl the God’s clock it was) and, upon humble duty to greet his Tyskminister and he shall gildthegap Gaper and thee his a mouldy voids, went about his business, whoever it was, saluting corpses, as a metter of corse (one could hound him out had one hart to for the monticules of scalp and dandruff droppings blaze his trail) accompanied by his trusty snorler and his permanent reflection, verbigracious; I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early: and with tag for ildiot repeated in his secondmouth language as many of the bigtimer’s verbaten words which he could balbly call to memory that same kveldeve, ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea, when suppertide and souvenir to Charlatan Mall jointly kem gently and along the quiet darkenings of Grand and Royal, ff, flitmansfluh, and, kk, ’t crept i’ hedge whenas to many a softongue’s pawkytalk mude unswer u sufter poghyogh, Arvanda always aquiassent, while, studying castelles in the blowne and studding cowshots over the noran, he spat in careful convertedness a musaic dispensation about his hearthstone, if you please, (Irish saliva, mawshe dho hole, but would a respectable prominently connected fellow of Iro-European ascendances with welldressed ideas who knew the correct thing such as Mr Shallwesigh or Mr Shallwelaugh expectorate after such a callous fashion, no thank yous! when he had his belcher spuckertuck in his pucket, pthuck?) musefed with his thockits after having supped of the dish sot and pottage which he snobbishly dabbed Peach Bombay (it is rawly only Lukanpukan pilzenpie which she knows which senaffed and pibered him), a supreme of excelling peas, balled under minnshogue’s milk into whitemalt winesour, a proviant the littlebilker hoarsely relished, chaff it, in the snevel season, being as fain o’t as your rat wi’fennel; and on this celebrating [p.038] occasion of the happy escape, for a crowning of pot valiance, this regional platter, benjamin of bouillis, with a spolish olive to middlepoint its zaynith, was marrying itself (porkograso!) erebusqued very deluxiously with a bottle of Phenice-Bruerie ’98, followed for second nuptials by a Piessporter, Grand Cur, of both of which cherished tablelights (though humble the bounquet ’tis a leaman’s farewell) he obdurately sniffed the cobwebcrusted corks.

Our cad’s bit of strife (knee Bareniece Maxwelton) with a quick ear for spittoons (as the aftertale hath it) glaned up as usual with dumbestic husbandry (no persicks and armelians for thee, Pomeranzia!) but, slipping the clav in her claw, broke of the matter among a hundred and eleven others in her usual curtsey (how faint these first vhespers womanly are, a secret pispigliando, amad the lavurdy den of their manfolker!) the next night nudge one as was Hegesippus over a hup a ’ chee, her eys dry and small and speech thicklish because he appeared a funny colour like he couldn’t stood they old hens no longer, to her particular reverend, the director, whom she had been meaning in her mind primarily to speak with (hosch, intra! jist a timblespoon!) trusting, between cuppled lips and annie lawrie promises (mighshe never have Esnekerry pudden come Hunanov for her pecklapitschens!) that the gossiple so delivered in his epistolear, buried teatoastally in their Irish stew would go no further than his jesuit’s cloth, yet (in vinars venitas! volatiles valetotum!) it was this overspoiled priest Mr Browne, disguised as a vincentian, who, when seized of the facts, was overheard, in his secondary personality as a Nolan and underreared, poul soul, by accident—if, that is, the incident it was an accident for here the ruah of Ecclectiastes of Hippo outpuffs the writress of Havvah-ban-Annah—to pianissime a slightly varied version of Crookedribs confidentials, (what Mère Aloyse said but for Jesuphine’s sake!) hands between hahands, in fealty sworn (my bravor best! my fraur!) and, to the strains of The Secret of Her Birth, hushly pierce the rubiend aurellum of one Philly Thurnston, a layteacher of rural science and orthophonethics of a nearstout figure and about the middle [p.039] of his forties during a priestly flutter for safe and sane bets at the hippic runfields of breezy Baldoyle on a date (W. W. goes through the cald) easily capable of rememberance by all pickersup of events national and Dublin details, the doubles of Perkin and Paullock, peer and prole, when the classic Encourage Hackney Plate was captured by two noses in a stablecloth finish, ek and nek, some and none, evelo nevelo, from the cream colt Bold Boy Cromwell after a clever getaway by Captain Chaplain Blount’s roe hinny Saint Dalough, Drummer Coxon, nondepict third, at breakneck odds, thanks to you great little, bonny little, portey little, Winny Widger! you’re all their nappies! who in his neverrip mud and purpular cap was surely leagues unlike any other phantomweight that ever toppitt our timber maggies.

’Twas two pisononse Timcoves (the wetter is pest, the renns are overt and come and the voax of the turfur is hurled on our lande) of the name of Treacle Tom as was just out of pop following the theft of a leg of Kehoe, Donnelly and Packenham’s Finnish pork and his own blood and milk brother Frisky Shorty, (he was, to be exquisitely punctilious about them, both shorty and frisky) a tipster, come off the hulks, both of them awful poor, what was out on the bumaround for an oofbird game for a jimmy o’goblin or a small thick un as chanced, while the Seaforths was making the colleenbawl, to ear the passon in the motor clobber make use of his law language (Edzo, Edzo on), touchin the case of Mr Adams what was in all the sundays about it which he was rubbing noses with and having a gurgle off his own along of the butty bloke in the specs.

This Treacle Tom to whom reference has been made had been absent from his usual wild and woolly haunts in the land of counties capalleens for some time previous to that (he was, in fact, in the habit of frequenting common lodginghouses where he slept in a nude state, hailfellow with meth, in strange men’s cots) but on racenight, blotto after divers tots of hell fire, red biddy, bull dog, blue ruin and creeping jenny, Eglandine’s choicest herbage, supplied by the Duck and Doggies, the Galopping Primrose, Brigid Brewster’s, the Cock, the Postboy’s Horn, [p.040] the Little Old Man’s and All Swell That Aimswell, the Cup and the Stirrup, he sought his wellwarmed leababobed in a housingroom Abide With Oneanother at Block W.W., (why didn’t he back it?) Pump Court, The Liberties, and, what with moltapuke on voltapuke, resnored alcoh alcoho alcoherently to the burden of I come, my horse delayed, nom num, the substance of the tale of the evangelical bussybozzy and the rusinurbean (the ‘girls’ he would keep calling them for the collarette and skirt, the sunbonnet and carnation) in parts (it seemed he was before the eyots of martas or otherwales the thirds of fossilyears, he having beham with katya when lavinias had her mens lease to sea in a psumpship doodly show whereat he was looking for fight niggers with whilde roarses) oft in the chilly night (the metagonistic! the epickthalamorous!) during uneasy slumber in their hearings of a small and stonybroke cashdraper’s executive, Peter Cloran (discharged), O’Mara, an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (locally known as Mildew Lisa), who had passed several nights, funnish enough, in a doorway under the blankets of homelessness on the bunk of iceland, pillowed upon the stone of destiny colder than man’s knee or woman’s breast, and Hosty, (no slouch of a name), an illstarred beachbusker, who, sans rootie and sans scrapie, suspicioning as how he was setting on a twoodstool on the verge of selfabyss, most starved, with melancholia over everything in general, (night birman, you served him with natigal’s nano!) had been towhead tossing on his shakedown, devising ways and manners of means, of what he loved to ifidalicence somehow or other in the nation getting a hold of some chap’s parabellum in the hope of taking a wing sociable and lighting upon a sidewheel dive somewhere off the Dullkey Downlairy and Bleakrooky tramaline where he could throw true and go and blow the sibicidal napper off himself for two bits to boldywell baltitude in the peace and quitybus of a one sure shot bottle, he after having being trying all he knew with the lady’s help of Madam Gristle for upwards of eighteen calanders to get out of Sir Patrick Dun’s, through Sir Humphrey Jervis’s and into the Saint Kevin’s bed in the Adelaide’s hosspittles (from [p.041] these incurable welleslays among those uncarable wellasdays through Sant Iago by his cocklehat, good Lazar, deliver us!) without after having been able to jerrywangle it anysides. Lisa O’Deavis and Roche Mongan (who had so much incommon, epipsychidically; if the phrase be permitted hostis et odor insuper petroperfractus) as an understood thing slept their sleep of the swimborne in the one sweet undulant mother of tumblerbunks with Hosty just how the shavers in the shaw the yokels in the yoats or, well, the wasters in the wilde, and the bustling tweeny-dawn-of-all-works (meed of anthems here we pant!) had not been many jiffies furbishing potlids, doorbrasses, scholars’ applecheeks and linkboy’s metals when, ashhopperminded like no fella he go make bakenbeggfuss longa white man, the rejuvenated busker (for after a goodnight’s rave and rumble and a shinkhams topmorning with his coexes he was not the same man) and his broadawake bedroom suite (our boys, as our Byron called them) were up and ashuffle from the hogshome they lovenaned The Barrel, cross Ebblinn’s chilled hamlet (thrie routes and restings on their then superficies curiously correspondant with those linea and puncta where our tubenny habenny metro maniplumbs below the oberflake underrails and stations at this time of riding) to the thrummings of a crewth fiddle which, cremoaning and cronauning, levey grevey, witty and wevey, appy, leppy and playable, caressed the ears of the subjects of King Saint Finnerty the Festive who, in brick homes of their own and in their flavory fraiseberry beds, heeding hardly cry of honeyman, soed lavender or foyneboyne salmon alive, with their priggish mouths all open for the larger appraisiation of this longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios, were only halfpast atsweeeep and after a brisk pause at a pawnbroking establishment for the prothetic purpose of redeeming the songster’s truly admirable false teeth and a prolonged visit to a house of call at Cujas Place, fizz, the Old Sots’ Hole in the parish of Saint Cecily within the liberty of Ceolmore not a thousand or one national leagues, that was, by Griffith’s valuation, from the site of the statue of Primewer Glasstone setting a match to the march of a maker (last of the stewards peut-être), where, the tale rambles [p.042] along, the trio of whackfolthediddlers was joined by a further—  intentions—apply—tomorrow casual and a decent sort of the hadbeen variety who had just been touching the weekly insult, phewit, and all figblabbers (who saith of noun?) had stimulants in the shape of gee and gees stood by the damn decent sort after which stag luncheon and a few ones more just to celebrate yesterday, flushed with their firestufffostered friendship, the rascals came out of the licensed premises, (Browne’s first, the small p.s. ex-ex-executive capahand in their sad rear like a lady’s postscript: I want money. Pleasend), wiping their laughleaking lipes on their sleeves, how the bouckaleens shout their roscan generally (seinn fion, seinn fion’s araun.) and the rhymers’ world was with reason the richer for a wouldbe ballad, to the balledder of which the world of cumannity singing owes a tribute for having placed on the planet’s melomap his lay of the vilest bogeyer but most attractionable avatar the world has ever had to explain for.

This, more krectly lubeen or fellow—me—lieder was first poured forth where Riau Liviau riots and col de Houdo humps, under the shadow of the monument of the shouldhavebeen legislator (Eleutheriodendron! Spare, woodmann, spare!) to an overflow meeting of all the nations in Lenster fullyfilling the visional area and, as a singleminded supercrowd, easily representative, what with masks, whet with faces, of all sections and cross sections (wineshop and cocoahouse poured out to brim up the broaching) of our liffeyside people (to omit to mention of the mainland minority and such as had wayfared via Watling, Ernin, Icknild and Stane, in chief a halted cockney car with its quotal of Hardmuth’s hacks, a northern tory, a southern whig, an eastanglian chronicler and a landwester guardian) ranging from slips of young dublinos from Cutpurse Row having nothing better to do than walk about with their hands in their kneepants, sucking airwhackers, weedulicet, jumbobricks, side by side with truant officers, three woollen balls and poplin in search of a croust of pawn to busy professional gentlemen, a brace of palesmen with dundrearies, nooning toward Daly’s, fresh from snipehitting and mallardmissing on Rutland heath, exchanging cold sneers, mass- [p.043] going ladies from Hume Street in their chairs, the bearers baited, some wandering hamalags out of the adjacent cloverfields of Mosse’s Gardens, an oblate fater from Skinner’s Alley, bricklayers, a fleming, in tabinet fumant, with spouse and dog, an aged hammersmith who had some chisellers by the hand, a bout of cudgel players, not a few sheep with the braxy, two bluecoat scholars, four broke gents out of Simpson’s on the Rocks, a portly and a pert still tassing Turkey Coffee and orange shrub in tickeyes door, Peter Pim and Paul Fry and then Elliot and, O, Atkinson, suffering hell’s delights from the blains of their annuitant’s acorns not forgetting a deuce of dianas ridy for the hunt, a particularist prebendary pondering on the roman easter, the tonsure question and greek uniates, plunk em, a lace lappet head or two or three or four from a window, and so on down to a few good old souls, who, as they were juiced after taking their pledge over at the unkle’s place, were evidently under the spell of liquor, from the wake of Tarry the Tailor a fair girl, a jolly postboy thinking off three flagons and one, a plumodrole, a half sir from the weaver’s almshouse who clings and clings and chatchatchat clings to her, a wholedam’s cloudhued pittycoat, as child, as curiolater, as Caoch O’Leary. The wararrow went round, so it did, (a nation wants a gaze) and the ballad, in the felibrine trancoped metre affectioned by Taiocebo in his Casudas de Poulichinello Artahut, stumpstampaded on to a slip of blancovide and headed by an excessively rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville, soon fluttered its secret on white highway and brown byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, from archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village, through the five pussyfours green of the united states of Scotia Picta—and he who denies it, may his hairs be rubbed in dirt! To the added strains (so peacifold) of his majesty the floote, that onecrooned king of inscrewments, Piggots’s purest, ciello alsoliuto, which Mr Delaney (Mr Delacey?), horn, anticipating a perfect downpour of plaudits among the rapsods, piped out of his decentsoort hat, looking still more like his purseyful namesake as men of Gaul noted, but before of to sputabout, the [p.044] snowycrested curl amoist the leader’s wild and moulting hair, ‘Ductor’ Hitchcock hoisted his fezzy fuzz at bludgeon’s height signum to his companions of the chalice for the Loud Fellow, boys’ and silentium in curia! (our maypole once more where he rose of old) and the canto was chantied there chorussed and christened where by the old tollgate, Saint Annona’s Street and Church.

And aroud the lawn the rann it rann and this is the rann that Hosty made. Spoken. Boyles and Cahills, Skerretts and Pritchards, viersefied and piersified may the treeth we tale of live in stoney. Here line the refrains of. Some vote him Vike, some mote him Mike, some dub him Llyn and Phin while others hail him Lug Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne or Guinn. Some apt him Arth, some bapt him Barth, Coll, Noll, Soll, Will, Weel, Wall but I parse him Persse O’Reilly else he’s called no name at all. Together. Arrah, leave it to Hosty, frosty Hosty, leave it to Hosty for he’s the mann to rhyme the rann, the rann, the rann, the king of all ranns. Have you here? (Some ha) Have we where? (Some hant) Have you hered? (Others do) Have we whered (Others dont) It’s cumming, it’s brumming! The clip, the clop! (All cla) Glass crash. The (klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatz-klatschabattacreppycrotty-graddaghsemmihsammihnouit-happluddyappladdypkonpkot!).

{Ardite, arditi!
Music cue.

[p.045] Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty

How he fell with a roll and a rumble

And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple

By the butt of the Magazine Wall,

(Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall,
Hump, helmet and all?

He was one time our King of the Castle

Now he’s kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.

And from Green street he’ll be sent by order of His Worship

To the penal jail of Mountjoy

(Chorus) To the jail of Mountjoy!
Jail him and joy

He was fafafather of all schemes for to bother us

Slow coaches and immaculate contraceptives for the populace,

Mare’s milk for the sick, seven dry Sundays a week,

Openair love and religion’s reform,

(Chorus) And religious reform,
Hideous in form.

Arrah, why, says you, couldn’t he manage it?

I’ll go bail, my fine dairyman darling,

Like the bumping bull of the Cassidys

All your butter is in your horns.

(Chorus) His butter is in his horns.
Butter his horns!

(Repeat) Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye,

Rhyme the rann, the king of all ranns!

Balbaccio, balbuccio!

We had chaw chaw chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chickenpox and china chambers

Universally provided by this soffsoaping salesman.

[p.046] Small wonder He’ll Cheat E’erawan our local lads nicknamed him

When Chimpden first took the floor

(Chorus) With his bucketshop store
Down Bargainweg, Lower.

So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous

But soon we’ll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery

And’tis short till sheriff Clancy’ll be winding up his unlimited company

With the bailiff’s bom at the door,

(Chorus) Bimbam at the door.
Then he’ll bum no more.

Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island

The hooker of that hammerfast viking

And Gall’s curse on the day when Eblana bay

Saw his black and tan man-o’-war.

(Chorus) Saw his man-o’-war.
On the harbour bar.

Where from? roars Poolbeg. Cookingha’pence, he bawls Donnez-moi scampitle, wick an wipin’fampiny

Fingal Mac Oscar Onesine Bargearse Boniface

Thok’s min gammelhole Norveegickers moniker

Og as ay are at gammelhore Norveegickers cod.

(Chorus) A Norwegian camel old cod.
He is, begod.

Lift it, Hosty, lift it, ye devil ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann!

It was during some fresh water garden pumping

Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys

That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey

Made bold a maid to woo

(Chorus) Woohoo, what’ll she doo!
The general lost her maidenloo!

[p.047] He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher,

For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.

Begob, he’s the crux of the catalogue

Of our antediluvial zoo,

(Chorus) Messrs. Billing and Coo.
Noah’s larks, good as noo.

He was joulting by Wellinton’s monument

Our rotorious hippopopotamuns

When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus

And he caught his death of fusiliers,

(Chorus) With his rent in his rears.
Give him six years.

’Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children

But look out for his missus legitimate!

When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker

Won’t there be earwigs on the green?

(Chorus) Big earwigs on the green,
The largest ever you seen.

Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!

Then we’ll have a free trade Gaels’ band and mass meeting

For to sod the brave son of Scandiknavery.

And we’ll bury him down in Oxmanstown

Along with the devil and Danes,

(Chorus) With the deaf and dumb Danes,
And all their remains.

And not all the king’s men nor his horses

Will resurrect his corpus

For there’s no true spell in Connacht or hell

(bis) That’s able to raise a Cain.

 ® 

[p.048] Chest Cee! ’Sdense! Corpo di barragio! you spoof of visibility in a freakfog, of mixed sex cases among goats, hill cat and plain mousey, Bigamy Bob and his old Shanvocht! The Blackfriars treacle plaster outrage be liddled! Therewith was released in that kingsrick of Humidia a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed. Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then notever been. Canbe in some future we shall presently here amid those zouave players of Inkermann the mime mumming the mick and his nick miming their maggies, Hilton St Just (Mr Frank Smith), Ivanne Ste Austelle (Mr J. F. Jones), Coleman of Lucan taking four parts, a choir of the O’Daley O’Doyles doublesixing the chorus in Fenn Mac Call and the Seven Feeries of Loch Neach, Galloper Troppler and Hurleyquinn the zitherer of the past with his merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim. Of the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga (which, thorough readable to int from and, is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this applies to its whole wholume) of poor Osti-Frosti, described as quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match, not alone, but a very major poet of the poorly meritary order (he began Tuonisonian but worked his passage up as far as the we-all-hang-together Animandovites) no one end is known. If they [p.049] whistled him before he had curtains up they are whistling him still after his curtain’s doom’s doom. Ei fù. His husband, poor old A’Hara (Okaroff?) crestfallen by things and down at heels at the time, they squeak, accepted the (Zassnoch!) ardree’s shilling at the conclusion of the Crimean war and, having flown his wild geese, alohned in crowds to warnder on like Shuley Luney, enlisted in Tyrone’s horse, the Irish whites, and soldiered a bit with Wolsey under the assumed name of Blanco Fusilovna Bucklovitch (spurious) after which the cawer and the marble halls of Pump Court Columbarium, the home of the old seakings, looked upon each other and queth their haven evermore for it transpires that on the other side of the water it came about that on the field of Vasileff’s Cornix inauspiciously with his unit he perished, saying, this papal leafless to old chap give, rawl chawclates for mouther-in-louth. Booil. Poor old dear Paul Horan, to satisfy his literary as well as his criminal aspirations, at the suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity lunacy, so says the Dublin Intelligence, was thrown into a Ridley’s for inmates in the northern counties. Under the name of Orani he may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of sustaining long parts at short notice. He was. Sordid Sam, a dour decent deblancer, the unwashed, haunted always by his ham, the unwished, at a word from Israfel the Summoner, passed away painlessly after life’s upsomdowns one hallowe’en night, ebbrous and in the state of nature, propelled from Behind into the great Beyond by footblows coulinclouted upon his oyster and atlas on behanged and behooved and behicked and behulked of his last fishandblood bedscrappers, a Northwegian and his mate of the Sheawolving class. Though the last straw glimt his baring this stage thunkhard is said (the pitfallen gagged him as ‘Promptboxer’) to have solemnly said — as had the brief thot but fell in till his head like a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate (cogged!): Me drames, O’Loughlins, has come through! Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, — of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me — by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity [p.050] of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns and (but at this poingt though the iron thrust of his cockspurt start might have prepared us we are wellnigh stinkpotthered by the mustardpunge in the tailend) this outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese! Han var. Disliken as he was to druriodrama, her wife Langley, the prophet, and the decentest dozendest short of a frusker whoever stuck his spickle through his spoke, disappeared, (in which toodooing he has taken all the French leaves unveilable out of Calomnequiller’s Pravities) from the sourface of this earth, that austral plain he had transmaried himself to, so entirely spoorlessly (the mother of the book with a dustwhisk tabularasing his obliteration done upon her involucrum) as to tickle the speculative to all but opine (since the Levey who might have been Langley may have really been a redivivus of paganinism or a volunteer Vousden) that the hobo (who possessed a large amount of the humoresque) had transtuled his funster’s latitat to its finsterest interrimost. Bhi she. Again, if Father San Browne, tea and toaster to that quaintesttest of yarnspinners is Padre Don Bruno, treu and troster to the queen of Iar-Spain, was the reverend, the sodality director, that eupeptic viceflayer, a barefaced carmelite, to whose palpitating pulpit (which of us but remembers the rarevalent and hornerable Fratomistor Nawlanmore and Brawne.) sinning society sirens (see the [Roman Catholic] presspassim) fortunately became so enthusiastically attached and was an objectionable ass who very occasionally cockaded a raffles ticket on his hat which he wore all to one side like the hangle of his pan (if Her Elegance saw him she’d have the canary!) and was semiprivately convicted of malpractices with his hotwashed tableknife (glossing over the cark in his pocket) that same snob of the dunhill, fully several yearschaums riper, encountered by the General on that redletter morning or maynoon jovesday and were they? Fuitfuit.

When Phishlin Phil wants throws his lip ’tis pholly to be fortune flonting and whoever’s gone to mix Hotel by the salt say water there’s nix to nothing we can do for he’s never again to sea. It is nebuless an autodidact fact of the commonest that the shape of [p.051] the average human cloudyphiz, whereas sallow has long daze faded, frequently altered its ego with the possing of the showers (Not original!). Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone in scratch wig, squarecuts, stock lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers (he is often alluded to as Slypatrick, the llad in the llane) with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness (one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all sorts of ages!) who was asked by free boardschool shirkers in drenched coats overawall, Will, Conn and Otto, to tell them overagait, Vol, Pov and Dev, that fishabed ghoatstory of the haardly creditable edventyres of the Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums in their Bearskin ghoats! Girles and jongers, but he has changed alok syne Thorkill’s time! Ya, da, tra, gathery, pimp, shesses, shossafat, okodeboko, nine! Those many warts, those slummy patches, halfsinster wrinkles, (what has come over the face on wholebroader E?), and (shrine of Mount Mu save us!) the large fungopark he has grown! Drink!

Sport’s a common thing. It was the Lord’s own day for damp (to wait for a postponed regatta’s eventualising is not of Battlecock Shettledore - Juxta - Mare only) and the request for a fully armed explanation was put (in Loo of Pat) to the porty (a native of the sisterisle — Meathman or Meccan? — by his brogue, exrace eyes, lokil calour and lucal odour which are said to have been average clownturkish (though the capelist’s voiced nasal liquids and the way he sneezed at zees haul us back to the craogs and bryns of the Silurian Ordovices) who, the lesser pilgrimage accomplished, had made, pats’ and pigs’ older inselt, the southeast bluffs of the stranger stepshore, a regifugium persecutorum, hence hindquarters) as he paused at evenchime for some or so minutes (hit the pipe, dannyboy! Time to won, barmon. I’ll take ten to win.) amid the devil’s one duldrum (Apple by her blossom window and Charlotte at her toss panomancy his sole admirers, his only tearts in store) for a fragrend culubosh during his week- [p.052] end pastime of executing with Anny Oakley deadliness (the consummatory pairs of provocatives, of which remained provokingly but two, the ones he fell for, Lili and Tutu, cork em!) empties which had not very long before contained Reid’s family (you ruad that before, soaky, but all the bottles in sodemd histry will not soften your bloodathirst!) stout. Having reprimed his repeater and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances, with still a life or two to spare for the space of his occupancy of a world at a time, rose to his feet and there, far from Tolkaheim, in a quiet English garden (commonplace!), since known as Whiddington Wild, his simple intensive curolent vocality, my dearbraithers, my most dearbrathairs, as he, so is a supper as is a sipper, spake of the One and told of the Compassionate, called up before the triad of precoxious scaremakers (scoretaking: Spegulo ne helpas al malbellulo, Mi Kredas ke vi estas prava, Via dote la vizago rispondas fraulino) the now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne.

Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen! And wolfbone balefires blaze the trailmost if only that Mary Nothing may burst her bibby buckshee. When they set fire then she’s got to glow so we may stand some chances of warming to what every soorkabatcha, tum or hum, would like to know. The first Humphrey’s latitudinous baver with puggaree behind, (calaboose belong bigboss belong Kang the Toll) his fourinhand bow, his elbaroom surtout, the refaced unmansionables of gingerine hue, the state slate umbrella, his gruff woolselywellesly with the finndrinn knopfs and the gauntlet upon the hand which in an hour not for him solely evil had struck down the might he mighthavebeen d’Esterre of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to have need. Then, stealing his thunder, but in the befitting legomena of the smaller country, (probable words, possibly said, of field family gleaming) a bit duskish and flavoured with a smile, seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents (sukand see whybe!) the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might [p.053] a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum’s mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no œdor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (Prigged!)

And there oftafter, jauntyjogging, on an Irish visavis, insteadily with shoulder to shoulder Jehu will tell to Christianier, saint to sage, the humphriad of that fall and rise while daisy winks at her pinker sister among the tussocks and the copoll between the shafts mocks the couple on the car. And as your who may look like how on the owther side of his big belttry your tyrs and cloes your noes and paradigm maymay rererise in eren. Follow we up his whip vindicative. Thurston’s! Lo bebold! La arboro, lo petrusu. The augustan peacebetothem oaks, the monolith rising stark from the moonlit pinebarren. In all fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity. The angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm usetensiles, the soft belling of the fallow deers (doerehmoose genuane!) advertising their milky approach as midnight was striking the hours (letate!), and how brightly the great tribune outed the sharkskin smokewallet (imitation!) from his frock, kippers, and by Joshua, he tips un a topping swank cheroot, none of your swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and how manfally he says, pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan, he was to just pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana. Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be old high gothsprogue! Wherefore he met Master, he mean to say, he do, sire, bester of redpublicans, at Eagle Cock Hostel on Lorenzo Tooley street and how he wished his Honour the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, yore Loudship, and a starchboxsitting in the pit of his St Tomach’s, — a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times, when they were turrified by the hitz.

Chee chee cheers for Upkingbilly and crow cru cramwells [p.054] Downaboo! Hup, boys, and hat him! See! Oilbeam they’re lost we’ve found rerembrandtsers, their hours to date link these heirs to here but wowhere are those yours of Yestersdays? Farseeingetherich and Poolaulwoman Charachthercuss and his Ann van Vogt. D.e.e.d! Edned, ended or sleeping soundlessly? Favour with your tongues! Intendite!

Any dog’s life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes and seventies as eversure as Halley’s comet, ulemamen, sobranjewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: Huru more Nee, minny frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue. Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib? Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son succo, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A’Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily? Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tuvavnr dans Lptit boing going. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de portocallie. O.O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O piccolo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and you? Gomagh, thak.

And, Cod, says he with mugger’s tears: Would you care to know the prise of a liard? Maggis, nick your nightynovel! Mass Taverner’s at the mike again! And that bag belly is the buck to goat it! Meggeg, m’gay chapjappy fellow, I call our univalse to witness, as sicker as moyliffey eggs is known by our good househalters from yorehunderts of mamooth to be which they commercially are in ahoy high British quarters (conventional!) my guesthouse and cowhaendel credits will immediately stand ohoh open as straight as that neighbouring monument’s fabrication before the hygienic gllll (this was where the reverent sabboth and bottlebreaker with firbalk forthstretched touched upon his tricoloured boater, which he uplifted by its pickledhoopy (he gave Stetson one and a penny for it) whileas oleaginosity of ancestralolosis sgocciolated down the both pendencies of his mutsohito liptails (Sencapetulo, a more modestuous conciliabulite never curled a torn pocketmouth), cordially inwiting the adullescence who he was wising up to do in like manner what all did [p.055] so as he was able to add) lobe before the Great Schoolmaster’s. (I tell you no story.) Smile!

The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum! Maeromor Mournomates!) averging on blight like the mundibanks of Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten, the hen and crusader everintermutuomergent, for later in the century one of that puisne band of factferreters, (then an excivily (out of the custom huts) (retired), (hurt), under the sixtyfives act) in a dressy black modern style and wewere shiny tan burlingtons, (tam, homd and dicky, quopriquos and peajagd) rehearsed it, pippa pointing, with a dignified (copied) bow to a namecousin of the late archdeacon F. X. Preserved Coppinger (a hot fellow in his night, may the mouther of guard have mastic on him!) in a pullwoman of our first transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a dirkandurk heartskewerer if ever to bring bouncing brimmers from marbled eyes. Cycloptically through the windowdisks and with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers, back to back, buck to bucker, on their airish chaunting car, beheld with intouristing anterestedness the clad pursue the bare, the bare the green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig’s lifetree, our fireleaved loverlucky blomsterbohm, phoenix in our woodlessness, haughty, cacuminal, erubescent (repetition!) whose roots they be asches with lustres of peins. For as often as the Archicadenus, pleacing aside his Irish Field and craving their auriculars to recepticle particulars before they got the bump at Castlebar (mat and far!) spoke of it by request all, hearing in this new reading of the part whereby, because of Dyas in his machina, the new garrickson’s grimacing grimaldism hypostasised by substintuation the axiomatic orerotundity of that once grand old elrington [p.056] bawl, the copycus’s description of that fellowcommuter’s play upon countenants, could simply imagine themselves in their bosom’s inmost core, as pro tem locums, timesported acorss the yawning (abyss), as once they were seasiders, listening to the cockshyshooter’s evensong evocation of the doomed but always ventriloquent Agitator, (nonot more plangorpound the billows o’er Thounawahallya Reef!) silkhouatted, a whallrhosmightiadd, aginsst the dusk of skumring, (would that fane be Saint Muezzin’s calling — holy places! — and this fez brimless as brow of faithful toucher of the ground, did wish it were — blessed be the bones! — the ghazi, power of his sword.) his manslayer’s gunwielder protended towards that overgrown leadpencil which was soon, monumentally at least, to rise as Molyvdokondylon to, to be, to be his mausoleum (O’dan stod tillsteyne at meisies aye skould show pon) while olover his exculpatory features, as Roland rung, a wee dropeen of grief about to sillonise his jouejous, the ghost of resignation diffused a spectral appealingness, as a young man’s drown o’er the fate of his waters may gloat, similar in origin and akkurat in effective to a beam of sunshine upon a coffin plate.

Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Traveller remote, unfriended, from van Demon’s Land, some lazy skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wildbroom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally quasi-begin to presquesm’ile to queasithin’ (Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)

But in the pragma what formal cause made a smile of that tothink? Who was he to whom? (O’Breen’s not his name nor the brown one his maid.) Whose are the placewheres? Kiwasti, kisker, kither, kitnabudja? Tal the tem of the tumulum. Giv the gav of the grube. Be it cudgelplayers’ country, orfishfellows’ town or leeklickers’ land or panbpanungopovengreskey. What regnans [p.057] raised the rains have levelled but we hear the pointers and can gauge their compass for the melos yields the mode and the mode the manners plicyman, plansiman, plousiman, plab. Tsin tsin tsin tsin! The forefarther folkers for a prize of two peaches with Ming, Ching and Shunny on the lie low lea. We’ll sit down on the hope of the ghouly ghost for the titheman troubleth but his hantitat hies not here. They answer from their Zoans; Hear the four of them! Hark torroar of them! I, says Armagh, and a’m proud o’it. I, says Clonakilty, God help us! I, says Deansgrange, and say nothing. I, says Barna, and whatabout it? Hee haw! Before he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um, cool of her curls: We were but thermites then, wee, wee. Our antheap we sensed as a Hill of Allen, the Barrow for an People, one Jotnursfjaell: and it was a grummelung amung the porktroop that wonderstruck us as a thunder, yunder.

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus twos. Nevertheless Madam’s Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious. Oblige with your blackthorns; gamps, degrace! And there many have paused before that exposure of him by old Tom Quad, a flashback in which he sits sated, gowndabout, in clericalease habit, watching bland sol slithe dodgsomely into the nethermore, a globule of maugdleness about to corrugitate his mild dewed cheek and the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his limper looser.

Yet certes one is. Eher the following winter had overed the pages of nature’s book and till Ceadurbar-atta-Cleath became Dablena Tertia, the shadow of the huge outlander, maladik, multvult, magnoperous, had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals in manor hall as in thieves’ kitchen, mid pillow talk and chithouse chat, on Marlborough Green as through Molesworth Fields, here sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted con- [p.058] testimony with benefit of clergy. His Thing Mod have undone him: and his madthing has done him man. His beneficiaries are legion in the part he created: they number up his years. Greatwheel Dunlop was the name was on him: behung, all we are his bisaacles. As hollyday in his house so was he priest and king to that: ulvy came, envy saw, ivy conquered. Lou! Lou! They have waved his green boughs o’er him as they have torn him limb from lamb. For his muertification and uxpiration and dumnation and annuhulation. With schreis and grida, deprofound souspirs. Steady, sullivans! Mannequins pause! Longtong’s breach is fallen down but Graunya’s spreed’s abroad. Ahdostay, feedailyones, and feel the Flucher’s bawls for the total of your flouts is not fit to fan his fettle, O! Have a ring and sing wohl! Chin, chin! Chin, chin! And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality. Swiping rums and beaunes and sherries and ciders and negus and citronnades too. The strongers. Oho, oho, Mester Begge, you’re about to be bagged in the bog again. Bugge. But softsies seufsighed: Eheu, for gassies! But, lo! lo! by the threnning gods, human, erring and condonable, what the statues of our kuo, who is the messchef be our kuang, ashu ashure there, the unforgettable treeshade looms up behind the jostling judgements of those, as all should owe, malrecapturable days.

Tap and pat and tapatagain, (fire firstshot, Missiers the Refuseleers! Peingpeong! For saxonlootie!) three tommix, soldiers free, cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream. Guards were walking, in (pardonnez-leur, je vous en prie, eh?) Montgomery Street. One voiced an opinion in which on either wide (pardonnez!), nodding, all the Finner Camps concurred (je vous en prie, eh?). It was the first woman, they said, souped him, that fatal wellesday, Lili Coninghams, by suggesting him they go in a field. Wroth mod eldfar, ruth redd stilstand, wrath wrackt wroth, confessed private Pat Marchison retro. (Terse!) Thus contenters with santoys play. One of our coming Vauxhall ontheboards who is resting for the moment (she has been callit by a noted stagey elecutioner a wastepacket Sittons) was interfeud in a waistend pewty parlour. Looking perhaps even more pewtyflushed in her cherry- [p.059] derry padouasoys, girdle and braces by the Halfmoon and Seven Stars, russets from the Blackamoor’s Head, amongst the climbing boys at his Eagle and Child and over the corn and hay emptors at their Black and All Black, Mrs F . . . A . . . saidaside, half in stage of whisper to her confidante glass, while recoopering her cartwheel chapot (ahat! — and we now know what thimbles a baquets on lallance a talls mean), she hoped Sid Arthar would git a Chrissman’s portrout of orange and lemonsized orchids with hollegs and ether, from the feeatre of the Innocident, as the worryld had been uncained. Then, while it is odrous comparisoning to the sprangflowers of his burstday which was a viridable goddinpotty for the reinworms and the charlattinas and all branches of climatitis, it has been such a wanderful noyth untirely, added she, with many regards to Maha’s pranjapansies. (Tart!) Prehistoric, obitered to his dictaphone an entychologist: his propenomen is a properismenon. A dustman nocknamed Sevenchurches in the employ of Messrs Achburn, Soulpetre and Ashreborn, prairmakers, Glintalook, was asked by the sisterhood the vexed question during his midday collation of leaver and buckrom alternatively with stenk and kitteney phie in a hashhoush and, thankeaven, responsed impulsively: We have just been propogandering his nullity suit and what they took out of his ear among my own crush. All our fellows at O’Dea’s sages with Aratar Calaman he is a cemented brick, buck it all! A more nor usually sober cardriver, who was jauntingly hosing his runabout, Ginger Jane, took a strong view. Lorry hosed her as he talked and this is what he told rewritemen: Irewaker is just a plain pink joint reformee in private life but folks all have it by brehemons laws he has parliamentary honours. Eiskaffier said (Louigi’s, you know that man’s, brillant Savourain): Mon foie, you wish to ave some homelette, yes, lady! Good, mein leber! Your hegg he must break himself. See, I crack, so, he sit in the poele, umbedimbt! A perspirer (over sixty) who was keeping up his tennises panted he kne ho har twa to clect infamatios but a diffpair flannels climb wall and trespassing on doorbell. After fullblown Braddon hear this fresky troterella! A railways barmaid’s view (they call her [p.060] Spilltears Rue) was thus expressed: to sympathisers of the Dole Line, Death Avenue, anent those objects of her pity-prompted ministrance, to wet, man and his syphon. Ehim! It is ever too late to whissle when Phyllis floods her stable. It would be skarlot shame to jailahim in lockup, as was proposed to him by the Seddoms creature what matter what merrytricks went off with his revulverher in connections with ehim being a norphan and enjoining such wicked illth, ehim! Well done, Drumcollakill! Kitty Tyrrel is proud of you, was the reply of a B.O.T. official (O blame gnot the board!) while the Daughters Benkletter murmured in uniswoon: Golforgilhisjurylegs! Brian Lynsky, the cub curser, was questioned at his shouting box, Bawlonabraggat, and gave a snappy comeback, when saying: Paw! Once more I’ll hellbowl! I am for caveman chase and sahara sex, burk you! Them two bitches ought to be leashed, canem! Up hog and hoar hunt! Paw! A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves’ licence and his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there would be fights all over Cuxhaven. (Tosh!) Missioner Ida Wombwell, the seventeenyearold revivalist, said concerning the coincident of interfizzing with grenadines and other respectable and disgusted peersons using the park: That perpendicular person is a brut! But a magnificent brut! ‘Caligula’ (Mr Danl Magrath, bookmaker, wellknown to Eastrailian poorusers of the Sydney Parade Ballotin) was, as usual, antipodal with his: striving todie, hopening tomellow, Ware Splash. Cobbler. We have meat two hourly, sang out El Caplan Buycout, with the famous padre’s turridur’s capecast, meet too ourly, matadear! Dan Meiklejohn, precentor, of S.S. Smack and Olley’s was probiverbal with his upsiduxit: mutatus mutandus. Dauran’s lord (’Sniffpox’) and Moirgan’s lady (’Flatterfun’) took sides and crossed and bowed to each other’s views and recrossed themselves. The dirty dubs upin their flies, went too free, echoed the dainly drabs downin their [p.061] scenities, una mona. Sylvia Silence, the girl detective (Meminerva, but by now one hears turtlings all over Doveland!) when supplied with informations as to the several facets of the case in her cozydozy bachelure’s flat, quite overlooking John a’Dream’s mews, leaned back in her really truly easy chair to query restfully through her vowelthreaded syllabelles: Have you evew thought, wepowtew, that sheew gweatness was his twadgedy? Nevewtheless accowding to my considewed attitudes fow this act he should pay the full penalty, pending puwsuance, as pew Subsec. 32, section 11, of the C. L. A. act 1885, anything in this act to the contwawy notwithstanding. Jarley Jilke began to silke for he couldn’t get home to Jelsey but ended with: He’s got the sack that helped him moult instench of his gladsome rags. Meagher, a naval rating, seated on one of the granite cromlech setts of our new fishshambles for the usual aireating after the ever popular act, with whom were Questa and Puella, piquante and quoite, (this had a cold in her brain while that felt a sink in her summock, wit’s wat, wot’s wet) was encouraged, although nearvanashed himself, by one of his co-affianced to get your breath, Walt, and gobbit and when ther chidden by her fastra sastra to saddle up your pance, Naville, thus cor replied to her other’s thankskissing: I lay my two fingerbuttons, fiancee Meagher, (he speaks!) he was to blame about your two velvetthighs up Horniman’s Hill — as hook and eye blame him or any other piscman? — but I also think, Puellywally, by the siege of his trousers there was someone else behind it — you bet your boughtem blarneys — about their three drummers down Keysars Lane. (Trite!).

Be these meer marchant taylor’s fablings of a race referend with oddman rex? Is now all seenheard then forgotten? Can it was, one is fain in this leaden age of letters now to wit, that so diversified outrages (they have still to come!) were planned and partly carried out against so staunch a covenanter if it be true than any of those recorded ever took place for many, we trow, beyessed to and denayed of, are given to us by some who use the truth but sparingly and we, on this side ought to sorrow for their pricking pens on that account. The seventh city, Urovivla, [p.062] his citadear of refuge, whither (would we believe the laimen and their counts), beyond the outraved gales of Atreeatic, changing clues with a baggermalster, the hejirite had fled, silentioussuemeant under night’s altosonority, shipalone, a raven of the wave, (be mercy, Mara! A he whence Rahoulas!) from the ostmen’s dirtby on the old vic, to forget in expiating manslaughter and, reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness to devine previdence, (if you are looking for the bilder deep your ear on the movietone!) to league his lot, palm and patte, with a papishee. For mine qvinne I thee giftake and bind my hosenband I thee halter. The wastobe land, a lottuse land, a luctuous land, Emeraldilluim, the peasant pastured, in which by the fourth commandment with promise his days apostolic were to be long by the abundant mercy of Him Which Thundereth From On High, murmured, would rise against him with all which in them were, franchisables and inhabitands, astea as agora, helotsphilots, do him hurt, poor jink, ghostly following bodily, as were he made a curse for them, the corruptible lay quick, all saints of incorruption of an holy nation, the common or ere-in-garden castaway, in red resurrection to condemn so they might convince him, first pharoah, Humpheres Cheops Exarchas, of their proper sins. Business bred to speak with a stiff upper lip to all men and most occasions the Man we wot of took little short of fighting chances but for all that he or his or his care were subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland. (perorhaps!)

We seem to us (the real Us!) to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black. It was after the show at Wednesbury that one tall man, humping a suspicious parcel, when returning late amid a dense particular on his home way from the second house of the Boore and Burgess Christy Menestrels by the old spot, Roy’s Corner, had a barkiss revolver placed to his faced with the words: you’re shot, major: by an unknowable assailant (masked) against whom he had been jealous over, Lotta Crabtree or Pomona Evlyn. More than that Whenn the Waylayer (not a Lucalizod diocesan or even of the Glendalough see, but hailing fro’ the prow of Little Britain), mention- [p.063] ing in a bytheway that he, the crawsopper, had, in edition to Reade’s cutless centiblade, a loaded Hobson’s which left only twin alternatives as, viceversa, either he would surely shoot her, the aunt, by pistol, (she could be okaysure of that!) or, failing of such, bash in Patch’s blank face beyond recognition, pointedly asked with gaeilish gall wodkar blizzard’s business Thornton had with that Kane’s fender only to be answered by the aggravated assaulted that that that was the snaps for him, Midweeks, to sultry well go and find out if he was showery well able. But how transparingly nontrue, gentlewriter! His feet one is not a tall man, not at all, man. No such parson. No such fender. No such lumber. No such race. Was it supposedly in connection with a girls, Myramy Huey or Colores Archer, under Flaggy Bridge (for ann there is but one liv and hir newbridge is her old) or to explode his twelvechamber and force a shrievalty entrance that the heavybuilt Abelbody in a butcherblue blouse from One Life One Suit (a men’s wear store), with a most decisive bottle of single in his possession, seized after dark by the town guard at Haveyou-caught-emerod’s temperance gateway was there in a gate’s way.

Fifthly, how parasoliloquisingly truetoned on his first time of hearing the wretch’s statement that, muttering Irish, he had had had o’gloriously a’lot too much hanguest or hoshoe fine to drink in the House of Blazes, the Parrot in Hell, the Orange Tree, the Glibt, the Sun, the Holy Lamb and, lapse not leashed, in Ramitdown’s ship hotel since the morning moment he could dixtinguish a white thread from a black till the engine of the laws declosed unto Murray and was only falling fillthefluthered up against the gatestone pier which, with the cow’s bonnet a’top o’it, he falsetook for a cattlepillar with purest peaceablest intentions. Yet how lamely hobbles the hoy of his then pseudojocax axplanation how, according to his own story, he vas a process server and was merely trying to open zozimus a bottlop stoub by mortially hammering his magnum bonum (the curter the club the sorer the savage) against the bludgey gate for the boots about the swan, Maurice Behan, who hastily into his shoes with nothing his hald barra tinnteack and came down with homp, [p.064] shtemp and jumphet to the tiltyard from the wastes a’sleep in his obi ohny overclothes or choker, attracted by the norse of guns playing Delandy is cartager on the raglar rock to Dulyn, said war’ prised safe in bed as he dreamed that he’d wealthes in mormon halls when wokenp by a fourth loud snore out of his land of byelo while hickstrey’s maws was grazing in the moonlight by hearing hammering on the pandywhank scale emanating from the blind pig and anything like it (oonagh! oonagh!) in the whole history of the Mullingcan Inn he never. This battering babel allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like the belzey babble of a bottle of boose which would not rouse him out o’slumber deep but reminded him loads more of the martiallawsey marses of foreign musikants’ instrumongs or the overthrewer to the third last days of Pompery, if anything. And that after this most nooningless knockturn the young reine came down desperate and the old liffopotamus started ploring all over the plains, as mud as she cud be, ruinating all the bouchers’ schurts and the backers’ wischandtugs so that be the chandeleure of the Rejaneyjailey they were all night wasching the walters of, the weltering walters off. Whyte.

Just one moment. A pinch in time of the ideal, musketeers! Alphos, Burkos and Caramis, leave Astrelea for the astrollajerries and for the love of the saunces and the honour of Keavens pike puddywhackback to Pamintul. And roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world! And call all your smokeblushes, Snowwhite and Rosered, if you will have the real cream! Now for a strawberry frolic! Filons, filoosh! Cherchons la flamme! Fammfamm! Fammfamm!

Come on, ordinary man with that large big nonobli head, and that blanko berbecked fischial ekksprezzion Machinsky Scapolopolos, Duzinascu or other. Your machelar’s mutton leg’s getting musclebound from being too pulled. Noah Beery weighed stone thousand one when Hazel was a hen. Now her fat’s falling fast. Therefore, chatbags, why not yours? There are 29 sweet reasons why blossomtime’s the best. Elders fall for green almonds when [p.065] they’re raised on bruised stone root ginger though it winters on their heads as if auctumned round their waistbands. If you’d had pains in your hairs you wouldn’t look so orgibald. You’d have Colley Macaires on your lump of lead. Now listen, Mr Leer! And stow that sweatyfunnyadams Simper! Take an old geeser who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek hair, so elegant, tableau vivant. He vows her to be his own honeylamb, swears they will be papa pals, by Sam, and share good times way down west in a guaranteed happy lovenest when May moon she shines and they twit twinkle all the night, combing the comet’s tail up right and shooting popguns at the stars. Creampuffs all to dime! Every nice, missymackenzies! For dear old grumpapar, he’s gone on the razzledar, through gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars. Compree! She wants her wardrobe to hear from above by return with cash so as she can buy her Peter Robinson trousseau and cut a dash with Arty, Bert or possibly Charley Chance (who knows?) so tolloll Mr Hunker you’re too dada for me to dance (so off she goes!) and that’s how half the gels in town has got their bottom drars while grumpapar he’s trying to hitch his braces on to his trars. But old grum he’s not so clean dippy between sweet you and yum (not on your life, boy! not in those trousers! not by a large jugful!) for someplace on the sly, where Furphy he isn’t by, old grum has his gel number two (bravevow, our Grum!) and he would like to canoodle her too some part of the time for he is downright fond of his number one but O he’s fair mashed on peaches number two so that if he could only canoodle the two, chivee chivoo, all three would feel genuinely happy, it’s as simple as A. B. C., the two mixers, we mean, with their cherrybum chappy (for he is simply shamming dippy) if they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat, hugging two by two in his zoo-doo-you-doo, a tofftoff for thee, missymissy for me and howcameyou-e’enso for Farber, in his tippy, upindown dippy, tiptoptippy canoodle, can you? Finny.

Ack, ack, ack. With which clap, trap and soddenment, three to a loaf, our mutual friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem to be implicitly in the same bateau, so to singen, bearing also [p.066] several of the earmarks of design, for there is in fact no use in putting a tooth in a snipery of that sort and the amount of all those sort of things which has been going on onceaday in and twiceaday out every other nachtistag among all kinds of promiscious individuals at all ages in private homes and reeboos publikiss and allover all and elsewhere throughout secular sequence the country over and overabroad has been particularly stupendous. To be continued. Federals’ Uniteds’ Transports’ Unions’ for Exultations’ of Triumphants’ Ecstasies.

But resuming inquiries. Will it ever be next morning the postal unionist’s (officially called carrier’s, Letters Scotch, Limited) strange fate (Fierceendgiddyex he’s hight, d.e., the losel that hucks around missivemaids’ gummibacks) to hand in a huge chain envelope, written in seven divers stages of ink, from blanchessance to lavandaiette, every pothook and pancrook bespaking the wisherwife, superscribed and subpencilled by yours A Laughable Party, with afterwite, S.A.G., to Hyde and Cheek, Edenberry, Dubblenn, WC? Will whatever will be written in lappish language with inbursts of Maggyer always seem semposed, black looking white and white guarding black, in that siamixed twoatalk used twist stern swift and jolly roger? Will it bright upon us, nightle, and we plunging to our plight? Well, it might now, mircle, so it light. Always and ever till Cox’s wife, twice Mrs Hahn, pokes her beak into the matter with Owen K. after her, to see whawa smutter after, will this kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch of that halpbrother of a herm, a pillarbox?

The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist’s art, at first blench naturally taken for a handharp (it is handwarp to tristinguish jubabe from jabule or either from tubote when all three have just been invened) had been removed from the hardware premises of Oetzmann and Nephew, a noted house of the gonemost west, which in the natural course of all things continues to supply funeral requisites of every needed description. Why needed, though? Indeed needed (wouldn’t you feel like rattanfowl if you hadn’t the oscar!) because the flash brides or bride in their lily [p.067] boleros one games with at the Nivynubies’ finery ball and your upright grooms that always come right up with you (and by jingo when they do!) what else in this mortal world, now ours, when meet there night, mid their nackt, me there naket, made their nought the hour strikes, would bring them rightcame back in the flesh, thumbs down, to their orses and their hashes.

To proceed. We might leave that nitrience of oxagiants to take its free of the air and just analectralyse that very chymerical combination, the gasbag where the warderworks. And try to pour somour heiterscene up thealmostfere. In the bottled heliose case continuing, Long Lally Tobkids, the special, sporting a fine breast of medals, and a conscientious scripturereader to boot in the brick and tin choorch round the coroner, swore like a Norewheezian tailliur on the stand before the proper functionary that he was up against a right querrshnorrt of a mand in the butcher of the blues who, he guntinued, on last epening after delivering some carcasses mattonchepps and meatjutes on behalf of Messrs Otto Sands and Eastman, Limericked, Victuallers, went and, with his unmitigated astonissment, hickicked at the dun and dorass against all the runes and, when challenged about the pretended hick (it was kickup and down with him) on his solemn by the imputant imputed, said simply: I appop pie oath, Phillyps Captain. You did, as I sostressed before. You are deepknee in error, sir, Madam Tomkins, let me then tell you, replied with a gentlewomanly salaam MackPartland, (the meatman’s family, and the oldest in the world except nick, name.) And Phelps was flayful with his peeler. But his phizz fell.

Now to the obverse. From velveteens to dimities is barely a fivefinger span and hence these camelback excesses are thought to have been instigated by one or either of the causing causes of all, those rushy hollow heroines in their skirtsleeves, be she magretta be she the posque. Oh! Oh! Because it is a horrible thing to have to say to say to day but one dilalah, Lupita Lorette, shortly after in a fit of the unexpectednesses drank carbolic with all her dear placid life before her and paled off while the other soiled dove that’s her sister-in-love, Luperca Latouche, finding [p.068] one day while dodging chores that she stripped teasily for binocular man and that her jambs were jimpjoyed to see each other, the nautchy girly soon found her fruitful hat too small for her and rapidly taking time, look, she rapidly took to necking, partying and selling her spare favours in the haymow or in lumber closets or in the greenawn ad huck (there are certain intimacies in all ladies’ lavastories we just lease to imagination) or in the sweet churchyard close itself for a bit of soft coal or an array of thin trunks, serving whom in fine that same hot coney a la Zingara which our own little Graunya of the chilired cheeks dished up to the greatsire of Oscar, that son of a Coole. Houri of the coast of emerald, arrah of the lacessive poghue, Aslim-all-Muslim, the resigned to her surrender, did not she, come leinster’s even, true dotter of a dearmud, (her pitch was Forty Steps and his perch old Cromwell’s Quarters) with so valkirry a licence as sent many a poor pucker packing to perdition, again and again, ay, and again sfidare him, tease fido, eh tease fido, eh eh tease fido, toos topples topple, stop, dug of a dog of a dgiaour, ye! Angealousmei! And did not he, like Arcoforty, farfar off Bissavolo, missbrand her behaveyous with iridescent huecry of down right mean false sop lap sick dope? Tawfulsdreck! A reine of the shee, a shebeen quean, a queen of pranks. A kingly man, of royal mien, regally robed, exalted be his glory! So gave so take: Now not, not now! He would just a min. Suffering trumpet! He thought he want. Whath? Hear, O hear, living of the land! Hungreb, dead era, hark! He hea, eyes ravenous on her lippling lills. He hear her voi of day gon by. He hears! Zay, zay, zay! But, by the beer of his profit, he cannot answer. Upterputty till rise and shine! Nor needs none shaft ne stele from Phenicia or Little Asia to obelise on the spout, neither pobalclock neither folksstone, nor sunkenness in Tomar’s Wood to bewray how erpressgangs score off the rued. The mouth that tells not will ever attract the unthinking tongue and so long as the obseen draws theirs which hear not so long till allearth’s dumbnation shall the blind lead the deaf. Tatcho, tawney yeeklings! The column of lumps lends the pattrin of the leaves behind us. If violence to life, limb and chattels, often as [p.069] not, has been the expression, direct or through an agent male, of womanhid offended, (ah! ah!), has not levy of black mail from the times the fairies were in it, and fain for wilde erthe blothoms followed an impressive private reputation for whispered sins?

Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of the wall. Where Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wallhole did exist. Ere ore or ire in Aaarlund. Or you Dair’s Hair or you Diggin Mosses or your horde of orts and oriorts to garble a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves. Armen? The doun is theirs and still to see for menags if he strikes a lousaforitch and we’ll come to those baregazed shoeshines if you just shoodov a second. And let oggs be good old gaggles and Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr. In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Diseased. A stonehinged gate then was for another thing while the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack under fair rental of one yearlyng sheep, (prime) value of sixpence, and one small yearlyng goat (cadet) value of eightpence, to grow old and happy (hogg it and kidd him) for the reminants of his years; and when everything was got up for the purpose he put an applegate on the place by no means as some pretext a bedstead in loo thereof to keep out donkeys (the pigdirt hanging from the jags to this hour makes that clear) and just thenabouts the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent the cats from getting at the gout, was triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly enaunter he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade’s eggday, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded.

O, by the by, lets wee brag of praties, it ought to be always remembered in connection with what has gone before that there was a northroomer, Herr Betreffender, out for his zimmer holedigs, digging in number 32 at the Rum and Puncheon (Branch of Dirty Dick’s free house) in Laxlip (where the Sockeye Sammons were stopping at the time orange fasting) prior to that, a Kommerzial (Gorbotipacco, he was wreaking like Zentral Oylrubber) [p.070] from Osterich, the U.S.E. paying (Gaul save the mark!) 11/- in the week (Gosh, these wholly romads!) of conscience money in the first deal of Yuly wheil he was, swishing beesnest with blessure, and swobbing broguen eeriesh myth brockendootsch, making his reporterage on Der Fall Adams for the Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule, and er, consstated that one had on him the Lynn O’Brien, meltoned lammswolle, disturbed, and wider he might the same zurichschicken other he would, with tosend and obertosend tonnowatters, one monkey’s damages become. Now you must know, franksman, to make a heart of glass, that the game of gaze and bandstand butchery was merely a Patsy O’Strap tissue of threats and obuses such as roebucks raugh at pinnacle’s peak and after this sort. Humphrey’s unsolicited visitor, Davy or Titus, on a burgley’s clan march from the middle west, a hikely excellent crude man about road who knew his Bullfoost Mountains like a starling bierd, after doing a long dance untidled to Cloudy Green, deposend his bockstump on the waityoumaywantme, after having blew some quaker’s (for you! Oates!) in through the houseking’s keyhole to attract attention, bleated through the gale outside which the tairor of his clothes was hogcallering, first, be the hirsuiter, that he would break his bulsheywigger’s head for him, next, be the heeltapper, that he would break the gage over his lankyduckling head the same way he would crack a nut with a monkeywrench and, last of all, be the stirabouter, that he would give him his (or theumperom’s or anybloody else’s) thickerthanwater to drink and his bleday steppebrodhar’s into the bucket. He demanded more wood alcohol to pitch in with, alleging that his granfather’s was all taxis and that it was only after ten o’connell, and this his isbar was a public oven for the sake of irsk irskusky, and then, not easily discouraged, opened the wrathfloods of his atillarery and went on at a wicked rate, weathering against him in mooxed metaphores from eleven thirty to two in the afternoon without even a luncheonette interval for House, son of Clod, to come out, you jewbeggar, to be Executed Amen. Earwicker, that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive as his of Dionysius, longsuffer- [p.071] ing although whitening under restraint in the sititout corner of his conservatory, behind faminebuilt walls, his thermos flask and ripidian flabel by his side and a walrus whiskerbristle for a tuskpick, compiled, while he mourned the flight of his wild guineese, a long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all abusive names he was called (we have been compelled for the rejoicement of foinne loidies ind the humours of Milltown etcetera by Josephine Brewster in the collision known as Contrastations with Inkermann and so on and sononward, lacies in loo water, flee, celestials, one clean turv): Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit, Yellow Whigger, Wheatears, Goldy Geit, Bogside Beauty, Yass We’ve Had His Badannas, York’s Porker, Funnyface, At Baggotty’s Bend He Bumped, Grease with the Butter, Opendoor Ospices, Cainandabler, Ireland’s Eighth Wonderful Wonder, Beat My Price, Godsoilman, Moonface the Murderer, Hoary Hairy Hoax, Midnight Sunburst, Remove that Bible, Hebdromadary Publocation, Tummer the Lame the Tyrannous, Blau Clay, Tight before Teatime, Read Your Pantojoke, Acoustic Disturbance, Thinks He’s Gobblasst the Good Dook of Ourguile, W.D.’s Grace, Gibbering Bayamouth of Dublin, His Farther was a Mundzucker and She had him in a Growler, Burnham and Bailey, Artist, Unworthy of the Homely Protestant Religion, Terry Cotter, You’re Welcome to Waterfood, signed the Ribbonmen, Lobsterpot Lardling, All for Arthur of this Town, Hooshed the Cat from the Bacon, Leathertogs Donald, The Ace and Deuce of Paupering, O’Reilly’s Delights to Kiss the Man behind the Borrel, Magogagog, Swad Puddlefoot, Gouty Ghibeline, Loose Luther, Hatches Cocks’ Eggs, Muddle the Plan, Luck before Wedlock, I Divorce Thee Husband, Tanner and a Make, Go to Hellena or Come to Connies, Piobald Puffpuff His Bride, Purged out of Burke’s, He’s None of Me Causin, Barebarean, Peculiar Person, Grunt Owl’s Facktotem, Twelve Months Aristocrat, Lycanthrope, Flunkey Beadle Vamps the Tune Letting on He’s Loney, Thunder and Turf Married into Clandorf, Left Boot Sent on Approval, Cumberer of Lord’s Holy Ground, Stodge Arschmann, Awnt Yuke, Tommy Furlong’s Pet Plagues, Archdukon Cabbanger, Last Past the Post, Kennealey Won’t Tell Thee off Nancy’s Gown, [p.072] Scuttle to Cover, Salary Grab, Andy Mac Noon in Annie’s Room, Awl Out, Twitchbratschballs, Bombard Street Bester, Sublime Porter, A Ban for Le King of the Burgaans and a Bom for Ye Sur of all the Ruttledges, O’Phelim’s Cutprice, And at Number Wan Wan Wan, What He Done to Castlecostello, Sleeps with Feathers end Ropes, It is Known who Sold Horace the Rattler, Enclosed find the Sons of Fingal, Swayed in his Falling, Wants a Wife and Forty of Them, Let Him Do the Fair, Apeegeequanee Chimmuck, Plowp Goes his Whastle, Ruin of the Small Trader, He — —   Milkinghoneybeaverbrooker, Vee was a Vindner, Sower Rapes, Armenian Atrocity, Sickfish Bellyup, Edomite, — ’Man Devoyd of the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature, Bad Humborg, Hraabhraab, Coocoohandler, Dirt, Miching Daddy, Born Burst Feet Foremost, Woolworth’s Worst, Easyathic Phallusaphist, Guilteypig’s Bastard, Fast in the Barrel, Boose in the Bed, Mister Fatmate, In Custody of the Polis, Boawwll’s Alocutionist, Deposed, but anarchistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual, did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity, though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in the booth he was in to reach for the hello gripes and ring up Kimmage Outer 17.67, because, as the fundamentalist explained, when at last shocked into speech, touchin his woundid feelins in the fuchsiar the dominican mission for the sowsealist potty was on at the time and he thought the rowmish devowtion known as the howly rowsary might reeform ihm, Gonn. That more than considerably unpleasant bullocky before he rang off drunkishly pegged a few glatt stones, all of a size, by way of final mocks for his grapes, at the wicket in support of his words that he was not guilphy but, after he had so slaunga vollayed, reconnoitring through his semisubconscious the seriousness of what he might have done had he really polished off his terrible intentions finally caused him to change the bawling and leave downg the whole grumus of brookpebbles pangpung and, having sobered up a bit, paces his groundould diablen lionndub, the flay the flegm, the floedy fleshener, (purse, purse, pursyfurse, I’ll splish the splume of them all!) this backblocks boor bruskly put out [p.073] his langwedge and quite quit the paleologic scene, telling how by his selfdenying ordnance he had left Hyland on the dissenting table, after exhorting Earwicker or, in slightly modified phraseology, Messrs or Missrs Earwicker, Seir, his feminisible name of multitude, to cocoa come outside to Mockerloo out of that for the honour of Crumlin, with his broody old flishguds, Gog’s curse to thim, so as he could brianslog and burst him all dizzy, you go bail, like Potts Fracture did with Keddle Flatnose and nobodyatall with Wholyphamous and build rocks over him, or if he didn’t, for two and thirty straws, be Cacao Campbell, he didn’t know what he wouldn’t do for him nor nobody else nomore nor him after which, batell martell, a brisha a milla a stroka a boola, so the rage of Malbruk, playing on the least change of his manjester’s voice, the first heroic couplet from the fuguall tropical, Opus Elf, Thortytoe: My schemes into obeyance for This time has had to fall: they bit goodbyte to their thumb and, his bandol eer his solgier, dripdropdrap on pool or poldier, wishing the loff a falladelfian in the morning, proceeded with a Hubbleforth slouch in his slips backwords (Et Cur Heli!) in the directions of the duff and demb institutions about ten or eleven hundred years lurch away in the moonshiny gorge of Patself on the Bach. Adyoe!

And thus, with this rochelly exetur of Bully Acre, came to close that last stage in the siegings round our archicitadel which we would like to recall, if old Nestor Alexis would wink the worth for us, as Bar-le-Duc and Dog-an-Doras and Bangen-op-Zoom.

Yed he med leave to many a door beside of Oxmanswold for so witness his chambered cairns a cloudletlitter silent that are at browse up hill and down coombe and on eolithostroton, at Howth or at Coolock or even at Enniskerry, a theory none too rectiline of the evoluation of human society and a testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living. Olivers lambs we do call them, skatterlings of a stone, and they shall be gathered unto him, their herd and paladin, as nubilettes to cumule, in that day hwen, same the lightning lancer of Azava Arthur- [p.074] honoured (some Finn, some Finn avant!), he skall wake from earthsleep, haught crested elmer, in his valle of briers of Greenman’s Rise O, (lost leaders live! the heroes return!) and o’er dun and dale the Wulverulverlord (protect us!) his mighty horn skall roll, orland, roll.

For in those deyes his Deyus shall ask of Allprohome and call to himm: Allprohome! And he make answer: Add some. Nor wink nor wunk. Animadiabolum, mene credidisti mortuum? Silence was in thy faustive halls, O Truiga, when thy green woods went dry but there will be sounds of manymirth on the night’s ear ringing when our pantriarch of Comestowntonobble gets the pullover on his boots.

Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes coolt parritch, his pelt nassy, his heart’s adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff, his extremeties extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chilblaimend and Baldowl. Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.

 ® 

[p.075] As the lion, in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile (shall Ariuz forget Arioun or Boghas the baregams of the Marmarazalles from Marmeniere?) it may be, tots wearsense full a naggin in twentyg have sigilposted what in our brievingbust, the besieged bedreamt him stil and solely of those lililiths undeveiled which had undone him, gone for age, and knew not the watchful treachers at his wake, and theirs to stay. Fooi, fooi, chamermissies! Zeepyzoepy, larcenlads! Zijnzijn Zijnzijn! It may be, we moest ons hasten selves te declareer it, that he reglimmed? presaw? the fields of heat and yields of wheat where corngold Ysit? shamed and shone. It may be, we habben to upseek a bitty door our good township’s courants want we knew’t, that with his deepseeing insight (had not wishing oftebeen but good time wasted), within his patriarchal shamanah, broadsteyne ’bove citie (Twillby! Twillby!) he conscious of enemies, a kingbilly whitehorsed in a Finglas mill, prayed, as he sat on anxious seat, (kunt ye neat gift mey toe bout a peer saft eyballds!) during that three and a hellof hours’ agony of silence, ex profundis malorum, and bred with unfeigned charity that his wordwounder (an engles to the teeth who, nomened Nash of Girahash, would go anyold where in the weeping world on his mottled belly (the rab, the kreeponskneed!) for milk, music or married missusses) might, mercy to providential benevolence’s who hates prudencies’ astuteness, unfold into the first of a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors, [p.076] blackfaced connemaras not of the fold but elder children of his household, his most besetting of ideas (pace his twolve predamanant passions) being the formation, as in more favoured climes, where the Meadow of Honey is guestfriendly and the Mountain of Joy receives, of a truly criminal stratum, Ham’s cribcracking yeggs, thereby at last eliminating from all classes and masses with directly derivative decasualisation: sigarius (sic!) vindicat urbes terrorum (sicker!): and so, to mark a bank taal she arter, the obedience of the citizens elp the ealth of the ole.

Now gode. Let us leave theories there and return to here’s here. Now hear. ’Tis gode again. The teak coffin, Pughglasspanelfitted, feets to the east, was to turn in later, and pitly patly near the porpus, materially effecting the cause. And this, liever, is the thinghowe. Any number of conservative public bodies, through a number of select and other committees having power to add to their number, before voting themselves and himself, town, port and garrison, by a fit and proper resolution, following a koorts order of the groundwet, once for all out of plotty existence, as a forescut, so you maateskippey might to you cuttinrunner on a neuw pack of klerds, made him, while his body still persisted, their present of a protem grave in Moyelta of the best Lough Neagh pattern, then as much in demand among misonesans as the Isle of Man today among limniphobes. Wacht even! It was in a fairly fishy kettlekerry, after the Fianna’s foreman had taken his handful, enriched with ancient woods and dear dutchy deeplinns mid which were an old knoll and a troutbeck, vainyvain of her osiery and a chatty sally with any Wilt or Walt who would ongle her as Izaak did to the tickle of his rod and watch her waters of her sillying waters of and there now brown peater arripple (may their quilt gild lightly over his somnolulutent form!) Whoforyou lies his last, by the wrath of Bog, like the erst curst Hun in the bed of his treubleu Donawhu.

Best. This wastohavebeen underground heaven, or mole’s paradise which was probably also an inversion of a phallopharos, intended to foster wheat crops and to ginger up tourist trade (its architecht, Mgr Peurelachasse, having been obcaecated lest [p.077] he should petrifake suchanevver while the contractors Messrs T. A. Birkett and L. O. Tuohalls were made invulnerably venerable) first in the west, our misterbilder, Castlevillainous, openly damned and blasted by means of a hydromine, system, Sowan and Belting, exploded from a reinvented T.N.T. bombingpost up ahoy of eleven and thirty wingrests (circiter) to sternbooard out of his aerial thorpeto, Auton Dynamon, contacted with the expectant minefield by tins of improved ammonia lashed to her shieldplated gunwale, and fused into tripupcables, slipping through tholse and playing down from the conning tower into the ground battery fuseboxes, all differing as clocks from keys since nobody appeared to have the same time of beard, some saying by their Oorlog it was Sygstryggs to nine, more holding with the Ryan vogt it was Dane to pfife. He afterwards whaanever his blaetther began to fail off him and his rough bark was wholly husky and, stoop by stoop, he neared it (wouldmanspare!) carefully lined the ferroconcrete result with rotproof bricks and mortar, fassed to fossed, and retired beneath the heptarchy of his towerettes, the beauchamp, byward, bull and lion, the white, the wardrobe and bloodied, so encouraging (insteppen, alls als hats beliefd!) additional useful councils public with hoofd offdealings which were welholden of ladykants te huur out such as the Breeders’ Union, the Guild of Merchants of the Staple et, a.u.c. to present unto him with funebral pomp, over and above that, a stone slab with the usual Mac Pelah address of velediction, a very fairworded instance of falsemeaning adamelegy: We have done ours gohellt with you, Heer Herewhippit, overgiven it, skidoo!

But t’house and allaboardshoops! Show coffins, winding sheets, goodbuy bierchepes, cinerary urns, liealoud blasses, snuffchests, poteentubbs, lacrimal vases, hoodendoses, reekwaterbeckers, breakmiddles, zootzaks for eatlust, including upyourhealthing rookworst and meathewersoftened forkenpootsies and for that matter, javel also, any kind of inhumationary bric au brac for the adornment of his glasstone honophreum, would, met these trein of konditiens, naturally follow, halas, in the ordinary course, enabling that roundtheworlder wandelingswight, did suches pass [p.078] him, to live all safeathomely the presenile days of his life of opulence, ancient ere decrepitude, late lents last lenience, till stuffering stage, whaling away the whole of the while (hypnos chilia eonion!) lethelulled between explosion and reexplosion (Donnaurwatteur! Hunderthunder!) from grosskopp to megapod, embalmed, of grand age, rich in death anticipated.

But abide Zeit’s sumonserving, rise afterfall. Blueblitzbolted from there, knowing the hingeworms of the hallmirks of habitationlesness, buried burrowing in Gehinnon, to proliferate through all his Unterwealth, seam by seam, sheol om sheol, and revisit our Uppercrust Sideria of Utilitarios, the divine one, the hoarder hidden propaguting his plutorpopular progeniem of pots and pans and pokers and puns from biddenland to boughtenland, the spearway fore the spoorway.

The other spring offensive on the heights of Abraham may have come about all quite by accidence, Foughtarundser (for Breedabrooda had at length presuaded him to have himself to be as septuply buried as the murdered Cian in Finntown), had not been three monads in his watery grave (what vigilantes and ridings then and spuitwyne pledges with aardappel frittling!) when portrifaction, dreyfussed as ever, began to ramp, ramp, ramp, the boys are parching. A hoodenwinkle gave the signal and a blessing paper freed the flood. Why did the patrizien make him scares with his gruntens? Because the druiven were muskating at the door. From both Celtiberian camps (granting at the onset for the sake of argument that men on the two sides in New South Ireland and Vetera Uladh, bluemin and pillfaces, during the ferment With the Pope or On the Pope, had, moors or letts, grant ideas, grunted) all conditions, poor cons and dives mor, each, of course, on the purely doffensive since the eternals were owlwise on their side every time, were drawn toowards their Bellona’s Black Bottom, once Woolwhite’s Waltz (Ohiboh, how becrimed, becursekissed and bedumbtoit!) some for want of proper feeding in youth, others already caught in the honourable act of slicing careers for family and carvers in conjunction; and, if emaciated nough, the person garrotted may have suggested to whomever he [p.079] took the ham of, the plain being involved in darkness, low cirque waggery, nay, even the first old wugger of himself in the flesh, whiggissimus incarnadined, when falsesighted by the ifsuchhewas bully on the hill for there had circulated freely fairly among his opposition the feeling that in so hibernating Massa Ewacka, who, previous to that demidetached life, had been known of barmicidal days, cook said, between soups and savours, to get outside his own length of rainbow trout and taerts atta tarn as no man of woman born, nay could, like the great crested brebe, devour his threescoreten of roach per lifeday, ay, and as many minnow a minute (the big mix, may Gibbet choke him!) was, like the salmon of his ladderleap all this time of totality secretly and by suckage feeding on his own misplaced fat.

Ladies did not disdain those pagan ironed times of the first city (called after the ugliest Danadune) when a frond was a friend inneed to carry, as earwigs do their dead, their soil to the earthball where indeeth we shall calm decline, our legacy unknown. Venuses were gigglibly temptatrix, vulcans guffawably eruptious and the whole wives’ world frockful of fickles. Fact, any human inyon you liked any erenoon or efter would take her bare godkin out, or an even pair of hem, (lugod! lugodoo!) and prettily pray with him (or with em even) everyhe to her taste, long for luck, tapette and tape petter and take pettest of all. (Tip!) Wells she’d woo and wills she’s win but how the deer knowed where she’d marry! Arbour, bucketroom, caravan, ditch? Coach, carriage, wheelbarrow, dungcart?

Kate Strong, a widow (Tiptip!) — she pulls a lane picture for us, in a dreariodreama setting, glowing and very vidual, of old dumplan as she nosed it, a homelike cottage of elvanstone with droppings of biddies, stinkend pusshies, moggies’ duggies, rotten witchawubbles, festering rubbages and beggars’ bullets, if not worse, sending salmofarious germs in gleefully through the smithereen panes — Widow Strong, then, as her weaker had turned him to the wall (Tiptiptip!), did most all the scavenging from good King Hamlaugh’s gulden dayne though her lean besom cleaned but sparingly and her bare statement reads that, [p.080] there being no macadamised sidetracks on those old nekropolitan nights in, barring a footbatter, Bryant’s Causeway, bordered with speedwell, white clover and sorrel a wood knows, which left off, being beaten, where the plaintiff was struck, she left down, as scavengers, who will be scavengers must, her filthdump near the Serpentine in Phornix Park (at her time called Finewell’s Keepsacre but later tautaubapptossed Pat’s Purge), that dangerfield circling butcherswood where fireworker oh flaherty engaged a nutter of castlemallards and ah for archer stunned’s turk, all over which fossil footprints, bootmarks, fingersigns, elbowdints, breechbowls, a. s. o. were all successively traced of a most envolving description. What subtler timeplace of the weald than such wolfsbelly castrament to will hide a leabhar from Thursmen’s brandihands or a loveletter, lostfully hers, that would be lust on Ma, than then when ructions ended, than here where race began: and by four hands of forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle of hume sweet hume. Give over it! And no more of it! So pass the pick for child sake! O men!

For hear Allhighest sprack for krischnians as for propagana fidies and his nuptial eagles sharped their beaks of prey: and every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine: as it was let it be, says he! And it is as though where Agni araflammed and Mithra monished and Shiva slew as mayamutras the obluvial waters of our noarchic memory withdrew, windingly goharksome, to some hastyswasty timberman torchpriest, flamenfan, the ward of the wind that lightened the fire that lay in the wood that Jove bolt, at his rude word. Posidonius O’Fluctuary! Lave that bloody stone as it is! What are you doing your dirty minx and his big treeblock way up your path? Slip around, you, by the rare of the ministers’! And, you, take that barrel back where you got it, Mac Shane’s, and go the way your old one went, Hatchettsbury Road! And gish! how they gushed away, the pennyfares, a whole school for scamper, with their sashes flying sish behind them, all the little pirlypettes! Issy-la-Chapelle! Any lucans, please?

[p.081] Yes, the viability of vicinals if invisible is invincible. And we are not trespassing on his corns either. Look at all the plotsch! Fluminian! If this was Hannibal’s walk it was Hercules’ work. And a hungried thousand of the unemancipated slaved the way. The mausoleum lies behind us (O Adgigasta, multipopulipater!) and there are milestones in their cheadmilias faultering along the tramestrack by Brahm and Anton Hermes! Per omnibus secular seekalarum. Amain. But the past has made us this present of a rhedarhoad. So more boher O’Connell! Though rainyhidden, you’re rhinohide. And if he’s not a Romeo you may scallop your hat. Wereupunder in the fane of Saint Fiacre! Halte!

It was hard by the howe’s there, plainly on this disoluded and a buchan cold spot, rupestric then, resurfaced that now is, that Luttrell sold if Lautrill bought, in the saddle of the Brennan’s (now Malpasplace?) pass, versts and versts from true civilisation, not where his dreams top their traums halt (Beneathere! Benathere!) but where livland yontide meared with the wilde, saltlea with flood, that the attackler, a cropatkin, though under medium and between colours with truly native pluck, engaged the Adversary who had more in his eye than was less to his leg but whom for plunder sake, he mistook in the heavy rain to be Oglethorpe or some other ginkus, Parr aparrently, to whom the headandheelless chickenestegg bore some Michelangiolesque resemblance, making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them but he would cannonise the b — y b — r’s life out of him and lay him out contritely as smart as the b — r had his b — y nightprayers said, three patrecknocksters and a couplet of hellmuirries (tout est sacré pour un sacreur, femme à barbe ou homme-nourrice) at the same time, so as to plugg well let the blubbywail ghoats out of him, catching holst of an oblong bar he had and with which he usually broke furnitures he rose the stick at him. The boarder incident prerepeated itself. The pair (whethertheywere Nippoluono engaging Wei-Ling-Taou or de Razzkias trying to reconnoistre the general Boukeleff, man may not say), struggled apairently for some considerable time, (the cradle rocking equally [p.082] to one and oppositely from the other on its law of capture and recapture), under the All In rules around the booksafe, fighting like purple top and tipperuhry Swede, (Secremented Servious of the Divine Zeal!) and in the course of their tussle the toller man, who had opened his bully bowl to beg, said to the miner who was carrying the worm (a handy term for the portable distillery which consisted of three vats, two jars and several bottles though we purposely say nothing of the stiff, both parties having an interest in the spirits): Let me go, Pautheen! I hardly knew ye. Later on, after the solstitial pause for refleshmeant, the same man (or a different and younger him of the same ham) asked in the vermicular with a very oggly chew-chin-grin: Was six victolios fifteen pigeon takee offa you, tell he me, stlongfella, by picky-pocky ten to foul months behindaside? There were some further collidabanter and severe tries to convert for the best part of an hour and now a woden affair in the shape of a webley (we at once recognise our old friend Ned of so many illortemporate letters) fell from the intruser who, as stuck as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that christchurch organ, (did the imnage of Girl Cloud Pensive flout above them light young charm, in ribbons and pigtail?) whereupon became friendly and, saying not his shirt to tear, to know wanted, joking and knobkerries all aside laying, if his change companion who stuck still to the invention of his strongbox, with a tenacity corrobberating their mutual tenitorial rights, happened to have the loots change of a tenpound crickler about him at the moment, addling that hap so, he would pay him back the six vics odd, do you see, out of that for what was taken on the man of samples last Yuni or Yuly, do you follow me, Capn? To this the other, Billi with the Boule, who had mummed and mauled up to that (for he was hesitency carried to excelcism) rather amusedly replied: Woowoo would you be grossly surprised, Hill, to learn that, as it so happens, I honestly have not such a thing as the loo, as the least chance of a tinpanned crackler anywhere about me at the present mohomoment but I believe I can see my way, as you suggest, it being Yuletide or Yuddanfest and as it’s mad nuts, son, for you [p.083] when it’s hatter’s hares, mon, for me, to advance you something like four and sevenpence between hopping and trapping which you might just as well have, boy baches, to buy J. J. and S. with. There was a minute silence before memory’s fire’s rekindling and then. Heart alive! Which at very first wind of gay gay and whiskwigs wick’s ears pricked up, the starving gunman, strike him pink, became strangely calm and forthright sware by all his lards porsenal that the thorntree of sheol might ramify up his Sheofon to the lux apointlex but he would go good to him suntime marx my word fort, for a chip off the old Flint, (in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world and one might as fairly go and kish his sprogues as fail to certify whether the wartrophy eluded at some lives earlier was that somethink like a jug, to what, a coctable) and remarxing in languidoily, seemingly much more highly pleased than tongue could tell at this opening of a lifetime and the foretaste of the Dun Bank pearlmothers and the boy to wash down which he would feed to himself in the Ruadh Cow at Tallaght and then into the Good Woman at Ringsend and after her inat Conway’s Inn at Blackrock and, first to fall, cursed be all, where appetite would keenest be, atte, funeral fare or fun fain real, Adam and Eve’s in Quantity Street by the grace of gamy queen Tailte, her will and testament: You stunning little southdowner! I’d know you anywhere, Declaney, let me truthfully tell you in or out of the lexinction of life and who the hell else, be your blanche patch on the boney part! Goalball I’ve struck this daylit dielate night of nights, by golly! My hat, you have some bully German grit, sundowner! He spud in his faust (axin); he toped the raw best (pardun); he poked his pick (a tip is a tap): and he tucked his friend’s leave. And, with French hen or the portlifowlium of hastes and leisures, about to continue that, the queer mixture exchanged the pax in embrace or poghue puxy as practised between brothers of the same breast, hillelulia, killelulia, allenalaw, and, having ratified before the god of the day their torgantruce which belittlers have schmallkalled the treatyng to cognac, turning his fez menialstrait in the [p.084] direction of Moscas, he first got rid of a few mitsmillers and hurooshoos and levanted off with tubular jurbulance at a bull’s run over the assback bridge, spitting his teeths on rooths, with the seven and four in danegeld and their humoral hurlbat or other uncertain weapon of lignum vitae, but so evermore rhumanasant of a toboggan poop, picked up to keep some crowplucking appointment with some rival rialtos anywheres between Pearidge and the Littlehorn while this poor delaney, who they left along with the confederate fender behind and who albeit ballsbluffed, bore up wonderfully wunder all of it with a whole number of plumsized contusiums, plus alasalah bruised coccyx, all over him, reported the occurance in the best way he could, to the flabbergaze of the whole lab, giving the Paddybanners the military salute as for his exilicy’s the O’Daffy, in justifiable hope that, in nobiloroman review of the hugely sitisfactuary conclusium of their negotiations and the jugglemonkysh agripment deinderivative, some lotion or fomentation of poppyheads would be jennerously exhibited to the parts, at the nearest watchhouse in Vicar Lane, the white ground of his face all covered with digonally redcrossed nonfatal mammalian blood as proofpositive of the seriousness of his character and that he was bleeding in self defience (stanch it!) from the nostrils, lips, pavilion and palate, while some of his hitter’s hairs had been pulled off his knut’s head by Colt though otherwise his allround health appeared to be middling along as it proved most fortunate that not one of the two hundred and six bones and five hundred and one muscles in his corso was a whit the whorse for her whacking. Herwho?

Nowthen, leaving clashing ash, brawn and muscle and brassmade to oust earthernborn and rockcrystal to wreck isinglass but wurming along gradually for our savings backtowards motherwaters so many miles from bank and Dublin stone (olympiading even till the eleventh dynasty to reach that thuddysickend Hamlaugh) and to the question of boney’s unlawfully obtaining a pierced paraflamme and claptrap fireguard there crops out the still more salient point of the politish leanings and town pursuits of our forebeer, El Don De Dunelli, (may his ship thicked stick [p.085] in the bottol of the river and all his crewsers stock locked in the burral of the seas!) who, when within the black of your toenail, sir, of being mistakenly ambushed by one of the uddahveddahs, and as close as made no matter, mam, to being kayoed offhand when the hyougono heckler with the Peter the Painter wanted to hole him, was consistently practising the first of the primary and imprescriptible liberties of the pacific subject by circulating (be British, boys to your bellybone and chuck a chum a chance!) alongst one of our umphrohibited semitary thrufahrts, open to buggy and bike, to walk, Wellington Park road, with the curb or quaker’s quacknostrum under his auxter and his alpenstuck in his redhand, a highly commendable exercise, or, number two of our acta legitima plebeia, on the brink (beware to baulk a man at his will!) of taking place upon a public seat, to what, bare by Butt’s, most easterly (but all goes west!) of blackpool bridges, as a public protest and naturlikevice, without intent to annoy either, being praisegood thankfully for the wrathbereaved ringdove and the fearstung boaconstrictor and all the more right jollywell pleased, which he was, at having other people’s weather.

But to return to the atlantic and Phenitia Proper. As if that were not to be enough for anyone but little headway, if any, was made in solving the wasnottobe crime cunundrum when a child of Maam, Festy King, of a family long and honourably associated with the tar and feather industries, who gave an address in old plomansch Mayo of the Saxons in the heart of a foulfamed potheen district, was subsequently haled up at the Old Bailey on the calends of Mars, under an incompatibly framed indictment of both the counts (from each equinoxious points of view, the one fellow’s fetch being the other follow’s person) that is to see, flying cushats out of his ouveralls and making fesses immodst his forces on the field. Oyeh! Oyeh! When the prisoner, soaked in methylated, appeared in dry dock, appatently ambrosiaurealised, like Kersse’s Korduroy Karikature, wearing, besides stains, rents and patches, his fight shirt, straw braces, souwester and a policeman’s corkscrew trowswers, all out of the true (as he had purposely torn up all his cymtrymanx bespokes in the mamertime), deposing for [p.086] his exution with all the fluors of sparse in the royal Irish vocabulary how the whole padderjagmartin tripiezite suet and all the sulfeit of copperas had fallen off him quatz unaccountably like the chrystalisations of Alum on Even while he was trying for to stick fire to himcell, (in feacht he was dripping as he found upon stripping for a pipkin ofmalt as he feared the coold raine) it was attempted by the crown (P.C. Robort) to show that King, elois Crowbar, once known as Meleky, impersonating a climbing boy, rubbed some pixes of any luvial peatsmoor o’er his face, plucks and pussas, with a clanetourf as the best means of disguising himself and was to the middlewhite fair in Mudford of a Thoorsday, feishts of Peeler and Pole, under the illassumed names of Tykingfest and Rabworc picked by him and Anthony out of a tellafun book, ellegedly with a pedigree pig (unlicensed) and a hyacinth. They were on that sea by the plain of Ir nine hundred and ninetynine years and they never cried crack or ceased from regular paddlewicking till that they landed their two and a trifling selves, amadst camel and ass, greybeard and suckling, priest and pauper, matrmatron and merrymeg, into the meddle of the mudstorm. The gathering, convened by the Irish Angricultural and Prepostoral Ouraganisations, to help the Irish muck to look his brother dane in the face and attended thanks to Larry by large numbers, of christies and jew’s totems, tospite of the deluge, was distinctly of a scattery kind when the ballybricken he could get no good of, after cockofthewalking through a few fancyfought mains ate some of the doorweg, the pikey later selling the gentleman ratepayer because she, Francie’s sister, that is to say, ate a whole side of his (the animal’s) sty, on a struggle Street, Qui Sta Troia, in order to pay off, hiss or lick, six doubloons fifteen arrears of his, the villain’s not the rumbler’s rent.

Remarkable evidence was given, anon, by an eye, ear, nose and throat witness, whom Wesleyan chapelgoers suspected of being a plain clothes priest W.P., situate at Nullnull, Medical Square, who, upon letting down his rice and peacegreen coverdisk and having been sullenly cautioned against yawning while [p.087] being grilled, smiled (he had had a onebumper at parting from Mrs Molroe in the morning) and stated to his eliciter under his morse mustaccents (gobbless!) that he slept with a bonafides and that he would be there to remember the filth of November, hatinaring, rowdy O, which, with the jiboulees of Juno and the dates of ould lanxiety, was going, please the Rainmaker, to decembs within the ephemerides of profane history, all one with Tournay, Yetstoslay and Temorah, and one thing which would pigstickularly strike a person of such sorely tried observational powers as Sam, him and Moffat, though theirs not to reason why, the striking thing about it was that he was patrified to see, hear, taste and smell, as his time of night, how Hyacinth O’Donnell, B.A., described in the calendar as a mixer and wordpainter, with part of a sivispacem (Gaeltact for dungfork) on the fair green at the hour of twenty-four o’clock sought (the bullycassidy of the friedhoffer!) to sack, sock, stab and slaughter singlehanded another two of the old kings, Gush Mac Gale and Roaring O’Crian, Jr., both changelings, unlucalised, of no address and in noncommunicables, between him and whom, ever since wallops before the Mise of Lewes, bad blood existed on the ground of the boer’s trespass on the bull or because he firstparted his polarbeeber hair in twoways, or because they were creepfoxed andt grousuppers over a nippy in a noveletta, or because they could not say meace, (mute and daft) meathe. The litigants, he said, local congsmen and donalds, kings of the arans and the dalkeys, kings of mud and tory, even the goat king of Killorglin, were egged on by their supporters in the shape of betterwomen with bowstrung hair of Carrothagenuine ruddiness, waving crimson petties and screaming from Isod’s towertop. There were cries from the thicksets in court and from the macdublins on the bohernabreen of: Mind the bank from Banagher, Mick, sir! Prodooce O’Donner. Ay! Exhibit his relics! Bu! Use the tongue mor! Give lip less! But it oozed out in Deadman’s Dark Scenery Court through crossexanimation of the casehardened testis that when and where that knife of knifes the treepartied ambush was laid (roughly spouting around half hours ’twixt dusk in dawn, [p.088] by Waterhose’s Meddle Europeic Time, near Stop and Think, high chief evervirens and only abfalltree in auld the land) there was not as much light from the widowed moon as would dim a child’s altar. The mixer, accordingly, was bluntly broached, and in the best basel to boot, as to whether he was one of those lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed. That he was only too cognitively conatively cogitabundantly sure of it because, living, loving, breathing and sleeping morphomelosophopancreates, as he most significantly did, whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper. Whether he was practically sure too of his lugs and truies names in this king and blouseman business? That he was pediculously so. Certified? As cad could be. Be lying! Be the lonee I will. It was Morbus O’ Somebody? A’Quite. Szerday’s Son? A satyr in weddens. And how did the greeneyed mister arrive at the B.A.? That it was like his poll. A crossgrained trapper with murty odd oogs, awflorated ares, inquiline nase and a twithcherous mouph? He would be. Who could bit you att to a tenyerdfuul when aastalled? Ballera jobbera. Some majar bore too? Iguines. And with tumblerous legs, redipnominated Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa Vercingetorix Ethelwulf Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann? Holy Saint Eiffel, the very phoenix! It was Chudley Magnall once more between the deffodates and the dumb scene? The two childspies waapreesing him auza de Vologue but the renting of his rock was from the three wicked Vuncouverers Forests bent down awhits, arthou sure? Yubeti, Cumbilum comes! One of the oxmen’s thingabossers, hvad? And had he been refresqued by the founts of bounty playing there — is — a — pain — aleland in Long’s gourgling barral? A loss of Lordedward and a lack of sirphilip a surgeonet showeradown could suck more gargling bubbles out of the five lamps in Portterand’s praise. Wirrgeling and maries? As whose wouldn’t, laving his leaftime in Blackpool. But, of course, he could call himself Tem, too, if he had time to? You butt he could anytom. When he pleased? Win and [p.089] place. A stoker temptated by evesdripping aginst the driver who was a witness as well? Sacred avatar, how the devil did they guess it! Two dreamyums in one dromium? Yes and no error. And both as like as a duel of lentils? Peacisely. So he was pelted out of the coram populo, was he? Be the powers that be he was. The prince in principel should not expose his person? Macchevuole! Rooskayman kamerad? Sooner Gallwegian he would say. Not unintoxicated, fair witness? Drunk as a fishup. Askt to whether she minded whither he smuked? Not if he barkst into phlegms. Anent his ajaciulations to his Crosscann Lorne, cossa? It was corso in cursu on coarser again. The gracious miss was we not doubt sensible how yellowatty on the forx was altered? That she esually was, O’Dowd me not! As to his religion, if any? It was the see-you-Sunday sort. Exactly what he meant by a pederast prig? Bejacob’s, just a gent who prayed his lent. And if middleclassed portavorous was a usual beast? Bynight as useful as a vomit to a shorn man. If he had rognarised dtheir gcourts marsheyls? Dthat nday in ndays he had. Lindendelly, coke or skilllies spell me gart without a gate? Harlyadrope. The grazing rights (Mrs Magistra Martinetta) expired with the expiry of the goat’s sire, if they were not mistaken? That he exactly could not tell the worshipfuls but his mother-in-waders had the recipis for the price of the coffin and that he was there to tell them that herself was the velocipede that could tell them kitcat. A maundarin tongue in a pounderin jowl? Father ourder about the mathers of prenanciation. Distributary endings? And we recommends. Quare hircum? No answer. Unde gentium fe . . . ? No ah. Are you not danzzling on the age of a vulcano? Siar, I am deed. And how olld of him? He was intendant to study pulu. Which was meant in a shirt of two shifts macoghamade or up Finn, threehatted ladder? That a head in thighs under a bush at the sunface would bait a serpent to a millrace through the heather. Arm bird colour defdum ethnic fort perharps? Sure and glomsk handy jotalpheson as well. Hokey jasons, then, in a pigeegeeses? On a pontiff’s order as ture as there’s an ital on atac. As a gololy bit to joss? Leally and tululy. But, why this hankowchaff and [p.090] whence this second tone, son-yet-sun? He had the cowtaw in his buxers flay of face. So this that Solasistras, setting odds evens at defiance, took the laud from Labouriter? What displaced Tob, Dilke and Halley, not been greatly in love with the game. And, changing the venders, from the king’s head to the republican’s arms, as to the pugnaxities evinxed from flagfall to antepost during the effrays round fatherthyme’s beckside and the regents in the plantsown raining, with the skiddystars and the morkernwindup, how they appealed to him then? That it was wildfires night on all the bettygallaghers. Mickmichael’s soords shrieking shrecks through the wilkinses and neckanicholas’ toastingforks pricking prongs up the tunnybladders. Let there be fight? And there was. Foght. On the site of the Angel’s, you said? Guinney’s Gap, he said, between what they said and the pussykitties. In the middle of the garth, then? That they mushn’t toucht it. The devoted couple was or were only two disappainted solicitresses on the job of the unfortunate class on Saturn’s mountain fort? That was about it, jah! And Camellus then said to Gemellus: I should know you? Parfaitly. And Gemellus then said to Camellus: Yes, your brother? Obsolutely. And if it was all about that, egregious sir? About that and the other. If he was not alluding to the whole in the wall? That he was when he was not eluding from the whole of the woman. Briefly, how such beginall finally struck him now? Like the crack that bruck the bank in Multifarnham. Whether he fell in with what they meant? Cursed that he suppoxed he did. Thos Thoris, Thomar’s Thom? The rudacist rotter in Roebuckdom. Surtopical? And subhuman. If it was, in yappanoise language, ach bad clap? Oo! Ah! Augs and ohrs with Rhian O’kehley to put it tertianly, we wrong? Shocking! Such as turly pearced our really’s that he might, that he might never, that he might never that night? Treely and rurally. Bladyughfoulmoeck- lenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpa-pornanennykocksapastippata-ppatupperstrip-puckputtanach, eh? You have it alright.

Meirdreach an Oincuish! But a new complexion was put upon the matter when to the perplexedly uncondemnatory bench (whereon punic judgeship strove with penal law) the senior [p.091] king of all, Pegger Festy, as soon as the outer layer of stucckomuck had been removed at the request of a few live jurors, declared in a loudburst of poesy, through his Brythonic interpreter on his oath, mhuith peisth mhuise as fearra bheura muirre hriosmas, whereas take notice be the relics of the bones of the story bouchal that was ate be Cliopatrick (the sow) princess of parked porkers, afore God and all their honours and king’s commons that, what he would swear to the Tierney of Dundalgan or any other Tierney, yif live thurkells folloged him about sure that was no steal and that, nevertheless, what was deposited from that eyebold earbig noseknaving gutthroat, he did not fire a stone either before or after he was born down and up to that time. And, incidentalising that they might talk about Markarthy or they might walk to Baalastartey or they might join the nabour party and come on to Porterfeud this the sockdologer had the neck to endorse with the head bowed on him over his outturned noreaster by protesting to his lipreaders with a justbeencleaned barefacedness, abeam of moonlight’s hope, in the same trelawney what he would impart, pleas bench, to the Llwyd Josus and the gentlemen in Jury’s and the four of Masterers who had been all those yarns yearning for that good one about why he left Dublin, that, amreeta beaker coddling doom, as an Inishman was as good as any cantonnatal, if he was to parish by the market steak before the dorming of the mawn, he skuld never ask to see sight or light of this world or the other world or any either world, of Tyrenan-Og, as true as he was there in that jackabox that minute, or wield or wind (no thanks t’yous!) the inexousthausthible wassailhorn tot of iskybaush the hailth up the wailth of the endknown abgod of the fire of the moving way of the hawks with his heroes in Warhorror if ever in all his exchequered career he up or lave a chancery hand to take or throw the sign of a mortal stick or stone at man, yoelamb or salvation army either before or after being puptised down to that most holy and every blessed hour. Here, upon the halfkneed castleknocker’s attempting kithoguishly to lilt his holymess the paws and make the sign of the Roman Godhelic faix, (Xaroshie, zdrst!— in his excitement the laddo had [p.092] broken exthro Castilian into which the whole audience perseguired and pursuited him olla podrida) outbroke much yellachters from owners in the heall (Ha!) in which, under the mollification of methaglin, the testifighter reluctingly, but with ever so ladylike indecorum, joined. (Ha! Ha!)

The hilariohoot of Pegger’s Windup cumjustled as neatly with the tristitone of the Wet Pinter’s as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies. Distinctly different were their duasdestinies. Whereas the maidies of the bar, (a pairless trentene, a lunarised score) when the eranthus myrrmyrred: Show’m the Posed: fluttered and flattered around the willingly pressed, nominating him for the swiney prize, complimenting him, the captivating youth, on his having all his senses about him, stincking thyacinths through his curls (O feen! O deur!) and bringing busses to his cheeks, their masculine Oirisher Rose (his neece cleur!), and legando round his nice new neck for him and pizzicagnoling his woolywags, with their dindy dandy sugar de candy mechree me postheen flowns courier to belive them of all his untiring young dames and send treats in their times. Ymen. But it was not unobserved of those presents, their worships, how, of one among all, her deputised to defeme him by the Lunar Sisters’ Celibacy Club, a lovelooking leapgirl, all all alonely, Gentia Gemma of the Makegiddyculling Reeks, he, wan and pale in his unmixed admiration, seemed blindly, mutely, tastelessly, tactlessly, innamorate with heruponhim in shining aminglement, the shaym of his hisu shifting into the shimmering of her hers, (youthsy, beautsy, hee’s her chap and shey’ll tell memmas when she gays whom) till the wild wishwish of her sheeshea melted most musically mid the dark deepdeep of his shayshaun.

And whereas distracted (for was not just this in effect which had just caused that the effect of that which it had caused to occur?) the four justicers laid their wigs together, Untius, Muncius, Punchus and Pylax but could do no worse than promulgate [p.093] their standing verdict of Nolans Brumans whereoneafter King, having murdered all the English he knew, picked out his pockets and left the tribunal scotfree, trailing his Tommeylommey’s tunic in his hurry, thereinunder proudly showing off the blink pitch to his britgits to prove himself (an’t plase yous!) a rael genteel. To the Switz bobbyguard’s curial but courtlike: Commodore valley O hairy, Arthre jennyrosy?: the firewaterloover returted with such a vinesmelling fortytudor ages rawdownhams tanyouhide as would turn the latten stomach even of a tumass equinous (we were prepared for the chap’s clap cap, the accent, but, took us as, by surprise and now we’re geshing it like gush gash from a burner!) so that all the twofromthirty advocatesses within echo, pulling up their briefs at the krigkry: Shun the Punman!: safely and soundly soccered that fenemine Parish Poser, (how dare he!) umprumptu rightoway hames, much to his thanks, gratiasagam, to all the wrong donatrices, biss Drinkbattle’s Dingy Dwellings where (for like your true venuson Esau he was dovetimid as the dears at Bottome) he shat in (zoo), like the muddy goalbind who he was (dun), the chassetitties belles conclaiming: You and your gift of your gaft of your garbage abaht our Farvver! and gaingridando: Hon! Verg! Nau! Putor! Skam! Schams! Shames!

And so it all ended. Artha kama dharma moksa. Ask Kavya for the kay. And so everybody heard their plaint and all listened to their plause. The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther! Of eyebrow pencilled, by lipstipple penned. Borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap. From dark Rosa Lane a sigh and a weep, from Lesbia Looshe the beam in her eye, from lone Coogan Barry his arrow of song, from Sean Kelly’s anagrim a blush at the name, from I am the Sullivan that trumpeting tramp, from Suffering Dufferin the Sit of her Style, from Kathleen May Vernon her Mebbe fair efforts, from Fillthepot Curran his scotchlove machreether, from hymn Op. 2 Phil Adolphos the weary O, the leery, O, from Samyouwill Leaver or Damyouwell Lover thatjolly old molly bit or that bored saunter by, from Timm Finn again’s weak tribes loss of strenghth to his sowheel, from the wedding [p.094] on the greene, agirlies, the gretnass of joyboys, from Pat Mullen, Tom Mallon, Dan Meldon, Don Maldon a slickstick picnic made in Moate by Muldoons. The solid man saved by his sillied woman. Crackajolking away like a hearse on fire. The elm that whimpers at the top told the stone that moans when stricken. Wind broke it. Wave bore it. Reed wrote of it. Syce ran with it. Hand tore it and wild went war. Hen trieved it and plight pledged peace. It was folded with cunning, sealed with crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? The old hunks on the hill read it to perlection. It made ma make merry and sissy so shy and rubbed some shine off Shem and put some shame into Shaun. Yet Una and Ita spill famine with drought and Agrippa, the propastored, spells tripulations in his threne. Ah, furchte fruchte, timid Danaides! Ena milo melomon, frai is frau and swee is too, swee is two when swoo is free, ana mala woe is we! A pair of sycopanties with amygdaleine eyes, one old obster lumpky pumpkin and three meddlars on their slies. And that was how framm Sin fromm Son, acity arose, finfin funfun, a sitting arrows. Now tell me, tell me, tell me then!

               What was it?

                A . . . . . . . . . . !

                ? . . . . . . . . . O!

So there you are now there they were, when all was over again, the four with them, setting around upin their judges’ chambers, in the muniment room, of their marshalsea, under the suspices of Lally, around their old traditional tables of the law like Somany Solans to talk it over rallthesameagain. Well and druly dry. Suffering law the dring. Accourting to king’s evelyns. So help her goat and kiss the bouc. Festives and highajinks and jintyaun and her beetyrossy bettydoaty and not to forget now a’duna o’darnel. The four of them and thank court now there were no more of them. So pass the push for port sake. Be it soon. Ah ho! And do you remember, Singabob, the badfather, the same, the great Howdoyoucallem, and his old nickname, Dirty Daddy Pantaloons, in his monopoleums, behind the war of the two roses, with Michael Victory, the sheemen’s preester, before [p.095] he caught his paper dispillsation from the poke, old Minace and Minster York? Do I mind? I mind the gush off the mon like Ballybock manure works on a tradewinds day. And the O’Moyly gracies and the O’Briny rossies chaffing him bluchface and playing him pranks. How do you do, todo, North Mister? Get into my way! Ah dearome forsailoshe! Gone over the bays! When ginabawdy meadabawdy! Yerra, why would he heed that old gasometer with his hooping coppin and his dyinboosycough and all the birds of the southside after her, Minxy Cunningham, their dear divorcee darling, jimmies and jonnies to be her jo? Hold hard. There’s three other corners to our isle’s cork float. Sure, ’tis well I can telesmell him H₂ C E₃ that would take a township’s breath away! Gob and I nose him too well as I do meself, heaving up the Kay Wall by the 32 to 11 with his limelooking horsebags full of sesameseed, the Whiteside Kaffir, and his sayman’s effluvium and his scentpainted voice, puffing out his thundering big brown cabbage! Pa! Thawt I’m glad a gull for his pawsdeen fiunn! Goborro, sez he, Lankyshied! Gobugga ye, sez I! O breezes! I sniffed that lad long before anyone. It was when I was in my farfather out at the west and she and myself, the redheaded girl, firstnighting down Sycomore Lane. Fine feelplay we had of it mid the kissabetts frisking in the kool kurkle dusk of the lushiness. My perfume of the pampas, says she (meaning me) putting out her netherlights, and I’d sooner one precious sip at your pure mountain dew than enrich my acquaintance with that big brewer’s belch.

And so they went on, the fourbottle men, the analists, unguam and nunguam and lunguam again, their anschluss about her whosebefore and his whereafters and how she was lost away away in the fern and how he was founded deap on deep in anear, and the rustlings and the twitterings and the raspings and the snappings and the sighings and the paintings and the ukukuings and the (hist!) the springapartings and the (hast!) the bybyscuttlings and all the scandalmunkers and the pure craigs that used to be (up) that time living and lying and rating and riding round Nunsbelly Square. And all the buds in the bush. And the laugh- [p.096] ing jackass. Harik! Harik! Harik! The rose is white in the darik! And Sunfella’s nose has got rhinoceritis from haunting the roes in the parik! So all rogues lean to rhyme. And contradrinking themselves about Lillytrilly law pon hilly and Mrs Niall of the Nine Corsages and the old markiss their besterfar, and, arrah, sure there was never a marcus at all at all among the manlies and dear Sir Armoury, queer Sir Rumoury, and the old house by the churpelizod, and all the goings on so very wrong long before when they were going on retreat, in the old gammeldags, the four of them, in Milton’s Park under lovely Father Whisperer and making her love with his stuffstuff in the languish of flowers and feeling to find was she mushymushy, and wasn’t that very both of them, the saucicissters, a drahereen o machree!, and (peep!) meeting waters most improper (peepette!) ballround the garden, trickle trickle trickle triss, please, miman, may I go flirting? farmers gone with a groom and how they used her, mused her, licksed her and cuddled. I differ with ye! Are you sure of yourself now? You’re a liar, excuse me! I will not and you’re another! And Lully holding their breach of the peace for them. Pool loll Lolly! To give and to take! And to forego the pasht! And all will be forgotten! Ah ho! It was too too bad to be falling out about her kindness pet and the shape of OOOOOOOO Ourang’s time. Well, all right, Lelly. And shakeahand. And schenkusmore. For Craig sake. Be it suck.

Well?

Well, even should not the framing up of such figments in the evidential order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as a dim seer’s setting of a starchart might (heaven helping it!) uncover the nakedness of an unknown body in the fields of blue or as forehearingly as the sibspeeches of all mankind have foliated (earth seizing them!) from the root of some funner’s stotter all the soundest sense to be found immense our special mentalists now holds (securus iudicat orbis terrarum) that by such playing possum our hagious curious encestor bestly saved his brush with his posterity, you, charming coparcenors, us, heirs of his tailsie. Gundogs of all breeds were beagling with renounced urbiandor- [p.097] bic bugles, hot to run him, given law, on a scent breasthigh, keen for the worry. View! From his holt outratted across the Juletide’s genial corsslands of Humfries Chase from Mullinahob and Peacockstown, then bearing right upon Tankardstown, the outlier, a white noelan which Mr Lœwensteil Fitz Urse’s basset beaters had first misbadgered for a bruin of some swart, led bayers the run, then through Raystown and Horlockstown and, louping the loup, to Tankardstown again. Ear canny hare for doubling through Cheeverstown they raced him, through Loughlinstown and Nutstown to wind him by the Boolies. But from the good turn when he last was lost, check, upon Ye Hill of Rut in full winter coat with ticker pads, pointing for his rooming house his old nordest in his rolltoproyal hessians a deaf fuchser’s volponism hid him close in covert, miraculously ravenfed and buoyed up, in rumer, reticule, onasum and abomasum, upon (may Allbrewham have his mead!) the creamclotted sherriness of cinnamon syllabub, Mikkelraved, Nikkelsaved. Hence hounds hied home. Preservative perseverance in the reeducation of his intestines was the rebuttal by whilk he sort of git the big bulge on the whole bunch of spasoakers, dieting against glues and gravies, in that sometime prestreet protown. Vainly violence, virulence and vituperation sought wellnigh utterly to attax and abridge, to derail and depontify, to enrate and inroad, to ongoad and unhume the great shipping mogul and underlinen overlord.

But the spoil of hesitants, the spell of hesitency. His atake is it ashe, tittery taw tatterytail, hasitense humponadimply, heyheyheyhey a winceywencky.

Assembly men murmured. Reynard is slow!

One feared for his days. Did there yawn? ’Twas his stommick. Eruct? The libber. A gush? From his visuals. Pung? Delivver him, orelode! He had laid violent hands on himself, it was brought in Fugger’s Newsletter, lain down, all in, fagged out, with equally melancholy death. For the triduum of Saturnalia his goatservant had paraded hiz willingsons in the Forum while the jenny infanted the lass to be greeted raucously (the Yardstated) with houx and epheus and measured with missiles too from [p.098] a hundred of manhood and a wimmering of weibes. Big went the bang: then wildewide was quiet: a report: silence: last Fama put it under ether. The noase or the loal had dreven him blem, blem, stun blem. Sparks flew. He had fled again (open shunshema!) this country of exile, sloughed off, sidleshomed via the subterranean shored with bedboards, stowed away and ankered in a dutch bottom tank, the Arsa, hod S.S. Finlandia, and was even now occupying, under an islamitic newhame in his seventh generation, a physical body Cornelius Magrath’s (badoldkarakter, commonorrong canbung) in Asia Major, where as Turk of the theater (first house all flatty: the king, eleven sharps) he had bepiastered the buikdanseuses from the opulence of his omnibox while as arab at the streetdoor he bepestered the bumbashaws for the alms of a para’s pence. Wires hummed. Peacefully general astonishment assisted by regrettitude had put a term till his existence: he saw the family saggarth, resigned, put off his remainders, was recalled and scrapheaped by the Maker. Chirpings crossed. An infamous private ailment (vulgovarioveneral) had claimed endright, closed his vicious circle, snap. Jams jarred. He had walked towards the middle of an ornamental lilypond when innebriated up to the point where braced shirts meet knickerbockers, as wangfish daring the buoyant waters, when rodmen’s firstaiding hands had rescued un from very possibly several feel of demifrish water. Mush spread. On Umbrella Street where he did drinks from a pumps a kind workman, Mr Whitlock, gave him a piece of wood. What words of power were made fas between them, ekenames and auchnomes, acnomina ecnumina? That, O that, did Hansard tell us, would gar ganz Dub’s ear wag in every pub of all the citta! Batty believes a baton while Hogan hears a hod yet Heer prefers a punsil shapner and Cope and Bull go cup and ball. And the Cassidy — Craddock rome and reme round e’er a wiege ne’er a waage is still immer and immor awagering over it, a cradle with a care in it or a casket with a kick behind. Toties testies quoties questies. The war is in words and the wood is the world. Maply me, willowy we, hickory he and yew yourselves. Howforhim chirrupeth evereach- [p.099] bird! From golddawn glory to glowworm gleam. We were lowquacks did we not tacit turn. Elsewere there here no concern of the Guinnesses. But only the ruining of the rain has heard. Estout pourporteral! Cracklings cricked. A human pest cycling (pist!) and recycling (past!) about the sledgy streets, here he was (pust!) again! Morse nuisance noised. He was loose at large and (Oh baby!) might be anywhere when a disguised exnun, of huge standbuild and masculine manners in her fairly fat forties, Carpulenta Gygasta, hattracted hattention by harbitrary conduct with a homnibus. Aerials buzzed to coastal listeners of an oertax bror collector’s budget, fullybigs, sporran, tie, tuft, tabard and bloody antichill cloak, its tailor’s (Baernfather’s) tab reading V.P.H., found nigh Scaldbrothar’s Hole, and divers shivered to think what kaind of beast, wolves, croppis’s or fourpenny friars, had devoured him. C.W. cast wide. Hvidfinns lyk, drohneth svertgleam, Valkir lockt. On his pinksir’s postern, the boys had it, at Whitweekend had been nailed an inkedup name and title, inscribed in the national cursives, accelerated, regressive, filiform, turreted and envenomoloped in piggotry: Move up. Mumpty! Mike room for Rumpty! By order, Nickekellous Plugg; and this go, no pentecostal jest about it, how gregarious his race soever or skilful learned wise cunning knowledgable clear profound his saying fortitudo fraught or prudentiaproven, were he chief, count, general, fieldmarshal, prince, king or Myles the Slasher in his person, with a moliamordhar mansion in the Breffnian empire and a place of inauguration on the hill of Tullymongan, there had been real murder, of the rayheallach royghal raxacraxian variety, the MacMahon chaps, it was, that had done him in. On the fidd of Verdor the rampart combatants had left him lion with his dexter handcoup wresterected in a pureede paumee bloody proper. Indeed not a few thick and thin wellwishers, mostly of the clontarfminded class, (Colonel John Bawle O’Roarke, fervxamplus), even ventured so far as to loan or beg copies of D. Blayncy’s trilingual triweekly, Scatterbrains’ Aftening Posht, so as to make certain sure onetime and be satisfied of their quasicontribusodalitarian’s having become genuinely quite [p.100] beetly dead whether by land whither by water. Transocean atalaclamoured him; The latter! The latter! Shall their hope then be silent or Macfarlane lack of lamentation? He lay under leagues of it in deep Bartholoman’s Deep.

Achdung! Pozor! Attenshune! Vikeroy Besights Smucky Yung Pigeschoolies. Tri Paisdinernes Eventyr Med Lochlanner Fathach I Fiounnisgehaven. Bannalanna Bangs Ballyhooly Out Of Her Buddaree Of A Bullavogue.

But, their bright little contemporaries notwithstanding, on the morrowing morn of the suicidal murder of the unrescued expatriate, aslike as asnake comes sliduant down that oaktree onto the duke of beavers, (you may have seen some liquidamber exude exotic from a balsam poplar at Parteen-a-lax Limestone. Road and cried Abies Magnifica! not, noble fir?) a quarter of nine, imploring his resipiency, saw the infallible spike of smoke’s jutstiff punctual from the seventh gable of our Quintus Centimachus’ porphyroid buttertower and then thirsty p.m. with oaths upon his lastingness (En caecos harauspices! Annos longos patimur!) the lamps of maintenance, beaconsfarafield innerhalf the zuggurat, all brevetnamed, the wasting wyvern, the tawny of his mane, the swinglowswaying bluepaw, the outstanding man, the lolllike lady, being litten for the long (O land, how long!) lifesnight, with suffusion of fineglass transom and leadlight panes.

Wherefore let it hardly by any being thinking be said either or thought that the prisoner of that sacred edifice, were he an Ivor the Boneless or an Olaf the Hide, was at his best a onestone parable, a rude breathing on the void of to be, a venter hearing his own bauchspeech in backwords, or, more strictly, but tristurned initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke (the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting an authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract. Be still, O quick! Speak him dumb! Hush ye fronds of Ulma!

[p.101] Dispersal women wondered. Was she fast?

Do tell us all about. As we want to hear allabout. So tellus tellas allabouter. The why or whether she looked alottylike like ussies and whether he had his wimdop like themses shut? Notes and queries, tipbids and answers, the laugh and the shout, the ards and downs. Now listed to one aneither and liss them down and smoothen out your leaves of rose. The war is o’er. Wimwim wimwim! Was it Unity Moore or Estella Swifte or Varina Fay or Quarta Quaedam? Toemaas, mark oom for yor ounckel! Pigeys, hold op med yer leg! Who, but who (for second time of asking) was then the scourge of the parts about folkrich Lucalizod it was wont to be asked, as, in ages behind of the Homo Capite Erectus, what price Peabody’s money, or, to put it bluntly, whence is the herringtons’ white cravat, as, in epochs more cainozoic, who struck Buckley though nowadays as thentimes every schoolfilly of sevenscore moons or more who knowher intimologies and every colleen bawl aroof and every redflammelwaving warwife and widowpeace upon Dublin Wall for ever knows as yayas is yayas how it was Buckleyself (we need no blooding paper to tell it neither) who struck and the Russian generals, da! da!, instead of Buckley who was caddishly struck by him when be herselves. What fullpried paulpoison in the spy of three castles or which hatefilled smileyseller? And that such a vetriol of venom, that queen’s head affranchisant, a quiet stinkingplaster zeal could cover, prepostered or postpaid! The loungelizards of the pumproom had their nine days’ jeer, and pratschkats at their platschpails too and holenpolendom beside, Szpaszpas Szpissmas, the zhanyzhonies, when, still believing in her owenglass, when izarres were twinklins, that the upper reaches of her mouthless face and her impermanent waves were the better half of her, one nearer him, dearer than all, first warming creature of his early morn, bondwoman of the man of the house, and murrmurr of all the mackavicks, she who had given his eye for her bed and a tooth for a child till one one and one ten and one hundred again, O me and O ye! cadet and prim, the hungray and anngreen (and if she is older now than her teeth she has hair that [p.102] is younger than thighne, my dear!) she who shuttered him after his fall and waked him widowt sparing and gave him keen and made him able and held adazillahs to each arche of his noes, she who will not rast her from her running to seek him till, with the help of the okeamic, some such time that she shall have been after hiding the crumbends of his enormousness in the areyou lookingfor Pearlfar sea, (ur, uri, uria!) stood forth, burnzburn the gorggony old danworld, in gogor’s name, for gagar’s sake, dragging the countryside in her train, finickin here and funickin there, with her louisequean’s brogues and her culunder buzzle and her little bolero boa and all and two times twenty curlicornies for her headdress, specks on her eyeux, and spudds on horeilles and a circusfix riding her Parisienne’s cockneze, a vaunt her straddle from Equerry Egon, when Tinktink in the churchclose clinked Steploajazzyma Sunday, Sola, with pawns, prelates and pookas pelotting in her piecebag, for Handiman the Chomp, Esquoro, biskbask, to crush the slander’s head.

Wery weeny wight, plead for Morandmor! Notre Dame de la Ville, mercy of thy balmheartzyheat! Ogrowdnyk’s beyond herbata tay, wort of the drogist. Bulk him no bulkis. And let him rest, thou wayfarre, and take no gravespoil from him! Neither mar his mound! The bane of Tut is on it. Ware! But there’s a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P. And you’ll agree. She must be she. For her holden heirheaps hanging down her back. He spenth his strenth amok haremscarems. Poppy Narancy, Giallia, Chlora, Marinka, Anileen, Parme. And ilk a those dames had her rainbow huemoures yet for whilko her whims but he coined a cure. Tifftiff today, kissykissy tonay and agelong pine tomauranna. Then who but Crippled-with-Children would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?

Sold him her lease of ninenineninetee,

Tresses undresses so dyedyedaintee,

Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.

Hoo was the C. O. D.?

Bum!

[p.103] At Island Bridge she met her tide.

Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!

The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride.

Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!

We’re all up to the years in hues and cribies.

That’s what she’s done for wee!

Woe!

Nomad may roam with Nabuch but let naaman laugh at Jordan! For we, we have taken our sheet upon her stones where we have hanged our hearts in her trees; and we list, as she bibs us, by the waters of babalong.

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[p.104] In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times. Thus we hear of, The Augusta Angustissimost for Old Seabeastius’ Salvation, Rockabill Booby in the Wave Trough, Here’s to the Relicts of All Decencies, Anna Stessa’s Rise to Notice, Knickle Down Duddy Gunne and Arishe Sir Cannon, My Golden One and My Selver Wedding, Amoury Treestam and Icy Siseule, Saith a Sawyer til a Strame, Ik dik dopedope et tu mihimihi, Buy Birthplate for a Bite, Which of your Hesterdays Mean Ye to Morra? Hoebegunne the Hebrewer Hit Waterman the Brayned, Arcs in His Ceiling Flee Chinx on the Flur, Rebus de Hibernicis, The Crazier Letters, Groans of a Britoness, Peter Peopler Picked a Plot to Pitch his Poppolin, An Apology for a Big (some such nonoun as Husband or husboat or hosebound is probably understood for we have also the plutherplethoric My Hoonsbood Hansbaad’s a Journey to Porthergill gone and He Never Has the Hour), Ought We To Visit Him? For Ark see Zoo, Cleopater’s Nedlework Ficturing Aldborougham on the Sahara with the Coombing of the Cammmels and the Parlourmaids of Aegypt, Cock in the Pot for Father, Placeat Vestrae, A New Cure for an Old Clap, Where Portentos they’d Grow Gonder how I’d Wish I Woose a Geese; Gettle Nettie, Thrust him not, When the [p.105] Myrtles of Venice Played to Bloccus’s Line, To Plenge Me High He Waives Chiltern on Friends, Oremunds Queue Visits Amen Mart, E’en Tho’ I Granny a-be He would Fain Me Cuddle, Twenty of Chambers, Weighty Ten Beds and a Wan Ceteroom, I Led the Life, Through the Boxer Coxer Rising in the House with the Golden Stairs, The Following Fork, He’s my O’Jerusalem and I’m his Po, The Best in the West, By the Stream of Zemzem under Zigzag Hill, The Man That Made His Mother in the Marlborry Train, Try Our Taal on a Taub, The Log of Anny to the Base All, Nopper Tipped a Nappiwenk to his Notylytl Dantsigirls, Prszss Orel Orel the King of Orlbrdsz, Intimier Minnelisp of an Extorreor Monolothe, Drink to Him, My Juckey, and Dhoult Bemine Thy Winnowing Sheet, I Ask You to Believe I was his Mistress, He Can Explain, From Victrolia Nuancee to Allbart Noahnsy, Da’s a Daisy so Guimea your Handsel too, What Barbaras Done to a Barrel Organ Before the Rank, Tank and Bonnbtail, Huskvy Admortal, What Jumbo made to Jalice and what Anisette to Him, Ophelia’s Culpreints, Hear Hubty Hublin, My Old Dansh, I am Older northe Rogues among Whisht I Slips and He Calls Me his Dual of Ayessha, Suppotes a Ventriliquorst Merries a Corpse, Lapps for Finns This Funnycoon’s Week, How the Buckling Shut at Rush in January, Look to the Lady, From the Rise of the Dudge Pupublick to the Fall of the Potstille, Of the Two Ways of Opening the Mouth, I have not Stopped Water Where It Should Flow and I Know the Twentynine Names of Attraente, The Tortor of Tory Island Traits Galasia like his Milchcow, From Abbeygate to Crowalley Through a Lift in the Lude, Smocks for Their Graces and Me Aunt for Them Clodshoppers, How to Pull a Good Horuscoup even when Oldsire is Dead to the World, Inn the Gleam of Waherlow, Fathe He’s Sukceded to My Esperations, Thee Steps Forward, Two Stops Back, My Skin Appeals to Three Senses and My Curly Lips Demand Columbkisses; Gage Street on a Crany’s Savings, Them Lads made a Trion of Battlewatschers and They Totties a Doeit of Deers, In My Lord’s Bed by One Whore Went Through It, Mum It is All Over, Cowpoyride by Twelve Acre Terriss in the Unique Estates of Amessican, He Gave me a Thou so I [p.106] serve Him with Thee, Of all the Wide Torsos in all the Wild Glen, O’Donogh, White Donogh, He’s Hue to Me Cry, I’m the Stitch in his Baskside You’d be Nought Without Mom, To Keep the Huskies off the Hustings and Picture Pets from Lifting Shops, Norsker Torsker Find the Poddle, He Perssed Me Here with the Ardour of a Tonnoburkes, A Boob Was Weeping This Mower was Reaping, O’Loughlin, Up from the Pit of my Stomach I Swish you the White of the Mourning, Inglo-Andeen Medoleys from Tommany Moohr, The Great Polynesional Entertrainer Exhibits Ballantine Brautchers with the Link of Natures, The Mimic of Meg Neg and the Mackeys, Entered as the Lastest Pigtarial and My Pooridiocal at Stitchioner’s Hall, Siegfield Follies and or a Gentlehomme’s Faut Pas, See the First Book of Jealesies Pessim, The Suspended Sentence, A Pretty Brick Story for Childsize Heroes, As Lo Our Sleep, I Knew I’d Got it in Me so Thit settles That, Thonderbalt Captain Smeth and La Belle Sauvage Pocahonteuse, Way for Wet Week Welikin’s Douchka Marianne, The Last of the Fingallians, It Was Me Egged Him on to the Stork Exchange and Lent my Dutiful Face to His Customs, Chee Chee Cheels on their China Miction, Pickedmeup Peters, Lumptytumtumpty had a Big Fall, Pimpimp Pimpimp, Measly Ventures of Two Lice and the Fall of Fruit, The Fokes Family Interior, If my Spreadeagles Wasn’t so Tight I’d Loosen my Cursits on that Bunch of Maggiestraps, Allolosha Popofetts and Howke Cotchme Eye, Seen Aples and Thin Dyed, i big U to Beleaves from Love and Mother, Fine’s Fault was no Felon, Exat Delvin Renter Life, The Flash that Flies from Vuggy’s Eyes has Set Me Hair On Fire, His is the House that Malt Made, Divine Views from Back to the Front, Abe to Sare Stood Icyk Neuter till Brahm Taulked Him Common Sex, A Nibble at Eve Will That Bowal Relieve, Allfor Guineas, Sounds and Compliments Libidous, Seven Wives Awake Aweek, Airy Ann and Berber Blut, Amy Licks Porter While Huffy Chops Eads, Abbrace of Umbellas or a Tripple of Caines, Buttbutterbust, From the Manorlord Hoved to the Misses O’Mollies and from the Dames to their Sames, Manyfestoons for the Colleagues on the Green, An Outstanding Back and an Excellent Halfcentre if Called on, As Tree is Quick and Stone is [p.107] White So is My Washing Done by Night, First and Last Only True Account all about the Honorary Mirsu Earwicker, L.S.D., and the Snake (Nuggets!) by a Woman of the World who only can Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Man and all his Conspirators how they all Tried to Fall him Putting it all around Lucalizod about Privates Earwicker and a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly Showing all the Unmentionability falsely Accusing about the Raincoats.

The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput. To the hardily curiosing entomophilust then it has shown a very sexmosaic of nymphosis in which the eternal chimerahunter Oriolopos, now frond of sugars, then lief of saults, the sensory crowd in his belly coupled with an eye for the goods trooth bewilderblissed by their night effluvia with guns like drums and fondlers like forceps persequestellates his vanessas from flore to flore. Somehows this sounds like the purest kidooleyoon wherein our madernacerution of lour lore is rich. All’s so herou from us him in a kitchernott darkness, by hasard and worn rolls arered, we must grope on till Zerogh hour like pou owl giaours as we are would we salve aught of moments for our aysore today. Amousin though not but. Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along. In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it’s as semper as oxhousehumper!) generations, more generations and still more generations.

Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing [p.108] anyhow? Erect, beseated, mountback, against a partywall, below freezigrade, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind, accompanied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted by visit of seer to scribe or of scribe to site, atwixt two showers or atosst of a trike, rained upon or blown around, by a rightdown regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning?

Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience. A good plan used by worried business folk who may not have had many momentums to master Kung’s doctrine of the meang or the propriety codestruces of Carprimustimus is just to think of all the sinking fund of patience possessed in their conjoint names by both brothers Bruce with whom are incorporated their Scotch spider and Elberfeld’s Calculating Horses. If after years upon years of delving in ditches dark one tubthumper more than others, Kinihoun or Kahanan, giardarner or mear measenmanonger, has got up for the darnall same purpose of reassuring us with all the barbar of the Carrageehouse that our great ascendant was properly speaking three syllables less than his own surname (yes, yes, less!), that the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker local jargon for an ace’s patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!) then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return, whereabouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that glorisol which plays touraloup with us in this Aludin’s Cove of our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us the dinkum oil?

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

[p.109] Luckily there is another cant to the questy. Has any fellow, of the dime a dozen type, it might with some profit some dull evening quietly be hinted — has any usual sort of ornery josser, flatchested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination by syncopation in the elucidation of complications, of his greatest Fung Yang dynasdescendanced, only another the son of, in fact, ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it exhibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passionpallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck itself under its flap. Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the latter’s acquaintance, engaged in performing the elaborative antecistral ceremony of upstheres, straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard’s eyes to the ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations, a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessary or a trifle irritating here and there, but for all that suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts separated don’t they now, for better survey by the deft hand of an expert, don’t you know? Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up and considered in turn apart from the other?

[p.110] Here let a few artifacts fend in their own favour. The river felt she wanted salt. That was just where Brien came in. The country asked for bearspaw for dindin! And boundin aboundin it got it surly. We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kingdom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land. We suddenly have. Our isle is Sainge. The place. That stern chuckler Mayhappy Mayhapnot, once said to repeation in that lutran conservatory way of his that Isitachapel-Asitalukin was the one place, ult aut nult, in this madh vaal of tares (whose verdhure’s yellowed therever Phaiton parks his car while its tamelised tay is the drame of Drainophilias) where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable. If the proverbial bishop of our holy and undivided with this me ken or no me ken Zot is the Quiztune havvermashed had his twoe nails on the head we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles though possibly nobody after having grubbed up a lock of cwold cworn aboove his subject probably in Harrystotalies or the vivle will go out of his way to applaud him on the onboiassed back of his remark for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be. Ahahn!

About that original hen. Midwinter (fruur or kuur?) was in the offing and Premver a promise of a pril when, as kischabrigies sang life’s old sahatsong, an iceclad shiverer, merest of bantlings observed a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short) afterwards changed into the orangery when in the course of deeper demolition unexpectedly one bushman’s holiday its limon threw up a few spontaneous fragments of orangepeel, the last remains of an outdoor meal by some unknown sunseeker or placehider illico way back in his mistridden past. What child of a strandlooper but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up on a strate that was called strete a motive for future saintity by euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice by another heily innocent and beachwalker whilst trying with pious clamour to wheedle Tip- [p.111] peraw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the Jacobiters.

The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than quinquegintarian (Terziis prize with Serni medal, Cheepalizzy’s Hane Exposition) and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome’s health well only the hate turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general’s elections with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael don’t forget unto life’s & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses for holy paul holey corner holipoli whollyisland pee ess from (locust may eat all but this sign shall they never) affectionate largelooking tache of tch. The stain, and that a teastain (the overcautelousness of the masterbilker here, as usual, signing the page away), marked it off on the spout of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as a hurry-me-o’er-the-hazy.

Why then how?

Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive (there’s a sod of a turb for you! please wisp off the grass!) unfilthed from the boucher by the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen. Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while [p.112] the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip.

You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.

Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluffballs safe through din and danger!); lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman’s part every time. Let us auspice it! Yes, before all this has time to end the golden age must return with its vengeance. Man will become dirigible, Ague will be rejuvenated, woman with her ridiculous white burden will reach by one step sublime incubation, the manewanting human lioness with her dishorned discipular manram will lie down together publicly flank upon fleece. No, assuredly, they are not justified, those gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday in bleak Janiveer (yet how palmy date in a waste’s oasis!) when to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature.

And. She may be a mere marcella, this midget madgetcy, Misthress of Arths. But. It is not a hear or say of some anomorous letter, signed Toga Girilis, (teasy dear). We have a cop of her fist right against our nosibos. We note the paper with her jotty young watermark: Notre Dame du Bon Marché. And she has a heart of Arin! What lumililts as she fols with her fallimineers and her nadianods. As a strow will shaw she does the wind blague, recting to show the rudess of a robur curling and shewing the fansaties of a frizette. But how many of her readers [p.113] realise that she is not out to dizzledazzle with a graith uncouthrement of postmantuam glasseries from the lapins and the grigs. Nuttings on her wilelife! Grabar gooden grandy for old almeanium adamologists like Dariaumaurius and Zovotrimaserovmeravmerouvian; (dmzn!); she feel plain plate one flat fact thing and if, lastways firdstwise, a man alones sine anyon anyons utharas has no rates to done a kik at with anyon anakars about tutus milking fores and the rereres on the outerrand asikin the tutus to be forrarder. Thingcrooklyexin-everypasturesixdix-likencehimaroundhers-themaggerbykinkin-kankanwithdownmind-lookingated. Mesdaims, Marmouselles, Mescerfs! Silvapais! All schwants (schwrites) ischt tell the cock’s trootabout him. Kapak kapuk. No minzies matter. He had to see life foully the plak and the smut, (schwrites). There were three men in him (schwrites). Dancings (schwrites) was his only ttoo feebles. With apple harlottes. And a little mollvogels. Spissially (schwrites) when they peaches. Honeys wore camelia paints. Yours very truthful. Add dapple inn. Yet is it but an old story, the tale of a Treestone with one Ysold, of a Mons held by tentpegs and his pal whatholoosed on the run, what Cadman could but Badman wouldn’t, any Genoaman against any Venis, and why Kate takes charge of the waxworks.

Let us now, weather, health, dangers, public orders and other circumstances permitting, of perfectly convenient, if you police, after you, policepolice, pardoning mein, ich beam so fresch, bey? drop this jiggerypokery and talk straight turkey meet to mate, for while the ear, be we mikealls or nicholists, may sometimes be inclined to believe others the eye, whether browned or nolensed, find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. Habes aures et num videbis? Habes oculos ac mannepalpabuat? Tip! Drawing nearer to take our slant at it (since after all it has met with misfortune while all underground), let us see all there may remain to be seen.

I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear. You are a poorjoist, unctuous to polise nopebobbies and tunnibelly [p.114] soully when ’tis thime took o’er home, gin. We cannot say aye to aye. We cannot smile noes from noes. Still. One cannot help noticing that rather more than half of the lines run north-south in the Nemzes and Bukarahast directions while the others go west-east in search from Maliziies with Bulgarad for, tiny tot though it looks when schtschupnistling alongside other incunabula, it has its cardinal points for all that. These ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lampblack and blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian of course, but the use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism. It is seriously believed by some that the intention may have been geodetic, or, in the view of the cannier, domestic economical. But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?

Another point, in addition to the original sand, pounce powder, drunkard paper or soft rag used (any vet or inhanger in ous sot’s social can see the seen for seemself, a wee ftofty od room, the cheery spluttered on the one karrig, a darka disheen of voos from Dalbania, any gotsquantity of racky, a portogal and some buk setting out on the sofer, you remember the sort of softball sucker motru used to tell us when we were all biribiyas or nippies and messas) it has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past. The teatimestained terminal (say not the tag, mummer, or our show’s a failure!) is a cosy little brown study all to oneself and, whether it be thumbprint, mademark or just a poor trait of the artless, its importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexus (for if the hand was one, the minds of active and agitated were more than so) will be best appreciated by never forgetting that both before and after the battle of the Boyne it was a habit not to sign letters [p.115] always. Tip. And it is surely a lesser ignorance to write a word with every consonant too few than to add all too many. The end? Say it with missiles then and thus arabesque the page. You have your cup of scalding Souchong, your taper’s waxen drop, your cat’s paw, the clove or coffinnail you chewed or champed as you worded it, your lark in clear air. So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own? A true friend is known much more easily, and better into the bargain, by his personal touch, habits of full or undress, movements, response to appeals for charity than by his footwear, say. And, speaking anent Tiberias and other incestuish salacities among gerontophils, a word of warning about the tenderloined passion hinted at. Some softnosed peruser might mayhem take it up erogenously as the usual case of spoons, prostituta in herba plus dinky pinks deliberatively summersaulting off her bisexycle, at the main entrance of curate’s perpetual soutane suit with her one to see and awoh! who picks her up as gingerly as any balmbearer would to feel whereupon the virgin was most hurt and nicely asking: whyre have you been so grace a mauling and where were you chaste me child? Be who, farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices, when they were yung and easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and what oracular comepression we have had apply to them! could (did we care to sell our feebought silence in camera) tell our very moistnostrilled one that father in such virgated contexts is not always that undemonstrative relative (often held up to our contumacy) who settles our hashbill for us and what an innocent allabroad’s adverb such as Michaelly looks like can be suggestive of under the pudendascope and, finally, what a neurasthene nympholept, endocrine-pineal typus, of inverted parentage with a prepossessing drauma present in her past and a priapic urge for congress with agnates before cognates fundamentally is feeling for under her lubricitous meiosis when she refers with liking to some feeler she fancie’s face. And Mm. We could. Yet what need to say? ’Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry, in [p.116] affect, as singsing so Salaman susuing to swittvitles while as unbluffingly blurtubruskblunt as an Esra, the cat, the cat’s meeter, the meeter’s cat’s wife, the meeter’s cat’s wife’s half better, the meeter’s cat’s wife’s half better’s meeter, and so back to our horses, for we also know, what we have perused from the pages of I Was A Gemral, that Showting up of Bulsklivism by ‘Schottenboum’, that Father Michael about this red time of the white terror equals the old regime and Margaret is the social revolution while cakes mean the party funds and dear thank you signifies national gratitude. In fine, we have heard, as it happened, of Spartacus intercellular. We are not corknered yet, dead hand! We can recall, with voluntears, the froggy jew, and sweeter far ’twere now westhinks in Dumbil’s fair city ere one more year is o’er. We tourned our coasts to the good gay tunes. When from down swords the sea merged the oldowth guns and answer made the bold O’ Dwyer. But. Est modest in verbos. Let a prostitute be whoso stands before a door and winks or parks herself in the fornix near a makeussin wall (sinsin! sinsin!) and the curate one who brings strong waters (gingin! gingin!), but also, and dinna forget, that there is many asleeps between someathome’s first and moreinausland’s last and that the beautiful presence of waiting kates will until life’s (!) be more than enough to make any milkmike in the language of sweet tarts punch hell’s hate into his twin nicky and that Maggy’s tea, or your majesty, if heard as a boost from a born gentleman is (?). For if the lingo gasped between kicksheets, however basically English, were to be preached from the mouths of wickerchurchwardens and metaphysicians in the row and advokaatoes, allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths, lesbiels, dentelles, gutterhowls and furtz, where would their practice be or where the human race itself were the Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion, however apically Volapucky, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, ppppfff, over country stiles, behind slated dwellinghouses, down blind lanes, or, when all fruit fails, under some sacking left on a coarse cart?

So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and [p.117] ages. Thief us the night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest, mine! Here, Ohere, insult the fair! Traitor, bad hearer, brave! The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times. Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun shine on menday’s daughter; a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well; such is manowife’s lot of lose and win again, like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s chin again, she plucketed them out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about it? O dear!

If juness she saved! Ah ho! And if yulone he pouved! The olold stoliolum! From quiqui quinet to michemiche chelet and a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo! It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall. Since nozzy Nanette tripped palmyways with Highho Harry there’s a spurtfire turf a’kind o’kindling when oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve: and whathough (revilous life proving aye the death of ronaldses when winpower wine has bucked the kick on poor won man) billiousness has been billiousness during milliums of millenions and our mixed racings have been giving two hoots or three jeers for the grape, vine and brew and Pieter’s in Nieuw Amsteldam and Paoli’s where the poules go and rum smelt his end for him and he dined off sooth american (it would give one the frier even were one a normal Kettlelicker) this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections has combled tumbled down to us fersch and made-at-all-hours like an ould cup on tay. As I was hottin me souser. Haha! And as you was caldin your dutchy hovel. Hoho! She tole the tail or her toon. Huhu!

Now, kapnimancy and infusionism may both fit as tight as two trivets but while we in our wee free state, holding to that prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in [p.118] the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness. And let us bringtheecease to beakerings on that clink, olmond bottler! On the face of it, to volt back to our desultory horses, and for your roughshod mind, bafflelost bull, the affair is a thing once for all done and there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time, be it a day or a year or even supposing, it should eventually turn out to be a serial number of goodness gracious alone knows how many days or years. Anyhow, somehow and somewhere, before the bookflood or after her ebb, somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory, Coccolanius or Gallotaurus, wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop. O, undoubtedly yes, and very potably so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?

Because, Soferim Bebel, if it goes to that, (and dormerwindow gossip will cry it from the housetops no surelier than the writing on the wall will hue it to the mod of men that mote in the main street) every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns. No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are lufted to ourselves as the soulfisher when he led the cat out of the bout) after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the [p.119] earth and all it has gone through and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff’s flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.

For, with that farmfrow’s foul flair for that flayfell foxfetor, (the calamite’s columitas calling for calamitous calamitance) who that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign T, finally called after some his hes hecitency Hec, which, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller U, fontly called following a certain change of state of grace of nature alp or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside the consort: (though for that matter, since we have heard from Cathay cyrcles how the hen is not mirely a tick or two after the first fifth fourth of the second eighth twelfth — siangchang hongkong sansheneul — but yirely the other and thirtieth of the ninth from the twentieth, our own vulgar 432 and 1132 irrespectively, why not take the former for a village inn, the latter for an upsidown bridge, a multiplication marking for crossroads ahead, which you like pothook for the family gibbet, their old fourwheedler for the bucker’s field, a tea anyway for a tryst someday, and his onesidemissing for an allblind alley leading to an Irish plot in the Champ de Mors, not?) the steady monologuy of the interiors; the pardonable confusion for which some blame the cudgel and more blame the soot but unthanks to which the pees with their caps awry are quite as often as not taken for kews with their tails in their or are quite as often as not [p.120] taken for pews with their tails in their mouths, thence your pristopher polombos, hence our Kat Kresbyterians; the curt witty wotty dashes never quite just right at the trim trite truth letter; the sudden spluttered petulance of some capItalIsed mIddle; a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons: that absurdly bullsfooted bee declaring with an even plainer dummpshow than does the mute commoner with us how hard a thing it is to mpe mporn a gentlerman: and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens: and the geegees too, jesuistically formed at first but afterwards genuflected aggrily toewards the occident: the Ostrogothic kakography affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line’s end: the headstrength (at least eleven men of thirtytwo palfrycraft) revealed by a constant labour to make a ghimel pass through the eye of an iota: this, for instance, utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past; those throne open doubleyous (of an early muddy terranean origin whether man chooses to damn them agglutinatively loo — too — blue — face — ache or illvoodawpeehole or, kants koorts, topplefouls) seated with such floprightdown determination and reminding uus ineluctably of nature at her naturalest while that fretful fidget eff, the hornful digamma of your bornabarbar, rarely heard now save when falling from the unfashionable lipsus of some hetarosexual (used always in two boldfaced print types — one of them as wrongheaded as [p.121] his Claudian brother, is it worth while interrupting to say? — throughout the papyrus as the revise mark) stalks all over the page, broods H sensationseeking an idea, amid the verbiage, gaunt, stands dejectedly in the diapered window margin, with its basque of bayleaves all aflutter about its forksfrogs, paces with a frown, jerking to and fro, flinging phrases here, there, or returns inhibited, with some half-halted suggestion, I, dragging its shoestring; the curious warning sign before our protoparent’s ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired, hole of Aran man the hat through the whispering his ho (here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again); those haughtypitched disdotted aiches easily of the rariest inasdroll as most of the jaywalking eyes we do plough into halve, unconnected, principial, medial or final, always jims in the jam, sahib, as pipless as threadworms: the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings: that strange exotic serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture, about as freakwing a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a corkhorse, which, in its invincible insolence ever longer more and of more morosity, seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily before our eyes under pressure of the writer’s hand; the ungainly musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsounder ah ha as blackartful as a podatus and dumbfounder oh ho oaproariose as ten canons in skelterfugue: the studious omission of year number and era name from the date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint; the lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first: the gipsy mating of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns (an interpolation: these munchables occur only in the Bootherbrowth family of MSS., Bb — Cod IV, Pap II, Brek XI, Lun III, Dinn XVII, Sup XXX, Fullup M D C X C: the scholiast has hungrily misheard a deadman’s toller as a muffinbell): the four shortened [p.122] ampersands under which we can glypse at and feel for ourselves across all those rushyears the warm soft short pants of the quickscribbler: the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative hole in which it ends itself; the aphasia of that heroic agony of recalling a once loved number leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia of misnomering one’s own: next those ars, rrrr! those ars all bellical, the highpriest’s hieroglyph of kettletom and oddsbones, wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed rubric prayer for truce with booty, O’Remus pro Romulo, and rudely from the fane’s pinnacle tossed down by porter to within an aim’s ace of their quatrain of rubyjets among Those Who arse without the Temple nor since Roe’s Distillery burn’d have quaff’d Night’s firefill’d Cup But jig jog jug as Day the Dicebox Throws, whang, loyal six I lead, out wi’yer heart’s bluid, blast ye, and there she’s for you, sir, whang her, the fine ooman, rouge to her lobster locks, the rossy, whang, God and O’Mara has it with his ruddy old Villain Rufus, wait, whang, God and you’re another he hasn’t for there’s my spoil five of spuds’s trumps, whang, whack on his pigsking’s Kisser for him, K.M. O’Mara where are you?; then (coming over to the left aisle corner down) the cruciform postscript from which three basia or shorter and smaller oscula have been overcarefully scraped away, plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells (and then it need not be lost sight of that there are exactly three squads of candidates for the crucian rose awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of Columkiller, chugged in their three ballotboxes, then set apart for such hanging committees, where two was enough for anyone, starting with old Matthew himself, as he with great distinction said then just as since then people speaking have fallen into the custom, when speaking to a person, of saying two is company when the third person is the person darkly spoken of, and then that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium if whoever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his (or perhaps her) cheek as the case may have been then); and the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imperfectible moral blindness; the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness [p.123] of all those fourlegged ems: and why spell dear god with a big thick dhee (why, O why, O why?): the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso — who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?

Duff-Muggli, who now may be quoted by very kind arrangement (his dectroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon astone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp), first called this kind of paddygoeasy partnership the ulykkhean or tetrachiric or quadrumane or ducks and drakes or debts and dishes perplex (v. Some Forestallings over that Studium of Sexophonologistic Schizophrenesis, vol. xxiv, pp. 2-555) after the wellinformed observation, made miles apart from the Master by Tung-Toyd (cf. Later Frustrations amengst the Neomugglian Teachings abaft the Semiunconscience, passim) that in the case of the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner (trianforan deffwedoff our plumsucked pattern shapekeeper) a Punic admiralty report, From MacPerson’s Oshean Round By the Tides of Jason’s Cruise, had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to tickle me gander as game as your goose.

The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast duplex came to light in the most devious of ways. The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant [p.124] fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out → that they ad bîn “provoked” ay Y fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! Deeply religious by nature and position, and warmly attached to Thee, and smearbread and better and Him and newlaidills, it was rightly suspected that such ire could not have been visited by him Brotfressor Prenderguest even underwittingly, upon the ancestral pneuma of one whom, with rheuma, he venerated shamelessly at least once a week at Cockspur Common as his apple in his eye and her first boys’ best friend and, though plain English for a married lady misled heaps by the way, yet when some peerer or peeress detected that the fourleaved shamrock or quadrifoil jab was more recurrent wherever the script was clear and the term terse and that these two were the selfsame spots naturally selected for her perforations by Dame Partlet on her dungheap, thinkers all put grown in waterungspillfull Pratiland only and a playful fowl and musical me and not you in any case, two and two together, and, with a swarm of bisses honeyhunting after, a sigh for shyme (O, the pettybonny rouge!) separated modest mouths. So be it. And it was. The lettermaking of the explots of Fjorgn Camhelsson when he was in the Kvinnes country with Soldru’s men. With acknowledgment of our fervour of the first instant he remains years most fainfully. For postscrapt see spoils. Though not yet had the sailor sipped that sup nor the humphar foamed to the fill. And fox and geese still kept the peace around L’Auberge du Père Adam.

Small need after that, old Jeromesolem, old Huffsnuff, old Andycox, old Olecasandrum, for quizzing your weekenders come [p.125] to the R.Q. with: shoots off in a hiss, muddles up in a mussmass and his whole’s a dismantled noondrunkard’s son. Howbeit we heard not a son of sons to leave by him to oceanic society in his old man without a thing in his ignorance, Tulko MacHooley. And it was thus he was at every time, that son, and the other time, the day was in it and after the morrow Diremood is the name is on the writing chap of the psalter, the juxtajunctor of a dearmate and he passing out of one desire into its fellow. The daughters are after going and loojing for him, Torba’s nicelookers of the fair neck. Wanted for millinary servance to olderly’s person by the Totty Askinses. Formelly confounded with amother. Maybe growing a moustache, did you say, with an adorable look of amuzement? And uses noclass billiardhalls with an upandown ladder? Not Hans the Curier though had he had have only had some little laughings and some less of cheeks and were he not so warried by his bulb of persecussion he could have, ay, and would have, as true as Essex bridge. And not Gopheph go gossip, I declare to man! Noe! To all’s much relief one’s half hypothesis of that jabberjaw ape amok the showering jestnuts of Bruisanose was hotly dropped and his room taken up by that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher (kak, pfooi, bosh and fiety, much earny, Gus, poteen? Sez you!) Shem the Penman.

 ® 

[p.126] So?

Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman?

The echo is where in the back of the wodes; callhim forth!

(Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger, for the concern of Messrs Jhon Jhamieson and Song, rated one hundrick and thin per storehundred on this nightly quisquiquock of the twelve apostrophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak. He misunderstruck and aim for am ollo of number three of them and left his free natural ripostes to four of them in their own fine artful disorder.)

1.  What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the bluegum buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia; went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies; was well known to claud a conciliation cap onto the esker of his hooth; sports a chainganger’s albert solemenly over his hullender’s epulence; thought he weighed a new ton when there felled his first lapapple; gave the heinousness of choice to everyknight betwixt yesterdicks and twomaries; had sevenal successivecoloured serebanmaids on the same big white drawringroam horthrug; is a Willbeforce to this hour at house as he was in heather; pumped the catholick wartrey and shocked the prodestung boyne; killed his own hungery self in anger as a young man; found fodder for five when allmarken rose goflooded; with Hirish tutores Cornish made easy; voucher [p.127] of rotables, toll of the road; bred manyheaded stepsons for one leapyourown taughter; is too funny for a fish and has too much outside for an insect; like a heptagon crystal emprisoms trues and fauss for us; is infinite swell in unfitting induments; once was he shovelled and once was he arsoned and once was he inundered and she hung him out billbailey; has a quadrant in his tile to tell Toler cad a’clog it is; offers chances to Long on but stands up to Legge before; found coal at the end of his harrow and mossroses behind the seams; made a fort out of his postern and wrote F.E.R.T. on his buckler; is escapemaster-in-chief from all sorts of houdingplaces; if he outharrods against barkers, to the shoolbred he acts whiteley; was evacuated at the mere appearance of three germhuns and twice besieged by a sweep; from zoomorphology to omnianimalism he is brooched by the spin of a coin; towers, an eddistoon amid the lampless, casting swannbeams on the deep; threatens thunder upon malefactors and sends whispers up fraufrau’s froufrous; when Dook Hookbackcrook upsits his ass booseworthies jeer and junket but they boos him oos and baas his aas when he lukes like Hunkett Plunkett; by sosannsos and search a party on a lady of this city; business, reading newspaper, smoking cigar, arranging tumblers on table, eating meals, pleasure, etcetera, etcetera, pleasure, eating meals, arranging tumblers on table, smoking cigar, reading newspaper, business; minerals, wash and brush up, local views, juju toffee, comic and birthdays cards; those were the days and he was their hero; pink sunset shower, red clay cloud, sorrow of Sahara, oxhide on Iren; arraigned and attainted, listed and lited, pleaded and proved; catches his check at banck of Indgangd and endurses his doom at chapel exit; brain of the franks, hand of the christian, tongue of the north; commands to dinner and calls the bluff; has a block at Morgen’s and a hatache all the afternunch; plays gehamerat when he’s ernst but misses mausey when he’s lustyg; walked as far as the Head where he sat in state as the Rump; shows Early English tracemarks and a marigold window with manigilt lights, a myrioscope, two remarkable piscines and three wellworthseeing ambries; arches all portcullised and his nave dates from dots; is [p.128] a horologe unstoppable and the Benn of all bells; fuit, isst and herit and though he’s mildewstaned he’s mouldystoned; is a quercuss in the forest but plane member for Megalopolis; mountunmighty, faunonfleetfoot; plank in our platform, blank in our scouturn; hidal, in carucates he is enumerated, hold as an earl, he counts; shipshaped phrase of buglooking words with a form like the easing moments of a graminivorous; to our dooms brought he law, our manoirs he made his vill of; was an overgrind to the underground and acqueduced for fierythroats; sends boys in socks acoughawhooping when he lets farth his carbonoxside and silk stockings show her shapings when he looses hose on hers; stocks dry puder for the Ill people and pinkun’s pellets for all the Pale; gave his mundyfoot to Miserius, her pinch to Anna Livia, that superfine pigtail to Cerisia Cerosia and quid rides to Titius, Caius and Sempronius; made the man who had no notion of shopkeepers feel he’d rather play the duke than play the gentleman; shot two queans and shook three caskles when he won his game of dwarfs; fumes inwards like a strombolist till he smokes at both ends; manmote, befier of him, womankind, pietad!; shows one white drift of snow among the gorsegrowth of his crown and a chaperon of repentance on that which shed gore; pause and quies, triple bill; went by metro for the polis and then hoved by; to the finders, hail! woa, you that seek!; whom fillth had plenished, dearth devoured; hock is leading, cocoa comes next, emery tries for the flag; can dance the O’Bruin’s polerpasse at Noolahn to his own orchistruss accompaniment; took place before the internatural convention of catholic midwives and found stead before the congress for the study of endonational calamities; makes a delictuous entrée and finishes off the course between sweets and savouries; flouts for forecasts, flairs for finds and the fun of the fray on the fairground; cleared out three hundred sixty five idles to set up one all khalassal for henwives hoping to have males; the flawhoolagh, the grasping one, the kindler of paschal fire; forbids us our trespassers as we forgate him; the phoenix be his pyre, the cineres his sire!; piles big pelium on little ossas like the pilluls of hirculeads; has an eatupus complex [p.129] and a drinkthedregs kink; wurstmeats for chumps and cowcarlows for scullions; when he plies for our favour is very trolly ours; two psychic espousals and three desertions; may be matter of fact now but was futter of magd then; Cattermole Hill, exmountain of flesh was reared up by stress and sank under strain; tank it up, dank it up, tells the tailor to his tout; entoutcas for a man, but bit a thimble for a maid; blimp, blump; a dud letter, a sing a song a sylble; a byword, a sentence with surcease; while stands his canyouseehim frails shall fall; was hatched at Cellbridge but ejoculated abrood; as it gan in the biguinnengs so wound up in a battle of Boss; Roderick, Roderick, Roderick, O, you’ve gone the way of the Danes; variously catalogued, regularly regrouped; a bushboys holoday, a quacker’s mating, a wenches’ sandbath; the same homoheatherous checkinlossegg as when sollyeye airly blew ye; real detonation but false report; spa mad but inn sane; half emillian via bogus census but a no street hausmann when allphannd; is the handiest of all andies and a most alleghant spot to dump your hump; hands his secession to the new patricius but plumps plebmatically for the bloody old centuries; eats with doors open and ruts with gates closed; some dub him Rotshield and more limn him Rockyfellow; shows he’s fly to both demisfairs but thries to cover up his tracers; seven dovecotes cooclaim to have been pigeonheim to this homer, Smerrnion, Rhoebok, Kolonsreagh, Seapoint, Quayhowth, Ashtown, Ratheny; independent of the lordship of chamberlain, acknowledging the rule of Rome; we saw thy farm at Useful Prine, Domhnall, Domhnall; reeks like Illbelpaese and looks like Iceland’s ear; lodged at quot places, lived through tot reigns; takes a szumbath for his weekend and a wassarnap for his refreskment; after a good bout at stoolball enjoys Giroflee Giroflaa; what Nevermore missed and Colombo found; believes in everyman his own goaldkeeper and in Africa for the fullblacks; the arc of his drive was forty full and his stumps were pulled at eighty; boasts him to the thick-in-thews the oldest creater in Aryania and looks down on the Suiss family Collesons whom he calls les nouvelles roches; though his heart, soul and spirit turn to pharaoph times, his love, faith and [p.130] hope stick to futuerism; light leglifters cense him souriantes from afore while boor browbenders curse him grommelants to his hindmost; between youlasses and yeladst glimse of Even; the Lug his peak has, the Luk his pile; drinks tharr and wodhar for his asama and eats the unparishable sow to styve off reglar rack; the beggars cloak them reclined about his paddystool, the whores winken him as they walk their side; on Christienmas at Advent Lodge, New Yealand, after a lenty illness the roeverand Mr Easterling of pentecostitis, no followers by bequest, fanfare all private; Gone Where Glory Waits Him (Ball, bulletist) but Not Here Yet (Maxwell, clark); comminxed under articles but phoenished a borgiess; from the vat on the bier through the burre in the dark to the buttle of the bawn; is A1 an the highest but Roh re his root; filled fanned of hackleberries whenas all was tuck and toss up for him as a yangster to fall fou of hockinbechers wherein he had gauged the use of raisin; ads aliments, das doles, raps rustics, tams turmoil; sas seed enough for a semination but sues skivvies on the sly; learned to speak from hand to mouth till he could talk earish with his eyes shut; hacked his way through hickheckhocks but hanged hishelp from there hereafters; rialtos, annesleyg, binn and balls to say nothing atolk of New Comyn; the gleam of the glow of the shine of the sun through the dearth of the dirth on the blush of the brick of the viled ville of Barnehulme has dust turned to brown; these dyed to tartan him, rueroot, dulse, bracken, teasel, fuller’s ash, sundew and cress; long gunn but not for cotton; stood his sharp assault of famine but grew girther, girther and girther; he has twenty four or so cousins germinating in the United States of America and a namesake with an initial difference in the once kingdom of Poland; his first’s a young rose and his second’s FrenchEgyptian and his whole means a slump at Christie’s; forth of his pierced part came the woman of his dreams, blood thicker then water last trade overseas; buyshop of Glintylook, eorl of Hoed; you and I are in him surrented by brwn bldns; Elin’s flee polt pelhaps but Hwang Chang evelytime; he one was your of highbigpipey boys but fancy him as smoking fags his at time of [p.131] life; Mount of Mish, Mell of Moy; had two cardinal ventures and three capitol sinks; has a peep in his pocketbook and a packetboat in his keep; B.V.H., B.L.G., P.P.M., T.D.S., V.B.D., T.C.H., L.O.N.; is Breakfates, Lunger, Diener and Souper; as the streets were paved with cold he felt his topperairy; taught himself skating and learned how to fall; distinctly dirty but rather a dear; hoveth chieftains evrywehr, with morder; Ostman Effendi, Serge Paddishaw; baases two mmany, outpriams all his parisites; first of the fenians, roi des fainéants; his Tiara of scones was held unfillable till one Liam Fail felled him in Westmunster; was struck out of his sittem when he rowed saulely to demask us and to our appauling predicament brought as plagues from Buddapest; put a matchhead on an aspenstalk and set the living a fire; speared the rod and spoiled the lightning; married with cakes and repunked with pleasure; till he was buried howhappy was he and he made the welkins ring with Up Micawber!; god at the top of the staircase, carrion on the mat of straw; the false hood of a spindler web chokes the cavemouth of his unsightliness but the nestlings that liven his leafscreen sing him a lover of arbuties; we strike hands over his bloodied warsheet but we are pledged entirely to his green mantle; our friend vikelegal, our swaran foi; under the four stones by his streams who vanished the wassailbowl at the joy of shells; Mora and Lora had a hill of a high time looking down on his confusion till firm look in readiness, forward spear and the windfoot of curach strewed the lakemist of Lego over the last of his fields; we darkened for you, faulterer, in the year of mourning but we’ll fidhil to the dimtwinklers when the streamy morvenlight calls up the sunbeam; his striped pantaloons, his rather strange walk; hereditatis columna erecta, hagion chiton eraphon; nods a nap for the nonce but crows cheerio when they get ecunemical; is a simultaneous equator of elimbinated integras when three upon one is by inspection improper; has the most conical hodpiece of confusianist heronim and that chuchuffuous chinchin of his is like a footsey kungoloo around Taishantyland; he’s as globeful as a gasometer of lithium and luridity and he was thrice ten anular [p.132] years before he wallowed round Raggiant Circos; the cabalstone at the coping of his cavin is a canine constant but only an amirican could apparoxemete the apeupresiosity of his atlast’s alongement; sticklered rights and lefts at Baddersdown in his hunt for the boar trwth but made his end with the modareds that came at him in Camlenstrete; a hunnibal in exhaustive conflict, an otho to return; burning body to aiger air on melting mountain in wooing wave; we go into him sleepy children, we come out of him strucklers for life; he divested to save from the Mrs Drownings their rival queens while Grimshaw, Bragshaw and Renshaw made off with his storen clothes; taxed and rated, licensed and ranted; his threefaced stonehead was found on a whitehorse hill and the print of his costellous feet is seen in the goat’s grasscircle; pull the blind, toll the deaf and call dumb, lame and halty; Miraculone, Monstrucceleen; led the upplaws at the Creation and hissed a snake charmer off her stays; hounded become haunter, hunter become fox; harrier, marrier, terrier, tav; Olaph the Oxman, Thorker the Tourable; you feel he is Vespasian yet you think of him as Aurelius; whugamore, tradertory, socianist, commoniser; made a summer assault on our shores and begiddy got his sands full; first he shot down Raglan Road and then he tore up Marlborough Place; Cromlechheight and Crommalhill were his farfamed feetrests when our lurch as lout let free into the Lubar heloved; mareschalled his wardmotes and delimited the main; netted before nibbling, can scarce turn a scale but, grossed after meals, weighs a town in himself; Banba prayed for his conversion, Beurla missed that grand old voice; a Colossus among cabbages, the Melarancitrone of fruits; larger than life, doughtier than death; Gran Turco, orege forment; lachsembulger, leperlean; the sparkle of his genial fancy, the depth of his calm sagacity, the clearness of his spotless honour, the flow of his boundless benevolence; our family furbear, our tribal tarnpike; quary was he invincibled and cur was he burked; partitioned Irskaholm, united Irishmen; he took a svig at his own methyr but she tested a bit gorky and as for the salmon he was coming up in him all life long; comm, eilerdich, hecklebury and sawyer thee, warden; [p.133] silent as the bee in honey, stark as the breath on hauwck, Costello, Kinsella, Mahony, Moran, though you rope Amrique your home ruler is Dan; figure right, he is hoisted by the scurve of his shaggy neck, figure left, he is rationed in isobaric patties among the crew; one asks was he poisoned, one thinks how much did he leave; ex-gardener (Riesengebirger), fitted up with planturous existencies would make Roseoogreedy (mite’s) little hose; taut sheets and scuppers awash but the oil silk mack Liebsterpet micks his aquascutum; the enjoyment he took in kay women, the employment he gave to gee men; sponsor to a squad of piercers, ally to a host of rawlies; against lightning, explosion, fire, earthquake, flood, whirlwind, burglary, third party, rot, loss of cash, loss of credit, impact of vehicles; can rant as grave as oxtail soup and chat as gay as a porto flippant; is unhesitent in his unionism and yet a pigotted nationalist; Sylviacola is shy of him, Matrosenhosens nose the joke; shows the sinews of peace in his chest-o-wars; fiefeofhome, ninehundred and thirtunine years of copyhold; is aldays open for polemypolity’s sake when he’s not suntimes closed for the love of Janus; sucks life’s eleaxir from the pettipickles of the Jewess and ruoulls in sulks if any popeling runs down the Huguenots; Boomaport, Walleslee, Ubermeerschall Blowcher and Supercharger, Monsieur Ducrow, Mister Mudson, master gardiner; to one he’s just paunch and judex, to another full of beans and brehons; hallucination, cauchman, ectoplasm; passed for baabaa blacksheep till he grew white woo woo woolly; was drummatoysed by Mac Milligan’s daughter and put to music by one shoebard; all fitzpatricks in his emirate remember him, the boys of wetford hail him babu; indanified himself with boro tribute and was schenkt publicly to brigstoll; was given the light in drey orchafts and entumuled in threeplexes; his likeness is in Terrecuite and he giveth rest to the rainbowed; lebriety, frothearnity and quality; his reverse makes a virtue of necessity while his obverse mars a mother by invention; beskilk his gunwale and he’s the second imperial, untie points, unhook tenters and he’s lath and plaster; calls upon Allthing when he fails to appeal to Eachovos; basidens, ardree, kongsemma, rexregulorum; stood into Dee mouth, [p.134] then backed broadside on Baulacleeva; either eldorado or ultimate thole; a kraal of fou feud fires, a crawl of five pubs; laid out lashings of laveries to hunt down his family ancestors and then pled double trouble or quick quits to hush the buckers up; threw pebblets for luck over one sodden shoulder and dragooned peoplades armed to their teeth; pept as Gaudio Gambrinus, grim as Potter the Grave; ace of arts, deuce of damimonds, trouble of clubs, fear of spates; cumbrum, cumbrum, twiniceynurseys fore a drum but tre to uno tips the scale; reeled the titleroll opposite a brace of girdles in Silver on the Screen but was sequenced from the set as Crookback by the even more titulars, Rick, Dave and Barry; he can get on as early as the twentysecond of Mars but occasionally he doesn’t come off before Virgintiquinque Germinal; his Indian name is Hapapoosiesobjibway and his number in arithmosophy is the stars of the plough; took weapon in the province of the pike and let fling his line on Eelwick; moves in vicous cicles yet remews the same; the drain rats bless his offals while the park birds curse his floodlights; Portobello, Equadocta, Therecocta, Percorello; he pours into the softclad shellborn the hard cash earned in Watling Street; his birth proved accidental shows his death its grave mistake; brought us giant ivy from the land of younkers and bewitthered Apostolopolos with the gale of his gall; while satisfied that soft youthful bright matchless girls should bosom into fine silkclad joyous blooming young women is not so pleased that heavy swearsome strongsmelling irregularshaped men should blottout active handsome wellformed frankeyed boys; herald hairyfair, alloaf the wheat; husband your aunt and endow your nepos; hearken but hush it, screen him and see; time is, an archbishopric, time was, a tradesmen’s entrance; beckburn brooked with wath, scale scarred by scow; his rainfall is a couple of kneehighs while his meanst grass temperature marked three in the shade; is the meltingpoint of snow and the bubblingplace of alcohol; has a tussle with the trulls and then does himself justice; hinted at in the eschatological chapters of Humphrey’s Justesse of the Jaypees and hunted for by Theban recensors who sniff there’s something behind the Bug of the Deaf; the king was in [p.135] his cornerwall melking mark so murry, the queen was steep in armbour feeling fain and furry, the mayds was midst the hawthorns shoeing up their hose, out pimps the back guards (pomp!) and pump gun they goes; to all his foretellers he reared a stone and for all his comethers he planted a tree; forty acres, sixty miles, white stripe, red stripe, washes his fleet in annacrwatter; whou missed a porter so whot shall he do for he wanted to sit for Pimploco but they’ve caught him to stand for Sue?; Dutchlord, Dutchlord, overawes us; Headmound, king and martyr, dunstung in the Yeast, Pitre-le-Pore-in Petrin, Barth-the-Grete-by-the-Exchange; he hestens towards dames troth and wedding hand like the prince of Orange and Nassau while he has trinity left behind him like Bowlbeggar Bill-the-Bustonly; brow of a hazelwood, pool in the dark; changes blowicks into bullocks and a well of Artesia into a bird of Arabia; the handwriting on his facewall, the cryptoconchoidsiphonostomata in his exprussians; his birthspot lies beyond the herospont and his burialplot in the pleasant little field; is the yldist kiosk on the pleninsula and the unguest hostel in Saint Scholarland; walked many hundreds and many score miles of streets and lit thousands in one nightlights in hectares of windows; his great wide cloak lies on fifteen acres and his little white horse decks by dozens our doors; O sorrow the sail and woe the rudder that were set for Mairie Quai!; his suns the huns, his dartars the tartars, are plenty here today; who repulsed from his burst the bombolts of Ostenton and falchioned each flash downsaduck in the deep; apersonal problem, a locative enigma; upright one, vehicule of arcanisation in the field, lying chap, floodsupplier of celiculation through ebblanes; a part of the whole as a port for a whale; Dear Hewitt Castello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to unearly summers, from Rhoda Dundrums; is above the seedfruit level and outside the leguminiferous zone; when older links lock older hearts then he’ll resemble she; can be built with glue and clippings, scrawled or voided on a buttress; the night express sings his story, the song of sparrownotes on his stave of wires; he crawls with lice, he swarms with saggarts; is as quiet as a [p.136] mursque but can be as noisy as a sonogog; was Dilmun when his date was palmy and Mudlin when his nut was cracked; suck up the sease, lep laud at ease, one lip on his lap and one cushlin his crease; his porter has a mighty grasp and his baxters the boon of broadwhite; as far as wind dries and rain eats and sun turns and water bounds he is exalted and depressed, assembled and asundered; go away, we are deluded, come back, we are disghosted; bored the Ostrov, leapt the Inferus, swam the Mabbul and flure the Moyle; like fat, like fatlike tallow, of greasefulness, yea of dripping greasefulness; did not say to the old, old, did not say to the scorbutic, scorbutic; he has founded a house, Uru, a house he has founded to which he has assigned its fate; bears a raaven geulant on a fjeld duiv; ruz the halo off his varlet when he appeared to his shecook as Haycock, Emmet, Boaro, Toaro, Osterich, Mangy and Skunk; pressed the beer of aled age out of the nettles of rashness; put a roof on the lodge for Hymn and a coq in his pot pro homo; was dapifer then pancircensor then hortifex magnus; the topes that tippled on him, the types that toppled off him; still starts our hares yet gates our goat; pocketbook packetboat, gapman gunrun; the light of other days, dire dreary darkness; our awful dad, Timour of Tortur; puzzling, startling, shocking, nay, perturbing; went puffing from king’s brugh to new customs, doffing the gibbous off him to every breach of all size; with Pa’s new heft and Papa’s new helve he’s Papapa’s old cutlass Papapapa left us; when youngheaded oldshouldered and middlishneck aged about; caller herring everydaily, turgid tarpon overnight; see Loryon the comaleon that changed endocrine history by loeven his loaf with forty bannucks; she drove him dafe till he driv her blind up; the pigeons doves be perchin all over him one day on Baslesbridge and the ravens duv be pitchin their dark nets after him the next night behind Koenigstein’s Arbour; tronf of the rep, comf of the priv, prosp of the pub; his headwood it’s ideal if his feet are bally clay; he crashed in the hollow of the park, trees down, as he soared in the vaguum of the phoenix, stones up; looks like a moultain boultter and sounds like a rude word; the moontaen view, some lumin pale [p.137] round a lamp of succar in boinyn water; three shots a puddy at up blup saddle; made up to Miss MacCormack Ni Lacarthy who made off with Darly Dermod, swank and swarthy; once diamond cut garnet now dammat cuts groany; you might find him at the Florence but watch our for him in Wynn’s Hotel; theer’s his bow and wheer’s his leaker and heer lays his bequiet hearse, deep; Swed Albiony, likeliest villain of the place; Hennery Canterel — Cockran, eggotisters, limitated; we take our tays and frees our fleas round sadurn’s mounted foot; built the Lund’s kirk and destroyed the church’s land; who guesse his title grabs his deeds; fletch and prities, fash and chaps; artful Juke of Wilysly; Hugglebelly’s Funniral; Kukkuk Kallikak; heard in camera and excruciated; boon when with benches billeted, bann if buckshotbackshattered; heavengendered, chaosfoedted, earthborn; his father presumptively ploughed it deep on overtime and his mother as all evince must have travailled her fair share; a footprinse on the Megacene, hetman unwhorsed by Searingsand; honorary captain of the extemporised fire brigade, reported to be friendly with the police; the door is still open; the old stock collar is coming back; not forgetting the time you laughed at Elder Charterhouse’s duckwhite pants and the way you said the whole township can see his hairy legs; by stealth of a kersse her aulburntress abaft his nape she hung; when his kettle became a hearthsculdus our thorstyites set their lymphyamphyre; his yearletter concocted by masterhands of assays, his hallmark imposed by the standard of wrought plate; a pair of pectorals and a triplescreen to get a wind up; lights his pipe with a rosin tree and hires a towhorse to haul his shoes; cures slavey’s scurvy, breaks barons boils; called to sell polosh and was found later in a bedroom; has his seat of justice, his house of mercy, his corn o’copious and his stacks a’rye; prospector, he had a rooksacht, retrospector, he holds the holpenstake; won the freedom of new yoke for the minds of jugoslaves; acts active, peddles in passivism and is a gorgon of selfridgeousness; pours a laughsworth of his illformation over a larmsworth of salt; half heard the single maiden speech La Belle spun to her Grand Mount and wholed a lifetime [p.138] by his ain fireside, wondering was it hebrew set to himmeltones or the quicksilversong of qwaternions; his troubles may be over but his doubles have still to come; the lobster pot that crabbed our keel, the garden pet that spoiled our squeezed peas; he stands in a lovely park, sea is not far, importunate towns of X, Y and Z are easily over reached; is an excrescence to civilised humanity and but a wart on Europe; wanamade singsigns to soundsense an yit he wanna git all his flesch nuemaid motts truly prural and plusible; has excisively large rings and is uncustomarily perfumed; lusteth ath he listeth the cleah whithpeh of a themise; is a prince of the fingallian in a hiberniad of hoolies; has a hodge to wherry him and a frenchy to curry him and a brabanson for his beeter and a fritz at his switch; was waylaid of a parker and beschotten by a buckeley; kicks lintils when he’s cuppy and casts Jacob’s arroroots, dime after dime, to poor waifstrays on the perish; reads the charms of H. C. Endersen all the weaks of his evenin and the crimes of Ivaun the Taurrible every strongday morn; soaps you soft to your face and slaps himself when he’s badend; owns the bulgiest bungbarrel that ever was tiptapped in the privace of the Mullingar Inn; was born with a nuasilver tongue in his mouth and went round the coast of Iron with his lift hand to the scene; raised but two fingers and yet smelt it would day; for whom it is easier to found a see in Ebblannah than for I or you to find a dubbeltye in Dampsterdamp; to live with whom is a lifemayor and to know whom a liberal education; was dipped in Hoily Olives and chrysmed in Scent Otooles; hears cricket on the earth but annoys the life out of predikants; still turns the durc’s ear of Darius to the now thoroughly infurioted one of God; made Man with juts that jerk and minted money mong maney; likes a six acup pudding when he’s come whome sweetwhome; has come through all the eras of livsadventure from moonshine and shampaying down to clouts and pottled porter; woollem the farsed, hahnreich the althe, charge the sackend, writchad the thord; if a mandrake shricked to convultures at last surviving his birth the weibduck will wail bitternly over the rotter’s resurrection; loses weight in the moon night but girds girder by the sundawn; with one touch [p.139] of nature set a veiled world agrin and went within a sheet of tissuepaper of the option of three gaols; who could see at one blick a saumon taken with a lance, hunters pursuing a doe, a swallowship in full sail, a whyterobe lifting a host; faced flappery like old King Cnut and turned his back like Cincinnatus; is a farfar and morefar and a hoar father Nakedbucker in villas old as new; squats aquart and cracks aquaint when it’s flaggin in town and on haven; blows whiskery around his summit but stehts stout upon his footles; stutters fore he falls and goes mad entirely when he’s waked; is Timb to the pearly morn and Tomb to the mourning night; and an he had the best bunbaked bricks in bould Babylon for his pitching plays he’d be lost for the want of his wan wubblin wall?

Answer: Finn MacCool!

2.  Does your mutter know your mike?

Answer: When I turn meoptics, from suchurban prospects, ’tis my filial’s bosom, doth behold with pride, that pontificator, and circumvallator, with his dam night garrulous, slipt by his side. Ann alive, the lisp of her, ’twould grig mountains whisper her, and the bergs of Iceland melt in waves of fire, and her spoonme-spondees, and her dirckle-me-ondenees, make the Rageous Ossean, kneel and quaff a lyre! If Dann’s dane, Ann’s dirty, if he’s plane she’s purty, if he’s fane, she’s flirty, with her auburnt streams, and her coy cajoleries, and her dabblin drolleries, for to rouse his rudderup, or to drench his dreams. If hot Hammurabi, or cowld Clesiastes, could espy her pranklings, they’d burst bounds agin, and renounce their ruings, and denounce their doings, for river and iver, and a night. Amin!

3.  Which title is the true-to-type motto-in-lieu for that Tick for Teac thatchment painted witt wheth one darkness, where asnake is under clover and birds aprowl are in the rookeries and a magda went to monkishouse and a riverpaard was spotted, which is not Whichcroft Whorort not Ousterholm Dreyschluss not Haraldsby, grocer, not Vatandcan, vintner, not Houseboat and Hive not Knox-atta-Belle not O’Faynix Coalprince not Wohn Squarr Roomyeck not Ebblawn Downes not Le Decer [p.140] Le Mieux not Benjamin’s Lea not Tholomew’s Whaddingtun gnot Antwarp gnat Musca not Corry’s not Weir’s not the Arch not The Smug not The Dotch House not The Uval nothing Grand nothing Splendid (Grahot or Spletel) nayther Erat Est Erit noor Non michi sed luciphro?

Answer: Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!

4.  What Irish capitol city (a dea o dea!) of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) can boost of having a) the most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing industry in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world, d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paùpulation in the world: and harmonise your abecedeed responses?

Answer: a) Delfas. And when ye’ll hear the gould hommers of my heart, my floxy loss, bingbanging again the ribs of yer resistance and the tenderbolts of my rivets working to your destraction ye’ll be sheverin wi’ all yer dinful sobs when we’ll go riding acope-acurly, you with yer orange garland and me with my conny cordial, down the greaseways of rollicking into the waters of wetted life. b) Dorhqk. And sure where can you have such good old chimes anywhere, and leave you, as on the Mash and how’tis I would be engaging you with my plovery soft accents and descanting upover the scene beunder me of your loose vines in their hairafall with them two loving loofs braceleting the slims of your ankles and your mouth’s flower rose and sinking ofter the soapstone of silvry speech. c) Nublid. Isha, why wouldn’t we be happy, avourneen, on the mills’ money he’ll soon be leaving you as soon as I’ve my own owned brooklined Georgian mansion’s lawn to recruit upon by Doctor Cheek’s special orders and my copper’s panful of soybeans and Irish in my east hand and a James’s Gate in my west, after all the errears and erroriboose of combarative embottled history, and your goodself churning over the newleaved butter (more power to you), the choicest and the cheapest from Atlanta to Oconee, while I’ll be drowsing in the gaarden. d) Dalway. I hooked my [p.141] thoroughgoing trotty the first down Spanish Place, Mayo I make, Tuam I take, Sligo’s sleek but Galway’s grace. Holy eel and Sainted Salmon, chucking chub and ducking dace, Rodiron’s not your aequal! says she, leppin half the lane. abcd) A bell a bell on Shalldoll Steepbell, ond be’ll go massplon pristmoss speople, Shand praise gon ness our fayst moan neople, our prame Shandeepen, pay name muy feepence, moy nay non Aequallllllll!

5.  Whad slags of a loughladd would retten smuttyflesks, emptout old mans, melk vitious geit, scareoff jackinjills fra tiddle anding, smoothpick waste papish pastures, insides man outsiders angell, sprink dirted water around village, newses, tobaggon and sweeds, plain general kept, louden on the kirkpeal, foottreats given to malafides, outshriek hyelp hyelp nor his hair efter buggelawrs, might underhold three barnets, putzpolish crotty bottes, nightcoover all fireglims, serve’s time till baass, grindstone his kniveses, fullest boarded, lewd man of the method of godliness, perchance he nieows and thans sits in the spoorwaggen, X.W.C.A. on Z.W.C.U., Doorsteps, Limited, or Baywindaws Bros swobber preferred. Walther Clausetter’s and Sons with the H. E. Chimneys’ Company to not skreve, will, on advices, be bacon or stable hand, must begripe fullstandingly irers’ langurge, jublander or northquain bigger prefurred, all duties, kine rights, family fewd, outings fived, may get earnst, no get combitsch, profusional drinklords to please obstain, he is fatherlow soundigged inmoodmined pershoon but aleconnerman, nay, that must he isn’t?

Answer: Pore ole Joe!

6.  What means the saloon slogan Summon In The Housesweep Dinah?

Answer: Tok. Galory bit of the sales of Cloth nowand I have to beeswax the bringing in all the claub of the porks to us how I thawght I knew his stain on the flower if me ask and can could speak and he called by me midden name Tik. I am your honey honeysugger phwhtphwht tha Bay and who bruk the dandleass and who seen the blackcullen jam for Tomorrha’s big pickneck I hope it’ll pour prais the Climate of all Ireland I heard the [p.142] grackles and I skimming the crock on all your sangwidges fippence per leg per drake. Tuk. And who eight the last of the goosebellies that was mowlding from measlest years and who leff that there and who put that here and who let the kilkenny stale the chump. Tek. And whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith. Shite! will you have a plateful? Tak.

7.  Who are those component partners of our societate, the doorboy, the cleaner, the sojer, the crook, the squeezer, the lounger, the curman, the tourabout, the mussroomsniffer, the bleakablue tramp, the funpowtherplother, the christymansboxer, from their prés salés and Donnybrook prater and Roebuck’s campos and the Ager Arountown and Crumglen’s grassy but Kimmage’s champ and Ashtown fields and Cabra fields and Finglas fields and Santry fields and the feels of Raheny and their fails and Baldoygle to them who are latecomers all the year’s round by anticipation, are the porters of the passions in virtue of retroratiocination, and, contributting their conflingent controversies of differentiation, unify their voxes in a vote of vaticination, who crunch the crusts of comfort due to depredation, drain the mead for misery to incur intoxication, condone every evil by practical justification and condam any good to its own gratification, who are ruled, roped, duped and driven by those numen daimons, the feekeepers at their laws, nightly consternation, fortnightly fornication, monthly miserecordation and omniannual recreation, doyles when they deliberate but sullivans when they are swordsed, Matey, Teddy, Simon, Jorn, Pedher, Andy, Barty, Philly, Jamesy Mor and Tom, Matt and Jakes Mac Carty?

Answer: The Morphios!

8.  And how war yore maggies?

Answer: They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt daring, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeking, as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile and rile by rule of ruse ’reathed rose and [p.143] hose hol’d home, yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more.

9.  Now, to be on anew and basking again in the panaroma of all flores of speech, if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands and vacants of space at his sleepish feet and as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk, were at this auctual futule preteriting unstant, in the states of suspensive exanimation, accorded, throughout the eye of a noodle, with an earsighted view of old hopeinhaven with all the ingredient and egregiunt whights and ways to which in the curse of his persistence the course of his tory will had been having recourses, the reverberration of knotcracking awes, the reconjungation of nodebinding ayes, the redissolusingness of mindmouldered ease and the thereby hang of the Hoel of it, could such a none, whiles even led comesilencers to comeliewithhers and till intempestuous Nox should catch the gallicry and spot lucan’s dawn, byhold at ones what is main and why tis twain, how one once meet melts in tother wants poignings, the sap rising, the foles falling, the nimb now nihilant round the girlyhead so becoming, the wrestless in the womb, all the rivals to allsea, shakeagain, O disaster! shakealose, Ah how starring! but Heng’s got a bit of Horsa’s nose and Jeff’s got the signs of Ham round his mouth and the beau that spun beautiful pales as it palls, what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it! Violet’s dyed! then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?

Answer: A collideorscape!

10.  What bitter’s love but yurning, what’ sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes dothe smoake retourne?

Answer: I know, pepette, of course, dear, but listen, precious! Thanks, pette, those are lovely, pitounette, delicious! But mind the wind, sweet! What exquisite hands you have, you angiol, if you didn’t gnaw your nails, isn’t it a wonder you’re not achamed of me, you pig, you perfect little pigaleen! I’ll nudge you in a minute! I bet you use her best Perisian smear off her vanity table [p.144] to make them look so rosetop glowstop nostop. I know her. Slight me, would she? For every got I care! Three creamings a day, the first during her shower and wipe off with tissue. Then after cleanup and of course before retiring. Beme shawl, when I think of that espos of a Clancarbry, the foodbrawler, of the sociationist party with hiss blackleaded chest, hello, Prendregast! that you, Innkipper, and all his fourteen other fullback maulers or hurling stars or whatever the dagos they are, baiting at my Lord Ornery’s, just becups they won the egg and spoon there so ovally provencial at Balldole. My Eilish assent he seed makes his admiracion. He is seeking an opening and means to be first with me as his belle alliance. Andoo musnoo play zeloso! Soso do todas. Such is Spanish. Stoop alittle closer, fealse! Delightsome simply! Like Jolio and Romeune. I haven’t fell so turkish for ages and ages! Mine’s me of squisious, the chocolate with a soul. Extraordinary! Why, what are they all, the mucky lot of them only? Sht! I wouldn’t pay three hairpins for them. Peppt! That’s rights, hold it steady! Leg me pull. Pu! Come big to Iran. Poo! What are you nudging for? No, I just thought you were. Listen, loviest! Of course it was too kind of you, miser, to remember my sighs in shockings, my often expressed wish when you were wandering about my trousseaurs and before I forget it don’t forget, in your extensions to my personality, when knotting my remembrancetie, shoeweek will be trotting back with red heels at the end of the moon but look what the fool bought cabbage head and, as I shall answer to gracious heaven, I’ll always in always remind of snappy new girters, me being always the one for charms with my very best in proud and gloving even if he was to be vermillion miles my youth to live on, the rubberend Mr Polkingtone, the quonian fleshmonger who Mother Browne solicited me for unlawful converse with, with her mug of October (a pots on it!), creaking around on his old shanksaxle like a crosty old cornquake. Airman, waterwag, terrier, blazer! I’m fine, thanks ever! Ha! O mind you poo tickly. Sall I puhim in momou. Mummum. Funny spot to have a fingey! I’m terribly sorry, I swear to you I am! May you never see me in my [p.145] birthday pelts seenso tutu and that her blanches mainges may rot leprous off her whatever winking maggis I’ll bet by your cut you go fleurting after with all the glass on her and the jumps in her stomewhere! Haha! I suspected she was! Sink her! May they fire her for a barren ewe! So she says: Tay for thee? Well, I saith: Angst so mush: and desired she might not take it amiss if I esteemed her but an odd. If I did ate toughturf I’m not a mishymissy. Of course I know, pettest, you’re so learningful and considerate in yourself, so friend of vegetables, you long cold cat you! Please by acquiester to meek my acquointance! Codling, snakelet, iciclist! My diaper has more life to it! Who drowned you in drears, man, or are you pillale with ink? Did a weep get past the gates of your pride? My tread on the clover, sweetness? Yes, the buttercups told me, hug me, damn it all, and I’ll kiss you back to life, my peachest. I mean to make you suffer, meddlar, and I don’t care this fig for contempt of courting. That I chid you, sweet sir? You know I’m tender by my eye. Can’t you read by dazzling ones through me true? Bite my laughters, drink my tears. Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning. I just don’t care what my thwarters think. Transname me loveliness, now and here me for all times! I’d risk a policeman passing by, Magrath or even that beggar of a boots at the Post. The flame? O, pardone! That was what? Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? More poestries from Chickspeer’s with gleechoreal music or a jaculation from the garden of the soul. Of I be leib in the immoralities? O, you mean the strangle for love and the sowiveall of the prettiest? Yep, we open hap coseries in the home. And once upon a week I improve on myself I’m so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside. I’m always as tickled as can be over Man in a Surplus by the Lady who Pays the Rates. But I’m as pie as is possible. Let’s root out Brimstoker and give him the thrall of our lives. It’s Dracula’s nightout. For creepsake don’t make a flush! Draw the shades, curfe you, and I’ll beat any sonnamonk to love. Holy bug, how my highness would jump to make you flame your halve a bannan in two when I’d run my burning torchlight through (to adore [p.146] me there and then cease to be? Whatever for, blossoms?) Your hairmejig if you had one. If I am laughing with you? No, lovingest, I’m not so dying to take my rise out of you, adored. Not in the very least. True as God made my Mamaw hiplength modesty coatmawther! It’s only because the rison is I’m only any girl, you lovely fellow of my dreams, and because old somebooby is not a roundabout, my trysting of the tulipies, like that puff pape bucking Daveran assoiling us behinds. What a nerve! He thinks that’s what the vesprey’s for. How vain’s that hope in cleric’s heart Who still pursues th’adult’ rous art, Cocksure that rusty gown of his Will make fair Sue forget his phiz! Tame Schwipps. Blessed Marguerite bosses, I hope they threw away the mould or else we’ll have Ballshossers and Sourdamapplers with their medical assassiations all over the place. But hold hard till I’ve got my latchkey vote and I’ll teach him when to wear what woman callours. On account of the gloss of the gleison Hasaboobrawbees isabeaubel. And because, you pluckless lankaloot, I hate the very thought of the thought of you and because, dearling, of course, adorest, I was always meant for an engindear from the French college, to be musband, nomme d’engien, when we do and contract with encho tencho solver when you are married to reading and writing which pleasebusiness now won’t be long for he’s so loopy on me and I’m so leapy like since the day he carried me from the boat, my saviored of eroes, to the beach and I left on his shoulder one fair hair to guide hand and mind to its softness. Ever so sorry! I beg your pardon, I was listening to every treasuried word I said fell from my dear mot’s tongue otherwise how could I see what you were thinking of our granny? Only I wondered if I threw out my shaving water. Anyway, here’s my arm, pulletneck. Gracefully yours. Move your mouth towards minth, more, preciousest, more on more! To please me, treasure. Don’t be a, I’m not going to! Sh! nothing! A cricri somewhere! Buybuy! I’m fly! Hear, pippy, under the limes. You know bigtree are all against gravstone. They hisshistenency. Garnd ond mand! So chip chirp chirrup, cigolo, for the lug of Migo! The little passdoor, I go you before, so, and you’re [p.147] at my apron stage. Shy is him, dovey? Musforget there’s an audience. I have been lost, angel. Cuddle, ye divil ye! It’s our toot-a-toot. Hearhere! Sensation! Let them, their whole four courtships! Let them, Bigbawl and his boosers’ eleven makes twelve territorials. The Old Sot’s Hole that wants wide streets to commission their noisense in, at the Mitchells v. Nicholls. Aves Selvae Acquae Valles! And my waiting twenty classbirds, sitting on their stiles! Let me finger their eurhythmytic. And you’ll see if I’m selfthought. They’re all of them out to please. Wait! In the name of. And all the holly. And some the mistle and it Saint Yves. Hoost! Ahem! There’s Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia, Ena, Fretta, Gilda, Hilda, Ita, Jess, Katty, Lou, (they make me cough as sure as I read them) Mina, Nippa, Opsy, Poll, Queeniee, Ruth, Saucy, Trix, Una, Vela, Wanda, Xenia, Yva, Zulma, Phoebe, Thelma. And Mee! The reformatory boys is goaling in for the church so we’ve all comefeast like the groupsuppers and caught lipsolution from Anty Pravidance under penancies for myrtle sins. When their bride was married all my belles began ti ting. A ring a ring a rosaring! Then everyone will hear of it. Whoses wishes is the farther to my thoughts. But I’ll plant them a poser for their nomanclatter. When they’re out with the daynurse doing Chaperon Mall. Bright pigeons all over the whirrld will fly with my mistletoe message round their loveribboned necks and a crumb of my cake for each chasta dieva. We keeps all and sundry papers. In th’ amourlight, O my darling! No, I swear to you by Fibsburrow churchdome and Sainte Andrée’s Undershift, by all I hold secret from my world and in my underworld of nighties and naughties and all the other wonderwearlds! Close your, notmust look! Now open, pet, your lips, pepette, like I used my sweet parted lipsabuss with Dan Holohan of facetious memory taught me after the flannel dance, with the proof of love, up Smock Alley the first night he smelled pouder and I coloured beneath my fan, pipetta mia, when you learned me the linguo to melt. Whowham would have ears like ours, the blackhaired! Do you like that, silenzioso? Are you enjoying, this same little me, my life, my love? Why do you like my [p.148] whisping? Is it not divinely deluscious? But in’t it bafforyou? Misi, misi! Tell me till my thrillme comes! I will not break the seal. I am enjoying it still, I swear I am! Why do you prefer its in these dark nets, if why may ask, my sweetykins? Sh sh! Longears is flying. No, sweetissest, why would that ennoy me? But don’t! You want to be slap well slapped for that. Your delighted lips, love, be careful! Mind my duvetyne dress above all! It’s golded silvy, the newest sextones with princess effect. For Rutland blue’s got out of passion. So, so, my precious! O, I can see the cost, chare! Don’t tell me! Why, the boy in sheeps’ lane knows that. If I sell whose, dears? Was I sold here’ tears? You mean those conversation lozenges? How awful! The bold shame of me! I wouldn’t, chickens, not for all the juliettes in the twinkly way! I could snap them when I see them winking at me in bed. I didn’t did so, my intended, or was going to or thinking of. Shshsh! Don’t start like that, you wretch! I thought ye knew all and more, ye aucthor, to explique to ones the significat of their exsystems with your nieu nivulon lead. It’s only another queer fish or other in Brinbrou’s damned old trouchorous river again, Gothewishegoths bless us and spare her! And gibos rest from the bosso! Excuse me for swearing, love, I swear to the sorrasims on their trons of Uian I didn’t mean to by this alpin armlet! Did you really never in all our cantalang lives speak clothse to a girl’s before? No! Not even to the charmermaid? How marfellows! Of course I believe you, my own dear doting liest, when you tell me. As I’d live to, O, I’d love to! Liss, liss! I muss whiss! Never that ever or I can remember dearstreaming faces, you may go through me! Never in all my whole white life of my matchless and pair. Or ever for bitter be the frucht of this hour! With my whiteness I thee woo and bind my silk breasths I thee bound! Always, Amory, amor andmore! Till always, thou lovest! Shshshsh! So long as the lucksmith. Laughs!

11.  If you met on the binge a poor acheseyeld from Ailing, when the tune of his tremble shook shimmy on shin, while his countrary raged in the weak of his wailing, like a rugilant pugilant Lyon O’Lynn; if he maundered in misliness, plaining his [p.149] plight or, played fox and lice, pricking and dropping hips teeth, or wringing his handcuffs for peace, the blind blighter, praying Dieuf and Domb Nostrums foh thomethinks to eath; if he weapt while he leapt and guffalled quith a quhimper, made cold blood a blue mundy and no bones without flech, taking kiss, kake or kick with a suck, sigh or simper, a diffle to larn and a dibble to lech; if the fain shinner pegged you to shave his immartial, wee skillmustered shoul with his ooh, hoodoodoo! broking wind that to wiles, woemaid sin he was partial, we don’t think, Jones, we’d care to this evening, would you?

Answer: No, blank ye! So you think I have impulsivism? Did they tell you I am one of the fortysixths? And I suppose you heard I had a wag on my ears? And I suppose they told you too that my roll of life is not natural? But before proceeding to conclusively confute this begging question it would be far fitter for you, if you dare! to hasitate to consult with and consequentially attempt at my disposale of the same dime-cash problem elsewhere naturalistically of course, from the blinkpoint of so eminent a spatialist. From it you will here notice, Schott, upon my for the first remarking you that the sophology of Bitchson while driven as under by a purely dime-dime urge is not without his cashcash characktericksticks, borrowed for its nonce ends from the fiery goodmother Miss Fortune (who the lost time we had the pleasure we have had our little recherché brush with, what, Schott?) and as I further could have told you as brisk as your D.B.C. behaviouristically pailleté with a coat of homoid icing which is in reality only a done by chance ridiculisation of the whoo-whoo and where’s hairs theorics of Winestain. To put it all the more plumbsily. The speechform is a mere sorrogate. Whilst the quality and tality (I shall explex what you ought to mean by this with its proper when and where and why and how in the subsequent sentence) are alternativomentally harrogate and arrogate, as the gates may be.

Talis is a word often abused by many passims (I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really most tantumising state of affairs). A pessim may frequent you to say: Have you been [p.150] seeing much of Talis and Talis those times? optimately meaning: Will you put up at hree of irish? Or a ladyeater may perhaps have casualised as you temptoed her à la sourdine: Of your plates? Is Talis de Talis, the swordswallower, who is on at the Craterium the same Talis von Talis, the penscrusher, no funk you! who runs his duly mile? Or this is a perhaps cleaner example. At a recent postvortex piece infustigation of a determinised case of chronic spinosis an extension lecturer on The Ague who out of matter of form was trying his seesers, Dr’s Het Ubeleeft, borrowed the question: Why’s which Suchman’s talis qualis? to whom, as a fatter of macht, Dr Gedankje of Stoutgirth, who was wiping his whistle, toarsely retoarted: While thou beast’ one zoom of a whorl! (Talis and Talis originally mean the same thing, hit it’s: Qualis.)

Professor Loewy-Brueller (though as I shall promptly prove his whole account of the Sennacherib as distinct from the Shalmanesir sanitational reforms and of the Mr Skekels and Dr Hydes problem in the same connection differs toto coelo from the fruit of my own investigations — though the reason I went to Jericho must remain for certain reasons a political secret —   especially as I shall shortly be wanted in Cavantry, I congratulate myself, for the same and other reasons — as being again hopelessly vitiated by what I have now resolved to call the dime and cash diamond fallacy) in his talked off confession which recently met with such a leonine uproar on its escape after its confinement Why am I not born like a Gentileman and why am I now so speakable about my own eatables (Feigenbaumblatt and Father, Judapest, 5688, A.M.) whole-heartedly takes off his gabbercoat and wig, honest draughty fellow, in his public interest, to make us see how though, as he says: ‘by Allswill’ the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity, looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity [p.151] as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes (I am very pressing for a parliamentary motion this term which, under my guidance, would establish the deleteriousness of decorousness in the morbidisation of the modern mandaboutwoman type) is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum. I need not anthrapologise for any obintentional (I must here correct all that school of neoitalian or paleoparisien schola of tinkers and spanglers who say I’m wrong parcequeue out of revolscian from romanitis I want to be) downtrodding on my foes. Professor Levi-Brullo, F.D. of Sexe-Weiman-Eitelnaky finds, from experiments made by hinn with his Nuremberg eggs in the one hands and the watches cunldron apan the oven, though it is astensably a case of Ket’s rebollions cooling the Popes back, because the number of squeer faiths in weekly circulation will not be appreciably augmented by the notherslogging of my cupolar clods. What the romantic in rags pines after like all tomtompions haunting crevices for a deadbeat escupement and what het importunes our Mitleid for in accornish with the Mortadarthella taradition is the poorest commononguardiant waste of time. His everpresent toes are always in retaliessian out throuth his overpast boots. Hear him squak! Teek heet to that looswallawer how he bolo the bat! Tyro a toray! When Mullocky won the couple of colds, when we were stripping in number three, I would like the neat drop that would malt in my mouth but I fail to see when (I am purposely refraining from expounding the obvious fallacy as to the specific gravitates of the two deglutables implied nor to the lapses lequou asousiated with the royal gorge through students of mixed hydrostatics and pneumodipsics will after some difficulties grapple away with my meinungs). Myrrdin aloer! as old Marsellas Cambriannus puts his. But, on Professor Llewellys ap Bryllars, F.D., Ph. Dr’s showings, the plea, if he pleads, is all posh and robbage on a melodeontic scale since his man’s when is no otherman’s quandour (Mine, dank you?) while, for aught I care for the contrary, the all is where in love as war and [p.152] the plane where me arts soar you’d aisy rouse a thunder from and where I cling true’tis there I climb tree and where Innocent looks best (pick!) there’s holly in his ives.

As my explanations here are probably above your understandings, lattlebrattons, though as augmentatively uncomparisoned as Cadwan, Cadwallon and Cadwalloner, I shall revert to a more expletive method which I frequently use when I have to sermo with muddlecrass pupils. Imagine for my purpose that you are a squad of urchins, snifflynosed, goslingnecked, clothyheaded, tangled in your lacings, tingled in your pants, etsitaraw etcicero. And you, Bruno Nowlan, take your tongue out of your inkpot! As none of you knows javanese I will give all my easyfree translation of the old fabulist’s parable. Allaboy Minor, take your head out of your satchel! Audi, Joe Peters! Exaudi facts!

The Mookse and The Gripes.

Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lubberds!

Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse. The onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsitslike, broady oval, and a Mookse he would a walking go (My hood! cries Antony Romeo), so one grandsumer evening, after a great morning and his good supper of gammon and spittish, having flabelled his eyes, pilleoled his nostrils, vacticanated his ears and palliumed his throats, he put on his impermeable, seized his impugnable, harped on his crown and stepped out of his immobile De Rure Albo (socolled becauld it was chalkfull of masterplasters and had borgeously letout gardens strown with cascadas, pintacostecas, horthoducts and currycombs) and set off from Ludstown a spasso to see how badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways.

As he set off with his father’s sword, his lancia spezzata, he was girded on, and with that between his legs and his tarkeels, our once in only Bragspear, he clanked, to my clinking, from veetoes to threetop, every inch of an immortal.

He had not walked over a pentiadpair of parsecs from his azylium when at the turning of the Shinshone Lanteran near [p.153] Saint Bowery’s-without-his-Walls he came (secunding to the one one oneth of the propecies, Amnis Limina Permanent) upon the most unconsciously boggylooking stream he ever locked his eyes with. Out of the colliens it took a rise by daubing itself Ninon. It looked little and it smelt of brown and it thought in narrows and it talked showshallow. And as it rinn it dribbled like any lively purliteasy: My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don’t I love thee!

And, I declare, what was there on the yonder bank of the stream that would be a river, parched on a limb of the olum, bolt downright, but the Gripes? And no doubt he was fit to be dried for why had he not been having the juice of his times?

His pips had been neatly all drowned on him; his polps were charging odours every older minute; he was quickly for getting the dresser’s desdaign on the flyleaf of his frons; and he was quietly for giving the bailiff’s distrain on to the bulkside of his cul de Pompe. In all his specious heavings, as be lived by Optimus Maximus, the Mookse had never seen his Dubville brooder-on-low so nigh to a pickle.

Adrian (that was the Mookse now’s assumptinome) stuccstill phiz-à-phiz to the Gripes in an accessit of aurignacian. But Allmookse must to Moodend much as Allrouts, austereways or wastersways, in roaming run through Room. Hic sor a stone, singularly illud, and on hoc stone Seter satt huc sate which it filled quite poposterously and by acclammitation to its fullest justotoryum and whereopum with his unfallable encyclicling upom his alloilable, diupetriark of the wouest, and the athemystsprinkled pederect he always walked with, Deusdedit, cheek by jowel with his frisherman’s blague, Bellua Triumphanes, his everyway addedto wallat’s collectium, for yea longer he lieved yea broader he betaught of it, the fetter, the summe and the haul it cost, he looked the first and last micahlike laicness of Quartus the Fifth and Quintus the Sixth and Sixtus the Seventh giving allnight sitting to Lio the Faultyfindth.

— Good appetite us, sir Mookse! How do you do it? cheeped the Gripes in a wherry whiggy maudelenian woice and the jack- [p.154] asses all within bawl laughed and brayed for his intentions for they knew their sly toad lowry now. I am rarumominum blessed to see you, my dear mouster. Will you not perhopes tell me everything if you are pleased, sanity? All about aulne and lithial and allsall allinall about awn and liseias? Ney?

Think of it! O miserendissimest retempter! A Gripes!

— Rats! bullowed the Mookse most telesphorously, the concionator, and the sissymusses and the zozzymusses in their robenhauses quailed to hear his tardeynois at all for you cannot wake a silken nouse out of a hoarse oar. Blast yourself and your anathomy infairioriboos! No, hang you for an animal rurale! I am superbly in my supremest poncif! Abase you, baldyqueens! Gather behind me, satraps! Rots!

— I am till infinity obliged with you, bowed the Gripes, his whine having gone to his palpruy head. I am still always having a wish on all my extremities. By the watch, what is the time, pace?

Figure it! The pining peever! To a Mookse!

— Ask my index, mund my achilles, swell my obolum, woshup my nase serene, answered the Mookse, rapidly by turning clement, urban, eugenious and celestian in the formose of good grogory humours. Quote awhore? That is quite about what I came on my missions with my intentions laudibiliter to settle with you, barbarousse. Let thor be orlog. Let Pauline be Irene. Let you be Beeton. And let me be Los Angeles. Now measure your length. Now estimate my capacity. Well, sour? Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? Will you give you up? Como? Fuert it?

Sancta Patientia! You should have heard the voice that answered him! Culla vosellina.

— I was just thinkling upon that, swees Mooksey, but, for all the rime on my raisins, if I connow make my submission, I cannos give you up, the Gripes whimpered from nethermost of his wanhope. Ishallassoboundbewilsothoutoosezit. My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own. My velicity is too fit in one stockend. And my spetial inexshellsis the belowing things ab ove. But I will never be abler to tell Your Honoriousness (here he near lost [p.155] his limb) though my corked father was bott a pseudowaiter, whose o’cloak you ware.

Incredible! Well, hear the inevitable.

—Your temple, sus in cribro! Semperexcommunicambiambisumers. Tugurios-in-Newrobe or Tukurias-in-Ashies. Novarome, my creature, blievend bleives. My building space in lyonine city is always to let to leonlike Men, the Mookse in a most consistorous allocution pompifically with immediate jurisdiction constantinently concludded (what a crammer for the shapewrucked Gripes!). And I regret to proclaim that it is out of my temporal to help you from being killed by inchies, (what a thrust!), as we first met each other newwhere so airly. (Poor little sowsieved subsquashed Gripes! I begin to feel contemption for him!). My side, thank decretals, is as safe as motherour’s houses, he continued, and I can seen from my holeydome what it is to be wholly sane. Unionjok and be joined to yok! Parysis, tu sais, crucycrooks, belongs to him who parises himself. And there I must leave you subject for the pressing. I can prove that against you, weight a momentum, mein goot enemy! or Cospol’s not our star. I bet you this dozen odd. This foluminous dozen odd. Quas primas — but ’tis bitter to compote my knowledge’s fructos of. Tomes.

Elevating, to give peint to his blick, his jewelled pederect to the allmysty cielung, he luckystruck blueild out of a few shouldbe santillants, a cloister of starabouts over Maples, a lucciolys in Teresa street and a stopsign before Sophy Barratt’s, he gaddered togodder the odds docence of his vellumes, gresk, letton and russicruxian, onto the lapse of his prolegs, into umfullth onescuppered, and sat about his widerproof. He proved it well whoonearth dry and drysick times, and vremiament, tu cesses, to the extinction of Niklaus altogether (Niklaus Alopysius having been the once Gripes’s popwilled nimbum) by Neuclidius and Inexagoras and Mumfsen and Thumpsem, by Orasmus and by Amenius, by Anacletus the Jew and by Malachy the Augurer and by the Cappon’s collection and after that, with Cheekee’s gelatine and Alldaybrandy’s formolon, he reproved it ehrltogether [p.156] when not in that order sundering in some different order, alter three thirty and a hundred times by the binomial dioram and the penic walls and the ind, the Inklespill legends and the rure, the rule of the hoop and the blessons of expedience and the jus, the jugicants of Pontius Pilax and all the mummyscrips in Sick Bokes’ Juncroom and the Chapters for the Cunning of the Chapters of the Conning Fox by Tail.

While that Mooksius with preprocession and with proprecession, duplicitly and diplussedly, was promulgating ipsofacts and sadcontras this raskolly Gripos he had allbust seceded in monophysicking his illsobordunates. But asawfulas he had caught his base semenoyous sarchnaktiers to combuccinate upon the silipses of his aspillouts and the acheporeoozers of his haggyown pneumax to synerethetise with the breadchestviousness of his sweeatovular ducose sofarfully the loggerthuds of his sakellaries were fond at variance with the synodals of his somepooliom and his babskissed nepogreasymost got the hoof from his philioquus.

— Efter thousand yaws, O Gripes con my sheepskins, yow will be belined to the world, enscayed Mookse the pius.

— Ofter thousand yores, amsered Gripes the gregary, be the goat of MacHammud’s, yours may be still, O Mookse, more botheared.

— Us shall be chosen as the first of the last by the electress of Vale Hollow, obselved the Mookse nobily, for par the unicum of Elelijiacks, Us am in Our stabulary and that is what Ruby and Roby fall for, blissim.

The Pills, the Nasal Wash (Yardly’s), the Army Man Cut, as british as bondstrict and as straightcut as when that brokenarched traveller from Nuzuland . . .

— Wee, cumfused the Gripes limply, shall not even be the last of the first, wee hope, when oust are visitated by the Veiled Horror. And, he added: Mee are relying entirely, see the fortethurd of Elissabed, on the weightiness of mear’s breath. Puffut!

Unsightbared embouscher, relentless foe to social and business succes! (Hourihaleine) It might have been a happy evening but . . .

[p.157] And they viterberated each other, canis et coluber with the wildest ever wielded since Tarriestinus lashed Pissasphaltium.

— Unuchorn!

— Ungulant!

— Uvuloid!

— Uskybeak!

And bullfolly answered volleyball.

Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. How she was brightened when Shouldrups in his glaubering hochskied his welkinstuck and how she was overclused when Kneesknobs on his zwivvel was makeacting such a paulse of himshelp! She was alone. All her nubied companions were asleeping with the squirrels. Their mivver, Mrs Moonan, was off in the Fuerst quarter scrubbing the backsteps of Number 28. Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood’s sokaparlour, eating oceans of Voking’s Blemish. Nuvoletta listened as she reflected herself, though the heavenly one with his constellatria and his emanations stood between, and she tried all she tried to make the Mookse look up at her (but he was fore too adiaptotously farseeing) and to make the Gripes hear how coy she could be (though he was much too schystimatically auricular about his ens to heed her) but it was all mild’s vapour moist. Not even her feignt reflection, Nuvoluccia, could they toke their gnoses off for their minds with intrepifide fate and bungless curiasity, were conclaved with Heliogobbleus and Commodus and Enobarbarus and whatever the coordinal dickens they did as their damprauch of papyrs and buchstubs said. As if that was their spiration! As if theirs could duiparate her queendim! As if she would be third perty to search on search proceedings! She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her sfumastelliacinous hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born [p.158] to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus. But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy’s worth to Florida. For the Mookse, a dogmad Accanite, were not amoosed and the Gripes, a dubliboused Catalick, wis pinefully obliviscent.

— I see, she sighed. There are menner.

The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the softzing at the stir of the ver grose O arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing, duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds. Metamnisia was allsoonome coloroform brune; citherior spiane an eaulande, innemorous and unnumerose. The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear. The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see. He ceased. And he ceased, tung and trit, and it was neversoever so dusk of both of them. But still Moo thought on the deeps of the undths he would profoundth come the morrokse and still Gri feeled of the scripes he would escipe if by grice he had luck enoupes.

Oh, how it was duusk! From Vallee Maraia to Grasyaplaina, dormimust echo! Ah dew! Ah dew! It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie!

Then there came down to the thither bank a woman of no appearance (I believe she was a Black with chills at her feet) and she gathered up his hoariness the Mookse motamourfully where he was spread and carried him away to her invisible dwelling, thats hights, Aquila Rapax, for he was the holy sacred solem and poshup spit of her boshop’s apron. So you see the Mookse he had reason as I knew and you knew and he knew all along. And there came down to the hither bank a woman to all important (though they say that she was comely, spite the cold in her heed) and, for he was as like it as blow it to a hawker’s hank, she plucked down the Gripes, torn panicky autotone, in angeu from his limb and cariad away its beotitubes with her to her unseen [p.159] shieling, it is, De Rore Coeli. And so the poor Gripes got wrong; for that is always how a Gripes is, always was and always will be. And it was never so thoughtful of either of them. And there were left now an only elmtree and but a stone. Polled with pietrous, Sierre but saule. O! Yes! And Nuvoletta, a lass.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the pretty-pretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

No applause, please! Bast! The romescot nattleshaker will go round your circulation in diu dursus.

Allaboy, Major, I’ll take your reactions in another place after themes. Nolan Browne, you may now leave the classroom. Joe Peters, Fox.

As I have now successfully explained to you my own naturalborn rations which are even in excise of my vaultybrain insure me that I am a mouth’s more deserving case by genius. I feel in symbathos for my ever devoted friend and halfaloafonwashed, Gnaccus Gnoccovitch. Darling gem! Darling smallfox! Horoseshoew! I could love that man like my own ambo for being so baileycliaver though he’s a nawful curillass and I must slav to methodiousness. I want him to go and live like a theabild in charge of the night brigade on Tristan da Cunha, isle of manoverboard, where he’ll make Number 106 and be near Inaccessible. (The meeting of mahoganies, be the waves, rementious me that this exposed sight though it pines for an umbrella of its own and needs a shelter belt of the true service sort to keep its [p.160] boles clean, — the weeping beeches, Picea and Tillia, are in a wild state about it — ought to be classified, as Cricketbutt Willowm and his two nurserymen advisers suggested, under genus Inexhaustible when we refloat upon all the butternat, sweet gum and manna ash redcedera which is so purvulent there as if there was howthorns in Curraghchasa which ought to look as plane as a lodgepole to anybody until we are introduced to that pinetacotta of Verney Rubeus where the deodarty is pinctured for us in a pure stand, which we do not doubt ha has a habitat of doing, but without those selfsownseedlings which are a species of proof that the largest individual can occur at or in an olivetion such as East Conna Hillock where it mixes with foolth accacians and common sallies and is tender) Vux Populus, as we say in hickoryhockery and I wish we had some more glasses of arbor vitae. Why roat by the roadside or awn over alum pot? Alderman Whitebeaver is dakyo. He ought to go away for a change of ideas and he’d have a world of things to look back on. Do, sweet Daniel! If I weren’t a jones in myself I’d elect myself to be his dolphin in the wildsbillow because he is such a barefooted rubber with my supersocks pulled over his face which I publicked in my bestback garden for the laetification of siderodromites and to the irony of the stars. You will say it is most unenglish and I shall hope to hear that you will not be wrong about it. But I further, feeling a bit husky in my truths.

Will you please come over and let us mooremoore murgessly to each’s other down below our vices. I am underheerd by old billfaust. Wilsh is full of curks. The coolskittle is philip deblinite. Mr Wist is thereover beyeind the wantnot. Wilsh and wist are as thick of thins udder as faust on the deblinite. Sgunoshooto estas preter la tapizo malgranda. Lilegas al si en sia chambro. Kelkefoje funcktas, kelkefoje srumpas Shultroj. Houdian Kiel vi fartas, mia nigra sinjoro? And from the poignt of fun where I am crying to arrive you at they are on allfore as foibleminded as you can feel they are fablebodied.

My heeders will recoil with a great leisure how at the outbreak before trespassing on the space question where even [p.161] michelangelines have fooled to dread I proved to mindself as to your sotisfiction how his abject all through (the quickquid of Professor Ciondolone’s too frequently hypothecated Bettlermensch) is nothing so much more than a mere cashdime however genteel he may want ours, if we please (I am speaking to us in the second person), for to this graded intellecktuals dime is cash and the cash system (you must not be allowed to forget that this is all contained, I mean the system, in the dogmarks of origen on spurios) means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps in your pocket at the same time and with the same manners as you can now nothalf or half the cheek apiece I’ve in mind unless Burrus and Caseous have not or not have seemaultaneously sysentangled themselves, selldear to soldthere, once in the dairy days of buy and buy.

Burrus, let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace, the mildest of milkstoffs yet unbeaten as a risicide and, of course, obsoletely unadulterous whereat Caseous is obversely the revise of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals, though the betterman of the two is meltingly addicted to the more casual side of the arrivaliste case and, let me say it at once, as zealous over him as is passably he. The seemsame home and histry seeks and hidepence which we used to be reading for our prepurgatory, hot, Schott? till Duddy shut the shopper op and Mutti, poor Mutti! brought us our poor suppy, (ah who! eh how!) in Acetius and Oleosus and Sellius Volatilis and Petrus Papricus! Our Old Party quite united round the Slatbowel at Commons: Pfarrer Salamoss himself and that sprog of a Pedersill and his Sprig of Thyme and a dozen of the Murphybuds and a score and more of the hot young Capels and Lettucia in her greensleeves and you too and me three, twinsome bibs but hansome ates, like shakespill and eggs! But there’s many a split pretext bowl and jowl; and (snob screwing that cork, Schott!) to understand this as well as you can, feeling how backward you are in your down-to-the-ground benches, I have completed the following arrangement for the coarse use of stools and if I don’t make away with you I’m beyond Caesar outnullused.

[p.162] The older sisars (Tyrants, regicide is too good for you!) become unbeurrable from age, (the compositor of the farce of dustiny however makes a thunpledrum mistake by letting off this pienofarte effect as his furst act as that is where the juke comes in) having been sort-of-nineknived and chewly removed (this soldier - author - batman for all his commontoryism is just another of those souftsiezed bubbles who never quite got the sandhurst out of his eyes so that the champaign he draws for us is as flop as a plankrieg) the twinfreer types are billed to make their reupprearance as the knew kneck and knife knickknots on the deserted champ de bouteilles. (A most cursery reading into the Persic-Uraliens hostery shows us how Fonnumagula picked up that propper numen out of a colluction of prifixes though to the permienting cannasure the Coucousien oafsprung of this sun of a kuk is as sattin as there’s a tub in Tobolosk) Ostiak della Vogul Marina! But that I dannoy the fact of wanton to weste point I could paint you to that butter (cheese it!) if you had some wash. Mordvealive! Oh me none onsens! Why the case is as inessive and impossive as kezom hands! Their interlocative is conprovocative just as every hazzy hates to having a hazbane in her noze. Caseous may bethink himself a thought of a caviller but Burrus has the reachly roundered head that goes best with thofthinking defensive fideism. He has the lac of wisdom under every dent in his lofter while the other follow’s onni vesy milky indeedmymy. Laughing over the linnuts and weeping off the uniun. He hisn’t the hey og he lisn’t the lug, poohoo. And each night sim misses mand he winks he had the semagen. It was aptly and corrigidly stated (and, it is royally needless for one ex ungue Leonem to say by whom) that his seeingscraft was that clarety as were the wholeborough of Poutresbourg to be averlaunched over him pitchbatch he could still make out with his augstritch the green moat in Ireland’s Eye. Let me sell you the fulltroth of Burrus when he wore a younker. Here it is, and chorming too, in six by sevens! A cleanly line, by the gods! A king off duty and a jaw for ever! And what a cheery ripe outlook, good help me Deus v Deus! If I were to speak [p.163] my ohole mouthful to arinam about it you should call me the ormuzd aliment in your midst of faime. Eat ye up, heat ye up! sings the somun in the salm. Butyrum et mel comedet ut sciat reprobare malum et eligere bonum. This, of course, also explains why we were taught to play in the childhood: Der Haensli ist ein Butterbrot, mein Butterbrot! Und Koebi iss dein Schtinkenkot! Ja! Ja! Ja!

This in fact, just to show you, is Caseous, the brutherscutch or puir tyron: a hole or two, the highstinks aforefelt and anygo prigging wurms. Cheesugh! you complain. And Hi Hi High must say you are not Hoa Hoa Hoally in the wrong!

Thus we cannot escape our likes and mislikes, exiles or ambusheers, beggar and neighbour and — this is where the dimeshow advertisers advance the temporal relief plea — let us be tolerant of antipathies. Nex quovis burro num fit mercaseus? I am not hereby giving my final endorsement to the learned ignorants of the Cusanus philosophism in which old Nicholas pegs it down that the smarter the spin of the top the sounder the span of the buttom (what the worthy old auberginiste ought to have meant was: the more stolidly immobile in space appears to me the bottom which is presented to use in time by the top primomobilisk &c.). And I shall be misunderstord if understood to give an unconditional sinequam to the heroicised furibouts of the Nolanus theory, or, at any rate, of that substrate of apart from hissheory where the Theophil swoors that on principial he was the pointing start of his odiose by comparison and that whiles eggs will fall cheapened all over the walled the Bure will be dear on the Brie.

Now, while I am not out now to be taken up as unintentionally recommending the Silkebjorg tyrondynamon machine for the more economical helixtrolysis of these amboadipates until I can find space to look into it myself a little more closely first I shall go on with my decisions after having shown to you in good time how both products of our social stomach (the excellent Dr Burroman, I noticed by the way from his emended food theory, has been carefully digesting the very wholesome criticism [p.164] I helped him to in my princeps edition which is all so munch to the cud) are mutuearly polarised the incompatabilily of any delusional acting as ambivalent to the fixation of his pivotism. Positing, as above, too males pooles, the one the pictor of the other and the omber the Skotia of the one, and looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males we feel we must waistfully woent a female to focus and on this stage there pleasantly appears the cowrymaid M. whom we shall often meet below who introduces herself upon us at some precise hour which we shall again agree to call absolute zero or the babbling pumpt of platinism. And so like that former son of a kish who went up and out to found his farmer’s ashes we come down home gently on our own turnedabout asses to meet Margareen.

We now romp through a period of pure lyricism of shamebred music (technologically, let me say, the appetising entry of this subject on a fool chest of vialds is plumply pudding the carp before doevre hors) evidenced by such words in distress as I cream for thee, Sweet Margareen, and the more hopeful O Margareena! O Margareena! Still in the bowl is left a lump of gold! (Correspondents, by the way, will keep on asking me what is the correct garnish to serve drisheens with. Tansy Sauce. Enough). The pawnbreaking pathos of the first of these shoddy pieces reveals it as a Caseous effort. Burrus’s bit is often used for a toast. Criniculture can tell us very precisely indeed how and why this particular streak of yellow silver first appeared on (not in) the bowel, that is to see, the human head, bald, black, bronze, brown, brindled, betteraved or blanchemanged where it might be usefully compared with an earwig on a fullbottom. I am offering this to Signorina Cuticura and I intend to take it up and bring it under the nosetice of Herr Harlene by way of diverting his attentions. Of course the unskilled singer continues to pervert our wiser ears by subordinating the space-element, that is to sing, the aria, to the time-factor, which ought to be killed, ill tempor. I should advise any unborn singer who may still be among my heeders to forget her temporal diaphragm at home [p.165] (the best thing that could happen to it!) and attack the roulade with a swift colpo di glottide to the lug (though Maace I will insist was reclined from overdoing this, his recovery often being slow) and then, O! on the third dead beat, O! to cluse her eyes and aiopen her oath and see what spice I may send her. How? Cease thee, cantatrickee! I fain would be solo. Arouse thee, my valour! And save for e’er my true Bdur!

I shall have a word to say in a few yards about the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall but, as ours is a vivarious where one plant’s breaf is a lunger planner’s byscent and you may not care for argon, it will be very convenient for me for the emolument to pursue Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle. Every admirer has seen my goulache of Marge (she is so like the sister, you don’t know, and they both dress A L I K E !) which I titled The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman which in the presence ornates our national cruetstand. This genre of portraiture of changes of mind in order to be truly torse should evoke the bush soul of females so I am leaving it to the experienced victim to complete the general suggestion by the mental addition of a wallopy bound or, should the zulugical zealot prefer it, a congorool teal. The hatboxes which composed Rhomba, lady Trabezond (Marge in her excelsis), also comprised the climactogram up which B and C may fondly be imagined ascending and are suggestive of gentlemen’s spring modes, these modes carrying us back to the superimposed claylayers of eocene and pleastoseen formation and the gradual morphological changes in our body politic which Professor Ebahi-Ahuri of Philadespoinis (Ill) — whose bluebutterbust I have just given his coupe de grass to — neatly names a boîte à surprises. The boxes, if I may break the subject gently, are worth about fourpence pourbox but I am inventing a more patent process, foolproof and pryperfect (I should like to ask that Shedlock Homes person who is out for removing the roofs of our criminal classics by what deductio ad domunum he hopes de tacto to detect anything unless he happens of himself, movibile tectu, to have a slade off) after which they can be reduced to a fragment of their [p.166] true crust by even the youngest of Margees if she will take plase to be seated and smile if I please.

Now there can be no question about it either that I having done as much, have quite got the size of that demilitery young female (we will continue to call her Marge) whose types may be met with in any public garden, wearing a very “dressy” affair, known as an “ethel” of instep length and with a real fur, reduced to 3/9, and muffin cap to tone (they are “angelskin” this fall), ostentatiously hemming apologetically over the shirtness of some “sweet” garment, when she is not sitting on all the free benches avidously reading about “it” but ovidently on the look out for “him” or so “thrilled” about the best dressed dolly pram and beautiful elbow competition or at the movies swallowing sobs and blowing bixed mixcuits over “childe” chaplain’s “latest” or on the verge of the gutter with some bobbedhair brieffrocked babyma’s toddler (the Smythe-Smythes now keep TWO domestics and aspire to THREE male ones, a shover, a butlegger and a sectary) held hostage at armslength, teaching His Infant Majesty how to make waters worse.

(I am closely watching Master Pules, as I have regions to suspect from my post that her “little man” is a secondary schoolteacher under the boards of education, a voted disciple of Infantulus who is being utilised thus publicly by the seducente infanta to conceal her own more mascular personality by flaunting frivolish finery over men’s inside clothes, for the femininny of that totamulier will always lack the musculink of a verumvirum. My solotions for the proper parturience of matres and the education of micturious mites must stand over from the moment till I tackle this tickler hussy for occupying my uttentions.)

Margareena she’s very fond of Burrus but, alick and alack! she velly fond of chee. (The important influence exercised on everything by this eastasian import has not been till now fully flavoured though we can comfortably taste it in this case. I shall come back for a little more say farther on.) A cleopatrician in her own right she at once complicates the position while Burrus and Caseous are contending for her misstery by implicating her- [p.167] self with an elusive Antonius, a wop who would appear to hug a personal interest in refined chees of all chades at the same time as he wags an antomine art of being rude like the boor. This Antonius-Burrus-Caseous grouptriad may be said to equate the qualis equivalent with the older socalled talis on talis one just as quantly as in the hyperchemical economantarchy the tantum ergons irruminate the quantum urge so that eggs is to whey as whay is to zeed like your golfchild’s abe boob caddy. And this is why any simple philadolphus of a fool you like to dress, an athemisthued lowtownian, exlegged phatrisight, may be awfully green to one side of him and fruitfully blue on the other which will not screen him however from appealing to my gropesarching eyes, through the strongholes of my acropoll, as a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesphorous idiot who kennot tail a bomb from a painapple when he steals one and wannot psing his psalmen with the cong in our gregational pompoms with the canting crew.

No! Topsman to your Tarpeia! This thing, Mister Abby, is nefand. (And, taking off soutstuffs and alkalike matters, I hope we can kill time to reach the salt because there’s some forceglass neutric assets bittering in the soldpewter for you to plump your pottage in). The thundering legion has stormed Olymp that it end. Twelve tabular times till now have I edicted it. Merus Genius to Careous Caseous! Moriture, te salutat! My phemous themis race is run, so let Demoncracy take the highmost! (Abraham Tripier. Those old diligences are quite out of date. Read next answer). I’ll beat you so lon. (Bigtempered. Why not take direct action. See previous reply). My unchanging Word is sacred. The word is my Wife, to exponse and expound, to vend and to velnerate, and may the curlews crown our nuptias! Till Breath us depart! Wamen. Beware would you change with my years. Be as young as your grandmother! The ring man in the rong shop but the rite words by the rote order! Ubi lingua nuncupassit, ibi fas! Adversus hostem semper sac! She that will not feel my fulmoon let her peel to thee as the hoyden and the impudent! That mon that hoth no moses in his sole nor is not awed by conquists [p.168] of word’s law, who never with humself was fed and leaves his soil to lave his head, when his hope’s in his highlows from whisking his woe, if he came to my preach, a proud pursebroken ranger, when the heavens were welling the spite of their spout, to beg for a bite in our bark Noisdanger, would meself and Mac Jeffet, four-in-hand, foot him out? — ay! — were he my own breastbrother, my doubled withd love and my singlebiassed hate, were we bread by the same fire and signed with the same salt, had we tapped from the same master and robbed the same till, were we tucked in the one bed and bit by the one flea, homogallant and hemycapnoise, bum and dingo, jack by churl, though it broke my heart to pray it, still I’d fear I’d hate to say!

12. Sacer esto?

Answer: Semus sumus!

 ® 

[p.169] Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming (he was an outlex between the lines of Ragonar Blaubarb ant Horrild Hairwire and an inlaw to Capt. the Hon. and Rev. Mr Bbyrdwood de Trop Blogg was among his most distant connections) but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white. Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at.

Shem’s bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman’s son), the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt’s thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes, a bladder tristended, so much so that young Master Shemmy on his very first debouch at the very dawn of protohistory seeing himself such and such, when playing with thistlewords in their garden nursery, Griefotrofio, at Phig Streat 111, Shuvlin, Old Hoeland, (would we go back there now for sounds, pillings and [p.170] sense? would we now for annas and annas? would we for fullscore eight and a liretta? for twelve blocks one bob? for four testers one groat? not for a dinar! not for jo!) dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?: telling them take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past, for their copper age was yet unminted, to the winner. One said when the heavens are quakers, a second said when Bohemeand lips, a third said when he, no, when hold hard a jiffy, when he is a gnawstick and detarmined to, the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket of life, still another said when the wine’s at witsends, and still another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him, one of the littliest said me, me, Sem, when pappa papared the harbour, one of the wittiest said, when he yeat ye abblokooken and he zmear hezelf zo zhooken, still one said when you are old I’m grey fall full wi sleep, and still another when wee deader walkner, and another when he is just only after having being semisized, another when yea, he hath no mananas, and one when dose pigs they begin now that they will flies up intil the looft. All were wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being — all give it up? — when he is a — yours till the rending of the rocks, — Sham.

Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs. So low was he that he preferred Gibsen’s teatime salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time he repeated in his botulism that no junglegrown pineapple ever smacked like the whoppers you shook out of Ananias’ cans, Findlater and Gladstone’s, Corner House, Englend. None of your inchthick blueblooded Balaclava fried-at-belief-stakes or juicejelly legs of the Grex’s molten mutton or greasilygristly grunters’ goupons or slice upon slab of luscious goosebosom with lump after load of plumpudding stuffing all aswim in a [p.171] swamp of bogoakgravy for that greekenhearted yude! Rosbif of Old Zealand! he could not attouch it. See what happens when your somatophage merman takes his fancy to our virgitarian swan? He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea. Once when among those rebels in a state of hopelessly helpless intoxication the piscivore strove to lift a czitround peel to either nostril, hiccupping, apparently impromptued by the hibat he had with his glottal stop, that he kukkakould flowrish for ever by the smell, as the czitr, as the kcedron, like a scedar, of the founts, on mountains, with limon on, of Lebanon. O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to! No likedbylike firewater or firstserved firstshot or gulletburn gin or honest brewbarrett beer either. O dear no! Instead the tragic jester sobbed himself wheywhingingly sick of life on some sort of a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice and, to hear him twixt his sedimental cupslips when he had gulfed down mmmmuch too mmmmany gourds of it retching off to almost as low withswillers, who always knew notwithstanding when they had had enough and were rightly indignant at the wretch’s hospitality when they found to their horror they could not carry another drop, it came straight from the noble white fat, jo, openwide sat, jo, jo, her why hide that, jo jo jo, the winevat, of the most serene magyansty az archdiochesse, if she is a duck, she’s a douches, and when she has a feherbour snot her fault, now is it? artstouchups, funny you’re grinning at, fancy you’re in her yet, Fanny Urinia.

Aint that swell, hey? Peamengro! Talk about lowness! Any dog’s quantity of it visibly oozed out thickly from this dirty little blacking beetle for the very fourth snap the Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak shotted the as yet unremuneranded national apostate, who was cowardly gun and camera shy, taking what he fondly thought was a short cut to Caer Fere, Soak Amerigas, vias the shipsteam Pridewin, after having buried a hatchet not so long before, by the wrong goods exeunt, num- [p.172] mer desh to tren, into Patatapapaveri’s, fruiterers and musical florists, with his Ciaho, chavi! Sar shin, shillipen? she knew the vice out of bridewell was a bad fast man by his walk on the spot.

[Johns is a different butcher’s. Next place you are up town pay him a visit. Or better still, come tobuy. You will enjoy cattlemen’s spring meat. Johns is now quite divorced from baking. Fattens, kills, flays, hangs, draws, quarters and pieces. Feel his lambs! Ex! Feel how sheap! Exex! His liver too is great value, a spatiality! Exexex! COMMUNICATED.]

Around that time, moravar, one generally, for luvvomony hoped or at any rate suspected among morticians that he would early turn out badly, develop hereditary pulmonary T.B., and do for himself one dandy time, nay, of a pelting night blanketed creditors, hearing a coarse song and splash off Eden Quay sighed and rolled over, sure all was up, but, though he fell heavily and locally into debit, not even then could such an antinomian be true to type. He would not put fire to his cerebrum; he would not throw himself in Liffey; he would not explaud himself with pneumantics; he refused to saffrocake himself with a sod. With the foreign devil’s leave the fraid born fraud diddled even death. Anzi, cabled (but shaking the worth out of his maulth: Guardacosta leporello? Szasas Kraicz!) from his Nearapoblican asylum to his jonathan for a brother: Here tokay, gone tomory, we’re spluched, do something, Fireless. And had answer: Inconvenient, David.

You see, chaps, it will trickle out, freaksily of course, but the tom and the shorty of it is: he was in his bardic memory low. All the time he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each and every crumb of trektalk, covetous of his neighbour’s word, and if ever, during a Munda conversazione commoted in the nation’s interest, delicate tippits were thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers, vainly pleading by scriptural arguments with the opprobrious papist about trying to brace up for the kidos of the thing, Scally wag, and be a men instead of a dem scrounger, dish it all, such as: Pray, what is [p.173] the meaning, sousy, of that continental expression, if you ever came acrux it, we think it is a word transpiciously like canaille?: or: Did you anywhere, kennel, on your gullible’s travels or during your rural troubadouring, happen to stumble upon a certain gay young nobleman whimpering to the name of Low Swine who always addresses women out of the one corner of his mouth, lives on loans and is furtivefree yours of age? without one sigh of haste like the supreme prig he was, and not a bit sorry, he would pull a vacant landlubber’s face, root with earwaker’s pensile in the outer of his lauscher and then, lisping, the prattlepate parnella, to kill time, and swatting his deadbest to think what under the canopies of Jansens Chrest would any decent son of an Albiogenselman who had bin to an university think, let a lent hit a hint and begin to tell all the intelligentsia admitted to that tamileasy samtalaisy conclamazzione (since, still and before physicians, lawyers merchant, belfry pollititians, agricolous manufraudurers, sacrestanes of the Pure River Society, philanthropicks lodging on as many boards round the panesthetic at the same time as possible) the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were and one moment tarabooming great blunderguns (poh!) about his farfamed fine Poppamore, Mr Humhum, whom history, climate and entertainment made the first of his sept and always up to debt, though Eavens ears ow many fines he faces, and another moment visanvrerssas, cruaching three jeers (pah!) for his rotten little ghost of a Peppybeg, Mr Himmyshimmy, a blighty, a reeky, a lighty, a scrapy, a babbly, a ninny, dirty seventh among thieves and always bottom sawyer, till nowan knowed how howmely howme could be, giving unsolicited testimony on behalf of the absent, as glib as eaveswater to those present (who meanwhile, with increasing lack of interest in his semantics, allowed various subconscious smickers to drivel slowly across their fichers), unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused and cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the [p.174] other people in the story, leaving out, of course, foreconsciously, the simple worf and plague and poison they had cornered him about until there was not a snoozer among them but was utterly undeceived in the heel of the reel by the recital of the rigmarole.

He went without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row and, as often as he was called in to umpire any octagonal argument among slangwhangers, the accomplished washout always used to rub shoulders with the last speaker and clasp shakers (the handtouch which is speech without words) and agree to every word as soon as half uttered, command me!, your servant, good, I revere you, how, my seer? be drinking that! quite truth, gratias, I’m yoush, see wha’m hearing?, also goods, please it, me sure?, be filling this!, quiso, you said it, apasafello, muchas grassyass, is there firing-on-me?, is their girlic-on-you?, to your good self, your sulphur, and then at once focuss his whole unbalanced attention upon the next octagonist who managed to catch a listener’s eye, asking and imploring him out of his piteous onewinker, (hemoptysia diadumenos) whether there was anything in the world he could do to please him and to overflow his tumbletantaliser for him yet once more.

One hailcannon night (for his departure was attended by a heavy downpour) as very recently as some thousand rains ago he was therefore treated with what closely resembled parsonal violence, being soggert all unsuspectingly through the deserted village of Tumblin-on-the-Leafy from Mr Vanhomrigh’s house at 81 bis Mabbot’s Mall as far as Green Patch beyond the brickfields of Salmon Pool by rival teams of slowspiers counter quicklimers who finally, as rahilly they had been deteened out rawther laetich, thought, busnis hits busnis, they had better be streaking for home after their Auborne-to-Auborne, with thanks for the pleasant evening, one and all disgustedly, instead of ruggering him back, and awake, reconciled (though they were as jealous as could be cullions about all the truffles they had brought on him) to a friendship, fast and furious, which merely arose out of the noxious pervert’s perfect lowness. Again there was a hope that people, [p.175] looking on him with the contemp of the contempibles, after first gaving him a roll in the dirt, might pity and forgive him, if properly deloused, but the pleb was born a Quicklow and sank alowing till he stank out of sight.

All Saints beat Belial! Mickil Goals to Nichil! Notpossible! Already?

In Nowhere has yet the Whole World taken part of himself for his Wife;

By Nowhere have Poorparents been sentenced to Worms, Blood and Thunder for Life

Not yet has the Emp from Corpsica forced the Arth out of Engleterre;

Not yet have the Sachsen and Judder on the Mound of a Word made Warre;

Not yet Witchywithcy of Wench struck Fire of his Heath from on Hoath;

Not yet his Arcobaleine forespoken Peacepeace upon Oath;

Cleftfoot from Hempal must tumpel, Blamefool Gardener’s bound to fall;

Broken Eggs will poursuive bitten Apples for where theirs is Will there’s his Wall;

But the Mountstill frowns on the Millstream while their Madsons leap his Bier

And her Rillstrill liffs to His Murkesty all her daft Daughters laff in her Ear.

Till the four Shores of deff Tory Island let the douze dumm Eire whiggs raille!

Hirp! Hirp! for their Missed Understandings! chirps the Ballat of Perce-Oreille.

O fortunous casualitas! Lefty takes the cherubcake while Rights cloves his hoof. Darkies never done tug that coon out to play non-excretory, anti-sexuous, misoxenetic, gaasy pure, flesh and blood games, written and composed and sung and danced by Niscemus Nemon, same as piccaninnies play all day, those old (none of your honeys and rubbers!) games for fun and element we used to play with Dina and old Joe kicking her behind and before and the yellow girl kicking him behind old Joe, [p.176] games like Thom Thom the Thonderman, Put the Wind up the Peeler, Hat in the Ring, Prisson your Pritchards and Play Withers Team, Mikel on the Luckypig, Nickel in the Slot, Sheila Harnett and her Cow, Adam and Ell, Humble Bumble, Moggie’s on the Wall, Twos and Threes, American Jump, Fox Come out of your Den, Broken Bottles, Writing a Letter to Punch, Tiptop is a Sweetstore, Henressy Crump Expolled, Postman’s Knock, Are We Fairlys Represented?, Solomon Silent reading, Appletree Bearstone, I know a Washerwoman, Hospitals, As I was Walking, There is Oneyone’s House in Dreamcolohour, Battle of Waterloo, Colours, Eggs in the Bush, Habberdasherisher, Telling your Dreams, What’s the Time, Nap, Ducking Mammy, Last Man Standing, Heali Baboon and the Forky Theagues, Fickleyes and Futilears, Handmarried but once in my Life and I’ll never commit such a Sin agin, Zip Cooney Candy, Turkey in the Straw, This is the Way we sow the Seed of a long and lusty Morning, Hops of Fun at Miliken’s Make, I seen the Toothbrush with Pat Farrel, Here’s the Fat to graze the Priest’s Boots, When his Steam was like a Raimbrandt round Mac Garvey.

Now it is notoriously known how on that surprisingly bludgeony Unity Sunday when the grand germogall allstar bout was harrily the rage between our weltingtoms extraordinary and our pettythicks the marshalaisy and Irish eyes of welcome were smiling daggers down their backs, when the roth, vice and blause met the noyr blank and rogues and the grim white and cold bet the black fighting tans, categorically unimperatived by the maxims, a rank funk getting the better of him, the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives, to Talviland, ahone ahaza, pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles and, without having struck one blow, (pig stole on him was lust he lagging it was becaused dust he shook) kuskykorked himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay in afar for the life, where, as there was not a moment to be lost, after he had boxed around with his fortepiano till he was whole bach bamp him and bump him blues, he collapsed carefully under a bedtick from Schwitzer’s, his face enveloped into a dead warrior’s telemac, with a lullobaw’s somnbomnet and a whotwater- [p.177] wottle at his feet to stoke his energy of waiting, moaning feebly, in monkmarian monotheme, but tarned long and then a nation louder, while engaged in swallowing from a large ampullar, that his pawdry’s purgatory was more than a nigger bloke could bear, hemiparalysed by the tong warfare and all the shemozzle, (Daily Maily, fullup Lace! Holy Maly, Mothelup Joss!) his cheeks and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked.

How is that for low, laities and gentlenuns? Why, dog of the Crostiguns, whole continents rang with this Kairokorran lowness! Sheols of houris in chems upon divans, (revolted stellas vespertine vesamong them) at a bare (O!) mention of the scaly rybald exclaimed: Poisse!

But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookisonester himself, ever nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective (here perhaps at the vanessance of his lownest) who was known to grognt rather than gunnard upon one occasion, while drinking heavily of spirits to that interlocutor a latere and private privysuckatary he used to pal around with, in the kavehazs, one Davy Browne-Nowlan, his heavenlaid twin, (this hambone dogpoet pseudoed himself under the hangname he gave himself of Bethgelert) in the porchway of a gipsy’s bar (Shem always blaspheming, so holy writ, Billy, he would try, old Belly, and pay this one manjack congregant of his four soups every lass of nexmouth, Bolly, so sure as thair’s a tail on a commet, as a taste for storik’s fortytooth, that is to stay, to listen out, ony twenny minnies moe, Bully, his Ballade Imaginaire which was to be dubbed Wine, Woman and Waterclocks, or How a Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty, by Maistre Sheames de la Plume, some most dreadful stuff in a murderous mirrorhand) that he was avoopf (parn me!) aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard, either prexactly unlike his polar andthisishis or procisely the seem as woops (parn!) as what he fancied or guessed the sames as he was himself and that, greet scoot, duckings and thuggery, though he was foxed fux to fux like a bunnyboy rodger with all the teashop [p.178] lionses of Lumdrum hivanhoesed up gagainst him, being a lapsis linquo with a ruvidubb shortartempa, bad cad dad fad sad mad nad vanhaty bear, the consciquenchers of casuality prepestered crusswords in postposition, scruff, scruffer, scrufferumurraimost andallthatsortofthing, if reams stood to reason and his lankalivline lasted he would wipe alley english spooker, multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse.

After the thorough fright he got that bloody, Swithun’s day, though every doorpost in muchtried Lucalizod was smeared with generous erstborn gore and every free for all cobbleway slippery with the bloods of heroes, crying to Welkins for others, and noahs and cul verts agush with tears of joy, our low waster never had the common baalamb’s pluck to stir out and about the compound while everyone else of the torchlit throng, slashers and sliced alike, mobbu on massa, waaded and baaded around, yampyam pampyam, chanting the Gillooly chorus, from the Monster Book of Paltryattic Puetrie, O pura e pia bella! in junk et sampam or in secular sinkalarum, heads up, on his bonafide avocation (the little folk creeping on all fours to their natural school treat but childishly gleeful when a stray whizzer sang out intermediately) and happy belongers to the fairer sex on their usual quest for higher things, but vying with Lady Smythe to avenge MacJobber, went stonestepping with their bickerrstaffs on educated feet, plinkity plonk, across the sevenspan ponte dei colori set up over the slop after the war-to-end war by Messrs a charitable government for the only once (dia dose Finnados!) he did take a tompip peepestrella throug a threedraw eighteen hawkspower durdicky telescope, luminous to larbourd only like the lamps in Nassaustrass, out of his westernmost keyhole, spitting at the impenetrablum wetter, (and it was porcoghastly that outumn) with an eachway hope in his shivering soul, as he prayed to the cloud Incertitude, of finding out for himself, on akkount of all the kules in Kroukaparka or oving to all the kodseoggs in Kalatavala, whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back after the celestious intemperance and, for Duvvelsache, why, with his see me see and his my see a corves and his frokerfoskerfuskar [p.179] layen loves in meeingseeing, he got the charm of his optical life when he found himself (hic sunt lennones!) at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver of the bulldog with a purpose pattern, handled by an unknown quarreler who, supposedly, had been told off to shade and shoot shy Shem should the shit show his shiny shnout out awhile to look facts in their face before being hosed and creased (uprip and jack him!) by six or a dozen of the gayboys.

What, para Saom Plaom, in the names of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the incensed privy and the licensed pantry gods and Stator and Victor and Kutt and Runn and the whole mesa redonda of Lorencao Otulass in convocacaon, was this disinterestingly low human type, this Calumnious Column of Cloaxity, this Bengalese Beacon of Biloxity, this Annamite Aper of Atroxity, really at, it will be precise to quarify, for he seems in a badbad case?

The answer, to do all the diddies in one dedal, would sound: from pulling himself on his most flavoured canal the huge chesthouse of his elders (the Popapreta, and some navico, navvies!) he had flickered up and flinnered down into a drug and drunkery addict, growing megalomane of a loose past. This explains the litany of septuncial lettertrumpets honorific, highpitched, erudite, neoclassical, which he so loved as patricianly to manuscribe after his name. It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, édition de ténèbres, (even yet sighs the Most Different, Dr. Poindejenk, authorised bowdler and censor, it can’t be repeated!) turning over three sheets at a wind, telling himself delightedly, no espellor mor so, that every splurge on the vellum he blundered over was an aisling vision more gorgeous than the one before t.i.t.s., a roseschelle cottage by the sea for nothing for ever, a ladies tryon hosiery raffle at liberty, a sewerful of guineagold wine with brancomongepadenopie and sickcylinder oysters worth a billion a bite, an entire operahouse (there was to be stamping room only in the prompter’s box and [p.180] everthemore his queque kept swelling) of enthusiastic noblewomen flinging every coronetcrimsoned stitch they had off at his probscenium, one after the others, inamagoaded into ajustilloosing themselves, in their gaiety pantheomime, when, egad, sir, acordant to all acountstrick, he squealed the topsquall im Deal Lil Shemlockup Yellin (geewhiz, jew ear that far! soap ewer! loutgout of sabaous! juice like a boyd!) for fully five minutes, infinitely better than Baraton Mc Gluckin with a scrumptious cocked hat and three green, cheese and tangerine trinity plumes on the right handle side of his amarellous head, a coat macfarlane (the kerssest cut, you understand?) a sponiard’s digger at his ribs, (Alfaiate punxit) an azulblu blowsheet for his blousebosom blossom and a dean’s crozier that he won from Cardinal Lindundarri and Cardinal Carchingarri and Cardinal Loriotuli and Cardinal Occidentaccia (ah ho!) in the dearby darby doubled for falling first over the hurdles, madam, in the odder hand, a.a.t.s.o.t., but what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lieabed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his mindfag, the buzz in his braintree, the tic of his conscience, the height up his rage, the gush down his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the bane in his bullugs, the squince in his suil, the rot in his eater, the ycho in his earer, the totters of his toes, the tetters on his tumtytum, the rats in his garret, the bats in his belfry, the budgerigars and bumbosolom beaubirds, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears since it took him a month to steal a march he was hardset to mumorise more than a word a week. Hake’s haulin! Hook’s fisk! Can you beat it? Whawe! I say, can you bait it? Was there ever heard of such lowdown blackguardism? Positively it woolies one to think over it.

Yet the bumpersprinkler used to boast aloud alone to himself with a haccent on it when Mynfadher was a boer constructor and Hoy was a lexical student, parole, and corrected with the black- [p.181] board (trying to copy the stage Englesemen he broughts their house down on, shouting: Bravure, surr Chorles! Letter purfect! Culossal, Loose Wallor! Spache!) how he had been toed out of all the schicker families of the klondykers from Pioupioureich, Swabspays, the land of Nod, Shruggers’ Country, Pension Danubierhome and Barbaropolis, who had settled and stratified in the capital city after its hebdomodary metropoliarchialisation as sunblistered, moonplastered, gory, wheedling, joviale, litcherous and full, ordered off the gorgeous premises in most cases on account of his smell which all cookmaids eminently objected to as ressembling the bombinubble puzzo that welled out of the pozzo. Instead of chuthoring those model households plain wholesome pothooks (a thing he never possessed of his Nigerian own) what do you think Vulgariano did but study with stolen fruit how cutely to copy all their various styles of signature so as one day to utter an epical forged cheque on the public for his own private profit until, as just related, the Dustbin’s United Scullerymaid’s and Househelp’s Sorority, better known as Sluttery’s Mowlted Futt, turned him down and assisted nature by unitedly shoeing the source of annoyance out of the place altogether and taytotally on the heat of the moment, holding one another’s gonk (for no-one, hound or scrublady, not even the Turk, ungreekable in purscent of the armenable, dared whiff the polecat at close range) and making some pointopointing remarks as they done so at the perfects of the Sniffey, your honour, aboon the lyow why a stunk, mister.

[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and onthergarmenteries, to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist. Superior built, domestic, regular layer. Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies. ABORTISEMENT.]

One cannot even begin to post figure out a statuesquo ante as to how slow in reality the excommunicated Drumcondriac, nate Hamis, really was. Who can say how many pseudostylic [p.182] shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?

Be that as it may, but for that light phantastic of his gnose’s glow as it slid lucifericiously within an inch of its page (he would touch at its from time to other, the red eye of his fear in saddishness, to ensign the colours by the beerlitz in his mathness and his educandees to outhue to themselves in the cries of girlglee: gember! inkware! chonchambre! cinsero! zinnzabar! tincture and gin!) Nibs never would have quilled a seriph to sheepskin. By that rosy lampoon’s effluvious burning and with help of the simulchronic flush in his pann (a ghinee a ghirk he ghets there!) he scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met, even sharing a precipitation under the idlish tarriers’ umbrella of a showerproof wall, while all over up and down the four margins of this rancid Shem stuff the evilsmeller (who was devoted to Uldfadar Sardanapalus) used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself in the act of reciting old Nichiabelli’s monolook interyerear Hanno, o Nonanno, acce’l brubblemm’as, ser Autore, q.e.d., a heartbreakingly handsome young paolo with love lyrics for the goyls in his eyols, a plaintiff’s tanner vuice, a jucal inkome of one hundred and thirtytwo dranchmas per yard from Broken Hill stranded estate, Camebreech mannings, cutting a great dash in a brandnew two guinea dress suit and a burled hogsford hired for a Fursday evenin merry pawty, anna loavely long pair of inky Italian moostarshes glistering with boric vaseline and frangipani. Puh! How unwhisperably so!

The house O’Shea or O’Shame, Quivapieno, known as the Haunted Inkbottle, no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland, as it was infested with the raps, with his penname SHUT sepiascraped on the doorplate and a blind of black sailcloth over its wan phwinshogue, in which the soulcontracted son of the secret cell groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers, dejected into day and night with jesuit bark and bitter bite, calico- [p.183] hydrants of zolfor and scoppialamina by full and forty Queasisanos, every day in everyone’s way more exceeding in violent abuse of self and others, was the worst, it is hoped, even in our western playboyish world for pure mousefarm filth. You brag of your brass castle or your tyled house in ballyfermont? Niggs, niggs and niggs again. For this was a stinksome inkenstink, quite puzzonal to the wrottel. Smatterafact, Angles aftanon browsing there thought not Edam reeked more rare. My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof, to say nothing of the uprights and imposts, were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers, flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars, neverworn breeches, cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes, upset latten tintacks, unused mill and stumpling stones, twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts, schoolgirl’s, young ladies’, milkmaids’, washerwomen’s, shopkeepers’ wives, merry widows’, ex nuns’, vice abbess’s, pro virgins’, super whores’, silent sisters’, Charleys’ aunts’, grandmothers’, mothers’-in-laws, fostermothers’, godmothers’ garters, tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes, presents from pickpockets, borrowed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises, lees of whine, deoxodised carbons, convertible collars, diviliouker doffers, broken wafers, unloosed shoe latchets, crooked strait waistcoats, fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury, undeleted glete, glass eyes for an eye, gloss teeth for a tooth, [p.184] war moans, special sighs, longsufferings of longstanding, ahs ohs ouis sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos, yeses and yeses and yeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.

Of course our low hero was a self valeter by choice of need so up he got up whatever is meant by a stourbridge clay kitchenette and lithargogalenu fowlhouse for the sake of akes (the umpple does not fall very far from the dumpertree) which the moromelodious jigsmith, in defiance of the Uncontrollable Birth Preservativation (Game and Poultry) Act, playing lallaryrook cookerynook, by the dodginess of his lentern, brooled and cocked and potched in an athanor, whites and yolks and yilks and whotes to the frulling fredonnance of Mas blanca que la blanca hermana and Amarilla, muy bien, with cinnamon and locusts and wild beeswax and liquorice and Carrageen moss and blaster of Barry’s and Asther’s mess and Huster’s micture and Yellownan’s embrocation and Pinkingtone’s patty and stardust and sinner’s tears, acuredent to Sharadan’s Art of Panning, chanting, for all regale to the like of the legs he left behind with Litty fun Letty fan Leven, his cantraps of fermented words, abracadabra calubra culorum, (his oewfs à la Madame Gabrielle de l’Eglise, his avgs à la Mistress B. de B. Meinfelde, his eiers Usquadmala à la pomme de ciel, his uoves, oves and uves à la Sulphate de Soude, his ochiuri sowtay sowmmonay à la Monseigneur, his soufflosion of oogs with somekat on toyast à la Mère Puard, his Poggadovies alla Fenella, his Frideggs à la Tricarême) in what was meant for a closet (Ah ho! If only he had listened better to the four masters that infanted him Father Mathew and Le Père Noble and Pastor Lucas and Padre Aguilar — not forgetting Layteacher Baudwin! Ah ho!) His costive Satan’s antimonian manganese limolitmious [p.185] nature never needed such an alcove so, when Robber and Mumsell, the pulpic dictators, on the nudgment of their legal advisers, Messrs Codex and Podex, and under his own benefiction of their pastor Father Flammeus Falconer, boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose, he winged away on a wildgoup’s chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit’s waste. You ask, in Sam Hill, how? Let manner and matter of this for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushfed porporates that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude dunsky tunga, may ever behold the brand of scarlet on the brow of her of Babylon and feel not the pink one in his own damned cheek.

Primum opifex, altus prosator, ad terram viviparam et cunctipotentem sine ullo pudore nec venia, suscepto pluviali atque discinctis perizomatis, natibus nudis uti nati fuissent, sese adpropinquans, flens et gemens, in manum suam evacuavit (highly prosy, crap in his hand, sorry!), postea, animale nigro exoneratus, classicum pulsans, stercus proprium, quod appellavit deiectiones suas, in vas olim honorabile tristitiae posuit, eodem sub invocatione fratrorum geminorum Medardi et Godardi laete ac melliflue minxit, psalmum qui incipit: Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis: magna voce cantitans (did a piss, says he was dejected, asks to be exonerated), demum ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, frigorique exposito, encaustum sibi fecit indelibile (faked O’Ryan’s, the indelible ink).

Then, pious Eneas, conformant to the fulminant firman which enjoins on the tremylose terrian that, when the call comes, he shall produce nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Ourania or bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him, with this double dye, brought to blood heat, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, faithly, nastily, appropriately, this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one [p.186] continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud. This exists that isits after having been said we know. And dabal take dabnal! And the dal dabal dab aldanabal! So perhaps, agglaggagglomeratively asaspenking, after all and arklast fore arklyst on his last public misappearance, circling the square, for the deathfête of Saint Ignaceous Poisonivy, of the Fickle Crowd (hopon the sexth day of Hogsober, killim our king, layum low!) and brandishing his bellbearing stylo, the shining keyman of the wilds of change, if what is sauce for the zassy is souse for the zazimas, the blond cop who thought it was ink was out of his depth but bright in the main.

Petty constable Sistersen of the Kruis-Kroon-Kraal it was, the parochial watch, big the dog the dig the bog the bagger the dugger the begadag degabug, who had been detailed from pollute stoties to save him, this the quemquem, that the quum, from the ligatureliablous effects of foul clay in little clots and mobmauling on looks, that wrongcountered the tenderfoot an eveling near the livingsmeansuniumgetherum, Knockmaree, Comty Mea, reeling more to the right than he lurched to the left, on his way from a protoprostitute (he would always have a (stp!) little pigeoness somewhure with his arch girl, Arcoiris, smockname of Mergyt) just as he was butting in rand the coyner of bad times under a hideful between the rival doors of warm bethels of worship through his boardelhouse fongster, greeting for grazious oras as usual: Where ladies have they that a dog meansort herring? Sergo, search me, the incapable reparteed with a selfevitant subtlety so obviously spurious and, raising his hair, after the grace, with the christmas under his clutcharm, for Portsymasser and Purtsymessus and Pertsymiss and Partsymasters, like a prance [p.187] of findingos, with a shillto shallto slipny stripny, in he skittled. Swikey! The allwhite poors guardiant, pulpably of balltossic stummung, was literally astundished over the painful sake, how he burstteself, which he was gone to, where he intent to did he, whether you think will, wherend the whole current of the afternoon whats the souch of a surch hads of hits of hims, urged and staggered thereto in his countryports at the caledosian capacity for Lieutuvisky of the caftan’s wineskin and even more so, during, looking his bigmost astonishments, it was said him, aschu, fun the concerned outgift of the dead med dirt, how that, arrahbejibbers, conspuent to the dominical order and exking noblish permish, he was namely coon at bringer at home two gallonts, as per royal, full poultry till his murder. Nip up and nab it!

Polthergeistkotzdondherhoploits! Kick? What mother? Whose porter? Which pair? Why namely coon? But our undilligence has been plutherotested so enough of such porterblack lowneess, too base for printink! Perpending that Putterick O’Purcell pulls the coald stoane out of Winterwater’s and Silder Seas sing for Harreng our Keng, sept okt nov dez John Phibbs march! We cannot, in mercy or justice nor on the lovom for labaryntos, stay here for the residence of our existings, discussing Tamstar Ham of Tenman’s thirst.

JUSTIUS (to himother): Brawn is my name and broad is my nature and I’ve breit on my brow and all’s right with every feature and I’ll brune this bird or Brown Bess’s bung’s gone bandy. I’m the boy to bruise and braise. Baus!

Stand forth, Nayman of Noland (for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular and the moods and hesitensies of the deponent but address myself to you, with the empirative of my vendettative, provocative and out direct), stand forth, come boldly, jolly me, move me, zwilling though I am, to laughter in your true colours ere you be back for ever till I give you your talkingto! Shem Macadamson, you know me and I know you and all your shemeries. Where have you been in the uterim, enjoying yourself [p.188] all the morning since your last wetbed confession? I advise you to conceal yourself, my little friend, as I have said a moment ago and put your hands in my hands and have a nightslong homely little confiteor about things. Let me see. It is looking pretty black against you, we suggest, Sheem avick. You will need all the elements in the river to clean you over it all and a fortifine popespriestpower bull of attender to booth.

Let us pry. We thought, would and did. Cur, quicquid, ubi, quomodo, quoties, quibus auxiliis? You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two easter island on the piejaw of hilarious heaven and roaring the other place (plunders to night of you, blunders what’s left of you, flash as flash can!) and now, forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul. Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger, Shehohem, that you will neither serve not let serve, pray nor let pray? And here, pay the piety, must I too nerve myself to pray for the loss of selfrespect to equip me for the horrible necessity of scandalisang (my dear sisters, are you ready?) by sloughing off my hope and tremors while we all swin together in the pool of Sodom? I shall shiver for my purity while they will weepbig for your sins. Away with covered words, new Solemonities for old Badsheetbaths! That inharmonious detail, did you name it? Cold caldor! Gee! Victory! Now, opprobro of underslung pipes, johnjacobs, while yet an adolescent (what do I say?), while still puerile in your tubsuit with buttonlegs, you got a handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders (you know, Monsieur Abgott, in your art of arts, to your cost as well as I do (and don’t try to hide it) the penals lots I am now poking at) and the wheeze sort of was you should (if you were as bould a stroke now as the curate that christened you, sonny douth-the-candle!) repopulate the land of your birth and count up your progeny by the hungered head and the angered thousand but you thwarted [p.189] the wious pish of your cogodparents, soph, among countless occasions of failing (for, said you, I will elenchate), adding to the malice of your transgression, yes, and changing its nature, (you see I have read your theology for you) alternating the morosity of my delectations — a philtred love, trysting by tantrums, small peace in ppenmark — with sensibility, sponsibility, passibility and prostability, your lubbock’s other fear pleasures of a butler’s life, even extruding your strabismal apologia, when legibly depressed, upon defenceless paper and thereby adding to the already unhappiness of this our popeyed world, scribblative! — all that too with cantreds of countless catchaleens, the mannish as many as the minneful, congested around and about you for acres and roods and poles or perches, thick as the fluctuant sands of Chalwador, accomplished women, indeed fully educanded, far from being old and rich behind their dream of arrivisme, if they have only their honour left, and not deterred by bad weather when consumed by amorous passion, struggling to possess themselves of your boosh, one son of Sorge for all daughters of Anguish, solus cum sola sive cuncties cum omnibobs (I’d have been the best man for you, myself), mutely aying for that natural knot, debituary vases or vessels preposterous, for what would not have cost you ten bolivars of collarwork or the price of one ping pang, just a lilt, let us trillt, of the oldest song in the wooed woodworld, (two-we! to-one!), accompanied by a plain gold band! Hail! Hail! Highbosomheaving Missmisstress Morna of the allsweetheartening bridemuredemeanour! Her eye’s so gladsome we’ll all take shares in the —— groom!

Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word, you, who sleep at our vigil and fast for our feast, you with your dislocated reason, have cutely foretold, a jophet in your own absence, by blind poring upon your many scalds and burns and blisters, impetiginous sore and pustules, by the auspices of that raven cloud, your shade, and by the auguries of rooks in parlament, death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot [p.190] of sweetempered gunpowdered didst unto dudst but it never stphruck your mudhead’s obtundity (O hell, here comes our funeral! O pest, I’ll miss the post!) that the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel, the more onions you cry over, the more bullbeef you butch, the more mutton you crackerhack, the more potherbs you pound, the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon and the harder you gruel with more grease to your elbow the merrier fumes your new Irish stew.

O, by the way, yes, another thing occurs to me. You let me tell you, with the utmost politeness, were very ordinarily designed, your birthwrong was, to fall in with Plan, as our nationals should, as all nationists must, and do a certain office (what, I will not tell you) in a certain holy office (nor will I say where) during certain agonising office hours (a clerical party all to yourself) from such a year to such an hour on such and such a date at so and so much a week pro anno (Guinness’s, may I remind, were just agulp for you, failing in which you might have taken the scales off boilers like any boskop of Yorek) and do your little thruppenny bit and thus earn from the nation true thanks, right here in our place of burden, your bourne of travail and ville of tares, where after a divine’s prodigence you drew the first watergasp in your life, from the crib where you once was bit to the crypt you’ll be twice as shy of, same as we, long of us, alone with the colt in the curner, where you were as popular as an armenial with the faithful, and you set fire to my tailcoat when I hold the paraffin smoker under yours (I hope that chimney’s clear) but, slackly shirking both your bullet and your billet, you beat it backwards like Boulanger from Galway (but he combed the grass against his stride) to sing us a song of alibi, (the cuthone call over the greybounding slowrolling amplyheaving metamorphoseous that oozy rocks parapangle their preposters with) nomad, mooner by lamplight, antinos, shemming amid everyone’s repressed laughter to conceal your scatchophily by mating, like a thoroughpaste prosodite, masculine monosyllables of the same numerical mus, an Irish emigrant the wrong way out, sitting on your crooked [p.191] sixpenny stile, an unfrillfrocked quackfriar, you (will you for the laugh of Scheekspair just help mine with the epithet?) semisemitic serendipitist, you (thanks, I think that describes you) Europasianised Afferyank!

Shall we follow each others a steplonger, drowner of daggers, whiles our liege, tilyet a stranger in the frontyard of his happiness, is taking, (heal helper! one gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all!) his refreshment?

There grew up beside you, amid our orisons of the speediest in Novena Lodge, Novara Avenue, in Patripodium-am-Bummel, oaf, outofwork, one remove from an unwashed savage, on his keeping and in yours, (I pose you know why possum hides is cause he haint the nogumtreeumption) that other, Immaculatus, from head to foot, sir, that pure one, Altrues of other times, he who was well known to celestine circles before he sped aloft, our handsome young spiritual physician that was to be, seducing every sense to selfwilling celebesty, the most winning counterfeuille on our incomeshare lotetree, a chum of the angelets, a youth those reporters so pettitily wanted as gamefellow that they asked his mother for ittle earps brupper to let him tome to Tindertarten, pease, and bing his scooter ’long and ’tend they were all real brothers in the big justright home where Dodd lives, just to teddyfy the life out of him and pat and pass him one with other like musk from hand to hand, that mothersmothered model, that goodlooker with not a flaw whose spiritual toilettes were the talk of half the town, for sunset wear and nightfallen use and daybroken donning and nooncheon showing and the very thing for teasetime, but him you laid low with one hand one fine May morning in the Meddle of your Might, your bosom foe, because he mussed your speller on you or because he cut a pretty figure in the focus of your frontispecs (not one did you slay, no, but a continent!) to find out how his innards worked!

Ever read of that greatgrand landfather of our visionbuilders, Baaboo, the bourgeoismeister, who thought to touch both himmels at the punt of his risen stiffstaff and how wishywashy sank [p.192] the waters of his thought? Ever thought of that hereticalist Marcon and the two scissymaidies and how bulkily he shat the Ructions gunorrhal? Ever hear of that foxy, that lupo and that monkax and the virgin heir of the Morrisons, eh, blethering ape?

Malingerer in luxury, collector general, what has Your Lowness done in the mealtime with all the hamilkcars of cooked vegetables, the hatfuls of stewed fruit, the suitcases of coddled ales, the Parish funds, me schamer, man, that you kittycoaxed so flexibly out of charitable butteries by yowling heavy with a hollow voice drop of your horrible awful poverty of mind so as you couldn’t even pledge a crown of Thorne’s to pawn a coat off Trevi’s and as how you was bad no end, so you was, so whelp you Sinner Pitre and Sinner Poule, with the chicken’s gape and pas mal de siècle, which, by the by, Reynaldo, is the ordinary emetic French for grenadier’s drip. To let you have your plank and your bonewash (O the hastroubles you lost!), to give you your pound of platinum and a thousand thongs a year (O, you were excruciated, in honour bound to the cross of your own cruelfiction!) to let you have your Sarday spree and holinight sleep (fame would come to you twixt a sleep and a wake) and leave to lie till Paraskivee and the cockcock crows for Danmark. (O Jonathan, your estomach!) The simian has no sentiment secretions but weep cataracts for all me, Pain the Shamman! Oft in the smelly night will they wallow for a clutch of the famished hand, I say, them bearded jezabelles you hired to rob you, while on your sodden straw impolitely you encored (Airish and nawboggaleesh!) those hornmade ivory dreams you reved of the Ruth you called your companionate, a beauty from the bible, of the flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylebone. But the dormer moonshee smiled selene and the lightthrowers knickered: who’s whinging we? Comport yourself, you inconsistency! Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day? Is it not the fact (gainsay me, cakeeater!) that, while whistlewhirling your crazy elegies around Templetombmount joyntstone, (let him pass, pleasegoodjesusalem, in a bundle of straw, he was balbettised after hay- [p.193] making) you squandered among underlings the overload of your extravagance and made a hottentot of dulpeners crawsick with your crumbs? Am I not right? Yes? Yes? Yes? Holy wax and holifer! Don’t tell me, Leon of the fold, that you are not a loanshark! Look up, old sooty, be advised by mux and take your medicine. The Good Doctor mulled it. Mix it twice before repastures and powder three times a day. It does marvels for your gripins and it’s fine for the solitary worm.

Let me finish! Just a little judas tonic, my ghem of all jokes, to make you go green in the gazer. Do you hear what I’m seeing, hammet? And remember that golden silence gives consent, Mr Anklegazer! Cease to be civil, learn to say nay! Whisht! Come here, Herr Studiosus, till I tell you a wig in your ear. We’ll do a whisper drive, for if the barishnyas got a twitter of it they’d tell the housetops and then all Cadbury would go crackers. Look! Do you see your dial in the rockingglass? Look well! Bend down a stigmy till I! It’s secret! Iggri, I say, the booseleers! I had it from Lamppost Shawe. And he had it from the Mullah. And Mull took it from a Bluecoat schooler. And Gay Socks jot it from Potapheu’s wife. And Rantipoll tipped the wink from old Mrs Tinbullet. And as for she was confussed by pro-Brother Thacolicus. And the good brother feels he would need to defecate you. And the Flimsy Follettes are simply beside each other. And Kelly, Kenny and Keogh are up up and in arms. That a cross may crush me if I refuse to believe in it. That I may rock anchor through the ages if I hope it’s not true. That the host may choke me if I beneighbour you without my charity! Sh! Shem, you are. Sh! You are mad!

He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm.

MERCIUS (of hisself): Domine vopiscus! My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault! Pariah, cannibal Cain, I who oathily forswore the womb that bore you and the paps I sometimes sucked, you who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams, haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been or you meant to becoming, [p.194] bewailing like a man that innocence which I could not defend like a woman, lo, you there, Cathmon-Carbery, and thank Movies from the innermost depths of my still attrite heart, Wherein the days of youyouth are evermixed mimine, now ere the compline hour of being alone athands itself and a puff or so before we yield our spiritus to the wind, for (though that royal one has not yet drunk a gouttelette from his consummation and the flowerpot on the pole, the spaniel pack and their quarry, retainers and the public house proprietor have not budged a millimetre and all that has been done has yet to be done and done again, when’s day’s woe, and lo, you’re doomed, joyday dawns and, la, you dominate) it is to you, firstborn and firstfruit of woe, to me, branded sheep, pick of the wasterpaperbaskel, by the tremours of Thundery and Ulerin’s dogstar, you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil, ay, clothed upon with the metuor and shimmering like the horescens, astroglodynamonologos, the child of Nilfit’s father, blzb, to me unseen blusher in an obscene coalhole, the cubilibum of your secret sigh, dweller in the downandoutermost where voice only of the dead may come, because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because, O me lonly son, ye are forgetting me!, that our turfbrown mummy is acoming, alpilla, beltilla, ciltilla, deltilla, running with her tidings, old the news of the great big world, sonnies had a scrap, woewoewoe! bab’s baby walks at seven months, waywayway! bride leaves her raid at Punchestime, stud stoned before a racecourseful, two belles that make the one appeal, dry yanks will visit old sod, and fourtiered skirts are up, mesdames, while Parimiknie wears popular short legs, and twelve hows to mix a tipsy wake, did ye hear, colt Cooney? did ye ever, filly Fortescue? with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking, rocks drops in her tachie, tramtokens in her hair, all waived to a point and then all inuendation, little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght’s green hills and the pools of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington and [p.195] slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.

He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.

— Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!

 ® 

[p.196]
O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all

about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. And don’t butt me — hike! — when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil! Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. Wallop it well with your battle and clean it. My wrists are wrusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it! What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under loch and neagh? It was put in the newses what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But toms will till. I know he well. Temp untamed will hist for no man. As you spring so shall you neap. O, the roughty old rappe! Minxing marrage and making loof. [p.197] Reeve Gootch was right and Reeve Drughad was sinistrous! And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous eld duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking wiesel rat. And his derry’s own drawl and his corksown blather and his doubling stutter and his gullaway swank. Ask Lictor Hackett or Lector Reade of Garda Growley or the Boy with the Billyclub. How elster is he a called at all? Qu’appelle? Huges Caput Earlyfouler. Or where was he born or how was he found? Urgothland, Tvistown on the Kattekat? New Hunshire, Concord on the Merrimake? Who blocksmitt her saft anvil or yelled lep to her pail? Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve’s or were him and her but captain spliced? For mine ether duck I thee drake. And by my wildgaze I thee gander. Flowey and Mount on the brink of time makes wishes and fears for a happy isthmass. She can show all her lines, with love, license to play. And if they don’t remarry that hook and eye may! O, passmore that and oxus another! Don Dom Dombdomb and his wee follyo! Was his help inshored in the Stork and Pelican against bungelars, flu and third risk parties? I heard he dug good tin with his doll, delvan first and duvlin after, when he raped her home, Sabrine asthore, in a parakeet’s cage, by dredgerous lands and devious delts, playing catched and mythed with the gleam of her shadda, (if a flic had been there to pop up and pepper him!) past auld min’s manse and Maisons Allfou and the rest of incurables and the last of immurables, the quaggy waag for stumbling. Who sold you that jackalantern’s tale? Pemmican’s pasty pie! Not a grasshoop to ring her, not an antsgrain of ore. In a gabbard he barqued it, the boat of life, from the harbourless Ivernikan Okean, till he spied the loom of his landfall and he loosed two croakers from under his tilt, the gran Phenician rover. By the smell of her kelp they made the pigeonhouse. Like fun they did! But where was Himself, the timoneer? That marchantman he suivied their scutties right over the wash, his cameleer’s burnous breezing up on him, till with his runagate bowmpriss he roade and borst her bar. Pilcomayo! Suchcaughtawan! And the whale’s away with the grayling! Tune [p.198] your pipes and fall ahumming, you born ijypt, and you’re nothing short of one! Well, ptellomey soon and curb your escumo. When they saw him shoot swift up her sheba sheath, like any gay lord salomon, her bulls they were ruhring, surfed with spree. Boyarka buah! Boyana bueh! He erned his lille Bunbath hard, our staly bred, the trader. He did. Look at here. In this wet of his prow. Don’t you know he was kaldt a bairn of the brine, Wasserbourne the waterbaby? Havemmarea, so he was! H.C.E. has a codfisck ee. Shyr she’s nearly as badher as him herself. Who? Anna Livia? Ay, Anna Livia. Do you know she was calling bakvandets sals from all around, nyumba noo, chamba choo, to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy? She was? Gota pot! Yssel that the limmat? As El Negro winced when he wonced in La Plate. O, tell me all I want to hear, how loft she was lift a laddery dextro! A coneywink after the bunting fell. Letting on she didn’t care, sina feza, me absantee, him man in passession, the proxenete! Proxenete and phwhat is phthat? Emme for your reussischer Honddu jarkon! Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate. Did they never sharee you ebro at skol, you antiabecedarian? It’s just the same as if I was to go par examplum now in conservancy’s cause out of telekinesis and proxenete you. For coxyt sake and is that what she is? Botlettle I thought she’d act that loa. Didn’t you spot her in her windaug, wubbling up on an osiery chair, with a meusic before her all cunniform letters, pretending to ribble a reedy derg on a fiddle she bogans without a band on? Sure she can’t fiddan a dee, with bow or abandon! Sure, she can’t! Tista suck. Well, I never now heard the like of that! Tell me moher. Tell me moatst. Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus, with the tares at his thor and the buboes for ages and neither bowman nor shot abroad and bales allbrant on the crests of rockies and nera lamp in kitchen or church and giant’s holes in Grafton’s causeway and deathcap mushrooms round Funglus grave and the great tribune’s barrow all darnels occumule, sittang sambre on his sett, drammen and drommen, usking queasy quizzers of his ruful continence, his childlinen scarf to encourage his obsequies where he’d check their [p.199] debths in that mormon’s thames, be questing and handsetl, hop, step and a deepend, with his berths in their toiling moil, his swallower open from swolf to fore and the snipes of the gutter pecking his crocs, hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over hunselv, dreeing his weird, with his dander up, and his fringe combed over his eygs and droming on loft till the sight of the sternes, after zwarthy kowse and weedy broeks and the tits of buddy and the loits of pest and to peer was Parish worth thette mess. You’d think all was dodo belonging to him how he durmed adranse in durance vaal. He had been belching for severn years. And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of a child, Wendawanda, a fingerthick, in a Lapsummer skirt and damazon cheeks, for to ishim bonzour to her dear dubber Dan. With neuphraties and sault from his maggias. And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs, yayis, and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or a dzoupgan of Kaffue mokau an sable or Sikiang sukry or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shinkobread (hamjambo, bana?) for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt and as rash as she’d russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve (metauwero rage it swales and rieses) my hardey Hek he’d kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough. And then she’d esk to vistule a hymn, The Heart Bowed Down or The Rakes of Mallow or Chelli Michele’s La Calumnia è un Vermicelli or a balfy bit ov old Jo Robidson. Sucho fuffing a fifeing ’twould cut you in two! She’d bate the hen that crowed on the turrace of Babbel. What harm if she knew how to cockle her mouth! And not a mag out of Hum no more than out of the mangle weight. Is that a faith? That’s the fact. Then riding the ricka and roya romanche, Annona, gebroren aroostokrat Nivia, dochter of Sense and Art, with Sparks’ pirryphlickathims funkling her fan, anner frostivying tresses dasht with virevlies,— [p.200] while the prom beauties sreeked nith their bearers’ skins! — in a period gown of changeable jade that would robe the wood of two cardinals’ chairs and crush poor Cullen and smother MacCabe. O blazerskate! Theirs porpor patches! And brahming to him down the feedchute, with her femtyfyx kinds of fondling endings, the poother rambling off her nose: Vuggybarney, Wickerymandy! Hello, ducky, please don’t die! Do you know what she started cheeping after, with a choicey voicey like water-glucks or Madame Delba to Romeoreszk? You’ll never guess. Tell me. Tell me. Phoebe, dearest, tell, O tell me and I loved you better nor you knew. And letting on hoon var daft about the warbly sangs from over holmen: High hellskirt saw ladies hensmoker lilyhung pigger: and soay and soan and so firth and so forth in a tone sonora and Oom Bothar below like Bheri-Bheri in his sandy cloak, so umvolosy, as deaf as a yawn, the stult! Go away! Poor deef old deary! Yare only teasing! Anna Liv? As chalk is my judge! And didn’t she up in sorgues and go and trot doon and stand in her douro, puffing her old dudheen, and every shirvant siligirl or wensum farmerette walking the pilend roads, Sawy, Fundally, Daery or Maery, Milucre, Awny or Graw, usedn’t she make her a simp or sign to slip inside by the sullyport? You don’t say, the sillypost? Bedouix but I do! Calling them in, one by one (To Blockbeddum here! Here the Shoebenacaddie!) and legging a jig or so on the sihl to show them how to shake their benders and the dainty how to bring to mind the gladdest garments out of sight and all the way of a maid with a man and making a sort of a cackling noise like two and a penny or half a crown and holding up a silliver shiner. Lordy, lordy, did she so? Well, of all the ones ever I heard! Throwing all the neiss little whores in the world at him! To inny captured wench you wish of no matter what sex of pleissful ways two adda tammar a lizzy a lossie to hug and hab haven in Humpy’s apron!

And what was the wyerye rima she made! Odet! Odet! Tell me the trent of it while I’m lathering hail out of Denis Florence MacCarthy’s combies. Rise it, flut ye, pian piena! I’m dying down off my iodine feet until I lerryn Anna Livia’s cushingloo, [p.201] that was writ by one and rede by two and trouved by a poule in the parco! I can see that, I see you are. How does it tummel? Listen now. Are you listening? Yes, yes! Idneed I am! Tarn your ore ouse! Essonne inne!

By earth and the cloudy but I badly want a brandnew bankside, bedamp and I do, and a plumper at that!

For the putty affair I have is wore out, so it is, sitting, yaping and waiting for my old Dane hodder dodderer, my life in death companion, my frugal key of our larder, my much-altered camel’s hump, my jointspoiler, my maymoon’s honey, my fool to the last Decemberer, to wake himself out of his winter’s doze and bore me down like he used to.

Is there irwell a lord of the manor or a knight of the shire at strike, I wonder, that’d dip me a dace or two in cash for washing and darning his worshipful socks for him now we’re run out of horsebrose and milk?

Only for my short Brittas bed made’s as snug as it smells it’s out I’d lep and off with me to the slobs della Tolka or the plage au Clontarf to feale the gay aire of my salt troublin bay and the race of the saywint up me ambushure.

Onon! Onon! tell me more. Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul. Down to what made the potters fly into jagsthole. And why were the vesles vet. That homa fever’s winning me wome. If a mahun of the horse but hard me! We’d be bundukiboi meet askarigal. Well, now comes the hazelhatchery part. After Clondalkin the Kings’s Inns. We’ll soon be there with the freshet. How many aleveens had she in tool? I can’t rightly rede you that. Close only knows. Some say she had three figures to fill and confined herself to a hundred eleven, wan bywan bywan, making meanacuminamoyas. Olaph lamm et, all that pack? We won’t have room in the kirkeyaard. She can’t remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them by the grace of her boxing bishop’s infallible slipper, the cane for Kund and abbles for Eyolf and ayther nayther for Yakov Yea. A hundred and how? They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle. O loreley! What a loddon lodes! Heigh ho! But it’s quite on the cards she’ll shed [p.202] more and merrier, twills and trills, sparefours and spoilfives, nordsihkes and sudsevers and ayes and neins to a litter. Grandfarthring nap and Messamisery and the knave of all knaves and the joker. Heehaw! She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most. Shoal she was, gidgad. She had a flewmen of her owen. Then a toss nare scared that lass, so aimai moe, that’s agapo! Tell me, tell me, how cam she camlin through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? Casting her perils before our swains from Fonte-in-Monte to Tidingtown and from Tidingtown tilhavet. Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pietaring out and clyding by on her eastway. Waiwhou was the first thurever burst? Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tilar, souldrer, salor, Pieman Peace or Polistaman. That’s the thing I’m elwys on edge to esk. Push up and push vardar and come to uphill headquarters! Was it waterlows year, after Grattan or Flood, or when maids were in Arc or when three stood hosting? Fidaris will find where the Doubt arises like Nieman from Nirgends found the Nihil. Worry you sighin foh, Albern, O Anser? Untie the gemman’s fistiknots, Qvic and Nuancee! She can’t put her hand on him for the moment. Tez thelon langlo, walking weary! Such a loon waybashwards to row! She sid herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how blyth she played or how, when, why, where and who offon he jumpnad her and how it was gave her away. She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her. She thought she’s sankh neathe the ground with nymphant shame when he gave her the tigris eye! O happy fault! Me wish it was he! You’re wrong there, corribly wrong! Tisn’t only tonight you’re anacheronistic! It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere, in county [p.203] Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she’d lave Kilbride and go foaming under Horsepass bridge, with the great southerwestern windstorming her traces and the midland’s grainwaster asarch for her track, to wend her ways byandby, robecca or worse, to spin and to grind, to swab and to thrash, for all her golden lifey in the barleyfields and pennylotts of Humphrey’s fordofhurdlestown and lie with a landleaper, wellingtonorseher. Alesse, the lagos of girly days! For the dove of the dunas! Wasut? Izod? Are you sarthin suir? Not where the Finn fits into the Mourne, not where the Nore takes lieve of Blœm, not where the Braye divarts the Farer, not where the Moy changez her minds twixt Cullin and Conn tween Cunn and Collin? Or where Neptune sculled and Tritonville rowed and leandros three bumped heroines two? Neya, narev, nen, nonni, nos! Then whereabouts in Ow and Ovoca? Was it yst with wyst or Lucan Yokan or where the hand of man has never set foot? Dell me where, the fairy ferse time! I will if you listen. You know the dinkel dale of Luggelaw? Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown. By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, the reignbeau’s heavenarches arronged orranged her. Afrothdizzying galbs, her enamelled eyes indergoading him on to the vierge violetian. Wish a wish! Why a why? Mavro! Letty Lerck’s lafing light throw those laurals now on her daphdaph teasesong petrock. Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd. He cuddle not help himself, thurso that hot on him, he had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he baised his lippes in smiling mood, kiss akiss after kisokushk (as he warned her niver to, niver to, nevar) on Anna-na-Poghue’s of [p.204] the freckled forehead. While you’d parse secheressa she hielt her souff. But she ruz two feet hire in her aisne aestumation. And steppes on stilts ever since. That was kissuahealing with bantur for balm! O, wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy? Nautic Naama’s now her navn. Two lads in scoutsch breeches went through her before that, Barefoot Burn and Wallowme Wade, Lugnaquillia’s noblesse pickts, before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler not to mention a bulgic porterhouse barge. And ere that again, leada, laida, all unraidy, too faint to buoy the fairiest rider, too frail to flirt with a cygnet’s plume, she was licked by a hound, Chirripa-Chirruta, while poing her pee, pure and simple, on the spur of the hill in old Kippure, in birdsong and shearingtime, but first of all, worst of all, the wiggly livvly, she sideslipped out by a gap in the Devil’s glen while Sally her nurse was sound asleep in a sloot and, feefee fiefie, fell over a spillway before she found her stride and lay and wriggled in all the stagnant black pools of rainy under a fallow coo and she laughed innocefree with her limbs aloft and a whole drove of maiden hawthorns blushing and looking askance upon her.

Drop me the sound of the findhorn’s name, Mtu or Mti, sombogger was wisness. And drip me why in the flenders was she frickled. And trickle me through was she marcellewaved or was it weirdly a wig she wore. And whitside did they droop their glows in their florry, aback to wist or affront to sea? In fear to hear the dear so near or longing loth and loathing longing? Are you in the swim or are you out? O go in, go on, go an! I mean about what you know. I know right well what you mean. Rother! You’d like the coifs and guimpes, snouty, and me to do the greasy jub on old Veronica’s wipers. What am I rancing now and I’ll thank you? Is it a pinny or is it a surplice? Arran, where’s your nose? And where’s the starch? That’s not the vesdre benediction smell. I can tell from here by their eau de Colo and the scent of her oder they’re Mrs Magrath’s. And you ought to have aird them. They’ve moist come off her. Creases in silk they are, not crampton lawn. Baptiste me, father, for she has sinned! [p.205] Through her catchment ring she freed them easy, with her hips’hurrahs for her knees’dontelleries. The only parr with frills in old the plain. So they are, I declare! Welland well! If tomorrow keeps fine who’ll come tripping to sightsee? How’ll? Ask me next what I haven’t got! The Belvedarean exhibitioners. In their cruisery caps and oarsclub colours. What hoo, they band! And what hoa, they buck! And here is her nubilee letters too. Ellis on quay in scarlet thread. Linked for the world on a flushcaloured field. Annan exe after to show they’re not Laura Keown’s. O, may the diabolo twisk your seifety pin! You child of Mammon, Kinsella’s Lilith! Now who has been tearing the leg of her drawars on her? Which leg is it? The one with the bells on it. Rinse them out and aston along with you! Where did I stop? Never stop! Continuarration! You’re not there yet. I amstel waiting. Garonne, garonne!

Well, after it was put in the Mericy Cordial Mendicants’ Sitterdag-Zindeh-Munaday Wakeschrift (for once they sullied their white kidloves, chewing cuds after their dinners of cheeckin and beggin, with their show us it here and their mind out of that and their when you’re quite finished with the reading matarial), even the snee that snowdon his hoaring hair had a skunner against him. Thaw, thaw, sava, savuto! Score Her Chuff Exsquire! Everywhere erriff you went and every bung you arver dropped into, in cit or suburb or in addled areas, the Rose and Bottle or Phoenix Tavern or Power’s Inn or Jude’s Hotel or wherever you scoured the countryside from Nannywater to Vartryville or from Porta Lateen to the lootin quarter you found his ikom etsched tipside down or the cornerboys cammocking his guy and Morris the Man, with the role of a royss in his turgos the turrible, (Evropeahahn cheic house, unskimmed sooit and yahoort, hamman now cheekmee, Ahdahm this way make, Fatima, half turn!) reeling and railing round the local as the peihos piped und ubanjees twanged, with oddfellow’s triple tiara busby rotundarinking round his scalp. Like Pate-by-the-Neva or Pete-over-Meer. This is the Hausman all paven and stoned, that cribbed the Cabin that never was owned that cocked his leg and hennad his Egg. And [p.206] the mauldrin rabble around him in areopage, fracassing a great bingkan cagnan with their timpan crowders. Mind your Grimmfather! Think of your Ma! Hing the Hong is his jove’s hangnomen! Lilt a bolero, bulling a law! She swore on croststyx nyne wyndabouts she’s be level with all the snags of them yet. Par the Vulnerable Virgin’s Mary del Dame! So she said to herself she’d frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you niever heard. What plan? Tell me quick and dongu so crould! What the meurther did she mague? Well, she bergened a zakbag, a shammy mailsack, with the lend of a loan of the light of his lampion, off one of her swapsons, Shaun the Post, and then she went and consulted her chapboucqs, old Mot Moore, Casey’s Euclid and the Fashion Display and made herself tidal to join in the mascarete. O gig goggle of gigguels. I can’t tell you how! It’s too screaming to rizo, rabbit it all! Minneha, minnehi minaaehe, minneho! O but you must, you must really! Make my hear it gurgle gurgle, like the farest gargle gargle in the dusky dirgle dargle! By the holy well of Mulhuddart I swear I’d pledge my chanza getting to heaven through Tirry and Killy’s mount of impiety to hear it all, aviary word! O, leave me my faculties, woman, a while! If you don’t like my story get out of the punt. Well, have it your own way, so. Here, sit down and do as you’re bid. Take my stroke and bend to your bow. Forward in and pull your overthepoise! Lisp it slaney and crisp it quiet. Deel me longsome. Tongue your time now. Breathe thet deep. Thouat’s the fairway. Hurry slow and scheldt you go. Lynd us your blessed ashes here till I scrub the canon’s underpants. Flow now. Ower more. And pooleypooley.

First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greesed the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her [p.207] grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rehr, of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shellmarble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey, Annushka Lutetiavitch Pufflovah, and the lellipos cream to her lippeleens and the pick of the paintbox for her pommettes, from strawbirry reds to extra violates, and she sendred her boudeloire maids to His Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, the two chirsines, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin. A call to pay and light a taper, in Brie-on-Arrosa, back in a sprizzling. The cock striking mine, the stalls bridely sign, there’s Zambosy waiting for Me! She said she wouldn’t be half her length away. Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slang over her shulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came.

Describe her! Hustle along, why can’t you? Spitz on the iern while it’s hot. I wouldn’t miss her for irthing on nerthe. Not for the lucre of lomba strait. Oceans of Gaud, I mosel hear that! Ogowe presta! Leste, before Julia sees her! Ishekarry and washemeskad, the carishy caratimaney? Whole lady fair? Duodecimoroon? Bon a ventura? Malagassy? What had she on, the liddel oud oddity? How much did she scallop, harness and weights? Here she is, Amnisty Ann! Call her calamity electrifies man.

No electress at all but old Moppa Necessity, angin mother of injons. I’ll tell you a test. But you must sit still. Will you hold your peace and listen well to what I am going to say now? It might have been ten or twenty to one of the night of Allclose or the nexth of April when the flip of her hoogly igloo flappered and out toetippit a bushman woman, the dearest little moma ever you saw, nodding around her, all smiles, with ems of embarras and aues to awe, between two ages, a judyqueen, not up to your [p.208] elb. Quick, look at her cute and saise her quirk for the bicker she lives the slicker she grows. Save us and tagus! No more? Werra where in ourthe did you ever pick a Lambay chop as big as a battering ram? Ay, you’re right. I’m epte to forgetting, Like Liviam Liddle did Loveme Long. The linth of my hough, I say! She wore a ploughboy’s nailstudded clogs, a pair of ploughfields in themselves: a sugarloaf hat with a gaudyquiviry peak and a band of gorse for an arnoment and a hundred streamers dancing off it and a guildered pin to pierce it: owlglassy bicycles boggled her eyes: and a fishnetzeveil for the sun not to spoil the wrinklings of her hydeaspects: potatorings boucled the loose laubes of her laudsnarers: her nude cuba stockings were salmospotspeckled: she sported a galligo shimmy of hazevaipar tinto that never was fast till it ran in the washing: stout stays, the rivals, lined her length: her bloodorange bockknickers, a two in one garment, showed natural nigger boggers, fancyfastened, free to undo: her blackstripe tan joseph was sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy rushgreen epaulettes and a leadown here and there of royal swansruff: a brace of gaspers stuck in her hayrope garters: her civvy codroy coat with alpheubett buttons was boundaried round with a twobar tunnel belt: a fourpenny bit in each pocketside weighed her safe from the blowaway windrush; she had a clothespeg tight astride on her joki’s nose and she kep on grinding a sommething quaint in her fiumy mouth and the rrreke of the fluve of the tail of the gawan of her snuffdrab siouler’s skirt trailed ffiffty odd Irish miles behind her lungarhodes.

Hellsbells, I’m sorry I missed her! Sweet gumptyum and nobody fainted! But in whelk of her mouths? Was her naze alight? Everyone that saw her said the dowce little delia looked a bit queer. Lotsy trotsy, mind the poddle! Missus, be good and don’t fol in the say! Fenny poor hex she must have charred. Kickhams a frumpier ever you saw! Making mush mullet’s eyes at her boys dobelon. And they crowned her their chariton queen, all the maids. Of the may? You don’t say! Well for her she couldn’t see herself. I recknitz wharfore the darling murrayed her mirror. She did? Mersey me! There was a koros of drouthdropping sur- [p.209] facemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of her filimentation, lolling and leasing on North Lazers’ Waal all eelfare week by the Jukar Yoick’s and as soon as they saw her meander by that marritime way in her grasswinter’s weeds and twigged who was under her archdeaconess bonnet, Avondale’s fish and Clarence’s poison, sedges an to aneber, Wit-upon-Crutches to Master Bates: Between our two southsates and the granite they’re warming, or her face has been lifted or Alp has doped!

But what was the game in her mixed baggyrhatty? Just the tembo in her tumbo or pilipili from her pepperpot? Saas and taas and specis bizaas. And where in thunder did she plunder? Fore the battle or efter the ball? I want to get it frisk from the soorce. I aubette my bearb it’s worth while poaching on! Shake it up, do, do! That’s a good old son of a ditch! I promise I’ll make it worth your while. And I don’t mean maybe. Nor yet with a goodfor. Spey me pruth and I’ll tale you true.

Well, arundgirond in a waveney lyne aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder through narrowa mosses, the diliskydrear on our drier side and the vilde vetchvine agin us, curara here, careero there, not knowing which medway or weser to strike it, edereider, making chattahoochee all to her ain chichiu, like Santa Claus at the cree of the pale and puny, nistling to hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romas and Reims, on like a lech to be off like a dart, then bathing Dirty Hans’ spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door! On the matt, by the pourch and inunder the cellar. The rivulets ran aflod to see, the glashaboys, the pollynooties. Out of the paunschaup on to the pyre. And they all about her, juvenile leads and ingenuinas, from the slime of their slums and artesaned wellings, rickets and riots, like the Smyly boys at their vicereine’s levee. Vivi vienne, little Annchen! Vielo Anna, high life! Sing us a sula, O, susuria! Ausone sidulcis! Hasn’t she tambre! Chipping her and raising a bit of a chir or a [p.210] jary every dive she’d neb in her culdee sacco of wabbash she raabed and reach out her maundy meerschaundize, poor souvenir as per ricorder and all for sore aringarung, stinkers and heelers, laggards and primelads, her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them. For evil and ever. And kiks the buch. A tinker’s bann and a barrow to boil his billy for Gipsy Lee; a cartridge of cockaleekie soup for Chummy the Guardsman; for sulky Pender’s acid nephew deltoïd drops, curiously strong; a cough and a rattle and wildrose cheeks for poor Piccolina Petite MacFarlane; a jigsaw puzzle of needles and pins and blankets and shins between them for Isabel, Jezebel and Llewelyn Mmarriage; a brazen nose and pigiron mittens for Johnny Walker Beg; a papar flag of the saints and stripes for Kevineen O’Dea; a puffpuff for Pudge Craig and a nightmarching hare for Techertim Tombigby; waterleg and gumboots each for Bully Hayes and Hurricane Hartigan; a prodigal heart and fatted calves for Buck Jones, the pride of Clonliffe; a loaf of bread and a father’s early aim for Val from Skibereen; a jauntingcar for Larry Doolin, the Ballyclee jackeen; a seasick trip on a government ship for Teague O’Flanagan; a louse and trap for Jerry Coyle; slushmincepies for Andy Mackenzie; a hairclip and clackdish for Penceless Peter; that twelve sounds look for G. V. Brooke; a drowned doll, to face downwards for modest Sister Anne Mortimer; altar falls for Blanchisse’s bed; Wildairs’ breechettes for Magpeg Woppington; to Sue Dot a big eye; to Sam Dash a false step; snakes in clover, picked and scotched, and a vaticanned viper catcher’s visa for Patsy Presbys; a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick and a drop every minute for Stumblestone Davy; scruboak beads for beatified Biddy; two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely; for Saara Philpot a jordan vale tearorne; a pretty box of Pettyfib’s Powder for Eileen Aruna to whiten her teeth and outflash Helen Arhone; a whippingtop for Eddy Lawless; for Kitty Coleraine of Butterman’s Lane a penny wise for her foolish pitcher; a putty shovel for Terry the Puckaun; an apotamus mask for Promoter Dunne; a niester egg with a twicedated shell and a dynamight right for Pavl the Curate; [p.211] a collera morbous for Mann in the Cloack; a starr and girton for Draper and Deane; for Will-of-the-Wisp and Barny-the-Bark two mangolds noble to sweeden their bitters; for Oliver Bound a way in his frey; for Seumas, thought little, a crown he feels big; a tibertine’s pile with a Congoswood cross on the back for Sunny Twimjim; a praises be and spare me days for Brian-the Bravo; penteplenty of pity with lubilashings of lust for Olona Lena Magdalena; for Camilla, Dromilla, Ludmilla, Mamilla, a bucket, a packet, a book and a pillow; for Nancy Shannon a Tuami brooch; for Dora Riparia Hopeandwater a cooling douche and a warmingpan; a pair of Blarney braggs for Wally Meagher; a hairpin slatepencil for Elsie Oram to scratch her toby, doing her best with her volgar fractions; an old age pension for Betty Bellezza; a bag of the blues for Funny Fitz; a Missa pro Messa for Taff de Taff; Jill, the spoon of a girl, for Jack, the broth of a boy; a Rogerson Crusoe’s Friday fast for Caducus Angelus Rubiconstein; three hundred and sixtysix poplin tyne for revery warp in the weaver’s woof for Victor Hugonot; a stiff steaded rake and good varians muck for Kate the Cleaner; a hole in the ballad for Hosty; two dozen of cradles for J.F.X.P. Coppinger; tenpounten on the pop for the daulphins born with five spoiled squibs for Infanta; a letter to last a lifetime for Maggi beyond by the ashpit; the heftiest frozenmeat woman from Lusk to Livienbad for Felim the Ferry; spas and speranza and symposium’s syrup for decayed and blind and gouty Gough; a change of naves and joys of ills for Armoricus Tristram Amoor Saint Lawrence; a guillotine shirt for Reuben Redbreast and hempen suspendeats for Brennan on the Moor; an oakanknee for Conditor Sawyer and musquodoboits for Great Tropical Scott; a C3 peduncle for Karmalite Kane; a sunless map of the month, including the sword and stamps, for Shemus O’Shaun the Post; a jackal with hide for Browne but Nolan; a stonecold shoulder for Donn Joe Vance; all lock and no stable for Honorbright Merreytrickx; a big drum for Billy Dunboyne; a guilty goldeny bellows, below me blow me, for Ida Ida and a hushaby rocker, Elletrouvetout, for Who-is-silvier — Where-is-he?; whatever you like to swilly to swash, [p.212] Yuinness or Yennessy, Laagen or Niger, for Festus King and Roaring Peter and Frisky Shorty and Treacle Tom and O. B. Behan and Sully the Thug and Master Magrath and Peter Cloran and O’Delawarr Rossa and Nerone MacPacem and whoever you chance to meet knocking around; and a pig’s bladder balloon for Selina Susquehanna Stakelum. But what did she give to Pruda Ward and Katty Kanel and Peggy Quilty and Briery Brosna and Teasy Kieran and Ena Lappin and Muriel Maassy and Zusan Camac and Melissa Bradogue and Flora Ferns and Fauna Fox-Goodman and Grettna Greaney and Penelope Inglesante and Lezba Licking like Leytha Liane and Roxana Rohan with Simpatica Sohan and Una Bina Laterza and Trina La Mesme and Philomena O’Farrell and Irmak Elly and Josephine Foyle and Snakeshead Lily and Fountainoy Laura and Marie Xavier Agnes Daisy Frances de Sales Macleay? She gave them ilcka madre’s daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein: but the grapes that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress. So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears as from Shem, her penmight, life past befoul his prime.

My colonial, wardha bagful! A bakereen’s dusind with tithe tillies to boot. That’s what you may call a tale of a tub! And Hibernonian market! All that and more under one crinoline envelope if you dare to break the porkbarrel seal. No wonder they’d run from her pison plague. Throw us your hudson soap for the honour of Clane! The wee taste the water left. I’ll raft it back, first thing in the marne. Merced mulde! Ay, and don’t forget the reckitts I lohaned you. You’ve all the swirls your side of the current. Well, am I to blame for that if I have? Who said you’re to blame for that if you have? You’re a bit on the sharp side. I’m on the wide. Only snuffers’ cornets drifts my way that the cracka dvine chucks out of his cassock, with her estheryear’s marsh narcissus to make him recant his vanitty fair. Foul strips of his chinook’s bible I do be reading, dodwell disgustered but chickled with chuckles at the tittles is drawn on the tattlepage. Senior ga dito: Faciasi Omo! E omo fu fò. Ho! Ho! Senior ga dito: Faciasi Hidamo! Hidamo se ga facessà. Ha! Ha! And Die Windermere [p.213] Dichter and Lefanu (Sheridan’s) old House by the Coachyard and Mill (J.) On Woman with Ditto on the Floss. Ja, a swamp for Altmuehler and a stone for his flossies! I know how racy they move his wheel. My hands are blawcauld between isker and suda like that piece of pattern chayney there, lying below. Or where is it? Lying beside the sedge I saw it. Hoangho, my sorrow, I’ve lost it! Aimihi! With that turbary water who could see? So near and yet so far! But O, gihon! I lovat a gabber. I could listen to maure and moravar again. Regn onder river. Flies do your float. Thick is the life for mere.

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ’Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s [p.214] beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with [p.215] them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine.

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel [p.216] as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

 ® 

II

[p.219] Every evening at lighting up o’clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem Club douncestears.) Entrancings: gads, a scrab; the quality, one large shilling. Newly billed for each wickeday perfumance. Somndoze massinees. By arraignment, childream’s hours, expercatered. Jampots, rinsed porters, taken in token. With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing of ghosters, with the benediction of the Holy Genesius Archimimus and under the distinguished patronage of their Elderships the Oldens from the four coroners of Findrias, Murias, Gorias and Falias, Messoirs the Coarbs, Clive Sollis, Galorius Kettle, Pobiedo Lancey and Pierre Dusort, while the Caesar-in-Chief looks. On. Sennet. As played to the Adelphi by the Brothers Bratislavoff (Hyrcan and Haristobulus), after humpteen dumpteen revivals. Before all the King’s Hoarsers with all the Queen’s Mum. And wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids. While fern may cald us until firn make cold. The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, adopted from the Ballymooney Bloodriddon Murther by Bluechin Blackdillain (authorways ‘Big Storey’), featuring:

glugg (Mr Seumas McQuillad, hear the riddles between the robot in his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues’ gallery), the bold bad bleak boy of the storybooks, who, when the tabs go [p.220] up, as we discover, because he knew to mutch, has been divorced into disgrace court by

the floras (Girl Scouts from St. Bride’s Finishing Establishment, demand acidulateds), a month’s bunch of pretty maidens who, while they pick on her, their pet peeve, form with valkyrienne licence the guard for

izod (Miss Butys Pott, ask the attendantess for a leaflet), a bewitching blonde who dimples delightfully and is approached in loveliness only by her grateful sister reflection in a mirror, the cloud of the opal, who, having jilted Glugg, is being fatally fascinated by

chuff (Mr Sean O’Mailey, see the chalk and sanguine pictograph on the safety drop), the fine frank fairhaired fellow of the fairytales, who wrestles for tophole with the bold bad bleak boy Glugg, geminally about caps or puds or tog bags or bog gats or chuting rudskin gunerally or something, until they adumbrace a pattern of somebody else or other, after which they are both carried off the set and brought home to be well soaped, sponged and scrubbed again by

ann (Miss Corrie Corriendo, Grischun scoula, bring the babes, Pieder, Poder and Turtey, she mistributes mandamus monies, after perdunamento, hendrud aloven entrees, pulcinellis must not miss our national rooster’s rag), their poor little old mother-in-lieu, who is woman of the house, playing opposite to

hump (Mr Makeall Gone, read the sayings from Laxdalesaga in the programme about King Ericus of Schweden and the spirit’s whispers in his magical helmet), cap-a-pipe with watch and topper, coat, crest and supporters, the cause of all our grievances, the whirl, the flash and the trouble, who, having partially recovered from a recent impeachment due to egg everlasting, but throughandthoroughly proconverted, propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance with the remnance of the emblence reveiling a quemdam supercargo, of The Rockery, Poopinheavin, engaged in entertaining in his pilgrimst customhouse at Caherlehome-upon-Eskur those statutory persons

[p.221] the customers (Components of the Afterhour Courses at St. Patricius’ Academy for Grownup Gentlemen, consult the annuary, coldporters sibsuction), a bundle of a dozen of representative locomotive civics, each inn quest of outings, who are still more sloppily served after every cup final by

saunderson (Mr Knut Oelsvinger, Tiffsdays off, wouldntstop in bad, imitation of flatfish, torchbearing supperaape, dud halfsovereign, no chee daily, rolly pollsies, Glen of the Downs, the Gugnir, his geyswerks, his earsequack, his lokistroki, o.s.v.), a scherinsheiner and spoilcurate, unconcerned in the mystery but under the inflounce of the milldieuw and butt of

kate (Miss Rachel Lea Varian, she tells forkings for baschfellors, under purdah of card palmer teaput tosspot Madam d’Elta, during the pawses), kook-and-dishdrudge, whitch believes wanthingthats, whouse be the churchyard or whorts up the aasgaars, the show must go on.

Time: the pressant.

With futurist onehorse balletbattle pictures and the Pageant of Past History worked up with animal variations amid everglaning mangrovemazes and beorbtracktors by Messrs Thud and Blunder. Shadows by the film folk, masses by the good people. Promptings by Elanio Vitale. Longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stagetolets by Hexenschuss, Coachmaher, Incubone and Rocknarrag. Creations tastefully designed by Madame Berthe Delamode. Dances arranged by Harley Quinn and Coollimbeina. Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties of the late cemented Mr T. M. Finnegan R.I.C. Lipmasks and hairwigs by Ouida Nooikke. Limes and Floods by Crooker and Toll. Kopay pibe by Kappa Pedersen. Hoed Pine hat with twentyfour ventholes by Morgen. Bosse and stringbag from Heteroditheroe’s and All Ladies’ presents. Tree taken for grafted. Rock rent. Phenecian blends and Sourdanian doofpoosts by Shauvesourishe and Wohntbedarft. The oakmulberryeke with silktrick twomesh from Shop-Sowry, seedsmanchap. Grabstone beg from General Orders Mailed. The crack (that’s Cork!) by a smoker from the gods. The interjection (Buckley!) by the fire- [p.222] ment in the pit. Accidental music providentially arranged by L’Archet and Laccorde. Melodiotiosities in purefusion by the score. To start with in the beginning, we need hirtly bemark, a community prayer, everyone for himself, and to conclude with as an exodus, we think it well to add, a chorale in canon, good for us all for us all us all all. Songs betune the acts by the ambiamphions of Annapolis, Joan MockComic, male soprano, and Jean Souslevin, bass noble, respectively: O, Mester Sogermon, ef thes es whot ye deux, then l’m not surpleased ye want that bottle of Sauvequipeu and Oh Off Nunch Der Rasche Ver Lasse Mitsch Nitscht. Till the summit scenes of climbacks castastrophear, The Bearded Mountain (Polymop Baretherootsch), and The River Romps to Nursery (Maidykins in Undiform). The whole thugogmagog, including the portions understood to be oddmitted as the results of the respective titulars neglecting to produce themselves, to be wound up for an afterenactment by a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radium Wedding of Neid and Moorning and the Dawn of Peace, Pure, Perfect and Perpetual, Waking the Weary of the World.

An argument follows.

Chuffy was a nangel then and his soard fleshed light like likening. Fools top! Singty, sangty, meekly loose, defendy nous from prowlabouts. Make a shine on the curst. Emen.

But the duvlin sulph was in Glugger, that lost-to-lurning. Punct. He was sbuffing and sputing, tussing like anisine, whipping his eyesoult and gnatsching his teats over the brividies from existers and the outher liubbocks of life. He halth kelchy chosen a clayblade and makes prayses to his three of clubs. To part from these, my corsets, is into overlusting fear. Acts of feet, hoof and jarrety: athletes longfoot. Djowl, uphere!

Aminxt that nombre of evelings, but how pierceful in their sojestiveness were those first girly stirs, with zitterings of flight released and twinglings of twitchbells in rondel after, with waverings that made shimmershake rather naightily all the duskcended airs and shylit beaconings from shehind hims back. Sammy, call [p.223] on. Mirrylamb, she was shuffering all the diseasinesses of the unherd of. Mary Louisan Shousapinas! If Arck could no more salve his agnols from the wiles of willy wooly woolf! If all the airish signics of her dipandump helpabit from an Father Hogam till the Mutther Masons could not that Glugg to catch her by the calour of her brideness! Not Rose, Sevilla nor Citronelle; not Esmeralde, Pervinca nor Indra; not Viola even nor all of them four themes over. But, the monthage stick in the melmelode jawr, I am (twintomine) all thees thing. Up tighty in the front, down again on the loose, drim and drumming on her back and a pop from her whistle. What is that, O holytroopers? Isot givin yoe?

Up he stulpled, glee you gees, with search a fling did die near sea, beamy owen and calmy hugh and if you what you my call for me I will wishyoumaycull for you.

And they are met, face a facing. They are set, force to force. And no such Copenhague-Marengo was less so fated for a fall since in Glenasmole of Smiling Thrushes Patch Whyte passed O’Sheen ascowl.

Arrest thee, scaldbrother! came the evangelion, sabre accusant, from all Saint Joan’s Wood to kill or maim him, and be dumm but ill s’arrested. Et would proffer to his delected one the his trifle from the grass.

A space. Who are you? The cat’s mother. A time. What do you lack? The look of a queen.

But what is that which is one going to prehend? Seeks, buzzling is brains, the feinder.

The howtosayto itiswhatis hemustwhomust worden schall. A darktongues, kunning. O theoperil! Ethiaop lore, the poor lie. He askit of the hoothed fireshield but it was untergone into the matthued heaven. He soughed it from the luft but that bore ne mark ne message. He luked upon the bloomingrund where ongly his corns were growning. At last he listed back to beckline how she pranked alone so johntily. The skand for schooling.

With nought a wired from the wordless either.

Item. He was hardset then. He wented to go (somewhere) while he was weeting. Utem. He wished to grieve on the good persons, that [p.224] is the four gentlemen. Otem. And it was not a long time till he was feeling true forim he was goodda purssia and it was short after that he was fooling mehaunt to mehynte he was an injine ruber. Etem. He was at his thinker’s aunts to give (the four gentlemen) the presence (of a curpse). And this is what he would be willing. He fould the fourd; they found the hurtled stones; they fell ill with the gravy duck: and he sod town with the roust of the meast. Atem.

Towhere byhangs ourtales.

Ah ho! This poor Glugg! It was so said of him about of his old fontmouther. Truly deplurabel! A dire, O dire! And all the freightfullness whom he inhebited after his colline born janitor. Sometime towerable! With that hehry antlets on him and the baublelight bulching out of his sockets whiling away she sprankled his allover with her noces of interregnation: How do you do that lack a lock and pass the poker, please? And bids him tend her, lute and airly. Sing, sweetharp, thing to me anone! So that Glugg, the poor one, in that limbopool which was his subnesciousness he could scares of all knotknow whither his morrder had bourst a blabber or if the vogalstones that hit his tynpan was that mearly his skoll missed her. Misty’s trompe or midst his flooting? Ah, ho! Cicely, awe!

The youngly delightsome frilles-in-pleyurs are now showen drawen, if bud one, or, if in florileague, drawens up consociately at the hinder sight of their commoner guardian. Her boy fiend or theirs, if they are so plurielled, cometh up as a trapadour, sinking how he must fand for himself by gazework what their colours wear as they are all showen drawens up. Tireton, cacheton, tireton, ba! Doth that not satisfy youth, sir? Quanty purty bellas, here, Madama Lifay! And what are you going to charm them to, Madama, do say? Cinderynelly angled her slipper; it was cho chiny yet braught her a groom. He will angskt of them from their commoner guardian at next lineup (who is really the rapier of the two though thother brother can hold his own, especially for he bandished it with his hand the hold time, mamain, a simply gracious: Mi, O la!), and reloose that thong off his art: Hast thou feel liked carbunckley ones? Apun which his poohoor pricoxity theirs [p.225] is a little tittertit of hilarity (Lad-o’-me-soul! Lad-o’-me-soul, see!) and the wordchary is atvoiced ringsoundinly by their toots ensembled, though not meaning to be clever, but just with a shrug of their hips to go to troy and harff a freak at himself by all that story to the ulstramarines. Otherwised, holding their noises, they insinuate quiet private, Ni, he make peace in his preaches and play with esteem.

Warewolff! Olff! Toboo!

So olff for his topheetuck the ruck made raid, aslick aslegs would run; and he ankered on his hunkers with the belly belly prest. Asking: What’s my muffinstuffinaches for these times? To weat: Breath and bother and whatarcurss. Then breath more bother and more whatarcurss. Then no breath no bother but worrawarrawurms. And Shim shallave shome.

As Rigagnolina to Mountagnone, what she meaned he could not can. All she meaned was golten sylvup, all she meaned was some Knight’s ploung jamn. It’s driving her dafft like he’s so dumnb. If he’d lonely talk instead of only gawk as thought yateman hat stuck hits stick althrough his spokes and if he woold nut wolly so! Hee. Speak, sweety bird! Mitzymitzy! Though I did ate tough turf I’m not the bogdoxy.

— Have you monbreamstone?

— No.

— Or Hellfeuersteyn?

— No.

— Or Van Diemen’s coral pearl?

— No.

He has lost.

 Off to clutch, Glugg! Forwhat! Shape your reres, Glugg! Foreweal! Ring we round, Chuff! Fairwell! Chuffchuff’s inners even. All’s rice with their whorl!

Yet, ah tears, who can her mater be? She’s promised he’d eye her. To try up her pretti. But now it’s so longed and so fared and so forth. Jerry for jauntings. Alabye! Fled.

The flossies all and mossies all they drooped upon her draped brimfall. The bowknots, the showlots, they wilted into woeblots. [p.226] The pearlagraph, the pearlagraph, knew whitchly whether to weep or laugh. For always down in Carolinas lovely Dinahs vaunt their view.

Poor Isa sits a glooming so gleaming in the gloaming; the tincelles a touch tarnished wind no lovelinoise awound her swan’s. Hey, lass! Woefear gleam she so glooming, this pooripathete I solde? Her beauman’s gone of a cool. Be good enough to symperise. If he’s at anywhere she’s therefor to join him. If it’s to nowhere she’s going to too. Buf if he’ll go to be a son to France’s she’ll stay daughter of Clare. Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue. She is fading out like Journee’s clothes so you can’t see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve’s now wearing she’ll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline’s to be. In the Dee dips a dame and the dame desires a demselle but the demselle dresses dolly and the dolly does a dulcydamble. The same renew. For though she’s unmerried she’ll after truss up and help that hussyband how to hop. Hip it and trip it and chirrub and sing. Lord Chuffy’s sky sheraph and Glugg’s got to swing.

So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round, for they are the ingelles, scattering nods as girls who may, for they are an angel’s garland.

Catchmire stockings, libertyed garters, shoddyshoes, quicked out with selver. Pennyfair caps on pinnyfore frocks and a ring on her fomefing finger. And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light. And they look so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious night. Withasly glints in. Andecoy glants out. They ramp it a little, a lessle, a lissle. Then rompride round in rout.

Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. Though they’re all but merely a schoolgirl yet these way went they. I’ th’ view o’ th’avignue dancing goes entrancing roundly. Miss Oodles of Anems before the Luvium doeslike. So. And then again doeslike. So. And miss Endles of Eons efter Dies [p.227] of Eirae doeslike. So. And then again doeslike. So. The many wiles of Winsure.

The grocer’s bawd she slips her hand in the haricot bag, the lady in waiting sips her sup from the paraffin can, Mrs Wildhare Quickdoctor helts her skelts up the casuaway the flasht instinct she herds if a tinkle of tunder, the widow Megrievy she knits cats’ cradles, this bountiful actress leashes a harrier under her tongue, and here’s the girl who she’s kneeled in coldfashion and she’s told her priest (spt!) she’s pot on a chap (chp!) and this lass not least, this rickissime woman, who she writes foot fortunes money times over in the nursery dust with her capital thumb. Buzz. All runaway sheep bound back bopeep, trailing their teenes behind them. And these ways wend they. And those ways went they. Winnie, Olive and Beatrice, Nelly and Ida, Amy and Rue. Here they come back, all the gay pack, for they are the florals, from foncey and pansey to papavere’s blush, foresakeme-nought, while there’s leaf there’s hope, with primtim’s ruse and marrymay’s blossom, all the flowers of the ancelles’ garden.

But vicereversing thereout from those palms of perfection to anger arbour, treerack monatan, scroucely out of scout of ocean, virid with woad, what tornaments of complementary rages rocked the divlun from his punchpoll to his tummy’s shentre as he displaid all the oathword science of his visible disgrace. He was feeling so funny and floored for the cue, all over which girls as he don’t know whose hue. If goosseys gazious would but fain smile him a smile he would be fondling a praise he ate some nice bit of fluff. But no geste reveals the unconnouth. They’re all odds against him, the beasties. Scratch. Start.

He dove his head into Wat Murrey, gave Stewart Ryall a puck on the plexus, wrestled a hurry-come-union with the Gillie Beg, wiped all his sinses, martial and menial, out of Shrove Sundy MacFearsome, excremuncted as freely as any frothblower into MacIsaac, had a belting bout, chaste to chaste, with McAdoo about nothing and, childhood’s age being aye the shameleast, tel a Tartaran tastarin toothsome tarrascone tourtoun, vestimentivorous chlamydophagian, imbretellated himself for any time un- [p.228] tellable with what hung over to the Machonochie Middle from the MacSiccaries of the Breeks. Home!

Allwhile, moush missuies from mungy monsie, preying in his mind, son of Everallin, within himself, he swure. Macnoon maggoty mag! Cross of a coppersmith bishop! He would split. He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte. Seek hells where from yank islanders the petriote’s absolation. Mocknitza! Genik! He take skiff come first dagrene day overwide tumbler, rough and dark, till when bow of the shower show of the bower with three shirts and a wind, pagoda permettant, crookolevante, the bruce, the coriolano and the ignacio. From prudals to the secular but from the cumman to the nowter. Byebye, Brassolis, I’m breaving! Our war, Dully Gray! A conansdream of lodascircles, he here schlucefinis. Gelchasser no more! Mischnary for the minestrary to all the sems of Aram. Shimach, eon of Era. Mum’s for’s maxim, ban’s for’s book and Dodgesome Dora for hedgehung sheolmastress. And Unkel Silanse coach in diligence. Disconnection of the succeeding. He wholehog himself for carberry banishment care of Pencylmania, Bretish Armerica, to melt Mrs Gloria of the Bunkers’ Trust, recorporated, (prunty!) by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin, quit to hail a hurry laracor and catch the Paname-Turricum and regain that absendee tarry easty, his città immediata, by an alley and detour with farecard awailable getrennty years. Right for Rovy the Roder. From the safe side of distance! Libera, nostalgia! Beate Laurentie O’Tuli, Euro pra nobis! Every monk his own cashel where every little ligger is his own liogotenente with inclined jambs in full purview to his pronaose and to the deretane at his reredoss. Fuisfinister, fuyerescaper! He would, with the greatest of ease, before of weighting midhook, by dear home trashold on the raging canal, for othersites of Jorden, (heave a hevy, waterboy!) make one of hissens with a knockonacow and a chow collegions and fire off, gheol ghiornal, foull subustioned mullmud, his farced epistol to the hibruws. From Cernilius slomtime prepositus of Toumaria to the clutch in Anteach. Salvo! Ladigs and jointuremen! No more turdenskaulds! Free leaves for ebribadies! All tinsammon in the [p.229] yord! With harm and aches till farther alters! Wild primates not stop him frem at rearing a writing in handy antics. Nom de plume! Gout strap Fenlanns! And send Jarge for Mary Inklenders! And daunt you logh if his vineshanky’s schwemmy! For he is the general, make no mistake in he. He is General Jinglesome.

Go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs in S.P.Q.R.ish and inform to the old sniggering publicking press and its nation of sheepcopers about the whole plighty troth between them, malady of milady made melodi of malodi, she, the lalage of lyonesses, and him, her knave arrant. To Wildrose La Gilligan from Croppy Crowhore. For all within crystal range.

Ukalepe. Loathers’ leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids’ Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt.

Maleesh! He would bare to untired world of Leimuncononnulstria (and what a strip poker globbtrottel they pairs would looks!) how wholefallows, his guffer, the sabbatarian (might faction split his beard!), he too had a great big oh in the megafundum of his tomashunders and how her Lettyshape, his gummer, that congealed sponsar, she had never cessed at waking malters among the jemassons since the cluft that meataxe delt her made her microchasm as gap as down low. So they fished in the kettle and fought free and if she bit his tailibout all hat tiffin for thea. He would jused sit it all write down just as he would jused set it up all writhefully rate in blotch and void, yielding to no man in hymns ignorance, seeing how heartsilly sorey he was, owning to the condrition of his bikestool. And, reading off his fleshskin and writing with his quillbone, fillfull ninequires with it for his auditers, Caxton and Pollock, a most moraculous jeeremyhead sindbook for all the peoples, under the presidency of the suchess of sceaunonsceau, a hadtobe heldin, thoroughly enjoyed by many so meny on block at Boyrut season and for their account ottorly admired by her husband in sole intimacy, about whose told his innersense and the grusomehed’s [p.230] yoeureeke of his spectrescope and why he was off colour and how he was ambothed upon by the very spit of himself, first on the cheekside by Michelangelo and, besouns thats, over on the owld jowly side by Bill C. Babby, and the suburb’s formule why they provencials drollo eggspilled him out of his homety dometry narrowedknee domum (osco de basco de pesco de bisco!) because all his creature comfort was an omulette finas erbas in an ark finis orbe and, no master how mustered, mind never mend, he could neither swuck in nonneither swimp in the flood of cecialism and the best and schortest way of blacking out a caughtalock of all the sorrors of Sexton until he would accoster her coume il fou in teto-dous as a wagoner would his mudheeldy wheesindonk at their trist in Parisise after tourments of tosend years, bread cast out on waters, making goods at mutuurity, Mondamoiseau of Casanuova and Mademoisselle from Armentières. Neblonovi’s Nivonovio! Nobbio and Nuby in ennoviacion! Occitantitempoli! He would si through severalls of sanctuaries maywhatmay mightwhomight so as to meet somewhere, if produced, on a demi panssion for his whole lofetime, payment in goo to slee music and poisonal comfany, following which, like Ipsey Secumbe, when he fingon to foil the fluter, she could have all the g. s. M. she moohooed after fore and rickwards to herslF, including science of sonorous silence, while he, being brung up on soul butter, have recourse of course to poetry. With tears for his coronaichon, such as engines weep. Was liffe worth leaving? Nej!

Tholedoth, treetrene! Zokrahsing, stone! Arty, reminiscensitive, at bandstand finale on grand carriero, dreaming largesse of lifesighs over early lived offs — all old Sators of the Sowsceptre highly nutritius family histrionic, genitricksling with Avus and Avia, that simple pair, and descendant down on veloutypads by a vuncular process to Nurus and Noverca, those notorious nepotists, circumpictified in their sobrine census, patriss all of them by the glos on their germane faces and their socerine eyes like transparents of vitricus, patruuts to a man, the archimade levirs of his ekonome world. Remember thee, castle throwen? Ones propsperups treed, now stohong baroque. And oil paint use a pumme if yell trace [p.231] me there title to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle of his juniverse) with a tingtumtingling and a next, next and next (gin a paddy? got a petty? gussies, gif it ope?), while itch ish shome.

   — My God, alas, that dear olt tumtum home

   Whereof in youthfood port I preyed

   Amook the verdigrassy convict vallsall dazes.

   And cloitered for amourmeant in thy boosome shede!

His mouthfull of ecstasy (for Shing-Yung-Thing in Shina from Yoruyume across the Timor Sea), herepong (maladventure!) shot pinging up through the errorooth of his wisdom (who thought him a Fonar all, feastking of shellies by googling Lovvey, regally freytherem, eagelly plumed, and wasbut gumboil owrithy prods wretched some horsery megee plods coffin acid odarkery pluds dense floppens mugurdy) as thought it had been zawhen intwo. Wholly sanguish blooded up disconvulsing the fixtures of his fizz. Apang which his tempory chewer med him a crazy chump of a Haveajube Sillayass. Joshua Croesus, son of Nunn! Though he shall live for millions of years a life of billions of years, from their roseaced glows to their violast lustres, he shall not forget that pucking Pugases. Holihowlsballs and bloody acres! Like gnawthing unheardth!

But, by Jove Chronides, Seed of Summ, after at he had bate his breastplates for, forforget, forforgetting his birdsplace, it was soon that, that he, that he rehad himself. By a prayer? No, that comes later. By contrite attrition? Nay, that we passed. Mid esercizism? So is richt.

And it was so. And Malthos Moramor resumed his soul. With: Go Ferchios off to Allad out of this! An oldsteinsong. He threwed his fit up to his aers, rolled his poligone eyes, snivelled from his snose and blew the guff out of his hornypipe. The hopjoimt jerk of a ladle broom jig that he learned in locofoco when a redhot turnspite he. Under reign of old Roastin the Bowl Ratskillers, readyos! Why was that man for he’s doin her wrong! Lookery looks, how he’s knots in his entrails! Mookery mooks, it’s a grippe of his gripes. Seekeryseeks, why his biting he’s head off? [p.232] Cokerycokes, it’s his spurt of coal. And may his tarpitch dilute not give him chromitis! For the mauwe that blinks you blank is mostly Carbo. Where the inflammabilis might pursuive his comburenda with a pure flame and a true flame and a flame all toogasser, soot. The worst is over. Wait! And the dubuny Mag may gang to preesses. With Dinny Finneen, me canty, ho! In the lost of the gleamens. Sousymoust. For he would himself deal a treatment as might be trusted in anticipation of his inculmination unto fructification for the major operation. When (pip!) a message interfering intermitting interskips from them (pet!) on herzian waves, (call her venicey names! call her a stell!) a butterfly from her zipclasped handbag, a wounded dove astarted from, escaping out her forecotes. Isle wail for yews, O doherlynt! The poetesser. And around its scorched cap she has twilled a twine of flame to let the laitiest know she’s marrid. And pim it goes backballed. Tot burns it so leste. A claribel cumbeck to errind. Hers before his even, posted ere penned. He’s your change, thinkyou methim. Go daft noon, madden, mind the step. Please stoop O to please. Stop. What saying? I have soreunder from to him now, dearmate ashore, so, so compleasely till I can get redressed, which means the end of my stays in the languish of Tintangle. Is you zealous of mes, brother? Did you boo moiety lowd? You suppoted to be the on conditiously rejected? Satanly, lade! Can that sobstuff, whingeywilly! Stop up, mavrone, and sit in my lap, Pepette, though I’d much rather not. Like things are m. ds. is all in vincibles. Decoded.

Now a run for his money! Now a dash to her dot! Old cocker, young crowy, sifadda, sosson. A bran new, speedhount, outstripperous on the wind. Like a waft to wingweary one or a sos to a coastguard. For directly with his whoop, stop and an upalepsy didando a tishy, in appreciable less time than it takes a glaciator to submerger an Atlangthis, was he again, agob, before the trembly ones, a spark’s gap off, doubledasguesched, gotten orlop in a simplasailormade and shaking the storm out of his hiccups. The smartest vessel you could find would elazilee him on her knee as her lucky for the Rio Grande. He’s a pigtaiI tarr [p.233] and if he hadn’t got it toothick he’d a telltale tall of his pitcher on a wall with his photure in the papers for cutting moutonlegs and capers, letting on he’d jest be japers and his tail cooked up.

Goal! It’s one by its length.

Angelinas, hide from light those hues that your sin beau may bring to light! Though down to your dowerstrip he’s bent to knee he maun’t know ledgings here.

For a haunting way will go and you need not make your mow. Find the frenge for frocks and translace it into shocks of such as touch with show and show.

He is guessing at hers for all he is worse, the seagoer. Hark to his wily geeses goosling by, and playfair, lady! And note that they who will for exile say can for dog while them that won’t leave ingle end says now for know.

For he faulters how he hates to trouble them without.

 But leaving codhead’s mitre and the heron’s plumes sinistrant to the server of servants and rex of regums and making a bolderdash for lubberty of speech he asks not have you seen a match being struck nor is this powder mine but, letting punplays pass to ernest:

— Haps thee jaoneofergs?

— Nao.

— Haps thee mayjaunties?

— Naohao.

— Haps thee per causes nunsibellies?

— Naohaohao.

— Asky, asky, asky! Gau on! Micaco! Get!

Ping an ping nwan ping pwan pong.

And he did a get, their anayance, and slink his hook away, aleguere come alaguerre, like a chimista inchamisas, whom the harricana hurries and hots foots, zingo, zango, segur. To hoots of utskut, urqurd, jamal, qum, yallah, yawash, yak! For he could ciappacioppachew upon a skarp snakk of pure undefallen engelsk, melanmoon or tartatortoise, tsukisaki or soppisuppon, as raskly and as baskly as your cheesechalk cow cudd spanich. Makoto! Whagta kriowday! Gelagala nausy is. Yet right divining do not [p.234] was. Hovobovo hafogate hokidimatzi in kamicha! He had his sperrits all foulen on him; to vet, most griposly, he was bedizzled and debuzzled; he had his tristiest cabaleer on; and looked like bruddy Hal. A shelling a cockshy and be donkey shot at? Or a peso besant to join the armada?

But, Sin Showpanza, could anybroddy which walked this world with eyes whiteopen have looked twinsomer than the kerl he left behind him? Candidatus, viridosus, aurilucens, sinelab? Of all the green heroes everwore coton breiches, the whitemost, the goldenest! How he stud theirs with himselfs mookst kevinly, and that anterevolitionary, the churchman childfather from tonsor’s tuft to almonder’s toes, a haggiography in duotrigesumy, son soptimost of sire sixtusks, of Mayaqueenies sign osure, hevnly buddhy time, inwreathed of his near cissies, a mickly dazzly eely oily with looiscurrals, a soulnetzer by zvesdals priestessd, their trail the tractive, and dem dandypanies knows de play of de eyelids, with his gamecox spurts and his smile likequid glue (the suessiest sourir ever weanling wore), whiles his host of spritties, lusspillerindernees, they went peahenning a ripidarapidarpad around him, pilgrim prinkips, kerilour kevinour, in neuchoristic congressulations, quite purringly excited, rpdrpd, allauding to him by all the licknames in the litany with the terms in which no little dulsy nayer ever thinks about implying except to her future’s year and sending him perfume most praypuffs to setisfire more then to teasim (shllwe help, now you’ve massmuled, you t’rigolect a bit? yismik? yimissy?) that he, the finehued, the fairhailed, the farahead, might bouchesave unto each but everyone, asfar as safras durst assune, the havemercyonhurs of his kissier licence. Meanings: Andure the enjurious till imbetther rer. We know you like Latin with essies impures, (and your liber as they sea) we certney like gurgles love the nargleygargley so, arrahbeejee, tell that old frankay boyuk to bellows upthe tombucky in his tumtum argan and give us a gust of his gushy old. Goof!

Hymnumber twentynine. O, the singing! Happy little girlycums to have adolphted such an Adelphus! O, the swinginging hopops so goholden! They’ve come to chant en chor. They say [p.235] their salat, the madiens’ prayer to the messiager of His Nabis, prostitating their selfs eachwise and combinedly. Fateha, fold the hands. Be it honoured, bow the head. May thine evings e’en be blossful! Even of bliss! As we so hope for ablution. For the sake of the farbung and of the scent and of the holiodrops. Amems.

A pause. Their orison arises misquewhite as Osman glory, ebbing wasteward, leaves to the soul of light its fading silence (allahlah lahlah lah!), a turquewashed sky. Then:

 —Xanthos! Xanthos! Xanthos! We thank to thine, mighty innocent, that diddest bring it off fuitefuite. Should in ofter years it became about you will after desk jobduty becoming a bank midland mansioner we and I shall reside with our obeisant servants among Burke’s mobility at La Roseraie, Ailesbury Road. Red bricks are all hellishly good values if you trust to the roster of ads but we’ll save up ourselves and nab what’s nicest and boskiest of timber trees in the nebohood. Oncaill’s plot. Luccombe oaks, Turkish hazels, Greek firs, incense palm edcedras. The hypsometers of Mount Anville is held to be dying out of arthataxis but, praise send Larix U’ Thule, the wych elm of Manelagh is still flourishing in the open, because its native of our nature and the seeds was sent by Fortune. We’ll have our private palypeachum pillarposterns for lovesick letterines fondly affianxed to our front railings and swings, hammocks, tighttaught balletlines, accomodationnooks and prismic bathboites, to make Envyeyes mouth water and wonder when they binocular us from their embrassured windows in our garden rare. Fyat-Fyat shall be our number on the autokinaton and Chubby in his Chuffs oursforownly chuffeur. T will be waiting for uns as I sold U at the first antries. Our cousin gourmand, Percy, the pup, will denounce the sniffnomers of all callers where among our Seemyease Sister, Tabitha, the ninelived, will extend to the full her hearthy welcome. While the turf and twigs they tattle. Tintin tintin. Lady Marmela Shortbred will walk in for supper with her marchpane switch on, her necklace of almonds and her poirette Sundae dress with bracelets of honey and her cochineal hose with the caramel dancings, the briskly best from Bootiestown, and her suckingstaff of ivory- [p.236] mint. You mustn’t miss it or you’ll be sorry. Charmeuses chloes, glycering juwells, lydialight fans and puffumed cynarettes. And the Prince Le Monade has been graciously pleased. His six chocolate pages will run bugling before him and Cococream toddle after with his sticksword in a pink cushion. We think His Sparkling Headiness ought to know Lady Marmela. Luisome his for lissome hers. He’s not going to Cork till Cantalamesse or mayhope till Rose Easter or Saint Tibble’s Day. So Niomon knows. The Fomor’s in his Fin, the Momor’s her and hin. A paaralone! A paaralone! And Dublin’s all adin. We’ll sing a song of Singlemonth and you’ll too and you’ll. Here are notes. There’s the key. One two three. Chours! So come on, ye wealthy gentrymen wibfrufrocksfull of fun! Thin thin! Thin thin! Thej olly and thel ively, thou billy with thee coo, for to jog a jig of a crispness nice and sing a missal too. Hip champouree! Hiphip champouree! O you longtailed blackman, polk it up behind me! Hip champouree! Hiphip champouree! And, jessies, push the pumkik round. Anneliuia!

Since the days of Roamaloose and Rehmoose the pavanos have been strident through their struts of Chapelldiseut, the vaulsies have meed and youdled through the purly ooze of Ballybough, many a mismy cloudy has tripped taintily along that hercourt strayed reelway and the rigadoons have held ragtimed revels on the platauplain of Grangegorman; and, though since then sterlings and guineas have been replaced by brooks and lions and some progress has been made on stilts and the races have come and gone and Thyme, that chef of seasoners, has made his usual astewte use of endadjustables and whatnot willbe isnor was, those danceadeils and cancanzanies have come stimmering down for our begayment through the bedeafdom of po’s taeorns, the obcecity of pa’s teapucs, as lithe and limbfree limber as when momie mummed at ma.

Just so stylled with the nattes are their flowerheads now and each of all has a lovestalk onto herself and the tot of all the tits of their understamens is as open as he can posably she and is tournesoled straightcut or sidewaist, accourdant to the coursets of [p.237] things feminite, towooerds him in heliolatry, so they may catchcup in their calyzettes, alls they go troping, those parryshoots from his muscalone pistil, for he can eyespy through them, to their selfcolours, nevertheleast their tissue peepers, (meaning Mullabury mesh, the time of appling flowers, a guarded figure of speech, a variety of perfume, a bridawl, seamist inso one) as leichtly as see saw (O my goodmiss! O my greatmess! O my prizelestly preshoes!) while, dewyfully as dimb dumbelles, all alisten to his elixir. Lovelyt!

 And they said to him:

— Enchainted, dear sweet Stainusless, young confessor, dearer dearest, we herehear, aboutobloss, O coelicola, thee salutamt. Pattern of our unschoold, pageantmaster, deliverer of softmissives, round the world in forty mails, bag, belt and balmybeam, our barnaboy, our chepachap, with that pampipe in your putaway, gab borab, when you will be after doing all your sightseeing and soundhearing and smellsniffing and tastytasting and tenderumstouchings in all Daneygaul, send us, your adorables, thou overblaseed, a wise and letters play of all you can ceive, chief celtech chappy, from your holy post now you hast ascertained ceremonially our names. Unclean you art not. Outcaste thou are not. Leperstower, the karman’s loki, has not blanched at our pollution and your intercourse at ninety legsplits does not defile. Untouchable is not the scarecrown is on you. You are pure. You are pure. You are in your puerity. You have not brought stinking members into the house of Amanti. Elleb Inam, Titep Notep, we name them to the Hall of Honour. Your head has been touched by the god Enel-Rah and your face has been brightened by the goddess Aruc-Ituc. Return, sainted youngling, and walk once more among us! The rains of Demani are masikal as of yere. And Baraza is all aflower. Siker of calmy days. As shiver as shower can be. Our breed and better class is in brood and bitter pass. Labbeycliath longs. But we’re counting on the cluck. The Great Cackler comes again. Sweetstaker, Abel lord of all our haloease, we (to be slightly more femmiliar perhips than is slickly more then nacessory), toutes philomelas as well as mag- [p.238] delenes, were drawpairs with two pinmarks, BVD and BVD dot, so want lotteries of ticklets posthastem (you appreciate?) so as to be very dainty, if an isaspell, and so as to be verily dandydainty, if an ishibilley, of and on, to and for, by and with, from you. Let the hitback hurry his wayward ere the missive has time to take herself off, ’twill be o’erthemore willfully intomeet if the coming offence can send our shudders before. We feem to have being elfewhere as tho’ th’ had pafs’d in our fufpens. Next to our shrinking selves we love sensitivas best. For they are the Angèles. Brick, fauve, jonquil, sprig, fleet, nocturne, smiling bruise. For they are an Angèle’s garment. We will be constant (what a word!) and bless the day, for whole hours too, yes, for sold long syne as we shall be heing in our created being of ours elvishness, the day you befell, you dreadful temptation! Now promisus as at our requisted you will remain ignorant of all what you hear and, though if whilst disrobing to the edge of risk, (the bisifings in idolhours that satinfines tootoo!) draw a veil till we next time! You don’t want to peach but bejimboed if ye do! Perhelps. We ernst too may. How many months or how many years till the myriadth and first become! Bashfulness be tupped! May he colp, may he colp her, may he mixandmass colp her! Talk with a hare and you wake of a tartars. That’s mus. Says the Law. List! Kicky Lacey, the pervergined, and Bianca Mutantini, her conversa, drew their fools longth finnishfurst, Herzog van Vellentam, but me and meother ravin, my coosine of mine, have mour good three chancers, weothers, after Bohnaparts. The mything smile of me, my wholesole assumption, shes nowt mewithout as weam twin herewithin, that I love like myselfish, like smithereens robinsongs, like juneses nutslost, like the blue of the sky if I stoop for to spy’s between my whiteyoumightcallimbs. How their duel makes their triel! Eer’s wax for Sur Soord, dongdong bollets for the iris riflers, queemswellth of coocome in their combs for the jennyjos. Caro caressimus! Honey swarns where mellisponds. Will bee all buzzy one another minnies for the mere effect that you are so fuld of pollen yourself. Teomeo! Daurdour! We feel unspeechably thoughtless over it all here in Gizzygazelle [p.239] Tark’s bimboowood so pleasekindly communicake with the original sinse we are only yearning as yet how to burgeon. It’s meant milliems of centiments deadlost or mislaid on them but, master of snakes, we can sloughchange in the nip of a napple solongas we can allsee for deedsetton your quick. By the hook in your look we’re eyed for aye were you begging the questuan with your lutean bowl round Monkmesserag. And whenever you’re tingling in your trout we’re sure to be tangled in our ticements. It’s game, ma chère, be off with your shepherdress on! Upsome cauda! Behose our handmades for the lured! To these nunce we are but yours in ammatures yet well come that day we shall ope to be ores. Then shalt thou see, seeing, the sight. No more hoaxites! Nay more gifting in mennage! A her’s fancy for a his friend and then that fellow yours after this follow ours. Vania, Vania Vaniorum, Domne Vanias!

Hightime is ups be it down into outs according! When there shall be foods for vermin as full as feeds for the fett, eat on earth as there’s hot in oven. When every Klitty of a scolderymeid shall hold every yardscullion’s right to stimm her uprecht for whimsoever, whether on privates, whather in publics. And when all us romance catholeens shall have ones for all amanseprated. And the world is maidfree. Methanks. So much for His Meignysthy man! And all his bigyttens. So till Coquette to tell Cockotte to teach Connie Curley to touch Cattie Hayre and tip Carminia to tap La Chérie though where the diggings he dwellst amongst us here’s nobody knows save Mary. Whyfor we go ringing hands in hands in gyrogyrorondo.

These bright elects, consentconsorted, they were waltzing up their willside with their princesome handsome angeline chiuff while in those wherebus there wont bears way (mearing unknown, a place where pigeons carry fire to seethe viands, a miry hill, belge end sore footh) oaths and screams and bawley groans with a belchybubhub and a hellabelow bedemmed and bediabbled the arimaining lucisphere. Helldsdend, whelldselse! Lonedom’s breach lay foulend up uncouth not be broched by punns and reedles. Yet the ring gayed rund rorosily with a drat for a brat [p.240] you. Yasha Yash ate sassage and mash. So he found he bash, poor Yasha Yash. And you wonna make one of our micknick party. No honaryhuest on our sposhialiste. For poor Glugger was dazed and late in his crave, ay he, laid in his grave.

But low, boys low, he rises, shrivering, with his spittyful eyes and his whoozebecome woice. Ephthah! Cisamis! Examen of conscience scruples now he to the best of his memory schemado. Nu mere for ever siden on the stolen. With his tumescinquinance in the thight of his tumstull. No more singing all the dags in his sengaggeng. Experssly at hand counterhand. Trinitatis kink had mudded his dome, peccat and pent fore, pree. Hymserf, munchaowl, maden, born of thug tribe into brood blackmail, dooly redecant allbigenesis henesies. He, by bletchendmacht of the golls, proforhim penance and come off enternatural. He, selfsufficiencer, eggscumuddher-in-chaff sporticolorissimo, what though the duthsthrows in his lavabad eyes, maketomake polentay rossum, (Good savours queen with the stem of swuith Aftreck! Fit for king of Zundas) out of bianconies, hiking ahake like any nudgemeroughgorude all over Terracuta. No more throw acids, face all lovabilities, appeal for the union and play for tirnitys. He, praise Saint Calembaurnus, make clean breastsack of goody girl now as ever drank milksoep from a spoen, weedhearted boy of potter and mudder, chip of old Flinn the Flinter, twig of the hider that tanned him. He go calaboosh all same he tell him out. Teufleuf man he strip him all mussymussy calico blong him all same he tell him all out how he make what name. He, through wolkenic connection, relation belong this remarklable moliman, Anaks Andrum, parleyglutton pure blood Jebusite, centy procent Erserum spoking. Drugmallt storehuse. Intrance on back. Most open on the laydays. He, A. A., in peachskin shantungs, possible, sooth to say, notwithstanding far former guiles and he gaining fish considerable, by saving grace after avalunch, to look most prophitable out of smily skibluh eye. He repeat of him as pious alios cos he ast for shave and haircut people said he’d shape of hegoat where he just was sheep of herrgott with his tile togged. Top. Not true what chronicles is bringing his portemanteau priamed full potato- [p.241] wards. Big dumm crumm digaditchies say short again akter, even while lossassinated by summan, he coaxyorum a pennysilvers offarings bloadonages with candid zuckers on Spinshesses Walk in presents to lilithe maidinettes for at bloo his noose for him with pruriest pollygameous inatentions, he having that pecuniarity ailmint spectacularly in heather cliff emurgency on gale days because souffrant chronic from a plentitude of house torts. Collosul rhodomantic not wert one bronze lie Scholarina say as he, greyed vike cuddlepuller, walk in her sleep his pig indicks weg femtyfem funts. Of so little is her timentrousnest great for greeting his immensesness. Sutt soonas sett they were, her uyes as his auroholes. Kaledvalch! How could one classically? One could naught critically. Ininest lightingshaft only for lovalit smugpipe, his Mistress Mereshame, of cupric tresses, the formwhite foaminine, the ambersandalled, after Aasdocktor Talop’s onamuttony legture. A mish, holy balm of seinsed myrries, he is as good as a mountain and everybody what is found of his gients he knew Meistral Wikingson, furframed Noordwogen’s kampften, with complexion of blushing dolomite fanned by ozeone brisees, what naver saw his bedshead farrer and nuver met his swigamore, have his ignomen from prima signation of being Master Milchku, queerest man in the benighted queendom, and, adcraft aidant, how he found the kids. Other accuse him as lochkneeghed forsunkener, dope in stockknob, all ameltingmoult after rhomatism, purely simply tammy ratkins. The kurds of Copt on the berberutters and their bedaweens! Even was Shes whole begeds off before all his nahars in the koldbethizzdryel. No gudth! Not one zouz! They whiteliveried ragsups, two Whales of the Sea of Deceit, they bloodiblabstard shooters, three Dromedaries of the Sands of Calumdonia. As is note worthies to shock his hind! Ur greeft on them! Such askors and their ruperts they are putting in for more osghirs is alse false liarnels. The frockenhalted victims! Whore affirm is agains sempry Lotta Karssens. They would lick their lenses before they would negatise a jom petter from his sodalites. In his contrary and on reality, which Bichop Babwith bares to his whitness in his Just a Fication of [p.242] Villumses, this Mr Heer Assassor Neelson, of sorestate hearing, diseased, formarly with Adenoiks, den feed all Lighty, laxtleap great change of retiring family buckler, highly accurect in his everythinks, from tencents coupoll to bargain basement, live with howthold of nummer seven, wideawake, woundabout, wokinbetts, weeklings, in black velvet on geolgian mission senest mangy years his rear in the lane pictures, blanking same with autonaut and annexes and got a daarlingt babyboy bucktooth, the thick of a gobstick, coming on ever so nerses nursely, gracies to goodess, at 81. That why all parks up excited about his gunnfodder. That why ecrazyaztecs and the crime ministers preaching him mornings and makes a power of spoon vittles out of his praverbs. That why he, persona erecta, glycorawman arsenicful femorniser, for a trial by julias, in celestial sunhat, with two purses agitatating his theopot with wokklebout shake, rather incoherend, from one 18 to one 18 biss, young shy gay youngs. Sympoly far infusing up pritty tipidities to lock up their rhainodaisies and be nice and twainty in the shade. Old grand tuttut toucher up of young poetographies and he turn aroundabrupth red altfrumpishly like hear samhar tionnor falls some make one noise. It’s his last lap, Gigantic, fare him weal! Revelation! A fact. True bill. By a jury of matrons. Hump for humbleness, dump for dirts. And, to make a long stoney badder and a whorly show a parfect sight, his Thing went the wholyway retup Suffrogate Strate.

Helpmeat too, contrasta toga, his fiery goosemother, laotsey taotsey, woman who did, he tell princes of the age about. You sound on me, judges! Suppose we brisken up. Kings! Meet the Mem, Avenlith, all viviparous out of couple of lizards. She just as fenny as he is fulgar. How laat soever her latest still her sawlogs come up all standing. Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme! His cheekmole of allaph foriverever her allinall and his Kuran never teachit her the be the owner of thyself. So she not swop her eckcot hjem for Howarden’s Castle, Englandwales. But be the alleance of iern on his flamen vestacoat, the fibule of broochbronze to his wintermantle of pointefox. Who not knows she, the Madame Cooley-Couley, spawife to laird of manna, when first [p.243] come into the pictures more as hundreads elskerelks’ yahrds of annams call away, factory fresh and fiuming at the mouth, wronged by Hwemwednoget (magrathmagreeth, he takable a rap for that early party) and whenceforward Ani Mama and her fiertey bustles terrified of gmere gnomes of gmountains and furibound to be back in her mytinbeddy? Schi schi, she feightened allsouls at pignpugn and gets a pan in her stummi from the pialabellars in their pur war. Yet jackticktating all around her about his poorliness due to pannellism and grime for that he harboured her when feme sole, her zoravarn lhorde and givnergenral, and led her in antient consort ruhm and bound her durant coverture so as she could not steal from him, oz her or damman, so as if ever she’s beleaved by checkenbrooth death since both was parties to the feed it’s Hetman MacCumhal foots the funeral. Mealwhile she nutre him jacent from her elmer’s almsdish, giantar and tschaina as sieme as bibrondas with Foli Signur’s tinner roumanschy to fishle the ladwigs out of his lugwags, like a skittering kitty skattering hayels, when his favourites were all beruffled on him and her own undesirables justickulating, it was such a blowick day. Winden wanden wild like wenchen wenden wanton. The why if he but would bite and plug his baccypipes and renownse the devlins in all their pumbs and kip the streelwarkers out of the plague and nettleses milk from sickling the honeycoombe and kop Ulo Bubo selling foulty treepes, she would make massa dinars with her savuneer dealinsh and delicate her nutbrown glory cloack to Mayde Berenice and hang herself in Ostmannstown Saint Megan’s and make no more mulierage before mahatmas or moslemans, but would ondulate her shookerloft hat from Alpoleary with a viv baselgia and a clamast apotria like any purple cardinal’s princess or woman of the grave word to the papal legate from the Vatucum, Monsaigneur Rabbinsohn Crucis, with an ass of milg to his cowmate and chilterlings on account of all he quaqueduxed for the hnor of Hrom and the nations abhord him and wop mezzo scudo to Sant Pursy Orelli that gave Luiz-Marios Josephs their loyal devouces to be offered up missas for vowts for widders.

[p.244] Hear, O worldwithout! Tiny tattling! Backwoods, be wary! Daintytrees, go dutch!

But who comes yond with pire on poletop? He who relights our spearing torch, the moon. Bring lolave branches to mud cabins and peace to the tents of Ceder, Neomenie! The feast of Tubbournigglers is at hand. Shopshup. Inisfail! Timple temple tells the bells. In syngagyng a sangasongue. For all in Ondslosby. And, the hag they damename Coverfew hists from her lane. And haste, ’tis time for bairns ta hame. Chickchilds, comeho to roo. Comehome to roo, wee chickchilds doo, when the wildworewolf’s abroad. Ah, let’s away and let’s gay and let’s stay chez where the log foyer’s burning!

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world. Yon marshpond by ruodmark verge is visited by the tide. Alvemmarea! We are circumveiloped by obscuritads. Man and belves frieren. There is a wish on them to be not doing or anything. Or just for rugs. Zoo koud! Drr, deff, coal lay on and, pzz, call us pyrress! Ha. Where is our highly honourworthy salutable spousefounderess? The foolish one of the family is within. Haha! Huzoor, where’s he? At house, to’s pitty. With Nancy Hands. Tcheetchee! Hound through the maize has fled. What hou! Isegrim under lolling ears. Far wol! And wheaten bells bide breathless. All. The trail of Gill not yet is to be seen, rocksdrops, up benn, down dell, a craggy road for rambling. Nor yet through starland that silver sash. What era’s o’ering? Lang gong late. Say long, scielo! Sillume, see lo! Selene, sail O! Amune! Ark!? Noh?! Nought stirs in spinney. The swayful pathways of the dragonfly spider stay still in reedery. Quiet takes back her folded fields. Tranquille thanks. Adew. In deerhaven, imbraced, alleged, injoynted and unlatched, the birds, tommelise too, quail silent. ii. Luathan? Nuathan! Was avond ere a while. Now conticinium. As Lord the Laohun is sheutseuyes. The time of lying together will come and the wildering of the nicht till cockeedoodle aubens Aurore. Panther monster. Send leabarrow loads amorrow. While loevdom shleeps. Elenfant has siang his triump, Great is Eliphas Magistrodontos and after kneeprayer pious for behemuth and mahamoth [p.245] will rest him from tusker toils. Salamsalaim! Rhinohorn isnoutso pigfellow but him ist gonz wurst. Kikikuki. Hopopodorme. Sobeast! No chare of beagles, frantling of peacocks, no muzzing of the camel, smuttering of apes. Lights, pageboy, lights! Brights we’ll be brights. With help of Hanoukan’s lamp. When otter leaps in outer parts then Yul remembers Mei. Her hung maid mohns are bluming, look, to greet those loes on coast of amethyst; arcglow’s seafire siemens lure and wextward warnerforth’s hookercrookers. And now with robby brerfox’s fishy fable lissaned out, the threads simwhat toran and knots in its antargumends, the pesciolines in Liffeyetta’s bowl have stopped squiggling about Junoh and the whalk and feriaquintaism and pebble infinibility and the poissission of the hoghly course. And if Lubbernabohore laid his horker to the ribber, save the giregargoh and dabardin going on in his mount of knowledge (munt), he would not hear a flip flap in all Finnyland. Witchman, watch of your night? Es voes, ez noes, nott voes, ges, noun. It goes. It does not go. Darkpark’s acoo with sucking loves. Rosimund’s by her wishing well. Soon tempt-in-twos will stroll at venture and hunt-by-threes strut musketeering. Brace of girdles, brasse of beauys. With the width of the way for jogjoy. Hulker’s cieclest elbownunsense. Hold hard! And his dithering dathering waltzers of. Stright! But meetings mate not as forsehn. Hesperons! And if you wand to Livmouth, wenderer, while Jempson’s weed decks Jacqueson’s Island, here lurks, bar hellpelhullpulthebell, none iron welcome. Bing. Bong. Bangbong. Thunderation! You took with the mulligrubs and we lack mulsum? No sirrebob! Great goodness, no! Were you Marely quean of Scuts or but Chrestien the Last, (our duty to you, chris! royalty, squat!) how matt your mark, though luked your johl, here’s dapplebellied mugs and troublebedded rooms and sawdust strown in expectoration and for ratification by specification of your information, Mr Knight, tuntapster, buttles; his alefru’s up to his hip. And Watsy Lyke sees after all rinsings and don’t omiss Kate, homeswab homely, put in with the bricks. A’s the sign and one’s the number. Where Chavvyout Chacer calls the cup and Pouropourim stands astirrup. De oud huis bij [p.246] de kerkegaard. So who over comes ever for Whoopee Weeks must put up with the Jug and Chambers.

But heed! Our thirty minutes war’s alull. All’s quiet on the felled of Gorey. Between the starfort and the thornwood brass castle flambs with mutton candles. Hushkah, a horn! Gadolmagtog! God es El? Housefather calls enthreateningly. From Brandenborgenthor. At Asa’s arthre. In thundercloud periwig. With lightning bug aflash from afinger. My souls and by jings, should he work his jaw to give down the banks and hark from the tomb! Ansighosa pokes in her potstill to souse at the sop be sodden enow and to hear to all the bubbles besaying: the coming man, the future woman, the food that is to build, what he with fifteen years will do, the ring in her mouth of joyous guard, stars astir and stirabout. A palashe for hirs, a saucy for hers and ladlelike spoons for the wonner. But ein and twee were never worth three. So they must have their final since he’s on parole. Et la pau’ Leonie has the choice of her lives between Josephinus and Mario-Louis for who is to wear the lily of Bohemey, Florestan, Thaddeus, Hardress or Myles. And lead raptivity captive. Ready! Like a Finn at a fair. Now for la bella! Icy-la-Belle!

The campus calls them. Ninan ninan, the gattling gan! Childs will be wilds. ’Twastold. And vamp, vamp, vamp, the girls are merchand. The horseshow magnete draws his field and don’t the fillyings fly? Educande of Sorrento, they newknow knowwell their Vico’s road. Arranked in their array and flocking for the fray on that old orangeray, Dolly Brae. For these are not on terms, they twain, bartrossers, since their baffle of Whatalose when Adam Leftus and the devil took our hindmost, gegifting her with his painapple, nor will not be atoned at all in fight to no finish, that dark deed doer, this wellwilled wooer, Jerkoff and Eatsoup, Yem or Yan, while felixed is who culpas does and harm’s worth healing and Brune is bad French for Jour d’Anno. Tiggers and Tuggers they’re all for tenzones. Bettlimbraves. For she must walk out. And it must be with who. Teaseforhim. Toesforhim. Tossforhim. Two. Else there is danger of. Solitude.

Postreintroducing Jeremy, the chastenot coulter, the flowing [p.247] taal that brooks no brooking runs on to say how, as it was mutualiter foretold of him by a timekiller to his spacemaker, velos ambos and arubyat knychts, with their tales within wheels and stucks between spokes, on the hike from Elmstree to Stene and back, how, running awage with the use of reason (sics) and ramming amok at the brake of his voice (secs), his lasterhalft was set for getting the besterwhole of his yougendtougend, for control number thrice was operating the subliminal of his invaded personality. He nobit smorfi and go poltri and let all the tondo gang bola del ruffo. Barto no know him mor. Eat larto altruis with most perfect stranger.

Boo, you’re through!

Hoo, I’m true!

Men, teacan a tea simmering, hamo mavrone kerry O?

Teapotty. Teapotty.

Kod knows. Anything ruind. Meetingless.

He wept indeiterum. With such a tooth he seemed to love his wee tart when abuy. Highly momourning he see the before him. Melained from nape to kneecap though vied from her girders up. Holy Santalto, cursing saint, sight most deletious to ross up the spyballs like exude of margary! And how him it heaviered that eyerim rust! An they bare falls witless against thee how slight becomes a hidden wound? Soldwoter he wash him all time bigfeller bruisy place blong him. He no want missies blong all boy other look bruisy place blong him. Hence. It will paineth the chastenot in that where of his whence he had loseth his once for every, even though mode grow moramor maenneritsch and the Tarara boom decay. Immaculacy, give but to drink to his shirt and all skirtaskortas must change her tunics. So warred he from first to last, forebanned and betweenly, a smuggler for lifer. Lift the blank ve veered as heil! Split the hvide and aye seize heaven! He knows for he’s seen it in black and white through his eyetrompit trained upon jenny’s and all that sort of thing which is dandymount to a clearobscure. Prettimaid tints may try their taunts: apple, bacchante, custard, dove, eskimo, feldgrau, hematite, isingglass, jet, kipper, lucile, mimosa, nut, oysterette, prune, [p.248] quasimodo, royal, sago, tango, umber, vanilla, wisteria, xray, yesplease, zaza, philomel, theerose. What are they all by? Shee.

If you nude her in her prime, make sure you find her complementary or, on your very first occasion, by Angus Dagdasson and all his piccions, she’ll prick you where you’re proudest with her unsatt speagle eye. Look sharp, she’s signalling from among the asters. Turn again, wistfultone, lode mere of Doubtlynn! Arise, Land-under-Wave! Clap your lingua to your pallet, drop your jowl with a jolt, tambourine until your breath slides, pet a pout and it’s out. Have you got me, Allysloper?

My top it was brought Achill’s low, my middle I ope before you, my bottom’s a vulser if ever there valsed and my whole the flower that stars the day and is solly well worth your pilger’s fahrt. Where there’s a hitch, a head of things, let henker’s halter hang the halunkenend. For I see through your weapon. That cry’s not Cucullus. And his eyelids are painted. If my tutor here is cut out for an oldeborre I’m Flo, shy of peeps, you know. But when he beetles backwards, ain’t I fly? Pull the boughpee to see how we sleep. Bee Peep! Peepette! Would you like that lump of a tongue for lungeon or this Turkey’s delighter, hys hyphen mys? My bellyswain’s a twalf whulerusspower though he knows as much how to man a wife as Dunckle Dalton of matching wools. Shake hands through the thicketloch! Sweet swanwater! My other is mouthfilled. This kissing wold’s full of killing fellows kneeling voyantly to the cope of heaven. And somebody’s coming, I feel for a fect. I’ve a seeklet to sell thee if old Deanns won’t be threaspanning. When you’ll next have the mind to retire to be wicked this is as dainty a way as any. Underwoods spells bushment’s business. So if you sprig poplar you’re bound to twig this. ’Twas my lord of Glendalough benedixed the gape for me that time at Long Entry, commanding the approaches to my intimast innermost. Look how they’re browthered! Six thirteens at Blanche de Blanche’s of 3 Behind Street and 2 Turnagain Lane. Awabeg is my callby, Magnus here’s my Max, Wonder One’s my cipher and Seven Sisters is my nighbrood. Radouga, Rab will ye na pick them in their pink of panties. You can colour up till you’re [p.249] prawn while I go squirt with any cockle. When here who adolls me infuxes sleep. But if this could see with its backsight he’d be the grand old greeneyed lobster. He’s my first viewmarc since Valentine. Wink’s the winning word.

Luck!

In the house of breathings lies that word, all fairness. The walls are of rubinen and the glittergates of elfinbone. The roof herof is of massicious jasper and a canopy of Tyrian awning rises and still descends to it. A grape cluster of lights hangs therebeneath and all the house is filled with the breathings of her fairness, the fairness of fondance and the fairness of milk and rhubarb and the fairness of roasted meats and uniomargrits and the fairness of promise with consonantia and avowals. There lies her word, you reder! The height herup exalts it and the lowness her down abaseth it. It vibroverberates upon the tegmen and prosplodes from pomoeria. A window, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sign, a head and keep your other augur on her paypaypay. And you have it, old Sem, pat as ah be seated! And Sunny, my gander, he’s coming to land her. The boy which she now adores. She dores. Oh backed von dem zug! Make weg for their tug!

With a ring ding dong, they raise clasped hands and advance more steps to retire to the saum. Curtsey one, curtsey two, with arms akimbo, devotees.

Irrelevance.

All sing:

— I rose up one maypole morning and saw in my glass how nobody loves me but you. Ugh. Ugh.

All point in the shem direction as if to shun.

— My name is Misha Misha but call me Toffey Tough. I mean Mettenchough. It was her, boy the boy that was loft in the larch. Ogh! Ogh!

Her reverence.

All laugh.

They pretend to helf while they simply shauted at him sauce to make hims prich. And ith ith noth cricquette, Sally Lums. Not by ever such a lot. Twentynines of bloomers gegging een man [p.250] arose. Avis was there and trilled her about it. She’s her sex, for certain. So to celebrate the occasion:

— Willest thou rossy banders havind?

He simules to be tight in ribbings round his rumpffkorpff.

— Are you Swarthants that’s hit on a shorn stile?

He makes semblant to be swiping their chimbleys.

— Can you ajew ajew fro’ Sheidam?

He finges to be cutting up with a pair of sissers and to be buytings of their maidens and spitting their heads into their facepails.

Spickspuk! Spoken.

So now be hushy, little pukers! Side here roohish, cleany fuglers! Grandicellies, all stay zitty! Adultereux, rest as befour! For you’ve jollywelly dawdled all the day. When ye coif tantoncle’s hat then’ll be largely temts for that. Yet’s the time for being now, now, now.

For a burning would is come to dance inane. Glamours hath moidered’s lieb and herefore Coldours must leap no more. Lack breath must leap no more.

Lel lols for libelman libling his lore. Lolo Lolo liebermann you loved to be leaving Libnius. Lift your right to your Liber Lord. Link your left to your lass of liberty. Lala Lala, Leapermann, your lep’s but a loop to lee.

A fork of hazel o’er the field in vox the verveine virgins ode. If you cross this rood as you roamed the rand I’m blessed but you’d feel him a blasting rod. Behind, me, frees from evil smells! Perdition stinks before us.

Aghatharept they fleurelly to Nebnos will and Rosocale. Twice is he gone to quest of her, thrice is she now to him. So see we so as seed we sow. And their prunktqueen kilt her kirtles up and set out. And her troup came heeling, O. And what do you think that pride was drest in! Voolykins’ diamondinah’s vestin. For ever they scent where air she went. While all the fauns’ flares widens wild to see a floral’s school.

Led by Lignifer, in four hops of the happiest, ach beth cac duff, a marrer of the sward incoronate, the few fly the farbetween! We haul minymony on that piebold nig. Will any dubble dabble [p.251] on the bay? Nor far jocubus? Nic for jay? Attilad! Attattilad! Get up, Goth’s scourge on you! There’s a visitation in your impluvium. Hun! Hun!

He stanth theirs mun in his natural, oblious autamnesically of his very proprium, (such is stockpot leaden, so did sonsepun crake) the wont to be wanton maid a will to be wise. Thrust from the light, apophotorejected, he spoors loves from her heats. He blinkth. But’s wrath’s the higher where those wreathe charity. For all of these have been thisworlders, time liquescing into state, pitiless age grows angelhood. Though, as he stehs, most anysing may befallhim from a song of a witch to the totter of Blackarss, given a fammished devil, a young sourceress and (eternal conjunction) the permission of overalls with the cuperation of nightshirt. If he spice east he seethes in sooth and if he pierce north he wilts in the waist. And what wonder with the murkery viceheid in the shade? The specks on his lapspan are his foul deed thougths, wishmarks of mad imogenation. Take they off! Make the off! But Funnylegs are leanly. A bimbamb bum! They vain would convert the to be hers in the word. Gush, they wooed! Gash, they’re fair ripecherry!

As for she could shake him. An oaf, no more. Still he’d be good tutor two in his big armschair lerningstoel and she be waxen in his hands. Turning up and fingering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous longerous book of the dark. Look at this passage about Galilleotto! I know it is difficult but when your goche I go dead. Turn now to this patch upon Smacchiavelluti! Soot allours, he’s sure to spot it! ’Twas ever so in monitorology since Headmaster Adam became Eva Harte’s toucher, in omnibus moribus et temporibus, with man’s mischief in his mind whilst her pupils swimmed too heavenlies, let his be exaspirated, letters be blowed! I is a femaline person. O, of provocative gender. U unisingular case.

Which is why trumpers are mixed up in duels and here’s B. Rohan meets N. Ohlan for the prize of a thou.

But listen to the mocking birde to micking barde making bared! We’ve heard it aye since songdom was gemurrmal. As he was [p.252] queering his shoolthers. So was I. And as I was cleansing my fausties. So was he. And as way ware puffiing our blowbags. Souwouyou.

Come, thrust! Go, parry! Dvoinabrathran, dare! The mad long ramp of manchind’s parlements, the learned lacklearning, merciless as wonderful.

— Now may Saint Mowy of the Pleasant Grin be your everglass and even prospect!

— Feeling dank.

Exchange, reverse.

— And may Saint Jerome of the Harlots’ Curse make family three of you which is much abedder!

— Grassy ass ago.

And each was wrought with his other. And his continence fell. The bivitellines, Metellus and Ametallikos, her crown pretenders, obscindgemeinded biekerers, varying directly, uruseye each oxesother, superfetated (never cleaner of lamps frowned fiercelier on anointer of hinges), while their treegrown girls, king’s game, if he deign so, are in such transfusion just to know twigst timidy twomeys, for gracious sake, who is artthoudux from whose heterotropic, the sleepy or the glouch, for, shyly bawn and showly nursured, exceedingly nice girls can strike exceedingly bad times unless so richtly chosen’s by (what though of riches he have none and hope dashes hope on his heart’s horizon) to gar their great moments greater. The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere waterstichystuff in a selfmade world that you can’t believe a word he’s written in, not for pie, but one’s only owned by naturel rejection. Charley, you’re my darwing! So sing they sequent the assent of man. Till they go round if they go roundagain before breakparts and all dismissed. They keep. Step keep. Step. Stop. Who is Fleur? Where is Ange? Or Gardoun?

Creedless, croonless hangs his haughty. There end no moe red devil in the white of his eye. Braglodyte him do a katadupe! A condamn quondam jontom sick af a suckbut! He does not know how his grandson’s grandson’s grandson’s grandson will stammer up [p.253] in Peruvian for in the ersebest idiom I have done it equals I so shall do. He dares not think why the grandmother of the grandmother of his grandmother’s grandmother coughed Russky with suchky husky accent since in the mouthart of the slove look at me now means I once was otherwise. Nor that the mappamund has been changing pattern as youth plays moves from street to street since time and races were and wise ants hoarded and sauterelles were spendthrifts, no thing making newthing wealthshowever for a silly old Sol, healthytobedder and latewiser. Nor that the turtling of a London’s alderman is ladled out by the waggerful to the regionals of pigmyland. His part should say in honour bound: So help me symethew, sammarc, selluc and singin, I will stick to you, by gum, no matter what, bite simbum, and in case of the event coming off beforehand even so you was to release me for the sake of the other cheap girl’s baby’s name plaster me but I will pluckily well pull on the buckskin gloves! But Noodynaady’s actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines.

Evidentament he has failed as tiercely as the deuce before for she is wearing none of the three. And quite as patenly there is a hole in the ballet trough which the rest fell out. Because to explain why the residue is, was, or will not be, according to the eighth axiom, proceeded with, namely, since ever apart that gossan duad, so sure as their’s a patch on a pomelo, this yam ham in never live could, the shifting about of the lassies, the tug of love of their lads ending with a great deal of merriment, hoots, screams, scarf drill, cap fecking, ejaculations of aurinos, reechoable mirthpeals and general thumbtonosery (Myama’s a yaung yaung cauntry), one must recken with the sudden and gigantesquesque appearance unwithstandable as a general election in Barnado’s bearskin amongst the brawlmiddle of this village childergarten of the largely longsuffering laird of Lucanhof.

But, vrayedevraye Blankdeblank, god of all machineries and tomestone of Barnstaple, by mortisection or vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded, an isaac jacquemin mauromormo milesian, how accountibus for him, moreblue?

[p.254] Was he pitssched for an ensemple as certain have dognosed of him against our seawall by Rurie, Thoath and Cleaver, those three stout sweynhearts, Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden, product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means, as might occur to anyone, your brutest layaman with the princest champion in our archdeaconry, or so yclept from Clio’s clippings, which the chroncher of chivalries is sulpicious save he scan, for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends, have done, do and will again as John, Polycarp and Irenews eye-to-eye ayewitnessed and to Paddy Palmer, while monks sell yew to archers or the water of the livvying goes the way of all fish from Sara’s drawhead, the corralsome, to Isaac’s, the lauphed butt one, with her minnelisp extorreor to his moanolothe inturned? So Perrichon with Bastienne or heavy Humph with airy Nan, Ricqueracqbrimbillyjicqueyjocqjolicass? How sowesthow, dullcisamica? A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch of tears.

The mar of murmury mermers to the mind’s ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed. Only the caul knows his thousandfirst name, Hocus Crocus, Esquilocus, Finnfinn the Faineant, how feel full foes in furrinarr! Doth it not all come aft to you, puritysnooper, in the way television opes longtimes ofter when Potollomuck Sotyr or Sourdanapplous the Lollapaloosa? The charges are, you will remember, the chances are, you won’t; bit it’s old Joe, the Java Jane, older even than Odam Costollo, and we are recurrently meeting em, par Mahun Mesme, in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture. Greets Godd, Groceries! Merodach! Defend the King! Hoet of the rough throat attack but whose say is soft but whose ee has a cute angle, he whose hut is a hissarlik even as her hennin’s aspire. And insodaintily she’s a quine of selm ashaker while as a murder of corpse when his magot’s up he’s the best berrathon sanger in all the aisles of Skaldignavia. As who shall hear. For now at last is Longabed going to be gone to, that more than man, prince of Bunnicombe of wide roadsterds, the herblord the gillyflowrets so fain fan to flatter about. Artho is the [p.255] name is on the hero, Capellisato, shoehanded slaughterer of the shader of our leaves.

Attach him! Hold!

Yet stir thee, to clay, Tamor!

Why wilt thou erewaken him from his earth, O summonorother: he is weatherbitten from the dusts of ages? The hour of his closing hies to hand; the tocsin that shall claxonise his wareabouts. If one who remembered his webgoods and tealofts were to ask of a hooper for whose it was the storks were quitting Aquileyria, this trundler would not wot; if other who joined faith when his depth charge bombed our barrel spillway were to —!

Jehosophat, what doom is here! Rain ruth on them, sire! The wing of Moykill cover him! The Bulljon Bossbrute quarantee him! Calavera, caution! Slaves to Virtue, save his Veritotem! Bearara Tolearis, procul abeat! The Ivorbonegorer of Danamaraca be, his Hector Protector! Woldomar with Vasa, peel your peeps! And try to saviourise the nights of labour to the order of our blooding worold! While Pliny the Younger writes to Pliny the Elder his calamolumen of contumellas, what Aulus Gellius picked on Micmacrobius and what Vitruvius pocketed from Cassiodorus. Like we larnt from that Buke of Lukan in Dublin’s capital, Kongdam Coombe. Even if you are the kooper of the winkel over measure never lost a licence. Nor a duckindonche divulse from hath and breakfast. And for the honour of Alcohol drop that you-know-what-I’ve-come-about-I-saw-your-act air! Punch may be pottleproud but his Judy’s a wife’s wit better.

For the producer (Mr John Baptister Vickar) caused a deep abuliousness to descend upon the Father of Truants and, at a side issue, pluterpromptly brought on the scene the cutletsized consort, foundling filly of fortyshilling fostertailor and shipman’s shopahoyden, weighing ten pebble ten, scaling five footsy five and spanning thirtyseven inchettes round the good companions, twentynine ditties round the wishful waistress, thirtyseven alsos round the answer to everything, twentythree of the same round each of the quis separabits, fourteen round the beginning of happiness and nicely nine round her shoed for slender.

[p.256] And eher you could pray mercy to goodness or help with your hokey or mehokeypoo, Gallus’s hen has collared her pullets. That’s where they have owreglias for. Their bone of contention, flesh to their thorns, prest as Prestissima, makes off in a thinkling (and not one hen only nor two hens neyther but every blessed brigid came aclucking and aclacking), while, a rum a rum, the ram of all harns, Bier, Wijn, Spirituosen for consumption on the premises, advokaat withouten pleaders, Mas marrit, Pas poulit, Ras ruddist of all, though flamifestouned from galantifloures, is hued and cried of each’s colour.

Home all go. Halome. Blare no more ramsblares, oddmund barkes! And cease your fumings, kindalled bushies! And sherrigoldies yeassymgnays; your wildeshaweshowe moves swiftly sterneward! For here the holy language. Soons to come. To pausse.

’Tis goed. Het best.

For they are now tearing, that is, teartoretorning. Too soon are coming tasbooks and goody, hominy bread and bible bee, with jaggery-yo to juju-jaw, Fine’s French phrases from the Grandmère des Grammaires and bothered parsenaps from the Four Massores, Mattatias, Marusias, Lucanias, Jokinias, and what happened to our eleven in thirtytwo antepostdating the Valgur Eire and why is limbo where is he and what are the sound waves saying ceased ere they all wayed wrong and Amnist anguished axes Collis and where fishngaman fetched the mongafesh from and whatfor paddybird notplease rancoon and why was Sindat sitthing on him sitbom like a saildior, with what the doc did in the doil, not to mention define the hydraulics of common salt and, its denier crid of old provaunce, where G.P.O. is zentrum and D.U.T.C. are radients write down by the frequency of the scores and crores of your refractions the valuations in the pice of dinggyings on N.C.R. and S.C.R.

That little cloud, a nibulissa, still hangs isky. Singabed sulks before slumber. Light at night has an alps on his druckhouse. Thick head and thin butter or after you with me. Caspi, but gueroligue stings the air. Gaylegs to riot of us! Gallocks to lafft! [p.257] What is amaid today todo? So angelland all weeping bin that Izzy most unhappy is. Fain Essie fie onhapje? laughs her stella’s vispirine.

While, running about their ways, going and coming, now at rhimba rhomba, now in trippiza trappaza, pleating a pattern Gran Geamatron showed them of gracehoppers, auntskippers and coneyfarm leppers, they jeerilied along, durian gay and marian maidcap, lou Dariou beside la Matieto, all boy more all girl singoutfeller longa house blong store Huddy, whilest nin nin nin nin that Boorman’s clock, a winny on the tinny side, ninned nin nin nin nin, about old Father Barley how he got up of a morning arley and he met with a plattonem blondes named Hips and Haws and fell in with a fellows of Trinity some header Skowood Shaws like (You’ll catch it, don’t fret, Mrs Tummy Lupton! Come indoor, Scoffynosey, and shed your swank!) auld Daddy Deacon who could stow well his place of beacon but he never could hold his kerosene’s candle to (The nurse’ll give it you, stickypots! And you wait, my lasso, fecking the twine!) bold Farmer Burleigh who wuck up in a hurlywurly where he huddly could wuddle to wallow his weg tillbag of the baker’s booth to beg of (You’re well held now, Missy Cheekspeer, and your panto’s off! Fie, for shame, Ruth Wheatacre, after all the booz said!) illed Diddiddy Achin for the prize of a pease of bakin with a pinch of the panch of the ponch in jurys for (Ah, crabeyes, I have you, showing off to the world with that gape in your stocking!) Wold Forrester Farley who, in deesperation of deispiration at the diasporation of his diesparation, was found of the round of the sound of the lound of the. Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdy-looshoofermoyportertoo-ryzooysphalnabortansport-haokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.

Byfall.

Upploud!

The play thou schouwburgst, Game, here endeth. The curtain drops by deep request.

Uplouderamain!

Gonn the gawds, Gunnar’s gustspells. When the h, who the hu, how the hue, where the huer? Orbiter onswers: lots lives lost. Fionia is fed up with Fidge Fudgesons. Sealand snorres. [p.258] Rendningrocks roguesreckning reigns. Gwds with gurs are gttrdmmrng. Hlls vlls. The timid hearts of words all exeomnosunt. Mannagad, lammalelouh, how do that come? By Dad, youd not heed that fert? Fulgitudes ejist rowdownan tonuout. Quoq! And buncskleydoodle! Kidoosh! Of their fear they broke, they ate wind, they fled; where they ate there they fled; of their fear they fled, they broke away. Go to, let us extol Azrael with our harks, by our brews, on our jambses, in his gaits. To Mezouzalem with the Dephilim, didits dinkun’s dud? Yip! Yup! Yarrah! And let Nek Nekulon extol Mak Makal and let him say unto him: Immi ammi Semmi. And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war. And he shall open his mouth and answer: I hear, O Ismael, how they laud is only as my loud is one. If Nekulon shall be havonfalled surely Makal haven hevens. Go to, let us extell Makal, yea, let us exceedingly extell. Though you have lien amung your posspots my excellency is over Ismael. Great is him whom is over Ismael and he shall mekanek of Mak Nakulon. And he deed.

Uplouderamainagain!

For the Clearer of the Air from on high has spoken in tumbuldum tambaldam to his tembledim tombaldoom worrild and, moguphonoised by that phonemanon, the unhappitents of the earth have terrerumbled from fimament unto fundament and from tweedledeedumms down to twiddledeedees.

Loud, hear us!

Loud, graciously hear us!

Now have thy children entered into their habitations. And nationglad, camp meeting over, to shin it, Gov be thanked! Thou hast closed the portals of the habitations of thy children and thou hast set thy guards thereby, even Garda Didymus and Garda Domas, that thy children may read in the book of the opening of the mind to light and err not in the darkness which is the afterthought of thy nomatter by the guardiance of those guards which are thy bodemen, the cheeryboyum chirryboth with the kerrybommers in their krubeems, Pray-your-Prayers Timothy and Back-to-Bunk Tom.

[p.259] Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever.

O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour’s time, O Loud!

That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall not gomeet madhowiatrees.

Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!

Ha he hi ho hu.

Mummum.

 ® 

unde et ubi.[p.260] As we there are where are we are we there from tomtittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo.

With his broad and hairy face, to Ireland a disgrace.sic. Whom will comes over. Who to caps ever. And howelse do we hook our hike to find that pint of porter place? Am shot, says the bigguard. 1 

imaginable itinerary through the particular universal.Whence. Quick lunch by our left, wheel, Menly about peebles. to where. Long Livius Lane, mid Mezzofanti Mall, diagonising Lavatery Square, up Tycho Brache Crescent, 2  shouldering Berkeley Alley, Dont retch meat fat salt lard sinks down (and out).querfixing Gainsborough Carfax, under Guido d’Arezzo’s Gadeway, by New Livius Lane till where we whiled while we whithered. Old Vico Roundpoint. But fahr, be fear! And natural, simple, slavish, filial. The marriage of Montan wetting his moll we know, like any enthewsyass cuckling a hoyden 3  in her rougey [p.261] gipsylike chinkaminx pulshandjupeyjade and her petsybluse indecked o’ voylets. 1  When who was wist was ware. En elv, et fjaell. And the whirr of the whins humming us howe. His hume. Hencetaking tides we haply return, trumpeted by prawns and ensigned with seakale, to befinding ourself when old is said in one and maker mates with made (O my!), having conned the cones and meditated the mured and pondered the pensils and ogled the olymp and delighted in her dianaphous and cacchinated behind his culosses, before a Swiney Tod, ye Daimon Barbar! mosoleum. Length Withought Breath, of him, a chump of the evums, upshoot of picnic or stupor out of sopor, Cave of Kids or Hymanian Glattstoneburg, denary, danery, donnery, Dig him in the rubsh! domm, who, entiringly as he continues highlyfictional, tumulous under his chthonic exterior Ungodly old Ardrey, Cronwall beeswaxing the convulsion box. but plain Mr Tumulty in muftilife, 2  in his antisipiences as in his recognisances, is, (Dominic Directus) a manyfeast munificent more mob than man.

constitu-tion of the constitu-tionable as constitu-tional. Ainsoph, 3  this upright one, with that noughty besighed him zeroine. To see in his horrorscup he is mehrkurios than saltz of sulphur. Terror of the noonstruck by day, cryptogam of each nightly bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? 4  How is he? And what the decans is there about him [p.262] anyway, the decemt man? Easy, calm your haste! Approach to lead our passage!

proba-possible prolego-mena to ideareal history. This bridge is upper.
Cross.
Thus come to castle.
Knock.  1 
A password, thanks.
Yes, pearse.
Well, all be dumbed!
O really?  2  Swing the banjo, ban-tams, bounce-the-baller’s blown to fook. Hoo cavedin earthwight
At furscht kracht of thunder.  3 
When shoo, his flutterby,
Was netted and named. 4  Thsight near left me eyes when I seen her put thounce otay ithpot. Erdnacrusha, requiestress, wake em!
And let luck’s puresplutterall lucy at ease!  5 
To house as wise fool ages builded.
Sow byg eat.  6 

gnosis of precreate determina-tion. agnosis of postcreate deter-minism. Staplering to tether to, steppingstone to Quartandwds. mount by, as the Boote’s at Pickardstown. And that skimmelk steed still in the groundloftfan. As over all. Or be these wingsets leaned to the outwalls, beastskin trophies of booth of Baws the balsamboards?  7  Burials be ballyhouraised! So let Bacchus e’en call! Inn inn! Tickets for the Tailwaggers Terrierpuppy Raffle. Inn inn! Where. The babbers ply the pen. The bibbers drang the den. The papplicom, the pubblicam he’s turning tin for ten. From [p.263] seldomers that most frequent him. That same erst crafty hakemouth which under the assumed name of Ignotus Loquor, of foggy old, harangued bellyhooting fishdrunks on their favorite stamping ground, from a father theobalder brake. 1  And Egyptus, the incenstrobed, Mars speaking. as Cyrus heard of him? And Major A. Shaw after he got the miner smellpex? And old Whiteman self, the blighty blotchy, beyond the bays, hope of ostrogothic and ottomanic faith converters, despair of Pandemia’s postwartem plastic surgeons? But is was all so long ago. Hispano–Cathayan-Euxine, Castillian-Emeratic-Hebridian, Espanol-Cymric- Smith, no home. Helleniky? Rolf the Ganger, Rough the Gangster, not a feature alike and the face the same. 2  Pastimes are past times. Now let bygones be bei Gunne’s. Saaleddies er it in this warken werden, mine boerne, and it vild need olderwise  3  since primal made alter in garden of Idem. The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes and all’s Non quod sed quiat. loth and pleasestir, are we told, on excellent inkbottle authority, solarsystemised, seriolcosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun. Securely judges orb terrestrial.  4  Haud certo ergo. Hearasay in paradox lust. But O felicitous culpability, sweet bad cess to you for an archetypt!

archaic zelotypia and the odium teleolo-gicum. [p.264] Honour commercio’s energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody and ech with pal, this ernst of Allsap’s ale halliday of roaring month with its two lunar eclipses and its three saturnine settings! Horn of Heatthen, highbrowed! Brook of Life, backfrish! Amnios amnium, fluminiculum flaminulinorum! We seek the Blessed One, the Harbourer-cum-Enheritance. Even Canaan the Hateful. Ever a-going, ever a-coming. Between a stare and a sough. Fossilisation, all branches.  1  Wherefore Petra sware unto Ulma: Bags.
Balls. By the mortals’ frost! And Ulma sware unto Petra: On my veiny life!

the locali-sation of legend leading to the legali-sation of latifund-ism. In these places sojournemus, where Eblinn water, leased of carr and fen, leaving amont her shoals and salmen browses, whom inshore breezes woo with freshets, windeth to her broads. A phantom city, phaked of philim pholk, bowed and sould for a four of hundreds of manhood in their three and threescore Move up, Mackinerny! Make room for Muckinurney! fylkers for a price partitional of twenty six and six. By this riverside, on our sunnybank,  2  how buona the vista, by Santa Rosa! A field of May, the very vale of Spring. Orchards here are lodged; sainted lawrels evremberried. You have a hoig view ashwald, a glen of marrons and of thorns. Gleannaulinn, Ardeevin: purty glint of plaising height. This Norman court at boundary of the ville, yon creepered tower of a church of Ereland, meet for true saints in worshipful assemblage,  3  with our king’s house [p.265] of stone, belgroved of mulbrey, the still that was mill and Kloster that was Yeomansland, the ghastcold tombshape of the quick fore-gone on, the loftleaved elm Lefanunian abovemansioned, each, every, all is for the retrospectioner. Skole! Agus skole igen!  1  Sweetsome auburn, cometh up as a selfreizing flower, that fragolance of the fraisey beds: the phoenix, his pyre, is still flaming away with trueprattight spirit: the wren his nest is niedelig as the turrises of the sabines are televisible. Here are the cottage and the bungalow for the cobbeler and the brandnewburgher:  2  but Izolde, her chaplet gardens, an litlee plads af liefest pose, In snowdrop, trou-de-dentelle, flesh and heliotrope. arride the winnerful wonders off, the winnerful wonnerful wanders off,  3  with hedges of ivy and hollywood and bower of mistletoe, are, tho if it theem tho and yeth if you pleathes,  4  for the blithehaired daughter of Angoisse. All out of two barreny old perishers, Tytonyhands and Vlossyhair, a kilolitre in metromyriams. Presepeprosapia, the parent bole. Wone tabard, wine tap and warm tavern  5  and, by ribbon development, from contact bridge to lease lapse, only two millium two humbered and eighty thausig nine humbered Here’s our dozen cousins from the starves on tripes. and sixty radiolumin lines to the wustworts of a Finntown’s generous poet’s office. Distorted mirage, aloofliest of the plain, wherein the [p.266] boxomeness of the bedelias  1  makes hobbyhodge happy in his hole.  2  The store and charter, Treetown Castle under Lynne.Rivapool? Hod a brieck on it! But its piers eerie, its span spooky, its toll but a till, its parapets all peripateting. D’Oblong’s by his by. Which we all pass. Tons. In our snoo. Znore. While we hickerwards the thicker. Schein. Schore. Which assoars us from the murk of the mythelated in the barrabelowther, bedevere butlered table round, past Morningtop’s necessity and Harington’s invention, to the clarience of the childlight in the studiorium upsturts. Here we’ll dwell on homiest powers, love at the latch with novices nig and nag. The chorus: the principals. For the rifocillation of their inclination to the manifestation of irritation: doldorboys and doll.  3  After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding.

Bet you fippence, anythesious, there’s no puggatory, are yous game?preausteric man and his pursuit of pan-hysteric woman. Here (the memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for wringwrowdy wready are, F J, (at gaze, respecting, fourteenth baronet, meet, altrettanth bancorot, chaff) and ere commence commencement catalaunic when Aetius check chokewill Attil’s gambit, (that buxon bruzeup, give it a burl!) lead us seek, O june of eves the jenniest, thou who fleeest flicklesome the fond fervid frondeur to thickly thyself attach with thine efteased ensuer,  4  ondrawer of our unconscionable, flickerflapper fore our unter- [p.267] drugged, 1  lead us seek, lote us see, light us find, let us missnot Maidadate, Mimosa Multimimetica, the maymeaminning of maimoomeining! Elpis, thou fountain of the greeces, all shall speer theeward, 2  from kongen in his canteenhus to knivers hind the knoll. Ausonius Audacior and gael, gillie, gall. 3  Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with end- There was a sweet hopeful culled Cis. speaking nots for yestures, plutonically pursuant on briefest glimpse from gladrags, pretty Proserpronette whose slit satchel spilleth peas.

urges and widerurges in a primitive sept. Belisha beacon, beckon bright! Usherette, unmesh us! That grene ray of earong it waves us to yonder as the red, blue and yellow flogs time on the domisole, 4  with a blewy blow and a windigo. Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud. To brace congeners, trebly bounden and asservaged twainly. Adamman, 5  Emhe, Issossianusheen and sometypes Yggely ogs Weib. Uwayoei!  6  So mag this sybilette be our shibboleth that we may syllable her well! Vetus may be occluded behind the mou in The Big Bear bit the Sailor’s Only. Trouble, trou-ble, trouble. Veto but Nova will be nearing as their radient among the Nereids. A one of charmers, ay, Una Unica, charmers, who, under the branches of the elms, in shoes as yet unshent by stoniness, Forening Unge Kristlike Kvinne. wend, went, will wend a way of honey myrrh and rambler roses mistmusk while still the maybe mantles the meiblume or ever her [p.268] if have faded from the fleur, 1  their arms enlocked, (ringrang, the chimes of sex appeal- Telltale me all of annaryllies. ing as conchitas with sentas stray, 2  rung!), all thinking all of it, the It with an itch in it, the All every inch of it, the pleasure each will preen her for, the business each was bred to breed by. 3 

early notions of acquired rights and the influ-ence of collective tradition upon the individual. Soon jemmijohns will cudgel about some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan’s divisional tables whereas she, of Will you carry my can and fight the fairies? minions’ novence charily being cupid, for mug’s wumping, grooser’s grubbiness, andt’s avarice and grossopper’s grandegaffe, with her tootpettypout of jemenfichue will sit and knit on solfa sofa. 4  Stew of the evening, booksyful stew. And a bodikin a boss in the Thimble Theatre. But all is her inbourne. Intend. From Allma Mathers, Auctioneer. gramma’s grammar she has it that if there is a third person, mascarine, phelinine or nuder, being spoken abad it moods prosodes from a person speaking to her second which is the direct object that has been spoken to, with and at. Take the dative with his oblative 5  for, even if obsolete, it is always of interest, so spake gramma on the impetus of her imperative, only mind your genderous towards his reflexives Old Gavelkind the Gamper and he’s as daff as you’re erse. such that I was to your grappa (Bott’s trousend, hore a man uff!) when him was me hedon 6  and mine, what the lewdy saying, his analectual pygmyhop. 7  There is comfortism in the [p.269] knowledge that often hate on first hearing comes of love by second sight. Have your little sintalks in the dunk of subjunctions, dual in duel and prude with pruriel, but even the aoriest chaparound whatever plaudered perfect anent prettydotes and haec genua omnia may perhaps chance to be about to be in the case to be becoming a pale peterwright in spite of all your tense accusatives whilstly you’re wallfloored 1  like your gerandiums for the better half of a yearn or sob. It’s a wild’s kitten, my dear, who can tell a wilkling from a warthog. For you may be as practical as is predicable but you must have the proper sort of accident to meet that kind of a being with a difference. 2  Flame at his fumbles but freeze on his fist. 3  Every letter is a godsend, ardent Ares, brusque Boreas and glib Ganymede like zealous Zeus, the O’Meghisthest of all. To me or not to me. Satis thy quest on. Werbungsap! Jeg suis, vos Undante umoroso. M. 50–50. wore a gentleman, thou arr, I am a quean. Is a game over? The game goes on. Cookcook! Search me. The beggar the maid the bigger hij klmnho pqlrs the mauler. And the greater the patrarc the griefer the pinch. And that’s what your doctor knows. O love it is the commonknounest thing how it pashes the plutous and the paupe. 4  Pop! And egg she active or spoon she passive, all them fine clauses in Lindley’s and Murrey’s never braught the participle of a present to a desponent hortatrixy, vindicatively I say it, [p.270] from her postconditional future. 1  Lumpsome is who lumpsum pays. Quantity counts though accents falter. Yoking apart and oblique orations I’ll go for that small polly if you’ll suck to your lebbens-quatsch. parsed to one side, a brat, alanna, can choose from so many, be he a sollicitor’s appendix, a pipe clerk or free functionist flyswatter, that perfect little cad, from the languors and weakness of limberlimbed lassihood till the head, back and heartaches of waxedup womanage and heaps on heaps of other things too. Note the Respectable Irish Distressed Ladies and the Merry Mustard Frothblowers of Humphreystown Associations. Atac first, queckqueck quicks after. Beware how in that hist subtaile of schlangder 2  lies liaison to tease oreilles! To vert embowed set proper penchant. But learn from that ancient tongue to be middle old modern to the minute. A spitter that can be depended on. Though Wonderlawn’s lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain. 3  You may spin on youthlit’s bike and multiplease your Mike and Nike with your kickshoes on the algebrars O’Mara Farrell. but, volve the virgil page and view, the O of woman is long when burly those two muters Verschwindibus. sequent her so from Nebob 4  see you never stray who’ll nimm you nice and nehm the day.

concomi-tance of courage, counsel and constancy. ordination of omen, onus and obit. distribution of danger, duty and destiny. polar principles. One hath just been areading, hath not one, ya, ya, in their memoiries of Hireling’s puny Ulstria, Monastir, Leninstar and Connecticut. wars, end so, und all, ga, ga, of The O’Brien, [p.271] The O’Connor, The Mac Loughlin and The Mac Namara with summed their appondage, da, da, of Sire Jeallyous Seizer, that gamely Cliopatria, thy hosies history. torskmester, 1  with his duo of druidesses in ready money rompers 2  and the tryonforit of Oxthievious, Lapidous and Malthouse Anthemy. You may fail to see the lie of that layout, Suetonia, 3  but the reflections which recur to me are that so long as beauty life is body love 4  and so bright as Mutua of your mirror holds her candle to your caudle, lone lefthand likeless, sombring Autum of your Spring, reck you not one spirt of anyseed whether trigemelimen cuddle his coddle or nope. She’ll confess it by her figure and she’ll deny it to your face. If you’re not ruined by that one she won’t do you any whim. And then? What afters it? Cruff Gunne may blow, Gam Gonna flow, the gossans eye the jennings aye. From the butts of Heber and The Eroico Furioso makes the valet like smiling. Heremon, nolens volens, brood our pansies, brune in brume. There’s a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be. As they warred in their big innings ease now we never shall know. Eat early earthapples. Coax Cobra to chatters. Hail, Heva, we hear! This is the The hyperape the mink he groves the mole you see nowfor crush sake, chawley! glider that gladdened the girl 5  that list to the wind that lifted the leaves that folded the fruit that hung on the tree that grew in the garden Gough gave. Wide hiss, we’re wizen- [p.272] ing. Hoots fromm, we’re globing. Why hidest thou hinder thy husband his name? Leda, Lada, aflutter-afraida, so does your girdle grow! Willed without witting, whorled without aimed. Pappapassos, Mammamanet, warwhetswut and whowitswhy. 1  But it’s tails for toughs and titties for totties and come Pige pas. buckets come bats till deeleet.  2 

panoptical purview of political progress and the future pre-sentation of the past. Dark ages clasp the daisy roots, Stop, if you are a sally of the allies, hot off Minnowaurs and naval actiums, picked engagements and banks of rowers. Please stop if you’re a BCAD B.C. minding missy, please do. But should you prefer A.D. stepplease. And if you miss with a venture it serves you girly well glad. But, holy Janus, I was forgetting the Blitzenkopfs! Here, Hengegst and Horsesauce, take your heads 3  out of that taletub! And leave your hinnyhennyhindyou! It’s haunted. The chamber. Of errings. Whoan, tug, trace, Seidlitz powther for slogan plumpers. stirrup! It is distinctly understouttered that, sense you threehandshighs put your twofootlarge timepates in that dead wash of Lough Murph and until such time pace one and the same Messherrn the grinning statesmen, Brock and Leon, have shunted the grumbling coundedtouts, Starlin and Ser Artur Ghinis. Foamous homely brew, bebattled by bottle, Hoploits and atthems. gageure de guegerre. 4  Bull igien bear and then bearagain bulligan. Gringrin gringrin. Staffs varsus herds and bucks vursus barks. Curragh machree, me bosthoon fiend. [p.273] By old Grumbledum’s walls. Bumps, bellows and bawls. 1  Opprimor’s down, up up Opima! Rents and rates and tithes and taxes, wages, Femilies hug bank! saves and spends. Heil, heptarched span of peace! 2  Live, league of lex, nex and the mores! Fas est dass and foe err you. Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble. So All we suffered under them Cowdung Forks and how we enjoyed over our pick of the basketfild. Old Kine’s Meat Meal. wrap up your worries in your woe (wumpumtum!) and shake down the shuffle for the throw. For there’s one mere ope 3  for downfall ned. As Hanah Levy, shrewd shroplifter, and nievre anore skidoos with her spoileds.  4  To add gay touches. For hugh and guy and goy and jew. To dimpled and pimpled and simpled and wimpled. A peak in a poke and a pig in a pew. 5  She wins them by wons, a haul Flieflie for the jillies and a bombambum for the nappotondus. hectoendecate, for mangay mumbo jumbjubes tak mutts and jeffs muchas bracelonettes gracies barcelonas. 6  O what a loovely freespeech ’twas (tep)  7  to gar howalively hintergrunting! Tip. Like lilt of larks to burdened crocodile, 8  or skittering laubhing at that wheeze of old windbag, Blusterboss, blowharding about all he didn’t do. Hell o’ your troop! With is the winker for the muckwits of willesly and nith is the nod for the umproar napollyon and hitheris poorblond piebold hoerse. Huirse. With its tricuspidal hauberk- [p.274] helm coverchaf emblem on. For the man that Murdoch. broke the ranks on Monte Sinjon. The allriddle of it? That that is allruddy with us, ahead of schedule, which already is plan accomplished Pas d’action, peu de sauce. from and syne: Daft Dathy of the Five Positions (the death ray stop him!) is still, as reproaches Paulus, on the Madderhorn and, entre chats and hobnobs, 1  daring Dunderhead to shiver his timbers and Hannibal mac Hamiltan the Hegerite 2  (more livepower elbow him!) ministerbuilding up, as repreaches Timothy, in Saint Barmabrac’s. 3  Number Thirty two West Eleventh streak looks on to that (may all in the tocoming of the sempereternal speel From the seven tents of Joseph till the calends of Mary Marian, olivehunkered and thorny too. spry with it!) datetree doloriferous which more and over leafeth earlier than every growth and, elfshot, headawag, with frayed nerves wondering till they feeled sore like any woman that has been born at all events to the purdah and for the howmanyeth and howmovingth time at what the demons in that As Shakefork might pitch it. jackhouse that jerry built for Massa and Missus and hijo de puta, the sparksown fermament of the starryk fieldgosongingon where blows a nemone at each blink of windstill 4  they were sliding along and sleeting aloof and scouting around and shooting about. Allwhichwhile or whereaballoons for good vaunty years Dagobert is in Clane’s clean hometown prepping up his prepueratory and learning how to put a broad face bronzily out through a broken breached meataerial Puzzly, puzzly, I smell a cat. [p.275] from Bryan Awlining! Erin’s hircohaired culoteer.  1 

from cenogenetic dichotomy through diagonistic conciliance to dynastic continuity. And as, these things being so or ere those things having done, way back home in Pacata Auburnia, 2  (untillably holy gammel Eire) one Two makes a wing at the macroscope telluspeep. world burrowing on another, (if you’ve got me, neighbour, in any large lumps, geek?, ant got the strong of it) Standfest, our topiocal sagon hero, or any otther macotther, signs is on the bellyguds bastille back, bucked up with fullness, ant silvering to her jubilee, 3  birchleaves her jointure, our lavy in waving, visage full of flesh ant fat as a hen’s i’ forehead, From the Buffalo Times of bysone days. Airyanna ant Blowyhart topsirturvy, that royal pair in their palace of quicken boughs hight The Goat ant Compasses (‘phone number 17:69, if you want to know 4  ) his seaarm strongsround her, her velivole eyne ashipwracked, have discusst their things of the past, crime and fable with shame, home and profit, 5  why lui lied to lei and hun tried to kill ham, scribbledehobbles, in whose veins runs a mixture of, are head bent and hard upon. Spell me the chimes. They are tales all tolled.  6  Quick quake quokes the parrotbook of dates. Today is well thine but where’s may tomorrow be. But, bless his cowly head and press his crankly hat, what a world’s woe is each’s [p.276] other’s weariness waiting to beadroll his own properer mistakes, the backslapping gladhander, 1  Some is out for twoheaded dul-carnons but more pulfers turnips. free of his florid future and the other singing likeness, dirging a past of bloody altars, gale with a blost to him, dove without gall. And she, of the jilldaw’s nest 2  who tears up Omnitudes in a knutshedell. lettereens she never apposed a pen upon. 3  Yet sung of love and the monster man. What’s Hiccupper to hem or her to Hagaba? Ough, ough, brieve kindli!  4 

the mongrel under the dungmound. significance of the infraliminal inelligence. offrandes. Dogs’ vespers are anending. Vespertiliabitur. Goteshoppard quits his gabhard cloke to sate with Becchus. Zumbock! Achevre! Yet wind will be ere fadervor 5  and the hour of For all us kids under his aegis. fruminy and bergoo bell if Nippon have pearls or opals Eldorado, the daindy dish, the lecking out! Gipoo, good oil! For (hushmagandy!) long ’tis till gets bright that all cocks waken and birds Diana 6  with dawnsong hail. Aught darks flou a duskness. Bats that? There peepeestrilling. Saving the public his health. At Brannan’s on the moor. At Tam Fanagan’s weak yat his still’s going strang. And still here is noctules and can tell things acommon on by that fluffy feeling. Larges Superlative absolute of Porterstown. loomy wheelhouse to bodgbox 7  lumber up with hoodie hearsemen carrawain we keep is peace who follow his law, Sunday [p.277] King. 1  His sevencoloured’s soot (Ochone! Ochonal!) 2  and his imponence one heap lumpblock Why so mucky spick bridges span our Fluminian road. (Mogoul!). And rivers burst out like weeming racesround joydrinks for the fewnrally, 3  where every feaster’s a foster’s other, fiannians P.C. Helmut’s in the cotton-wood, listnin. all.  4  The wellingbreast, he willing giant, the mountain mourning his duggedy dew. To obedient of civicity in urbanious at felicity The throne is an umbrella strande and a sceptre’s a stick. what’ll yet meek Mike 5  our diputy mimber when he’s head on poll and Peter’s burgess and Miss Mishy Mushy is tiptupt by Toft Taft. Boblesse gobleege. For as Anna was at the beginning Jady jewel, our daktar deer. lives yet and will return after great deap sleap rerising and a white night high with a cows of Gautamed budders deossiphysing our Theas. Drommhiem as shower as there’s a wet enclouded in Westwicklow or a little black rose a truant in a thorntree. We drames our dreams tell Bappy returns. And Sein annews. We will not say it shall not be, this passing of order and order’s coming, but in the herbest country and in the country around Blath as in that city self of legionds they look for its being ever yet. So shuttle the pipers done. 6  Eric aboy!  7  And it’s time that all paid tribute to this massive mortiality, By lineal in pondus overthepoise. the pink of punk perfection as photography in mud. Some may seek to dodge the [p.278] gobbet for its quantity of quality but who wants to cheat the choker’s got to learn to chew the cud. Allwhichhole scrubs on scroll Pitchcap and triangle, noose and tinctunc. circuminiuminluminatedhave encuoniams here and improperies there. 1  With a pansy for the pussy in the corner.  2 

incipit intermissio. Bewise of Fanciulla’s heart, the heart of Fanciulla! Even the recollection of willow fronds is a spellbinder that lets to hear. 3  The rushes by the grey nuns’ pond: ah eh oh let Uncle Flabbius Muximus to Niecia Flappia Minnimiss. As this is. And as this this is. me sigh too. Coalmansbell: behoves you handmake of the load. Jenny Wren: pick, peck. Johnny Post: pack, puck. 4  All the world’s in want and is writing a letters. 5  A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world’s on wish to be carrying a letters. A letters Dear Brotus, land me arrears. to a king about a treasure from a cat.  6  When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a Rockaby, babel, flatten a wall. ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader. How he broke the good news to Gent. Is then any lettersday from many peoples, Daganasanavitch? Empire, your outermost.  7  A posy cord. Plece.

major and minor modes coalescing proliferate homo-genuine homo-geneity. We have wounded our way on foe tris prince till that force in the gill is faint afarred [p.279] and the face in the treebark feigns afear. This is rainstones ringing. Strangely cult for this ceasing of the yore. But Erigureen is ever. Pot price pon patrilinear plop, if the osseletion of the onkring gives omen nome? Since alls war that end war let sports be leisure and bring and buy fair. Ah ah athclete, blest your bally bathfeet! Towntoquest, fortorest, the hour that hies is hurley. A halt for hearsake.  1  [p.280] A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise. By her freewritten Hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the now woodwordings Bibelous hicstory and Barbarassa harestary. of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome as Satadays aftermoon lex leap smiles on the twelvemonthsminding? Such is. Dear (name of desired subject, A.N.), well, and I go on to. Shlicksher. I and we (tender condolences for happy funeral, one if) so sorry to (mention person suppressed for A shieling in coppingers and porrish soup all days. the moment, F.M.). Well (enquiries after allhealths) how are you (question maggy). A lovely (introduce to domestic circles) pershan of cates. Shrubsher. Those pothooks mostly How matches metroosers? she hawks from Poppa Vere Foster but these curly mequeues are of Mippa’s moulding. Shrubsheruthr. (Wave gently in the ere turning ptover.) Well, mabby (consolation of shopes) to soon air. With best from cinder Christinette if prints chumming, can be when desires Soldi, for asamples, backfronted or, if all, peethrolio or Get my Prize, using her Le hélos tombaut soul sur la jambe de marche. flower or perfume or, if veryveryvery chumming, in otherwards, who she supposed adeal, kissists my exits. Shlicksheruthr. From Auburn chenlemagne. Pious and pure fair one, all has concomitated to this that she shall tread them lifetrees leaves whose silence hitherto has shone as sphere of silver fastalbarnstone, that fount Bandusian shall play liquick music and after odours sigh of musk. Blotsbloshblothe, one dear that was. Sleep in the water, drug at the fire, shake the dust off and dream your one who would give her sidecurls to. Till later Mai maintenante elle est venuse. [p.281] Lammas is led in by baith our washwives, a weird of wonder tenebrous as that evil thorngarth, a field of faery blithe as this flowing wild.

Twos Dons Johns Threes Totty Askins.the part played by belletri-pax-bellum. mutuo-morpho-mutation. Aujourd’hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance 1  et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs Also Spuke Zerothruster. paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et sont arrivées jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles.  2 

sortes virginianae. Margaritomancy! Hyacinthinous pervinciveness! Flowers. A cloud. But Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues 3  the A saxum shillum for the sextum but nothums for that parridge preast. whispered wilfulness, (’tis demonal!) and shadows shadows multiplicating (il folsoletto nel falsoletto col fazzolotto dal fuzzolezzo), 4  totients quotients, they tackle their quarrel. Sickamoor’s so woful sally. Ancient’s aerger. And eachway bothwise glory signs. What if she love Sieger less though she leave Ruhm moan? That’s how our oxyggent has gotten ahold of half their world. Moving about in the free of the air and mixing with the ruck. Enten eller, either or.

interrogation. And!

exclamation. Nay, rather!

antithesis of ambi-dual anticipation. the mind factory, its give and take. [p.282] With sobs for his job, with tears Tricks stunts. for his toil, with horror for his squalor but with pep for his perdition, 1  lo, the boor plieth as the laird hireth him.

auspicium. Boon on begyndelse.

auguria. At maturing daily gloryaims!  2 

divinity not deity the uncertainty justified by our certitude. examples. A flink dab for a freck dive and a stern poise for a swift pounce was frankily at the manual arith sure enough which was the bekase he knowed from his cradle, no bird better, why his fingures were giving him whatfor to fife Truckeys’ cant for dactyl and spondee. with. First, by observation, there came boko and nigh him wigworms and nigh him tittlies and nigh him cheekadeekchimple and nigh him pickpocket with pickpocketpumb, pickpocketpoint, pickpocketprod, pickpocketpromise and upwithem. Holy Joe in lay Eden. 3  And anyhows always after them the dimpler he weighed the fonder fell he of his null four lovedroyd curdinals, his element curdinal Panoplous peregrine pifflicative pomposity. numen and his enement curdinal marryng and his epulent curdinal weisswassh and his eminent curdinal Kay O’Kay. Always would he be reciting of them, hoojahs koojahs, up by rota, in his Fanden’s catachysm from fursed to laced, quickmarch to decemvers, so as to pin the tenners, thumbs down. And anon and aldays, strues yerthere, would he wile arecreating em om lumerous ways, caiuscounting in the scale of pin puff pive piff, piff puff pive poo, poo puff pive pree, pree puff pive pfoor, pfoor puff pive pippive, poopive, 4  Niall Dhu, [p.283] Foughty Unn, Enoch Thortig, endso one, like to pitch of your cap, pac, on to tin tall spillicans. 1  Non plus ulstra, Elba, nec, cashellum tuum. To sum, borus pew notus pew eurus pew zipher. Ace, deuce, tricks, quarts, quims. Mumtiplay of course and carry to their whole number. While on the other hand, traduced by their comedy nominator to the loaferst terms for their aloquent parts, sexes, suppers, oglers, novels and dice. 2  He could find (the rakehelly!) by practice the valuse of thine-to-mine articles with no reminder for an equality of relations and, with the helpings from his tables, improduce fullmin to trumblers, links unto chains, weys in Nuffolk till tods of Yorek, oozies ad libs and several townsends, several hundreds, civil-to-civil imperious gallants into gells (Irish), bringing alliving stone allaughing down to grave clothnails and Dondderwedder Kyboshicksal. a league of archers, fools and lurchers under the rude rule of fumb. What signifieth whole that 3  but, be all the prowess of ten, ’tis as strange to relate he, nonparile to rede, rite and reckan, caught allmeals dullmarks for his nucleuds and alegobrew. They wouldn’t took bearings no how anywheres. O them doddhunters and allanights, aabs and baas for agnomes, yees and zees for incognits, bate him up jerrybly! Worse nor herman dororrhea. Give you the fantods, seemed to him. They ought to told you every last word first stead of trying every which way to kinder smear it out poison long. Show that the A stodge Angleshman has been worked by eccentricity. [p.284] median, hce che ech, interecting at royde angles the parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuts both the arcs that are in curveachord behind. Brickbaths. The family umbroglia. A Tullagrove pole 1  to the Height of County Fearmanagh has a septain inclinaison 2  and the graphplot for all the functions in Lower County Monachan, whereat samething is rivisible by nighttim, may be involted into the zeroic couplet, palls pell inhis heventh glike An oxygon is noturally reclined to rest. noughty times ∞ , find, if you are not literally cooefficient, how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd! pthwndxrclzp!, hids cubid rute being extructed, taking anan illitterettes, ififif at a tom. Answers, (for teasers only). 3  Ten, twent, thirt, see, ex and three icky totchty ones. From solation to solution. Imagine the twelve deaferended dumbbawls of the whowl abovebeugled to be the contonuation through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross. It follows that, if the two antesedents be bissyclitties and the three comeseekwenchers trundletrikes, then, Aysha Lalipat Ba be bi bo bum. behidden on the footplate, Big Whiggler  4  restant upsittuponable, the NCR 5  presents to us (tandem year at lasted length!) an ottomantic turquo-indaco of pictorial shine by pictorial shimmer so long as, gad of the gidday, pictorial summer, viridorefulvid, lits asheen, [p.285] but (lenz alack lends a lot), if this habby cyclic erdor be outraciously enviolated by a mierelin roundtableturning, like knuts in maze, the zitas runnind hare and dart 1  with the yeggs in their muddle, like a seven of wingless arrows, hodgepadge, thump, kick and hurry, all boy more missis blong him he race quickfeller all Finnfinnotus of Cincinnati. same hogglepiggle longer house blong him,  2  while the catched and dodged exarx seems himmulteemiously to beem (he wins her hend! he falls to tail!) the ersed ladest mand 3  and (uhu and uhud!) the losed farce on erroroots, 4  twalegged poneys and threehandled dorkeys (madahoy, morahoy, lugahoy, jogahoyaway) Arthurgink’s hussies and Everguin’s men. mPm brings us a rainborne pamtomomiom, aqualavant to (cat my dogs, if I baint dingbushed like everything!) kaksitoista volts yksitoista volts kymmenen volts yhdeksan volts kahdeksan volts seitseman volts kuusi volts viisi volts nelja volts kolme volts kaksi volts yksi! allahthallacamellated, caravan series Nom de nombres! The balbearians. to the finish of helve’s fractures. 5  In outher wards, one from five, two to fives ones, one from fives two millamills with a mill and a half a mill and twos twos fives fives of bully clavers. For a surview over all the factionables see Iris in the Evenine’s World. 6  Binomeans to be comprendered. Inexcessible as thy by god ways. The aximones. And their prosta- [p.286] lutes. For his neuralgiabrown.

Equal to=aosch.

heptagrammaton. P.t.l.o.a.t.o.

hypotheses of commonest experiences before apotheosis of the lustral principium. So, bagdad, after those initials falls and that primary taincture, as I know and you know yourself, begath, and the arab in the ghetto knows better, by nettus, nor anymeade or persan, comic cuts and series exerxeses always were to be capered in Casey’s frost book of, page torn on dirty, to be hacked at Hickey’s, Vive Paco Hunter! hucksler, Wellington’s Iron Bridge, and so, by long last, as it would shuffle out, must he to trump adieu atout atous to those cardinhands The hoisted in red and the lowered in black. he a big deal missed, radmachrees and rossecullinans and blagpikes in suitclover. Dear hearts of my counting, would he revoke them, forewheel to packnumbers, and, the time being no help fort, plates to lick one and turn over.

ingenious labour-tenacity as between ingenuous and libertine. Problem ye ferst, construct ann aquilittoral dryankle Probe loom! With his primal handstoe The boss’s bess bass is the browd of Mullingar. in his sole salivarium. Concoct an equoangular trillitter. 1  On the name of the tizzer and off the tongs and off the mythametical tripods. Beatsoon.

prope and procul in the convergence of their contrapul-siveness. Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph,  2  suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, 3  expecting the answer guess. 4  Nor was the noer long disappointed for easiest of kisshams, he was made vicewise. The aliments of jumeantry. Oc, tell it to oui, do, Sem! Well, ’tis oil thusly. First mull a mugfull of mud, son. 5  Oglores, [p.287] the virtuoser prays, olorum! What the D.V. would I do that for? That’s a goosey’s ganswer you’re for giving me, he is told, what the Deva would you do that for? 1  Now, sknow royol road to Puddlin, take your mut for a first beginning, big to bog, back to bach. Wolsherwomens at their weirdst. Anny liffle mud which cometh out of Mam will doob, I guess. A.i. Amnium instar. And to find a locus for an alp get a howlth on her bayrings as a prisme O and for a second O unbox your compasses. I cain but are you able? Amicably nod. Gu it! So let’s seth off betwain us. Prompty? Mux your pistany at a point of the coastmap to be called a but pronounced olfa. There’s the isle of Mun, ah! O! Tis just. Bene! Now, whole in applepine odrer  2 

(for—husk, hisk, a spirit spires—Dolph, dean of idlers, meager suckling of gert stoan, though barekely a balbose boy, he too, — venite, preteriti, 3  sine mora dumque de entibus nascituris decentius in lingua romana mortuorum parva chartula liviana ostenditur, sedentes in letitiae super ollas carnium, spectantes immo situm lutetiae unde auspiciis secundis tantae consurgent humanae stirpes, antiquissimam flaminum amborium Jordani et Jambaptistae mentibus revolvamus sapientiam: totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere, eadem quae ex aggere fututa fuere iterum inter alveum fore futura, quodlibet sese ipsum per aliudpiam agnoscere contrarium, omnem demun amnem ripis rivalibus amplecti 4  — recurrently often, when him moved he would cake their chair, coached rebelliumtending mikes of his same and over his own choirage at Backlane Univarsity, among of which pupal souaves the pizdrool was pulled up, bred and bat- [p.288] tered, for a dillon a dollar, 1  chanching letters for them vice o’verse to bronze mottes and blending tschemes for em in tropadores and doublecressing twofold thruths and devising tingling tailwords too whilest, cunctant that another would finish his sentence for him, he druider would smilabit eggways 2  ned, he, to don’t say nothing, would, so prim, and pick upon his ten ordinailed ungles, trying to undo with his teeth the knots made by his tongue, retelling humself by the math hour, long as he’s brood, a reel of funnish ficts apout the shee, how faust of all and on segund thoughts and the thirds the charmhim girlalove and fourthermore and filthily with bag from Oxatown and baroccidents and proper accidence and hoptohill and hexenshoes, in fine the whole damning letter; and, in point of feet, when he landed in ourland’s leinster 3  of saved and solomnones for the twicedhecame time, off Lipton’s strongbowed launch, the Lady Eva, in a tan soute of sails 4  he converted it’s nataves, name saints, young ordnands, maderaheads and old unguished P.T. Publikums, through the medium of znigznaks with sotiric zeal, to put off the barcelonas 5  from their peccaminous corpulums (Gratings, Mr Dane!) and kiss on their bottes (Master!) as often as they came within bloodshot of that other familiar temple and showed em the celestine way to by his tristar and his flop hattrick and his perry humdrum dumb and numb nostrums that he larned in Hymbuktu, 6  and that same galloroman cultous is very prevailend up to this windiest of landhavemiseries all over what was beforeaboots a land of nods, in spite of all the bloot, all the braim, all the brawn, all the brile, that was shod, that were shat, that was shuk all the while, for our massangrey if mosshungry people, the at Wickerworks, 7  still hold [p.289] ford to their healing and 1  byleave in the old weights downupon the Swanny, innovated by him, the prence di Propagandi, the chrism for the christmass, the pillar of the perished and the rock o’ralereality, and it is veritably belied, we belove, that not allsods of esoupcans that’s in the queen’s pottage post and not allfinesof greendgold that the Indus contains would overhinduce them, (o.p.) to steeplechange back once from their ophis workship and twice on sundises, to their ancient flash and crash habits of old Pales time ere beam slewed cable 2  or Derzherr, live wire, fired Benjermine Funkling outa th’Empyre, sin righthand son; which, cummal, having listed curefully to the interlooking and the underlacking of her twentynine shifts or his continental’s curses, pummel, apostrophised Byrne’s and Flamming’s and Furniss’s and Bill Hayses’s and Ellishly Haught’s, hoc, they (t.a.W.), sick or whole, stiff or sober, let drop as a doombody drops, without another ostrovgods word eitherways, in their own lineal descendance, as priesto as puddywhack, 3  coal on:  4  and, as we gang along to gigglehouse, talking of molniacs’ manias and missions for mades to scotch the schlang and leathercoats for murty magdies, of course this has blameall in that medeoturanian world to say to blessed by Pointer the Grace’s his privates judgements 5  whenso to put it, disparito, duspurudo, desterrado, despertieu, or, saving his presents for his own onefriend Bevradge, Conn the Shaughraun; but to return for a moment from the reptile’s age 6  to the coxswain on the first landing (page Ainée Riviere!) if the pretty Lady Elisabbess, Hotel des Ruines — she laid her batsleeve for him two trueveres tell love (on the Ides of Valentino’s, at Idleness, Floods Area, Isolade, Liv’s lonely daughter, with the Comes Tichiami, of Prima Vista, Abroad, suddenly), and beauty alone of all dare say when now, uncrowned, [p.290] deceptered, in what niche of time 1  is Shee or where in the rose world trysting, that was the belle of La Chapelle, shapely Liselle, and the peg-of-my-heart of all the tompull or on whose limbs-to-lave her semicupiose eyes now kindling themselves are brightning,  2  O Shee who then (4.32 m.p., old time, to be precise, according to all three doctors waterburies that was Mac Auliffe and poor Mac–Beth and poor MacGhimley to the tickleticks, of the synchronisms, all lauschening, a time also confirmed seven sincuries later by the quatren medical johnny, poor old MacAdoo MacDollett, with notary, 3  whose presence was required by law of Devine Foresygth and decretal of the Douge) who after the first compliments  4  med darkist day light, gave him then that vantage of a Blinkensope’s cuddlebath at her proper mitts — if she then, the then that matters,— but, seigneur ! she could never have forefelt, as she yet will fearfeel, when the lovenext breaks out, such a coolcold douche as him, the totterer, the four-flights-the-charmer, doubling back, in nowtime, 5  bymby when saltwater he wush him these iselands, O alors!, to mount miss (the wooeds of Fogloot!) under that chemise de fer and a vartryproof name, Multalusi (would it wash?) with a cheek white peaceful as, wen shall say, a single professed claire’s 6  and his washawash tubatubtub and his diagonoser’s lampblick, to pure where they where hornest girls, to buy her in par jure , il you plait, nuncandtunc and for simper, and other duel mavourneens in plurible numbers from Arklow Vikloe to Louth super Luck, come messes, come mams, and touch your spottprice (for ’twas he was the born suborner, man) on behalf of an oldest ablished firma of winebakers, Lagrima and Gemiti, later on, his craft ebbing, invoked by the unirish title, Grindings of Nash, 7  the [p.291] One and Only, Unic bar None, of Saint Yves by Landsend cornwer, man — ship me silver!, it must have been, faw! a terrible mavrue mavone, to synamite up the old Adam-he-used-to, such a finalley, and that’s flat as Tut’s fut, for whowghowho? the poour girl, a lonely peggy, given the bird, so inseuladed as Crampton’s peartree, (she sall eurn bitter bed by thirt sweet of her face!), and short wonder so many of the tomthick and tarry members in all there subsequious ages of our timocracy tipped to console with her at her mirrorable gracewindow’d hut 1  till the ives of Man, the O’Kneels and the O’Prayins and the O’Hyens of Lochlaunstown and the O’Hollerins of Staneybatter, hollyboys, all, burryripe who’ll buy?, 2  in juwelietry and kickychoses and madornaments and that’s not the finis of it (would it were!) — but to think of him foundling a nelliza the second, 3  also cliptbuss (the best was still there if the torso was gone) where he did and when he did, retriever to the last 4  — escapes my forgetness now was it dustcovered, nom de Lieu! on lapse or street ondown, through, for or from a foe, by with as on a friend, at the Rectory? Vicarage Road? Bishop’s Folly? Papesthorpe?, after picket fences, stonewalls, out and ins or oxers — for merry a valsehood whisprit he to manny a lilying earling; 5  and to try to analyse that ambo’s pair of braceleans akwart the rollyon trying to amarm all  6  of that miching micher’s bearded but insensible virility and its gaulish moustaches, Dammad and Groany, into her limited (tuff, tuff, que tu es pitre !) lapse at the same slapse for towelling ends 7  in their dolightful Sexsex home, Somehow-at-Sea (O little oily head, sloper’s brow and prickled ears!) as though he, a notoriety, a foist edition, were a wrigular writher neonovene babe! 8  — well, diarmuee and [p.292] granyou and Vae Vinctis, if that is what lamoor that of gentle breast rathe is intaken seems circling toward out yondest (it’s life that’s all chokered by that batch of grim rushers) heaven help his hindmost and, mark mo, if the so greatly displeaced diorems in the Saint Lubbock’s Day number of that most improving of roundshows, Spice and Westend Woman (utterly exhausted before publication, indiapepper edition shortly), are for our indices, it agins to pear like it, par my fay, and there is no use for your pastripreaching for to cheesse it either or praying fresh fleshblood claspers of young catholick throats on Huggin Green 1  to take warning by the prispast, why?, by cows ·.· man, in shirt, is how he is più la gonna è mobile and .·. they wonet do ut; and, an you could peep inside the cerebralised saucepan of this eer illwinded goodfornobody, you would see in his house of thoughtsam (was you, that is, decontaminated enough to look discarnate) what a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost or strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues laggin too, longa yamsayore, not only that but, search lighting, beached, bashed and beaushelled à la Mer pharahead into faturity, your own convolvulis pickninnig capman would real to jazztfancy the novo takin place of what stale words whilom were woven with and fitted fairly featly for, so; and equally so, the crame of the whole faustian fustian, whether your launer’s lightsome or your soulard’s schwearmood, it is that, whenas the swiftshut scareyss of our pupilteachertaut duplex will hark back to lark to you symibellically that, though a day be as dense as a decade, no mouth has the might to set a mearbound to the march of a landsmaul, 2  in half a sylb, helf a solb, holf a salb onward  3  the beast of boredom, common sense, lurking gyrographically down inside his loose Eating S.S. collar is gogoing of whisth to you sternly how — Plutonic loveliaks twinnt Platonic yearlings — you must, how, in undivided reawlity draw the line somewhawre)

why my as likewise whis his. [p.293] Coss? Cossist? Your parn! You, you make what name? (and in truth, as a poor soul is between shift and shift ere the death he has lived through becomes the life he is to die into, he or he had albut — he was rickets as to reasons but the balance of his minds was stables — lost himself or himself some somnione sciupiones, soswhitchoverswetch had he or he gazet, murphy come, murphy go, murphy plant, murphy grow, a maryamyriameliamurphies, in the lazily eye of his lapis,

Uteralterance or the Interplay of Bones in the Womb. Vieus Von DVbLIn, ’twas one of dozedeams a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore ground). 1  Given now ann linch you take enn all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical expressions out of old Sare Isaac’s 2  universal The Vortex. Spring of Sprung Verse. The Ver-tex. of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens [p.294] your dappled yeye here, mine’s presbyoperian, shill and wall) we see the copyngink strayedline AL (in Fig., the forest) from being con tinued, stops ait Lambday: 1  Modder ilond there too. Allow me anchore! I bring down noth and carry awe. Now, then, take this in! One of the most murmurable loose carollaries Sarga, or the path of outgoing. ever Ellis threw his cookingclass. With Olaf as centrum and Olaf’s lambtail for his spokesman circumscript a cyclone. Allow ter! Hoop! As round as the calf of an egg! O, dear me! O, dear me now! Another grand discobely! After Makefearsome’s Ocean. You’ve actuary entducked one! Quok! Why, you haven’t a passer! Fantastic! Early’ clever, surely doomed, to Swift’s, alas, the galehus! Docetism and Didicism, Maya-Thaya. Tamas-Rajas-Sattvas. Match of a matchness, like your Bigdud dadder in the boudeville song, Gorotsky Gollovar’s Troubles, raucking his flavourite turvku in the smukking precincts of lydias, 2  with Mary Owens and Dolly Monks seesidling to edge his cropulence and Blake–Roche, Kingston and Dockrell auriscenting him from afurz, our papacocopotl, 3  Abraham Bradley King? (ting ting! ting ting!) By his magmasine fall. Lumps, lavas and all. 4  Bene! But, thunder and turf, it’s not alover yet! One recalls Byzantium. The mystery repeats itself todate as our callback mother Gaudyanna, that was daughter to a tanner, 5  used to sing, as I think, now and then consinuously over her possetpot in her quer [p.295] homolocous humminbass hesterdie and istherdie forivor. 1  Vanissas Vanistatums! And The Vegetable Cell and its Private Properties. for a night of thoughtsendyures and a day. As Great Shapesphere puns it. In effect, I remumble, from the yules gone by, purr lil murrerof myhind, so she used indeed. When she give me the Sundaclouths she hung up for Tate and Comyng and snuffed out the ghost in the candle at his old game of haunt the sleepper. Faithful departed. When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes. Or the comeallyoum saunds. Like when I dromed I was in Dairy and was wuckened up with thump in thudderdown. Rest in peace! But to return. 2  What a wonderful memory you have too! Twonderful morrowy! Straorbinaire! Bene! I bring town eau and curry nothung up my sleeve. Now, springing quickenly from the mudland Loosh from Luccan with Allhim as her Elder tetraturn a somersault. All’s fair on all fours, as my instructor unstrict me. Watch! And you’ll have the whole inkle. Allow, allow! Gyre O, gyre O, gyrotundo! Hop lala! As umpty herum as you seat! O, dear me, that was very nesse! Very nace indeed! And makes us a The haves and the havenots: a distinction. daintical pair of accomplasses! You, allus for the kunst and me for omething with a handel to it. Beve! Now, as will pressantly be felt, there’s tew tricklesome poinds where our twain of doubling bicirculars, mating approxemetely in their suite poi and poi, dunloop into eath the ocher. Lucihere.! I fee where you [p.296] mea. The doubleviewed seeds. Nun, lemmas quatsch, vide pervoys akstiom, and I think as I’m suqeez in the limon, stickme punctum, but for semenal rations I’d likelong, by Araxes, to mack a capital Pee for Pride down there on the batom 1  where Hoddum and Heave, our monsterbilker, balked his bawd of parodies. Zweispaltung as Fundemaintalish of Wiederher-stellung. And let you go, Airmienious, and mick your modest mock Pie out of Humbles up your end. Where your apexojesus will be a point of order. With a geing groan grunt and a croak click cluck. 2  And my faceage kink and kurkle trying to make keek peep. 3  Are you right there, Michael, are you right? Do you think you can hold on by sitting tight? Well, of course, it’s awful angelous. Still I don’t feel it’s so dangelous. Ay, I’m right here, Nickel, and I’ll write. Singing the top line why it suits me mikey fine. But, yaghags hogwarts and arrahquinonthiance, it’s the muddest thick that was ever heard dump since Eggsmather got smothered in the plap of the pfan. Now, to compleat anglers, beloved bironthiarn and hushtokan hishtakatsch, join alfa pea and pull loose by dotties and, to be more sparematically logoical, eelpie and paleale by trunkles. Alow me align while I encloud especious! The Nike done it. Like pah, 4  I peh. Innate little bondery. And as plane as a poke stiff. 5  Now, aqua in buccat. I’ll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal [p.297] geomater. And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you’d wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexengown. 1  Destiny, Influence of Design upon. Hissss!, Arrah, go on! Fin for fun! You’ve spat your shower like a son of Sibernia but let’s have at it! Subtend to me now! Pisk! Outer serpumstances beiug ekewilled, we carefully, if she pleats, lift by her seam hem and jabote at the spidsiest of her trickkikant (like thousands done before since fillies calpered. Ocone! Ocone!) the maidsapron of our A.L.P., fearfully! till its nether nadir is vortically where (allow me aright to two cute winkles) its naval’s Prometheus or the Promise of Provision napex will have to beandbe. You must proach near mear for at is dark. Lob. And light your mech. Jeldy! And this is what you’ll say. 2  Waaaaaa. Tch! Sluice! Pla! And their, redneck, (for addn’t we to gayatsee with Puhl the Punkah’s bell?)mygh and thy, the living spit of dead waters, 3  fastness firm of Hurdlebury Fenn, discinct and isoplural in its (your sow to the duble) sixuous parts, flument, fluvey and fluteous, midden wedge of the stream’s your muddy old triagonal delta, fiho miho, plain for you now, appia lippia pluvaville, (hop the hula, girls!) the no niggard spot of her safety vulve, first of all usquiluteral threeingles, (and why wouldn’t she sit cressloggedlike the lass that lured a tailor?) the constant of fluxion, Mahamewetma, pride of the province 4  and when that tidled boare rutches up from the Afrantic, allaph quaran’s his bett und bier!  5  Ambages and Their Rôle. [p.298] Paa lickam laa lickam, apl lpa! This it is an her. You see her it. Which it whom you see it is her. And if you could goaneggbetter we’d soon see some raffant scrumala riffa. Quicks herit fossyending. Quef! So post that to your pape and smarket! And you can haul up that languil pennant, mate. I’ve read your tunc’s dimissage. For, let it be taken that her littlenist is of no magnetude or again let it be granted that Doll the laziest can be dissimulant with all respects from Doll the fiercst, thence must any whatyoulike in the power of empthood be either Ecclasiastical and Celestial Hierarchies. The Ascending. The Descending. greater THan or less tHaN the unitate we have in one or hence shall the vectorious readyeyes of evertwo circumflicksrent searclhers never film in the elipsities of their gyribouts those fickers which are returnally reprodictive of themselves. 1  Which is unpassible. Quarrellary. The logos of somewome to that base anything, when most characteristically mantissa minus, comes to nullum in the endth: 2  orso, here is nowet badder than the sin of Aha with his cosin Lil, verswaysed on coverswised, and all that’s consecants and cotangincies till Perperp stops repippinghim since her redtangles The peripatetic periphery. It’s Allothesis. are all abscissan for limitsing this tendency of our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima 3  to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) shrinks from schurtiness [p.299] to scherts. 1  Scholium, there are trist sigheds to everysing but ichs on the freed brings euchs to the feared. Qued? Mother of us all! O, dear me, look at that now! I don’t know is it your spictre or my omination but I’m glad you dimentioned it! My Lourde! My Lourde! If that aint just the beatenest lay I ever see! And a superpbosition! Quoint a quincidence! O.K. Canine Venus sublimated to Aulidic Aphrodite. Omnius Kollidimus. As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber his grannyamother. Kangaroose feathers: Who in the name of thunder’d ever belevin you were that bolt? But you’re holy mooxed and gaping up the wrong palce 2  as if you was seeheeing the gheist that stays forenenst, you blessed simpletop domefool! Where’s your belested loiternan’s lamp? You must lap wandret down the bluishing refluction below. Her trunk’s not her brainbox. Hear where the bolgylines, Yseen here the puncture. So he done it. Luck! See her good. Exclusivism: the Ors, Sors and Fors, which? Well, well, well, well! O dee, O dee, that’s very lovely! We like Simperspreach Hammeltones to fellow Selvertunes O’Haggans. 3  When he rolls over his ars and shows the hise of his heels. Vely lovely entilely! Like a yangsheepslang with the tsifengtse. So analytical plausible! And be the powers of Moll Kelly, neighbour topsowyer, it will be a lozenge to me all my lauffe. 4  More better twofeller we been speak copperads. Ever thought about Guinness’s? And the regrettable Parson Rome’s advice? [p.300] Want to join the police. 1  You know, you were always one of the bright ones, since a foot made you an unmentionable, fakes! You know, you’re the divver’s own smart gossoon, aequal to yoursell and wanigel to anglyother, so you are, hoax! You know, you’ll be dampned, so you will, one of these invernal days but you will be, carrotty!  2 

Primanouriture and Ultimo-geniture.sick us a sock with some sediment in it for the sake of our darning wives. Wherapool, gayet that when he stop look time he stop long ground who here hurry he would have ever the lothst word, with a sweet me ah err eye ear marie to reat from the jacob’s 3  and a shypull for toothsake of his armjaws at the slidepage of de Vere Foster, would and could candykissing P. Kevin to fress up the rinnerung and to ate by hart (leo I read, such a spanish, escribibis all your mycoscoups) wont to nibbleh ravenostonnoriously ihs mum to me in bewonderment of his chipper chuthor for, while that Other by the halp of his creactive mind offered to deleberate the mass from the booty of fight our Same with the holp of the bounty of food sought to delubberate the mess from his corructive mund, with his muffetee cuffes ownconsciously grafficking with his sinister cyclopes after trigamies and spirals’ wobbles pursuiting their rovinghamilton selves and godolphing in fairlove to see around the waste of noland’s browne jesus  4  (thur him no quartos!) till that on him poorin No Sturm. No Drang. sweat the juggaleer’s veins (quench his quill!) in his napier scrag stud out bursthright tam- Illustration. [p.301] quam taughtropes. (Spry him! call a blood-lekar! Where’s Dr Brassenaarse?) Es war itwas in his priesterrite. O He Must Suffer ! From this misbelieving feacemaker to his noncredible fancyflame. 1  Ask for bosthoon, late for Mass, pray for blaablaablack sheep. (Sure you could wright anny pippap passage, Eye bet, as foyne as that moultylousy Erewhig, yerself, mick! Nock the muddy nickers! 2  Christ’s Church varses Bellial !) Dear and he went on to scripple Ascription of the Active. gentlemine born, milady bread, he would pen for her, he would pine for her, 3  how he would patpun fun for all 4  with his frolicky frowner so and his glumsome grinner otherso. And how are you, waggy? 5  My animal his sorrafool! And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver! Se non é vero son trovatore. O jerry! He was soso, harriot all! He was sadfellow, steifel! He was mistermysterion. Like a purate out of pensionee with a gouvernament job. All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law. Look at this twitches! He was quisquis, floored on his plankraft of shittim wood. Look at him! Sink deep or Proscription of the Passive. touch not the Cartesian spring! Want more ashes, griper? How diesmal he was lying low on his rawside laying siege to goblin castle. And, bezouts that, how hyenesmeal he was laying him long on his laughside lying sack to croakpartridge. (Be thou wars Rolaf’s intes- [p.302] tions, quoths the Bhagavat biskop Leech) Ann opes tipoo soon ear! If you could me lendtill my pascol’s kondyl, sahib, and the price of a plate of poultice. Punked. With best apolojigs and merrymoney thanks to self for all the Ensouling Female Sustains Agonising Overman. clerricals and again begs guerdon for bistrispissing on your bunificence. Well wiggywiggywagtail, and how are you, yaggy? With a capital Tea for Thirst. From here Buvard to dear Picuchet. Blott.

when the answerer is a leman. Now, (peel your eyes, my gins, and brush your saton hat, me elementator joyclid, son of a Butt! She’s mine, Jow low jure, 1  be Skibbering’s eagles, sweet tart of Whiteknees Archway) watch him, having caught at the bifurking calamum in his bolsillos, the onelike underworp he had ever funnet without difficultads, the aboleshqvick, signing away in Sesama to the Rescues. The Key Signature. happinext complete, (Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand. So could I too and without the scrope of a pen. Ohr for oral, key for crib, olchedolche and a lunge ad lib. Can you write us a last line? From Smith–Jones-Orbison?) intrieatedly in years, jirryalimpaloop. And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl.  2  Unds alws my thts. To fallthere at bare feet hurryaswormarose. Two dies of one rafflement. Eche bennyache. Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society. To be continued. Anon.

all square and according to cocker. And ook, ook, ook, fanky! All the charictures 3  in the drame! This is how San holy- [p.303] polypools. And this, pardonsky! is the way Romeopullupalleaps. 1  Pose the pen, man, way me does. Way ole missa vellatooth fust show me how. Fourth power to her illpogue! Force Centres of the Fire Serpen ine: heart, throat, navel, spleen, sacral, fontanella, inter-temporal eye. Bould strokes for your life! Tip! This is Steal, this is Barke, this is Starn, this is Swhipt, this is Wiles, this is Pshaw, this is Doubbllinnbbayyates. 2  This is brave Danny weeping his spache for the popers. This is cool Connolly wiping his hearth with brave Danny. And this, regard! how Chawleses Skewered parparaparnelligoes Conception of the Compromise and Finding of a Formula. between brave Danny boy and the Connolly. Upanishadem! Top. Spoken hath L’arty Magory. Eregobragh. Prouf!  3 

troth-blowers. And Kev was wreathed with his pother.

fig and thistle plot a pig and whistle. But, (that Jacoby feeling again for forebitten fruit and, my Georgeous, Kevvy too he just loves his puppadums, I judge!) after all his autocratic writings of paraboles of famellicurbs and meddlied muddlingisms, thee faroots hof Ideal Present Alone Produces Real Future. cullchaw end ate citrawn woodint wun able rep of the triperforator awlrite blast through his pergaman hit him where he lived and do for the blessted selfchuruls, what I think, smarter like it done for a manny another unpious of the hairydary quare quandary firstings till at length, you one bladdy bragger, by mercystroke he measured his earth anyway? could not but recken in his adder’s badder cadder way our frankson who, to be plain, he fight him all time twofeller longa kill dead finish bloody face blong you, was misocain. Wince [p.304] wan’s won! Rip! 1  And his countinghands rose.

with eboniser. Formalisa. Loves deathhow simple!

in pix. Slutningsbane  2 .

Service superseding self.euchre risk, merci buckup, and mind who you’re pucking, flebby. Thanks eversore much, Pointcarried! I can’t say if it’s the weight you strike me to the quick or that red mass I was looking at but at the present momentum, potential as I am, I’m seeing rayingbogeys rings round me. Honours to you and may you be commended for our exhibitiveness! I’d love to take you for a bugaboo ride and play funfer all if you’d only sit and be the ballasted bottle in the porker barrel. You will deserve a rolypoly as long as from here to tomorrow. And to hell with them driftbombs and bottom trailers! If my maily was bag enough I’d send you a toxis. By Saxon Chromaticus, you done that lovely for me! Didn’t he now, Nubilina? Tiny Mite, she studiert whas? With her listeningin coiffure, her dream of Endsland’s daylast and the glorifires of being presainted maid to majesty.  3  And less is the pity for she isn’t the lollypops she easily might be if she had for a sample Virginia’s air of achievement. That might Catastrophe and Anabasis. keep her from throwing delph. 4  As I was saying, while retorting thanks, you make me a reborn of the cards. We’re offals boys ambows.  5  The rotary processus and its reestablishment of reciprocities. For I’ve flicked up all the crambs as they crumbed from your table um, singing glory allaloserem, cog it out, here goes a sum. So [p.305] read we in must book. It tells. He prophets most who bilks the best.

come si compita cunctiti-titilatio? conkery cunk, thigh-thight-tickelly-thigh, lig-gerilag, titteritot, leg in a tee, lug in a law, two at a tie, three on a thricky till ohio ohio ioiomiss. And that salubrated sickenagiaour of yaours have teaspilled all my hazeydency. Forge away, Sunny Sim! Sheepshopp. Bleating Goad, it is the least of things, Eyeinstye! Imagine it, my deep dartry dullard! It is hours giving, not more. I’m only out for celebridging over the guilt of the gap in your hiscitendency. You are a hundred thousand times welcome, old wortsampler, hellbeit you’re just about as culpable The Twofold Truth and the Conjunctive Appetites of Oppositional Orexes. as my woolfell merger would be. In effect I could engage in an energument over you till you were republicly royally toobally prussic blue in the shirt after. 1  Trionfante di bestia! And if you’re not your bloater’s kipper may I never curse again on that pint I took of Jamesons. Old Keane now, you’re rod, hook and sinker, old jubalee Keane! Biddy’s hair. Biddy’s hair, mine lubber. Where is that Quin but he sknows it knot but what you that are my popular endphthisis were born with a solver arm up your Trishagion. sleep. Thou in shanty! Thou in scanty shanty!! Thou in slanty scanty shanty!!! Bide in your hush! Bide in your hush, do! The law does not aloud you to shout. I plant my penstock in your postern, chinarpot. Ave! And let it be to all remembrance. Vale. Ovocation of maiding waters. 2  For auld lang salvy steyne. I defend you to champ my scullion’s praises. To book alone belongs the lobe. Foremaster’s meed 3  will mark tomorrow when we are making pilscrummage to whaboggeryin with [p.306] staff, scarf and blessed wallet and our aureoles round our neckkandcropfs where as and when Heavysciusgardaddy, parent who offers sweetmeats, will gift uns his Noblett’s surprize. Abnegation is Adaptation. With this laudable purpose in loud ability let us be singulfied. Betwixt me and thee hung cong. Item, mizpah ends.

enter the cop and how. secures gubernant urbis terrorem. But while the dial are they doodling dawdling over the mugs and the grubs? Oikey, Impostolopulos? 1  Steady steady steady steady steady studiavimus. Many many many many many manducabimus. 2  We’ve had our day at triv and quad and writ our bit as intermidgets. Art, literature, politics, economy, chemistry, humanity, Cato.
Nero.
Saul.
Aristotle.
Julius Caesar.
Pericles.
Ovid.
Adam,
Eve.
Domitian.
Edipus.
Socrates.
Ajax. &c. Duty, the daughter of discipline, the Great Fire at the South City Markets, Belief in Giants and the Banshee, A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? A Successful Career in the Civil Service, 3  The Voice of Nature in the Forest, 4  Your Favorite Hero or Heroine, On the Benefits of Recreation, 5  If Standing Stones Could Speak, Devotion to the Feast of the Indulgence of Portiuncula, The Dublin Metropolitan Police Sports at Ballsbridge, Describe Homer. Marcus Aurelius. in Homely Anglian Monosyllables the Wreck of the Hesperus, 6  What Morals, if any, can be drawn from Diarmuid and Grania? 7  Do Alcibiades.
Lucretius.
Noah.
Plato.
Horace.
Isaac.
Tiresias.
Marius.
Diogenes.
Procne, Philomela. you Approve of our Existing Parliamentary System? The Uses and Abuses of Insects, A [p.307] Visit to Guinness’ Brewery, Clubs, Advantages of the Penny Post, When is a Pun not a Pun? Is the Co–Education of Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable? 1  What Happened at Clontarf? Since our Brother Johnathan Signed Abraham.
Nestor.
Cincinnatus.
Leonidas.
Jacob.
Theocritus.
Joseph.
Fabius.
Samson.
Cain. the Pledge or the Meditations of Two Young Spinsters, 2  Why we all Love our Little Lord Mayor, Hengler’s Circus Entertainment, On Thrift, 3  The Kettle-Griffith-Moynihan Scheme for a New Electricity Supply, Travelling in the Olden Times, 4  American Lake Poetry, the Strangest Dream that was ever Halfdreamt.  5  Circumspection, Our Allies the Hills, Are Parnellites Just towards Henry Tudor? Esop.
Prometheus.
Lot.
Pompeius Magnus,
Miltiades Strategos.
Solon.
Castor, Pollux.
Dionysius.
Sappho. Tell a Friend in a Chatty Letter the Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant, 6  Santa Claus, The Shame of Slumdom, The Roman Pontiffs and the Orthodox Churches, 7  The Thirty Hour Week, Compare the Fistic Styles of Jimmy Wilde and Jack Sharkey, How to Understand the Deaf, Should Ladies learn Music or Mathematics? Moses.
Job.
Catilina.
Cadmus.
Ezekiel.
Solomon.
Themistocles.
Vitellius.
Darius.
Xenophon. Glory be to Saint Patrick! What is to be found in a Dustheap, The Value of Circumstantial Evidence, Should Spelling? Outcasts in India, Collecting Pewter, Eu, 8  Proper and Regular Diet Necessity For, 9  If You Do It Do It Now. [p.308] Delays are Dangerous. Vitavite! Gobble Anne: tea’s set, see’s eneugh! Mox soonly will be in a split second per the chancellory of his exticker.

Pantocracy. Bimutualism. Interchange-ability. Naturality. Superfetation. Stabimobilism. Periodicity. Consummation. Interpene-trativeness. Predicament. Balance of the factual by the theoric Boox and Coox, Amallagamated.mawmaw, luk, your beeeftay’s fizzin over! Aun

Do

Tri

Car

Cush  1 

Shay

Shockt

Ockt

Ni

Geg  2 

kakaopoetic lippudenies of the ungumptious. Their feed begins.

NIGHTLETTER

With our best youlldied greedings to Pep and Memmy and the old folkers below and beyant, wishing them all very merry Incarnations in this land of the livvey and plenty of preprosperousness through their coming new yonks

from
jake, jack and little sousoucie
(the babes that mean too)

 ® 

[p.309] It may not or maybe a no concern of the Guinnesses but.

That the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride’s eye stammpunct is when a man that means a mountain barring his distance wades a lymph that plays the lazy winning she likes yet that pride that bogs the party begs the glory of a wake while the scheme is like your rumba round me garden, allatheses, with perhelps the prop of a prompt to them, was now or never in Etheria Deserta, as in Grander Suburbia, with Finnfannfawners, ruric or cospolite, for much or moment indispute.

Whyfor had they, it is Hiberio-Miletians and Argloe-Noremen, donated him, birth of an otion that was breeder to sweatoslaves, as mysterbolder, forced in their waste, and as for Ibdullin what of Himana, that their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute, (hearing that anybody in that ruad duchy of Wollinstown schemed to halve the wrong type of date) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distancegetting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and [p.310] ohmes. This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) they caused to be worked from a magazine battery (called the Mimmim Bimbim patent number 1132, Thorpetersen and Synds, Jomsborg, Selverbergen) which was tuned up by twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines (lackslipping along as if their liffing deepunded on it) with a howdrocephalous enlargement, a gain control of circumcentric megacycles, ranging from the antidulibnium onto the serostaatarean. They finally caused, or most leastways brung it about somehows, (that) the pip of the lin (to) pinnatrate inthro an auricular forfickle (known as the Vakingfar sleeper, monofractured by Piaras UaRhuamhaighaudhlug, tympan founder, Eustache Straight, Bauliaughacleeagh) a meatous conch culpable of cunduncing Naul and Santry and the forty routs of Corthy with the concertiums of the Brythyc Symmonds Guild, the Ropemakers Reunion, the Variagated Peddlars Barringoy Bnibrthirhd, the Askold Olegsonder Crowds of the O’Keef-Rosses ant Rhosso-Keevers of Zastwoking, the Ligue of Yahooth O.S.V. so as to lall the bygone dozed they arborised around, up his corpular fruent and down his reuctionary buckling, hummer, enville and cstorrap (the man of Iren, thore’s Curlymane for you!), lill the lubberendth of his otological life.

House of call is all their evenbreads though its cartomance hallucinate like an erection in the night the mummery of whose deed, a lur of Nur, immerges a mirage in a merror, for it is where by muzzinmessed for one watthour, bilaws below, till time jings pleas, that host of a bottlefilled, the bulkily hulkwight, hunter’s pink of face, an orel orioled, is in on a bout to be unbulging an o’connell’s, the true one, all seethic, a luckybock, pledge of the stoup, whilom his canterberry bellseyes wink wickeding indtil the teller, oyne of an oustman in skull of skand. Yet is it, this ale of man, for him, our hubuljoynted, just a tug and a fistful as for Culsen, the Patagoreyan, chieftain of chokanchuckers and his moyety joyant, under the foamer dispensation when he pullupped the turfeycork by the greats of gobble out of Lougk Neagk. When, pressures be to our hoary frother, the pop gave his sullen bulletaction and, bilge, sled a movement of catharic emulsipotion [p.311] down the sloppery slide of a slaunty to tilted lift-ye-landsmen. Allamin. Which in the ambit of its orbit heaved a sink her sailer alongside of a drink her drainer from the basses brothers, those two theygottheres.

It was long after once there was a lealand in the luffing ore it was less after lives thor a toyler in the tawn at all ohr it was note before he drew out the moddle of Kersse by jerkin his dressing but and or it was not before athwartships he buttonhaled the Norweeger’s capstan.

So he sought with the lobestir claw of his propencil the clue of the wickser in his ear. O, lord of the barrels, comer forth from Anow (I have not mislaid the key of Efas-Taem), O, Ana, bright lady, comer forth from Thenanow (I have not left temptation in the path of the sweeper of the threshold), O!

But first, strongbowth, they would deal death to a drinking. Link of a leadder, dubble in it, slake your thirdst thoughts awake with it. Our svalves are svalves aroon! We rescue thee, O Baass, from the damp earth and honour thee. O Connibell, with mouth burial! So was done, neat and trig. Up draught and whet them!

— Then sagd he to the ship’s husband. And in his translatentic norjankeltian. Hwere can a ketch or hook alive a suit and sowterkins? Soot! sayd the ship’s husband, knowing the language, here is tayleren. Ashe and Whitehead, closechop, successor to. Ahorror, he sayd, canting around to that beddest his friend, the tayler, for finixed coulpure, chunk pulley muchy chink topside numpa one sellafella, fake an capstan make and shoot! Manning to sayle of clothse for his lady her master whose to be precised of a peer of trouders under the pattern of a cassack. Let me prove, I pray thee, but this once, sazd Mengarments, saving the mouthbrand from his firepool. He spit in his faist (beggin): he tape the raw baste (paddin): he planked his pledge (as dib is a dab): and he tog his fringe sleeve (buthock lad, fur whale). Alloy for allay and this toolth for that soolth. Lick it and like it. A barter, a parter. And plenty good enough, neighbour Norreys, every bit and grain. And the ship’s husband brokecurst after him to hail the [p.312] lugger. Stolp, tief, stolp, come bag to Moy Eireann! And the Norweeger’s capstan swaradeed, some blowfish out of schooling: All lykkehud! Below taiyor he ikan heavin sets. But they broken waters and they made whole waters at they surfered bark to the lots of his vauce. And aweigh he yankered on the Norgean run so that seven sailend sonnenrounders was he breastbare to the brinabath, where bottoms out has fatthoms full, fram Franz José Land til Cabo Thormendoso, evenstarde and risingsoon. Up the Rivor Tanneiry and down the Golfe Desombres. Farety days and fearty nights. Enjoy yourself, O maremen! And the tides made, veer and haul, and the times marred, rear and fall, and, holey bucket, dinned he raign!

 — Hump! Hump! bassed the broaders-in-laugh with a quick piddysnip that wee halfbit a second.

 — I will do that, sazd Kersse, mainingstaying the rigout for her wife’s lairdship. Nett sew? they hunched back at the earpicker.

But old sporty, as endth lord, in ryehouse reigner, he nought feared crimp or cramp of shore sharks, plotsome to getsome. It was whol niet godthaab of errol Loritz off his Cape of Good Howthe and his trippertrice loretta lady, a maomette to his monetone, with twy twy twinky her stone hairpins, only not, if not, a queen of Prancess their telling tabled who was for his seeming a casket through the heavenly, nay, heart of the sweet (had he hows would he keep her as niece as a fiddle!) but in the mealtub it was wohl yeas sputsbargain what, rarer of recent, an occasional conformity, he, with Muggleton Muckers, alwagers allalong most certainly allowed, as pilerinnager’s grace to petitionists of right, of the three blend cupstoomerries with their customed spirits, the Gill gob, the Burklley bump, the Wallisey wanderlook, having their ceilidhe gailydhe in his shaunty irish. Group drinkards maaks grope thinkards or how reads rotary, jewr of a chrestend, respecting the otherdogs churchees, so long plubs will be plebs but plabs by low frequency amplification may later agree to have another. For the people of the shed are the sure ads of all quorum. Lorimers and leathersellers, skinners and salters, pewterers and paperstainers, parishclerks, fletcherbowyers, [p.313] girdlers, mercers, cordwainers and first, and not last, the weavers. Our library he is hoping to ye public.

Innholder, upholder.

— Sets on sayfohrt! Go to it, agitator! they bassabosuned over the flowre of their hoose. Godeown moseys and skeep thy beeble bee!

— I will do that, acordial, by mine hand, sazd Kersse, piece Cod, and in the flap of a jacket, ructified after his nap of a blankit their o’cousin, as sober as the ship’s husband he was one my godfather when he told me saw whileupon I am now well and jurily sagasfide after the boonamorse the widower, according to rider, following pnomoneya, he is consistently blown to Adams. So help me boyg who keeps the book!

Whereofter, behest his suzerain law the Thing and the pilsener had the baar, Recknar Jarl, (they called him Roguenor, Irl call him) still passing the change-a-pennies, pengeypigses, a several sort of coyne in livery, pushed their whisper in his hairing, (seemed, a some shipshep’s sottovoxed stalement, a dearagadye, to hasvey anyone doing duty for duff point of dorkland compors) the same to the good ind ast velut discharge after which he had exemptied more than orphan for the ballast of his nurtural life. And threw a cast. A few pigses and hare you are and no chicking, tribune’s tribute, if you guess mimic miening. Meanly in his lewdbrogue take your tyon coppels token, with this good sixtric from-mine runbag of juwels. Nummers that is summus that is toptip that is bottombay that is Twomeys that is Digges that is Heres. In the frameshape of hard mettles. For we all would fain make glories. It is minely well mint.

Thus as count the costs of liquid courage, a bullyon gauger, stowed stivers pengapung in bulk in hold (fight great finnence! brayvoh, little bratton!) keen his kenning, the queriest of the crew, with that fellow fearing for his own misshapes, should he be himpself namesakely a foully fallen dissentant from the peripulator, sued towerds Meade-Reid and Lynn-Duff, rubbing the hodden son of a pookal, leaden be light, lather be dry and it be drownd on all the ealsth beside, how the camel and where the [p.314] deiffel or when the finicking or why the funicking, who caused the scaffolding to be first removed you give orders, babeling, were their reidey meade answer when on the cutey (the corespondent) in conflict of evidence drew a kick at witness but (missed) and for whom in the dyfflun’s kiddy removed the planks they were wanted, boob.

Bump!

 Bothallchoractorschummin-aroundgansumuminarumdrum- strumtruminahumptadump-waultopoofoolooder-amaunsturnup!

— Did do a dive, aped one.

— Propellopalombarouter, based two.

— Rutsch is for rutterman ramping his roe, seed three. Where the muddies scrimm ball. Bimbim bimbim. And the maidies scream all. Himhim himhim.

And forthemore let legend go lore of it that mortar scene so cwympty dwympty what a dustydust it razed arboriginally but, luck’s leap to the lad at the top of the ladder, so sartor’s risorted why the sinner the badder! Ho ho ho hoch! La la la lach! Hillary rillarry gibbous grist to our millery! A pushpull, qq: quiescence, pp: with extravent intervulve coupling. The savest lauf in the world. Paradoxmutose caring, but here in a present booth of Ballaclay, Barthalamou, where their dutchuncler mynhosts and serves them dram well right for a boors’ interior (homereek van hohmryk) that salve that selver is to screen its auntey and has ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash substittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitzh call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd. Let there be. Due.

— That’s all murtagh purtagh but whad ababs his dopter? sissed they who were onetime ungkerls themselves, (when the youthel of his yorn shook the bouchal in his bed) twilled alongside in wiping the rice assatiated with their wetting. The lappel of his size? His ros in sola velnere and he sicckumed of homnis terrars. She wends to scoulas in her slalpers. There were no peanats in her famalgia so no wumble she tumbled for his famas [p.315] roalls davors. Don’t him forget! A butcheler artsed out of Cullege Trainity. Diddled he daddle a drop of the cradler on delight mebold laddy was stetched? Knit wear? And they addled, (or ere the cry of their tongues would be uptied dead) Shufflebotham asidled, plus his ducks fore his drills, an inlay of a liddle more lining maught be licensed all at ones, be these same tokens, forgiving a brass rap, sneither a whole length nor a short shift so full as all were concerned.

Burniface, shiply efter, shoply after, at an angle of lag, let flow, brabble brabble and brabble, and so hostily, heavyside breathing, came up with them and, check me joule, shot the three tailors, butting back to Moyle herring, bump as beam and buttend, roller and reiter, after the diluv’s own deluge, the seasant samped as skibber breezed in, tripping, dripping, threw the sheets in the wind, the tights of his trunks at tickle to tackle and his rubmelucky truss rehorsing the pouffed skirts of his overhawl. He’d left his stickup in his hand to show them none ill feeling. Whatthough for all appentices it had a mushroom on it. While he faced them front to back, Then paraseuls round, quite taken atack, sclaiming, Howe cools Eavybrolly!

— Good marrams, sagd he, freshwatties and boasterdes all, as he put into bierhiven, nogeysokey first, cabootle segund, jilling to windwards, as he made straks for that oerasound the snarsty weg for Publin, so was his horenpipe lug in the lee off their mouths organs, with his tilt too taut for his tammy all a slaunter and his wigger on a wagger with its tag tucked. Up. With a good eastering and a good westering. And he asked from him how the hitch did do this my fand sulkers that mone met the Kidballacks which he suttonly remembered also where the hatch was he endnew strandweys he’s that fond sutchenson, a penincular fraimd of mind, fordeed he was langseling to talka holt of hems, clown toff, tye hug fliorten. Cablen: Clifftop. Shelvling tobay oppelong tomeadow. Ware cobbles. Posh.

— Skibbereen has common inn, by pounautique, with pokeway paw, and sadder raven evermore, telled shinshanks lauwering frankish for his kicker who, through the medium of gallic

[p.316] — Pukkelsen, tilltold.

That with some our prowed invisors how their ulstravoliance led them infroraids, striking down and landing alow, against our aerian insulation resistance, two boards that beached ast one, widness thane and tysk and hanry. Prepatrickularly all, they summed. Kish met. Bound to. And for landlord, noting, nodding, a coast to moor was cause to mear. Besides proof plenty, over proof While they either took a heft. Or the other swore his eric. Heaved two, spluiced the menbrace. Heirs at you, Brewinbaroon! Weth a whistle for methanks.

— Good marrams and good merrymills, sayd good mothers gossip, bobbing his bowing both ways with the bents and skerries, when they were all in the old walled of Kinkincaraborg (and that they did overlive the hot air of Montybunkum upon the coal blasts of Mitropolitos let there meeds be the hourihorn), hiberniating after seven oak ages, fearsome where they were he had gone dump in the doomering this tide where the peixies would pickle him down to the button of his seat and his sess old soss Erinly into the boelgein with the help of Divy and Jorum’s locquor and shut the door after him to make a rarely fine Ran’s cattle of fish. Morya Mortimor! Allapalla overus! Howoft had the ballshee tried! And they laying low for his home gang in that eeriebleak mead, with fireball feast and turkeys tumult and paupers patch to provide his bum end. The foe things your niggerhead needs to be fitten for the Big Water. He made the sign of the hammer. God’s drought, he sayd, after a few daze, thinking of all those bliakings, how leif pauses! Here you are back on your hawkins, from Blasil the Brast to our povotogesus portocall, the furt on the turn of the hurdies, slave to trade, vassal of spices and a dragon-the-market, and be turbot, lurch a stripe, as were you soused methought out of the mackerel. Eldsfells! sayd he. A kumpavin on iceslant! Here’s open handlegs for one old faulker from the hame folk here in you’s booth! So sell me gundy, sagd the now waging cappon, with a warry posthumour’s expletion, shoots ogos shootsle him or where’s that slob? A bit bite of keesens, he sagd, til Dennis, for this jantar (and let the dobblins [p.317] roast perus,) or a stinger, he sagd, t. d., on a doroughbread kennedy’s for Patriki San Saki on svo fro or my old relogion’s out of tiempor and when I’m soured to the tipple you can sink me lead, he sagd, and, if I get can, sagd he, a pusspull of tomtartarum. Thirst because homing hand give. Allkey dallkey, sayd the shop’s housebound, for he was as deep as the north star (and could tolk sealer’s solder into tankar’s tolder) as might have sayd every man to his beast, and a treat for the trading scow, my cater million falls to you and crop feed a stall! Afram. And he got and gave the ekspedient for Hombreyhambrey wilcomer what’s the good word. He made the sign on the feaster. Cloth be laid! And a disk of osturs for the swanker! Allahballah! He was the carelessest man I ever see but he sure had the most sand. One fishball with fixings! For a dan of a ven of a fin of a son of a gun of a gombolier. Ekspedient, sayd he, sonnur mine, Shackleton Sulten! Opvarts and at ham, or this ogry Osler will oxmaul us all, sayd he, like one familiar to the house, while Waldemar was heeling it and Maldemaer was toeing it, soe syg he was walking from the bowl at his food and the meer crank he was waiting for the tow of his turn. Till they plied him behaste on the fare. Say wehrn!

— Nohow did he kersse or hoot alike the suit and solder skins, minded first breachesmaker with considerable way on and

— Humpsea dumpsea, the munchantman, secondsnipped cutter the curter.

— A ninth for a ninth. Take my worth from it. And no mistaenk, they thricetold the taler and they knew the whyed for too. The because of his sosuch. Uglymand fit himshemp but throats fill us all! And three’s here’s for repeat of the unium! Place the scaurs wore on your groot big bailey bill, he apullajibed, the O’Colonel Power, latterly distented from the O’Conner Dan, so promonitory himself that he was obliffious of the headth of hosth that rosed before him, from Sheeroskouro, under its zembliance of mardal mansk, like a dun darting dullemitter, with his moultain haares stuck in plostures upon it, (do you kend yon peak with its coast so green?) still trystfully acape for her his gragh knew well in pre- [p.318] cious memory and that proud grace to her, in gait a movely water, of smile a coolsome cup, with that rarefied air of a Montmalency and her quick little breaths and her climbing colour. Take thee live will save thee wive? I’ll think uplon, lilady. Should anerous enthroproise call homovirtue, duinnafear! The ghem’s to the ghoom be she nere zo zma. Obsit nemon! Floodlift, her ancient of rights regaining, so yester yidd, even remembrance. And greater grown then in the trifle of her days, a mouse, a mere tittle, trots off with the whole panoromacron picture. Her youngfree yoke stilling his wandercursus, jilt the spin of a curl and jolt the broadth of a buoy. The Annexandreian captive conquest. Ethna Prettyplume, Hooghly Spaight. Him her first lap, her his fast pal, for ditcher for plower, till deltas twoport. While this glowworld’s lump is gloaming off and han in hende will grow. Through simpling years where the lowcasts have aten of amilikan honey and datish fruits and a bannock of barley on Tham the Thatcher’s palm. O wanderness be wondernest and now! Listeneath to me, veils of Mina! He would withsay, nepertheloss, that is too me mean. I oldways did me walsh and preechup ere we set to sope and fash. Now eats the vintner over these contents oft with his sad slow munch for backonham. Yet never shet it the brood of aurowoch, not for legions of donours of Gamuels. I have performed the law in truth for the lord of the law, Taif Alif. I have held out my hand for the holder of my heart in Annapolis, my youthrib city. Be ye then my protectors unto Mussabotomia before the guards of the city. Theirs theres is a gentlemeants agreement. Womensch plodge. To slope through heather till the foot. Join Andersoon and Co. If the flowers of speech valed the springs of me rising the hiker I hilltapped the murk I mist my blezzard way. Not a knocker on his head nor a nicknumber on the manyoumeant. With that coldtbrundt natteldster wefting stinks from Alpyssinia, wooving nihilnulls from Memoland and wolving the ulvertones of the voice. But his spectrem onlymergeant crested from the irised sea in plight, calvitousness, loss, nngnr, gliddinyss, unwill and snorth. It might have been what you call your change of my life but there’s the chance of a [p.319] night for my lifting. Hillyhollow, valleylow! With the sounds and the scents in the morning.

— I shot be shoddied, throttle me, fine me cowheel for ever, usquebauched the ersewild aleconner, for bringing briars to Bembracken and ringing rinbus round Demetrius for, as you wrinkle wryghtly, bully bluedomer, it’s a suirsite’s stircus haunting hesteries round old volcanoes. We gin too gnir and thus plinary indulgence makes collemullas of us all. But Time is for talerman tasting his tap. Tiptoptap, Mister Maut.

He made one summery (Cholk and murble in lonestime) of his the three swallows like he was muzzling Moselems and torched up as the faery pangeant fluwed down the hisophenguts, a slake for the quicklining, to the tickle of his tube and the twobble of his fable, O, fibbing once upon a spray what a queer and queasy spree it was. Plumped.

Which both did. Prompt. Eh, chrystal holder? Save Ampsterdampster that had rheumaniscences in his netherlumbs.

— By the drope in his groin, Ali Slupa, thinks the cappon, plumbing his liners, we were heretofore.

— And be the coop of his gobbos, Reacher the Thaurd, thinks your girth fatter, apopo of his buckseaseilers, but where’s Horace’s courtin troopsers?

— I put hem behind the oasthouse, sagd Pukkelsen, tuning wound on the teller, appeased to the cue, that double dyode dealered, and he’s wallowing awash swill of the Tarra water. And it marinned down his gargantast trombsathletic like the marousers of the gulpstroom. The kersse of Wolafs on him, shitateyar, he sagd in the fornicular, and, at weare or not at weare, I’m sigen no stretcher, for I carsed his murhersson goat in trotthers with them newbucklenoosers behigh in the fire behame in the oasthouse. Hops! sagd he.

— Smoke and coke choke! lauffed till the tear trickled drown a thigh the loafers all but a sheep’s whosepants that swished to the lord he hadn’t and the starer his story was talled to who felt that, the fierifornax being thurst on him motophosically, as Omar sometime notes, such a satuation, debauchly to be watched for, would empty dempty him down to the ground.

[p.320] — And hopy dope! sagd he, anded the enderer, now dyply hypnotised or hopeseys doper himself. And kersse him, sagd he, after inunder tarrapoulling, and the shines he cuts, shinar, the screeder, the stitchimesnider, adepted to nosestorsioms in his budinholder, cummanisht, sagd he, (fouyoufoukou!) which goes in the ways smooking publics, sagd he, bomboosting to be in thelitest civille row faction for a dubblebrasterd navvygaiterd, (flick off that hvide aske, big head!) sagd he, the big bag of my hamd till hem, tollerloon, sagd he, with his pudny bun brofkost when he walts meet the bangd. I will put his fleas of wood in the flour, and he sagd, behunt on the oatshus, the not wellmade one, sagd he, the kersse of my armsore appal this most unmentionablest of men (mundering eeriesk, if he didn’t scalded him all the shimps names in his gitter!) a coathemmed gusset sewer, sagd he, his first cudgin is an innvalet in the unitred stables which is not feed tonights a kirtle offal fisk and he is that woe worstered wastended shootmaker whatever poked a noodle in a clouth!

So for the second tryon all the meeting of the acarras had it. How he hised his bungle oar his shourter and cut the pinter off his pourer and lay off for Fellagulphia in the farning. From his dhruimadhreamdhrue back to Brighten-pon-the-Baltic, from our lund’s rund turs bag til threathy hoeres a wuke. Ugh!

— Stuff, Taaffe, stuff! interjoked it his wife’s hopesend to the boath of them consistently. Come back to May Aileen.

— Ild luck to it! blastfumed the nowraging scamptail, in flating furies outs trews his cammelskins, the flashlight of his ire wackering from the eyewinker on his masttop. And aye far he fared from Afferik Arena and yea near he night till Blawland Bearring, baken be the brazen sun, buttered be the snows. And the sea shoaled and the saw squalled. And, soaking scupper, didn’t he drain

A pause.

Infernal machinery (serial number: Bullysacre, dig care a dig) having thus passed the buck to billy back from jack (finder the keeper) as the baffling yarn sailed in circles it was now high tide for the reminding pair of snipers to be suitably punished till they [p.321] had, like the pervious oelkenner done, liquorally no more powers to their elbow. Ignorinsers’ bliss, therefore, their not to say rifle butt target, none too wisefolly, poor fish, (he is eating, he is spun, is milked, he dives) upholding a lampthorne of lawstift as wand of welcome to all men in bonafay, (and the corollas he so has saved gainsts the virus he has thus injected!) discoastedself to that kipsie point of its Dublin bar there, breaking and entering, from the outback’s dead heart, Glasthule Bourne or Boehernapark Nolagh, by wattsismade or bianconi, astraylians in island, a wellknown tall hat blown in between houses by a nightcap of that silk or it might be a black velvet and a kiber galler dragging his hunker, were signalling gael warnings towards Wazwollenzee Haven to give them their beerings, east circular route or elegant central highway. Open, ’tis luck will have it! Lifeboat Alloe, Noeman’s Woe, Hircups Emptybolly! With winkles whelks and cocklesent jelks. Let be buttercup eve lit by night in the Phoenix! Music. And old lotts have funn at Flammagen’s ball. Till Irinwakes from Slumber Deep. How they succeeded by courting daylight in saving darkness he who loves will see.

Business. His bestness. Copeman helpen.

Contrescene.

He cupped his years to catch me’s to you in what’s yours as minest to hissent, giel as gail, geil as gaul, Odorozone, now ourmenial servent, blanding rum, milk and toddy with I hand it to you. Saying whiches, see his bow on the hapence, with a pattedyr but digit here, he scooped the hens, hounds and horses biddy by bunny, with an arc of his covethand, saved from the drohnings they might oncounter, untill his cubid long, to hide in dry. Aside. Your sows tin the topple, dodgers, trink me dregs! Zoot!

And with the gust of a spring alice the fossickers and swaggelers with him on the hoof from down under piked forth desert roses in that mulligar scrub.

Reenter Ashe Junior. Peiwei toptip, nankeen pontdelounges. Gives fair day. Cheroot. Cheevio!

Off.

[p.322] — Take off thatch whitehat (lo, Kersse come in back bespoking of loungeon off the Boildawl stuumplecheats for rushirishis IrushIrish, dangieling his old Conan over his top gallant shouldier so was, lao yiu shao, he’s like more look a novicer on the nevay).

— Tick off that whilehot, you scum of a botch, (of Kersse who, as he turned out, alas, hwen ching hwan chang, had been mocking his hollaballoon a sample of the costume of the country).

— Tape oaf that saw foull and sew wrong, welsher, you suck of a thick, stock and the udder, and confiteor yourself (for bekersse he had cuttered up and misfutthered in the most multiplest manner for that poor old bridge’s masthard slouch a shook of cloakses the wise, hou he pouly hung hoang tseu, his own fitther couldn’t nose him).

Chorus: With his coate so graye. And his pounds that he pawned from the burning.

— And, haikon or hurlin, who did you do at doyle today, my horsey dorksey gentryman. Serge Mee, suit! sazd he, tersey kersey. And when Tersse had sazd this Kersse stood them the whole koursse of training how the whole blazy raze acurraghed, from lambkinsback to sliving board and from spark to phoenish. And he tassed him tartly and he sassed him smartly, tig for tager, strop for stripe, as long as there’s a lyasher on a kyat. And they peered him beheld on the pyre.

And it was so. Behold.

— Same capman no nothing horces two feller he feller go where. Isn’t that effect? gig for gag, asked there three newcommers till knockingshop at the ones upon a topers who, while in admittance to that impedance, as three as they were there, they had been malttreating themselves to their health’s contempt.

— That’s fag for fig, metinkus, confessed, mhos for mhos, those who, would it not be for that dielectrick, were upon the point of obsoletion, and at the brink of from the pillary of the Nilsens and from the statutes of the Kongbullies and from the millestones of Ovlergroamlius libitate nos, Domnial!

— And so culp me goose, he sazd, szed the ham muncipated of the first course, recoursing, all cholers and coughs with his beauw [p.323] on the bummell, the bugganeering wanderducken, he sazd, (that his pumps may ship awhoyle shandymound of the dussard), the coarsehair highsaydighsayman, there’s nice tugs he looks, (how you was, Ship Alouset?) he sazd, the bloedaxe bloodooth baltxebec, that is crupping into our raw lenguage navel through the lumbsmall of his hawsehole, he sazd, donconfounder him, voyaging after maidens, belly jonah hunting the polly joans, and the hurss of all portnoysers befaddle him, he sazd, till I split in his flags, he sazd, one to one, the landslewder, after Donnerbruch fire. Reefer was a wenchman. One can smell off his wetsments how he is coming from a beach of promisck. Where is that old muttiny, shall I ask? Free kicks he will have from me, turncoats, in Bar Bartley if I wars a fewd years ago. Meistr Capteen Gaascooker, a salestrimmer! As he was soampling me ledder, like pulp, and as I was trailing his fumbelums, like hulp, he’ll fell the fall of me faus, he sazd, like yulp! The goragorridgorballyed pushkalsson, he sazd, with his bellows pockets fulled of potchtatos and his fox in a stomach, a disagrees to his ramskew coddlelecherskithers’ zirkuvs, drop down dead and deaf, and there is never a teilwrmans in the feof fife of Iseland or in the wholeabelongd of Skunkinabory from Drumadunderry till the rumnants of Mecckrass, could milk a colt in thrushes foran furrow follower width that a hole in his tale and that hell of a hull of a hill of a camelump bakk. Fadgestfudgist!

Upon this dry call of selenium cell (that horn of lunghalloon, Riland’s in peril!) with its doomed crack of the old damn ukonnen power insound in it the lord of the saloom, as if for a flash salamagunnded himself, listed his tummelumpsk pack and hearinat presently returned him, ambilaterally alleyeoneyesed, from their uppletoned layir to his beforetime guests, that bunch of palers on their round, timemarching and petrolling how, who if they were abound to loose a laugh (Toni Lampi, you booraascal!) they were abooned to let it as the leashed they might do when they felt (O, the wolf he’s on the walk, sees his sham cram bokk!) their joke was coming home to them, the steerage way for stabling, ghustorily spoeking, gen and gang, dane and dare, like the dud spuk [p.324] of his first foetotype (Trolldedroll, how vary and likely!), the fillibustered, the fully bellied. With the old sit in his shoulders, and the new satin atlas onder his uxter, erning his breadth to the swelt of his proud and, picking up the emberose of the lizod lights, his tail toiled of spume and spawn, and the bulk of him, and hulk of him as whenever it was he reddled a ruad to riddle a rede from the sphinxish pairc while Ede was a guardin, ere love a side issue. They hailed him cheeringly, their encient, the murrainer, and wallruse, the merman, ye seal that lubs you lassers, Thallasee or Tullafilmagh, when come of uniform age.

— Heave, coves, emptybloddy!

And ere he could catch or hook or line to suit their saussyskins, the lumpenpack. Underbund was overraskelled. As

— Sot! sod the tailors opsits from their gabbalots, change all that whole set. Shut down and shet up. Our set, our set’s allohn.

And they poured em behoiled on the fire. Scaald!

Rowdiose wodhalooing. Theirs is one lessonless missage for good and truesirs. Will any persen bereaved to be passent bringback or rumpart to the Hoved politymester. Clontarf, one love, one fear. Ellers for the greeter glossary of code, callen hom: Finucane-Lee, Finucane-Law.

Am. Dg.

Welter focussed.

Wind from the nordth. Warmer towards muffinbell, Lull.

As our revelant Colunnfiller predicted in last mount’s chattiry sermon, the allexpected depression over Schiumdinebbia, a bygger muster of veirying precipitation and haralded by faugh sicknells, (hear kokkenhovens ekstras!) and umwalloped in an unusuable suite of clouds, having filthered through the middelhav of the same gorgers’ kennel on its wage wealthwards and incursioned a sotten retch of low pleasure, missed in some parts but with lucal drizzles, the outlook for tomarry (Streamstress Mandig) beamed brider, his ability good.

What hopends to they?

 Giant crash in Aden. Birdflights confirm abbroaching nub- [p.325] tials. Burial of Lifetenant-Groevener Hatchett, R.I.D. Devine’s Previdence.

Ls. De.

Art thou gainous sense uncompetite! Limited. Anna Lynchya Pourable! One and eleven. United We Stand, even many offered. Don’t forget. I wish auspicable thievesdayte for the stork dyrby. It will be a thousand’s a won paddies. And soon to bet. On drums of bliss. With hapsalap troth, hipsalewd prudity, hopesalot honnessy, hoopsaloop luck. After when from midnights unwards the fourposter harp quartetto. (Kiskiviikko, Kalastus. Torstaj, tanssia. Perjantaj, peleja. Lavantaj ja Sunnuntaj, christianismus kirjallisuus, kirjallisuus christianismus.) Whilesd this pellover his finnisch.

— Comither, ahorace, thou mighty man of valour, elderman adaptive of Capel Ysnod, and tsay-fong tsei-foun a laun bricksnumber till I’ve fined you a faulter-in-law, to become your son-to-be, gentlemens tealer, generalman seelord, gosse and bosse, hunguest and horasa, jonjemsums both, in sailsmanship, szed the head marines talebearer, then sayd the ships gospfather in the scat story to the husband’s capture and either you does or he musts and this moment same, sayd he, so let laid pacts be being betving ye, he sayd, by my main makeshift, he sayd, one fisk and one flesk, as flat as, Aestmand Addmundson you, you’re iron slides and so hompety domp as Paddley Mac Namara here he’s a hardy canooter, for the two breasts of Banba are her soilers and her toilers, if thou wilt serve Idyall as thou hast sayld. Brothers Boathes, brothers Coathes, ye have swallen blooders’ oathes. And Gophar sayd unto Glideon and sayd he to the nowedding captain, the rude hunnerable Humphrey, who was praying god of clothildies by the seven bosses of his trunktarge he would save bucklesome when she wooed belove on him, comeether, sayd he, my merrytime marelupe, you wutan whaal, sayd he, into the shipfolds of our quadrupede island, bless madhugh, mardyk, luusk and cong! Blass Neddos bray! And no more of your maimed acts after this with your kowtoros and criados to every tome, thick and heavy, and our onliness of his revelance to your ultitude. The illfollowable staying in wait for you with the winning word put into his mouth [p.326] or be the hooley tabell, as Horrocks Toler hath most cares to call it, I’ll rehearse your comeundermends and first mardhyr you entirely. As puck as that Paddeus picked the pun and left the lollies off the foiled. A Trinity judge will crux your boom. Pat is the man for thy. Ay ay! And he pured him beheild of the ouishguss, mingling a sign of the cruisk. I popetithes thee, Ocean, sayd he, Oscarvaughther, sayd he, Erievikkingr, sayd he, intra trifum triforium trifoliorum, sayd he, onconditionally, forfor furst of gielgaulgalls and hero chief explunderer of the clansakiltic, sayd he, the streameress mastress to the sea aase cuddycoalman’s and let this douche for you as a wholly apuzzler’s and for all the pukkaleens to the wakes of you, sayd he, out of the hellsinky of the howtheners and be danned to ye, sayd he, into our roomyo connellic relation, sayd he, from which our this pledge is given, Tera truly ternatrine if not son towards thousand like expect chrisan athems to which I osker your godhsbattaring, saelir, for as you gott kvold whereafter a gooden diggin and with gooder enscure from osion buck fared agen fairioes feuded hailsohame til Edar in that the loyd mave hercy on your sael! Anomyn and awer. Spickinusand.

— Nansense, you snorsted? he was haltid considerable agenst all religions overtrow so hworefore the thokkurs pokker the bigbug miklamanded storstore exploder would he be whulesalesolde daadooped by Priest Gudfodren of the sacredhaunt suit in Diaeblen-Balkley at Domnkirk Saint Petricksburg? But ear this:

— And here, aaherra, my rere admirable peadar poulsen, sayd he, consistently, to the secondnamed sutor, my lately lamented sponsorship, comesend round that wine and lift your horn, sayd he, to show you’re a skolar for, winter you likes or not, we brought your summer with us and, tomkin about your lief eurekason and his undishcovery of americle, be the rolling forties, he sayd, and on my sopper crappidamn, as Harris himself says, to let you in on some crismion dottrin, here is the ninethest pork of a man whisk swimmies in Dybblin water from Ballscodden easthmost till Thyrston’s Lickslip and, sayd he, (whiles the heart of Lukky Swayn slaughed in his icebox for to think of all the soorts of [p.327] smukklers he would behave in juteyfrieze being forelooper to her) praties peel to our goodsend Brandonius, filius of a Cara, spouse to Fynlogue, he has the nicesth pert of a nittlewoman in the house, la chito, la chato, la Charmadouiro, Tina-bat-Talur, cif for your fob and a tesura astore for you, eslucylamp aswhen the surge seas sombren, that he daughts upon of anny livving plusquebelle, to child and foster, that’s the lippeyear’s wonder of Totty go, Newschool, two titty too at win winnie won, tramity trimming and funnity fare, with a grit as hard as the trent of the thimes but a touch as saft as the dee in flooing and never a Hyderow Jenny the like of her lightness at look and you leap, rheadoromanscing long evmans invairn, about little Anny Roners and all the Lavinias of ester yours and pleding for them to herself in the periglus glatsch hangs over her trickle bed, it’s a piz of fortune if it never falls from the stuffel, and, when that mallaura’s over till next time and all the prim rossies are out dressparading and the tubas tout tout for the glowru of their god, making every Dinny dingle after her down the Dargul dale and (wait awhile, blusterbuss, you’re marchadant too forte and don’t start furlan your ladins till you’ ve learned the lie of her landuage!), when it’s summwer calding and she can hear the pianutunar beyant the bayondes in Combria sleepytalking to the Wiltsh muntons, titting out through her droemer window for the flyend of a touchman over the wishtas of English Strand, when Kilbarrack bell pings saksalaisance that Concessas with Sinbads may (pong!), where our dollimonde sees the phantom shape of Mr Fortunatus Wright since winksome Miss Bulkeley made loe to her wrecker and he took her to be a rover, O, and playing house of ivary dower of gould and gift you soil me peepat my prize, which its a blue loogoont for her in a bleakeyed seusan if she can’t work her mireiclles and give Norgeyborgey good airish timers, while her fresh racy turf is kindly kindling up the lovver with the flu, with a roaryboaryellas would set an Eriweddyng on fire, let aloon an old Humpopolamos with the boomarpoorter on his brain, aiden bay scye and dye, aasbukividdy, twentynine to her dozen and coocoo him didulceydovely to his old cawcaws huggin and munin for his strict privatear which [p.328] there’s no pure rube like an ool pool roober when your pullar beer turns out Bruin O’Luinn and beat his barge into a battering pram with her wattling way for cubblin and, be me fairy fay, sayd he, the marriage mixter, to Kersse, Son of Joe Ashe, her coaxfonder, wiry eyes and winky hair, timkin abeat your Andraws Meltons and his lovsang of the short and shifty, I will turn my thinks to things alove and I will speak but threes ones, sayd he, my truest patrions good founter, poles a port and zones asunder, tie up in hates and repeat at luxure, you can better your tooblue prodestind arson, tyler bach, after roundsabouts and donochs and the volumed smoke, though the clonk in his stumble strikes warn, and were he laid out on that counter there like a Slavocrates amongst his skippies, when it comes to the ride onerable, sayd he, that’s to make plain Nanny Ni Sheeres a full Dinamarqueza, and all needed for the lay, from the hursey on the montey with the room in herberge down to forkpiece and bucklecatch, (Elding, my elding! and Lif, my lif!) in the pravacy of the pirmanocturne, hap, sayd he, at that meet hour of night, and hop, sayd he, and the fyrsty annas everso thried (whiles the breath of Huppy Hullespond swumped in his seachest for to renumber all the mallymedears’ long roll and call of sweetheart emmas that every had a port in from Coxenhagen till the brottels on the Nile), while taylight is yet slipping under their pillow, (ill omens on Kitty Cole if she’s spilling laddy’s measure!) and before Sing Mattins in the Fields, ringsengd ringsengd, bings Heri the Concorant Erho, and the Referinn Fuchs Gutmann gives us I’ll Bell the Welled or The Steeplepoy’s Revanger and all Thingavalley knows for its never dawn in the dark but the deed comes to life, and raptist bride is aptist breed (tha lassy! tha lassy!), and, to buoy the hoop within us springing, ’tis no timbertar she’ll have then in her armsbrace to doll the dallydandle, our fiery quean, upon the night of the things of the night of the making to stand up the double tet of the oversear of the seize who cometh from the mighty deep and on the night of making Horuse to crihumph over his enemy, be the help of me cope as so pluse the riches of the roedshields, with Elizabeliza blessing the bedpain, at the willbedone [p.329] of Yinko Jinko Randy, come Bastabasco and hippychip eggs, she will make a suomease pair and singlette, jodhpur smalls and tailorless, a copener’s cribful, leaf, bud and berry, the divlin’s own little mimmykin puss, (hip, hip, horatia!) for my old comrhade saltymar here, Briganteen—General Sir A. I. Magnus, the flappernooser, master of the good lifebark Ulivengrene of Onslought, and the homespund of her hearth, (Fuss his farther was the norse norse east and Muss his mother was a gluepot) and, gravydock or groovy anker, and a hulldread pursunk manowhood, who (with a chenchen for his delight time and a bonzeye nappin through his doze) he is the bettest bluffy blondblubber of an olewidgeon what overspat a skettle in a skib.

Cawcaught. Coocaged.

And Dub did glow that night. In Fingal of victories. Cannmatha and Cathlin sang together. And the three shouters of glory. Yelling halfviewed their harps. Surly Tuhal smiled upon drear Darthoola: and Roscranna’s bolgaboyo begirlified the daughter of Cormac. The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself. A doublemonth’s licence, lease on mirth, while hooneymoon and her flame went huneysuckling. Holyryssia, what boom of bells! What battle of bragues on Sandgate where met the bobby mobbed his bibby mabbing through the ryce. Even Tombs left doss and dunnage down in Demidoff’s tomb and drew on the dournailed clogs that Morty Manning left him and legged in by Ghoststown Gate, like Pompei up to date, with a sprig of Whiteboys heather on his late Luke Elcock’s heirloom. And some say they seen old dummydeaf with a leaf of bronze on his cloak so grey, trooping his colour a pace to the reire. And as owfally posh with his halfcrown jool as if he was the Granjook Meckl or Paster de Grace on the Route de l’Epée. It was joobileejeu that All Sorts’ Jour. Freestouters and publicranks, hafts on glaives. You could hear them swearing threaties on the Cymylaya Mountains, man. And giving it out to the Ould Fathach and louthmouthing after the Healy Mealy with an enfysis to bring down the rain of Tarar. Nevertoletta! Evertomind! The grandest bethehailey seen or heard on earth’s conspectrum since Scape [p.330] the Goat, that gafr, ate the Suenders bible. Hadn’t we heaven’s lamps to hide us? Yet every lane had its lively spark and every spark had its several spurtles and each spitfire spurtle had some trick of her trade, a tease for Ned, nook’s nestle for Fred and a peep at me mow for Peer Pol. So that Father Matt Hughes looked taytotally threbled. But Danno the Dane grimmed. Dune. ’Twere yeg will elsecare doatty lanv meet they dewscent hyemn to cannons’ roar and rifles’ peal vill shantey soloweys sang! For there were no more Tyrrhanees and for Laxembraghs was passthecupper to Our Lader’s. And it was dim upon the floods only and there was day on all the ground.

Thus street spins legends while wharves woves tales but some family fewd felt a nick in their name. Old Vickers sate down on their airs and straightened the points of their lace. Red Rowleys popped out of their lairs and asked what was wrong with the race. Mick na Murrough used dripping in layers to shave all the furze off his face. The Burke-Lees and Coyle-Finns paid full feines for their sinns when the Cap and Miss Coolie were roped.

Rolloraped.

With her banbax hoist from holder, zig for zag through pool and polder, cheap, cheap, cheap and Laughing Jack, all augurs scorenning, see the Bolche your pictures motion and Kitzy Kleinsuessmein eloping for that holm in Finn’s Hotel Fiord, Nova Norening. Where they pulled down the kuddle and they made fray and if thee don’t look homey, well, that Dook can eye Mae.

He goat a berth. And she cot a manege. And wohl’s gorse mundom ganna wedst.

Knock knock. War’s where! Which war? The Twwinns. Knock knock. Woos without! Without what? An apple. Knock knock.

The kilder massed, one then and uhindred, (harefoot, birdyhands, herringabone, beesknees), and they barneydansked a kathareen round to know the who and to show the howsome. Why was you hiding, moder of moders? And where was hunty, [p.331] poppa the gun? Pointing up to skyless heaven like the spoon out of sergeantmajor’s tay. Which was the worst of them phaymix cupplerts? He’s herd of hoarding and her faiths is altared. Becoming ungoing, their seeming sames for though that liamstone deaf do his part there’s a windtreetop whipples the damp off the mourning. But tellusit allasif wellasits end. And the lunger it takes the swooner they tumble two. He knows he’s just thrilling and she’s sure she’d squeam. The threelegged man and the tulippied dewydress. Lludd hillmythey, we’re brimming to hear! The durst he did and the first she ever? Peganeen Bushe, this isn’t the polkar, catch as you cancan when high land fling! And you Tim Tommy Melooney, I’ll tittle your barents if you stick that pigpin upinto meh!

So in the names of the balder and of the sol and of the hollichrost, ogsowearit, trisexnone, and by way of letting the aandt out of her grosskropper and leading the mokes home by their gribes, whoopsabout a plabbaside of plobbicides, alamam alemon, poison kerls, on this mounden of Delude, and in the high places of Delude of Isreal, which is Haraharem and the diublin’s owld mounden over against Vikens, from your tarns, thwaites and thorpes, withes, tofts and fosses, fells, haughs and shaws, lunds, garths and dales, mensuring the megnominous as so will is the littleyest, the myrioheartzed with toroidal coil, eira area round wantanajocky, fin above wave after duckydowndivvy, trader arm aslung beauty belt, the formor velican and nana karlikeevna, sommerlad and cinderenda, Valtivar and Viv, how Big Bil Brine Borumoter first took his gage at lil lolly lavvander waader since when capriole legs covets limbs of a crane and was it the twylyd or the mounth of the yare or the feint of her smell made the seomen assalt of her (in imageascene all: whimwhim whimwhim). To the laetification of disgeneration by neuhumorisation of our kristianiasation. As the last liar in the earth begeylywayled the first lady of the forest. Though Toot’s pardoosled sauve l’hummour! For the joy of the dew on the flower of the fleets on the fields of the foam of the waves of the seas of the wild main from Borneholm has jest come to crown.

[p.332] Snip snap snoody. Noo err historyend goody. Of a lil trip trap and a big treeskooner for he put off the ketyl and they made three (for fie!) and if hec dont love alpy then lad you annoy me. For hanigen with hunigen still haunt ahunt to finnd their hinnigen where Pappappapparrassan-nuaragheallachnatull-aghmonganmacmacmac-whackfalltherdebblen-onthedubblandadd-ydoodled and anruly person creeked a jest. Gestapose to parry off cheekars or frankfurters on the odor. Fine again, Cuoholson! Peace, O wiley!

Such was the act of goth stepping the tolk of Doolin, drain and plantage, wattle and daub, with you’ll peel as I’ll pale and we’ll pull the boath toground togutter, testies touchwood and shenstone unto pop and puma, calf and condor, under all the gaauspices (incorporated), the chal and his chi, their roammerin over, gribgrobgrab reining trippetytrappety (so fore shalt thou flow, else thy cavern hair!) to whom she (anit likenand pleasethee!). Till sealump becamedump to bumpslump a lifflebed, (altolà, allamarsch! O gué, O gué!). Kaemper Daemper to Jetty de Waarft, all the weight of that mons on his little ribbeunuch! Him that gronde old mand to be that haard of heaering (afore said) and her the petty tondur with the fix in her changeable eye (which see), Lord, me lad, he goes with blowbierd, leedy, plasheous stream. But before that his loudship was converted to a landshop there was a little theogamyjig incidence that hoppy-go-jumpy Junuary morn when he colluded with the cad out on the beg amudst the fiounaregal gaames of those oathmassed fenians for whome he’s forcecaused a bridge of the piers, at Inverleffy, mating pontine of their engagement, synnbildising graters and things, eke ysendt? O nilly, not all, here’s the first cataraction! As if ever she cared an assuan damm about her harpoons sticking all out of him whet between phoenix his calipers and that psourdonome sheath. Sdrats ye, Gus Paudheen! Kenny’s thought ye, Dinny Oozle! While the cit was leaking asphalt like a suburbiaurealis in his rure was tucking to him like old booths, booths, booths, booths.

Enterruption. Check or slowback. Dvershen.

[p.333] Why, wonder of wenchalows, what o szeszame open, v doer s t doing? V door s being. But how theng thingajarry miens but this being becoming n z doer? K? An o. It is ne not him what foots like a glove, shoehandschiner Pad Podomkin. Sooftly, anni slavey, szszuszchee is slowjaneska.

The aged crafty nummifeed confusionary overinsured everlapsing accentuated katekattershin clopped, clopped, clopped, darsey dobrey, back and along the danzing corridor, as she was going to pimpim him, way boy wally, not without her complement of cavarnan men, between the two deathdealing allied divisions and the lines of readypresent fire of the corkedagains upstored, taken in giving the saloot, band your hands going in, bind your heads coming out, and remoltked to herselp in her serf’s alown, a weerpovy willowy dreevy drawly and the patter of so familiars, farabroads and behomeans, as she shure sknows, boof for a booby, boo: new uses in their mewseyfume. The jammesons is a cook in his hair. And the juinnesses is a rapin his hind. And the Bullingdong caught the wind up. Dip.

And the message she braught belaw from the missus she bragged abouve that had her agony stays outsize her sari chemise, blancking her shifts for to keep up the fascion since the king of all dronnings kissed her beeswixed hand, fang (pierce me, hunky, I’m full of meunders!), her fize like a tubtail of mondayne clothes, fed to the chaps with working medicals and her birthright pang that would split an atam like the forty pins in her hood, was to fader huncher a howdydowdy, to mountainy mots in her amnest plein language, from his fain a wan, his hot and tot lass, to pierce his ropeloop ear, how, Podushka be prayhasd, now the sowns of his loins were awinking and waking and his dorter of the hush lillabilla lullaby (lead us not into reformication with the poors in your thingdom of gory, O moan!), once after males, nonce at a time, with them Murphy’s puffs she dursted with gnockmeggs and the bramborry cake for dour dorty dompling obayre Mattom Beetom and epsut the pfot and if he was whishtful to licture her caudal with chesty chach from his dauberg den and noviny news from Naul or toplots talks from morrienbaths [p.334] or a parrotsprate’s cure for ensevelised lethurgies, spick’s my spoon and the veriblest spoon, ’twas her hour for the chamber’s ensallycopodium with love to melost Panny Kostello from X.Y. Zid for to folly billybobbis gibits porzy punzy and she was a wanton for De Marera to take her genial glow to bed.

— This is time for my tubble, reflected Mr ‘Gladstone Browne’ in the toll hut (it was choractoristic from that ‘man of Delgany’). Dip.

— This is me vulcanite smoking, profused Mr ‘Bonaparte Nolan’ under the natecup (one feels how one may hereby reekignites the ‘ground old mahonagyan’). Dip.

— And this is defender of defeater of defaulter of deformer of the funst man in Danelagh, willingtoned in with this glance dowon his browen and that born appalled noodlum the panellite pair’s cummal delimitator, odding: Oliver White, he’s as tiff as she’s tight. And thisens his speak quite hoarse. Dip.

In reverence to her midgetsy the lady of the comeallyous as madgestoo our own one’s goff stature. Prosim, prosit, to the krk n yr nck!

O rum it is the chomicalest thing how it pickles up the punchey and the jude. If you’ll gimmy your thing to me I will gamey a sing to thee. Stay where you’re dummy! To get her to go ther. He banged the scoop and she bagged the sugar while the whole pub’s pobbel done a stare. On the mizzatint wall. With its chromo for all, crimm crimms. Showing holdmenag’s asses sat by Allmeneck’s men, canins to ride with em, canins that lept at em, woollied and flundered.

So the katey’s came and the katey’s game. As so gangs sludgenose. And that henchwench what hopped it dunneth there duft the. Duras.

(Silents)

Yes, we’ve conned thon print in its gloss so gay how it came from Finndlader’s Yule to the day and it’s Hey Tallaght Hoe on the king’s highway with his hounds on the home at a turning. To Donnicoombe Fairing. Millikin’s Pass. When visiting at Izd-la-Chapelle taste the lipe of the waters from Carlowman’s Cup.

[p.335] It tellyhows its story to their six of hearts, a twelve-eyed man; for whom has madjestky who since is dyed drown reign before the izba.

Au! Au! Aue! Ha! Heish!

As stage to set by ritual rote for the grimm grimm tale of the four of hyacinths, the deafeeled carp and the bugler’s dozen of leagues-in-amour or how Holispolis went to Parkland with mabby and sammy and sonny and sissy and mop’s varlet de shambles and all to find the right place for it by peep o’skirt or pipe a skirl when the hundt called a halt on the chivvychace of the ground sloper at that ligtning lovemaker’s thender apeal till, between wandering weather and stable wind, vastelend hosteilend, neuziel and oltrigger some, Bullyclubber burgherly shut the rush in general.

Let us propel us for the frey of the fray! Us, us, beraddy!

Ko Niutirenis hauru leish! A lala! Ko Niutirenis haururu laleish! Ala lala! The Wullingthund sturm is breaking. The sound of maormaoring. The Wellingthund sturm waxes fuercilier. The whackawhacks of the sturm. Katu te ihis ihis! Katu te wana wana! The strength of the rawshorn generand is known throughout the world. Let us say if we may what a weeny wukeleen can do.

Au! Au! Aue! Ha! Heish! A lala!

— Paud the roosky, weren’t they all of them then each in his different way of saying calling on the one in the same time hibernian knights underthaner that was having, half for the laugh of the bliss it sint barbaras another doesend end once tale of a tublin wished on to him with its olives ocolombs and its hills owns ravings and Tutty his tour in his Nowhare’s yarcht. It was before when Aimee stood for Arthurduke for the figger in profane and fell from grace so madlley for fill the flatter fellows. (They were saying). And it was the lang in the shirt in the green of the wood, where obelisk rises when odalisks fall, major threft on the make and jollyjacques spindthrift on the merry (O Mr Mathurin, they were calling, what a topheavy hat you’re in! And there aramny maeud, then they were saying, these so piou- [p.336] pious!). And it was cyclums cyclorums after he made design on the corse and he want to mess on him (enterellbo add all taller Danis), back, seater and sides, and he applied (I’m amazingly sorracer!) the wholed bould shoulderedboy’s width for fullness, measures for messieurs, messer’s massed, (they were saycalling again and agone and all over agun, the louthly meathers, the loudly meaders, the lously measlers, six to one, bar ones).

And they pled him beheighten the firing. Dope.

Maltomeetim, alltomatetam, when a tale tarries shome shunter shove on. Fore auld they wauld to pree.

Pray.

Of this Mr A (tillalaric) and these wasch woman (dapplehued), fhronehflord and feeofeeds, who had insue keen and able and a spindlesong aside, nothing more is told until now, his awebrume hour, her sere Sahara of sad oakleaves. And then. Be old. The next thing is. We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.

So the truce, the old truce and nattonbuff the truce, boys. Drouth is stronger than faction. Slant. Shinshin. Shinshin.

— It was of The Grant, old gartener, qua golden meddlist, Publius Manlius, fuderal private, (his place is his poster, sure, they said, and we’re going to mark it, sore, they said, with a carbon caustick manner) bequother the liberaloider at his petty corporelezzo that hung caughtnapping from his baited breath, it was of him, my wife and I thinks, to feel to every of the younging fruits, tenderosed like an atalantic’s breastswells or, on a second wreathing, a bright tauth bight shimmeryshaking for the welt of his plow. And where the peckadillies at his wristsends meetings be loving so lightly dovessoild the candidacy, me wipin eye sinks, of his softboiled bosom should be apparient even to our illicterate of nullatinenties.

All to which not a lot snapped The Nolan of the Calabashes at his whilom eweheart photognomist who by this sum taken was as much incensed by Saint Bruno as that what he had consummed was his own panegoric, and wot a lout about it if it was [p.337] only a pippappoff pigeon shoot that gracesold getrunner, the man of centuries, was bowled out by judge, jury and umpire at batman’s biff like a witchbefooled legate. Dupe.

His almonence being alaterelly in dispensation with his three oldher patrons’ aid, providencer’s divine cow to milkfeeding mleckman, bonafacies to solafides, what matter what all his freudzay or who holds his hat to harm him, let hutch just keep on under at being a vanished consinent and let annapal livibel prettily prattle a lude all her own. And be that semeliminal salmon solemonly angled, ingate and outgate. A truce to lovecalls, dulled in warclothes, maleybags, things and bleakhusen. Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.

Simply. As says the mug in the middle, nay brian nay noel, ney billy ney boney. Imagine twee cweamy wosen. Suppwose you get a beautiful thought and cull them sylvias sub silence. Then inmaggin a stotterer. Suppoutre him to been one biggermaster Omnibil. Then lustily (tutu the font and tritt on the bokswoods like gay feeters’s dance) immengine up to three longly lurking lobstarts. Fair instents the Will Woolsley Wellaslayers. Pet her, pink him, play pranks with them. She will nod amproperly smile. He may seem to appraisiate it. They are as piractical jukersmen sure to paltipsypote. Feel the wollies drippeling out of your fingathumbs. Says to youssilves (floweers have ears, heahear!) solowly: So these ease Budlim! How do, dainty daulimbs? So peached to pick on you in this way, prue and simple, pritt and spry! Heyday too, Malster Faunagon, and hopes your hahititahiti licks the mankey nuts! And oodlum hoodlum doodlum to yes, Donn, Teague and Hurleg, who the bullocks brought you here and how the hillocks are ye?

We want Bud. We want Bud Budderly. We want Bud Budderly boddily. There he is in his Borrisalooner. The man that shunned the rucks on Gereland. The man thut won the bettlle of the bawll. Order, order, order, order! And tough. We call on Tancred Artaxerxes Flavin to compeer with Barnabas Ulick Dunne. [p.338] Order, order, order! Milster Malster in the chair. We’ve heard it sinse sung thousandtimes. How Burghley shuck the rackushant Germanon. For Ehren, boys, gobrawl!

A public plouse. Citizen soldiers.

taff (a smart boy, of the peat freers, thirty two eleven, looking through the roof towards a relevution of the karmalife order privious to his hoisting of an emergency umberolum in byway of paraguastical solation to the rhyttel in his hedd). All was flashing and krashning blurty moriartsky blutcherudd? What see, buttywalch? Tell ever so often?

butt (mottledged youth, clergical appealance, who, as his pied friar, is supposing to motto the sorry dejester in tifftaff toffiness or to be digarced from ever and a daye in his accounts). But da. But dada, mwilshsuni. Till even so aften. Sea vaast a pool!

taff (porumptly helping himself out by the cesspull with a yellup yurrup, puts up his furry furzed hare). Butly bitly! Humme to our mounthings. Conscribe him tillusk, unt, in his jubalant tubalence, the groundsapper, with his soilday site out on his moulday side in. The gubernier-gerenal in laut-lievtonant of Baltiskeeamore, amaltheouse for leporty hole! Endues paramilintary langdwage. The saillils of the yellavs nocadont palignol urdlesh. Shelltoss and welltass and telltuss aghom! Sling Stranaslang, how Malorazzias spikes her, coining a speak a spake! Not the Setanik stuff that slimed soft Siranouche! The good old gunshop monowards for manosymples. Tincurs tammit! They did oak hay doe fou Chang-li-meng when that man d’airain was big top tom saw tip side bum boss pageantfiller. Ajaculate! All lea light! Rassamble the glowrings of Bruyant the Bref when the Mollies Makehalpence took his leg for his thumb. And may he be too an intrepidation of our dreams which we foregot at wiking when the morn hath razed out limpalove and the bleakfrost chilled our ravery! Pook. Sing ching lew mang! Upgo, bobbycop! Lets hear in remember the braise of Hold!

butt (drawling forth from his blousom whereis meditabound of his minkerstary, switches on his gorsecopper’s fling weitoheito langthorn, fed up the grain oils of Aerin, while his laugh neighs banck as [p.339] that flashermind’s rays and his lipponease longuewedge wambles). Ullahbluh! Sehyoh narar, pokehole sann! Manhead very dirty by am anoyato. Like old Dolldy Icon when he cooked up his iggs in bicon. He gatovit and me gotafit and Oalgoak’s Cheloven gut a fudden. Povar old pitschobed! Molodeztious of metchennacht belaburt that pentschmyaso! Bog carsse and dam neat, sar, gam cant! Limbers affront of him, lumbers behund. While the bucks bite his dos his hart bides the ros till the bounds of his bays bell the warning. Sobaiter sobarkar. He was enmivallupped. Chromean fastion. With all his cannoball wappents. In his raglanrock and his malakoiffed bulbsbyg and his varnashed roscians and his cardigans blousejagged and his scarlett manchokuffs and his treecoloured camiflag and his perikopendolous gaelstorms. Here weeks hire pulchers! Obriania’s beromst! From Karrs and Polikoff’s, the men’s confessioners. Seval shimars pleasant time payings. Mousoumeselles buckwoulds look. Tenter and likelings.

taff (all Perssiasterssias shookatnaratatattar at his waggonhorchers, his bulgeglarying stargapers razzledazzlingly full of eyes, full of balls, full of holes, full of buttons, full of stains, full of medals, full of blickblackblobs). Grozarktic! Toadlebens! Some garmentguy! Insects appalling, low hum clang sin! A cheap decoy! Too deep destroy! Say mangraphique, may say nay por daguerre!

butt (if that he hids foregodden has nate of glozery farused ameet the florahs of the follest, his spent fish’s livid smile giving allasundery the bumfit of the doped). Come alleyou jupes of Wymmingtown that graze the calves of Man! A bear raigning in his heavenspawn consomation robes. Rent, outraged, yewleaved, grained, ballooned, hindergored and voluant! Erminia’s capecloaked hoodoodman! First he s s st steppes. Then he st stoo stoopt. Lookt.

taff (strick struck strangling like aleal lusky Lubliner to merumber by the cycl of the cruize who strungled Attahilloupa with what empoisoned El Monte de Zuma and failing wilnaynilnay that he was pallups barn in the minkst of the Krumlin befodt he was popsoused into the monkst of the vatercan, makes the holypolygon of the emt on the greaseshaper, a little farther, a little soon, a lettera- [p.340] cettera, oukraydoubray). Scutterer of guld, he is retourious on every roudery! The lyewdsky so so sewn of a fitchid! With his walshbrushup. And his boney bogey braggs.

butt (after his tongues in his cheeks, with pinkpoker pointing out in rutene to impassible abjects beyond the mistomist towards Lissnaluhy such as the Djublian Alps and the Hoofd Ribeiro as where he and his trulock may ever make a game). The field of karhags and that bloasted tree. Forget not the felled! For the lomondations of Oghrem! Warful doon’s bothem. Here furry glunn. Nye? Their feery pass. Tak! With guerillaman aspear aspoor to prink the pranks of primkissies. And the buddies behide in the byre. Allahblah!

taff (a blackseer, he stroves to regulect all the straggles for wife in the rut of the past through the widnows in effigies keening after the blank sheets in their faminy to the relix of oll decency from over draught). Oh day of rath! Ah, murther of mines! Eh, selo moy! Uh, zulu luy! Bernesson Mac Mahahon from Osro bearing nose easger for sweeth prolettas on his swooth prowl!

butt (back to his peatrol and paump: swee Gee’s wee rest: no more applehooley: dodewodedook). Bruinoboroff, the hooneymoonger, and the grizzliest manmichal in Meideveide! Whose annal livves the hoiest! For he devoused the lelias on the fined and he conforted samp, tramp and marchint out of the drumbume of a narse. Guards, serf Finnland, serve we all!

taff (whatwidth the psychophannies at the front and whetwadth the psuckofumbers beholden the fair, illcertain, between his bulchrichudes and the roshashanaral, where he sees Bishop Ribboncake plus his pollex prized going forth on his visitations of mirrage or Miss Horizon, justso all our fannacies daintied her, on the curve of the camber, unsheathing a showlaced limbaloft to the great consternations). Divulge! Hyededye, kittyls, and howdeddoh, pan! Poshbott and pulbuties. See that we soll or let dargman be luna as strait a way as your ant’s folly me line while ye post is goang from Piping Pubwirth to Haunted Hillborough on his Mujiksy’s Zaravence, the Riss, the Ross, the sur of all Russers, as my farst is near to hear and my sackend is meet to sedon while my whole’s a peer’s [p.341] aureolies. We should say you dones the polecad. Bang on the booche, gurg in the gorge, rap on the roof and your flup is unbu...

butt (at the signal of his act which seems to sharpnel his innermals menody, playing the spool of the little brown jog round the wheel of her whang goes the millner). Buckily buckily, blodestained boyne! Bimbambombumb. His snapper was shot in the Rumjar Journaral. Why the gigls he lubbed beeyed him.

taff (obliges with a two stop yogacoga sumphoty on the bones for ivory girl and ebony boy). The balacleivka! Trovatarovitch! I trumble!

butt (with the sickle of a scygthe but the humour of a hummer, O, howorodies through his cholaroguled, fumfing to a fullfrength with this wallowing olfact). Mortar martar tartar wartar! May his boules grow wider so his skittles gets worse! The aged monad making a venture out of the murder of investment. I seen him acting surgent what betwinks the scimitar star and the ashen moon. By their lights shalthow throw him! Piff paff for puffpuff and my pife for his cgar! The mlachy way for gambling.

[Up to this curkscraw bind an admirable verbivocovisual presentment of the worldrenownced Caerholme Event has been being given by The Irish Race and World. The huddled and aliven stablecrashers have shared fleetfooted enthusiasm with the paddocks dare and ditches tare while the mews was combing ground. Hippohopparray helioscope flashed winsor places as the gates might see. Meusdeus! That was (with burning briar) Mr Twomass Nohoholan for their common contribe satisfunction in the purports of amusedment telling the Verily Roverend Father Epiphanes shrineshriver of Saint Dhorough’s (in browne bomler) how (assuary as there’s a bonum in your osstheology!) Backlegs shirked the racing kenneldar. The saintly scholarist’s roastering guffalawd of nupersaturals holler at this metanoic excomologosis tells of the chestnut’s (once again, Wittyngtom!) absolutionally romptyhompty successfulness. A lot of lasses and lads without damas or dads, but fresh and blued with collecting boxes. One aught spare ones triflets, to be shut: it is Coppingers for the children. Slippery Sam hard by them, physically present how- [p.342] somedever morally absent, was slooching about in his knavish diamonds asking Gmax, Knox and the Dmuggies (a pinnance for your toughts, turffers!) to deck the ace of duds. Tomtinker Tim, howbeit, his unremitting retainer, (the seers are the seers of Samael but the heers are the heers of Timoth) is in Boozer’s Gloom, soalken steady in his sulken tents. Baldawl the curse, baledale the day! And the frocks of shick sheeples in their shummering insamples! You see: a chiefsmith, semperal scandal stinkmakers, a middinest from the Casabianca and, of course, Mr Fry. Barass! Pardon the inquisition, causas es quostas? It is Da Valorem’s Dominical Brayers. Why coif that weird hood? Because among nosoever circusdances is to be apprehended the dustungwashed poltronage of the lost Gabbarnaur-Jaggarnath. Pamjab! Gross Jumpiter, whud was thud? Luckluckluckluck luckluckluck! It is the Thousand to One Guinea-Gooseberry’s Lipperfull Slipver Cup. Hold hard, ridesiddle titelittle Pitsy Riley! Gurragrunch, gurragrunch! They are at the turn of the fourth of the hurdles. By the hross of Xristos, Holophullopopulace is a shote of excramation! Bumchub! Emancipator, the Creman hunter (Major Hermyn C. Entwhistle) with dramatic effect reproducing the form of famous sires on the scene of the formers triumphs, is showing the eagle’s way to Mr Whaytehayte’s three buy geldings Homo Made Ink, Bailey Beacon and Ratatuohy while Furstin II and The Other Girl (Mrs ’Boss’ Waters, Leavybrink) too early spring dabbles, are showing a clean pairofhids to Immensipater. Sinkathinks to oppen here! To this virgin’s tuft, on this golden of evens! I never sought of sinkathink. Our lorkmakor he is proformly annuysed. He is shinkly thinkly shaking in his schayns. Sat will be off follteedee. This eeridreme has being effered you by Bett and Tipp. Tipp and Bett, our swapstick quackchancers, in From Topphole to Bottom of The Irish Race and World.]

taff (awary that the first sports report of Loundin Reginald has now been afterthoughtfully colliberated by a saggind spurts flash, takes the dipperend direction and, for tasing the tiomor of [p.343] malaise after the pognency of orangultonia, orients by way of Sagittarius towards Draco on the Lour). And you collier carsst on him, the corsar, with Boyle, Burke and Campbell, I’ll gogemble on strangbones tomb. You had just been cerberating a camp camp camp to Saint Sepulchre’s march through the armeemonds retreat with the boys all marshalled, scattering giant’s hail over the curseway, fellowed along the rout by the stenchions of the corpse. Tell the coldspell’s terroth! If you please, commeylad! Perfedes Albionias! Think some ingain think, as Teakortairer sate over the Galwegian caftan forewhen Orops and Aasas were chooldrengs and micramacrees! A forward movement, Miles na Bogaleen, and despatch!

butt (slinking his coatsleeves surdout over his squad mutton shoulder so as to loop more life the jauntlyman as he scents the anggreget yup behound their whole scoopchina’s desperate noy’s totalage and explaining aposteriorly how awstooloo was valdesombre belowes hero and he was in a greak esthate phophiar an erixtion on the soseptuple side of him made spoil apriori his popoporportiums). Yass, zotnyzor, I don’t think I did not, pojr. Never you brother me for I scout it, think you! Ichts nichts on nichts! Greates Schtschuptar! Me fol the rawlawdy in the schpirrt of a schkrepz. Of all the quirasses and all the qwehrmin in the tragedoes of those antiants their grandoper, that soun of a gunnong, with his sabaothsopolettes, smooking his scandleloose at botthends of him! Foinn duhans! I grandthinked after his obras after another time about the itch in his egondoom he was legging boldylugged from some pulversporochs and lyoking for a stooleazy for to nemesisplotsch allafranka and for to salubrate himself with an ultradungs heavenly mass at his base by a suprime pompship chorams the perished popes, the reverend and allaverred cromlecks, and when I heard his lewdbrogue reciping his cheap cheateary gospeds to sintry and santry and sentry and suntry I thought he was only haftara having afterhis brokeforths but be the homely Churopodvas I no sooner seen aghist of his frighteousness then I was bibbering with vear a few versets off fooling for fjorg for my fifth foot. Of manifest ’tis obedience and the. Flute!

[p.344] taff (though the unglucksarsoon is giming for to git him, jotning in, hoghly ligious, hapagodlap, like a soldierry sap, with a pique at his cue and a tyr in his eye and a bond of his back and a croak in his cry as did jolly well harm lean o’er him) Is not athug who would. Weepon, weeponder, song of sorrowmon! Which goatheye and sheepskeer they damnty well know. Papaist! Gambanman! Take the cawraidd’s blow! Yia! Your partridge’s last!

butt (giving his scimmianised twinge in acknuckledownedgment of this cumulikick, strafe from the firetrench, studenly drobs led, satoniseels ouchyotchy, he changecors induniforms as he is lefting the gat out of the big: his face glows green, his hair greys white, his bleyes bcome broon to suite his cultic twalette). But when I seeing him in his oneship fetch along within hail that tourrible tall with his nitshnykopfgoknob and attempting like a brandylogged rudeman cathargic, lugging up and laiding down his livepelts so cruschinly like Mebbuck at Messar and expousing his old skinful self tailtottom by manurevring in open ordure to renewmurature with the cowruads in their airish pleasantry I thanked he was recovering breadth from some herdsquatters beyond the carcasses and I couldn’t erver nerver to tell a liard story not of I knew the prize if from lead or alimoney. But when I got inoccupation of a full new of his old basemiddelism, in ackshan, pagne pogne, by the veereyed lights of the stormtrooping clouds and in the sheenflare of the battleaxes of the heroim and mid the shieldfails awail of the bitteraccents of the sorafim and caught the pfierce tsmell of his aurals, orankastank, a suphead setrapped, like Peder the Greste, altipaltar, my bill it forsooks allegiance (gut bull it!) and, no lie is this, I was babbeing and yetaghain bubbering, bibbelboy, me marrues me shkewers me gnaas me fiet, tob tob tob beat it, solongopatom. Clummensy if ever misused, must used you’s now! But, meac Coolp, Arram of Eirzerum, as I love our Deer Dirouchy, I confesses withould pridejealice when I looked upon the Saur of all the Haurousians with the weight of his arge fullin upon him from the travaillings of his tommuck and rueckenased the fates of a bosser there was fear on me the sons of Nuad for him and it was heavy he was for me [p.345] then the way I immingled my Irmenial hairmaierians ammongled his Gospolis fomiliours till, achaura moucreas, I adn’t the arts to.

taff (as a marrer off act, prepensing how such waldmanns from Burnias seduced country clowns, he is preposing barangaparang after going knowing what he is doing after to see him pluggy well moidered as a murder effect, you bet your blowie knife, before he doze soze, sopprused though he is) Grot Zot! You hidn’t the hurts? Vott Fonn!

butt (hearing somrother sudly give tworthree peevish sniff snuff snoores like govalise falseleep he waitawhishts to see might he stirs and then goes on kuldrum like without asking for pepeace or anysing a soul). Merzmard! I met with whom it was too late. My fate! O hate! Fairwail! Fearwealing of the groan! And think of that when you smugs to bagot.

taff (who meanwhilome at yarn’s length so as to put a nodje in the poestcher, by wile of stoccan his hand and of rooma makin ber getting umptyums gatherumed off the skattert, had been lavishing, lagan on lighthouse, words of silent power, susu glouglou biribiri gongos, upon the repleted speechsalver’s innkeeping right which, thanks giveme and naperied norms nonobstaclant, there can be little doubt, have resulted in a momstchance ministring of another guidness, my good, to see) Bompromifazzio! Shumpum for Pa-li-di and oukosouso for the nipper dandy! Trink off this scup and be bladdy orafferteed! To bug at?

butt (he whipedoff’s his chimbley phot, as lips lovecurling to the tongueopener, he takecups the communion of sense at the hands of the foregiver of trosstpassers and thereinofter centelinnates that potifex miximhost with haruspical hospedariaty proferring into his pauses somewhot salt bacon). Theres scares knud in this gnarld warld a fully so svend as dilates for the improvement of our foerses of nature by your very ample solvent of referacting upon me like is boesen fiennd.

[The other foregotthened abbosed in the Mullingaria are during this swishingsight teilweisioned. How the fictionable world [p.346] in Fruzian Creamtartery is loading off heavy furses and affubling themselves with muckinstushes. The neatschknee Novgolosh. How the spinach ruddocks are being tatoovatted up for the second comings of antigreenst. Hebeneros for Aromal Peace. How Alibey Ibrahim wisheths Bella Suora to a holy cryptmahs while the Arumbian Knives Riders axecutes devilances round the jehumispheure. Learn the Nunsturk. How Old Yales boys is making rebolutions for the cunning New Yirls, never elding, still begidding, never to mate to lend, never to ate selleries and never to add soulleries and never to ant sulleries and never to aid silleries with sucharow with sotchyouroff as Burkeley’s Show’s a ructiongetherall. Phone for Phineal toomellow aftermorn and your phumeral’s a roselixion.]

taff (now as he has been past the buckthurnstock from Peadhar Piper of Colliguchuna, whiles they all are bealting pots to dubrin din for old daddam dombstom to tomb and wamb humbs lumbs agamb, glimpse agam, glance agen, rise up road and hive up hill, and find your pollyvoulley foncey pitchin ingles in the parler). Since you are on for versingrhetorish say your piece! How Buccleuch shocked the rosing girnirilles. A ballet of Gasty Power. A hov and az ov and off like a gow! And don’t live out the sad of tearfs, piddyawhick! Not offgott affsang is you, buthbach? Ath yetheredayth noth endeth, hay? Vaersegood! Buckle to! Sayyessik, Ballygarry. The fourscore soculums are watchyoumaycodding to cooll the skoopgoods blooff. Harkabuddy, feign! Thingman placeyear howed wholst somwom shimwhir tinkledinkledelled. Shinfine deed in the myrtle of the bog tway fainmain stod op to slog, free bond men lay lurkin on. Tuan about whattinghim! Fore sneezturmdrappen! ’Twill be a rpnice pschange, arrah, sir? Can you come it, budd?

butt (who in the cushlows of his goodsforseeking hoarth, ever fondlinger of his pimple spurk, is a niallist of the ninth homestages, the babybell in his baggutstract upper going off allatwanst, begad, lest he should challenge himself, beygoad, till angush). Horrasure, toff! As said as would. It was Colporal Phailinx first. Hittit was [p.347] of another time, a white horsday where the midril met the bulg, sbogom, roughnow along about the first equinarx in the cholonder, on the plain of Khorason as thou goest from the mount of Bekel, Steep Nemorn, elve hundred and therety and to years how the krow flees end in deed, after a power of skimiskes, blodidens and godinats of them, when we sight the beasts, (hegheg whatlk of wraimy wetter!), moist moonful date man aver held dimsdzey death with, and higheye was in the Reilly Oirish Krzerszonese Milesia asundurst Sirdarthar Woolwichleagues, good tomkeys years somewhile in Crimealian wall samewhere in Ayerland, during me weeping stillstumms over the freshprosts of Eastchept and the dangling garters of Marrowbone and daring my wapping stiltstunts on Bostion Moss, old stile and new style and heave a lep onwards. And winn again, blaguadargoos, or lues the day, plays goat, the banshee pealer, if moskats knows whoss whizz, the great day and the druidful day come San Patrisky and the grand day, the excellent fine splendorous long agreeable toastworthy cylindrical day, go Sixt of the Ninth, the heptahundread annam dammias that Hajizfijjiz ells me is and will and was be till the timelag is in it that’s told in the Bok of Alam to columnkill all the prefacies of Erin gone brugk. But Icantenue. And incommixtion. We was lowsome like till we’d took out after the dead beats. So I begin to study and I soon show them day’s reasons how to give the cold shake to they blighty perishers and lay one over the beats. All feller he look he call all feller come longa villa finish. Toumbalo, how was I acclapadad! From them banjopeddlars on the raid. Gidding up me anti vanillas and getting off the stissas me aunties. Boxerising and coxerusing. And swiping a johnny dann sweept for to exercitise myself neverwithstanding the topkats and his roaming cartridges, orussheying and patronning, out all over Crummwiliam wall. Be the why it was me who haw haw.

taff (all for letting his tinder and lighting be put to beheiss in the feuer and, while durblinly obasiant to the felicias of the skivis, still smolking his fulvurite turfkish in the rooking pressance of [p.348] laddios). Yaa hoo how how, col? Whom battles joined no bottles sever! Worn’t you aid a comp?

butt (in his difficoltous tresdobremient, he feels a bitvalike a baddlefall of staot but falls a batforlake a borrlefull of bare). And me awlphul omegrims! Between me rassociations in the postleadeny past and me disconnections with aplompervious futules I’ve a boodle full of maimeries in me buzzim and medears runs sloze, bleime, as I now with platoonic leave recoil in (how the thickens they come back to one to rust!) me misenary post for all them old boyars that’s now boomaringing in waulholler, me alma marthyrs. I dring to them, bycorn spirits fuselaiding, and you cullies adjutant, even where its contentsed wody, with absents wehrmuth. Junglemen in agleement, I give thee our greatly swooren, Theoccupant that Rueandredful, the thrownfullvner and all our royal devouts with the arrest of the whole inhibitance of Neuilands! One brief mouth. And a velligoolapnow! Meould attashees the currgans, (if they could get a kick at this time for all that’s hapenced to us!) Cedric said Gormleyson and Danno O’Dunnochoo and Conno O’Cannochar it is this were their names for we were all under that manner barracksers on Kong Gores Wood together, thurkmen three, with those khakireinettes, our miladies in their toileries, the twum plumyumnietcies, Vjeras Vjenaskayas, of old Djadja Uncken who was a great mark for jinking and junking, up the palposes of womth and wamth, we war, and the charme of their lyse brocade. For lispias harth a burm in eye but whem it bames fire norone screeneth. Hulp, hulp, huzzars! Raise ras tryracy! Freetime’s free! Up Lancesters! Anathem!

taff (who still senses that heavinscent houroines that entertrained him who they were sinuorivals from the sunny Espionia but plied wopsy with his wallets in thatthack of the bustle Bakerloo, (11.32), passing the uninational truthbosh in smoothing irony over the multinotcheralled infructuosities of his grinner set). The rib, the rib, the quean of oldbyrdes, Sinya Sonyavitches! Your Rhoda Cockardes that are raday to embrace our ruddy inflamtry world! In their ohosililesvienne biribarbebeway. Till they’ve [p.349] kinks in their tringers and boils on their taws. Whor dor the pene lie, Mer Pencho? Ist dramhead countmortial or gonorrhal stab? Mind your pughs and keaoghs, if you piggots, marsh! Do the nut, dingbut! Be a dag! For zahur and zimmerminnes! Sing in the chorias to the ethur:

[In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes, glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines. Shlossh! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caeseine coatings. Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellowchap in the wohly ghast, Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates. The idolon exhibisces the seals of his orders: the starre of the Son of Heaven, the girtel of Izodella the Calottica, the cross of Michelides Apaleogos, the latchet of Jan of Nepomuk, the puffpuff and pompom of Powther and Pall, the great belt, band and bucklings of the Martyrology of Gorman. It is for the castomercies mudwake surveice. The victar. Pleace to notnoys speach above your dreadths, please to doughboys. Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch! He blanks his oggles because he confesses to all his tellavicious nieces. He blocks his nosoes because that he confesses to everywheres he was always putting up his latest faengers. He wollops his mouther with a sword of tusk in as because that he confesses how opten he used be obening her howonton he used be undering her. He boundles alltogotter his manucupes with his pedarrests in asmuch as because that he confesses before all his handcomplishies and behind all his comfoderacies. And (hereis cant came back saying he codant steal no lunger, yessis, [p.350] catz come buck beques he caudant stail awake) he touched upon this tree of livings in the middenst of the garerden for inasmuch as because that he confessed to it on Hillel and down Dalem and in the places which the lepers inhabit in the place of the stones and in pontofert jusfuggading amoret now he come to think of it jolly well ruttengenerously olyovyover the ole blucky shop. Pugger old Pumpey O’Dungaschiff! There will be a hen collection of him after avensung on the field of Hanar. Dumble down, looties and gengstermen! Dtin, dtin, dtin, dtin!]

butt (with a gisture expansive of Mr Lhugewhite Cadderpollard with sunflawered beautonhole pulled up point blanck by mailbag mundaynism at Oldbally Court though the hissindensity buck far of his melovelance tells how when he was fast marking his first lord for cremation the whyfe of his bothem was the very lad’s thing to elter his mehind). Prostatates, pujealousties! Dovolnoisers, prayshyous! Defense in every circumstancias of deboutcheries no the chaste daffs! Pack pickets, pioghs and kughs to be palseyputred! Be at the peme, prease, of not forgetting or mere betoken yourself to hother prace! Correct me, pleatze commando, for cossakes but I abjure of it. No more basquibezigues for this pole aprican! With askormiles’ eskermillas. I had my billyfell of duckish delights the whole pukny time on rawmeots and juliannes with their lambstoels in my kiddeneys and my ramsbutter in their sassenacher ribs, knee her, do her and trey her, when th’osirian cumb dumb like the whalf on the fiord and we preying players and pinching peacesmokes, troupkers tomiatskyns all, for Father Petrie Spence of Parishmoslattary to go and leave us and the crimsend daun to shellalite on the darkumen (scene as signed, Slobabogue), feeding and sleeping on the huguenottes (the snuggest spalniel’s where the lieon’s tame!) and raiding revolations over the allbegeneses (sand us and saint us and sound as agun!). Yet still in all, spit for spat, like we chantied on Sunda schoon, every warson wearrier kaddies a komnate in his schnapsack and unlist I am getting foegutfulls of the rugiments of savaliged wildfire I was gamefellow willmate and send [p.351] us victorias with nowells and brownings, dumm, sneak and curry, and all the fun I had in that fanagan’s week. A strange man wearing abarrel. And here’s a gift of meggs and teggs. And as I live by chipping nortons. And ’tis iron fits the farmer, ay. Arcdesedo! Renborumba! Then were the hellscyown days for our fellows, the loyal leibsters, and we was the redugout rawrecruitioners, praddies three and prettish too, a wheeze we has in our waynward islands, wee engrish, one long blue streak, jisty and pithy af durck rosolun, with hand to hand as Homard Kayenne was always jiggilyjugging about in his wendowed courage when our woos with the wenches went wined for a song, tsingirillies’ zyngarettes, while Woodbine Willie, so popiular with the poppyrossies, our Chorney Choplain, blued the air. Sczlanthas! Banzaine! Bissbasses! S. Pivorandbowl. And we all tuned in to hear the topmast noviality. Up the revels drown the rinks and almistips all round! Paddy Bonhamme he vives! Encore! And tig for tag. Togatogtug. My droomodose days Y loved you abover all the strest. Blowhole brasshat and boy with his boots off and the butch of our bunch and all. It was buckoo bonzer, beleeme. I was a bare prive without my doglegs but I did not give to one humpenny dump, wingh or wangh, touching those thusengaged slavey generales of Tanah Kornalls, the meelisha’s deelishas, pronouncing their very flank movemens in sunpictorsbosk. Baghus the whatwar! I could always take good cover of myself and, eyedulls or earwakers, preyers for rain or cominations, I did not care three tanker’s hoots, (’sham! hem! or chaffit!) for any feelings from my lifeprivates on their reptrograd leanins because I have Their Honours booth my respectables sœurs assistershood off Lyndhurst Terrace, the puttih Misses Celana Dalems, and she in vinting her angurr can belle the troth on her alliance and I know His Heriness, my respeaktoble medams culonelle on Mellay Street, Lightnints Gundhur Sawabs, and they would never as the aimees of servation let me down. Not on your bludger life, touters! No peeping, pimpadoors! And, by Jova I never went wrong nor let him doom till, risky wark rasky wolk, at the head of the wake, up come stumblebum [p.352] (ye olde cottemptable!), his urssian gemenal, in his scutt’s rudes unreformed and he went before him in that nemcon enchelonce with the same old domstoole story and his upleave the fallener as is greatly to be petted (whitesides do his beard!) and I seen his brichashert offensive and his boortholomas vadnhammaggs vise a vise them scharlot runners and how they gave love to him and how he took the ward from us (odious the fly fly flurtation of his him and hers! Just mairmaid maddeling it was it he was!) and, my oreland for a rolvever, sord, by the splunthers of colt and bung goes the enemay the Percy rally got me, messger, (as true as theirs an Almagnian Gothabobus!) to blow the grand off his aceupper. Thistake it’s meest! And after meath the dulwich. We insurrectioned and, be the procuratress of the hory synnotts, before he could tell pullyirragun to parrylewis, I shuttm, missus, like a wide sleever! Hump to dump! Tumbleheaver!

taff (camelsensing that sonce they have given bron a nuhlan the volkar boastsung is heading to sea vermelhion but too wellbred not to ignore the umzemlianess of this rifal’s preceedings, in an effort towards autosotorisation, effaces himself in favour of the idiology alwise behounding his lumpy hump off homosodalism which means that if he has lain amain to lolly his liking-cabronne! - he may pops lilly a young one to his herth - combrune -) Oholy rasher, I’m believer! And Oho bullyclaver of ye, bragadore-gunneral! The grand ohold spider! It is a name to call to him Umsturdum Vonn! Ah, you were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged. Aha race of fiercemarchands counterination oho of shorpshoopers.

butt (miraculising into the Dann Deafir warcry, his bigotes bristling, as, jittinju triggity shittery pet, he shouts his thump and feeh fauh foul finngures up the heighohs of their ahs!) Bluddymuddymuzzle! The buckbeshottered! He’ll umbozzle no more graves nor horne nor haunder, lou garou, for gayl geselles in dead men’s hills! Kaptan (backsights to his bared!), His Cumbulent Embulence, the frustate fourstar Russkakruscam, Dom Allaf O’Khorwan, connundurumchuff.

taff (who, asbestas can, wiz the healps of gosh and his bluzzid maikar, has been sulphuring to himsalves all the pungataries [p.353] of sin praktice in failing to furrow theogonies of the dommed). Trisseme, the mangoat! And the name of the Most Marsiful, the Aweghost, the Gragious One! In sobber sooth and in souber civiles? And to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his all of man? Notshoh?

butt (maomant scoffin, but apoxyomenously deturbaned but thems bleachin banes will be after making a bashman’s haloday out of the euphorious hagiohygiecynicism of his die and be diademmed). Yastsar! In sabre tooth and sobre saviles! Senonnevero! That he leaves nyet is my grafe. He deared me to it and he dared me do it, and bedattle I didaredonit as Cocksnark of Killtork can tell and Ussur Ursussen of the viktaurious onrush with all the rattles in his arctic! As bold and as madhouse a bull in a meadows. Knout Knittrick Kinkypeard! Olefoh, the sourd of foemoe times! Unknun! For when meseemim, and tolfoklokken rolland allover ourloud’s lande, beheaving up that sob of tunf for to claimhis, for to wollpimsolff, puddywhuck. Ay, and untuoning his culothone in an exitous erseroyal Deo Jupto. At that instullt to Igorladns! Prronto! I gave one dobblenotch and I ups with my crozzier. Mirrdo! With my how on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock rockrogn. Sparro!

[The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of hurtreford expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules while coventry plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenatas are projectilised from Hullulullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. They were precisely the twelves of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira.]

taff (skimperskamper, his wools gatherings all over cromlin what with the birstol boys artheynes and is it her tour and the crackery of the fullfour fivefirearms and the crockery of their dam- [p.354] dam domdom chumbers). Wharall thubulbs uptheaires! Shattamovick?

butt (pulling alast stark daniel with alest doog at doorak while too greater than pardon painfully the issue of his mouth diminuendoing, vility of vilities, he becomes, allasvitally, faint). Shurenoff! Like Faun MacGhoul!

butt and taff (desprot slave wager and foeman feodal unsheckled, now one and the same person, their fight upheld to right for a wee while being baffled and tottered, umbraged by the shadow of Old Erssia’s magisquammythical mulattomilitiaman, the living by owning over the surfers of the glebe whose sway craven minnions had caused to revile, as, too foul for hell, under boiling Mauses’ burning brand, he falls by Goll’s gillie, but keenheartened by the circuminsistence of the Parkes O’Rarelys in a hurdly gurdly Cicilian concertone of their fonngeena barney brawl, shaken everybothy’s hands, while S. E. Morehampton makes leave to E. N. Sheilmartin after Meetinghouse Lanigan has embaraced Vergemout Hall, and, without falter or mormor or blathrehoot of sophsterliness, pugnate the pledge of fiannaship, dook to dook, with a commonturn oudchd of fest man and best man astoutsalliesemoutioun palms it off like commodity tokens against a cococancancacacanotioun). When old the wormd was a gadden and Anthea first unfoiled her limbs wanderloot was the way the wood wagged where opter and apter were samuraised twimbs. They had their mutthering ivies and their murdhering idies and their mouldhering iries in that muskat grove but there’ll be bright plinnyflowers in Calomella’s cool bowers when the magpyre’s babble towers scorching and screeching from the ravenindove. If thees lobed the sex of his head and mees ates the seep of his traublers he’s dancing figgies to the spittle side and shoving outs the soord. And he’ll be buying buys and go gulling gells with his flossim and jessim of carm, silk and honey while myandthys playing lancifer lucifug and what’s duff as a bettle for usses makes coy cosyn corollanes’ moues weeter to wee. So till butagain budly shoots thon rising germinal let bodley chow the fatt of his anger and badley bide the toil of his tubb.

[p.355] [The pump and pipe pingers are ideally reconstituted. The putther and bowls are peterpacked up. All the presents are determining as regards for the future the howabouts of their past absences which they might see on at hearing could they once smell of tastes from touch. To ought find a values for. The must overlistingness. When ex what is ungiven. As ad where. Stillhead. Blunk.]

Shutmup. And bud did down well right. And if he sung dumb in his glass darkly speech lit face to face on allaround.

Vociferagitant. Viceversounding. Namely, Abdul Abulbul Amir or Ivan Slavansky Slavar. In alldconfusalem. As to whom the major guiltfeather pertained it was Hercushiccups’ care to educe. Beauty’s bath she’s bound to bind beholders and pride, his purge, has place appoint in penance and the law’s own libel lifts and lames the low with the lofty. Be of the housed! While the Hersy Hunt they harrow the hill for to rout them rollicking rogues from, rule those racketeer romps from, rein their rockery rides from. Rambling.

Nightclothesed, arooned, the conquerods sway. After their battle thy fair bosom.

— That is too tootrue enough in Solidan’s Island as in Moltern Giaourmany and from the Amelakins off to date back to land of engined Egypsians, assented from his opening before his inlookers of where an oxmanstongue stalled stabled the wellnourished one, lord of the seven days, overlord of sats and suns, the sat of all the suns which are in the ring of his system of the sats of his sun, god of the scuffeldfallen skillfilledfelon, who (he contaimns) hangsters, who (he constrains) hersirrs, a gain changful, a mintage vaster, heavy on shirts, lucky with shifts, the topside humpup stummock atween his showdows fellah, Misto Teewiley Spillitshops, who keepeth watch in Khummer-Phett, whose spouse is An-Lyph, the dog’s bladder, warmer of his couch in fore. We all, for whole men is lepers, have been nobbut wonterers in that chill childerness which is our true name after the allfaulters (mug’s luck to em!) and, bespeaking of love and lie detectors in venuvarities, whateither the drugs truth of it, was [p.356] there an iota of from the faust to the lost. And that is at most redoubtedly an overthrew of each and ilkermann of us, I persuade myself, before Gow, gentlemen, so true as this are my kopfinpot astrode on these is my boardsoldereds.

It sollecited, grobbling hummley, his roundhouse of seven orofaces, of all, guiltshouters or crimemummers, to be sayd by, codnops, advices for, free of gracies, scamps encloded, competitioning them, if they had steadied Jura or when they had raced Messafissi, husband of your wifebetter or bestman botchalover of you yourself, how comes ever a body in our taylorised world to selve out thishis, whither it gives a primeum nobilees for our notomise or naught, the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, wheile he is asame. And fullexampling. The pints in question. With some byspills. And sicsecs to provim hurtig. Soup’s on!

— A time. And a find time. Whenin aye was a kiddling. And the tarikies held sowansopper. Let there beam a frishfrey. And they sodhe gudhe rudhe brodhe wedhe swedhe medhe in the kanddledrum. I have just (let us suppraise) been reading in a (suppressed) book — it is notwithstempting by meassures long and limited—the latterpress is eminently legligible and the paper, so he eagerly seized upon, has scarsely been buttered in works of previous publicity wholebeit in keener notcase would I turf aside for pastureuration. Packen paper paineth whomto is sacred scriptured sign. Who straps it scraps it that might, if ashed, have healped. Enough, however, have I read of it, like my good bedst friend, to augur in the hurry of the times that it will cocommend the widest circulation and a reputation coextensive with its merits when inthrusted into safe and pious hands upon so edifying a mission as it, I can see, as is his. It his ambullished with expurgative plates, replete in information and accampaigning the action passiom, slopbang, whizzcrash, boomarattling from burst to past, as I have just been seeing, with my warmest venerections, of a timmersome townside upthecountrylifer, (Guard place the town!) allthose everwhalmed upon that preposterous blank seat, before the wordcraft of this early woodcutter, a master of vignett- [p.357] iennes and our findest grobsmid among all their orefices, (and, shukar in chowdar, so splunderdly English!) Mr Aubeyron Birdslay. Chubgoodchob, arsoncheep and wellwillworth a triat! Bismillafoulties. But the hasard you asks is justly ever behind his meddle throw! Those sad pour sad forengistanters, dastychappy dustyrust! Chaichairs. It is that something, awe, aurorbean in that fellow, hamid and damid, (did he have but Hugh de Brassey’s beardslie his wear mine of ancient guised) which comequeers this anywhat perssian which we, owe, realisinus with purups a dard of pene. There is among others pleasons whom I love and which are favourests to mind, one which I have pushed my finker in for the movement and, but for my sealring is none to hand I swear, she is highly catatheristic and there is another which I have fombly fongered freequuntly and, when my signet is on sign again I swear, she is deeply sangnificant. Culpo de Dido! Ars we say in the classies. Kunstful, we others said. What ravening shadow! What dovely line! Not the king of this age could richlier eyefeast in oreillental longuardness with alternate nightjoys of a thousand kinds but one kind. A shahrryar cobbler on me when I am lying! And whilst (when I doot my sliding panel and I hear cawcaw) I have been idylly turmbing over the loose looves leaflefts jaggled casuallty on the lamatory, as is my this is, as I must commit my lips to make misface for misfortune, often, so far as I can chance to recollect from the some farnights ago, (so dimsweet is that selvischdischdienence of to not to be able to be obliged to have to hold further anything than a stone his throw’s fruit’s fall!) when I, if you wil excuse for me this informal leading down of illexpressibles, enlivened toward the Author of Nature by the natural sins liggen gobelimned theirs before me, (how differended with the manmade Eonochs Cunstuntonopolies!), weathered they be of a general golf stature, assasserted, or blossomly emblushing thems elves underneed of some howthern folleys, am entrenched up contemplating of myself, wiz my naked I, for relieving purposes in our trurally virvir vergitabale (garden) I sometimes, maybe, what has justly said of old Flannagan, a wake from this or huntsfurwards, with some shock (shell I so render [p.358] it?) have (when I ope my shylight window and I see coocoo) a notion quiet involuptary of that I am cadging hapsnots as at murmurrandoms of distend renations from ficsimilar phases or dugouts in the behindscenes of our earthwork (what rovining shudder! what deadly loom!) as this is, at no spatial time processly which regards to concrude chronology about which in fact, at spite of I having belittled myself to my gay giftname of insectarian, happy burgages abeyance would make homesweetstown hopeygoalucrey, my mottu propprior, as I claim, cad’s truck, I coined, I am highly pelaged and deeply gluttened to mind hindmost hearts to see by their loudest reports from my threespawn bottery parts (shsh!) that, colombophile and corvinophobe alike, when I have remassed me, my travellingself, as from Magellanic clouds, after my contractual expenditures, through the perofficies of merelimb, I, my good grief, I am, I am big altoogooder.

He beached the bark of his tale; and set to husband and vine: and the harpermaster told all the living conservancy, know Meschiameschianah, how that win a gain was in again. Flying the Perseoroyal. Withal aboarder, padar and madar, hal and sal, the sens of Ere with the duchtars of Iran. Amick amack amock in a mucktub. Qith the tou loulous and the gryffygryffygryffs, at Fenegans Wick, the Wildemanns. Washed up whight and deliveried rhight. Loud lauds to his luckhump and bejetties on jonahs! And they winxed and wanxed like baillybeacons. Till we woksed up oldermen.

From whose plultibust preaggravated, by baskatchairch theologies (there werenighn on thaurity herouns in that alraschil arthouducks draken), they were whoalike placed to say, in the matters off ducomans nonbar one, with bears’ respects to him and bulls’ acknowledgments (come on now, girls! lead off, O cara, whichever won of you wins! The two Gemuas and Jane Agrah and Judy Tombuys!) disassembling and taking him apart, the slammocks, with discrimination for his maypole and a rub in passing over his hump, drogueries inaddendance, frons, fesces and frithstool: 1) he hade to die it, the beetle, 2) he didhithim self, [p.359] hod’s fush, 3) all ever the pelican huntered with truly fond bullpen backthought since his toork human life where his personal low outhired his taratoryism, the orenore under the selfhide of his bessermettle, was forsake in his chiltern and lumbojumbo, 4) he was like Fintan fore flood and after sometimes too damned merely often on the saved side, saw he was, 5) regarding to prussyattes or quazzyverzing he wassand no better than he would have been before he could have been better than what he warrant after, 6) blood, musk or haschish, as coked, diamoned or penceloid, and bleaching him naclenude from all cohlorine matter, down to a boneash bittstoff, he’s, tink fors tank, the same old dustamount on the same old tincoverdull baubleclass, totstittywinktosser and bogusbagwindburster, whether fitting tyres onto Danelope boys or fluttering flaus for laurettas, whatever the bucket brigade and the plug party says, touchant Arser of the Rum Tipple and his camelottery and lyonesslooting but with a layaman’s brutstrenth, by Jacohob and Esahur and the all saults or all sallies, what we warn to hear, jeff, is the woods of chirpsies cries to singaloo sweecheeriode and sock him up, the oldcant rogue.

Group A.

You have jest (a ham) beamed listening through (a ham pig) his haulted excerpt from John Whiston’s fiveaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides, from the Tales of Yore of the times gone by before there was a hofdking or a hoovthing or a pinginapoke in Oreland, all sould. Goes Tory by Eeric Whigs is To Become Tintinued in Fearson’s Nightly in the Lets All Wake Brickfaced In Lucan. Lhirondella, jaunty lhirondella! With tirra lirra rondinelles, atantivy we go!

Attention! Stand at!! Ease!!!

We are now diffusing among our lovers of this sequence (to you! to you!) the dewfolded song of the naughtingels (Alys! Alysaloe!) from their sheltered positions, in rosescenery haydyng, on the heather side of waldalure, Mount Saint John’s, Jinnyland, whither our allies winged by duskfoil from Mooreparque, swift sanctuary seeking, after Sunsink gang (Oiboe! [p.360] Hitherzither! Almost dotty! I must dash!) to pour their peace in partial (floflo floreflorence), sweetishsad lightandgayle, twittwin twosingwoolow. Let everie sound of a pitch keep still in resonance, jemcrow, jackdaw, prime and secund with their terce that whoe betwides them, now full theorbe, now dulcifair, and when we press of pedal (sof!) pick out and vowelise your name. A mum. You pere Golazy, you mere Bare and you Bill Heeny, and you Smirky Dainty and, more beethoken, you wheckfoolthenairyans with all your badchthumpered peanas! We are gluckglucky in our being so far fortunate that, bark and bay duol with Man Goodfox inchimings having ceased to the moment, so allow the clinkars of our nocturnefield, night’s sweetmoztheart, their Carmen Sylvae, my quest, my queen. Lou must wail to cool me airly! Coil me curly, warbler dear! May song it flourish (in the underwood), in chorush, long make it flourish (in the Nut, in the Nutsky) till thorush! Secret Hookup.

— Roguenaar Loudbrags, that soddy old samph! How high is vuile, var?

To which yes he did, capt, that was the answer.

— And his shartshort trooping its colours! We knows his ventruquulence.

Which that that rang ripprippripplying.

— Bulbul, bulbulone! I will shally. Thou shalt willy. You wouldnt should as youd remesmer. I hypnot. ’Tis golden sickle’s hour. Holy moon priestess, we’d love our grappes of mistellose! Moths the matter? Pschtt! Tabarins comes. To fell our fairest. O gui, O gui! Salam, salms, salaum! Carolus! O indeed and we ware! And hoody crow was ere. I soared from the peach and Missmolly showed her pear too, onto three and away. Whet the bee as to deflowret greendy grassies yellowhorse. Kematitis, cele our erdours! Did you aye, did you eye, did you everysee suchaway, suchawhy, eeriewhigg airywhugger? Even to the extremity of the world? Dingoldell! The enormanous his, our littlest little! Wee wee, that long alancey one! Let sit on this anthill for our frilldress talk after this day of making blithe inveiled the heart before our groatsupper serves to us Panchomaster and let har- [p.361] leqwind play peeptomine up all our colombinations! Wins won is nought, twigs too is nil, tricks trees makes nix, fairs fears stoops at nothing. And till Arthur comes againus and sen peatrick’s he’s reformed we’ll pose him together a piece, a pace. Shares in guineases! There’s lovely the sight! Surey me, man weepful! Big Seat, you did hear? And teach him twisters in tongue irish. Pat lad may goh too. Quicken, aspen; ash and yew; willow, broom with oak for you. And move your tellabout. Not nice is that, limpet lady! Spose we try it promissly. Love all. Naytellmeknot tennis! Taunt me treattening! But do now say to Mr Eustache! Ingean mingen has to hear. Whose joint is out of jealousy now? Why, heavilybody’s evillyboldy’s. Hopping Gracius, onthy ovful! O belessk mie, what a nerve! How a mans in his armor we nurses know. Wingwong welly, pitty pretty Nelly! Some Poddy pitted in, will anny petty pullet out? Call Kitty Kelly! Kissykitty Killykelly! What a nossowl buzzard! But what a neats ung gels!

Here all the leaves alift aloft, full o’liefing, fell alaughing over Ombrellone and his parasollieras with their black thronguards from the County Shillelagh. Ignorant invincibles, innocents immutant! Onzel grootvatter Lodewijk is onangonamed before the bridge of primerose and his twy Isas Boldmans is met the blueybells near Dandeliond. We think its a gorsedd shame, these godoms. A lark of limonladies! A lurk of orangetawneymen! You’re backleg wounted, budkley mister, bester of the boyne!

And they leaved the most leavely of leaftimes and the most folliagenous till there came the marrer of mirth and the jangtherapper of all jocolarinas and they were as were they never ere. Yet had they laughtered, one on other, undo the end and enjoyed their laughings merry was the times when so grant it High Hilarion us may too!

Cease, prayce, storywalkering around with gestare romanoverum he swinking about is they think and plan unrawil what.

Back to Droughty! The water of the face has flowed.

The all of them, the sowriegueuxers, blottyeyed boys, in that [p.362] pig’s village smoke, a sixdigitarian legion on druid circle, the Clandibblon clam cartel, then pulled out and came off and rally agreed them, roasted malts with toasted burleys, in condomnation of his totomptation and for the duration till his repepulation, upon old nollcromforemost ironsides, as camnabel chieftain, since, as Sammon trowed to explain to summon, seeing that, as he had contracted out of islands empire, he might as coolly have rolled to school call, tarponturboy, a grampurpoise, the manyfathom brinegroom with the fortyinch bride, out of the cuptin klanclord kettle auction like the soldr of a britsh he was bound to be and become till the sea got him whilask, from maker to misses and what he gave was as a pattern, he, that hun of a horde, is a finn as she, his tent wife, is a lap, at home on a steed, abroad by the fire (to say nothing of him having done whatyouknow howyousaw whenyouheard whereyouwot, the kenspeckled souckar, generose as cocke, greediguss with garzelle, uprighter of age and most umbrasive of yews all, under heaviest corpsus exemption) and whoasever spit her in howsoever’s fondling saving her keepers that mould the bould she sould to hould the wine that wakes the barley, the peg in his pantry to hold the heavyache off his heart. The droll delight of deemsterhood, a win from the wood to bond. Like the bright lamps, Thamamahalla, yearin out yearin. Auspicably suspectable but in expectancy of respectableness. From dirty flock bedding, drip dropping through the ceiling, with two sisters of charities on the front steps and three evacuan cleansers at the back gaze, single box and pair of chairs (suspectable), occasionally and alternatively used by husband when having writing to do in connection with equitable druids and friendly or other societies through periods of dire want with comparative plenty (thunderburst, ravishment, dissolution and providentiality) to a sofa allbeit of hoarsehaar with Amodicum cloth, hired payono, still playing off, used by the youngsters for czurnying out oldstrums, three bedrooms upastairs, of which one with fireplace (aspectable), with greenhouse in prospect (particularly perspectable).

And you, when you kept at Dulby, were you always (for that [p.363] time only) what we knew how when we (from that point solely) were you know where? There you are! And why? Why, hitch a cock eye, he was snapped on the sly upsadaisying coras pearls out of the pie when all the perts in princer street set up their tinker’s humn, (the rann, the rann, that keen of old bards), with them newnesboys pearcin screaming off their armsworths. The boss made dovesandraves out of his bucknesst while herself wears the bowler’s hat in her bath. Deductive Almayne Rogers disguides his voice, shetters behind hoax chestnote from exexive. Heat wives rasing. They jest keeps rosing. He jumps leaps rizing. Howlong!

You known that tom? I certainly know. Is their bann bothstiesed? Saddenly now. Has they bane reneemed? Soothinly low. Does they ought to buy the papelboy when he footles up their suit? He’s their mark to foil the flouter and they certainty owe.

He sprit in his phiz (baccon!). He salt to their bis (pudden!). He toockled her palam (so calam is solom!). And he suked their friends’ leave (bonnick lass, fair weal!)

— Guilty but fellows culpows! It was felt by me sindeade, that submerged doughdoughty doubleface told waterside labourers. But since we for athome’s health have chanced all that, the wild whips, the wind ships, the wonderlost for world hips, unto their foursquare trust prayed in aid its plumptylump piteousness which, when it turtled around seeking a thud of surf, spake to approach from inherdoff trisspass through minxmingled hair. Though I may have hawked it, said, and selled my how hot peas after theactrisscalls from my imprecurious position and though achance I could have emptied a pan of backslop down drain by whiles of dodging a rere from the middenprivet appurtenant thereof, salving the presents of the board of wumps and pumps, I am ever incalpable, where release of prisonals properly is concerned, of unlifting upfallen girls wherein dangered from them in thereopen out of unadulteratous bowery, with those hintering influences from an angelsexonism. It was merely my barely till their oh offs. Missaunderstaid. Meggy Guggy’s giggag. The [p.364] code’s proof! The rebald danger with they who would bare whiteness against me I dismissem from the mind of good. He can tell such as story to the Twelfth Maligns that my first was a nurssmaid and her fellower’s a willbe perambulatrix. There are twingty to twangty too thews and leathermail coatschemes penparing to hostpost for it valinnteerily with my valued fofavour to the post puzzles deparkment with larch parchels’ of presents for future branch offercings. The green approve the raid! Shaum Baum’s bode he is amustering in the groves while his shool comes merging along! Want I put myself in their kirtlies I were ayearn to leap with them and show me too bisextine. Dear and lest I forget mergers and bow to you low, marchers! Attemption! What a mazing month of budsome misses they are making, so wingtywish to flit beflore their kin! Attonsure! Ears to hears! The skall of a gall (for every dime he yawpens that momouth you could park your ford in it) who has papertreated him into captivities with his inside man by a hocksheat of starvision for an avragetopeace of parchment, cooking up his lenses to be my apoclogypst, the recreuter of conscraptions, let him be asservent to Kinahaun! For (peace peace perfectpeace!) I have abwaited me in a water of Elin and I have placed my reeds intectis before the Registower of the perception of tribute in the hall of the city of Analbe. How concerns any merryaunt and hworsoever gravesobbers it is perensempry sex of fun to help a dazzle off the othour. What for Mucias and Gracias may the duvlin rape the handsomst! And the whole mad knightmayers’ nest! Tunpother, prison and plotch! If Y shoulden somewhat, well, I am able to owe it, hearth and chemney easy. They seeker for vannflaum all worldins merkins. I’ll eager make lyst turpidump undher arkens. Basast! And if my litigimate was well to wrenn tigtag cackling about it, like the sally berd she is, to abery ham in the Cutey Strict, (I shall call upon my first among my lost of lyrars beyond a jingoobangoist, to overcast her) dismissing mundamanu all the riflings of her victuum gleaner (my old chuck! she drakes me druck! turning out, gay at ninety!) and well shoving off a boastonmess like lots wives does over her handpicked hunsbend, as she would be calling, well, [p.365] for further oil mircles upon all herwayferer gods and reanouncing my deviltries as was I a locally person of caves until I got my purchase on her firmforhold I am, I like to think, by their sacreligion of daimond cap daimond, confessedly in my baron gentilhomme to the manhor bourne till ladiest day as panthoposopher, to have splet for groont a peer of bellows like Bacchulus shakes a rousing guttural at any old cerpaintime by peaching (allsole we are not amusical) the warry warst against myself in the defile as a lieberretter sebaiscopal of these mispeschyites of the first virginial water who, without an auction of biasement from my part, with gladyst tone ahquickyessed in it, overhowe and underwhere, the totty lolly poppy flossy conny dollymaukins! Though I heave a coald on my bauck and am could up to my eres hoven sametimes I used alltides to be aswarmer for the meekst and the graced. You are not going to not. You might be threeabreasted wholenosing at a whallhoarding from our Don Amir anent villayets prostatution precisingly kuschkars tarafs and it could be double densed uncounthest hour of allbleakest age with a bad of wind and a barran of rain, nompos mentis like Novus Elector, what with his Marx and their Groups, yet did a doubt, should a dare, were to you, you would do and dhamnk me, shenker, dhumnk you. Skunk. And fare with me to share with me. Hinther and thonther, hant by hont. By where dauvening shedders down whose rovely lanes. As yose were and as yese is. Sure and you would, Mr Mac Gurk! Be sure and you would, Mr O’Duane! To be sure and you would so, Mr MacElligut! Wod you nods? Mom mom. No mum has the rod to pud a stub to the lurch of amotion. My little love apprencisses, my dears, the estelles, van Nessies von Nixies voon der pool, which I had a reyal devouts for yet was it marly lowease or just a feel with these which olderman K.K. Alwayswelly he is showing ot the fullnights for my palmspread was gav to a parsleysprig, the curliest weedeen old ocean coils around, so spruce a spice for salthorse, sonnies, and as tear to the thrusty as Taylor’s Spring, when aftabournes, when she was look like a little cheayat chilled (Oh sard! ah Mah!) by my tide impracing, as Beacher seath, and all the colories fair fled from my folced cheeks! [p.366] Popottes, where you canceal me you mayst forced guage my bribes. Wickedgapers, I appeal against the light! A nexistence of vividence! Panto, boys, is on a looser inloss; ballet, girls, suppline thrown tights. I have wanted to thank you such a long time so much now. Thank you. Sir, kindest of bottleholders and very dear friend, among our hearts of steel, froutiknow, it will befor you, me dare beautiful young soldier, winninger nor anyour of rudimental moskats, before you go to mats, you who have watched your share with your sockboule sodalists on your buntad nogs at our love tennis squats regatts, suckpump, when on with the balls did disserve the fain, my goldrush gainst her silvernetss, to say, biguidd, for the love of goddess and perthanow as you reveres your one mothers, mitsch for matsch, and while I reveal thus my deepseep daughter which was bourne up pridely out of medsdreams unclouthed when I was pillowing in my brime (of Saturnay Eve, how now, woren’t we’t?), to see, I say, whoahoa, in stay of execution in re Milcho Melekmans, increaminated, what you feel, oddrabbit, upon every strong ground you have ever taken up, by bitterstiff work or battonstaff play, with assault of turk against a barrakraval of grakeshoots, e’en tho’ Jambuwel’s defecalties is Terry Shimmyrag’s upperturnity, if that is grace for the grass what is balm for the bramblers, as it is as it is, that I am the catasthmatic old ruffin sippahsedly improctor to be seducint trovatellas, the dire daffy damedeaconesses, like (why sighs the sootheesinger) the lilliths oft I feldt, and, when booboob brutals and cautiouses only aims at the oggog hogs in the humand, then, (Houtes, Blymey and Torrenation, upkurts and scotchem!) I’ll tall tale tell croon paysecurers, sowill nuggets and nippers, that thash on me stumpen blows the gaff off mombition and thit thides or marse makes a good dayle to be shattat. Fall stuff.

His rote in ere, afstef, was.

And dong wonged Magongty till the bombtomb of the warr, thrusshed in his whole soort of cloose.

Whisht who wooed in Weald, bays of Bawshaw binding. The desire of Miriam is the despair of Marian as Joh Joseph’s beauty is Jacq Jacob’s grief. Brow, tell nun; eye, feign sad; mouth, sing [p.367] mim. Look at Lokman! Whatbetween the cupgirls and the platterboys. And he grew back into his grossery baseness: and for all his grand remonstrance: and there you are.

Here endeth chinchinatibus with have speak finish. With a haygue for a halt on a pouncefoot panse. Pink, pleas pink, two pleas pink, how to pleas pink.

Punk.

Mask one. Mask two. Mask three. Mask four.

Up.

— Look about you, Tutty Comyn!

— Remember and recall, Kullykeg!

— When visiting Dan Leary try the corner house for thee.

— I’ll gie ye credit for simmence more if ye’ll be lymphing. Our four avunculusts.

And, since threestory sorratelling was much too many, they maddened and they morgued and they lungd and they jowld. Synopticked on the word.

Till the Juke done it.

Down.

Like Jukoleon, the seagoer, when he bore down in his perry boat he had raised a slide and shipped his orders and seized his pullets and primed their plumages, the fionnling and dubhlet, the dun and the fire, and, sending them one by other to fare fore forn, he had behold the residuance of a delugion: the foggy doze still going strong, the old thalassocrats of invinsible empores, maskers of the waterworld, facing one way to another way and this way on that way, from severalled their fourdimmansions. Where the lighning leaps from the numbulous; where coold by cawld breide lieth langwid; the bounds whereinbourne our solied bodies all attomed attaim arrest: appoint, that’s all. But see what follows. Wringlings upon wronglings among incomputables about an uncomeoutable (an angel prophetethis? kingcorrier of beheasts? the calif in his halifskin? that eyriewinging one?) and the voids bubbily vode’s dodos across the which the boomomouths from their dupest dupes were in envery and anononously blowing great.

[p.368] Guns.

Keep backwards, please, because there was no good to gundy running up again. Guns. And it was written up in big capital. Guns. Saying never underrupt greatgrandgosterfosters! Guns. And whatever one did they said, the fourlings, that on no acounts you were not to. Guns.

Not to pad them behaunt in the fear. Not to go, tonnerwatter, and bungley well chute the rising gianerant. Not to wandly be woking around jerumsalemdo at small hours about the murketplots, smelling okey boney, this little figgy and arraky belloky this little pink into porker but, porkodirto, to let the gentlemen pedestarolies out of the Monabella culculpuration live his own left leave, cullebuone, by perperusual of the petpubblicities without inwoking his also’s between (sic) the arraky bone and (suc) the okey bellock. And not to not be always, hemmer and hummer, treeing unselves up with one exite but not to never be caving nicely, precisely, quicely, rebustly, tendrolly, unremarkably, forsakenly, haltedly, reputedly, firstly, somewhatly, yesayenolly about the back excits. Never to weaken up in place of the broths. Never to vvollusslleepp in the pleece of the poots. And, allerthings, never to ate the sour deans if they weren’t having anysin on their consients. And, when in Zumschloss, to never, narks, cease till the finely ending was consummated by the completion of accomplishment.

And thus within the tavern’s secret booth The wisehight ones who sip the tested sooth Bestir them as the Just has bid to jab The punch of quaram on the mug of truth.

K.C. jowls, they’re sodden in the secret. K.C. jowls, they sure are wise. K.C. jowls, the justicestjobbers, for they’ll find another faller if their ruse won’t rise. Whooley the Whooper.

There is to see. Squarish large face with the atlas jacket. Brights, brownie eyes in bluesackin shoeings. Peaky booky nose over a lousiany shirt. Ruddy stackle hair besides a strawcamel belt. Namely. Gregorovitch, Leonocopolos, Tarpinacci and Duggelduggel. And was theys stare all atime? Yea but they was. Andoring the games, induring the studies, undaring the stories, end all. Ned? Only snugged then and cosied after one percepted nought [p.369] while tuffbettle outraged the waywords and meansigns of their hinterhand suppliesdemands. And be they gone to splane splication? That host that hast one on the hoose when backturns when he facefronts none none in the house his geust has guest. You bet they is. And nose well down.

With however what sublation of compensation in the radification of interpretation by the byeboys? Being they. Mr G. B. W. Ashburner, S. Bruno’s Toboggan Drive, Mr Faixgood, Bellchimbers, Carolan Crescent, Mr I. I. Chattaway, Hilly Gape, Poplar Park, Mr Q. P. Dieudonney, The View, Gazey Peer, Mr T. T. Erchdeakin, Multiple Lodge, Jiff Exby Rode, Mr W. K. Ferris-Fender, Fert Fort, Woovil Doon Botham ontowhom adding the tout that pumped the stout that linked the lank that cold the sandy that nextdoored the rotter that rooked the rhymer that lapped at the hoose that Joax pilled.

They had heard or had heard said or had heard said written.

Fidelisat.

That there first a rudrik kingcomed to an inn court; and the seight of that yard was a perchypole with a loovahgloovah on it; last mannarks maketh man when wandshift winneth womans: so how would it hum, whoson of a which, if someof aswas to start to stunt the story on?

So many needles to ponk out to as many noodles as are company, they noddling all about it tutti to tempo, decumans numbered too, (a) well, that the secretary bird, better known as Pandoria Paullabucca, whom they thought was more like a solicitor general, indiscriminatingly made belief mid authorsagastions from Schelm the Pelman to write somewords to Senders about her chilikin puck, laughing that Poulebec would be the death of her, (b) that, well, that Madges Tighe, the postulate auditressee, when her daremood’s a grownian, is always on the who goes where, hoping to Michal for the latter to turn up with a cupital tea before her ephumeral comes off without any much father which is parting parcel of the same goumeral’s postoppage, it being lookwhyse on the whence blows weather helping mickle so that the loiter end of that leader may twaddle out after a cubital lull with a hopes soon [p.370] to ear, comprong? (c) becakes the goatsman on question, or whatever the hen the bumbler was, feeling not up to scratch bekicks of whatever the kiddings Payne Inge and Popper meant for him, thoughy onced at a throughlove, true grievingfrue danger, as a nirshe persent to his minstress, devourced the pair of them Mather Caray’s chucklings, pante blanche, and skittered his litters like the cavaliery man in Cobra Park for ungeborn yenkelmen, Jeremy Trouvas or Kepin O’Keepers, any old howe and any old then and when around Dix Dearthy Dungbin, remarking scenically with laddylike lassitude upon what he finally postscrapped, (d) after it’s so long till I thanked you about I do so much now thank you so very much as you introduced me to fourks, (e) will, these remind to be sane? (f) Fool step! Aletheometry? Or just zoot doon floon?

Nut it out, peeby eye! Onamassofmancynaves.

But. Top.

You were in the same boat of yourselves too, Getobodoff or Treamplasurin; and you receptionated the most diliskious of milisk; which it all flowowered your drooplin dunlearies: but dribble a drob went down your rothole. Meaning, Kelly, Grimes, Phelan, Mollanny, O’Brien, MacAlister, Sealy, Coyle, Hynes-Joynes, Naylar-Traynor, Courcy de Courcy and Gilligan-Goll.

Stunner of oddstodds on bluebleeding boarhorse! What soresen’s head subrises thus tous out of rumpumplikun oak with, well, we cannot say whom we are looking like through his nowface? It is of Noggens whilk dusts the bothsides of the seats of the bigslaps of the bogchaps of the porlarbaar of the marringaar of the Lochlunn gonlannludder of the feof of the foef of forfummed Ship-le-Zoyd.

Boumce! It is polisignstunter. The Sockerson boy. To pump the fire of the lewd into those soulths of bauchees, havsousedovers, tillfellthey deadwar knootvindict. An whele time he was rancing there smutsy floskons nodunder ycholerd for their poopishers, ahull onem Fyre maynoother endnow! Shatten up ship! Bouououmce! Nomo clandoilskins cheakinlevers! All ashored for Capolic Gizzards! Stowlaway there, glutany of [p.371] stainks! Porterfillyers and spirituous suncksters, oooom oooom!

As these vitupetards in his boasum he did strongleholder, bushbrows, nobblynape, swinglyswanglers, sunkentrunk, that from tin of this clucken hadded runced slapottleslup. For him had hord from fard a piping. As? Of?

Dour douchy was a sieguldson. He cooed that loud nor he was young. He cud bad caw nor he was gray Like wather parted from the say.

Ostia, lift it! Lift at it, Ostia! From the say! Away from the say!

Himhim. Himhim.

Hearhasting he, himmed, reromembered all the chubbs, chipps, chaffs, chuckinpucks and chayney chimebells That he had mistributed in port, pub, park, pantry and poultryhouse, While they, thered, the others, that are, were most emulously concerned to cupturing the last dropes of summour down through their grooves of blarneying. Ere the sockson locked at the dure. Which he would, shuttinshure. And lave them to sture.

For be all rules of sport ‚tis right That youth bedower’d to charm the night Whilst age is dumped to mind the day When wather parted from the say.

The humming, it’s coming. Insway onsway.

Fingool MacKishgmard Obesume Burgearse Benefice, He was bowen hem and scrapin him in recolcitrantament to the rightabout And these probenopubblicoes clamatising for an extinsion on his hostillery With his chargehand bombing their eres. Tids, genmen, plays, she been goin shoother off almaynoother onawares.

You here nort farwellens rouster? Ashiffle ashuffle the wayve they.

From Dancingtree till Suttonstone There’s lads no lie would filch a crown To mull their sack and brew their tay With wather parted from the say.

Lelong Awaindhoo’s a selverbourne enrouted to Rochelle Lane and liberties those Mullinguard minstrelsers are marshalsing, par tunepiped road, under where, perked on hollowy hill, that poor man of Lyones, good Dook Weltington, hugon come er- [p.372] rindwards, had hircomed to the belles bows and been cutattrapped by the mausers. Now is it town again, londmear of Dublin! And off coursse the toller, ples the dotter of his eyes with her: Moke the Wanst, whye doe we aime alike a pose of poeter peaced? While the dumb he shoots the shopper rope. And they all pour forth. Sans butly Tuppeter Sowyer, the rouged engenerand, a barttler of the beauyne, still our benjamin liefest, sometime frankling to thise citye, whereas bigrented him a piers half subporters for his arms, Josiah Pipkin, Amos Love, Raoul Le Febber, Blaize Taboutot, Jeremy Yopp, Francist de Loomis, Hardy Smith and Sequin Pettit followed by the snug saloon seanad of our Café Béranger. The scenictutors.

Because they wonted to get out by the goatweigh afore the sheep was looset for to wish the Wobbleton Whiteleg Welshers kaillykailly kellykekkle and savebeck to Brownhazelwood from all the dinnasdoolins on the labious banks of their swensewn snewwesner, turned again weastinghome, by Danesbury Common, and they onely, duoly, thruely, fairly after rainydraining fountybuckets (chalkem up, hemptyempty!) till they caught the wind abroad (alley loafers passinggeering!) all the rockers on the roads and all the boots in the stretes.

Oh dere! Ah hoy!

Last ye, lundsmin, hasty hosty! For an anondation of mirification and the lutification of our paludination.

His bludgeon’s bruk, his drum is tore. For spuds we’ll keep the hat he wore And roll in clover on his clay By wather parted from the say.

Hray! Free rogue Mountone till Dew Mild Well to corry awen and glowry! Are now met by Brownaboy Fuinnninuinn’s former for a lyncheon partyng of his burgherbooh. The Shanavan Wacht. Rantinroarin Batteries Dorans. And that whistling thief, O’ Ryne O’Rann. With a catch of her cunning like and nowhere a keener.

The for eolders were aspolootly at their wetsend in the mailing waters, trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek! Because number one lived at Bothersby North and he was trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! [p.373] Seek! And number two digged up Poors Coort, Soother, trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek! And nomber three he sleeped with Lilly Tekkles at The Eats and he was trying to. Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek! And the last with the sailalloyd donggie he was berthed on the Moherboher to the Washte and they were all trying to and baffling with the walters of, hoompsydoompsy walters of. High! Sink! High! Sink! Highohigh! Sinkasink!

Waves.

The gangstairs strain and anger’s up As Hoisty rares the can and cup To speed the bogre’s barque away O’er wather parted from the say.

Horkus chiefest ebblynuncies!

— He shook be ashaped of hempshelves, hiding that shepe in his goat. And for rassembling so bearfellsed the magreedy prince of Roger. Thuthud. Heigh hohse, heigh hohse, our kindom from an orse! Bruni Lanno’s woollies on Brani Lonni’s hairyparts. And the hunk in his trunk it would be an insalt foul the matter of that cellaring to a pigstrough. Stop his laysense. Ink him! You would think him Alddaublin staking his lordsure like a gourd on puncheon. Deblinity devined. Wholehunting the pairk on a methylogical mission whenever theres imberillas! And calling Rina Roner Reinette Ronayne. To what mine answer is a lemans. Arderleys, beedles and postbillers heard him. Three points to one. Ericus Vericus corrupted into ware eggs. Dummy up, distillery! Broree aboo! Run him a johnsgate down jameseslane. Begetting a wife which begame his niece by pouring her youngthings into skintighs. That was when he had dizzy spells. Till Gladstools Pillools made him ride as the mall. Thanks to his huedobrass beerd. Lodenbroke the Longman, now he canseels under veerious persons but is always that Rorke relly! On consideration for the musickers he ought to have down it. Pass out your cheeks, why daunt you! Penalty, please! There you’ll know how warder barded the bollhead that parssed our alley. We just are upsidedown singing what ever the dimkims mummur allalilty she pulls inner out heads. This is not the end of this by no manners means. When you’ve bled till you’re bone it crops out [p.374] in your flesh. To tell how your mead of, mard, is made of. All old Dadgerson’s dodges one conning one’s copying and that’s what wonderland’s wanderlad’ll flaunt to the fair. A trancedone boyscript with tittivits by. Ahem. You’ll read it tomorrow, marn, when the curds on the table. A nigg for a nogg and a thrate for a throte. The auditor learns. Still pumping on Torkenwhite Radlumps, Lencs. In preplays to Anonymay’s left hinted palinode obviously inspiterebbed by a sibspecious connexion. Note the notes of admiration! See the signs of suspicion! Count the hemisemidemicolons! Screamer caps and invented gommas, quoites puntlost, forced to farce! The pipette will say anything at all for a change. And you know what aglove means in the Murdrus dueluct! Fewer to feud and rompant culotticism, a fugle for the gleemen and save, sit and sew. And a pants outsizinned on the Doughertys’ duckboard pointing to peace at home. In some, lawanorder on lovinardor. Wait till we hear the Boy of Biskop reeling around your postoral lector! Epistlemadethemology for deep dorfy doubtlings. As we’ll lay till break of day in the bunk of basky, O! Our island, Rome and duty! Well tried, buckstiff! Batt in, boot! Sell him a breach contact, the vendoror, the buylawyer! One hyde, sack, hic! Two stick holst, Lucky! Finnish Make Goal! First you were Nomad, next you were Namar, now you’re Numah and it’s soon you’ll be Nomon. Hence counsels Ecclesiast. There’s every resumption. The forgein offils is on the shove to lay you out dossier. Darby’s in the yard, planning it on you, plot and edgings, the whispering peeler after cooks wearing an illformation. The find of his kind! An artist, sir! And dirt cheap at a sovereign a skull! He knows his Finsbury Follies backwoods so you batter see to your regent refutation. Ascare winde is rifing again about nice boys going native. You know who was wrote about in the Orange Book of Estchapel? Basil and the two other men from King’s Avenance. Just press this cold brand against your brow for a mow. Cainfully! The sinus the curse. That’s it. Hung Chung Egglyfella now speak he tell numptywumpty topsawys belongahim pidgin. Secret things other persons place there covered not. How you fell from story to story like a sagasand [p.375] to lie. Enfilmung infirmity. On the because alleging to having a finger a fudding in pudding and pie. And here’s the witnesses. Glue on to him, Greevy! Bottom anker, Noordeece! And kick kick killykick for the house that juke built! Wait till they send you to sleep, scowpow! By jurors’ cruces! Then old Hunphydunphyville’ll be blasted to bumboards by the youthful herald who would once you were. He’d be our chosen one in the matter of Brittas more than anarthur. But we’ll wake and see. The wholes poors riches of ours hundreds of manhoods and womhoods. Two cents, two mills and two myrds. And it’s all us rangers you’ll be facing in the box before the twelfth correctional. Like one man, gell. Between all the Misses Mountsackvilles in their halfmoon haemicycles, gasping to giddies to dye for the shame. Just hold hard till the one we leapt out gets her yearing! Hired in cameras, extra! With His Honour Surpacker on the binge. So yelp your guilt and kitz the buck. You’ll have loss of fame from Wimmegame’s fake. Forwards! One bully son growing the goff and his twinger read out by the Nazi Priers. You fought as how they’d never woxen up, did you, crucket? It will wecker your earse, that it will! When hives the court to exchequer ‚tis the child which gives the sire away. Good for you, Richmond Rover! Scrum around, our side! Let him have another between the spindlers! A grand game! Dalymount’s decisive. Don Gouverneur Buckley’s in the Tara Tribune, sporting the insides of a Rhutian Jhanaral and little Mrs Ex-Skaerer-Sissers is bribing the halfpricers to pray for her widower in his gravest embazzlement. You on her, hosy jigses, that’ll be some nonstop marrimont! You in your stolen mace and anvil, Magnes, and her burrowed in Berkness cirrchus clouthses. Fummuccumul with a graneen aveiled. Playing down the slavey touch. Much as she was when the fancy cutter out collecting milestones espied her aseesaw on a fern. So nimb, he said, a dat of dew. Between Furr-y-Benn and Ferr-y-Bree. In this tear Vikloe vich he lofed. The smiling ever. If you pulls me over pay me, prhyse! A talor would adapt his caulking trudgers on to any shape at see. Address deceitfold of wovens weard. The wonder of the women of the world together, moya! And the lovablest [p.376] Lima since Ineen MacCormick MacCoort MacConn O’Puckins MacKundred. Only but she is a little width wider got. Be moving abog. You cannot make a limousine lady out of a hillman minx. Listun till you’ll hear the Mudquirt accent. This is a bulgen horesies, this is wollan indulgencies, this is a flemsh. Tik. Scapulars, beads and a stump of a candle, Hubert was a Hunter, chemins de la croixes and Rosairette’s egg, all the trimmings off the tree that she picked up after the Clontarf voterloost when O’Bryan MacBruiser bet Norris Nobnut. Becracking his cucconut between his kknneess. Umpthump, Here Inkeeper, it’s the doatereen’s wednessmorn! Delphin dringing! Grusham undergang! And the Real Hymernians strenging strong at knocker knocker! Holy and massalltolled. You ought to tak a dos of frut. Jik. Sauss. You’re getting hoovier, a twelve stone hoovier, fullends a twelve stone hoovier, in your corpus entis and it scurves you right, demnye! Aunt as unclish ams they make oom. But Nichtia you bound not to loose’s gone on Neffin since she clapped her charmer on him at Gormagareen. At the Gunting Munting Hunting Punting. The eitch is in her blood, arrah! For a frecklesome freshcheeky sweetworded lupsqueezer. And he shows how he’ll pick him the lock of her fancy. Poghue! Poghue! Poghue! And a good jump, Powell! Clean over all their heads. We could kiss him for that one, couddled we, Huggins? Sparkes is the footer to hance off nancies. Scaldhead, pursue! Before you bunkledoodle down upon your birchentop again after them three blows from time, drink and hurry. The same three that nursed you, Skerry, Badbols and the Grey One. All of your own club too. With the fistful of burryberries were for the massus for to feed you living in dying. Buy bran biscuits and you’ll never say dog. And be in the finest of companies. Morialtay and Kniferope Walker and Rowley the Barrel. With Longbow of the lie. Slick of the trick and Blennercassel of the brogue. Clanruckard for ever! The Fenn, the Fenn, the kinn of all Fenns! Deaf to the winds when for Croonacreena. Fisht! And it’s not now saying how we are where who’s softing what rushes. Merryvirgin forbed! But of they never eat soullfriede they’re ating it now. With easter [p.377] greeding. Angus! Angus! Angus! The keykeeper of the keys of the seven doors of the dreamadoory in the house of the household of Hecech saysaith. Whitmore, whatmore? Give it over, give it up! Mawgraw! Head of a helo, chesth of champgnon, eye of a gull! What you’d if he’d. The groom is in the greenhouse, gattling out his. Gun! That lad’s the style for. Lannigan’s ball! Now a drive on the naval! The Shallburn Shock. Never mind your gibbous. Slip on your ropen collar and draw the noosebag on your head. Nobody will know or heed you, Postumus, if you skip round schlymartin by the back and come front sloomutren to beg in one of the shavers’ sailorsuits. Three climbs threequickenthrees in the garb of nine. We’ll split to see you mouldem imparvious. A wing for oldboy Welsey Wandrer! Well spat, witty wagtail! Now piawn to bishop’s forthe! Moove. There’s Mumblesome Wadding Murch cranking up to the hornemoonium. Drawg us out Ivy Eve in the Hall of Alum! The finnecies of poetry wed music. Feeling the jitters? You’ll be as tight as Trivett when the knot’s knutted on. Now’s your never! Peena and Queena are duetting a giggle-for-giggle and the brideen Alannah is lost in her diamindwaiting. What a magnificent gesture you will show us this gallus day. Clean and easy, be the hooker! And a free for croaks after. Dovlen are out for it. So is Rathfinn. And, hike, here’s the hearse and four horses with the interprovincial crucifixioners throwing lots inside to know whose to be their gosson and whereas to brake the news to morhor. How our myterbilder his fullen aslip. And who will wager but he’ll Shonny Bhoy be, the fleshlumpfleeter from Poshtapengha and all he bares sobsconcious inklings shadowed on soulskin. Its segnet yores, the strake of a hin. Nup. Laying the cloth, to fore of them. And thanking the fish, in core of them. To pass the grace for Gard sake! Ahmohn. Mr Justician Matthews and Mr Justician Marks and Mr Justician Luk de Luc and Mr Justinian JohnstonJohnson. And the aaskart, see, behind! Help, help, hurray! Allsup, allsop! Four ghools to nail! Cut it down, mates, look slippy! They’ve got a dathe with a swimminpull. Dang! Ding! Dong! Dung! Dinnin. Isn’t it great he is swaying above us for his good [p.378] and ours. Fly your balloons, dannies and dennises! He’s doorknobs dead! And Annie Delap is free! Ones more. We could ate you, par Buccas, and imbabe through you, reassuranced in the wild lac of gotliness. One fledge, one brood till hulm culms evurdyburdy. Huh the throman! Huh the traidor. Huh the truh. Arrorsure, he’s the mannork of Arrahland oversense he horrhorrd his name in thuthunder. Rrrwwwkkkrrr! And seen it rudden up in fusefiressence on the flashmurket. P.R.C.R.L.L. Royloy. Of the rollorrish rattillary. The lewdningbluebolteredallucktruckalltraumconductor! The unnamed nonirishblooder that becomes a Greenislender overnight! But we’re molting superstituettes out of his fulse thortin guts. Tried mark, Easterlings. Sign, Soideric O’Cunnuc, Rix. Adversed ord, Magtmorken, Kovenhow. There’s a great conversion, myn! Coucous! Find his causcaus! From Motometusolum through Bulley and Cowlie and Diggerydiggerydock down to bazeness’s usual? He’s alight there still, by Mike! Loose afore! Bung! Bring forth your deed! Bang! Till is the right time. Bang! Partick Thistle agen S. Megan’s versus Brystal Palace agus the Walsall! Putsch! Tiemore moretis tisturb badday! The playgue will be soon over, rats! Let sin! Geh tont! All we wants is to get peace for possession. We dinned unnerstunned why you sassad about thurteen to aloafen, sor, kindly repeat! Or ledn us alones of your lungorge, parsonifier propounde of our edelweissed idol worts! Shaw and Shea are lorning obsen so hurgle up, gandfarder, and gurgle me gurk. You can’t impose on frayshouters like os. Every tub here spucks his own fat. Hang coersion everyhow! And smotthermock Gramm’s laws! But we’re a drippindhrue gayleague all at ones. In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy. You talker dunsker’s brogue men we our souls speech obstruct hostery. Silence in thought! Spreach! Wear anartful of outer nocense! Pawpaw, wowow! Momerry twelfths, noebroed! That was a good one, ha! So it will be quite a material what May farther be unvuloped for you, old Mighty, when it’s aped to foul a delfian in the Mahnung. Ha ha! Talk of Paddy- [p.379] barke’s echo! Kick nuck, Knockcastle! Muck! And you’ll nose it, O you’ll nose it, without warnward from we. We don’t know the sendor to whome. But you’ll find Chiggenchugger’s taking the Treaclyshortcake with Bugle and the Bitch pairsadrawsing and Horssmayres Prosession tyghting up under the threes. Stop. Press stop. To press stop. All to press stop. And be the seem talkin wharabahts hosetanzies, dat sure is sullibrated word! Bing bong! Saxolooter, for congesters are salders’ prey. Snap it up in the loose, patchy the blank! Anyone can see you’re the son of a gunnell. Fellow him up too, Carlow! Woes to the wormquashed, aye, and wor to the winner! Think of Aerian’s Wall and the Fall of Toss. Give him another for to volleyholleydoodlem! His lights not all out yet, the liverpooser! Boohoohoo it oose! With seven hores always in the home of his thinkingthings, his nodsloddledome of his noiselisslesoughts. Two Idas, two Evas, two Nessies and Rubyjuby. Phook! No wonder, pipes as kirles, that he sthings like a rheinbok. One bed night he had the delysiums that they were all queens mobbing him. Fell stiff. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ah, he, he! Abedicate yourself. It just gegs our goad. He’ll be the deaf of us, pappappoppopcuddle, samblind daiyrudder. Yus, sord, fathe, you woll, putty our wraughther! What we waits be after? Whyfore we come agooding? None of you, cock icy! You keep that henayearn and her fortycantle glim lookbehinder. We might do with rubiny leeses. But of all your wanings send us out your peppydecked ales and you’ll not be such a bad lot. The rye is well for whose amind but the wheateny one is proper lovely. B E N K! We sincerestly trust that Missus with the kiddies of sweet Gorteen has not B I N K to their very least tittles deranged if in B U N K and we greesiously augur for your Meggers a B E N K B A N K B O N K to sloop in with all sorts of adceterus and adsaturas. It’s our last fight, Megantic, fear you will! The refergee’s took to hailing to time the pass. There goes the blackwatchwomen, all in white, flaxed up, purgad! Right toe, Armitage! Tem for Tam at Timmotty Hall! We’re been carried away. Beyond bournes and bowers. So we’ll leave it to Keyhoe, Danelly and Pykemhyme, the three muskrat- [p.380] eers, at the end of this age that had it from Variants’ Katey Sherratt that had it from Variants’ Katey Sherratt’s man for the bonnefacies of Blashwhite and Blushred of the Aquasancta Liffey Patrol to wind up and to tells of all befells after that to Mocked Majesty in the Malincurred Mansion.

So you were saying, boys? Anyhow he what?

So anyhow, melumps and mumpos of the hoose uncommons, after that to wind up that longtobechronickled gettogether thanksbetogiving day at Glenfinnisk-en-la-Valle, the anniversary of his finst homy commulion, after that same barbecue beanfeast was all over poor old hospitable corn and eggfactor, King Roderick O’Conor, the paramount chief polemarch and last preelectric king of Ireland, who was anything you say yourself between fiftyodd and fiftyeven years of age at the time after the socalled last supper he greatly gave in his umbrageous house of the hundred bottles with the radio beamer tower and its hangars, chimbneys and equilines or, at least, he was’nt actually the then last king of all Ireland for the time being for the jolly good reason that he was still such as he was the eminent king of all Ireland himself after the last preeminent king of all Ireland, the whilom joky old top that went before him in the Taharan dynasty, King Arth Mockmorrow Koughenough of the leathered leggions, now of parts unknown, (God guard his generous comicsongbook soul!) that put a poached fowl in the poor man’s pot before he took to his pallyass with the weeping eczema for better and worse until he went under the grass quilt on us, nevertheless, the year the sugar was scarce, and we to lather and shave and frizzle him, like a bald surging buoy and himself down to three cows that was meat and drink and dogs and washing to him, ‚tis good cause we have to remember it, going through summersultryngs of snow and sleet witht the widow Nolan’s goats and the Brownes girls neats anyhow, wait till I tell you, what did he do, poor old Roderick O’Conor Rex, the auspicious waterproof monarch of all Ireland, when he found himself all alone by himself in his grand old handwedown pile after all of them had all gone off with themselves to their castles of [p.381] mud, as best they cud, on footback, owing to the leak of the McCarthy’s mare, in extended order, a tree’s length from the longest way out, down the switchbackward slidder of the landsown route of Hauburnea’s liveliest vinnage on the brain, the unimportant Parthalonians with the mouldy Firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan googs and the ramblers from Clane and all the rest of the notmuchers that he did not care the royal spit out of his ostensible mouth about, well, what do you think he did, sir, but, faix, he just went heeltapping through the winespilth and weevily popcorks that were kneedeep round his own right royal round rollicking toper’s table, with his old Roderick Random pullon hat at a Lanty Leary cant on him and Mike Brady’s shirt and Greene’s linnet collarbow and his Ghenter’s gaunts and his Macclefield’s swash and his readymade Reillys and his panprestuberian poncho, the body you’d pity him, the way the world is, poor he, the heart of Midleinster and the supereminent lord of them all, overwhelmed as he was with black ruin like a sponge out of water, allocutioning in bellcantos to his own oliverian society MacGuiney’s Dreans of Ergen Adams and thruming through all to himself with diversed tonguesed through his old tears and his ould plaised drawl, starkened by the most regal of belches, like a blurney Cashelmagh crooner that lerking Clare air, the blackberd’s ballad I’ve a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday, well, what did he go and do at all, His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick O’Conor but, arrah bedamnbut, he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him, as keen as mustard, he could not tell what he did ale, that bothered he was from head to tail, and, wishawishawish, leave it, what the Irish, boys, can do, if he did’nt go, sliggymaglooral reemyround and suck up, sure enough, like a Trojan, in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue, whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses by that whole hogsheaded firkin family, the departed honourable homegoers and other sly- [p.382] grogging suburbanites, such as it was, fall and fall about, to the brindishing of his charmed life, as toastified by his cheeriubicundenances,no matter whether it was chateaubottled Guiness’s or Phoenix brewery stout it was or John Jameson and Sons or Roob Coccola or, for the matter of that, O’Connell’s famous old Dublin ale that he wanted like hell, more that halibut oil or jesuits tea, as a fall back, of several different quantities and qualities amounting in all to, I should say, considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry and liquid measure till, welcome be from us here, till the rising of the morn, till that hen of Kaven’s shows her beaconegg, and Chapwellswendows stain our horyhistoricold and Father MacMichael stamps for aitch o’clerk mess and the Litvian Newestlatter is seen, sold and delivered and all’s set for restart after the silence, like his ancestors to this day after him (that the blazings of their ouldmouldy gods may attend to them we pray!), overopposides the cowery lad in the corner and forenenst the staregaze of the cathering candled, that adornment of his album and folkenfather of familyans, he came acrash a crupper sort of a sate on accomondation and the very boxst in all his composs, whereuponce, behome the fore for cove and trawlers, heave hone, leave lone, Larry’s on the focse and Faugh MacHugh O’Bawlar at the wheel, one to do and one to dare, par by par, a peerless pair, ever here and over there, with his fol the dee oll the doo on the flure of his feats and the feels of the fumes in the wakes of his ears our wineman from Barleyhome he just slumped to throne.

So sailed the stout ship Nansy Hans. From Liff away. For Nattenlaender. As who has come returns. Farvel, farerne! Goodbark, goodbye!

Now follow we out by Starloe!

 ® 

[p.383] — Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark

To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark

And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?

Hohohoho, moulty Mark!

You’re the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah’s ark

And you think you’re cock of the wark.

Fowls, up! Tristy’s the spry young spark

That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her

Without ever winking the tail of a feather

And that’s how that chap’s going to make his money and mark!

Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans. The winging ones. Seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercallzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.

And there they were too, when it was dark, whilest the wildcaps was circling, as slow their ship, the winds aslight, upborne the fates, the wardorse moved, by courtesy of Mr Deaubaleau Downbellow Kaempersally, listening in, as hard as they could, in Dubbeldorp, the donker, by the tourneyold of the wattarfalls, with their vuoxens and they kemin in so hattajocky (only a [p.384] quartebuck askull for the last acts) to the solans and the sycamores and the wild geese and the gannets and the migratories and the mistlethrushes and the auspices and all the birds of the rockbysuckerassousyoceanal sea, all four of them, all sighing and sobbing, and listening. Moykle ahoykling!

They were the big four, the four maaster waves of Erin, all listening, four. There was old Matt Gregory and then besides old Matt there was old Marcus Lyons, the four waves, and oftentimes they used to be saying grace together, right enough, bausnabeatha, in Miracle Squeer: here now we are the four of us: old Matt Gregory and old Marcus and old Luke Tarpey: the four of us and sure, thank God, there are no more of us: and, sure now, you wouldn’t go and forget and leave out the other fellow and old Johnny MacDougall: the four of us and no more of us and so now pass the fish for Christ sake, Amen: the way they used to be saying their grace before fish, repeating itself, after the interims of Augusburgh for auld lang syne. And so there they were, with their palms in their hands, like the pulchrum’s proculs, spraining their ears, luistening and listening to the oceans of kissening, with their eyes glistening, all the four, when he was kiddling and cuddling and bunnyhugging scrumptious his colleen bawn and dinkum belle, an oscar sister, on the fifteen inch loveseat, behind the chieftaness stewardesses cubin, the hero, of Gaelic champion, the onliest one of her choice, her bleaueyedeal of a girl’s friend, neither bigugly nor smallnice, meaning pretty much everything to her then, with his sinister dexterity, light and rufthandling, vicemversem her ragbags et assaucyetiams, fore and aft, on and offsides, the brueburnt sexfutter, handson and huntsem, that was palpably wrong and bulbubly improper, and cuddling her and kissing her, tootyfay charmaunt, in her ensemble of maidenna blue, with an overdress of net, tickled with goldies, Isolamisola, and whisping and lisping her about Trisolanisans, how one was whips for one was two and two was lips for one was three, and dissimulating themself, with his poghue like Arrah-na-poghue, the dear dear annual, they all four remembored who made the world and how they used to be at that time in the vulgar ear [p.385] cuddling and kiddling her, after an oyster supper in Cullen’s barn, from under her mistlethrush and kissing and listening, in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault, the elder, in Arrah-na-pogue, in the otherworld of the passing of the key of Twotongue Common, with Nush, the carrier of the word, and with Mesh, the cutter of the reed, in one of the farback, pitchblack centuries when who made the world, when they knew O’Clery, the man on the door, when they were all four collegians on the nod, neer the Nodderlands Nurskery, whiteboys and oakboys, peep of tim boys and piping tom boys, raising hell while the sin was shining, with their slates and satchels, playing Florian’s fables and communic suctions and vellicar frictions with mixum members, in the Queen’s Ultonian colleges, along with another fellow, a prime number, Totius Quotius, and paying a pot of tribluts to Boris O’Brien, the buttler of Clumpthump, two looves, two turnovers plus (one) crown, to see the mad dane ating his vitals. Wulf! Wulf! And throwing his tongue in the snakepit. Ah ho! The ladies have mercias! It brought the dear prehistoric scenes all back again, as fresh as of yore, Matt and Marcus, natural born lovers of nature, in all her moves and senses, and after that now there he was, that mouth of mandibles, vowed to pure beauty, and his Arrah-na-poghue, when she murmurously, after she let a cough, gave her firm order, if he wouldn’t please mind, for a sings to one hope a dozen of the best favourite lyrical national blooms in Luvillicit, though not too much, reflecting on the situation, drinking in draughts of purest air serene and revelling in the great outdoors, before the four of them, in the fair fine night, whilst the stars shine bright, by she light of he moon, we longed to be spoon, before her honeyoldloom, the plaint effect being in point of fact there being in the whole, a seatuition so shocking and scandalous and now, thank God, there were no more of them and he poghuing and poghuing like the Moreigner bowed his crusted hoed and Tilly the Tailor’s Tugged a Tar in the Arctic Newses Dagsdogs number and there they were, like a foremasters in the rolls, listening, to Rolando’s deepen darblun Ossian roll, (Lady, it was just too gorgeous, that expense of a [p.386] lovely tint, embellished by the charms of art and very well conducted and nicely mannered and all the horrid rudy noisies locked up in nasty cubbyhole!) as tired as they were, the three jolly topers, with their mouths watering, all the four, the old connubial men of the sea, yambing around with their old pantometer, in duckasaloppics, Luke and Johnny MacDougall and all wishening for anything at all of the bygone times, the wald times and the fald times and the hempty times and the dempty times, for a cup of kindness yet, for four farback tumblerfuls of woman squash, with them, all four, listening and spraining their ears for the millennium and all their mouths making water.

Johnny. Ah well, sure, that’s the way (up) and it so happened there was poor Matt Gregory (up), their pater familias, and (up) the others and now really and (up) truly they were four dear old heladies and really they looked awfully pretty and so nice and bespectable and after that they had their fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms and their half a tall hat, just now like the old Merquus of Pawerschoof, the old determined despot, (quiescents in brage!) only for the extrusion of the saltwater or the auctioneer there dormont, in front of the place near O’Clery’s, at the darkumound numbur wan, beside that ancient Dame street, where the statue of Mrs Dana O’Connell, prostituent behind the Trinity College, that arranges all the auctions of the valuable colleges, Bootersbay Sisters, like the auctioneer Battersby Sisters, the prumisceous creaters, that sells all the emancipated statues and flowersports, James H. Tickell, the jaypee, off Hoggin Green, after he made the centuries, going to the tailturn horseshow, before the angler nomads flood, along with another fellow, active impalsive, and the shoeblacks and the redshanks and plebeians and the barrancos and the cappunchers childerun, Jules, everyone, Gotopoxy, with the houghers on them, highstepping the fissure and fracture lines, seven five threes up, three five sevens down, to get out of his way, onasmuck as their withers conditions could not possibly have been improved upon, (praisers be to deeseesee!) like hopolopocattls, erumping oround their Judgity Yaman, and all the tercentenary horses and priest [p.387] hunters, from the Curragh, and confusionaries and the authorities, Noord Amrikaans and Suid Aferican cattleraiders (so they say) all over like a tiara dullfuoco, in his grey half a tall hat and his amber necklace and his crimson harness and his leathern jib and his cheapshein hairshirt and his scotobrit sash and his parapilagian gallowglasses (how do you do, jaypee, Elevato!) to find out all the improper colleges (and how do you do, Mr Dame James? Get out of my way!), forkbearded and bluetoothed and bellied and boneless, from Strathlyffe and Aylesburg and Northumberland Anglesey, the whole yaghoodurt sweepstakings and all the horsepowers. But now, talking of hayastdanars and wolkingology and how our seaborn isle came into exestuance, (the explutor, his three andesiters and the two pantellarias) that reminds me about the manausteriums of the poor Marcus of Lyons and poor Johnny, the patrician, and what do you think of the four of us and there they were now, listening right enough, the four saltwater widowers, and all they could remembore, long long ago in the olden times Momonian, throw darker hour sorrows, the princest day, when Fair Margrate waited Swede Villem, and Lally in the rain, with the blank prints, now extincts, after the wreak of Wormans’ Noe, the barmaisigheds, when my heart knew no care, and after that then there was the official landing of Lady Jales Casemate, in the year of the flood 1132 S.O.S., and the christening of Queen Baltersby, the Fourth Buzzersbee, according to Her Grace the bishop Senior, off the whate shape, and then there was the drowning of Pharoah and all his pedestrians and they were all completely drowned into the sea, the red sea, and then poor Merkin Cornyngwham, the official out of the castle on pension, when he was completely drowned off Erin Isles, at that time, suir knows, in the red sea and a lovely mourning paper and thank God, as Saman said, there were no more of him. And that now was how it was. The arzurian deeps o’er his humbodumbones sweeps. And his widdy the giddy is wreathing her murmoirs as her gracest triput to the Grocery Trader’s Manthly. Mind mand gunfree by Gladeys Rayburn! Runtable’s Reincorporated. The new world presses. Where the [p.388] old conk cruised now croons the yunk. Exeunc throw a darras Kram of Llawnroc, ye gink guy, kirked into yord. Enterest attawonder Wehpen, luftcat revol, fairescapading in his natsirt. Tuesy tumbles. And mild aunt Liza is as loose as her neese. Fulfest withim inbrace behent. As gent would deem oncontinent. So mulct per wenche is Elsker woed. Ne hath his thrysting. Fin. Like the newcasters in their old plyable of A Royenne Devours. Jazzaphoney and Mirillovis and Nippy she nets best. Fing. Ay, ay! Sobbos. And so he was. Sabbus.

Marcus. And after that, not forgetting, there was the Flemish armada, all scattered, and all officially drowned, there and then, on a lovely morning, after the universal flood, at about aleven thirtytwo was it? off the coast of Cominghome and Saint Patrick, the anabaptist, and Saint Kevin, the lacustrian, with toomuch of tolls and lottance of beggars, after converting Porterscout and Dona, our first marents, and Lapoleon, the equestrian, on his whuite hourse of Hunover, rising Clunkthurf over Cabinhogan and all they remembored and then there was the Frankish floot of Noahsdobahs, from Hedalgoland, round about the freebutter year of Notre Dame 1132 P.P.O. or so, disumbunking from under Motham General Bonaboche, (noo poopery!) in his half a grey traditional hat, alevoila come alevilla, and after that there he was, so terrestrial, like a Nailscissor, poghuing her scandalous and very wrong, the maid, in single combat, under the sycamores, amid the bludderings from the boom and all the gallowsbirds in Arrahna-Poghue, so silvestrious, neer the Queen’s Colleges, in 1132 Brian or Bride street, behind the century man on the door. And then again they used to give the grandest gloriaspanquost universal howldmoutherhibbert lectures on anarxaquy out of doxarchology (hello, Hibernia!) from sea to sea (Matt speaking!) according to the pictures postcard, with sexon grimmacticals, in the Latimer Roman history, of Latimer repeating himself, from the vicerine of Lord Hugh, the Lacytynant, till Bockleyshuts the rahjahn gerachknell and regnumrockery roundup, (Marcus Lyons speaking!) to the oceanfuls of collegians green and high classes and the poor scholars and all the old trinitarian senate and saints and [p.389] sages and the Plymouth brethren, droning along, peanzanzangan, and nodding and sleeping away there, like forgetmenots, in her abijance service, round their twelve tables, per pioja at pulga bollas, in the four trinity colleges, for earnasyoulearning Eringrowback, of Ulcer, Moonster, Leanstare and Cannought, the four grandest colleges supper the matther of Erryn, of Killorcure and Killthemall and Killeachother and Killkelly-on-the-Flure, where their role was to rule the round roll that Rollo and Rullo rolled round. Those were the grandest gynecollege histories (Lucas calling, hold the line!) in the Janesdanes Lady Andersdaughter Universary, for auld acquaintance sake (this unitarian lady, breathtaking beauty, Bambam’s bonniest, lived to a great age at or in or about the late No. 1132 or No. 1169, bis, Fitzmary Round where she was seen by many and widely liked) for teaching the Fatima Woman history of Fatimiliafamilias, repeating herself, on which purposeth of the spirit of nature as difinely developed in time by psadatepholomy, the past and present (Johnny MacDougall speaking, give me trunks, miss!) and present and absent and past and present and perfect arma virumque romano. Ah, dearo, dear! O weep for the hower when eve aleaves bower! How it did but all come eddaying back to them, if they did but get gaze, gagagniagnian, to hear him there, kiddling and cuddling her, after the gouty old galahat, with his peer of quinnyfears and his troad of thirstuns, so nefarious, from his elevation of one yard one handard and thartytwo lines, before the four of us, in his Roman Catholic arms, while his deepseepeepers gazed and sazed and dazecrazemazed into her dullokbloon rodolling olosheen eyenbowls by the Cornelius Nepos, Mnepos. Anumque, umque. Napoo.

Queh? Quos?

Ah, dearo dearo dear! Bozun braceth brythe hwen gooses gandered gamen. Mahazar ag Dod! It was so scalding sorry for all the whole twice two four of us, with their familiar, making the toten, and Lally when he lost part of his half a hat and all belongings to him, in his old futile manner, cape, towel and drawbreeches, and repeating himself and telling him now, for the seek of Senders [p.390] Newslaters and the mossacre of Saint Brices, to forget the past, when the burglar he shoved the wretch in churneroil, and contradicting all about Lally, the ballest master of Gosterstown, and his old fellow, the Lagener, in the Locklane Lighthouse, earing his wick with a pierce of railing, and liggen hig with his ladder up, and that oldtime turner and his sadderday erely cloudsing, the old croniony, Skelly, with the lether belly, full of neltts, full of keltts, full of lightweight beltts and all the bald drakes or ever he had up in the bohereen, off Artsichekes Road, with Moels and Mahmullagh Mullarty, the man in the Oran mosque, and the old folks at home and Duignan and Lapole and the grand confarreation, as per the cabbangers richestore, of the filest archives, and he couldn’t stop laughing over Tom Tim Tarpey, the Welshman, and the four middleaged widowers, all nangles, sangles, angles and wangles. And now, that reminds me, not to forget the four of the Welsh waves, leaping laughing, in their Lumbag Walk, over old Battleshore and Deaddleconche, in their half a Roman hat, with an ancient Greek gloss on it, in Chichester College auction and, thank God, they were all summarily divorced, four years before, or so they say, by their dear poor shehusbands, in dear byword days, and never brought to mind, to see no more the rainwater on the floor but still they parted, raining water laughing, per Nupiter Privius, only terpary, on the best of terms and be forgot, whilk was plainly foretolk by their old pilgrim cocklesong or they were singing through the wettest indies As I was going to Burrymecarott we fell in with a lout by the name of Peebles as also in another place by their orthodox proverb so there was said thus That old fellow knows milk though he’s not used to it latterly. And so they parted. In Dalkymont nember to. Ay, ay. The good go and the wicked is left over. As evil flows so Ivel flows. Ay, ay. Ah, well sure, that’s the way. As the holymaid of Kunut said to the haryman of Koombe. For his humple pesition in odvices. Woman. Squash. Part. Ay, ay. By decree absolute.

Lucas. And, O so well they could remembore at that time, when Carpery of the Goold Fins was in the kingship of Poolland, Mrs Dowager Justice Squalchman, foorsitter, in her fullbottom wig [p.391] and beard, (Erminia Reginia!) in or aring or around about the year of buy in disgrace 1132 or 1169 or 1768 Y.W.C.A., at the Married Male Familyman’s Auctioneer’s court in Arrahnacuddle. Poor Johnny of the clan of the Dougals, the poor Scuitsman, (Hohannes!) nothing if not amorous, dinna forget, so frightened (Zweep! Zweep!) on account of her full bottom, (undullable attraxity!) that put the yearl of mercies on him, and the four maasters, in chors, with a hing behangd them, because he was so slow to borstel her schoon for her, when he was grooming her ladyship, instead of backscratching her materfamilias proper, like any old methodist, and all divorced and innasense interdict, in the middle of the temple, according to their dear faithful. Ah, now, it was too bad, too bad and stout entirely, all the missoccurs; and poor Mark or Marcus Bowandcoat, from the brownesberrow in nolandsland, the poor old chronometer, all persecuted with ally croaker by everybody, by decree absolute, through Herrinsilde, because he forgot himself, making wind and water, and made a Neptune’s mess of all of himself, sculling over the giamond’s courseway, and because he forgot to remember to sign an old morning proxy paper, a writing in request to hersute herself, on stamped bronnanoleum, from Roneo to Giliette, before saying his grace before fish and then and there and too there was poor Dion Cassius Poosycomb, all drowned too, before the world and her husband, because it was most improper and most wrong, when he attempted to (well, he was shocking poor in his health, he said, with the shingles falling off him), because he (ah, well now, peaces pea to Wedmore and let not the song go dumb upon your Ire, as we say in the Spasms of Davies, and we won’t be too hard on him as an old Manx presbyterian) and after that, as red as a Rosse is, he made his last will and went to confession, like the general of the Berkeleyites, at the rim of the rom, on his two bare marrowbones, to Her Worship his Mother and Sister Evangelist Sweainey, on Cailcainnin widnight and he was so sorry, he was really, because he left the bootybutton in the handsome cab and now, tell the truth, unfriends never, (she was his first messes dogess and it was a very pretty peltry and there [p.392] were faults on both sides) well, he attempted (or so they say) ah, now, forget and forgive (don’t we all?) and, sure, he was only funning with his andrewmartins and his old age coming over him, well, he attempted or, the Connachy, he was tempted to attempt some hunnish familiarities, after eten a bad carmp in the rude ocean and, hevantonoze sure, he was dead seasickabed (it was really too bad!) her poor old divorced male, in the housepays for the daying at the Martyr Mrs MacCawley’s, where at the time he was taying and toying, to hold the nursetendered hand, (ah, the poor old coax!) and count the buttons and her hand and frown on a bad crab and doying to remembore what doed they were byorn and who made a who a snore. Ah dearo dearo dear!

And where do you leave Matt Emeritus? The laychief of Abbotabishop? And exchullard of ffrench and gherman. Achoch! They were all so sorgy for poorboir Matt in his saltwater hat, with the Aran crown, or she grew that out of, too big for him, of or Mnepos and his overalls, all falling over her in folds—sure he hadn’t the heart in her to pull them up—poor Matt, the old perigrime matriarch, and a queenly man, (the porple blussing upon them!) sitting there, the sole of the settlement, below ground, for an expiatory rite, in postulation of his cause, (who shall say?) in her beaver bonnet, the king of the Caucuses, a family all to himself, under geasa, Themistletocles, on his multilingual tombstone, like Navellicky Kamen, and she due to kid by sweetpea time, with her face to the wall, in view of the poorhouse, and taking his rust in the oxsight of Iren, under all the auspices, amid the rattle of hailstorms, kalospintheochromatokreening, with her ivyclad hood, and gripping an old pair of curling tongs, belonging to Mrs Duna O’Cannell, to blow his brains with, till the heights of Newhigherland heard the Bristolhut, with his can of tea and a purse of alfred cakes from Anne Lynch and two cuts of Shackleton’s brown loaf and dilisk, waiting for the end to come. Gordon Heighland, when you think of it! The merthe dirther! Ah ho! It was too bad entirely! All devoured by active parlourmen, laudabiliter, of woman squelch and all on account of the [p.393] smell of Shakeletin and scratchman and his mouth watering, acid and alkolic; signs on the salt, and so now pass the loaf for Christ sake. Amen. And so. And all.

Matt. And loaf. So that was the end. And it can’t be helped. Ah, God be good to us! Poor Andrew Martin Cunningham! Take breath! Ay! Ay!

And still and all at that time of the dynast days of old konning Soteric Sulkinbored and Bargomuster Bart, when they struck coil and shock haunts, in old Hungerford-on-Mudway, where first I met thee oldpoetryck flied from may and the Finnan haddies and the Noal Sharks and the muckstails turtles like an acoustic pottish and the griesouper bullyum and how he poled him up his boccat of vuotar and got big buzz for his name in the airweek’s honours from home, colonies and empire, they were always with assisting grace, thinking (up) and not forgetting about shims and shawls week, in auld land syne (up) their four hosenbands, that were four (up) beautiful sister misters, now happily married, unto old Gallstonebelly, and there they were always counting and contradicting every night ’tis early the lovely mother of periwinkle buttons, according to the lapper part of their anachronism (up one up two up one up four) and after that there now she was, in the end, the deary, soldpowder and all, the beautfour sisters, and that was her mudhen republican name, right enough, from alum and oves, and they used to be getting up from under, in their tape and straw garlands, with all the worries awake in their hair, at the kookaburra bell ringring all wrong inside of them (come in, come on, you lazy loafs!) all inside their poor old Shandon bellbox (come out to hell, you lousy louts!) so frightened, for the dthclangavore, like knockneeghs bumpsed by the fisterman’s straights, (ys! ys!), at all hours every night, on their mistletoes, the four old oldsters, to see was the Transton Postscript come, with their oerkussens under their armsaxters, all puddled and mythified, the way the wind wheeled the schooler round, when nobody wouldn’t even let them rusten, from playing their gastspiels, crossing their sleep by the shocking silence, when they were in dreams of yore, standing behind the [p.394] door, or leaning out of the chair, or kneeling under the sofacover and setting on the souptureen, getting into their way something barbarous, changing the one wet underdown convibrational bed or they used to slumper under, when hope was there no more, and putting on their half a hat and falling over all synopticals and a panegyric and repeating themselves, like svvollovving, like the time they were dadging the talkeycook that chased them, look look all round the stool, walk everywhere for a jool, to break fyre to all the rancers, to collect all and bits of brown, the rathure’s evelopment in spirits of time in all fathom of space and slooping around in a bawneen and bath slippers and go away to Oldpatrick and see a doctor Walker. And after that so glad they had their night tentacles and there they used to be, flapping and cycling, and a dooing a doonloop, panementically, around the waists of the ships, in the wake of their good old Foehn again, as tyred as they were, at their windswidths in the waveslength, the clipperbuilt and the five fourmasters and Lally of the cleftoft bagoderts and Roe of the fair cheats, exchanging fleas from host to host, with arthroposophia, and he selling him before he forgot, issle issle, after having prealably dephlegmatised his gutterful of throatyfrogs, with a lungible fong in his suckmouth ear, while the dear invoked to the coolun dare by a palpabrows lift left no doubt in his minder, till he was instant and he was trustin, sister soul in brother hand, the subjects being their passion grand, that one fresh from the cow about Aithne Meithne married a mailde and that one too from Engrvakon saga abooth a gooth a gev a gotheny egg and the parkside pranks of quality queens, katte efter kinne, for Earl Hoovedsoon’s choosing and Huber and Harman orhowwhen theeuponthus (chchch!) eysolt of binnoculises memostinmust egotum sabcunsciously senses upers the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities wherebejubers in the pancosmic urge the allimmanence of that which Itself is Itself Alone (hear, O hear, Caller Errin!) exteriorises on this ourherenow plane in disunited solod, likeward and gushious bodies with (science, say!) perilwhitened passionpanting pugnoplangent intuitions of reunited [p.395] selfdom (murky whey, abstrew adim!) in the higherdimissional selfless Allself, theemeeng Narsty meetheeng Idoless, and telling Jolly MacGolly, dear mester John, the belated dishevelled, hacking away at a parchment pied, and all the other analist, the steamships ant the ladies’foursome, ovenfor, nedenfor, dinkety, duk, downalupping, (how long tandem!) like a foreretyred schoonmasters, and their pair of green eyes and peering in, so they say, like the narcolepts on the lakes of Coma, through the steamy windows, into the honeymoon cabins, on board the big steamadories, made by Fumadory, and the saloon ladies’ madorn toilet chambers lined over prawn silk and rub off the salty catara off a windows and, hee hee, listening, qua committe, the poor old quakers, oben the dure, to see all the hunnishmooners and the firstclass ladies, serious me, a lass spring as you fancy, and sheets far from the lad, courting in blankets, enfamillias, and, shee shee, all improper, in a lovely mourning toilet, for the rosecrumpler, the thrilldriver, the sighinspirer, with that olive throb in his nude neck, and, swayin and thayin, thanks ever so much for the tiny quote, which sought of maid everythingling again so very much more delightafellay, and the perfidly suite of her, bootyfilly yours, under all their familiarities, by preventing grace, forgetting to say their grace before chambadory, before going to boat with the verges of the chaptel of the opering of the month of Nema Knatut, so pass the poghue for grace sake. Amen. And all, hee hee hee, quaking, so fright, and, shee shee, shaking. Aching. Ay, ay.

For it was then a pretty thing happened of pure diversion mayhap, when his flattering hend, at the justright moment, like perchance some cook of corage might clip the lad on a poot of porage handshut his duckhouse, the vivid girl, deaf with love, (ah sure, you know her, our angel being, one of romance’s fadeless wonderwomen, and, sure now, we all know you dote on her even unto date!) with a queeleetlecree of joysis crisis she renulited their disunited, with ripy lepes to ropy lopes (the dear o’dears!) and the golden importunity of aloofer’s leavetime, when, as quick, is greased pigskin, Amoricas Champius, with one aragan throust, druve the massive of virilvigtoury flshpst the [p.396] both lines of forwards (Eburnea’s down, boys!) rightjingbangshot into the goal of her gullet.

Alris!

And now, upright and add them! And plays be honest! And pullit into yourself, as on manowoman do another! Candidately, everybody! A mot for amot. Comong, meng, and douh! There was this, wellyoumaycallher, a strapping modern old ancient Irish prisscess, so and so hands high, such and such paddock weight, in her madapolam smock, nothing under her hat but red hair and solid ivory (now you know it’s true in your hardup hearts!) and a firstclass pair of bedroom eyes, of most unhomy blue, (how weak we are, one and all!) the charm of favour’s fond consent! Could you blame her, we’re saying, for one psocoldlogical moment? What would Ewe do? With that so tiresome old milkless a ram, with his tiresome duty peck and his bronchial tubes, the tiresome old hairyg orangogran beaver, in his tiresome old twennysixandsixpenny sheopards plods drowsers and his thirtybobandninepenny tails plus toop! Hagakhroustioun! It were too exceeding really if one woulds to offer at sulk an oldivirdual a pinge of hinge hit. The mainest thing ever! Since Edem was in the boags noavy. No, no, the dear heaven knows, and the farther the from it, if the whole stole stale mis betold, whoever the gulpable, and whatever the pulpous was, the twooned togethered, and giving the mhost phassionable wheathers, they were doing a lally a lolly a dither a duther one lelly two dather three lilly four dother. And it was a fiveful moment for the poor old timetetters, ticktacking, in tenk the count. Till the spark that plugged spared the chokee he gripped and (volatile volupty, how brieved are thy lunguings!) they could and they could hear like of a lisp lapsing, that was her knight of the truths thong plipping out of her chapellledeosy, after where he had gone and polped the questioned. Plop.

Ah now, it was tootwoly torrific, the mummurrlubejubes! And then after that they used to be so forgetful, counting motherpeributts (up one up four) to membore her beaufu mouldern [p.397] maiden name, for overflauwing, by the dream of woman the owneirist, in forty lands. From Greg and Doug on poor Greg and Mat and Mar and Lu and Jo, now happily buried, our four! And there she was right enough, that lovely sight enough, the girleen bawn asthore, as for days galore, of planxty Gregory. Egory. O bunket not Orwin! Ay, ay.

But, sure, that reminds me now, like another tellmastory repeating yourself, how they used to be in lethargy’s love, at the end of it all, at that time (up) always, tired and all, after doing the mousework and making it up, over their community singing (up) the top loft of the voicebox, of Mamalujo like the senior follies at murther magrees, squatting round, two by two, the four confederates, with Caxons the Coswarn, up the wet air register in Old Man’s House, Millenium Road, crowning themselves in lauraly branches, with their cold knees and their poor (up) quad rupeds, ovasleep, and all dolled up, for their blankets and materny mufflers and plimsoles and their bowl of brown shackle and milky and boterham clots, a potion a peace, a piece aportion, a lepel alip, alup a lap, for a cup of kindest yet, with hold take hand and nurse and only touch of ate, a lovely munkybown and for xmell and wait the pinch and prompt poor Marcus Lyons to be not beheeding the skillet on for the live of ghosses but to pass the teeth for choke sake, Amensch, when it so happen they were all sycamore and by the world forgot, since the phlegmish hoopicough, for all a possabled, after ete a bad cramp and johnny magories, and backscrat the poor bedsores and the farthing dip, their caschal pandle of magnegnousioum, and read a letter or two every night, before going to dodo sleep atrance, with their catkins coifs, in the twilight, a capitaletter, for further auspices, on their old one page codex book of old year’s eve 1132, M.M.L.J. old style, their Senchus Mor, by his fellow girl, the Mrs Shemans, in her summer seal houseonsample, with the caracul broadtail, her totam in tutu, final buff noonmeal edition, in the regatta covers, uptenable from the orther, for to regul their reves by incubation, and Lally, through their gangrene spentacles, and all the good or they did in their time, the rigorists, for Roe and O’Mulcnory a [p.398] Conry ap Mul or Lap ap Morion and Buffler ap Matty Mac Gregory for Marcus on Podex by Daddy de Wyer, old bagabroth, beeves and scullogues, churls and vassals, in same, sept and severalty and one by one and sing a mamalujo. To the heroest champion of Eren and his braceoelanders and Gowan, Gawin and Gonne.

And after that now in the future, please God, after nonpenal start, all repeating ourselves, in medios loquos, from where he got a useful arm busy on the touchline, due south of her western shoulder, down to death and the love embrace, with an interesting tallow complexion and all now united, sansfamillias, let us ran on to say oremus prayer and homeysweet homely, after fully realising the gratifying experiences of highly continental evenements, for meter and peter to temple an eslaap, for auld acquaintance, to Peregrine and Michael and Farfassa and Peregrine, for navigants et peregrinantibus, in all the old imperial and Fionnachan sea and for vogue awallow to a Miss Yiss, you fascinator, you, sing a lovasteamadorion to Ladyseyes, here’s Tricks and Doelsy, delightfully ours, in her doaty ducky little blue and roll his hoop and how she ran, when wit won free, the dimply blissed and awfully bucked, right glad we never shall forget, thoh the dayses gone still they loves young dreams and old Luke with his kingly leer, so wellworth watching, and Senchus Mor, possessed of evident notoriety, and another more of the bigtimers, to name no others, of whom great things were expected in the fulmfilming department, for the lives of Lazarus and auld luke syne and she haihaihail her kobbor kohinor sehehet on the praze savohole shanghai.

Hear, O hear, Iseult la belle! Tristan, sad hero, hear! The Lambeg drum, the Lombog reed, the Lumbag fiferer, the Limibig brazenaze.

Anno Domini nostri sancti Jesu Christi

Nine hundred and ninetynine million pound sterling in the blueblack bowels of the bank of Ulster.

Braw bawbees and good gold pounds, galore, my girleen, a Sunday’ll prank thee finely.

[p.399] And no damn loutll come courting thee or by the mother of the Holy Ghost there’ll be murder!

O, come all ye sweet nymphs of Dingle beach to cheer Brinabride queen from Sybil surfriding

In her curragh of shells of daughter of pearl and her silverymonnblue mantle round her.

Crown of the waters, brine on her brow, she’ll dance them a jig and jilt them fairly.

Yerra, why would she bide with Sig Sloomysides or the grogram grey barnacle gander?

You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering

Nor wake in winter, window machree, but snore sung in my old Balbriggan surtout.

Wisha, won’t you agree now to take me from the middle, say, of next week on, for the balance of my days, for nothing (what?) as your own nursetender?

A power of highsteppers died game right enough—but who, acushla, ’ll beg coppers for you?

I tossed that one long before anyone.

It was of a wet good Friday too she was ironing and, as I’m given now to understand, she was always mad gone on me.

Grand goosegreasing we had entirely with an allnight eiderdown bed picnic to follow.

By the cross of Cong, says she, rising up Saturday in the twilight from under me, Mick, Nick the Maggot or whatever your name is, you’re the mose likable lad that’s come my ways yet from the barony of Bohermore.

Mattheehew, Markeehew, Lukeehew, Johnheehewheehew!

Haw!

And still a light moves long the river. And stiller the mermen ply their keg.

Its pith is full. The way is free. Their lot is cast.

So, to john for a john, johnajeams, led it be!

 ® 

III

[p.403] Hark!

Tolv two elf kater ten (it can’t be) sax.

Hork!

Pedwar pemp foify tray (it must be) twelve.

And low stole o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep.

White fogbow spans. The arch embattled. Mark as capsules. The nose of the man who was nought like the nasoes. It is self-tinted, wrinkling, ruddled. His kep is a gorsecone. He am Gascon Titubante of Tegmine – sub – Fagi whose fixtures are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts. She, exhibit next, his Anastashie. She has prayings in lowdelph. Zeehere green eggbrooms. What named blautoothdmand is yon who stares? Gugurtha! Gugurtha! He has becco of wild hindigan. Ho, he hath hornhide! And hvis now is for you. Pensée! The most beautiful of woman of the veilch veilchen veilde. She would kidds to my voult of my palace, with obscidian luppas, her aal in her dhove’s suckling. Apagemonite! Come not nere! Black! Switch out!

Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we) I heard at zero hour as ’twere the peal of vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church tolling so faint a goodmantrue as nighthood’s unseen violet rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewable to human watchers save ’twere perchance anon some glistery [p.404] gleam darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation. And as I was jogging along in a dream as dozing I was dawdling, arrah, methought broadtone was heard and the creepers and the gliders and flivvers of the earth breath and the dancetongues of the woodfires and the hummers in their ground all vociferated echoating: Shaun! Shaun! Post the post! with a high voice and O, the higher on high the deeper and low, I heard him so! And lo, mescemed somewhat came of the noise and somewho might amove allmurk. Now, ’twas as clump, now mayhap. When look, was light and now’twas as flasher, now moren as the glaow. Ah, in unlitness ’twas in very similitude, bless me, ’twas his belted lamp! Whom we dreamt was a shaddo, sure, he’s lightseyes, the laddo! Blessed momence, O romence, he’s growing to stay! Ay, he who so swayed a will of a wisp before me, hand prop to hand, prompt side to the pros, dressed like an earl in just the correct wear, in a classy mac Frieze o’coat of far suparior ruggedness, indigo braw, tracked and tramped, and an Irish ferrier collar, freeswinging with mereswin lacers from his shoulthern and thick welted brogues on him hammered to suit the scotsmost public and climate, iron heels and sparable soles, and his jacket of providence wellprovided woolies with a softrolling lisp of a lapel to it and great sealingwax buttons, a good helping bigger than the slots for them, of twentytwo carrot krasnapoppsky red and his invulnerable burlap whiskcoat and his popular choker, Tamagnum sette-and-forte and his loud boheem toy and the damasker’s overshirt he sported inside, a starspangled zephyr with a decidedly surpliced crinklydoodle front with his motto through dear life embrothred over it in peas, rice, and yeggyyolk, Or for royal, Am for Mail, R.M.D. hard cash on the nail and the most successfully carried gigot turnups now you ever, (what a pairfact crease! how amsolookly kersse!) breaking over the ankle and hugging the shoeheel, everything the best— none other from (Ah, then may the turtle’s blessings of God and Mary and Haggispatrick and Huggisbrigid be souptumbling all over him!) other than (and may his hundred thousand welcome stewed [p.405] letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith, and plultiply!) Shaun himself.

What a picture primitive!

Had I the concordant wiseheads of Messrs Gregory and Lyons alongside of Dr Tarpey’s and I dorsay the reverend Mr Mac Dougall’s, but I, poor ass, am but as their fourpart tinckler’s dunkey. Yet methought Shaun (holy messonger angels be uninterruptedly nudging him among and along the winding ways of random ever!) Shaun in proper person (now may all the blueblacksliding constellations continue to shape his changeable timetable!) stood before me. And I pledge you my agricultural word by the hundred and sixty odds rods and cones of this even’s vision that young fellow looked the stuff, the Bel of Beaus’ Walk, a prime card if ever was! Pep? Now without deceit it is hardly too much to say he was looking grand, so fired smart, in much more than his usual health. No mistaking that beamish brow! There was one for you that ne’er would nunch with good Duke Humphrey but would aight through the months without a sign of an err in hem and then, otherwise rounding, fourale to the lees of Traroe. Those jehovial oyeglances! The heart of the rool! And hit the hencoop. He was immense, topping swell for he was after having a great time of it, a twentyfour hours every moment matters maltsight, in a porterhouse, scutfrank, if you want to know, Saint Lawzenge of Toole’s, the Wheel of Fortune, leave your clubs in the hall and wait on yourself, no chucks for walnut ketchups, Lazenby’s and Chutney graspis (the house the once queen of Bristol and Balrothery twice admired because her frumped door looked up Dacent Street) where in the sighed of lovely eyes while his knives of hearts made havoc he had recruited his strength by meals of spadefuls of mounded food, in anticipation of the faste of tablenapkins, constituting his threepartite pranzipal meals plus a collation, his breakfast of first, a bless us O blood and thirsthy orange, next, the half of a pint of becon with newled googs and a segment of riceplummy padding, met of sunder suigar and some cold forsoaken steak peatrefired from the batblack night o’erflown then, without prejuice to evectuals, [p.406] came along merendally his stockpot dinner of a half a pound of round steak, very rare, Blong’s best from Portarlington’s Butchery, with a side of riceypeasy and Corkshire alla mellonge and bacon with (a little mar pliche!) a pair of chops and thrown in from the silver grid by the proprietoress of the roastery who lives on the hill and gaulusch gravy and pumpernickel to wolp up and a gorger’s bulby onion (Margareter, Margaretar Margarasticandeatar) and as well with second course and then finally, after his avalunch oclock snack at’ Appelredt’s or Kitzy Braten’s of saddlebag steak and a Botherhim with her old phoenix portar, jistr to gwen his gwistel and praties sweet and Irish too and mock gurgle to whistle his way through for the swallying, swp by swp, and he getting his tongue arount it and Boland’s broth broken into the bargain, to his regret his soupay avic nightcap, vitellusit, a carusal consistent with second course eyer and becon (the rich of) with broad beans, hig, steak, hag, pepper the diamond bone hotted up timmtomm and while’twas after that he scoffed a drakeling snuggily stuffed following cold loin of veal more cabbage and in their green free state a clister of peas, soppositorily petty, last. P.S. but a fingerhot of rheingenever to give the Pax cum Spiritututu. Drily thankful. Burud and dulse and typureely jam, all free of charge, aman, and. And the best of wine avec. For his heart was as big as himself, so it was, ay, and bigger! While the loaves are aflowering and the nachtingale jugs. All St Jilian’s of Berry, hurrah there for tobies! Mabhrodaphne, brown pride of our custard house quay, amiable with repastful, cheerus graciously, cheer us! Ever of thee, Anne Lynch, he’s deeply draiming! Houseanna! Tea is the Highest! For auld lang Ayternitay! Thus thicker will he grow now, grew new. And better and better on butterand butter. At the sign of Mesthress Vanhungrig. However! Mind you, nuckling down to nourritures, were they menuly some ham and jaffas, and I don’t mean to make the ingestion for the moment that he was guilbey of gulpable gluttony as regards chewable boltaballs, but, biestings be biestings, and upon the whole, when not off his oats, given prelove appetite and postlove pricing good coup, goodcheap, were it thermidor oogst or floreal may [p.407] while the whistling prairial roysters play, between gormandising and gourmeteering, he grubbed his tuck all right, deah smorregos, every time he was for doing dirt to a meal or felt like a bottle of ardilaun arongwith a smag of a lecker biss of a welldressed taart or. Though his net intrants wight weighed nought but a flyblow to his gross and ganz afterduepoise. And he was so jarvey jaunty with a romp of a schoolgirl’s completion sitting pretty over his Oyster Monday print face and he was plainly out on the ramp and mash, as you might say, for he sproke.

Overture and beginners!

When lo (whish, O whish!) mesaw mestreamed, as the green to the gred was flew, was flown, through deafths of durkness greengrown deeper I heard a voice, the voce of Shaun, vote of the Irish, voise from afar (and cert no purer puer palestrine e’er chanted panangelical mid the clouds of Tu es Petrus, not Michaeleen Kelly, not Mara O’Mario, and sure, what more numerose Italicuss ever rawsucked frish uov in urinal?), a brieze to Yverzone o’er the brozaozaozing sea, from Inchigeela call the way how it suspired (morepork! morepork!) to scented nightlife as softly as the loftly marconimasts from Clifden sough open tireless secrets (mauveport! mauveport!) to Nova Scotia’s listing sisterwands. Tubetube!

His handpalm lifted, his handshell cupped, his handsign pointed, his handheart mated, his handaxe risen, his handleaf fallen. Helpsome hand that holemost heals! What is het holy! It gested.

And it said:

— Alo, alass, aladdin, amobus! Does she lag soft fall means rest down? Shaun yawned, as his general address rehearsal, (that was antepropreviousday’s pigeons-in-a-pie with rough dough for the carrier and the hash-say-ugh of overgestern pluzz the ’stuesday’s shampain in his head, with the memories of the past and the hicnuncs of the present embelliching the musics of the futures from Miccheruni’s band) addressing himself ex alto and complaining with vocal discontent it was so close as of the fact the rag was up and of the briefs and billpasses, a houseful of deadheads, of him to dye his paddycoats to morn his hestern- [p.408] most earning, his board in the swealth of his fate as, having moistened his manducators upon the quiet and scooping molars and grinders clean with his two fore fingers, he sank his hunk, dowanouet to resk at once, exhaust as winded hare, utterly spent, it was all he could do (disgusted with himself that the combined weight of his tons of iosals was a hundred men’s massed too much for him), upon the native heath he loved covered kneehigh with virgin bush, for who who e’er trod sod of Erin could ever sleep off the turf! Well, I’m liberally dished seeing myself in this trim! How all too unwordy am I, a mere mailman of peace, a poor loust hastehater of the first degree, the principot of Candia, no legs and a title, for such eminence, or unpro promenade rather, to be much more exact, as to be the bearer extraordinary of these postoomany missive on his majesty’s service while me and yous and them we’re extending us after the pattern of reposiveness! Weh is me, yeh is ye! I, the mightif beam maircanny, which bit his mirth too early or met his birth too late! It should of been my other with his leickname for he’s the head and I’m an everdevoting fiend of his. I can seeze tomirror in tosdays of yer when we lofobsed os so ker. Those sembal simon pumpkel pieman yers! We shared the twin chamber and we winked on the one wench and what Sim sobs todie I’ll reeve tomorry, for ’twill be, I have hopes of, Sam Dizzier’s feedst. Tune in, tune on, old Tighe, high, high, high, I’m thine owelglass. Be old! He looks rather thin, imitating me. I’m very fond of that other of mine. Fish hands Macsorley! Elien! Obsequies! Bonzeye! Isaac Egari’s Ass! We’re the musichall pair that won the swimmyease bladdhers at the Guinness gala in Badeniveagh. I ought not to laugh with him on this stage. But he’ such a game loser! I lift my disk to him. Brass and reeds, brace and ready! How is your napper, Handy, and hownow does she stand? First he was living to feel what the eldest daughter she was panseying and last he was dying to know what old Madre Patriack does be up to. Take this John’s Lane in your toastingfourch. Shaunti and shaunti and shaunti again! And twelve coolinder moons! I am no helotwashipper but I revere her! For my own coant! She has studied! Piscisvendolor! You’re grace! Futs dronk of [p.409] Wouldndom! But, Gemini, he’s looking frightfully thin! I heard the man Shee shinging in the pantry bay. Down among the dustbins let him lie! Ear! Ear! Not ay! Eye! Eye! For I’m at the heart of it. Yet I cannot on my solemn merits as a recitativer recollect ever having done of anything of the kind to deserve of such. Not the phost of a nation! Nor by a long trollop! I just didn’t have the time to. Saint Anthony Guide!

— But have we until now ever besought you, dear Shaun, we remembered, who it was, good boy, to begin with, who out of symphony gave you the permit?

— Goodbye now, Shaun replied, with a voice pure as a churchmode, in echo rightdainty, with a good catlick tug at his cocomoss candylock, a foretaste in time of his cabbageous brain’s curlyflower. Athiacaro! Comb his tar odd gee sing your mower O meeow? Greet thee Good? How are them columbuses! Lard have mustard on them! Fatiguing, very fatiguing. Hobos homknees and the corveeture of my spine. Poumeerme! My heaviest crux and dairy lot it is, with a bed as hard as the thinkamuddles of the Greeks and a board as bare as a Roman altar. I’m off rabbited kitchens and relief porridgers. No later than a very few fortnichts since I was meeting on the Thinker’s Dam with a pair of men out of glasshouse whom I shuffled hands with named MacBlacks—I think their names is MacBlakes—from the Headfire Clump — and they were improving me and making me beliek no five hour factory life with insufficient emollient and industrial disabled for them that day o’gratises. I have the highest gratification by anuncing how I have it from whowho but Hagios Colleenkiller’s prophecies. After suns and moons, dews and wettings, thunders and fires, comes sabotag. Solvitur palumballando! Tilvido! Adie!

— Then, we explained, salve a tour, ambly andy, you possibly might be so by order?

— Forgive me, Shaun repeated from his liquid lipes, not what I wants to do a strike of work but it was condemned on me premitially by Hireark Books and Chiefoverseer Cooks in their Eusebian Concordant Homilies and there does be a power com- [p.410] ing over me that is put upon me from on high out of the book of breedings and so as it is becoming hairydittary I have of coerce nothing in view to look forward at unless it is Swann and beating the blindquarters out of my oldfellow’s orologium oloss olorium. A bad attack of maggot it feels like. ’Tis trope, custodian said. Almost might I say of myself, while keeping out of crime, I am now becoming about fed up be going circulating about them new hikler’s highways like them nameless souls, ercked and skorned and grizzild all over, till it’s rusty October in this bleak forest and was veribally complussed by thinking of the crater of some noted volcano or the Dublin river or the catchalot trouth subsidity as away out or to isolate i from my multiple Mes on the spits of Lumbage Island or bury meself, clogs, coolcellar and all, deep in my wineupon ponteen unless Morrissey’s colt could help me or the gander maybe at 49 as it is a tithe fish so it is, this pig’s stomach business, and where on dearth or in the miraculous meddle of this expending umniverse to turn since it came into my hands I am hopeless off course to be doing anything concerning.

— We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia.

— As, Shaun replied patly, with tootlepick tact too and a down of his dampers, to that I have the gumpower and, by the benison of Barbe, that is a lock to say with everything, my beloved.

— Would you mind telling us, Shaun honey, beg little big moreboy, we proposed to such a dear youth, where mostly are you able to work. Ah, you might! Whimper and we shall.

— Here! Shaun replied, while he was fondling one of his cowheel cuffs. There’s no sabbath for nomads and I mostly was able to walk, being too soft for work proper, sixty odd eilish mires a week between three masses a morn and two chaplets at eve. I am always telling those pedestriasts, my answerers, Top, Sid and Hucky, now (and it is a veriest throth as the thieves’ re- [p.411] scension) how it was forstold for me by brevet for my vacation in life while possessing stout legs to be disbarred after holy orders from unnecessary servile work of reckless walking of all sorts for the relics of my time for otherwise by my so douching I would get into a blame there where sieves fall out, Excelsior tips the best. Weak stop work stop walk stop whoak. Go thou this island, one housesleep there, then go thou other island, two housesleep there, then catch one nightmaze, then home to dearies. Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a foe till he’s rife and never get stuck to another man’s pfife. Amen, ptah! His hungry will be done! On the continent as in Eironesia. But believe me in my simplicity I am awful good, I believe, so I am, at the root of me, praised be right cheek Discipline! And I can now truthfully declaret before my Geity’s Pantokreator with my fleshfettered palms on the epizzles of the apossels that I do my reasonabler’s best to recite my grocery beans for mummy mit dummy mot muthar mat bonzar regular, genuflections enclosed. Hek domov muy, there thou beest on the hummock, ghee up, ye dog, for your daggily broth, etc., Happy Maria and Glorious Patrick, etc., etc. In fact, always, have I believe. Greedo! Her’s me hongue!

— And it is the fullsoot of a tarabred. Yet one minute’s observation, dear dogmestic Shaun, as we point out how you have while away painted our town a wearing greenridinghued.

— O murder mere, how did you hear? Shaun replied, smoiling the ily way up his lampsleeve (it just seemed the natural thing to do), so shy of light was he then. Well, so be it! The gloom hath rays, her lump is love. And I will confess to have, yes. Your diogneses is anonest man’s. Thrubedore I did! Inditty I did. All lay I did. Down with the Saozon ruze! And I am afraid it wouldn’t be my first coat’s wasting after striding on the vampire and blazing on the focoal. See! blazing on the focoal. As see! blazing upon the foe. Like the regular redshank I am. Impregnable as the mule himself. Somebody may perhaps hint at an aughter impression of I was wrong. No such a thing! You never made a more freudful mistake, excuse yourself! What’s pork to you means meat to [p.412] me while you behold how I be eld. But it is grandiose by my ways of thinking from the prophecies. New worlds for all! And they were scotographically arranged for gentlemen only by a scripchewer in whofoundland who finds he is a relative. And it was with my extravert davy. Like glue. Be through. Moyhard’s daynoight, tomthumb. Phwum!

— How mielodorous is thy bel chant, O songbird, and how exqueezit thine after draught! Buccinate in Emenia tuba insigni volumnitatis tuae. But do you mean, O phausdheen phewn, from Pontoffbellek till the Kisslemerched our ledan triz will be? we gathered substantively whether furniture would or verdure varnish?

— It is a confoundyous injective so to say, Shaun the fiery boy shouted, naturally incensed, as he shook the red pepper out of his auricles. And another time please confine your glaring intinuations to some other mordant body. What on the physiog of this furnaced planet would I be doing besides your verjuice? That is more than I can fix, for the teom bihan, anyway. So let I and you now kindly drop that, angryman! That’s not French pastry. You can take it from me. Understand me when I tell you (and I will ask you not to whisple, cry golden or quoth mecback) that under the past purcell’s office, so deeply deplored by my erstwhile elder friend, Miss Enders, poachmistress and gay receiver ever for in particular to the Scotic Poor Men’s Thousand Gallon Cow Society (I was thinking of her in sthore) allbethey blessed with twentytwo thousand sorters out of a biggest poss of twentytwo thousand, mine’s won, too much privet stationery and safty quipu was ate up larchly by those nettlesome goats out of pension greed. Colpa di Becco, buon apartita! Proceding, I will say it is also one of my avowal’s intentions, at some time pease Pod pluse murthers of gout (when I am not prepared to say) so apt as my pen is upt to scratch, to compound quite the makings of a verdigrease savingsbook in the form of a pair of capri sheep boxing gloves surrounding this matter of the Welsfusel mascoteers and their sindybuck that saved a city for my publickers, Nolaner and Browno, Nickil Hopstout, Christcross, so long as, [p.413] thanks to force of destiny, my selary as a paykelt is propaired, and there is a peg under me and there is a tum till me.

To the Very Honourable The Memory of Disgrace, the Most Noble, Sometime Sweepyard at the Service of the Writer. Salutem dicint. The just defunct Mrs Sanders who (the Loyd insure her!) I was shift and shuft too, with her shester Mrs Shunders, both mudical dauctors from highschoolhorse and aslyke as Easther’s leggs. She was the niceliest person of a wellteached nonparty woman that I ever acquired her letters, only too fat, used to babies and tottydean verbish this is her entertermentdags for she shuk the bottle and tuk the medascene all times a day. She was well under ninety, poor late Mrs, and had tastes of the poetics, me having stood the pilgarlick a fresh at sea when the moon also was standing in a corner of sweet Standerson my ski. P.L.M. Mevrouw von Andersen was her whogave me a muttonbrooch, stakkers for her begfirst party. Honour thy farmer and my litters. This, my tears, is my last will intesticle wrote off in the strutforit about their absent female assauciations which I, or perhaps any other person what squaton a toffette, have the honour to had upon their polite sophykussens in the real presence of devouted Mrs Grumby when her skin was exposed to the air. O what must the grief of my mund be for two little ptpt coolies worth twenty thousand quad herewitdnessed with both’s maddlemass wishes to Pepette for next match from their dearly beloved Roggers, M.D.D. O.D. May doubling drop of drooght! Writing.

— Hopsoloosely kidding you are totether with your cadenus and goat along nose how we shall complete that white paper. Two venusstas! Biggerstiff! Qweer but gaon! Be trouz and wholetrouz! Otherwise, frank Shaun, we pursued, what would be the autobiography of your softbodied fumiform?

— Hooraymost! None whomsoever, Shaun replied, Heavenly blank! (he had intentended and was peering now rather close to the paste of his rubiny winklering) though it ought to be more or less rawcawcaw romantical. By the wag, how is Mr Fry? All of it, I might say, in ex-voto, pay and perks and wooden half- [p.414] pence, some rhino, rhine, O joyoust rhine, was handled over spondaneously by me (and bundle end to my illwishers’ Miss Anders! she woor her wraith of ruins the night she lost I left!) in the ligname of Mr van Howten of Tredcastles, Clowntalkin, timbreman, among my prodigits nabobs and navious of every subscription entitled the Bois in the Boscoor, our evicted tenemants. What I say is (and I am noen roehorn or culkilt permit me to tell you, if uninformed), I never spont it. Nor have I the ghuest of innation on me the way to. It is my rule so. It went anyway like hot pottagebake. And this brings me to my fresh point. Quoniam, I am as plain as portable enveloped, inhowmuch, you will now parably receive, care of one of Mooseyeare Goonness’s registered andouterthus barrels. Quick take um whiffat andrainit. Now!

— So vi et! we responded. Song! Shaun, song! Have mood! Hold forth!

— I apologuise, Shaun began, but I would rather spinooze you one from the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup, fable one, feeble too. Let us here consider the casus, my dear little cousis (husstenhasstencaffincoffintussem-tossemdamandamnacosaghcusa-ghhobixhatouxpeswch-bechoscashlcarcarcaract) of the Ondt and the Gracehoper.

The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him), or, if not, he was always making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla to play pupa-pupa and pulicy-pulicy and langtennas and pushpygyddyum and to commence insects with him, there mouthparts to his orefice and his gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste, ameng the everlistings, behold a waspering pot. He would of curse melissciously, by his fore feelhers, flexors, contractors, depressors and extensors, lamely, harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me, till she was puce for shame and allso fourmish her in Spinner’s housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his cottage, which was cald fourmillierly Tingsomingenting, groped up. Or, if he was always striking up funny funereels with Besterfarther Zeuts, the Aged One, with all his wigeared corollas, albe- [p.415] dinous and oldbuoyant, inscythe his elytrical wormcasket and Dehlia and Peonia, his druping nymphs, bewheedling him, compound eyes on hornitosehead, and Auld Letty Plussiboots to scratch his cacumen and cackle his tramsitus, diva deborah (seven bolls of sapo, a lick of lime, two spurts of fussfor, threefurts of sulph, a shake o’shouker, doze grains of migniss and a mesfull of midcap pitchies. The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the whorl of the Boubou from Bourneum has thus come to taon!), and with tambarins and cantoridettes soturning around his eggshill rockcoach their dance McCaper in retrophoebia, beck from bulk, like fantastic disossed and jenny aprils, to the ra, the ra, the ra, the ra, langsome heels and langsome toesis, attended to by a mutter and doffer duffmatt baxingmotch and a myrmidins of pszozlers pszinging Satyr’s Caudledayed Nice and Hombly, Dombly Sod We Awhile but Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake! For if sciencium (what’s what) can mute uns nought, ’a thought, abought the Great Sommboddy within the Omniboss, perhops an artsaccord (hoot’s hoot) might sing ums tumtim abutt the Little Newbuddies that ring his panch. A high old tide for the barheated publics and the whole day as gratiis! Fudder and lighting for ally looty, any filly in a fog, for O’Cronione lags acrumbling in his sands but his sunsunsuns still tumble on. Erething above ground, as his Book of Breathings bed him, so as everwhy, sham or shunner, zeemliangly to kick time.

Grouscious me and scarab my sahul! What a bagateller it is! Libelulous! Inzanzarity! Pou! Pschla! Ptuh! What a zeit for the goths! vented the Ondt, who, not being a sommerfool, was thothfolly making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix. We shall not come to party at that lopp’s, he decided possibly, for he is not on our social list. Nor to Ba’s berial nether, thon sloghard, this oldeborre’s yaar ablong as there’s a khul on a khat. Nefersenless, when he had safely looked up his ovipository, he loftet hails and prayed: May he me no voida water! Seekit Hatup! May no he me tile pig shed on! Suckit Hotup! As broad as Beppy’s realm shall flourish my reign shall flourish! As high as [p.416] Heppy’s hevn shall flurrish my haine shall hurrish! Shall grow, shall flourish! Shall hurrish! Hummum.

The Ondt was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairmanlooking. Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the bimblebeaks, drikking with nautonects, bilking with durrydunglecks and horing after ladybirdies (ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon) he fell joust as sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo quant a churchprince, and wheer the midges to wend hemsylph or vosch to sirch for grub for his corapusse or to find a hospes, alick, he wist gnit! Bruko dry! fuko spint! Sultamont osa bare! And volomundo osi videvide! Nichtsnichtsundnichts! Not one pickopeck of muscowmoney to bag a tittlebits of beebread! Iomio! Iomio! Crick’s corbicule, which a plight! O moy Bog, he contrited with melanctholy. Meblizzered, him sluggered! I am heartily hungry!

He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the ternitary — not too dusty a cicada of neutriment for a chittinous chip so mitey. But when Chrysalmas was on the bare branches, off he went from Tingsomingenting. He took a round stroll and he took a stroll round and he took a round strollagain till the grillies in his head and the leivnits in his hair made him thought he had the Tossmania. Had he twicycled the sees of the deed and trestraversed their revermer? Was he come to hevre with his engiles or gone to hull with the poop? The June snows was flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes, millipeeds of it and myriopoods, and a lugly whizzling tournedos, the Boraborayellers, blohablasting tegolhuts up to tetties and ruching sleets off the coppeehouses, playing ragnowrock rignewreck, with an irri- [p.417] tant, penetrant, siphonopterous spuk. Grausssssss! Opr! Grausssssss! Opr!

The Gracehoper who, though blind as batflea, yet knew, not a leetle beetle, his good smetterling of entymology asped nissunitimost lous nor liceens but promptly tossed himself in the vico, phthin and phthir, on top of his buzzer, tezzily wondering wheer would his aluck alight or boss of both appease and the next time he makes the aquinatance of the Ondt after this they have met themselves, these mouschical umsummables, it shall be motylucky if he will beheld not a world of differents. Behailed His Gross the Ondt, prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his Papylonian babooshkees, smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o’monkynous and a confucion of minthe (for he was a conformed aceticist and aristotaller), as appi as a oneysucker or a baskerboy on the Libido, with Floh biting his leg thigh and Luse lugging his luff leg and Bieni bussing him under his bonnet and Vespatilla blowing cosy fond tutties up the allabroad length of the large of his smalls. As entomate as intimate could pinchably be. Emmet and demmet and be jiltses crazed and be jadeses whipt! schneezed the Gracehoper, aguepe with ptchjelasys and at his wittol’s indts, what have eyeforsight!

The Ondt, that true and perfect host, a spiter aspinne, was making the greatest spass a body could with his queens laceswinging for he was spizzing all over him like thingsumanything in formicolation, boundlessly blissfilled in an allallahbath of houris. He was ameising himself hugely at crabround and marypose, chasing Floh out of charity and tickling Luse, I hope too, and tackling Bienie, faith, as well, and jucking Vespatilla jukely by the chimiche. Never did Dorsan from Dunshanagan dance it with more devilry! The veripatetic imago of the impossible Gracehoper on his odderkop in the myre, after his thrice ephemeral journeeys, sans mantis ne shooshooe, featherweighed animule, actually and presumptuably sinctifying chronic’s despair, was sufficiently and probably coocoo much for his chorous [p.418] of gravitates. Let him be Artalone the Weeps with his parisites peeling off him I’ll be Highfee the Crackasider. Flunkey Footle furloughed foul, writing off his phoney, but Conte Carme makes the melody that mints the money. Ad majorem l.s.d.! Divi gloriam. A darkener of the threshold. Haru? Orimis, capsizer of his antboat, sekketh rede from Evil-it-is, lord of loaves in Amongded. Be it! So be it! Thou-who-thou-art, the fleet-as-spindhrift, impfang thee of mine wideheight. Haru!

The thing pleased him andt, and andt,

He larved ond he larved on he merd such a nauses

The Gracehoper feared he would mixplace his fauces.

I forgive you, grondt Ondt, said the Gracehoper, weeping,

For their sukes of the sakes you are safe in whose keeping.

Teach Floh and Luse polkas, show Bienie where’s sweet

And be sure Vespatilla fines fat ones to heat.

As I once played the piper I must now pay the count

So saida to Moyhammlet and marhaba to your Mount!

Let who likes lump above so what flies be a full ’un;

I could not feel moregruggy if this was prompollen.

I pick up your reproof, the horsegift of a friend,

For the prize of your save is the price of my spend.

Can castwhores pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake ’em

Or Culex feel etchy if Pulex don’t wake him?

A locus to loue, a term it t’embarass,

These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris.

Has Aquileone nort winged to go syf

Since the Gwyfyn we were in his farrest drewbryf

And that Accident Man not beseeked where his story ends

Since longsephyring sighs sought heartseast for their orience?

We are Wastenot with Want, precondamned, two and true,

Till Nolans go volants and Bruneyes come blue.

Ere those gidflirts now gadding you quit your mocks for my gropes

An extense must impull, an elapse must elopes,

Of my tectucs takestock, tinktact, and ail’s weal;

As I view by your farlook hale yourself to my heal.

[p.419] Partiprise my thinwhins whiles my blink points unbroken on

Your whole’s whercabroads with Tout’s trightyright token on.

My in risible universe youdly haud find

Sulch oxtrabeeforeness meat soveal behind.

Your feats end enormous, your volumes immense,

(May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!),

Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?

In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.

— Now? How good you are in explosition! How farflung is your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary! Qui vive sparanto qua muore contanto. O foibler, O flip, you’ve that wandervogl wail withyin! It falls easily upon the earopen and goes down the friskly shortiest like treacling tumtim with its tingtingtaggle. The blarneyest blather in all Corneywall! But could you, of course, decent Lettrechaun, we knew (to change your name of not your nation) while still in the barrel, read the strangewrote anaglyptics of those shemletters patent for His Christian’s Em?

— Greek! Hand it to me! Shaun replied, plosively pointing to the cinnamon quistoquill behind his acoustrolobe. I’m as afterdusk nobly Roman as pope and water could christen me. Look at that for a ridingpin! I am, thing Sing Larynx, letter potent to play the sem backwards like Oscan wild or in shunt Persse transluding from the Otherman or off the Toptic or anything off the types of my finklers in the draught or with buttles, with my oyes thickshut and all. But, hellas, it is harrobrew bad on the corns and callouses. As far as that goes I associate myself with your remark just now from theodicy re’furloined notepaper and quite agree in your prescriptions for indeed I am, pay Gay, in juxtaposition to say it is not a nice production. It is a pinch of scribble, not wortha bottle of cabbis. Overdrawn! Puffedly offal tosh! Besides its auctionable, all about crime and libel! Nothing beyond clerical horrors et omnibus to be entered for the foreign as secondclass matter. The fuellest filth ever fired since Charley Lucan’s. [p.420] Flummery is what I would call it if you were to ask me to put it on a single dimension what pronounced opinion I might possibly orally have about them bagses of trash which the mother and Mr Unmentionable (O breed not his same!) has reduced to writing without making news out of my sootynemm. When she slipped under her couchman. And where he made a cat with a peep. How they wore two madges on the makewater. And why there were treefellers in the shrubrubs. Then he hawks his handmud figgers from Francie to Fritzie down in the kookin. Phiz is me mother and Hair’s me father. Bauv Betty Famm and Pig Pig Pike. Their livetree (may it flourish!) by their ecotaph (let it stayne!). With balsinbal bimbies swarming tiltop. Comme bien, Comme bien! Feefeel! Feefeel! And the Dutches dyin loffin at his pon peck de Barec. And all the mound reared. Till he wot not wot to begin he should. An infant sailing eggshells on the floor of a wet day would have more sabby.

Letter, carried of Shaun, son of Hek, written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun. Initialled. Gee. Gone. 29 Hardware Saint. Lendet till Laonum. Baile-Atha-Cliath. 31 Jan. 1132 a.d. Here Commerces Enville. Tried Apposite House. 13 Fitzgibbets. Loco. Dangerous. Tax 9d. B.L. Guineys, esqueer. L.B. Not known at 1132 a. 12 Norse Richmound. Nave unlodgeable. Loved noa’s dress. Sinned, Jetty Pierrse. Noon sick parson. 92 Windsewer. Ave. No such no. Vale. Finn’s Hot. Exbelled from 1014 d. Pulldown. Fearview. Opened by Miss Take. 965 nighumpledan sextiffits. Shout at Site. Roofloss. Fit Dunlop and Be Satisfied. Mr. Domnall O’Domnally. Q.V. 8 Royal Terrors. None so strait. Shutter up. Dining with the Danes. Removed to Philip’s Burke. At sea. D.E.D. Place scent on. Clontalk. Father Jacob, Rice Factor. 3 Castlewoos. P.V. Arrusted. J.P. Converted to Hospitalism. Ere the March past of Civilisation. Once Bank of Ireland’s. Return to City Arms. 2 Milchbroke. Wrongly spilled. Traumcondraws. Now Bunk of England’s. Drowned in the Laffey. Here. The Reverest Adam Foundlitter. Shown geshotten. 7 Streetpetres. Since Cabranke. Seized of the Crownd. Well, Sir Arthur. Buy [p.421] Patersen’s Matches. Unto his promisk hands. Blown up last Lemmas by Orchid Lodge. Search Unclaimed Male. House Condamned by Ediles. Back in Few Minutes. Closet for Repeers. 60 Shellburn. Key at Kate’s. Kiss. Isaac’s Butt, Poor Man. Dalicious arson. Caught. Missing. Justiciated. Kainly forewarred. Abraham Badly’s King, Park Bogey. Salved. All reddy berried. Hollow and eavy. Desert it. Overwayed. Understrumped. Back to the P.O. Kaer of. Ownes owe M.O. Too Let. To Be Soiled. Cohabited by Unfortunates. Lost all Licence. His Bouf Toe is Frozen Over. X, Y and Z, Ltd, Destinied Tears. A.B, ab, Sender. Boston (Mass). 31 Jun. 13, 12. P.D. Razed. Lawyered. Vacant. Mined. Here’s the Bayleaffs. Step out to Hall out of that, Ereweaker, with your Bloody Big Bristol. Bung. Stop. Bung. Stop. Cumm Bumm. Stop. Came Baked to Auld Aireen. Stop.

— Kind Shaun, we all requested, much as we hate to say it, but since you rose to the use of money have you not, without suggesting for an instant, millions of moods used up slanguage tun times as words as the penmarks used out in sinscript with such hesitancy by your cerebrated brother — excuse me not mentioningahem?

— CelebrAted! Shaun replied under the sheltar of his broguish, vigorously rubbing his magic lantern to a glow of fullconsciousness. HeCitEncy! Your words grates on my ares. Notorious I rather would feel inclined to myself in the first place to describe Mr O’Shem the Draper with before letter as should I be accentually called upon for a dieoguinnsis to pass my opinions, properly spewing, into impulsory irelitz. But I would not care to be so unfruitful to my own part as to swear for the moment positively as to the views of Denmark. No, sah! But let me say my every belief before my high Gee is that I much doubt of it. I’ve no room for that fellow on my fagroaster, I just can’t. As I hourly learn from Rooters and Havers through Gilligan’s maypoles in a nice pathetic notice he, the pixillated doodler, is on his last with illegible clergimanths boasting always of his ruddy complexious! She, the mammy far, was put up to it by him, the iniquity that ought to be depraved of his libertins to be silenced, sackclothed [p.422] and suspended, and placed in irons into some drapyery institution off the antipopees for wordsharping only if he was klanver enough to pass the panel fleischcurers and the fieldpost censor. Gach! For that is a fullblown fact and well celibated before the four divorce courts and all the King’s paunches, how he has the solitary from seeing Scotch snakes and has a lowsense for the production of consumption and dalickey cyphalos on his brach premises where he can purge his contempt and dejeunerate into a skillyton be thinking himself to death. Rot him! Flannelfeet! Flattyro! I will describe you in a word. Thou. (I beg your pardon.) Homo! Then putting his bedfellow on me! (like into mike and nick onto post). The criniman: I’ll give it to him for that! Making the lobbard change hisstops, as we say in the long book! Is he on whosekeeping or are my! Obnoximost posthumust! With his unique hornbook and his prince of the apauper’s pride, blundering all over the two worlds! If he waits till I buy him a mosselman’s present! Ho’s nos halfcousin of mine, pigdish! Nor wants to! I’d famish with the cuistha first. Aham!

— May we petition you, Shaun illustrious, then, to put his prentis’ pride in your aproper’s purse and to unravel in your own sweet way with words of style to your very and most obsequient, we suggested, with yet an esiop’s foible, as to how?

— Well it is partly my own, isn’t it? and you may, ought and welcome, Shaun replied, taking at the same time, as his hunger got the bitter of him, a hearty bite out of the honeycomb of his Braham and Melosedible hat, tryone, tryon and triune. Ann wunkum. Sure, I thunkum you knew all about that, honorey causes, through thelemontary channels long agum. Sure, that is as old as the Baden bees of Saint Dominoc’s and as commonpleas now to allus pueblows and bunkum as Nelson his trifulgurayous pillar. However. Let me see, do. Beerman’s bluff was what begun it, Old Knoll and his borrowing! And then the liliens of the veldt, Nancy Nickies and Folletta Lajambe! Then mem and hem and the jaquejack. All about Wucherer and righting his name for him. I regret to announce, after laying out his litterery bed, for two days she kept squealing down for noisy priors and bawling out to her [p.423] jameymock farceson in Shemish like a mouther of the incas with a garcielasso huw Ananymus pinched her tights and about the Balt with the markshaire parawag and his loyal divorces, when he feraxiously shed ovas in Alemaney, tse tse, all the tell of the tud with the bourighevisien backclack, and him, the cribibber like an ambitrickster, aspiring like the decan’s, fast aslooped in the intrance to his polthronechair with his sixth finger between his catseye and the index, making his pillgrimace of Childe Horrid, engrossing to his ganderpan what the idioglossary he invented under hicks hyssop! Hock! Ickick gav him that toock, imitator! And it was entirely theck latter to blame. Does he drink because I am sorely there shall be no more Kates and Nells. If you see him it took place there. It was given meeck, thank the Bench, to assist at the whole thing byck special chancery licence. As often as I think of that unbloody housewarmer, Shem Skrivenitch, always cutting my prhose to please his phrase, bogorror, I declare I get the jawache! Be me punting his reflection he’d begin his beogrefright in muddyass ribalds. Digteter! Grundtsagar! Swop beef! You know he’s peculiar, that eggschicker, with the smell of old woman off him, to suck nothing of his switchedupes. M.D. made his ante mortem for him. He was grey at three, like sygnus the swan, when he made his boo to the public and barnacled up to the eyes when he repented after seven. The alum that winters on his top is the stale of the staun that will soar when he stambles till that hag of the coombe rapes the pad off his lock. He was down with the whooping laugh at the age of the loss of reason the whopping first time he prediseased me. He’s weird, I tell you, and middayevil down to his vegetable soul. Never mind his falls feet and his tanbark complexion. That’s why he was forbidden tomate and was warmed off the ricecourse of marrimoney, under the Helpless Corpses Enactment. I’m not at all surprised the saint kicked him whereby the sum taken Berkeley showed the reason genrously. Negas, negasti — negertop, negertoe, negertoby, negrunter! Then he was pusched out of Thingamuddy’s school by Miss Garterd, for itching. Then he caught the europicolas and went into the society of jewses. With Bro Cahlls and Fran Czeschs [p.424] and Bruda Pszths and Brat Slavos. One temp when he foiled to be killed, the freak wanted to put his bilingual head intentionally through the Ikish Tames and go and join the clericy as a demonican skyterrier. Throwing dust in the eyes of the Hooley Fermers! He used to be avowdeed as he ought to be vitandist. For onced I squeaked by twyst I’ll squelch him. Then he went to Cecilia’s treat on his solo to pick up Galen. Asbestopoulos! Inkupot! He has encaust in the blood. Shim! I have the outmost contempt for. Prost bitten! Conshy! Tiberia is waiting on you, arestocrank! Chaka a seagull ticket at Gattabuia and Gabbiano’s! Go o’er the sea, haythen, from me and leave your libber to TCD. Your puddin is cooked! You’re served, cram ye! Fatefully yaourth . . . Ex. Ex. Ex. Ex.

— But for what, thrice truthful teller, Shaun of grace? weakly we went on to ask now of the gracious one. Vouchsafe to say. You will now, goodness, won’t you? Why?

— For his root language, if you ask me whys, Shaun replied, as he blessed himself devotionally like a crawsbomb, making act of oblivion, footinmouther! (what the thickuns else?) which he picksticked into his lettruce invrention. Ullhodturdenweirmud-gaardgringnirurdrmolnirfen-rirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerin-surtkrinmgernrackinarockar! Thor’s for yo!

— The hundredlettered name again, last word of perfect language. But you could come near it, we do suppose, strong Shaun O’, we foresupposed. How?

— Peax! Peax! Shaun replied in vealar penultimatum. ’Tis pebils before Sweeney’s as he swigged a slug of Jon Jacobsen from his treestem sucker cane. Mildbut likesome! I might as well be talking to the four waves till tibbes grey eves and the rests asleep. Frost! Nope! No one in his seven senses could as I have before said, only you missed my drift, for it’s being incendiary. Every dimmed letter in it is a copy and not a few of the silbils and wholly words I can show you in my Kingdom of Heaven. The lowquacity of him! With his threestar monothong! Thaw! The last word in stolentelling! And what’s more rightdown lowbrown schisthematic robblemint! Yes. As he was rising [p.425] my lather. Like you. And as I was plucking his goosybone. Like yea. He store the tale of me shur. Like yup. How’s that for Shemese?

— Still in a way, not to flatter you, we fancy you that you are so strikingly brainy and well letterread in yourshelves as ever were the Shamous Shamonous, Limited, could use worse of yourself, ingenious Shaun, we still so fancied, if only you would take your time so and the trouble of so doing it. Upu now!

— Undoubtedly but that is show, Shaun replied, the muttermelk of his blood donor beginning to work, and while innocent of disseminating the foul emanation, it would be a fall day I could not, sole, so you can keep your space and by the power of blurry wards I am loyable to do it (I am convicted of it!) any time ever I liked (bet ye fippence off me boot allowance!) with the allergrossest transfusiasm as, you see, while I can soroquise the Siamanish better than most, it is an openear secret, be it said, how I am extremely ingenuous at the clerking even with my badily left and, arrah go braz, I’d pinsel it with immenuensoes as easy as I’d perorate a chickerow of beans for the price of two maricles and my trifolium librotto, the authordux Book of Lief, would, if given to daylight, (I hold a most incredible faith about it) far exceed what that bogus bolshy of a shame, my soamheis brother, Gaoy Fecks, is conversant with in audible black and prink. Outragedy of poetscalds! Acomedy of letters! I have them all, tame, deep and harried, in my mine’s I. And one of these fine days, man dear, when the mood is on me, that I may willhap cut my throat with my tongue tonight but I will be ormuzd moved to take potlood and introvent it Paatryk just like a work of merit, mark my words and append to my mark twang, that will open your pucktricker’s ops for you, broather brooher, only for, as a papst and an immature and a nayophight and a spaciaman spaciosum and a hundred and eleven other things, I would never for anything take so much trouble of such doing. And why so? Because I am altogether a chap too fly and hairyman for to infradig the like of that ultravirulence. And by all I hold sacred on earth clouds and in heaven I swear to you on my piop [p.426] and oath by the awe of Shaun (and that’s a howl of a name!) that I will commission to the flames any incendiarist whosoever or ahriman howsoclever who would endeavour to set ever annyma roner moother of mine on fire. Rock me julie but I will soho!

And, with that crickcrackcruck of his threelungged squool from which grief had usupped every smile, big hottempered husky fusky krenfy strenfy pugiliser, such as he was, he virtually broke down on the mooherhead, getting quite jerry over her, overpowered by himself with the love of the tearsilver that he twined through her hair for, sure, he was the soft semplgawn slob of the world with a heart like Montgomery’s in his showchest and harvey loads of feeling in him and as innocent and undesignful as the freshfallen calef. Still, grossly unselfish in sickself, he dished allarmes away and laughed it off with a wipe at his pudgies and a gulp apologetic, healing his tare be the smeyle of his oye, oogling around. Him belly no belong sollow mole pigeon. Ally bully. Fu Li’s gulpa. Mind you, now, that he was in the dumpest of earnest orthough him jawr war hoo hleepy hor halk urthing hurther. Moe like that only he stopped short in looking up up upfrom his tide shackled wrists through the ghost of an ocean’s, the wieds of pansiful heathvens of joepeter’s gaseytotum as they are telling not but were and will be, all told, scruting foreback into the fargoneahead to feel out what age in years tropical, ecclesiastic, civil or sidereal he might find by the sirious pointstand of Charley’s Wain (what betune the spheres sledding along the lacteal and the mansions of the blest turning on old times) as erewhile had he craved of thus, the dreamskhwindel necklassoed him, his thumbs fell into his fists and, lusosing the harmonical balance of his ballbearing extremities, by the holy kettle, like a flask of lightning over he careened (O the sons of the fathers!) by the mightyfine weight of his barrel (all that prevented the happering of who if not the asterisks betwink themselves shall ever?) and, as the wisest postlude course he could playact, collaspsed in ensemble and rolled buoyantly backwards in less than a twinkling via Rattigan’s corner out of farther earshot with his highly curious mode of slipashod motion, surefoot, sorefoot, slickfoot, [p.427] slackfoot, linkman laizurely, lampman loungey, and by Killesther’s lapes and falls, with corks, staves and treeleaves and more bubbles to his keelrow a fairish and easy way enough as the town cow cries behind the times in the direction of Mac Auliffe’s, the crucethouse, Open the Door Softly, down in the valley before he was really uprighted ere in a dip of the downs (uila!) he spoorlessly disappaled and vanesshed, like a popo down a papa, from circular circulatio. Ah, mean!

Gaogaogaone! Tapaa!

And the stellas were shinings. And the earthnight strewed aromatose. His pibrook creppt mong the donkness. A reek was waft on the luftstream. He was ours, all fragrance. And we were his for a lifetime. O dulcid dreamings languidous! Taboccoo!

It was sharming! But sharmeng!

And the lamp went out as it couldn’t glow on burning, yep, the lmp wnt out for it couldn’t stay alight.

Well, (how dire do we thee hours when thylike fades!) all’s dall and youllow and it is to bedowern that thou art passing hence, mine bruder, able Shaun, with a twhisking of the robe, ere the morning of light calms our hardest throes, beyond cods’ cradle and porpoise plain, from carnal relations undfamiliar faces, to the inds of Tuskland where the oliphants scrum till the ousts of Amiracles where the toll stories grow proudest, more is the pity, but for all your deeds of goodness you were soo ooft and for ever doing, manomano and myriamilia even to mulimuli, as our humbler classes, whose virtue is humility, can tell, it is hardly we in the country of the old, Sean Moy, can part you for, oleypoe, you were the walking saint, you were, tootoo too stayer, the graced of gods and pittites and the salus of the wake. Countenance whose disparition afflictedly fond Fuinn feels. Winner of the gamings, primed at the studience, propredicted from the storybouts, the choice of ages wise! Spickspookspokesman of our specturesque silentiousness! Musha, beminded of us out there in Cockpit, poor twelve o’clock scholars, sometime or other anywhen you think the time. Wisha, becoming back to us way home in Biddyhouse one way or either anywhere we miss your smile. [p.428] Palmwine breadfruit sweetmeat milksoup! Suasusupo! However! Our people here in Samoanesia will not be after forgetting you and the elders luking and marking the jornies, chalkin up drizzle in drizzle out on the four bare mats. How you would be thinking in your thoughts how the deepings did it all begin and how you would be scrimmaging through your scruples to collar a hold of an imperfection being committled. Sireland calls you. Mery Loye is saling moonlike. And Slyly mamourneen’s ladymaid at Gladshouse Lodge. Turn your coat, strong character, and tarry among us down the vale, yougander, only once more! And may the mosse of prosperousness gather you rolling home! May foggy dews bediamondise your hooprings! May the fireplug of filiality reinsure your bunghole! May the barleywind behind glow luck to your bathershins! ’Tis well we know you were loth to leave us, winding your hobbledehorn, right royal post, but, aruah sure, pulse of our slumber, dreambookpage, by the grace of Votre Dame, when the natural morning of your nocturne blankmerges into the national morning of golden sunup and Don Leary gets his own back from old grog Georges Quartos as that goodship the Jonnyjoys takes the wind from waterloogged Erin’s king, you will shiff across the Moylendsea and round up in your own escapology some canonisator’s day or other, sack on back, alack! digging snow, (not so?) like the good man you are, with your picture pockets turned knockside out in the rake of the rain for fresh remittances and from that till this in any case, timus tenant, may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercops.

 ® 

[p.429] Jaunty Jaun, as I was shortly before that made aware, next halted to fetch a breath, the first cothurminous leg of his nightstride being pulled through, and to loosen (let God’s son now be looking down on the poor preambler!) both of his bruised brogues that were plainly made a good bit before his hosen were, at the weir by Lazar’s Walk (for far and wide, as large as he was lively, was he noted for his humane treatment of any kind of abused footgear), a matter of maybe nine score or so barrelhours distance off as truly he merited to do. He was there, you could planemetrically see, when I took a closer look at him, that was to say, (gracious helpings, at this rate of growing our cotted child of yestereve will soon fill space and burst in systems, so speeds the instant!) amply altered for the brighter, though still the graven image of his squarer self as he was used to be, perspiring but happy notwithstanding his foot was still asleep on him, the way he thought, by the holy januarious, he had a bullock’s hoof in his buskin, with his halluxes so splendid, through Ireland untranscended, bigmouthed poesther, propped up, restant, against a butterblond warden of the peace, one comestabulish Sigurdsen, (and where a better than such exsearfaceman to rest from roving the laddyown he bootblacked?) who, buried upright like the Osbornes, kozydozy, had tumbled slumbersomely on sleep at night duty behind the curing station, equilebriated amid the embracings of a monopolized bottle.

[p.430] Now, there were as many as twentynine hedge daughters out of Benent Saint Berched’s national nightschool (for they seemed to remember how it was still a once-upon-a-four year) learning their antemeridian lesson of life, under its tree, against its warning, beseated, as they were, upon the brinkspondy, attracted to the rarerust sight of the first human yellowstone landmark (the bear, the boer, the king of all boors, sir Humphrey his knave we met on the moors!) while they paddled away, keeping time magnetically with their eight and fifty pedalettes, playing foolufool jouay allo misto posto, O so jaonickally, all barely in their typtap teens, describing a charming dactylogram of nocturnes though repelled by the snores of the log who looked stuck to the sod as ever and oft, when liquefied, (vil!) he murmoaned abasourdly in his Dutchener’s native, visibly unmoved, over his treasure trove for the crown: Dotter dead bedstead mean diggy smuggy flasky!

Jaun (after he had in the first place doffed a hat with a reinforced crown and bowed to all the others in that chorus of praise of goodwill girls on their best beehiviour who all they were girls all rushing sowarmly for the post as buzzy as sie could bie to read his kisshands, kittering all about, rushing and making a tremendous girlsfuss over him pellmale, their jeune premier and his rosyposy smile, mussing his frizzy hair and the golliwog curls of him, all, but that one; Finfria’s fairest, done in loveletters like a trayful of cloudberry tartlets (ain’t they fine, mighty, mighty fine and honoured?) and smilingly smelling, pair and pair about, broad by bread and slender to slimmer, the nice perfumios that came cunvy peeling off him (nice!) which was angelic simply, savouring of wild thyme and parsley jumbled with breadcrumbs (O nice!) and feeling his full fat pouch for him so tactily and jingaling his jellybags for, though he looked a young chapplie of sixtine, they could frole by his manhood that he was just the killingest ladykiller all by kindness, now you, Jaun, asking kindlily (hillo, missies!) after their howareyous at all with those of their dollybegs (and where’s Agatha’s lamb? and how are Bernadetta’s columbillas? and Juliennaw’s tubberbunnies? and Eulalina’s [p.431] tuggerfunnies?) he next went on (finefeelingfit!) to drop a few stray remarks anent their personal appearances and the contrary tastes displayed in their tight kittycasques and their smart frickyfrockies, asking coy one after sloy one had she read Irish legginds and gently reproving one that the ham of her hom could be seen below her hem and whispering another aside, as lavariant, that the hook of her hum was open a bittock at her back to have a sideeye to that, hom, (and all of course just to fill up a form out of pure human kindness and in a sprite of fun) for Jaun, by the way, was by the way of becoming (I think, I hope he was) the most purely human being that ever was called man, loving all up and down the whole creation from Sampson’s tyke to Jones’s sprat and from the King of all Wrenns down to infuseries) Jaun, after those few prelimbs made out through his eroscope the apparition of his fond sister Izzy for he knowed his love by her waves of splabashing and she showed him proof by her way of blabushing nor could he forget her so tarnelly easy as all that since he was brotherbesides her benedict godfather and heaven knows he thought the world and his life of her sweet heart could buy, (brao!) poor, good, true, Jaun!

— Sister dearest, Jaun delivered himself with express cordiality, marked by clearance of diction and general delivery, as he began to take leave of his scolastica at once so as to gain time with deep affection, we honestly believe you sorely will miss us the moment we exit yet we feel as a martyr to the dischurch of all duty that it is about time, by Great Harry, we would shove off to stray on our long last journey and not be the load on ye. This is the gross proceeds of your teachings in which we were raised, you, sis, that used to write to us the exceeding nice letters for presentation and would be telling us anun (full well do we wont to recall to mind) thy oldworld tales of homespinning and derringdo and dieobscure and daddyho, these tales which reliterately whisked off our heart so narrated by thou, gesweest, to perfection, our pet pupil of the whole rhythmetic class and the mainsay of our erigenal house, the time we younkers twain were fairly tossing ourselves (O Phoebus! O Pollux!) in bed, having [p.432] been laid up with Castor’s oil on the Parrish’s syrup (the night we will remember) for to share our hard suite of affections with thee.

I rise, O fair assemblage! Andcommincio. Now then, after this introit of exordium, my galaxy girls, quiproquo of directions to henservants I was asking his advice on the strict T.T. from Father Mike, P.P., my orational dominican and confessor doctor, C.C.D.D. (buy the birds, he was saying as he yerked me under the ribs sermon in an offrand way and confidence petween peas like ourselves in soandso many nuncupiscent words about how he had been confarreating teat-a-teat with two viragos intactas about what an awful life he led, poorish priced, uttering mass for a coppall of geldings and what a lawful day it was, there and then, for a consommation with an effusion and how, by all the manny larries ate pignatties, how, hell in tunnels, he’d marry me any old buckling time as flying quick as he’d look at me) and I am giving youth now again in words of style byaway of offertory hisand mikeadvice, an it place the person, as ere he retook him to his cure, those verbs he said to me. From above. The most eminent bishop titular of Dubloonik to all his purtybusses in Dellabelliney. Comeallyedimseldamsels, siddle down and lissle all! Follow me close! Keep me in view! Understeady me saries! Which is to all practising massoeurses from a preaching freer and be a gentleman without a duster before a parlourmade without a spitch. Now. During our brief apsence from this furtive feugtig season adhere to as many as probable of the ten commandments touching purgations and indulgences and in the long run they will prove for your better guidance along your path of right of way. Where the lisieuse are we and what’s the first sing to be sung? Is it rubrics, mandarimus, pasqualines, or verdidads is in it, or the bruiselivid indecores of estreme voyoulence and, for the lover of lithurgy, bekant or besant, where’s the fate’s to be wished for? Several sindays after whatsintime. I’ll sack that sick server the minute I bless him. That’s the mokst I can do for his grapce. Economy of movement, axe why said. I’ve a hopesome’s choice if I chouse of all the sinkts in the colander. From the com- [p.433] mon for ignitious Purpalume to the proper of Francisco Ultramare, last of scorchers, third of snows, in terrorgammons howdydos. Here she’s, is a bell, that’s wares in heaven, virginwhite, Undetrigesima, vikissy manonna. Doremon’s! The same or similar to be kindly observed within the affianced dietcess of Gay O’Toole and Gloamy Gwenn du Lake (Danish spoken!) from Manducare Monday up till farrier’s siesta in china dominos. Words taken in triumph, my sweet assistance, from the sufferant pen of our jocosus inkerman militant of the reed behind the ear.

Never miss your lostsomewhere mass for the couple in Myles you butrose to brideworship. Never hate mere pork which is bad for your knife of a good friday. Never let a hog of the howth trample underfoot your linen of Killiney. Never play lady’s game for the Lord’s stake. Never lose your heart away till you win his diamond back. Make a strong point of never kicking up your rumpus over the scroll end of sofas in the Dar Bey Coll Cafeteria by tootling risky apropos songs at commercial travellers’ smokers for their Columbian nights entertainments the like of White limbs they never stop teasing or Minxy was a Manxmaid when Murry wor a Man. And, by the bun, is it you goes bisbuiting His Esaus and Cos and then throws them bag in the box? Why the tin’s nearly empty. First thou shalt not smile. Twice thou shalt not love. Lust, thou shalt not commix idolatry. Hip confiners help compunction. Never park your brief stays in the men’s convenience. Never clean your buttoncups with your dirty pair of sassers. Never ask his first person where’s your quickest cut to our last place. Never let the promising hand usemake free of your oncemaid sacral. The soft side of the axe! A coil of cord, a colleen coy, a blush on a bush turned first man’s laughter into wailful moither. O foolish cuppled! Ah, dice’s error! Never dip in the ern while you’ve browsers on your suite. Never slip the silver key through your gate of golden age. Collide with man, collude with money. Ere you sail foreget my prize. Where you truss be circumspicious and look before you leak, dears. Never christen medlard apples till a swithin is in sight. Wet your thistle where a weed is and you’ll rue it, despyneedis. Especially beware [p.434] please of being at a party to any demoralizing home life. That saps a chap. Keep cool faith in the firm, have warm hoep in the house and begin frem athome to be chary of charity. Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager’s virtue. Give back those stolen kisses; restaure those allcotten glooves. Recollect the yella perals that all too often beset green gerils, Rhidarhoda and Daradora, once they gethobbyhorsical, playing breeches parts for Bessy Sudlow in fleshcoloured pantos instead of earthing down in the coalhole trying to boil the big gun’s dinner. Leg-before-Wicked lags-behind-Wall where here Mr Whicker whacked a great fall. Femorafamilla feeled it a candleliked but Hayes, Conyngham and Erobinson sware it’s an egg. Forglim mick aye! Stay, forestand and tillgive it! Remember the biter’s bitters I shed the vigil I buried our Harlotte Quai from poor Mrs Mangain’s of Britain Court on the feast of Marie Maudlin. Ah, who would wipe her weeper dry and lead her to the halter? Sold in her heyday, laid in the straw, bought for one puny petunia. Moral: if you can’t point a lily get to henna out of here! Put your swell foot foremost on foulardy pneumonia shertwaists, irriconcilible with true fiminin risirvition and ribbons of lace, limenick’s disgrace. Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied together, the merest and transparent washingtones to make Languid Lola’s lingery longer? Scenta Clauthes stiffstuffs your hose and heartsies full of temptiness. Vanity flee and Verity fear! Diobell! Whalebones and buskbutts may hurt you (thwackaway thwuck!) but never lay bare your breast secret (dickette’s place!) to joy a Jonas in the Dolphin’s Barncar with your meetual fan, Doveyed Covetfilles, comepulsing paynattention spasms between the averthisment for Ulikah’s wine and a pair of pulldoors of the old cupiosity shape. There you’ll fix your eyes darkled on the autocart of the bringfast cable but here till youre martimorphysed please sit still face to face. For if the shorth of your skorth falls down to his knees pray how wrong will he look till he rises? Not before Gravesend is commuted. But now reappears Autist Algy, the pulcherman and would-do performer, oleas Mr Smuth, stated by the vice crusaders to be well [p.435] known to all the dallytaunties in and near the ciudad of Buellas Arias, taking you to the playguehouse to see the Smirching of Venus and asking with whispered offers in a very low bearded voice, with a nice little tiny manner and in a very nice little tony way, won’t you be an artist’s moral and pose in your nudies as a local esthetic before voluble old masters, introducing you, left to right the party comprises, to hogarths like Bottisilly and Titteretto and Vergognese and Coraggio with their extrahand Mazzaccio, plus the usual bilker’s dozen of dowdycameramen. And the volses of lewd Buylan, for innocence! And the phyllisophies of Bussup Bulkeley. O, the frecklessness of the giddies nouveautays! There’s many’s the icepolled globetopper is haunted by the hottest spot under his equator like Ramrod, the meaty hunter, always jaeger for a thrust. The back beautiful, the undraped divine! And Suzy’s Moedl’s with their Blue Danuboyes! All blah! Viper’s vapid vilest! Put off the old man at the very font and get right on with the nutty sparker round the back. Slip your oval out of touch and let the paravis be your goal. Up leather, Prunella, convert your try! Stick wicks in your earshells when you hear the prompter’s voice. Look on a boa in his beauty and you’ll never more wear your strawberry leaves. Rely on the relic. What bondman ever you bind on earth I’ll be bound ’twas combined in hemel. Keep airly hores and the worm is yores. Dress the pussy for her nighty and follow her piggytails up their way to Winkyland. See little poupeep she’s firsht ashleep. After having sat your poetries and you know what happens when chine throws over jupan. Go to doss with the poulterer, you understand, and shake up with the milchmand. The Sully van vultures are on the prowl. And the hailies fingringmaries. Tobaccos tabu and toboggan’s a back seat. Secret satieties and onanymous letters make the great unwatched as bad as their betters. Don’t on any account acquire a paunchon for that alltoocommon fagbutt habit of frequenting and chumming together with the braces of couples in Mr Tunnelly’s hallways (smash it) wriggling with lowcusses and cockchafers and vamps and rodants, with the end to commit acts of [p.436] interstipital indecency as between twineties and tapegarters, fingerpats on fondlepets, under the couvrefeu act. It’s the thin end; wedge your steps! Your high powered hefty hoyden thinks nothing of ramping through a whole suite of smokeless husbands. Three minutes I’m counting you. Woooooon. No triching now! Give me that when I tell you! Ragazza ladra.! And is that any place to be smuggling his madam’s apples up? Deceitful jade. Gee wedge! Begor, I like the way they’re half cooked. Hold, flay, grill, fire that laney feeling for kosenkissing disgenically within the proscribed limits like Population Peg on a hint or twim clandestinely does be doing to Temptation Tom, atkings questions in barely and snakking svarewords like a nursemagd. While there’s men-a’war on the say there’ll be loves-o’women on the do. Love through the usual channels, cisternbrothelly, when properly disinfected and taken neat in the generable way upon retiring to roost in the company of a husband-in-law or other respectable relative of an apposite sex, not love that leads by the nose as I foresmellt but canalised love, you understand, does a felon good, suspiciously if he has a slugger’s liver but I cannot belabour the point too ardently (and after the lessions of experience I speak from inspiration) that fetid spirits is the thief of prurities, so none of your twenty rod cherrywhisks, me daughter! At the Cat and Coney or the Spotted Dog. And at 2bis Lot’s Road. When parties get tight for each other they lose all respect together. By the stench of her fizzle and the glib of her gab know the drunken draggletail Dublin drab. You’ll pay for each bally sorraday night every billing sumday morning. When the night is in May and the moon shines might. We won’t meeth in Navan till you try to give the Kellsfrieclub the goby. Hill or hollow, Hull or Hague! And beware how you dare of wet cocktails in Kildare or the same may see your wedding driving home from your wake. Mades of ashens when you flirt spoil the lad but spare his shirt! Lay your lilylike long his shoulder but buck back if he buts bolder and just hep your homely hop and heed no horning but if you’ve got some brainy notion to raise cancan and rouse commotion I’ll be apt to flail that tail for you till it’s [p.437] borning. Let the love ladleliked at the eye girde your gastricks in the gym. Nor must you omit to screw the lid firmly on that jazz jiggery and kick starts. Bumping races on the flat and point to point over obstacles. Ridewheeling that acclivisciously up windy Rutland Rise and insighting rebellious northers before the saunter of the city of Dunlob. Then breretonbiking on the free with your airs of go-be-dee and your heels upon the handlebars. Berrboel brazenness! No, before your corselage rib is decartilaged, that is to mean if you have visceral ptossis, my point is, making allowances for the fads of your weak abdominal wall and your liver asprewl, vinvin, vinvin, or should you feel, in shorts, as though you needed healthy physicking exorcise to flush your kidneys, you understand, and move that twelffinger bowel and threadworm inhibitating it, lassy, and perspire freely, lict your lector in the lobby and why out you go by the ostiary on to the dirt track and skip! Be a sportive. Deal with Nature the great greengrocer and pay regularly the monthlies. Your Punt’s Perfume’s only in the hatpinny shop beside the reek of the rawny. It’s more important than air—I mean than eats—air (Oop, I never open momouth but I pack mefood in it) and promotes that natural emotion. Stamp out bad eggs. Why so many puddings prove disappointing, as Dietician says, in Creature Comforts Causeries, and why so much soup is so muck slop. If we could fatten on the elizabeetons we wouldn’t have teeth like the hippopotamians. However. Likewise if I were in your envelope shirt I’d keep my weathereye well cocked open for your furnished lodgers paying for their feed on tally with company and piano tunes. Only stuprifying yourself! The too friendly friend sort, Mazourikawitch or some other sukinsin of a vitch, who he’s kommen from olt Pannonia on this porpoise whom sue stooderin about the maul and femurl artickles and who mix himself so at home mid the musik and spanks the ivory that lovely for this your Mistro Melosiosus MacShine MacShane may soon prove your undoing and bane through the succeeding years of rain should you, whilst Jaun is from home, get used to basking in his loverslowlap, inordinately clad, moustacheteasing, [p.438] when closehended together behind locked doors, kissing steadily, (malbongusta, it’s not the thing you know!) with the calfloving selfseeker, under the influence of woman, inching up to you, disarranging your modesties and fumbling with his forte paws in your bodice after your billy doos twy as a first go off (take care, would you stray and split on me!) and going on doing his idiot every time you gave him his chance to get thick and play pigglywiggly, making much of you, bilgetalking like a ditherer, gougouzoug, about your glad neck and the round globe and the white milk and the red raspberries (O horrifier!) and prying down furthermore to chance his lucky arm with his pregnant questions up to our past lives. What has that caught to sing with him? The next fling you’ll be squitting on the Tubber Nakel, pouring pitchers to the well for old Gloatsdane’s glorification and the postequities of the Black Watch, peeping private from the Bush and Rangers. And our local busybody, talker-go-bragk. Worse again! Off of that praying fan on to them priars! It would be a whorable state of affairs altogether for the redcolumnists of presswritten epics, Peter Paragraph and Paulus Puff, (I’m keepsoaking them to cover my concerts) to get ahold of for their balloons and shoot you private by surprise, considering the marriage slump that’s on this oil age and pulexes three shillings a pint and wives at six and seven when domestic calamities belame par and newlaids bellow mar for the twenty twotoosent time thwealthy took thousands in the slack march of civilisation were you, becoming guilty of unleckylike intoxication to have and to hold, to pig and to pay direct connection, qua intervener, with a prominent married member of the vicereeking squad and, in consequence of the therinunder subpenas, be flummoxed to the second degree by becoming a detestificated companykeeper on the dammymonde of Lucalamplight. Anything but that, for the fear and love of gold! Once and for all, I’ll have no college swankies (you see, I am well voiced in love’s arsenal and all its overtures from collion boys to colleen bawns so I have every reason to know that rogues’ gallery of nightbirds and bitchfanciers, lucky duffs and light lindsays, haughty hamiltons and gay gordons, dosed, doctored [p.439] and otherwise, messing around skirts and what their fickling intentions look like, you make up your mind to that) trespassing on your danger zone in the dancer years. If ever I catch you at it, mind, it’s you that will cocottch it! I’ll tackle you to feel if you have a few devils in you. Holy gun, I’ll give it to you, hot, high and heavy before you can say sedro! Or may the maledictions of Lousyfear fall like nettlerash on the white friar’s father that converted from moonshine the fostermother of the first nancyfree that ran off after the trumpadour that mangled Moore’s melodies and so upturned the tubshead of the stardaft journalwriter to inspire the prime finisher to fellhim the firtree out of which Cooper Funnymore planed the flat of the beerbarrel on which my grandydad’s lustiest sat his seat of unwisdom with my tante’s petted sister for the cause of his joy! Amene.

Poof! There’s puff for ye, begor, and planxty of it, all abound me breadth! Glor galore and glory be! As broad as its lung and as long as a line! The valiantine vaux of Venerable Val Vousdem. If my jaws must brass away like the due drops on my lay. And the topnoted delivery you’d expected be me invoice! Theo Dunnohoo’s warning from Daddy O’Dowd. Whoo? What I’m wondering to myselfwhose for there’s a strong tendency, to put it mildly, by making me the medium. I feel spirts of itchery outching out from all over me and only for the sludgehummer’s force in my hand to hold them the darkens alone knows what’ll who’ll be saying of next. However. Now, before my upperotic rogister, something nice. Now? Dear Sister, in perfect leave again I say take a brokerly advice and keep it to yourself that we, Jaun, first of our name here now make all receptacles of, free of price. Easy, my dear, if they tingle you either say nothing or nod. No cheekacheek with chipperchapper, you and your last mashboy and the padre in the pulpbox enumerating you his nostrums. Be vacillant over those vigilant who would leave you to belave black on white. Close in for psychical hijiniks as well but fight shy of mugpunters. I’d burn the books that grieve you and light an allassundrian bompyre that would suffragate Tome Plyfire or Zolfanerole. Perousse instate your Weekly Standerd, our verile organ that is ethelred by all [p.440] pressdom. Apply your five wits to the four verilatest. The Arsdiken’s An Traitey on Miracula or Viewed to Death by a Priest Hunter is still first in the field despite the castle bar, William Archer’s a rompan good cathalogue and he’ll give you a riser on the route to our nazional labronry. Skim over Through Hell with the Papes (mostly boys) by the divine comic Denti Alligator (exsponging your index) and find a quip in a quire arisus aream from bastardtitle to fatherjohnson. Swear aloud by pious fiction the like of Lentil Lore by Carnival Cullen or that Percy Wynns of our S. J. Finn’s or Pease in Plenty by the Curer of Wars, licensed and censered by our most picturesque prelates, Their Graces of Linzen and Petitbois, bishops of Hibernites, licet ut lebanus, for expansion on the promises, the two best sells on the market this luckiest year, set up by Gill the father, put out by Gill the son and circulating disimally at Gillydehooly’s Cost. Strike up a nodding acquaintance for our doctrine with the works of old Mrs Trot, senior, and Manoel Canter, junior, and Loper de Figas, nates maximum. I used to follow Mary Liddlelambe’s flitsy tales, espicially with the scentaminted sauce. Sifted science will do your arts good. Egg Laid by Former Cock and With Flageolettes in Send Fanciesland. Chiefly girls. Trip over sacramental tea into the long lives of our saints and saucerdotes, with vignettes, cut short into instructual primers by those in authority for the bittermint of your soughts. Forfet not the palsied. Light a match for poor old Contrabally and send some balmoil for the schizmatics. A hemd in need is aye a friendly deed. Remember, maid, thou dust art powder but Cinderella thou must return (what are you robbing her sleeve for, Ruby? And pull in your tongue, Polly!). Cog that out of your teen times, everyone. The lad who brooks no breaches lifts the lass that toffs a tailor. How dare ye be laughing out of your mouthshine at the lack of that? Keep cool your fresh chastity which is far better far. Sooner than part with that vestalite emerald of the first importance, descended to me by far from our family, which you treasure up so closely where extremes meet, nay, mozzed lesmended, rather let the whole ekumene universe belong to merry Hal and do whatever his Mary well [p.441] likes. When the gong goes for hornets-two-nest marriage step into your harness and strip off that nullity suit. Faminy, hold back! For the race is to the rashest of, the romping, jomping rushes of. Haul Seton’s down, black, green and grey, and hoist Mikealy’s whey and sawdust. What’s overdressed if underclothed? Poposht forstake me knot where there’s white lets ope. Whisht! Blesht she that walked with good Jook Humprey for he made her happytight. Go! You can down all the dripping you can dumple to, and buffkid scouse too ad libidinum, in these lassitudes if you’ve parents and things to look after. That was what stuck to the Comtesse Cantilene while she was sticking out Mavis Toffeelips to feed her soprannated huspals, and it is henceforth associated with her names. La Dreeping! Die Droopink! The inimitable in puresuet of the inevitable! There’s nothing to touch it, we are taucht, unless she’d care for a mouthpull of white pudding for the wish is on her rose marine and the lunchlight in her eye, so when you pet the rollingpin write my name on the pie. Guard that gem, Sissy, rich and rare, ses he. In this cold old worold who’ll feel it? Hum! The jewel you’re all so cracked about there’s flitty few of them gets it for there’s nothing now but the sable stoles and a runabout to match it. Sing him a ring. Touch me low. And I’ll lech ye so, my soandso. Show and show. Show on show. She. Shoe. Shone.

Divulge, sjuddenly jouted out hardworking Jaun, kicking the console to his double and braying aloud like Brahaam’s ass, and, as his voixehumanar swelled to great, clenching his manlies, so highly strong was he, man, and gradually quite warming to her (there must have been a power of kinantics in that buel of gruel he gobed at bedgo) divorce into me and say the curname in undress (if you get into trouble with a party you are not likely to forget his appearance either) of any lapwhelp or sleevemongrel who talks to you upon the road where he tuck you to be a roller, O, (the goattanned saxopeeler upshotdown chigs peel of him!) and volunteers to trifle with your roundlings for profferred glass and dough, the marrying hand that his leisure repents of, without taking out his proper password [p.442] from the eligible ministriss for affairs with the black fremdling, that enemy of our country, in a cleanlooking light and I don’t care a tongser’s tammany hang who the mucky is nor twoo hoots in the corner nor three shouts on a hill (were he even a constantineal namesuch of my very own, Attaboy Knowling, and like enoch to my townmajor ancestors, the two that are taking out their divorces in the Spooksbury courts circuits, Rere Uncle Remus, the Baas of Eboracum and Old Father Ulissabon Knickerbocker, the lanky sire of Wolverhampton, about their bristelings), but as true as there’s a soke for sakes in Twoways Peterborough and sure as home we come to newsky prospect from west the wave on schedule time (if I came any quicker I’ll be right back before I left) from the land of breach of promise with Brendan’s mantle whitening the Kerribrasilian sea and March’s pebbles spinning from beneath our footslips to carry fire and sword, rest insured that as we value the very name in sister that as soon as we do possibly it will be a poor lookout for that insister. He’s a markt man from that hour. And why do we say that, you may query me? Quary? Guess! Call’st thou? Think and think and think, I urge on you. Muffed! The wrong porridge. You are an ignoratis! Because then probably we’ll dumb well soon show him what the Shaun way is like how we’ll go a long way towards breaking his outsider’s face for him for making up to you with his bringthee balm of Gaylad and his singthee songs of Arupee, chancetrying my ward’s head into sanctuary before feeling with his two dimensions for your nuptial dito. Ohibow, if I was Blonderboss I’d gooandfrighthisdualman! Now, we’ll tell you what we’ll do to be sicker instead of compensation. We’ll he’ll burst our his mouth like Leary to the Leinsterface and reduce he’ll we’ll ournhisn liniments to a poolp. Open the door softly, somebody wants you, dear! You’ll hear him calling you, bump, like a blizz, in the muezzin of the turkest night. Come on now, pillarbox! I’ll stiffen your scribeall, broken reed! That’ll be it, grand operoar style, even should I, with my sleuts of hogpew and cheekas, have to coomb the brash of the libs round Close Saint Patrice to lay my louseboob on his [p.443] behaitch like solitar. We are all eyes. I have his quoram of images all on my retinue, Mohomadhawn Mike. Brassup! Moreover after that, bad manners to me, if I don’t think strongly about giving the brotherkeeper into custody to the first police bubby cunstabless of Dora’s Diehards in the field I might chance to follopon. Or for that matter, for your information, if I get the wind up what do you bet in the buckets of my wrath I mightn’t even take it into my progromme, as sweet course, to do a rash act and pitch in and swing for your perfect stranger in the meadow of heppiness and then wipe the street up with the clonmellian, pending my bringing proceedings verses the joyboy before a bunch of magistrafes and twelve good and gleeful men? Filius nullius per fas et nefas. It should prove more or less of an event and show the widest federal in my cup. He’ll have pansements then for his pensamientos, howling for peace. Pretty knocks, I promise him with plenty burkes for his shins. Dumnlimn wimn humn. In which case I’ll not be complete in fighting lust until I contrive to half kill your Charley you’re my darling for you and send him to Home Surgeon Hume, the algebrist, before his appointed time, particularly should he turn out to be a man in brown about town, Rollo the Gunger, son of a wants a flurewaltzer to Arnolff’s, picking up ideas, of well over or about fiftysix or so, pithecoid proportions, with perhops five foot eight, the usual X Y Z type, R.C. Toc H, nothing but claret, not in the studbook by a long stortch, with a toothbrush moustache and jawcrockeries, alias grinner through collar, and of course no beard, meat and colmans suit, with tar’s baggy slacks, obviously too roomy for him and springside boots, washing tie, Father Mathew’s bridge pin, sipping some Wheatley’s at Rhoss’s on a barstool, with some pubpal of the Olaf Stout kidney, always trying to poorchase movables by hebdomedaries for to putt in a new house to loot, cigarette in his holder, with a good job and pension in Buinness’s, what about our trip to Normandy style conversation, with an occasional they say that filmacoulored featured at the Mothrapurl skrene about Michan and his lost angeleens is corkyshows do morvaloos, blueygreen eyes a bit scummy developing a series of [p.444] angry boils with certain references to the Deity, seeking relief in alcohol and so on, general omnibus character with a dash of railwaybrain, stale cough and an occasional twinge of claudication, having his favourite fecundclass family of upwards of a decade, both harefoot and loadenbrogued, to boot and buy off, Imean.

So let it be a knuckle or an elbow, I hereby admonish you! It may all be topping fun but it’s tip and run and touch and flow for every whack when Marie stopes Phil fluther’s game to go. Arms arome, side aside, face into the wall. To the tumble of the toss tot the trouble of the swaddled, O. And lest there be no misconception, Miss Forstowelsy, over who to fasten the plightforlifer on (threehundred and thirty three to one on Rue the Day!) when the nice little smellar squalls in his crydle what the dirty old bigger’ll be squealing through his coughin you better keep in the gunbarrel straight around vokseburst as I recommence you to (you gypseyeyed baggage, do you hear what I’m praying?) or, Gash, without butthering my head to assortail whose stroke forced or which struck backly, I’ll be all over you myselx horizontally, as the straphanger said, for knocking me with my name and yourself and your babybag down at such a greet sacrifice with a rap of the gavel to a third price cowhandler as cheap as the niggerd’s dirt (for sale!) or I’ll smack your fruitflavoured jujube lips well for you, so I will well for you, if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your pigeonhouse. The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime. I’ll have it in for you. I’ll teach you bed minners, tip for tap, to be playing your oddaugghter tangotricks with micky dazzlers if I find corsehairs on your river-frock and the squirmside of your burberry lupitally covered with chiffchaff and shavings. Up Rosemiry Lean and Potanasty Rod you wos, wos you? I overstand you, you understand. Asking Annybettyelsas to carry your parcels and you dreaming of net glory. You’ll ging naemaer wi’Wolf the Ganger. Cutting chapel, were you? and had dates with slickers in particular hotels, had we? Lonely went to play your mother, isod? You was wiffriends? Hay, dot’s a doll yarn! Mark mean then! I’ll homeseek you, Luperca as sure as there’s a palatine in Limerick and in [p.445] striped conference here’s how. Nerbu de Bios! If you twos goes to walk upon the railway, Gard, and I’ll goad to beat behind the bush! See to it! Snip! It’s up to you. I’ll be hatsnatching harrier to hiding huries hinder hedge. Snap! I’ll tear up your limpshades and lock all your trotters in the closet, I will, and cut your silkskin into garters. You’ll give up your ask unbrodhel ways when I make you reely smart. So skelp your budd and kiss the hurt! I’ll have plenary sadisfaction, plays the bishop, for your partial’s indulgences if your my rodeo gell. Fair man and foul suggestion. There’s a lot of lecit pleasure coming bangslanging your way, Miss Pinpernelly satin. For your own good, you understand, for the man who lifts his pud to a woman is saving the way for kindness. You’ll rebmemer your mottob Aveh Tiger Roma mikely smarter the nickst time. For I’ll just draw my prancer and give you one splitpuck in the crupper, you understand, that will bring the poppy blush of shame to your peony hindmost till you yelp papapardon and radden your rhodatantarums to the beat of calorrubordolor, I am, I do and I suffer, (do you hear me now, lickspoon, and stop looking at your bussycat bow in the slate?) that you won’t obliterate for the bulkier part of a running year, failing to give a good account of yourself, if you think I’m so tan cupid as all that. Lights out now (bouf!), tight and sleep on it. And that’s how I’ll bottle your greedypuss beautibus for ye, me bullin heifer, for ’tis I that have the peer of arrams that carry a wallop. Between them.

Unbeknownst to you would ire turn o’er see, a nuncio would I return here. How (from the sublime to the ridiculous) times out of oft, my future, shall we think with deepest of love and recollection by rintrospection of thee but me far away on the pillow, breathing foundly o’er my names all through the empties, whilst moidhered by the rattle of the doppeldoorknockers. Our homerole poet to Ostelinda, Fred Wetherly, puts it somewhys better. You’re sitting on me style, maybe, whereoft I helped your ore. Littlegame rumilie from Liffalidebankum, (Toobliqueme!) but a big corner fill you do in this unadulterated seat of our affections. Aerwenger’s my breed so may we uncreepingly [p.446] multipede like the sands on Amberhann! Sevenheavens, O heaven! Iy waount yiou! yore ways to melittleme were wonderful so Ickam purseproud in sending uym loveliest pansiful thoughts touching me dash in-you through wee dots Hyphen, the so pretty arched godkin of beddingnights. If I’ve proved to your sallysfashion how I’m a man of Armor let me so, let me sue, let me see your isabellis. How I shall, should I survive, as, please the uniter of U.M.I. hearts, I am living in hopes to do, replacing mig wandering handsup in yawers so yeager for mitch, positively cover the two pure chicks of your comely plumpchake with zuccherikissings, hong, kong, and so gong, that I’d scare the bats out of the ivfry one of those puggy mornings, honestly, by my rantandog and daddyoak I will, become come coming when, upon the mingling of our meeting waters, wish to wisher, like massive mountains to part no more, you will there and then, in those happy moments of ouryour soft accord, rainkiss on me back, for full marks with shouldered arms, and in that united I.R.U. stade, when I come (touf! touf!) wildflier’s fox into my own greengeese again, swap sweetened smugs, six of one for half a dozen of the other, till they’ll bet we’re the cuckoo derby when cherries next come back to Ealing as come they must, as they musted in their past, as they must for my pressing season, as hereinafter must they chirrywill immediately suant on my safe return to ignorance and bliss in my horseless Coppal Poor, through suirland and noreland, kings country and queens, with my ropes of pearls for gamey girls the way ye’ll hardly. Knowme.

Slim ye, come slum with me and rally rats’ roundup! ’Tis post purification we will, sales of work and social service, missus, completing our Abelite union by the adoptation of fosterlings. Embark for Euphonia! Up Murphy, Henson and O’Dwyer, the Warchester Warders! I’ll put in a shirt time if you’ll get through your shift and between us in our shared slaves, brace to brassiere and shouter to shunter, we’ll pull off our working programme. Come into the garden guild and be free of the gape athome! We’ll circumcivicise all Dublin country. Let us, the real Us, all ignite in our prepurgatory grade as apos- [p.447] cals and be instrumental to utensilise, help our Jakeline sisters clean out the hogshole and generally ginger things up. Meliorism in massquantities, raffling receipts and sharing sweepstakes till navel, spokes and felloes hum like hymn. Burn only what’s Irish, accepting their coals. You will soothe the cokeblack bile that’s Anglia’s and touch Armourican’s iron core. Write me your essayes, my vocational scholars, but corsorily, dipping your nose in it, for Henrietta’s sake, on mortinatality in the life of jewries and the sludge of King Haarington’s at its height, running boulevards over the whole of it. I’d write it all by mownself if I only had here of my jolly young watermen. Bear in mind, by Michael, all the provincial’s bananas peels and elacock eggs making drawadust jubilee along Henry, Moore, Earl and Talbot Streets. Luke at all the memmer manning he’s dung for the pray of birds, our priest-mayor-king-merchant, strewing the Castleknock Road and drawing manure upon it till the first glimpse of Wales and from Ballses Breach Harshoe up to Dumping’s Corner with the Mirist fathers’ brothers eleven versus White Friars out on a rogation stag party. Compare them caponchin trowlers with the Bridge of Belches in Fairview, noreast Dublin’s favourite souwest wateringplatz and ump as you lump it. What do you mean by Jno Citizen and how do you think of Jas Pagan? Compost liffe in Dufblin by Pierce Egan with the baugh in Baughkley of Fino Ralli. Explain why there is such a number of orders of religion in Asea! Why such an order number in preference to any other number? Why any number in any order at all? Now? Where is the greenest island off the black coats of Spaign? Overset into universal: I am perdrix and upon my pet ridge. Oralmus! Way, O way for the autointaxication of our town of the Fords in a huddle! Hailfellow some wellmet boneshaker or, to ascertain the facts for herself, run up your showeryweather once and trust and take the Drumgondola tram and, wearing the midlimb and vestee endorsed by the hierarchy fitted with ecclastics, bending your steps, pick a trail and stand on, say, Aston’s, I advise you strongly, along quaith a copy of the Seeds and Weeds Act when you have procured one for your- [p.448] self and take a good longing gaze into any nearby shopswindow you may select at suppose, let us say, the hoyth of number eleven, Kane or Keogh’s, and in the course of about thirtytwo minutes’ time proceed to turn aroundabout on your heehills towards the previous causeway and I shall be very cruelly mistaken indeed if you will not be jushed astunshed to see how you will be meanwhile durn weel topcoated with kakes of slush occasioned by the mush jam of the cross and blackwalls traffic in transit. See Capels and then fly. Show me that complaint book here. Where’s Cowtends Kateclean, the woman with the muckrake? When will the W.D. face of our sow muckloved d’lin, the Troia of towns and Carmen of cities, crawling with mendiants in perforated clothing, get its wellbelavered white like l’pool and m’chester? When’s that grandnational goldcapped dupsydurby houspill coming with its vomitives for our mothers-in-load and stretchers for their devitalised males? I am all of me for freedom of speed but who’ll disasperaguss Pope’s Avegnue or who’ll uproose the Opian Way? Who’ll brighton Brayhowth and bait the Bull Bailey and never despair of Lorcansby? The rampant royal commissioners! ’Tis an ill weed blows no poppy good. And this labour’s worthy of my higher. Oil for meed and toil for feed and a walk with the band for Job Loos. If I hope not charity what profiteers me? Nothing! My tippers of flags are knobs of hardshape for it isagrim tale, keeping the father of curls from the sport of oak. Do you know what, liddle giddles? One of those days I am advised by the smiling voteseeker who’s now snoring elued to positively strike off hiking for good and all as I bldy well bdly ought until such temse as some mood is made under privy-sealed orders to get me an increase of automoboil and footwear for these poor discalced and a bourse from bon Somewind for a cure at Badanuweir (though where it’s going to come from this time —) as I sartunly think now, honest to John, for an income plexus that that’s about the sanguine boundary limit. Amean.

Sis dearest, Jaun added, with voise somewhit murky, what though still high fa luting, as he turned his dorse to her to pay court to it, and ouverleaved his booseys to give the note and [p.449] score, phonoscopically incuriosited and melancholic this time whiles, as on the fulmament he gaped in wulderment, his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction followed swift to an imaginary swellaw, O, the vanity of Vanissy! All ends vanishing! Pursonally, Grog help me, I am in no violent hurry. If time enough lost the ducks walking easy found them. I’ll nose a blue fonx with any tristys blinking upon this earthlight of all them that pass by the way of the deerdrive, conconey’s run or wilfrid’s walk, but I’d turn back as lief as not if I could only spoonfind the nippy girl of my heart’s appointment, Mona Vera Toutou Ipostila, my lady of Lyons, to guide me by gastronomy under her safe conduct. That’s more in my line. I’d ask no kinder of fates than to stay where I am, with my tinny of brownie’s tea, under the invocation of Saint Jamas Hanway, servant of Gamp, lapidated, and Jacobus a Pershawm, intercissous, for my thurifex, with Peter Roche, that frind of my boozum, leaning on my cubits, at this passing moment by localoption in the birds’ lodging, me pheasants among, where I’ll dreamt that I’ll dwealth mid warblers’ walls when throstles and choughs to my sigh hiehied, with me hares standing up well and me longlugs dittoes, where a maurdering row, the fox! has broken at the coward sight till well on into the beausome of the exhaling night, pinching stopandgo jewels out of the hedges and catching dimtop brilliants on the tip of my wagger but for that owledclock (fast cease to it!) has just gone twoohoo the hour and that yen breezes zipping round by Drumsally do be devils to play fleurt. I could sit on safe side till the bark of Saint Grouseus for hoopoe’s hours, till heoll’s hoerrisings, laughing lazy at the sheep’s lightning and turn a widamost ear dreamily to the drummling of snipers, hearing the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial and the mails across the nightrives (peepet! peepet!) and whippoor willy in the woody (moor park! moor park!) as peacefed as a philopotamus, and crekking jugs at the grenoulls, leaving tealeaves for the trout and belleeks for the wary till I’d followed through my upfielded neviewscope the rugaby moon cumuliously godrolling himself westasleep amuckst the cloudscrums for to watch how carefully my nocturnal goose- [p.450] mother would lay her new golden sheegg for me down under in the shy orient. What wouldn’t I poach — the rent in my riverside, my otther shoes, my beavery, honest! — ay, and melt my belt for a dace feast of grannom with the finny ones, those happy greppies in their minnowahaw, flashing down the swansway, leaps ahead of the swift MacEels, the big Gillaroo redfellows and the pursewinded carpers, rearin antis rood perches astench of me, or, when I’d like own company best, with the help of a norange and bear, to be reclined by the lasher on my logansome, my g.b.d. in my f.a.c.e., solfanelly in my shellyholders and lov’d latakia, the benuvolent, for my nosethrills, with the jealosomines wilting away to their heart’s deelight and the king of saptimber letting down his humely odours for my consternation, dapping my griffeen, burning water in the spearlight or catching trophies of the king’s royal college of sturgeone by the armful for to bake pike and pie while, O twined me abower in L’Alouette’s Tower, all Adelaide’s naughtingerls juckjucking benighth me, I’d gamut my twittynice Dorian blackbudds chthonic solphia off my singasongapiccolo to pipe musicall airs on numberous fairyaciodes. I give, a king, to me, she does, alone, up there, yes see, I double give, till the spinney all eclosed asong with them. Isn’t that lovely though? I give to me alone I trouble give! I may have no mind to lamagnage the forte bits like the pianage but you can’t cadge me off the key. I’ve a voicical lilt too true. Nomario! And bemolly and jiesis! For I sport a whatyoumacormack in the latcher part of my throughers. And the lark that I let fly (olala!) is as cockful of funantics as it’s tune to my fork. Naturale you might lower register me as diserecordant, but I’m athlone in the lillabilling of killarnies. That’s flat. Yet ware the wold, you! What’s good for the gorse is a goad for the garden. Lethals lurk heimlocked in logans. Loathe laburnums. Dash the gaudy deathcup! Bryony O’Bryony, thy name is Belladama! But enough of greenwood’s gossip. Birdsnests is birdsnests. Thine to wait but mine to wage. And now play sharp to me. Doublefirst I’ll head foremost through all my examhoops. And what sensitive coin I’d be possessed of at Latouche’s, begor, I’d sink it sumtotal, every [p.451] dolly farting, in vestments of subdominal poteen at prime cost and I bait you my chancey oldcoat against the whole ounce you half on your backboard (if madamaud strips mesdamines may cold strafe illglands!) that I’m the gogetter that’d make it pay like cash registers as sure as there’s a pot on a pole. And, what with one man’s fish and a dozen men’s poissons, sowing my wild plums to reap ripe plentihorns mead, lashings of erbole and hydromel and bragget, I’d come out with my magic fluke in close time, fair, free and frolicky, zooming tophole on the mart as a factor. And I tell you the Bective’s wouldn’t hold me. By the unsleeping Solman Annadromus, ye god of little pescies, nothing would stop me for mony makes multimony like the brogues and the kishes. Not the Ulster Rifles and the Cork Milice and the Dublin Fusees and Connacht Rangers ensembled! I’d axe the channon and leip a liffey and drink annyblack water that rann onme way. Yip! How’s thats for scats, mine shatz, for a lovebird? To funk is only peternatural its daring feers divine. Bebold! Like Varian’s balaying all behind me. And before you knew where you weren’t, I stake my ignitial’s divy, cash-and-cash-can-again, I’d be staggering humanity and loyally rolling you over, my sowwhite sponse, in my tons of red clover, nighty nigh to the metronome, fiehigh and fiehigher and fiehighest of all. Holy petter and pal, I’d spoil you altogether, my sumptuous Sheila! Mumm all to do brut frull up fizz and unpop a few shortusians or shake a pale of sparkling ice, hear it swirl, happy girl! Not a spot of my hide but you’d love to seek and scanagain! There’d be no standing me, I tell you. And, as gameboy as my pagan name K.C. is what it is, I’d never say let fly till we shot that blissup and swumped each other, manawife, into our sever nevers where I’d plant you, my Gizzygay, on the electric ottoman in the lap of lechery, simpringly stitchless with admiracion, among the most uxuriously furnished compartments, with sybarate chambers, just as I’d run my shoestring into near a million or so of them as a firstclass dealer and everything. Only for one thing that, howover famiksed I would become, I’d be awful anxious, you understand, about shoepisser pluvious and in assideration of the terrible [p.452] luftsucks woabling around with the hedrolics in the coold amstophere till the borting that would perish the Dane and his chapter of accidents to be atramental to the better half of my alltoolyrical health, not considering my capsflap, and that’s the truth now out of the cackling bag for truly sure, for another thing, I never could tell the leest falsehood that would truthfully give sotisfiction. I’m not talking apple sauce eithou. Or up in my hat. I earnst. Schue!

Sissibis dearest, as I was reading to myself not very long ago in Tennis Flonnels Mac Courther, his correspondance, besated upon my tripos, and just thinking like thauthor how long I’d like myself to be continued at Hothelizod, peeking into the focus and pecking at thumbnail reveries, pricking up ears to my phono on the ground and picking up airs from th’other over th’ether, ’tis tramsported with grief I am this night sublime, as you may see by my size and my brow that’s all forehead, to go forth, frank and hoppy, to the tune the old plow tied off, from our nostorey house, upon this benedictine errand but it is historically the most glorious mission, secret or profund, through all the annals of our — as you so often term her — efferfreshpainted livy, in beautific repose, upon the silence of the dead, from pharoph the nextfirst down to ramescheckles the last bust thing. The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and unappalled by the recoursers we feel all serene, never you fret, as regards our dutyful cask. Full of my breadth from pride I am (breezed be the healthy same!) for ’tis a grand thing (superb!) to be going to meet a king, not an everynight king, nenni, by gannies, but the overking of Hither-on-Thither Erin himself, pardee, I’m saying. Before there was patch at all on Ireland there lived a lord at Lucan. We only wish everyone was as sure of anything in this watery world as we are of everything in the newlywet fellow that’s bound to follow. I’ll lay you a guinea for a hayseed now. Tell mother that. And tell her tell her old one. ’Twill amuse her.

Well, to the figends of Annanmeses with the wholeabuelish business! For I declare to Jeshuam I’m beginning to get sunsick! I’m not half Norawain for nothing. The fine ice so temperate [p.453] of our, alas, those times are not so far off as you might wish to be congealed. So now, I’ll ask of you, let ye create no scenes in my poor primmafore’s wake. I don’t want yous to be billowfighting you biddy moriarty duels, gobble gabble, over me till you spit stout, you understand, after soused mackerel, sniffling clambake to hering and impudent barney, braggart of blarney, nor you ugly lemoncholic gobs o’er the hobs in a sewing circle, stopping oddments in maids’ costumes at sweeping reductions, wearing out your ohs by sitting around your ahs, making areekeransy round where I last put it, with the painters in too, curse luck, with your rags up, exciting your mucuses, turning breakfarts into lost soupirs and salon thay nor you flabbies on your groaning chairs over Bollivar’s troubles of a bluemoondag, steamin your damp ossicles, praying Holy Prohibition and Jaun Dyspeptist while Ole Clo goes through the wood with Shep togather, touting in the chesnut burrs for Goodboy Sommers and Mistral Blownowse hugs his kindlings when voiceyversy it’s my gala bene fit, robbing leaves out of my taletold book. May my tunc fester if ever I see such a miry lot of maggalenes! Once upon a drunk and a fairly good drunk it was and the rest of your blatherumskite! Just a plain shays by the fire for absenter Sh the Po and I’ll make ye all an eastern hummingsphere of myself the moment that you name the way. Look in the slag scuttle and you’ll see me sailspread over the singing, and what do ye want trippings for when you’ve Paris inspire your hat? Sussumcordials all round, let ye alloyiss and ominies, while I stray and let ye not be getting grief out of it, though blighted troth be all bereft, on my poor headsake, even should we forfeit our life. Lo, improving ages wait ye! In the orchard of the bones. Some time very presently now when yon clouds are dissipated after their forty years shower, the odds are, we shall all be hooked and happy, communionistically, among the fieldnights eliceam, élite of the elect, in the land of lost of time. Johannisburg’s a revelation! Deck the diamants that never die! So cut out the lonesome stuff! Drink it up, ladies, please, as smart as you can lower it! Out with lent! Clap hands postilium! Fastintide is by. Your [p.454] sole and myopper must hereupon part company. So for e’er fare thee welt! Parting’s fun. Take thou, the wringle’s thine, love. This dime doth trost thee from mine alms. Goodbye, swisstart, goodbye! Haugh! Haugh! Sure, treasures, a letterman does be often thought reading ye between lines that do have no sense at all. I sign myself. With much leg. Inflexibly yours. Ann Posht the Shorn. To be continued. Huck!

Something of a sidesplitting nature must have occurred to westminstrel Jaunathaun for a grand big blossy hearty stenorious laugh (even Drudge that lay doggo thought feathers fell) hopped out of his woolly’s throat like a ball lifted over the head of a deep field, at the bare thought of how jolly they’d like to be trolling his whoop and all of them truetotypes in missammen massness were just starting to spladher splodher with the jolly magorios, hicky hecky hock, huges huges huges, hughy hughy hughy, O Jaun, so jokable and so geepy, O, (Thou pure! Our virgin! Thou holy! Our health! Thou strong! Our victory! O salutary! Sustain our firm solitude, thou who thou well strokest! Hear, hairy ones! We have sued thee but late. Beauty parlous!) when suddenly (how like a woman!), swifter as mercury he wheels right round starnly on the Rizzies suddenly, with his gimlets blazing rather sternish (how black like thunder!), to see what’s loose. So they stood still and wondered. Till first he sighed (and how ill soufered!) and they nearly cried (the salt of the earth!) after which he pondered and finally he replied:

— There is some thing more. A word apparting and shall the heart’s tone be silent. Engagements, I’ll beseal you! Fare thee well, fairy well! All I can tell you is this, my sorellies. It’s prayers in layers all the thumping time, begor, the young gloria’s gang voices the old doxologers, in the suburrs of the heavenly gardens, once we shall have passed, after surceases, all serene through neck and necklike Derby and June to our snug eternal retribution’s reward (the scorchhouse). Shunt us! shunt us! shut us! If you want to be felixed come and be parked. Sacred ease there! The seanad and pobbel queue’s remainder. To it, to it! Seekit headup! No petty family squabbles Up There nor homemade [p.455] hurricanes in our Cohortyard, no cupahurling nor apuckalips nor no puncheon jodelling nor no nothing. With the Byrns which is far better and eve for ever your idle be. You will hardly reconnoitre the old wife in the new bustle and the farmer shinner in his latterday paint. It’s the fulldress Toussaint’s wakeswalks experdition after a bail motion from the chamber of horrus. Saffron buns or sovran bonhams whichever you’r avider to like it and lump it, but give it a name. Iereny allover irelands. And there’s food for refection when the whole flock’s at home. Hogmanny di’yegut? Hogmanny di’yesmellygut? And hogmanny di’yesmellyspatterygut? You take Joe Hanny’s tip for it! Postmartem is the goods. With Jollification a tight second. Toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow! That’s our crass, hairy and evergrim life, till one finel howdiedow Bouncer Naster raps on the bell with a bone and his stinkers stank behind him with the sceptre and the hourglass. We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends. Here we moult in Moy Kain and flop on the seemy side, living sure of hardly a doorstep for a stop gap, with Whogoesthere and a live sandbag round the corner. But upmeyant, Prospector, you sprout all your abel and woof your wings dead certain however of neuthing whatever to aye forever while Hyam Hyam’s in the chair. Ah, sure, pleasantries aside, in the tail of the cow what a humpty daum earth looks our miseryme heretoday as compared beside the Hereweareagain Gaieties of the Afterpiece when the Royal Revolver of these real globoes lets regally fire of his mio colpo for the chrisman’s pandemon to give over and the Harlequinade to begin properly SPQueaRking Mark Time’s Finist Joke. Putting Allspace in a Notshall.

Well, the slice and veg joint’s well in its way, and so is a ribroast and jackknife as sporten dish, but home cooking everytime. Mountains good mustard and, with the helpings of ladies’ lickfings and gentlemen’s relish, I’ve eaten a griddle. But I fill twice as stewhard what I felt before when I’m after eating a few natives. The crisp of the crackling is in the chawing. Give us another cup of your scald. Santos Mozos! That was a damn good [p.456] cup of scald! You could trot a mouse on it. I ingoyed your pick of hissing hot luncheon fine, I did, thank awfully, (sublime!). Tenderest bully ever I ate with the boiled protestants (allinoilia allinoilia!) only for your peas again was a taste tooth psalty to carry flavour with my godown and hereby return with my best savioury condiments and a penny in the plate for the jemes. O.K. Oh Kosmos! Ah Ireland! A.I. And for kailkannonkabbis gimme Cincinnatis with Italian (but ci vuol poco!) ciccalick cheese, Haggis good, haggis strong, haggis never say die! For quid we have recipimus, recipe, O lout! And save that, Oliviero, for thy sunny day! Soupmeagre! Couldn’t look at it! But if you’ll buy me yon coat of the vairy furry best, I’ll try and pullll it awn mee. It’s in fairly good order and no doubt ’twill sarve to turn. Remove this boardcloth! Next stage, tell the tabler, for a variety of Huguenot ligooms I’ll try my set on edges grapeling an aigrydoucks, grilled over birchenrods, with a few bloomancowls in albies. I want to get outside monasticism. Mass and meat mar no man’s journey. Eat a missal lest. Nuts for the nerves, a flitch for the flue and for to rejoice the chambers of the heart the spirits of the spice isles, curry and cinnamon, chutney and cloves. All the vitalmines is beginning to sozzle in chewn and the hormonies to clingleclangle, fudgem, kates and eaps and naboc and erics and oinnos on kingclud and xoxxoxo and xooxox xxoxoxxoxxx till I’m fustfed like fungstif and very presently from now posthaste it’s off yourll see me ryuoll on my usual rounds again to draw Terminus Lower and Killadown and Letternoosh, Letterspeak, Lettermuck to Littorananima and the roomiest house even in Ireland, if you can understamp that, and my next item’s platform it’s how I’ll try and collect my extraprofessional postages owing to me by Thaddeus Kellyesque Squire, dr, for nondesirable printed matter. The Jooks and the Kelly-Cooks have been milking turnkeys and sucking the blood out of the marshalsea since the act of First Offenders. But I know what I’ll do. Great pains off him I’ll take and that’ll be your redletterday calendar, window machree! I’ll knock it out of him! I’ll stump it out of him! I’ll rattattatter it out of him before I’ll quit the doorstep of [p.457] old Con Connolly’s residence! By the horn of twenty of both of the two Saint Collopys, blackmail him I will in arrears or my name’s not penitent Ferdinand! And it’s daily and hourly I’ll nurse him till he pays me fine fee. Ameal.

Well, here’s looking at ye! If I never leave you biddies till my stave is a bar I’d be tempted rigidly to become a passionate father. Me hunger’s weighed. Hungkung! Me anger’s suaged! Hangkang! Ye can stop as ye are, little lay mothers, and wait in wish and wish in vain till the grame reaper draws nigh, with the sickle of the sickles, as a blessing in disguise. Devil a curly hair I care! If any lightfoot Clod Dewvale was to hold me up, dicksturping me and marauding me of my rights to my onus, yan, tyan, tethera, methera, pimp, I’d let him have my best pair of galloper’s heels in the creamsourer. He will have better manners, I’m dished if he won’t! Console yourself, drawhure deelish! There’s a refond of eggsized coming to you out of me so mind you do me duty on me! Bruise your bulge below the belt till I blewblack beside you. And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday. Look for me always at my west and I will think to dine. A tear or two in time is all there’s toot. And then in a click of the clock, toot toot, and doff doff we pop with sinnerettes in silkettes lining longroutes for His Diligence Majesty, our longdistance laird that likes creation. To whoosh!

— Meesh, meesh, yes, pet. We were too happy. I knew something would happen. I understand but listen, drawher nearest, Tizzy intercepted, flushing but flashing from her dove and dart eyes as she tactilifully grapbed her male corrispondee to flusther sweet nunsongs in his quickturned ear, I know, benjamin brother, but listen, I want, girls palmassing, to whisper my whish. (She like them like us, me and you, had thoud he n’er it would haltin so lithe when leased is tacitempust tongue). Of course, engine dear, I’m ashamed for my life (I must clear my throttle) over this lost moment’s gift of memento nosepaper which I’m sorry, my precious, is allathome I with grief can call my own but all the same, listen, Jaunick, accept this witwee’s mite, though a jenny- [p.458] teeny witween piece torn in one place from my hands in second place of a linenhall valentino with my fondest and much left to tutor. X.X.X.X. It was heavily bulledicted for young Fr Ml, my pettest parriage priest, and you know who between us by your friend the pope, forty ways in forty nights, that’s the beauty of it, look, scene it, ratty. Too perfectly priceless for words. And, listen, now do enhance me, oblige my fiancy and bear it with you morn till life’s e’en and, of course, when never you make usage of it, listen, please kindly think galways again or again, never forget, of one absendee not sester Maggy. Ahim. That’s the stupidest little cough. Only be sure you don’t catch your cold and pass it on to us. And, since levret bounds and larks is soaring, don’t be all the night. And this, Joke, a sprig of blue speedwell just a spell of floralora so you’ll mind your veronique. Of course, Jer, I know you know who sends it, presents that please, mercy, on the face of the waters like that film obote, awfly charmig of course, but it doesn’t do her justice, apart from her cattiness, in the magginbottle. Of course, please too write, won’t you, and leave your little bag of doubts, inquisitive, behind you unto your utterly thine, and, thank you, forward it back by return pigeon’s pneu to the loving in case I couldn’t think who it was or any funforall happens I’ll be so curiose to see in the Homesworth breakfast tablotts as I’ll know etherways by pity bleu if it’s good for my system, what exquisite buttons, gorgiose, in case I don’t hope to soon hear from you. And thanks ever so many for the ten and the one with nothing at all on. I will tie a knot in my stringamejip to letter you with my silky paper, as I am given now to understand it will be worth my price in money one day so don’t trouble to ans unless sentby special as I am getting his pay and wants for nothing so I can live simply and solely for my wonderful kinkless and its loops of loveliness. When I throw away my rollets there’s rings for all. Flee a girl, says it is her colour. So does B and L and as for V! And listen to it! Cheveluir! So distant you’re always. Bow your boche! Absolutely perfect! I will pack my comb and mirror to praxis oval owes and artless awes and it will follow you pulpicly [p.459] as far as come back under all my eyes like my sapphire chaplets of ringarosary I will say for you to the Allmichael and solve qui pu while the dovedoves pick my mouthbuds (msch! msch!) with nurse Madge, my linkingclass girl, she’s a fright, poor old dutch, in her sleeptalking when I paint the measles on her and mudstuskers to make her a man. We. We. Issy done that, I confesh! But you’ll love her for her hessians and sickly black stockies, cleryng’s jumbles, salvadged from the wash, isn’t it the cat’s tonsils! Simply killing, how she tidies her hair! I call her Sosy because she’s sosiety for me and she says sossy while I say sassy and she says will you have some more scorns while I say won’t you take a few more schools and she talks about ithel dear while I simply never talk about athel darling; she’s but nice for enticing my friends and she loves your style considering she breaksin me shoes for me when I’ve arch trouble and she would kiss my white arms for me so gratefully but apart from that she’s terribly nice really, my sister, round the elbow of Erne street Lower and I’ll be strictly forbidden always and true in my own way and private where I will long long to betrue you along with one who will so betrue you that not once while I betreu him not once well he be betray himself. Can’t you understand? O bother, I must tell the trouth! My latest lad’s loveliletter I am sore I done something with. I like him lots coss he never cusses. Pity bonhom. Pip pet. I shouldn’t say he’s pretty but I’m cocksure he’s shy. Why I love taking him out when I unletched his cordon gate. Ope, Jack, and atem! Obealbe myodorers and he dote so. He fell for my lips, for my lisp, for my lewd speaker. I felt for his strength, his manhood, his do you mind? There can be no candle to hold to it, can there? And, of course, dear professor, I understand. You can trust me that though I change thy name though not the letter never while I become engaged with my first horsepower, masterthief of hearts, I will give your lovely face of mine away, my boyish bob, not for tons of donkeys, to my second mate, with the twirlers the engineer of the passioflower (O the wicked untruth! whot a tell! that he has bought [p.460] me in his wellingtons what you haven’t got!), in one of those pure clean lupstucks of yours thankfully, Arrah of the passkeys, no matter what. You may be certain of that, fluff, now I know how to tackle. Lock my mearest next myself. So don’t keep me now for a good boy for the love of my fragrant saint, you villain, peppering with fear, my goodless graceless, or I’ll first murder you but, hvisper, meet me after by next appointment near you know Ships just there beside the Ship at the future poor fool’s circuts of lovemountjoy square to show my disrespects now, let me just your caroline for you, I must really so late. Sweet pig, he’ll be furious! How he stalks to simself louther and lover, immutating aperybally. My prince of the courts who’ll beat me to love! And I’ll be there when who knows where with the objects of which I’ll knowor forget. We say. Trust us. Our game. (For fun!) The Dargle shall run dry the sooner I you deny. Whoevery heard of such a think? Till the ulmost of all elmoes shall stele our harts asthone! And Mrs A’Mara makes it up and befriends with Mrs O’Morum! I will write down all your names in my gold pen and ink. Everyday, precious, while m’m’ry’s leaves are falling deeply on my Jungfraud’s Messongebook I will dream telepath posts dulcets on this isinglass stream (but don’t tell him or I’ll be the mort of him!) under the libans and the sickamours, the cyprissis and babilonias, where the frondoak rushes to the ask and the yewleaves too kisskiss themselves and ’twill carry on my hearz’waves my still waters reflections in words over Margrate von Hungaria, her Quaidy ways and her Flavin hair, to thee, Jack, ahoy, beyond the boysforus. Splesh of hiss splash springs your salmon. Twick twick, twinkle twings my twilight as Sarterday afternoon lex leap will smile on my fourinhanced twelvemonthsmind. And what’s this I was going to say, dean? O, I understand. Listen, here I’ll wait on thee till Thingavalla with beautiful do be careful teacakes, more stuesser flavoured than Vanilla and blackcurrant there’s a cure in, like a born gentleman till you’ll resemble me, all the time you’re awhile way, I swear to you, I will, by Candlemas! And listen, joey, don’t be ennoyed with me, my old evernew, when, by the [p.461] end of your chapter, you citch water on the wagon for me being turned a star I’ll dubeurry my two fesces under Pouts Vanisha Creme, their way for spilling cream, and, accent, umto extend my personnalitey to the latents, I’ll boy me for myself only of expensive rainproof of pinked elephant’s breath grey of the loveliest sheerest dearest widowshood over airforce blue I am so wild for, my precious once, Hope Bros., Faith Street, Charity Corner, as the bee loves her skyhighdeed, for I always had a crush on heliotrope since the dusess of yore cycled round the Finest Park, and listen. And never mind me laughing at what’s atever! I was in the nerves but it’s my last day. Always about this hour, I’m sorry, when our gamings for Bruin and Noselong is all oh you tease and afterdoon my lickle pussiness I stheal heimlick in my russians from the attraction part with my terriblitall boots calvescatcher Pinchapoppapoff, who is going to be a jennyroll, at my nape, drenched, love, with dripping to affectionate slapmamma but last at night, look, after my golden violents wetting in my upperstairs splendidly welluminated with such lidlylac curtains wallpapered to match the cat and a fireplease keep looking of priceless pearlogs I just want to see will he or are all Michales like that, I’ll strip straight after devotions before his fondstare—and I mean it too, (thy gape to my gazing I’ll bind and makeleash) and poke stiff under my isonbound with my soiedisante chineknees cheeckchubby chambermate for the night’s foreign males and your name of Shane will come forth between my shamefaced whesen with other lipth I nakest open my thight when just woken by his toccatootletoo my first morning. So now, to thalk thildish, thome, theated with Mag at the oilthan we are doing to thay one little player before doing to deed. An a tiss to the tassie for lu and for tu! Coach me how to tumble, Jaime, and listen, with supreme regards, Juan, in haste, warn me which to ah ah ah ah. . . .

— MEN! Juan responded fullchantedly to her sororal sonority, imitating himself capitally with his bubbleblown in his patapet and his chalished drink now well in hand. (A spilt, see, for a split, see see!) Ever gloriously kind! And I truly am [p.462] eucherised to yous. Also sacré père and maître d’autel. Well, ladies upon gentlermen and toastmaster general, let us, brindising brandisong, woo and win womenlong with health to rich vineyards, Erin go Dry! Amingst the living waters of, the living in giving waters of. Tight! Loose! A stiff one for Staffetta mullified with creams of hourmony, the coupe that’s chill for jackless jill and a filiform dhouche on Doris! Esterelles, be not on your weeping what though Shaunathaun is in his fail! To stir up love’s young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne, dimming douce from her peepair of hideseeks, tightsqueezed on my snowybrusted and while my pearlies in their sparkling wisdom are nippling her bubblets I swear (and let you swear!) by the bumper round of my poor old snaggletooth’s solidbowel I ne’er will prove I’m untrue to your liking (theare!) so long as my hole looks. Down.

So gullaby, me poor Isley! But I’m not for forgetting me innerman monophone for I’m leaving my darling proxy behind for your consolering, lost Dave the Dancekerl, a squamous runaway and a dear old man pal of mine too. He will arrive incessantly in the fraction of a crust, who, could he quit doubling and stop tippling, he would be the unicorn of his kind. He’s the mightiest penumbrella I ever flourished on behond the shadow of a post! Be sure and link him, me O treasauro, as often as you learn provided there’s nothing between you but a plain deal table only don’t encourage him to cry lessontimes over Leperstown. But soft! Can’t be? Do mailstanes mumble? Lumtum lumtum! Now! The froubadour! I fremble! Talk of wolf in a stomach by all that’s verminous! Eccolo me! The return of th’athlate! Who can secede to his success! Isn’t Jaunstown, Ousterrike, the small place after all? I knew I smelt the garlic leek! Why, bless me swits, here he its, darling Dave, like the catoninelives just in time as if he fell out of space, all draped in mufti, coming home to mourn mountains from his old continence and not on one foot either or on two feet aether but on quinquisecular cycles after his French evolution and a blindfold passage by the 4.32 with the pork’s pate in his suicide paw and the gulls laughing lime on his natural skunk, [p.463] blushing like Pat’s pig, begob! He’s not too timtom well ashamed to carry out onaglibtograbakelly in his showman’s sinister the testymonicals he gave his twenty annis orf, showing the three white feathers, as a home cured emigrant in Paddyouare far below on our sealevel. Bearer may leave the church, signed, Figura Porca, Lictor Magnaffica. He’s the sneaking likeness of us, faith, me altar’s ego in miniature and every Auxonian aimer’s ace as nasal a Romeo as I am, for ever cracking quips on himself, that merry, the jeenjakes, he’d soon arise mother’s roses mid bedewing tears under those wild wet lashes onto anny living girl’s laftercheeks. That’s his little veiniality. And his unpeppeppediment. He has novel ideas I know and he’s a jarry queer fish betimes, I grant you, and cantanberous, the poisoner of his word, but lice and all and semicoloured stainedglasses, I’m enormously full of that foreigner, I’ll say I am! Got by the one goat, suckled by the same nanna, one twitch, one nature makes us oldworld kin. We’re as thick and thin now as two tubular jawballs. I hate him about his patent henesy, plasfh it, yet am I amorist. I love him. I love his old portugal’s nose. There’s the nasturtium for ye now that saved manny a poor sinker from water on the grave. The diasporation of all pirates and quinconcentrum of a fake like Basilius O’Cormacan MacArty? To camiflag he turned his shirt. Isn’t he after borrowing all before him, making friends with everybody red in Rossya, white in Alba and touching every distinguished Ourishman he could ever distinguish before or behind from a Yourishman for the customary halp of a crown and peace? He is looking aged with his pebbled eyes, and johnnythin too, from livicking on pidgins’ ifs with puffins’ ands, he’s been slanderising himself, but I pass no remark. Hope he hasn’t the cholera. Give him an eyot in the farout. Moseses and Noasies, how are you? He’d be as snug as Columbsisle Jonas wrocked in the belly of the whaves, as quotad before. Bravo, senior chief! Famose! Sure there’s nobody else in touch anysides to hold a chef’s cankle to the darling at all for sheer dare with that prisonpotstill of spanish breans on him like the knave of trifles! A jollytan fine demented brick and the prince of goodfilips! Dave [p.464] knows I have the highest of respect of annyone in my oweand smooth way for that intellectual debtor (Obbligado!) Mushure David R. Crozier. And we’re the closest of chems. Mark my use of you, cog! Take notice how I yemploy, crib! Be ware as you, I foil, coppy! It’s a pity he can’t see it for I’m terribly nice about him. Canwyll y Cymry, the marmade’s flamme! A leal of the O’Looniys, a Brazel aboo! The most omportent man! Shervos! Ho, be the holy snakes, someone has shaved his rough diamond skull for him as clean as Nuntius’ piedish! The burnt out mesh and the matting and all! Thunderweather, khyber schinker escapa sansa pagar! He’s the spatton spit, so he is, scaly skin and all, with his blackguarded eye and the goatsbeard in his buttinghole of Shemuel Tulliver, me grandsourd, the old cruxader, when he off with his paudeen! That was to let the crowd of the Flu Flux Fans behind him see me proper. Ah, he’s very thoughtful and sympatrico that way is Brother Intelligentius, when he’s not absintheminded, with his Paris addresse! He is, really. Holdhard till you’ll ear him clicking his bull’s bones! Some toad klakkin! You’re welcome back, Wilkins, to red berries in the frost! And here’s the butter exchange to pfeife and dramn ye with a bawlful of the Moulsaybaysse and yunker doodler wanked to wall awriting off his phoney. I’m tired hairing of you. Hat yourself! Give us your dyed dextremity here, frother, the Claddagh clasp! I met with dapper dandy and he shocked me big the hamd. Where’s your watch keeper? You’ve seen all sorts in shapes and sizes, marauding about the moppamound. How’s the cock and the bullfight? And old Auster and Hungrig? And the Beer and Belly and the Boot and Ball? Not forgetting the oils of greas under that turkey in julep and Father Freeshots Feilbogen in his rockery garden with the costard? And did you meet with Peadhar the Grab at all? And did you call on Tower Geesyhus? Was Mona, my own love, no bigger than she should be, making up to you in her bestbehaved manor when you made your breastlaw and made her, tell me? And did you like the landskip from Lambay? I’m better pleased than ten guidneys! You rejoice me! Faith, I’m proud of you, french davit! [p.465] You’ve surpassed yourself! Be introduced to yes! This is me aunt Julia Bride, your honour, dying to have you languish to scandal in her bosky old delltangle. You don’t reckoneyes him? He’s Jackot the Horner who boxed in his corner, jilting no fewer than three female bribes. That’s his penals. Shervorum! You haven’t seen her since she stepped into her drawoffs. Come on, spinister, do your stuff! Don’t be shoy, husbandmanvir! Weih, what’s on you, wip? Up the shamewaugh! She has plenty of woom in the smallclothes for the bothsforus, nephews push! Hatch yourself well! Enjombyourselves thurily! Would you wait biss she buds till you bite on her? Embrace her bashfully by almeans at my frank incensive and tell her in your semiological agglutinative yez, how Idos be asking after her. Let us be holy and evil and let her be peace on the bough. Sure, she fell in line with our tripertight photos as the lyonised mails when we were stablelads together like the corks again brothers, hungry and angry, cavileer grace by roundhered force, or like boyrun to sibster, me and you, shinners true and pinchme, our tertius quiddus, that never talked or listened. Always raving how we had the wrinkles of a snailcharmer and the slits and sniffers of a fellow that fell foul of the county de Loona and the meattrap of the first vegetarian. To be had for the asking. Have a hug! Take her out of poor tuppeny luck before she goes off in pure treple licquidance. I’d give three shillings a pullet to the canon for the conjugation to shadow you kissing her from me leberally all over as if she was a crucifix. It’s good for her bilabials, you understand. There’s nothing like the mistletouch for finding a queen’s earring false. Chink chink. As the curly bard said after kitchin the womn in his hym to the hum of her garments. You try a little tich to the tissle of his tail. The racist to the racy, rossy. The soil is for the self alone. Be ownkind. Be kithkinish. Be bloodysibby. Be irish. Be inish. Be offalia. Be hamlet. Be the property plot. Be Yorick and Lankystare. Be cool. Be mackinamucks of yourselves. Be finish. No martyr where the preature is there’s no plagues like rome. It gives up the gripes. Watch the swansway. Take your tiger over it. The leady on the lake and the convict of the forest. [p.466] Why, they might be Babau and Momie! Yipyip! To pan! To pan! To tinpinnypan. All folly me yap to Curlew! Give us a pin for her and we’ll call it a tossup. Can you reverse positions? Lets have a fuchu all round, courting cousins! Quuck, the duck of a woman for quack, the drake of a man, her little live apples for Leas and love potients for Leos, the next beast king. Put me down for all ringside seats. I can feel you being corrupted. Recoil. I can see you sprouting scruples. Get back. And as he’s boiling with water I’ll light your pyre. Turn about, skeezy Sammy, out of metaphor, till we feel are you still tropeful of popetry. Told you so. If you doubt of his love of darearing his feelings you’ll very much hurt for mishmash mastufractured on europe you can read off the tail of his. Rip ripper rippest and jac jac jac. Dwell on that, my hero and lander! That’s the side that appeals to em, the wring wrong way to wright woman. Shuck her! Let him! What he’s good for. Shuck her more! Let him again! All she wants! Could you wheedle a staveling encore out of your imitationer’s jubalharp, hey, Mr Jinglejoys? Congregational singing. Rota rota ran the pagoda con dio in capo ed il diavolo in coda. Many a diva devoucha saw her Dauber Dan at the priesty pagoda Rota ran. Uck! He’s so sedulous to singe always if prumpted, the mirthprovoker! Grunt unto us, I pray, your foreboden article in our own deas dockandoilish introducing the death of Nelson with coloraturas! Coraio, fra! And I’ll string second to harmanize. My loaf and pottage neaheaheahear Rochelle. With your dumpsey diddely dumpsey die, fiddeley fa. Diavoloh! Or come on, schoolcolours, and we’ll scrap, rug and mat and then be as chummy as two bashed spuds. Bitrial bay holmgang or betrayal buy jury. Attaboy! Fee gate has Heenan hoity, mind uncle Hare? What, sir? Poss, myster? Acheve! Thou, thou! What say ye? Taurus periculosus, morbus pedeiculosus. Miserere mei in miseribilibus! There’s uval lavguage for you! The tower is precluded, the mob’s in her petticoats; Mr R. E. Meehan is in misery with his billyboots. Begob, there’s not so much green in his Ireland’s eye! Sweet fellow ovocal, he stones out of stune. But he could be near a colonel with a voice like that. The [p.467] bark is still there but the molars are gone. The misery billyboots I used to lend him before we split and, be the hole in the year, they were laking like heaven’s reflexes. But I told him make your will be done and go to a general and I’d pray confessions for him. Areesh! Areesh! And I’ll be your intrepider. Ambras! Ruffle her! Bussing was before the blood and bissing will behind the curtain. Triss! Did you note that worrid expressionism on his megalogue? A full octavium below me! And did you hear his browrings rattlemaking when he was preaching to himself? And, whoa! do you twig the schamlooking leaf greeping ghastly down his blousyfrock? Our national umbloom! Areesh! He won’t. He’s shoy. Those worthies, my old faher’s onkel that was garotted, Caius Cocoa Codinhand, that I lost in a crowd, used to chop that tongue of his, japlatin, with my yuonkle’s owlseller, Woowoolfe Woodenbeard, that went stomebathred, in the Tower of Balbus, as brisk, man, as I’d scoff up muttan chepps and lobscouse. But it’s all deafman’s duff to me, begob. Sam knows miles bettern me how to work the miracle. And I see by his diarrhio he’s dropping the stammer out of his silenced bladder since I bonded him off more as a friend and as a brother to try and grow a muff and canonise his dead feet down on the river airy by thinking himself into the fourth dimension and place the ocean between his and ours, the churchyard in the cloister of the depths, after he was capped out of beurlads scoel for the sin against the past participle and earned the factitation of codding chaplan and being as homely gauche as swift B.A.A. Who gets twickly fullgets twice as allemanden huskers. But the whacker his word the weaker our ears for auracles who parles parses orileys. Illstarred punster, lipstering cowknucks. ’Twas the quadra sent him and Trinity too. And he can cantab as chipper as any oxon ever I mood with, a tiptoe singer! He’ll prisckly soon hand tune your Erin’s ear for you, p.p. a mimograph at a time, numan bitter, with his ancomartins to read the road roman with false steps ad Pernicious from rhearsilvar ormolus to torquinions superbers while I’m far away from wherever thou art serving my tallyhos and tullying [p.468] my hostilious by going in by the most holy recitatandas ffff for my varsatile examinations in the ologies, to be a coach on the Fukien mission. P? F? How used you learn me, brather soboostius, in my augustan days? With cesarella looking on. In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says, for the end is with woman, flesh-without-word, while the man to be is in a worse case after than before since she on the supine satisfies the verg to him! Toughtough, tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, an imperfect subjunctive. Paltry, flappent, had serious. Miss Smith onamatterpoetic. Hammisandivis axes colles waxes warmas like sodullas. So pick your stops with fondnes snow. And mind you twine the twos noods of your nicenames. And pull up your furbelovs as farabove as you’re farthingales. That’ll hint him how to click the trigger. Show you shall and won’t he will! His hearing is indoubting just as my seeing is onbelieving. So dactylise him up to blankpoint and let him blink for himself where you speak the best ticklish. You’ll feel what I mean. Fond namer, let me never see thee blame a kiss for shame a knee!

Echo, read ending! Siparioramoci! But from the stress of their sunder enlivening, ay clasp, deciduously, a nikrokosmikon must come to mike.

— Well, my positively last at any stage! I hate to look at alarms but, however they put on my watchcraft, must now close as I hereby hear by ear from by seeless socks ’tis time to be up and ambling. Mymiddle toe’s mitching, so mizzle I must else ’twill sarve me out. Gulp a bulper at parting and the moore the melodest! Farewell but whenever, as Tisdall told Toole. Tempos fidgets. Let flee me fiacckles, says the grand old manoark, stormcrested crowcock and undulant hair, hoodies tway! Yes, faith, I am as mew let freer, beneath me corthage, bound. I’m as bored now bawling beersgrace at sorepaws there as Andrew Clays was sharing sawdust with Daniel’s old collie. This shack’s not big enough for me now. I’m dreaming of ye, azores. And, remember this, a chorines, there’s the witch on the heath, sistra! ’Bansheeba peeling hourihaared while her Orcotron is hoaring [p.469] ho. And whinn muinnuit flittsbit twinn her ttittshe cries tallmidy! Daughters of the heavens, be lucks in turnabouts to the wandering sons of red loam! The earth’s atrot! The sun’s a scream! The air’s a jig. The water’s great! Seven oldy oldy hills and the one blue beamer. I’m going. I know I am. I could bet I am. Somewhere I must get far away from Banbashore, wherever I am. No saddle, no staffet, but spur on the moment! So I think I’ll take freeboots’ advise. Psk! I’ll borrow a path to lend me wings, quickquack, and from Jehusalem’s wall, clickclack, me courser’s clear, to Cheerup street I’ll travel the void world over. It’s Winland for moyne, bickbuck! Jeejakers! I hurt meself nettly that time! Come, my good frogmarchers! We felt the fall but we’ll front the defile. Was not my olty mutther, Sereth Maritza, a Runningwater? And the bould one that quickened her the seaborne Fingale? I feel like that hill of a whaler went yulding round Groenmund’s Circus with his tree full of seaweeds and Dinky Doll asleep in her shell. Hazelridge has seen me. Jerne valing is. Squall aboard for Kew, hop! Farewell awhile to her and thee! The brine’s my bride to be. Lead on, Macadam, and danked be he who first sights Halt Linduff! Solo, solone, solong! Lood Erynnana, ware thee wail! With me singame soarem o’erem! Here’s me take off. Now’s nunc or nimmer, siskinder! Here goes the enemy! Bennydick hotfoots onimpudent stayers! Sorry! I bless alls to the whished with this panromain apological which Watllwewhistlem sang to the kerrycoys. Break ranks! After wage-of-battle bother I am thinking most. Fik yew! I’m through. Won. Toe. Adry. You watch my smoke.

After poor Jaun the Boast’s last fireless words of postludium of his soapbox speech ending in’sheaven, twentyaid add one with a flirt of wings were pouring to his bysistance (could they snip that curl of curls to lay with their gloves and keep the kids bright!) prepared to cheer him should he leap or to curse him should he fall, but, with their biga triga rheda rodeo, the cherubs in the charabang, set down here and sedan chair, don’t you wish you’d a yoke or a bit in your mouth, repulsing all attempts [p.470] at first hands on, as no es nada, our greatly misunderstood one we perceived to give himself some sort of a hermetic prod or kick to sit up and take notice, which acted like magic, while the phalanx of daughters of February Filldyke, embushed and climbing, ramblers and weeps, voiced approval in their customary manner by dropping kneedeep in tears over their concelebrated meednight sunflower, piopadey boy, their solase in dorckaness, and splattering together joyously the plaps of their tappyhands as, with a cry of genuine distress, so prettly prattly pollylogue, they viewed him, the just one, their darling, away.

A dream of favours, a favourable dream. They know how they believe that they believe that they know. Wherefore they wail.

Eh jourd’weh! Oh jourd’woe! dosiriously it psalmodied. Guesturn’s lothlied answring to-maronite’s wail.

Oasis, cedarous esaltarshoming Leafboughnoon!

Oisis, coolpressus onmountof Sighing!

Oasis, palmost esaltarshoming Gladdays!

Oisis, phantastichal roseway anjerichol!

Oasis, newleavos spaciosing encampness!

Oisis, plantainous dewstuckacqmirage playtennis!

Pipetto, Pipetta has misery unnoticed!

But the strangest thing happened. Backscuttling for the hop off with the odds altogether in favour of his tumbling into the river, Jaun just then I saw to collect from the gentlest weaner among the weiners, (who by this were in half droopleaflong mourning for the passing of the last post) the familiar yellow label into which he let fall a drop, smothered a curse, choked a guffaw, spat expectoratiously and blew his own trumpet. And next thing was he gummalicked the stickyback side and stamped the oval badge of belief to his agnelows brow with a genuine dash of irrepressible piety that readily turned his ladylike typmanzelles capsy curvy (the holy scamp!), with half a glance of Irish frisky (a Juan Jaimesan hastaluego) from under the shag of his parallel brows. It was then he made as if be but waved instead a handacross the sea as notice to quit while the pacifettes made their armpacts widdershins (Frida! Freda! [p.471] Paza! Paisy! Irine! Areinette! Bridomay! Bentamai! Sososopky! Bebebekka! Bababadkessy! Ghugugoothoyou! Dama! Damadomina! Takiya! Tokaya! Scioccara! Siuccherillina! Peocchia! Peucchia! Ho Mi Hoping! Ha Me Happinice! Mirra! Myrha! Solyma! Salemita! Sainta! Sianta! O Peace!), but in selfrighting the balance of his corporeity to reexchange widerembrace with the pillarbosom of the Dizzier he loved prettier, between estellos and venoussas, bad luck to the lie but when next to nobody expected, their star and gartergazer at the summit of his climax, he toppled a lipple on to the off and, making a brandnew start for himself to run down his easting, by blessing hes sthers with the sign of the southern cross, his bungaloid borsaline with the hedgygreen bound blew off in a loveblast (award for trover!) and Jawjon Redhead, bucketing after, meccamaniac, (the headless shall have legs!), kingscouriered round with an easy rush and ready relays by the bridge a stadion beyond Ladycastle (and what herm but he narrowly missed fouling her buttress for her but for he acqueducked) and then, cocking a snook at the stock of his sermons, so mear and yet so fahr from that region’s general, away with him at the double, the hulk of a garron, pelting after the road, on Shanks’s mare, let off like a wind hound loose (the bouchal! you’d think it was that moment they gave him the jambos!) with a posse of tossing hankerwaves to his windward like seraph’s summonses on the air and a tempest of good things in packetshape teeming from all accounts into the funnel of his fanmail shrimpnet, along the highroad of the nation, Traitor’s Track, following which fond floral fray he was quickly lost to sight through the statuemen though without a doubt he was all the more on that same head to memory dear while Sickerson, that borne of bjoerne, la garde auxiliaire she murmured, hellyg Ursulinka, full of woe (and how fitlier should goodboy’s hand be shook than by the warmin of her besom that wrung his swaddles?): Where maggot Harvey kneeled till bags? Ate Andrew coos hogdam farvel!

Wethen, now, may the good people speed you, rural Haun, export stout fellow that you are, the crooner born with sweet [p.472] wail of evoker, healing music, ay, and heart in hand of Shamrogueshire! The googoos of the suckabolly in the rockabeddy are become the copiosity of wiseableness of the friarylayman in the pulpitbarrel. May your bawny hair grow rarer and fairer, our own only wideheaded boy! Rest your voice! Feed your mind! Mint your peas! Coax your qyous! Come to disdoon blarmey and walk our groves so charming and see again the sweet rockelose where first you hymned O Ciesa Mea! and touch the light theorbo! Songster, angler, choreographer! Piper to prisoned! Musicianship made Embrassador-at-Large! Good by nature and natural by design, had you but been spared to us, Hauneen lad, but sure where’s the use my talking quicker when I know you’ll hear me all astray? My long farewell I send to you, fair dream of sport and game and always something new. Gone is Haun! My grief, my ruin! Our Joss-el-Jovan! Our Chris-na-Murty! ’Tis well you’ll be looked after from last to first as yon beam of light we follow receding on your photophoric pilgrimage to your antipodes in the past, you who so often consigned your distributory tidings of great joy into our nevertoolatetolove box, mansuetudinous manipulator, victimisedly victorihoarse, dearest Haun of all, you of the boots, true as adie, stepwalker, pennyatimer, lampaddyfair, postanulengro, our rommanychiel! Thy now paling light lucerne we ne’er may see again. But could it speak how nicely would it splutter to the four cantons praises be to thee, our pattern sent! For you had — may I, in our, your and their names, dare to say it? — the nucleus of a glow of a zeal of soul of service such as rarely, if ever, have I met with single men. Numerous are those who, nay, there are a dozen of folks still unclaimed by the death angel in this country of ours today, humble indivisibles in this grand continuum, overlorded by fate and interlarded with accidence, who, while there are hours and days, will fervently pray to the spirit above that they may never depart this earth of theirs till in his long run from that place where the day begins, ere he retourneys postexilic, on that day that belongs to joyful Ireland, the people that is of all time, the old old oldest, the young young youngest, after decades of [p.473] longsuffering and decennia of brief glory, to mind us of what was when and to matter us of the withering of our ways, their Janyouare Fibyouare wins true from Sylvester (only Walker himself is like Waltzer, whimsicalissimo they go murmurand) comes marching ahome on the summer-crust of the flagway. Life, it is true, will be a blank without you because avicuum’s not there at all, to nomore cares from nomad knows, ere Molochy wars bring the devil era, a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark, rived by darby’s chilldays embers, spatched fun Juhn that dandyforth, from the night we are and feel and fade with to the yesterselves we tread to turnupon.

But, boy, you did your strong nine furlong mile in slick and slapstick record time and a farfetched deed it was in troth, champion docile, with your high bouncing gait of going and your feat of passage will be contested with you and through you, for centuries to come. The phaynix rose a sun before Erebia sank his smother! Shoot up on that, bright Bennu bird! Va faotre! Eftsoon so too will our own sphoenix spark spirt his spyre and sunward stride the rampante flambe. Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished! Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain.

 ® 

[p.474] Lowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the hillock lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshape, brief wallet to his side, and arm loose, by his staff of citron briar, tradition stick-pass-on. His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact. Most distressfully (but, my dear, how successfully!) to wail he did, his locks of a lucan tinge, quickrich, ripely rippling, unfilleted, those lashbetasselled lids on the verge of closing time, whiles ouze of his sidewiseopen mouth the breath of him, evenso languishing as the princeliest treble treacle or lichee chewchow purse could buy. Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!), which earpiercing dulcitude! As were you suppose to go and push with your bluntblank pin in hand upinto his fleshasplush cushionettes of some chubby boybold love of an angel. Hwoah!

When, as the buzzer brings the light brigade, keeping the home fires burning, so on the churring call themselves came at him, from the westborders of the eastmidlands, three kings of three suits and a crowner, from all their cardinal parts, along the amber way where Brosna’s furzy. To lift them they did, senators four, by the first quaint skreek of the gloaming and they hopped it up the mountainy molehill, traversing climes of old times gone by of the days not worth remembering; inventing some excusethems, any sort, having a sevenply [p.475] sweat of night blues moist upon them. Feefee! phopho!! foorchtha!!! aggala!!!! jeeshee!!!!! paloola!!!!!! ooridiminy!!!!!!! Afeared themselves were to wonder at the class of a crossroads puzzler he would likely be, length by breadth nonplussing his thickness, ells upon ells of him, making so many square yards of him, one half of him in Conn’s half but the whole of him nevertheless in Owenmore’s five quarters. There would he lay till they would him descry, spancelled down upon a blossomy bed, at one foule stretch, amongst the daffydowndillies, the flowers of narcosis fourfettering his footlights, a halohedge of wild spuds hovering over him, epicures waltzing with gardenfillers, puritan shoots advancing to Aran chiefs. Phopho!! The meteor pulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel. Aggala!!!! His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel. Paloola!!!!!! And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members. Ooridiminy!!!!!!! His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt.

Those four claymen clomb together to hold their sworn starchamber quiry on him. For he was ever their quarrel, the way they would see themselves, everybug his bodiment atop of annywom her notion, and the meet of their noght was worth two of his morning. Up to the esker ridge it was, Mallinger parish, to a mead that was not far, the son’s rest. First klettered Shanator Gregory, seeking spoor through the deep timefield, Shanator Lyons, trailing the wavy line of his partition footsteps (something in his blisters was telling him all along how he had been in that place one time), then his Recordership, Dr Shunadure Tarpey, caperchasing after honourable sleep, hot on to the aniseed and, up out of his prompt corner, old Shunny MacShunny, MacDougal the hiker, in the rere of them on the run, to make a quorum. Roping their ass he was, their skygrey globetrotter, by way of an afterthought and by no means legless either for such sprouts on him they were that much oneven it was tumbling he was by four lengths, within the bawl of a mascot, kuss yuss, kuss cley, patsy watsy, like the kapr in the kabisses, the big ass, to hear with his unaided ears the harp in the air, the bugle [p.476] dianablowing, wild as wild, the mockingbird whose word is misfortune, so ’tis said, the bulbul down the wind.

The proto was traipsing through the tangle then, Mathew Walker, godsons’ goddestfar, deputising for gossipocracy, and his station was a few perch to the weatherside of the knoll Asnoch and it was from no other place unless there, how and ever, that he proxtended aloof upon the ether Mesmer’s Manuum, the hand making silence. The buckos beyond on the lea, then stopped wheresoever they found their standings and that way they set ward about him, doing obedience, nod, bend, bow and curtsey, like the watchers of Prospect, upholding their broadawake prober’s hats on their firrum heads, the travelling court on its findings circuiting that personer in his fallen. And a crack quatyouare of stenoggers they made of themselves, solons and psychomorers, all told, with their hurts and daimons, spites and clops, not even to the seclusion of their beast by them that was the odd trick of the pack, trump and no friend of carrots. And, what do you think, who should be laying there above all other persons forenenst them only Yawn! All of asprawl he was laying too amengst the poppies and, I can tell you something more than that, drear writer, profoundly as you may bedeave to it, he was oscasleep asleep. And it was far more similar to a satrap he lay there with unctuous beauty all surrounded, the poser, or for whatall I know like Lord Lumen, coaching his preferred constellations in faith and doctrine, for old Matt Gregory, ’tis he had the starmenagerie, Marcus Lyons and Lucas Metcalfe Tarpey and the mack that never forgave the ass that lurked behind him, Jonny na Hossaleen.

More than their good share of their five senses ensorcelled you would say themselves were, fuming censor, the way they could not rightly tell their heels from their stools as they cooched down a mamalujo by his cubical crib, as question time drew nighing and the map of the souls’ groupography rose in relief within their quarterings, to play tops or kites or hoops or marbles, curchycurchy, gawking on him, for the issuance of his pnum and softnoising one of them to another one, the boguaqueesthers. [p.477] And it is what they began to say to him tetrahedrally then, the masters, what way was he.

— He’s giving, the wee bairn. Yun has lived.

— Yerra, why dat, my leader?

— Wisha, is he boosed or what, alannah?

— Or his wind’s from the wrong cut, says Ned of the Hill.

— Lesten!

— Why so and speak up, do you hear me, you sir?

— Or he’s rehearsing somewan’s funeral.

— Whisht outathat! Hubba’s up!

And as they were spreading abroad on their octopuds their drifter nets, the chromous gleamy seiners’ nets and, no lie, there was word of assonance being softspoken among those quartermasters.

— Get busy, kid!

— Chirpy, come now!

— The present hospices is a good time.

— I’ll take on that chap.

For it was in the back of their mind’s ear, temptive lissomer, how they would be spreading in quadriliberal their azurespotted fine attractable nets, their nansen nets, from Matt Senior to the thurrible mystagogue after him and from thence to the neighbour and that way to the puisny donkeyman and his crucifer’s cauda. And in their minds years backslibris, so it was, slipping beauty, how they would be meshing that way, when he rose to it, with the planckton at play about him, the quivers of scaly silver and their clutches of chromes of the highly lucid spanishing gold whilst, as hour gave way to mazing hour, with Yawn himself keeping time with his thripthongue, to ope his blurbeous lips he would, a let out classy, the way myrrh of the moor and molten moonmist would be melding mellifond indo his mouth.

— Y?

— Before You!

— Ecko! How sweet thee answer makes! Afterwheres? In the land of lions’ odor?

— Friends! First if yu don’t mind. Name yur historical grouns.

— This same prehistoric barrow ’tis, the orangery.

[p.478] — I see. Very good now. It is in your orangery, I take it, you have your letters. Can you hear here me, you sir?

— Throsends. For my darling. Typette!

— So long aforetime? Can you hear better?

— Millions. For godsends. For my darling dearling one.

— Now, to come nearer zone; I would like to raise my deuterous point audibly touching this. There is this maggers. I am told by our interpreter, Hanner Esellus, that there are fully six hundred and six ragwords in your malherbal Magis landeguage in which wald wand rimes alpman and there is resin in all roots for monarch but yav hace not one pronouncable teerm that blows in all the vallums of tartallaght to signify majestate, even provisionally, nor no rheda rhoda or torpentine path or hallucinian via nor aurellian gape nor sunkin rut nor grossgrown trek nor crimeslaved cruxway and no moorhens cry or mooner’s plankgang there to lead us to hopenhaven. Is such the unde derivatur casematter messio! Frankly. Magis megis enerretur mynus hoc intelligow.

— How? C’est mal prononsable, tartagliano, perfrances. Vous n’avez pas d’o dans votre boche provenciale, mousoo. Je m’incline mais Moy jay trouvay la clee dang les champs. Hay sham nap poddy velour, come on!

— Hep there! Commong, sa na pa de valure? Whu’s teit dans yur jambs? Whur’s that inclining and talkin about the messiah so cloover? A true’s to your trefling! Whure yu!

— Trinathan partnick dieudonnay. Have you seen her? Typette, my tactile O!

— Are you in your fatherick, lonely one?

— The same. Three persons. Have you seen my darling only one? I am sohohold!

— What are yu shevering about, ultramontane, like a houn? Is there cold on ye, doraphobian? Or do yu want yur primafairy schoolmam?

— The woods of fogloot! O mis padredges!

— Whisht awhile, greyleg! The duck is rising and you’ll wake that stand of plover. I know that place better than anyone. Sure, [p.479] I used to be always overthere on the fourth day at my grandmother’s place, Tear-nan-Ogre, my little grey home in the west, in or about Mayo when the long dog gave tongue and they coursing the marches and they straining at the leash. Tortoiseshell for a guineagould! Burb! Burb! Burb! Follow me up Tucurlugh! That’s the place for the claire oysters, Polldoody, County Conway. I never knew how rich I was like another story in the zoedone of the zephyros, strolling and strolling, carrying my dragoman, Meads Marvel, thass withumpronouceable tail, along the shore. Do you know my cousin, Mr Jasper Dougal that keeps the Anchor on the Mountain, the parson’s son, Jasper of the Tuns, Pat Whateveryournameis?

— Dood and I dood. The wolves of Fochlut! By Whydoyoucallme? Do not flingamejig to the twolves!

— Turcafiera amd that’s a good wan right enough! Wooluvs no less!

— One moment now, if I foreshorten the bloss on your bleather. Encroachement spells erosion. Dunlin and turnstone augur us where, how and when best as to burial of carcass, fuselage of dump and committal of noisance. But, since you invocate austers for the trailing of vixens, I would like to send a cormorant around this blue lagoon. Tell me now this. You told my larned friend rather previously, a moment since, about this mound or barrow. Now I suggest to you that ere there was this plagueburrow, as you seem to call it, there was a burialbattell, the boat of millions of years. Would you bear me out in that, relatively speaking, with her jackstaff jerking at her pennyladders, why not, and sizing a fair sail, knowest thout the kind? The Pourquoi Pas, bound for Weissduwasland, that fourmaster barquentine, Webster says, our ship that ne’re returned. The Frenchman, I say, was an orangeboat. He is a boat. You see him. The both how you see is they! Draken af Danemork! Sacked it or ate it? What! Hennu! Spake ab laut!

— Couch, cortege, ringbarrow, dungcairn. Beseek the runes and see the longurn! Allmaun away when you hear the ganghorn. And meet Nautsen. Ess Ess. O ess. Warum night! Con- [p.480] ning two lay payees. Norsker. Her raven flag was out, the slaver. I trow pon good, jordan’s scaper, good’s barnet and trustyman. Crouch low, you pigeons three! Say, call that girl with the tan tress awn! Call Wolfhound! Wolf of the sea. Folchu! Folchu!

— Very good now. That folklore’s straight from the ass his mouth. I will crusade on with the parent ship, weather prophetting, far away from those green hills, a station, Ireton tells me, bonofide for keeltappers, now to come to the midnight middy on this levantine ponenter. From Daneland sailed the oxeyed man, now mark well what I say.

— Magnus Spadebeard, korsets krosser, welsher perfyddye. A destroyer in our port. Signed to me with his baling scoop. Laid bare his breastpaps to give suck, to suckle me. Ecce Hagios Chrisman!

— Oh, Jeyses, fluid! says the poisoned well. Futtfishy the First. Hootchcopper’s enkel at the navel manuvres!

— Hep! Hello there, Bill of old Bailey! Whu’s he? Whu’s this lad, why the pups?

— Hunkalus Childared Easterheld. It’s his lost chance, Emania. Ware him well.

— Hey! Did you dream you were ating your own tripe, acushla, that you tied yourself up that wrynecky fix?

— I see now. We move in the beast circuls. Grimbarb and pancercrucer! You took the words out of my mouth. A child’s dread for a dragon vicefather. Hillcloud encompass us! You mean you lived as milky at their lyceum, couard, while you learned, volp volp, to howl yourself wolfwise. Dyb! Dyb! Do your best.

— I am dob dob dobbling like old Booth’s, courteous. The cubs are after me, it zeebs, the whole totem pack, vuk vuk and vuk vuk to them, for Robinson’s shield.

— Scents and gouspils! The animal jangs again! Find the fingall harriers! Here howl me wiseacre’s hat till I die of the milkman’s lupus!

— What? Wolfgang? Whoah! Talk very slowe!

[p.481] — Hail him heathen, heal him holystone!

Courser, Recourser, Changechild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ?

Eld as endall, earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ?

— A cataleptic mithyphallic! Was this Totem Fulcrum Est Ancestor yu hald in Dies Eirae where no spider webbeth or Anno Mundi ere bawds plied in Skiffstrait? Be fair, Chris!

— Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake. Ah! May he have now of here fearfilled me! Sinflowed, O sinflowed! Fia! Fia! Befurcht christ!

— I have your tristich now; it recurs in three times the same differently (there is such a fui fui story which obtains of him): comming nown from the asphalt to the concrete, from the human historic brute, Finnsen Faynean, occeanyclived, to this same vulganized hillsir from yours, Mr Tupling Toun of Morning de Heights, with his lavast flow and his rambling undergroands, would he reoccur Ad Horam, as old Romeo Rogers, in city or county, and your sure ob, or by, with or from an urb, of you know the differenciabus, as brauchbarred in apabhramsa, sierrah! We speak of Gun, the farther. And in the locative. Bap! Bap!

— Ouer Tad, Hellig Babbau, whom certayn orbits assertant re humeplace of Chivitats Ei, Smithwick, Rhonnda, Kaledon, Salem (Mass), Childers, Argos and Duthless. Well, I am advised he might in a sense be both nevertheless, every at man like myself, suffix it to say, Abrahamsk and Brookbear! By him it was done bapka, by me it was gone into, to whom it will beblive, Mushame, Mushame! I am afraid you could not heave ahore one of your own old stepstones, barnabarnabarn, over a stumbledown wall here in Huddlestown to this classic Noctuber night but itandthey woule binge, much as vecious, off the dosshouse back of a racerider in his truetoflesh colours, either handicapped on her flat or barely repeating himself. That is a tiptip tim oldy faher now the man I go in fear of, Tommy Terracotta, and he could be all your and my das, the brodar of the founder of the father of the finder of the pfander of the pfunder of the furst man in Ranelagh, fué! fué! Petries and violet ice (I am yam, as Me and Tam Tower used to jagger pemmer it, over at the house of [p.482] Eddy’s Christy, meaning Dodgfather, Dodgson and Coo) and spiriduous sanction!

— Breeze softly. Aures are aureas. Hau’s his naun?

— Me das has or oreils. Piercey, piercey, piercey, piercey!

— White eyeluscious and muddyhorsebroth! Pig Pursyriley! But where do we get off, chiseller?

— Haltstille, Lucas and Dublinn! Vulva! Vulva! Vulva! Vulva!

— Macdougal, Atlantic City, or his onagrass that is, chuam and coughan! I would go near identifying you from your stavrotides, Jong of Maho, and the weslarias round your yokohahat. And that O’mulanchonry plucher you have from the worst curst of Ireland, Glwlwd of the Mghtwg Grwpp, is no use to you either, Johnny my donkeyschott. Number four, fix up your spreadeagle and pull your weight!

— Hooshin hom to our regional’s hin and the gander of Hayden. Would ye ken a young stepschuler of psychical chirography, the name of Keven, or (let outers pray) Evan Vaughan, of his Posthorn in the High Street, that was shooing a Guiney gagag, Poulepinter, that found the dogumen number one, I would suggest, an illegible downfumbed by an unelgible?

— If I do know sinted sageness? Sometimes he would keep silent for a few minutes as if in prayer and clasp his forehead and during the time he would be thinking to himself and he would not mind anybody who would be talking to him or crying stinking fish. But I no way need you, stroke oar nor your quick handles. Your too farfar a cock of the north there, Matty Armagh, and your due south so.

— South I see. You’re up-in-Leal-Ulster and I’m-free-Down-in-Easia, this is much better. He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause caus- [p.483] ing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman’s tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas. Shan - Shim - Schung. There is a strong suspicion on counterfeit Kevin and we all remember ye in childhood’s reverye. ’Tis the bells of scandal that gave tune to grumble over him and someone between me and thee. He would preach to the two turkies and dipdip all the dindians, this master the abbey, and give gold tidings to all that are in the bonze age of anteproresurrectionism to entrust their easter neappearance to Borsaiolini’s house of hatcraft. He is our sent on the firm. Now, have you reasonable hesitancy in your mind about him after fourpriest redmass or are you in your post? Tell me andat sans dismay. Leap, pard!

— Fierappel putting years on me! Nwo, nwo! This bolt in hand be my worder! I’ll see you moved farther, blarneying Marcantonio! What cans such wretch to say to I or how have My to doom with him? We were wombful of mischief and initiumwise, everliking a liked, hairytop on heeltipper, alpybecca’s unwachsibles, an ikeson am ikeson, that babe, imprincipially, my leperd brethern, the Puer, ens innocens of but fifteen primes. Ya all in your kalblionized so trilustriously standing the real school, to be upright as his match, healtheous as is egg, saviour so the salt and good wee braod, parallaling buttyr, did I altermobile him to a flare insiding hogsfat. Been ike hins kindergardien? I know not, O cashla, I am sure offed habitand this undered heaven, meis enfins, contrasting the first mover, that father I ascend fromming knows, as I think, caused whom I, a self the sign, came remaining being dwelling ayr, plage and watford as to I was eltered impostulance possessing my future state falling towards thrice myself resting the childhide when I received the habit following Mezienius connecting Mezosius including was verted embracing a palegrim, circumcised my hairs, Oh laud, and removed my clothes from patristic motives, meas minimas culpads! Permitting this ick (ickle coon icoocoon) crouched low entering humble down, dead thrue mean scato- [p.484] logical past, making so smell partaking myself to confess abiding clean tumbluponing yous octopods, mouthspeech allno fingerforce, owning my mansuetude before him attaching Audeon’s prostratingwards mine sore accompanying my thrain tropps offering meye eyesalt, what I (the person whomin I now am) did not do, how he to say essied anding how he was making errand andanding how he all locutey sunt, why did you, my sexth best friend, blabber always you would be so delated to back me, then ersed irredent, toppling Humphrey hugging Nephew, old beggelaut, designing such post sitting his night office? Annexing then, producing Saint Momuluius, you snub around enclosing your moving motion touching the other catachumens continuing say providing append of signature quoniam you will celebrand my dirthdags quoniam, concealed a concealer, I am twosides uppish, a mockbelief insulant, ending none meer hyber irish. Well, chunk your dimned chink, before avtokinatown, forasmuch as many have tooken in hand to, I may as well humbly correct that vespian now in case of temporalities. I’ve my pockets full comeplay of you laycreated cardonals, ap rince, ap rowler, ap rancer, ap rowdey! Improperial! I saved you fore of the Hekkites and you loosed me hind bland Harry to the burghmote of Aud Dub. I teachet you in fair time, my elders, the W.X.Y.Z. and P.Q.R.S. of legatine powers and you, Ailbey and Ciardeclan, I learn, episcoping me altogether, circumdeditioned me. I brought you from the loups of Lazary and you have remembered my lapsus langways. Washywatchywataywatashy! Oirasesheorebukujibun! Watacooshy lot! Mind of poison is. That time thing think! Honorific remembrance to spit humble makes. My ruridecanal caste is a cut above you peregrines. Aye vouchu to rumanescu. See the leabhour of my generations! Has not my master, Theophrastius Spheropneumaticus, written that the spirit is from the upper circle? I’m of the ochlocracy with Prestopher Palumbus and Porvus Parrio. Soa koa Kelly Terry per Chelly Derry lepossette. Ho look at my jailbrand Exquovis and sequencias High marked on me fakesimilar in the foreign by Pappagallus and Pumpusmugnus: ahem! Anglicey: Eggs squawfish lean yoe nun feed marecurious. [p.485] Sagart can self laud nilobstant to Lowman Catlick’s patrician morning coat of arms with my High tripenniferry cresta and caudal mottams: Itch dean: which Gaspey, Otto and Sauer, he renders: echo stay so! Addressing eat or not eat body Yours am. And, Mind, praisegad, is the first praisonal Egoname Yod heard boissboissy in Moy Bog’s domesday. Hastan the vista! Or in alleman: Suck at!

— Suck it yourself, sugarstick! Misha, Yid think whose was asking to luckat your sore toe or to taste your gaspy, hot and sour! Ichthyan! Hegvat tosser! Gags be plebsed! Between his voyous and her consinnantes! Thugg, Dirke and Hacker with Rose Lankester and Blanche Yorke! Are we speachin d’anglas landadge or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch? Oy soy, Bleseyblasey, where to go is knowing remain? Become quantity that discourse bothersome when what do? Knowing remain? Come back, baddy wrily, to Bullydamestough! Cum him, buddy rowly, with me! What about your thruppenny croucher of an old fellow, me boy, through the ages, tell us, eh? What about Brian’s the Vauntandonlieme, Master Monk, eh, eh, Spira in Me Domino, spear me Doyne! Fat prize the bonafide peachumpidgeonlover, eh, eh, eh, esquire earwugs, escusado, of Jenkins’ Area, with his I’ve Ivy under his tangue and the hohallo to his dullaphone, before there was a sound in the world? How big was his boost friend and be shanghaied to him? The swaaber! The twicer, trifoaled in Wanstable! Loud’s curse to him! If you hored him outerly as we harum lubberintly, from morning rice till nightmale, with his drums and bones and hums in drones your innereer’d heerdly heer he. Ho ha hi he hung! Tsing tsing!

— Me no angly mo, me speakee Yellman’s lingas. Nicey Doc Mistel Lu, please! Me no pigey ludiments all same numpa one Topside Tellmastoly fella. Me pigey savvy a singasong anothel time. Pleasie, Mista Lukie Walkie! Josadam cowbelly maam belongame shepullamealahmalong, begolla, Jackinaboss belongashe; plentymuch boohoomeo.

— Hell’s Confucium and the Elements! Tootoo moohootch! Thot’s never the postal cleric, checking chinchin chat with nip- [p.486] ponnippers! Halt there sob story to your lambdad’s tale! Are you roman cawthrick 432?

— Quadrigue my yoke.

Triple my tryst.

Tandem my sire.

— History as her is harped. Too the toone your owldfrow lied of. Tantris, hattrick, tryst and parting, by vowelglide! I feel your thrilljoy mouths overtspeaking, O dragoman, hands understudium. Plunger words what paddle verbed. Mere man’s mime: God has jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first. Every third man has a chink in his conscience and every other woman has a jape in her mind. Now, fix on the little fellow in my eye, Minucius Mandrake, and follow my little psychosinology, poor armer in slingslang. Now I, the lord of Tuttu, am placing that inital T square of burial jade upright to your temple a moment. Do you see anything, templar?

— I see a blackfrinch pliestrycook . . . who is carrying on his brainpan . . . a cathedral of lovejelly for his . . . Tiens, how he is like somebodies!

— Pious, a pious person. What sound of tistress isoles my ear? I horizont the same, this serpe with ramshead, and lay it lightly to your lip a little. What do you feel, liplove?

— I feel a fine lady . . . floating on a stillstream of isisglass . . . with gold hair to the bed . . . and white arms to the twinklers . . . O la la!

— Purely, in a pure manner. O, sey but swift and still a vain essaying! Trothed today, trenned tomorrow. I invert the initial of your tripartite and sign it sternly, and adze to girdle, on your breast. What do you hear, breastplate?

— I ahear of a hopper behidin the door slappin his feet in a pool of bran.

— Bellax, acting like a bellax. And so the triptych vision passes. Out of a hillside into a hillside. Fairshee fading. Again am I deliciated by the picaresqueness of your irmages. Now, the oneir urge iterimpellant, I feel called upon to ask did it ever occur to you, qua you, prior to this, by a stretch of [p.487] your iberborealic imagination, when it’s quicker than this quacking that you might, bar accidens, be very largely substituted in potential secession from your next life by a complementary character, voices apart? Upjack! I shudder for your thought! Think! Put from your mind that and take on trust this. The next word depends on your answer.

— I’m thinking to, thogged be thenked! I was just trying to think when I thought I felt a flea. I might have. I cannot say for it is of no significance at all. Once or twice when I was in odinburgh with my addlefoes, Jake Jones, the handscabby, when I thinkled I wore trying on my garden substisuit, boy’s apert, at my nexword nighboor’s, and maybe more largely nor you quosh yet you, messmate, realise. A few times, so to shape, I chanced to be stretching, in the shadow as I thought, the liferight out of myself in my ericulous imaginating. I felt feeling a half Scotch and pottage like roung my middle ageing like Bewley in the baste so that I indicate out to myself and I swear my gots how that I’m not meself at all, no jolly fear, when I realise bimiselves how becomingly I to be going to become.

— O, is that the way with you, you craythur? In the becoming was the weared, wontnat! Hood maketh not frere. The voice is the voice of jokeup, I fear. Are you imitation Roma now or Amor now. You have all our empathies, eh, Mr Trickpat, if you don’t mind, that is, aside from sings and mush, answering to my straight question?

— God save the monk! I won’t mind this is, answering to your strict crossqueets, whereas it would be as unethical for me now to answer as it would have been nonsensical for you then not to have asked. Same no can, home no will, gangin I am. Gangang is Mine and I will return. Out of my name you call me, Leelander. But in my shelter you’ll miss me. When Lapac walks backwords he’s darkest horse in Capalisoot. You knew me once but you won’t know me twice. I am simpliciter arduus, ars of the schoo, Freeday’s child in loving and thieving.

— My child, know this! Some portion of that answer appears to have been token by you from the writings of Saint Synodius, [p.488] that first liar. Let us hear, therefore, as you honour and obey the queen, whither the indwellingness of that which shamefieth be entwined of one or atoned of two. Let us hear, Art simplicissime!

— Dearly beloved brethren: Bruno and Nola, leymon bogholders and stationary lifepartners off orangey Saint Nessau Street, were explaining it avicendas all round each other ere yesterweek out of Ibn Sen and Ipanzussch. When himupon Nola Bruno monopolises his egobruno most unwillingly seses by the mortal powers alionola equal and opposite brunoipso, id est, eternally provoking alio opposite equally as provoked as Bruno at being eternally opposed by Nola. Poor omniboose, singalow singelearum: so is he!

— One might hear in their beyond that lionroar in the air again, the zoohoohoom of Felin make Call. Bruin goes to Noble, aver who is? If is itsen? Or you mean Nolans but Volans, an alibi, do you Mutemalice, suffering unegoistically from the singular but positively enjoying on the plural? Dustify of that sole, you breather! Ruemember, blither, thou must lie!

— Oyessoyess! I never dramped of prebeing a postman but I mean in ostralian someplace, mults deeply belubdead; my allaboy brother, Negoist Cabler, of this city, whom ’tis better ne’er to name, my said brother, the skipgod, expulled for looking at churches from behind, who is sender of the Hullo Eve Cenograph in prose and worse every Allso’s night. High Brazil Brandan’s Deferred, midden Erse clare language, Noughtnoughtnought nein. Assass. Dublire, per Neuropaths. Punk. Starving today plays punk opening tomorrow two plays punk wire splosh how two plays punk Cabler. Have you forgotten poor Alby Sobrinos, Geoff, you blighter, identifiable by the necessary white patch on his rear? How he went to his swiltersland after his lungs, my sad late brother, before his coglionial expancian? Won’t you join me in a small halemerry, a bottle of the best, for wellmet Capeler, united Irishmen, what though preferring the stranger, the coughs and the itches and the minnies and the ratties the opulose and bilgenses, for of his was the patriots mistaken. The heart that wast our Graw McGree! [p.489] Yet be there some who mourn him, concluding him dead, and more there be that wait astand. His fuchs up the staires and the ladgers in his haires, he ought to win that V.V.C. Fullgrapce for an endupper, half muxy on his whole! Would he were even among the lost! From ours bereft beyond belongs. Oremus poor fraternibus that he may yet escape the gallews and still remain ours faithfully departed. I wronged you. I never want to see more of bad men but I want to learn from any on the airse, like Tass with much thanks, here’s ditto, if he lives sameplace in the antipathies of austrasia or anywhere with my fawngest on his hooshmoney, safe and damned, or has hopped it or who can throw any lime on the sopjack, my fond fosther, E. Obiit Nolan, The Workings, N.S.W., his condition off the Venerable Jerrybuilt, not belonging to these parts, who, I remember ham to me, when we were like bro and sis over our castor and porridge, with his roamin I suppose, expecting for his clarenx negus, a teetotum abstainer. He feels he ought to be as asamed of me as me to be ashunned of him. We were in one class of age like to two clots of egg. I am most beholding to him, my namesick, as we sayed it in our Amharican, through the Doubly Telewisher. Outpassed hearts wag short pertimes. Worndown shoes upon his feet, to whose redress no tongue can tell! In his hands a boot! Spare me, do, a copper or two and happy I’ll hope you’ll be! It will pleased me behind with thanks from before and love to self and all I remain here your truly friend. I am no scholar but I loved that man who has africot lupps with the moonshane in his profile, my shemblable! My freer! I call you my halfbrother because you in your soberer otiumic moments remind me deeply of my natural saywhen brothel in feed, hop and jollity, S. H. Devitt, that benighted irismaimed, who is tearly belaboured by Sydney and Alibany.

— As you sing it it’s a study. That letter selfpenned to one’s other, that neverperfect everplanned?

— This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel.

— My dear sir! In this wireless age any owl rooster can peck [p.490] up bostoons. But whoewaxed he so anquished? Was he vector victored of victim vexed?

— Mighty sure! Way way for his wehicul! A parambolator ram into his bagsmall when he was reading alawd, with two ecolites and he’s been failing of that kink in his arts over sense.

— Madonagh and Chiel, idealist leading a double life! But who, for the brilliance of brothers, is the Nolan as appearant nominally?

— Mr Nolan is pronuminally Mr Gottgab.

— I get it. By hearing his thing about a person one begins to place him for a certain in true. You reeker, he stands pat for you before a direct object in the feminine. I see. By maiden sname. Now, I am earnestly asking you, and putting it as between this yohou and that houmonymh, will just you search through your gabgut memoirs for all of two minutes for this impersonating pronolan, fairhead on foulshoulders. Would it be in twofold truth an untaken mispatriate, too fullfully true and rereally a doblinganger much about your own medium with a sandy whiskers? Poke me nabs in the ribs and pick the erstwort out of his mouth.

— Treble Stauter of Holy Baggot Street, formerly Swordmeat, who I surpassed him lately for four and six bringing home the Christmas, as heavy as music, hand to eyes on the peer for Noel’s Arch, in blessed foster’s place is doing the dirty on me with his tantrums and all these godforgiven kilowatts I’d be better off without. She’s write to him she’s levt by me, Jenny Rediviva! Toot! Detter for you, Mr Nobru. Toot toot! Better for you, Mr Anol! This is the way we. Of a redtettetterday morning.

— When your contraman from Tuwarceathay is looking for righting that is not a good sign? Not?

— I speak truly, it’s a shower sign that it’s not.

— What though it be for the sow of his heart? If even she were a good pool Pegeen?

— If she ate your windowsill you wouldn’t say sow.

— Would you be surprised after that my asking have you a bull, a bosbully, with a whistle in his tail to scare other birds?

— I would.

[p.491] — Were you with Sindy and Sandy attending Goliath, a bull?

— You’d make me sag what you like to. I was intending a funeral. Simply and samply.

— They are too wise of solbing their silbings?

— And both croon to the same theme.

— Tugbag is Baggut’s, when a crispin sokolist besoops juts kamps or clapperclaws an irvingite offthedocks. A luckchange, I see. Thinking young through the muddleage spread, the moral fat his mental leans on. We can cop that with our straat that is called corkscrewed. It would be the finest boulevard billy for a mile in every direction, from Lismore to Cape Brendan, Patrick’s, if they took the bint out of the mittle of it. You told of a tryst too, two a tutu. I wonder now, without releasing seeklets of the alcove, turturs or raabraabs, have I heard mention of whose name anywhere? Mallowlane or Demaasch? Strike us up either end Have You Erred off Van Homper or Ebell Teresa Kane.

— Marak! Marak! Marak!

He drapped has draraks an Mansianhase parak

And he had ta barraw the watarcrass shartclaths aff the arkbashap af Yarak!

— Braudribnob’s on the bummel?

— And lillypets on the lea.

— A being again in becomings again. From the sallies to the allies through their central power?

— Pirce! Perce! Quick! Queck!

— O Tara’s thrush, the sharepusher! And he said he was only taking the average grass temperature for green Thurdsday, the blutchy scaliger! Who you know the musselman, his muscle-mum and mistlemam? Maomi, Mamie, My Mo Mum! He loves a drary lane. Feel Phylliscitations to daff Mr Hairwigger who has just hadded twinned little curls! He was resting between horrockses’ sheets, wailing for white warfare, prooboor welshtbreton, and unbiassed by the embarrassment of disposal but, the first woking day, by Thunder, he stepped into the breach and put on his recriution trousers and riding apron in Baltic Bygrad, the old soggy, was when the bold bhuoys of Iran wouldn’t join up.

[p.492] — How voice you that, nice Sandy man? Not large goodman is he, Sandy nice. Ask him this one minute upthrow inner lotus of his burly ear womit he dropped his Bass’s to P flat. And for that he was allaughed? And then baited? The whole gammat?

— Loonacied! Marterdyed!! Madwakemiherculossed!!! Judascessed!!!! Pairaskivvymenassed!!!!! Luredogged!!!!!! And, needatellye, faulscrescendied!!!!!!!

— Dias domnas! Dolled to dolthood? And Annie Delittle, his daintree diva, in deltic dwilights, singing him henpecked rusish through the bars? My Wolossay’s wild as the Crasnian Sea! Grabashag, groogy, scoop and I’ll cure ye! Mother of emeralds, ara poog neighbours!

— Capilla, Rubrilla and Melcamomilla! Dauby, dauby, without dulay! Well, I beg to traverse same above statement by saxy luters in their back haul of Coalcutter what reflects upon my administrants of slow poisoning as my dodear devere revered mainhirr was confined to guardroom, I hindustand, by my pint of his Filthered pilsens bottle due to Zenaphiah Holwell, H and J. C. S, Which I was bringing up my quee parapotacarry’s orders in my sedown chair with my mudfacepacket from my cash chemist and family drugger, Surager Dowling, V.S. to our aural surgeon, Afamado Hairductor Achmed Borumborad, M.A.C.A, Sahib, of a 1001 Ombrilla Street, Syringa padham, Alleypulley, to see what was my watergood, my mesical wasserguss, for repairs done by bollworm in the rere of pilch knickers, seven yerds to his galandhar pole on perch, together with his for me unfillable slopper, property of my deeply forfear revebereared, who is costing us mostfortunes which I am writing in mepetition to Kavanagh Djanaral, when he was sitting him humpbacked in dry dryfilthyheat to his trinidads pinslers at their orpentings, entailing a laxative tendency to mary, especially with him being forbidden fruit and certified by his sexular clergy to have as badazmy emotional volvular, with a basketful of priesters crossing the singorgeous to aroint him with tummy moor’s maladies, and thereinafter liable to succumb when served with letters potent below the belch, if my rupee repure riputed husbandship H.R.R. [p.493] took a brief one in his shirtsails out of the alleged given mineral, telling me see his in Foraignghistan sambat papers Sunday feactures of a welcomed aperrytiff with vallad of Erill Pearcey O he never battered one eagle’s before paying me his duty on my annaversary to the parroteyes list in my nil ensemble, in his lazychair but he hidded up my hemifaces in all my mayarannies and he locked plum into my mirrymouth like Ysamasy morning in the end of time, with the so light’s hope on his ruddycheeks and rawjaws and, my charmer, whom I dipped my hand in, he simply showed me his propendiculous loadpoker, Seaserpents hisses sissastones, which was as then is produced in his mansway by this wisest of the Vikramadityationists, with the remere remind remure remark, in his gulughurutty: Yran for parasites with rum for the turkeycockeys so Lithia, M.D., as this is for Snooker, bort!

— Which was said by whem to whom?

— It wham. But whim I can’t whumember.

— Fantasy! funtasy on fantasy, amnaes fintasies! And there is nihil nuder under the clothing moon. When Ota, weewahrwificle of Torquells, bumpsed her dumpsydiddle down in her woolsark she mode our heuteyleutey girlery of peerlesses to set up in all their bombossities of feudal fiertey, fanned, flounced and frangipanned, while the massstab whereby Ephialtes has exceeded is the measure, simplex mendaciis, by which our Outis cuts his thruth. Arkaway now!

— Yerds and nudes say ayes and noes! Vide! Vide!

— Let Eivin bemember for Gates of Gold for their fadeless suns berayed her. Irise, Osirises! Be thy mouth given unto thee! For why do you lack a link of luck to poise a pont of perfect, peace? On the vignetto is a ragingoos. The overseer of the house of the oversire of the seas, Nu-Men, triumphant, sayeth: Fly as the hawk, cry as the corncrake, Ani Latch of the postern is thy name; shout!

— My heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth of darkness! They know not my heart, O coolun dearast! Mon gloomerie! Mon glamourie! What a surpraise, dear Mr Preacher, [p.494] I to hear from your strawnummical modesty! Yes, there was that skew arch of chrome sweet home, floodlit up above the flabberghosted farmament and bump where the camel got the needle. Talk about iridecencies! Ruby and beryl and chrysolite, jade, sapphire, jasper and lazul.

— Orca Bellona! Heavencry at earthcall, etnat athos? Extinct your vulcanology for the lava of Moltens!

— It’s you not me’s in erupting, hecklar!

— Ophiuchus being visible above thorizon, muliercula occluded by Satarn’s serpent ring system, the pisciolinnies Nova Ardonis and Prisca Parthenopea, are a bonnies feature in the northern sky. Ers, Mores and Merkery are surgents below the rim of the Zenith Part while Arctura, Anatolia, Hesper and Mesembria weep in their mansions over Noth, Haste, Soot and Waste.

— Apep and Uachet! Holy snakes, chase me charley, Eva’s got barley under her fluencies! The Ural Mount he’s on the move and he’ll quivvy her with his strombolo! Waddlewurst, the bag of tow, as broad above as he is below! Creeping through the liongrass and bullsrusshius, the obesendean, before the Emfang de Maurya’s class, in Bill Shasser’s Shotshrift writing academy, camouflaged as a blancmange and maple syrop! Obeisance so their sitinins is the follicity of this Orp! Her sheik to Slave, his dick to Dave and the fat of the land to Guygas. The treadmill pebbledropper haha halfahead overground and she’d only chitschats in her spanking bee bonetry, Allapolloosa! Up the slanger! Three cheers and a heva heva for the name Dan Magraw!

— The giant sun is in his emanence but which is chief of those white dwarfees of which he ever is surabanded? And do you think I might have being his seventh! He will kitssle me on melbaw. What about his age? says you. What about it? says I. I will confess to his sins and blush me further. I would misdemean to rebuke to the libels of snots from the fleshambles, the canalles. Synamite is too good for them. Two overthirties in shore shorties. She’s askapot at Nile Lodge and she’s citchincarry at the left Mrs Hamazum’s. Will you warn your old habasund, barking at baggermen, his chokefull chewing his chain? Responsif you [p.495] plais. The said Sully, a barracker associated with tinkers, the blackhand, Shovellyvans, wreuter of annoyimgmost letters and skirriless ballets in Parsee Franch who is Magrath’s thug and smells cheaply of Power’s spirits, like a deepsea dibbler, and he is not fit enough to throw guts down to a bear. Sylphling me when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for her! So long, Sulleyman! If they cut his nose on the stitcher they had their siven good reasons. Here’s to the leglift of my snuff and trout stockangt henkerchoff, orange fin with a mosaic of dispensations and a froren black patata, from my church milliner. When Lynch Brother, Withworkers, Friends and Company with T. C. King and the Warden of Galway is prepared to stretch him sacred by the powers to the starlight, L.B.W. Hemp, hemp, hurray! says the captain in the moonlight. I could put him under my pallyass and slepp on him all nights as I would roll myself for holy poly over his borrowing places. How we will make laugh over him together, me and my Riley in the Vickar’s bed! Quink! says I. He cawls to me Granny-stream-Auborne when I am hiding under my hair from him and I cool him my Finnyking he’s so joyant a bounder. Plunk! said he. Inasmuch as I am delightful to be able to state, with the joy of lifing in my forty winkers, that a handsome sovereign was freely pledged in their pennis in the sluts maschine, alonging wath a cherrywickerkishabrack of maryfruit under Shadow La Rose, to both the legintimate lady performers of display unquestionable, Elsebett and Marryetta Gunning, H₂O, by that noblesse of leechers at his Saxontannery with motto in Wwalshe’s ffrenchllatin: O’Neill saw Queen Molly’s pants: and much admired engraving, meaning complet manly parts during alleged recent act of our chief mergey margey magistrades, five itches above the kneecap, as required by statues. V.I.C.5.6. If you won’t release me stop to please me up the leg of me. Now you see! Respect. S.V.P. Your wife. Amn. Anm. Amm. Ann.

— You wish to take us, Frui Mria, by degrees, as artis litterarumque patrona but I am afraid, my poor woman of that same name, what with your silvanes and your salvines, you are misled.

[p.496] — Alas for livings’ pledjures!

— Lordy Daw and Lady Don! Uncle Foozle and Aunty Jack! Sure, that old humbugger was boycotted and girlcutted in debt and doom, on hill and haven, even by the show-the-flag flotilla, as I’m given now to understand, illscribed in all the gratuitouses and conspued in the takeyourhandaways. Bumbty, tumbty, Sot on a Wall, Mute art for the Million. There wasn’t an Archimandrite of Dane’s Island and the townlands nor a minx from the Isle of Woman nor a one of the four cantins nor any on the whole wheel of his ecunemical conciliabulum nor nogent ingen meid on allad the hold scurface of the jorth would come next or nigh him, Mr Eelwhipper, seed and nursery man, or his allgas bumgalowre, Auxilium Meum Solo A Domino (Amsad), for rime or ration, from piles or faces, after that.

— All ears did wag, old Eire wake as Piers Aurell was flappergangsted.

— Recount!

— I have it here to my fingall’s ends. This liggy piggy wanted to go to the jampot. And this leggy peggy spelt pea. And theese lucky puckers played at pooping tooletom. Ma’s da. Da’s ma. Madas. Sadam.

— Pater patruum cum filiabus familiarum. Or, but, now, and, ariring out of her mirgery margery watersheads and, to change that subjunct from the traumaturgid for once in a while and darting back to stuff, if so be you may identify yourself with the him in you, that fluctuous neck merchamtur, bloodfadder and milkmudder, since then our too many of her, Abha na Lifé, and getting on to dadaddy again, as them we’re ne’er free of, was he in tea e’er he went on the bier or didn’t he ontime do something seemly heavy in sugar? He sent out Christy Columb and he came back with a jailbird’s unbespokables in his beak and then he sent out Le Caron Crow and the peacies are still looking for him. The seeker from the swayed, the beesabouties from the parent swarm. Speak to the right! Rotacist ca canny! He caun ne’er be bothered but maun e’er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at [p.497] Quinnigan’s Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!

— Arra irrara hirrara man, weren’t they arriving in clansdestinies for the Imbandiment of Ad Regias Agni Dapes, fogabawlers and panhibernskers, after the crack and the lean years, scalpjaggers and houthhunters, like the messicals of the great god, a scarlet trainful, the Twoedged Petrard, totalling, leggats and prelaps, in their aggregate ages two and thirty plus undecimmed centries of them with insiders, extraomnes and tuttifrutties allcunct, from Rathgar, Rathanga, Rountown and Rush, from America Avenue and Asia Place and the Affrian Way and Europa Parade and besogar the wallies of Noo Soch Wilds and from Vico, Mespil Rock and Sorrento, for the lure of his weal and the fear of his oppidumic, to his salon de espera in the keel of his kraal, like lodes of ores flocking fast to Mount Maximagnetic, afeerd he was a gunner but affaird to stay away, Merrionites, Dumstdumbdrummers, Luccanicans, Ashtoumers, Batterysby Parkes and Krumlin Boyards, Phillipsburgs, Cabraists and Finglossies, Ballymunites, Raheniacs and the bettlers of Clontarf, for to contemplate in manifest and pay their firstrate duties before the both of him, twelve stone a side, with their Thieve le Roué! and their Shvr yr Thrst! and their Uisgye ad Inferos! and their Usque ad Ebbraios! at and in the licensed boosiness primises of his delhightful bazar and reunited magazine hall, by the magazine wall, Hosty’s and Co, Exports, for his five hundredth and sixtysixth borthday, the grand old Magennis Mor, Persee and Rahli, taker of the tributes, their Rinseky Poppakork and Piowtor the Grape, holding Dunker’s durbar, boot kings and indiarubber umpires and shawhs from paisley and muftis in muslim and sultana reiseines and jordan almonders and a row of jam sahibs and a odd principeza in her pettedcoat and the queen of knight’s clubs and the claddagh ringleaders and the two salaames and the Halfa Ham and the Hanzas Khan with two fat Maharashers and the German selver geyser and he polished up, protemptible, tintanambulating to himsilf so silfrich, and there was J. B. Dunlop, the [p.498] best tyrent of ourish times, and a swanks of French wine stuarts and Tudor keepsakes and the Cesarevitch for the current counter Leodegarius Sant Legerleger riding lapsaddlelonglegs up the oakses staircase on muleback like Amaxodias Isteroprotos, hindquarters to the fore and kick to the lift, and he handygrabbed on to his trulley natural anthem: Horsibus, keep your tailyup, and as much as the halle of the vacant fhroneroom, Oldloafs Buttery, could safely accomodate of the houses of Orange and Betters M.P, permeated by Druids D.P, Brehons B.P, and Flawhoolags F.P, and Agiapommenites A.P, and Antepummelites P.P, and Ulster Kong and Munster’s Herald with Athclee Ensigning and Athlone Poursuivant and his Imperial Catchering, his fain awan, and his gemmynosed sanctsons in epheud and ordilawn and his diamondskulled granddaucher, Adamantaya Liubokovskva, all murdering Irish, amok and amak, out of their boom companions in paunchjab and dogril and pammel and gougerotty, after plenty of his fresh stout and his good balls of malt, not to forget his oels a’mona nor his beers o’ryely, sopped down by his pani’s annagolorum, (at Kennedy’s kiln she kned her dough, back of her bake for me, buns!) socializing and communicanting in the deification of his members, for to nobble or salvage their herobit of him, the poohpooher old bolssloose, with his arthurious clayroses, Dodderick Ogonoch Wrack, busted to the wurld at large, on the table round, with the floodlight switched back, as true as the Vernons have Brian’s sword, and a dozen and one by one tilly tallows round in ringcampf, circumassembled by his daughters in the foregiftness of his sons, lying high as he lay in all dimensions, in court dress and ludmers chain, with a hogo, fluorescent of his swathings, round him, like the cummulium of scents in an italian warehouse, erica’s clustered on his hayir, the spectrem of his prisent mocking the candiedights of his dadtid, bagpuddingpodded to the deafspot, bewept of his chilidrin and serafim, poors and personalities, venturous, drones and dominators, ancients and auldancients, with his buttend up, expositoed for sale after referee’s inspection, bulgy and blowrious, bunged to ignorious, healed cured and [p.499] embalsemate, pending a rouseruction of his bogey, most highly astounded, as it turned up, after his life overlasting, at thus being reduced to nothing.

— Bappy-go-gully and gaff for us all! And all his morties calisenic, tripping a trepas, neniatwantyng: Mulo Mulelo! Homo Humilo! Dauncy a deady O! Dood dood dood! O Bawse! O Boese! O Muerther! O Mord! Mahmato! Moutmaro! O Smirtsch! O Smertz! Woh Hillill! Woe Hallall! Thou Thuoni! Thou Thaunaton! Umartir! Udamnor! Tschitt! Mergue! Eulumu! Huam Khuam! Malawinga! Malawunga! Ser Oh Ser! See ah See! Hamovs! Hemoves! Mamor! Rockquiem eternuel give donal aye in dolmeny! Bad luck’s perpepperpot loosen his eyis! (Psich!).

— But there’s leps of flam in Funnycoon’s Wick. The keyn has passed. Lung lift the keying!

— God save you king! Muster of the Hidden Life!

— God serf yous kingly, adipose rex! I had four in the morning and a couple of the lunch and three later on, but your saouls to the dhaoul, do ye. Finnk. Fime. Fudd?

— Impassable tissue of improbable liyers! D’yu mean to sett there where y’are now, coddlin your supernumerary leg, wi’that bizar tongue in yur tolkshap, and your hindies and shindies, like a muck in a market, Sorley boy, repeating yurself, and tell me that?

— I mean to sit here on this altknoll where you are now, Surly guy, replete in myself, as long as I live, in my homespins, like a sleepingtop, with all that’s buried ofsins insince insensed insidesofme. If I can’t upset this pound of pressed ollaves I can sit up zounds of sounds upon him.

— Oliver! He may be an earthpresence. Was that a groan or did I hear the Dingle bagpipes Wasting war and? Watch!

— Tris tris a ni ma mea! Prisoner of Love! Bleating Hart! Lowlaid Herd! Aubain Hand! Wonted Foot! Usque! Usque! Usque! Lignum in . . .

— Rawth of Gar and Donnerbruck Fire? Is the strays world moving mound or what static babel is this, tell us?

— Whoishe whoishe whoishe whoishe linking in? Whoishe whoishe whoishe?

[p.500] — The snare drum! Lay yer lug till the groun. The dead giant manalive! They’re playing thimbles and bodkins. Clan of the Gael! Hop! Whu’s within?

— Dovegall and finshark, they are ring to the rescune!

— Zinzin. Zinzin.

— Crum abu! Cromwell to victory!

— We’ll gore them and gash them and gun them and gloat on them.

— Zinzin.

— O, widows and orphans, it’s the yeomen! Redshanks for ever! Up Lancs!

— The cry of the roedeer it is! The white hind. Their slots, linklink, the hound hunthorning! Send us and peace! Title! Title!

— Christ in our irish times! Christ on the airs independence! Christ hold the freedman’s chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!

— Slog slagt and sluaghter! Rape the daughter! Choke the pope!

— Aure! Cloudy father! Unsure! Nongood!

— Zinzin.

— Sold! I am sold! Brinabride! My ersther! My sidster! Brinabride, goodbye! Brinabride! I sold!

— Pipette dear! Us! Us! Me! Me!

— Fort! Fort! Bayroyt! March!

— Me! I’m true. True! Isolde. Pipette. My precious!

— Zinzin.

— Brinabride, bet my price! Brinabride!

— My price, my precious?

— Zin.

— Brinabride, my price! When you sell get my price!

— Zin.

— Pipette! Pipette, my priceless one!

— O! Mother of my tears! Believe for me! Fold thy son!

— Zinzin. Zinzin.

— Now we’re gettin it. Tune in and pick up the forain counties! Hello!

[p.501] — Zinzin.

— Hello! Tittit! Tell your title?

— Abride!

— Hellohello! Ballymacarett! Am I thru’ Iss? Miss? True?

— Tit! What is the ti . . ?

SILENCE.

Act drop. Stand by! Blinders! Curtain up. Juice, please! Foots!

— Hello! Are you Cigar shank and Wheat?

— I gotye. Gobble Ann’s Carrot Cans.

— Parfey. Now, after that justajiff siesta, just permit me a moment. Challenger’s Deep is childsplay to this but, by our soundings in the swish channels, land is due. A truce to demobbed swarwords. Clear the line, priority call! Sybil! Better that or this? Sybil Head this end! Better that way? Follow the baby spot. Yes. Very good now. We are again in the magnetic field. Do you remember on a particular lukesummer night, following a crying fair day? Moisten your lips for a lightning strike and begin again. Mind the flickers and dimmers! Better?

— Well. The isles is Thymes. The ales is Penzance. Vehement Genral. Delhi expulsed.

— Still calling of somewhave from its specific? Not more? Lesscontinuous. There were fires on every bald hill in holy Ireland that night. Better so?

— You may say they were, son of a cove!

— Were they bonfires? That clear?

— No other name would at all befit them unless that. Bonafieries! With their blue beards streaming to the heavens.

— Was it a high white night now?

— Whitest night mortal ever saw.

— Was our lord of the heights nigh our lady of the valley?

— He was hosting himself up and flosting himself around and ghosting himself to merry her murmur like an andeanupper balkan.

— Lewd’s carol! Was there rain by any chance, mistandew?

[p.502] — Plenty. If you wend farranoch.

— There fell some fall of littlewinter snow, holy-as-ivory, I gather, jesse?

— By snaachtha clocka. The nicest at all. In hilly-and-even zimalayars.

— Did it not blow some gales, westnass or ostscent, rather strongly to less, allin humours out of turn, jusse as they rose and sprungen?

— Out of all jokes it did. Pipep! Icecold. Brr na brr, ny prr! Lieto galumphantes!

— Stll cllng! Nmr! Peace, Pacific! Do you happen to recollect whether Muna, that highlucky nackt, was shining at all?

— Sure she was, my midday darling! And not one but a pair of pritty geallachers.

— Quando? Quonda? Go datey!

— Latearly! Latearly! Latearly! Latearly!

— That was latterlig certainly. And was there frostwork about and thick weather and hice, soon calid, soon frozen, cold on warm but moistly dry, and a boatshaped blanket of bruma airsighs and hellstohns and flammballs and vodashouts and everything to please everybody?

— Hail many fell of greats! Horey morey smother of fog! There was, so plays your ahrtides. Absolutely boiled. Obsoletely cowled. Julie and Lulie at their parkiest.

— The amenities, the amenities of the amenities with all their amenities. And the firmness of the formous of the famous of the fumous of the first fog in Maidanvale?

— Catchecatche and couchamed!

— From Miss Somer’s nice dream back to Winthrop’s delugium stramens. One expects that kind of rimey feeling in the sire season?

— One certainly does. Desire, for hire, would tire a shire, phone, phunkel, or wire. And mares.

— Of whitecaps any?

— Foamflakes flockfuyant from Foxrock to Finglas.

— A lambskip for the marines! Paronama! The entire hori- [p.503] zon cloth! All effects in their joints caused ways. Raindrum, windmachine, snowbox. But thundersheet?

— No here. Under the blunkets.

— This common or garden is now in stilller realithy the starey sphere of an oleotorium for broken pottery and ancient vegetables?

— Simply awful the dirt. An evernasty ashtray.

— I see. Now do you know the wellknown kikkinmidden where the illassorted first couple first met with each other? The place where Ealdermann Fanagan? The time when Junkermenn Funagin?

— Deed then I do, W.K.

— In Fingal too they met at Littlepeace aneath the bidetree, Yellowhouse of Snugsborough, Westreeve-Astagob and Slutsend with Stockins of Winning’s Folly Merryfalls, all of a two, skidoo and skephumble?

— Godamedy, you’re a delville of a tolkar!

— Is it a place fairly exspoused to the four last winds?

— Well, I faithly sincerely believe so indeed if all what I hope to charity is half true.

— This stow on the wolds, is it Woful Dane Bottom?

— It is woful in need whatever about anything or allselse under the grianblachk sun of gan greyne Eireann.

— A tricolour ribbon that spells a caution. The old flag, the cold flag.

— The flagstone. By tombs, deep and heavy. To the unaveiling memory of. Peacer the grave.

— And what sigeth Woodin Warneung thereof?

— Trickspissers vill be pairsecluded.

— There used to be a tree stuck up? An overlisting eshtree?

— There used, sure enough. Beside the Annar. At the ford of Slivenamond. Oakley Ashe’s elm. With a snoodrift from one beerchen bough. And the grawndest crowndest consecrated maypole in all the reignladen history of Wilds. Browne’s Thesaurus Plantarum from Nolan’s, The Prittlewell Press, has nothing alike it. For we are fed of its forest, clad in its wood, burqued by its [p.504] bark and our lecture is its leave. The cran, the cran the king of all crans. Squiremade and damesman of plantagenets, high and holy.

— Now, no hiding your wren under a bushle! What was it doing there, for instance?

— Standing foreninst us.

— In Summerian sunshine?

— And in Cimmerian shudders.

— You saw it visibly from your hidingplace?

— No. From my invisibly lyingplace.

— And you then took down in stereo what took place being tunc committed?

— I then tuk my takenplace lying down, I thunk I told you. Solve it!

— Remounting aliftle towards the ouragan of spaces. Just how grand in cardinal rounders is this preeminent giant, sir Arber? Your bard’s highview, avis on valley! I would like to hear you burble to us in strict conclave, purpurando, and without too much italiote interfairance, what you know in petto about our sovereign beingstalk, Tonans Tomazeus. O dite!

— Corcor Andy, Udi, Udite! Your Ominence, Your Imminence and delicted fraternitrees! There’s tuodore queensmaids and Idahore shopgirls and they woody babies growing upon her and bird flamingans sweenyswinging fuglewards on the tipmast and Orania epples playing hopptociel bommptaterre and Tyburn fenians snoring in his quickenbole and crossbones strewing its holy floor and culprines of Erasmus Smith’s burstall boys with their underhand leadpencils climbing to her crotch for the origin of spices and charlotte darlings with silk blue askmes chattering in dissent to them, gibbonses and gobbenses, guelfing and ghiberring proferring praydews to their anatolies and blighting findblasts on their catastripes and the killmaimthem pensioners chucking overthrown milestones up to her to fall her cranberries and her pommes annettes for their unnatural refection and handpainted hoydens plucking husbands of him and cock robins muchmore hatching most out of his missado eggdrazzles for him, the sun and moon pegging honeysuckle and white [p.505] heather down and timtits tapping resin there and tomahawks watching tar elsewhere, creatures of the wold approaching him, hollow mid ivy, for to claw and rub, hermits of the desert barking their infernal shins over her triliteral roots and his acorns and pinecorns shooting wide all sides out of him, plantitude outsends of plenty to thousands, after the truants of the utmostfear and her downslyder in that snakedst-tu-naughsy whimmering woman’t seeleib such a fashionaping sathinous dress out of that exquisitive creation and her leaves, my darling dearest, sinsinsinning since the night of time and each and all of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world through the germination of its gemination from Ond’s outset till Odd’s end. And encircle him circuly. Evovae!

— Is it so exaltated, eximious, extraoldandairy and excelssiorising?

— Amengst menlike trees walking or trees like angels weeping nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it! But rocked of agues, cliffed for aye!

— Telleth that eke the treeth?

— Mushe, mushe of a mixness.

— A shrub of libertine, indeed! But that steyne of law indead what stiles its neming?

— Tod, tod, too hard parted!

— I’ve got that now, Dr Melamanessy. Finight mens midinfinite true. The form masculine. The gender feminine. I see. Now, are you derevatov of it yourself in any way? The true tree I mean? Let’s hear what science has to say, pundit-the-next-best-king. Splanck!

— Upfellbowm.

— It reminds of the weeping of the daughters?

— And remounts to the sense arrest.

— The wittold, the frausch and the dibble! How this looseaffair brimsts of fussforus! And was this treemanangel on his soredbohmend because Knockout, the knickknaver, knacked him in the knechtschaft?

— Well, he was ever himself for the presention of crudities to [p.506] animals for he had put his own nickelname on every toad, duck and herring before the climber clomb aloft, doing the midhill of the park, flattering his bitter hoolft with her conconundrums. He would let us have the three barrels. Such was a bitte too thikke for the Muster of the hoose so as he called down on the Grand Precurser who coiled him a crawler of the dupest dye and thundered at him to flatch down off that erection and be aslimed of himself for the bellance of hissch leif.

— Oh Finlay’s coldpalled!

— Ahday’s begatem!

— Were you there, eh Hehr? Were you there when they lagged um through the coombe?

— Wo wo! Who who! Psalmtimes it grauws on me to ramble, ramble, ramble.

— Woe! Woe! So that was how he became the foerst of our treefellers?

— Yesche and, in the absence of any soberiquiet, the fanest of our truefalluses. Bapsbaps Bomslinger!

— How near do you feel to this capocapo promontory, sir?

— There do be days of dry coldness between us when he does be like a lidging house far far astray and there do be nights of wet windwhistling when he does be making me onions woup all kinds of ways.

— Now you are mehrer the murk, Lansdowne Road. She’s threwed her pippin’s thereabouts and they’ve cropped up tooth oneydge with hates to leaven this socried isle. Now, thornyborn, follow the spotlight, please! Concerning a boy. Are you acquainted with a pagany, vicariously known as Toucher ‘Thom’ who is. I suggest Finoglam as his habitat. Consider yourself on the stand now and watch your words, take my advice. Let your motto be: Inter nubila numbum.

— Never you mind about my mother or her hopitout. I consider if I did, I would feel frightfully ashamed of admired vice.

— He is a man of around fifty, struck on Anna Lynsha’s Pekoe with milk and whisky, who does messuages and has more dirt on him than an old dog has fleas, kicking stones and knocking [p.507] snow off walls. Have you ever heard of this old boy “Thom” or “Thim” of the fishy stare who belongs to Kimmage, a crofting district, and is not all there, and is all the more himself since he is not so, being most of his time down at the Green Man where he steals, pawns, belches and is a curse, drinking gaily two hours after closing time, with the coat on him skinside out against rapparitions, with his socks outsewed his springsides, clapping his hands in a feeble sort of way and systematically mixing with the public going for groceries, slapping greats and littlegets soundly with his cattegut belts, flapping baresides and waltzywembling about in his accountrements always in font of the tubbernuckles, like a longarmed lugh, when he would be finished with his tea?

— Is it that fellow? As mad as the brambles he is. Touch him. With the lawyers sticking to his trewsershins and the swatmenotting on the basque of his beret. He has kissed me more than once, I am sorry to say and if I did commit gladrolleries may the loone forgive it! O wait till I tell you!

— We are not going yet.

— And look here! Here’s, my dear, what he done, as snooks as I am saying so!

— Get out, you dirt! A strangely striking part of speech for the hottest worked word of ur sprogue. You’re not! Unhindered and odd times? Mere thumbshow? Lately?

— How do I know? Such my billet. Buy a barrack pass. Ask the horneys. Tell the robbers.

— You are alluding to the picking pockets in Lower O’Connell Street?

— I am illuding to the Pekin packet but I am eluding from Laura Connor’s treat.

— Now, just wash and brush up your memoirias a little bit. So I find, referring to the pater of the present man, an erely demented brick thrower, I am wondering to myself in my mind, qua our arc of the covenant, was Toucher, a methodist, whose name, as others say, is not really ‘Thom’, was this salt son of a century from Boaterstown, Shivering William, the sealiest old forker ever hawked crannock, who is always with him at the Big Elm [p.508] and the Arch after his teeth were shaken out of their suckets by the wrang dog, for having 5 pints 73 of none Eryen blood in him abaft the seam level, the scatterling, wearing his cowbeamer and false clothes of a brewer’s grains pattern with back buckons with his motto on, Yule Remember, ostensibly for that occasion only of the twelfth day Pax and Quantum wedding, I’m wondering.

— I bet you are. Well, he was wandering, you bet, whatever was his matter, in his mind too, give him his due, for I am sorry to have to tell you, hullo and evoe, they were coming down from off him.

— How culious an epiphany!

— Hodie casus esobhrakonton?

— It looked very like it.

— Needer knows necess and neither garments. Man is minded of the Meagher, wat? Wooly? Walty?

— Ay, another good button gone wrong.

— Blondman’s blaff! Like a skib leaked lintel the arbour leidend with . . .?

— Pamelas, peggylees, pollywollies, questuants, quaintaquilties, quickamerries.

— Concaving now convexly to the semidemihemispheres and, from the female angle, music minnestirring, were the subligate sisters, P. and Q., Clopatrick’s cherierapest, mutatis mutandis, in pretty much the same pickle, the peach of all piedom, the quest of all quicks?

— Peequeen ourselves, the prettiest pickles of unmatchemable mute antes I ever bopeeped at, seesaw shallshee, since the town go went gonning on Pranksome Quaine.

— Silks apeel and sulks alusty?

— Boy and giddle, gape and bore.

— I hear these two goddesses are liable to sue him?

— Well, I hope the two Collinses don’t leg a bail to shoot him.

— Both were white in black arpists at cloever spilling, knickt?

— Gels bach, I, languised, liszted. Etoudies for the right hand.

— Were they now? And were they watching you as watcher as well?

[p.509] — Where do you get that wash? This representation does not accord with my experience. They were watching the watched watching. Vechers all.

— Good. Hold that watching brief and keep this witching longuer. Now, retouching friend Tomsky, the enemy, did you gather much from what he let drop? We are sitting here for that.

— I was rooshian mad, no lie. About his shapeless hat.

— I suspect you must have been.

— You are making your thunderous mistake. But I was dung sorry for him too.

— O Schaum! Not really? Were you sorry you were mad with him then?

— When I tell you I was rooshiamarodnimad with myself altogether, so I was, for being sorry for him.

— So?

— Absolutely.

— Would you blame him at all stages?

— I believe in many an old stager. But what seemed sooth to a Greek summed nooth to a giantle. Who kills the cat in Cairo coaxes cocks in Gaul.

— I put it to you that this was solely in his sunflower state and that his haliodraping het was why maids all sighed for him, ventured and vied for him. Hm?

— After Putawayo, Kansas, Liburnum and New Aimstirdames, it wouldn’t surprise me in the very least.

— That tare and this mole, your tear and our smile. ’Tis life that lies if woman’s eyes have been our old undoing. Lid efter lid. Reform in mine size his deformation. Tiffpuff up my nostril, would you puff the earthworm outer my ear.

— He could claud boose his eyes to the birth of his garce, he could lump all his lot through the half of her play, but he jest couldn’t laugh through the whole of her farce becorpse he warn’t billed that way. So he outandouts his volimetangere and has a lightning consultation and he downadowns his pantoloogions and made a piece of first perpersonal puetry that staystale remains to be. Cleaned.

[p.510] — Booms of bombs and heavy rethudders?

— This aim to you!

— The tail, so mastrodantic, as you tell it nearly takes your own mummouth’s breath away. Your troppers are so unrelieved because his troopers were in difficulties. Still let stultitiam done in veino condone ineptias made of veritues. How many were married on that top of all strapping mornings, after the midnight turkay drive, my good watcher?

— Puppaps. That’d be telling. With a hoh frohim and heh fraher. But, as regards to Tammy Thornycraft, Idefyne the lawn mare and the laney moweress and all the prentisses of wildes to massage him.

— Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors’ Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers’ Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers’ Gall. Awake! Come, a wake! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel, was thomistically drunk, two by two, lairking o’ tootlers with tombours a’beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers, trou Normend fashion, I have been told, down to the bank lean clorks? Some nasty blunt clubs were being operated after the tradition of a wellesleyan bottle riot act and a few plates were being shied about and tumblers bearing traces of fresh porter rolling around, independent of that, for the ehren of Fyn’s Insul, and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven and Covenant, with Rodey O’echolowing how his breadcost on the voters would be a comeback for e’er a one, like the depredations of Scandalknivery, in and on usedtowobble sloops off cloasts, eh? Would that be a talltale too? This was the grandsire Orther. This was his innwhite horse. Sip?

— Well, naturally he was, louties also genderymen. Being Kerssfesstiydt. They came from all lands beyond the wave for songs of Inishfeel. Whiskway and mortem! No puseyporcious either, invitem kappines all round. But the right reverend priest, Mr Hopsinbond, and the reverent bride eleft, Frizzy Fraufrau, were sober enough. I think they were sober.

[p.511] — I think you’re widdershins there about the right reverence. Magraw for the Northwhiggern cupteam was wedding beastman, papers before us carry. You saw him hurriedly, or did you if thatseme’s not irrelevant? With Slater’s hammer perhaps? Or he was in serge?

— I horridly did. On the stroke of the dozen. I’m sure I’m wrong but I heard the irreverend Mr Magraw, in search of a stammer, kuckkuck kicking the bedding out of the old sexton, red-Fox Good-man around the sacristy, till they were bullbeadle black and bufeteer blue, while I and Flood and the other men, jazzlike brollies and sesuos, was gickling his missus to gackles in the hall, the divileen, (she’s a lamp in her throth) with her cygncygn leckle and her twelve pound lach.

— A loyal wifish woman cacchinic wheepingcaugh! While she laylylaw was all their rage. But you did establish personal contact? In epexegesis or on a point of order?

— That perkumiary pond is beyawnd my pinnigay pretonsions. I am resting on a pigs of cheesus but I’ve a big suggestion it was about the pint of porter.

— You are a suckersome! But this all, as airs said to oska, was only that childbearer might blogas well sidesplit? Where letties hereditate a dark mien swart hairy?

— Only. ’Twas womans’ too woman with mans’ throw man.

— Bully burley yet hardly hurley. The saloon bulkhead, did you say, or the tweendecks?

— Between drinks, I deeply painfully repeat it.

— Was she wearing shubladey’s tiroirs in humour of her hubbishobbis, Massa’s star stellar?

— Mrs Tan-Taylour? Just a floating panel, secretairslidingdraws, a budge of klees on her schalter, a siderbrass sehdass on her anulas findring and forty crocelips in her curlingthongues.

— So this was the dope that woolied the cad that kinked the ruck that noised the rape that tried the sap that hugged the mort?

— That legged in the hoax that joke bilked.

— The jest of junk the jungular?

— Jacked up in a jock the wrapper.

[p.512] — Lollgoll! You don’t soye so! All upsydown her whole creation? So there was nothing serical between you? And Drysalter, father of Izod, how was he now?

— To the pink, man, like an allmanox in his shirt and stickup, brustall to the bear, the Megalomagellan of our winevatswaterway, squeezing the life out of the liffey.

— Crestofer Carambas! Such is zodisfaction. You punk me! He came, he kished, he conquered. Vulturuvarnar! The must of his glancefull coaxing the beam in her eye? That musked bell of this masked ball! Annabella, Lovabella, Pullabella, yep?

— Yup! Titentung Tollertone in S. Sabina’s. Aye aye, she was lithe and pleasable. Wilt thou the lee? Wilt thou the hee? Wilt thou the hussif?

— The quicker the deef the safter the sapstaff, but the main the mightier the stricker the strait. To the vast go the game! It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?

— I believe you. Taiptope reelly, O reelly!

— Nautaey, nautaey, we’re nowhere without ye! In steam of kavos now arbatos above our hearths doth hum. And Malkos crackles logs of fun while Anglys cheers our ingles. So lent she him ear to burrow his manhood (or so it appierce) and borrow his namas? Suilful eyes and sallowfoul hairweed and the sickly sigh from her gingering mouth like a Dublin bar in the moarning.

— Primus auriforasti me.

— The park is gracer than the hole, says she, but shekleton’s my fortune?

— Eversought of being artained? You’ve soft a say with ye, Flatter O’Ford, that, honey, I hurdley chew you.

— Is that answers?

— It am queery!

— The house was Toot and Come-Inn by the bridge called Tiltass, but are you solarly salemly sure, beyond the shatter of the canicular year? Nascitur ordo seculi numfit.

[p.513] — Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. Securius indicat umbris tellurem.

— Date as? Your time of immersion? We are still in drought of . . . ?

— Amnis Dominae, Marcus of Corrig. A laughin hunter and Purty Sue.

— And crazyheaded Jorn, the bulweh born?

— Fluteful as his orkan. Ex ugola lenonem.

— And Jambs, of Delphin’s Bourne or (as olders lay) of Tophat?

— Dawncing the kniejinksky choreopiscopally like an easter sun round the colander, the vice! Taranta boontoday! You should pree him prance the polcat, you whould sniff him wops around, you should hear his piedigrotts schraying as his skimpies skirp a . . .

— Crashedafar Corumbas! A Czardanser indeed! Dervilish glad too. Ortovito semi ricordo. The pantaglionic affection through his blood like a bad influenza in a leap at bounding point?

— Out of Prisky Poppagenua, the palsied old priamite, home from Edwin Hamilton’s Christmas pantaloonade, Oropos Roxy and Pantharhea at the Gaiety, trippudiating round the aria, with his fiftytwo heirs of age! They may reel at his likes but it’s Noeh Bonum’s shin do.

— And whit what was Lillabil Issabil maideve, maid at?

— Trists and thranes and trinies and traines.

— A take back to the virgin page, darm it!

— Ay, graunt ye.

— The quobus quartet were there too, if I mistake not, as a sideline but, pace the contempt of senate, well to the fore, in an amenessy meeting, metandmorefussed to decide whereagainwhen to meet themselves, flopsome and jerksome, lubber and deliric, drinking unsteadily through the Kerry quadrilles and Listowel lancers and mastersinging always with that consecutive fifth of theirs, eh? Like four wise elephants inandouting under a twelvepodestalled table?

[p.514] — They were simple scandalmongers, that familiar, and all! Normand, Desmond, Osmund and Kenneth. Making mejical history all over the show!

— In sum, some hum? And other marrage feats?

— All our stakes they were astumbling round the ranky roars assumbling when Big Arthur flugged the field at Annie’s courting.

— Suddenly some wellfired clay was cast out through the schappsteckers of hoy’s house?

— Schottenly there was a hellfire club kicked out through the wasistas of Thereswhere.

— Like Heavystost’s envil catacalamitumbling. Three days three times into the Vulcuum?

— Punch!

— Or Noe et Ecclesiastes, nonne?

— Ninny, there is no hay in Eccles’s hostel.

— Yet an I saw a sign of him, if you could scrape out his acquinntence? Name or redress him and we’ll call it a night!

— . i . . ’ . . o . . l .

— You are sure it was not a shuler’s shakeup or a plighter’s palming or a winker’s wake etcaetera etcaeterorum you were at?

— Precisely.

— Mayhap. Hora pro Nubis, Thundersday, at A Little Bit Of Heaven, Howth, the wife of Deimetuus (D’amn), Earl Adam Fitzadam, of a Tartar (Birtha) or Sackville-Lawry and Morland-West, at the Auspice for the Living, Bonnybrook, by the river and A. Briggs Carlisle, guardian of the birdsmaids and deputiliser for groom. Pontifical mess. Or (soddenly) Schott, furtivfired by the riots. No flies. Agreest?

— Mayhem. Also loans through the post. With or without security. Everywhere. Any amount. Mofsovitz, swampstakers, purely providential.

— Flood’s. The pinkman, the squeeze, the pint with the kick. Gaa. And then the punch to Gaelicise it. Fox. The lady with the lamp. The boy in the barleybag. The old man on his ars. Great Scrapp! ’Tis we and you and ye and me and hymns and hurts and heels and shields. The eirest race, the ourest nation, the airest place [p.515] that erestationed. He was culping for penance while you were ringing his belle. Did the kickee, goodman rued fox, say anything important? Clam or cram, spick or spat?

— No more than Richman’s periwhelker.

— Nnn ttt wrd?

— Dmn ttt thg.

— A gael galled by scheme of scorn? Nock?

— Sangnifying nothing. Mock!

— Fortitudo eius rhodammum tenuit?

— Five maim! Or something very similar.

— I should like to euphonise that. It sounds an isochronism. Secret speech Hazelton and obviously disemvowelled. But it is good laylaw too. We may take those wellmeant kicks for free granted, though ultra vires, void and, in fact, unnecessarily so. Happily you were not quite so successful in the process verbal whereby you would sublimate your blepharospasmockical suppressions, it seems?

— What was that? First I heard about it.

— Were you or were you not? Ask yourself the answer, I’m not giving you a short question. Now, not to mix up, cast your eyes around Capel Court. I want you, witness of this epic struggle, as yours so mine, to reconstruct for us, as briefly as you can, inexactly the same as a mind’s eye view, how these funeral games, which have been poring over us through homer’s kerryer pidgeons, massacreedoed as the holiname rally round took place.

— Which? Sure I told you that afoul. I was drunk all lost life.

— Well, tell it to me befair, the whole plan of campaign, in that bamboozelem mincethrill voice of yours. Let’s have it, christie! The Dublin own, the thrice familiar.

— Ah, sure, I eyewitless foggus. ’Tis all around me bebattersbid hat.

— Ah, go on now, Masta Bones, a gig for a gag, with your impendements and your perroqtriques! Blank memory of hatless darky in blued suit. You were ever the gentle poet, dove from Haywarden. Pitcher cup, patcher cap, pratey man? Be nice about it, Bones Minor! Look chairful! Come, delicacy! Go to the end, [p.516] thou slackerd! Once upon a grass and a hopping high grass it was.

— Faith, then, Meesta Cheeryman, first he come up, a gag as a gig, badgeler’s rake to the town’s major from the wesz, MacSmashall Swingy of the Cattelaxes, got up regardless, with a cock on the Kildare side of his Tattersull, in his riddlesneek’s ragamufflers and the horrid contrivance as seen above, whisklyng into a bone tolerably delicately, the Wearing of the Blue, and taking off his plushkwadded bugsby in his perusual flea and loisy manner, saying good mrowkas to weevilybolly and dragging his feet in the usual course and was ever so terribly naas, really, telling him clean his nagles and fex himself up, Miles, and so on and so fort, and to take the coocoomb to his grizzlies and who done that foxy freak on his bear’s hairs like fire bursting out of the Ump pyre and, half hang me, sirr, if he wasn’t wanting his calicub body back before he’d to take his life or so save his life. Then, begor, counting as many as eleven to thritytwo seconds with his pocket browning, like I said, wann swanns wann, this is my awethorrorty, he kept forecursing hascupth’s foul Fanden, Cogan, for coaccoackey the key of John Dunn’s field fore it was for sent and the way Montague was robbed and wolfling to know all what went off and who burned the hay, perchance wilt thoult say, before he’d kill all the kanes and the price of Patsch Purcell’s faketotem, which the man, his plantagonist, up from the bog of the depths who was raging with the thirst of the sacred sponge and who, as a mashter of pasht, so far as him was concerned, was only standing there nonplush to the corner of Turbot Street, perplexing about a paumpshop and pupparing to spit, wanting to know whelp the henconvention’s compuss memphis he wanted with him new nothing about.

— A sarsencruxer, like the Nap O’ Farrell Patter Tandy moor and burgess medley? In other words, was that how in the annusual curse of things, as complement to compliment though, after a manner of men which I must and will say seems extraordinary, their celicolar subtler angelic warfare or photoplay finister started?

[p.517] — Truly. That I may never!

— Did one scum then in the auradrama, the deff, after some clever play in the mud, mention to the other undesirable, a dumm, during diverse intentional instants, that upon the resume after the angerus, how for his deal he was a pigheaded Swede and to wend himself to a medicis?

— To be sore he did, the huggornut! Only it was turniphudded dunce, I beg your pardon, and he would jokes bowlderblow the betholder with his black masket off the bawling green.

— Sublime was the warning!

— The author, in fact, was mardred.

— Did he, the first spikesman, do anything to him, the last spokesman, when, after heaving some more smutt and chaff between them, they rolled togutter into the ditch together? Black Pig’s Dyke?

— No, he had his teeth in the back of his head.

— Did Box then try to shine his puss?

— No but Cox did to shin the punman.

— The worsted crying that if never he looked on Leaverholma’s again and the bester huing that he might ever save sunlife?

— Trulytruly Asbestos he ever. And sowasso I never.

— That forte carlysle touch breaking the campdens pianoback.

— Pansh!

— Are you of my meaning that would be going on to about half noon, click o’clock, pip emma, Grinwicker time, by your querqcut quadrant?

— You will be asking me and I wish to higgins you wouldn’t. Would it?

— Let it be twelve thirty after a somersautch of the tardest!

— And it was eleven thirstytoo befour in soandsuch, reloy on it!

— Tick up on time. Howday you doom? That rising day sinks rosing in a night of nine week’s wonder.

— Amties, marcy buckup! The uneven day of the unleventh month of the unevented year. At mart in mass.

— A triduum before Our Larry’s own day. By which of your chronos, my man of four watches, larboard, starboard, dog or dath?

[p.518] — Dunsink, rugby, ballast and ball. You can imagine.

— Language this allsfare for the loathe of Marses ambiviolent about it. Will you swear all the same you saw their shadows a hundred foot later, struggling diabolically over this, that and the other, their virtues pro and his principality con, near the Ruins, Drogheda Street, and kicking up the devil’s own dust for the Milesian wind?

— I will. I did. They were. I swear. Like the heavenly militia. So wreek me Ghyllygully! With my tongue through my toecap on the headlong stone of kismet if so ’tis the will of Whose B. Dunn.

— Weepin Lorcans! They must have put in some wonderful work, ecad, on the quiet like, during this arms’ parley, meatierities forces vegateareans. Dost thou not think so?

— Ay.

— The illegallooking range or fender, alias turfing iron, a product of Hostages and Co, Engineers, changed feet several times as briars revalvered during the weaponswap? Piff?

— Puff! Excuse yourself. It was an ersatz lottheringcan.

— They did not know the war was over and were only berebelling or bereppelling one another by chance or necessity with sham bottles, mere and woiney, as betwinst Picturshirts and Scutticules, like their caractacurs in an Irish Ruman to sorowbrate the expeltsion of the Danos? What sayest thou, scusascmerul?

— That’s all. For he was heavily upright man, Limba romena in Bucclis tucsada. Farcing gutterish.

— I mean the Morgans and the Dorans, in finnish?

— I know you don’t, in Feeney’s.

— The mujic of the footure on the barbarihams of the bashed? Co Canniley?

— Da Donnuley.

— Yet this war has meed peace? In voina viritas. Ab chaos lex, neat wehr?

— O bella! O pia! O pura! Amem. Handwalled amokst us. Thanksbeer to Balbus!

— All the same you sound it twould clang houlish like Hull hopen for christmians?

[p.519] — But twill cling hellish like engels opened to neuropeans, if you’ve sensed, whole the sum. So be vigil!

— And this pattern pootsch punnermine of concoon and proprey went on, hog and minne, a whole whake, your night after larry’s night, spittinspite on Dora O’Huggins, ormonde caught butler, the artillery of the O’Hefferns answering the cavalry of the MacClouds, fortey and more fortey, a thousand and one times, according to your cock and a biddy story? Lludillongi, for years and years perhaps?

— That’s ri. This is his largos life, this is me timtomtum and this is her two peekweeny ones. From the last finger on the second foot of the fourth man to the first one on the last one of the first. That’s right.

— Finny. Vary vary finny!

— It may look funny but fere it is.

— This is not guid enough, Mr Brasslattin. Finging and tonging and winging and ponging! And all your rally and ramp and rant! Didget think I was asleep at the wheel? D’yu mean to tall grand jurors of thathens of tharctic on your oath, me lad, and ask us to believe you, for all you’re enduring long terms, with yur last foot foremouthst, that yur moon was shining on the tors and on the cresties and winblowing night after night, for years and years perhaps, after you swearing to it a while back before your Corth examiner, Markwalther, that there was reen in planty all the teem?

— Perhaps so, as you grand duly affirm, Robman Calvinic. I never thought over it, faith. I most certainly think so about it. I hope. Unless it is actionable. It would be a charity for me to think about something which I must on no caste accounts omit, if you ask to me. It was told me as an inspired statement by a friend of myself, in reply to salute, Tarpey, after three o’clock mass, with forty ducks indulgent, that some rain was promised to Mrs Lyons, the invalid of Aunt Tarty Villa, with lots gulp and sousers and likewise he told me, the recusant, after telling mass, with two hundred genuflexions, at the split hour of blight when bars are keeping so sly, as was what’s follows. He [p.520] is doing a walk, says she, in the feelmick’s park, says he, like a tarrable Turk, says she, letting loose on his nursery and, begalla, he meet himself with Mr Michael Clery of a Tuesday who said Father MacGregor was desperate to the bad place about thassbawls and ejaculating about all the stairrods and the catspew swashing his earwanker and thinconvenience being locked up for months, owing to being putrenised by stragglers abusing the apparatus, and for Tarpey to pull himself into his soup and fish and to push on his borrowsaloaner and to go to the tumple like greased lining and see Father MacGregor and, be Cad, sir, he was to pipe up and saluate that clergyman and to tell his holiness the whole goat’s throat about the three shillings in the confusional and to say how Mrs Lyons, the cuptosser, was the infidel who prophessised to pose three shielings Peter’s pelf off her tocher from paraguais and albs by the yard to Mr Martin Clery for Father Mathew to put up a midnight mask saints withins of a Thrushday for African man and to let Brown child do and to leave he Anlone and all the nuisances committed by soldats and nonbehavers and missbelovers for N.D. de l’Ecluse to send more heehaw hell’s flutes, my prodder again! And I never brought my cads in togs blanket! Foueh!

— Angly as arrows, but you have right, my celtslinger! Nils, Mugn and Cannut. Should brothers be for awe then?

— So let use off be octo while oil bike the bil and wheel whang till wabblin befoul you but mere and mire trullopes will knaver mate a game on the bibby bobby burns of.

— Quatsch! What hill ar yu fluking about, ye lamelookond fyats! I’ll discipline ye! Will you swear or affirm the day to yur second sight noo and recant that all yu affirmed to profetised at first sight for his southerly accent was all paddyflaherty? Will ye, ay or nay?

— Ay say aye. I affirmly swear to it that it rooly and cooly boolyhooly was with my holyhagionous lips continuously poised upon the rubricated annuals of saint ulstar.

— That’s very guid of ye, R.C.! Maybe yu wouldn’t mind talling us, my labrose lad, how very much bright cabbage or [p.521] paperming comfirts d’yu draw for all yur swearin? The spanglers, kiddy?

— Rootha prootha. There you have me! Vurry nothing, O potators, I call it for I might as well tell yous Essexelcy, and I am not swallowing my air, the Golden Bridge’s truth. It amounts to nada in pounds or pence. Not a glass of Lucan nor as much as the cost price of a highlandman’s trousertree or the three crowns round your draphole (isn’t it dram disgusting?) for the whole dumb plodding thing!

— Come now, Johnny! We weren’t born yesterday. Pro tanto quid retribuamus? I ask you to say on your scotty pictail you were promised fines times with some staggerjuice or deadhorse, on strip or in larges, at the Raven and Sugarloaf, either Jones’s lame or Jamesy’s gait, anyhow?

— Bushmillah! Do you think for a moment? Yes, by the way. How very necessarily true! Give me fair play. When?

— At the Dove and Raven tavern, no, ah? To wit your wizzend?

— Water, water, darty water! Up Jubilee sod! Beet peat wheat treat!

— What harm wants but demands it! How would you like to hear yur right name now, Ghazi Power, my tristy minstrel, if yur not freckened of frank comment?

— Not afrightened of Frank Annybody’s gaspower or illconditioned ulcers neither.

— Your uncles!

— Your gullet!

— Will you repeat that to me outside, leinconnmuns?

— After you’ve shouted a few? I will when it suits me, hulstler.

— Guid! We make fight! Three to one! Raddy?

— But no, from exemple, Emania Raffaroo! What do you have? What mean you, august one? Fairplay for Finnians! I will have my humours. Sure, you would not do the cowardly thing and moll me roon? Tell Queen’s road I am seilling. Farewell, but whenever! Buy!

[p.522] — Ef I chuse to put a bullet like yu through the grill for heckling what business is that of yours, yu bullock?

— I don’t know, sir. Don’t ask me, your honour!

— Gently, gently Northern Ire! Love that red hand! Let me once more. There are sordidly tales within tales, you clearly understand that? Now my other point. Did you know, whether by melanodactylism or purely libationally, that one of these two Crimeans with the fender, the taller man, was accused of a certain offence or of a choice of two serious charges, as skirts were divided on the subject, if you like it better that way? You did, you rogue, you?

— You hear things. Besides (and serially now) bushes have eyes, don’t forget. Hah!

— Which moral turpitude would you select of the two, for choice, if you had your way? Playing bull before shebears or the hindlegs off a clotheshorse? Did any orangepeelers or greengoaters appear periodically up your sylvan family tree?

— Buggered if I know! It all depends on how much family silver you want for a nass-and-pair. Hah!

— What do you mean, sir, behind your hah! You don’t hah to do thah, you know, snapograph.

— Nothing, sir. Only a bone moving into place. Blotogaff. Hahah!

— Whahat?

— Are you to have all the pleasure quizzing on me? I didn’t say it aloud, sir. I have something inside of me talking to myself.

— You’re a nice third degree witness, faith! But this is no laughing matter. Do you think we are tonedeafs in our noses to boot? Can you not distinguish the sense, prain, from the sound, bray? You have homosexual catheis of empathy between narcissism of the expert and steatopygic invertedness. Get yourself psychoanolised!

— O, begor, I want no expert nursis symaphy from yours broons quadroons and I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want (the fog follow you all!) without your interferences or any other pigeonstealer.

[p.523] — Sample! Sample!

— Have you ever weflected, wepowtew, that the evil what though it was willed might nevewtheless lead somehow on to good towawd the genewality?

— A pwopwo of haster meets waster and talking of plebiscites by a show of hands, whether declaratory or effective, in all seriousness, has it become to dawn in you yet that the deponent, the man from Saint Yves, may have been (one is reluctant to use the passive voiced) may be been as much sinned against as sinning, for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being — please read this mufto — is becoming in its owntown eyeballs. Now the long form and the strong form and reform alltogether!

— Hotchkiss Culthur’s Everready, one brother to neverreached, well over countless hands, sieur of many winners and losers, groomed by S. Samson and son, bred by dilalahs, will stand at Bay (Dublin) from nun till dan and vites inversion and at Miss or Mrs’s MacMannigan’s Yard.

— Perhaps you can explain, sagobean? The Mod needs a rebus.

— Pro general continuation and in particular explication to your singular interrogation our asseveralation. Ladiegent, pals will smile but me and Frisky Shorty, my inmate friend, as is uncommon struck on poplar poetry, and a few fleabesides round at West Pauper Bosquet, was glad to be back again with the chaps and just arguing friendlylike at the Doddercan Easehouse having a wee chatty with our hosty in his comfy estably over the old middlesex party and his moral turps, meaning flu, pock, pox and mizzles, grip, gripe, gleet and sprue, caries, rabies, numps and dumps. What me and Frisky in our concensus and the whole double gigscrew of suscribers, notto say the burman, having successfully concluded our tour of bibel, wants to know is thisahere. Supposing, for an ethical fict, him, which the findings showed, to have taken his epscene licence before the norsect’s divisional respectively as regards them male privates and or concomitantly with all common or neuter respects to them [p.524] public exess females, whereas allbeit really sweet fillies, as was very properly held by the metropolitan in connection with this regrettable nuisance, touching arbitrary conduct, being in strict contravention of schedule in board of forests and works bylaws regulationing sparkers’ and succers’ amusements section of our beloved naturpark in pursuance of which police agence me and Shorty have approached a reverend gentlman of the name of Mr Coppinger with reference to a piece of fire fittings as was most obliging, ’pon my sam, in this matter of his explanations affirmative, negative and limitative, given to me and Shorty, touching what the good book says of toooldaisymen, concerning the merits of early bisectualism, besides him citing from approved lectionary example given by a valued friend of the name of Mr J. P. Cockshott, reticent of England, as owns a pretty maisonette, Quis ut Deus, fronting on to the Soussex Bluffs as was telling us categoric how Mr Cockshott, as he had his assignation with, present holder by deedpoll and indenture of the swearing belt, he tells him hypothetic, the reverend Mr Coppinger, hereckons himself disjunctively with his windwarrd eye up to a dozen miles of a cunifarm school of herring, passing themselves supernatently by the Bloater Naze from twelve and them mayridinghim by the silent hour. Butting, charging, bracing, backing, springing, shrinking, swaying, darting, shooting, bucking and sprinkling their dossies sodouscheock with the twinx of their taylz. And, reverend, he says, summat problematical, by yon socialist sun, gut me, but them errings was as gladful as Wissixy kippers could be considering, flipping their little coppingers, pot em, the fresh little flirties, the dirty little gillybrighteners, pickle their spratties, the little smolty gallockers, and, reverend, says he, more assertitoff, zwelf me Zeus, says he, lettin olfac be the extench of the supperfishies, lamme the curves of their scaligerance and pesk the everurge flossity of their pectoralium, them little salty populators, says he, most apodictic, as sure as my briam eggs is on cockshot under noose, all them little upandown dippies they was all of a libidous pickpuckparty and raid on a wriggolo finsky doodah in testimonials to their early bisectualism. Such, he says, [p.525] is how the reverend Coppinger, he visualises the hidebound homelies of creed crux ethics. Watsch yourself tillicately every morkning in your bracksullied twilette. The use of cold water, testificates Dr Rutty, may be warmly recommended for the sugjugation of cungunitals loosed. Tolloll, schools!

— Tallhell and Barbados wi ye and your Errian coprulation! Pelagiarist! Remonstrant Montgomeryite! Short lives to your relatives! Y’are absexed, so y’are, with mackerglosia and mickroocyphyllicks.

— Wait now, leixlep! I scent eggoarchicism. I will take you to task. I don’t follow you that far in your otherwise accurate account. Was it esox lucius or salmo ferax? You are taxing us into the driven future, are you not, with this ruttymaid fishery?

— Lalia Lelia Lilia Lulia and lively lovely Lola Montez.

— Gubbernathor! That they say is a fenian on the secret. Named Parasol Irelly. Spawning ova and fry like a marrye monach all amanygoround his seven parish churches! And peopling the ribald baronies with dans, oges and conals!

— Lift it now, Hosty! Hump’s your mark! For a runnymede landing! A dondhering vesh vish, Magnam Carpam, es hit neat zoo?

— There’s an old psalmsobbing lax salmoner fogeyboren Herrin Plundehowse.

Who went floundering with his boatloads of spermin spunk about. Leaping freck after every long tom and wet lissy between Howth and Humbermouth.

Our Human Conger Eel!

— Hep! I can see him in the fishnoo! Up wi’yer whippy! Hold that lad! Play him, Markandeyn! Bullhead!

— Pull you, sir! Olive quill does it. Longeal of Malin, he’ll cry before he’s flayed. And his tear make newisland. Did a rise? Way, lungfush! The great fin may cumule! Three threeth o’er the wild! Manu ware!

— He missed her mouth and stood into Dee, Romunculus Remus, plying the rape, so as now any bompriss’s bound to get up her if he pool her leg and bunk on her butt. No, he skid like a skate and berthed on her byrnie and never a fear but they’ll [p.526] land him yet, slitheryscales on liffeybank, times and times and halve a time with a pillow of sand to polster him.

— Do you say they will?

— I bet you they will.

— Among the shivering sedges so? Weedy waving.

— Or tulipbeds of Rush below.

— Where you take your mugs to wash after dark?

— To my lead, Toomey lout, Tommy lad.

— Besides the bubblye waters of, babblyebubblye waters of?

— Right.

— Grenadiers. And tell me now. Were these anglers or angelers coexistent and compresent with or without their tertium quid?

— Three in one, one and three. Shem and Shaun and the shame that sunders em. Wisdom’s son, folly’s brother.

— God bless your ginger, wigglewaggle! That’s three slots and no burners. You’re forgetting the jinnyjos for the fayboys. What, Walker John Referent? Play us your patmost! And unpackyoulloups!

— Naif Cruachan! Woe on woe, says Wardeb Daly. Woman will water the wild world over. And the maid of the folley will go where glory. Sure I thought it was larking in the trefoll of the furry glans with two stripping baremaids, Stilla Underwood and Moth MacGarry, he was, hand to dagger, that time and their mother, a rawkneepudsfrowse, I was given to understand, with superflowvius heirs, begum. There was that one that was always mad gone on him, her first king of cloves and the most broadcussed man in Corrack-on-Sharon, County Rosecarmon. Sure she was near drowned in pondest coldstreams of admiration forherself, as bad as my Tarpeyan cousin, Vesta Tully, making faces at her bachspilled likeness in the brook after and cooling herself in the element, she pleasing it, she praising it, with salices and weidowwehls, all tossed, as she was, the playactrix, Lough Shieling’s love!

— O, add shielsome bridelittle! All of her own! Nircississies are as the doaters of inversion. Secilas through their laughing classes becoming poolermates in laker life.

[p.527] — It seems to same with Iscappellas? Ys? Gotellus! A tickey for tie taughts!

— Listenest, meme mearest! They were harrowd, those finweeds! Come, rest in this bosom! So sorry you lost him, poor lamb! Of course I know you are a viry vikid girl to go in the dreemplace and at that time of the draym and it was a very wrong thing to do, even under the dark flush of night, dare all grandpassia! He’s gone on his bombashaw. Through geesing and so pleasing at Strip Teasy up the stairs. The boys on the corner were talking too. And your soreful miseries first come on you. Still to forgive it, divine my lickle wiffey, and everybody knows you do look lovely in your invinsibles, Eulogia, a perfect apposition with the coldcream, Assoluta, from Boileau’s I always use in the wards after I am burned a rich egg and derive the greatest benefit, sign of the cause. My, you do! Simply adorable! Could I but pass my hands some, my hands through, thine hair! So vickyvicky veritiny! O Fronces, say howdyedo, Dotty! Chic hands. The way they curve there under nue charmeen cuffs! I am more divine like that when I’ve two of everything up to boyproof knicks. Winning in a way, only my arms are whiter, dear. Blanchemain, idler. Fairhair, frail one. Listen, meme sweety! O be joyfold! Mirror do justice, taper of ivory, heart of the conavent, hoops of gold! My veil will save it undyeing from his ethernal fire! It’s meemly us two, meme idoll. Of course it was downright verry wickred of him, reely meeting me disguised, Bortolo mio, peerfectly appealling, D.V., with my lovebirds, my colombinas. Their sinsitives shrinked. Even Netta and Linda, our seeyu tities and they’ve sin sumtim, tankus! My rillies were liebeneaus, my aftscents embre. How me adores eatsother simply (Mon ishebeau! Ma reinebelle!), in his storm collar, as I leaned yestreen from his muskished labs, even my little pom got excited, when I turned his head on his same manly bust and kissed him more. Only he might speak to a person, lord so picious, taking up my worths ill wrong! May I introduce! This is my futuous, lips and looks lovelast. Still me with you, you poor chilled! Will make it up with mother Concepcion and a glorious lie between us, [p.528] sweetness, so as not a novene in all the convent loretos, not my littlest one of all, for mercy’s sake need ever know, what passed our lips or. Yes sir, we’ll will! Clothea wind! Fee o fie! Covey us niced! Bansh the dread! Alitten’s looking. Low him lovly! Make me feel good in the moontime. It will all take bloss as oranged at St Audiens rosan chocolate chapelry with my diamants blickfeast after at minne owned hos for all the catclub to go cryzy and Father Blesius Mindelsinn will be beminding hand. Kyrielle elation! Crystal elation! Kyrielle elation! Elation immanse! Sing to us, sing to us, sing to us! Amam! So meme nearest, languished hister, be free to me! (I’m fading!) And listen, you, you beauty, esster, I’ll be clue to who knows you, pray Magda, Marthe with Luz and Joan, while I lie with warm lisp on the Tolka. (I’m fay!)

— Eusapia! Fais-le, tout-tait! Languishing hysteria? The clou historique? How is this at all? Is dads the thing in such or are tits the that? Hear we here her first poseproem of suora unto suora? Alicious, twinstreams twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland? Ding dong! Where’s your pal in silks alustre? Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Annupciacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, Immacolacion. Knock and it shall appall unto you! Who shone yet shimmers will be e’er scheining. Cluse her, voil her, hild her hindly. After liryc and themodius soft aglo iris of the vals. This young barlady, what, euphemiasly? Is she having an ambidual act herself in apparition with herself as Consuelas to Sonias may?

— Dang! And tether, a loguy O!

— Dis and dat and dese and dose! Your crackling out of your turn, my Moonster firefly, like always. And 2 R.N. and Longhorns Connacht, stay off my air! You’ve grabbed the capital and you’ve had the lion’s shire since 1542 but there’s all the difference in Ireland between your borderation, my chatty cove, and me. The leinstrel boy to the wall is gone and there’s moreen astoreen for Monn and Conn. With the tyke’s named moke. Doggymens’ nimmer win! You last led the first when we last but we’ll first trump your last with a lasting. Jump the railchairs or take them, as you please, but and, sir, my queskins first, foxyjack! Ye’ve as much skullabogue cheek on you now as would boil a caldron of [p.529] kalebrose. Did the market missioners Hayden Wombwell, when given the raspberry, fine more than sandsteen per cent of chalk in the purity, promptitude and perfection flour of this raw materialist and less than a seventh pro mile in his meal? We bright young chaps of the brandnew braintrust are briefed here and with maternal sanction compellably empanelled at quarter sessions under the six disqualifications for the uniformication of young persons (Nodding Neutrals) removal act by Committalman Number Underfifteen to know had the peeress of generals, who have been getting nose money cheap and stirring up the public opinion about private balls with their legs, Misses Mirtha and Merry, the two dreeper’s assistents, had they their service books in order and duly signed J. H. North and Company when discharged from their last situations? Will ye gup and tell the board in the anterim how, in the name of the three tailors on Tooley Street, did O’Bejorumsen or Mockmacmahonitch, ex of Butt and Hocksett’s, violating the bushel standard, come into awful position of the barrel of bellywash? And why, is it any harm to ask, was this hackney man in the coombe, a papersalor with a whiteluke to him, Fauxfitzhuorson, collected from Manofisle, carrying his ark, of eggshaped fuselage and made in Fredborg into the bullgine, across his back when he might have been setting on his jonass inside like a Glassthure cabman? Where were the doughboys, three by nombres, won in ziel, cavehill exers or hearts of steel, Hansen, Morfydd and O’Dyar, V.D., with their glenagearries directing their steps according to the R.U.C’s liaison officer, with their trench ulcers open and their hands in their pockets, contrary to military rules, when confronted with his lifesize obstruction? When did he live off rooking the pooro and how did start pfuffpfaffing at his Paterson and Hellicott’s? Is it a factual fact, proved up to scabsteethshilt, that this fancydress nordic in shaved lamb breeches, child’s kilts, bibby buntings and wellingtons, with club, torc and headdress, preholder of the Bar Ptolomei, is coowner of a hengster’s circus near North Great Denmark Street (incidentally, it’s the most unjoyable show going the province and I’m taking the youngsters [p.530] there Saturday first when it’s halfprice naturals night to see the fallensickners aping the buckleybackers and the blind to two worlds taking off the deffydowndummies) and the shamshemshowman has been complaining to the police barracks and applying for an order of certiorari and crying out something vile about him being molested, after him having triplets, by offers of vacancies from females in this city, neighing after the man and his outstanding attraction ever since they seen his X ray picture turned out in wealthy red in the sabbath sheets? Was it him that suborned that surdumutual son of his, a litterydistributer in Saint Patrick’s Lavatory, to turn a Roman and leave the chayr and gout in his bare balbriggans, the sweep, and buy the usual jar of porter at the Morgue and Cruses and set it down before the wife with her fireman’s halmet on her, bidding her mine the hoose, the strumpet, while him and his lagenloves were rampaging the roads in all their paroply under the noses of the Heliopolitan constabulary? Can you beat it? Prepare the way! Where’s that gendarm auxiliar, arianautic sappertillery, that reported on the whole hoodlum, relying on his morse-erse wordybook and the trunchein up his tail? Roof Seckesign van der Deckel and get her story from him! Recall Sickerson, the lizzyboy! Seckersen, magnon of Errick. Sackerson! Hookup!

— Day shirker four vanfloats he verdants market.

High liquor made lust torpid dough hunt her orchid.

— Hunt her orchid! Gob and he found it on her right enough! With her shoes upon his shoulders, ’twas most trying to beholders when he upped their frullatullepleats with our warning. A disgrace to the homely protestant religion! Bloody old preadamite with his twohandled umberella! Trust me to spy on me own spew!

— Wallpurgies! And it’s this’s your deified city? Norganson? And it’s we’s to pray for Bigmesser’s conversions? Call Kitty the Beads, the Mandame of Tipknock Castle! Let succuba succumb, the improvable his wealth made possible! He’s cookinghagar that rost her prayer to him upon the top of the stairs. She’s deep, that one.

— A farternoiser for his tuckish armenities. Ouhr Former [p.531] who erred in having down to gibbous disdag our darling breed. And then the confisieur for the boob’s indulligence. As sunctioned for his salmenbog by the Councillors-om-Trent. Pave Pannem at his gaiter’s bronze! Nummer half dreads Log Laughty. Master’s gunne he warrs the bedst. I messaged his dilltoyds sausepander mussels on the kisschen table. With my ironing duck through his rollpins of gansyfett, do dodo doughdy dough, till he was braising red in the toastface with lovensoft eyebulbs and his kiddledrum steeming and rattling like the roasties in my mockamill. I awed to have scourched his Abarm’s brack for him. For the loaf of Obadiah, take your pastryart’s noas out of me flouer bouckuet! Of the strainger scene you given squeezers to me skillet! As cream of the hearth thou reinethst alhome. His lapper and libbers was glue goulewed as he sizzled there watching me lautterick’s pitcher by Wexford-Atelier as Katty and Lanner, the refined souprette, with my bust alla brooche and the padbun under my matelote, showing my jigotty sleeves and all my new toulong touloosies. Whisk! There’s me shims and here’s me hams and this is me juppettes, gause be the meter! Whisk! What’s this? Whisk! And that? He never cotched finer, balay me, at Romiolo Frullini’s flea pantamine out of Griddle-the-Sink or Shusies-with-her-Soles-Up or La Sauzerelly, the pucieboots, when I started so hobmop ladlelike, highty tighty, to kick the time off the cluckclock lucklock quamquam camcam potapot panapan kickakickkack. Hairhorehounds, shake up pfortner. Fuddling fun for Fullacan’s sake!

— All halt! Sponsor programme and close down. That’s enough, genral, of finicking about Finnegan and fiddling with his faddles. A final ballot, guvnor, to remove all doubt. By sylph and salamander and all the trolls and tritons, I mean to top her drive and to tip the tap of this, at last. His thoughts that wouldbe words, his livings that havebeen deeds. And will too, by the holy child of Coole, primapatriock of the archsee, if I have at first to down every mask in Trancenania from Terreterry’s Hole to Stutterers’ Corner to find that Yokeoff his letter, this Yokan his dahet. Pass the jousters of the king, the Kovnor-Journal and [p.532] eirenarch’s custos himself no less, the meg of megs, with the Carrison old gang! Off with your persians! Search ye the Finn! The sinder’s under shriving sheet. Fa Fe Fi Fo Fum! Ho, croak, evildoer! Arise, sir ghostus! As long as you’ve lived there’ll be no other. Doff!

— Amtsadam, sir, to you! Eternest cittas, heil! Here we are again! I am bubub brought up under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric Shilkanbeard (or is it Owllaugh MacAuscullpth the Thord?), but, in pontofacts massimust, I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken by Sall and Will from Augustanus to Ergastulus, as this is, whether in Farnum’s rath or Condra’s ridge or the meadows of Dalkin or Monkish tunshep, by saints and sinners eyeeye alike as a cleanliving man and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up. On my verawife I never was nor can afford to be guilty of crim crig con of malfeasance trespass against parson with the person of a youthful gigirl frifrif friend chirped Apples, acted by Miss Dashe, and with Any of my cousines in Kissilov’s Slutsgartern or Gigglotte’s Hill, when I would touch to her dot and feel most greenily of her unripe ones as it should prove most anniece and far too bahad, nieceless to say, to my reputation on Babbyl Malket for daughters-in-trade being lightly clad. Yet, as my acquainters do me the complaisance of apprising me, I should her have awristed under my duskguise of whippers through toombs and deempeys, lagmen, was she but tinkling of such a tink. And, as a mere matter of ficfect, I tell of myself how I popo possess the ripest littlums wifukie around the globelettes globes upon which she was romping off on Floss Mundai out of haram’s way round Skinner’s circusalley first with her consolation prize in my serial dreams of faire women, Mannequins Passe, with awards in figure and smile subsections, handicapped by two breasts in operatops, a remarkable little endowment garment. Fastened at various places. What spurt! I kickkick keenly love [p.533] such, particularly while savouring of their flavours at their most perfect best when served with heliotrope ayelips, as this is, where I do drench my jolly soul on the pu pure beauty of hers past.

She is my bestpreserved wholewife, sowell her as herafter, in Evans’s eye, with incompatibly the smallest shoenumber outside chinatins. They are jolly dainty, spekin tluly. May we not recommend them? It was my proofpiece from my prenticeserving. And, alas, our private chaplain of Lambeyth and Dolekey, bishopregionary, an always sadfaced man, in his lutestring pewcape with tabinet band, who has visited our various hard hearts and reins by imposition of fufuf fingers, olso haddock’s fumb, in that Upper Room can speak loud to you some quite complimentary things about my clean charactering, even when detected in the dark, distressful though such recital prove to me, as this is, when I introduced her (Frankfurters, numborines, why drive fear?) to our fourposter tunies chantreying under Castrucci Sinior and De Mellos, those whapping oldsteirs, with sycamode euphonium in either notation in our altogether cagehaused duckyheim on Goosna Greene, that cabinteeny homesweetened through affection’s hoardpayns (First Murkiss, or so they sankeyed. Dodo! O Clearly! And Gregorio at front with Johannes far in back. Aw, aw!), gleeglom there’s gnome sweepplaces like theresweep Nowhergs. By whom, as my Kerk Findlater’s, ye litel chuch rond ye coner, and K. K. Katakasm enjoineth in the Belief and, as you all know, of a child, dear Humans, one of my life’s ambitions of my youngend from an early peepee period while still to hedjeskool, intended for broadchurch, I, being fully alive to it, was parruchially confirmed in Caulofat’s bed by our bujibuji beloved curate-author. Michael Engels is your man. Let Michael relay Sutton and tell you people here who have the phoney habit (it was remarketable) in his clairaudience, as this is, as only our own Michael can, when reicherout at superstation, to bring ruptures to our roars how I am amp amp amplify. Hiemlancollin. Pimpim’s Ornery forninehalf. Shaun Shemsen saywhen saywhen. Holmstock unsteaden. Livpoomark lloyrge hoggs one four tupps noying. Big Butter Boost! Sorry! Thnkyou! Thatll beall for- [p.534] tody. Cal it off. Godnotch, vryboily. End a muddy crushmess! Abbreciades anew York gustoms. Kyow! Tak.

— Tiktak. Tikkak.

— Awind abuzz awater falling.

— Poor a cowe his jew placator.

— It’s the damp damp damp.

— Calm has entered. Big big Calm, announcer. It is most ernst terooly a moresome intartenment. Colt’s tooth! I will give tandsel to it. I protest there is luttrelly not one teaspoonspill of evidence at bottomlie to my babad, as you shall see, as this is. Keemun Lapsang of first pickings. And I contango can take off my dudud dirtynine articles of quoting here in Pynix Park before those in heaven to provost myself, by gramercy of justness, I mean veryman and moremon, stiff and staunch for ever, and enter under the advicies from Misrs Norris, Southby, Yates and Weston, Inc, to their favoured client, into my preprotestant caveat against the pupup publication of libel by any tixtim tipsyloon or tobtomtowley of Keisserse Lean (a bloweyed lanejoymt, waring lowbelt suit, with knockbrecky kenees and bullfist rings round him and a fallse roude axehand (he is cunvesser to Saunter’s Nocelettres and the Poe’s Toffee’s Directory in his pisness), the best begrudged man in Belgradia who doth not belease to our paviour) to my nonesuch, that highest personage at moments holding down the throne. So to speak of beauty scouts in elegant pursuit of flowers, searchers for tabernacles and the celluloid art! Happen seen sore eynes belived? The caca cad! He walked by North Strand with his Thom’s towel in hand. Snakeeye! Strangler of soffiacated green parrots! I protest it that he is, by my wipehalf. He was leaving out of my double inns while he was all teppling over my single ixits. So was keshaned on for his recent behaviour. Sherlook is lorking for him. Allare beltspanners. Get your air curt! Shame upon Private M! Shames on his fulsomeness! Shamus on his atkinscum’s lulul lying suulen for an outcast mastiff littered in blood currish! Eristocras till Hanging Tower! Steck a javelin through his advowtried heart! Instaunton! Flap, my Larrybird! Dangle, my highflyer! Jiggety jig my [p.535] jackadandyline! Let me never see his waddphez again! And mine it was, Barktholed von Hunarig, Soesown of Furrows (hourspringlike his joussture, immitiate my chry! as urs now, so yous then!), when to our lot it fell on my poplar Sexsex, my Sexencentaurnary, whenby Gate of Hal, before his hostel of the Wodin Man, I hestened to freeholdit op to his Mam his Maman, Majuscules, His Magnus Maggerstick, first city’s leasekuays of this Nova Tara, our most noble, when hrossbucked on his pricelist charger, Pferdinamd Allibuster (yeddonot need light oar till Noreway for you fanned one o’er every doorway) with my allbum’s greethims through this whole of my promises, handshakey congrandyoulikethems, ecclesency.

Whosaw the jackery dares at handgripper thisa breast? Dose makkers ginger. Some one we was with us all fours. Adversarian! The spiking Duyvil! First liar in Londsend! Wulv! See you scargore on that skeepsbrow! And those meisies! Sulken taarts! Man sicker at I ere bluffet konservative? Shucks! Such ratshause bugsmess so I cannot barely conceive of! Lowest basemeant in hystry! Ibscenest nansence! Noksagt! Per Peeler and Pawr! The brokerheartened shugon! Hole affair is rotten muckswinish porcupig’s draff. Enouch!

— Is that yu, Whitehed?

— Have you headnoise now?

— Give us your mespilt reception, will yous?

— Pass the fish for Christ’s sake!

— Old Whitehowth he is speaking again. Ope Eustace tube! Pity poor whiteoath! Dear gone mummeries, goby! Tell the woyld I have lived true thousand hells. Pity, please, lady, for poor O.W. in this profundust snobbing I have caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs hoar, mummery failend, snowdrift to my ellpow, deff as Adder. I askt you, dear lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits. I gave you of the tree. I gave two smells, three eats. My freeandies, my celeberrimates: my happy bossoms, my allfalling fruits of my boom. Pity poor Haveth Childers Everywhere with Mudder!

That was Communicator, a former colonel. A disincarnated [p.536] spirit, called Sebastion, from the Rivera in Januero, (he is not all hear) may fernspreak shortly with messuages from my deadported. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appunkment for a future date. Hello, Commudicate! How’s the buttes? Everscepistic! He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby. He has had some indiejestings, poor thing, for quite a little while, confused by his tonguer of baubble. A way with him! Poor Felix Culapert! Ring his mind, ye staples, (bonze!) in my ould reekeries’ ballyheart and in my krumlin and in aroundisements and stremmis! Sacks eleathury! Sacks eleathury! Bam! I deplore over him ruely. Mongrieff! O Hone! Guestermed with the nobelities, to die bronxitic in achershous! So enjoying of old thick whiles, in haute white toff’s hoyt of our formed reflections, with stock of eisen all his prop, so buckely hosiered from the Royal Leg, and his puertos mugnum, he would puffout a dhymful bock. And the how he would husband her that verikerfully, his cigare divane! (He would redden her with his vestas, but ’tis naught.) With us his nephos and his neberls, mest incensed and befogged by him and his smoke thereof. But he shall have his glad stein of our zober beerbest in Oscarshal’s winetavern. Buen retiro! The boyce voyce is still flautish and his mounth still wears that soldier’s scarlet though the flaxafloyeds are peppered with salsedine. It is bycause of what he was ascend into his prisonce on account off. I whit it wel. Hence his deepraised words. Some day I may tell of his second storey. Mood! Mood! It looks like someone other bearing my burdens. I cannot let it. Kanes nought.

Well, yeamen, I have bared my whole past, I flatter myself, on both sides. Give me even two months by laxlaw in second division and my first broadcloth is business will be to protest to Recorder at Thing of all Things, or court of Skivinis, with marchants grey, antient and credibel, Zerobubble Barrentone, Jonah Whalley, Determined Codde or Cucumber Upright, my jurats, if it does not occur again. O rhyme us! Haar Faagher, wild heart in Homelan; Harrod’s be the naun. Mine kinder come, mine wohl be won. There is nothing like leuther. O Shee! And nosty [p.537] mens in gladshouses they shad not peggot stones. The elephant’s house is his castle. I am here to tell you, indeed to goodness, that, allbe I discountenanced beallpersuasions, in rinunciniation of pomps of heretofore, with a wax too held in hand, I am thorgtfulldt to do dope me of her miscisprinks and by virchow of those filthered Ovocnas presently like Browne umbracing Christina Anya, after the Irishers, to convert me into a selt (but first I must proxy babetise my old antenaughties), when, as Sigismond Stolterforth, with Rabbin Robroost for my auspicer and Leecher Rutty for my lifearst and Lorencz Pattorn (Ehren til viktrae!), when I will westerneyes those poor sunuppers and outbreighten their land’s eng. A man should stump up and I will pay my pretty decent trade price for my glueglue gluecose, peebles, were it even, as this is, the legal eric for infelicitous conduict (here incloths placefined my pocketanchoredcheck) and, as a matter of fact, I undertake to discontinue entyrely all practices and I deny wholeswiping in toto at my own request in all stoytness to have confermentated and confoederated and agreed in times prebellic, when here were waders for the trainsfolk, as it is now nuggently laid to me, with a friend from mine, Mr Billups, pulleter, my quarterbrother, who sometimes he is doing my locum for me on a grubstake and whom I have cleped constoutuent, for so it was felt by me, at goodbuy cootcoops byusucapiture a mouthless niggeress, Blanchette Brewster from Cherna Djamja, Blawlawnd-via-Brigstow, or to illsell my fourth part in her, which although allowed of in Deuterogamy as in several places of Scripture (copyright) and excluded books (they should quite rightly verbanned be), would seem eggseggs excessively haroween to my feelimbs for two punt scotch, one pollard and a crockard or three pipples on the bitch. Thou, Frick’s Flame, Uden Sulfer, who strikest only on the marryd bokks, enquick me if so be I did cophetuise milady’s maid! In spect of her beavers she is a womanly and sacret. Such wear a frillick for my comic strip, Mons Meg’s Monthly, comes out aich Fanagan’s Weck, to bray at by clownsillies in Donkeybrook Fair. It would lackin mackin Hodder’s and Cocker’s erithmatic. The unpurdonable preemp- [p.538] son of all of her of yourn, by Juno Moneta! If she, irished Marryonn Teheresiann, has been disposed of for her consideration, I, Ledwidge Salvatorious, am tradefully unintiristid. And if she is still further talc slopping over her cocoa contours, I hwat mick angars, am strongly of opinion why I should not be. Inprobable! I do not credit one word of it from such and suchess mistraversers. Just feathers! Nanenities! Or to have ochtroyed to resolde or borrough by exchange same super melkkaart, means help; best Brixton high yellow, no outings: cent for cent on Auction’s Bridge. ’Twere a honnibel crudelty wert so tentement to their naktlives and scatab orgias we devour about in the mightyevil roohms of encient cartage. Utterly improperable! Not for old Crusos or white soul of gold! A pipple on the panis, two claps on the cansill, or three pock pocks cassey knocked on the postern! Not for one testey tickey culprik’s coynds ore for all ecus in cunziehowffse! So hemp me Cash! I meanit.

My herrings! The surdity of it! Amean to say. Her bare idears, it is choochoo chucklesome. Absurd bargain, mum, will call. One line with! One line, with with! Will ate everadayde saumone like a boyne alive O. The tew cherripickers, with their Catheringnettes, Lizzy and Lissy Mycock, from Street Fleshshambles, were they moon at aube with hespermun and I their covin guardient, I would not know to contact such gretched youngsteys in my ways from Haddem or any suistersees or heiresses of theirn, claiming by, through, or under them. Ous of their freiung pfann into myne foyer. Her is one which rassembled to mein enormally. The man what shocked his shanks at contey Carlow’s. He is Deucollion. Each habe goheerd, uptaking you are innersence, but we sen you meet sose infance. Deucollion! Odor. Evilling chimbes is smutsick rivulverblott but thee hard casted thereass pigstenes upann Congan’s shootsmen in Schottenhof, ekeascent? Igen Deucollion! I liked his Gothamm chic! Stuttertub! What a shrubbery trick to play! I will put my oathhead unner my whitepot for ransom of beeves and will stand me where I stood mine in all free heat between Pelagios and little [p.539] Chistayas by Roderick’s our mostmonolith, after my both earstoear and brebreeches buybibles and, minhatton, testify to my unclothed virtue by the longstone erectheion of our allfirst manhere. I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth’s of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A. G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come. Like as my palmer’s past policy I have had my best master’s lessons, as the public he knows, and do you know, homesters, I honestly think, if I have failed lamentably by accident benefits though shintoed, spitefired, perplagued and cramkrieged, I am doing my dids bits and have made of my prudentials good. I have been told I own stolemines or something of that sorth in the sooth of Spainien. Hohohoho! Have I said ogso how I abhor myself vastly (truth to tell) and do repent to my netherheart of suntry clothing? The amusin part is, I will say, hotelmen, that since I, over the deep drowner Athacleeath to seek again Irrlanding, shamed in mind, with three plunges of my ruddertail, yet not a bottlenim, vanced imperial standard by weaponright and platzed mine residenze, taking bourd and burgage under starrymisty and ran and operated my brixtol selection here at thollstall, for mean straits male with evorage fimmel, in commune soccage among strange and enemy, among these plotlets, in Poplinstown, alore Fort Dunlip, then-on-sea, hole of Serbonian bog, now city of magnificent distances, goodwalldabout, with talus and counterscarp and pale of palisades, upon martiell siegewin, with Abbot Warre to blesse, on yon slauchterday of cleantarriffs, in that year which I have called myriabellous, and overdrave these marken (the soord on Whencehislaws was mine and mine the prusshing stock of Allbrecht the Bearn), under patroonshaap of our good kingsinnturns, T. R. H. Urban First and Champaign Chollyman and Hungry the Loaved and Hangry the Hathed, here where my tenenure of office and my toils of domestication first began, with weight of woman my skat and skuld but Flukie of the Ravens as my sure piloter, famine with Englisch sweat and oppedemics, the two- [p.540] toothed dragon worms with allsort serpents, has compolitely seceded from this landleague of many nations and open and notorious naughty livers are found not on our rolls. This seat of our city it is of all sides pleasant, comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills, they are not far off. If champain land, it lieth of all parts. If you would be delited with fresh water, the famous river, called of Ptolemy the Libnia Labia, runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand. Give heed!

— Do Drumcollogher whatever you do!

— Visitez Drumcollogher-la-Belle!

— Be suke and sie so ersed Drumcollogher!

— Vedi Drumcollogher e poi Moonis.

— Things are not as they were. Let me briefly survey. Pro clam a shun! Pip! Peep! Pipitch! Ubipop jay piped, ibipep goes the whistle. Here Tyeburn throttled, massed murmars march: where the bus stops there shop I: here which ye see, yea reste. On me, your sleeping giant. Estoesto! Estote sunto! From the hold of my capt in altitude till the mortification that’s my fate. The end of aldest mosest ist the beginning of all thisorder so the last of their hansbailis shall the first in our sheriffsby. New highs for all! Redu Negru may be black in tawn but under them lintels are staying my horneymen meet each his mansiemagd. For peers and gints, quaysirs and galleyliers, fresk letties from the say and stale headygabblers, gaingangers and dudder wagoners, pullars off societies and pushers on rothmere’s homes. Obeyance from the townsmen spills felixity by the toun. Our bourse and politico-ecomedy are in safe with good Jock Shepherd, our lives are on sure in sorting with Jonathans, wild and great. Been so free! Thank you, besters! Hattentats have mindered. Blaublaze devilbobs have gone from the mode and hairtrigger nicks are quite out of time now. Thuggeries are reere as glovars’ metins, lepers lack, ignerants show beneath suspicion like the bitterhalves of esculapuloids. In midday’s mallsight let Miledd discurverself. Me ludd in her hide park seek Minuinette. All is waldy bonums. Blownose aerios we luft to you! Firebugs, good blazes! Lubbers, kepp your poudies drier! Seamen, we segn your skivs and wives! [p.541] Seven ills so barely as centripunts havd I habt, seaventy seavens for circumference inkeptive are your hill prospect. Braid Blackfordrock, the Calton, the Liberton, Craig and Lockhart’s, A. Costofino, R. Thursitt. The chort of Nicholas Within was my guide and I raised a dome on the wherewithouts of Michan: by awful tors my wellworth building sprang sky spearing spires, cloud cupoled campaniles: further this. By fineounce and imposts I got and grew and by grossscruple gat I grown outreachesly: murage and lestage were my mains for Ouerlord’s tithing and my drains for render and prender the doles and the tribute: I was merely out of my mint with all the percussors on my braincap till I struck for myself and muched morely by token: to Sirrherr of Gambleden ruddy money, to Madame of Pitymount I loue yous. Paybads floriners moved in hugheknots against us and I matt them, pepst to papst, barthelemew: milreys (mark!) onfell, and (Luc!) I arose Daniel in Leonden. Bulafests onvied me, Corkcuttas graatched. Atabey! I braved Brien Berueme to berow him against the Loughlins, all her tolkies shraking: Fugabollags! Lusqu’au bout! If they had ire back of eyeball they got danage on front tooth: theres were revelries at ridottos, here was rivalry in redoubt: I wegschicked Duke Wellinghof to reshockle Roy Shackleton: Walhalloo, Walhalloo, Walhalloo, mourn in plein! Under law’s marshall and warschouw did I thole till lead’s plumbate, ping on pang, reliefed me. I made praharfeast upon acorpolous and fastbroke down in Neederthorpe. I let faireviews in on slobodens but ranked rothgardes round wrathmindsers: I bathandbaddend on mendicity and I corocured off the unoculated. Who can tell their tale whom I filled ad liptum on the plain of Soulsbury? With three hunkered peepers and twa and twas! For sleeking beauties I spinned their nightinveils, to slumbred beast I tummed the thief air. Round the musky moved a murmel but mewses whinninaird and belluas zoomed: tendulcis tunes like water parted fluted up from the westinders while from gorges in the east came the strife of ourangoontangues. All in my thicville Escuterre ofen was thorough fear but in the meckling of my burgh Belvaros was the site forbed: tuberclerosies I [p.542] reized spudfully from the murphyplantz Hawkinsonia and berriberries from the pletoras of the Irish shou. I heard my libertilands making free through their curraghcoombs, my trueblues hurusalaming before Wailingtone’s Wall: I richmounded the rainelag in my bathtub of roundwood and conveyed it with cheers and cables, roaring mighty shouts, through my longertubes of elm: out of fundness for the outozone I carried them amd curried them in my Putzemdown cars to my Kommeandine hotels: I made sprouts fontaneously from Philuppe Sobriety in the coupe that’s cheyned for noon inebriates: when they weaned weary of that bibbing I made infusion more infused: sowerpacers of the vinegarth, obtemperate unto me! When you think me in my coppeecuffs look in ware would you meckamockame, as you pay in caabman’s sheltar tot the ites like you corss the tees. Wherefore watch ye well! For, while I oplooked the first of Janus’s straight, I downsaw the last of Christmas steps: syndic podestril and on the rates, I for indigent and intendente: in Forum Foster I demosthrenated my folksfiendship, enmy pupuls felt my burk was no worse than their brite: Sapphrageta and Consciencia were undecidedly attached to me but the maugher machrees and the auntieparthenopes my schwalby words with litted spongelets set their soakye pokeys and botchbons afume: Fletcher-Flemmings, elisaboth, how interquackeringly they rogated me, their golden one, I inhesitant made replique: Mesdememdes to leursieuresponsor: and who in hillsaide, don’t you let flyfire till you see their whites of the bunkers’ eyes! Mr Answers: Brimgem young, bringem young, bringem young!: in my bethel of Solyman’s I accouched their rotundaties and I turnkeyed most insultantly over raped lutetias in the lock: I gave bax of biscums to the jacobeaters and pottage bakes to the esausted; I dehlivered them with freakandesias by the constant droppings from my smalls instalmonths while I titfortotalled up their farinadays for them on my slataper’s slate with my chandner’s chauk: I jaunted on my jingelbrett rapt in neckloth and sashes, and I beggered about the amnibushes like belly in a bowle. In the humanity of my heart I sent out heyweywomen to refresh [p.543] the ballwearied and then, doubling megalopolitan poleetness, my great great greatest of these charities, devaleurised the base fellows for the curtailment of their lower man: with a slog to square leg I sent my boundary to Botany Bay and I ran up a score and four of mes while the Yanks were huckling the Empire: I have been reciping om omominous letters and widelysigned petitions full of pieces of pottery about my monumentalness as a thingabolls and I have been inchanting causeries to the feshest cheoilboys so that they are allcalling on me for the song of a birtch: the more secretely bi built, the more openly palastered. Attent! Couch hear! I have becket my vonderbilt hutch in sunsmidnought and at morningrise was encampassed of mushroofs. Rest and bethinkful, with licence, thanks. I considered the lilies on the veldt and unto Balkis did I disclothe mine glory. And this. This missy, my taughters, and these man, my son, from my fief of the villa of the Ostmanorum to Thorstan’s, recte Thomars Sraid, and from Huggin Pleaze to William Inglis his house, that man de Loundres, in all their barony of Saltus, bonders and foeburghers, helots and zelots, strutting oges and swaggering macks, the darsy jeamses, the drury joneses, redmaids and bleucotts, in hommage all and felony, all who have received tickets, fair home overcrowded, tidy but very little furniture, respectable, whole family attends daily mass and is dead sick of bread and butter, sometime in the militia, mentally strained from reading work on German physics, shares closet with eight other dwellings, more than respectable, getting comfortable parish relief, wageearner freshly shaven from prison, highly respectable, planning new departure in Mountgomery cyclefinishing, eldest son will not serve but peruses Big-man-up-in-the-Sky scraps, anoopanadoon lacking backway, quasi respectable, pays ragman in bones for faded windowcurtains, staircase continually lit up with guests, particularly respectable, house lost in dirt and blocked with refuse, getting on like Roe’s distillery on fire, slovenly wife active with the jug, in business for himself, has a tenth illegitimate coming, partly respectable, following correspondence courses, chucked work over row, both [p.544] cheeks kissed at levee by late marquess of Zetland, sharing closet which is profusely written over with eleven other subscribers, once respectable, open hallway pungent of Baltic dishes, bangs kept woman’s head against wall thereby disturbing neighbours, private chapel occupies return landing, removal every other quarter day, case one of peculiar hopelessness, most respectable, nightsoil has to be removed through snoring household, eccentric naval officer not quite steady enjoys weekly churchwarden and laugh while reading foreign pictorials on clumpstump before door, known as the trap, widow rheumatic and chars, haunted, condemned and execrated, of dubious respectability, tools too costly pledged or uninsured, reformed philanthropist whenever feasible takes advantage of unfortunates against dilapidating ashpits, serious student is eating his last dinners, floor dangerous for unaccompanied old clergymen, thoroughly respectable, many uncut pious books in evidence, nearest watertap two hundred yards’ run away, fowl and bottled gooseberry frequently on table, man has not had boots off for twelve months, infant being taught to hammer flat piano, outwardly respectable, sometimes hears from titled connection, one foot of dust between banister and cracked wall, wife cleans stools, eminently respectable, ottawark and regular loafer, should be operated would she consent, deplorable rent in roof, claret cellar cobwebbed since the pontificate of Leo, wears drill trousers and collects rare buddhas, underages very treacly and verminous have to be separated, sits up with fevercases for one and threepence, owns two terraces (back to back breeze), respectable in every way, harmless imbecile supposingly weakminded, a sausage every Sunday, has a staff of eight servants, outlook marred by ne’er-do-wells using the laneway, lieabed sons go out with sisters immediately after dark, has never seen the sea, travels always with her eleven trunks of clothing, starving cat left in disgust, the pink of respectability, resting after colonial service, labours at plant, the despair of his many benefactresses, calories exclusively from Rowntrees and dumplings, one bar of sunlight does them all january and half february, the V. de V’s (animal diet) live in five- [p.545] storied semidetached but rarely pay tradesmen, went security for friend who absconded, shares same closet with fourteen similar cottages and an illfamed lodginghouse, more respectable than some, teawidow pension but held to purchase, inherited silk hat from father-in-law, head of domestic economy never mentioned, queery how they live, reputed to procure, last four occupants carried out, mental companionship with mates only, respectability unsuccessfully aimed at, copious holes emitting mice, decoration from Uganda chief in locked ivory casket, grandmother has advanced alcoholic amblyopia, the terror of Goodmen’s Field, and respected and respectable, as respectable as respectable can respectably be, though their orable amission were the herrors I could have expected, all, let them all come, they are my villeins, with chartularies I have talledged them. Wherfor I will and firmly command, as I willed and firmly commanded, upon my royal word and cause the great seal now to be affixed, that from the farthest of the farther of their fathers to their children’s children’s children they do inhabit it and hold it for me unencumbered and my heirs, firmly and quietly, amply and honestly, and with all the liberties and free customs which the men of Tolbris, a city of Tolbris, have at Tolbris, in the county of their city and through whole my land. Hereto my vouchers, knive and snuffbuchs. Fee for farm. Enwreak us wrecks.

Struggling forlongs I have livramentoed, milles on milles of mancipelles. Lo, I have looked upon my pumpadears in their easancies and my drummers have tattled tall tales of me in the land: in morgenattics litt I hope, in seralcellars louched I bleakmealers: on my siege of my mighty I was parciful of my subject but in street wauks that are darkest I debelledem superb: I deemed the drugtails in my pettycourts and domstered dustyfeets in my husinclose: at Guy’s they were swathed, at Foulke’s slashed, the game for a Gomez, the loy for a lynch: if I was magmonimoss as staidy lavgiver I revolucanized by my eructions: the hye and bye wayseeds I scattered em, in my graben fields sew sowage I gathered em: in Sheridan’s Circle my wits repose, in black pitts of the pestered Lenfant he is dummed. (Hearts of Oak, may ye root to piece! [p.546] Rechabites obstain! Clayed sheets, pineshrouded, wake not, walk not! Sigh lento, Morgh!) Quo warranto has his greats my soliven and puissant lord V. king regards for me and he has given to me my necknamesh (flister it!) which is second fiddler to nomen. These be my genteelician arms. At the crest, two young frish, etoiled, flappant, devoiled of their habiliments, vested sable, withdrewers argent. For the boss a coleopter, pondant, partifesswise, blazoned sinister, at the slough, proper. In the lower field a terce of lanciers, shaking unsheathed shafts, their arms crossed in saltire, embusked, sinople. Motto, in letters portent: Hery Crass Evohodie. Idle were it, repassing from elserground to the elder disposition, to inquire whether I, draggedasunder, be the forced generation of group marriage, holocryptogam, of my essenes, or carried of cloud from land of locust, in ouzel galley borne, I, huddled til summone be the massproduct of teamwork, three surtouts wripped up in itchother’s, two twin pritticoaxes lived as one, troubled in trine or dubildin too, for abram nude be I or roberoyed with the faineans, of Feejeean grafted ape on merfish, surrounded by obscurity, by my virtus of creation and by boon of promise, by my natural born freeman’s journeymanright and my otherchurch’s inher light, in so and such a manner as me it so besitteth, most surely I pretend and reclam to opt for simultaneous. Till daybowbreak and showshadows flee. Thus be hek. Verily! Verily! Time, place!

— What is your numb? Bun!

— Who gave you that numb? Poo!

— Have you put in all your sparepennies? I’m listening. Sree!

— Keep clear of propennies! Fore!

— Mr Televox, Mrs Taubiestimm and invisible friends! I maymay mean to say. Annoyin part of it was, had faithful Fulvia, following the wiening courses of this world, turned her back on her ways to gon on uphills upon search of louvers, brunette men of Earalend, Chief North Paw and Chief Goes in Black Water and Chief Brown Pool and Chief Night Cloud by the Deeps, or again had Fluvia, amber whitch she was, left her chivily crookcrook crocus bed at the bare suggestions of some prolling bywaymen [p.547] from Moabit who could have abused of her, the foxrogues, there might accrue advantage to ask wher in pellmell her deceivers sinned. Yet know it was vastly otherwise which I have heard it by mmummy goods waif, as I, chiefly endmost hartyly aver, for Fulvia Fluvia, iddle woman to the plusneeborn, ever did ensue tillstead the things that pertained unto fairnesse, this wharom I am fawned on, that which was loost. Even so, for I waged love on her: and spoiled her undines. And she wept: O my lors!

— Till we meet!

— Ere we part!

— Tollollall!

— This time a hundred years!

— But I was firm with her. And I did take the reached of my delights, my jealousy, ymashkt, beyashmakt, earswathed, snoutsnooded, and did raft her flumingworthily and did leftlead her overland the pace, from lacksleap up to liffsloup, tiding down, as portreeve should, whimpering by Kevin’s creek and Hurdlesford and Gardener’s Mall, long rivierside drive, embankment large, to Ringsend Flott and Ferry, where she began to bump a little bit, my dart to throw: and there, by wavebrink, on strond of south, with mace to masthigh, taillas Cowhowling, quailless Highjakes, did I upreized my magicianer’s puntpole, the tridont sired a tritan stock, farruler, and I bade those polyfizzyboisterous seas to retire with hemselves from os (rookwards, thou seasea stamoror!) and I abridged with domfine norsemanship till I had done abate her maidan race, my baresark bride, and knew her fleshly when with all my bawdy did I her whorship, min bryllupswibe: Heaven, he hallthundered; Heydays, he flung blissforhers. And I cast my tenspan joys on her, arsched overtupped, from bank of call to echobank, by dint of strongbow (Galata! Galata!) so streng we were in one, malestream in shegulf: and to ringstresse I thumbed her with iern of Erin and tradesmanmarked her lieflang mine for all and singular, iday, igone, imorgans, and for ervigheds: base your peak, you! you, strike your flag!: (what screech of shippings! what low of dampf- [p.548] bulls!): from Livland, hoks zivios, from Lettland, skall vives! With Impress of Asias and Queen Columbia for her pairanymphs and the singing sands for herbrides’ music: goosegaze annoynted uns, canailles canzoned and me to she her shyblumes lifted: and I pudd a name and wedlock boltoned round her the which to carry till her grave, my durdin dearly, Appia Lippia Pluviabilla, whiles I herr lifer amstell and been: I chained her chastemate to grippe fiuming snugglers, her chambrett I bestank so to spunish furiosos: I was her hochsized, her cleavunto, her everest, she was my annie, my lauralad, my pisoved: who cut her ribbons when nought my prowes? who expoused that havenliness to beachalured ankerrides when not I, freipforter?: in trinity huts they met my dame, pick of their poke for me: when I foregather ’twas my sumbad, if I farseeker itch my list: had I not workit in my cattagut with dogshunds’ crotts to clene and had I not gifted of my coataways, constantonoble’s aim: and, fortiffed by my right as man of capitol, I did umgyrdle her about, my vermincelly vinagerette, with all loving kindness as far as in man’s might it lay and enfranchised her to liberties of fringes: and I gave until my lilienyounger turkeythighs soft goods and hardware (catalogue, passim) and ladderproof hosiery lines (see stockinger’s raiment), cocquette coiffs (see Agnes’ hats) and peningsworths of the best taste of knaggs of jets and silvered waterroses and geegaws of my pretty novelties and wispywaspy frocks of redferns and lauralworths, trancepearances such as women cattle bare and peltries piled, the peak of Pim’s and Slyne’s and Sparrow’s, loomends day lumineused luxories on looks, La Primamère, Pyrrha Pyrrhine, Or de Reinebeau, Sourire d’Hiver and a crinoline, wide a shire, and pattens for her trilibies that know she might the tortuours of the boots and bedes of wampun with to toy and a murcery glaze of shard to mirrow, for all daintiness by me and theetime, the cupandnaggin hour: and I wound around my swanchen’s neckplace a school of shells of moyles marine to swing their saysangs in her silents: and, upping her at king’s count, her aldritch cry oloss unheading, what though exceeding bitter, I pierced her beak with order of the [p.549] Danabrog (Cunnig’s great! Soll leve! Soll leve!): with mare’s greese cressets at Leonard’s and Dunphy’s and Madonna lanthorns before quintacasas and tallonkindles spearhead syngeing nickendbookers and mhutton lightburnes dipdippingdownes in blackholes, the tapers of the topers and his buntingpall at hoist: for days there was no night for nights were days and our folk had rest from Blackheathen and the pagans from the prince of pacis: what was trembling sod quaked no more, what were frozen loins were stirred and lived: gone the septuor, dark deadly dismal doleful desolate dreadful desperate, no more the tolvmaans, bloody gloomy hideous fearful furious alarming terrible mournful sorrowful frightful appalling: peace, perfect peace: and I hung up at Yule my duindleeng lunas, helphelped of Kettil Flashnose, for the souperhore of my frigid one, coloumba mea, frimosa mea, in Wastewindy tarred strate and Elgin’s marble halles lamping limp from black to block, through all Livania’s volted ampire, from anodes to cathodes and from the topazolites of Mourne, Wykinloeflare, by Arklow’s sapphire siomen’s lure and Wexterford’s hook and crook lights to the polders of Hy Kinsella: avenyue ceen my peurls ahumming, the crown to my estuarine munipicence?: three firths of the sea I swept with draughtness and all ennempties I bottled em up in bellomport: when I stabmarooned jack and maturin I was a bad boy’s bogey but it was when I went on to sankt piotersbarq that they gave my devil his dues: what is seizer can hack in the old wold a sawyer may hew in the green: on the island of Breasil the wildth of me perished and I took my plowshure sadly, feeling pity for me sored: where bold O’Connee weds on Alta Mahar, the tawny sprawling beside that silver burn, I sate me and settled with the little crither of my hearth: her intellects I charmed with I calle them utile thoughts, her turlyhyde I plumped with potatums for amiens pease in plenty: my biblous beadells shewed her triumphs of craftygild pageantries, loftust Adam, duffed our cousterclother, Conn and Owel with cortoppled baskib, Sire Noeh Guinnass, exposant of his bargeness and Lord Joe Starr to hump the body of the camell: I screwed the Emperor down with ninepins gaelic with sixpenny- [p.550] hapennies for his hanger on: my worthies were bissed and trissed from Joshua to Godfrey but my processus prophetarum they would have plauded to perpetuation. Moral: book to besure, see press.

— He’s not all buum and bully.

— But his members handly food him.

— Steving’s grain for’s greet collegtium.

— The S. S. Paudraic’s in the harbour.

— And after these things, I fed her, my carlen, my barelean linsteer, upon spiceries for her garbage breath, italics of knobby lauch and the rich morsel of the marrolebone and shains of garleeks and swinespepper and gothakrauts and pinkee dillisks, primes of meshallehs and subleties in jellywork, come the feast of Saint Pancreas, and shortcake nutrients for Paas and Pingster’s pudding, bready and nutalled and potted fleshmeats from store dampkookin, and the drugs of Kafa and Jelupa and shallots out of Ascalon, feeding her food convenient herfor, to pass them into earth: and to my saffronbreathing mongoloid, the skinsyg, I gave Biorwik’s powlver and Uliv’s oils, unguents of cuticure, for the swarthy searchall’s face on her, with handewers and groinscrubbers and a carrycam to teaze her tussy out, the brown but combly, a mopsa’s broom to duist her sate, and clubmoss and wolvesfoot for her more moister wards (amazing efficiencies!): and, my shopsoiled doveling, when weeks of kindness kinly civicised, in our saloons esquirial, with fineglas bowbays, draped embrasures and giltedged librariums, I did devise my telltale sports at evenbread to wring her withers limberly, wheatears, slapbang, drapier-cut-dean, bray, nap, spinado and ranter-go-round: we had our lewd mayers and our lairdie meiresses kiotowing and smuling fullface on us out of their framous latenesses, oilclothed over for cohabitation and allpointed by Hind: Tamlane the Cussacke, Dirk Wettingstone, Pieter Stuyvesant, Outlawrie O’Niell, Mrs Currens, Mrs Reyson-Figgis, Mrs Dattery, and Mrs Pruny-Quetch: in hym we trust, footwash and sects principles, apply to overseer, Amos five six: she had dabblingtime for exhibiting her grace of aljambras and duncingk the bloodanoobs in her vauxhalls while I, dizzed and dazed by the lumpty thumpty of our [p.551] interloopings, fell clocksure off my ballast: in our windtor palast it vampared for elenders, we lubded Sur Gudd for the sleep and the ghoasts: she chauffed her fuesies at my Wigan’s jewels while she skalded her mermeries on my Snorryson’s Sagos: in paycook’s thronsaale she domineered, lecking icies off the dormer panes all admired her in camises: on Rideau Row Duanna dwells, you merk well what you see: let wellth were I our pantocreator would theirs be tights for the gods: in littleritt reddinghats and cindery yellows and tinsel and glitter and bibs under hoods: I made nusance of many well pressed champdamors and peddled freely in the scrub: I foredreamed for thee and more than fullmaked: I prevened for thee in the haunts that joybelled frail light-a-leaves for sturdy traemen: pelves ad hombres sumus: I said to the shiftless prostitute; let me be your fodder; and to rodies and prater brothers; Chau, Camerade!: evangel of good tidings, omnient as the Healer’s word, for the lost, loathsome and whomsoever will: who, in regimentation through liberal donation in coordination for organisation of their installation and augmentation plus some annexation and amplification without precipitation towards the culmination in latification of what was formerly their utter privation, competence, cheerfulness, usefulness and the meed, shall, in their second adams, all be made alive: my tow tugs steered down canal grand, my lighters lay longside on Regalia Water. And I built in Urbs in Rure, for minne elskede, my shiny brows, under astrolobe from my upservatory, an erdcloset with showne ejector wherewithin to be squatquit in most covenience from her sabbath needs, when open noise should stilled be: did not I festfix with mortarboard my unniversiries, wholly rational and gottalike, sophister agen sorefister, life sizars all?: was I not rosetted on two stellas of little egypt? had not I rockcut readers, hieros, gregos and democriticos?: triscastellated, bimedallised: and by my sevendialled changing charties Hibernska Ulitzas made not I to pass through twelve Threadneedles and Newgade and Vicus Veneris to cooinsight?: my camels’ walk, kolossa kolossa! no porte sublimer benared my ghates: Oi polled ye many but my fews were chousen (Voter, voter, early voter, [p.552] he was never too oft for old Sarum): terminals four my staties were, the Geenar, the Greasouwea, the Debwickweck, the Mifgreawis. And I sept up twinminsters, the pro and the con, my stavekirks wove so norcely of peeled wands and attachatouchy floodmud, now all loosebrick and stonefest, freely masoned, arked for covennanters and shinners’ rifuge: descent from above on us, Hagiasofia of Astralia, our orisons thy nave and absedes, our aeone tone aeones thy studvaast vault; Hams, circuitise! Shemites, retrace!: horns, hush! no barkeys! hereround is’t holied!: all truanttrulls made I comepull, all rubbeling gnomes I pushed, gowgow: Cassels, Redmond, Gandon, Deane, Shepperd, Smyth, Neville, Heaton, Stoney, Foley, Farrell, Vnost with Thorneycroft and Hogan too: sprids serve me! gobelins guard!: tect my tileries (O tribes! O gentes!), keep my keep, the peace of my four great ways: oathiose infernals to Booth Salvation, arcane celestials to Sweatenburgs Welhell! My seven wynds I trailed to maze her and ever a wynd had saving closes and all these closes flagged with the gust, hoops for her, hatsoff for him and ruffles through Neeblow’s garding: and that was why Blabus was razing his wall and eltering the suzannes of his nighboors: and thirdly, for ewigs, I did reform and restore for my smuggy piggiesknees, my sweet coolocked, my auburn coyquailing one, her paddypalace on the crossknoll with massgo bell, sixton clashcloshant, duominous and muezzatinties to commind the fitful: doom adimdim adoom adimadim: and the oragel of the lauds to tellforth’s glory: and added thereunto a shallow laver to slub out her hellfire and posied windows for her oriel house: gospelly pewmillieu, christous pewmillieu: zackbutts babazounded, ollguns tararulled: and she sass her nach, chillybombom and forty bonnets, upon the altarstane. May all have mossyhonours!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— And wholehail, snaeffell, dreardrizzle or sleetshowers of blessing, where it froze in chalix eller swum in the vestry, with fairskin [p.553] book and ruling rod, vein of my vergin page, her chastener ever I did learn my little ana countrymouse in alphabeater cameltemper, from alderbirk to tannenyou, with myraw rattan atter dundrum; ooah, oyir, oyir, oyir: and I did spread before my Livvy, where Lord street lolls and ladies linger and Cammomile Pass cuts Primrose Rise and Coney Bend bounds Mulbreys Island but never a blid had bledded or bludded since long agore when the whole blighty acre was bladey well pessovered, my selvage mats of lecheworked lawn, my carpet gardens of Guerdon City, with chopes pyramidous and mousselimes and beaconphires and colossets and pensilled turisses for the busspleaches of the summiramies and esplanadas and statuesques and templeogues, the Pardonell of Maynooth, Fra Teobaldo, Nielsen, rare admirable, Jean de Porteleau, Conall Gretecloke, Guglielmus Caulis and the eiligh ediculous Passivucant (glorietta’s inexcellsiored!): for irkdays and for folliedays till the comple anniums of calendarias, gregoromaios ant gypsyjuliennes as such are pleased of theirs to walk: and I planted for my own hot lisbing lass a quickset vineyard and I fenced it about with huge Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops and rigs of barlow and bowery nooks and greenwished villas and pampos animos and (N.I.) necessitades iglesias and pons for aguaducks: a hawthorndene, a feyrieglenn, the hallaw vall, the dyrchace, Finmark’s Howe, against lickybudmonth and gleanermonth with a magicscene wall (rimrim! rimrim!) for a Queen’s garden of her phoenix: and (hush! hush!) I brewed for my alpine plurabelle, wigwarming wench, (speakeasy!) my granvilled brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, puss, puss, pussyfoot, to split the spleen of her maw: and I laid down before the trotters to my eblanite my stony battered waggonways, my nordsoud circulums, my eastmoreland and westlandmore, running boullowards and syddenly parading, (hearsemen, opslo! nuptiallers, get storting!): whereon, in mantram of truemen like yahoomen (expect till dutc cundoctor summoneth him all fahrts to pay, velkommen all hankinhunkn in this vongn of Hoseyeh!), claudesdales withe arabinstreeds, Roamer Reich’s rickyshaws with Hispain’s King’s trompateers, madridden mus- [p.554] tangs, buckarestive bronchos, poster shays and turnintaxis, and tall tall tilburys and nod nod noddies, others gigging gaily, some sedated in sedans: my priccoping gents, aroger, aroger, my damsells softsidesaddled, covertly, covertly, and Lawdy Dawe a perch behind: the mule and the hinny and the jennet and the mustard nag and piebald shjelties and skewbald awknees steppit lively (lift ye the left and rink ye the right!) for her pleashadure: and she lalaughed in her diddydid domino to the switcheries of the whip. Down with them! Kick! Playup!

Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!

 ® 

[p.555] What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth.

But really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes?

So, nat by night by naught by naket, in those good old lousy days gone by, the days, shall we say? of Whom shall we say? while kinderwardens minded their twinsbed, therenow theystood, the sycomores, all four of them, in their quartan agues, the majorchy, the minorchy, the everso and the fermentarian with their ballyhooric blowreaper, titranicht by tetranoxst, at their pussycorners, and that old time pallyollogass, playing copers fearsome, with Gus Walker, the cuddy, and his poor old dying boosy cough, esker, newcsle, saggard, crumlin, dell me, donk, the way to wumblin. Follow me beeline and you’re bumblin, esker, newcsle, saggard, crumlin. And listening. So gladdied up when nicechild Kevin Mary (who was going to be commandeering chief of the choirboys’ brigade the moment he grew up under all the auspices) irishsmiled in his milky way of cream dwibble and onage tustard and dessed tabbage, frighted out when badbrat Jerry Godolphing (who was hurrying to be cardinal scullion in a night refuge as bald as he was cured enough unerr all the hospitals) furrinfrowned down his wrinkly waste of methylated spirits, ick, and lemoncholy lees, ick, and pulverised rhubarbarorum, icky;

[p.556] night by silentsailing night while infantina Isobel (who will be blushing all day to be, when she growed up one Sunday, Saint Holy and Saint Ivory, when she took the veil, the beautiful presentation nun, so barely twenty, in her pure coif, sister Isobel, and next Sunday, Mistlemas, when she looked a peach, the beautiful Samaritan, still as beautiful and still in her teens, nurse Saintette Isabelle, with stiffstarched cuffs but on Holiday, Christmas, Easter mornings when she wore a wreath, the wonderful widow of eighteen springs, Madame Isa Veuve La Belle, so sad but lucksome in her boyblue’s long black with orange blossoming weeper’s veil) for she was the only girl they loved, as she is the queenly pearl you prize, because of the way the night that first we met she is bound to be, methinks, and not in vain, the darling of my heart, sleeping in her april cot, within her singachamer, with her greengageflavoured candywhistle duetted to the crazyquilt, Isobel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood’s eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitethorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon, for soon again ’twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me! deeply, now evencalm lay sleeping;

nowth upon nacht, while in his tumbril Wachtman Havelook seequeerscenes, from yonsides of the choppy, punkt by his curserbog, went long the grassgross bumpinstrass that henders the pubbel to pass, stowing his bottle in a hole for at whet his whuskle to stretch ecrooksman, sequestering for lovers’ lost propertied offices the leavethings from allpurgers’ night, og gneiss ogas gnasty, kikkers, brillers, knappers and bands, handsboon and strumpers, sminkysticks and eddiketsflaskers;

wan fine night and the next fine night and last find night while Kothereen the Slop in her native’s chambercushy, with dreamings of simmering my veal astore, was basquing to her pillasleep how she thawght a knogg came to the dowanstairs dour at that howr to peirce the yare and dowandshe went, schritt be schratt, to see was it Schweeps’s mingerals or Shuhorn the posth with a tilly- [p.557] cramp for Hemself and Co, Esquara, or them four hoarsemen on their apolkaloops, Norreys, Soothbys, Yates and Welks, and, galorybit of the sanes in hevel, there was a crick up the stirkiss and when she ruz the cankle to see, galohery, downand she went on her knees to blessersef that were knogging together like milkjuggles as if it was the wrake of the hapspurus or old Kong Gander O’Toole of the Mountains or his googoo goosth she seein, sliving off over the sawdust lobby out of the backroom, wan ter, that was everywans in turruns, in his honeymoon trim, holding up his fingerhals, with the clookey in his fisstball, tocher of davy’s, tocher of ivileagh, for her to whisht, you sowbelly, and the whites of his pious eyebulbs swering her to silence and coort;

each and every juridical sessions night, whenas goodmen twelve and true at fox and geese in their numbered habitations tried old wireless over boord in their juremembers, whereas by reverendum they found him guilty of their and those imputations of fornicolopulation with two of his albowcrural correlations on whom he was said to have enjoyed by anticipation when schooling them in amown, mid grass, she sat, when man was, amazingly frank, for their first conjugation whose colours at standing up from the above were of a pretty carnation but, if really ’twere not so, of some deretane denudation with intent to excitation, caused by his retrogradation, among firearmed forces proper to this nation but apart from all titillation which, he said, was under heat pressure and a good mitigation without which in any case he insists upon being worthy of continued alimentation for him having displayed, he says, such grand toleration, reprobate so noted and all, as he was, with his washleather sweeds and his smokingstump, for denying transubstantiation nevertheless in respect of his highpowered station, whereof more especially as probably he was meantime suffering genteel tortures from the best medical attestation, as he oftentimes did, having only strength enough, by way of festination, to implore (or I believe you have might have said better) to complore, with complete obsecration, on everybody connected with him the curse of coagulation for, he tells me outside Sammon’s in King Street, after [p.558] two or three hours of close confabulation, by this pewterpint of Gilbey’s goatswhey which is his prime consolation, albeit involving upon the same no uncertain amount of esophagous regurgitation, he being personally unpreoccupied to the extent of a flea’s gizzard anent eructation, if he was still extremely offensive to a score and four nostrils’ dilatation, still he was likewise, on the other side of him, for some nepmen’s eyes a delectation, as he asserts without the least alienation, so prays of his faullt you would make obliteration but for our friend behind the bars, though like Adam Findlater, a man of estimation, summing him up to be done, be what will of excess his exaltation, still we think with Sully there can be no right extinuation for contravention of common and statute legislation for which the fit remedy resides, for Mr Sully, in corporal amputation: so three months for Gubbs Jeroboam, the frothwhiskered pest of the park, as per act one, section two, schedule three, clause four of the fifth of King Jark, this sentence to be carried out tomorrowmorn by Nolans Volans at six o’clock shark, and may the yeastwind and the hoppinghail malt mercy on his seven honeymeads and his hurlyburlygrowth, Amen, says the Clarke;

niece by nice by neat by natty, whilst amongst revery’s happy gardens nine with twenty Leixlip yearlings, darters all, had such a ripping time with gleeful cries of what is nice toppingshaun made of made for and weeping like fun, him to be gone, for they were never happier, huhu, than when they were miserable, haha;

in their bed of trial, on the bolster of hardship, by the glimmer of memory, under coverlets of cowardice, Albatrus Nyanzer with Victa Nyanza, his mace of might mortified, her beautifell hung up on a nail, he, Mr of our fathers, she, our moddereen ru arue rue, they, ay, by the hodypoker and blazier, they are, as sure as dinny drops into the dyke . . .

A cry off.

Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?

I don’t understand. I fail to say. I dearsee you too.

House of the cederbalm of mead. Garth of Fyon. Scene and property plot. Stagemanager’s prompt. Interior of dwelling on out- [p.559] skirts of city. Groove two. Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set. Salmonpapered walls. Back, empty Irish grate, Adam’s mantel, with wilting elopement fan, soot and tinsel, condemned. North, wall with window practicable. Argentine in casement. Vamp. Pelmit above. No curtains. Blind drawn. South, party wall. Bed for two with strawberry bedspread, wickerworker clubsessel and caneseated millikinstool. Bookshrine without, facetowel upon. Chair for one. Woman’s garments on chair. Man’s trousers with crossbelt braces, collar on bedknob. Man’s corduroy surcoat with tabrets and taces, seapan nacre buttons on nail. Woman’s gown on ditto. Over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke. Small table near bed, front. Bed with bedding. Spare. Flagpatch quilt. Yverdown design. Limes. Lighted lamp without globe, scarf, gazette, tumbler, quantity of water, julepot, ticker, side props, eventuals, man’s gummy article, pink.

A time.

Act: dumbshow.

Closeup. Leads.

Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view. First position of harmony. Say! Eh? Ha! Check action. Matt. Male partly masking female. Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage. Business. Ruddy blond, Armenian bole, black patch, beer wig, gross build, episcopalian, any age. Woman, sitting, looks at ceiling, haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth, fithery wight, exhibits fear. Welshrabbit teint, Nubian shine, nasal fossette, turfy tuft, undersized, free kirk, no age. Closeup. Play!

Callboy.  Cry off. Tabler. Her move.

Footage.

By the sinewy forequarters of the mare Pocahontas and by the white shoulders of Finnuala you should have seen how that smart sallowlass just hopped a nanny’s gambit out of bunk like old mother Mesopotomac and in eight and eight sixtyfour she was off, door, knightlamp with her, billy’s largelimbs prodgering [p.560] after to queen’s lead. Promiscuous Omebound to Fiammelle la Diva. Huff! His move. Blackout.

Circus. Corridor.

Shifting scene. Wall flats: sink and fly. Spotlight working wall cloths. Spill playing rake and bridges. Room to sink: stairs to sink behind room. Two pieces. Haying after queue. Replay.

The old humburgh looks a thing incomplete so. It is so. On its dead. But it will pawn up a fine head of porter when it is finished. In the quicktime. The castle arkwright put in a chequered staircase certainly. It has only one square step, to be steady, yet notwithstumbling are they stalemating backgammoner supstairs by skips and trestles tiltop double corner. Whist while and game.

What scenic artist! It is ideal residence for realtar. By hims ingang tilt tinkt a tunning bell that Limen Mr, that Boggey Godde, be airwaked. Lingling, lingling. Be their maggies in all. Chump, do your ephort. Shop! Please shop! Shop ado please! O ado please shop! How hominous his house, haunt it? Yesses indead it be! Nogen, of imperial measure, is begraved beneadher. Here are his naggins poured, his alladim lamps. Around the bloombiered, booty with the bedst. For them whom he have fordone make we newly thankful!

Tell me something. The Porters, so to speak, after their shadowstealers in the newsbaggers, are very nice people, are they not? Very, all fourlike tellt. And on this wise, Mr Porter (Bartholomew, heavy man, astern, mackerel shirt, hayamatt peruke) is an excellent forefather and Mrs Porter (leading lady, a poopahead, gaffneysaffron nightdress, iszoppy chepelure) is a most kindhearted messmother. A so united family pateramater is not more existing on papel or off of it. As keymaster fits the lock it weds so this bally builder to his streamline secret. They care for nothing except everything that is allporterous. Porto da Brozzo! Isn’t that terribly nice of them? You can ken that they come of a rarely old family by their costumance and one must togive that one supped of it in all tonearts from awe to zest. I think I begin to divine so much. Only snakkest me truesome! I stone us I’m hable.

[p.561] To reachy a skeer do! Still hoyhra, till venstra! Here are two rooms on the upstairs, at forkflank and at knifekanter. Whom in the wood are they for? Why, for little Porter babes, to be saved! The coeds, boytom thwackers and timbuy teaser. Here is onething you owed two noe. This one once upon awhile was the other but this is the other one nighadays. Ah so? The Corsicos? They are numerable. Guest them. Major bed, minor bickhive. Halosobuth, sov us! Who sleeps in now number one, for example? A pussy, purr esimple. Cunina, Statulina and Edulia, but how sweet of her! Has your pussy a pessname? Yes, indeed, you will hear it passim in all the noveletta and she is named Buttercup. Her bare name will tellt it, a monitress. How very sweet of her and what an excessively lovecharming missyname to forsake, now that I come to drink of it filtred, a gracecup fulled of bitterness. She is dadad’s lottiest daughterpearl and brooder’s cissiest auntybride. Her shellback thimblecasket mirror only can show her dearest friendeen. To speak well her grace it would ask of Grecian language, of her goodness, that legend golden. Biryina Saindua! Loreas with lillias flocaflake arrosas! Here’s newyearspray, the posquiflor, a windaborne and heliotrope; there miriamsweet and amaranth and marygold to crown. Add lightest knot unto tiptition. O Charis! O Charissima! A more intriguant bambolina could one not colour up out of Boccuccia’s Enameron. Would one but to do apart a lilybit her virginelles and, so, to breath, so, therebetween, behold, she had instantt with her handmade as to graps the myth inmid the air. Mother of moth! I will to show herword in flesh. Approach not for ghost sake! It is dormition! She may think, what though little doth she realise, as morning fresheth, it hath happened her, you know what, as they too what two dare not utter. Silvoo plush, if scolded she draws a face. Petticoat’s asleep but in the gentlenest of her thoughts apoo is a nursepin. To be presented, Babs for Bimbushi? Of courts and with enticers. Up, girls, and at him! Alone? Alone what? I mean, our strifestirrer, does she do fleurty winkies with herself. Pussy is never alone, as records her chambrette, for she can always look at Biddles and talk petnames with her little [p.562] playfilly when she is sitting downy on the ploshmat. O, she talks, does she? Marry, how? Rosepetalletted sounds. Ah Biddles es ma plikplak. Ah plikplak wed ma Biddles. A nice jezebel barytinette she will gift but I much prefer her missnomer in maidenly golden lasslike gladsome wenchful flowery girlish beautycapes. So do I, much. Dulce delicatissima! Doth Dolly weeps she is hastings. Will Dally bumpsetty it is tubtime. Allaliefest, she who pities very pebbles, dare we not wish on her our thrice onsk? A lovely fear! That she seventip toe her chrysming, that she spin blue to scarlad till her temple’s veil, that the Mount of Whoam it open it her to shelterer! She will blow ever so much more promisefuller, blee me, than all the other common marygales that romp round brigidschool, charming Carry Whambers or saucy Susy Maucepan of Merry Anna Patchbox or silly Polly Flinders. Platsch! A plikaplak.

And since we are talking amnessly of brukasloop crazedledaze, who doez in sleeproom number twobis? The twobirds. Holy policeman, O, I see! Of what age are your birdies? They are to come of twinning age so soon as they may be born to be eldering like those olders while they are living under chairs. They are and they seem to be so tightly tattached as two maggots to touch other, I think I notice, do I not? You do. Our bright bull babe Frank Kevin is on heartsleeveside. Do not you waken him! Our farheard bode. He is happily to sleep, limb of the Lord, with his lifted in blessing, his buchel Iosa, like the blissed angel he looks so like and his mou is semiope as though he were blowdelling on a bugigle. Whene’er I see those smiles in eyes ’tis Father Quinn again. Very shortly he will smell sweetly when he will hear a weird to wean. By gorgeous, that boy will blare some knight when he will take his dane’s pledges and quit our ingletears, spite of undesirable parents, to wend him to Amorica to quest a cashy job. That keen dean with his veen nonsolance! O, I adore the profeen music! Dollarmighty! He is too audorable really, eunique! I guess to have seen somekid like him in the story book, guess I met somewhere somelam to whom he will be becoming liker. But hush! How unpardonable of me! I beg for your venials, sincerely I do.

[p.563] Hush! The other, twined on codliverside, has been crying in his sleep, making sharpshape his inscissors on some first choice sweets fished out of the muck. A stake in our mead. What a teething wretch! How his book of craven images! Here are posthumious tears on his intimelle. And he has pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from inkinghorn. He is jem job joy pip poo pat (jot um for a sobrat!) Jerry Jehu. You will know him by name in the capers but you cannot see whose heel he sheepfolds in his wrought hand because I have not told it to you. O, foetal sleep! Ah, fatal slip! the one loved, the other left, the bride of pride leased to the stranger! He will be quite within the pale when with lordbeeron brow he vows him so tosset to be of the sir Blake tribes bleak while through life’s unblest he rodes backs of bannars. Are you not somewhat bulgar with your bowels? Whatever do you mean with bleak? With pale blake I write tintingface. O, you do? And with steelwhite and blackmail I ha’scint for my sweet an anemone’s letter with a gold of my bridest hair betied. Donatus his mark, address as follows. So you did? From the Cat and Cage. O, I see and see! In the ink of his sweat he will find it yet. What Gipsy Devereux vowed to Lylian and why the elm and how the stone. You never may know in the preterite all perhaps that you would not believe that you ever even saw to be about to. Perhaps. But they are two very blizky little portereens after their bredscrums, Jerkoff and Eatsup, as for my part opinion indeed. They would be born so, costarred, puck and prig, the maryboy at Donnybrook Fair, the godolphinglad in the Hoy’s Court. How frilled one shall be as at taledold of Formio and Cigalette ! What folly innocents ! Theirs whet pep of puppyhood! Both barmhearts shall become yeastcake by their brackfest. I will to leave a my copperwise blessing between the pair of them, for rosengorge, for greenafang. Blech and tin soldies, weals in a sniffbox. Som’s wholed, all’s parted. Weeping shouldst not thou be when man falls but that divine scheming ever adoring be. So you be either man or mouse and you be neither fish nor flesh. Take. And take. Vellicate nyche! Be ones as wes for gives for gives now the hour of passings sembles quick with quelled. Adieu, soft adieu, for these nice presents, kerryjevin. Still tosorrow!

[p.564] Jeminy, what is the view which now takes up a second position of discordance, tell it please? Mark! You notice it in that rereway because the male entail partially eclipses the femecovert. It is so called for its discord the meseedo. Do you ever heard the story about Helius Croesus, that white and gold elephant in our zoopark? You astonish me by it. Is it not that we are commanding from fullback, woman permitting, a profusely fine birdseye view from beauhind this park? Finn his park has been much the admiration of all the stranger ones, grekish and romanos, who arrive to here. The straight road down the centre (see relief map) bisexes the park which is said to be the largest of his kind in the world. On the right prominence confronts you the handsome vinesregent’s lodge while, turning to the other supreme piece of cheeks, exactly opposite, you are confounded by the equally handsome chief sacristary’s residence. Around is a little amiably tufted and man is cheered when he bewonders through the boskage how the nature in all frisko is enlivened by gentlemen’s seats. Here are heavysuppers — ’tis for daddies housings for hundredaires of our super thin thousand. By gum, but you have resin! Of these tallworts are yielded out juices for jointoils and pappasses for paynims. Listeneth! ’Tis a tree story. How olave, that firile, was aplantad in her liveside. How tannoboom held tonobloom. How rood in norlandes. The black and blue marks athwart the weald, which now barely is so stripped, indicate the presence of sylvious beltings. Therewithal shady rides lend themselves out to rustic cavalries. In yonder valley, too, stays mountain sprite. Any pretty dears are to be caught inside but it is a bad pities of the plain. A scarlet pimparnell now mules the mound where anciently first murders were wanted to take root. By feud fionghalian. Talkingtree and sinningstone stay on either hand. Hystorical leavesdroppings may also be garnered up with sir Shamus Swiftpatrick, Archfieldchaplain of Saint Lucan’s. How familiar it is to see all these interesting advenements with one snaked’s eyes! Is all? Yet not. Hear one’s. At the bodom fundus of this royal park, which, with tvigate shyasian gardeenen, is open to the public till night at late, so well the sissastrides so will [p.565] the pederestians, do not fail to point to yourself a depression called Holl Hollow. It is often quite guttergloomering in our duol and gives wankyrious thoughts to the head but the banders of the pentapolitan poleetsfurcers bassoons into it on windy woodensdays their wellbooming wolvertones. Ulvos! Ulvos!

Whervolk dorst ttou begin to tremble by our moving pictures at this moment when I am to place my hand of our true friendshapes upon thee knee to mark well what I say? Throu shayest who? In Amsterdam there lived a . . . But how? You are tremblotting, you retchad, like a verry jerry! Niet? Will you a guineeser? Gaij beutel of staub? To feel, you? Yes, how it trembles, the timid! Vortigern, ah Gortigern! Overlord of Mercia! Or doth brainskin flinchgreef? Stemming! What boyazhness! Sole shadow shows. Tis jest jibberweek’s joke. It must have stole. O, keve silence, both! Putshameyu! I have heard her voice somewhere else’s before me in these ears still that now are for mine.

Let op. Slew musies. Thunner in the eire.

You were dreamend, dear. The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern, dear one. Opop opop capallo, muy malinchily malchick! Gothgorod father godown followay tomollow the lucky load to Lublin for make his thoroughbass grossman’s bigness. Take that two piece big slap slap bold honty bottomsside pap pap pappa.

— Li ne dormis?

— S! Malbone dormas.

— Kia li krias nikte?

— Parolas infanetes. S!

Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind! Shoe to me now, dear! Shoom of me! While elvery stream winds seling on for to keep this barrel of bounty rolling and the nightmail afarfrom morning nears.

When you’re coaching through Lucalised, on the sulphur spa to visit, it’s safer to hit than miss it, stop at his inn! The hammers are telling the cobbles, the pickts are hacking the saxums, it’s snugger to burrow abed than ballet on broadway. Tuck in your [p.566] blank! For it’s race pound race the hosties rear all roads to ruin and layers by lifetimes laid down riches from poormen. Cried unions to chip, saltpetre to strew, gallpitch to drink, stonebread to break but it’s bully to gulp good blueberry pudding. Doze in your warmth! While the elves in the moonbeams, feeling why, will keep my lilygem gently gleaming.

In the sleepingchambers. The court to go into half morning. The four seneschals with their palfrey to be there now, all balaaming in their sellaboutes and sharping up their penisills. The boufeither Soakersoon at holdup tent sticker. The swabsister Katya to have duntalking and to keep shakenin dowan her droghedars. Those twelve chief barons to stand by duedesmally with their folded arums and put down all excursions and false alarums and after that to go back now to their runameat farums and recompile their magnum chartarums with the width of the road between them and all harrums. The maidbrides all, in favours gay, to strew sleety cinders on their falling hair and for wouldbe joybells to ring sadly ringless hands. The dame dowager to stay kneeled how she is, as first mutherer with cord in coil. The two princes of the tower royal, daulphin and deevlin, to lie how they are without to see. The dame dowager’s duffgerent to present wappon, blade drawn to the full and about wheel without to be seen of them. The infant Isabella from her coign to do obeisance toward the duffgerent, as first futherer with drawn brand. Then the court to come in to full morning. Herein see ye fail not!

— Vidu, porkego! Ili vi rigardas. Returnu, porkego! Maldelikato!

Gauze off heaven! Vision. Then. O, pluxty suddly, the sight entrancing! Hummels! That crag! Those hullocks! O Sire! So be accident occur is not going to commence! What have you therefore? Fear you the donkers? Of roovers? I fear lest we have lost ours (non grant it!) respecting these wildy parts. How is hit finister! How shagsome all and beastful! What do you show on? I show because I must see before my misfortune so a stark pointing pole. Lord of ladders, what for lungitube! Can you read the verst legend hereon? I am hather of the missed. Areed! To the dun- [p.567] leary obelisk via the rock vhat myles knox furlongs; to the general’s postoffice howsands of patience; to the Wellington memorial half a league wrongwards; to Sara’s bridge good hunter and nine to meet her: to the point, one yeoman’s yard. He, he, he! At that do you leer, a setting up? With a such unfettered belly? Two cascades? I leer (O my big, O my bog, O my bigbagbone!) because I must see a buntingcap of so a pinky on the point. It is for a true glover’s greetings and many burgesses by us, greats and grosses, uses to pink it in this way at tet-at-tet. For long has it been effigy of standard royal when broken on roofstaff which to the gunnings shall cast welcome from Courtmilits’ Fortress, umptydum dumptydum. Bemark you these hangovers, those streamer fields, his influx. Do you not have heard that, the queen lying abroad from fury of the gales, (meekname mocktitles her Nan Nan Nanetta) her liege of lateenth dignisties shall come on their bay tomorrow, Michalsmas, mellems the third and fourth of the clock, there to all the king’s aussies and all their king’s men, knechts tramplers and cavalcaders, led of herald graycloak, Ulaf Goldarskield? Dog! Dog! Her lofts will be loosed for her and their tumblers broodcast. A progress shall be made in walk, ney? I trow it well, and uge by uge. He shall come, sidesmen accostant, by aryan jubilarian and on brigadier-general Nolan or and buccaneer-admiral Browne, with — who can doubt it? — his golden beagles and his white elkox terriers for a hunting on our littlego illcome faxes. In blue and buff of Beaufort the hunt shall make. It is poblesse noblige. Ommes will grin through collars when each riders other’s ass. Me Eccls! What cats’ killings overall! What popping out of guillotened widows! Quick time! Beware of waiting! Squintina plies favours on us from her rushfrail and Zosimus, the crowder, in his surcoat, sues us with souftwister. Apart we! Here are gantlets. I believe, by Plentifolks Mixymost! Yet if I durst to express the hope how I might be able to be present. All these peeplers entrammed and detrained on bikeygels and troykakyls and those puny farting little solitires! Tollacre, tollacre! Polo north will beseem Sibernian and Plein Pelouta will behowl ne yerking at lawncastrum ne ghimbelling on guelflinks. [p.568] Mauser Misma shall cease to stretch her and come abroad for what the blinkins is to be seen. A ruber, a rancher, a fullvide, a veridust and as crerdulous behind as he was before behind a damson of a sloe cooch. Mbv! The annamation of evabusies, the livlianess of her laughings, such as a plurity of bells! Have peacience, pray you! Place to dames! Even the Lady Victoria Landauner will leave to loll and parasol, all giddied into gushgasps with her dickey standing. Britus and Gothius shall no more joustle for that sonneplace but mark one autonement when, with si so silent, Cloudia Aiduolcis, good and dewed up, shall let fall, yes, no, yet, now, a rain. Muchsias grapcias! It is how sweet from her, the wispful, and they are soon seen swopsib so a sautril as a meise. Its ist not the tear on this movent sped. Tix sixponce! Poum! Hool poll the bull? Fool pay the bill. Becups a can full. Peal, pull the bell! Still sayeme of ceremonies, much much more! So pleaseyour! It stands in Instopressible how Meynhir Mayour, our boorgomaister, thon staunch Thorsman, (our Nancy’s fancy, our own Nanny’s Big Billy), his hod hoisted, in best bib and tucker, with Woolington bottes over buckram babbishkis and his clouded cane and necknoose aureal, surrounded of his full cooperation with fixed baronets and meng our pueblos, restrained by chain of hands from pinchgut, hoghill, darklane, gibbetmeade and beaux and laddes and bumbellye, shall receive Dom King at broadstone barrow meet a keys of goodmorrow on to his pompey cushion. Me amble dooty to your grace’s majers! Arise, sir Pompkey Dompkey! Ear! Ear! Weakear! An allness eversides! We but miss that horse elder yet cherchant of the wise graveleek in cabbuchin garden. That his be foison, old Caubeenhauben! ’Twill be tropic of all days. By the splendour of Sole! Perfect weatherest prevailing. Thisafter, swift’s mightmace deposing, he shall aidress to His Serenemost by a speechreading from his miniated vellum, alfi byrni gamman dealter etcera zezera eacla treacla youghta kaptor lomdom noo, who meaningwhile that illuminatured one, Papyroy of Pepinregn, my Sire, great, big King, (his scaffold is there set up, as to edify, by Rex Ingram, pageantmaster) will be poking out with his canule into the arras of [p.569] what brilliant bridgecloths and joking up with his tonguespitz to the crimosing balkonladies, here’s a help undo their modest stays with a fullbelow may the funnyfeelbelong. Oddsbones, that may it! Carilloners will ring their gluckspeels. Rng rng! Rng rng! S. Presbutt-in-the-North, S. Mark Underloop, S. Lorenz-by-the-Toolechest, S. Nicholas Myre. You shall hark to anune S. Gardener, S. George-le-Greek, S. Barclay Moitered, S. Phibb, Iona-in-the-Fields with Paull-the-Aposteln. And audialterand: S. Jude-at-Gate, Bruno Friars, S. Weslen-on-the-Row, S. Molyneux Without, S. Mary Stillamaries with Bride-and-Audeons-behind-Wardborg. How chimant in effect! Alla tingaling pealabells! So a many of churches one cannot pray own’s prayers. ’Tis holyyear’s day! Juin jully we may! Agithetta and Tranquilla shall demure umclaused but Marlborough-the-Less, Greatchrist and Holy Protector shall have open virgilances. Beata Basilica! But will be not pontification? Dock, dock, agame! Primatially. At wateredge. Cantaberra and Neweryork may supprecate when, by vepers, for towned and travalled, his goldwhite swaystick aloft ylifted, umbrilla-parasoul, Monsigneur of Deublan shall impart to all. Benedictus benedicat! To board! And mealsight! Unjoint him this bittern, frust me this chicken, display yon crane, thigh her her pigeon, unlace allay rabbit and pheasant! Sing: Old Finncoole, he’s a mellow old saoul when he swills with his fuddlers free! Poppop array! For we’re all jollygame fellhellows which nobottle can deny! Here be trouts culponed for ye and salmons chined and sturgeons tranched, sanced capons, lobsters barbed. Call halton eatwords! Mumm me moe mummers! What, no Ithalians? How, not one Moll Pamelas? Accordingly! Play actors by us ever have crash to their gate. Mr Messop and Mr Borry will produce of themselves, as they’re two genitalmen of Veruno, Senior Nowno and Senior Brolano (finaly! finaly!), all for love of a fair penitent that, a she be broughton, rhoda’s a rosy she. Their two big skins! How they strave to gat her! Such a boyplay! Their bouchicaulture! What tyronte power! Buy our fays! My name is novel and on the Granby in hills. Bravose! Thou traitor slave! [p.570] Mine name’s Apnorval and o’er the Grandbeyond Mountains. Bravossimost! The royal nusick their show shall shut with songslide to nature’s solemn silence. Deep Dalchi Dolando! Might gentle harp addurge! It will give piketurns on the tummlipplads and forain dances and crosshurdles and dollmanovers and viceuvious pyrolyphics, a snow of dawnflakes, at darkfall for Grace’s Mamnesty and our fancy ladies, all assombred. Some wholetime in hot town tonight! You do not have heard? It stays in book of that which is. I have heard anyone tell it jesterday (master currier with brassard was’t) how one should come on morrow here but it is never here that one today. Well but remind to think, you where yestoday Ys Morganas war and that it is always tomorrow in toth’s tother’s place. Amen.

True! True! Vouchsafe me more soundpicture! It gives furiously to think. Is rich Mr Pornter, a squire, not always in his such strong health? I thank you for the best, he is in taken deal exceedingly herculeneous. One sees how he is lot stoutlier than of formerly. One would say him to hold whole a litteringture of kidlings under his aproham. Has handsome Sir Pournter always been so long married? O yes, Lord Pournterfamilias has been marryingman ever since so long time in Hurtleforth, where he appeers as our oily the active, and, yes indeed, he has his mic son and his two fine mac sons and a superfine mick want they mack metween them. She, she, she! But on what do you again leer? I am not leering, I pink you pardons. I am highly sheshe sherious.

Do you not must want to go somewhere on the present? Yes, O pity! At earliest moment! That prickly heat feeling! Forthink not me spill it’s at always so guey. Here we shall do a far walk (O pity) anygo khaibits till the number one of sairey’s place. Is, is. I want you to admire her sceneries illustrationing our national first rout, one ought ought one. We shall too downlook on that ford where Sylvanus Sanctus washed but hurdley those tips of his anointeds. Do not show ever retrorsehim, crookodeyled, till that you become quite crimstone in the face! Beware! guardafew! It is Stealer of the Heart! I am anxious in regard you should everthrown your sillarsalt. I will dui sui, tef- [p.571] nute! These brilling waveleaplights! Please say me how sing you them. Seekhem seckhem! They arise from a clear springwell in the near of our park which makes the daft to hear all blend. This place of endearment! How it is clear! And how they cast their spells upon, the fronds that thereup float, the bookstaff branchings! The druggeted stems, the leaves incut on trees! Do you can their tantrist spellings? I can lese, skillmistress aiding. Elm, bay, this way, cull dare, take a message, tawny runes ilex sallow, meet me at the pine. Yes, they shall have brought us to the water trysting, by hedjes of maiden ferm, then here in another place is their chapelofeases, sold for song, of which you have thought my praise too much my price. O ma ma! Yes, sad one of Ziod? Sell me, my soul dear! Ah, my sorrowful, his cloister dreeping of his monkshood, how it is triste to death, all his dark ivytod! Where cold in dearth. Yet see, my blanching kissabelle, in the under close she is allso gay, her kirtles green, her curtsies white, her peony pears, her nistlingsloes! I, pipette, I must also quicklingly to tryst myself softly into this littleeasechapel. I would rather than Ireland! But I pray, make! Do your easiness! O, peace, this is heaven! O, Mr Prince of Pouringtoher, whatever shall I pppease to do? Why do you so lifesighs, my precious, as I hear from you, with limmenings lemantitions, after that swollen one? I am not sighing, I assure, but only I am soso sorry about all in my saarasplace. Listen, listen! I am doing it. Hear more to those voices! Always I am hearing them. Horsehem coughs enough. Annshee lispes privily.

— He is quieter now.

— Legalentitled. Accesstopartnuzz. Notwildebeestsch. Byrightofoaptz. Twainbeonerflsh. Haveandholdpp.

— S! Let us go. Make a noise. Slee . . .

— Qui . . . The gir . . .

— Huesofrichunfoldingmorn. Wakenupriseandprove. Provideforsacrifice.

— Wait! Hist! Let us list!

For our netherworld’s bosomfoes are working tooth and nail overtime: in earthveins, toadcavites, chessganglions, saltkles- [p.572] ters, underfed: nagging firenibblers knockling aterman up out of his hinterclutch. Tomb be their tools! When the youngdammers will be soon heartpocking on their betters’ doornoggers: and the youngfries will be backfrisking diamondcuts over their lyingin underlayers, spick and spat trowelling a gravetrench for their fourinhand forebears. Vote for your club!

— Wait!

— What!

— Her door!

— Ope?

— See!

— What?

— Careful.

— Who?

Live well! Iniivdluaritzas! Tone!

Cant ear! Her dorters ofe? Whofe? Her eskmeno daughters hope? Whope? Ellme, elmme, elskmestoon! Soon!

Let us consider.

 The procurator Interrogarius Mealterum presends us this proposer.

Honuphrius is a concupiscent exservicemajor who makes dishonest propositions to all. He is considered to have committed, invoking droit d’oreiller, simple infidelities with Felicia, a virgin, and to be practising for unnatural coits with Eugenius and Jeremias, two or three philadelphians. Honophrius, Felicia, Eugenius and Jeremias are consanguineous to the lowest degree. Anita the wife of Honophrius, has been told by her tirewoman, Fortissa, that Honuphrius has blasphemously confessed under voluntary chastisement that he has instructed his slave, Mauritius, to urge Magravius, a commercial, emulous of Honuphrius, to solicit the chastity of Anita. Anita is informed by some illegitimate children of Fortissa with Mauritius (the supposition is Ware’s) that Gillia, the schismatical wife of Magravius, is visited clandestinely by Barnabas, the advocate of Honuphrius, an immoral person who has been corrupted by Jeremias. Gillia, (a cooler blend, D’Alton insists) ex equo with Poppea, Arancita, Clara, [p.573] Marinuzza, Indra and Iodina, has been tenderly debauched (in Halliday’s view), by Honuphrius, and Magravius knows from spies that Anita has formerly committed double sacrilege with Michael, vulgo Cerularius, a perpetual curate, who wishes to seduce Eugenius. Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orthodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani), who desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo, Vitellius and Macdugalius, four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius by rendering conjugal duty when demanded. Anita who claims to have discovered incestuous temptations from Jeremias and Eugenius would yield to the lewdness of Honuphrius to appease the savagery of Sulla and the mercernariness of the twelve Sullivani, and (as Gilbert at first suggested), to save the virginity of Felicia for Magravius when converted by Michael after the death of Gillia, but she fears that, by allowing his marital rights she may cause reprehensible conduct between Eugenius and Jeremias. Michael, who has formerly debauched Anita, dispenses her from yielding to Honuphrius who pretends publicly to possess his conjunct in thirtynine several manners (turpiter! affirm ex cathedris Gerontes Cambronses) for carnal hygiene whenever he has rendered himself impotent to consummate by subdolence. Anita is disturbed but Michael comminates that he will reserve her case tomorrow for the ordinary Guglielmus even if she should practise a pious fraud during affrication which, from experience, she knows (according to Wadding), to be leading to nullity. Fortissa, however, is encouraged by Gregorius, Leo, Viteilius, and Magdugalius, reunitedly, to warn Anita by describing the strong chastisements of Honuphrius and the depravities (turpissimas!) of Canicula, the deceased wife of Mauritius, with Sulla, the simoniac, who is abnegand and repents. Has he hegemony and shall she submit?

Translate a lax, you breed a bradaun. In the goods of Cape and Chattertone, deceased.

This, lay readers and gentilemen, is perhaps the commonest of all cases arising out of umbrella history in connection with [p.574] the wood industries in our courts of litigation. D’Oyly Owens holds (though Finn Magnusson of himself holds also) that so long as there is a joint deposit account in the two names a mutual obligation is posited. Owens cites Brerfuchs and Warren, a foreign firm, since disseized, registered as Tangos, Limited, for the sale of certain proprietary articles. The action which was at the instance of the trustee of the heathen church emergency fund, suing by its trustee, a resigned civil servant, for the payment of tithes due was heard by Judge Doyle and also by a common jury. No question arose as to the debt for which vouchers spoke volumes. The defence alleged that payment had been made effective. The fund trustee, one Jucundus Fecundus Xero Pecundus Coppercheap, counterclaimed that payment was invalid having been tendered to creditor under cover of a crossed cheque, signed in the ordinary course, in the name of Wieldhelm, Hurls Cross, voucher copy provided, and drawn by the senior partner only by whom the lodgment of the species had been effected but in their joint names. The bank particularised, the national misery (now almost entirely in the hands of the four chief bondholders for value in Tangos), declined to pay the draft, though there were ample reserves to meet the liability, whereupon the trusty Coppercheap negociated it for and on behalf of the fund of the thing to a client of his, a notary, from whom, on consideration, he received in exchange legal relief as between trusthee and bethrust, with thanks. Since then the cheque, a good washable pink, embossed D you D No 11 hundred and thirty 2, good for the figure and face, had been circulating in the country for over thirtynine years among holders of Pango stock, a rival concern, though not one demonetised farthing had ever spun or fluctuated across the counter in the semblance of hard coin or liquid cash. The jury (a sour dozen of stout fellows all of whom were curiously named after doyles) naturally disagreed jointly and severally, and the belligerent judge, disagreeing with the allied jurors’ disagreement, went outside his jurisfiction altogether and ordered a garnishee attachment to the neutral firm. No mandamus could locate the depleted whilom Breyfawkes as he had entered into an [p.575] ancient moratorium, dating back to the times of the early barters, and only the junior partner Barren could be found, who entered an appearance and turned up, upon a notice of motion and after service of the motion by interlocutory injunction, among the male jurors to be an absolete turfwoman, originally from the proletarian class, with still a good title to her sexname of Ann Doyle, 2 Coppinger’s Cottages, the Doyle’s country. Doyle (Ann), add woman in, having regretfully left the juryboxers, protested cheerfully on the stand in a long jurymiad in re corset checks, delivered in doylish, that she had often, in supply to brusk demands rising almost to bollion point, discounted Mr Brakeforth’s first of all in exchange at nine months from date without issue and, to be strictly literal, unbottled in corrubberation a current account of how she had been made at sight for services rendered the payeedrawee of unwashable blank assignations, sometimes pinkwilliams (laughter) but more often of the crème-de-citron, vair émail paoncoque or marshmallow series, which she, as bearer, used to endorse, adhesively, to her various payers-drawers who in most cases were identified by the timber papers as wellknown tetigists of the city and suburban. The witness, at her own request, asked if she might and wrought something between the sheets of music paper which she had accompanied herself with for the occasion and this having been handed up for the bench to look at in camera, Coppinger’s doll, as she was called, (annias, Mack Erse’s Dar, the adopted child) then proposed to jerrykin and jureens and every jim, jock and jarry in that little green courtinghousie for her satisfaction and as a whole act of settlement to reamalgamate herself, tomorrow perforce, in pardonership with the permanent suing fond trustee, Monsignore Pepigi, under the new style of Will Breakfast and Sparrem, as, when all his cognisances had been estreated, he seemed to proffer the steadiest interest towards her, but this prepoposal was ruled out on appeal by Judge Jeremy Doyler, who, reserving judgment in a matter of courts and reversing the findings of the lower correctional, found, beyond doubt of treuson, fending the dissassents of the pickpackpanel, twelve as upright judaces as ever let down their thoms, and, occupante extremum [p.576] scabie, handed down to the jury of the Liffey that, as a matter of tact, the woman they gave as free was born into contractual incapacity (the Calif of Man v the Eaudelusk Company) when, how and where mamy’s mancipium act did not apply and therefore held supremely that, as no property in law can exist in a corpse, (Hal Kilbride v Una Bellina) Pepigi’s pact was pure piffle (loud laughter) and Wharrem would whistle for the rhino. Will you, won’t you, pango with Pepigi? Not for Nancy, how dare you do! And whew whewwhew whew.

— He sighed in sleep.

— Let us go back.

— Lest he forewaken.

— Hide ourselves.

While hovering dreamwings, folding around, will hide from fears my wee mee mannikin, keep my big wig long strong manomen, guard my bairn, mon beau.

— To bed.

Prospector projector and boomooster giant builder of all causeways woesoever, hopping offpoint and true terminus of straxstraightcuts and corkscrewn perambulaups, zeal whence to goal whither, wonderlust, in sequence to which every muckle must make its mickle, as different as York from Leeds, being the only wise in a muck’s world to look on itself from beforehand; mirrorminded curiositease and would-to-the-large which bring hills to molehunter, home through first husband, perils behind swine and horsepower down to hungerford, prick this man and tittup this woman, our forced payrents, Bogy Bobow with his cunnyngnest couchmare, Big Maester Finnykin with Phenicia Parkes, lame of his ear and gape of her leg, most correctingly, we beseach of you, down their laddercase of nightwatch service and bring them at suntime flush with the nethermost gangrung of their stepchildren, guide them through the labyrinth of their samilikes and the alteregoases of their pseudoselves, hedge them bothways from all roamers whose names are ligious, from loss of bearings deliver them; so they keep to their rights and be ware of duty frees, neoliffic smith and magdalenian jinnyjones, [p.577] mandragon mor and weak wiffeyducky, Morionmale and Thrydacianmad, basilisk glorious with his weeniequeenie, tigernack and swansgrace, he as hale as his ardouries, she as verve as her veines; this prime white arsenic with bissemate alloyed, martial sin with peccadilly, free to lease hold with first mortgage, dowser dour and dipper douce, stop-that-war and feel-this-feather, norsebloodheartened and landsmoolwashable, great gas with fun-in-the-corner, grand slam with fall-of-the-trick, solomn one and shebby, cod and coney, cash and carry, in all we dreamed the part we dreaded, corsair coupled with his dame, royal biber but constant lymph, boniface and bonnyfeatures, nazil hose and river mouth, bang-the-change and batter-the-bolster, big smoke and lickley roesthy, humanity’s fahrman by society leader, voguener and trulley, humpered and elf, Urloughmoor with Miryburrow, leaks and awfully, basal curse yet grace abunda, Regies Producer with screendoll Vedette, peg of his claim and pride of her heart, cliffscaur grisly but rockdove cooing, hodinstag on fryggabet, baron and feme: that he may dishcover her that she may uncouple him, that one may come and crumple them, that they may soon recoup themselves: now and then, time on time again, as per periodicity; from Neaves to Willses, from Bushmills to Enos; to Goerz from Harleem, to Hearths of Oak from Skittish Widdas; via mala, hyber pass, heckhisway per alptrack: through landsvague and vain, after many mandelays: in their first case, to the next place, till their cozenkerries: the high and the by, both pent and plain: cross cowslips yillow, yellow, yallow, past pumpkins pinguind, purplesome: be they whacked to the wide other tied to hustings, long sizzleroads neath arthruseat, him to the derby, her to toun, til sengentide do coddlam: in the grounds or unterlinnen: rue to lose and ca canny: at shipside, by convent garden: monk and sempstress, in sackcloth silkily: curious dreamers, curious dramas, curious deman, plagiast dayman, playajest dearest, plaguiest dourest: for the strangfort planters are prodesting, and the karkery felons dryflooring it and the leperties’ laddos railing the way, blump for slogo slee!

Stop! Did a stir? No, is fast. On to bed! So he is. It’s only the [p.578] wind on the road outside for to wake all shivering shanks from snorring.

But. Oom Godd his villen, who will he be, this mitryman, some king of the yeast, in his chrismy greyed brunzewig, with the snow in his mouth and the caspian asthma, so bulk of build? Relics of pharrer and livite! Dik Gill, Tum Lung or Macfinnan’s cool Harryng? He has only his hedcosycasket on and his wollsey shirtplisse with peascod doublet, also his feet wear doubled width socks for he always must to insure warm sleep between a pair of fullyfleeced bankers like a finnoc in a cauwl. Can thus be Misthra Norkmann that keeps our hotel? Begor, Mr O’Sorgmann, you’re looking right well! Hecklar’s champion ethnicist. How deft as a fuchser schouws daft as a fish! He’s the dibble’s own doges for doublin existents! But a jolly fine daysent form of one word. He’s rounding up on his family.

And who is the bodikin by him, sir? So voulzievalsshie? With ybbs and zabs? Her trixiestrail is tripping her, vop! Luck at the way for the lucre of smoke she’s looping the lamp! Why, that’s old missness wipethemdry! Well, well, wellsowells! Donauwatter! Ardechious me! With her halfbend as proud as a peahen, allabalmy, and her troutbeck quiverlipe, ninyananya. And her steptojazyma’s culunder buzztle. Happy tea area, naughtygay frew! Selling sunlit sopes to washtout winches and rhaincold draughts to the props of his pubs. She tired lipping the swells at Pont Delisle till she jumped the boom at Brounemouth. Now she’s borrid his head under Hatesbury’s Hatch and loamed his fate to old Love Lane. And she’s just the same old haporth of dripping. She’s even brennt her hair.

Which route are they going? Why? Angell sitter or Amen Corner, Norwood’s Southwalk or Euston Waste? The solvent man in his upper gambeson withnot a breth against him and the wee wiping womanahoussy. They’re coming terug their diamond wedding tour, giant’s inchly elfkin’s ell, vesting their characters vixendevolment, andens aller, athors err, our first day man and your dresser and mine, that Luxuumburgher evec cettehis Alzette, konyglik shire with his queensh countess, Stepney’s [p.579] shipchild with the waif of his bosun, Dunmow’s flitcher with duck-on-the-rock, down the scales, the way they went up, under talls and threading tormentors, shunning the startraps and slipping in sliders, risking a runway, ruing reveals, from Elder Arbor to La Puirée, eskipping the clockback, crystal in carbon, sweetheartedly. Hot and cold and electrickery with attendance and lounge and promenade free. In spite of all that science could boot or art could eke. Bolt the grinden. Cave and can em. Single wrecks for the weak, double axe for the mail, and quick queck quack for the radiose. Renove that bible. You will never have post in your pocket unless you have brasse on your plate. Beggards outdoor. Goat to the Endth, thou slowguard! Mind the Monks and their Grasps. Scrape your souls. Commit no miracles. Postpone no bills. Respect the uniform. Hold the raabers for the kunning his plethoron. Let leash the dooves to the cooin her coynth. Hatenot havenots. Share the wealth and spoil the weal. Peg the pound to tom the devil. My time is on draught. Bottle your own. Love my label like myself. Earn before eating. Drudge after drink. Credit tomorrow. Follow my dealing. Fetch my price. Buy not from dives. Sell not to freund. Herenow chuck english and learn to pray plain. Lean on your lunch. No cods before Me. Practise preaching. Think in your stomach. Import through the nose. By faith alone. Season’s weather. Gomorrha. Salong. Lots feed from my tidetable. Oil’s wells in our lands. Let earwigger’s wivable teach you the dance!

Now their laws assist them and ease their fall!

For they met and mated and bedded and buckled and got and gave and reared and raised and brought Thawland within Har danger, and turned them, tarrying to the sea and planted and plundered and pawned our souls and pillaged the pounds of the extramurals and fought and feigned with strained relations and bequeathed us their ills and recrutched cripples gait and undermined lungachers, manplanting seven sisters while wan warmwooed woman scrubbs, and turned out coats and removed their origins and never learned the first day’s lesson and tried to mingle and managed to save and feathered foes’ nests and fouled [p.580] their own and wayleft the arenotts and ponted vodavalls for the zollgebordened and escaped from liquidation by the heirs of their death and were responsible for congested districts and rolled olled logs into Peter’s sawyery and werfed new woodcuts on Paoli’s wharf and ewesed Rachel’s lea and rammed Dominic’s gap and looked haggards after lazatables and rode fourscore oddwinters and struck rock oil and forced a policeman and collaughsed at their phizes in Toobiassed and Zachary and left off leaving off and kept on keeping on and roused up drink and poured balm down and were cuffed by their customers and bit the dust at the foot of the poll when in her deergarth he gave up his goat after the battle of Multaferry. Pharoah with fairy, two lie, let them! Yet they wend it back, qual his leif, himmertality, bullseaboob and rivishy divil, light in hand, helm on high, to peekaboo durk the thicket of slumbwhere, till their hour with their scene be struck for ever and the book of the dates he close, he clasp and she and she seegn her tour d’adieu, Pervinca calling, Soloscar hears. (O Sheem! O Shaam!), and gentle Isad Ysut gag, flispering in the nightleaves flattery, dinsiduously, to Finnegan, to sin again and to make grim grandma grunt and grin again while the first grey streaks steal silvering by for to mock their quarrels in dollymount tumbling.

They near the base of the chill stair, that large incorporate licensed vintner, such as he is, from former times, nine hosts in himself, in his hydrocomic establishment and his ambling limfy peepingpartner, the slave of the ring that worries the hand that sways the lamp that shadows the walk that bends to his bane the busynext man that came on the cop with the fenian’s bark that pickled his widow that primed the pope that passed it round on the volunteers’ plate till it croppied the ears of Purses Relle that kneed O’Connell up out of his doss that shouldered Burke that butted O’Hara that woke the busker that grattaned his crowd that bucked the jiggers to rhyme the rann that flooded the routes in Eryan’s isles from Malin to Clear and Carnsore Point to Slynagollow and cleaned the pockets and ransomed the ribs of all the listeners, leud and lay, that bought the ballad that Hosty made.

[p.581] Anyhow (the matter is a troublous and a peniloose) have they not called him at many’s their mock indignation meeting, vehmen’s vengeance vective volleying, inwader and uitlander, the notables, crashing libels in their sullivan’s mounted beards about him, their right renownsable patriarch? Heinz cans everywhere and the swanee her ainsell and Eyrewaker’s family sock that they smuggled to life betune them, roaring (Big Reilly was the worst): free boose for the man from the nark, sure, he never was worth a cornerwall fark, and his banishee’s bedpan she’s a quareold bite of a tark: as they wendelled their zingaway wivewards from his find me cool’s moist opulent vinery, highjacking through the nagginneck pass, as they hauled home with their hogsheads, axpoxtelating, and claiming cowled consollation, sursumcordial, from the bluefunkfires of the dipper and the martian’s frost?

Use they not, our noesmall termtraders, to abhors offrom him, the yet unregendered thunderslog, whose sbrogue cunneth none lordmade undersiding, how betwixt wifely rule and mens conscia recti, then hemale man all unbracing to omniwomen, but now shedropping his hitches like any maidavale oppersite orseriders in an idinhole? Ah, dearo! Dearo, dear! And her illian! And his willyum! When they were all there now, matinmarked for lookin on. At the carryfour with awlus plawshus, their happyass cloudious! And then and too the trivials! And their bivouac! And his monomyth! Ah ho! Say no more about it! I’m sorry! I saw. I’m sorry! I’m sorry to say I saw!

Gives there not too amongst us after all events (or so grunts a leading hebdromadary) some togethergush of stillandbutallyouknow that, insofarforth as, all up and down the whole concreation say, efficient first gets there finally every time, as a complex matter of pure form, for those excess and that pasphault hardhearingness from their eldfar, in grippes and rumblions, through fresh taint and old treason, another like that alter but not quite such anander and stillandbut one not all the selfsame and butstillone just the maim and encore emmerhim may always, with a little difference, till the latest up to date so early in the morning, have evertheless been allmade amenable?

[p.582] Yet he begottom.

Let us wherefore, tearing ages, presently preposterose a snatchvote of thanksalot to the huskiest coaxing experimenter that ever gave his best hand into chancerisk, wishing him with his famblings no end of slow poison and a mighty broad venue for themselves between the devil’s punchbowl and the deep angleseaboard, that they may gratefully turn a deaf ear clooshed upon the desperanto of willynully, their shareholders from Taaffe to Auliffe, that will curse them below par and mar with their descendants, shame, humbug and profit, to greenmould upon mildew over jaundice as long as ever there’s wagtail surtaxed to a testcase on enver a man.

We have to had them whether we’ll like it or not. They’ll have to have us now then we’re here on theirspot. Scant hope theirs or ours to escape life’s high carnage of semperidentity by subsisting peasemeal upon variables. Bloody certainly have we got to see to it ere smellful demise surprends us on this concrete that down the gullies of the eras we may catch ourselves looking forward to what will in no time be staring you larrikins on the postface in that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end. So there was a raughty . . . who in Dyfflinsborg did . . . With his soddering iron, spadeaway, hammerlegs and . . . Where there was a fair young . . . Who was playing her game of . . . And said she you rockaby . . . Will you peddle in my bog . . . And he sod her in Iarland, paved her way from Maizenhead to Youghal. And that’s how Humpfrey, champion emir, holds his own. Shysweet, she rests.

Or show pon him now, will you! Derg rudd face should take patrick’s purge. Hokoway, in his hiphigh bearserk! Third position of concord! Excellent view from front. Sidome. Female imperfectly masking male. Redspot his browbrand. Woman’s the prey! Thon’s the dullakeykongsbyogblagroggerswagginline (private judgers, change here for Lootherstown! Onlyromans, keep your seats!) that drew all ladies please to our great mettrollops. Leary, leary, twentytun nearly, he’s plotting kings down for his villa’s extension! Gaze at him now in momentum! As his [p.583] bridges are blown to babbyrags, by the lee of his hulk upright on her orbits, and the heave of his juniper arx in action, he’s naval I see. Poor little tartanelle, her dinties are chattering, the strait’s she’s in, the bulloge she bears! Her smirk is smeeching behind for her hills. By the queer quick twist of her mobcap and the lift of her shift at random and the rate of her gate of going the pace, two thinks at a time, her country I’m proud of. The field is down, the race is their own. The galleonman jovial on his bucky brown nightmare. Bigrob dignagging his lylyputtana. One to one bore one! The datter, io, io, sleeps in peace, in peace. And the twillingsons, ganymede, garrymore, turn in trot and trot. But old pairamere goes it a gallop, a gallop. Bossford and phospherine. One to one on!

O, O, her fairy setalite! Casting such shadows to Persia’s blind! The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon. Like jealousjoy titaning fear; like rumour rhean round the planets; like china’s dragon snapping japets; like rhodagrey up the east. Satyrdaysboost besets Phoebe’s nearest. Here’s the flood and the flaxen flood that’s to come over helpless Irryland. Is there no-one to malahide Liv and her bettyship? Or who’ll buy her rosebuds, jettyblack rosebuds, ninsloes of nivia, nonpaps of nan? From the fall of the fig to doom’s last post every ephemeral anniversary while the park’s police peels peering by for to weight down morrals from county bubblin. That trainer’s trundling! Quick, pay up!

Kickakick. She had to kick a laugh. At her old stick-in-the-block. The way he was slogging his paunch about, elbiduubled, meet oft mate on, like hale King Willow, the robberer. Cainmaker’s mace and waxened capapee. But the tarrant’s brand on his hottoweyt brow. At half past quick in the morning. And her lamp was all askew and a trumbly wick-in-her, ringeysingey. She had to spofforth, she had to kicker, too thick of the wick of her pixy’s loomph, wide lickering jessup the smooky shiminey. And her duffed coverpoint of a wickedy batter, whenever she druv behind her stumps for a tyddlesly wink through his tunnilclefft bagslops after the rising bounder’s yorkers, as he studd and [p.584] stoddard and trutted and trumpered, to see had lordherry’s blackham’s red bobby abbels, it tickled her innings to consort pitch at kicksolock in the morm. Tipatonguing him on in her pigeony linguish, with a flick at the bails for lubrication, to scorch her faster, faster. Ye hek, ye hok, ye hucky hiremonger! Magrath he’s my pegger, he is, for bricking up all my old kent road. He’ll win your toss, flog your old tom’s bowling and I darr ye, barrackybuller, to break his duck! He’s posh. I lob him. We’re parring all Oogster till the empsyseas run googlie. Declare to ashes and teste his metch! Three for two will do for me and he for thee and she for you. Goeasyosey, for the grace of the fields, or hooley pooley, cuppy, we’ll both be bye and by caught in the slips for fear he’d tyre and burst his dunlops and waken her bornybarnies making his boobybabies. The game old merrimynn, square to leg, with his lolleywide towelhat and his hobbsy socks and his wisden’s bosse and his norsery pinafore and his gentleman’s grip and his playaboy’s plunge and his flannelly feelyfooling, treading her hump and hambledown like a maiden wellheld, ovalled over, with her crease where the pads of her punishments ought to be by womanish rights when, keek, the hen in the doran’s shantyqueer began in a kikkery key to laugh it off, yeigh, yeigh, neigh, neigh, the way she was wuck to doodledoo by her gallows bird (how’s that? Noball, he carries his bat!) nine hundred and dirty too not out, at all times long past conquering cock of the morgans.

How blame us?

Cocorico!

Armigerend everfasting horde. Rico! So the bill to the bowe. As the belle to the beau. We herewith pleased returned auditors’ thanks for those and their favours since safely enjoined. Cocoree! Tellaman tillamie. Tubbernacul in tipherairy, sons, travellers in company and their carriageable tochters, tanks tight anne thynne for her contractations tugowards his personeel. Echo, choree chorecho! O I you O you me! Well, we all unite thoughtfully in rendering gratias, well, between loves repassed, begging your honour’s pardon for, well, exclusive pigtorial rights of here- [p.585] hear fond tiplady his weekreations, appearing in next eon’s issue of the Neptune’s Centinel and Tritonville Lightowler with well the widest circulation round the whole universe. Echolo choree choroh choree chorico! How me O my youhou my I youtou to I O? Thanks furthermore to modest Miss Glimglow and neat Master Mettresson who so kindly profiteered their serwishes as demysell of honour and, well, as strainbearer respectively. And a cordiallest brief nod of chinchin dankyshin to, well, patient ringasend as prevenient (by your leave), to all such occasions, detachably replaceable (thanks too! twos intact!). As well as his auricular of Malthus, the promethean paratonnerwetter which first (Pray go! pray go!) taught love’s lightning the way (pity shown) to, well, conduct itself (mercy, good shot! only please don’t mention it!). Come all ye goatfathers and groanmothers, come all ye markmakers and piledrivers, come all ye laboursaving devisers and chargeleyden dividends, firefinders, waterworkers, deeply condeal with him! All that is still life with death inyeborn, all verbumsaps yet bound to be, to do and to suffer, every creature, everywhere, if you please, kindly feel for her! While the dapplegray dawn drags nearing nigh for to wake all droners that drowse in Dublin.

Humperfeldt and Anunska, wedded now evermore in annastomoses by a ground plan of the placehunter, whiskered beau and donahbella. Totumvir and esquimeena, who so shall separate fetters to new desire, repeals an act of union to unite in bonds of schismacy. O yes! O yes! Withdraw your member! Closure. This chamber stands abjourned. Such precedent is largely a cause to lack of collective continencies among Donnelly’s orchard as lifelong the shadyside to Fairbrother’s field. Humbo, lock your kekkle up! Anny, blow your wickle out! Tuck away the tablesheet! You never wet the tea! And you may go rightoway back to your Aunty Dilluvia, Humprey, after that!

Retire to rest without first misturbing your nighboor, mankind of baffling descriptions. Others are as tired of themselves as you are. Let each one learn to bore himself. It is strictly re- [p.586] quested that no cobsmoking, spitting, pubchat, wrastle rounds, coarse courting, smut, etc, will take place amongst those hours so devoted to repose. Look before behind before you strip you. Disrobe clothed in the strictest secrecy which privacy can afford. Water non to be discharged coram grate or ex window. Never divorce in the bedding the glove that will give you away. Maid Maud ninnies nay but blabs to Omama (for your life, would you!) she to her bosom friend who does all chores (and what do you think my Madeleine saw?): this ignorant mostly sweeps it out along with all the rather old corporators (have you heard of one humbledown jungleman how he bet byrn-and-bushe playing peg and pom?): the maudlin river then gets its dues (adding a din a ding or do): thence those laundresses (O, muddle me more about the maggies! I mean bawnee Madge Ellis and brownie Mag Dillon). Attention at all! Every ditcher’s dastard in Dupling will let us know about it if you have paid the mulctman by whether your rent is open to be foreclosed or aback in your arrears. This is seriously meant. Here is a homelet not a hothel.

That’s right, old oldun!

All in fact is soon as all of old right as anywas ever in very old place. Were he, hwen scalded of that couverfowl, to beat the bounds by here at such a point of time as this is for at sammel up all wood’s haypence and riviers argent (half back from three gangs multaplussed on a twentylot add allto a fiver with the deuce or roamer’s numbers ell a fee and do little ones) with the caboosh on him opheld for thrushes’ mistiles yet singing oud his parasangs in cornish token: mean fawthery eastend appullcelery, old laddy he high hole: pollysigh patrolman Seekersenn, towney’s tanquam, crumlin quiet down from his hoonger, he would mac siccar of inket goodsforetombed ereshiningem of light turkling eitheranny of thuncle’s windopes. More, unless we were neverso wrongtaken, if he brought his boots to pause in peace, the one beside the other one, right on the road, he would seize no sound from cache or cave beyond the flow of wand was gypsing water, telling him now, telling him all, all about ham and livery, stay and toast ham in livery, and buttermore with murmurladen, to [p.587] waker oats for him on livery. Faurore! Fearhoure! At last it past! Loab at cod then herrin or wind thin mong them treen.

Hiss! Which we had only our hazelight to see with, cert, in our point of view, me and my auxy, Jimmy d’Arcy, hadn’t we, Jimmy? — Who to seen with? Kiss! No kidd, captn, which he stood us, three jolly postboys, first a couple of Mountjoys and nutty woodbines with his cadbully’s choculars, pepped from our Theoatre Regal’s drolleries puntomine, in the snug at the Cambridge Arms of Teddy Ales while we was laying, crown jewels to a peanut, was he stepmarm, old noseheavy, or a wouldower, which he said, lads, a taking low his Whitby hat, lopping off the froth and whishing, with all respectfulness to the old country, tomorow comrades, we, his long life’s strength and cuirscrween loan to our allhallowed king, the pitchur that he’s turned to weld the wall, (Lawd lengthen him!) his standpoint was, to belt and blucher him afore the hole pleading churchal and submarine bar yonder but he made no class at all in port and cemented palships between our trucers, being a refugee, didn’t he, Jimmy? — Who true to me? Sish! Honeysuckler, that’s what my young lady here, Fred Watkins, bugler Fred, all the ways from Melmoth in Natal, she calls him, dip the colours, pet, when he commit his certain questions vivaviz the secret empire of the snake which it was on a point of our sutton down, how was it, Jimmy? — Who has sinnerettes to declare? Phiss! Touching our Phoenix Rangers’ nuisance at the meeting of the waitresses, the daintylines, Elsies from Chelsies, the two legglegels in blooms, and those pest of parkies, twitch, thistle and charlock, were they for giving up their fogging trespasses by order which we foregathered he must be raw in cane sugar, the party, no, Jimmy MacCawthelock? Who trespass against me? Briss! That’s him wiv his wig on, achewing of his maple gum, that’s our grainpopaw, Mister Beardall, an accompliced burgomaster, a great one among the very greatest, which he told us privates out of his own scented mouf he used to was, my lads, afore this wineact come, what say, our Jimmy the chapelgoer? — Who fears all masters! Hi, Jocko Nowlong, my [p.588] own sweet boosy love, which he puts his feeler to me behind the beggar’s bush, does Freda, don’t you be an emugee! Carryone, he says, though we marooned through this woylde. We must spy a half a hind on honeysuckler now his old face’s hardalone wiv his defences down during his wappin stillstand, says my Fred, and Jamessime here which, pip it, she simply must, she says, our pet, she’ll do a retroussy from her point of view (Way you fly! Like a frush!) to keep her flouncies off the grass while paying the wetmenots a musichall visit and pair her fiefighs fore him with just one curl after the cad came back which we fought he wars a gunner and his corkiness lay up two bottles of joy with a shandy had by Fred and a fino oloroso which he was warming to, my right, Jimmy, my old brown freer? — Whose dolour, O so mine!

Following idly up to seepoint, neath kingmount shadow the ilk for eke of us, whose nathem’s banned, whose hofd a-hooded, welkim warsail, how di’ you dew? Hollymerry, ivysad, whicher and whoer, Mr Black Atkins and you tanapanny troopertwos, were you there? Was truce of snow, moonmounded snow? Or did wolken hang o’er earth in umber hue his fulmenbomb? Number two coming! Full inside! Was glimpsed the mean amount of cloud? Or did pitter rain fall in a sprinkling? If the waters could speak as they flow! Timgle Tom, pall the bell! Izzy’s busy down the dell! Mizpah low, youyou, number one, in deep humidity! Listen, misled peerless, please! You are of course. You miss him so, to listleto! Of course, my pledge between us, there’s no-one Noel like him here to hear. Esch so eschess, douls a doulse! Since Allan Rogue loved Arrah Pogue it’s all Killdoughall fair. Triss! Only trees such as these such were those, waving there, the barketree, the o’briertree, the rowantree, the o’corneltree, the behanshrub near windy arbour, the magill o’dendron more. Trem! All the trees in the wood they trembold, humbild, when they heard the stoppress from domday’s erewold.

Tiss! Two pretty mistletots, ribboned to a tree, up rose liberator and, fancy, they were free! Four witty missywives, wink- [p.589] ing under hoods, made lasses like lads love maypoleriding and dotted our green with tricksome couples, fiftyfifty, their chiltren’s hundred. So childish pence took care of parents’ pounds and many made money the way in the world where rushroads to riches crossed slums of lice and, the cause of it all, he forged himself ahead like a blazing urbanorb, brewing treble to drown grief, giving and taking mayom and tuam, playing milliards with his three golden balls, making party capital out of landed selfinterest, light on a slavey but weighty on the bourse, our hugest commercial emporialist, with his sons booing home from afar and his daughters bridling up at his side. Finner!

How did he bank it up, swank it up, the whaler in the punt, a guinea by a groat, his index on the balance and such wealth into the bargain, with the boguey which he snatched in the baggage coach ahead? Going forth on the prowl, master jackill, under night and creeping back, dog to hide, over morning. Humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, exposition of failures. Through Duffy’s blunders and MacKenna’s insurance for upper ten and lower five the band played on. As one generation tells another. Ofter the fall. First for a change of a seven days license he wandered out of his farmer’s health and so lost his early parishlife. Then (’twas in fenland) occidentally of a sudden, six junelooking flamefaces straggled wild out of their turns through his parsonfired wicket, showing all shapes of striplings in sleepless tights. Promptly whomafter in undated times, very properly a dozen generations anterior to themselves, a main chanced to burst and misflooded his fortunes, wrothing foulplay over his fives’ court and his fine poultryyard wherein were spared a just two of a feather in wading room only. Next, upon due reflotation, up started four hurrigan gales to smithereen his plateglass housewalls and the slate for accounts his keeper was cooking. Then came three boy buglehorners who counterbezzled and crossbugled him. Later on in the same evening two hussites absconded through a breach in his bylaws and left him, the infidels, to pay himself off in kind remembrances. Till, ultimatehim, fell the crowning barleystraw, when an explosium of his distilleries [p.590] deafadumped all his dry goods to his most favoured sinflute and dropped him, what remains of a heptark, leareyed and letterish, weeping worrybound on his bankrump.

Pepep. Pay bearer, sure and sorry, at foot of ohoho honest policist. On never again, by Phoenis, swore on him Lloyd’s, not for beaten wheat, not after Sir Joe Meade’s father, thanks! They know him, the covenanter, by rote at least, for a chameleon at last, in his true falseheaven colours from ultraviolent to subred tissues. That’s his last tryon to march through the grand tryomphal arch. His reignbolt’s shot. Never again! How you do that like, Mista Chimepiece? You got nice yum plemyums. Praypaid my promishles!

Agreed, Wu Welsher, he was chogfulled to beacsate on earn as in hiving, of foxold conningnesses but who, hey honey, for all values of his latters, integer integerrimost, was the formast of the firm? At folkmood hailed, at part farwailed, accwmwladed concloud, Nuah-Nuah, Nebob of Nephilim! After all what followed for apprentice sake? Since the now nighs nearing as the yetst hies hin. Jeebies, ugh, kek, ptah, that was an ill man! Jawboose, puddigood, this is for true a sweetish mand! But Jumbluffer, bagdad, sir, yond would be for a once over our all honoured christmastyde easteredman. Fourth position of solution. How johnny! Finest view from horizon. Tableau final. Two me see. Male and female unmask we hem. Begum by gunne! Who now broothes oldbrawn. Dawn! The nape of his nameshielder’s scalp. Halp! After having drummed all he dun. Hun! Worked out to an inch of his core. More! Ring down. While the queenbee he staggerhorned blesses her bliss for to feel her funnyman’s functions Tag. Rumbling.

Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds.

 ® 

IV

[p.593] Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!

Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. O rally, O rally, O rally! Phlenxty, O rally! To what lifelike thyne of the bird can be. Seek you somany matters. Haze sea east to Osseania. Here! Here! Tass, Patt, Staff, Woff, Havv, Bluvv and Rutter. The smog is lofting. And already the olduman’s olduman has godden up on othertimes to litanate the bonnamours. Sonne feine, somme feehn avaunt! Guld modning, have yous viewsed Piers’ aube? Thane yaars agon we have used yoors up since when we have fused now orther. Calling all daynes. Calling all daynes to dawn. The old breeding bradsted culminwillth of natures to Foyn MacHooligan. The leader, the leader! Securest jubilends albas Temoram. Clogan slogan. Quake up, dim dusky, wook doom for husky! And let Billey Feghin be baallad out of his humuluation. Confindention to churchen. We have highest gratifications in announcing to pewtewr publikumst of pratician pratyusers, genghis is ghoon for you.

A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded.

The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh.

[p.594] Vah! Suvarn Sur! Scatter brand to the reneweller of the sky, thou who agnitest! Dah! Arcthuris comeing! Be! Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces! Kilt by kelt shell kithagain with kinagain. We elect for thee, Tirtangel. Svadesia salve! We Durbalanars, theeadjure. A way, the Margan, from our astamite, through dimdom done till light kindling light has led we hopas but hunt me the journeyon, iteritinerant, the kal his course, amid the semitary of Somnionia. Even unto Heliotropolis, the castellated, the enchanting. Now if soomone felched a twoel and soomonelses warmet watter we could, while you was saying Morkret Miry or Smud, Brunt and Rubbinsen, make sunlike sylp om this warful dune’s battam. Yet clarify begins at. Whither the spot for? Whence the hour by? See but! Lever hulme! Take in. Respassers should be pursaccoutred. Qui stabat Meins quantum qui stabat Peins. As of yours. We annew. Our shades of minglings mengle them and help help horizons. A flasch and, rasch, it shall come to pasch, as hearth by hearth leaps live. For the tanderest stock with the rosinost top Ahlen Hill’s, clubpubber, in general stores and. Atriathroughwards, Lugh the Brathwacker will be the listened after and he larruping sparks out of his teiney ones. The spearspid of dawnfire totouches ain the tablestoane ath the centre of the great circle of the macroliths of Helusbelus in the boshiman brush on this our peneplain by Fangaluvu Bight whence the horned cairns erge, stanserstanded, to floran frohn, idols of isthmians. Overwhere. Gaunt grey ghostly gossips growing grubber in the glow. Past now pulls. Cur one beast, even Dane the Great, may treadspath with sniffer he snout impursuant to byelegs. Edar’s chuckal humuristic. But why pit the cur afore the noxe? Let shrill their duan Gallus, han, and she, hou the Sassqueehenna, makes ducksruns at crooked. Once for the chantermale, twoce for the pother and once twoce threece for the waither. So an inedible yellowmeat turns out the invasable blackth. Kwhat serves to rob with Alliman, saelior, a turnkeyed trot to Seapoint, pierrotettes, means Noel’s Bar and Julepunsch, by Joge, if you’ve tippertaps in your head or starting kursses, tailour, you’re silenced at Henge Ceol- [p.595] leges, Exmooth, Ostbys for ost, boys, each and one? Death banes and the quick quoke. But life wends and the dombs spake! Whake? Hill of Hafid, knock and knock, nachasach, gives relief to the langscape as he strauches his lamusong untoupon gazelle channel and the bride of the Bryne, shin high shake, is dotter than evar for a damse wed her farther. Lambel on the up! We may plesently heal Geoglyphy’s twentynine ways to say goodbett an wassing seoosoon liv. With the forty wonks winking please me your much as to. With her tup. It’s a long long ray to Newirgland’s premier. For korps, for streamfish, for confects, for bullyoungs, for smearsassage, for patates, for steaked pig, for men, for limericks, for waterfowls, for wagsfools, for louts, for cold airs, for late trams, for curries, for curlews, for leekses, for orphalines, for tunnygulls, for clear goldways, for lungfortes, for moonyhaunts, for fairmoneys, for coffins, for tantrums, for armaurs, for waglugs, for rogues comings, for sly goings, for larksmathes, for homdsmeethes, for quailsmeathes, kilalooly. Tep! Come lead, crom lech! Top. Wisely for us Old Bruton has withdrawn his theory. You are alpsulumply wroght! Amsulummmm. But this is perporteroguing youpoorapps? Namantanai. Sure it’s not revieng your? Amslu! Good all so. We seem to understand apad vellumtomes muniment, Arans Duhkha, among hoseshoes, cheriotiers and etceterogenious bargainboutbarrows, ofver and umnder, since, evenif or although, in double preposition as in triple conjunction, how the mudden research in the topaia that was Mankaylands has gone to prove from the picalava present in the maramara melma that while a successive generation has been in the deep deep deeps of Deepereras. Buried hearts. Rest here.

Conk a dook he’ll doo. Svap.

So let him slap, the sap! Till they take down his shatter from his shap. He canease. Fill stap.

Thus faraclacks the friarbird. Listening, Syd!

The child, a natural child, thenown by the mnames of, (aya! aya!), wouldbewas kidnapped at an age of recent probably, possibly remoter; or he conjured himself from seight by slide [p.596] at hand; for which thetheatron is a lemoronage; at milchgoat fairmesse; in full dogdhis; sod on a fall; pat; the hundering blundering dunderfunder of plundersundered manhood; behold, he returns; renascenent; fincarnate; still foretold around the hearthside; at matin a fact; hailed chimers’ ersekind; foe purmanant, fum in his mow; awike in wave risurging into chrest; victis poenis hesternis; fostfath of solas; fram choicest of wiles with warmen and sogns til Banba, burial aranging; under articles thirtynine of the reconstitution; by the lord’s order of the canon consecrandable; earthlost that we thought him; pesternost, the noneknown worrier; from Tumbarumba mountain; in persence of whole landslots; forebe all the rassias; sire of leery subs of dub; the Diggins, Woodenhenge, as to hang out at; with spawnish oel full his angalach; the sousenugh; gnomeosulphidosalamermauderman; the big brucer, fert in fort; Gunnar, of The Gunnings, Gund; one of the two or three forefivest fellows a bloke could in holiday crowd encounter; benedicted be the barrel; kilderkins, lids off; a roache, an oxmaster, a sort of heaps, a pamphilius, a vintivat niviceny, a hygiennic contrivance socalled from the editor; the thick of your thigh; you knox; quite; talking to the vicar’s joy and ruth; the gren, woid and glue been broking by the maybole gards; he; when no crane in Elga is heard; upout to speak this lay; without links, without impediments, with gygantogyres, with freeflawforms; parasama to himself; atman as evars; whom otherwise becauses; no puler as of old but as of young a palatin; whitelock not lacked nor temperasoleon; though he appears a funny colour; stoatters some; but a quite a big bug after the dahlias; place inspectorum sarchent; also the hullow chyst excavement; astronomically fabulafigured; as Jambudvispa Vipra foresaw of him; the last half versicle repurchasing his pawned word; sorensplit and paddypatched; and pfor to pfinish our pfun of a pfan coalding the keddle mickwhite; sure, straight, slim, sturdy, serene, synthetical, swift.

By the antar of Yasas! Ruse made him worthily achieve inherited wish. The drops upon that mantle rained never around Fingal. Goute! Loughlin’s Salts, Will, make a newman if any- [p.597] worn. Soe? La! Lamfadar’s arm it has cocoincidences. You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? You may so. It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover. Svapnasvap. Of all the stranger things that ever not even in the hundrund and badst pageans of unthowsent and wonst nice or in eddas and oddes bokes of tomb, dyke and hollow to be have happened! The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle. Why? Because, graced be Gad and all giddy gadgets, in whose words were the beginnings, there are two signs to turn to, the yest and the ist, the wright side and the wronged side, feeling aslip and wauking up, so an, so farth. Why? On the sourdsite we have the Moskiosk Djinpalast with its twin adjacencies, the bathouse and the bazaar, allahallahallah, and on the sponthesite it is the alcovan and the rosegarden, boony noughty, all puraputhry. Why? One’s apurr apuss a story about brid and breakfedes and parricombating and coushcouch but others is of tholes and oubworn buyings, dolings and chafferings in heat, contest and enmity. Why? Every talk has his stay, vidnis Shavarsanjivana, and all-a-dreams perhapsing under lucksloop at last are through. Why? It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me.

And howpsadrowsay.

Lok! A shaft of shivery in the act, anilancinant. Cold’s sleuth! Vayuns! Where did thots come from? It is infinitesimally fevers, resty fever, risy fever, a coranto of aria, sleeper awakening, in the smalls of one’s back presentiment, gip, and again, geip, a flash from a future of maybe mahamayability through the windr of a wondr in a wildr is a weltr as a wirbl of a warbl is a world.

Tom.

It is perfect degrees excelsius. A jaladaew still stilleth. Cloud lay but mackrel are. Anemone activescent, the torporature is returning to mornal. Humid nature is feeling itself freely at ease with the all fresco. The vervain is to herald as the grass administers. They say, they say in effect, they really say. You have eaden fruit. Say whuit. You have snakked mid a fish. Telle whish. [p.598] Every those personal place objects if nonthings where soevers and they just done been doing being in a dromo of todos withouten a bound to be your trowers. Forswundled. You hald him by the tap of the tang. Not a salutary sellable sound is since. Insteed for asteer, adrift with adraft. Nuctumbulumbumus wanderwards the Nil. Victorias neanzas. Alberths neantas. It was a long, very long, a dark, very dark, an allburt unend, scarce endurable, and we could add mostly quite various and somenwhat stumbletumbling night. Endee he sendee. Diu! The has goning at gone, the is coming to come. Greets to ghastern, hie to morgning. Dormidy, destady. Doom is the faste. Well down, good other! Now day, slow day, from delicate to divine, divases. Padma, brighter and sweetster, this flower that bells, it is our hour or risings. Tickle, tickle. Lotus spray. Till herenext. Adya.

Take thanks, thankstum, thamas. In that earopean end meets Ind.

There is something supernoctural about whatever you called him it. Panpan and vinvin are not alonety vanvan and pinpin in your Tamal without tares but simplysoley they are they. Thisutter followis that odder fellow. Himkim kimkim. Old yeasterloaves may be a stale as a stub and the pitcher go to aftoms on the wall. Mildew, murk, leak and yarn now want the bad that they lied on. And your last words todate in camparative accoustomology are going to tell stretch of a fancy through strength towards joyance, adyatants, where he gets up. Allay for allay, a threat for a throat.

Tim!

To them in Ysat Loka. Hearing. The urb it orbs. Then’s now with now’s then in tense continuant. Heard. Who having has he shall have had. Hear! Upon the thuds trokes truck, chim, it will be exactlyso fewer hours by so many minutes of the ope of the diurn of the sennight of the maaned of the yere of the age of the madamanvantora of Grossguy and Littleylady, our hugibus hugibum and our weewee mother, actaman housetruewith, and their childer and their napirs and their napirs’ childers napirs and their chattels and their servance and their [p.599] cognance and their ilks and their orts and their everythings that is be will was theirs.

Much obliged. Time-o’-Thay! But wherth, O clerk?

Whithr a clonk? Vartman! See you not soo the pfath they pfunded, oura vatars that arred in Himmal, harruad bathar namas, the gow, the stiar, the tigara, the liofant, when even thurst was athar vetals, mid trefoils slipped the sable rampant, hoof, hoof, hoof, hoof, padapodopudupedding on fattafottafutt. Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that, primeval conditions having gradually receded but nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted through intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary military maritory monetary morphological circumformation in a more or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium. Gam on, Gearge! Nomomorphemy for me! Lessnatbe angardsmanlake! You jast gat a tache of army on the stumuk. To the Angar at Anker. Aecquotincts. Seeworthy. Lots thankyouful, polite pointsins! There’s a tavarn in the tarn.

Tip. Take Tamotimo’s topical. Tip. Browne yet Noland. Tip. Advert.

Where. Cumulonubulocirrhonimbant heaven electing, the dart of desire has gored the heart of secret waters and the poplarest wood in the entire district is being grown at present, eminently adapted for the requirements of pacnincstricken humanity and, between all the goings up and the whole of the comings down and the fog of the cloud in which we toil and the cloud of the fog under which we labour, bomb the thing’s to be domb about it so that, beyond indicating the locality, it is felt that one cannot with advantage add a very great deal to the aforegoing by what, such as it is to be, follows, just mentioning however that the old man of the sea and the old woman in the sky if they don’t say nothings about it they don’t tell us lie, the gist of the pantomime, from [p.600] cannibal king to the property horse, being, slumply and slopely, to remind us how, in this drury world of ours, Father Times and Mother Spacies boil their kettle with their crutch. Which every lad and lass in the lane knows. Hence.

Polycarp pool, the pool of Innalavia, Saras the saft as, of meadewy marge, atween Deltas Piscium and Sagittariastrion, whereinn once we lave ’tis alve and vale, minnyhahing here from hiarwather, a poddlebridges in a passabed, the river of lives, the regenerations of the incarnations of the emanations of the apparentations of Funn and Nin in Cleethabala, the kongdomain of the Alieni, an accorsaired race, infester of Libnud Ocean, Moylamore, let it be! Where Allbroggt Neandser tracking Viggynette Neeinsee gladsighted her Linfian Fall and a teamdiggingharrow turned the first sod. Sluce! Caughterect! Goodspeed the blow! (Incidentally ’tis believed that his harpened before Gage’s Fane for it has to be over this booty spotch, though some hours to the wester, that ex-Colonel House’s preterpost heiress is to return unto the outstretcheds of Dweyr O’Michael’s loinsprung the blunterbusted pikehead which his had hewn in hers, prolonged laughter words). There an alomdree begins to green, soreen seen for loveseat, as we know that should she, for by essentience his law, so it make all. It is scainted to Vitalba. And her little white bloomkins, twittersky trimmed, are hobdoblins’ hankypanks. Saxenslyke our anscessers thought so darely on now they’re going soever to Anglesen, free of juties, dyrt chapes. There too a slab slobs, immermemorial, the only in all swamp. But so bare, so boulder, brag sagging such a brr bll bmm show that, of Barindens, the white alfred, it owed to have at leased some butchup’s upperon. Homos Circas Elochlannensis! His showplace at Leeambye. Old Wommany Wyes. Pfif! But, while gleam with gloom swan here and there, this shame rock and that whispy planter tell Paudheen Steel-the-Poghue and his perty Molly Vardant, in goodbroomirish, arrah, this place is a proper and his feist a ferial for curdnal communial, so be who would celibrate the holy mystery upon or that the pirigrim from Mainylands beatend, the calmleaved hutcaged by that look whose glaum [p.601] is sure he means bisnisgels to empalmover. A naked yogpriest, clothed of sundust, his oakey doaked with frondest leoves, offrand to the ewon of her owen. Tasyam kuru salilakriyamu! Pfaf!

Bring about it to be brought about and it will be, loke, our lake lemanted, that greyt lack, the citye of Is is issuant (atlanst!), urban and orbal, through seep froms umber under wasseres of Erie.

Lough!

 Hwo! Hwy, dairmaidens? Asthoreths, assay! Earthsigh to is heavened.

Hillsengals, the daughters of the cliffs, responsen. Longsome the samphire coast. From thee to thee, thoo art it thoo, that thouest there. The like the near, the liker nearer. O sosay! A family, a band, a school, a clanagirls. Fiftines andbut fortines by novanas andor vantads by octettes ayand decadendecads by a lunary with last a lone. Whose every has herdifferent from the similies with her site. Sicut campanulae petalliferentes they coroll in caroll round Botany Bay. A dweam of dose innocent dirly dirls. Keavn! Keavn! And they all setton voicies about singsing music was Keavn! He. Only he. Ittle he. Ah! The whole clangalied. Oh!

S. Wilhelmina’s, S. Gardenia’s, S. Phibia’s, S. Veslandrua’s, S. Clarinda’s, S. Immecula’s, S. Dolores Delphin’s, S. Perlanthroa’s, S. Errands Gay’s, S. Eddaminiva’s, S. Rhodamena’s, S. Ruadagara’s, S. Drimicumtra’s, S. Una Vestity’s, S. Mintargisia’s, S. Misha-La-Valse’s, S. Churstry’s, S. Clouonaskieym’s, S. Bellavistura’s, S. Santamonta’s, S. Ringsingsund’s, S. Heddadin Drade’s, S. Glacianivia’s, S. Waidafrira’s, S. Thomassabbess’s and (trema! unloud!! pepet!!!) S. Loellisotoelles!

Prayfulness! Prayfulness!

Euh! Thaet is seu whaet shaell one naeme it!

The meidinogues have tingued togethering. Ascend out of your bed, cavern of a trunk, and shrine! Kathlins is kitchin. Soros cast, ma brone! You must exterra acquarate to interirigate all the arkypelicans. The austrologer Wallaby by Tolan, who farshook our showrs from Newer Aland, has signed the you and the now our mandate. Milenesia waits. Be smark.

[p.602] One seekings. Not the lithe slender, not the broad roundish near the lithe slender, not the fairsized fullfeatured to the leeward of the broad roundish but, indeed and inneed, the curling, perfectportioned, flowerfleckled, shapely highhued, delicate features swaying to the windward of the fairsized fullfeatured.

Was that in the air about when something is to be said for it or is it someone imparticular who will somewherise for the whole anyhow?

What does Coemghen? Tell his hidings clearly! A woodtoogooder. Is his moraltack still his best of weapons? How about a little more goaling goold? Rowlin’s tun he gadder no must. It is the voice of Roga. His face is the face of a son. Be thine the silent hall, O Jarama! A virgin, the one, shall mourn thee. Roga’s stream is solence. But Croona is in adestance. The ass of the O’Dwyer of Greyglens is abrowtobayse afeald in his terroirs of the Potterton’s forecoroners, the reeks around the burleyhearthed. When visited by an indepondant reporter, “Mike” Portlund, to burrow burning the latterman’s Resterant so is called the gortan in questure he mikes the fallowing for the Durban Gazette, firstcoming issue. From a collispendent. Any were. Deemsday. Bosse of Upper and Lower Byggotstrade, Ciwareke, may he live for river! The Games funeral at Valleytemple. Saturnights pomps, exhabiting that corricatore of a harss, revealled by Oscur Camerad. The last of Dutch Schulds, perhumps. Pipe in Dream Cluse. Uncovers Pub History. The Outrage, at Length. Affected Mob Follows in Religious Sullivence. Rinvention of vestiges by which they drugged the buddhy. Moviefigure on in scenic section. By Patathicus. And there, from out of the scuity, misty Londan, along the canavan route, that is with the years gone, mild beam of the wave his polar bearing, steerner among stars, trust touthena and you tread true turf, comes the sorter, Mr Hurr Hansen, talking alltheways in himself of his hopes to fall in among a merryfoule of maidens happynghome from the dance, his knyckle allaready in his knackskey fob, a passable compatriate proparly of the Grimstad galleon, old pairs frieze, feed up to the noxer with their geese and peeas and oats upon a trencher and the toyms [p.603] he’d lust in Wooming but with that smeoil like a grace of backoning over his egglips of the sunsoonshine. Here’s heering you in a guessmasque, latterman! And such an improofment! As royt as the mail and as fat as a fuddle! Schoen! Shoan! Shoon the Puzt! A penny for your thought abouts! Tay, tibby, tanny, tummy, tasty, tosty, tay. Batch is for Baker who baxters our bread. O, what an ovenly odour! Butter butter! Bring us this days our maily bag! But receive me, my frensheets, from the emerald dark winterlong! For diss is the doss for Eilder Downes and dass is it duss, as singen sengers, what the hardworking straightwalking stoutstamping securelysealing officials who trow to form our G.M.P.’s pass muster generally shay for shee and sloo for slee when butting their headd to the pillow for a nightshared nakeshift with the alter girl they tuck in for sweepsake. Dutiful wealker for his hydes of march. Haves you the time. Hans ahike? Heard you the crime, senny boy? The man was giddy on letties on the dewry of the duary, be pursueded, whethered with entrenous, midgreys, dagos, teatimes, shadows, nocturnes or samoans, if wellstocked fillerouters plushfeverfraus with dopy chonks, and this, that and the other pigskin or muffle kinkles, taking a pipe course or doing an anguish, seen to his fleece in after his foull, when Dr Chart of Greet Chorsles street he changed his backbone at a citting. He had not the declaination, as what with the foos as whet with the fays, but so far as hanging a goobes on the precedings, wherethen the lag allows, it mights be anything after darks. Which the deers alones they sees and the darkies they is snuffing of the wind up. Debbling. Greanteavvents! Hyacinssies with heliotrollops! Not once fullvixen freakings and but dubbledecoys! It is a lable iction on the porte of the cuthulic church and summum most atole for it. Where is that blinketey blanketer, that quound of a pealer, the sunt of a hunt whant foxes good men! Where or he, our loved among many?

But what does Coemghem, the fostard? Tyro a tora. The novened iconostase of his blueygreyned vitroils but begins in feint to light his legend. Let Phosphoron proclaim! Peechy [p.604] peechy. Say he that saw him that saw! Man shall sharp run do a get him. Ask no more, Jerry mine, Roga’s voice! No pice soorkabatcha. The bog which puckerooed the posy. The vinebranch of Heremonheber on Bregia’s plane where Teffia lies is leaved invert and fructed proper but the cublic hatches endnot open yet for hourly rincers’ mess. Read Higgins, Cairns and Egen. Malthus is yet lukked in close. Withun. How swathed thereanswer alcove makes theirinn! Besoakers loiter on. And primilibatory solicates of limon sodias will be absorbable. It is not even yet the engine of the load with haled morries full of crates, you mattinmummur, for dombell dumbs? Sure and ’tis not then. The greek Sideral Reulthway, as it havvents, will soon be starting a smooth with its first single hastencraft. Danny buzzers instead of the vialact coloured milk train on the fartykket plan run with its endless gallaxion of rotatorattlers and the smooltroon our elderens rememberem as the scream of the service, Strubry Bess. Also the waggonwobblers are still yet everdue to precipitate after night’s combustion. Aspect, Shamus Rogua or! Taceate and! Hagiographice canat Ecclesia. Which aubrey our first shall show. Inattendance who is who is will play that’s what’s that to what’s that, what.

Oyes! Oyeses! Oyesesyeses! The primace of the Gaulls, protonotorious, I yam as I yam, mitrogenerand in the free state on the air, is now aboil to blow a Gael warning. Inoperation Eyrlands Eyot, Meganesia, Habitant and the onebut thousand insels, Western and Osthern Approaches.

Of Kevin, of increate God the servant, of the Lord Creator a filial fearer, who, given to the growing grass, took to the tall timber, slippery dick the springy heeler, as we have seen, so we have heard, what we have received, that we have transmitted, thus we shall hope, this we shall pray till, in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction, it may again how it may again, shearing aside the four wethers and passing over the dainty daily dairy and dropping by the way the lapful of live coals and smoothing out Nelly Nettle and her lad of mettle, full of stings, [p.605] fond of stones, friend of gnewgnawns bones and leaving all the messy messy to look after our douche douche, the miracles, death and life are these.

Yad. Procreated on the ultimate ysland of Yreland in the encyclical yrish archipelago, come their feast of precreated holy whiteclad angels, whomamong the christener of his, voluntarily poor Kevin, having been graunted the praviloge of a priest’s postcreated portable altare cum balneo, when espousing the one true cross, invented and exalted, in celibate matrimony at matin chime arose and westfrom went and came in alb of cloth of gold to our own midmost Glendalough-le-vert by archangelical guidance where amiddle of meeting waters of river Yssia and Essia river on this one of eithers lone navigable lake piously Kevin, lawding the triune trishagion, amidships of his conducible altar super bath, rafted centripetally, diaconal servent of orders hibernian, midway across the subject lake surface to its supreem epicentric lake Ysle, whereof its lake is the ventrifugal principality, whereon by prime, powerful in knowledge, Kevin came to where its centre is among the circumfluent watercourses of Yshgafiena and Yshgafiuna, an enysled lakelet yslanding a lacustrine yslet, whereupon with beached raft subdiaconal bath propter altar, with oil extremely anointed, accompanied by prayer, holy Kevin bided till the third morn hour but to build a rubric penitential honeybeehivehut in whose enclosure to live in fortitude, acolyte of cardinal virtues, whereof the arenary floor, most holy Kevin excavated as deep as to the depth of a seventh part of one full fathom, which excavated, venerable Kevin, anchorite, taking counsel, proceded towards the lakeside of the ysletshore whereat seven several times he, eastward genuflecting, in entire ubidience at sextnoon collected gregorian water sevenfold and with ambrosian eucharistic joy of heart as many times receded, carrying that privileged altar unacumque bath, which severally seven times into the cavity excavated, a lector of water levels, most venerable Kevin, then effused thereby letting there be water where was theretofore dry land, by him so concreated, who now, confirmed a strong and perfect christian, blessed Kevin, exorcised his holy sister [p.606] water, perpetually chaste, so that, well understanding, she should fill to midheight his tubbathaltar, which hanbathtub, most blessed Kevin, ninthly enthroned, in the concentric centre of the translated water, whereamid, when violet vesper vailed, Saint Kevin, Hydrophilos, having girded his sable cappa magna as high as to his cherubical loins, at solemn compline sat in his sate of wisdom, that handbathtub, whereverafter, recreated doctor insularis of the universal church, keeper of the door of meditation, memory extempore proposing and intellect formally considering, recluse, he meditated continuously with seraphic ardour the primal sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of all man by affusion of water. Yee.

Bisships, bevel to rock’s rite! Sarver buoy, extinguish! Nuotabene. The rare view from the three Benns under the bald heaven is on the other end, askan your blixom on dimmen and blastun, something to right hume about. They were erected in a purvious century, as a hen fine coops and, if you know your Bristol and have trudged the trolly ways and elventurns of that old cobbold city, you will sortofficially scribble a mental Peny-Knox-Gore. Whether they were franklings by name also has not been fully probed. Their design is a whosold word and the charming details of light in dark are freshed from the feminiairity which breathes content. O ferax cupla! Ah, fairypair! The first exploder to make his ablations in these parks was indeed that lucky mortal which the monster trial showed on its first day out. What will not arky paper, anticidingly inked with penmark, push, per sample prof, kuvertly falted, when style, stink and stigmataphoron are of one sum in the same person? He comes out of the soil very well after all just where Old Toffler is to come shuffling alongsoons Panniquanne starts showing of her peequuliar talonts. Awaywrong wandler surking to a rightrare rute for his plain utterrock sukes, appelled to by her fancy claddaghs. You plied that pokar, gamesy, swell as aye did, while there were flickars to the flores. He may be humpy, nay, he may be dumpy but there is always something racey about, say, a sailor on a horse. As soon as we sale him geen we gates a sprise! He brings up tofatufa and [p.607] that is how we get to Missas in Massas. The old Marino tale. We veriters verity notefew demmed lustres priorly magistrite maximollient in ludubility learned. Facst. Teak off that wise head! Great sinner, good sonner, is in effect the motto of the MacCowell family. The gloved fist (skrimmhandsker) was intraduced into their socerdatal tree before the fourth of the twelfth and it is even a little odd all four horolodgeries still gonging restage Jakob van der Bethel, smolking behing his pipe, with Essav of Messagepostumia, lentling out his borrowed chafingdish, before cymbaloosing the apostles at every hours of changeover. The first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! Heroes’ Highway where our fleshers leave their bonings and every bob and joan to fill the bumper fair. It is their segnall for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners lovesoftfun at Finnegan’s Wake.

And it’s high tigh tigh. Titley hi ti ti. That my dig pressed in your dag si. Gnug of old Gnig. Ni, gnid mig brawly! I bag your burden. Mees is thees knees. Thi is Mi. We have caught oneselves, Sveasmeas, in somes incontigruity coumplegs of heoponhurrish marrage from whose I most sublumbunate. A polog, my engl! Excutes. Om still so sovvy. Whyle om till ti ti.

Ha!

Dayagreening gains in schlimninging. A summerwint springfalls, abated. Hail, regn of durknass, snowly receassing, thund lightening thund, into the dimbelowstard departamenty whitherout, soon hist, soon mist, to the hothehill from the hollow, Solsking the Frist (attempted by the admirable Captive Bunting and Loftonant-Cornel Blaire) will processingly show up above Tumplen Bar whereupont he was much jubilated by Boergemester “Dyk” ffogg of Isoles, now Eisold, looking most plussed with (exhib 39) a clout capped sunbubble anaccanponied from his bequined torse. Up.

Blanchardstown mewspeppers pleads coppyl. Gracest goodness, heave mensy upponnus! Grand old Manbutton, give your bowlers a rest!

[p.608] It is a mere mienerism of this vague of visibilities, mark you, as accorded to by moisturologist of the Brehons Assorceration for the advauncement of scayence because, my dear, mentioning of it under the breath, as in pure (what bunkum!) essenesse, there have been disselving forenenst you just the draeper, the two drawpers assisters and the three droopers assessors confraternitisers. Who are, of course, Uncle Arth, your two cozes from Niece and (kunject a bit now!) our own familiars, Billyhealy, Ballyhooly and Bullyhowley, surprised in an indecorous position by the Sigurd Sigerson Sphygmomanometer Society for bledprusshers.

Knightsmore. Haventyne?

Ha ha!

This Mister Ireland? And a live?

Ay, ay. Aye, aye, baas.

The cry of Stena chills the vitals of slumbring off the motther has been pleased into the harms of old salaciters, meassurers soon and soon, but the voice of Alina gladdens the cocklyhearted dreamerish for that magic moning with its ching chang chap sugay kaow laow milkee muchee bringing beckerbrose, the brew with the foochoor in it. Sawyest? Nodt? Nyets, I dhink I sawn to remumb or sumbsuch. A kind of a thinglike all traylogged then pubably it resymbles a pelvic or some kvind then props an acutebacked quadrangle with aslant off ohahnthenth a wenchyoumaycuddler, lying with her royalirish uppershoes among the theeckleaves. Signs are on of a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world. As the dayeleyves unfolden them. In the wake of the blackshape, Nattenden Sorte; whenat, hindled firth and hundled furth, the week of wakes is out and over; as a wick weak woking from ennemberable Ashias unto fierce force fuming, temtem tamtam, the Phoenican wakes.

Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing. Four. Come, hours, be ours!

But still. Ah diar, ah diar! And stay.

[p.609] It was allso agreenable in our sinegear clutchless, touring the no placelike no timelike absolent, mixing up pettyvaughan populose with the magnumoore genstries, lloydhaired mersscenary blookers with boydskinned pigttetails and goochlipped gwendolenes with duffyeyed dolores; like so many unprobables in their poor suit of the improssable. With Mata and after please with Matamaru and after please stop with Matamaruluka and after stop do please with Matamarulukajoni.

And anotherum. Ah ess, dapple ass! He will be longing after the Grogram Grays. And, Weisingchetaoli, he will levellaut ministel Trampleasure be. Sheflower Rosina, younger Sheflower fruit Amaryllis, youngest flowerfruityfrond Sallysill or Sillysall. And house with heaven roof occupanters they are continuatingly attraverse of its milletestudinous windows, ricocoursing themselves, as staneglass on stonegloss, inplayn unglish Wynn’s Hotel. Brancherds at: Bullbeck, Oldboof, Sassondale, Jorsey Uppygard, Mundelonde, Abbeytotte, Bracqueytuitte with Hockeyvilla, Fockeyvilla, Hillewille and Wallhall. Hoojahoo managers the thingaviking. Obning shotly. When the messanger of the risen sun, (see other oriel) shall give to every seeable a hue and to every hearable a cry and to each spectacle his spot and to each happening her houram. The while we, we are waiting, we are waiting for. Hymn.

Muta: Quodestnunc fumusiste volhvuns ex Domoyno?

Juva: It is Old Head of Kettle puffing off the top of the mornin.

Muta: He odda be thorly well ashamed of himself for smoking before the high host.

Juva: Dies is Dorminus master and commandant illy tonobrass.

Muta: Diminussed aster! An I could peecieve amonkst the gatherings who ever they wolk in process?

Juva: Khubadah! It is the Chrystanthemlander with his porters of bonzos, pompommy plonkyplonk, the ghariwallahs, moveyovering the cabrattlefield of slaine.

Muta: Pongo da Banza! An I would uscertain in druidful scatterings one piece tall chap he stand one piece same place?

[p.610] Juva: Bulkily: and he is fundementially theosophagusted over the whorse proceedings.

Muta: Petrificationibus! O horild haraflare! Who his dickhuns now rearrexes from undernearth the memorialorum?

Juva: Beleave filmly, beleave! Fing Fing! King King!

Muta: Ulloverum? Fulgitudo ejus Rhedonum teneat!

Juva: Rolantlossly! Till the tipp of his ziff. And the ubideintia of the savium is our ervics fenicitas.

Muta: Why soly smiles the supremest with such for a leary on his rugular lips?

Juva: Bitchorbotchum! Eebrydime! He has help his crewn on the burkeley buy but he has holf his crown on the Eurasian Generalissimo.

Muta: Skulkasloot! The twyly velleid is thus then paridicynical?

Juva: Ut vivat volumen sic pereat pouradosus!

Muta: Haven money on stablecert?

Juva: Tempt to wom Outsider!

Muta: Suc? He quoffs. Wutt?

Juva: Sec! Wartar wartar! Wett.

Muta: Ad Piabelle et Purabelle?

Juva: At Winne, Woermann og Sengs.

Muta: So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?

Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high.

Muta: May I borrow that hordwanderbaffle from you, old rubberskin?

Juva: Here it is and I hope it’s your wormingpen, Erinmonker!

Shoot.

Rhythm and Colour at Park Mooting. Peredos Last in the Grand Natural. Velivision victor. Dubs newstage oldtime turftussle, recalling Winny Willy Widger. Two draws. Heliotrope [p.611] leads from Harem. Three ties. Jockey the Ropper jerks Jake the Rape. Paddrock and bookley chat.

And here are the details.

Tunc. Bymeby, bullocky vampas tappany bobs topside joss pidgin fella Balkelly, archdruid of islish chinchinjoss in the his heptachromatic sevenhued septicoloured roranyellgreenlindigan mantle finish he show along the his mister guest Patholic with alb belongahim the whose throat hum with of sametime all the his cassock groaner fellas of greysfriaryfamily he fast all time what time all him monkafellas with Same Patholic, quoniam, speeching, yeh not speeching noh man liberty is, he drink up words, scilicet, tomorrow till recover will not, all too many much illusiones through photoprismic velamina of hueful panepiphanal world spectacurum of Lord Joss, the of which zoantholitic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together fallen man than under but one photoreflection of the several iridals gradationes of solar light, that one which that part of it (furnit of heupanepi world) had shown itself (part of fur of huepanwor) unable to absorbere, whereas for numpa one puraduxed seer in seventh degree of wisdom of Entis-Onton he savvy inside true inwardness of reality, the Ding hvad in idself id est, all objects (of panepiwor) allside showed themselves in trues coloribus resplendent with sextuple gloria of light actually retained, untisintus, inside them (obs of epiwo). Rumnant Patholic, stareotypopticus, no catch all that preachybook, utpiam, tomorrow recover thing even is not, bymeby vampsybobsy tappanasbullocks topside joss pidginfella Bilkilly-Belkelly say patfella, ontesantes, twotime hemhaltshealing, with other words verbigratiagrading from murmurulentous till stridulocelerious in a hunghoranghoangoly tsinglontseng while his comprehendurient, with diminishing claractinism, augumentationed himself in caloripeia to vision so throughsighty, you anxioust melancholic, High Thats Hight Uberking Leary his fiery grassbelonghead all show colour of sorrelwood herbgreen, again, niggerblonker, of the his essixcoloured holmgrewnworsteds costume the his fellow saffron pettikilt look same hue of boiled spinasses, [p.612] other thing, voluntary mutismuser, he not compyhandy the his golden twobreasttorc look justsamelike curlicabbis, moreafter, to pace negativisticists, verdant readyrainroof belongahim Exuber High Ober King Leary very dead, what he wish to say, spit of superexuberabundancy plenty laurel leaves, after that commander bulopent eyes of Most Highest Ardreetsar King same thing like thyme choppy upon parsley, alongsidethat, if pleasesir, nos displace tauttung, sowlofabishospastored, enamel Indian gem in maledictive fingerfondler of High High Siresultan Emperor all same like one fellow olive lentil, onthelongsidethat, by undesendas, kirikirikiring, violaceous warwon contusiones of facebuts of Highup Big Cockywocky Sublissimime Autocrat, for that with pure hueglut intensely saturated one, tinged uniformly, allaroundside upinandoutdown, very like you seecut chowchow of plentymuch sennacassia. Hump cumps Ebblybally! Sukkot?

Punc. Bigseer, refrects the petty padre, whackling it out, a tumble to take, tripeness to call thing and to call if say is good while, you pore shiroskuro blackinwhitepaddynger, by thiswis aposterioprismically apatstrophied and paralogically periparolysed, celestial from principalest of Iro’s Irismans ruinboon pot before, (for beingtime monkblinkers timeblinged completamentarily murkblankered in their neutrolysis between the possible viriditude of the sager and the probable eruberuption of the saint), as My tappropinquish to Me wipenmeselps gnosegates a handcaughtscheaf of synthetic shammyrag to hims hers, seemingsuch four three two agreement cause heart to be might, saving to Balenoarch (he kneeleths), to Great Balenoarch (he kneeleths down) to Greatest Great Balenoarch (he kneeleths down quitesomely), the sound sense sympol in a weedwayedwold of the firethere the sun in his halo cast. Onmen.

That was thing, bygotter, the thing, bogcotton, the very thing, begad! Even to uptoputty Bilkilly-Belkelly-Balkally. Who was for shouting down the shatton on the lamp of Jeeshees. Sweating on to stonker and throw his seven. As he shuck his thumping fore features apt the hoyhop of His Ards.

Thud.

[p.613] Good safe firelamp! hailed the heliots. Goldselforelump! Halled they. Awed. Where thereon the skyfold high, trampatrampatramp. Adie. Per ye comdoom doominoom noonstroom. Yeasome priestomes. Fullyhum toowhoom.

Taawhaar?

Sants and sogs, cabs and cobs, kings and karls, tentes and taunts.

’Tis gone infarover. So fore now, dayleash. Pour deday. To trancefixureashone. Feist of Taborneccles, scenopegia, come! Shamwork, be in our scheining! And let every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos. With a hottyhammyum all round. Gudstruce!

Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!

Lo, the laud of laurens now orielising benedictively when saint and sage have said their say.

A spathe of calyptrous glume involucrumines the perinanthean Amenta: fungoalgaceous muscafilicial graminopalmular planteon; of increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhullows and charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild when Ralph the Retriever ranges to jawrode his knuts knuckles and her theas thighs; onegugulp down of the nauseous forere brarkfarsts oboboomaround and you’re as paint and spickspan as a rainbow; wreathe the bowl to rid the bowel; no runcure, no rank heat, sir; amess in amullium; chlorid cup.

Health, chalce, endnessnessessity! Arrive, likkypuggers, in a poke! The folgor of the frightfools is olympically optimominous; there is bound to be a lovleg day for mirrages in the open; Murnane and Aveling are undertoken to berry that ortchert: provided that. You got to make good that breachsuit, seamer. You going to haulm port houlm, toilermaster. You yet must get up to kill (nonparticular). You still stand by and do as hit (private). While for yous, Jasminia Aruna and all your likers, affinitatively must it be by you elected if Monogynes his is or hers Diander, the tubous, limbersome and nectarial. Owned or [p.614] grazeheifer, ethel or bonding. Mopsus or Gracchus, all your horodities will incessantlament be coming back from the Annone Wishwashwhose, Ormepierre Lodge, Doone of the Drumes, blanches bountifully and nightsend made up, every article lathering leaving several rinsings so as each rinse results with a dapperent rolle, cuffs for meek and chokers for sheek and a kink in the pacts for namby. Forbeer, forbear! For nought that is has bane. In mournenslaund. Themes have thimes and habit reburns. To flame in you. Ardor vigor forders order. Since ancient was our living is in possible to be. Delivered as. Caffirs and culls and onceagain overalls, the fittest surviva lives that blued, iorn and storridge can make them. Whichus all claims. Clean. Whenastcleeps. Close. And the mannormillor clipperclappers. Noxt. Doze.

Fennsense, finnsonse, aworn! Tuck upp those wide shorts. The pink of the busket for sheer give. Peeps. Stand up to hard ware and step into style. If you soil may, puett, guett me prives. For newmanmaun set a marge to the merge of unnotions. Innition wons agame.

What has gone? How it ends?

Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend.

Forget, remember!

Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness? Whyafter what forewhere? A plainplanned liffeyism assemblements Eblania’s conglomerate horde. By dim delty Deva.

Forget!

Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon (the “Mamma Lujah” known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination so that the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy [p.615] of the past, type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance, since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret swayed over the all-too-ghoulish and illyrical and innumantic in our mutter nation, all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it, may be there for you, Cockalooralooraloomenos, when cup, platter and pot come piping hot, as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there’s scribings scrawled on eggs.

Of cause, so! And in effect, as?

Dear. And we go on to Dirtdump. Reverend. May we add majesty? Well, we have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures (thanks ever for it, we humbly pray) and, well, was really so denighted of this lights time. Mucksrats which bring up about uhrweckers they will come to know good. Yon clouds will soon disappear looking forwards at a fine day. The honourable Master Sarmon they should be first born like he was with a twohangled warpon and it was between Williamstown and the Mairrion Ailesbury on the top of the longcar, as merrily we rolled along, we think of him looking at us yet as if to pass away in a cloud. When he woke up in a sweat besidus it was to pardon him, goldylocks, me having an airth, but he daydreamsed we had a lovelyt face for a pulltomine. Back we were by the jerk of a beamstark, backed in paladays last, on the brinks of the wobblish, the man what never put a dramn in the swags but milk from a national cowse. That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave me the keys to dreamland. Sneakers in the grass, keep off! If we were to tick off all that cafflers head, whisperers for his accomodation, the me craws, namely, and their bacon what harmed butter! It’s margarseen oil. Thinthin thinthin. Stringstly is it forbidden by the honorary tenth commendmant to shall not bare full sweetness against a nighboor’s wiles. What those slimes up the cavern door around you, keenin, (the lies is coming out on them frecklefully) had the shames to suggest can we ever? Never! So may the low forget him their trespasses [p.616] against Molloyd O’Reilly, that hugglebeddy fann, now about to get up, the hartiest that Coolock ever! A nought in nought Eirinishmhan, called Ervigsen by his first mate. May all similar douters of our oldhame story have that fancied widming! For a pipe of twist or a slug of Hibernia metal we could let out and, by jings, someone would make a carpus of somebody with the greatest of pleasure by private shootings. And in contravention to the constancy of chemical combinations not enough of all the slatters of him left for Peeter the Picker to make their threi sevelty filfths of a man out of. Good wheat! How delitious for the three Sulvans of Dulkey and what a sellpriceget the two Peris of Monacheena! Sugars of lead for the chloras ashpots! Peace! He possessing from a child of highest valency for our privileged beholdings ever complete hairy of chest, hamps and eyebags in pursuance to salesladies’ affectionate company. His real devotes. Wriggling reptiles, take notice! Whereas we exgust all such sprinkling snigs. They are pestituting the whole time never with standing we simply agree upon the committee of amusance! Or could above bring under same notice for it to be able to be seen.

About that coerogenal hun and his knowing the size of an eggcup. First he was a skulksman at one time and then Cloon’s fired him through guff. Be sage about sausages! Stuttutistics shows with he’s heacups of teatables the old firm’s fatspitters are most eatenly appreciated by metropolonians. While we should like to drag attentions to our Wolkmans Cumsensation Act. The magnets of our midst being foisted upon by a plethorace of parachutes. Did speece permit the bad example of setting before the military to the best of our belief in the earliest wish of the one in mind was the mitigation of the king’s evils. And how he staired up the step after it’s the power of the gait. His giantstand of manunknown. No brad wishy washy wathy wanted neither! Once you are balladproof you are unperceable to haily, icy and missilethroes. Order now before we reach Ruggers’ Rush! As we now must close hoping to Saint Laurans all in the best. Moral. Mrs Stores Humphreys: So you are expecting trouble, Pondups, from the domestic service questioned? Mr Stores Humphreys: Just as [p.617] there is a good in even, Levia, my cheek is a compleet bleenk. Plumb. Meaning: one two four. Finckers. Up the hind hose of hizzars. Whereapon our best again to a hundred and eleven ploose one thousand and one other blessings will now concloose thoose epoostles to your great kindest, well, for all at trouble to took. We are all at home in old Fintona, thank Danis, for ourselfsake, that direst of housebonds, whool wheel be true unto lovesend so long as we has a pockle full of brass. Impossible to remember persons in improbable to forget position places. Who would pellow his head off to conjure up a, well, particularly mean stinker like funn make called Foon MacCrawl brothers, mystery man of the pork martyrs? Force in giddersh! Tomothy and Lorcan, the bucket Toolers, both are Timsons now they’ve changed their characticuls during their blackout. Conan Boyles will pudge the daylives out through him, if they are correctly informed. Music, me ouldstrow, please! We’ll have a brand rehearsal. Fing! One must simply laugh. Fing him aging! Good licks! Well, this ought to weke him to make up. He’ll want all his fury gutmurdherers to redress him. Gilly in the gap. The big bad old sprowly all uttering foon! Has now stuffed last podding. His fooneral will sneak pleace by creeps o’clock toosday. Kingen will commen. Allso brewbeer. Pens picture at Manchem House Horsegardens shown in Morning post as from Boston transcripped. Femelles will be preadaminant as from twentyeight to twelve. To hear that lovelade parson, of case, of a bawl gentlemale, pour forther moracles. Don’t forget! The grand fooneral will now shortly occur. Remember. The remains must be removed before eaght hours shorp. With earnestly conceived hopes. So help us to witness to this day to hand in sleep. From of Mayasdaysed most duteoused.

Well, here’s lettering you erronymously anent other clerical fands allieged herewith. I wisht I wast be that dumb tyke and he’d wish it was me yonther heel. How about it? The sweetest song in the world! Our shape as a juvenile being much admired from the first with native copper locks. Referring to the Married Woman’s Improperty Act a correspondent paints out that the Swees Aubumn vogue is hanging down straith fitting to her [p.618] innocenth eyes. O, felicious coolpose! If all the MacCrawls would only handle virgils like Armsworks, Limited! That’s handsel for gertles! Never mind Micklemans! Chat us instead! The cad with the pope’s wife, Lily Kinsella, who became the wife of Mr Sneakers for her good name in the hands of the kissing solicitor, will now engage in attentions. Just a prinche for tonight! Pale bellies our mild cure, back and streaky ninepace. The thicks off Bully’s Acre was got up by Sully. The Boot lane brigade. And she had a certain medicine brought her in a licenced victualler’s bottle. Shame! Thrice shame! We are advised the waxy is at the present in the Sweeps hospital and that he may never come out! Only look through your leatherbox one day with P.C.Q. about 4.32 or at 8 and 22.5 with the quart of scissions masters and clerk and the bevyhum of Marie Reparatrices for a good allround sympowdhericks purge, full view, to be surprised to see under the grand piano Lily on the sofa (and a lady!) pulling a low and then he’d begin to jump a little bit to find out what goes on when love walks in besides the solicitous bussness by kissing and looking into a mirror.

That we were treated not very grand when the police and everybody is all bowing to us when we go out in all directions on Wanterlond Road with my cubarola glide? And, personably speaking, they can make their beaux to my alce, as Hillary Allen sang to the opernnine knighters. Item, we never were chained to a chair, and, bitem, no widower whother soever followed us about with a fork on Yankskilling Day. Meet a great civilian (proud lives to him!) who is gentle as a mushroom and a very affectable when he always sits forenenst us for his wet while to all whom it may concern Sully is a thug from all he drunk though he is a rattling fine bootmaker in his profession. Would we were herearther to lodge our complaint on sergeant Laraseny in consequence of which in such steps taken his health would be constably broken into potter’s pance which would be the change of his life by a Nollwelshian which has been oxbelled out of crispianity.

Well, our talks are coming to be resumed by more polite conversation with a huntered persent human over the natural bestness [p.619] of pleisure after his good few mugs of humbedumb and shag. While for whoever likes that urogynal pan of cakes one apiece it is thanks, beloved, to Adam, our former first Finnlatter and our grocerest churcher, as per Grippiths’ varuations, for his beautiful crossmess parzel.

Well, we simply like their demb cheeks, the Rathgarries, wagging here about around the rhythms in me amphybed and he being as bothered that he pausably could by the fallth of hampty damp. Certified reformed peoples, we may add to this stage, are proptably saying to quite agreeable deef. Here gives your answer, pigs and scuts! Hence we’ve lived in two worlds. He is another he what stays under the himp of holth. The herewaker of our hamefame is his real namesame who will get himself up and erect, confident and heroic when but, young as of old, for my daily comfreshenall, a wee one woos.

Alma Luvia, Pollabella.

P.S. Soldier Rollo’s sweetheart. And she’s about fetted up now with nonsery reams. And rigs out in regal rooms with the ritzies. Rags! Worns out. But she’s still her deckhuman amber too.

Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have falled on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! Or is it only so mesleems? On your pondered palm. Reclined from cape to pede. With pipe on bowl. Terce for a fiddler, sixt for makmerriers, none for a Cole. Rise up now and aruse! Norvena’s over. I am leafy, your goolden, so you called me, may me life, yea your goolden, silve me solve, exsogerraider! You did so drool. I was so sharm. But there’s a great poet in you too. Stout Stokes would take you offly. So has he as bored me to slump. But am good and rested. Taks to you, toddy, tan ye! Yawhawaw. Helpunto min, helpas vin. Here is your shirt, the day one, come back. The stock, your collar. Also your double brogues. A comforter as well. And here your iverol and everthelest your [p.620] umbr. And stand up tall! Straight. I want to see you looking fine for me. With your brandnew big green belt and all. Blooming in the very lotust and second to nill, Budd! When you’re in the buckly shuit Rosensharonals near did for you. Fiftyseven and three, cosh, with the bulge. Proudpurse Alby with his pooraroon Eireen, they’ll. Pride, comfytousness, enevy! You make me think of a wonderdecker I once. Or somebalt thet sailder, the man megallant, with the bangled ears. Or an earl was he, at Lucan? Or, no, it’s the Iren duke’s I mean. Or somebrey erse from the Dark Countries. Come and let us! We always said we’d. And go abroad. Rathgreany way perhaps. The childher are still fast. There is no school today. Them boys is so contrairy. The Head does be worrying himself. Heel trouble and heal travel. Galliver and Gellover. Unless they changes by mistake. I seen the likes in the twinngling of an aye. Som. So oft. Sim. Time after time. The sehm asnuh. Two bredder as doffered as nors in soun. When one of him sighs or one of him cries ’tis you all over. No peace at all. Maybe it’s those two old crony aunts held them out to the water front. Queer Mrs Quickenough and odd Miss Doddpebble. And when them two has had a good few there isn’t much more dirty clothes to publish. From the Laundersdale Minssions. One chap googling the holyboy’s thingabib and this lad wetting his widdle. You were pleased as Punch, recitating war exploits and pearse orations to them jackeen gapers. But that night after, all you were wanton! Bidding me do this and that and the other. And blowing off to me, hugly Judsys, what wouldn’t you give to have a girl! Your wish was mewill. And, lo, out of a sky! The way I too. But her, you wait. Eager to choose is left to her shade. If she had only more matcher’s wit. Findlings makes runaways, runaways a stray. She’s as merry as the gricks still. ’Twould be sore should ledden sorrow. I’ll wait. And I’ll wait. And then if all goes. What will be is. Is is. But let them. Slops hospodch and the slusky slut too. He’s for thee what she’s for me. Dogging you round cove and haven and teaching me the perts of speech. If you spun your yarns to him on the swishbarque waves I was spelling my yearns to her over cottage cake. We’ll not disturb their sleep- [p.621] ing duties. Let besoms be bosuns. It’s Phoenix, dear. And the flame is, hear! Let’s our joornee saintomichael make it. Since the lausafire has lost and the book of the depth is. Closed. Come! Step out of your shell! Hold up you free fing! Yes. We’ve light enough. I won’t take our laddy’s lampern. For them four old windbags of Gustsofairy to be blowing at. Nor you your rucksunck. To bring all the dannymans out after you on the hike. Send Arctur guiddus! Isma! Sft! It is the softest morning that ever I can ever remember me. But she won’t rain showerly, our Ilma. Yet. Until it’s the time. And me and you have made our. The sons of bursters won in the games. Still I’ll take me owld Finvara for my shawlders. The trout will be so fine at brookfisht. With a taste of roly polony from Blugpuddels after. To bring out the tang of the tay. Is’t you fain for a roost brood? Oaxmealturn, all out of the woolpalls! And then all the chippy young cuppinjars cluttering round us, clottering for their creams. Crying, me, grownup sister! Are me not truly? Lst! Only but, theres a but, you must buy me a fine new girdle too, nolly. When next you go to Market Norwall. They’re all saying I need it since the one from Isaacsen’s slooped its line. Mrknrk? Fy arthou! Come! Give me your great bearspaw, padder avilky, fol a miny tiny. Dola. Mineninecyhandsy, in the languo of flows. That’s Jorgen Jargonsen. But you understood, nodst? I always know by your brights and shades. Reach down. A lil mo. So. Draw back your glave. Hot and hairy, hugon, is your hand! Here’s where the falskin begins. Smoos as an infams. One time you told you’d been burnt in ice. And one time it was chemicalled after you taking a lifeness. Maybe that’s why you hold your hodd as if. And people thinks you missed the scaffold. Of fell design. I’ll close me eyes. So not to see. Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The child we all love to place our hope in for ever. All men has done something. Be the time they’ve come to the weight of old fletch. We’ll lave it. So. We will take our walk before in the timpul they ring the earthly bells. In the church by the hearseyard. Pax Goodmens will. Or the birds start their treestirm shindy. Look, there are yours off, high on high! And [p.622] cooshes, sweet good luck they’re cawing you, Coole! You see, they’re as white as the riven snae. For us. Next peaters poll you will be elicted or I’m not your elicitous bribe. The Kinsella woman’s man will never reduce me. A MacGarath O’Cullagh O’Muirk MacFewney sookadoodling and sweepacheeping round the lodge of Fjorn na Galla of the Trumpets! It’s like potting the po to shambe on the dresser or tamming Uncle Tim’s Caubeen on to the brows of a Viker Eagle. Not such big strides, huddy foddy! You’ll crush me antilopes I saved so long for. They’re Penisole’s. And the two goodiest shoeshoes. It is hardly a Knut’s mile or seven, possumbotts. It is very good for the health of a morning. With Buahbuah. A gentle motion all around. As leisure paces. And the helpyourselftoastrool cure’s easy. It seems so long since, ages since. As if you had been long far away. Afartodays, afeartonights, and me as with you in thadark. You will tell me some time if I can believe its all. You know where I am bringing you? You remember? When I ran berrying after hucks and haws. With you drawing out great aims to hazel me from the hummock with your sling. Our cries. I could lead you there and I still by you in bed. Les go dutc to Danegreven, nos? Not a soul but ourselves. Time? We have loads on our hangs. Till Gilligan and Halligan call again to hooligan. And the rest of the guns. Sullygan eight, from left to right. Olobobo, ye foxy theagues! The moskors thought to ball you out. Or the Wald Unicorns Master, Bugley Captain, from the Naul, drawls up by the door with the Honourable Whilp and the Reverend Poynter and the two Lady Pagets of Tallyhaugh, Ballyhuntus, in their riddletight raiding hats for to lift a hereshealth to their robost, the Stag, evers the Carlton hart. And you needn’t host out with your duck and your duty, capapole, while they reach him the glass he never starts to finish. Clap this wis on your poll and stick this in your ear, wiggly! Beauties don’t answer and the rich never pays. If you were the enlarged they’d hue in cry you, Heathtown, Harbourstown, Snowtown, Four Knocks, Flemingtown, Bodingtown to the Ford of Fyne on Delvin. How they housed to house you after the Platonic garlens! And all because, [p.623] loosed in her reflexes, she seem she seen Ericoricori coricome huntsome with his three poach dogs aleashing him. But you came safe through. Enough of that horner corner! And old mutthergoosip! We might call on the Old Lord, what do you say? There’s something tells me. He is a fine sport. Like the score and a moighty went before him. And a proper old promnentory. His door always open. For a newera’s day. Much as your own is. You invoiced him last Eatster so he ought to give us hockockles and everything. Remember to take off your white hat, ech? When we come in the presence. And say hoothoothoo, ithmuthisthy! His is house of laws. And I’ll drop my graciast kertssey too. If the Ming Tung no go bo to me homage me hamage kow bow tow to the Mong Tang. Ceremonialness to stand lowest place be! Saying: What’ll you take to link to light a pike on porpoise, plaise? He might knight you an Armor elsor daub you the first cheap magyerstrape. Remember Bomthomanew vim vam vom Hungerig. Hoteform, chain and epolettes, botherbumbose. And I’ll be your aural eyeness. But we vain. Plain fancies. It’s in the castles air. My currant bread’s full of sillymottocraft. Aloof is anoof. We can take or leave. He’s reading his ruffs. You’ll know our way from there surely. Flura’s way. Where once we led so many car couples have follied since. Clatchka! Giving Shaughnessy’s mare the hillymount of her life. With her strulldeburgghers! Hnmn hnmn! The rollcky road adondering. We can sit us down on the heathery benn, me on you, in quolm unconsciounce. To scand the arising. Out from Drumleek. It was there Evora told me I had best. If I ever. When the moon of mourning is set and gone. Over Glinaduna. Lonu nula. Ourselves, oursouls alone. At the site of salvocean. And watch would the letter you’re wanting be coming may be. And cast ashore. That I prays for be mains of me draims. Scratching it and patching at with a prompt from a primer. And what scrips of nutsnolleges I pecked up me meself. Every letter is a hard but yours sure is the hardest crux ever. Hack an axe, hook an oxe, hath an an, heth hith ences. But once done, dealt and delivered, tattat, you’re on the map. Rased on traumscrapt from Maston, Boss. After rounding his [p.624] world of ancient days. Carried in a caddy or screwed and corked. On his mugisstosst surface. With a bob, bob, bottledby. Blob. When the waves give up yours the soil may for me. Sometime then, somewhere there, I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard Thy voice, ruddery dunner, so loud that none but, and left it to lie till a kissmiss coming. So content me now. Lss. Unbuild and be buildn our bankaloan cottage there and we’ll cohabit respectable. The Gowans, ser, for Medem, me. With acute bubel runtoer for to pippup and gopeep where the sterres be. Just to see would we hear how Jove and the peers talk. Amid the soleness. Tilltop, bigmaster! Scale the summit! You’re not so giddy any more. All your graundplotting and the little it brought! Humps, when you hised us and dumps, when you doused us! But sarra one of me cares a brambling ram, pomp porteryark! On limpidy marge I’ve made me hoom. Park and a pub for me. Only don’t start your stunts of Donachie’s yeards agoad again. I could guessp to her name who tuckt you that one, tufnut! Bold bet backwords. For the loves of sinfintins! Before the naked universe. And the bailby pleasemarm rincing his eye! One of these fine days, lewdy culler, you must redoform again. Blessed shield Martin! Softly so. I am so exquisitely pleased about the loveleavest dress I have. You will always call me Leafiest, won’t you, dowling? Wordherfhull Ohldhbhoy! And you won’t urbjunk to me parafume, oiled of kolooney, with a spot of marashy. Sm! It’s Alpine Smile from Yesthers late Yhesters. I’m in everywince nasturtls. Even in Houlth’s nose. Medeurscodeignus! Astale of astoun. Grand owld marauder! If I knew who you are! When that hark from the air said it was Captain Finsen makes cumhulments and was mayit pressing for his suit I said are you there here’s nobody here only me. But I near fell off the pile of samples. As if your tinger winged ting to me hear. Is that right what your brothermilk in Bray bes telling the district you were bragged up by Brostal because your parents would be always tumbling into his foulplace and losing her pentacosts after drinking their pledges? Howsomendeavour, you done me fine! The only man was ever known could eat the crushts of lobsters. Our native [p.625] night when you twicetook me for some Marienne Sherry and then your Jermyn cousin who signs hers with exes and the beardwig I found in your Clarksome bag. Pharaops you’ll play you’re the king of Aeships. You certainly make the most royal of noises. I will tell you all sorts of makeup things, strangerous. And show you to every simple storyplace we pass. Cadmillersfolly, Bellevenue, Wellcrom, Quid Superabit, villities valleties. Change the plates for the next course of murphies! Spendlove’s still there and the canon going strong and so is Claffey’s habits endurtaking and our parish pomp’s a great warrent. But you’ll have to ask that same four that named them is always snugging in your barsalooner, saying they’re the best relicts of Conal O’Daniel and writing Finglas since the Flood. That’ll be some kingly work in progress. But it’s by this route he’ll come some morrow. And I can signal you all flint and fern are rasstling as we go by. And you’ll sing thumb a bit and then wise your selmon on it. It is all so often and still the same to me. Snf? Only turf, wick dear! Clane turf. You’ve never forgodden batt on tarf, have you, at broin burroow, what? Mch? Why, them’s the muchrooms, come up during the night. Look, agres of roofs in parshes. Dom on dam, dim in dym. And a capital part for olympics to ply at. Steadyon, Cooloosus! Mind your stride or you’ll knock. While I’m dodging the dustbins. Look what I found! A lintil pea. And look at here! This cara weeseed. Pretty mites, my sweetthings, was they poorloves abandoned by wholawidey world? Neighboulotts for newtown. The Eblanamagna you behazyheld loomening up out of the dumblynass. But the still sama sitta. I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again. Why I’m all these years within years in soffran, allbeleaved. To hide away the tear, the parted. It’s thinking of all. The brave that gave their. The fair that wore. All them that’s gunne. I’ll begin again in a jiffey. The nik of a nad. How glad you’ll be I waked you! My! How well you’ll feel! For ever after. First we turn by the vagurin here and then it’s gooder. So side by side, turn agate, weddingtown, laud men of Londub! I only hope whole the heavens sees [p.626] us. For I feel I could near to faint away. Into the deeps. Annamores leep. Let me lean, just a lea, if you le, bowldstrong bigtider. Allgearls is wea. At times. So. While you’re adamant evar. Wrhps, that wind as if out of norewere! As on the night of the Apophanypes. Jumpst shootst throbbst into me mouth like a bogue and arrohs! Ludegude of the Lashlanns, how he whips me cheeks! Sea, sea! Here, weir, reach, island, bridge. Where you meet I. The day. Remember! Why there that moment and us two only? I was but teen, a tiler’s dot. The swankysuits was boosting always, sure him, he was like to me fad. But the swaggerest swell off Shackvulle Strutt. And the fiercest freaky ever followed a pining child round the sluppery table with a forkful of fat. But a king of whistlers. Scieoula! When he’d prop me atlas against his goose and light our two candles for our singers duohs on the sewingmachine. I’m sure he squirted juice in his eyes to make them flash for flightening me. Still and all he was awful fond to me. Who’ll search for Find Me Colours now on the hillydroops of Vikloefells? But I read in Tobecontinued’s tale that while blubles blows there’ll still be sealskers. There’ll be others but non so for me. Yed he never knew we seen us before. Night after night. So that I longed to go to. And still with all. One time you’d stand fornenst me, fairly laughing, in your bark and tan billows of branches for to fan me coolly. And I’d lie as quiet as a moss. And one time you’d rush upon me, darkly roaring, like a great black shadow with a sheeny stare to perce me rawly. And I’d frozen up and pray for thawe. Three times in all. I was the pet of everyone then. A princeable girl. And you were the pantymammy’s Vulking Corsergoth. The invision of Indelond. And, by Thorror, you looked it! My lips went livid for from the joy of fear. Like almost now. How? How you said how you’d give me the keys of me heart. And we’d be married till delth to uspart. And though dev do espart. O mine! Only, no, now it’s me who’s got to give. As duv herself div. Inn this linn. And can it be it’s nnow fforvell? Illas! I wisht I had better glances to peer to you through this baylight’s growing. But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I’m getting mixed. Brightening [p.627] up and tightening down. Yes, you’re changing, sonhusband, and you’re turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. Diveltaking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger’s there. Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she’ll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can seen meself among them, allaniuvia pulchrabelled. How she was handsome, the wild Amazia, when she would seize to my other breast! And what is she weird, haughty Niluna, that she will snatch from my ownest hair! For ’tis they are the stormies. Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free. Auravoles, they says, never heed of your name! But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s [p.628] sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Paris,
1922-1939.

 ® 

Footnotes for II.2

[p.260]

 1   Rawmeash, quoshe with her girlic teangue. If old Herod with the Cormwell’s eczema was to go for me like he does Snuffler whatever about his blue canaries I’d do nine months for his beaver beard.

 2   Mater Mary Mercerycordial of the Dripping Nipples, milk’s a queer arrangement.

 3   Real life behind the floodlights as shown by the best exponents of a royal divorce.

[p.261]

 1   When we play dress grownup at alla ludo poker you’ll be happnessised to feel how fetching I can look in clingarounds.

 2   Kellywick, Longfellow’s Lodgings, House of Comments III, Cake Walk, Amusing Avenue, Salt Hill, Co. Mahogany, Izalond, Terra Firma.

 3   Groupname for grapejuice.

 4   Bhing, said her burglar’s head, soto poce.

[p.262]

 1   Yussive smirte and ye mermon answerth from his beelyingplace below the tightmark, Gotahelv!

 2   O Evol, kool in the salg and ees how Dozi pits what a drows er.

 3   A goodrid croven in a tynwalled tub.

 4   Apis amat aram. Luna legit librum. Pulla petit pascua.

 5   And after dinn to shoot the shades.

 6   Says blistered Mary Achinhead to beautifed Tummy Tullbutt.

 7   Begge. To go to Begge. To go to Begge and to be sure to reminder Begge. Goodbeg, buggey Begge.

[p.263]

 1   Huntler and Pumar’s animal alphabites, the first in the world from aab to zoo.

 2   We dont hear the booming cursowarries, we wont fear the fletches of fightning, we float the meditarenias and come bask to the isle we love in spice. Punt.

 3   And this once golden bee a cimadoro.

 4   And he was a gay Lutharius anyway, Sinobiled. You can tell by their extraordinary clothes.

[p.264]

 1   Startnaked and bonedstiff. We vivvy soddy. All be dood.

 2   When you dreamt that you’d wealth in marble arch do you ever think of pool beg slowe.

 3   Porphyrious Olbion, redcoatliar, we were always wholly rose marines on our side every time.

[p.265]

 1   Now a muss wash the little face.

 2   A viking vernacular expression still used in the Summerhill district for a jerryhatted man of forty who puts two fingers into his boiling soupplate and licks them in turn to find out if there is enough mushroom catsup in the mutton broth.

 3   H’ dk’ fs’ h’p’y.

 4   Googlaa pluplu.

 5   Tomley. The grown man. A butcher szewched him the bloughs and braches. I’m chory to see P. Shuter.

[p.266]

 1   I believe in Dublin and the Sultan of Turkey.

 2   I have heard this word used by Martin Halpin, an old gardener from the Glens of Antrim who used to do odd jobs for my godfather, the Rev. B.B. Brophy of Swords.

 3   Ravens may rive so can dove deelish.

 4   A question of pull.

[p.267]

 1   For Rose Point see Inishmacsaint.

 2   Mannequins’ Pose.

 3   Their holy presumption and hers sinfly desprit.

 4   Anama anamaba anamabapa.

 5   Only for he’s fathering law I could skewer that old one and slosh her out many’s the time but I thinks more of my pottles and ketts.

 6   All abunk for Tarararat! Look slipper, soppyhat, we’ve a doss in the manger.

[p.268]

 1   One must sell it to some one, the sacred name of love.

 2   Making it up as we goes along.

 3   The law of the jungerl.

 4   Let me blush to think of all those halfwayhoist pullovers.

 5   I’d like his pink’s cheek.

 6   Frech devil in red hairing! So that’s why you ran away to sea, Mrs Lappy. Leap me, Locklaun, for you have sensed!

 7   A washable lovable floatable doll.

[p.269]

 1   With her poodle feinting to be let off and feeling dead in herself. Is love worse living?

 2   If she can’t follow suit Renée goes to the pack.

 3   Improper frictions is maledictions and mens uration makes me mad.

 4   Llong and Shortts Primer of Black and White Wenchcraft.

[p.270]

 1   The gaggles all out.

 2   He’s just bug nuts on white mate he hasn’t the teath nor the grits to choo and that’s what’s wrong with Lang Wang Wurm, old worbbling goesbelly.

 3   Dear and I trust in all frivolity I may be pardoned for trespassing but I think I may add hell.

 4   He is my all menkind of every desception.

[p.271]

 1   All his teeths back to the front, then the moon and then the moon with a hole behind it.

 2   Skip one, flop fore, jennies in the cabbage store.

 3   None of your cumpohlstery English here!

 4   Understudy my understandings, Sostituda, and meek thine complinement, gymnufleshed.

 5   Tho’ I have one just like that to home, deadleaf brown with quicksilver appliques, would whollymost applissiate a nice shiny sleekysilk out of that slippering snake charmeuse.

[p.272]

 1   What’s that, ma’am? says I.

 2   As you say yourself.

 3   That’s the lethemuse but it washes off.

 4   Where he fought the shessock of his stimmstammer and we caught the pepettes of our lovelives.

[p.273]

 1   Shake eternity and lick creation.

 2   I’m blest if I can see.

 3   Hoppity Huhneye, hoosh the hen. I like cluckers, you like nuts (wink).

 4   Sweet, medium and dry like altar wine.

 5   Who’ll buy me penny babies?

 6   Well, Maggy, I got your castoff devils all right and fits lovely. And am vaguely graceful. Maggy thanks.

 7   My six is no secret, sir, she said.

 8   Yes, there, Tad, thanks, give, from, tathair, look at that now.

[p.274]

 1   Go up quick, stay so long, come down slow!

 2   If I gnows me gneesgnobs the both of him is gnatives of Genuas.

 3   A glass of peel and pip for Mr Potter of Texas, please.

 4   All the world loves a big gleaming jelly.

[p.275]

 1   A pengeneepy for your warcheekeepy.

 2   My globe goes gaddy at geography giggle pending which time I was looking for my shoe all through Arabia.

 3   It must be some bugbear in the gender especially when old which they all soon get to look.

 4   After me looking up the plan in Humphrey’s Justice of the Piece it said to see preseeding chaps.

 5   O boyjones and hairyoddities! Only noane told missus of her massas behaving she would laugh that flat that after that she had sanked down on her fat arks they would shaik all to sheeks.

 6   Traduced into jinglish janglage for the nusances of dolphins born.

[p.276]

 1   He gives me pulpititions with his Castlecowards never in these twowsers and ever in those twawsers and then babeteasing us out of our hoydenname.

 2   My goldfashioned bother near drave me roven mad and I dyeing to keep my linefree face like readymaid maryangs for jollycomes smashing Holmes.

 3   What I would like is a jade louistone to go with the moon’s increscent.

 4   Parley vows the Askinwhose? I do, Ida. And how to call the cattle black. Moopetsi meepotsi.

 5   I was so snug off in my apholster’s creedle but at long leash I’ll stretch more capritious in his dapplepied bed.

 6   Pipette. I can almost feed their sweetness at my lisplips.

 7   A liss in hunterland.

[p.277]

 1   I wonder if I put the old buzzerd one night to suckle in Millickmaam’s honey like they use to emballem some of the special popes with a book in his hand and his mouth open.

 2   And a ripping rude rape in his lucreasious togery.

 3   Will ye nought would wet your weapons, warriors bard?

 4   Roe, Williams, Bewey, Greene, Gorham, McEndicoth and Vyler, the lays of ancient homes.

 5   The stanidsglass effect, you could sugerly swear buttermilt would not melt down his dripping ducks.

 6   Thickathigh and Thinathews with sant their dam.

 7   Oh, could we do with this waddled of ours like that redbanked profanian with his bakset of yosters.

[p.278]

 1   Gosem pher, gezumpher, greeze a jarry grim felon! Good bloke him!

 2   And if they was setting on your stool as hard as my was she could beth her bothom dolours he’d have a culious impressiom on the diminitive that chafes our ends.

 3   When I’am Enastella and am taken for Essastessa I’ll do that droop on the pohlmann’s piano.

 4   Heavenly twinges, if it’s one of his I’ll fearly feint as swoon as he enter- rooms.

 5   To be slipped on, to be slept by, to be conned to, to be kept up. And when you’re done push the chain.

 6   With her modesties office.

 7   Strutting as proud as a great turquin weggin that cuckhold on his Eddems and Clay’s hat.

[p.279]

 1   Come, smooth of my slate, to the beat of my blosh! With all these gelded ewes jilting about and the thrills and ills of laylock blossoms three’s so much more plants than chants for cecilies that I was thinking fairly killing times of putting an end to myself and my malody, when I remembered all your pupil- teacher’s erringnesses in perfection class. You sh’undn’t write you can’t if you w’udn’t pass for undevelopmented. This is the propper way to say that, Sr. If it’s me chews to swallow all you saidn’t you can eat my words for it as sure as there’s a key in my kiss. Quick erit faciofacey. When we will conjugate together toloseher tomaster tomiss while morrow fans amare hour, verbe de vie and verve to vie, with love ay loved have I on my back spine and does for ever. Your are me severe? Then rue. My intended, Jr, who I’m throne away on, (here he inst, my lifstack, a newfolly likon) when I slip through my pettigo I’ll get my decree and take seidens when I’m not ploughed first by some Rolando the Lasso, and flaunt on the flimsyfilmsies for to grig my collage juniorees who, though they flush fuchsia, are they octette and viginity in my shade but always my figurants. They may be yea of my year but they’re nary nay of my day. Wait till spring has sprung in spickness and prigs beg in to pry they’ll be plentyprime of housepets to pimp and pamper my. Impending mar- riage. Nature tells everybody about but I learned all the runes of the gamest game ever from my old nourse Asa. A most adventuring trot is her and she vicking well knowed them all heartswise and fourwords. How Olive d’Oyly and Winnie Carr, bejupers, they reized the dressing of a salandmon and how a peeper coster and a salt sailor med a mustied poet atwaimen. It most have bean Mad Mullans planted him. Bina de Bisse and Trestrine von Terrefin. Sago sound, rite go round, kill kackle, kook kettle and (remember all should I forget to) bolt the thor. Auden. Wasn’t it just divining that dog of a dag in Skokholme as I sat astrid uppum their Drewitt’s altar, as cooledas as cul- cumbre, slapping my straights till the sloping ruins, postillion, postallion, a swinge a swank, with you offering me clouts of illscents and them horners stagstruck on the leasward! Don’t be of red, you blanching mench! This isabella I’m on knows the ruelles of the rut and she don’t fear andy mandy. So sing loud, sweet cheeriot, like anegreon in heaven! The good fother with the twingling in his eye will always have cakes in his pocket to bethroat us with for our allmichael good. Amum. Amum. And Amum again. For tough troth is stronger than fortuitous fiction and it’s the surplice money, oh my young friend and ah me sweet creature, what buys the bed while wits borrows the clothes.

[p.281]

 1   The nasal foss of our natal folkfarthers so so much now for Valsinggiddyrex and his grand arks day triump.

 2   Translout that gaswind into turfish, Teague, that’s a good bog and you, Thady, poliss it off, there’s a nateswipe, on to your blottom pulper.

 3   You daredevil donnelly, I love your piercing lots of lies and your flashy foreign mail so here’s my cowrie card, I dalgo, with all my exes, wise and sad.

 4   All this Mitchells is a niggar for spending and I will go to the length of seeing that one day Big Mig will be nickleless himself.

[p.282]

 1   While I’ll wind the wildwoods’ bluckbells among my window’s weeds.

 2   Lawdy Dawdy Simpers.

 3   But where, O where, is me lickle dig done?

 4   That’s his whisper waltz I like from Pigott’s with that Lancydancy step. Stop.

[p.283]

 1   Twelve buttles man, twentyeight bows of curls, forty bonnets woman and ever youthfully yours makes alleven add the hundred.

 2   Gamester Damester in the road to Rouen he grows more like his deed every die.

 3   Slash-the-Pill lifts the pellet. Run, Phoenix, run!

[p.284]

 1   Dideney, Dadeney, Dudeney, O, I’d know that putch on your poll.

 2   That is tottinghim in his boots.

 3   Come all ye hapney coachers and support the richview press.

 4   Braham Baruch he married his cook to Massach McKraw her uncle-in-law who wedded his widow to Hjalmar Kjaer who adapted his daughter to Braham the Bear. V for wadlock, P for shift, H for Lona the Konkubine.

 5   A gee is just a jay on the jaunts cowsway.

[p.285]

 1    Talking about trilbits.

 2     Barneycorrall, a precedent for the prodection of curiosity from children.

 3     A pfurty pscore of ruderic rossies haremhorde for his divelsion.

 4     Look at your mad father on his boneshaker fraywhaling round Myriom square.

 5    Try Asia for the assphalt body with the concreke soul and the forequarters of the moon behinding out of his phase.

 6   Tomatoes malmalaid with De Quinceys salade can be tastily served with Indiana Blues on the violens.

[p.286]

 1   As Rhombulus and Rhebus went building rhomes one day.

 2   The trouveller.

 3   Of the disorded visage.

 4   Singlebarrelled names for doubleparalleled twixtytwins.

 5   Like pudging a spoon fist of sugans into a sotspot of choucolout.

[p.287]

 1   Will you walk into my wavetrap? said the spiter to the shy.

 2   If we each could always do all we ever did.

 3   Dope in Canorian words we’ve made. Spish from the Doc.

 4   Basqueesh, Finnican, Hungulash and Old Teangtaggle, the only pure way to work a curse.

[p.288]

 1   An ounceworth of onions for a pennyawealth of sobs.

 2   Who brought us into the yellow world!

 3   Because it’s run on the mountain and river system.

 4   When all them allied sloopers was ventitillated in their poppos and, sliding down by creek and veek, stole snaking out to sea.

 5   They were plumped and plumed and jerried and citizens and racers, and cinnamondhued.

 6   Creeping Crawleys petery parley, banished to his native Ireland from erring under Ryan.

 7   Had our retrospectable fearfurther gatch mutchtatches?

[p.289]

 1   That is to sight, when cleared of factions, vulgure and decimating.

 2   They just spirits a body away.

 3   Patatapadatback.

 4   Dump her (the missuse).

 5   Fox him! The leggy colt!

 6   Do he not know that walleds had wars. Harring man, is neow king. This is modeln times.

[p.290]

 1   Muckross Abbey with the creepers taken off.

 2   Joke and Jilt will have their tilt.

 3   Old Mamalujorum and Rawrogerum.

 4   Why have these puerile blonds those large flexible ears?

 5   Pomeroy Roche of Portobello, or the Wreck of the Ragamuffin.

 6   No wonder Miss Dotsh took to veils and she descended from that obloquohy.

 7   The bookley with the rusin’s hat is Patomkin but I’m blowed if I knowed who the slave is doing behind the curtain.

[p.291]

 1   O hce! O hce!

 2   Six and seven the League.

 3   It’s all round me hat I’ll wear a drooping dido.

 4   Have you ever thought of a hitching your stern and being ourdeaned, Mester Bootenfly, here’s me and Myrtle is twinkling to know.

 5   To show they caught preferment.

 6   See the freeman’s cuticatura by Fennella.

 7   Just one big booty’s pot.

 8   Charles de Simples had an infirmierity complexe before he died a natural death.

[p.292]

 1   Where Buickly of the Glass and Bellows pumped the Rudge engineral.

 2   Matter of Brettaine and brut fierce.

 3   Bussmullah, cried Lord Wolsley, how me Aunty Mag’ll row !

[p.293]

 1   Draumcondra’s Dreamcountry where the betterlies blow.

 2   O, Laughing Sally, are we going to be toadhauntered by that old Pantifox Sir Somebody Something, Burtt, for the rest of our secret stripture?

[p.294]

 1   Ex jup pep off Carpenger Strate. The kids’ and dolls’ home. Makeacake- ache.

 2   A vagrant need is a flagrant weed.

 3   Grand for blowing off steam when you walk up in the morning.

 4   At the foot of Bagnabun Banbasday was lost on one.

 5   We’re all found of our anmal matter.

[p.295]

 1   Sewing up the beillybursts in their buckskin shiorts for big Kapitayn Killykook and the Jukes of Kelleiney.

 2   Say where! A timbrelfill of twinkletinkle.

[p.296]

 1   Parsee ffrench for the upholdsterer would be delightered.

 2   I’ll pass out if the screw spliss his strut.

 3   Thargam then goeligum? If you sink I can, swimford. Suksumkale!

 4   Hasitatense?

 5   The impudence of that in girl’s things!

[p.297]

 1   The chape of Doña Speranza of the Nacion.

 2   Ugol egal ogle. Mi vidim Mi.

 3   It is, it is Sangannon‹s dream.

 4   And all meinkind.

 5   Whangpoos the paddle and whiss whee whoo.

[p.298]

 1   I enjoy as good as anyone.

 2   Neither a soul to be saved nor a body to be kicked.

 3   The boast of the town.

[p.299]

 1   Hen’s bens, are we soddy we missiled her?

 2   I call that a scumhead.

 3   Pure chingchong idiotism with any way words all in one soluble. Gee each owe tea eye smells fish. That‹s U.

 4   The Doodles family, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Hoodle doodle, fam.?

[p.300]

 1   Picking on Nickagain, Pikey Mikey?

 2   Early morning, sir Dav Stephens, said the First Gentleman in youreups.

 3   Bag bag blockcheap, have you any will?

 4   What a lubberly whide elephant for the men-in-the straits!

[p.301]

 1   And she had to seek a pond’s apeace to salve her suiterkins. Sued!

 2   Excuse theyre christianbrothers irish!

 3   When she tripped against the briery bush he profused her allover with curtsey flowers.

 4   A nastilow disigraible game.

 5   Dear old Erosmas. Very glad you are going to Penmark. Write to the corner. Grunny Grant.

[p.302]

 1   I loved to see the Macbeths Jerseys knacking spots of the Plumpduffs Pants.

 2   Lifp year fends you all and moe, fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow, fweet willings and forget-uf-knots.

 3   Gag his tubes yourself.

[p.303]

 1   He, angel that I thought him, and he not aebel to speel eelyotripes., Mr Tellibly Divilcult!

 2   When the dander rattles how the peacocks prance!

 3   The Brownes de Browne - Browne of Castlehacknolan.

[p.304]

 1   A byebye bingbang boys! See you Nutcracker Sunday!

 2   Chinchin Childaman! Chapchopchap!

 3   Wipe your glosses with what you know.

 4   If I’d more in the cups that peeves thee you could cracksmith your rows tureens.

 5   Alls Sings and Alls Howls.

[p.305]

 1   From three shellings. A bluedye sacrifice.

 2   Not Kilty. But the manajar was. He! He! Ho! Ho! Ho!

 3   Giglamps, Soapy Geyser, The Smell and Gory Mac Gusty.

[p.306]

 1   The divvy wants that babbling brook. Dear Auntie Emma Emma Eates.

 2   Strike the day off, the nightcap’s on nigh. Goney, goney gone!

 3   R.C., disengaged, good character, would help, no salary.

 4   Where Lily is a Lady found the nettle rash.

 5   Bubabipibambuli, I can do as I like with what’s me own. Nyamnyam.

 6   Able seaman’s caution.

 7   Rarely equal and distinct in all things.

[p.307]

 1   Jests and the Beastalk with a little rude hiding rod.

 2   Wherry like the whaled prophet in a spookeerie.

 3   What sins is pim money sans Paris?

 4   I’ve lost the place, where was I?

 5   Something happened that time I was asleep, torn letters or was there snow?

 6   Mich for his pain, Nick in his past.

 7   He has toglieresti in brodo all over his agrammatical parts of face and as for that hippofoxphiz, unlucky number, late for the christening!

 8   Eh, Monsieur? Où, Monsieur? Eu, Monsieur? Nenni No, Monsieur!

 9   Ere we hit the hay, brothers, let’s have that response to prayer!

[p.308]

 1   Kish is for anticheirst, and the free of my hand to him!

 2   And gags for skool, and crossbuns and whopes he’ll enjoyimsolff over our drawings on the line!

 ® 

P O E M S

c o n t e n t s — p o e m s

Ecce Puer

youthful poems

Et Tu, Healy

O fons Bandusiae

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

I only ask you to give me your fair hands

La scintille de l’allumette

A voice that sings

Scalding tears shall not avail,

Yea, for this love of mine

We will leave the village behind,

Gladly above,

After the tribulation of dark strife,

Told sublimely in the language

Love that I can give you, lady

Wind thine arms round me, woman of sorcery,

Where none murmureth,

Lord, thou knowest my misery,

Thunders and sweeps along

Though there is no resurrection from the past,

And I have sat amid the turbulent crowd,

Gorse-flower makes but sorry dining,

That I am feeble, that my feet

The grieving soul. But no grief is thine

Let us fling to the winds all moping and madness,

Hands that soothe my burning eyes

Now a whisper … now a gale

O, queen, do on thy cloak

‘Requiem eternam dona ei, Domine’;

Of thy dark life, without a love, without a friend,

I intone the high anthem,

Some are comely and some are sour,

Flower to flower knits

In the soft nightfall

Discarded, broken in two.

And orient banners they outfling

poems from the chamber music cycle

Alas, how sad the lover’s lot

O, it is cold and still—alas!

She is at peace where she is sleeping,

I said: I will go down to where

Though we are leaving youth behind

Come out to where the youth is met

The Holy Office

Gas from a Burner

occasional poems

G. O’Donnell

There was an old lady named Gregory

There was a young priest named Delaney

There is a weird poet called Russell

A holy Hegelian Kettle

John Eglinton, my Jo, John,

Have you heard of the admiral, Togo,

There once was a Celtic librarian

Dear, I am asking a favour

O, there are two brothers, the Fays

The Sorrow of Love

C’era una volta, una bella bambina

The flower I gave rejected lies

There is a young gallant named Sax

There’s a monarch who knows no repose

Lament for the Yeomen

There’s a donor of lavish largesse

There is a clean climber called Sykes

There once was a lounger named Stephen

Now let awhile my messmates be

There once was an author named Wells

Solomon

D. L. G.

A Goldschmidt swam in a Kriegsverein

Dooleysprudence

There’s an anthropoid consul called Bennett

New Tipperary

To Budgeon, raughty tinker

A bard once in lakelapt Sirmione

The Right Heart in the Wrong Place

The Right Man in the Wrong Place

O, Mr Poe

Bis Dat Qui Cito Dat

And I shall have no peace …

Who is Sylvia, what is she

The press and the public misled me

Jimmy Joyce, Jimmy Joyce, where have you been

Fréderic’s Duck

I never thought a fountain pen

Rosy Brook he bought a book

I saw at Miss Beach’s when midday was shining

Bran! Bran! the baker’s ban!

P. J. T.

Little Miss Moschos

Post Ulixem Scriptum

The clinic was a patched one

Is it dreadfully necessary

Rouen is the rainiest place getting

There’s a coughmixture scopolamine

Troppa Grazia, Sant’ Antonio!

For he’s a jolly queer fellow

Scheveningen, 1927

Pour Ulysse IX

Crossing to the Coast

Hue’s Hue? or Dalton’s Dilemma

Buried Alive

Father O’Ford

Buy a book in brown paper

To Mrs H. G. who complained that her visitors kept late hours

Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse

Stephen’s Green

As I was going to Joyce Saint James’

Pour la Rime Seulement

A Portrait of the Artist as an Ancient Mariner

Pennipomes Twoguineaseach

There’s a genial young poetriarch Euge

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty

Epilogue to Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’

Goodbye, Zurich, I must leave you

Le bon repos

Aiutami dunque, O Musa, …

Come-all-ye

There’s a maevusmarked maggot called Murphy

 ® 

[The texts follow Poems and Shorter Writings, Faber & Faber, London 1991, Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson, eds.; except “And orient banners they outfling” and “Little Miss Moschos”: Poems and Exiles, Penguin Books, 1992, Edited with an introduction and notes by J. C. C. Mays.]

Ecce Puer

Of the dark past

A child is born.

With joy and grief

My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle

The living lies.

May love and mercy

Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed

On the glass;

The world that was not

Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:

An old man gone.

O, father forsaken,

Forgive your son!

[February 1932]

 ® 

Et Tu, Healy

My cot alas that dear old shady home

Where oft in youthful sport I played

Upon thy verdant grassy fields all day

Or lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade.

– – – – –

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time

Where the rude din of this … century

Can trouble him no more.

[1891]

 ® 

O fons Bandusiae

Brighter than glass Bandusian spring

For mellow wine and flowers meet,

The morrow thee a kid shall bring

Boding of rivalry and sweet

Love in his swelling horns. In vain

He, wanton offspring, deep shall stain

Thy clear cold streams with crimson rain.

The raging dog star’s season thou,

Still safe from in the heat of day,

When oxen weary of the plough

Yieldst thankful cool for herds that stray.

Be of the noble founts! I sing

The oak tree o’er thine echoing

Crags, thy waters murmuring.

[translated from Horace: Odes III 13; 1898]

 ® 

Are you not weary of ardent ways,

Lure of the fallen seraphim?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze

And you have had your will of him.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise

Goes up from ocean rim to rim.

Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays

Rise in one eucharistic hymn.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise

The chalice flowing to the brim,

Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze

With languorous look and lavish limb!

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

 ® 

I only ask you to give me your fair hands.

Ah, dearest, this one grace, it will be the last.

How fast are they fled, halcyon days, how fast.

Nor you nor I can arrest time’s running sands.

Enough that we have known the pleasure of love

Albeit pleasure, fraught with an heartfelt grief.

Though our love season hath been marvellous

Yet we have loved and told our passion—[ending.]

Then fade the uncertain day and come the night.

 ® 

La scintille de l’allumette

Qui se cachait entre vos mains

A ensorcelé ma cigarette—

Ah, l’étoile de l’allumette!

Il me plait bien d’observer

– – – – –

 ® 

A voice that sings

Like viol strings

Through the wane

Of the pale year

Lulleth me here

With its strain.

My soul is faint

At the bell’s plaint,

Ringing deep;

I think upon

A day bygone

And I weep.

Away! Away!

I must obey

This drear wind,

Like a dead leaf

In aimless grief

Drifting blind.

[translated from Paul Verlaine: Chanson d’automne; 1900–1902]

 ® 

– – – – –

Scalding tears shall not avail,

Love shall be to us for aye

An heart-breaking tale.

Ah, how fast your warm heart beats—

Fluttering upon my breast.

Lay aside your deep unrest;

We have eaten all the sweets;

The golden fruit falls from the tree

 ® 

– – – – –

Yea, for this love of mine

I have given all I had;

For she was passing fair,

And I was passing mad.

All flesh, it is said,

Shall wither as the grass;

The fuel for the oven

Shall be consumed, alas!

 ® 

We will leave the village behind,

Merrily, you and I,

Tramp it smart and sing to the wind,

With the Rommany Rye.

[Mullingar, July 1900]

[A gypsy’s song, in the third act of A Brilliant Career]

 ® 

– – – – –

Gladly above,

The lover listens

In deepest love.

[29 June 1900]

 ® 

– – – – –

After the tribulation of dark strife,

And all the ills of the earth, crying for my release.

Why is the truth so hidden and the land of dreams so far,

That the feet of the climber fail on the upward way;

Although in the purple distance burns a red-gold star,

There are briers on the mountain and the weary feet have bled.

The homesteads and the fireglow bid him stay:

And the burden of his body is like a burden of lead.

 ® 

– – – – –

Told sublimely in the language

Which the shining angels knew.

Tearless choirs of joyful servants,

Sounding cymbals, brazen shawms,

Distant hymns of myriad planets,

Heavenly maze of full-voiced psalms.

Only, when the heart is peaceful,

When the soul is moved to love,

May we hearken to those voices

Starry singing from above.

 ® 

– – – – –

Love that I can give you, lady

Ah, that they haven’t, lady

Lady witchin’, lady mine.

O, you say that I torment you

With my verses, lady mine

Faith! the best I had I sent you,

Don’t be laughin’, lady mine.

I am foolish to be hopin’

That you left your window open,

– – – – –

 ® 

– – – – –

… Wind thine arms round me, woman of sorcery,

While the lascivious music murmurs afar:

I will close mine eyes, and dream as I dance with thee,

And pass away from the world where my sorrows are.

Faster and faster! strike the harps in the hall!

Woman, I fear that this dance is the dance of death!

Faster!—ah, I am faint… and, ah, I fall.

The distant music mournfully murmureth.

 ® 

– – – – –

Where none murmureth,

Let all grieving cease

And fade as a breath,

And come the final peace

Which men call death.

Joy and sorrow

Pass away and be fled,

Welcome the morrow

– – – – –

 ® 

Lord, thou knowest my misery,

See the gifts which I have brought,

Sunshine on a dying face

Stricken flowers, seldom sought.

See the pale moon, the sunless dawn

Of my fainting feebleness;

But only shed thy dew on me

And I shall teem in fruitfulness.

 ® 

– – – – –

Thunders and sweeps along

The roadway. The rain is strong

And the tide of it lays all pain.

I am in no idle passion

That my threadbare coat is torn,

And quaint of fashion.

My humour is devil-may-care,

As the labourer’s song upborne

On the quiet air.

 ® 

– – – – –

Though there is no resurrection from the past,

It matters not, for one pure thing I see,

On which no stain, no shadow has been cast.

I see the image of my love unclouded,

Like a white maiden in some hidden place,

In a bright cloak, woven of my hopes, enshrouded,

And looking at me with a smiling face.

I do not care for an honourable mention

– – – – –

 ® 

And I have sat amid the turbulent crowd,

And have assisted at their boisterous play;

I have unbent myself and shouted loud,

And been as blatant and as coarse as they.

I have consorted with vulgarity

And am indelibly marked with its fell kiss,

Meanly I lived upon casual charity

Eagerly drinking of the dregs of bliss.

 ® 

– – – – –

—Gorse-flower makes but sorry dining,

Mulberries make no winecups full,

Grass-threads lacing and entwining

Weave no linen by the waters—

Said the mother to her daughters.

The sisters viewed themselves reclining,

Heeding not, undutiful.

The first girl wished for spinning,

And she asked a spindle of gold;

The second sister wished to weave,

– – – – –

 ® 

– – – – –

That I am feeble, that my feet

Are weak as young twigs in the wind;

That this poor heart, which was of old

So reckless, passionate and proud,

Shivers at trifles and wanes cold

Whene’er thy fair face shows a cloud.

A golden bird in azure skies,

Late radiant with sunbright wings,

Is fallen down to earth, and sighs

– – – – –

 ® 

– – – – –

The grieving soul. But no grief is thine

Who driftest the creeks and shallows among,

Shaking thy hair of the clinging brine.

Why is thy garment closer drawn?

Thine eyes are sad, my sorrowful one,

Thy tresses are strewn with the woe of dawn,

The pearly dawn weeping the sun.

Hast thou no word—to raise—to ease

Our souls? Well, go, for the faint far cry

Of the seabirds calls thee over the seas.

 ® 

Let us fling to the winds all moping and madness,

Play us a jig in the spirit of gladness

On the creaky, old squeaky strings of the fiddle.

The why of the world is an answerless riddle

Puzzlesome, tiresome, hard to unriddle

To the seventeen devils with sapient sadness:

Tra la, tra la.

 ® 

– – – – –

Hands that soothe my burning eyes

In the silence of moonrise,

At the midmost hour of night,

Trouble me not.

Fingers soft as rain alight,

Like flowers borne upon the night

From the pure deeps of sapphire skies.

 ® 

– – – – –

Now a whisper … now a gale

List, ah list, how drear it calls!

There is in it that appals

As it wanders round the walls,

Like a forlorn woman, pale.

List the wind!

 ® 

O, queen, do on thy cloak

Of scarlet, passion hue,

And lift, attending folk,

A mournful ululu,

For flame-spun is the cloak.

· · · · · ·

Fling out thy voice, O lyre,

Forth of thy seven strings.

– – – – –

 ® 

‘Requiem eternam dona ei, Domine’;

Silently, sorrowfully I bent down my head,

For I had hated him—a poor creature of clay:

And all my envious, bitter, cruel thoughts that came

Out of the past and stood by the bier whereon he lay

Pointed their long, lean fingers through the gloom … O Name,

Ineffable, proud Name to whom the cries ascend

From lost, angelical orders, seraph flame to flame,

For this end have I hated him—for this poor end?

 ® 

– – – – –

Of thy dark life, without a love, without a friend,

Here is, indeed, an end.

There are no lips to kiss this foul remains of thee,

O, dead Unchastity!

The curse of loneliness broods silent on thee still,

Doing its utmost will,

And men shall cast thee justly to thy narrow tomb,

A sad and bitter doom.

 ® 

– – – – –

I intone the high anthem,

Partaking in their festival.

Swing out, swing in, the night is dark,

Magical hair, alive with glee,

Winnowing spark after spark,

Star after star, rapturously.

Toss and toss, amazing arms;

Witches, weave upon the floor

Your subtle-woven web of charms.

 ® 

– – – – –

Some are comely and some are sour,

Some are dark as wintry mould,

Some are fair as a golden shower.

To music liquid as a stream

They move with dazzling symmetry;

Their flashing limbs blend in a gleam

Of luminous-swift harmony.

They wear gold crescents on their heads,

Hornèd and brilliant as the moon:

– – – – –

 ® 

– – – – –

Flower to flower knits

Of willing lips and leaves:

Thy springtide of bliss

Maketh the breezes sing,

And blossoms yield their kiss

Unto amorous thieves.

But the arrow that flies

Must fall spent at last;

– – – – –

 ® 

In the soft nightfall

Hear thy lover call,

Hearken the guitar!

Lady, lady fair

Snatch a cloak in haste,

Let thy lover taste

The sweetness of thy hair.

– – – – –

 ® 

– – – – –

Discarded, broken in two.

Sing to mine ear, O rain,

Thine ultimate melody;

That the dearest loss is gain

In a holier treasury;

That a passionate cry in the night

For a woman, hidden and pale,

– – – – –

 ® 

And orient banners they outfling

Before the ripple-bearded king.

[1900?]

 ® 

Alas, how sad the lover’s lot

Whose love to him can do offence!

Alas, that beauty should have not

Stability nor reverence!

My heart is taken in a net

Misled ill-used made captive too

By promises and shows—but yet

Happy with vows that are untrue.

Poor heart, alas, that such offence

Love all too reverent may not chide,

That winds that have no reverence

Abide where love doth still abide!

[1902]

 ® 

O, it is cold and still—alas!—

The soft white bosom of my love,

Wherein no mood of guile or fear

But only gentleness did move.

She heard, as standing on the shore,

A bell above the waters toll,

She heard the call of ‘Come away’

Which is the calling of the soul

They covered her with linen white

And set white candles at her head

And loosened out her glorious hair

And laid her on a snow-white bed.

I saw her passing like a cloud,

Discreet and silent and apart.

O, little joy and great sorrow

Is all the music of the heart

The fiddle has a mournful sound

That’s playing in the street below.

I would I lay with her I love—

And who is here to say me no?

We lie upon the bed of love

And lie together in the ground:

To live, to love and to forget

Is all the wisdom lovers have.

 ® 

She is at peace where she is sleeping,

Her pale hands folded on her shroud,

And I am wandering in the world

Alone and sorrowful and proud.

She heard, as standing on the shore,

A bell above the waters toll,

She heard the call of ‘Come away’

Which is the calling of the soul.

They covered her with linen white

And laid her on a snow-white bed

And loosened out her glorious hair

And set white candles at her head.

I remember her moving of old

Amid grave days as one apart.

O, little joy and great sorrow

Is all the music of my heart.

The fiddle has a mournful sound

That’s playing in the street below—

I would I lay with her I love:

And who is there to say me no?

I would I lay in the dark earth

For sorrow bids me now depart

And the remembering of love

Makes a sad music in my heart.

[1902]

 ® 

I said: I will go down to where

She waits amid the silences,

And look upon her face and smile;

And she will cover me with her hair.

I shall forget what sorrow is

And rest with her a little while.

I put aside sorrow and care

For these may not be where she is,

For these are enemies. I came

And sought the glimmer of her hair

Amid the desolate silences

And cried upon the gloom her name.

[1902?]

 ® 

Though we are leaving youth behind

And ways of pleasure would reprove

Thou hast engraven in the mind

Thy name, O many-weathered love

And should the grace, the presence—all

That was thy magic—cease to be,

Here in the bosom ever shall

Endure thy dear charactery.

[1902?]

 ® 

Come out to where the youth is met

Under the moon, beside the sea,

And leave your weapon and your net,

Your loom and your embroidery.

Bring back the pleasantness of days

And crystal moonlight on the shore.

Your feet have woven many a maze

In old times on the ivory floor.

The weapons and the looms are mute

And feet are hurrying by the sea.

I hear the viol and the flute,

The sackbut and the psaltery.

[1903–4?]

 ® 

The Holy Office

Myself unto myself will give

This name Katharsis-Purgative.

I, who dishevelled ways forsook

To hold the poets’ grammar-book,

Bringing to tavern and to brothel

The mind of witty Aristotle,

Lest bards in the attempt should err

Must here be my interpreter:

Wherefore receive now from my lip

Peripatetic scholarship.

To enter heaven, travel hell,

Be piteous or terrible

One positively needs the ease,

Of plenary indulgences.

For every true-born mysticist

A Dante is, unprejudiced,

Who safe at ingle-nook, by proxy,

Hazards extremes of heterodoxy

Like him who finds a joy at table,

Pondering the uncomfortable.

Ruling one’s life by common sense

How can one fail to be intense?

But I must not accounted be

One of that mumming company—

With him who hies him to appease

His giddy dames’ frivolities

While they console him when he whinges

With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes—

Or him who sober all the day

Mixes a naggin in his play—

Or him whose conduct ‘seems to own’,

His preference for a man of ‘tone’—

Or him who plays the rugged patch

To millionaires in Hazelhatch

But weeping after holy fast

Confesses all his pagan past—

Or him who will his hat unfix

Neither to malt nor crucifix

But show to all that poor-dressed be

His high Castilian courtesy—

Or him who loves his Master dear—

Or him who drinks his pint in fear—

Or him who once when snug abed

Saw Jesus Christ without his head

And tried so hard to win for us

The long-lost works of Eschylus.

But all these men of whom I speak

Make me the sewer of their clique.

That they may dream their dreamy dreams

I carry off their filthy streams

For I can do those things for them

Through which I lost my diadem,

Those things for which Grandmother Church

Left me severely in the lurch.

Thus I relieve their timid arses,

Perform my office of Katharsis.

My scarlet leaves them white as wool

Through me they purge a bellyful.

To sister mummers one and all

I act as vicar-general

And for each maiden, shy and nervous,

I do a similar kind service.

For I detect without surprise

That shadowy beauty in her eyes,

The ‘dare not’ of sweet maidenhood

That answers my corruptive ‘would’.

Whenever publicly we meet

She never seems to think of it;

At night when close in bed she lies

And feels my hand between her thighs

My little love in light attire

Knows the soft flame that is desire.

But Mammon places under ban

The uses of Leviathan

And that high spirit ever wars

On Mammon’s countless servitors

Nor can they ever be exempt

From his taxation of contempt.

So distantly I turn to view

The shamblings of that motley crew,

Those souls that hate the strength that mine has

Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.

Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed

I stand the self-doomed, unafraid,

Unfellowed, friendless and alone,

Indifferent as the herring-bone,

Firm as the mountain-ridges where

I flash my antlers on the air.

Let them continue as is meet

To adequate the balance-sheet.

Though they may labour to the grave

My spirit shall they never have

Nor make my soul with theirs at one

Till the Mahamanvantara be done:

And though they spurn me from their door

My soul shall spurn them evermore.

[August 1904]

 ® 

Gas from a Burner

Ladies and gents, you are here assembled

To hear why earth and heaven trembled

Because of the black and sinister arts

Of an Irish writer in foreign parts.

He sent me a book ten years ago.

I read it a hundred times or so,

Backwards and forwards, down and up,

Through both the ends of a telescope.

I printed it all to the very last word

But by the mercy of the Lord

The darkness of my mind was rent

And I saw the writer’s foul intent.

But I owe a duty to Ireland:

I hold her honour in my hand,

This lovely land that always sent

Her writers and artists to banishment

And in a spirit of Irish fun

Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.

’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,

Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye;

’Tis Irish brains that save from doom

The leaky barge of the Bishop of Rome

For everyone knows the Pope can’t belch

Without the consent of Billy Walsh.

O Ireland my first and only love

Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

O lovely land where the shamrock grows!

(Allow me, ladies, to blow my nose)

To show you for strictures I don’t care a button

I printed the poems of Mountainy Mutton

And a play he wrote (you’ve read it, I’m sure)

Where they talk of ‘bastard’, ‘bugger’ and ‘whore’

And a play on the Word and Holy Paul

And some woman’s legs that I can’t recall

Written by Moore, a genuine gent

That lives on his property’s ten per cent:

I printed mystical books in dozens:

I printed the table book of Cousins

Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse

’Twould give you a heartburn on your arse:

I printed folklore from North and South

By Gregory of the Golden Mouth:

I printed poets, sad, silly and solemn:

I printed Patrick What-do-you-Colm:

I printed the great John Milicent Synge

Who soars above on an angel’s wing

In the playboy shift that he pinched as swag

From Maunsel’s manager’s travelling-bag.

But I draw the line at that bloody fellow,

That was over here dressed in Austrian yellow,

Spouting Italian by the hour

To O’Leary Curtis and John Wyse Power

And writing of Dublin, dirty and dear,

In a manner no blackamoor printer could bear.

Shite and onions! Do you think I’ll print

The name of the Wellington Monument,

Sydney Parade and the Sandymount tram,

Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s jam?

I’m damned if I do—I’m damned to blazes!

Talk about Irish Names of Places!

It’s a wonder to me, upon my soul,

He forgot to mention Curly’s Hole.

No, ladies, my press shall have no share in

So gross a libel on Stepmother Erin.

I pity the poor—that’s why I took

A red-headed Scotchman to keep my book.

Poor sister Scotland! Her doom is fell;

She cannot find any more Stuarts to sell.

My conscience is fine as Chinese silk:

My heart is as soft as buttermilk.

Colm can tell you I made a rebate

Of one hundred pounds on the estimate

I gave him for his Irish Review.

I love my country—by herrings I do!

I wish you could see what tears I weep

When I think of the emigrant train and ship.

That’s why I publish far and wide

My quite illegible railway guide.

In the porch of my printing institute

The poor and deserving prostitute

Plays every night at catch-as-catch-can

With her tight-breeched British artilleryman

And the foreigner learns the gift of the gab

From the drunken draggletail Dublin drab.

Who was it said: Resist not evil?

I’ll burn that book, so help me devil.

I’ll sing a psalm as I watch it burn

And the ashes I’ll keep in a one-handled urn.

I’ll penance do with farts and groans

Kneeling upon my marrowbones.

This very next lent I will unbare

My penitent buttocks to the air

And sobbing beside my printing press

My awful sin I will confess.

My Irish foreman from Bannockburn

Shall dip his right hand in the urn

And sign crisscross with reverent thumb

Memento homo upon my bum.

[Flushing, September 1912]

 ® 

G. O’Donnell

Poor little Georgie, the son of a lackey,

Famous for ‘murphies’, spirits, and ’baccy

Renowned all around for a feathery head

Which had a tendency to become red.

His genius was such that all men used to stare,

His appearance was that of a bull at a fair.

The pride of Kilmainham, the joy of the class,

A moony, a loony, an idiot, an ass.

Drumcondra’s production, and by the same rule,

The prince of all pot-boys, a regular fool.

All hail to the beauteous, the lovely, all hail

And hail to his residence in Portland gaol.

[1896–97]

 ® 

There was an old lady named Gregory

Who said: ‘Come, all ye poets in beggary.’

But she found her imprudence

When hundreds of students

Cried: ‘We’re in that noble category.’

[1902]

 ® 

There was a young priest named Delaney

Who said to the girls, ‘Nota bene,

’Twould tempt the archbishop

The way that you swish up

Your skirts when the weather is rainy.’

[1904]

 ® 

There is a weird poet called Russell

Who wouldn’t eat even a mussel

When chased by an oyster

He ran to a cloister

Away from the beef and the bustle.

The cloister he called the ‘Hermetic’

I found it a fine diuretic

A most energetic

And mental emetic

Heretic, prophetic, ascetic.

 ® 

A holy Hegelian Kettle

Has faith which we cannot unsettle

If no one abused it

He might have reduced it

But now he is quite on his mettle.

[1899?]

 ® 

John Eglinton, my Jo, John,

When last had you a?

I fear ye canna go, John,

Although ye are na spent.

O       begin to fel’, John,

Ye canna mak’ it flow,

And even if it swell, John

The lassies wadna know.

John Eglinton, my Jo, John,

I dinna like to say

Of course ye must have sinned, John

When ye were young and gay

It canna be remorse, John,

That keeps ye fra a ride

Your virtue is a farce, John,

Ye cardna if ye tried

[1903–4]

 ® 

Have you heard of the admiral, Togo,

Who said to the girls, ‘It is no go;

But when we come back,

Then each jolly Jack—

Yókogó! Yókogó! Yókogó!’

 ® 

There once was a Celtic librarian

Whose essays were voted Spencerian,

His name is Magee

But it seems that to me

He’s a flavour that’s more Presbyterian.

[1902]

 ® 

Dear, I am asking a favour

Little enough

This, that thou shouldst entype me

This powdery puff

I had no heart for your troubling,

Dearest, did I

Only possess a typewriter or

Money to buy

Thine image, dear, rosily litten

Ever shall be

Thereafter that thou hast typewritten

These things for me—

[1904]

 ® 

O, there are two brothers, the Fays,

Who are excellent players of plays,

And, needless to mention, all

Most unconventional,

Filling the world with amaze.

But I angered these brothers, the Fays,

Whose ways are conventional ways,

For I lay in my urine

While ladies so pure in

White petticoats ravished my gaze.

[June 1904]

 ® 

The Sorrow of Love

If any told the blue ones that

mountain-footed move,

They would bend down and with batons,

belabour my love.

 ® 

C’era una volta, una bella bambina

Che si chiamava Lucia

Dormiva durante il giorno

Dormiva durante la notte

Perché non sapeva camminare

Perché non sapeva camminare

Dormiva durante il giorno

Dormiva durante la notte.

[1910]

 ® 

The flower I gave rejected lies.

Sad is my lot for all to see.

Humiliation burns my eyes.

The Grace of God abandons me.

As Alberic sweet love forswore

The power of cursed gold to wield

So you, who lust for metal ore,

Forswear me for a copperfield.

Rejoice not yet in false bravado

The pimpernel you flung away

Shall torchlike burn your El Dorado.

Vengeance is mine. I will repay.

[1902–4?]

 ® 

There is a young gallant named Sax

Who is prone to hayfever attacks

For the prime of the year

To Cupid so dear

Stretches maidens—and men!—on their backs.

[1916]

 ® 

There’s a monarch who knows no repose

For he’s dressed in a dual trunk hose

And ever there itches

Some part of his breeches;

How he stands it the Lord only knows.

[1916]

 ® 

Lament for the Yeomen

(from the German of Felix Beran)

And now is come the war, the war:

And now is come the war, the war:

And now is come the war, the war.

War! War!

For soldiers are they gone now:

For soldiers all.

Soldiers and soldiers!

All! All!

Soldiers must die, must die.

Soldiers all must die.

Soldiers and soldiers and soldiers

Must die.

What man is there to kiss now,

To kiss, to kiss,

O white soft body, this

Thy soft sweet whiteness?

[1918]

 ® 

There’s a donor of lavish largesse

Who once bought a play in MS

He found out what it all meant

By the final instalment

But poor Scriptor was left in a mess.

[5 September 1917]

 ® 

There is a clean climber called Sykes

Who goes scrambling o’er ditches and dikes,

To skate on his scalp

Down the side of an alp

Is the kind of diversion he likes.

[5 September 1917]

 ® 

There once was a lounger named Stephen

Whose youth was most odd and uneven.

He throve on the smell

Of a horrible hell

That a Hottentot wouldn’t believe in.

[1916]

 ® 

Now let awhile my messmates be

My ponderous Penelope

And my Ulysses born anew

In Dublin as an Irish jew.

With them I’ll sit, with them I’ll drink

Nor heed what press and pressmen think

Nor leave their rockbound house of joy

For Helen or for windy Troy.

 ® 

There once was an author named Wells

Who wrote about science, not smells […]

The result is a series of cells.

 ® 

Solomon

There’s a hairyfaced Moslem named Simon

Whose tones are not those of a shy man

When with cast iron lungs

He howls twentyfive tongues—

But he’s not at all easy to rhyme on.

[10 September 1917]

 ® 

D. L. G.

There’s a George of the Georges named David

With whose words we are now night and day fed

He cries: I’ll give small rations

To all the small nations.

Bully God made this world—but I’ll save it.

[November 1917]

 ® 

A Goldschmidt swam in a Kriegsverein

As wise little Goldschmidts do,

And he loved every scion of the Habsburg line,

Each Archduke proud, the whole jimbang crowd,

And he felt that they loved him, too.

Herr Rosenbaum and Rosenfeld

And every other Feld except Schlachtfeld

All worked like niggers, totting rows of crazy figures,

To save Kaiser Karl and Goldschmidt, too.

Chorus:

For he said it is bet-bet-better

To stick stamps on some God-damned letter

Than be shot in a trench

Amid shells and stench,

Jesus Gott, Donnerwet-wet-wetter.

[November 1917?]

 ® 

Dooleysprudence

(Air: Mr. Dooley)

Who is the man when all the gallant nations run to war

Goes home to have his dinner by the very first cablecar

And as he eats his cantaloups contorts himself in mirth

To read the blatant bulletins of the rulers of the earth?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The coolest chap our country ever knew

‘They are out to collar

The dime and dollar’

Says Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

Who is the funny fellow who declines to go to church

Since pope and priest and parson left the poor man in the lurch

And taught their flocks the only way to save all human souls

Was piercing human bodies through with dumdum bulletholes?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The mildest man our country ever knew

‘Who will release us

From Jingo Jesus?’

Prays Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

Who is the meek philosopher who doesn’t care a damn

About the yellow peril or problem of Siam

And disbelieves that British Tar is water from life’s fount

And will not gulp the gospel of the German on the Mount?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The broadest brain our country ever knew

‘The curse of Moses

On both your houses’

Cries Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

Who is the cheerful imbecile who lights his long chibouk

With pages of the pendect, penal code and Doomsday Book

And wonders why bald justices are bound by law to wear

A toga and a wig made out of someone else’s hair?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The finest fool our country ever knew

‘They took that toilette

From Pontius Pilate,

Thinks Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

Who is the man who says he’ll go the whole and perfect hog

Before he pays an income tax or licence for a dog

And when he licks a postagestamp regards with smiling scorn

The face of king or emperor or snout of unicorn?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The wildest wag our country ever knew

‘O my poor tummy

His backside gummy!’

Moans Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

Who is the tranquil gentleman who won’t salute the State

Or serve Nabuchodonosor or proletariat

But thinks that every son of man has quite enough to do

To paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The wisest lad our country ever knew

‘Poor Europe ambles

Like sheep to shambles!’

Sighs Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

Who is the sunny sceptic who fights shy of Noah’s arks

When they are made in Germany by Engels and by Marx

But when the social deluge comes and rain begins to pour

Takes off his coat and trousers and prepares to swim ashore?

It’s Mr. Dooley,

Mr. Dooley,

The bravest boy our country ever knew

With arms akimbo

‘I’ll find that rainbow!’

Shouts Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

[1916–18]

 ® 

There’s an anthropoid consul called Bennett,

With the jowl of a jackass or jennet,

He must muzzle or mask it

In the waste paper basket,

When he rises to bray in the Senate.

[1918]

 ® 

New Tipperary

Up to rheumy Zurich came an Irishman one day

As the town was rather dull he thought he’d give a play

So that German propagandists might be rightly riled

But the bully British philistine once more made Oscar wild.

For the C. G. is not literairy

And his handymen are rogues

Our C. G.’s about as literairy

As an Irish kish of brogues.

We paid all expenses,

As the good Swiss public knows,

But we’ll be damn well damned before we pay for

Private Carr’s swank hose.

When the play was over Carr with rage began to dance,

Howling ‘I wanta twenty quid for them there dandy pants:

Fork us out the tin or comrade Bennett here and me,

We’re going to wring your bloody necks. We’re out for liberty.’

Chorus (as above)

They found a Norse solicitor to prove that white was black,

That one can boss in Switzerland beneath the Union Jack,

They marched to the Gerichtshof but came down like Jack and Jill,

While the pants came tumbling after … and the judge is laughing still.

No, the C. G. is not literairy

And his handymen are rogues,

Our C. G.’s about as literairy

As an Irish kish of brogues.

Goodbye, brother Bennett!

Goodbye, chummy Carr!

If you put a beggar upon horseback,

Why, ’e dunno where ’e are!

[October 1918]

 ® 

To Budgeon, raughty tinker

Oh! Budgeon, boozer, bard, and canvas dauber

If to thine eyes these lines should sometime come

Bethink thee that the fleshpots of old Egypt

Nothing avail if beauty’s heart would beat.

Wherefore forswear butter besmeared Ravioli

Which do the mainsprings of thy talent clog

On Roggenbrot, in Joghurt, and cold water,

Paint and be damned. We wait. Begin, and end.

[1918]

 ® 

A bard once in lakelapt Sirmione

Lived in peace, eating locusts and honey

Till a son of a bitch

Left him dry on the beach

Without clothes, boots, time, quiet or money.

[1920]

 ® 

The Right Heart in the Wrong Place

Of spinach and gammon

Bull’s full to the crupper,

White lice and black famine

Are the mayor of Cork’s supper.

But the pride of old Ireland

Must be damnably humbled

If a Joyce is found cleaning

The boots of a Rumbold.

S.O.S.

[27 August 1920]

 ® 

The Right Man in the Wrong Place

(Air: My heart’s in my highlands)

The pig’s in the barley,

The fat’s in the fire:

Old Europe can hardly

Find twopence to buy her.

Jack Spratt’s in his office,

Puffed, powdered and curled:

Rumbold’s in Warsaw—

All’s right with the world!

[27 August 1920]

 ® 

O, Mr Poe,

You’re very slow!

St Monsieur Valette

Il nous faut la galette!

So haste to ease us

For the love of Jesus!

Kreutzbomben,

Sakrament!

 ® 

Bis Dat Qui Cito Dat

Yanks who hae wi’ Wallace read,

Yanks whom Joyce has often bled,

Welcome to the hard plank bed,

And bolschevistic flea.

Who for Bloom and Inisfail

Longs to pine in Sing Sing jail,

Picking oakum without bail,

Let him publish me.

[20 December 1920]

 ® 

And I shall have no peace there for Joyce comes more and more,

Dropping from a tramp or a taxi to where the white wine swills.

Then midnight’s all of a shimmy and Bloom a bloody bore

And morning full—of bills! bills! bills!

[ca. 1921]

 ® 

Who is Sylvia, what is she

That all our scribes commend her?

Yankee, young and brave is she

The west this grace did lend her,

That all books might published be.

Is she rich as she is brave

For wealth oft daring misses?

Throngs about her rant and rave

To subscribe for Ulysses

But, having signed, they ponder grave.

Then to Sylvia let us sing

Her daring lies in selling.

She can sell each mortal thing

That’s boring, beyond telling.

To her let us buyers bring.

J.J. after W.S.

February 1922

 ® 

The press and the public misled me

So brand it as slander and lies

That I am the bloke with the watches

And that you are the chap with the ties.

[March 1922]

 ® 

—Jimmy Joyce, Jimmy Joyce, where have you been?

—I’ve been to London to see the queen—

—Jimmy Joyce, Jimmy Joyce, what saw you, tell?

—I saw a brass bed in the Euston Hotel.

 ® 

Fréderic’s Duck

(air: Dougherty’s Duck)

Cantus Plenus

Now Wallace he heard that Fréderic’s was the dearest place to dine

So he took the Joyces there to have combustible duck and wine.

The toothpicks cost a pound apiece, the salt a guinea a grain:

When Wallace saw the bill he felt an epigastric pain.

Chorus Coenatorum

Fréderic, Fréderic, Fréderic, O! My word, you pile it on!

A tour of the world is cheaper than a meal in the Tour d’Argent.

I’d rather eat hot dog in the street or dine for half a buck

Than sweat in full dress in your poultry-press and be bled like Fréderic’s duck.

[June 1923]

 ® 

I never thought a fountain pen

Exemption gave as well as solace.

If critics blame my style again

I’ll say ’twas given me by Wallace.

Shem the Penman

[February 1924]

 ® 

Rosy Brook he bought a book

Though he didn’t know how to spell it.

Such is the lure of literature

To the lad who can buy it and sell it.

[24 May 1924]

 ® 

I saw at Miss Beach’s when midday was shining

A bard with fresh water drone drowsily on

I came when Miss Beach was distant and dining

The bard was asleep but the water was gone.

(with apologies to Thomas Moore)

 ® 

Bran! Bran! the baker’s ban!

Gobble it quick and die if you can.

Forgive us this day our deadly bread

But give us old Kellogg’s bran poultice instead.

[April 1925]

 ® 

P. J. T.

There’s a funny facepainter dubbed Tuohy

Whose bleaklook is rosybud bluey

For when he feels strong

He feels your daub’s all wrong

But when he feels weak he feels wooey.

[1925–7]

 ® 

Little Miss Moschos

Soft as a mouse goes

[1920s?]

 ® 

Post Ulixem Scriptum

(Air: Molly Brannigan)

Man dear, did you never hear of buxom Molly Bloom at all,

As plump an Irish beauty, Sir, as any Levi-Blumenthal?

If she sat in the viceregal box Tim Healy’d have no room at all,

But curl up in a corner at a glance from her eye.

The tale of her ups and downs would aisy fill a handybook

That would cover the two worlds at once from Gibraltar ’cross to Sandy Hook.

But now that tale is told, ochone, I’ve lost my daring dandy look:

Since Molly Bloom has left me here alone for to cry.

Man dear, I remember when my roving time was troubling me

We picknicked fine in storm or shine in France and Spain and Hungary

And she said I’d be her first and last while the wine I poured went bubbling free.

Now every male you meet with has a finger in her pie.

Man dear, I remember with all the heart and brain of me

I arrayed her for the bridal but, O, she proved the bane of me.

With more puppies sniffing round her than the wooers of Penelope

She’s left me on her doorstep like a dog for to die.

My left eye is wake and his neighbour full of water, man.

I cannot see the lass I limned as Ireland’s gamest Daughter, man,

When I hear her lovers tumbling in their thousands for to court her, man,

If I was sure I’d not be seen I’d sit down and cry.

May you live, may you love like this gaily spinning earth of ours,

And every morn a gallant sun awake you with new wealth of gold

But if I cling like a child to the clouds that are your petticoats

O Molly, handsome Molly, sure you won’t let me die!

[1925]

 ® 

The clinic was a patched one

Its outside old as rust

And every stick beneath that roof

Lay four foot thick in dust.

[25 April 1925]

 ® 

Is it dreadfully necessary

AND

(I mean that I pose etc) is it useful, I ask

this

Heat!?

We all know Mercury will when

he Kan!

but as Dante saith:

1 Inferno is enough

Basta, he said, un’ inferno, perbacco!

And that bird—

Well!

He

—

—

—

oughter know!

—

—

—

(with apologies to Mr Ezra Pound)

[13 June, 1925]

 ® 

Rouen is the rainiest place getting

Inside all impermeables, wetting

Damp marrow in drenched bones.

Midwinter soused us coming over Le Mans

Our inn at Niort was the Grape of Burgundy

But the winepress of the Lord thundered over that grape of Burgundy

And we left it in a hurgundy.

(Hurry up, Joyce, it’s time!)

I heard mosquitoes swarm in old Bordeaux

So many!

I had not thought the earth contained so many

(Hurry up, Joyce, it’s time)

Mr Anthologos, the local gardener,

Greycapped, with politeness full of cunning

Has made wine these fifty years

And told me in his southern French

Le petit vin is the surest drink to buy

For if ’tis bad

Vous ne l’avez pas payé

(Hurry up, hurry up, now, now, now!)

But we shall have great times,

When we return to Clinic, that waste land

O Esculapios!

(Shan’t we? Shan’t we? Shan’t we?)

[15 August 1925]

 ® 

There’s a coughmixture scopolamine

And its equal has never been seen

’Twould make staid Tutankamen

Laugh and leap like a salmon

And his mummy hop Skotch on the green.

[20 January 1926]

 ® 

Troppa Grazia, Sant’ Antonio!

E. P. is fond of an extra inch

Whenever the ’ell it’s found.

But wasn’t J. J. the son of a binch

To send him an extra pound?

[? 8 November 1927]

 ® 

For he’s a jolly queer fellow

And I’m a jolly queer fellow

And Roth’s bad German for yellow

Which nobody can deny

[1 February 1927]

 ® 

Scheveningen, 1927

Sáy, ain’t thís succéss fool aúthor

Jést a dándy páradóx,

With that sílvier béach behínd him,

Hówling: Hélp! I’m ón the rócks!

[July 1927]

 ® 

Pour Ulysse IX

à H. W.

L. B. lugubriously still treads the press of pain

But J. J.’s joyicity is on the jig again

And he’ll highkick every abelboobied humballoon he cain

As he goes jubiling along.

Souvenir de la Chandeleur 1928

Paris

jokes

These capital letters represent the dancer

kicking the balloons of imposture into the

heaven of deception.

 ® 

Crossing to the Coast

(Air: Killaloo)

Don’t talk of Congo Stanley

Or Livingstone the manly

Or the boys walked marching, parching

from Atlanta to the sea.

When I lift me left lad lazy,

Begor, I take it aisy.

Dijon—Lyon—par Avignon—

It’s long toulong for me!

J’y. J’y.

(suis le reste)

[Avignon, 21 April 1928]

 ® 

Hue’s Hue? or Dalton’s Dilemma

What colour’s Jew Joyce when he’s rude and grim both,

Varied virid from groening and rufous with rage

And if this allrotter’s allred as a roth

Can he still blush unirish yet green as a gage?

[ca. 1928]

 ® 

Buried Alive

Now have I fed and eaten up the rose

Which then she laid within my stiffcold hand.

That I should ever feed upon a rose

I never had believed in liveman’s land.

Only I wonder was it white or red

The flower that in this dark my food has been.

Give us, and if Thou give, thy daily bread,

Deliver us from evil, Lord. Amen.

[translated from Gottfried Keller: Lebendig Begraben; 1934]

 ® 

Father O’Ford

(Air: Father O’Flynn)

O Father O’Ford you’ve a masterful way with you.

Maid, wife and widow are wild to make hay with you.

Blonde and brunette turn-about run away with you.

You’ve such a way with you, Father O’Ford.

That instant they see the sunshine from your eyes

Their hearts flitter flutter, they think and they sigh:

We kiss ground before thee, we madly adore thee

And crave and implore thee to take us, O Lord!

[February 1931]

 ® 

Buy a book in brown paper

From Faber and Faber

To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper.

Sevensinns in her singthings,

Plurabells on her prose,

Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.

[1929]

 ® 

To Mrs H. G. who complained that her visitors kept late hours

Go ca’canny with the cognac

And of the Wine fight shy,

Keep your eye upon the hourglass

That leaves the beaker dry.

Guestfriendliness to callers

Is your surest thief of time,

They’re so much at holmes when with you

They don’t dream of gugging heim.

[March 1931]

 ® 

Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse,

Humptydump Dublin hath a horriple vorse,

And, with all his kinks english

Plus his irishmanx brogues,

Humpydump Dublin’s grandada of rogues.

[May 1931?]

 ® 

Stephen’s Green

The wind stood up and gave a shout.

He whistled on his fingers and

Kicked the withered leaves about

And thumped the branches with his hand

And said he’d kill and kill and kill,

And so he will and so he will.

Les Verts de Jacques

Le vent d’un saut lance son cri,

Se siffle sur les doigts et puis

Trépigne les feuilles d’automne,

Craque les branches qu’il assomme.

Je tuerai, crie-t-il, holà!

Et vous verrez s’il le fera!

* * *

Der Wind stand auf, liess los einen Schrei,

Pfiff mit den Fingern schrill dabei.

Wirbelte dürres Laub durch den Wald

Und hämmerte Äste mit Riesengewalt.

Zum Tod, heult, zum Tod und Mord!

Und meint es ernst: ein Wind, ein Wort.

* * *

Surgit Boreas digitorum

Fistulam, faciens et clamorem.

Pes pugno certat par (oremus!)

Foliis quatit omne nemus.

Caedam, ait, caedam, caedam!

Nos ne habeat ille praedam.

* * *

Vinden staar op med en vild Huru,

Han piber paa fingerne og nu

Sparker bladenes flyvende flok.

Traeerne troer han er Ragnarok.

Skovens liv og blod vil han draebe og drikke.

Hvad der bliver at goere, det ved ieg ikke.

* * *

Balza in piè Fra Vento e grida.

Tre dita in bocca fischia la sfida.

Tira calci, pesta botte:

Ridda di foglie e frasche rotte.

Ammazzerò, ei urla, O gente!

E domeneddio costui non mente diuraddio

[translated from James Stephens: The Wind; 1932]

 ® 

As I was going to Joyce Saint James’

I met with seven extravagant dames;

Every dame had a bee in her bonnet,

With bats from the belfry roosting upon it.

And Ah, I said, poor Joyce Saint James,

What can he do with these terrible dames?

Poor Saint James Joyce.

[January 1931]

 ® 

Pour la Rime Seulement

A Pierre de Lanux

dit Valery Larbaud

prête moi un dux

qui peut conduire l’assault.

mes pioux piou sont fondus

et meurent de malaise

sois ton petit tondu

pour la gloire d’Ares

Lanux de la Pierre

à Beaulard fit réplique

foute-moi la guerre

avec tes soldiques

car pour l’Italie

presto fais tes malles

tire ta bonne partie

avec quelques balles

à ces mots Leryval

file en obobus

et comme le vieux Hannibal

perce le blocus

à peine atterre sa mine

qu’on crie à la foire

un sous la Mursoline

pour l’arrats de gloire

[May 1932]

 ® 

A Portrait of the Artist as an Ancient Mariner

I met with an ancient scribelleer

As I scoured the pirates’ sea

His sailes were alullt at nought coma null

Not raise the wind could he.

The bann of Bull, the sign of Sam

Burned crimson on his brow.

And I rocked at the rig of his bricabrac brig

With K.O. 11 on his prow

Shakefears & Coy danced poor old joy

And some of their steps were corkers

As they shook the last shekels like phantom freckels

His pearls that had poisom porkers

The gnome Norbert read rich bills of fare

The ghosts of his deep debauches

But there was no bibber to slip that scribber

The price of a box of matches

For all cried, Schuft! He has lost the Luft

That made his U.boat go

And what a weird leer wore that scribelleer

As his wan eye winked with woe.

He dreamed of the goldest sands uprolled

By the silviest Beach of Beaches

And to watch it dwindle gave him Kugelkopfschwindel

Till his eyeboules bust their stitches

His hold shipped seas with a drunkard’s ease

And its deadweight grew and grew

While the witless wag still waived his flag

Jemmyrend’s white and partir’s blue.

His tongue stuck out with a dragon’s drouth

For a sluice of schweppes and brandy

And but for the glows on his roseate nose

Youd have staked your goat he was Gandhi.

For the Yanks and Japs had made off with his traps!

So that stripped to the stern he clung

While, increase of a cross, an Albatross

Abaft his nape was hung.

[October 1932]

 ® 

Pennipomes Twoguineaseach

Sing a song of shillings

A guinea cannot buy,

Thirteen tiny pomikins

Bobbing in a pie.

The printer’s pie was published

And the pomes began to sing

And wasn’t Herbert Hughesius

As happy as a king!

[April 1932]

 ® 

There’s a genial young poetriarch Euge

Who hollers with heartiness huge:

Let sick souls sob for solace

So the jeunes joy with Jolas!

Book your berths! Après mot, le déluge.

[1927]

 ® 

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty

How he fell with a roll and a rumble

And lay low like Low All of a crumple

By the butt of the Magazine’s Wall?

 ® 

Epilogue to Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’

Dear quick, whose conscience buried deep

The grim old grouser has been salving,

Permit one spectre more to peep.

I am the ghost of Captain Alving.

Silenced and smothered by my past

Like the lewd knight in dirty linen

I struggle forth to swell the cast

And air a long-suppressed opinion.

For muddling weddings into wakes

No fool could vie with Parson Manders.

I, though a dab at ducks and drakes,

Let gooseys serve or sauce their ganders.

My spouse bore me a blighted boy,

Our slavey pupped a bouncing bitch.

Paternity, thy name is joy

When the wise sire knows which is which.

Both swear I am that selfsame man

By whom their infants were begotten.

Explain, fate, if you care and can

Why one is sound and one is rotten.

Olaf may plod his stony path

And live as chastely as Susanna

Yet pick up in some Turkish bath

His quantum est of Pox Romana.

While Haakon hikes up primrose way,

Spreeing and gleeing as he goes,

To smirk upon his latter day

Without a pimple on his nose.

I gave it up I am afraid

But if I loafed and found it fun

Remember how a coyclad maid

Knows how to take it out of one.

The more I dither on and drink

My midnight bowl of spirit punch

The firmlier I feel and think

Friend Manders came too oft to lunch.

Since scuttling ship Vikings like me

Reck not to whom the blame is laid,

Y.M.C.A., V.D., T.B.

Or Harbourmaster of Port-Said.

Blame all and none and take to task

The harlot’s lure, the swain’s desire.

Heal by all means but hardly ask

Did this man sin or did his sire.

The shack’s ablaze. That canting scamp,

The carpenter, has dished the parson.

Now had they kept their powder damp

Like me there would have been no arson.

Nay more, were I not all I was,

Weak, wanton, waster out and out,

There would have been no world’s applause

And damn all to write home about.

[April 1934]

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Goodbye, Zurich, I must leave you,

Though it breaks my heart to shreds

Tat then attat.

Something tells me I am needed

In Paree to hump the beds.

Bump! I hear the trunks a tumbling

And I’m frantic for the fray.

Farewell, dolce far niente!

Goodbye, Zürichesee!

[28 November 1934]

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Le bon repos

Des Espagneux

Et les roseaux

d’Annecy

Leurrent notre âme

Et nous nous pâmons

Pour une Paname

Loin d’ici

· · · · · ·

Tirons nos grègues

Faisons nos mègues

Prenons le trègue

Et filons là!

Too hot to go on …

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Aiutami dunque, O Musa, nitidissima Calligraphia!

Forbisci la forma e lo stil e frena lo stilo ribelle!

Mesci il limpide suon e distilla il liquido senso

E sulla rena riarsa, deh!, scuoti lungo il ramo!

[28 October 1935]

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Come-all-ye

Come all you lairds and ladies and listen to my lay!

I’ll tell of my adventures upon last Thanksgiving Day

I was picked by Madame Jolas to adorn the barbecue

So the chickenchoker patched me till I looked as good as new.

I drove out, all tarred and feathered, from the Grand Palais Potin

But I met with foul disaster in the Place Saint Augustin.

My charioteer collided—with the shock I did explode

And the force of my emotions shot my liver on the road.

Up steps a dapper sergeant with his pencil and his book.

Our names and our convictions down in Leber’s code he took.

Then I hailed another driver and resumed my swanee way.

They couldn’t find my liver but I hadn’t time to stay.

When we reached the gates of Paris cries the boss at the Octroi:

Holy Poule, what’s this I’m seeing? Can it be Grandmother Loye?

When Caesar got the bird she was the dindy of the flock

But she must have boxed a round or two with some old turkey cock.

I ruffled up my plumage and proclaimed with eagle’s pride:

You jackdaw, these are truffles and not blues on my backside.

Mind, said he, that one’s a chestnut. There’s my bill and here’s my thanks

And now please search through your stuffing and fork out that fifty francs.

At last I reached the banquet-hall—and what a sight to see!

I felt myself transported back among the Osmanli.

I poured myself a bubbly flask and raised the golden horn

With three cheers for good old Turkey and the roost where I was born.

I shook claws with all the hammers and bowed to blonde and brune,

The mistress made a signal and the mujik called the tune.

Madamina read a message from the Big Noise of her State

After which we crowed in unison: That Turco’s talking straight!

We settled down to feed and, if you want to know my mind,

I thought that I could gobble but they left me picked behind,

They crammed their crops till cockshout when like ostriches they ran

To hunt my missing liver round the Place Saint Augustin.

Still I’ll lift my glass to Gallia and augur that we may

Untroubled in her dovecot dwell till next Thanksgiving Day

So let every Gallic gander pass the sauceboat to his goose—

And let’s all play happy homing though our liver’s on the loose.

[November 1937]

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There’s a maevusmarked maggot called Murphy

Who would fain be thought thunder-and-turfy.

When he’s out to be chic he

Sticks on his gum dicky

And worms off for a breeze by the surfy.

[1938]

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C R I T I C A L
W R I T I N G S

c o n t e n t s — e s s a y s

Trust Not Appearances

Force

The Study of Languages

Royal Hibernian Academy ‘Ecce Homo’

Drama and Life

Ibsen’s New Drama

The Day of the Rabblement

James Clarence Mangan

An Irish Poet

George Meredith

Today and Tomorrow in Ireland

A Suave Philosophy

An Effort at Precision in Thinking

Colonial Verses

Catilina

The Soul of Ireland

The Motor Derby

Aristotle on Education

A Ne’er-Do-Well

Empire Building

New Fiction

The Mettle of the Pasture

A Peep Into History

A French Religious Novel

Unequal Verse

Mr. Arnold Graves’ New Work

A Neglected Poet

Mr. Mason’s Novels

The Bruno Philosophy

Humanism

Shakespeare Explained

Borlase and Son

Aesthetics:

I. Paris Notebook

II. Pola Notebook

A Portrait of the Artist

Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages

James Clarence Mangan

The Irish Literary Renaissance

Fenianism

Home Rule Comes of Age

Ireland at the Bar

Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salome’

Bernard Shaw’s Battle with the Censor

The Home Rule Comet

A Curious History

Realism and Idealism in English Literature: Daniel Defoe

Realism and Idealism in English Literature: William Blake

The Centenary of Charles Dickens

The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance

The Shade of Parnell

The City of the Tribes

The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran

Politics and Cattle Disease

Programme Notes for the English Players

Letter on Pound

Letter on Hardy

Letter on Svevo

From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer

Ad-Writer

On the Moral Right of Authors

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[The texts follow The Critical Writings of James Joyce, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York 1989, Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds.
except
“A Portrait of the Artist”: Poems and Shorter Writings, Faber & Faber, London 1991, Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson, eds.;
“The Irish Literary Renaissance”, “A Curious History”, “Realism and Idealism in English Literature: Daniel Defoe”, “The Centenary of Charles Dickens”, “The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance”, and “On the Moral Right of Authors”: Occasional, Political, and Critical Writing, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, Kevin Barry, ed. ]

Trust Not Appearances

AMDG

trust not appearances

There is nothing so deceptive and for all that so alluring as a good surface. The sea, when beheld in the warm sunlight of a summer’s day; the sky, blue in the faint and amber glimmer of an autumn sun, are pleasing to the eye: but, how different the scene, when the wild anger of the elements has waked again the discord of confusion, how different the ocean, choking with froth and foam, to the calm, placid sea, that glanced and rippled merrily in the sun. But the best examples of the fickleness of appearances are—Man and Fortune. The cringing, servile look; the high and haughty mien alike conceal the worthlessness of the character. Fortune that glittering bauble, whose brilliant shimmer has allured and trifled with both proud and poor, is as wavering as the wind. Still however, there is a ‘something’ that tells us the character of man. It is the eye. The only traitor that even the sternest will of a fiendish villian [sic] cannot overcome. It is the eye that reveals to man the guilt or innocence, the vices or the virtues of the soul. This is the only exception to the proverb ‘Trust not appearance’. In every other case the real worth has to be searched for. The garb of royalty or of democracy are but the shadow that a ‘man’ leaves behind him. ‘Oh! how unhappy is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours.’ The fickle tide of ever-changing fortune brings with it—good and evil. How beautiful it seems as the harbinger of good and how cruel as the messenger of ill! The man who waits on the temper of a King is but a tiny craft in that great ocean. Thus we see the hollowness of appearances. The hypocrite is the worst kind of villain yet under the appearance of virtue he conceals the worst of vices. The friend, who is but the fane of fortune, fawns and grovels at the feet of wealth. But, the man, who has no ambition, no wealth no luxury save contentment cannot hide the joy of happiness that flows from a clear conscience and an easy mind.

lds

James A. Joyce

[1896]

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Force

[The first half-page of the manuscript is missing.]

—both questions of moment and difficult to answer. And although it is, in the main, evident that the conquest gained in a righteous war, is itself righteous, yet it will not be necessary to digress into the regions of political economy, etc, but it will be as well to bear in mind, that all subjugation by force, if carried out and prosecuted by force is only so far successful in breaking men’s spirits and aspirations. Also that it is, in the extreme, productive of ill-will and rebellion, that it is, again, from its beginning in unholy war, stamped with the stamp of ultimate conflict. But indeed it seems barbaric to only consider subjugation, in the light of an oppressing force, since we shall see that more often is it an influence rather than a positive power, and find it better used than for the vain shedding of blood.

In the various grades of life there are many homely illustrations of its practice—none the truer, that they are without blaze or notoriety, and in the humblest places. The tiller who guides the plough through the ground, and breaks the ‘stubborn glebe’ is one. The gardener who prunes the wayward vine or compels the wild hedge into decent level, subjugating the savage element in ‘trim gardens’, is another. Both of these represent subjugation by force; but the sailor’s method is more diplomatic. He has no plough to furrow the resisting wind, nor no knife to check the rude violence of storm. He cannot, with his partial skill, get the better of its unruliness. When Aeolus has pronounced his fiat, there is no direct countermanding his order. That way the sailor cannot overcome him; but by veering, and patient trial, sometimes using the strength of the Wind, sometimes avoiding it, now advancing and now retreating, at last the shifting sails are set for a straight course, and amid the succeeding calm the vessel steers for port. The miller’s wheel which although it restrains the stream yet allows it to proceed on its own way, when it has performed the required service, is an useful example. The water rushing in swift stream, is on the higher mountains a fierce power both to excite emotion and to flood the fields. But the magic miller changes its humour, and it proceeds on its course, with all its tangled locks in orderly crease, and laps its waves, in placid resignation, on the banks that slope soberly down from suburban villas. And more, its strength has been utilised for commercial ends, and it helps to feed, with fine flour and bread, no longer the poetical but the hungry.

After these subjugations of the elements, we come to the subjugation of animals. Long ago in Eden responsible Adam had a good time. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field, ministered to his comfort. At his feet slept the docile lion, and every animal was his willing servant. But when sin arose in Adam—before only a latent evil—and his great nature was corrupted and broken, there were stirred up also among beasts the unknown dregs of ferocity. A similar revolt took place among them against man, and they were no longer to be friendly servants but bitter foes to him. From that hour, in greater or less degree, more in one land than another, they have struggled against him and refused him service. Aided often by great strength they fought successfully. But at length by superior power, and because he was man and they were but brutes, they, at least to a great extent, were overcome. Some of them, as the dog, he made the guardians of his house; others, as the horses and oxen, the helpmates of his toils. Others again he could not conquer but merely guard against, but one race in particular threatened by its number and power, to conquer him; and here it may be as well to follow the fate of it and see how a superior power intervened to preserve for man his title, not in derision, of lord of the creation and to keep him safe from the fear of mammoth and of mastodon. The Zoo elephants are sorry descendants of those mighty monsters who once traversed the sites of smoky cities; who roamed in hordes, tameless and fearless, proud in their power, through fruitful regions and forests, where now are the signs of busy men and the monuments of their skill and toil; who spread themselves over whole continents and carried their terror to the north and south, bidding defiance to man that he could not subjugate them; and finally in the wane of their day, though they knew it not, trooped up to the higher regions of the Pole, to the doom that was decreed for them. There what man could not subdue, was subdued, for they could not withstand the awful changes that came upon the earth. Lands of bright bloom, by degrees, lost all beauty and promise. Luxuriance of trees and fullness of fruit gradually departed, and were not, and stunted growth of shrub and shrivelled berries that no suns would ripen, were found in their room. The tribes of the Mammoth were huddled together, in strange wonder, and this devastation huddled them still closer. From oases, yet left them, they peered at the advancing waves, that locked them in their barren homes. Amid the gradual ice and waters, they eked out the days of the life of their vanity and when nothing remained for them but death, the wretched animals died in the unkind cold of enduring winter, and to-day their colossal tusks and ivory bones, are piled in memorial mounds, on the New Siberian Islands. This is all of them that is left, that man may have good by their death, whom he was not able to make his slaves when they lived, to tempt his greed across the perilous, Polar seas, to those feasts of the wealth of bygone times, that are strewn and bleaching beneath the desolate sky, white and silent through the song of the changeless waves, and on the verge of the eternal fathoms. What a subjugation has this been—how awful and how complete! Scarce the remembrance of the mammoth remains and no more is there the fear of the great woolly elephant but contempt of his bulk and advantage of his unwieldiness.

It is generally by intercourse with man, that animals have been tamed and it is noticeable that the domestic tabby and the despised pig rage in distant lands, with all their inbred fierceness and strength. These with others are subjugated by constant war, or driven from familiar haunts, and then their race dies out as the bison of America is dying. Gradually all common animals are subdued to man’s rule, becoming once again his servants and regaining something of former willingness, in the patient horse and faithful dog. In some instances the vain-glory and conscious victory of the three spears is observed. Thus, in the swampy marshes of South America, the venomous snakes are lulled into deadness, and lie useless and harmless, at the crooning of the charmer and in shows and circuses before large crowds, broken-spirited lions and in the streets the ungraceful bears are witnesses to the power of man.

It may be that the desire to overcome and get the mastery of things, which is expressed in man’s history of progress, is in a great measure responsible for his supremacy. Had it been that he possessed no such desire, the trees and vegetation would have choked the sunlight from him, barring all passage; the hills and seas would have been the bounds of his dwellings; the unstemmed mountain-stream would always snatch away his rude huts and the ravaging hungry beasts stamp on the ashes of his fire. But his superior mind overcame all obstacles, not however universally, for in those places where seldom, the lower creation has usurped his Kingdom, and his labour must be anew expended in hunting the savage tiger through the jungles and forests of India, and in felling the tree in Canadian woods.

The next important subjugation is that of race over race. Among human families the white man is the predestined conqueror. The negro has given way before him, and the red men have been driven by him out of their lands and homes. In far New Zealand the sluggish Maoris in conceded sloth, permit him to portion out and possess the land of their fathers. Everywhere that region and sky allow, he has gone. Nor any longer does he or may he practise the abuse of subjugation—slavery, at least in its most degrading forms or at all so generally. Yet slavery only seems to have appealed to the conscience of men when most utterly base and inhuman and minor offences never troubled them. Happily this could not continue and now any encroachment on the liberties of others whether by troublesome Turk or not, is met with resolute opposition and just anger. Rights when violated, institutions set at nought, privileges disregarded, all these, not as shibboleths and war-cries, but as deep-seated thorough realities, will happily always call forth, not in foolish romantic madness nor for passionate destruction, but with unyielding firmness of resistance, the energies and sympathies of men to protect them and to defend them.

Hitherto we have only treated of man’s subjugation

[one-half page missing]

often when a person gets embarked on a topic which in its vastness almost completely swallows up his efforts, the subject dwarfs the writer; or when a logician has to treat of great subjects, with a view to deriving a fixed theory, he abandons the primal idea and digresses into elaborate disquisitions, on the more inviting portions of his argument. Again in works of fancy, a too prolific imagination literally flys away with the author, and lands him in regions of loveliness unutterable, which his faculties scarcely grasp, which dazzles his senses, and defies speech, and thus his compositions are beautiful indeed, but beautiful with the cloudiness and dream-beauty of a visionary. Such a thing as this often affects poets of high, fanciful temper, as Shelley, rendering their poetry vague and misty. When however the gift—great and wonderful—of a poetic sense, in sight and speech and feeling, has been subdued by vigilance and care and has been prevented from running to extremes, the true and superior spirit, penetrates more watchfully into sublime and noble places, treading them with greater fear and greater wonder and greater reverence, and in humbleness looks up into the dim regions, now full of light, and interprets, without mysticism, for men the great things that are hidden from their eyes, in the leaves of the trees and in the flowers, to console them, to add to their worship, and to elevate their awe. This result proceeds from the subjugation of a great gift, and indeed it is so in all our possessions. We improve in strength when we husband it, in health when we are careful of it, in power of mental endurance when we do not over-tax it. Otherwise in the arts, in sculpture and painting, the great incidents that engross the artist’s attention would find their expression, in huge shapelessness or wild daubs; and in the ear of the rapt musician, the loveliest melodies outpour themselves, madly, without time or movement, in chaotic mazes, ‘like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.’

It has been pointed out what an influence this desire of man to overcome has exerted over the kingdom of animals and vegetation, and how it not merely destroys and conquers the worse features but betters and improves what is good. There are spots on this earth, where licence of growth holds absolute sway, where leaves choke the light and rankness holds the soil, where there are dangerous reptiles and fierce beasts, all untamed, amid surroundings of great beauty, in colour and fertility, but overshadowed by the horror of savage unrule. But the coming of man in his onward way, shall alter the face of things, good himself rendering good his own dominions. As has been written—‘when true servants of Heaven shall enter these Edens and the Spirit of God enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into the physical air; and the stinging insect and venomous snake and poisonous tree, pass away before the power of the regenerate human soul’—This is the wished subjugation that must come in good time. And meanwhile we have considered the power of overcoming man, against the lower races of the world, and his influence in the subjugation of his own mental faculties, and there remains for us to consider the manifold influence of his desire to conquer, over his human instincts, over his work and business and over his reason.

In the sagas of Norway, in ancient epics in the tales of ‘knights and barons bold’ and to-day in the stories of Hall Caine, we have abundant examples of the havoc that men’s passions make, when they are allowed to spend their force in Bersirk freedom. Of course in conventional life there are fewer instances of such characters as Thor, Ospakar, Jason, and Mylrea as in those savage places which were once their homes. Modern civilization will not permit such wholesale licence, as the then state of affairs gave occasion to. The brood of men now, in towns and cities, is not of fierce passion, at least not to such an extent as to make men subserve their rages. The ordinary man has not so often to guard against fits of demon’s anger, though the Vendetta is is still common in Southern Europe but mankind has quite as many opportunities of subjugating himself or herself as before. The fretful temper, the base interpretation, the fool’s conceitedness, the fin-de-siècle sneer, the gossiping, the refusal of aid, the hurting word and worthless taunt, together with ingratitude and the forgetting of friends—all these are daily waiting for us to subjugate. Above all, the much-maligned, greatest charity, so distinct from animal profusion and reckless liberality, that charitable deeds do not wholly constitute; but which springs from inner wells of gentleness and goodness; which is shy of attributing motives; ‘which interprets everything for the best’; which dictates, from emotions of Heaven’s giving, the sacrifice of all that is dear, in urgent need, which has its being and beauty from above; which lives and thrives in the atmosphere of thoughts, so upraised and so serene that they will not suffer themselves to be let down on earth among men, but in their own delicate air ‘intimate their presence and commune with themselves’—this utter unselfishness in all things, how does it on the contrary, call for constant practice and worthy fulfilling!

Again in the case of man’s mission, marked out for him from the gate of Eden, labour and toil, has not subjugation a direct influence, with advantage both to the world and to the man himself. ‘Foul jungles’ says Carlyle ‘are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead and stately cities, and withal the man

[a half page missing]

greater difficulty for some to subjugate their reason, than their passions. For they pit the intellect and reason of men, with their vain theorisings, against the superhuman logic of belief. Indeed to a rightly constituted mind the bugbears of infidelity have no terrors and excite no feeling save contempt. Men have passions and reason, and the doctrine of licence is an exact counterpart of the doctrine of freethinking. Human reason has no part in wisdom, if it fulfils not the whole three attributes given by the inspired writer, if it is not ‘pudica, pacifica et desursum’—chaste, peaceful and from above. How can it thrive if it comes not from the seat of Wisdom but has its source elsewhere? And how can earthly intellects, if they blind their eyes to wisdom’s epithets ‘pudica, pacifica et desursum’ hope to escape that which was the stumbling-block with Abelard and the cause of his fall.

The essence of subjugation lies in the conquest of the higher. Whatever is nobler and better, or reared upon foundations more solid, than the rest, in the appointed hour, comes to the appointed triumph. When right is perverted into might, or more properly speaking, when justice is changed to sheer strength, a subjugation ensues—but transient not lasting. When it is unlawful, as too frequently in the past it has been, the punishment invariably follows in strife through ages. Some things there are no subjugation can repress and if these preserve, as they do and will the germs of nobility, in good men and saintly lives, they preserve also for those who follow and obey, the promise of after victory and the solace and comfort of active expectation. Subjugation is ‘almost of the essence of an empire and when it ceases to conquer, it ceases to be’. It is an innate part of human nature, responsible, in a great way, for man’s place. Politically it is a dominant factor and a potent power in the issues of nations. Among the faculties of men it is a great influence, and forms part of the world’s laws, unalterable and for ever—subjugation with the existence also of freedom, and even, within its sight, that there may be constant manifestation of powers over all, bringing all things under sway, with fixed limits and laws and in equal regulation, permitting the prowl

[one-half page missing]

power for force and of persuasion for red conquest, has brought about the enduring rule foretold, of kindness over all the good, for ever, in a new subjugation.

The End

written by Jas. A. Joyce 27/9/98

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The Study of Languages

In the church of San’ Maria Novella there are seven figures by Memmi, named the seven earthly Sciences. Reading from right to left, the first is the ‘Art of Letters’ and the seventh ‘Arithmetic’. The first is oftener called Grammar, because it refers more directly to that branch of ‘Letters’. Now the artist’s idea in this arrangement was to shew the gradual progress from Science to Science, from Grammar to Rhetoric, from Rhetoric to Music and so on to Arithmetic. In selecting his subjects he assumes two things. First he assumes that the primary science is Grammar, that is, that science which is the first and most natural one to man, and also that Arithmetic is the last, not exactly as the culmination of the other six, but rather as the final, numbered expression of man’s life. Secondly, or perhaps first, he assumes that Grammar, or Letters, is a science. His first assumption classes, if it does nothing more, Grammar and Arithmetic together as the first and last things in human knowledge. His second assumption, as we have said, makes Grammar a science. Both of these assumptions are directly opposed to the opinions of many illustrious followers of Arithmetic, who deny that Letters is a science, and seem or affect to regard it as a totally different thing from Arithmetic. Literature is only at the root a science, that is in its Grammar and Characters, but such conduct is most senseless on the part of the Arithmeticians.

We hope that they will grant that it is essential for a man, who wishes to communicate in the ordinary way with his fellow-man, that he should know how to speak. We, on our part, will admit that, for the building of an intellectual man, his most important study is that of Mathematics. It is the study which most developes his mental precision and accuracy, which gives him a zest for careful and orderly method, which equips him, in the first place, for an intellectual career. We, the pluralized essayist, say this, who were never an ardent votary of the subject, rather from disinclination to task work than because of a rooted aversion to it. In this we are supported by the great lights of the age, though Matthew Arnold has his own little opinion about the matter, as he had about other matters. Now while the advocates of more imaginative pursuits fully recognize the paramount importance of a mathematical education, it is deplorable that so many followers of the more rigid course, having assimilated unto themselves, a portion of the rigidity of that course, and a share of its uncompromising theorems, affect to regard the study of languages as altogether beneath them, and merely a random, occasional sort of study. Linguists must be allowed to make protest against such treatment and surely their defence is worthy of consideration.

For that which ennobles the study of Mathematics in the eyes of the wise, is the fact that it proceeds with regular course, that it is a science, a knowledge of facts, in contradistinction to literature, which is in the more elegant aspect of it, imaginary and notional. This draws a line of stern demarcation between the two; and yet as Mathematics and the Sciences of Numbers partake of the nature of that beauty which is omnipresent, which is expressed, almost noiselessly, in the order and symmetry of Mathematics, as in the charms of literature; so does Literature in turn share in the neatness and regularity of Mathematics. Moreover we do not, by any means, suffer such a premiss to pass unchallenged, but before taking up the cudgels in behalf of Language and Literature, we wish it to be understood that we admit that the most important study for the mind is Mathematics, and our vindication of Literature will never venture to put it before Mathematics in that respect.

The statement the study of Languages is to be despised since it is imaginary and does not deal with facts nor deals in a precise way with ideas, is absurd. First, because the study of any language must begin at the beginning and must advance slowly and carefully, over ascertained ground. The Grammar of a language, its orthography and etymology are admitted as known. They are studies in the same manner as tables in Arithmetic, surely and accurately. Some will admit this but go on to say that thus far a language is to be approved of, but that the higher parts of syntax and style and history, are fanciful and imaginative. Now the study of languages is based on a mathematical foundation, and sure of its footing, and in consequence both in style and syntax there is always present a carefulness, a carefulness bred of the first implantings of precision. So they are no mere flourishings of unkempt, beautiful ideas but methods of correct expression ruled and directed by clear regulations, sometimes of facts, sometimes of ideas. And when of ideas their expression elevated from the hardness, which is sufficient for ‘flat unraised’ statements, by an over-added influence of what is beautiful in pathetic phrases, swelling of words, or torrents of invective, in tropes and varieties and figures, yet preserving even in moments of the greatest emotion, an innate symmetry.

Secondly even if we were disposed to admit, which we are far from doing, that unwarrantable ‘since’ of the mathematicians we should not admit that poetry and imagination, though not so deeply intellectual, are to be despised and their names to be cast out, totally. Are our libraries to contain only works of Science? Are Bacon and Newton to monopolize our shelves? and no place be found for Shakespeare and Milton? Theology is a Science, yet will either Catholic or Anglican, however profound and learned, taboo poetry from their studies, and the one banish a living, constant element of his Church and the other forbid the ‘Christian Year’? The higher grades of language, style, syntax, poetry, oratory, rhetoric, are again the champions and exponents, in what way soever, of Truth. So in the figure of Rhetoric in Santa Maria’s church Truth is seen reflected in a Mirror. The notion of Aristotle and his school, that in a bad cause there can be true oratory, is utterly false. Finally, if they claim, Science advances more the civilization of the world, there must be some restriction imposed. Science may improve yet demoralize. Witness Dr. Benjulia. Did the great Science of Vivisection improve him? ‘Heart and Science’! yes, there is great danger in heartless science, very great danger indeed, leading only to inhumanity. Let it not be our case to stand like him, crushed and broken, aloof from sympathy at the door of his laboratory, while the maimed animals flee away terrified between his legs, into the darkness. Do not think that science, human or divine, will effect on the one hand a great substantial change for good in men and things, if it merely consults the interests of men in its own interests, and does good to them it may do good to itself, and in everything pass over that first, most natural aspect of man, namely, as a living being, and regard him as an infinitely small actor, playing a most uninteresting part in the drama of worlds. Or on the other hand, if it proceeds, when directed towards divine objects, as a contrivance useful for extracting hard, rational inferences, ever induce in man an uplifting of trust and worship.

Having thus got rid of the obnoxious mathematicians, something is to be said about the study of languages and there chiefly in the study of our own. First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that of years ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race. Sometimes they have changed greatly in meaning, as the word ‘villain’ because of customs now extinct, and sometimes the advent of an overcoming power may be attested by the crippled diction, or by the complete disuse of the original tongue, save in solitary, dear phrases, spontaneous in grief or gladness. Secondly, this knowledge tends to make our language purer and more lucid, and therefore tends also to improve style and composition. Thirdly, the names we meet in the literature of our language are handed down to us, as venerable names, not to be treated lightly but entitled beforehand to our respect. They are landmarks in the transition of a language, keeping it inviolate, directing its course straight on like an advancing way, widening and improving as it advances but staying always on the high road, though many byways branch off it at all parts and seem smooth to follow. Thus these names, as those of the masters of English, are standards for imitation and reference, and are valuable because their use of the language was also based on their study of it, and is for that reason deserving of great and serious attention. Fourthly, and this is the greatest of all, the careful study of the language, used by these men, is almost the only way to gain a thorough knowledge of the power and dignity, that are in the elements of a language and further to understand, as far as nature allows, the feelings of great writers, to enter into their hearts and spirits, to be admitted, by privilege, into the privacy of their proper thoughts. The study of their language is useful as well, not merely to add to our reading and store of thought, but to add to our vocabulary and imperceptibly to make us sharers in their delicateness or strength. How frequently it happens that when persons become excited, all sense of language seems to forsake them, and they splutter incoherently and repeat themselves, that their phrases may have more sound and meaning. Look, how great the difficulty that many have in expressing their most ordinary ideas in correct English. If it were only to rectify these errors which exist amongst us, the study of our language should recommend itself to us. How much more so, then, when it not alone cures these defects, but works such wonderful changes in our speech by the mere contact with good diction and introduces us to beauties, which cannot here be enlarged on but obtain only passing mention, to which our former ignorance or negligence denied us access.

Lest we should seem to dwell over long on our own language let us consider the case of the classics. In Latin—for the writer acknowledges humbly his ignorance of Greek—a careful and well-directed study must be very advantageous. For it acquaints us with a language, which has a strong element in English, and thus makes us know the derivations of many words, which we then apply more correctly and which have therefore a truer meaning for us. Again Latin is the recognised language of scholars and philosophers, and the weapon of the learned; whose books and thoughts are only open, through the medium of translation. Further, it is astonishing that Latin is like Shakespeare in everyone’s mouth, without his seeming, in the least, to recognize the fact. Quotations are constantly employed, even by those who are not Latin scholars and common convenience would prompt us to study it. Then also it is the uniform language of the ritual of the Church. Moreover it is for those who study it a great help intellectually, for it has some terse expressions, that are more forcible than many of our similar expressions. For instance a single Latin phrase or word is so complex in meaning, and enters into the nature of so many words, and has yet a delicate shade of its own, that no single word in English will properly represent. Thus Vergil’s Latin is said to be so idiomatic as to defy translation. Evidently careful rendering of such language into suitable English must be a great exercise in judgment and expression, if we were to count nothing else. But Latin besides being in its degraded form the language of schoolmen, is in a better form the language of Lucretius, Vergil, Horace, Cicero, Pliny and Tacitus, all of whom are great names and who have withstood dislodgment from their high seats for thousands of years—a fact which is sufficient in itself to gain them a reading. They are moreover interesting as the writers in a vast Republic, the greatest and vastest the world has seen, a Republic which during five hundred years was the home of nearly all the great men of action in that time, which made its name heard from Gibraltar to Arabia, and to the stranger-hating Briton, everywhere a name of power, and everywhere with conquest in its army’s van. [The manuscript ends here.]

[1998/99]

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Royal Hibernian Academy ‘Ecce Homo’

Munkacsy’s picture which has been exhibited in the principal cities of Europe, is now on view at the Royal Hibernian Academy. With the other two pictures ‘Christ before Pilate’ and ‘Christ on Calvary’ it forms almost a complete trilogy of the later portion of the Passion. Perhaps what strikes one most in the picture under consideration is the sense of life, the realistic illusion. One could well fancy that the men and women were of flesh and blood, struck into silent trance, by the warlock’s hand. Hence the picture is primarily dramatic, not an execution of faultless forms, or a canvas reproduction of psychology. By drama I understand the interplay of passions; drama is strife, evolution, movement, in whatever way unfolded. Drama exists as an independent thing, conditioned but not controlled by its scene. An idyllic portrait or an environment of haystacks do not constitute a pastoral drama, no more than rhodomontade and a monotonous trick of ‘tutoyer’ build up a tragedy. If there be only quiescence in one, or vulgarity in the second, as is generally the case, then in neither one nor the other is the note of true drama sounded for a moment. However subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace the diction, if a play, or a work of music, or a picture concerns itself with the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of humanity, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama. Maeterlinck’s characters may be, when subjected to the searchlight of that estimable torch, common sense, unaccountable, drifting, fate-impelled creatures—in fact, as our civilization dubs them, uncanny. But in whatever dwarfed and marionette-like a manner, their passions are human, and so the exposition of them is drama. This is fairly obvious when applied to a stage subject but when the word drama is in an identical way, applied to Munkacsy, it may need perhaps an additional word of explanation.

In the statuary art the first step towards drama was the separation of the feet. Before that sculpture was a copy of the body, actuated by only a nascent impulse, and executed by routine. The infusion of life, or its semblance, at once brought soul into the work of the artist, vivified his forms and elucidated his theme. It follows naturally from the fact that the sculptor aims at producing a bronze or stone model of man, that his impulse should lead him to the portrayal of an instantaneous passion. Consequently although he has the advantage of the painter, in at the first glance deceiving the eye, his capability to be a dramatist is less broad than the painter’s. His power of moulding can be equalized by the painter’s backgrounds and skilful disposition of shades, and while in such a manner naturalism is produced on an areal canvas, the colours, which add another life, help his theme to its expression in a very much completer and clearer whole. Moreover, and this applies markedly in the present case, as the theme becomes loftier or more extended, it can manifestly obtain more adequate treatment in a large picture than in the crowding of colourless, perfectly-modelled statues in a tableau. Notably then does the difference hold in the instance of ‘Ecce Homo’ where some seventy figures are limned on one canvas. It is a mistake to limit drama to the stage; a drama can be painted as well as sung or acted, and ‘Ecce Homo’ is a drama.

In addition, it is much more deserving of the comment of a dramatic critic than the majority of the pieces which are directly under his notice in the theatre. To speak of the technical point of an artwork such as this is, to my thinking, somewhat superfluous. Of course the draping, and the upraised hands, and outstretched fingers reveal a technique and a skill, beyond criticism. The narrow yard is a scene of crowded figures, all drawn with a master’s faithfulness. The one blemish is the odd, strained position of the governor’s left hand. It gives one the impression of being maimed or crippled from the manner in which the cloak conceals it. The background is a corridor, opened on the spectator, with pillars upholding a verandah, on which the eastern shrubs show out against a sapphire sky. At the right hand and in the extreme corner, as you face the picture, a stairway of two flights, say some twenty steps in all leads to a platform which is thus almost at right angles to the line of the pillars. The garish sunlight falls directly over this platform leaving the rest of the court partly in the shade. The walls are decorated and at the back of the piazza is a narrow doorway crowded with Roman soldiery. The first half of the mob, that is, those next underneath the platform, is enclosed between the pillars and a swinging chain in the foreground, which is parallel to them. A decrepit street cur, the only animal in the picture, is crouching by it. On the platform in front of the soldiers, stand two figures. One has his hands bound in front and is standing facing the rabble, his fingers just touching the balustrade. A red mantle is so placed about the shoulders as to cover the entire back and a little of the foreshoulders and arms. The whole front of the figure is thus exposed to the waist. A crown of irregular, yellowish thorns is on the temples and head and a light, long reed barely supported between the clasped hands. It is Christ. The other figure is somewhat nearer the populace and leans a little towards them over the balustrade. The figure is pointing at Christ, the right arm in the most natural position of demonstration, and the left arm extended in the peculiar, crippled way I have already noticed. It is Pilate. Right underneath these two main figures, on the paved yard, is the tossing, tumbling Jewish rabble. The expressions conveyed in the varying faces, gestures, hands and opened mouths are marvellous. There is the palsied, shattered frame of a lewd wretch; his face is bruted animalism, feebly stirred to a grin. There is the broad back and brawny arm and tight clenched fist, but the face of the muscular ‘protestant’ is hidden. At his feet, in the angle where the stairway bends a woman is kneeling. Her face is dragged in an unwholesome pallor but quivering with emotion. Her beautifully rounded arms are displayed as a contrast of writhing pity against the brutality of the throng. Some stray locks of her copious hair are blown over them and cling to them as tendrils. Her expression is reverential, her eyes are straining up through her tears. She is the emblem of the contrite, she is the new figure of lamentation as against the severe, familiar types, she is of those, the sorrowstricken, who weep and mourn but yet are comforted. Presumably, from her shrinking pose, she is a magdalen. Near her is the street dog, and near him a street urchin. His back is turned but both arms are flung up high and apart in youthful exultation, the fingers pointing outwards, stiff and separate.

In the heart of the crowd is the figure of a man, furious at being jostled by a well clad Jew. The eyes are squinting with rage, and an execration foams on his lips. The object of his rage is a rich man, with that horrible cast of countenance, so common among the sweaters of modern Israël. I mean, the face whose line runs out over the full forehead to the crest of the nose and then recedes in a similar curve back to the chin, which, in this instance, is covered with a wispish, tapering beard. The upper lip is raised out of position, disclosing two long, white teeth, while the whole lower lip is trapped. This is the creature’s snarl of malice. An arm is stretched forth in derision, the fine, snowy linen falling back upon the forearm. Immediately behind is a huge face, with features sprawled upon it, the jaws torn asunder with a coarse howl. Then there is the half profile and figure of the triumphant fanatic. The long gaberdine falls to the naked feet, the head is erect, the arms perpendicular, raised in conquest. In the extreme end is the bleared face of a silly beggar. Everywhere is a new face. In the dark hoods, under the conical headdresses, here hatred, there the mouth gaping open at its fullest stretch, the head thrown back on the nape. Here an old woman is hastening away, horrorstruck, and there is a woman of comely appearance but evidently a proletarian. She has fine, languid eyes, full features and figure, but marred with cross stupidity and perfect, if less revolting bestiality. Her child is clambering about her knees, her infant hoisted on her shoulder. Not even these are free from the all pervading aversion and in their small beady eyes twinkles the fire of rejection, the bitter unwisdom of their race. Close by are the two figures of John and Mary. Mary has fainted. Her face is of a grey hue, like a sunless dawn, her features rigid but not drawn. Her hair is jet black, her hood white. She is almost dead, but her force of anguish keeps her alive. John’s arms are wound about her, holding her up, his face is half feminine in its drawing, but set in purpose. His rust coloured hair falls over his shoulders, his features express solicitude and pity. On the stairs is a rabbi, enthralled with amazement, incredulous yet attracted by the extraordinary central figure. Round about are the soldiers. Their mien is self-possessed contempt. They look on Christ as an exhibition and the rabble as a pack of unkennelled animals. Pilate is saved from the dignity his post would have given him, by the evidence that he is not Roman enough to spurn them. His face is round, his skull compact, the hair cropped short on it. He is shifting, uncertain of his next move, his eyes wide open in mental fever. He wears the white and red Roman toga.

It will be clear from all this that the whole forms a wonderful picture, intensely, silently dramatic, waiting but the touch of the wizard wand to break out into reality, life and conflict. As such too much tribute cannot be paid to it, for it is a frightfully real presentment of all the baser passions of humanity, in both sexes, in every gradation, raised and lashed into a demoniac carnival. So far praise must be given, but it is plain through all this, that the aspect of the artist is human, intensely, powerfully human. To paint such a crowd one must probe humanity with no scrupulous knife. Pilate is self-seeking, Mary is maternal, the weeping woman is penitent, John is a strong man, rent inside with great grief, the soldiers bear the impress of the stubborn unideality of conquest; their pride is uncompromising for are they not the overcomers? It would have been easy to have made Mary a Madonna and John an evangelist but the artist has chosen to make Mary a mother and John a man. I believe this treatment to be the finer and the subtler. In a moment such as when Pilate said to the Jews, Behold the man, it would be a pious error but indubitably, an error to show Mary as the ancestress of the devout rapt madonnas of our churches. The depicting of these two figures in such a way in a sacred picture, is in itself a token of the highest genius. If there is to be anything superhuman in the picture, anything above and beyond the heart of man, it will appear in Christ. But no matter how you view Christ, there is no trace of that in his aspect. There is nothing divine in his look, there is nothing superhuman. This is no defect of hand on the part of the artist, his skill would have accomplished anything. It was his voluntary position. Van Ruith painted a picture some years ago of Christ and the traders in the temple. His intention was to produce elevated reprimand and divine chastisement, his hand failed him and the result was a weak flogger and a mixture of lovingkindness and repose, wholly incompatible with the incident. Munkacsy on the contrary would never be under the power of his brush, but his view of the event is humanistic. Consequently his work is drama. Had he chosen to paint Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, redeeming his creatures of his own admirable will, through insult and hate, it would not have been drama, it would have been Divine Law, for drama deals with man. As it is from the artist’s conception, it is powerful drama, the drama of the thrice told revolt of humanity against a great teacher.

The face of Christ is a superb study of endurance, passion, I use the word in its proper sense, and dauntless will. It is plain that no thought of the crowd obtrudes itself on his mind. He seems to have nothing in common with them, save his features which are racial. The mouth is concealed by a brown moustache, the chin and up to the ears overgrown with an untrimmed but moderate beard of the same colour. The forehead is low and projects somewhat on the eyebrows. The nose is slightly Jewish but almost aquiline, the nostrils thin and sensitive, the eyes are of a pale blue colour, if of any, and as the face is turned to the light, they are lifted half under the brows, the only true position for intense agony. They are keen, but not large, and seem to pierce the air, half in inspiration, half in suffering. The whole face is of an ascetic, inspired, wholesouled, wonderfully passionate man. It is Christ, as the Man of Sorrows, his raiment red as of them that tread in the winepress. It is literally Behold the Man.

It is this treatment of the theme that has led me to appraise it as a drama. It is grand, noble, tragic but it makes the founder of Christianity, no more than a great social and religious reformer, a personality, of mingled majesty and power, a protagonist of a world-drama. No objections will be lodged against it on that score by the public, whose general attitude when they advert to the subject at all, is that of the painter, only less grand and less interested.

Munkacsy’s conception is as much greater than theirs, as an average artist is greater than an average greengrocer, but it is of the same kind, it is to pervert Wagner, the attitude of the town. Belief in the divinity of Christ is not a salient feature of secular Christendom. But occasional sympathy with the eternal conflict of truth and error, of right and wrong, as exemplified in the drama at Golgotha is not beyond its approval.

J.A.J.
Sept. 1899

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Drama and Life

Although the relations between drama and life are, and must be, of the most vital character, in the history of drama itself these do not seem to have been at all times, consistently in view. The earliest and best known drama, this side of the Caucasus, is that of Greece. I do not propose to attempt anything in the nature of a historical survey but cannot pass it by. Greek drama arose out of the cult of Dionysos, who, god of fruitage, joyfulness and earliest art, offered in his life-story a practical groundplan for the erection of a tragic and a comic theatre. In speaking of Greek drama it must be borne in mind that its rise dominated its form. The conditions of the Attic stage suggested a syllabus of greenroom proprieties and cautions to authors, which in after ages were foolishly set up as the canons of dramatic art, in all lands. Thus the Greeks handed down a code of laws which their descendants with purblind wisdom forthwith advanced to the dignity of inspired pronouncements. Beyond this, I say nothing. It may be a vulgarism, but it is literal truth to say that Greek drama is played out. For good or for bad it has done its work, which, if wrought in gold, was not upon lasting pillars. Its revival is not of dramatic but of pedagogic significance. Even in its own camp it has been superseded. When it had thriven over long in hieratic custody and in ceremonial form, it began to pall on the Aryan genius. A reaction ensued, as was inevitable; and as the classical drama had been born of religion, its follower arose out of a movement in literature. In this reaction England played an important part, for it was the power of the Shakespearean clique that dealt the deathblow to the already dying drama. Shakespeare was before all else a literary artist; humour, eloquence, a gift of seraphic music, theatrical instincts—he had a rich dower of these. The work, to which he gave such splendid impulse, was of a higher nature than that which it followed. It was far from mere drama, it was literature in dialogue. Here I must draw a line of demarcation between literature and drama.

Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours—a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them. Drama has to do with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motley agents who bear them out. When so much is recognized an advance has been made to a more rational and true appreciation of dramatic art. Unless some such distinction be made the result is chaos. Lyricism parades as poetic drama, psychological conversation as literary drama, and traditional farce moves over the boards with the label of comedy affixed to it.

Both of these dramas having done their work as prologues to the swelling act, they may be relegated to the department of literary curios. It is futile to say that there is no new drama or to contend that its proclamation is a huge boom. Space is valuable and I cannot combat these assertions. However it is to me day-clear that dramatic drama must outlive its elders, whose life is only eked by the most dexterous management and the carefullest husbanding. Over this New School some hard hits have been given and taken. The public is slow to seize truth, and its leaders quick to miscall it. Many, whose palates have grown accustomed to the old food, cry out peevishly against a change of diet. To these use and want is the seventh heaven. Loud are their praises of the bland blatancy of Corneille, the starchglaze of Trapassi’s godliness, the Pumblechookian woodenness of Calderon. Their infantile plot juggling sets them agape, so superfine it is. Such critics are not to be taken seriously but they are droll figures! It is of course patently true that the ‘new’ school masters them on their own ground. Compare the skill of Haddon Chambers and Douglas Jerrold, of Sudermann and Lessing. The ‘new’ school in this branch of its art is superior. This superiority is only natural, as it accompanies work of immeasurably higher calibre. Even the least part of Wagner—his music—is beyond Bellini. Spite of the outcry of these lovers of the past, the masons are building for Drama, an ampler and loftier home, where there shall be light for gloom, and wide porches for drawbridge and keep.

Let me explain a little as to this great visitant. By drama I understand the interplay of passions to portray truth; drama is strife, evolution, movement in whatever way unfolded; it exists, before it takes form, independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene. It might be said fantastically that as soon as men and women began life in the world there was above them and about them, a spirit, of which they were dimly conscious, which they would have had sojourn in their midst in deeper intimacy and for whose truth they became seekers in after times, longing to lay hands upon it. For this spirit is as the roaming air, little susceptible of change, and never left their vision, shall never leave it, till the firmament is as a scroll rolled away. At times it would seem that the spirit had taken up his abode in this or that form—but on a sudden he is misused, he is gone and the abode is left idle. He is, one might guess, somewhat of an elfish nature, a nixie, a very Ariel. So we must distinguish him and his house. An idyllic portrait, or an environment of haystacks does not constitute a pastoral play, no more than rhodomontade and sermonizing build up a tragedy. Neither quiescence nor vulgarity shadow forth drama. However subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace the diction, if a play or a work of music or a picture presents the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of us, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama. I shall not speak here of its many forms. In every form that was not fit for it, it made an outburst, as when the first sculptor separated the feet. Morality, mystery, ballet, pantomine, opera, all these it speedily ran through and discarded. Its proper form ‘the drama’ is yet intact. ‘There are many candles on the high altar, though one fall.’

Whatever form it takes must not be superimposed or conventional. In literature we allow conventions, for literature is a comparatively low form of art. Literature is kept alive by tonics, it flourishes through conventions in all human relations, in all actuality. Drama will be for the future at war with convention, if it is to realize itself truly. If you have a clear thought of the body of drama, it will be manifest what raiment befits it. Drama of so wholehearted and admirable a nature cannot but draw all hearts from the spectacular and the theatrical, its note being truth and freedom in every aspect of it. It may be asked what are we to do, in the words of Tolstoi. First, clear our minds of cant and alter the falsehoods to which we have lent our support. Let us criticize in the manner of free people, as a free race, recking little of ferula and formula. The Folk is, I believe, able to do so much. Securus judicat orbis terrarum, is not too high a motto for all human artwork. Let us not overbear the weak, let us treat with a tolerant smile the stale pronouncements of those matchless serio-comics—the ‘litterateurs’. If a sanity rules the mind of the dramatic world there will be accepted what is now the faith of the few, there will be past dispute written up the respective grades of Macbeth and The Master Builder. The sententious critic of the thirtieth century may well say of them—Between him and these there is a great gulf fixed.

There are some weighty truths which we cannot overpass, in the relations between drama and the artist. Drama is essentially a communal art and of widespread domain. The drama—its fittest vehicle almost presupposes an audience, drawn from all classes. In an artloving and art-producing society the drama would naturally take up its position at the head of all artistic institutions. Drama is moreover of so unswayed, so unchallengeable a nature that in its highest forms it all but transcends criticism. It is hardly possible to criticize The Wild Duck, for instance; one can only brood upon it as upon a personal woe. Indeed in the case of all Ibsen’s later work dramatic criticism, properly so called, verges on impertinence. In every other art personality, mannerism of touch, local sense, are held as adornments, as additional charms. But here the artist forgoes his very self and stands a mediator in awful truth before the veiled face of God.

If you ask me what occasions drama or what is the necessity for it at all, I answer Necessity. It is mere animal instinct applied to the mind. Apart from his world-old desire to get beyond the flaming ramparts, man has a further longing to become a maker and a moulder. That is the necessity of all art. Drama is again the least dependent of all arts on its material. If the supply of mouldable earth or stone gives out, sculpture becomes a memory, if the yield of vegetable pigments ceases, the pictorial art ceases. But whether there be marble or paints, there is always the artstuff for drama. I believe further that drama arises spontaneously out of life and is coeval with it. Every race has made its own myths and it is in these that early drama often finds an outlet. The author of Parsifal has recognized this and hence his work is solid as a rock. When the mythus passes over the borderline and invades the temple of worship, the possibilities of its drama have lessened considerably. Even then it struggles back to its rightful place, much to the discomfort of the stodgy congregation.

As men differ as to the rise, so do they as to the aims of drama. It is in most cases claimed by the votaries of the antique school that the drama should have special ethical claims, to use their stock phrase, that it should instruct, elevate, and amuse. Here is yet another gyve that the jailers have bestowed. I do not say that drama may not fulfil any or all of these functions, but I deny that it is essential that it should fulfil them. Art, elevated into the overhigh sphere of religion, generally loses its true soul in stagnant quietism. As to the lower form of this dogma it is surely funny. This polite request to the dramatist to please point a moral, to rival Cyrano, in iterating through each act ‘A la fin de l’envoi je touche’ is amazing. Bred as it is of an amiable-parochial disposition we can but waive it. Mr Beoerly sacked with strychnine, or M. Coupeau in the horrors are nothing short of piteous in a surplice and dalmatic apiece. However this absurdity is eating itself fast, like the tiger of story, tail first.

A yet more insidious claim is the claim for beauty. As conceived by the claimants beauty is as often anaemic spirituality as hardy animalism. Then, chiefly because beauty is to men an arbitrary quality and often lies no deeper than form, to pin drama to dealing with it, would be hazardous. Beauty is the swerga of the aesthete; but truth has a more ascertainable and more real dominion. Art is true to itself when it deals with truth. Should such an untoward event as a universal reformation take place on earth, truth would be the very threshold of the house beautiful.

I have just one other claim to discuss, even at the risk of exhausting your patience. I quote from Mr Beerbohm Tree. ‘In these days when faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, I believe it is the function of art to give us light rather than darkness. It should not point to our relationship with monkeys but rather remind us of our affinity with the angels.’ In this statement there is a fair element of truth which however requires qualification. Mr Tree contends that men and women will always look to art as the glass wherein they may see themselves idealized. Rather I should think that men and women seldom think gravely on their own impulses towards art. The fetters of convention bind them too strongly. But after all art cannot be governed by the insincerity of the compact majority but rather by those eternal conditions, says Mr Tree, which have governed it from the first. I admit this as irrefutable truth. But it were well we had in mind that those eternal conditions are not the conditions of modern communities. Art is marred by such mistaken insistence on its religious, its moral, its beautiful, its idealizing tendencies. A single Rembrandt is worth a gallery full of Van Dycks. And it is this doctrine of idealism in art which has in notable instances disfigured manful endeavour, and has also fostered a babyish instinct to dive under blankets at the mention of the bogey of realism. Hence the public disowns Tragedy, unless she rattles her dagger and goblet, abhors Romance which is not amenable to the laws of prosody, and deems it a sad effect in art if, from the outpoured blood of hapless heroism, there does not at once spring up a growth of sorrowful blossoms. As in the very madness and frenzy of this attitude, people want the drama to befool them, Purveyor supplies plutocrat with a parody of life which the latter digests medicinally in a darkened theatre, the stage literally battening on the mental offal of its patrons.

Now if these views are effete what will serve the purpose? Shall we put life—real life—on the stage? No, says the Philistine chorus, for it will not draw. What a blend of thwarted sight and smug commercialism. Parnassus and the city Bank divide the souls of the pedlars. Life indeed nowadays is often a sad bore. Many feel like the Frenchman that they have been born too late in a world too old, and their wanhope and nerveless unheroism point on ever sternly to a last nothing, a vast futility and meanwhile—a bearing of fardels. Epic savagery is rendered impossible by vigilant policing, chivalry has been killed by the fashion oracles of the boulevards. There is no clank of mail, no halo about gallantry, no hat-sweeping, no roystering! The traditions of romance are upheld only in Bohemia. Still I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama. It is a sinful foolishness to sigh back for the good old times, to feed the hunger of us with the cold stones they afford. Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery. The great human comedy in which each has share, gives limitless scope to the true artist, to-day as yesterday and as in years gone. The forms of things, as the earth’s crust, are changed. The timbers of the ships of Tarshish are falling asunder or eaten by the wanton sea; time has broken into the fastnesses of the mighty; the gardens of Armida are become as treeless wilds. But the deathless passions, the human verities which so found expression then, are indeed deathless, in the heroic cycle, or in the scientific age, Lohengrin, the drama of which unfolds itself in a scene of seclusion, amid half-lights, is not an Antwerp legend but a world drama. Ghosts, the action of which passes in a common parlour, is of universal import—a deepset branch on the tree, Igdrasil, whose roots are struck in earth, but through whose higher leafage the stars of heaven are glowing and astir. It may be that many have nothing to do with such fable, or think that their wonted fare is all that is of need to them. But as we stand on the mountains today, looking before and after, pining for what is not, scarcely discerning afar the patches of open sky; when the spurs threaten, and the track is grown with briers, what does it avail that into our hands we have given us a clouded cane for an alpenstock, or that we have dainty silks to shield us against the eager, upland wind? The sooner we understand our true position, the better; and the sooner then will we be up and doing on our way. In the meantime, art, and chiefly drama, may help us to make our resting places with a greater insight and a greater foresight, that the stones of them may be bravely builded, and the windows goodly and fair. ‘... what will you do in our Society, Miss Hessel?’ asked Rörlund—‘I will let in fresh air, Pastor.’—answered Lona.

Jas. A. Joyce
January 10, 1900

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Ibsen’s New Drama

Twenty years have passed since Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, thereby almost marking an epoch in the history of drama. During those years his name has gone abroad through the length and breadth of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living man. He has been upheld as a religious reformer, a social reformer, a Semitic lover of righteousness, and as a great dramatist. He has been rigorously denounced as a meddlesome intruder, a defective artist, an incomprehensible mystic, and, in the eloquent words of a certain English critic, ‘a muck-ferreting dog’. Through the perplexities of such diverse criticism, the great genius of the man is day by day coming out as a hero comes out amid the earthly trials. The dissonant cries are fainter and more distant, the random praises are rising in steadier and more choral chaunt. Even to the uninterested bystander it must seem significant that the interest attached to this Norwegian has never flagged for over a quarter of a century. It may be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times. Not Rousseau; not Emerson; not Carlyle; not any of those giants of whom almost all have passed out of human ken. Ibsen’s power over two generations has been enhanced by his own reticence. Seldom, if at all, has he condescended to join battle with his enemies. It would appear as if the storm of fierce debate rarely broke in upon his wonderful calm. The conflicting voices have not influenced his work in the very smallest degree. His output of dramas has been regulated by the utmost order, by a clockwork routine, seldom found in the case of genius. Only once he answered his assailants after their violent attack on Ghosts. But from The Wild Duck to John Gabriel Borkman, his dramas have appeared almost mechanically at intervals of two years. One is apt to overlook the sustained energy which such a plan of campaign demands; but even surprise at this must give way to admiration at the gradual, irresistible advance of this extraordinary man. Eleven plays, all dealing with modern life, have been published. Here is the list: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and lastly—his new drama, published at Copenhagen, December 19th, 1899—When We Dead Awaken. This play is already in process of translation into almost a dozen different languages—a fact which speaks volumes for the power of its author. The drama is written in prose, and is in three acts.

To begin an account of a play of Ibsen’s is surely no easy matter. The subject is, in one way, so confined, and, in another way, so vast. It is safe to predict that nine-tenths of the notices of this play will open in some such way as the following: ‘Arnold Rubek and his wife, Maja, have been married for four years, at the beginning of the play. Their union is, however, unhappy. Each is discontented with the other.’ So far as this goes, it is unimpeachable; but then it does not go very far. It does not convey even the most shadowy notion of the relations between Professor Rubek and his wife. It is a bald, clerkly version of countless, indefinable complexities. It is as though the history of a tragic life were to be written down rudely in two columns, one for the pros and the other for the cons. It is only saying what is literally true, to say that, in the three acts of the drama, there has been stated all that is essential to the drama. There is from first to last hardly a superfluous word or phrase. Therefore, the play itself expresses its own ideas as briefly and as concisely as they can be expressed in the dramatic form. It is manifest, then, that a notice cannot give an adequate notion of the drama. This is not the case with the common lot of plays, to which the fullest justice may be meted out in a very limited number of lines. They are for the most part reheated dishes—unoriginal compositions, cheerfully owlish as to heroic insight, living only in their own candid claptrap—in a word, stagey. The most perfunctory curtness is their fittest meed. But in dealing with the work of a man like Ibsen, the task set the reviewer is truly great enough to sink all his courage. All he can hope to do is to link some of the more salient points together in such a way as to suggest rather than to indicate, the intricacies of the plot. Ibsen has attained ere this to such mastery over his art that, with apparently easy dialogue, he presents his men and women passing through different soul-crises. His analytic method is thus made use of to the fullest extent, and into the comparatively short space of two days the life in life of all his characters is compressed. For instance, though we only see Solness during one night and up to the following evening, we have in reality watched with bated breath the whole course of his life up to the moment when Hilda Wangel enters his house. So in the play under consideration, when we see Professor Rubek first, he is sitting in a garden chair, reading his morning paper, but by degrees the whole scroll of his life is unrolled before us, and we have the pleasure not of hearing it read out to us, but of reading it for ourselves, piecing the various parts, and going closer to see wherever the writing on the parchment is fainter or less legible.

As I have said, when the play opens, Professor Rubek is sitting in the gardens of a hotel, eating, or rather having finished, his breakfast. In another chair, close beside him, is sitting Maja Rubek, the Professor’s wife. The scene is in Norway, a popular health resort near the sea. Through the trees can be seen the town harbour, and the fjord, with steamers plying over it, as it stretches past headland and river-isle out to the sea. Rubek is a famous sculptor, of middle age, and Maja, a woman still young, whose bright eyes have just a shade of sadness in them. These two continue reading their respective papers quietly in the peace of the morning. All looks so idyllic to the careless eye. The lady breaks the silence in a weary, petulant manner by complaining of the deep peace that reigns about them. Arnold lays down his paper with mild expostulation. Then they begin to converse of this thing and that; first of the silence, then of the place and the people, of the railway stations through which they passed the previous night, with their sleepy porters and aimlessly shifting lanterns. From this they proceed to talk of the changes in the people, and of all that has grown up since they were married. Then it is but a little further to the main trouble. In speaking of their married life it speedily appears that the inner view of their relations is hardly as ideal as the outward view might lead one to expect. The depths of these two people are being slowly stirred up. The leaven of prospective drama is gradually discerned working amid the fin-de-siècle scene. The lady seems a difficult little person. She complains of the idle promises with which her husband had fed her aspirations.

maja. You said you would take me up to a high mountain and show me all the glory of the world.

rubek (with a slight start). Did I promise you that, too?

In short, there is something untrue lying at the root of their union. Meanwhile the guests of the hotel, who are taking the baths, pass out of the hotel porch on the right, chatting and laughing men and women. They are informally marshalled by the inspector of the baths. This person is an unmistakable type of the conventional official. He salutes Mr. and Mrs. Rubek, enquiring how they slept. Rubek asks him if any of the guests take their baths by night, as he has seen a white figure moving in the park during the night. Maja scouts the notion, but the inspector says that there is a strange lady, who has rented the pavilion which is to the left, and who is staying there, with one attendant—a Sister of Mercy. As they are talking, the strange lady and her companion pass slowly through the park and enter the pavilion. The incident appears to affect Rubek, and Maja’s curiosity is aroused.

maja (a little hurt and jarred). Perhaps this lady has been one of your models, Rubek? Search your memory.

rubek (looks cuttingly at her). Model?

maja (with a provoking smile). In your younger days, I mean. You are said to have had such innumerable models—long ago, of course.

rubek (in the same tone). Oh, no, little Frau Maja. I have in reality had only one single model. One and one only for everything I have done.

While this misunderstanding is finding outlet in the foregoing conversation, the inspector, all at once, takes fright at some person who is approaching. He attempts to escape into the hotel, but the high-pitched voice of the person who is approaching arrests him.

ulfheim’s voice (heard outside). Stop a moment, man. Devil take it all, can’t you stop? Why do you always scuttle away from me?

With these words, uttered in strident tones, the second chief actor enters on the scene. He is described as a great bear-killer, thin, tall, of uncertain age, and muscular. He is accompanied by his servant, Lars, and a couple of sporting dogs. Lars does not speak a single word in the play. Ulfheim at present dismisses him with a kick, and approaches Mr. and Mrs. Rubek. He falls into conversation with them, for Rubek is known to him as the celebrated sculptor. On sculpture this savage hunter offers some original remarks.

ulfheim ... We both work in a hard material, madam—both your husband and I. He struggles with his marble blocks, I daresay; and I struggle with tense and quivering bear-sinews. And we both of us win the fight in the end—subdue and master our material. We don’t give in until we have got the better of it, though it fight never so hard.

rubek (deep in thought). There’s a great deal of truth in what you say.

This eccentric creature, perhaps by the force of his own eccentricity, has begun to weave a spell of enchantment about Maja. Each word that he utters tends to wrap the web of his personality still closer about her. The black dress of the Sister of Mercy causes him to grin sardonically. He speaks calmly of all his near friends, whom he has dispatched out of the world.

maja. And what did you do for your nearest friends?

ulfheim. Shot them, of course.

rubek (looking at him). Shot them?

maja (moving her chair back). Shot them dead?

ulfheim (nods). I never miss, madam.

However, it turns out that by his nearest friends he means his dogs, and the minds of his hearers are put somewhat more at ease. During their conversation the Sister of Mercy has prepared a slight repast for her mistress at one of the tables outside the pavilion. The unsustaining qualities of the food excite Ulfheim’s merriment. He speaks with a lofty disparagement of such effeminate diet. He is a realist in his appetite.

ulfheim (rising). Spoken like a woman of spirit, madam. Come with me, then! They [his dogs] swallow whole, great, thumping meat-bones—gulp them up and then gulp them down again. Oh, it’s a regular treat to see them!

On such half-gruesome, half-comic invitation Maja goes out with him, leaving her husband in the company of the strange lady who enters from the pavilion. Almost simultaneously the Professor and the lady recognize each other. The lady has served Rubek as model for the central figure in his famous masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day’. Having done her work for him, she had fled in an unaccountable manner, leaving no traces behind her. Rubek and she drift into familiar conversation. She asks him who is the lady who has just gone out. He answers, with some hesitation, that she is his wife. Then he asks if she is married. She replies that she is married. He asks her where her husband is at present.

rubek. And where is he now?

irene. Oh, in a churchyard somewhere or other, with a fine, handsome monument over him; and with a bullet rattling in his skull.

rubek. Did he kill himself?

irene. Yes, he was good enough to take that off my hands.

rubek. Do you not lament his loss, Irene?

irene (not understanding). Lament? What loss?

rubek. Why, the loss of Herr von Satow, of course.

irene. His name was not Satow.

rubek. Was it not?

irene. My second husband is called Satow. He is a Russian.

rubek. And where is he?

irene. Far away in the Ural Mountains. Among all his goldmines.

rubek. So he lives there?

irene (shrugs her shoulders). Lives? Lives? In reality I have killed him.

rubek (starts). Killed—!

irene. Killed him with a fine sharp dagger which I always have with me in bed

Rubek begins to understand that there is some meaning hidden beneath these strange words. He begins to think seriously on himself, his art, and on her, passing in review the course of his life since the creation of his masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day1. He sees that he has not fulfilled the promise of that work, and comes to realize that there is something lacking in his life. He asks Irene how she has lived since they last saw each other. Irene’s answer to his query is of great importance, for it strikes the key note of the entire play.

irene (rises slowly from her chair and says quiveringly). I was dead for many years. They came and bound me—lacing my arms together at my back. Then they lowered me into a grave-vault, with iron bars before the loophole. And with padded walls, so that no one on the earth above could hear the grave-shrieks.

In Irene’s allusion to her position as model for the great picture, Ibsen gives further proof of his extraordinary knowledge of women. No other man could have so subtly expressed the nature of the relations between the sculptor and his model, had he even dreamt of them.

irene. I exposed myself wholly and unreservedly to your gaze [more softly] and never once did you touch me....

* * *

rubek (looks impressively at her). I was an artist, Irene.

irene (darkly). That is just it. That is just it.

Thinking deeper and deeper on himself and on his former attitude towards this woman, it strikes him yet more forcibly that there are great gulfs set between his art and his life, and that even in his art his skill and genius are far from perfect. Since Irene left him he has done nothing but paint portrait busts of townsfolk. Finally, some kind of resolution is enkindled in him, a resolution to repair his botching, for he does not altogether despair of that. There is just a reminder of the will-glorification of Brand in the lines that follow.

rubek (struggling with himself, uncertainly). If we could, oh, if only we could....

irene. Why can we not do what we will?

In fine, the two agree in deeming their present state insufferable. It appears plain to her that Rubek lies under a heavy obligation to her, and with their recognition of this, and the entrance of Maja, fresh from the enchantment of Ulfheim, the first act closes.

rubek. When did you begin to seek for me, Irene?

irene (with a touch of jesting bitterness). From the time when I realized that I had given away to you something rather indispensable. Something one ought never to part with.

rubek (bowing his head). Yes, that is bitterly true. You gave me three or four years of your youth.

irene. More, more than that I gave you—spendthrift as I then was.

rubek. Yes, you were prodigal, Irene. You gave me all your naked loveliness—

irene. To gaze upon—

rubek. And to glorify....

* * *

irene. But you have forgotten the most precious gift.

rubek. The most precious ... what gift was that?

irene. I gave you my young living soul. And that gift left me empty within—soulless [looks at him with a fixed stare]. It was that I died of, Arnold.

It is evident, even from this mutilated account, that the first act is a masterly one. With no perceptible effort the drama rises, with a. methodic natural ease it develops. The trim garden of the nineteenth-century hotel is slowly made the scene of a gradually growing dramatic struggle. Interest has been roused in each of the characters, sufficient to carry the mind into the succeeding act. The situation is not stupidly explained, but the action has set in, and at the close the play has reached a definite stage of progression.

The second act takes place close to a sanatorium on the mountains. A cascade leaps from a rock and flows in steady stream to the right. On the bank some children are playing, laughing and shouting. The time is evening. Rubek is discovered lying on a mound to the left. Maja enters shortly, equipped for hill-climbing. Helping herself with her stick across the stream, she calls out to Rubek and approaches him. He asks how she and her companion are amusing themselves, and questions her as to their hunting. An exquisitely humorous touch enlivens their talk. Rubek asks if they intend hunting the bear near the surrounding locality. She replies with a grand superiority.

maja. You don’t suppose that bears are to be found in the naked mountains, do you?

The next topic is the uncouth Ulfheim. Maja admires him because he is so ugly—then turns abruptly to her husband saying, pensively, that he also is ugly. The accused pleads his age.

rubek (shrugging his shoulders). One grows old. One grows old, Frau Maja!

This semi-serious banter leads them on to graver matters. Maja lies at length in the soft heather, and rails gently at the Professor. For the mysteries and claims of art she has a somewhat comical disregard.

maja (with a somewhat scornful laugh). Yes, you are always, always an artist.

and again—

maja.... Your tendency is to keep yourself to yourself and—think your own thoughts. And, of course, I can’t talk properly to you about your affairs. I know nothing about Art and that sort of thing. [With an impatient gesture.] And care very little either, for that matter.

She rallies him on the subject of the strange lady, and hints maliciously at the understanding between them. Rubek says that he was only an artist and that she was the source of his inspiration. He confesses that the five years of his married life have been years of intellectual famine for him. He has viewed in their true light his own feelings towards his art.

rubek (smiling). But that was not precisely what I had in my mind.

maja. What then?

rubek (again serious). It was this—that all the talk about the artist’s vocation and the artist’s mission, and so forth, began to strike me as being very empty and hollow and meaningless at bottom.

maja. Then what would you put in its place?

rubek. Life, Maja.

The all-important question of their mutual happiness is touched upon, and after a brisk discussion a tacit agreement to separate is effected. When matters are in this happy condition Irene is descried coming across the heath. She is surrounded by the sportive children and stays awhile among them. Maja jumps up from the grass and goes to her, saying, enigmatically, that her husband requires assistance to ‘open a precious casket’. Irene bows and goes towards Rubek, and Maja goes joyfully to seek her hunter. The interview which follows is certainly remarkable, even from a stagey point of view. It constitutes, practically, the substance of the second act, and is of absorbing interest. At the same time it must be added that such a scene would tax the powers of the mimes producing it. Nothing short of a complete realization of the two rôles would represent the complex ideas involved in the conversation. When we reflect how few stage artists would have either the intelligence to attempt it or the powers to execute it, we behold a pitiful revelation.

In the interview of these two people on the heath, the whole tenors of their lives are outlined with bold steady strokes. From the first exchange of introductory words each phrase tells a chapter of experiences. Irene alludes to the dark shadow of the Sister of Mercy which follows her everywhere, as the shadow of Arnold’s unquiet conscience follows him. When he has half-involuntarily confessed so much, one of the great barriers between them is broken down. Their trust in each other is, to some extent, renewed, and they revert to their past acquaintance. Irene speaks openly of her feelings, of her hate for the sculptor.

irene (again vehemently). Yes, for you—for the artist who had so lightly and carelessly taken a warm-blooded body, a young human life, and worn the soul out of it—because you needed it for a work of art.

Rubek’s transgression has indeed been great. Not merely has he possessed himself of her soul, but he has withheld from its rightful throne the child of her soul. By her child Irene means the statue. To her it seems that this statue is, in a very true and very real sense, born of her. Each day as she saw it grow to its full growth under the hand of the skilful moulder, her inner sense of motherhood for it, of right over it, of love towards it, had become stronger and more confirmed.

irene (changing to a tone full of warmth and feeling). But that statue in the wet, living clay, that I loved—as it rose up, a vital human creature out of these raw, shapeless masses—for that was our creation, our child. Mine and yours.

It is, in reality, because of her strong feelings that she has kept aloof from Rubek for five years. But when she hears now of what he has done to the child—her child—all her powerful nature rises up against him in resentment. Rubek, in a mental agony, endeavours to explain, while she listens like a tigress whose cub has been wrested from her by a thief.

rubek. I was young then—with no experience of life. The Resurrection, I thought, would be most beautifully and exquisitely figured as a young unsullied woman—with none of a life’s experience—awakening to light and glory without having to put away from her anything ugly and impure.

With larger experience of life he has found it necessary to alter his ideal somewhat, he has made her child no longer a principal, but an intermediary figure. Rubek, turning towards her, sees her just about to stab him. In a fever of terror and thought he rushes into his own defence, pleading madly for the errors he has done. It seems to Irene that he is endeavouring to render his sin poetical, that he is penitent but in a luxury of dolour. The thought that she has given up herself, her whole life, at the bidding of his false art, rankles in her heart with a terrible persistence. She cries out against herself, not loudly, but in deep sorrow.

irene (with apparent self-control). I should have borne children into the world—many children—real children—not such children as are hidden away in grave-vaults. That was my vocation. I ought never to have served you—poet.

Rubek, in poetic absorption, has no reply, he is musing on the old, happy days. Their dead joys solace him. But Irene is thinking of a certain phrase of his which he had spoken unwittingly. He had declared that he owed her thanks for her assistance in his work. This has been, he had said, a truly blessed episode in my life. Rubek’s tortured mind cannot bear any more reproaches, too many are heaped upon it already. He begins throwing flowers on the stream, as they used in those bygone days on the lake of Taunitz. He recalls to her the time when they made a boat of leaves, and yoked a white swan to it, in imitation of the boat of Lohengrin. Even here in their sport there lies a hidden meaning.

irene. You said I was the swan that drew your boat.

rubek. Did I say so? Yes, I daresay I did [absorbed in the game]. Just see how the sea-gulls are swimming down the stream!

irene (laughing). And all your ships have run ashore.

rubek (throwing more leaves into the brook). I have ships enough in reserve.

While they are playing aimlessly, in a kind of childish despair, Ulfheim and Maja appear across the heath. These two are going to seek adventures on the high tablelands. Maja sings out to her husband a little song which she has composed in her joyful mood. With a sardonic laugh Ulfheim bids Rubek good-night and disappears with his companion up the mountain. All at once Irene and Rubek leap to the same thought. But at that moment the gloomy figure of the Sister of Mercy is seen in the twilight, with her leaden eyes looking at them both. Irene breaks from him, but promises to meet him that night on the heath.

rubek. And you will come, Irene?

irene. Yes, certainly I will come. Wait for me here.

rubek (repeats dreamily). Summer night on the upland. With you. With you. [His eyes meet hers.] Oh, Irene, that might have been our life. And that we have forfeited, we two.

irene. We see the irretrievable only when [breaks short off].

rubek (looks inquiringly at her). When? ...

irene. When we dead awaken.

The third act takes place on a wide plateau, high up on the hills. The ground is rent with yawning clefts. Looking to the right, one sees the range of the summits half-hidden in the moving mists. On the left stands an old, dismantled hut. It is in the early morning, when the skies are the colour of pearl. The day is beginning to break. Maja and Ulfheim come down to the plateau. Their feelings are sufficiently explained by the opening words.

maja (trying to tear herself loose). Let me go! Let me go, I say!

ulfheim. Come, come! are you going to bite now? You’re as snappish as a wolf.

When Ulfheim will not cease his annoyances, Maja threatens to run over the crest of the neighbouring ridge. Ulfheim points out that she will dash herself to pieces. He has wisely sent Lars away after the hounds, that he may be uninterrupted. Lars, he says, may be trusted not to find the dogs too soon.

maja (looking angrily at him). No, I daresay not.

ulfheim (catching at her arm). For Lars—he knows my—my methods of sport, you see.

Maja, with enforced self-possession, tells him frankly what she thinks of him. Her uncomplimentary observations please the bear-hunter very much. Maja requires all her tact to keep him in order. When she talks of going back to the hotel, he gallantly offers to carry her on his shoulders, for which suggestion he is promptly snubbed. The two are playing as a cat and a bird play. Out of their skirmish one speech of Ulfheim’s rises suddenly to arrest attention, as it throws some light on his former life.

ulfheim (with suppressed exasperation). I once took a young girl—lifted her up from the mire of the streets, and carried her in my arms. Next my heart I carried her. So I would have borne her all through life, lest haply she should dash her foot against a stone.... [With a growling laugh.] And do you know what I got for my reward?

maja. No. What did you get?

ulfheim (looks at her, smiles and nods). I got the horns! The horns that you can see so plainly. Is not that a comical story, madam bear-murderess?

As an exchange of confidence, Maja tells him her life in summary—and chiefly her married life with Professor Rubek. As a result, these two uncertain souls feel attracted to each other, and Ulfheim states his case in the following characteristic manner:

ulfheim. Should not we two tack our poor shreds of life together?

Maja, satisfied that in their vows there will be no promise on his part to show her all the splendours of the earth, or to fill her dwelling-place with art, gives a half-consent by allowing him to carry her down the slope. As they are about to go, Rubek and Irene, who have also spent the night on the heath, approach the same plateau. When Ulfheim asks Rubek if he and madame have ascended by the same pathway, Rubek answers significantly.

rubek. Yes, of course [With a glance at maja]. Henceforth the strange lady and I do not intend our ways to part.

While the musketry of their wit is at work, the elements seem to feel that there is a mighty problem to be solved then and there, and that a great drama is swiftly drawing to a close. The smaller figures of Maja and Ulfheim are grown still smaller in the dawn of the tempest. Their lots are decided in comparative quiet, and we cease to take much interest in them. But the other two hold our gaze, as they stand up silently on the fjaell, engrossing central figures of boundless, human interest. On a sudden, Ulfheim raises his hand impressively towards the heights.

ulfheim. But don’t you see that the storm is upon us? Don’t you hear the blasts of wind?

rubek (listening). They sound like the prelude to the Resurrection Day.

* * *

maja (drawing ulfheim away). Let us make haste and get down.

As he cannot take more than one person at a time, Ulfheim promises to send aid for Rubek and Irene, and, seizing Maja in his arms, clambers rapidly but warily down the path. On the desolate mountain plateau, in the growing light, the man and the woman are left together—no longer the artist and his model. And the shadow of a great change is stalking close in the morning silence. Then Irene tells Arnold that she will not go back among the men and women she has left; she will not be rescued. She tells him also, for now she may tell all, how she had been tempted to kill him in frenzy when he spoke of their connection as an episode of his life.

rubek (darkly). And why did you hold your hand?

irene. Because it flashed upon me with a sudden horror that you were dead already—long ago.

But, says Rubek, our love is not dead in us, it is active, fervent and strong.

irene. The love that belongs to the life of earth—the beautiful, miraculous life of earth—the inscrutable life of earth—that is dead in both of us.

There are, moreover, the difficulties of their former lives. Even here, at the sublimest part of his play, Ibsen is master of himself and his facts. His genius as an artist faces all, shirks nothing. At the close of The Master Builder, the greatest touch of all was the horrifying exclamation of one without, ‘O! the head is all crushed in.’ A lesser artist would have cast a spiritual glamour over the tragedy of Bygmester Solness. In like manner here Irene objects that she has exposed herself as a nude before the vulgar gaze, that Society has cast her out, that all is too late. But Rubek cares for such considerations no more. He flings them all to the wind and decides.

rubek (throwing his arms violently around her). Then let two of the dead—us two—for once live life to its uttermost, before we go down to our graves again.

irene (with a shriek). Arnold!

rubek. But not here in the half-darkness. Not here with this hideous dank shroud flapping around us!

irene (carried away by passion). No, no—up in the light and in all the glittering glory! Up to the Peak of Promise!

rubek. There we will hold our marriage-feast, Irene—oh! my beloved!

irene (proudly). The sun may freely look on us, Arnold.

rubek. All the powers of light may freely look on us—and all the powers of darkness too [seizes her hand]—will you then follow me, oh my grace-given bride!

irene (as though transfigured). I follow you, freely and gladly, my lord and master!

rubek (drawing her along with him). We must first pass through the mists, Irene, and then——

irene. Yes, through all the mists, and then right up to the summit of the tower that shines in the sunrise.

The mist-clouds close in over the scene, rubek and irene, hand in hand, climb up over the snowfield to the right and soon disappear among the lower clouds. Keen storm-gusts hurtle and whistle through the air.

The sister of mercy appears upon the rubble-slope to the left. She stops and looks around silently and searchingly.

maja can be heard singing triumphantly far in the depths below.

maja.

I am free! I am free! I am free!

No more life in the prison for me!

I am free as a bird! I am free!

Suddenly a sound like thunder is heard from high up on the snowfield, which glides and whirls downwards with rushing speed, rubek and irene can be dimly discerned as they are whirled along with the masses of snow and buried in them.

the sister of mercy (gives a shriek, stretches out her arms towards them, and cries), Irene! [Stands silent a moment, then makes the sign of the cross before her in the air, and says], Pax Vobiscum!

maja’s triumphant song sounds from still further down below.

Such is the plot, in a crude and incoherent way, of this new drama. Ibsen’s plays do not depend for their interest on the action, or on the incidents. Even the characters, faultlessly drawn though they be, are not the first thing in his plays. But the naked drama—either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance—this is what primarily rivets our attention. Ibsen has chosen the average lives in their uncompromising truth for the groundwork of all his later plays. He has abandoned the verse form, and has never sought to embellish his work after the conventional fashion. Even when his dramatic theme reached its zenith he has not sought to trick it out in gawds or tawdriness. How easy it would have been to have written An Enemy of the People on a speciously loftier level—to have replaced the bourgeois by the legitimate hero! Critics might then have extolled as grand what they have so often condemned as banal. But the surroundings are nothing to Ibsen. The play is the thing. By the force of his genius, and the indisputable skill which he brings to all his efforts, Ibsen has, for many years, engrossed the attention of the civilized world. Many years more, however, must pass before he will enter his kingdom in jubilation, although, as he stands to-day, all has been done on his part to ensure his own worthiness to enter therein. I do not propose here to examine into every detail of dramaturgy connected with this play, but merely to outline the characterization.

In his characters Ibsen does not repeat himself. In this drama—the last of a long catalogue—he has drawn and differentiated with his customary skill. What a novel creation is Ulfheim! Surely the hand which has drawn him has not yet lost her cunning. Ulfheim is, I think, the newest character in the play. He is a kind of surprise-packet. It is as a result of his novelty that he seems to leap, at first mention, into bodily form. He is superbly wild, primitively impressive. His fierce eyes roll and glare as those of Yégof or Herne. As for Lars, we may dismiss him, for he never opens his mouth. The Sister of Mercy speaks only once in the play, but then with good effect. In silence she follows Irene like a retribution, a voiceless shadow with her own symbolic majesty.

Irene, too, is worthy of her place in the gallery of her compeers. Ibsen’s knowledge of humanity is nowhere more obvious than in his portrayal of women. He amazes one by his painful introspection; he seems to know them better than they know themselves. Indeed, if one may say so of an eminently virile man, there is a curious admixture of the woman in his nature. His marvellous accuracy, his faint traces of femininity, his delicacy of swift touch, are perhaps attributable to this admixture. But that he knows women is an incontrovertible fact. He appears to have sounded them to almost unfathomable depths. Beside his portraits the psychological studies of Hardy and Turgénieff, or the exhaustive elaborations of Meredith, seem no more than sciolism. With a deft stroke, in a phrase, in a word, he does what costs them chapters, and does it better. Irene, then, has to face great comparison; but it must be acknowledged that she comes forth of it bravely. Although Ibsen’s women are uniformly true, they, of course, present themselves in various lights. Thus Gina Ekdal is, before all else, a comic figure, and Hedda Gabler a tragic one—if such old-world terms may be employed without incongruity. But Irene cannot be so readily classified; the very aloofness from passion, which is not separable from her, forbids classification. She interests us strangely—magnetically, because of her inner power of character. However perfect Ibsen’s former creations may be, it is questionable whether any of his women reach to the depth of soul of Irene. She holds our gaze for the sheer force of her intellectual capacity. She is, moreover, an intensely spiritual creation—in the truest and widest sense of that. At times she is liable to get beyond us, to soar above us, as she does with Rubek. It will be considered by some as a blemish that she—a woman of fine spirituality—is made an artist’s model, and some may even regret that such an episode mars the harmony of the drama. I cannot altogether see the force of this contention; it seems pure irrelevancy. But whatever may be thought of the fact, there is small room for complaint as to the handling of it. Ibsen treats it, as indeed he treats all things, with large insight, artistic restraint, and sympathy. He sees it steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes. Ibsen is different from the clever purveyor.

Maja fulfills a certain technical function in the play, apart from her individual character. Into the sustained tension she comes as a relief. Her airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note, counterbalances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of Rubek. Maja has practically the same effect on this play, as Hilda Wangel has on The Master Builder. But she does not capture our sympathy so much as Nora Helmer. She is not meant to capture it.

Rubek himself is the chief figure in this drama, and, strangely enough, the most conventional. Certainly, when contrasted with his Napoleonic predecessor, John Gabriel Borkman, he is a mere shadow. It must be borne in mind, however, that Borkman is alive, actively, energetically, restlessly alive, all through the play to the end, when he dies; whereas Arnold Rubek is dead, almost hopelessly dead, until the end, when he comes to life. Notwithstanding this, he is supremely interesting, not because of himself, but because of his dramatic significance. Ibsen’s drama, as I have said, is wholly independent of his characters. They may be bores, but the drama in which they live and move is invariably powerful. Not that Rubek is a bore by any means! He is infinitely more interesting in himself than Torvald Helmer or Tesman, both of whom possess certain strongly-marked characteristics. Arnold Rubek is, on the other hand, not intended to be a genius, as perhaps Eljert Lövborg is. Had he been a genius like Eljert he would have understood in a truer way the value of his life. But, as we are to suppose, the facts that he is devoted to his art and that he has attained to a degree of mastery in it—mastery of hand linked with limitation of thought—tell us that there may be lying dormant in him a capacity for greater life, which may be exercised when he, a dead man, shall have risen from among the dead.

The only character whom I have neglected is the inspector of the baths, and I hasten to do him tardy, but scant, justice. He is neither more nor less than the average inspector of baths. But he is that.

So much for the characterization, which is at all times profound and interesting. But apart from the characters in the play, there are some noteworthy points in the frequent and extensive side-issues of the line of thought. The most salient of these is what seems, at first sight, nothing more than an accidental scenic feature. I allude to the environment of the drama. One cannot but observe in Ibsen’s later work a tendency to get out of closed rooms. Since Hedda Gabler this tendency is most marked. The last act of The Master Builder and the last act of John Gabriel Borkman take place in the open air. But in this play the three acts are al fresco. To give heed to such details as these in the drama may be deemed ultra-Boswellian fanaticism. As a matter of fact it is what is barely due to the work of a great artist. And this feature, which is so prominent, does not seem to me altogether without its significance.

Again, there has not been lacking in the last few social dramas a fine pity for men—a note nowhere audible in the uncompromising rigour of the early eighties. Thus in the conversion of Rubek’s views as to the girl-figure in his masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day’, there is involved an all-embracing philosophy, a deep sympathy with the cross-purposes and contradictions of life, as they may be reconcilable with a hopeful awakening—when the manifold travail of our poor humanity may have a glorious issue. As to the drama itself, it is doubtful if any good purpose can be served by attempting to criticize it. Many things would tend to prove this. Henrik Ibsen is one of the world’s great men before whom criticism can make but feeble show. Appreciation, hearkening is the only true criticism. Further, that species of criticism which calls itself dramatic criticism is a needless adjunct to his plays. When the art of a dramatist is perfect the critic is superfluous. Life is not to be criticized, but to be faced and lived. Again, if any plays demand a stage they are the plays of Ibsen. Not merely is this so because his plays have so much in common with the plays of other men that they were not written to cumber the shelves of a library, but because they are so packed with thought. At some chance expression the mind is tortured with some question, and in a flash long reaches of life are opened up in vista, yet the vision is momentary unless we stay to ponder on it. It is just to prevent excessive pondering that Ibsen requires to be acted. Finally, it is foolish to expect that a problem, which has occupied Ibsen for nearly three years, will unroll smoothly before our eyes on a first or second reading. So it is better to leave the drama to plead for itself. But this at least is clear, that in this play Ibsen has given us nearly the very best of himself. The action is neither hindered by many complexities, as in The Pillars of Society, nor harrowing in its simplicity, as in Ghosts. We have whimsicality, bordering on extravagance, in the wild Ulfheim, and subtle humour in the sly contempt which Rubek and Maja entertain for each other. But Ibsen has striven to let the drama have perfectly free action. So he has not bestowed his wonted pains on the minor characters. In many of his plays these minor characters are matchless creations. Witness Jacob Engstrand, Tönnesen, and the demonic Molvik! But in this play the minor characters are not allowed to divert our attention.

On the whole, When We Dead A waken may rank with the greatest of the author’s work—if, indeed, it be not the greatest. It is described as the last of the series, which began with A Doll’s House—a grand epilogue to its ten predecessors. Than these dramas, excellent alike in dramaturgic skill, characterization, and supreme interest, the long roll of drama, ancient or modern, has few things better to show.

James A. Joyce

1900

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The Day of the Rabblement

No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself. This radical principle of artistic economy applies specially to a time of crisis, and today when the highest form of art has been just preserved by desperate sacrifices, it is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabblement. The Irish Literary Theatre is the latest movement of protest against the sterility and falsehood of the modern stage. Half a century ago the note of protest was uttered in Norway, and since then in several countries long and disheartening battles have been fought against the hosts of prejudice and misinterpretation and ridicule. What triumph there has been here and there is due to stubborn conviction, and every movement that has set out heroically has achieved a little. The Irish Literary Theatre gave out that it was the champion of progress, and proclaimed war against commercialism and vulgarity. It had partly made good its word and was expelling the old devil, when after the first encounter it surrendered to the popular will. Now, your popular devil is more dangerous than your vulgar devil. Bulk and lungs count for something, and he can gild his speech aptly. He has prevailed once more, and the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe.

It will be interesting to examine here. The official organ of the movement spoke of producing European masterpieces, but the matter went no further. Such a project was absolutely necessary. The censorship is powerless in Dublin, and the directors could have produced Ghosts or The Dominion of Darkness if they chose. Nothing can be done until the forces that dictate public judgement are calmly confronted. But, of course, the directors are shy of presenting Ibsen, Tolstoy or Hauptmann, where even Countess Cathleen is pronounced vicious and damnable. Even for a technical reason this project was necessary. A nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad. Earnest dramatists of the second rank, Sudermann, Björnson, and Giacosa, can write very much better plays than the Irish Literary Theatre has staged. But, of course, the directors would not like to present such improper writers to the uncultivated, much less to the cultivated, rabblement. Accordingly, the rabblement, placid and intensely moral, is enthroned in boxes and galleries amid a hum of approval—la bestia Trionfante—and those who think that Echegaray is ‘morbid’, and titter coyly when Mélisande lets down her hair, are not sure but they are the trustees of every intellectual and poetic treasure.

Meanwhile, what of the artists? It is equally unsafe at present to say of Mr. Yeats that he has or has not genius. In aim and form The Wind among the Reeds is poetry of the highest order, and The Adoration of the Magi (a story which one of the great Russians might have written) shows what Mr. Yeats can do when he breaks with the half-gods. But an aesthete has a floating will, and Mr. Yeats’s treacherous instinct of adaptability must be blamed for his recent association with a platform from which even self-respect should have urged him to refrain. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore are not writers of much originality. Mr. Martyn, disabled as he is by an incorrigible style, has none of the fierce, hysterical power of Strindberg, whom he suggests at times; and with him one is conscious of a lack of breadth and distinction which outweighs the nobility of certain passages. Mr. Moore, however, has wonderful mimetic ability, and some years ago his books might have entitled him to the place of honour among English novelists. But though Vain Fortune (perhaps one should add some of Esther Waters) is fine, original work, Mr. Moore is really struggling in the backwash of that tide which has advanced from Flaubert through Jakobsen to D’Annunzio: for two entire eras lie between Madame Bovary and Il Fuoco. It is plain from Celibates and the later novels that Mr. Moore is beginning to draw upon his literary account, and the quest of a new impulse may explain his recent startling conversion. Converts are in the movement now, and Mr. Moore and his island have been fitly admired. But however frankly Mr. Moore may misquote Pater and Turgenieff to defend himself, his new impulse has no kind of relation to the future of art.

In such circumstances it has become imperative to define the position. If an artist courts the favour of the multitude he cannot escape the contagion of its fetichism and deliberate self-deception, and if he joins in a popular movement he does so at his own risk. Therefore, the Irish Literary Theatre by its surrender to the trolls has cut itself adrift from the line of advancement. Until he has freed himself from the mean influences about him—sodden enthusiasm and clever insinuation and every flattering influence of vanity and low ambition—no man is an artist at all. But his true servitude is that he inherits a will broken by doubt and a soul that yields up all its hate to a caress; and the most seeming-independent are those who are the first to reassume their bonds. But Truth deals largely with us. Elsewhere there are men who are worthy to carry on the tradition of the old master who is dying in Christiania. He has already found his successor in the writer of Michael Kramer, and the third minister will not be wanting when his hour comes. Even now that hour may be standing by the door.

James A. Joyce

October 15th, 1901

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James Clarence Mangan

‘Memorial I would have ... a constant presence with those that love me.’

It is many a day since the dispute of the classical and romantic schools began in the quiet city of the arts, so that criticism, which has wrongly decided that the classical temper is the romantic temper grown older, has been driven to recognize these as constant states of mind. Though the dispute has been often ungentle (to say no more) and has seemed to some a dispute about names and with time has become a confused battle, each school advancing to the borders of the other and busy with internal strife, the classical school fighting the materialism which attends it, and the romantic school to preserve coherence, yet as this unrest is the condition of all achievement, it is so far good, and presses slowly towards a deeper insight which will make the schools at one. Meanwhile no criticism is just which avoids labour by setting up a standard of maturity by which to judge the schools. The romantic school is often and grievously misinterpreted, not more by others than by its own, for that impatient temper which, as it could see no fit abode here for its ideals, chose to behold them under insensible figures, comes to disregard certain limitations, and, because these figures are blown high and low by the mind that conceived them, comes at times to regard them as feeble shadows moving aimlessly about the light, obscuring it; and the same temper, which assuredly has not grown more patient, exclaims that the light is changed to worse than shadow, to darkness even, by any method which bends upon these present things and so works upon them and fashions them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning, which is still unuttered. Yet so long as this place in nature is given us, it is right that art should do no violence to that gift, though it may go far beyond the stars and the waters in the service of what it loves. Wherefore the highest praise must be withheld from the romantic school (though the most enlightened of Western poets be thereby passed over), and the cause of the impatient temper must be sought in the artist and in his theme. Nor must the laws of his art be forgotten in the judgment of the artist, for no error is more general than the judgment of a man of letters by the supreme laws of poetry. Verse, indeed, is not the only expression of rhythm, but poetry in any art transcends the mode of its expression; and to name what is less than poetry in the arts, there is need of new terms, though in one art the term ‘literature’ may be used. Literature is the wide domain which lies between ephemeral writing and poetry (with which is philosophy), and just as the greater part of verse is not literature, so even original writers and thinkers must often be jealously denied the most honourable title; and much of Wordsworth, and almost all of Baudelaire, is merely literature in verse and must be judged by the laws of literature. Finally, it must be asked concerning every artist how he is in relation to the highest knowledge and to those laws which do not take holiday because men and times forget them. This is not to look for a message but to approach the temper which has made the work, an old woman praying, or a young man fastening his shoe, and to see what is there well done and how much it signifies. A song by Shakespeare or Verlaine, which seems so free and living and as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or the lights of evening, is discovered to be the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, at least so fitly. But to approach the temper which has made art is an act of reverence and many conventions must be first put off, for certainly the inmost region will never yield to one who is enmeshed with profanities.

That was a strange question which the innocent Parsifal asked—‘Who is good?’ and it is recalled to mind when one reads certain criticisms and biographies, for which the influence of a modern writer, misunderstood as the worship of broad-cloth, is answerable. When these criticisms are insincere they are humorous, but the case is worse when they are as sincere as such things can be. And so, when Mangan is remembered in his country (for he is sometimes spoken of in literary societies), his countrymen lament that such poetic faculty was mated with so little rectitude of conduct, surprised to find this faculty in a man whose vices were exotic and who was little of a patriot. Those who have written of him, have been scrupulous in holding the balance between the drunkard and the opium-eater, and have sought to discover whether learning or imposture lies behind such phrases as ‘from the Ottoman’ or ‘from the Coptic’: and save for this small remembrance, Mangan has been a stranger in his country, a rare and unsympathetic figure in the streets, where he is seen going forward alone like one who does penance for some ancient sin. Surely life, which Novalis has called a malady of the spirit, is a heavy penance for him who has, perhaps, forgotten the sin that laid it upon him, a sorrowful portion, too, because of that fine artist in him which reads so truly the lines of brutality and of weakness in the faces of men that are thrust in upon his path. He bears it well for the most part, acquiescing in the justice which has made him a vessel of wrath, but in a moment of frenzy he breaks silence, and we read how his associates dishonoured his person with their slime and venom, and how he lived as a child amid coarseness and misery and that all whom he met were demons out of the pit and that his father was a human boa-constrictor. Certainly he is wiser who accuses no man of acting unjustly towards him, seeing that what is called injustice is never so but is an aspect of justice, yet they who think that such a terrible tale is the figment of a disordered brain do not know how keenly a sensitive boy suffers from contact with a gross nature. Mangan, however, is not without some consolation, for his sufferings have cast him inwards, where for many ages the sad and the wise have elected to be. When someone told him that the account which he had given of his early life, so full of things which were, indeed, the beginnings of sorrows, was wildly overstated, and partly false, he answered—‘Maybe I dreamed it.’ The world, you see, has become somewhat unreal for him, and he has begun to contemn that which is, in fine, the occasion of much error. How will it be with those dreams which, for every young and simple heart, take such dear reality upon themselves? One whose nature is so sensitive cannot forget his dreams in a secure, strenuous life. He doubts them, and puts them from him for a time, but when he hears men denying them with an oath he would acknowledge them proudly, and where sensitiveness has induced weakness, or, as here, refined upon natural weakness, would even compromise with the world, and win from it in return the favour of silence, if no more, as for something too slight to bear a violent disdain, for that desire of the heart so loudly derided, that rudely entreated idea. His manner is such that none can say if it be pride or humility that looks out of that vague face, which seems to live only because of those light shining eyes and of the fair silken hair above it, of which he is a little vain. This purely defensive reserve is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference. Something has been written of an affair of the heart between him and a pupil of his, to whom he gave lessons in German, and, it seems, he was an actor afterwards in a love-comedy of three, but if he is reserved with men, he is shy with women, and he is too self-conscious, too critical, knows too little of the soft parts of conversation, for a gallant. And in his strange dress, in which some have seen eccentricity, and others affectation—the high, conical hat, the loose trousers many sizes too big for him, and the old umbrella, so like a bagpipes—one may see a half-conscious expression of this. The lore of many lands goes with him always, eastern tales and the memory of curiously printed medieval books which have rapt him out of his time—gathered together day by day and embroidered as in a web. He has acquaintance with a score of languages, of which, upon occasion, he makes a liberal parade, and has read recklessly in many literatures, crossing how many seas, and even penetrating into Peristan, to which no road leads that the feet travel. In Timbuctooese, he confesses with a charming modesty which should prevent detractors, he is slightly deficient, but this is no cause for regret. He is interested, too, in the life of the seeress of Prevorst, and in all phenomena of the middle nature and here, where most of all the sweetness and resoluteness of the soul have power, he seems to seek in a world, how different from that in which Watteau may have sought, both with a certain graceful inconstancy, ‘what is there in no satisfying measure or not at all.’

His writings, which have never been collected and which are unknown, except for two American editions of selected poems and some pages of prose, published by Duffy, show no order and sometimes very little thought. Many of his essays are pretty fooling when read once, but one cannot but discern some fierce energy beneath the banter, which follows up the phrases with no good intent, and there is a likeness between the desperate writer, himself the victim of too dexterous torture, and the contorted writing. Mangan, it must be remembered, wrote with no native literary tradition to guide him, and for a public which cared for matters of the day, and for poetry only so far as it might illustrate these. He could not often revise what he wrote, and he has often striven with Moore and Walsh on their own ground. But the best of what he has written makes its appeal surely, because it was conceived by the imagination which he called, I think, the mother of things, whose dream are we, who imageth us to herself, and to ourselves, and imageth herself in us—the power before whose breath the mind in creation is (to use Shelley’s image) as a fading coal. Though even in the best of Mangan the presence of alien emotions is sometimes felt the presence of an imaginative personality reflecting the light of imaginative beauty is more vividly felt. East and West meet in that personality (we know how); images interweave there like soft, luminous scarves and words ring like brilliant mail, and whether the song is of Ireland or of Istambol it has the same refrain, a prayer that peace may come again to her who has lost her peace, the moonwhite pearl of his soul, Ameen. Music and odours and lights are spread about her, and he would search the dews and the sands that he might set another glory near her face. A scenery and a world have grown up about her face, as they will about any face which the eyes have regarded with love. Vittoria Colonna and Laura and Beatrice—even she upon whose face many lives have cast that shadowy delicacy, as of one who broods upon distant terrors and riotous dreams, and that strange stillness before which love is silent, Mona Lisa—embody one chivalrous idea, which is no mortal thing, bearing it bravely above the accidents of lust and faithlessness and weariness; and she whose white and holy hands have the virtue of enchanted hands, his virgin flower, and flower of flowers, is no less than these an embodiment of that idea. How the East is laid under tribute for her and must bring all its treasures to her feet! The sea that foams over saffron sands, the lonely cedar on the Balkans, the hall damascened with moons of gold and a breath of roses from the gulistan—all these shall be where she is in willing service: reverence and peace shall be the service of the heart, as in the verses ‘To Mihri’:

My starlight, my moonlight, my midnight, my noonlight,

Unveil not, unveil not!

And where the music shakes off its languor and is full of the ecstasy of combat, as in the ‘Lament for Sir Maurice FitzGerald’, and in ‘Dark Rosaleen’, it does not attain to the quality of Whitman indeed, but is tremulous with all the changing harmonies of Shelley’s verse. Now and then this note is hoarsened and a troop of unmannerly passions echoes it derisively, but two poems at least sustain the music unbroken, the ‘Swabian Popular Song’, and a translation of two quatrains by Wetzel. To create a little flower, Blake said, is the labour of ages, and even one lyric has made Dowland immortal; and the matchless passages which are found in other poems are so good that they could not have been written by anyone but Mangan. He might have written a treatise on the poetical art for he is more cunning in his use of the musical echo than is Poe, the high priest of most modern schools, and there is a mastery, which no school can teach, but which obeys an interior command, which we may trace in ‘Kathaleen-Ny-Houlahan, where the refrain changes the trochaic scheme abruptly for a line of firm, marching iambs.

All his poetry remembers wrong and suffering and the aspiration of one who has suffered and who is moved to great cries and gestures when that sorrowful hour rushes upon the heart. This is the theme of a hundred songs but of none so intense as these songs which are made in noble misery, as his favourite Swedenborg would say, out of the vastation of soul. Naomi would change her name to Mara, because it has gone bitterly with her, and is it not the deep sense of sorrow and bitterness which explains these names and titles and this fury of translation in which he has sought to lose himself? For he has not found in himself the faith of the solitary, or the faith, which in the middle age, sent the spires singing up to heaven, and he waits for the final scene to end the penance. Weaker than Leopardi, for he has not the courage of his own despair but forgets all ills and forgoes his scorn at the showing of some favour, he has, perhaps for this reason, the memorial he would have had—a constant presence with those that love him—and bears witness, as the more heroic pessimist bears witness against his will to the calm fortitude of humanity, to a subtle sympathy with health and joyousness which is seldom found in one whose health is safe. And so he does not shrink from the grave and the busy workings of the earth so much as from the unfriendly eyes of women and the hard eyes of men. To tell the truth, he has been in love with death all his life, like another, and with no woman, and he has the same gentle manner as of old to welcome him whose face is hidden with a cloud, who is named Azrael. Those whom the flames of too fierce love have wasted on earth become after death pale phantoms among the winds of desire, and, as he strove here towards peace with the ardour of the wretched, it may be that now the winds of peace visit him and he rests, and remembers no more this bitter vestment of the body.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the tests of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory, but sets store by every time less than the pulsation of an artery, the time in which its intuitions start forth, holding it equal in its period and value to six thousand years. No doubt they are only men of letters who insist on the succession of the ages, and history or the denial of reality, for they are two names for one thing, may be said to be that which deceives the whole world. In this, as in much else, Mangan is the type of his race. History encloses him so straitly that even his fiery moments do not set him free from it. He, too, cries out, in his life and in his mournful verses, against the injustice of despoilers, but never laments a deeper loss than the loss of plaids and ornaments. He inherits the latest and worst part of a legend upon which the line has never been drawn out and which divides against itself as it moves down the cycles. And because this tradition is so much with him he has accepted it with all its griefs and failures, and has not known how to change it, as the strong spirit knows, and so would bequeath it: the poet who hurls his anger against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and far more cruel tyranny. In the final view the figure which he worships is seen to be an abject queen upon whom, because of the bloody crimes that she has done and of those as bloody that were done to her, madness is come and death is coming, but who will not believe that she is near to die and remembers only the rumour of voices challenging her sacred gardens and her fair, tall flowers that have become the food of boars. Novalis said of love that it is the Amen of the universe, and Mangan can tell of the beauty of hate; and pure hate is as excellent as pure love. An eager spirit would cast down with violence the high traditions of Mangan’s race—love of sorrow for the sake of sorrow and despair and fearful menaces—but where their voice is a supreme entreaty to be borne with forbearance seems only a little grace; and what is so courteous and so patient as a great faith?

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state. The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life—the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is intense—the life of Blake or of Dante—taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. With Mangan a narrow and hysterical nationality receives a last justification, for when this feeble-bodied figure departs dusk begins to veil the train of the gods, and he who listens may hear their footsteps leaving the world. But the ancient gods, who are visions of the divine names, die and come to life many times, and, though there is dusk about their feet and darkness in their indifferent eyes, the miracle of light is renewed eternally in the imaginative soul. When the sterile and treacherous order is broken up, a voice or a host of voices is heard singing, a little faintly at first, of a serene spirit which enters woods and cities and the hearts of men, and of the life of earth—det dejlige vidunderlige jordliv det gaadefulde jordliv—beautiful, alluring, mysterious.

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life. As often as human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by luxury, are in league to make life ignoble and sullen and to speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timid courage seizes the keys of hell and of death, and flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding splendour of truth may sanctify, and of death, the most beautiful form of life. In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom. Nay, shall not such as these have part, because of that high, original purpose which remembering painfully or by way of prophecy they would make clear, in the continual affirmation of the spirit?

James A. Joyce

1902

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An Irish Poet

These are the verses of a writer lately dead, whom many consider the Davis of the latest national movement. They are issued from headquarters, and are preceded by two introductions wherein there is much said concerning the working man, mutual improvement, the superior person, shady musical plays, etc. They are illustrative of the national temper, and because they are so the writers of the introductions do not hesitate to claim for them the highest honours. But this claim cannot be allowed, unless it is supported by certain evidences of literary sincerity. For a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character; he enters into a region where there is question of the written word, and it is well that this should be borne in mind, now that the region of literature is assailed so fiercely by the enthusiast and the doctrinaire.

An examination of the poems and ballads of William Rooney does not warrant one in claiming for them any high honours. The theme is consistently national, so uncompromising, indeed, that the reader must lift an eyebrow and assure himself when he meets on page 114 the name of D’Arcy MacGee. But the treatment of the theme does not show the same admirable consistency. In ‘S. Patrick’s Day’ and in ‘Dromceat’ one cannot but see an uninteresting imitation of Denis Florence M’Carthy and of Ferguson; even Mr. T. D. Sullivan and Mr. Rolleston have done something in the making of this book. But ‘Roilig na Riogh’ is utterly lacking in the high distinctive virtue of ‘The Dead at Clonmacnoise’, and Mr. Rolleston, who certainly is not driven along by any poetic impulse, has written a poem because the very failure of the poetic impulse pleases in an epitaph. So much can careful writing achieve, and there can be no doubt that little is achieved in these verses, because the writing is so careless, and is yet so studiously mean. For, if carelessness is carried very far, it is like to become a positive virtue, but an ordinary carelessness is nothing but a false and mean expression of a false and mean idea.

Mr. Rooney, indeed, is almost a master in that ‘style’, which is neither good nor bad. In the verses of Maedhbh he writes:

‘Mid the sheltering hills, by the spreading waters,

They laid her down and her cairn raised

The fiercest-hearted of Erin’s daughters—

The bravest nature that ever blazed.

Here the writer has not devised, he has merely accepted, mean expressions, and even where he has accepted a fine expression, he cannot justify his use of it. Mangan’s Homeric epithet of ‘wine-dark’ becomes in his paper a colourless and meaningless epithet, which may cover any or all of the colours of the spectrum. How differently did Mangan write when he wrote:

Knowest thou the castle that beetles over

The wine-dark sea!

Here a colour rises in the mind and is set firmly against the golden glow in the lines that follow.

But one must not look for these things when patriotism has laid hold of the writer. He has no care then to create anything according to the art of literature, not the greatest of the arts, indeed, but at least an art with a definite tradition behind it, possessing definite forms. Instead we find in these pages a weary succession of verses, ‘prize’ poems—the worst of all. They were written, it seems, for papers and societies week after week, and they bear witness to some desperate and weary energy. But they have no spiritual and living energy, because they come from one in whom the spirit is in a manner dead, or at least in its own hell, a weary and foolish spirit, speaking of redemption and revenge, blaspheming against tyrants, and going forth, full of tears and curses, upon its infernal labours. Religion and all that is allied thereto can manifestly persuade men to great evil, and by writing these verses, even though they should, as the writers of the prefaces think, enkindle the young men of Ireland to hope and activity, Mr. Rooney has been persuaded to great evil.

And yet he might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy. There is no piece in the book which has even the first quality of beauty, the quality of integrity, the quality of being separate and whole, but there is one piece in the book which seems to have come out of a conscious personal life. It is a translation of some verses by Dr. Douglas Hyde, and is called ‘A Request’, and yet I cannot believe that it owes more than its subject to its original. It begins:

In that last dark hour when my bed I lie on,

My narrow bed of the deal board bare,

My kin and neighbours around me standing,

And Death’s broad wings on the thickening air.

It proceeds to gather desolation about itself, and does so in lines of living verse, as in the lines that follow. The third line is feeble, perhaps, but the fourth line is so astonishingly good that it cannot be overpraised:

When night shall fall and my day is over

And Death’s pale symbol shall chill my face,

When heart and hand thrill no more responsive,

Oh Lord and Saviour, regard my case!

And when it has gathered about itself all the imagery of desolation, it remembers the Divine temptation, and puts up its prayer to the Divine mercy. It seems to come out of a personal life which has begun to realize itself, but to which death and that realization have come together. And in this manner, with the gravity of one who remembers all the errors of his members and his sins of speech, it goes into silence.

Daily Express, 11 Dec. 1902

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George Meredith

Mr. George Meredith has been included in the English men of letters series, where he may be seen in honourable nearness to Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. Pinero. An age which has too keen a scent for contemporary values will often judge amiss, and, therefore, one must not complain when a writer who is, even for those who do not admire him unreservedly, a true man of letters, comes by his own in such a strange fashion. Mr. Jerrold in the biographical part of his book has to record a more than usual enormity of public taste, and if his book had recorded only this, something good would have been done; for it is certain that the public taste should be reproved, while it is by no means certain that Mr. Meredith is a martyr.

Mr. Jerrold confesses his faith in novels and plays alike, and he will have it that ‘Modern Love’ is on the same plane with the ‘Vita Nuova’. No one can deny to Mr. Meredith an occasional power of direct compelling speech (in a picture of a famine he wrote ‘starving lords were wasp and moth’) but he is plainly lacking in that fluid quality, the lyrical impulse, which, it seems, has been often taken from the wise and given unto the foolish. And it is plain to all who believe in the tradition of literature that this quality cannot be replaced.

Mr. Meredith’s eager brain, which will not let him be a poet, has, however, helped him to write novels which are, perhaps, unique in our time. Mr. Jerrold subjects each novel to a superficial analysis, and by doing so he has, I think, seized a fallacy for his readers. For these novels have, for the most part, no value as epical art, and Mr. Meredith has not the instinct of the epical artist. But they have a distinct value as philosophical essays, and they reveal a philosopher at work with much cheerfulness upon a very stubborn problem. Any book about the philosopher is worth reading, unless we have given ourselves over deliberately to the excellent foppery of the world, and though Mr. Jerrold’s book is not remarkable, it is worth reading.

Daily Express, 11 Dec. 1902

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Today and Tomorrow in Ireland

In this book, the latest addition to the already formidable mass of modern Anglo-Irish literature, Mr. Gwynn has collected ten essays from various reviews and journals, essays differing widely in interest, but for all of which he would claim a unity of subject. All the essays deal directly or indirectly with Ireland, and they combine in formulating a distinct accusation of English civilization and English modes of thought. For Mr. Gwynn, too, is a convert to the prevailing national movement, and professes himself a Nationalist, though his nationalism, as he says, has nothing irreconcilable about it. Give Ireland the status of Canada and Mr. Gwynn becomes an Imperialist at once. It is hard to say into what political party Mr. Gwynn should go, for he is too consistently Gaelic for the Parliamentarians, and too mild for the true patriots, who are beginning to speak a little vaguely about their friends the French.

Mr. Gwynn, however, is at least a member of that party which seeks to establish an Irish literature and Irish industries. The first essays in his book are literary criticisms, and it may be said at once that they are the least interesting. Some are mere records of events and some seem written to give English readers a general notion of what is meant by the Gaelic revival. Mr. Gwynn has evidently a sympathy with modern Irish writers, but his criticism of their work is in no way remarkable. In the opening essay he has somehow the air of discovering Mangan, and he transcribes with some astonishment a few verses from ‘O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire’. Few as the verses are, they are enough to show the real value of the work of the modern writers, whom Mr. Gwynn regards as the voice of Celticism proper. Their work varies in merit, never rising (except in Mr. Yeats’s case) above a certain fluency and an occasional distinction, and often falling so low that it has a value only as documentary evidence. It is work which has an interest of the day, but collectively it has not a third part of the value of the work of a man like Mangan, that creature of lightning, who has been, and is, a stranger among the people he ennobled, but who may yet come by his own as one of the greatest romantic poets among those who use the lyrical form.

Mr. Gwynn, however, is more successful in those essays which are illustrative of the industrial work which has been set in movement at different points of Ireland. His account of the establishing of the fishing industry in the West of Ireland is extremely interesting, and so are his accounts of dairies, old-fashioned and new-fashioned, and of carpet-making. These essays are written in a practical manner, and though they are supplemented by many quotations of dates and figures, they are also full of anecdotes. Mr. Gwynn has evidently a sense of the humorous, and it is pleasing to find this in a revivalist. He tells how, fishing one day, it was his fortune to meet with an old peasant whose thoughts ran all upon the traditional tales of his country and on the histories of great families. Mr. Gwynn’s instinct as a fisherman got the better of his patriotism, and he confesses to a slight disappointment when, after a good catch on an unfavourable day, he earned no word of praise from the peasant, who said, following his own train of thought, ‘The Clancartys was great men, too. Is there any of them living?’ The volume, admirably bound and printed, is a credit to the Dublin firm to whose enterprise its publication is due.

Daily Express, 29 Jan. 1903

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A Suave Philosophy

In this book one reads about a people whose life is ordered according to beliefs and sympathies which will seem strange to us. The writer has very properly begun his account of that life by a brief exposition of Buddhism, and he sets forth so much of its history as illustrates its main principles. He omits some incidents which are among the most beautiful of the Buddhist legend—the kindly devas strewing flowers under the horse, and the story of the meeting of Buddha and his wife. But he states at some length the philosophy (if that be the proper name for it) of Buddhism. The Burmese people seem naturally adapted to follow such a wise passive philosophy. Five things are the five supreme evils for them—fire, water, storms, robbers, and rulers. All things that are inimical to human peace are evil. Though Buddhism is essentially a philosophy built against the evils of existence, a philosophy which places its end in the annihilation of the personal life and the personal will, the Burmese people have known how to transform it into a rule of life at once simple and wise.

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence. There is a Burmese saying—‘The thoughts of his heart, these are the wealth of a man’, and Mr. Hall, who has lived in Burma for many years, draws a picture of Burmese life which shows that a happiness, founded upon peace of mind in all circumstances, has a high place in the Burmese table of values. And happiness abides among this people: the yellow-robed monks begging alms, the believers coming to tell their beads in the temple, tiny rafts drifting down the river on the night of some festival, each one bearing upon it a tiny lamp, a girl sitting at evening in the shadow of the eaves until the young men come ‘courting’—all this is part of a suave philosophy which does not know that there is anything to justify tears and lamentations. The courtesies of life are not neglected; anger and rudeness of manners are condemned; the animals themselves are glad to be under masters who treat them as living beings worthy of pity and toleration.

Mr. Hall is one of the conquerors of this people, and as he does not think it a warrior people he cannot predict for it any great political future. But he knows that peace lies before it, and, perhaps in literature, or in some art, a national temper so serene and order-loving may achieve itself. He gives a version of the story of Ma Pa Da, which he calls ‘Death, the Deliverer’, and this story itself is so pitiful that one would wish to know more of the Burmese popular tales. He gives elsewhere a rendering in prose of a Burmese love-song, which has, as may be seen, kept some of its charm, though it has lost, no doubt, much of its music:

‘The moon wooed the lotus in the night, the lotus was wooed by the moon, and my sweetheart is their child. The flower opened in the night, and she came forth; the petals moved and she was born.

‘She is more beautiful than any flower; her face is as delicate as the dusk; her hair is as night falling over the hills; her skin is as bright as the diamond. She is very full of health, no sickness can come near her.

‘When the wind blows I am afraid, when the breezes move I fear. I fear lest the south wind take her, I tremble lest the breath of evening woo her from me—so light is she, so graceful.

‘Her dress is of gold, of silk and gold, and her bracelets are of fine gold. She has precious stones in her ears, but her eyes, what jewels can compare unto them?

‘She is proud, my mistress; she is very proud, and all men are afraid of her. She is so beautiful and so proud that all men fear her.

‘In the whole world there is none anywhere that can compare unto her’.

Mr. Hall has written a most pleasing book in an easy and temperate style, a book which is full of interesting manners and stories. One is glad to see that even in these days of novels, religious and sensational, this book has run to four editions.

Daily Express, 6 Feb. 1903

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An Effort at Precision in Thinking

He must be a hardy man who contends that the disputants in this book are common people. They are, happily for the peace of human animals, very uncommon people. For common people will not argue for any considerable time as to whether succession of appearances is or is not anything more than the appearance of succession. But these uncommon people, whose colloquies are recorded here at somewhat distressing length by Mr. Anstie, argue about such subtleties with a precision which is more apparent than real. The speakers will seem more precise than they are, for at one time they dispute eagerly over certainty of thought, though certainty is not a habit of the mind at all, but a quality of propositions, and the speakers are really arguing about certitude, and more than once all the speakers are agreed that sense impressions mark the furthest limit of knowledge, and that ‘reasonable belief is an oxymoron—conclusions with which the man of the people, who is no philosopher, professes himself in loud accord. However, this book is an effort at precision in thinking, even if it does not always provoke that stimulated attention which one speaker calls a form of activity.

Daily Express, 6 Feb. 1903

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Colonial Verses

These are colonial verses. The colonial Esau is asked on page 3 would he change his pottage for Jacob’s birthright—a question which evidently expects the answer, No. One piece is named ‘Is Canada Loyal?’ and Mr. Wolley proclaims that it is loyal. His verse is for the most part loyal, and where it is not, it describes Canadian scenery. Mr. Wolley says that he is a barbarian; he does not want the ‘murmurous muddle’ of the choir; he wants a ‘clean-cut creed’, ‘plain laws for plain men’. There is a piece called ‘Tableau’, about a girl dreaming in a picture gallery. It begins: ‘I wonder if it’s really true that you are only paint.’

Daily Express, 6 Feb. 1903

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Catilina

The French translators of this play have included in their preface some extracts from Ibsen’s preface to the Dresden edition of 1875, and these extracts tell somewhat humorously the history of Ibsen’s early years. The play was written in 1848, when Ibsen was twenty, a poor student working all day in a druggist’s shop, and studying during the night as best he could. Sallust and Cicero, it seems, awakened his interest in the character of Catiline, and he set to work to write a tragedy, in part historical, and in part political, a reflection of the Norway of his day. The play was politely refused by the directors of the Christiania Theatre and by all the publishers. One of Ibsen’s friends, however, published it at his own expense, fully convinced that the play would at once make the writer’s name famous in the world. A few copies were sold and, as Ibsen and his friend were in need of money, they were glad to sell the remainder to a pork-butcher. ‘For some days’, Ibsen writes, ‘we did not lack the necessaries of life.’ This is a sufficiently instructive history, and it is well to remember it when reading a play which Ibsen publishes simply that his work may be complete. For the writer of Catilina is not the Ibsen of the social dramas, but, as the French translators joyfully proclaim, an ardent romantic exulting in disturbance and escaping from all formal laws under cover of an abundant rhetoric. This will not appear so strange when it is remembered that the young Goethe was somewhat given to alchemical researches, and as, to quote Goethe himself, the form in which a man goes into the shadows is the form in which he moves among his posterity, posterity will probably forget Ibsen the romantic as completely as it forgets Goethe and his athanor.

Yet, in some ways, this earlier manner suggests the later manner. In Catilina three figures are projected against the background of a restless and moribund society—Catiline, Aurelia, his wife, and Fulvia, a vestal virgin. Ibsen is known to the general public as a man who writes a play about three people—usually one man and two women—and even critics, while they assert their admiration for Ibsen’s ‘unqualified objectivity’, find that all his women are the same woman renamed successively Nora, Rebecca, Hilda, Irene—find, that is to say, that Ibsen has no power of objectivity at all. The critics, speaking in the name of the audience, whose idol is common sense, and whose torment is to be confronted with a clear work of art that reflects every obscurity like a mirror, have sometimes had the courage to say that they did not understand the system of three. They will be pleased to learn that some of the characters in Catilina are in as sorry a plight as themselves. Here is a passage in which Curius, a young relative of Catiline, professes his inability to understand Catiline’s relations with Fulvia and Aurelia:

Curius: Les aimerais-tu toutes deux à la fois?

Vraiment je n’y comprends plus rien.

Catilina: En effet c’est singulier et je n’y comprends rien moi-même.

But perhaps that he does not understand is part of the tragedy, and the play is certainly the struggle between Aurelia, who is happiness and the policy of non-interference, and Fulvia, who is at first the policy of interference and who, when she has escaped from the tomb to which her sin had brought her, becomes the figure of Catiline’s destiny. Very little use is made in this play of alarms and battles, and one can see that the writer is not interested in the usual property of romanticism. Already he is losing the romantic temper when it should be at its fiercest in him, and, as youth commonly brooks no prevention, he is content to hurl himself upon the world and establish himself there defiantly until his true weapons are ready to his hand. One must not take too seriously the solution of the drama in favour of Aurelia, for by the time the last act is reached the characters have begun to mean nothing to themselves and in the acted play would be related to life only by the bodies of the performers. And here is the most striking difference between Ibsen’s earlier manner and his later manner, between romantic work and classical work. The romantic temper, imperfect and impatient as it is, cannot express itself adequately unless it employs the monstrous or heroic. In Catilina the women are absolute types, and the end of such a play cannot but savour of dogma—a most proper thing in a priest but a most improper in a poet. Moreover, as the breaking-up of tradition, which is the work of the modern era, discountenances the absolute and as no writer can escape the spirit of his time, the writer of dramas must remember now more than ever a principle of all patient and perfect art which bids him express his fable in terms of his characters.

As a work of art Catilina has little merit, and yet one can see in it what the directors of the Christiania theatre and the publishers failed to see—an original and capable writer struggling with a form that is not his own. This manner continues, with occasional lapses into comedy, as far as Peer Gynt, in which, recognizing its own limitations and pushing lawlessness to its extreme limit, it achieves a masterpiece. After that it disappears and the second manner begins to take its place, advancing through play after play, uniting construction and speech and action more and more closely in a supple rhythm, until it achieves itself in Hedda Gabler. Very few recognize the astonishing courage of such work and it is characteristic of our age of transition to admire the later manner less than the earlier manner. For the imagination has the quality of a fluid, and it must be held firmly, lest it become vague, and delicately, that it may lose none of its magical powers. And Ibsen has united with his strong, ample, imaginative faculty a preoccupation with the things present to him. Perhaps in time even the professional critic, accepting the best of the social dramas for what they are—the most excellent examples of skill and intellectual self-possession—will make this union a truism of professional criticism. But meanwhile a young generation which has cast away belief and thrown precision after it, for which Balzac is a great intellect and every sampler who chooses to wander amid his own shapeless hells and heavens a Dante without the unfortunate prejudices of Dante, will be troubled by this pre-occupation, and out of very conscience will denounce a method so calm, so ironical. These cries of hysteria are confused with many others—the voices of war and statecraft and religion—in the fermenting vat. But Bootes, we may be sure, thinks nothing of such cries, eager as ever at that ancient business of leading his hunting-dogs across the zenith ‘in their leash of sidereal fire’.

Speaker, 21 March 1903

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The Soul of Ireland

Aristotle finds at the beginning of all speculation the feeling of wonder, a feeling proper to childhood, and if speculation be proper to the middle period of life it is natural that one should look to the crowning period of life for the fruit of speculation, wisdom itself. But nowadays people have greatly confused childhood and middle life and old age; those who succeed in spite of civilization in reaching old age seem to have less and less wisdom, and children who are usually put to some business as soon as they can walk and talk, seem to have more and more ‘common sense’; and, perhaps, in the future little boys with long beards will stand aside and applaud, while old men in short trousers play handball against the side of a house.

This may even happen in Ireland, if Lady Gregory has truly set forth the old age of her country. In her new book she has left legends and heroic youth far behind, and has explored in a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility. Half of her book is an account of old men and old women in the West of Ireland. These old people are full of stories about giants and witches, and dogs and black-handled knives, and they tell their stories one after another at great length and with many repetitions (for they are people of leisure) by the fire or in the yard of a workhouse. It is difficult to judge well of their charms and herb-healing, for that is the province of those who are learned in these matters and can compare the customs of countries, and, indeed, it is well not to know these magical-sciences, for if the wind changes while you are cutting wild camomile you will lose your mind.

But one can judge more easily of their stories. These stories appeal to some feeling which is certainly not that feeling of wonder which is the beginning of all speculation. The story-tellers are old, and their imagination is not the imagination of childhood. The story-teller preserves the strange machinery of fairyland, but his mind is feeble and sleepy. He begins one story and wanders from it into another story, and none of the stories has any satisfying imaginative wholeness, none of them is like Sir John Daw’s poem that cried tink in the close. Lady Gregory is conscious of this, for she often tries to lead the speaker back to his story by questions, and when the story has become hopelessly involved, she tries to establish some wholeness by keeping only the less involved part; sometimes she listens ‘half interested and half impatient’. In fine, her book, wherever it treats of the ‘folk’, sets forth in the fulness of its senility a class of mind which Mr. Yeats has set forth with such delicate scepticism in his happiest book, ‘The Celtic Twilight’.

Something of health and naturalness, however, enters with Raftery, the poet. He had a terrible tongue, it seems, and would make a satirical poem for a very small offence. He could make love-poems, too (though Lady Gregory finds a certain falseness in the western love-poems), and repentant poems. Raftery, though he be the last of the great bardic procession, has much of the bardic tradition about him. He took shelter one day from the rain under a bush: at first the bush kept out the rain, and he made verses praising it, but after a while it let the rain through, and he made verses dispraising it.

Lady Gregory translates some of his verses, and she also translates some West Irish ballads and some poems by Dr. Douglas Hyde. She completes her book with translations of four one-act plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, three of which have for their central figure that legendary person, who is vagabond and poet, and even saint at times, while the fourth play is called a ‘nativity’ play. The dwarf-drama (if one may use that term) is a form of art which is improper and ineffectual, but it is easy to understand why it finds favour with an age which has pictures that are ‘nocturnes’, and writers like Mallarmé and the composer of ‘Récapitulation’. The dwarf-drama is accordingly to be judged as an entertainment, and Dr. Douglas Hyde is certainly entertaining in the ‘Twisting of the Rope’, and Lady Gregory has succeeded better with her verse-translations here than elsewhere, as these four lines may show:

I have heard the melodious harp

On the streets of Cork playing to us;

More melodious by far I thought your voice,

More melodious by far your mouth than that.

This book, like so many other books of our time, is in part picturesque and in part an indirect or direct utterance of the central belief of Ireland. Out of the material and spiritual battle which has gone so hardly with her Ireland has emerged with many memories of beliefs, and with one belief—a belief in the incurable ignobility of the forces that have overcome her—and Lady Gregory, whose old men and women seem to be almost their own judges when they tell their wandering stories, might add to the passage from Whitman which forms her dedication, Whitman’s ambiguous word for the vanquished—‘Battles are lost in the spirit in which they are won.’

J. J.

Daily Express, 26 March 1903

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The Motor Derby

Paris, Sunday.

In the Rue d’Anjou, not far from the Church of the Madeleine, is M. Henri Fournier’s place of business. ‘Paris-Automobile’—a company of which M. Fournier is the manager—has its headquarters there. Inside the gateway is a big square court, roofed over, and on the floor of the court and on great shelves extending from the floor to the roof are ranged motor-cars of all sizes, shapes, and colours. In the afternoon this court is full of noises—the voices of workmen, the voices of buyers talking in half-a-dozen languages, the ringing of telephone bells, the horns sounded by the ‘chauffeurs’ as the cars come in and go out—and it is almost impossible to see M. Fournier unless one is prepared to wait two or three hours for one’s turn. But the buyers of ‘autos’ are, in one sense, people of leisure. The morning, however, is more favourable, and yesterday morning, after two failures, I succeeded in seeing M. Fournier.

M. Fournier is a slim, active-looking young man, with dark reddish hair. Early as the hour was our interview was now and again broken in upon by the importunate telephone.

‘You are one of the competitors for the Gordon-Bennett Cup, M. Fournier?’

‘Yes, I am one of the three selected to represent France.’

‘And you are also a competitor, are you not, for the Madrid prize?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which of the races comes first—the Irish race or the Madrid race?’

‘The Madrid race. It takes place early in May, while the race for the International Cup does not take place till July.’

‘I suppose that you are preparing actively for your races?’

‘Well, I have just returned from a tour to Monte Carlo and Nice.’

‘On your racing machine?’

‘No, on a machine of smaller power.’

‘Have you determined what machine you will ride in the Irish race?’

‘Practically.’

‘May I ask the name of it—is it a Mercedes?’

‘No, a Mors.’

‘And its horse-power?’

‘Eighty.’

‘And on this machine you can travel at a rate of ——?’

‘You mean its highest speed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Its highest speed would be a hundred and forty kilometres an hour.’

‘But you will not go at that rate all the time during the race?’

‘Oh, no. Of course its average speed for the race would be lower than that.’

‘An average speed of how much?’

‘Its average speed would be a hundred kilometres an hour, perhaps a little more than that, something between a hundred and a hundred and ten kilometres an hour.’

‘A kilometre is about a half-mile, is it not?’

‘More than that, I should think. There are how many yards in your mile?’

‘Seventeen hundred and sixty, if I am right.’

‘Then your half-mile has eight hundred and eighty yards. Our kilometre is just equal to eleven hundred yards.’

‘Let me see. Then your top speed is nearly eighty-six miles an hour, and your average speed is sixty-one miles an hour?’

‘I suppose so, if we calculate properly.’

‘It is an appalling pace! It is enough to burn our roads. I suppose you have seen the roads you are to travel?’

‘No.’

‘No? You don’t know the course, then?’

‘I know it slightly. I know it, that is, from some sketches that were given of it in the Paris newspapers.’

‘But, surely, you will want a better knowledge than that?’

‘Oh, certainly. In fact, before the month is over, I intend to go to Ireland to inspect the course. Perhaps I shall go in three weeks’ time.’

‘Will you remain any time in Ireland?’

‘After the race?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am afraid not. I should like to, but I don’t think I can.’

‘I suppose you would not like to be asked your opinion of the result?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Yet, which nation do you fear most?’

‘I fear them all—Germans, Americans, and English. They are all to be feared.’

‘And how about Mr. Edge?’

No answer.

‘He won the prize the last time, did he not?’

‘O, yes.’

‘Then he should be your most formidable opponent?’

‘O, yes.... But, you see, Mr. Edge won, of course, but ... a man who was last of all, and had no chance of winning might win if the other machines broke.’

Whatever way one looks at this statement it appears difficult to challenge its truth.

The Irish Times, 7 April 1903

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Aristotle on Education

This book is compiled from the first three books of the Ethics, and the tenth book, with some extracts from the Politics. Unfortunately, the compilation is not a complete treatise on education, nor is it even exhaustive so far as it goes. The Ethics is seized upon by admirers and opponents alike as the weak part of the peripatetic philosophy. The modern notion of Aristotle as a biologist—a notion popular among advocates of ‘science’—is probably less true than the ancient notion of him as a metaphysician; and it is certainly in the higher applications of his severe method that he achieves himself. His theory of education is, however, not without interest, and is subordinate to his theory of the state. Individualism, it would seem, is not easily recommended to the Greek mind, and in giving his theory of education Aristotle has endeavoured to recruit for a Greek state rather than to give a final and absolute solution to questions of the greatest interest. Consequently this book can hardly be considered a valuable addition to philosophical literature, but it has a contemporary value in view of recent developments in France, and at the present time, when the scientific specialists and the whole cohort of Materialists are cheapening the good name of philosophy, it is very useful to give heed to one who has been wisely named ‘maestro di color che sanno.’

Daily Express, 3 Sept. 1903

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A Ne’er-Do-Well

After all a pseudonym library has its advantages; to acknowledge bad literature by signature is, in a manner, to persevere in evil. ‘Valentine Caryl’ ’s book is the story of a gypsy genius, whose monologues are eked out by accompaniments on the violin—a story told in undistinguished prose. The series in which this volume appears, the production of the book, and the scantiness of its matter have an air of pretentiousness which is ill justified by perusal.

Daily Express, 3 Sept. 1903

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Empire Building

Empire building does not appear to be as successful in Northern, as it has been in Southern Africa. While his cousins are astonishing the Parisian public by excursions in the air M Jacques Lebaudy, the new Emperor of the Sahara, is preparing to venture into the heavier and more hazardous atmosphere of the Palais. He has been summoned to appear before M André at the suit of two sailors, Jean Marie Bourdiec and Joseph Cambrai, formerly of the Frosquetta. They claim 100,000 francs damages on account of the hardships and diseases which they have contracted owing to M Lebaudy’s conduct. The new emperor, it would seem, is not over-careful of the bodily welfare of his subjects. He leaves them unprovided for in a desert, bidding them wait until he returns. They are made captive by a party of natives and suffer the agonies of hunger and thirst during their captivity. They remain prisoners for nearly two months and are finally rescued by a French man-o’-war under the command of M Jaurès. One of them is subsequently an inmate of a hospital at the Havre and after a month’s treatment there is still only convalescent. Their appeals for redress have been all disregarded and now they are having recourse to law. Such is the case of the sailors for the defence of which Maître Aubin and Maître Labori have been retained. The emperor, acting through a certain Benoit, one of his officers, has entered a plea for arbitration. He considers that the case is between the French Republic and the Saharan empire and that in consequence it should be tried before a tribunal of some other national. He petitions, therefore, that the case should be submitted for judgment to England, Belgium or Holland. However the case goes (and it is plain that the peculiar circumstances attending it render it an extremely difficult one to try) it cannot be that the new empire will gain either materially or in prestige by its trial. The dispute, in fact, tends to reduce what was, perhaps, a colonising scheme into a commercial concern but indeed, when one considers how little the colonising spirit appeals to the French people, it is not easy to defend M Lebaudy against the accusation of faddism. The new scheme does not seem to have the State behind it; the new empire does not seem to be entering on its career under any such capable management as reared up the Southern Empire out of the Bechuanaland Commission. But, however this may be, the enterprise is certainly sufficiently novel to excite an international interest in this new candidate for nationhood and the hearing of a case, in which such singular issues are involved, will doubtless divide the attention of the Parisians with such comparatively minor topics as Réjane and les petits oiseaux.

James A. Joyce
7 S. Peter’s Terrace
Cabra, Dublin

1903

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New Fiction

This little volume is a collection of stories dealing chiefly with Indian life. The reader will find the first five stories—the adventures of Prince Aga Mirza—the more entertaining part of the book, if he is to any extent interested in tales of Indian magic. The appeal, however, of such stories is, frankly, sensational, and we are spared the long explanations which the professional occultists use. The stories that treat of camp life are soundly seasoned with that immature brutality which is always so anxious to be mistaken for virility. But the people who regulate the demand for fiction are being day by day so restricted by the civilization they have helped to build up that they are not unlike the men of Mandeville’s time, for whom enchantments, and monsters, and deeds of prowess were so liberally purveyed.

Daily Express, 26 March 1903

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The Mettle of the Pasture

A book written by the author of ‘The Increasing Purpose’ is sure of a kind hearing from a public which can be thankful to those who serve it well. Mr. Allen has not yet written any work of extraordinary merit, but he has written many which are, so far as they go, serious and patient interpretations of his people. Whether it be in the writer or in his theme, one cannot fail to recognize here the quality of self-reliant sanity—the very mettle (to employ the Shakespearian phrase which serves him for the title) of the pasture. The style is nearly always clean and limpid, and is at fault only where it assumes ornateness. The method is psychological, very slightly narrative, and though that epithet has been used to cover a multitude of literary sins, it can be as safely applied to Mr. Allen as longo intervallo to Mr. Henry James.

It is a tragedy of scandal, the story of a love affair, which is abruptly terminated by a man’s confession, but which is renewed again years later when it has passed through the trials which the world proposes to such as would renew any association and so offer offence to time and change. This story is surrounded with two or three other love affairs, all more or less conventional. But the characterization is often very original—as in the case of old Mrs. Conyers—and the general current of the book arrests the reader by its suggestion of an eager lively race working out its destiny among other races under the influence of some vague pantheistic spirit which is at times strangely mournful. ‘For her’, he says somewhere in a passage of great charm, ‘for her it was one of the moments when we are reminded that our lives are not in our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall us originates in sources beyond our power. Our wills may indeed reach the length of our arms, or as far as our voices can penetrate space; but without us and within us moves one universe that saves us or ruins us only for its own purposes; and we are no more free amid its laws than the leaves of the forest are free to decide their own shapes and seasons of unfolding, to order the showers by which they are to be nourished, and the storms which shall scatter them at last.’

Daily Express, 17 Sept. 1903

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A Peep Into History

One may have no satirical reference either to the subject of this book, or to its treatment by Mr. Pollock, in saying that this account of the Popish Plot is far more diverting than many works of fiction. Mr. Pollock, though he seems thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of the historical method, has set forth an account of the ‘Plot’ which is clear, detailed, and (so far as it is critical) liberal-minded.

By far the most interesting part of the book is the story of the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey—a murder so artistically secret that it evoked the admiration of De Quincey, a murder so little documented, yet so overwhelmed with false testimonies, that Lord Acton declared it an insoluble mystery. But justice was freely dealt out in those days of political and religious rancour, and Green and Berry suffered the last penalty for a crime of which posterity (unanimous in this one thing at least) has acquitted them.

As for those who swore against the poor wretches, Prance and Bedloe cannot be accorded the same condemnation. Prance, after all, was only lying himself out of a very awkward position, but Bedloe was a more enterprising ruffian, second only to his monstrous, moon-faced leader, the horrible Oates. It is bewildering to read all the charges and counter-charges made in connection with the Plot, and it is with a sigh of sympathy that we read of Charles’s conduct. ‘In the middle of the confusion the King suddenly left for the races at Newmarket, scandalizing all by his indecent levity.’ Nevertheless he conducted the examination of Oates in a very skilful manner, and he described Oates very succinctly as ‘a most lying knave’.

Mr. Pollock’s treatment of those who have been accused as instigators justifies him in citing a concise phrase from Mabillon on his title page, and the reader will know how patient and scholarly this book is if he compares it with the garbled, ridiculous account set down by L’Estrange.

Daily Express, 17 Sept. 1903

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A French Religious Novel

This novel, reprinted from the pages of one of the leading French reviews, and now very successfully translated into English, seems to have attracted more attention in London than in Paris. It deals with the problem of an uncompromising orthodoxy, beset by a peculiarly modern, or (as the Churchmen would say) morbid scepticism, and sorely tried by that alluring, beautiful, mysterious spirit of the earth, whose voice is for ever breaking in upon, and sometimes tempering, the prayers of the saints.

Augustine Chanteprie, the descendant of an old Catholic family, many of whose members have been disciples of Pascal, has been brought up in an atmosphere of rigid, practical belief, and is destined, if not for a clerical life, at least for such a life in the world as may be jealously guarded from the snares of the devil, sacrificing as little as may be of innocence and piety. Among his ancestors, however, there was one who forsook the holy counsel given him in youth, and assumed the excellent foppery of the world. He built, in protest against the gloomy house of his family, a pleasant folly, which afterwards came to be known as ‘The House of Sin’. Augustine, unfortunately for himself, inherits the double temperament, and little by little the defences of the spiritual life are weakened, and he is made aware of human love as a subtle, insinuating fire. The intercourse of Augustine and Madame Manole is finely conceived, finely executed, enveloped in a glow of marvellous tenderness. A simple narration has always singular charm when we divine that the lives it offers us are themselves too ample, too complex, to be expressed entirely:

‘Augustine and Fanny were now alone. They retraced their steps toward Chene-Pourpre, and suddenly stopping in the middle of the road, they kissed each other.... There was neither light nor sound. Nothing lived under the vault of heaven but the man and the woman intoxicated by their kiss. From time to time, without disengaging their hands, they drew away and looked at each other.’

The last chapters of the book, the chapters in which the tradition of generations overcomes the lover, but so remorselessly that the mortal temple of all those emotions is shattered into fragments, show an admirable adjustment of style and narrative, the prose pausing more and more frequently with every lessening of vitality, and finally expiring (if one may reproduce the impression somewhat fantastically) as it ushers into the unknown, amid a murmur of prayers, the poor trembling soul.

The interest in the politico-religious novel is, of course, an interest of the day, and, perhaps, it is because Huysmans is daily growing more formless and more obviously comedian in his books that Paris has begun to be wearied by the literary oblate. The writer of ‘The House of Sin’, again, is without the advantage of a perverted career, and is not to be reckoned among the converts. The complication of an innocent male and a woman of the world is, perhaps, not very new, but the subject receives here very striking treatment, and the story gains much by a comparison with Bourget’s ‘Mensonges’—a book that is crude, however detailed and cynical.

‘Marcelle Tinayre’, who seems to have a finer sympathy with Catholicism than most of the neo-Catholics have, is a lover of life and of the fair shows of the world; and though piety and innocence are interwoven with every change of affection and every mood of our manifold nature in these pages, one is conscious that the writer has suspended over her tragedy, as a spectre of sorrow and desolation, the horrible image of the Jansenist Christ.

Daily Express, 1 Oct. 1903

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Unequal Verse

Mr. Langbridge, in his preface to this volume of his verses, has confessed to so great a number of literary discipleships that one is well prepared for the variety of styles and subjects of which the book is full. Mr. Langbridge’s worst manner is very bad indeed; here the worst vices of Browning are united with a disease of sentiment of which the ‘Master’ cannot be justly accused; here ‘tears splash on ground’, blind beggars, mothers’ girlies, pathetic clerks, and cripples are huddled together in dire confusion, and the colloquial style, half American half Cockney, is employed to adorn their easily-imagined adventures. Anything more lamentable than the result would be difficult to conceive; and the result is all the more lamentable because the few sonnets which Mr. Langbridge has inserted in his volume are evidences of some care and a not inconsiderable technical power. The lines, ‘To Maurice Maeterlinck’, are, therefore, curiously out of place in this farrago of banal epics, so dignified are they in theme, so reserved in treatment, and one can only hope that Mr. Langbridge, when he publishes again, will see fit to sacrifice his taste for ‘comédie larmoyante’, and attest in serious verse that love which he professes for the muse.

Daily Express, 1 Oct. 1903

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Mr. Arnold Graves’ New Work

In the introduction which Dr. Tyrrell has written for Mr. Graves’s tragedy, it is pointed out that ‘Clytemnæstra’ is not a Greek play in English, like ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, but rather a Greek story treated from the standpoint of a modern dramatist—in other words it claims to be heard on its own merits merely, and not at all as a literary curio. To leave aside for the moment the subordinate question of language it is not easy to agree with Dr. Tyrrell’s opinion that the treatment is worthy of the subject. On the contrary there would appear to be some serious flaws in the construction. Mr. Graves has chosen to call his play after the faithless wife of Agamemnon, and to make her nominally the cardinal point of interest. Yet from the tenor of the speeches, and inasmuch as the play is almost entirely a drama of the retribution which follows crime, Orestes being the agent of Divine vengeance, it is plain that the criminal nature of the queen has not engaged Mr. Graves’s sympathies.

The play, in fact, is solved according to an ethical idea, and not according to that indifferent sympathy with certain pathological states which is so often anathematized by theologians of the street. Rules of conduct can be found in the books of moral philosophers, but ‘experts’ alone can find them in Elizabethan comedy. Moreover, the interest is wrongly directed when Clytemnæstra, who is about to imperil everything for the sake of her paramour, is represented as treating him with hardly disguised contempt, and again where Agamemnon, who is about to be murdered in his own palace by his own queen on his night of triumph, is made to behave towards his daughter Electra with a stupid harshness which is suggestive of nothing so much as of gout. Indeed, the feeblest of the five acts is the act which deals with the murder. Nor is the effect even sustained, for its second representation during Orestes’ hypnotic trance cannot but mar the effect of the real murder in the third act in the mind of an audience which has just caught Clytemnæstra and Egisthus red-handed.

These faults can hardly be called venial, for they occur at vital points of the artistic structure, and Mr. Graves, who might have sought to cover all with descriptive writing, has been honest enough to employ such a studiously plain language as throws every deformity into instant relief. However, there are fewer offences in the verse than in most of the verse that is written nowadays, and it is perhaps only an indication of the mental confusion incident upon seership when Tiresias, the prophet, is heard exclaiming:

Beware! beware!

The stone you started rolling down the hill

Will crush you if you do not change your course,

Daily Express, 1 Oct. 1903

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A Neglected Poet

Tennyson is reported to have said that if God made the country and man made the city, it must have been the devil that made the country town. The dreary monotonousness, the squalor, the inevitable moral decay—all, in fine, that has been called ‘provincial’—is the constant theme of Crabbe’s verse. Patronized in his own day by Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, the friend of Scott, and Rogers, and Bowles, the literary godfather of FitzGerald, Crabbe has so far fallen in our day from his high estate that it is only by a favour that he is accorded mention in some manual of literature.

This neglect, though it can be easily explained, is probably not a final judgment. Of course, much of Crabbe’s work is dull and undistinguished, and he never had such moments as those which Wordsworth can always plead in answer to his critics. On the contrary, it is his chief quality that he employs the metre of Pope so evenly, and with so little of Pope’s brilliancy that he succeeds admirably as narrator of the obscure tragedies of the provinces. His tales are, therefore, his claim to a place in the history of English fiction. At a time when false sentiment and the ‘genteel’ style were fashionable, and when country life was seized upon for exploitation as eagerly as by any of the modern Kailyard school, Crabbe appeared as the champion of realism. Goldsmith had preceded him in treating rural subjects, treating them with an Arcadian grace, it is true, but with what remoteness and lack of true insight and sympathy a comparison of Auburn with ‘The Village’, ‘The Borough’, and ‘The Parish Register’ will show. These latter are no more than names in the ears of the present generation, and it is the purpose of the present monograph to obtain a hearing, at least, for one of the most neglected of English writers.

The name of its author is one of the most honourable and painstaking in contemporary criticism, and amid a multitude of schools and theories perhaps he may succeed in securing a place for one like Crabbe, who, except for a few passages wherein the world of opinion is divided, is an example of sane judgment and sober skill, and who has set forth the lives of villagers with appreciation and fidelity, and with an occasional splendour reminiscent of the Dutchmen.

Daily Express, 15 Oct. 1903

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Mr. Mason’s Novels

These novels, much as they differ in their subjects and styles, are curiously illustrative of the truth of one of Leonardo’s observations. Leonardo, exploring the dark recesses of consciousness in the interests of some semi-pantheistic psychology, has noted the tendency of the mind to impress its own likeness upon that which it creates. It is because of this tendency, he says, that many painters have cast as it were a reflection of themselves over the portraits of others. Mr. Mason, perhaps, in like manner, has allowed these stories to fit themselves into what is doubtless one of the ‘moulds of his understanding’.

Among Mr. Mason’s ‘properties’ the reader will not fail to notice the early, effaceable husband. In ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’ it is Julian Harwood, in ‘The Philanderers’ it is the outcast Gorley, in ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ it is Ralph Warriner. In all three books a previously-implicated girl of wayward habits is associated with a young man, who is a type of class common enough in novels—the sturdy, slow-witted Englishman. It is curious to watch this story reproducing itself without the author’s assent, one imagines, through scenes and times differing so widely.

A minor phenomenon is the appearance of Horace in each story. In ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’ the plan of the castle in the Tyrol, which is the centre of gravity of the story, is made on a page of a little Elzevir copy of Horace. In ‘The Philanderers’ Horace is laid under tribute more than once for a simile worthy of the classical beauty of Clarice. And once again in ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ that interesting figure ‘Major’ Wilbraham is represented as engaged on a translation of Horace in the intervals of marauding and blackmailing.

Mr. Mason is much more successful when he is writing of a time or scene somewhat remote from big towns. The Belgravian atmosphere of ‘The Philanderers’ (a title which Mr. Mason has to share with Mr. George Bernard Shaw) is not enlivened by much wit or incident, but ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ has a pleasing sequence of Spanish and Moorish scenes. Mr. Mason’s best book, however, is certainly ‘The Courtship of Morrice Buckler’. The story is of the cape and sword order, and it passes in the years after Sedgemoor. Germany is an excellent place for castles and intrigues; and in the adventurous air of this romance those who have read too many novels of modern life may recreate themselves at will. The writing is often quite pretty, too. Isn’t ‘Miranda of the Balcony’ a pretty name?

Daily Express, 15 Oct. 1903

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The Bruno Philosophy

Except for a book in the English and Foreign Philosophical Library, a book the interest of which was chiefly biographical, no considerable volume has appeared in England to give an account of the life and philosophy of the heresiarch martyr of Nola. Inasmuch as Bruno was born about the middle of the sixteenth century, an appreciation of him—and that appreciation the first to appear in England—cannot but seem somewhat belated now. Less than a third of this book is devoted to Bruno’s life, and the rest of the book to an exposition and comparative survey of his system. That life reads like a heroic fable in these days of millionaires. A Dominican monk, a gipsy professor, a commentator of old philosophies and a deviser of new ones, a playwright, a polemist, a counsel for his own defence, and, finally, a martyr burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori—Bruno, through all these modes and accidents (as he would have called them) of being, remains a consistent spiritual unity.

Casting away tradition with the courage of early humanism, Bruno has hardly brought to his philosophical enquiry the philosophical method of a peripatetic. His active brain continually utters hypotheses; his vehement temper continually urges him to recriminate; and though the hypothesis may be validly used by the philosopher in speculation and the countercheck quarrelsome be allowed him upon occasion, hypotheses and recriminations fill so many of Bruno’s pages that nothing is easier than to receive from them an inadequate and unjust notion of a great lover of wisdom. Certain parts of his philosophy—for it is many-sided—may be put aside. His treatises on memory, commentaries on the art of Raymond Lully, his excursions into that treacherous region from which even ironical Aristotle did not come undiscredited, the science of morality, have an interest only because they are so fantastical and middle-aged.

As an independent observer, Bruno, however, deserves high honour. More than Bacon or Descartes must he be considered the father of what is called modern philosophy. His system by turns rationalist and mystic, theistic and pantheistic is everywhere impressed with his noble mind and critical intellect, and is full of that ardent sympathy with nature as it is—natura naturata—which is the breath of the Renaissance. In his attempt to reconcile the matter and form of the Scholastics—formidable names, which in his system as spirit and body retain little of their metaphysical character—Bruno has hardily put forward an hypothesis, which is a curious anticipation of Spinoza. Is it not strange, then, that Coleridge should have set him down a dualist, a later Heraclitus, and should have represented him as saying in effect: ‘Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion.’?

And yet it must be the chief claim of any system like Bruno’s that it endeavours to simplify the complex. That idea of an ultimate principle, spiritual, indifferent, universal, related to any soul or to any material thing, as the Materia Prima of Aquinas is related to any material thing, unwarranted as it may seem in the view of critical philosophy, has yet a distinct value for the historian of religious ecstasies. It is not Spinoza, it is Bruno, that is the god-intoxicated man. Inwards from the material universe, which, however, did not seem to him, as to the Neoplatonists the kingdom of the soul’s malady, or as to the Christians a place of probation, but rather his opportunity for spiritual activity, he passes, and from heroic enthusiasm to enthusiasm to unite himself with God. His mysticism is little allied to that of Molinos or to that of St. John of the Cross; there is nothing in it of quietism or of the dark cloister: it is strong, suddenly rapturous, and militant. The death of the body is for him the cessation of a mode of being, and in virtue of this belief and of that robust character ‘prevaricating yet firm’, which is an evidence of that belief, he becomes of the number of those who loftily do not fear to die. For us his vindication of the freedom of intuition must seem an enduring monument, and among those who waged so honourable a war, his legend must seem the most honourable, more sanctified, and more ingenuous than that of Averroes or of Scotus Erigena.

Daily Express, 30 Oct. 1903

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Humanism

Barbarism, says Professor Schiller, may show itself in philosophy in two guises, as barbarism of style and as barbarism of temper, and what is opposed to barbarism is Professor Schiller’s philosophical creed: Humanism, or, as he sometimes names it, Pragmatism. One, therefore, who has been prepared to expect courteous humanism both in temper and in style, will read with some surprise statements such as—‘The a priori philosophies have all been found out’; ‘Pragmatism ... has ... reached the “Strike, but hear me!” stage’; ‘It [the Dragon of Scholasticism] is a spirit ... that grovels in muddy technicality, buries itself in the futile burrowings of valueless researches, and conceals itself from human insight [but not from humane insight, Professor Schiller!] by dust-clouds of desiccated rubbish which it raises.’

But these are details. Pragmatism is really a very considerable thing. It reforms logic, it shows the absurdity of pure thought, it establishes an ethical basis for metaphysic, makes practical usefulness the criterion of truth, and pensions off the Absolute once and for all. In other words, pragmatism is common-sense. The reader, accordingly, will not be surprised to find that in the post-Platonic dialogue, which is called ‘“Useless” Knowledge,’ a disciple of William James utterly routs and puts to shame the ghostly forms of Plato and Aristotle. Emotional psychology is made the starting-point, and the procedure of the philosopher is to be regulated in accordance. If Professor Schiller had sought to establish rational psychology as a starting-point, his position would have been well-grounded, but rational psychology he has either never heard of or considers unworthy of mention. In his essay on the desire of immortality he establishes one fact—that the majority of human beings are not concerned as to whether or not their life is to end with the dissolution of the body. And yet, after having set up efficiency as the test of truth and the judgment of humanity as the final court of appeal, he concludes by pleading on behalf of the minority, by advocating the claims of the Society for Psychical Research, of which, it seems, he has been for many years a member.

Was it so well done, after all, to reform logic so radically? But your pragmatist is nothing if not an optimist, and though he himself denies philosophies by the score, he declares that pessimism is ‘der Geist der stets verneint.’ The Mephistopheles of Goethe is the subject of one of the most entertaining essays in the book. ‘The subtlest of his disguises,’ says Prof. Schiller in a characteristic sentence, ‘his most habitual mask, is one which deceives all the other characters in Faust, except the Lord, and has, so far as I know, utterly deceived all Goethe’s readers except myself.’ But surely Professor Schiller can hardly derive much satisfaction from the knowledge that he shares his discovery with the Lord in Goethe’s Faust, a being which (to quote the phrase of the English sceptic upon a term of the English sensationalist-theologians) is taken for God because we do not know what the devil it can be, a being, moreover, which is closely allied to such inefficient and pragmatically annihilated entities as the Absolute of Mr. Bradley and the Unknowable of Mr. Spencer.

Daily Express, 12 Nov. 1903

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Shakespeare Explained

In a short prefatory note the writer of this book states that he has not written it for Shakespearian scholars, who are well provided with volumes of research and criticism, but has sought to render the eight plays more interesting and intelligible to the general reader. It is not easy to discover in the book any matter for praise. The book itself is very long—nearly five hundred pages of small type—and expensive. The eight divisions of it are long drawn out accounts of some of the plays of Shakespeare—plays chosen, it would seem, at haphazard. There is nowhere an attempt at criticism, and the interpretations are meagre, obvious, and commonplace. The passages ‘quoted’ fill up perhaps a third of the book, and it must be confessed that the writer’s method of treating Shakespeare is (or seems to be) remarkably irreverent. Thus he ‘quotes’ the speech made by Marullus in the first act of ‘Julius Caesar’, and he has contrived to condense the first sixteen lines of the original with great success, omitting six of them without any sign of omission.

Perhaps it is a jealous care for the literary digestion of the general public that impels Mr. Canning to give them no more than ten-sixteenths of the great bard. Perhaps it is the same care which dictates sentences such as the following: ‘His noble comrade fully rivals Achilles in wisdom as in valour. Both are supposed to utter their philosophic speeches during the siege of Troy, which they are conducting with the most energetic ardour. They evidently turn aside from their grand object for a brief space to utter words of profound wisdom....’ It will be seen that the substance of this book is after the manner of ancient playbills. Here is no psychological complexity, no cross-purpose, no interweaving of motives such as might perplex the base multitude. Such a one is a ‘noble character’, such a one a ‘villain’; such a passage is ‘grand’, ‘eloquent’, or ‘poetic’. One page in the account of ‘Richard the Third’ is made up of single lines or couplets and such non-committal remarks as ‘York says then’, ‘Gloucester, apparently surprised, answers’, ‘and York replies’, ‘and Gloucester replies’, ‘and York retorts’. There is something very naïve about this book, but (alas!) the general public will hardly pay sixteen shillings for such naïveté. And the same Philistine public will hardly read five hundred pages of ‘replies’, and ‘retorts’ illustrated with misquotations. And even the pages are wrongly numbered.

Daily Express, 12 Nov. 1903

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Borlase and Son

‘Borlase and Son’ has the merit, first of all, of ‘actuality’. As the preface is dated for May last, one may credit the author with prophetic power, or at least with that special affinity for the actual, the engrossing topic, which is a very necessary quality in the melodramatist. The scene of the story is the suburban district about Peckham Rye, where the Armenians have just fought out a quarrel, and, moreover, the epitasis (as Ben Jonson would call it) of the story dates from a fall of stocks incident upon a revolution among the Latin peoples of America.

But the author has an interest beyond that derivable from such allusions. He has been called the Zola of Camberwell, and, inappropriate as the epithet is, it is to Zola we must turn for what is, perhaps, the supreme achievement in that class of fiction of which ‘Borlase and Son’ is a type. In ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ Zola has set forth the intimate glories and shames of the great warehouse—has, in fact, written an epic for drapers; and in ‘Borlase and Son’, a much smaller canvas, our author has drawn very faithfully the picture of the smaller ‘emporium’, with its sordid avarice, its underpaid labour, its intrigue, its ‘customs of trade’.

The suburban mind is not invariably beautiful, and its working is here delineated with unsentimental vigour. Perhaps the unctuousness of old Borlase is somewhat overstated, and the landladies may be reminiscent of Dickens. In spite of its ‘double circle’ plot, ‘Borlase and Son’ has much original merit, and the story, a little slender starveling of a story, is told very neatly and often very humorously. For the rest, the binding of the book is as ugly as one could reasonably expect.

Daily Express, 19 Nov. 1903

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Aesthetics

I. Paris Notebook

Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or by tragedy. Of comedy later. But tragedy aims at exciting in us feelings of pity and terror. Now terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with the human sufferer. Now loathing, which in an improper art aims at exciting in the way of tragedy, differs, it will be seen, from the feelings which are proper to tragic art, namely terror and pity. For loathing urges us from rest because it urges us to go from something, but terror and pity hold us in rest, as it were, by fascination. When tragic art makes my body to shrink terror is not my feeling because I am urged from rest, and moreover this art does not show me what is grave, I mean what is constant and irremediable in human fortunes nor does it unite me with any secret cause for it shows me only what is unusual and remediable and it unites me with a cause only too manifest. Nor is an art properly tragic which would move me to prevent human suffering any more than an art is properly tragic which would move me in anger against some manifest cause of human suffering. Terror and pity, finally, are aspects of sorrow comprehended in sorrow—the feeling which the privation of some good excites in us.

And now of comedy. An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy. Desire, as I have said, is the feeling which urges us to go to something but joy is the feeling which the possession of some good excites in us. Desire, the feeling which an improper art seeks to excite in the way of comedy, differs, it will be seen, from joy. For desire urges us from rest that we may possess something but joy holds us in rest so long as we possess something. Desire, therefore, can only be excited in us by a comedy (a work of comic art) which is not sufficient in itself inasmuch as it urges us to seek something beyond itself; but a comedy (a work of comic art) which does not urge us to seek anything beyond itself excites in us the feeling of joy. All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic and according as this feeling of joy is excited by whatever is substantial or accidental in human fortunes the art is to be judged more or less excellent: and even tragic art may be said to participate in the nature of comic art so far as the possession of a work of tragic art (a tragedy) excites in us the feeling of joy. From this it may be seen that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in art. All art, again, is static for the feelings of terror and pity on the one hand and of joy on the other hand are feelings which arrest us. It will be seen afterwards how this rest is necessary for the apprehension of the beautiful—the end of all art, tragic or comic—for this rest is the only condition under which the images, which are to excite in us terror or pity or joy, can be properly presented to us and properly seen by us. For beauty is a quality of something seen but terror and pity and joy are states of mind.

James A. Joyce, 13 Feb., 1903.

... There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others....

James A. Joyce, 6 March, 1903, Paris.

Rhythm seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole or of a whole to its part or parts, or of any part to the whole of which it is a part.... Parts constitute a whole as far as they have a common end.

James A. Joyce, 25 March, 1903, Paris.

e tekhne mimeitai ten physin—This phrase is falsely rendered as ‘Art is an imitation of Nature’. Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, ‘Art imitates Nature’ and means that the artistic process is like the natural process.... It is false to say that sculpture, for instance, is an art of repose if by that be meant that sculpture is unassociated with movement. Sculpture is associated with movement in as much as it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary movement in space. It is not false to say that sculpture is an art of repose in that a work of sculptural art cannot be presented as itself moving in space and remain a work of sculptural art.

James A. Joyce, 27 March, 1903, Paris.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

James A. Joyce, 28 March, 1903, Paris.

Question: Why are not excrements, children, and lice works of art?

Answer: Excrements, children, and lice are human products—human dispositions of sensible matter. The process by which they are produced is natural and non-artistic; their end is not an aesthetic end: therefore they are not works of art.

Question: Can a photograph be a work of art?

Answer: A photograph is a disposition of sensible matter and may be so disposed for an aesthetic end but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter. Therefore it is not a work of art.

Question: If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make there an image of a cow (say) has he made a work of art?

Answer: The image of a cow made by a man hacking in fury at a block of wood is a human disposition of sensible matter but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter for an aesthetic end. Therefore it is not a work of art.

Question: Are houses, clothes, furniture, etc., works of art?

Answer: Houses, clothes, furniture, etc., are not necessarily works of art. They are human dispositions of sensible matter. When they are so disposed for an aesthetic end they are works of art.

II. Pola Notebook

Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. S. Thomas Aquinas.

The good is that towards the possession of which an appetite tends: the good is the desirable. The true and the beautiful are the most persistent orders of the desirable. Truth is desired by the intellectual appetite which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is desired by the aesthetic appetite which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The true and the beautiful are spiritually possessed; the true by intellection, the beautiful by apprehension, and the appetites which desire to possess them, the intellectual and aesthetic appetites, are therefore spiritual appetites....

J. A. J. Pola, 7 XI 04.

Pulchra sunt quae visa placent. S. Thomas Aquinas.

Those things are beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. Therefore beauty is that quality of a sensible object in virtue of which its apprehension pleases or satisfies the aesthetic appetite which desires to apprehend the most satisfying relations of the sensible. Now the act of apprehension involves at least two activities, the activity of cognition or simple perception and the activity of recognition. If the activity of simple perception is, like every other activity, itself pleasant, every sensible object that has been apprehended can be said in the first place to have been and to be in a measure beautiful; and even the most hideous object can be said to have been and to be beautiful in so far as it has been apprehended. In regard then to that part of the act of apprehension which is called the activity of simple perception there is no sensible object which cannot be said to be in a measure beautiful.

With regard to the second part of the act of apprehension which is called the activity of recognition it may further be said that there is no activity of simple perception to which there does not succeed in whatsoever measure the activity of recognition. For by the activity of recognition is meant an activity of decision; and in accordance with this activity in all conceivable cases a sensible object is said to be satisfying or dissatisfying. But the activity of recognition is, like every other activity, itself pleasant and therefore every object that has been apprehended is secondly in whatsoever measure beautiful. Consequently even the most hideous object may be said to be beautiful for this reason as it is a priori said to be beautiful in so far as it encounters the activity of simple perception.

Sensible objects, however, are said conventionally to be beautiful or not for neither of the foregoing reasons but rather by reason of the nature, degree and duration of the satisfaction resulting from the apprehension of them and it is in accordance with these latter merely that the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are used in practical aesthetic philosophy. It remains then to be said that these words indicate only a greater or less measure of resultant satisfaction and that any sensible object, to which the word ‘ugly’ is practically applied, an object, that is, the apprehension of which results in a small measure of aesthetic satisfaction, is, in so far as its apprehension results in any measure of satisfaction whatsoever, said to be for the third time beautiful....

J. A. J. Pola, 15 XI 04.

The Act of Apprehension

It has been said that the act of apprehension involves at least two activities—the activity of cognition or simple perception and the activity of recognition. The act of apprehension, however, in its most complete form involves three activities—the third being the activity of satisfaction. By reason of the fact that these three activities are all pleasant themselves every sensible object that has been apprehended must be doubly and may be trebly beautiful. In practical aesthetic philosophy the epithets ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are applied with regard chiefly to the third activity, with regard, that is, to the nature, degree and duration of the satisfaction resultant from the apprehension of any sensible object and therefore any sensible object to which in practical aesthetic philosophy the epithet ‘beautiful’ is applied must be trebly beautiful, must have encountered, that is, the three activities which are involved in the act of apprehension in its most complete form. Practically then the quality of beauty in itself must involve three constituents to encounter each of these three activities....

J. A. J. Pola. 16 XI 04.

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A Portrait of the Artist

The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.

Use of reason is by popular judgment antedated [by] some seven years and so it is not easy to set down the exact age at which the natural [s]⁠ens⁠[ibi]⁠lity of the subject of this portrait awok⁠[e to the ide]⁠as of eternal damnation, the necessi⁠[ty of peni]⁠tence and the efficacy of prayer. <H⁠[is t]⁠raining had early developed a very lively sense of spiritual obligations at the expense of [wh]⁠at is called ‘common sense’. He ran through his measure like a spendthrift s⁠[aint], astonishing many by ejaculatory f⁠[erv]⁠ours, offending many by airs of the cloister. One day in a wood near Malahide a labourer had marvelled to see a boy of fifteen praying in an ecstasy of Oriental posture. It was indeed a long time before this boy understood the nature of that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without ordering one’s life in accordance with them. The digestive value of religion he never appreciated and he chose, as more fitting his case, those poorer, humbler orders in which a confessor did not seem anxious to reveal himself, in theory at least, a man of the world. In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards, he was still soothed by devotional exercises when he entered the University.

About this period the enigma of a manner was put up at all corners to protect the crisis. He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic. It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he imagined converging to him the deeds and thoughts of the microcosm. Is the mind of boyhood medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field sports (or their correspondents in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure, but for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic hunt was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage. But behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered. Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to the highlands after their game; there was his ground; and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.> There was evident self-flattery in the image but a danger of complacence too. Wherefore, neglecting the wheezier bayings in tha⁠[t Cho]⁠rus which no leagues of distance could make musical, he began loftily diagnosis of the younglings. His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural. <These young men saw in the sudden death of a dull French novelist the hand of Emmanuel—God with us; they admired Gla⁠[d]⁠stone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare; and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the Church diplomatic. In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (wherever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism>. He remarked the half-admiring, half-reproving demeanour of a class, implicitly pledged to abstinences towards <others among whom (the fame went) wild living was not unknown. Though the union of faith and fatherland was ever sacred in that world of easily inflammable enthusiasms a couplet from Davis, accusing the least docile of tempers,—never failed of its applause and the memory of McManus was hardly less revered than that of Cardinal Cullen>. They had many reasons to respect authority; and even if <a student were forbidden to go to Othello (“There are some coarse expressions in it” he was told.) what a little cross was that? Was it not rather an evidence of watchful care and interest, and were they not assured that in their future lives this care would continue, this interest be maintained? The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never. Who, therefore, readier than these young men to acknowledge gratefully the sallies of some genial professor or the surliness of some door-porter, who more sollicitous to cherish in every way and to advance in person the honour of Alma Mater? For his part he was at the difficult age, dispossessed and necessitous, sensible of all that was ignoble in such manners who, in revery at least, had been acquainted with nobility. An earnest Jesuit had prescribed a clerkship in Guinness’s: and doubtless the clerk-designate of a brewery would not have had scorn and pity only for an admirable community had it not been that he desired (in the language of the schoolmen) an arduous good. It was possible that he should find solace in [so]⁠cieties for the encouragement of thought among laymen or any other than bodily comfort in the warm sodality amid so many foolish or grotesque virginities. Moreover, it was impossible that a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy should submit to acquiesce, that a soul should decree servitude for its portion over which the image of beauty had fallen as a mantle. One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library, he said to his friend “I have left the Church.”> And as they walked home through the streets arm-in-arm he told, in words that seemed an echo of their closing, how he had left it through the gates of Assisi.

Extravagance followed: The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies. Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him. He descended among the hells of Swedenborg and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross. His heaven was suddenly illumined by a horde of stars, the signatures of all nature, the soul remembering ancient days. Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross. For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things. And was it any wonder that out of this marvellous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience, laboured and despaired, he came forth at last with a single purpose—to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality. A thousand eternities were to be reaffirmed, divine knowledge was to be re-established. Alas for Fatuity! as easily might he have summoned a regiment of the winds. They pleaded their natural pieties—social limitations, inherited apathy of race, an adoring mother, the Christian fable. Their treasons were venial only. Wherever the social monster permitted they would hazard the extremes of heterodoxy; reasons of an imaginative determinant in ethics, of anarchy (the folk), of blue triangles, [o]⁠f the fish-gods, proclaiming in a fervent moment the necessity for action. His revenge was a phrase and isolation. He lumped the emancipates together—Venomous Butter—and set away from the sloppy neighbourhood.

Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy but traditional and individual revelations were at that time pressing their claims and self-communion had been but shyly welcomed. But in the intervals of friendships (for he [had] outridden three) he had known the sisterhood of meditative hours and now the hope began to grow up within him of finding among them that serene emotion, that certitude, which among men he had not found. An impulse had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees; and as he had passed there amid the subduing night, in the secret fall of leaves, the fragrant rain, the mesh of vapours moon-transpierced, he had imagined an admonition of the frailty of all things/. In summer it had led him seaward⁠[.] Wandering over the arid, grassy hills or along the strand, avowedly in quest of shellfish, he had grown almost impatient of the day. Waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered—even they had not fascinated. But as day had waned it had been pleasant to watch the few last figures islanded in distant pools; and as evening deepened the grey glow above the sea he had gone out, out among the shallow waters, the holy joys of solitude uplifting him, singing passionately to the tide/[.] Sceptically, cynically, mystically, he had sought for an absolute satisfaction and now little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal conditions. He remembered a sentence in Augustine—“It was manifested unto me that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither if they are supremely good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted: for had they been [su]⁠premely good they would have been [in]⁠corruptible but if they were not good [the]⁠re would be nothing in them which could [be c]⁠orrupted.” A philosophy of reconcilement [possible ...] as eve⁠[....] Th⁠[...] of the [...] at lef⁠[...] bor [...] lit up with dolphin lights, but the lights in the chambers of the heart were unextinguished, nay, burning as for espousal.

Dearest of mortals! In spite of tributary verses and of the comedy of meetings here and in the foolish society of sleep the fountain of being (it seemed) had been interfused. Years before, in boyhood, <the energy of sin opening a world before him> he had been made aware of thee. <The yellow gaslamps arising in his troubled vision, against an autumnal sky, gleaming mysteriously there before that violet altar—the groups gathered at the doorways arrayed as for some rite—the glimpses of revel and fantasmal mirth—the vague face of some welcomer seeming to awaken from a slumber of centuries under his gaze—the blind confusion (iniquity! iniquity!) suddenly overtaking him—in all that ardent adventure of lust didst thou not even then communicate>? Beneficent one! (the shrewdness of love was in the title) thou camest timely, as a witch to the agony of the self-devourer, an envoy from the fair courts of life. How could he thank thee for that enrichment of soul by thee consummated? Mastery of art had been achieved in irony; asceticism of intellect had been a mood of indignant pride: but who had revealed him to himself but thou alone? In ways of tenderness, simple, intuitive tenderness, thy love had made to arise in him the central torrents of life. Thou hadst put thine arms about him and, intimately prisoned as thou hadst been, in the soft stir of thy bosom, the raptures of silence, the murmured words, thy heart had spoken to his heart. Thy disposition could refine and direct his passion, holding mere beauty at the cunningest angle. Thou wert sacramental, imprinting thine indelible mark, of very visible grace. A litany must honour thee; Lady of the Apple Trees, Kind Wisdom, Sweet Flower of Dusk. In another phase it had been not uncommon to devise dinners in white and purple upon the actuality of stirabout but here, surely, is sturdy or delicate food to hand; no need for devising. His way (abrupt creature!) lies out now to the measurable world and [t]⁠he broad expanses of activity. The blood hurries to a galop in his veins; his nerves accumulate an electric force; he is footed with flame. A kiss: and they leap together, indivisible, upwards, radiant lips and eyes, their bodies sounding with the triumph of harps! Again, beloved! Again, thou bride! Again, ere life is ours!

In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude to the new crowning era in a season of melancholy and unrest. He made up his tale of losses—a dispiriting tale enough even were there no comments. The air of false Christ was manifestly the mask of a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours; whence ingenuousness, forbearance, sweet amiability and the whole tribe of domestic virtues. Sadly mindful of the worst the vision of his dead, the vision (far more pitiful) of congenital lives shuffling onwards between yawn and howl, starvelings in mind and body, visions of which came a temporary failure of his olden, sustained manner, darkly beset him. The cloud of difficulties about him allowed only peeps of light; even his rhetoric proclaimed transition. He could convict himself at least of a natural inability to prove everything at once and certain random attempts suggested the need for regular campaigning. His faith increased. It emboldened him to say to a patron of the fine arts ‘What advance upon spiritual goods?’ and to a capitalist ‘I need two thousand pounds for a project’. He had interpreted for orthodox Greek scholarship the living doctrine of the Poetics and, out of the burning bushes of excess, had declaimed to a night-policeman on the true status of public women: but there was no budge of those mountains, no perilous cerebration. In a moment of frenzy he called for the elves. Many in our day, it would appear, cannot avoid a choice between sensitiveness and dulness; they recommend themselves by proofs of culture to a like-minded minority or dominate the huger world as lean of meat. But he saw between camps his ground of vantage, opportunities for the mocking devil in an isle twice removed from the mainland, under joint government of Their Intensities and Their Bullockships. His Nego, therefore, written amid a chorus of peddling Jews’ gibberish and Gentile clamour, was drawn up valiantly while true believers prophesied fried atheism and was hurled against the obscene hells of our Holy Mother: but, that outburst over, it was urbanity in warfare. Perhaps his state would pension off old tyranny—a mercy no longer hopelessly remote—in virtue of that mature civilisation to which (let all allow) it had in some way contributed. Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world, already the generous idea had emerged from a thirty years’ war in Germany and was directing the councils of the Latins. To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightning of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.

Jas. A. Joyce 7/1/1904/.

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Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages

Nations have their ego, just like individuals. The case of a people who like to attribute to themselves qualities and glories foreign to other people has not been entirely unknown in history, from the time of our ancestors, who called themselves Aryans and nobles, or that of the Greeks, who called all those who lived outside the sacrosanct land of Hellas barbarians. The Irish, with a pride that is perhaps less easy to explain, love to refer to their country as the island of saints and sages.

This exalted title was not invented yesterday or the day before. It goes back to the most ancient times, when the island was a true focus of sanctity and intellect, spreading throughout the continent a culture and a vitalizing energy. It would be easy to make a list of the Irishmen who carried the torch of knowledge from country to country as pilgrims and hermits, as scholars and wisemen. Their traces are still seen today in abandoned altars, in traditions and legends where even the name of the hero is scarcely recognizable, or in poetic allusions, such as the passage in Dante’s Inferno where his mentor points to one of the Celtic magicians tormented by infernal pains and says:

Quel’altro, che ne’ fianchi è così poco,

Michele Scotto fu, che veramente

Delle magiche frode seppe il gioco.

In truth, it would take the learning and patience of a leisurely Bollandist to relate the acts of these saints and sages. We at least remember the notorious opponent of St. Thomas, John Duns Scotus (called the Subtle Doctor to distinguish him from St. Thomas, the Angelic Doctor, and from Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor) who was the militant champion of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and, as the chronicles of that period tell us, an unbeatable dialectician. It seems undeniable that Ireland at that time was an immense seminary, where scholars gathered from the different countries of Europe, so great was its renown for mastery of spiritual matters. Although assertions of this kind must be taken with great reservations, it is more than likely (in view of the religious fervour that still prevails in Ireland, of which you, who have been nourished on the food of scepticism in recent years, can hardly form a correct idea) that this glorious past is not a fiction based on the spirit of self-glorification.

If you really wish to be convinced, there are always the dusty archives of the Germans. Ferrero now tells us that the discoveries of these good professors of Germany, so far as they deal with the ancient history of the Roman republic and the Roman empire, are wrong from the beginning—almost completely wrong. It may be so. But, whether or not this is so, no one can deny that, just as these learned Germans were the first to present Shakespeare as a poet of world significance to the warped eyes of his compatriots (who up to that time had considered William a figure of secondary importance, a fine fellow with a pleasant vein of lyric poetry, but perhaps too fond of English beer), these very Germans were the only ones in Europe to concern themselves with Celtic languages and the history of the five Celtic nations. The only Irish grammars and dictionaries that existed in Europe up until a few years ago, when the Gaelic League was founded in Dublin, were the works of Germans.

The Irish language, although of the Indo-European family, differs from English almost as much as the language spoken in Rome differs from that spoken in Teheran. It has an alphabet of special characters, and a history almost three thousand years old. Ten years ago, it was spoken only by the peasants in the western provinces on the coast of the Atlantic and a few in the south, and on the little islands that stand like pickets of the vanguard of Europe, on the front of the eastern hemisphere. Now the Gaelic League has revived its use. Every Irish newspaper, with the exception of the Unionist organs, has at least one special headline printed in Irish. The correspondence of the principal cities is written in Irish, the Irish language is taught in most of the primary and secondary schools, and, in the universities, it has been set on a level with the other modern languages, such as French, German, Italian, and Spanish. In Dublin, the names of the streets are printed in both languages. The League organizes concerts, debates, and socials at which the speaker of beurla (that is, English) feels like a fish out of water, confused in the midst of a crowd that chatters in a harsh and guttural tongue. In the streets, you often see groups of young people pass by speaking Irish, perhaps a little more emphatically than is necessary. The members of the League write to each other in Irish, and often the poor postman, unable to read the address, must turn to his superior to untie the knot.

This language is oriental in origin, and has been identified by many philologists with the ancient language of the Phoenicians, the originators of trade and navigation, according to historians. This adventurous people, who had a monopoly of the sea, established in Ireland a civilization that had decayed and almost disappeared before the first Greek historian took his pen in hand. It jealously preserved the secrets of its knowledge, and the first mention of the island of Ireland in foreign literature is found in a Greek poem of the fifth century before Christ, where the historian repeats the Phoenician tradition. The language that the Latin writer of comedy, Plautus, put in the mouth of Phoenicians in his comedy Poenulus is almost the same language that the Irish peasants speak today, according to the critic Vallancey. The religion and civilization of this ancient people, later known by the name of Druidism, were Egyptian. The Druid priests had their temples in the open, and worshipped the sun and moon in groves of oak trees. In the crude state of knowledge of those times, the Irish priests were considered very learned, and when Plutarch mentions Ireland, he says that it was the dwelling place of holy men. Festus Avienus in the fourth century was the first to give Ireland the title of Insula Sacra; and later, after having undergone the invasions of the Spanish and Gaelic tribes, it was converted to Christianity by St. Patrick and his followers, and again earned the title of ‘Holy Isle’.

I do not propose to give a complete history of the Irish church in the first centuries of the Christian era. To do so would be beyond the scope of this lecture, and, in addition, not overly interesting. But it is necessary to give you some explanation of my title ‘Island of Saints and Sages’, and to show you its historical basis. Leaving aside the names of the innumerable churchmen whose work was exclusively national, I beg you to follow me for a few minutes while I expose to your view the traces that the numerous Celtic apostles in almost every country have left behind them. It is necessary to recount briefly events that today seem trivial to the lay mind, because in the centuries in which they occurred and in all the succeeding Middle Ages, not only history itself, but the sciences and the various arts were all completely religious in character, under the guardianship of a more than maternal church. And, in fact, what were the Italian scientists and artists before the Renaissance if not obedient handmaids of God, erudite commentators of sacred writings, or illustrators in verse or painting of the Christian fable?

It will seem strange that an island as remote as Ireland from the centre of culture could excel as a school for apostles, but even a superficial consideration will show us that the Irish nation’s insistence on developing its own culture by itself is not so much the demand of a young nation that wants to make good in the European concert as the demand of a very old nation to renew under new forms the glories of a past civilization. Even in the first century of the Christian era, under the apostleship of St. Peter, we find the Irishman Mansuetus, who was later canonized, serving as a missionary in Lorraine, where he founded a church and preached for half a century. Cataldus had a cathedral and two hundred theologians at Geneva, and was later made bishop of Taranto. The great heresiarch Pelagius, a traveller and tireless propagandist, if not an Irishman, as many contend, was certainly either Irish or Scottish, as was his right hand, Caelestius. Sedulius traversed a great part of the world, and finally settled at Rome, where he composed the beauties of almost five hundred theological tracts, and many sacred hymns that are used even today in Catholic ritual. Fridolinus Viator, that is, the Voyager, of royal Irish stock, was a missionary among the Germans, and died at Seckingen in Germany, where he is buried. Fiery Columbanus had the task of reforming the French church, and, after having started a civil war in Burgundy by his preaching, went to Italy, where he became the apostle of the Lombards and founded the monastery at Bobbio. Frigidian, son of the king of northern Ireland, occupied the bishopric of Lucca. St. Gall, who at first was the student and companion of Columbanus, lived among the Grisons in Switzerland as a hermit, hunting, and fishing, and cultivating his fields by himself. He refused the bishopric of the city of Constance, which was offered to him, and died at the age of ninety-five. On the site of his hermitage an abbey rose, and its abbot became prince of the canton by the grace of God, and greatly enriched the Benedictine library, whose ruins are still shown to those who visit the ancient town of St. Gall.

Finnian, called the Learned, founded a school of theology on the banks of the river Boyne in Ireland, where he taught Catholic doctrine to thousands of students from Great Britain, France, Armorica, and Germany, giving them all (O happy time!) not only their books and instruction but also free room and board. However, it seems that some of them neglected to fill their study lamps, and one student whose lamp went out suddenly had to invoke the divine grace, which made his fingers shine miraculously in such a way that by running his luminous fingers through the pages, he was able to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. St. Fiacre, for whom there is a commemorative plaque in the church of St. Mathurin in Paris, preached to the French and conducted extravagant funerals at the expense of the court. Fursey founded monasteries in five countries, and his feast day is still celebrated at Peronne, the place where he died in Picardy.

Arbogast built sanctuaries and chapels in Alsace and Lorraine, and ruled the bishop’s see at Strasbourg for five years until, feeling that he was near his end (according to his Dauphin) he went to live in a hut at the place where criminals were put to death and where later the great cathedral of the city was built. St. Verus became champion of the cult of the Virgin Mary in France, and Disibod, bishop of Dublin, travelled here and there through all of Germany for more than forty years, and finally founded a Benedictine monastery named Mount Disibod, now called Disenberg. Rumold became bishop of Mechlin in France, and the martyr Albinus, with Charlemagne’s help, founded an institute of science at Paris and another which he directed for many years in ancient Ticinum (now Pavia). Kilian, the apostle of Franconia, was consecrated bishop of Würzburg, in Germany, but, trying to play the part of John the Baptist between Duke Gozbert and his mistress, he was killed by cut-throats. Sedulius the younger was chosen by Gregory II for the mission of settling the quarrels of the clergy in Spain, but when he arrived there, the Spanish priests refused to listen to him, on the grounds that he was a foreigner. To this Sedulius replied that since he was an Irishman of the ancient race of Milesius, he was in fact a native Spaniard. This argument so thoroughly convinced his opponents that they allowed him to be installed in the bishop’s palace at Oreto.

In sum, the period that ended in Ireland with the invasion of the Scandinavian tribes in the eighth century is nothing but an unbroken record of apostleships, and missions, and martyrdoms. King Alfred, who visited the country and left us his impressions of it in the verses called ‘The Royal Journey’, tells us in the first stanza:

I found when I was in exile

In Ireland the beautiful

Many ladies, a serious people,

Laymen and priests in abundance

and it must be admitted that in twelve centuries the picture has not changed much; although, if the good Alfred, who found an abundance of laymen and priests in Ireland at that time, were to go there now, he would find more of the latter than the former.

Anyone who reads the history of the three centuries that precede the coming of the English must have a strong stomach, because the internecine strife, and the conflicts with the Danes and the Norwegians, the black foreigners and the white foreigners, as they were called, follow each other so continuously and ferociously that they make this entire era a veritable slaughterhouse. The Danes occupied all the principal ports on the east coast of the island and established a kingdom at Dublin, now the capital of Ireland, which has been a great city for about twenty centuries. Then the native kings killed each other off, taking well-earned rests from time to time in games of chess. Finally, the bloody victory of the usurper Brian Boru over the nordic hordes on the sand dunes outside the walls of Dublin put an end to the Scandinavian raids. The Scandinavians, however, did not leave the country, but were gradually assimilated into the community, a fact that we must keep in mind if we want to understand the curious character of the modern Irishman.

During this period, the culture necessarily languished, but Ireland had the honour of producing the three great heresiarchs John Duns Scotus, Macarius, and Vergilius Solivagus. Vergilius was appointed by the French king to the abbey at Salzburg and later was made bishop of that diocese, where he built a cathedral. He was a philosopher, mathematician, and translator of the writings of Ptolemy. In his tract on geography, he held the theory, which was subversive at that time, that the earth was round, and for such audacity was declared a sower of heresy by Popes Boniface and Zacharias. Macarius lived in France, and the monastery of St. Eligius still preserves his tract De Anima, in which he taught the doctrine later known as Averroism, of which Ernest Renan, himself a Breton Celt, has left us a masterful examination. Scotus Erigena, Rector of the University of Paris, was a mystical pantheist, who translated from the Greek the books of mystical theology of Dionysius, the pseudo-Areopagite, patron saint of the French nation. This translation presented to Europe for the first time the transcendental philosophy of the Orient, which had as much influence on the course of European religious thought as later the translations of Plato, made in the time of Pico della Mirandola, had on the development of the profane Italian civilization. It goes without saying that such an innovation (which seemed like a life-giving breath resurrecting the dead bones of orthodox theology piled up in an inviolable churchyard, a field of Ardath) did not have the sanction of the Pope, who invited Charles the Bald to send both the book and the author to Rome under escort, probably because he wanted to have them taste the delights of papal courtesy. However, it seems that Scotus had kept a grain of good sense in his exalted brain, because he pretended not to hear this courteous invitation and departed in haste for his native land.

From the time of the English invasion to our time, there is an interval of almost eight centuries, and if I have dwelt rather at length on the preceding period in order to make you understand the roots of the Irish temperament, I do not intend to detain you by recounting the vicissitudes of Ireland under the foreign occupation. I especially will not do so because at that time Ireland ceased to be an intellectual force in Europe. The decorative arts, at which the ancient Irish excelled, were abandoned, and the sacred and profane culture fell into disuse.

Two or three illustrious names shine here like the last few stars of a radiant night that wanes as dawn arrives. According to legend, John Duns Scotus, of whom I have spoken before, the founder of the school of Scotists, listened to the arguments of all the Doctors of the University of Paris for three whole days, then rose and, speaking from memory, refuted them one by one; Joannes de Sacrobosco, who was the last great supporter of the geographical and astronomical theories of Ptolemy, and Petrus Hibernus, the theologian who had the supreme task of educating the mind of the author of the scholastic apology Summa contra Gentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the keenest and most lucid mind known to human history.

But while these last stars still reminded the European nations of Ireland’s past glory, a new Celtic race was arising, compounded of the old Celtic stock and the Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman races. Another national temperament rose on the foundation of the old one, with the various elements mingling and renewing the ancient body. The ancient enemies made common cause against the English aggression, with the Protestant inhabitants (who had become Hibernis Hiberniores, more Irish than the Irish themselves) urging on the Irish Catholics in their opposition to the Calvinist and Lutheran fanatics from across the sea, and the descendants of the Danish and Norman and Anglo-Saxon settlers championing the cause of the new Irish nation against the British tyranny.

Recently, when an Irish member of parliament was making a speech to the voters on the night before an election, he boasted that he was one of the ancient race and rebuked his opponent for being the descendant of a Cromwellian settler. His rebuke provoked a general laugh in the press, for, to tell the truth, to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible, and to deny the name of patriot to all those who are not of Irish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the modern movement—Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy, leaders of the uprising of 1798, Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, leaders of the Young Ireland movement, Isaac Butt, Joseph Biggar, the inventor of parliamentary obstructionism, many of the anticlerical Fenians, and, finally, Charles Stewart Parnell, who was perhaps the most formidable man that ever led the Irish, but in whose veins there was not even a drop of Celtic blood.

In the national calendar, two days, according to the patriots, must be marked as ill-omened—that of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasion, and that, a century ago, of the union of the two parliaments. Now, at this point, it is important to recall two piquant and significant facts. Ireland prides itself on being faithful body and soul to its national tradition as well as to the Holy See. The majority of the Irish consider fidelity to these two traditions their cardinal article of faith. But the fact is that the English came to Ireland at the repeated requests of a native king, without, needless to say, any great desire on their part, and without the consent of their own king, but armed with the papal bull of Adrian IV and a papal letter of Alexander. They landed on the east coast with seven hundred men, a band of adventurers against a nation; they were received by some native tribes, and in less than a year, the English King Henry II celebrated Christmas with gusto in the city of Dublin. In addition, there is the fact that parliamentary union was not legislated at Westminster but at Dublin, by a parliament elected by the vote of the people of Ireland, a parliament corrupted and undermined with the greatest ingenuity by the agents of the English prime minister, but an Irish parliament nevertheless. From my point of view, these two facts must be thoroughly explained before the country in which they occurred has the most rudimentary right to persuade one of her sons to change his position from that of an unprejudiced observer to that of a convinced nationalist.

On the other hand, impartiality can easily be confused with a convenient disregard of facts, and if an observer, fully convinced that at the time of Henry II Ireland was a body torn by fierce strife and at the time of William Pitt was a venal and wicked mess of corruption, draws from these facts the conclusion that England does not have many crimes to expiate in Ireland, now and in the future, he is very much mistaken. When a victorious country tyrannizes over another, it cannot logically be considered wrong for that other to rebel. Men are made this way, and no one who is not deceived by self-interest or ingenuousness will believe, in this day and age, that a colonial country is motivated by purely Christian motives. These are forgotten when foreign shores are invaded, even if the missionary and the pocket Bible precede, by a few months, as a routine matter, the arrival of the soldiers and the uplifters. If the Irishmen at home have not been able to do what their brothers have done in America, it does not mean that they never will, nor is it logical on the part of English historians to salute the memory of George Washington and profess themselves well content with the progress of an independent, almost socialist, republic in Australia while they treat the Irish separatists as madmen.

A moral separation already exists between the two countries. I do not remember ever having heard the English hymn ‘God Save the King’ sung in public without a storm of hisses, shouts, and shushes that made the solemn and majestic music absolutely inaudible. But to be convinced of this separation, one should have been in the streets when Queen Victoria entered the Irish capital the year before her death. Above all, it is necessary to notice that when an English monarch wants to go to Ireland, for political reasons, there is always a lively flurry to persuade the mayor to receive him at the gates of the city. But, in fact, the last monarch who entered had to be content with an informal reception by the sheriff, since the mayor had refused the honour. (I note here merely as a curiosity that the present mayor of Dublin is an Italian, Mr. Nannetti.)

Queen Victoria had been in Ireland only once, fifty years before, [nine years] after her marriage. At that time, the Irish (who had not completely forgotten their fidelity to the unfortunate Stuarts, nor the name of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, nor the legendary fugitive, Bonnie Prince Charlie) had the wicked idea of mocking the Queen’s consort as though he were an abdicated German prince, amusing themselves by imitating the way he was said to lisp English, and greeting him exuberantly with a cabbage stalk just at the moment when he set foot on Irish soil.

The Irish attitude and the Irish character were antipathetic to the queen, who was fed on the aristocratic and imperialistic theories of Benjamin Disraeli, her favourite minister, and showed little or no interest in the lot of the Irish people, except for disparaging remarks, to which they naturally responded in a lively way. Once, it is true, when there was a horrible disaster in county Kerry which left most of the county without food or shelter, the queen, who held on tightly to her millions, sent the relief committee, which had already collected thousands of pounds from benefactors of all social classes, a royal grant in the total amount of ten pounds. As soon as the committee noticed the arrival of such a gift, they put it in an envelope and sent it back to the donor by return mail, together with their card of thanks. From these little incidents, it would appear that there was little love lost between Victoria and her Irish subjects, and if she decided to visit them in the twilight of her years, such a visit was most certainly motivated by politics.

The truth is that she did not come; she was sent by her advisers. At that time, the English debacle in South Africa in the war against the Boers had made the English army an object of scorn in the European press, and if it took the genius of the two commanders-in-chief, Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener (both of them Irishmen, born in Ireland) to redeem its threatened prestige (just as in 1815 it took the genius of another Irish soldier to overcome the renewed might of Napoleon at Waterloo), it also took Irish recruits and volunteers to demonstrate their renowned valour on the field of battle. In recognition of this fact, when the war was over, the English government allowed the Irish regiments to wear the shamrock, the patriotic emblem, on St. Patrick’s Day. In fact, the Queen came over for the purpose of capturing the easy-going sympathies of the country, and adding to the lists of the recruiting sergeants.

I have said that to understand the gulf that still separates the two nations, one should have been present at her entry into Dublin. Along the way were arrayed the little English soldiers (because, since the time of James Stephens’ Fenian revolt, the government had never sent Irish regiments to Ireland), and behind this barrier stood the crowd of citizens. In the decorated balconies were the officials and their wives, the unionist employees and their wives, the tourists and their wives. When the procession appeared, the people in the balconies began to shout greetings and wave their handkerchiefs. The Queen’s carriage passed, carefully protected on all sides by an impressive body of guards with bared sabres, and within was seen a tiny lady, almost a dwarf, tossed and jolted by the movements of the carriage, dressed in mourning, and wearing horn-rimmed glasses on a livid and empty face. Now and then she bowed fitfully, in reply to some isolated shout of greeting, like one who has learned her lesson badly. She bowed to left and right, with a vague and mechanical movement. The English soldiers stood respectfully at attention while their patroness passed, and behind them, the crowd of citizens looked at the ostentatious procession and the pathetic central figure with curious eyes and almost with pity; and when the carriage passed, they followed it with ambiguous glances. This time there were no bombs or cabbage stalks, but the old Queen of England entered the Irish capital in the midst of a silent people.

The reasons for this difference in temperament, which has now become a commonplace of the phrase-makers of Fleet Street, are in part racial and in part historical. Our civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language (if we except the few whom a playful will seems to have preserved in ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland. Nationality (if it really is not a convenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels of present-day scientists have given the coup de grâce) must find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word. The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym of Dionysius, the pseudo-Areopagite, says somewhere, ‘God has disposed the limits of nations according to his angels’, and this probably is not a purely mystical concept. Do we not see that in Ireland the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers have united to form a new entity, one might say under the influence of a local deity? And, although the present race in Ireland is backward and inferior, it is worth taking into account the fact that it is the only race of the entire Celtic family that has not been willing to sell its birthright for a mess of pottage.

I find it rather naïve to heap insults on England for her misdeeds in Ireland. A conqueror cannot be casual, and for so many centuries the Englishman has done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State, and what the Nipponese dwarf will do tomorrow in other lands. She enkindled its factions and took over its treasury. By the introduction of a new system of agriculture, she reduced the power of the native leaders and gave great estates to her soldiers. She persecuted the Roman church when it was rebellious and stopped when it became an effective instrument of subjugation. Her principal preoccupation was to keep the country divided, and if a Liberal English government that enjoyed the full confidence of the English voters were to grant a measure of autonomy to Ireland tomorrow, the conservative press of England would immediately begin to incite the province of Ulster against the authority in Dublin.

She was as cruel as she was cunning. Her weapons were, and still are, the battering-ram, the club, and the rope; and if Parnell was a thorn in the English side, it was primarily because when he was a boy in Wicklow he heard stories of the English ferocity from his nurse. A story that he himself told was about a peasant who had broken the penal laws and was seized at the order of a colonel, stripped, bound to a cart, and whipped by the troops. By the colonel’s orders, the whipping was administered on his abdomen in such a way that the miserable man died in atrocious pain, his intestines falling out onto the roadway.

The English now disparage the Irish because they are Catholic, poor, and ignorant; however, it will not be so easy to justify such disparagement to some people. Ireland is poor because English laws ruined the country’s industries, especially the wool industry, because the neglect of the English government in the years of the potato famine allowed the best of the population to die from hunger, and because under the present administration, while Ireland is losing its population and crimes are almost non-existent, the judges receive the salary of a king, and governing officials and those in public service receive huge sums for doing little or nothing. In Dublin alone, to take an example, the Lord Lieutenant receives a half-million francs a year. For each policeman, the Dublin citizens pay 3,500 francs a year (twice as much, I suppose, as a high school teacher receives in Italy), and the poor fellow who performs the duties of chief clerk of the city is forced to get along as well as he can on a miserable salary of 6 pounds sterling a day. The English critic is right, then, Ireland is poor, and moreover it is politically backward. For the Irish, the dates of Luther’s Reformation and the French Revolution mean nothing. The feudal struggles of the nobles against the king, known in England as the Barons’ War, had their counterpart in Ireland. If the English barons knew how to slaughter their neighbours in a noble manner, the Irish barons did, too. At that time in Ireland, there was no lack of ferocious deeds, the fruit of aristocratic blood. The Irish prince, Shane O’Neill, was so strongly blessed by nature that they had to bury him up to his neck in his mother earth every so often, when he had a desire for carnal pleasure. But the Irish barons, cunningly divided by the foreign politician, were never able to act in a common plan. They indulged in childish civil disputes among themselves, and wasted the vitality of the country in wars, while their brothers across St. George’s Channel forced King John to sign the Magna Charta (the first chapter of modern liberty) on the field of Runnymede.

The wave of democracy that shook England at the time of Simon de Montfort, founder of the House of Commons, and later, at the time of Cromwell’s protectorate, was spent when it reached the shores of Ireland; so that now Ireland (a country destined by God to be the everlasting caricature of the serious world) is an aristocratic country without an aristocracy. Descendants of the ancient kings (who are addressed by their family names alone, without a prefix) are seen in the halls of the courts of justice, with wig and affidavits, invoking in favour of some defendant the laws that have suppressed their royal titles. Poor fallen kings, recognizable even in their decline as impractical Irishmen. They have never thought of following the example of their English brothers in a similar plight who go to wonderful America to ask the hand of the daughter of some other king, even though he may be a Varnish King or a Sausage King.

Nor is it any harder to understand why the Irish citizen is a reactionary and a Catholic, and why he mingles the names of Cromwell and Satan when he curses. For him, the great Protector of civil rights is a savage beast who came to Ireland to propagate his faith by fire and sword. He does not forget the sack of Drogheda and Waterford, nor the bands of men and women hunted down in the furthermost islands by the Puritan, who said that they would go ‘into the ocean or into hell’, nor the false oath that the English swore on the broken stone of Limerick. How could he forget? Can the back of a slave forget the rod? The truth is that the English government increased the moral value of Catholicism when they banished it.

Now, thanks partly to the endless speeches and partly to Fenian violence, the reign of terror is over. The penal laws have been revoked. Today, a Catholic in Ireland can vote, can become a government employee, can practise a trade or profession, can teach in a public school, can sit in parliament, can own his own land for longer than thirty years, can keep in his stalls a horse worth more than 5 pounds sterling, and can attend a Catholic mass, without running the risk of being hanged, drawn, and quartered by the common hangman. But these laws have been revoked such a short time ago that a Nationalist member of parliament who is still living was actually sentenced by an English jury to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for the crime of high treason by the common hangman (who is a mercenary in England, chosen by the sheriff from among his mercenary colleagues for conspicuous merit in diligence or industry.)

The Irish populace, which is ninety per cent Catholic, no longer contributes to the maintenance of the Protestant church, which exists only for the well-being of a few thousand settlers. It is enough to say that the English treasury has suffered some loss, and that the Roman church has one more daughter. With regard to the educational system, it allows a few streams of modern thought to filter slowly into the arid soil. In time, perhaps there will be a gradual reawakening of the Irish conscience, and perhaps four or five centuries after the Diet of Worms, we will see an Irish monk throw away his frock, run off with some nun, and proclaim in a loud voice the end of the coherent absurdity that was Catholicism and the beginning of the incoherent absurdity that is Protestantism.

But a Protestant Ireland is almost unthinkable. Without any doubt, Ireland has been up to now the most faithful daughter of the Catholic church. It is perhaps the only country that received the first Christian missionaries with courtesy and was converted to the new doctrine without spilling a drop of blood. And, in fact, the ecclesiastical history of Ireland completely lacks a martyrology, as the Bishop of Cashel had occasion to boast in a reply to the mocker, Giraldus Cambrensis. For six or eight centuries it was the spiritual focus of Christianity. It sent its sons to every country in the world to preach the gospel, and its Doctors to interpret and renew the holy writings.

Its faith was never once shaken seriously, if we except a certain doctrinal tendency of Nestorius in the fifth century concerning the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ, some negligible differences in ritual noticeable at the same time, such as the kind of clerical tonsure and the time of celebrating Easter, and finally, the defection of some priests at the urging of the reform emissaries of Edward VII. But at the first intimation that the church was running into danger, a veritable swarm of Irish envoys left at once for all the coasts of Europe, where they attempted to stir up a strong general movement among the Catholic powers against the heretics.

Well, the Holy See has repaid this fidelity in its own way. First, by means of a papal bull and a ring, it gave Ireland to Henry II of England, and later, in the papacy of Gregory XIII, when the Protestant heresy raised its head, it repented having given faithful Ireland to the English heretics, and to redeem the error, it named a bastard of the papal court as supreme ruler of Ireland. He naturally remained a king in partibus infidelium, but the pope’s intention was none the less courteous because of this. On the other hand, Ireland’s compliance is so complete that it would hardly murmur if tomorrow the pope, having already turned it over to an Englishman and an Italian, were to turn their island over to some hidalgo of the court of Alphonso who found himself momentarily unemployed, because of some unforseen complication in Europe. But the Holy See was more chary of its ecclesiastical honours, and although Ireland in the past has enriched the hagiographic archives in the manner that we have seen, this was scarcely recognized in the councils of the Vatican, and more than fourteen hundred years passed before the holy father thought of elevating an Irish bishop to a cardinal.

Now, what has Ireland gained by its fidelity to the papacy and its infidelity to the British crown? It has gained a great deal, but not for itself. Among the Irish writers who adopted the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and almost forgot their native land, are found the names of Berkeley, the idealist philosopher, Oliver Goldsmith, author of The Vicar of Wakefield, two famous playwrights, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Congreve, whose comic masterpieces are admired even today on the sterile stages of modern England, Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, which shares with Rabelais the place of the best satire in world literature, and Edmund Burke, whom the English themselves called the modern Demosthenes and considered the most profound orator who had ever spoken in the House of Commons.

Even today, despite her heavy obstacles, Ireland is making her contribution to English art and thought. That the Irish are really the unbalanced, helpless idiots about whom we read in the lead articles of the Standard and the Morning Post is denied by the names of the three greatest translators in English literature—FitzGerald, translator of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, Burton, translator of the Arabian masterpieces, and Cary, the classic translator of the Divine Comedy. It is also denied by the names of other Irishmen—Arthur Sullivan, the dean of modern English music, Edward O’Connor, founder of Chartism, the novelist George Moore, an intellectual oasis in the Sahara of the false spiritualistic, Messianic, and detective writings whose name is legion in England, by the names of two Dubliners, the paradoxical and iconoclastic writer of comedy, George Bernard Shaw, and the too well known Oscar Wilde, son of a revolutionary poetess.

Finally, in the field of practical affairs this pejorative conception of Ireland is given the lie by the fact that when the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. The soul of the country is weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties, and individual initiative is paralysed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while its body is manacled by the police, the tax office, and the garrison. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.

From the time of the Treaty of Limerick, or rather, from the time that it was broken by the English in bad faith, millions of Irishmen have left their native land. These fugitives, as they were centuries ago, are called the wild geese. They enlisted in all the foreign brigades of the powers of Europe—France, Holland, and Spain, to be exact—and won on many battlefields the laurel of victory for their adopted masters. In America, they found another native land. In the ranks of the American rebels was heard the old Irish language, and Lord Mountjoy himself said in 1784, ‘We have lost America through the Irish emigrants.’ Today, these Irish emigrants in the United States number sixteen million, a rich, powerful, and industrious settlement. Maybe this does not prove that the Irish dream of a revival is not entirely an illusion!

If Ireland has been able to give to the service of others men like Tyndall, one of the few scientists whose name has spread beyond his own field, like the Marquess of Dufferin, Governor of Canada and Viceroy of India, like Charles Gavin Duffy, and Hennessey, colonial governors, like the Duke de Tetuan, the recent Spanish minister, like Bryan, candidate for president of the United States, like Marshal MacMahon, president of the French Republic, like Lord Charles Beresford, virtual head of the English navy, just recently placed in command of the Channel Fleet, like the three most renowned generals of the English army—Lord Wolseley, the commander-in-chief, Lord Kitchener, victor of the Sudan campaign and at present commanding general of the army in India, and Lord Roberts, victor of the war in Afghanistan and South Africa—if Ireland has been able to give all this practical talent to the service of others, it means that there must be something inimical, unpropitious, and despotic in its own present conditions, since her sons cannot give their efforts to their own native land.

Because, even today, the flight of the wild geese continues. Every year, Ireland, decimated as she already is, loses 60,000 of her sons. From 1850 to the present day, more than 5,000,000 emigrants have left for America, and every post brings to Ireland their inviting letters to friends and relatives at home. The old men, the corrupt, the children, and the poor stay at home, where the double yoke wears another groove in the tamed neck; and around the death bed where the poor, anaemic, almost lifeless, body lies in agony, the rulers give orders and the priests administer last rites.

Is this country destined to resume its ancient position as the Hellas of the north some day? Is the Celtic mind, like the Slavic mind which it resembles in many ways, destined to enrich the civil conscience with new discoveries and new insights in the future? Or must the Celtic world, the five Celtic nations, driven by stronger nations to the edge of the continent, to the outermost islands of Europe, finally be cast into the ocean after a struggle of centuries? Alas, we dilettante sociologists are only second-class augurers. We look and peer into the innards of the human animal, and, after all, confess that we see nothing there. Only our supermen know how to write the history of the future.

It would be interesting, but beyond the scope I have set myself tonight, to see what might be the effects on our civilization of a revival of this race. The economic effects of the appearance of a rival island near England, a bilingual, republican, self-centred, and enterprising island with its own commercial fleet, and its own consuls in every port of the world. And the moral effects of the appearance in old Europe of the Irish artist and thinker—those strange spirits, frigid enthusiasts, sexually and artistically untaught, full of idealism and unable to yield to it, childish spirits, ingenuous and satirical, ‘the loveless Irishmen’, as they are called. But in anticipation of such a revival, I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

I do not see the purpose of the bitter invectives against the English despoiler, the disdain for the vast Anglo-Saxon civilization, even though it is almost entirely a materialistic civilization, nor the empty boasts that the art of miniature in the ancient Irish books, such as the Book of Kells, the Yellow Book of Lecan, the Book of the Dun Cow, which date back to a time when England was an uncivilized country, is almost as old as the Chinese, and that Ireland made and exported to Europe its own fabrics for several generations before the first Fleming arrived in London to teach the English how to make bread. If an appeal to the past in this manner were valid, the fellahin of Cairo would have all the right in the world to disdain to act as porters for English tourists. Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead. Its death chant has been sung, and on its gravestone has been placed the seal. The old national soul that spoke during the centuries through the mouths of fabulous seers, wandering minstrels, and Jacobite poets disappeared from the world with the death of James Clarence Mangan. With him, the long tradition of the triple order of the old Celtic bards ended; and today other bards, animated by other ideals, have the cry.

One thing alone seems clear to me. It is well past time for Ireland to have done once and for all with failure. If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake, or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave forever. ‘We Irishmen’, said Oscar Wilde one day to a friend of mine, ‘have done nothing, but we are the greatest talkers since the time of the Greeks.’ But though the Irish are eloquent, a revolution is not made of human breath and compromises. Ireland has already had enough equivocations and misunderstandings. If she wants to put on the play that we have waited for so long, this time let it be whole, and complete, and definitive. But our advice to the Irish producers is the same as that our fathers gave them not so long ago—hurry up! I am sure that I, at least, will never see that curtain go up, because I will have already gone home on the last train.

Università Popolare, Trieste, 27 April 1907

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James Clarence Mangan [II]

There are certain poets who, in addition to the virtue of revealing to us some phase of the human conscience unknown until their time, also have the more doubtful virtue of summing up in themselves the thousand contrasting tendencies of their era, of being, so to speak, the storage batteries of new forces. For the most part, it is in the latter role rather than the former that they come to be appreciated by the masses, who are by nature unable to evaluate any work of true self-revelation, and so hasten to recognize by some act of grace the incalculable aid that the individual affirmation of a poet gives to a popular movement. The most popular act of grace in such cases is a monument, because it honours the dead while it flatters the living. It has also the supreme advantage of finality, since, to tell the truth, it is the most polite and effective way to assure a lasting oblivion of the deceased. In logical and serious countries, it is customary to finish the monument in a decent manner, and have the sculptor, the city officials, orators, and a great crowd of people attend the unveiling. But in Ireland, a country destined by God to be the eternal caricature of the serious world, even when the monuments are for the most popular men, whose character is most amenable to the will of the people, they rarely get beyond the laying of the foundation stone. In the light of the foregoing, perhaps I can give you an idea of the Cimmerian night that enfolds the name of Clarence Mangan when I say that, to the detriment of the noted generosity of the Emerald Isle, up to now no ardent spirit has thought of laying the restless ghost of the national poet with the foundation stone and the usual wreaths. Perhaps the unbroken peace in which he lies will have become so pleasant for him that he will be offended (if mortal accents ever come to that world beyond the grave) at hearing his spectral quiet disturbed by a countryman in exile, at hearing an amateur talk about him in a strange tongue before well-wishing foreigners.

Ireland’s contribution to European literature can be divided into five periods and into two large parts, that is, literature written in the Irish language and literature written in the English language. Of the first part, which includes the first two periods, the more remote is almost lost in the night of the times in which all the ancient sacred books, the epics, the legal codes, and the topographic histories and legends were written. The more recent period lasted a long time after the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons and Normans under Henry II and King John, the age of the wandering minstrels, whose symbolic songs carried on the tradition of the triple order of the old Celtic bards, and of this period I had occasion to speak to you several nights ago. The second part, that of Irish literature written in the English language, is divided into three periods. The first is the eighteenth century, which includes among other Irishmen the glorious names of Oliver Goldsmith, author of the famous novel The Vicar of Wakefield, of the two famous writers of comedy, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Congreve, whose masterpieces are admired even today on the sterile stage of modern England, of the Rabelaisian Dean, Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, of the so-called English Demosthenes, Edmund Burke, whom even his English critics consider the most profound orator that ever spoke in the House of Commons and one of the wisest statesmen, even among the astute band of politicians of fair Albion. The second and third periods belong to the last century. One is the literary movement of Young Ireland in ’42 and ’45, and the other the literary movement of today, of which I intend to speak to you in my next lecture.

The literary movement of ’42 dates from the establishment of the separatist newspaper The Nation, founded by the three leaders Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon (father of the former leader of the Irish parliamentary party)

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of the middle class, and after a childhood passed in the midst of domestic cruelties, misfortunes, and misery, he became a clerk in a third-rate notary’s office. He had always been a child of quiet and unresponsive nature, secretly given to the study of various languages, retiring, silent, preoccupied with religious matters, without friends or acquaintances. When he began to write, he immediately attracted the attention of the cultured, who recognized in him an exalted lyrical music and a burning idealism that revealed themselves in rhythms of extraordinary and unpremeditated beauty, to be found, perhaps, nowhere else in the range of English literature except in the inspired songs of Shelley. Thanks to the influence of some literary men, he obtained a position as assistant in the great library of Trinity College, Dublin, a rich treasure of books three times as large as the Victor Emmanuel Library in Rome, and the place where such ancient Irish books as The Book of the Dun Cow, The Yellow Book of Lecan (a famous legal treatise, the work of the learned king Cormac the Magnificent, who was called the Irish Solomon) and The Book of Kells are kept, books that date back to the first century of the Christian era, and in the art of miniature are as old as the Chinese. There it was that his biographer and friend Mitchel saw him for the first time, and in the preface to the poet’s works, he describes the impression made on him by this thin little man with the waxen countenance and the pale hair, who was sitting on the top of a ladder with his legs crossed, deciphering a huge, dusty volume in the dim light.

In this library Mangan passed his days in study and became a competent linguist. He knew well the Italian, Spanish, French and German languages and literatures, as well as those of England and Ireland, and it appears that he had some knowledge of oriental languages, probably some Sanskrit and Arabic. From time to time he emerged from that studious quiet to contribute some poems to the revolutionary newspaper, but he took little interest in the nightly meetings of the party. He passed his nights far away. His dwelling was a dark and dingy room in the old city, a quarter of Dublin that even today has the significant name ‘The Liberties’. His nights were so many Stations of the Cross among the disreputable dives of ‘The Liberties’, where he must have made a very strange figure in the midst of the choice flower of the city’s low-life—petty thieves, bandits, fugitives, pimps and inexpensive harlots. It is strange to say (but it is the consensus of opinion among his countrymen, who are always ready to testify in such matters) that Mangan had nothing but purely formal intercourse with this underworld. He drank little, but his health was so weakened that drinking produced an extraordinary effect on him. The death mask that is left to us shows a refined, almost aristocratic face, in whose delicate lines it is impossible to discover anything but melancholy and great weariness.

I understand that pathologists deny the possibility of combining the pleasures of alcohol with those of opium, and it seems that Mangan soon became convinced of this fact, because he began to take narcotic drugs immoderately. Mitchel tells us that toward the end of his life Mangan looked like a living skeleton. His face was fleshless, barely covered with a skin as transparent as fine China. His body was gaunt, his eyes, behind whose infrequent glimmerings seemed to be hidden the horrible and voluptuous memories of his visions, were large, fixed, and vacant, his voice slow, weak, and sepulchral. He descended the last steps toward the grave with frightening rapidity. He became mute and ragged. He ate hardly enough to keep body and soul together, until one day he collapsed suddenly while he was walking in the street. When he was carried to the hospital, a few coins and a worn book of German poetry were found in his pockets. When he died, his miserable body made the attendants shudder, and some charitable friends paid the cost of his sordid burial.

So lived and died the man that I consider the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world, and one of the most inspired singers that ever used the lyric form in any country. It is too early, I think, to assert that he must live forever in the drab fields of oblivion, but I am firmly convinced that if he finally emerges into the posthumous glory to which he has a right, it will not be by the help of any of his countrymen. Mangan will be accepted by the Irish as their national poet on the day when the conflict will be decided between my native land and the foreign powers—Anglo-Saxon and Roman Catholic, and a new civilization will arise, either indigenous or completely foreign. Until that time, he will be forgotten or remembered rarely on holidays as

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The question that Wagner put into the mouth of the innocent Parsifal must come to mind when we read from time to time certain English criticism, due for the most part to the influence of the blind and bitter spirit of Calvinism. It is easy to explain these critics when they deal with a powerful and original genius, because the appearance of such a genius is always a signal for all the corrupt and vested interests to join together in defence of the old order. For instance, anyone who has understood the destructive and fiercely self-centred tendency of all of Henrik Ibsen’s works will not be astonished to hear the most influential critics in London inveighing against the playwright on the morning after one of Ibsen’s first nights, calling him (I quote the exact words of the deceased critic of the Daily Telegraph) a filthy, muck-ferreting dog. But the case in which the poor condemned man is some more or less innocuous poet whose fault is that of not having been able to adhere scrupulously to the cult of respectability is less explainable. And so it happens that when Mangan’s name is mentioned in his native land (and I must admit that he is sometimes spoken of in literary circles) the Irish lament that such poetic talent was found joined in him to such licence, and they are naively surprised to find evidence of the poetic faculty in a man whose vices were exotic and whose patriotism was not very ardent.

Those who have written about him have been scrupulous in holding the balance between the drunkard and the opium-eater, and have taken great pains to determine whether learning or imposture was hidden behind such phrases as ‘translated from the Ottoman’, ‘translated from the Coptic’; and save for this poor remembrance, Mangan has been a stranger in his native land, a rare and bizarre figure in the streets, where he is seen going sadly and alone, like one who does penance for some ancient sin. Surely life, which Novalis has called a malady of the spirit, is a heavy penance for Mangan, for him who has, perhaps, forgotten the sin that laid it on him, an inheritance so much the more sorrowful, too, because of the delicate artist in him who reads so well the lines of brutality and of weakness in the faces of men that look at him with hate and scorn. In the short biographical sketch that he has left us, he speaks only of his early life, his infancy and childhood, and tells us that as a child he knew nothing but sordid misery and coarseness, that his acquaintances defiled his person with their hateful venom, that his father was a human rattlesnake. In these violent assertions we recognize the effects of the oriental drug, but nevertheless, those who think that his story is only the figment of a disordered brain have never known, or have forgotten what keen pain contact with gross natures inflicts on a sensitive boy. His sufferings drove him to become a hermit, and in fact he lived the greater part of his life almost in a dream, in that sanctuary of the mind where for many centuries the sad and the wise have elected to be. When a friend remarked to him that the tale mentioned above was wildly exaggerated and partly false, Mangan answered, ‘Maybe I dreamed it.’ The world has evidently become somewhat unreal for him, and not very significant.

What, then, will become of those dreams, which, for every young and simple heart are garbed in such dear reality? One whose nature is so sensitive cannot forget his dreams in a secure and strenuous life. He doubts them for the first time and rejects them, but when he hears someone deride and curse them, he would acknowledge them proudly; and where sensitivity has induced weakness, or, as with Mangan, refined an innate weakness, would even compromise with the world to win at least the favour of silence, as for something too frail to bear a violent disdain, for that desire of the heart so cynically derided, that cruelly abused idea. His manner is such that none can say whether it is pride or humility that looks out of his vague face, which seems to live only in the clear and shining eyes, and in the fair and silken hair, of which he is a little vain. This reserve is not without dangers, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference. There is some talk of an intimate relation between Mangan and a pupil of his to whom he gave instruction in German, and later, it seems, he took part in a love-comedy of three, but if he is reserved with men, he is timid with women, and he is too self-conscious, too critical, knows too little of the flattering lie ever to be a gallant. In his strange dress—the high conical hat, the baggy trousers three times too big for his little legs, and the old umbrella shaped like a torch—we can see an almost comical expression of his diffidence. The learning of many lands goes with him always, eastern tales and the remembrance of curiously printed medieval books which have rapt him out of his time, gathered day by day and woven into a fabric. He knows twenty languages, more or less, and sometimes makes a liberal show of them, and has read in many literatures, crossing how many seas, even penetrating into the land of Peristan, which is found in no atlas. He is very much interested in the life of the seeress of Prevorst, and in all the phenomena of the middle nature, and here, where most of all the sweetness and resoluteness of soul have power, he seems to seek in a fictitious world, but how different from that in which Watteau (in Pater’s happy phrase) may have sought, both with a certain characteristic inconstancy, what is found there in no satisfying measure or not at all.

His writings, which have never been collected in a definitive edition, are completely without order and often without thought. His essays in prose are perhaps interesting on the first reading, but, in truth, they are insipid attempts. The style is conceited, in the worst sense of the word, strained, and banal, the subject trivial and inflated, the kind of prose, in fact, in which the bits of local news are written in a bad rural newspaper. It must be remembered that Mangan wrote without a native literary tradition, and wrote for a public that was interested only in the events of the day, and insisted that the only task of the poet was to illustrate these events. He was unable to revise his work, except in unusual cases, but, aside from the so-called humorous burlesques, and the occasional poems, which are obvious and unpolished, the best part of his work makes a genuine appeal; because it was conceived in the imagination, which he himself calls, I think, the mother of things, whose dream we are, who images us to herself, and to us, and images herself in us, that power before whose breath the mind in creation becomes (to use Shelley’s phrase) a fading coal. Though in that which he has written best the presence of alien emotions is often felt, the presence of an imaginative personality reflecting the light of imaginative beauty is felt even more vividly. East and West meet in that personality (we now know how), images interweave there like soft luminous scarves, the words shine and ring like the links in a coat of mail, and whether he sings of Ireland or of Istamboul, his prayer is always the same, that peace may come again to her who has lost it, the pearl of his soul, as he calls her, Ameen.

This figure which he adores recalls the spiritual yearnings and the imaginary loves of the Middle Ages, and Mangan has placed his lady in a world full of melody, of lights and perfumes, a world that grows fatally to frame every face that the eyes of a poet have gazed on with love. There is only one chivalrous idea, only one male devotion, that lights up the faces of Vittoria Colonna, Laura, and Beatrice, just as the bitter disillusion and the self-disdain that end the chapter are one and the same. But the world in which Mangan wishes his lady to dwell is different from the marble temple built by Buonarotti, and from the peaceful oriflamme of the Florentine theologian. It is a wild world, a world of night in the orient. The mental activity that comes from opium has scattered this world of magnificent and terrible images, and all the orient that the poet recreated in his flaming dream, which is the paradise of the opium-eater, pulsates in these pages in Apocalyptic phrases and similes and landscapes. He speaks of the moon that languishes in the midst of a riot of purple colours, of the magic book of heaven red with fiery signs, of the sea foaming over saffron sands, of the lonely cedar on the peaks of the Balkans, of the barbaric hall shining with golden crescents luxuriously permeated with the breath of roses from the gulistan of the king.

The most famous of Mangan’s poems, those in which he sings hymns of praise to his country’s fallen glory under a veil of mysticism, seem like a cloud that covers the horizon on a summer’s day, thin, impalpable, ready to disperse, and suffused with little points of light. Sometimes the music seems to waken from its lethargy and shouts with the ecstasy of combat. In the final stanzas of the Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tirconnell, in long lines full of tremendous force, he has put all the energy of his race:

And though frost glaze to-night the clear dew of his eyes,

And white gauntlets glove his noble fair fine fingers o’er,

A warm dress is to him that lightning-garb he ever wore,

The lightning of the soul, not skies.

Hugh marched forth to the fight—I grieved to see him so depart;

And lo! to-night he wanders frozen, rain-drenched, sad, betrayed—

But the memory of the lime-white mansions his right hand hath laid

In ashes warms the hero’s heart.

I do not know any other passage in English literature in which the spirit of revenge has been joined to such heights of melody. It is true that sometimes this heroic note becomes raucous, and a troop of unmannerly passions echoes it derisively, but a poet like Mangan who sums up in himself the soul of a country and an era does not so much try to create for the entertainment of some dilettante as to transmit to posterity the animating idea of his life by the force of crude blows. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Mangan always kept his poetic soul spotless. Although he wrote such a wonderful English style, he refused to collaborate with the English newspapers or reviews; although he was the spiritual focus of his time, he refused to prostitute himself to the rabble or to make himself the loud-speaker of politicians. He was one of those strange abnormal spirits who believe that their artistic life should be nothing more than a true and continual revelation of their spiritual life, who believe that their inner life is so valuable that they have no need of popular support, and thus abstain from proffering confessions of faith, who believe, in sum, that the poet is sufficient in himself, the heir and preserver of a secular patrimony, who therefore has no urgent need to become a shouter, or a preacher, or a perfumer.

Now what is this central idea that Mangan wants to hand down to posterity? All his poetry records injustice and tribulation, and the aspiration of one who is moved to great deeds and rending cries when he sees again in his mind the hour of his grief. This is the theme of a large part of Irish poetry, but no other Irish poems are full, as are those of Mangan, of misfortune nobly suffered, of vastation of soul so irreparable. Naomi wished to change her name to Mara, because she had known too well how bitter is the existence of mortals, and is it not perhaps a profound sense of sorrow and bitterness that explains in Mangan all the names and titles that he gives himself, and the fury of translation in which he tried to hide himself? For he did not find in himself the faith of the solitary, or the faith that in the Middle Ages sent the spires in the air like triumphant songs, and he waits his hour, the hour that will end his sad days of penance. Weaker than Leopardi, for he has not the courage of his own despair, but forgets every ill and forgoes all scorn when someone shows him a little kindness, he has, perhaps for this reason, the memorial that he wished, a [‘constant presence with those that love me’.]

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[Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in] a certain sense, against actuality. It speaks of that which seems unreal and fantastic to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the tests of reality. Poetry considers many of the idols of the market place unimportant—the succession of the ages, the spirit of the age, the mission of the race. The poet’s central effort is to free himself from the unfortunate influence of these idols that corrupt him from without and within, and certainly it would be false to assert that Mangan has always made this effort. The history of his country encloses him so straitly that even in his hours of extreme individual passion he can barely reduce its walls to ruins. He cries out in his life and in his mournful verses against the injustice of despoilers, but almost never laments a loss greater than that of buckles and banners. He inherits the latest and worst part of a tradition upon which no divine hand has ever traced a boundary, a tradition which is loosened and divided against itself as it moves down the cycles. And precisely because this tradition has become an obsession with him, he has accepted it with all its regrets and failures and would pass it on just as it is. The poet who hurls his lightning against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and crueller tyranny. The figure that he adores has the appearance of an abject queen to whom, because of the bloody crimes that she has committed and the no less bloody crimes committed against her by the hands of others, madness has come and death is about to come, but who does not wish to believe that she is about to die, and remembers only the rumour of voices that besiege her sacred garden and her lovely flowers that have become pabulum aprorum, food for wild boars. Love of grief, despair, high-sounding threats—these are the great traditions of the race of James Clarence Mangan, and in that impoverished figure, thin and weakened, an hysterical nationalism receives its final justification.

In what niche of the temple of glory should we place his image? If he has never won the sympathy of his own countrymen, how can he win that of foreigners? Doesn’t it seem probable that the oblivion that he would almost have desired awaits him? Certainly he did not find in himself the force to reveal to us triumphant beauty, the splendour of truth that the ancients deify. He is a romantic, a herald manqué, the prototype of a nation manqué, but with all that, one who has expressed in a worthy form the sacred indignation of his soul cannot have written his name in water. In those vast courses of multiplex life that surround us, and in that vast memory which is greater and more generous than ours, probably no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written in noble disdain have not written in vain, although, weary and [desperate, they have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom.]

[The manuscript ends here.]

Università Popolare, Trieste, spring 1907

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The Irish Literary Renaissance

[...] physical, either open or masked. Since the great rebellion in the last years of the eighteenth century, we find no less than three decisive clashes between the two nationalist tendencies. The first was in 1848 when the Young Ireland Party disdainfully detached itself from O’Connell’s ranks. The second came in 1867, when Fenianism reached its apogee, and the ‘Republic’ was proclaimed in Dublin. The third belongs to the present day, as the youth of Ireland, disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of parliamentary tactics after the moral assassination of Parnell, aligns itself increasingly with a nationalism that is broader and, at the same time, more severe; a nationalism that involves a daily economic battle, a moral and material boycott, the creation and development of independent industries, the propagation of the Irish language, a ban on English culture and a revival in another guise of the ancient civilization of the Celt. Each of these uncompromising political movements has been accompanied by a literary one: sometimes it is the oratory that prevails, sometimes [...]

1907

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Fenianism

The Last Fenian

With the recent death of John O’Leary in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish national holiday, went perhaps the last actor in the turbid drama of Fenianism, a time-honoured name derived from the old Irish language (in which the word ‘fenians’ means the King’s bodyguard) which came to designate the Irish insurrectionist movement. Anyone who studies the history of the Irish revolution during the nineteenth century finds himself faced with a double struggle—the struggle of the Irish nation against the English government, and the struggle, perhaps no less bitter, between the moderate patriots and the so-called party of physical force. This party under different names: ‘White Boys’, ‘Men of ’98’, ‘United Irishmen’, ‘Invincibles’, ‘Fenians’, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet. The intransigent press never ceases to greet the deeds of the Nationalist representatives at Westminster with virulent and ironic comments, and although it recognizes that in view of England’s power armed revolt has now become an impossible dream, it has never stopped inculcating in the minds of the coming generation the dogma of separatism.

Unlike Robert Emmet’s foolish uprising or the impassioned movement of Young Ireland in ’45, the Fenianism of ’67 was not one of the usual flashes of Celtic temperament that lighten the shadows for a moment and leave behind a darkness blacker than before. At the time that the movement arose, the population of the Emerald Isles was more than eight million, while that of England was no more than seventeen million. Under the leadership of James Stephens, head of the Fenians, the country was organized into circles composed of a Sergeant and twenty-five men, a plan eminently fitted to the Irish character because it reduces to a minimum the possibility of betrayal. These circles formed a vast and intricate net, whose threads were in Stephens’ hands. At the same time, the American Fenians were organized in the same way, and the two movements worked in concert. Among the Fenians there were many soldiers in the English Army, police spies, prison guards, and jailers.

Everything seemed to go well, and the Republic was on the point of being established (it was even proclaimed openly by Stephens), when O’Leary and Luby, editors of the party newspaper, were arrested. The government put a price on Stephens’ head, and announced that it knew all the locations where the Fenians held their military drills by night. Stephens was arrested and imprisoned, but succeeded in escaping, thanks to the loyalty of a Fenian prison guard; and while the English agents and spies were under cover at every port, watching the departing ships, he left the capital in a gig, disguised as a bride (according to legend) with a white crepe veil and orange blossoms. Then he was taken aboard a little charcoal boat that quickly set sail for France. O’Leary was tried and condemned to twenty years of forced labour, but later he was pardoned and exiled from Ireland for fifteen years.

And why this disintegration of a movement so well organized? Simply because in Ireland, just at the right moment, an informer always appears.

* * * *

After the dispersal of the Fenians, the tradition of the doctrine of physical force shows up at intervals in violent crimes. The Invincibles blow up the prison at Clerkenwell, snatch their friends from the hands of the police at Manchester and kill the escort, stab to death in broad daylight the English Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the Under-secretary, Burke, in Phoenix Park, Dublin.

After each one of these crimes, when the general indignation has calmed a little, an English minister proposes to the House some reform measure for Ireland, and the Fenians and Nationalists revile each other with the greatest scorn, one side attributing the measure to the success of parliamentary tactics and the other attributing it to the persuasive faculty of the knife or the bomb. And as a backdrop to this sad comedy is the spectacle of a population which diminishes year by year with mathematical regularity, of the uninterrupted emigration to the United States or Europe of Irishmen for whom the economic and intellectual conditions of their native land are unbearable. And almost as if to set in relief this depopulation there is a long parade of churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, and seminaries to tend to the spiritual needs of those who have been unable to find courage or money enough to undertake the voyage from Queenstown to New York. Ireland, weighed down by multiple duties, has fulfilled what has hitherto been considered an impossible task—serving both God and Mammon, letting herself be milked by England and yet increasing Peter’s pence (perhaps in memory of Pope Adrian IV, who made a gift of the island to the English King Henry II about 800 years ago, in a moment of generosity).

Now, it is impossible for a desperate and bloody doctrine like Fenianism to continue its existence in an atmosphere like this, and in fact, as agrarian crimes and crimes of violence have become more and more rare, Fenianism too has once more changed its name and appearance. It is still a separatist doctrine but it no longer uses dynamite. The new Fenians are joined in a party which is called Sinn Fein (We Ourselves). They aim to make Ireland a bi-lingual Republic, and to this end they have established a direct steamship service between Ireland and France. They practise boycotts against English goods; they refuse to become soldiers or to take the oath of loyalty to the English crown; they are trying to develop industries throughout the entire island; and instead of paying out a million and a quarter annually for the maintenance of eighty representatives in the English Parliament, they want to inaugurate a consular service in the principal ports of the world for the purpose of selling their industrial products without the intervention of England.

* * * *

From many points of view, this last phase of Fenianism is perhaps the most formidable. Certainly its influence has once more remodelled the character of the Irish people, and when the old leader O’Leary returned to his native land after years spent in study while an exile in Paris, he found himself among a generation animated by ideals quite different from those of ’65. He was received by his compatriots with marks of honour, and from time to time appeared in public to preside over some separatist conference or some banquet. But he was a figure from a world which had disappeared. He would often be seen walking along the river, an old man dressed in light-coloured clothes, with a shock of very white hair hanging down to his shoulders, almost bent in two from old age and suffering. He would stop in front of the gloomy shops of the old-book dealers, and having made some purchase, would return along the river. Aside from this, he had little reason to be happy. His plots had gone up in smoke, his friends had died, and in his own native land, very few knew who he was and what he had done. Now that he is dead, his countrymen will escort him to his tomb with great pomp. Because the Irish, even though they break the hearts of those who sacrifice their lives for their native land, never fail to show great respect for the dead.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 22 March 1907

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Home Rule Comes of Age

Twenty-one years ago, on the evening of April 9, 1886, the streets that led to the office of the Nationalist newspaper in Dublin were jammed with people. From time to time, a bulletin printed in four-inch letters would appear on the wall, and in this way the crowd was able to participate in the scene unfolding at Westminster, where the galleries had been crammed full since dawn. The Prime Minister’s speech which had begun at four o’clock lasted until eight. A few minutes later the final bulletin appeared on the wall: ‘Gladstone concluded with a magnificent peroration declaring that the English Liberal party would refuse to legislate for England until she granted a measure of autonomy to Ireland.’ At this news, the crowd in the street burst into enthusiastic cries. On all sides was heard, ‘Long live Gladstone’, ‘Long live Ireland’. People who were complete strangers shook hands to ratify the new national pact, and old men wept for sheer joy.

Seven years pass, and we are at the second Home Rule Act. Gladstone, having in the meantime completed the moral assassination of Parnell with the help of the Irish bishops, reads his measure to the House for a third time. This speech is shorter than the other; it lasts hardly an hour and a half. Then the Home Rule Bill is passed. The happy news traverses the wires to the Irish capital, where it arouses a new burst of enthusiasm. In the main room of the Catholic Club, it is the subject of joyous conversations, discussions, toasts and prophecies.

Fourteen more years pass and we are at 1907. Twenty-one years have passed since 1886; therefore the Gladstonian measure has come of age, according to English custom. But in the interval Gladstone himself has died and his measure is not yet born. As he well foresaw, immediately after his third reading, the alarm sounded in the upper House, and all the Lords spiritual and temporal gathered at Westminster in a solid phalanx to give the bill the coup de grâce. The English Liberals forgot their commitments. A fourth-rate politician who voted for every coercive measure against Ireland from 1881 to 1886 dons the mantle of Gladstone. The position of Chief Secretary of Ireland, a position which the English themselves have called the tomb of political reputations, is occupied by a literary jurist, who probably hardly knew the names of the Irish counties when he was presented to the electors of Bristol two years ago. Despite their pledges and promises, despite the support of the Irish vote during a quarter of a century, despite its enormous majority (which is without precedent in the parliamentary history of England), the English Liberal ministry introduces a measure of devolution which does not go beyond the proposals made by the imperialist Chamberlain in 1885, which the conservative press in London openly refused to take seriously. The bill is passed on the first reading with a majority of almost 300 votes, and while the yellow journals break out in shudders of pretended anger, the Lords consult each other to decide whether this wavering scarecrow about to enter the lists is really worthy of their sword.

Probably the Lords will kill the measure, since this is their trade, but if they are wise, they will hesitate to alienate the sympathy of the Irish for constitutional agitation; especially now that India and Egypt are in an uproar and the overseas colonies are asking for an imperial federation. From their point of view, it would not be advisable to provoke by an obstinate veto the reaction of a people who, poor in everything else and rich only in political ideas, have perfected the strategy of obstructionism and made the word ‘boycott’ an international war-cry.

On the other hand, England has little to lose. The measure (which is not the twentieth part of the Home Rule measure) gives the Executive Council at Dublin no legislative power, no power to impose or regulate taxes, no control over 39 of the 47 government offices, including the police, the supreme court, and the agrarian commission. In addition, the Unionist interests are jealously safeguarded. The Liberal minister has been careful to insert in the first line of his speech the fact that the English electorate must disburse more than a half million pounds sterling each year as the price of the measure; and, understanding their countryman’s intentions, the journalists and the Conservative speakers have made good use of this statement, appealing in their hostile comments to the most vulnerable part of the English electorate—their pocketbook. But neither the Liberal ministers nor the journalists will explain to the English voters that this expense is not a disbursement of English money, but rather a partial settlement on account of England’s debt to Ireland. Nor will they cite the report of the English Royal Commission which established the fact that Ireland was overtaxed 88 million francs in comparison with her senior partner. Nor will they recall the fact that the statesmen and scientists who inspected the vast central swamp of Ireland asserted that the two spectres that sit at every Irish fireplace, tuberculosis and insanity, deny all that the English claim; and that the moral debt of the English government to Ireland for not having reforested this pestiferous swamp during an entire century amounts to 500 million francs.

Now, even from a hasty study of the history of Home Rule, we can make two deductions, for what they are worth. The first is this: the most powerful weapons that England can use against Ireland are no longer those of Conservatism, but those of Liberalism and Vaticanism. Conservatism, though it may be tyrannical, is a frankly and openly inimical doctrine. Its position is logical; it does not want a rival island to arise near Great Britain, or Irish factories to create competition for those in England, or tobacco and wine again to be exported from Ireland, or the great ports along the Irish coast to become enemy naval bases under a native government or a foreign protectorate. Its position is logical, as is that of the Irish separatists which contradicts it point by point. It takes little intelligence to understand that Gladstone has done Ireland greater damage than Disraeli did, and that the most fervid enemy of the Irish Catholics is the head of English Vaticanism, the Duke of Norfolk.

The second deduction is even more obvious, and it is this: the Irish parliamentary party has gone bankrupt. For twenty-seven years it has talked and agitated. In that time it has collected 35 million francs from its supporters, and the fruit of its agitation is that Irish taxes have gone up 88 million francs and the Irish population has decreased a million. The representatives themselves have improved their own lot, aside from small discomforts like a few months in prison and some lengthy sittings. From the sons of ordinary citizens, pedlars, and lawyers without clients they have become well-paid syndics, directors of factories and commercial houses, newspaper owners, and large landholders. They have given proof of their altruism only in 1891, when they sold their leader, Parnell, to the pharisaical conscience of the English Dissenters without exacting the thirty pieces of silver.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 19 May 1907

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Ireland at the Bar

Several years ago a sensational trial was held in Ireland. In a lonely place in a western province, called Maamtrasna, a murder was committed. Four or five townsmen, all belonging to the ancient tribe of the Joyces, were arrested. The oldest of them, the seventy year old Myles Joyce, was the prime suspect. Public opinion at the time thought him innocent and today considers him a martyr. Neither the old man nor the others accused knew English. The court had to resort to the services of an interpreter. The questioning, conducted through the interpreter, was at times comic and at times tragic. On one side was the excessively ceremonious interpreter, on the other the patriarch of a miserable tribe unused to civilized customs, who seemed stupefied by all the judicial ceremony. The magistrate said:

‘Ask the accused if he saw the lady that night.’ The question was referred to him in Irish, and the old man broke out into an involved explanation, gesticulating, appealing to the others accused and to heaven. Then he quieted down, worn out by his effort, and the interpreter turned to the magistrate and said:

‘He says no, “your worship”.’

‘Ask him if he was in that neighbourhood at that hour.’ The old man again began to talk, to protest, to shout, almost beside himself with the anguish of being unable to understand or to make himself understood, weeping in anger and terror. And the interpreter, again, dryly:

‘He says no, “your worship”.’

When the questioning was over, the guilt of the poor old man was declared proved, and he was remanded to a superior court which condemned him to the noose. On the day the sentence was executed, the square in front of the prison was jammed full of kneeling people shouting prayers in Irish for the repose of Myles Joyce’s soul. The story was told that the executioner, unable to make the victim understand him, kicked at the miserable man’s head in anger to shove it into the noose.

The figure of this dumbfounded old man, a remnant of a civilization not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion. Like him, she is unable to appeal to the modern conscience of England and other countries. The English journalists act as interpreters between Ireland and the English electorate, which gives them ear from time to time and ends up being vexed by the endless complaints of the Nationalist representatives who have entered her House, as she believes, to disrupt its order and extort money. Abroad there is no talk of Ireland except when uprisings break out, like those which made the telegraph office hop these last few days. Skimming over the dispatches from London (which, though they lack pungency, have something of the laconic quality of the interpreter mentioned above), the public conceives of the Irish as highwaymen with distorted faces, roaming the night with the object of taking the hide of every Unionist. And by the real sovereign of Ireland, the Pope, such news is received like so many dogs in church. Already weakened by their long journey, the cries are nearly spent when they arrive at the bronze door. The messengers of the people who never in the past have renounced the Holy See, the only Catholic people to whom faith also means the exercise of faith, are rejected in favour of messengers of a monarch, descended from apostates, who solemnly apostasized himself on the day of his coronation, declaring in the presence of his nobles and commons that the rites of the Roman Catholic Church are ‘superstition and idolatry’.

* * * *

There are twenty million Irishmen scattered all over the world. The Emerald Isle contains only a small part of them. But, reflecting that, while England makes the Irish question the centre of all her internal politics she proceeds with a wealth of good judgment in quickly disposing of the more complex questions of colonial politics, the observer can do no less than ask himself why St. George’s Channel makes an abyss deeper than the ocean between Ireland and her proud dominator. In fact, the Irish question is not solved even today, after six centuries of armed occupation and more than a hundred years of English legislation, which has reduced the population of the unhappy island from eight to four million, quadrupled the taxes, and twisted the agrarian problem into many more knots.

In truth there is no problem more snarled than this one. The Irish themselves understand little about it, the English even less. For other people it is a black plague. But on the other hand the Irish know that it is the cause of all their sufferings, and therefore they often adopt violent methods of solution. For example, twenty-eight years ago, seeing themselves reduced to misery by the brutalities of the large landholders, they refused to pay their land rents and obtained from Gladstone remedies and reforms. Today, seeing pastures full of well fed cattle while an eighth of the population lacks means of subsistence, they drive the cattle from the farms. In irritation, the Liberal government arranges to refurbish the coercive tactics of the Conservatives, and for several weeks the London press dedicates innumerable articles to the agrarian crisis, which, it says, is very serious. It publishes alarming news of agrarian revolts, which is then reproduced by journalists abroad.

I do not propose to make an exegesis of the Irish agrarian question nor to relate what goes on behind the scene in the two-faced politics of the government. But I think it useful to make a modest correction of facts. Anyone who has read the telegrams launched from London is sure that Ireland is undergoing a period of unusual crime. An erroneous judgment, very erroneous. There is less crime in Ireland than in any other country in Europe. In Ireland there is no organized underworld. When one of those events which the Parisian journalists, with atrocious irony, call ‘red idylls’ occurs, the whole country is shaken by it. It is true that in recent months there were two violent deaths in Ireland, but at the hands of British troops in Belfast, where the soldiers fired without warning on an unarmed crowd and killed a man and woman. There were attacks on cattle; but not even these were in Ireland, where the crowd was content to open the stalls and chase the cattle through several miles of streets, but at Great Wyrley in England, where for six years bestial, maddened criminals have ravaged the cattle to such an extent that the English companies will no longer insure them. Five years ago an innocent man, now at liberty, was condemned to forced labour to appease public indignation. But even while he was in prison the crimes continued. And last week two horses were found dead with the usual slashes in their lower abdomen and their bowels scattered in the grass.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 16 September 1907

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Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salome’

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. These were the high-sounding titles that with youthful haughtiness he had printed on the title-page of his first collection of poems, and in this proud gesture, by which he tried to achieve nobility, are the signs of his vain pretences and the fate which already awaited him. His name symbolizes him: Oscar, nephew of King Fingal and the only son of Ossian in the amorphous Celtic Odyssey, who was treacherously killed by the hand of his host as he sat at table. O’Flahertie, a savage Irish tribe whose destiny it was to assail the gates of medieval cities; a name that incited terror in peaceful men, who still recite, among the plagues, the anger of God, and the spirit of fornication, in the ancient litany of the saints: ‘from the wild O’Flaherties, libera nos Domine.’ Like that other Oscar, he was to meet his public death in the flower of his years as he sat at table, crowned with false vine leaves and discussing Plato. Like that savage tribe, he was to break the lance of his fluent paradoxes against the body of practical conventions, and to hear, as a dishonoured exile, the choir of the just recite his name together with that of the unclean.

Wilde was born in the sleepy Irish capital fifty-five years ago. His father was a ranking scientist, who has been called the father of modern otology. His mother, who took part in the literary-revolutionary movement of ’48, wrote for the Nationalist newspaper under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’, and incited the public, in her poems and articles, to seize Dublin Castle. There are circumstances regarding the pregnancy of Lady Wilde and the infancy of her son which, in the eyes of some, explain in part the unhappy mania (if it may be called that) which later dragged him to his ruin; and at least it is certain that the child grew up in an atmosphere of insecurity and prodigality.

The public life of Oscar Wilde began at Oxford University, where, at the time of his matriculation, a pompous professor named Ruskin was leading a crowd of Anglo-Saxon adolescents to the promised land of the future society—behind a wheelbarrow. His mother’s susceptible temperament revived in the young man, and, beginning with himself, he resolved to put into practice a theory of beauty that was partly original and partly derived from the books of Pater and Ruskin. He provoked the jeers of the public by proclaiming and practising a reform in dress and in the appearance of the home. He made lecture tours in the United States and the English provinces and became the spokesman of the aesthetic school, while around him was forming the fantastic legend of the Apostle of Beauty. His name evoked in the public mind a vague idea of delicate pastels, of life beautified with flowers. The cult of the sunflower, his favourite flower, spread among the leisured class, and the little people heard tell of his famous white ivory walking stick glittering with turquoise stones, and of his Neronian hair-dress.

The subject of this shining picture was more miserable than the bourgeois thought. From time to time his medals, trophies of his academic youth, went to the pawnshop, and at times the young wife of the epigrammatist had to borrow from a neighbour the money for a pair of shoes. Wilde was constrained to accept a position as editor of a very petty newspaper, and only with the presentation of his brilliant comedies did he enter the short last phase of his life—luxury and wealth. Lady Windermere’s Fan took London by storm. In the tradition of the Irish writers of comedy that runs from the days of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, Wilde became, like them, court jester to the English. He became the standard of elegance in the metropolis, and the annual income from his writings reached almost half a million francs. He scattered his gold among a series of unworthy friends. Every morning he bought two expensive flowers, one for himself and one for his coachman; and until the day of his sensational trial, he was driven to the courtroom in a two-horse carriage with its brilliantly outfitted coachman and powdered page.

His fall was greeted by a howl of puritanical joy. At the news of his condemnation, the crowd gathered outside the courtroom began to dance a pavane in the muddy street. Newspaper reporters were admitted to the prison, and through the window of his cell fed on the spectacle of his shame. White bands covered up his name on theatre billboards. His friends abandoned him. His manuscripts were stolen, while he recounted in prison the pain inflicted on him by two years of forced labour. His mother died under a shadow. His wife died. He was declared bankrupt and his goods were sold at auction. His sons were taken from him. When he got out of prison, thugs urged on by the noble Marquis of Queensbury were waiting in ambush for him. He was hunted from house to house as dogs hunt a rabbit. One after another drove him from the door, refusing him food and shelter, and at nightfall he finally ended up under the windows of his brother, weeping and babbling like a child.

The epilogue came rapidly to an end, and it is not worth the effort to follow the unhappy man from the slums of Naples to his poor lodgings in the Latin Quarter where he died from meningitis in the last month of the last year of the nineteenth century. It is not worth the effort to shadow him, like the French spies did. He died a Roman Catholic, adding another facet to his public life by the repudiation of his wild doctrine. After having mocked the idols of the market place, he bent his knees, sad and repentant that he had once been the singer of the divinity of joy, and closed the book of his spirit’s rebellion with an act of spiritual dedication.

* * * *

This is not the place to examine the strange problem of the life of Oscar Wilde, nor to determine to what extent heredity and the epileptic tendency of his nervous system can excuse that which has been imputed to him. Whether he was innocent or guilty of the charges brought against him, he undoubtedly was a scapegoat. His greater crime was that he had caused a scandal in England, and it is well known that the English authorities did everything possible to persuade him to flee before they issued an order for his arrest. An employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs stated during the trial that, in London alone, there are more than 20,000 persons under police surveillance, but they remain footloose until they provoke a scandal. Wilde’s letters to his friends were read in court, and their author was denounced as a degenerate obsessed by exotic perversions: ‘Time wars against you; it is jealous of your lilies and your roses’, ‘I love to see you wandering through violet-filled valleys, with your honey-coloured hair gleaming’. But the truth is that Wilde, far from being a perverted monster who sprang in some inexplicable way from the civilization of modern England, is the logical and inescapable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university system, with its secrecy and restrictions.

Wilde’s condemnation by the English people arose from many complex causes; but it was not the simple reaction of a pure conscience. Anyone who scrutinizes the graffiti, the loose drawings, the lewd gestures of those people will hesitate to believe them pure at heart. Anyone who follows closely the life and language of men, whether in soldiers’ barracks or in the great commercial houses, will hesitate to believe that all those who threw stones at Wilde were themselves spotless. In fact, everyone feels uncomfortable in speaking to others about this subject, afraid that his listener may know more about it than he does. Oscar Wilde’s own defence in the Scots Observer should remain valid in the judgment of an objective critic. Everyone, he wrote, sees his own sin in Dorian Gray (Wilde’s best known novel). What Dorian Gray’s sin was no one says and no one knows. Anyone who recognizes it has committed it.

Here we touch the pulse of Wilde’s art—sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people. His own distinctive qualities, the qualities, perhaps, of his race—keenness, generosity, and a sexless intellect—he placed at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the Golden Age and the joy of the world’s youth. But if some truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms rather than syllogisms, to his assimilations of natures as foreign to his as the delinquent is to the humble, at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.

* * * *

In his last book, De Profundis, he kneels before a gnostic Christ, resurrected from the apocryphal pages of The House of Pomegranates, and then his true soul, trembling, timid, and saddened, shines through the mantle of Heliogabalus. His fantastic legend, his opera—a polyphonic variation on the rapport of art and nature, but at the same time a revelation of his own psyche—his brilliant books sparkling with epigrams (which made him, in the view of some people, the most penetrating speaker of the past century), these are now divided booty.

A verse from the book of Job is cut on his tombstone in the impoverished cemetry at Bagneux. It praises his facility, ‘eloquium suum’,—the great legendary mantle which is now divided booty. Perhaps the future will also carve there another verse, less proud but more pious:

Partiti sunt sibi vestimenta mea et super

vestem meam miserunt sortis.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 24 March 1909

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Bernard Shaw’s Battle with the Censor

‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’

Dublin, 31 August

There is one gay week every year in the Dublin calendar, the last week of August, in which the famous Horse Show draws to the Irish capital a vari-coloured crowd, of many languages, from its sister island, from the continent, and even from far-off Japan. For a few days the tired and cynical city is dressed like a newlywed bride. Its gloomy streets swarm with a feverish life, and an unaccustomed uproar breaks its senile slumber.

This year, however, an artistic event has almost eclipsed the importance of the Show, and all over town they are talking about the clash between Bernard Shaw and the Viceroy. As is well known, Shaw’s latest play, ‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’, was branded with the mark of infamy by the Lord Chamberlain of England, who banned its performance in the United Kingdom. The censor’s decision probably came as no surprise to Shaw, because the same censor did the same thing to two other of his theatrical works, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ and the very recent ‘Press Cuttings’; and Shaw probably considers himself more or less honoured by the arbitrary proclamation which has condemned his comedies, together with Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’, Tolstoy’s ‘The Power of Darkness’, and Wilde’s ‘Salome’.

However, he would not give up, and he found a way to elude the frightened vigilance of the censor. By a strange chance, the city of Dublin is the only place in all the British territory in which the censor has no power; in fact, the old law contains these words: ‘except the city of Dublin.’ Shaw, then, offered his play to the company of the Irish National Theatre, which accepted it and announced its performance just as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The censor was apparently rendered powerless. Then the Viceroy of Ireland intervened to uphold the prestige of authority. There was a lively exchange of letters between the representative of the King and the writer of comedy, severe and threatening on the one side, insolent and scoffing on the other, while Dubliners, who care nothing for art but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy. Shaw held fast, insisting on his rights, and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than seven times over.

A heavy crowd thronged about the Abbey Theatre that evening, and a cordon of giant guards maintained order; but it was evident at once that no hostile demonstration would be made by the select public who jammed every nook of the little avant garde theatre. In fact, the report of the evening performance mentioned not even the lightest murmur of protest; and at the curtain fall, a thunderous applause summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.

Shaw’s comedy, which he describes as a sermon in crude melodrama, is, as you know, in a single act. The action unfolds in a wild and woolly city of the Far West, the protagonist is a horse thief, and the play limits itself to his trial. He has stolen a horse which he thought belonged to his brother, to repay himself for a sum taken from him unjustly. But while he is fleeing from the city, he meets a woman with a sick baby. She wants to get back to town in order to save the life of her child, and, moved by her appeal, he gives her the horse. Then he is captured and taken to the city to be tried. The trial is violent and arbitrary. The sheriff acts as prosecutor, shouting at the accused, banging the table, and threatening witnesses with revolver in hand. Posnet, the thief, sets forth some primitive theology. The moment of sentimental weakness in which he yielded to the prayers of a poor mother has been the crisis of his life. The finger of God has touched his brain. He no longer has the strength to live the cruel, animal life he had led before this encounter. He breaks out into long, disjointed speeches (and it is here that the pious English censor covered his ears), which are theological insofar as their subject is God, but not very churchly in diction. In the sincerity of his convictions, Posnet resorts to the language of the mining camp; and, among other reflections, when he is trying to say that God works secretly in the hearts of men, to the language of horse thieves.

The play ends happily. The baby which Posnet tried to save dies, and the mother is apprehended. She tells her story to the court and Posnet is acquitted. Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks himself in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor.

Shaw is right; it is a sermon. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting. Indulging himself in wandering prefaces and extravagant rules of drama, he creates a dramatic form which is much like a dialogue novel. He has a sense of situation, rather than of drama logically and ethically led to a conclusion. In this case he has dug up the central incident of his ‘Devil’s Disciple’ and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.

And may not this play reflect a crisis in the mind of its writer? Earlier, at the end of ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, the crisis was set forth. Shaw, as well as his latest protagonist, has had a profane and unruly past. Fabianism, vegetarianism, prohibitionism, music, painting, drama—all the progressive movements in art and politics—have had him as champion. And now, perhaps, some divine finger has touched his brain, and he, in the guise of Blanco Posnet, is shown up.

James Joyce

1909

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The Home Rule Comet

The idea of Irish autonomy has gradually become surrounded with a pallid and tenuous substantiality, and just a few weeks ago, when a royal decree dissolved the English parliament, something pale and wavering was seen dawning in the East. It was the Home Rule comet, vague, distant, but as punctual as ever. The sovereign Word which in an instant made twilight fall on the demi-gods at Westminster had called from the darkness and the void the obedient and unknowing star.

This time, however, it could be made out very poorly because the skies were cloudy. The fog which usually covers the British shores grew so thick that it cloaked them in a fixed and impenetrable cloud bank, behind which could be heard the orchestral music of the electoral elements in discord—the fiddles of the nobles agitated and hysterical, the raucous horns of the people, and, from time to time, a passing phrase on the Irish flutes.

The uncertainty of the political situation in England is evident from the fact that their agencies hurl forth from morning to night enigmatic dispatches which contradict themselves. In fact, the tenor of the debates held recently in the United Kingdom makes an impartial examination of the situation very difficult. Aside from the three party heads, Asquith, Balfour, and Redmond, who always know how to maintain a certain dignified bearing not unbecoming to fatuous leaders, the electoral campaign which has just ended indicates a significant lowering of the tone of English public life. Has such a speech ever been heard from the lips of the Chancellor of the Exchequer? the Conservatives are asked. But the jibes of the warlike Welsh minister pale before the vulgar vituperations of Conservatives like representative Smith, and the well known lawyer Carson and the director of the ‘National Review’, while the two Irish factions, forgetting their common enemy, have waged underground war in an attempt to exhaust the gamut of coarse language.

Another cause of confusion is that the English parties no longer answer to their names. It is the Radicals who want to continue the present political tariff policy of free trade, while the Conservatives champion tariff reform at the top of their voices. It is the Conservatives who want to take away the legislative power from Parliament and give it instead to the nation as a whole by means of the plebiscite. Finally, it is the clerical and intransigent Irish party which comprises the majority of an anticlerical and Liberal government.

This paradoxical situation is accurately reflected in the characters of the party heads. Not to speak of Chamberlain or Rosebery, who have gone, respectively, from extreme Radicalism and Gladstonian Liberalism to the ranks of Imperialism (while the young minister Churchill has made his ideal voyage in the opposite direction), we find the causes of Anglican Protestantism and of conciliatory Nationalism led by a religious renegade and a converted Fenian.

Balfour, in fact, a worthy disciple of the Scottish school, is a sceptic rather than a politician, who, urged more by the instinct for nepotism innate in the Cecil family than by individual choice, assumed the leadership of the Conservative party after the death of his uncle, the lamented Marquis of Salisbury. Not a day passes that the reporters fail to point out his distracted and quibbling attitude. His tricks make his own followers laugh. And even if the orthodox army has met with three consecutive clashes under his vacillating flag, each more serious than the last, his biographer (who perhaps will be another member of the Cecil family) will be able to say of him that in his philosophical essays he dissected and laid bare with great art the intimate fibres of the religious and psychological principles whose champion he became by a turn of the parliamentary wheel. O’Brien, the ‘leader’ of the Irish dissidents, who calls his band of 10 representatives the ‘All for Ireland’ party, has become what every good fanatic becomes when his fanaticism dies before he does. Now he fights in league with the Unionist magistrates who would probably have issued a warrant for his arrest twenty years ago; and nothing remains of his fiery youth except those violent outbursts which make him seem epileptic.

In the midst of such confusions it is easy to understand how the dispatches contradict themselves, and announce that Home Rule is at the door, and write its obituary six hours later. The uninitiated cannot be too sure in the case of comets, but at any rate the passage of the celestial body so long awaited has been communicated to us by the official observatory.

* * * *

Last week, the Irish leader Redmond proclaimed the happy news to a crowd of fishermen. English democracy, he said, has broken the power of the Lords once and for all, and within a few weeks, perhaps, Ireland will have her independence. Now, it is necessary to be a voracious nationalist to be able to swallow such a mouthful. As soon as it is seated on the ministerial benches, the Liberal cabinet will be confronted by a conglomeration of troubles, among which the foremost is the double balance. When this matter is settled for good or for bad, peers and commoners will declare a treaty of peace in honour of the coronation of George V. So far the way is clear, but only prophets can tell us where a government as heterogeneous as the present one will end. To remain in power, will it try to appease the Welsh and the Scots with ecclesiastical and agrarian measures? If the Irish exact autonomy as the price for the support of their votes, will the cabinet hasten to blow the dust off one of their many Home Rule bills and present it to the House again?

The history of Anglo-Saxon liberalism teaches us the answer to these and similarly ingenuous questions very clearly. The Liberal ministers are scrupulous men, and once again the Irish problem will cause symptomatic rifts in the body of the cabinet, in the face of which it will plainly appear that the English electorate really did not authorize the government to legislate in its favour. And, following the Liberal strategy (which aims to wear down the separatist sentiment slowly and secretly, while creating a new, eager social class, dependent, and free from dangerous enthusiasms, by means of partial concessions), if the government introduces a reform bill, or the semblance of one, which Ireland will haughtily refuse, will not that be the propitious moment for the intervention of the Conservative party? Faithful to its cynical tradition of bad faith, will it not take this occasion to declare the Irish dictatorship intolerable, and start a campaign to reduce the number of Irish members from 80 to 40 on the basis of the depopulation, more unique than rare in a civilized country, which was and still is the bitter fruit of misgovernment?

The connection, then, between the abolition of the Lords’ veto and the granting of autonomy to the Irish is not as immediate as some would have us believe. In the final count, that is the business of the English themselves, and admitting that the English people no longer have the worship for their spiritual and temporal fathers that they once had, it is still probable that they will proceed with the reform of the upper house as slowly and cautiously as they are proceeding with the reform of their medieval laws, with the reform of their pompous and hypocritical literature, with the reform of their monstrous judicial system. And in anticipation of these reforms, it will matter very little to the credulous ploughman in Ireland whether Lord Lansdowne or Sir Edward Grey rules the lot of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

* * * *

The fact that Ireland now wishes to make common cause with British democracy should neither surprise nor persuade anyone. For seven centuries she has never been a faithful subject of England. Neither, on the other hand, has she been faithful to herself. She has entered the British domain without forming an integral part of it. She has abandoned her own language almost entirely and accepted the language of the conqueror without being able to assimilate the culture or adapt herself to the mentality of which this language is the vehicle. She has betrayed her heroes, always in the hour of need and always without gaining recompense. She has hounded her spiritual creators into exile only to boast about them. She has served only one master well, the Roman Catholic Church, which, however, is accustomed to pay its faithful in long term drafts.

What long term alliance can exist between this strange people and the new Anglo-Saxon democracy? The phrase-makers who speak so warmly about it today will soon see (if they do not see it already) that between the English nobles and the English workers there is a mysterious communion of blood; and that the highly praised Marquis of Salisbury, a refined gentleman, spoke not only for his caste but for his race when he said: ‘Let the Irish stew in their own juice.’

James Joyce

1910

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A Curious History

To the Editor
17 Aug 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

Sir May I ask you to publish this letter which throws some light on the present conditions of authorship in England and Ireland?

Nearly six years ago Mr Grant Richards, publisher, of London signed a contract with me for the publication of a book of stories written by me, entitled Dubliners. Some ten months later he wrote asking me to omit one of the stories and passages in others which, as he said, his printer refused to set up. I declined to do either and a correspondence began between Mr Grant Richards and myself which lasted more than three months. I went to an international jurist in Rome (where I lived then) and was advised to omit. I declined to do so and the MS was returned to me, the publisher refusing to publish notwithstanding his pledged printed word, the contract remaining in my possession.

Six months afterwards a Mr Hone wrote to me from Marseilles to ask me to submit the MS to Messrs Maunsel, publishers, of Dublin. I did so: and after about a year, in July 1909, Messrs Maunsel signed a contract with me for the publication of the book on or before 1 September 1910. In December 1909 Messrs Maunsel’s manager begged me to alter a passage in one of the stories, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, wherein some reference was made to Edward VII. I agreed to do so, much against my will, and altered one or two phrases. Messrs Maunsel continually postponed the date of publication and in the end wrote, asking me to omit the passage or to change it radically. I declined to do either, pointing out that Mr Grant Richards of London had raised no objection to the passage when Edward VII was alive and that I could not see why an Irish publisher should raise an objection to it when Edward VII had passed into history. I suggested arbitration or a deletion of the passage with a prefatory note of explanation by me but Messrs Maunsel would agree to neither. As Mr Hone (who had written to me in the first instance) disclaimed all responsibility in the matter and any connection with the firm I took the opinion of a solicitor in Dublin who advised me to omit the passage, informing me that as I had no domicile in the United Kingdom I could not sue Messrs Maunsel for breach of contract unless I paid £100 into court and that, even if I paid £100 into court and sued them, I should have no chance of getting a verdict in my favour from a Dublin jury if the passage in dispute could be taken as offensive in any way to the late king. I wrote then to the present king, George V, enclosing a printed proof of the story with the passage therein marked and begging him to inform me whether in his view the passage (certain allusions made by a person of the story in the idiom of his social class) should be withheld from publication as offensive to the memory of his father. His Majesty’s private secretary sent me this reply:

Buckingham Palace

The private secretary is commanded to acknowledge the receipt of Mr James Joyce’s letter of the 1 instant and to inform him that it is inconsistent with rule for His Majesty to express his opinion in such cases. The enclosures are returned herewith.

11 August 1911

Here is the passage in dispute:

—But look here, John,—said Mr O’Connor.—Why should we welcome the king of England? Didn’t Parnell himself...?—

—Parnell,—said Mr Henchy,—is dead. Now, here’s the way I look at it. Here’s this chap comes to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He’s a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself—The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By Christ, I’ll go myself and see what they’re like.—And are we going to insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? Eh? Isn’t that right, Crofton?—

Mr Crofton nodded his head.

—But after all now,—said Mr Lyons, argumentatively,—King Edward’s life, you know, is not the very ...—

—Let bygones be bygones.—said Mr Henchy—I admire the man personally. He’s just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He’s fond of his glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman. Damn it, can’t we Irish play fair?—

I wrote this book seven years ago and, as I cannot see in any quarter a chance that my rights will be protected, I hereby give Messrs Maunsel publicly permission to publish this story with what changes or deletions they may please to make and shall hope that what they may publish may resemble that to the writing of which I gave thought and time. Their attitude as an Irish publishing firm may be judged by Irish public opinion. I, as a writer, protest against the systems (legal, social and ceremonious) which have brought me to this pass. Thanking you for your courtesy, I am, Sir, Your obedient servant

James Joyce

Open letter to the press, published in Northern Whig, Belfast, 26 August 1911, and Sinn Féin, Dublin, 2 September 1911

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Realism and Idealism in English Literature: Daniel Defoe

I.

In the year of grace, 1660, the exiled, fugitive, and dispossessed Charles Stuart landed on English soil at Dover and, escorted by the fanfare and torches of a jubilant people, headed towards the capital to assume the crown that his father, the martyr king, had removed eleven years previously when he was executed on the gallows in Whitehall by order of the regicide generals. The corpses of Cromwell and Ireton were disinterred and dragged to Tyburn (the Golgotha, site of the skulls, in English history) where they were hanged on the gibbets and then, putrefied as they were, beheaded by the executioner. Merriment returned to Merry England; the gracefulness, culture, pomp, and luxury of the Stuart courts returned. The young king flung open the doors of his palace to flatterers of both sexes. Holding his lapdog in his arms, he gave audience to his ministers. Leaning against the fireplace of the House of Lords he would listen to the discourses of that elevated assembly, swearing by God’s bodikins (his majesty’s favourite oath) that his noblemen entertained him more than his comedians.

But this triumph was misleading and, within a short time, the star of the Stuart dynasty had set forever, and Protestant succession, embodied by the person of William of Nassau, had become the cornerstone of the British constitution. Here, according to the textbooks, the chapter of ancient history comes to an end, and that of modern history begins.

And yet, the constitutional crisis that was then resolved by a covenant between the crown, the church and the legislature is not the only, nor the most interesting, feat accomplished by that prince, who is called in remembrance the pious, glorious and immortal. His victory also signifies a crisis of race, an ethnic revenge. From the days of William the Conqueror onwards, no monarch of Germanic stock had wielded the English sceptre. The Normans were succeeded by the Plantagenets, the Plantagenets by the House of Tudor, the Tudors by the Stuarts.

Even Oliver Cromwell himself, the Lord Protector of civil liberties, was of Celtic origin, son of a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. So, over six centuries had passed since the Battle of Hastings before the true successor of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty was to ascend to the throne of England. The people who acclaimed the coming of the awkward and taciturn Dutch commander were acclaiming themselves, and saluting the human symbol of a true rebirth.

For the first time now the true English spirit begins to appear in literature. Consider how minimal the importance of that spirit was in the earlier times. In Chaucer, a court writer with a polished and comely style, the indigenous spirit can just be discerned as the framework for the adventures of respectable people—meaning Norman clerics and foreign heroes. How is the great English public depicted in the variegated dramas of William Shakespeare, who wrote two hundred years after Chaucer? A boorish peasant, a court jester, a half-mad and half-stupid ragamuffin, a gravedigger. Shakespeare’s characters all come from abroad and afar: Othello, a Moorish prince; Shylock, a Venetian Jew; Caesar, a Roman; Hamlet, a Danish prince; Macbeth, a Celtic usurper; Romeo and Juliet, citizens of Verona. Of all the rich gallery, perhaps the only one who can be called English is the fat knight with the monstrous paunch, Sir John Falstaff. In the centuries following the French conquest, English literature was schooled by masters such as Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso and Messer Lodovico. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are a version of the Decameron or the Novellino; Milton’s Paradise Lost is a puritanical transcript of the Divine Comedy. Shakespeare, with his Titianesque palette, his eloquence, his epileptic passion, and his creative fury, is an Italianized Englishman, while the theatre of the Restoration takes its cue from the Spanish stage and the works of Calderon and Lope de Vega. The first English writer to write without copying or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models, to instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen, and to manufacture an artistic form for himself that is perhaps without precedent (with the exception of the monographs of Sallust and Plutarch) is Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel.

Daniel Defoe was born in 1661, a year after the return of Charles Stuart. His father was a wealthy butcher from Cripplegate who, like a good burgher, intended his son for holy orders. But the son was anything but a saint, and preaching the gospel of Christian peace ill-fitted this bellicose man whose life from the cradle to the grave was a hard, vigorous, and ineffective struggle.

As soon as he had finished his studies, the young man threw himself into the vortex of politics. When the Duke of Monmouth (one of the merry monarch’s many bastard sons) raised the banner of revolt, he enlisted in the ranks of the pretender. The revolt failed and Defoe barely managed to escape with his life. A few years later we find him engaged in business as a hosiery merchant. In 1689, he rode in the volunteer light-horse regiment that escorted the new sovereigns William and Mary to a solemn banquet in the Guildhall. Later, he began trading in eastern drugs. He travelled to France, Spain and Portugal, stopping over there for a time. He also went to Holland and Germany on his business travels, but when he returned to England, the first of a long series of disasters awaited him. He was declared bankrupt and, as his creditors pursued him mercilessly, he thought it best to flee to Bristol, where the townspeople attached the nickname of Mr Sunday to him, because he only dared leave his house on a Sunday, a day on which the bailiffs could not legally arrest him. An agreement with his creditors freed him from his forced domicile, and for a full twelve years he worked to pay off the enormous debt of seventeen thousand pounds sterling.

From his liberation until the death of King William, Defoe was a director of a Dutch tile factory and actively involved himself in politics, publishing pamphlets, essays, satires, tracts, all in defence of the foreign king’s party, and all, with the exception of The True-Born Englishman, of very little literary value. Following the accession of Queen Anne, parliament voted for a coercive law against Protestant Dissenters (that is, those who did not recognize the supremacy of the Anglican church), and Defoe, masquerading as an extremist Anglican, published his famous satire, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, in which he proposed that all those who did not accept the dogmas and rites of the Anglican Church be condemned to the gallows or prison, reserving the honour of crucifixion for the fathers of the Society of Jesus. The satire caused an enormous uproar, at first fooling the very ministers who, having praised its sincerity and wisdom, realized that they were dealing with a solemn hoax. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Defoe and the London Gazette published this description of the satirist:

A spare man, middle-aged, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth, born in London, for many years a hose-factor in Cornhill, now owner of a brick and pantile works at Tilbury in Essex County.

The police put a price on his head, and within the month Defoe was imprisoned in Newgate. His book was burnt by the public executioner, and the writer was pilloried for three successive days in front of the Exchange, in Cheapside, at the gates to the City at Temple Bar. He did not lose heart during his punishment. By an act of royal clemency, his ears were not cropped; flower-sellers wreathed the instrument of torture with garlands; copies of his A Hymn to the Pillory, which the newsboys were selling for a few pennies, went like hot cakes, while the mob of citizens filled the square reciting the verses and toasting the health of the prisoner and the freedom of speech.

He was then detained in prison, but his literary activity did not cease. While still in prison, he founded and edited one of the first English Journals, The Review, and knew so well how to placate the authorities that a little while later he was not only set free, but appointed by the government to go to Edinburgh as a secret envoy.

Another seven years follow in which the figure of the writer is lost in the grey shadows of politics. Then the government levied a heavy tax on newspapers, and the Review folded after nine years of existence. Defoe, indefatigable scribbler that he was, launched himself once again into polemic. His pamphlet on the Jacobite succession earned him another trial and, condemned for contempt, he was again imprisoned in Newgate. He owed his release to a violent attack of apoplexy which almost killed him. Had it been fatal, world literature would have one masterpiece less. After the union of Scotland and England and the establishment of the House of Hanover on the English throne, Defoe’s political importance quickly ebbed. He then turned (he had passed his sixtieth year) to literature properly speaking in the first years of the reign of George I (the uneven life of Defoe stretches over seven reigns). He wrote and sent the first part of Robinson Crusoe to press. The author offered his book to almost all the publishing houses of the capital which, showing immense foresight, turned it down. It saw the light in April 1719; by the end of August it was already in its fourth reprinting. Eighty thousand copies were sold, an unprecedented circulation for those times. The public could not get enough of the adventures of Defoe’s hero and wanted more. Like Conan Doyle who, bowing to the insistence of the contemporary public, brought his lanky scarecrow Sherlock Holmes back from the dead to set him off once more chasing scroungers and malefactors, the sixty-year-old Defoe also followed up the first part of his novel with a second, in which the hero, nostalgic for his travels, returns to his island home. To this second part there followed a third, the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe, bless his soul, realizing a little late that in his prosaic realism he had taken little account of his hero’s spiritual side, wrote a collection of serious reflections on man, human destiny, and the Creator as a third part to his novel. These reflections and thoughts adorn the rough figure of the mariner like votive talismans hanging from the neck and outstretched arms of a miracle-working Madonna. The famous book even had the great fortune to be parodied by a London wit who also made a pile of money through the sales of a whimsical satire entitled The Life and Surprizing Adventure of a Certain Daniel Defoe, Wool Merchant, Who Lives All Alone in the Uninhabited Island of Great Britain.

The pedants strove to uncover the small mistakes which the great precursor of the Realist movement had run into. How could Robinson Crusoe have filled his pockets with biscuits if he had undressed before swimming from the beach to the stranded ship? How could he have seen the eyes of the goat in the pitch blackness of the cave? How could the Spaniards have given Friday’s father a written agreement if they had no ink or quill pens? Are there bears or not on the islands of the West Indies? And so forth. The pedants are right: the mistakes are there; but the wide river of the new realism sweeps them majestically away like bushes and rushes uprooted by the flood.

From 1719 to 1725 the aged writer’s pen was never still: he wrote almost a dozen romances (the so-called lives), pamphlets, tracts, journals, travelogues, and spiritualistic studies. Gout and old age forced him to lay aside his pen. It is thought that he was in prison for the third time in 1730. A year later we see him as a fugitive in a citadel in Kent. There is an air of mystery shrouding his death. Perhaps he was on the run, perhaps the quarrel with his son (a downright scoundrel worthy of inclusion in one of his father’s books) had forced him to wander about in misery in a way reminiscent of the tragedy of King Lear. Perhaps the travails of his long life, the excessive writing, the intrigues, the disasters, his ever-increasing avarice had produced a sort of senile atrophy of his quick and fertile intelligence. We are and shall remain uncertain. And yet, there is something meaningful in his strange, solitary death in the little boarding-house in Moorfields. The man that immortalized the strange, solitary Crusoe and many others as lost in their great sea of social misery, as Crusoe was lost in a sea of waters, may have felt a longing for solitude as his end drew nigh. The old lion goes to a secluded place when his final hour approaches. He feels loathing for his worn and tired-out body and wishes to die where no eye may see him. And so, sometimes man, born into shame, will also bow before the shame of death, not wishing others to be saddened by the sight of that obscene phenomenon with which brutal and mocking Nature puts an end to the life of a human being.

James Joyce

II.

It is by no means an easy task to make an adequate study of a writer as prolific as Daniel Defoe who set the presses cranking a good two hundred and ten times over. But if we first of all discard the works which are political in character and the reams of journalistic essays, Defoe’s works fall naturally around two focal points of interest. On the one hand, we have those writings that are based upon everyday occurrences, and on the other, the biographies which, if not true romance novels as we understand them—owing to their absence of love-plots, psychological examination and studied balance of characters and dispositions—are still literary works in which the soul of the modern realist novel can be glimpsed, like the dormant soul within an imperfect, amorphous organism. The Storm, for example, is a book which describes the havoc wreaked by a terrifying hurricane that raged over the British Isles in two stages towards the end of the month of November 1703. Modern meteorologists have been able to compile a highly accurate barometric chart from the details that Defoe furnishes. His method is simplicity itself. The book opens with an investigation into the causes of the winds; it then reviews the storms that have become famous in human history; and finally, the narrative, like a large snake, begins to slide slowly over a tangle of letters and reports. These follow one another endlessly. In all the letters, which come from every corner of the United Kingdom, we read of the same things: numerous trees (apple-trees, willows, oaks) uprooted here, numerous houses unroofed there; numerous ships smashed against the embankments in one place, numerous steeples collapsed in another. Then there is a meticulous enumeration of the losses of livestock and buildings suffered by various townships, of the deaths and the survivors, and an exact measurement of all the lead torn off the church roofs. Needless to say, the book attains a phenomenal level of boredom. The modern reader grumbles a lot before he reaches the end; but at the end the aim of the chronicler has been achieved. By dint of repetition, contradictions, details, figures, and rumours, the storm is made to exist, the destruction is visible.

In Journal of the Plague, Defoe spreads his wings further. Sir Walter Scott, in the preface which he contributed to the definitive edition of Defoe’s works, writes:

Had he not written Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe would have deserved immortality for the genius which he has displayed in this his journal of the plague.

The black plague devastated the City of London during the earlier years of the reign of Charles II. The toll of victims cannot be established with any certainty, but it probably exceeded a hundred and fifty thousand. Of this horrible slaughter Defoe provides an account which is all the more terrifying for its sobriety and gloominess. The doors of the infected households were marked with a red cross over which was written: Lord, have mercy on us! Grass was growing in the streets. A dismal, putrid silence overhung the devastated city like a pall. Funeral wagons passed through the streets by night, driven by veiled carters who kept their mouths covered with disinfected cloths. A crier walked before them ringing a bell intermittently and calling out into the night, Bring out your dead! Behind the church in Aldgate an enormous pit was dug. Here the drivers unloaded their carts and threw merciful lime over the blackened corpses. The desperate and the criminal revelled day and night in the taverns. The mortally ill ran to throw themselves in with the dead. Pregnant women cried for help. Large smoky fires were forever burning on the street corners and in the squares. Religious insanity reached its peak. A madman with a brazier of burning coals on his head used to walk stark naked through the streets shouting that he was a prophet and repeating by way of an antiphony: O the great and dreadful God!

In Defoe’s story the person who narrates these horrors is an unknown London saddler, but the narrative style has something majestic and (if you’ll allow the word) orchestral about it that recalls Tolstoy’s Sebastopol or Hauptmann’s Weavers. But in these two works we sense a lyrical drift, a self-conscious art, a musical theme that wishes to act as the emotive revolt of modern man against human or superhuman iniquity. In Defoe, there is nothing: no lyricism, nor art for art’s sake nor social sentiment. The saddler walks the abandoned streets, he listens to the cries of anguish, he keeps his distance from the sick, he reads the prefect’s edicts, he chats with the garlic- and rue-chewing sextons, he argues with a ferry-man in Blackwall, he faithfully compiles his statistics, he takes an interest in the price of bread, he complains about the night watchmen, he climbs to the top of Greenwich Hill and calculates more or less how many people have taken refuge in the ships anchored on the Thames, he praises, he curses, he cries not infrequently and prays now and again: and he rounds off his account with four halting lines of verse, for which he asks, like a good saddler, the reader’s indulgence. They are rough and ready, he says, but sincere. They go like this:

A dreadful plague in London was

In the year ’sixty-five,

Which swept an hundred thousand souls

Away; yet I alive!

In Defoe, as we can see, the star of poesy is, as they say, conspicuous by its absence—though he has a style of admirable clarity quite free of all pretension, that shines forth unexpectedly in a burst of brief, sweet splendour in certain pages of Robinson Crusoe and Duncan Campbell. This is why his History of the Devil has actually seemed quite nauseating to some. Defoe’s devil has little in common with the strange son of Chaos who wages eternal war against the plans of the Supreme Being. Instead he rather resembles a dealer in hosiery who has suffered a calamitous financial setback. Defoe puts himself in the devil’s shoes with a realism that strikes us, at first, as disconcerting. He has it out roughly with the majestic protagonist of Paradise Lost. He wonders how many days it took the devil to fall from Heaven into the Abyss; how many spirits fell with him; when he realized that the world had been created; how he seduced Eve; where he likes to live; why and how he made his wings. This attitude of mind in the presence of the supernatural, a natural consequence of his literary precepts, is the attitude of a reasonable barbarian. Sometimes, as in the awkward and rushed history of the philosopher Dickory Cronke, it seems as if a fool is narrating the deeds of a moron; sometimes, as in Duncan Campbell (a spiritualistic study, as we would put it, of an interesting case of clairvoyance in Scotland), the writer’s attitude is particularly apt for the subject-matter and reminds us of the precision and innocence of a child’s questions.

This story, which must have been the result of a sojourn in the Scottish Highlands or islands where, as is well-known, telepathy is in the air, marks the limits of Defoe’s method in these impersonal writings. Seated at the bedside of a boy visionary, gazing at his raised eyelids, listening to his breathing, examining the position of his head, noting his fresh complexion, Defoe is the realist in the presence of the unknown; it is the experience of the man who struggles and conquers in the presence of a dream which he fears may fool him; he is, finally, the Anglo-Saxon in the presence of the Celt.

In those works of Defoe which, belonging to the second category, contain more personal interest, we sporadically hear an accompanying intermittent roll of drums or roar of cannons. The Memoirs of a Cavalier, which Defoe, in a characteristic preface, pretends to have found among the papers of a secretary of state to William III, are the personal account of an officer who fought under Gustavus Adolphus and then enlisted in the army of Charles I. Although the dubious origins of the book caused a deal of ink to flow, it cannot be of interest today to anyone but a student of that turbid and bloody age. We have read elsewhere the things that the cavalier reports. We reread them here without caring too much about them and the most we remember is some vivid description, some colourful instance.

On the other hand, the Spanish chapters of Memoirs of Captain Carleton, crammed full of gallant adventures, bull-fights, and capital executions are, in today’s cinematic jargon, realistic ‘takes’. If Defoe were alive today, his gifts of precision and imagination, his farraginous experience and his neat, precise style would probably enable him to enjoy great fame as a special correspondent for some huge American or English newspaper.

The first female figure to stand out from this background is Mrs Christian Davies, known as the Mother Ross. This lady, along with the adventuress Roxana and the unforgettable harlot Moll Flanders, forms the third of that trio of female characters that reduce present-day critics to stupefied speechlessness. Indeed, the elegant literary gentleman and bibliophile Sir Leslie Stephen wonders with a respectable writer’s curiosity where on earth Defoe found the models for these figures. The latest editor of Defoe, the poet John Masefield, cannot find an explanation for why a writer should have created women with such a cynical, crass, and indecent realism when he lived in the years following the Restoration of the monarchy, happy years, made pleasant by the easy graces of so many consenting ladies, years whose intimate history is studded with female names: Lucy Walters, Nell Gwynne, Martha Blount, the scandalous Susannah Centlivre and the witty Lady Mary Montagu. For the aforementioned gentlemen critics, The Life of Mrs Christian Davies will certainly seem like the transcription of the life of Joan of Arc, done by a stable-boy.

Christian, who is a pretty Dublin tavern-girl, gets rid of her demijohns, and, dressed in male clothes, wanders through Europe in search of her husband as a dragoon in the Duke of Marlborough’s army. She catches up with him at the battle of Hochstat, but in the meantime he has taken a Dutch lover. The meeting scene between Christian and her unfaithful husband in the room in the inn presents us with the eternal feminine in an unexpected light. Here is Christian herself speaking.

I saw him in the kitchen drinking with the Dutch woman but, pretending not to see him, I went to the landlady and desired to be shown a private room. She went before me into the room and bringing me a pint of beer which I called for, left me alone with my melancholy thoughts. I sat me down, laid my elbow on the table, and leaning my head on my hand, I began to reflect ... But why is he thus changed? ... And his fondness for the Dutch woman gave vent to my tears, which flowing in abundance, was some relief to me. I could not stop this flood, which continued a good quarter of an hour. At length it ceased, and, drinking a little of the hougarde (which is a white beer, in colour like whey), I washed my eyes and face with the rest, to conceal my having wept. Then, calling my landlady, I desired she would bring me another pint.

Somewhat different from Tristan and Isolde! Modern musicians, literate or otherwise, would find very little here in the story of this woman who, while still a girl, began her career by rolling down a hill to send the elderly Count of C—— (note the delicacy of the initials) into ecstasies and who dies, aged sixty-two, in the Chelsea military hospital, a retired sutler, crippled, scrofulous and suffering from dropsy. They would find less than nothing in the life of Moll Flanders, the unique, the inimitable woman who (I quote the words of the old title-page) was born in Newgate prison and lived a life of continuing variety during her sixty years: she was a prostitute for twelve of them, a wife five times (once with her own brother), a thief for twelve years, eight years as a prisoner in a penal settlement in Virginia, then she became rich, lived honestly and died repentant. The realism of this writer, in effect, defies and surpasses the magical artifice of music.

Perhaps modern realism is a reaction. The great French nation which venerates the legend of the Maid of Orléans defiles her name through the mouth of Voltaire, lewdly sullies her at the hands of the nineteenth-century engravers, and lacerates and cuts her to pieces in the twentieth century through the incisive style of Anatole France. The very intensity and refinement of French realism betrays its spiritual origins. But you will search in vain for that angry fervour of corruption in Defoe that illuminates Huysmans’s sad pages with a blighted phosphorescence. You will search in vain for that studied fervour of lacerating yet soothing indignation and protest in the works of this writer who, two centuries before Gorky or Dostoievsky, introduced the lowest dregs of the populace into European literature: the foundling, the pick-pocket, the crooked dealer, the prostitute, the hag, the robber, the shipwrecked. If anything, you will find an instinct and prophetic sense beneath the rough skin of his characters. His women have the indecency and self-restraint of beasts; his men are strong and silent like trees. English feminism and English imperialism are already lurking in these souls which have but recently emerged from the animal kingdom. The proconsul of Africa, Cecil Rhodes, is a direct descendant of Captain Singleton and the aforementioned Mrs Christian Davies might be presumed to be the notional great-great-grandmother of Mrs Pankhurst.

Defoe’s masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe, is the finished artistic expression of this instinct and this prophetic sense. In the life of the pirate-explorer Captain Singleton, and in the story of Colonel Jack, suffused with such broad and sad charity, Defoe introduces us to the studies and rough drafts of that great solitary figure who later obtains, to the applause of the simple hearts of many a man and boy, his citizenship in the world of letters. The account of the shipwrecked sailor who lived for four years on a lonely island reveals, perhaps as no other book in all English literature does, the cautious and heroic instinct of the rational being and the prophecy of the empire.

European criticism has struggled for several generations with a persistence that is not entirely well-meaning to illuminate the mystery of the immense world conquest achieved by that hybrid race which lives a tough life on a small island in the northern sea, gifted with none of the intellect of the Latin, the forbearance of the Jew, the zeal of the German, nor the sensitivity of the Slav. For some years European caricature has amused itself by contemplating (with a pleasure unmixed with discomfort) an overgrown man with an ape’s jaw, dressed in checkered clothes that are too short and tight and with huge feet; or else John Bull, the plump bailiff with his vacuous and ruddy moon-shaped face and miniature top hat. Neither of these two comic figures would have conquered an inch of land in a thousand centuries. The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, baker, shipwright, potter, saddler, farmer, tailor, umbrella-maker, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness. Whoever re-reads this simple and moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot but be taken by its prophetic spell.

Saint John the Evangelist saw on the island of Patmos the apocalyptic collapse of the universe and the raising up of the walls of the eternal city splendid with beryl and emerald, onyx and jasper, sapphires and rubies. Crusoe saw but one marvel in all the fertile creation that surrounded him, a naked footprint in the virgin sand: and who knows if the latter does not matter more than the former?

James Joyce

Università Popolare, Trieste, March 1912

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Realism and Idealism in English Literature: William Blake

[The manuscript begins here.] of an ethical and practical interpretation, are not moral aphorisms. Looking at St. Paul’s cathedral, Blake heard with the ear of the soul the cry of the little chimney sweep, who symbolizes oppressed innocence in his strange literary language. Looking at Buckingham Palace, he sees with the eye of the mind the sigh of the hapless soldier running down the palace wall in the form of a drop of blood. While he was still young and vigorous, remaking himself with these visions, he had the power to etch their image in a hammered verse or a sheet of copper, and these verbal or mental etchings often comprise an entire sociological system. The prison, he writes, is built with stones of law; the brothel with bricks of religion. But the continual strain of these voyages into the unknown and the abrupt return to natural life slowly but inexorably corrode his artistic power. The visions, multiplying, blind the sight; and toward the end of his mortal life, the unknown for which he yearned covered him with the shadows of vast wings, and the angels with whom he conversed as an immortal with immortals hid him in the silence of their garments.

If I have evoked from the shades with bitter words and violent verses the figure of a weak, second or third rank politician, I have given you the wrong idea of Blake’s personality. As a young man he belonged to the literary-revolutionary school that included Miss Wollstonecraft, and the famous, perhaps I should say the notorious, author of the Rights of Man, Thomas Paine. Even among the members of this circle, Blake was the only one with the courage to wear in the street the red cap, emblem of the new era. He soon took it off, though, never to wear it again, after the massacres in the Paris prisons that occurred in September 1792. His spiritual rebellion against the powers of this world was not made of the kind of gunpowder, soluble in water, to which we are more or less accustomed. In 1799, he was offered the position of drawing master to the royal family. Afraid that in the artificial atmosphere of the court his art might die of inanition, he refused it; but at the same time, in order not to offend the king, he gave up all the other lower-class students that formed his major source of income. After his death, Princess Sophia sent his widow a private gift of a hundred pounds sterling. Mrs. Blake sent it back, thanking her politely, saying that she was able to get along on little, and that she didn’t want to accept the gift because, if it were used for another purpose, the money might help to restore the life and hopes of someone less fortunate than her.

There was evidently a distinct difference between that undisciplined and visionary heresiarch and those most orthodox church philosophers, Francesco Suarez, Europae atque orbis universi magister et oculus populi Christiani, and Don Giovanni Mariana di Talavera, who had written for the stupefaction of posterity a logical and sinister defence of tyrannicide in the preceding century. The same idealism that possessed and sustained Blake when he hurled his lightning against human evil and misery prevented him from being cruel to the body even of a sinner, the frail curtain of flesh, as he calls it in the mystical book of Thel, that lies on the bed of our desire. The episodes that show the primitive goodness of his heart are numerous in the story of his life. Although he had difficulty making a living and spent only half a guinea a week to maintain the little house where he lived, he gave forty pounds to a needy friend. Having seen a poor, phthisic art student pass his window each morning with a portfolio under his arm, he took pity on him and invited him into the house, where he fed him and tried to cheer his sad and dwindling life. His relations with his younger brother Robert recall the story of David and Jonathan. Blake loved him, supported him, and took care of him. During his long sickness, he spoke to him of the eternal world and comforted him. For many days before his death, he watched over his sickbed without interruption, and at the supreme moment he saw the beloved soul break loose from the lifeless body and rise toward heaven clapping its hands for joy. Then, serene and exhausted, he lay down in a deep sleep and slept for seventy-two hours in a row.

I have already referred to Mrs. Blake two or three times, and perhaps I should say something about the poet’s married life. Blake fell in love when he was twenty years old. The girl, who was rather foolish it seems, was named Polly Woods. The influence of this youthful love shines through Blake’s first works, the Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence, but the incident ended suddenly and brusquely. She thought him crazy, or little better, and he thought her a flirt, or something worse. This girl’s face appears in certain drawings in the prophetic book of Vala, a soft and smiling face, symbol of the sweet cruelty of woman, and of the illusion of the senses. To recuperate from this defeat, Blake left London and went to live in the cottage of a gardener named Bouchier. This gardener had a daughter, Catherine, about twenty-four, whose heart was filled with compassion at hearing of the young man’s misfortune in love. The affection born from this pity and its recognition finally united them. The lines from Othello:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

come to mind when we read this chapter of Blake’s life.

Like many other men of great genius, Blake was not attracted to cultured and refined women. Either he preferred to drawingroom graces and an easy and broad culture (if you will allow me to borrow a commonplace from theatrical jargon) the simple woman, of hazy and sensual mentality, or, in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his beloved to be entirely a slow and painful creation of his own, freeing and purifying daily under his very eyes, the demon (as he says) hidden in the cloud. Whichever is true, the fact is that Mrs. Blake was neither very pretty nor very intelligent. In fact, she was illiterate, and the poet took pains to teach her to read and write. He succeeded so well that within a few years his wife was helping him in his engraving work, retouching his drawings, and was cultivating in herself the visionary faculty.

Elemental beings and spirits of dead great men often came to the poet’s room at night to speak with him about art and the imagination. Then Blake would leap out of bed, and, seizing his pencil, remain long hours in the cold London night drawing the limbs and lineaments of the visions, while his wife, curled up beside his easy chair, held his hand lovingly and kept quiet so as not to disturb the visionary ecstasy of the seer. When the vision had gone, about daybreak his wife would get back into bed, and Blake, radiant with joy and benevolence, would quickly begin to light the fire and get breakfast for the both of them. We are amazed that the symbolic beings Los and Urizen and Vala and Tiriel and Enitharmon and the shades of Milton and Homer came from their ideal world to a poor London room, and no other incense greeted their coming than the smell of East Indian tea and eggs fried in lard. Isn’t this perhaps the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal spoke through the mouth of the humble?

So the mortal life of William Blake unfolded. The bark of his married life that had weighed anchor under the auspices of pity and gratitude sailed among the usual rocks for almost half a century. There were no children. In the early years of their life together there were discords, misunderstandings easy to understand if we keep in mind the great difference in culture and temperament that separated the young couple. It is even true, as I said before, that Blake almost followed Abraham’s example of giving to Hagar what Sarah refused. The vestal simplicity of his wife ill accorded with the temperament of Blake, for whom until the last days of his life exuberance was the only beauty. In a scene of tears and accusations that occurred between them, his wife fell in a faint, and injured herself in such a way that she was unable to have children. It is a sad irony to think that this poet of childish innocence, the only writer who has written songs for children with the soul of a child, and who has illuminated the phenomenon of gestation with a light so tender and mystical in his strange poem The Chrystal Cabinet, was destined never to see the sight of a real human child at his fireside. To him who had such great pity for everything that lives and suffers and rejoices in the illusions of the vegetable world, for the fly, the hare, the little chimney sweep, the robin, even for the flea, was denied any other fatherhood than the spiritual fatherhood, intensely natural though it is, that still lives in the lines of Proverbs:

He who mocks the Infant’s Faith

Shall be mock’d in Age & Death.

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the Infant’s faith

Triumphs over Hell & Death.

Over Blake’s fearless and immortal spirit, the rotting grave and the king of terrors had no power. In his old age, surrounded at last by friends and disciples and admirers, he began, like Cato the Elder, to study a foreign language. That language was the same in which tonight I try, by your leave, in so far as I can, to recall his spirit from the twilight of the universal mind, to detain it for a minute and question it. He began to study Italian in order to read the Divina Commedia in the original and to illustrate Dante’s vision with mystical drawings. Gaunt and weakened by the afflictions of illness, he would prop himself up on several pillows and spread a large drawing-book on his knees, forcing himself to trace the lines of his last vision on the white pages. It is the attitude in which he lives for us in Phillips’ drawing in the National Gallery in London. His brain did not weaken; his hand did not lose its old mastery. Death came to him in the form of a glacial cold, like the tremors of cholera, which possessed his limbs and put out the light of his intelligence in a moment, as the cold darkness that we call space covers and extinguishes the light of a star. He died singing in a strong, resounding voice that made the rafters ring. He was singing, as always, of the ideal world, of truth, the intellect and the divinity of the imagination. ‘My beloved, the songs that I sing are not mine,’ he said to his wife, ‘no, no, I tell you they are not mine.’

A full study of Blake’s personality should logically be divided into three phases—the pathological, the theosophical, and the artistic. The first, I believe, we can dismiss without many qualms. Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police. If we must accuse of madness every great genius who does not believe in the hurried materialism now in vogue with the happy fatuousness of a recent college graduate in the exact sciences, little remains for art and universal philosophy. Such a slaughter of the innocents would take in a large part of the peripatetic system, all of medieval metaphysics, a whole branch of the immense symmetrical edifice constructed by the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, Berkeley’s idealism, and (what a combination) the scepticism that ends with Hume. With regard to art, then, those very useful figures, the photographer and court stenographer, would get by all the more easily. The presentation of such an art and such a philosophy, flowering in the more or less distant future in the union of the two social forces felt more strongly in the market-place every day—women and the proletariat—will reconcile, if nothing else, every artist and philosopher to the shortness of life on earth.

To determine what position Blake must be assigned in the hierarchy of occidental mystics goes beyond the scope of this lecture. It seems to me that Blake is not a great mystic. The orient is the paternal home of mysticism, and now that linguistic studies have put us in the position to understand oriental thought (if that ideational energy that created the vast cycles of spiritual activity and passivity of which the Upanishads speak can be called thought) the mystical books of the occident shine, if at all, with a reflected light. Blake is probably less inspired by Indian mysticism than Paracelsus, Jacob Behmen, or Swedenborg; at any rate, he is less objectionable. In him, the visionary faculty is directly connected with the artistic faculty. One must be, in the first place, well-disposed to mysticism, and in the second place, endowed with the patience of a saint in order to get an idea of what Paracelsus and Behmen mean by their cosmic exposition of the involution and evolution of mercury, salt, sulphur, body, soul and spirit. Blake naturally belongs to another category, that of the artists, and in this category he occupies, in my opinion, a unique position, because he unites keenness of intellect with mystical feeling. This first quality is almost completely lacking in mystical art. St. John of the Cross, for example, one of the few idealist artists worthy to stand with Blake, never reveals either an innate sense of form or a coordinating force of the intellect in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, that cries and faints with such an ecstatic passion.

The explanation lies in the fact that Blake had two spiritual masters, very different from each other, yet alike in their formal precision—Michelangelo Buonarotti and Emanuel Swedenborg. The first of Blake’s mystical drawings that we have, Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion, has in one corner the words: Michelangelo pinxit. It is modelled after a sketch made by Michelangelo for his Last Judgment, and symbolizes the poetic imagination in the power of the sensual philosophy. Beneath the drawing Blake has written: ‘This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy.’ Michelangelo’s influence is felt in all of Blake’s work, and especially in some passages of prose collected in the fragments, in which he always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void.

The influence of Swedenborg, who died in exile in London when Blake was beginning to write and draw, is seen in the glorified humanity with which all of Blake’s work is stamped. Swedenborg, who frequented all of the invisible worlds for several years, sees in the image of man heaven itself and Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, who, according to him, are not three angels, but three angelic choirs. Eternity, which had appeared to the beloved disciple and to St. Augustine as a heavenly city, and to Alighieri as a heavenly rose, appeared to the Swedish mystic in the likeness of a heavenly man, animated in all his limbs by a fluid angelic life that forever leaves and re-enters, systole and diastole of love and wisdom. From this vision he developed that immense system of what he called correspondences which runs through his masterpiece Arcana Coelestia, the new Gospel which, according to him, will be the apparition in the heavens of the Son of Man foretold by St. Matthew.

Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom. To him, each moment shorter than a pulse-beat was equivalent in its duration to six thousand years, because in such an infinitely short instant the work of the poet is conceived and born. To him, all space larger than a red globule of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in a space smaller than a globule of blood we approach eternity, of which our vegetable world is but a shadow. Not with the eye, then, but beyond the eye, the soul and the supreme love must look, because the eye, which was born in the night while the soul was sleeping in rays of light, will also die in the night. Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, in his book De Divinis Nominibus, arrives at the throne of God by denying and overcoming every moral and metaphysical attribute, and falling into ecstasy and prostrating himself before the divine obscurity, before that unutterable immensity which precedes and encompasses the supreme knowledge in the eternal order. The mental process by which Blake arrives at the threshold of the infinite is a similar process. Flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, his soul is consumed by the rapidity of flight, and finds itself renewed and winged and immortal on the edge of the dark ocean of God. And although he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time, the sons of God with the sons of [The manuscript ends here.]

Università Popolare, Trieste, March 1912

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The Centenary of Charles Dickens

The influence which Dickens has exercised on the English language (second perhaps to that of Shakespeare alone) depends to a large extent on the popular character of his work. Examined from the standpoint of literary art or even from that of literary craftmanship he hardly deserves a place among the highest. The form he chose to write in, diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation, carefully relieved at regular intervals by the unfailing humorous note, is not the form of the novel which can carry the greatest conviction. Dickens has suffered not a little from too ardent admirers. Before his centenary there was perhaps a tendency to decry him somewhat. Towards the close of the Victorian period the peace of literary England was disturbed by the inroads of Russian and Scandinavian writers inspired by artistic ideals very different from those according to which the literary works (at least of the last century) of the chief writers of fiction had been shaped. A fierce and headstrong earnestness, a resoluteness to put before the reader the naked, nay, the flayed and bleeding reality, coupled with a rather juvenile desire to shock the prim middle-class sentimentalism of those bred to the Victorian way of thinking and writing—all these startling qualities combined to overthrow or, perhaps it would be better to say, to depose the standard of taste. By comparison with the stern realism of Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoiewsky [sic], Bjornson and other novelists of ultra-modern tendency the work of Dickens seemed to have paled, to have lost its freshness. Hence, as I have said, a reaction set in against him and so fickle is popular judgement in literary matters that he was attacked almost as unduly as he had been praised before. It is scarcely necessary to say that his proper place is between these two extremes of criticism; he is neither the great-hearted, great-brained, great-souled writer in whose honour his devotees burn so much incense nor yet the common purveyor of sentimental domestic drama and emotional claptrap as he appears to the jaundiced eye of a critic of the new school.

He has been nicknamed ‘the great Cockney’: no epithet could describe him more neatly nor more fully. Whenever he went far afield to America (as in American Notes) or to Italy (as in Pictures from Italy) his magic seems to have failed him, his hand seems to have lost her ancient cunning. Anything drearier, and therefore less Dickensian, than the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit it would be hard to imagine. If Dickens is to move you, you must not allow him to stray out of hearing of the chimes of Bow Bells. There he is on his native heath and there are his kingdom and his power. The life of London is the breath of his nostrils: he felt it as no writer since or before his time felt it. The colours, the familiar noises, the very odours of the great metropolis unite in his work as in a mighty symphony wherein humour and pathos, life and death, hope and despair, are inextricably interwoven. We can hardly appreciate this now because we stand too close to the scenery which he described and are too intimate with his amusing and moving characters. And yet it is certainly by his stories of the London of his own day that he must finally stand or fall. Even Barnaby Rudge, though the scene is laid chiefly in London and though it contains certain pages not unworthy of being placed beside the Journal of the Plague of Defoe (a writer, I may remark incidentally, of much greater importance than is commonly supposed), does not show us Dickens at his best. His realm is not the London of the time of Lord George Gordon but the London of the time of the Reform Bill. The provinces, indeed the English country of ‘meadows trim with daisies pied’, appear in his work but always as a background or as a preparation. With much greater truth and propriety could Dickens have applied to himself Lord Palmerston’s famous Civis Romanus sum. The noble lord, to tell the truth, succeeded on that memorable occasion (as Gladstone, unless my memory misleads me, took care to point out) in saying the opposite of what he had in mind to say. Wishing to say that he was an imperialist he said that he was a Little Englander. Dickens, in fact, is a Londoner in the best and fullest sense of the word. The church bells which rang over his dismal, squalid childhood, over his struggling youth, over his active and triumphant manhood, seem to have called him back whenever, with scrip and wallet in his hand, he intended to leave the city and to have bidden him turn again, like another Whittington, promising him (and the promise was to be amply fulfilled) a threefold greatness. For this reason he has a place for ever in the hearts of his fellow-citizens and also for this reason the legitimate affection of the great city for him has coloured to no slight extent the criticisms passed upon his work. To arrive at a just appreciation of Dickens, to estimate more accurately his place in what we may call the national gallery of English literature it would be well to read not only the eulogies of the London-born but also the opinion of representative writers of Scotland, or the Colonies or Ireland. It would be interesting to hear an appreciation of Dickens written, so to speak, at a proper focus from the original by writers of his own class and of a like (if somewhat lesser) stature, near enough to him in aim and in form and in speech to understand, far enough from him in spirit and in blood to criticize. One is curious to know how the great Cockney would fare at the hands of R.L.S. or of Mr Kipling or of Mr George Moore.

Pending such final judgment we can at least assign him a place among the great literary creators. The number and length of his novels prove incontestably that the writer is possessed by a kind of creative fury. As to the nature of the work so created we shall be safe if we say that Dickens is a great caricaturist and a great sentimentalist (using those terms in their strict sense and without any malice)— great caricaturist in the sense that Hogarth is a great caricaturist, a sentimentalist in the sense which Goldsmith would have given to that word. It is enough to point to a row of his personages to see that he has few (if any) equals in the art of presenting a character, fundamentally natural and probable with just one strange, wilful, wayward moral or physical deformity which upsets the equipoise and bears off the character from the world of tiresome reality and as far as the borderland of the fantastic. I should say perhaps the human fantastic, for what figures in literature are more human and warm-blooded than Micawber, Pumblechook, Simon Tappertit, Peggoty [sic], Sam Weller (to say nothing of his father), Sara Gamp, Joe Gargery? We do not think of these, and of a host of others in the well-crowded Dickensian gallery, as tragic or comic figures or even as national or local types as we think, for instance, of the characters of Shakespeare. We do not even see them through the eyes of their creator with that quaint spirit of nice and delicate observation with which we see the pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, noting (smiling and indulgent) the finest and most elusive points in dress or speech or gait. No, we see every character of Dickens in the light of one strongly marked or even exaggerated moral or physical quality—sleepiness, whimsical self-assertiveness, monstrous obesity, disorderly recklessness, reptile-like servility, intense round-eyed stupidity, tearful and absurd melancholy. And yet there are some simple people who complain that, though they like Dickens very much and have cried over the fate of Little Nell and over the death of Poor Joe [sic], the crossing-sweeper, and laughed over the adventurous caprices of Pickwick and his fellow-musketeers and hated (as all good people should) Uriah Heep and Fagin the Jew, yet he is after all a little exaggerated. To say this of him is really to give him what I think they call in that land of strange phrases, America, a billet for immortality. It is precisely this little exaggeration which rivets his work firmly to popular taste, which fixes his characters firmly in popular memory. It is precisely by this little exaggeration that Dickens has influenced the spoken language of the inhabitants of the British Empire as no other writer since Shakespeare’s time has influenced it and has won for himself a place deep down in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen, a honour which has been withheld from his great rival Thackeray. And yet is not Thackeray at his finest greater than Dickens? The question is an idle one. English taste has decreed to Dickens a sovereign position and Turk-like will have no brother near his throne.

James Joyce B. A.

April 1912

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The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance

The doctrine of evolution in the light of which our civilization basks teaches us that when we were small, we were not yet grown up. Accordingly, if we take the European Renaissance as a point of division, we must conclude that, until that age, humanity only had the soul and body of a child and it was only after this age that it developed physically and morally to the point of deserving the name of adulthood. It is a very drastic and somewhat unconvincing conclusion. In fact (were I not afraid of seeming to be a laudator temporis acti), I should like to oppose this conclusion with all my might. The much trumpeted progress of this century consists for the most part of a tangle of machines whose aim is simply to gather fast and furiously the scattered elements of profit and knowledge and to redistribute them to each member of the community who can afford a small fee. I agree that this social system can boast of great mechanical conquests, of great and beneficial discoveries. To be convinced of this, it is enough just to draw up a brief list of what we see on the street of a large modern city: the electric tram, telegraph wires, the humble and necessary postman, newspaper boys, large companies etc. But in the midst of this complex and many-sided civilization the human mind, almost terrorized by material greatness, becomes lost, denies itself and grows weaker. Should we then conclude that present-day materialism, which descends in a direct line from the Renaissance, atrophies the spiritual faculties of man, impedes his development, blunts his keenness? Let us see.

In the age of the Renaissance the human spirit struggled against scholastic absolutism, against that immense (and in many ways admirable) system of philosophy that has its fundamental origins in Aristotelian thought, cold, clear and imperturbable, while its summit stretched upwards towards the vague and mysterious light of Christian ideology. But if the human spirit struggled against this system, it was not because the system in itself was alien to him. The yoke was sweet and light: but it was a yoke. So when the great rebels of the Renaissance proclaimed the Good News to the peoples of Europe, that there was no more tyranny, that human sadness and suffering had dissolved like mist at sunrise, that man was no longer a prisoner, perhaps the human spirit felt the fascination of the unknown, heard the voice of the visual world tangible, inconstant, where one lives and dies, sins and repents, and, abandoning the cloistered peace in which it had been languishing, embraced the new gospel. It abandoned its peace, its true abode because it had tired of it, just as God, tired (if you will permit a rather irreverent term) of his perfections, called forth the creation out of nothing, just as woman, tired of the peace and quiet that were wasting away her heart, turned her gaze towards the life of temptation. Giordano Bruno himself says that all power, whether in nature or the spirit, must create an opposing power without which man cannot fulfil himself, and he adds that in every such separation there is a tendency towards a reunion. The dualism of the great Nolan faithfully reflects the phenomenon of the Renaissance. And if it seems a little arbitrary to quote a witness against himself and to quote the very words of an innovator so as to condemn (or at least to judge) the work of which he was the author, I respond that I am doing no more than following the example of Bruno himself who, in the course of his long, persistent and quibbling self-defence, turned the weapons of the prosecution against his accuser.

It would be easy to fill these pages with the names of the great writers whom the wave of the Renaissance lifted to the clouds (or thereabouts), easy to praise the greatness of their works which, in any case, no one is calling into doubt, and to end with a ritual prayer: and it might be an act of cowardice since reciting a litany is not philosophical inquiry. The crux of the question lies elsewhere. It must be seen what is really meant by the Renaissance as far as literature is concerned, and towards what end, happy or tragic, it leads us. The Renaissance, to put it briefly, has placed the journalist in the monk’s chair: in other words, it has deposed a sharp, limited and formal mind in order to hand the sceptre over to a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging (as the saying goes in theatre journals), a mentality that is restless and somewhat amorphous. Shakespeare and Lope de Vega are to a certain extent responsible for modern cinematography. Untiring creative power, heated, strong passion, the intense desire to see and feel, unfettered and prolix curiosity have, after three centuries, degenerated into frenetic sensationalism. Indeed, one might say of modern man that he has an epidermis rather than a soul. The sensory power of his organism has developed enormously, but it has developed to the detriment of his spiritual faculty. We lack moral sense and perhaps also strength of imagination. The most characteristic literary works that we possess are simply amoral: The Crisis by Marco Praga, Pelléas et Mélisande by Maeterlinck, Crainquebille by Anatole France, and Smoke by Turgenev. Perhaps I have taken these somewhat at random. No matter: they will do to document the thesis which I uphold. A great modern artist who wishes to set the sentiment of love to music will reproduce, as far as his art allows him to, every pulsation, every tremor, the lightest shiver, the lightest sigh; the chords interweave and wage a secret war among themselves: one loves while acting cruelly, one suffers when and as much as one rejoices, anger and doubt flash in the eyes of lovers whose bodies are the one flesh. Put Tristan and Isolde beside the Inferno and you will realize how the poet’s hate follows its path from abyss to abyss in the wake of an increasingly intense idea, and the more intensely that the poet is consumed in the fire of the idea of hate, the fiercer becomes the art by which the artist communicates his passion to us. One is the art of circumstance, the other is ideational. In the high Middle Ages, the compiler of an atlas would not lose his composure when he found himself at a loss. He would write over the unknown area the words: Hic sunt leones. The idea of solitude, the terror of strange beasts, the unknown were enough for him. Our culture has an entirely different goal: we are avid for details. For this reason our literary jargon speaks of nothing else than local colour, atmosphere, atavism: whence the restless search for what is new and strange, the accumulation of details that have been observed or read, the parading of common culture.

In strict terms the Renaissance should mean a rebirth after a death, an unexpected fecundity like that of Sarah after a long period of sterility. In fact, the Renaissance came about when art was dying of formal perfection, and thought was losing itself in vain subtleties. A poem would be reduced to an algebraic problem, put forth and resolved into human symbols in accordance with the rules. A philosopher was a learned sophist who, for all that he preached the word of Jesus to the crowd, would, like Bellarmine or Giovanni Mariana, strive to construct a moral defence of tyrannicide.

The Renaissance arrived like a hurricane in the midst of all this stagnation, and throughout Europe a tumult of voices arose, and, although the singers no longer exist, their works may be heard just as the shells of the sea in which, if we put them up to our ear, we can hear the voice of the sea reverberating.

Listening to it, it sounds like a lament: or at least, so our spirit interprets it. Strange indeed! All modern conquest, of the air, the land, the sea, disease, ignorance, melts, so to speak, in the crucible of the mind and is transformed into a little drop of water, into a tear. If the Renaissance did nothing else, it did much in creating within ourselves and our art a sense of pity for every being that lives and hopes and dies and deludes itself. In this at least we excel the ancients: in this the popular journalist is greater than the theologian.

James Joyce

April 1912

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The Shade of Parnell

By passing the bill for parliamentary autonomy on its second reading, the House of Commons has resolved the Irish question, which, like the hen of Mugello, looks newborn, though it is a hundred years old. The century which began with the transaction of buying and selling the Dublin parliament is now closing with a triangular pact between England, Ireland, and the United States. It was graced with six Irish revolutionary movements which, by the use of dynamite, rhetoric, the boycott, obstructionism, armed revolt, and political assassination, have succeeded in keeping awake the slow and senile conscience of English Liberalism.

The present law was conceived, in the full maturity of time, under the double pressure of the Nationalist party at Westminster which has been jumbling up the workings of the British legislative body for half a century, and the Irish party across the Atlantic, which is blocking the greatly desired Anglo-American alliance. Conceived and moulded with masterful cunning and art, the law forms a worthy capstone to the tradition handed down to posterity by that pluterperfect Liberal statesman, William Gladstone. It suffices to say that, while it reduces the strong phalanx of 103 Irish members actually represented at Westminster to a band of 40 representatives, it pushes these into the arms of the little Labour party; and from this incestuous embrace there will probably be born a coalition which will operate from the left, that is to say from the Liberal party’s point of operations in its campaign against Conservatism to the extreme left.

Into its tangle of financial qualifications, there is no chance of penetrating. At any rate, the Irish government about to be born will have to cover a deficit ably created by the British treasury, either by manipulation of local and imperial taxes, or by a reduction of its administrative expenses, or by an increase in direct taxes, in any case provoking the disillusioned hostility of the middle and lower classes. The Irish separatist party would like to reject this Greek gift, which makes the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Dublin a titular minister fully responsible to the taxpayers and at the same time dependent on the British cabinet, one who has the power to tax without being able to control the collections of his department—a transmitter which cannot work unless the dynamo at London sends a current of the necessary voltage.

It doesn’t matter—there is an appearance of autonomy. At the recent national assembly held at Dublin, the recriminations and protests of the Nationalists who belong to the bitterly sceptical school of John Mitchel did not disturb the popular rejoicing very much. The representatives, grown old in the constitutional struggle and weakened by so many years of deluded hopes, hailed in their speeches the end of a long era of misunderstanding. A young orator, Gladstone’s nephew, invoked the name of his uncle amid the frenzied acclamation of the crowd, and hailed the prosperity of the new nation. Within two years at the most, with or without the consent of the House of Lords, the doors of the old Irish parliament will be reopened; and Ireland, released from its century-old prison, will walk forth toward the palace like a new bride, escorted by musicians and ritual bridal torches. A grand-nephew of Gladstone, if there is one, will scatter flowers beneath the feet of the sovereign; but there will be a ghost at the banquet—the shade of Charles Parnell.

* * * *

His most recent critic has tried to minimize the greatness of this strange spirit by pointing out the different sources of his agile parliamentary tactics. But even if we grant the historical critic that obstructionism was invented by Biggar and Ronayne, that the doctrine of the independence of the Irish party was launched by Gavan Duffy, that the Agrarian League was the creation of Michael Davitt, these concessions only make more conspicuous the extraordinary personality of a leader who, without forensic gifts or any original political talent, forced the greatest English politicians to carry out his orders; and, like another Moses, led a turbulent and unstable people from the house of shame to the verge of the Promised Land.

The influence exerted on the Irish people by Parnell defies critical analysis. He had a speech defect and a delicate physique; he was ignorant of the history of his native land; his short and fragmentary speeches lacked eloquence, poetry, and humour; his cold and formal bearing separated him from his own colleagues; he was a Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and, as a crowning disgrace, he spoke with a distinct English accent. He would often come to meetings an hour or an hour and a half late without apologizing. He would neglect his correspondence for weeks on end. The applause and anger of the crowd, the abuse and praise of the press, the denunciations and defence of the British ministers never disturbed the melancholy serenity of his character. It is even said that he did not know by sight many of those who sat with him on the Irish benches. When the Irish people presented him with a national gratuity of 40,000 pounds sterling in 1887, he put the cheque into his billfold, and in the speech which he delivered to the immense gathering made not the slightest reference to the gift which he had received.

When he was shown the copy of The Times containing the famous autograph letter which would have proved his implication in the barbarous assassination in Phoenix Park, he put his finger on one letter in the handwriting and said simply, ‘I have not made an ‘s’ that way since ’78.’ Later, when the inquiries of the Royal Commission revealed the conspiracy which had been formed against him and the perjurer and forger Pigott blew out his brains in a Madrid hotel, the House of Commons, without regard to party, greeted Parnell’s entrance with an ovation that remains without precedent in the annals of the British Parliament. Is it necessary to say that Parnell made no response to the ovation with a smile or a bow or a gesture, but merely passed to his place beyond the aisle and sat down? Gladstone was probably thinking of this incident when he called the Irish leader an intellectual phenomenon.

Nothing more unusual can be imagined than the appearance of this intellectual phenomenon in the midst of the moral suffocation of Westminster. Now, looking back at the scene of the drama and hearing again the speeches that shook the minds of his listeners, it is useless to deny that all the eloquence and all those triumphs of strategy begin to smell stale. But time is kinder to the ‘uncrowned king’ than to the jester and the phrase-maker. The light of his sovereign bearing, mild and proud, silent and disconsolate, makes Disraeli look like a diplomatic opportunist who dines when he can at rich men’s houses, and Gladstone like an imposing major domo who has gone to night school. How lightly Disraeli’s wit and Gladstone’s culture weigh in the balance today. Today how flimsy seem the studied gibes, the greasy locks, and the stupid novels of Disraeli; and the high-sounding periods, the Homeric studies, the speeches on Artemis and on marmalade of Gladstone.

Although Parnell’s strategy was to make use of any English party, Liberal or Conservative, at his pleasure, a nexus of circumstances involved him in the Liberal movement. Gladstonian liberalism was an inconstant algebraic symbol whose coefficient was the movement’s political pressure and whose index was his personal profit. While he temporized in internal politics, contradicting and justifying himself in turn, he always maintained (as much as he was capable of it) a sincere admiration for liberty in the house of others. It is necessary to keep in mind this elastic quality of Gladstone’s liberalism in order to understand the nature and magnitude of Parnell’s task.

To put it in few words, Gladstone was a self-seeking politician. He raged at the restless iniquity of O’Connell in 1835, but he was the English legislator who proclaimed the moral and economic necessity for Irish autonomy. He thundered against the admission of Jews to public office, but he was the minister who, for the first time in English history, raised a Jew to the peerage. He spoke fiercely against the Boers who rebelled in 1881, but after the defeat of Majuba he concluded a treaty with Transvaal which the English themselves called a cowardly surrender. In his first parliamentary speech he warmly defended against Earl Grey’s accusation of cruelty his own father, a rich slave owner in Demerara who had made two million francs from the sale of human flesh, while in his last letter to another ‘childhood friend’, the Duke of Westminster, he invoked all the lightning available on the head of the great assassin of Constantinople.

Parnell, convinced that such liberalism would yield only to force, united behind him every element of Irish life and began to march, treading on the verge of insurrection. Just six years after his entrance into Westminster he held in his hands the fate of the government. He was imprisoned, but in his cell at Kilmainham he concluded a pact with the ministers who had imprisoned him. When the attempt at blackmail failed with Pigott’s confession and suicide, the Liberal government offered him a portfolio. Parnell not only refused it, he ordered all his followers as well to refuse ministerial duties, and forbade the municipalities and public corporations in Ireland to receive officially any member of the British royal house until the English government should restore autonomy to Ireland. The Liberals had to accept these humiliating conditions, and in 1886 Gladstone read the first Home Rule Bill at Westminster.

Parnell’s fall came in the midst of these events like lightning from a clear sky. He fell hopelessly in love with a married woman, and when her husband, Captain O’Shea, asked for a divorce, the ministers Gladstone and Morley openly refused to legislate in favour of Ireland if the sinner remained as head of the Nationalist Party. Parnell did not appear at the hearings to defend himself. He denied the right of a minister to exercise a veto over the political affairs of Ireland, and refused to resign.

He was deposed in obedience to Gladstone’s orders. Of his 83 representatives only 8 remained faithful to him. The high and low clergy entered the lists to finish him off. The Irish press emptied on him and the woman he loved the vials of their envy. The citizens of Castlecomer threw quicklime in his eyes. He went from county to county, from city to city, ‘like a hunted deer’, a spectral figure with the signs of death on his forehead. Within a year he died of a broken heart at the age of 45.

The ghost of the ‘uncrowned king’ will weigh on the hearts of those who remember him when the new Ireland in the near future enters into the palace ‘fimbriis aureis circumamicta varietatibus’; but it will not be a vindictive ghost. The melancholy which invaded his mind was perhaps the profound conviction that, in his hour of need, one of the disciples who dipped his hand in the same bowl with him would betray him. That he fought to the very end with this desolate certainty in mind is his greatest claim to nobility.

In his final desperate appeal to his countrymen, he begged them not to throw him as a sop to the English wolves howling around them. It redounds to their honour that they did not fail this appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 16 May 1912

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The City of the Tribes

Italian Echoes in an Irish Port.

Galway, August.

The lazy Dubliner, who travels little and knows his own country only by hearsay, believes that the inhabitants of Galway are descendants of Spanish stock, and that you can’t go four steps in the dark streets of the City of the Tribes without meeting the true Spanish type, with olive complexion and raven hair. The Dubliner is both right and wrong. Today in Galway the black eyes are scarce enough, and the raven hair, too, since a Titian red predominates for the most part. The old Spanish houses are falling to ruins, and clumps of weeds grow in the protruding bay windows. Outside the city walls rise the suburbs—new, gay, and heedless of the past, but you have only to close your eyes to this bothersome modernity for a moment to see in the twilight of history the ‘Spanish city’. It lies scattered among innumerable little islands, cut by rivulets, cataracts, conduits, and canals, at the lower end of a vast gulf of the Atlantic Ocean in which the entire British navy could anchor. At the mouth of the gulf, the three Aran islands, lying on the grey waters like a sleeping whale, form a natural breakwater and take the force of the Atlantic waves. The little lighthouse of the southern island casts a weak ray of light toward the west, the last greeting of the old world to the new, and calls stubbornly but in vain to the foreign merchant, who, for many years, has not come near these parts.

* * * *

And yet, in the Middle Ages these waters were cut by thousands of foreign ships. The signs at the corners of the narrow streets record the city’s connection with Latin Europe—Madeira Street, Merchant Street, Spaniards Walk, Madeira Island, Lombard Street, Velasquez de Palmeira Boulevard. Oliver Cromwell’s correspondence shows that the port of Galway was the second most important harbour in the United Kingdom, and the prime market in the entire Kingdom for the Spanish and Italian trade. In the first decade of the fourteenth century, a Florentine merchant, Andrea Gerardo, was tax collector of the government, and on the list of officials of the seventeenth century we find the name of Giovanni Fante. The city itself has as guardian Saint Nicholas of Bari, patron of sailors and babies, and the so-called ‘seal of the college’ bears his likeness. The papal envoy, Cardinal Rinuccini, came to Galway during the trial of the martyr king, and placed the city under the papal flag. The clergy and religious orders refused to recognize his authority, so the fiery Cardinal broke the bell in the Church of the Carmelites, and posted two priests of his own following at the church door to prevent the entrance of the faithful. The parish house of Saint Nicholas still preserves a record of another Italian prelate of the Middle Ages—an autograph letter of the notorious Borgia. In the same place there is a curious document, left by an Italian traveller of the sixteenth century, in which the writer says that, although he had travelled throughout the world, he had never seen in a single glance what he saw in Galway—a priest elevating the Host, a pack chasing a deer, a ship entering the harbour under full sail, and a salmon being killed with a spear.

Almost all the wine imported into the United Kingdom from Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, and Italy passed through this port, the annual import amounting to 1500 ‘tuns’, that is to say, almost two million litres. This trade was so important that the government of Holland proposed to buy a large tract of land near the city and pay for it by covering the ground with pieces of silver. Afraid of the foreign competition, the Galway merchants had their envoy reply that they would accept if the silver pieces would be placed end-up on the ground. The answer of the Dutch to this most kind counter-offer has not yet arrived.

* * * *

For many centuries, the entire municipal and church administration was in the hands of the descendants of the fourteen tribes, whose names are recorded in four limping verses. The strangest and most interesting historical document in the city archives is the map of the city made for the Duke of Lorraine in the seventeenth century, when His Highness wished to be assured of the city’s greatness on the occasion of a loan requested of him by his English confrère, the happy monarch. The map, full of symbolic expressions and engravings, was the work of Henry Joyce, Dean of the Canons of the city. All the margins of the parchment are heavy with the heraldic arms of the tribes, and the map itself is little more than a topographic symphony on the theme of the number of the tribes. Thus, the map maker enumerates and depicts fourteen bastions, fourteen towers on the wall, fourteen principal streets, fourteen narrow streets, and then, sliding down into a minor mode, six gardens, six altars for the procession of Corpus Domini, six markets, and six other wonders. Among these last, in fact, the last of the last, the worthy Dean enumerates ‘the old pigeon house located in the southern part of the city’.

* * * *

Of all the tribes, the most famous was that of the Lynches. During the century and a half that runs from the founding of the city to the devastating invasions of the Cromwellian soldiery, a member of this family filled the post of chief magistrate a good eighty-three times. The most tragic event in the city’s history was the expiation of a crime committed in 1493 by the young Walter Lynch, the only son of the chief magistrate James Lynch Fitz-Stephen. The magistrate, a rich wine merchant, took a voyage that year to Spain, where he was the guest of a Spanish friend of his, a certain Gomez. This man’s son, listening every night to the tales of the traveller, was very much attracted to far-away Ireland, and asked his father’s permission to accompany their guest when he returned to his native land. The father hesitated. Times were dangerous, and travellers were accustomed to make out their wills before setting out for shores known or unknown. But the magistrate Lynch guaranteed the safety of the youth, and they left together.

When they arrived in Galway, the young Spaniard became the friend of the magistrate’s son, Walter, a wayward young man of impetuous nature, who was paying court to Agnes Blake, the daughter of another nobleman of the city. Very soon, love arose between Agnes and the foreigner, and one night when Gomez was leaving the Blake house, Walter Lynch, who was waiting in ambush, stuck a knife in his back, and then, in a blind rage, dragged the body along the street and threw it into a ditch.

The crime was discovered and young Walter was arrested and tried. His father, chief magistrate of the city, was the judge. Deaf to the call of blood, and mindful only of the honour of the city and of his own pledged word, he condemned the assassin to death. In vain his friends tried to dissuade him. The people, full of pity for the unhappy youth, besieged the judge’s home, the dark and gloomy castle that still shadows the main street. But the magistrate was inexorable, even when the hangman refused to execute the sentence. Father and son spent the night before the execution together in the prison cell, praying until dawn. When the hour of execution arrived, father and son appeared at a window of the house. They kissed and bade each other farewell, then the father himself hanged his son from the window beam before the eyes of the horrified crowd.

The old Spanish houses are falling to ruin. The castles of the tribes are demolished. Clumps of weeds grow in the windows and the open courtyards. Over the gateways, the noble coats of arms, cut in the darkened rock, are fading—the wolf of the Campidoglio with the two twins, the two-headed eagle of the Hapsburgs, the black bull of the Darcys, descendants of Charlemagne. In the city of Galway, writes an old chronicler, reign the passions of pride and lust.

* * * *

The evening is quiet and grey. From the distance, beyond the waterfall, comes a murmur. It sounds like the hum of bees around a hive. It comes closer. Six young men appear, playing bagpipes, at the head of a band of people. They pass, proud and warlike, with heads uncovered, playing a vague and strange music. In the uncertain light you can hardly distinguish the green plaids hanging from the right shoulder and the saffron-coloured kilts. They enter the street of the Convent of Offerings, and, as the vague music spreads in the twilight, at the windows of the convent appear, one by one, the white veils of the nuns.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 11 August 1912

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The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran

England’s Safety Valve in Case of War.

Galway, 2 September

The little ship carrying a small load of travellers moves away from the quay under the watchful eyes of the Scottish agent absorbed in a private fantasy of calculation. It leaves the little port of Galway and enters open water, leaving behind on its right the village of Claddagh, a cluster of huts outside the walls of the city. A cluster of huts, and yet a kingdom. Up until a few years ago the village elected its own king, had its own mode of dress, passed its own laws, and lived to itself. The wedding rings of the inhabitants are still decorated with the king’s crest: two joined hands supporting a crowned heart.

We set out for Aranmor, the holy island that sleeps like a great shark on the grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which the islanders call the Old Sea. Beneath the waters of this bay and along its coast lie the wrecks of a squadron of the unfortunate Spanish Armada. After their defeat in the English Channel, the ships set sail for the North, where the storms and the waves scattered them. The citizens of Galway, remembering the long friendship between Spain and Ireland, hid the fugitives from the vengeance of the English garrison and gave the shipwrecked a decent burial, wrapping their bodies in white linen cloth.

The waters have repented. Every year on the day before the Feast of the Assumption, when the herring fishing begins, the waters of the bay are blessed. A flotilla of fishing boats departs from Claddagh preceded by a flagship, on whose deck stands a Dominican friar. When they reach an appropriate place the flotilla stops, the fishermen kneel down and uncover themselves, and the friar, muttering prayers of exorcism, shakes his aspergill on the sea, and divides the dark air in the form of a cross.

A border of white sand on the right indicates the place where the new transatlantic port is, perhaps, destined to rise. My companion spreads out a large map on which the projected lines curve, ramify, and cross each other from Galway to the great Canadian ports. The voyage from Europe to America will take less than three days, according to the figures. From Galway, the last port in Europe, to Saint John, Newfoundland, a steamship will take two days and sixteen hours, and from Galway to Halifax, the first port in Canada, three days and ten hours. The text of the booklet attached to the map bristles with figures, estimates of cost, and oceanographic pictures. The writer makes a warm appeal to the British admiralty, to the railway societies, to the Chambers of Commerce, to the Irish population. The new port would be a safety valve for England in case of war. From Canada, the granary and warehouse of the United Kingdom, great cargos of grain would enter the Irish port, thus avoiding the dangers of navigation in Saint George’s Channel and the enemy fleets. In time of peace, the new line would be the shortest way between one continent and the other. A large part of the goods and passengers which are now landed at Liverpool would in the future land at Galway, proceeding directly to London, via Dublin and Holyhead. The old decadent city would rise again. From the new world, wealth and vital energy would run through this new artery of an Ireland drained of blood. Again, after about ten centuries, the mirage which blinded the poor fisherman of Aran, follower and emulator of St. Brendan, appears in the distance, vague and tremulous on the mirror of the ocean.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America. A thousand years before the Genoese navigator was derided at Salamanca, Saint Brendan weighed anchor for the unknown world from the bare shore which our ship is approaching; and, after crossing the ocean, landed on the coast of Florida. The island at that time was wooded and fertile. At the edge of the woods he found the hermitage of Irish monks which had been established in the fourth century after Christ by Enda, a saint of royal blood. From this hermitage came Finnian, later Bishop of Lucca. Here lived and dreamed the visionary Saint Fursa, described in the hagiographic calendar of Ireland as the precursor of Dante Alighieri. A medieval copy of the Visions of Fursa depicts the voyage of the saint from hell to heaven, from the gloomy valley of the four fires among the bands of devils up through the universe to the divine light reflected from innumerable angels’ wings. This vision would have served as a model for the poet of the Divine Comedy, who, like Columbus, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to visit and describe the three regions of the soul.

* * * *

On the shore of the bay fragile little boats of stretched canvas are drawn up to dry. Four islanders come nimbly down to the sea over rocks covered with purple and rust-coloured seaweed, like that seen in the shops of herb-sellers in Galway. The fisherman of Aran has sure feet. He wears a rough sandal of untanned cowhide, without heels, open at the arch, and tied with rawhide laces. He dresses in wool as thick as felt and wears a big black hat with a wide brim.

We stop in one of the steep little streets, uncertain. An islander, who speaks an English all his own, says good morning, adding that it has been a horrible summer, praise be to God. The phrase, which at first seems one of the usual Irish blunders, rather comes from the innermost depths of human resignation. The man who said it bears a princely name, that of the O’Flaherties, a name which the young Oscar Wilde proudly had printed on the title page of his first book. But time and the wind have razed to the ground the bygone civilization to which he belongs—the sacred druids of his island, the territory ruled by his ancestors, the language, and perhaps even the name, of that hermit of Aran who was called the dove of the church. Around the stunted shrubs which grow on the hills of the island his imagination has woven legends and tales which reveal the depths of his psyche. And under his apparent simplicity he retains a slight trace of scepticism, and of humour. He looks away when he has spoken and lets the eager enthusiast jot down in his notebook the astounding fact that yonder hawthorn tree was the little tree from which Joseph of Arimathea cut his walking stick.

An old lady comes toward us and invites us to enter her house. She places on the table an enormous tea pot, a small loaf of bread, and some salted butter. The islander, who is her son, sits near the fireplace and answers the questions of my companion in an embarrassed and humble manner. He doesn’t know how old he is, but he says that he will soon be old. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t taken a wife, perhaps because there are no women for him. My companion goes on to ask why there are no women for him, and the islander, removing his hat from his head, sinks his face in the soft wool, confused and smiling. Aran, it is said, is the strangest place in the world. A poor place, but no matter how poor it is, when my companion tries to pay, the old lady rejects the money almost angrily and asks us if we are trying to dishonour her house.

* * * *

A fine and steady drizzle falls from the grey clouds. The rainy mist comes in from the West, while the little ship calls desperately for the laggards. The island disappears little by little, wrapped in a smoky veil. Three Danish sailors sitting stationary on the ridge of the slope also disappear. They were out in the ocean for the summer fishing and made a stop at Aran. Silent and melancholy, they seem to be thinking of the Danish hordes who burned the city of Galway in the eighth century, of the Irish lands which are included in the dowries of the girls of Denmark, according to legend, and which they dream of reconquering. On the islands and on the sea falls the rain. It rains as it can rain only in Ireland. Under the forecastle, where a girl is noisily making love to one of the crew, holding him on her knees, we again open the map. In the twilight the names of the ports cannot be distinguished, but the line that leaves Galway and ramifies and spreads out recalls the motto placed near the crest of his native city by a mystic and perhaps even prophetic head of a monastery:

Quasi lilium germinans germinabit,

et quasi terebinthus extendans ramos suos.

James Joyce

Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 5 September 1912

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Politics and Cattle Disease

Though the country has not been deceived by the pitiable endeavours of Unionists and factionists to make political capital out of the national calamity involved in the outbreak of the foot and mouth disease in a few Irish districts, Mr. Dillon renders a valuable service by pointing out the injury done by the dishonest clamour in which the mischief-makers have indulged. They have, he points out, played into the hands of English Protectionists like Mr. Henry Chaplin and Mr. Bathurst, whose object is not the security of English herds, but the prolonged exclusion of Irish cattle from the English markets. By enabling such enemies of the Irish farmer to raise the cry that any relaxation of the restrictions that may be proposed is due, not to Mr. Runciman’s unbiased opinion that the conditions justify the relaxation, but to ‘Irish dictation’, they have simply raised fresh obstructions to the fair treatment of the Irish stock-owners and traders’ claims. All these stupid threats and calls upon the Irish Party to ‘turn out the Government’ have been ammunition to the English exclusionists. We have seen how the Globe has turned them to account. It will have been noticed, too, that none of these Unionist fire-eaters have appealed to their own Party for assistance in the matter. According to the London correspondent of the Irish Times, ‘Irish members of all shades of opinion are asking for the removal of restrictions, but without success.’ This will be news to most people. Hitherto Irish members of the Unionist shade of opinion have been only remarkable for their silence on the matter. Not one of the Irish Unionist Party attended the deputation to Mr. Runciman. Mr. Chaplin and Mr. Bathurst have been allowed to rampage without a word of protest from an Irish Unionist member. Yet the Unionist landlords, land agents, and eleven-months’ men, and the defeated factionist candidates who have been joining in their cry, have not addressed a word of protest or appeal to the Irish Unionist leaders to put a snaffle on Mr. Chaplin. The simple fact is sufficient to explain the motives and purpose of all the Unionist talk upon the matter.

Mr. Dillon points out what would be the certain consequence of action of the kind recommended to the Irish Party. Not only would it involve the sacrifice of the Home Rule Bill and the Home Rule movement, but it would defeat the very object alleged by these advisers. After such an incident no British Minister dare open the English ports for months, because his motives would be instantly challenged. Equally bad and dangerous has been the talk about the unimportance of the disease, and the advice given by some foolish people to the farmers to conceal it. Fortunately the Irish farmers have not listened to the advice. They have proved their commonsense by reporting every suspicious case. Their anxiety to assist the public authorities has been proved by the fact that a majority of the cases so reported have proved to be cases of some other ailment. It is obvious that only by such action can the confidence of the trading public be so restored that the English Minister will be free to act upon the facts disclosed. The talk that the disease is only ‘like measles in children and that all the cattle should be allowed to get it’, like the foolish advice to farmers to conceal cases of the disease, is probably the explanation of the extraordinary official suggestion that the healthy areas should be denied their rights ‘until the situation disclose itself further’. The situation is fully disclosed, because the Irish stock-owners have been perfectly above-board in the matter. They ought not to be held responsible for the stupidities of irresponsible speakers like those whom we have quoted. But a moment’s reflection will convince the stock-owners that stupid people of the kind are worth as much as ten outbreaks of the disease to persons like the Right Hon. Henry Chaplin and Mr. Charles Bathurst.

We do not mean to urge that the Irish farmers and traders should relax their efforts or cease their agitation. Quite the contrary. The situation is critical, and they have sound and solid reasons for demanding the reopening of the ports to healthy Irish stock. These sound and solid reasons are only weakened by menaces that defeat themselves, and by declarations that allow slanderers to say that the disease is being concealed in Ireland. The stock-owners can point to the fact that since the original outbreak, when the existence of the disease could scarcely have been suspected, not a single prosecution for concealment has taken place, though the Constabulary and the officials of the Department are actively watching for symptoms of the disease all over the country. A fact of that kind is the most complete justification of the demand for equality of treatment with the English healthy areas, which the Irish stock-owners and traders are pressing. In putting forward that demand they have the full and hearty co-operation of the Irish Party and its Leader. The influence of the Party will be exercised no less strongly, because it is being used in a legitimate and reasonable way, and in a manner that will leave the exclusionists with no ground for slander. The Irish Department is, we have the strongest grounds for believing, no less active. Mr. Russell has not concealed his endorsement of the claim of the Irish stock-owners. On the contrary, he has taken the strong step of publicly proclaiming his agreement. His statement is the best justification for a vigorous agitation against the unreasonable prolongation of the embargo. It is essential to maintain that agitation, but it is no less essential to discountenance the use of silly and mischievous language, which is the only justification the intimidators of Mr. Runciman can plead for their attitude.

Freeman’s Journal, 10 September 1912

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Programme Notes for the English Players

The Twelve Pound Look
By J. M. Barrie

One Sims is about to be knighted: possibly, as the name would suggest, for having patented a hairgrower. He is discovered rehearsing his part with his wife whose portrait we see on the wall, painted by a Royal Academician, also knighted, presumably for having painted the label for the hairgrower. A typist is announced. This typist is his runaway wife of some fourteen years before. From their conversation we learn that she left him not for another man but to work out her salvation by typewriting. She had saved twelve pounds and bought a typewriter. The twelve pound look, she says, is that look of independence in a wife’s eye which every husband should beware of. The new knight’s new wife, ‘noted for her wit’—chary of it, too—seems likely to acquire the look if given time. Typewriters, however, are rather scarce at present.

Riders to the Sea
By John M. Synge

Synge’s first play, written in Paris in 1902 out of his memories of Aran. The play shows a mother and her dead son, her last, the anagke being the inexorable sea which claims all her sons, Seumas and Patch and Stephen and Shaun. Whether a brief tragedy be possible or not (a point on which Aristotle had some doubts) the ear and the heart mislead one gravely if this brief scene from ‘poor Aran’ be not the work of a tragic poet.

The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
By G. B. Shaw Mr. Shaw

here presents three orthodox figures—a virgin queen, a Shakespeare sober at midnight and a free giver of gold and the dark-haired maid of honour, Mary Fitton, discovered in the eighties by Thomas Tyler and Mr. Harris. Shakespeare comes to Whitehall to meet her and learns from a well-languaged beefeater that Mr. W. H. has forestalled him. The poet vents his spleen on the first woman who passes. It is the queen and she seems not loth to be accosted. She orders the maid of honour out of the way. When Shakespeare, however, begs her to endow his theatre she refers him with fine cruelty to her lord treasurer and leaves him. The most regicide of playwrights prays God to save her and goes home weighing against a lightened purse, love’s treason, an old queen’s leer and the evil eye of a government official, a horror still to come.

The Heather Field
By Edward Martyn

Edward Martyn, the author of the ‘Heather Field’, has in company with W. B. Yeats inaugurated the Irish National Theatre. He is an accomplished musician and man of letters. As a dramatist he follows the school of Ibsen and therefore occupies a unique position in Ireland, as the dramatists writing for the National Theatre have chiefly devoted their energies to peasant drama. The plot of the ‘Heather Field’, the best known of Martyn’s plays, is as follows:

Carden Tyrrell has made an unhappy marriage early in his youth and is now living on bad terms with his wife, Grace. He is an idealist who has never cared for the ordinary routine of life. Forced to settle down on his estate and finding most of his neighbours uncongenial, he has idealized farming and is engaged at the opening of the play in trying to bring into cultivation a vast tract of heather land. To carry on this work he has had to borrow large sums of money. His friend Barry Ussher and his brother Miles warn him of the danger he is running, but in vain. They urge that he is likely to get little profit from his work, for Ussher knows that it is very hard to reclaim lands on which heather grows, for the wild heather may break out upon them soon again. Grace learns that Carden intends borrowing further large sums of money and fears that he will ruin himself. Carden has admitted to his brother Miles that he hears mysterious voices in the air and that every day life is becoming more and more unreal to him. Convinced that he has lost his reason, Grace confides to her friend, Lady Shrule, that she has arranged for two doctors to come and see Carden; she hopes to have him certified as a lunatic and put under restraint. Lady Shrule sympathizes, but neither she nor her husband will do anything to help. The doctors come on an excuse of examining Kit, Carden’s son, but the plan is defeated by Barry Ussher who warns them of the danger they are running by falling in with Grace’s scheme. However matters go from bad to worse; Carden quarrels with his tenants, thus losing further money and having to have police protection. He is unable to pay the interest on the sums he has borrowed and is threatened with financial ruin. At this crisis Kit comes back from a ride and shows his father some wild heather buds which he has found in the heather field. Carden loses his reason and memory; his mind goes back to happy days before his marriage. As Grace tried to domesticate him, so he has tried to domesticate the heather field, and in each case the old wild nature avenges itself.

1918-19

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Letter on Pound

8 Avenue Charles Picquet Paris, France March 13, 1925

Dear Mr. Walsh:

I am glad to hear that the first number of your review will shortly appear. It was a very good thought of yours in dedicating this number to Mr. Ezra Pound and I am very happy indeed that you allow me to add my acknowledgment of thanks to him to the others you are publishing. I owe a great deal to his friendly help, encouragement and generous interest in everything that I have written, as you know there are many others who are under a similar debt of gratitude to him. He helped me in every possible way in the face of very great difficulties for seven years before I met him, and since then he has always been ready to give me advice and appreciation which I esteem very highly as coming from a mind of such brilliance and discernment.

I hope that your review, setting out under so good a name, will have the success which it deserves

Sincerely yours,
James Joyce

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Letter on Hardy

Cher Monsieur, La demande que vous venez de me faire au sujet d’une contribution éventuelle de ma part à votre numéro spécial dédié à la mémoire de Thomas Hardy me touche profondément. Je crains malheureusement de manquer des titres nécessaires pour donner une opinion qui ait une valeur quelconque sur l’oeuvre de Hardy, dont j’ai lu les romans il y a tant d’années que je préfère ne pas en faire le compte; et en ce qui concerne son oeuvre poétique, je dois vous avouer que je l’ignore complètement. Il y aurait donc de ma part une singulière audace à émettre le moindre jugement sur la figure vénérable qui vient de disparaître: il vaut mieux que je laisse ce soin aux critiques de son pays.

Mais quelque diversité de jugement qui pourrait exister sur cette oeuvre (s’il en existe), il paraît par contre évident à tous que Hardy offrait dans son attitude de poète vis-à-vis du public, un honorable exemple de probité et d’amour-propre dont nous autres clercs avons toujours un peu besoin, spécialement à une époque ou le lecteur semble se contenter de moins en moins de la pauvre parole écrite et où, par conséquent, l’écrivain tend à s’occuper de plus en plus des grandes questions qui, du reste, se règlent très bien sans son aide.

James Joyce Paris,
10 février 1928.

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Letter on Svevo

Dear Colleague:

I thank you very much for the kindness of including me in Solario’s tribute to the memory of my old friend Italo Svevo. And I willingly consent, although I believe that now his literary fate should be entrusted entirely to his books, and that passing judgment on them should be the concern especially of the critics of his own country.

The thought will always please me that chance gave me an opportunity to have a part, no matter how small, in the recognition that his own country and an international public accorded Svevo in the last years of his life. I retain the memory of a lovable person, and an admiration of long standing that matures, rather than weakens, with the years.

Paris, 31-V-1929

James Joyce

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From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer

He strides, booted with anger, along the spurs of Monte Rossini, accompanied solely by Fidelion, his mastiff’s voice. They quarrel consonantly about the vocality of the wind, calling each and its other clamant names.

* * * *

Just out of kerryosity howlike is a Sullivan? It has the fortefaccia of a Markus Brutas, the wingthud of a spread-eagle, the body uniformed of a metropoliceman with the brass feet of a collared grand. It cresces up in Aquilone but diminuends austrowards. It was last seen and heard of by some macgillic-cuddies above a lonely valley of their reeks, duskening the greylight as it flew, its cry echechohoing among the anfractuosities: pour la dernière fois! The blackbulled ones, stampeding, drew in their horns, all appailed and much upset, which explaints the guttermilk on their overcoats.

* * * *

A pugilant gang theirs, per Bantry! Don Philip, Jay Hell, Big O’Barry of the Bornstorms, Arthur, siruraganist who loosed that chor. Damnen. And tramp, tramp, tramp. And T. Deum sullivamus.

Faust of all, of curse, damnation. But given Parigot’s Trocadéro for his drawingroom with Ballaclavier in charge at the pianone the voice becomes suburban, sweethearted and subdued. The heat today was really too much of a hot thing and even Impressario is glad to walk his garden in the cool of the evening, fanning his furnaceface with his sweltertails. Merci, doux crépuscule!

* * * *

Who is this that advances in maresblood caftan, like Hiesous in Finisterre, his eyeholes phyllistained, his jewbones of a cross-backed? A little child shall lead him. Why, it’s Strongman Simpson, Timothy Nathan, now of Simpson’s on the Grill! Say, Tim Nat, bald winepresser, hast not one air left? But yeth he hath. Regard! Auscult! He upbraces for supremacy to the potence of Mosthigh and calls upon his baiters and their templum: You daggones, be flat!

* * * *

What was in that long long note he just delivered? For the laib of me I cannot tell. More twopenny tosh and luxus languor about I singabob you? No such thing, O son of an envelope. Dr to J. S. Just a pennyplain loafletter from Braun and Brotmann and it will take no rebutter. You may bark Mrs Liebfraumich as long as you love but you must not burk the baker. Pay us disday our daily bread. And oblige.

* * * *

On his native heath. Speech! Speech! cry the godlets. We are in land of Dan. But their words of Muskerry are harsh after that song of Othello. Orateur ne peut, charlatan ne daigne, Sullivan est.

* * * *

11.59 p.m Durch diese hohle Gasse muss er kommen. Guillaume’s shot telled, sure enough. But will that labour member for Melckthal be able to bring off his coo for the odd and twentieth supererogatory time? Wartemal! That stagesquall has passed over like water off a Helvetian’s back. And there they are, yodelling yokels, none the worse for their ducking and gewittermassen as free as you fancy to quit their homeseek heimat and leave the ritzprinz of their chyberschwitzerhoofs all over the worlds, cisalpic and transatlantine. And how confederate of gay old Gioacchino to have composed this finale so that Kamerad Wagner might be saved the annoyance of finding flauts for his Feuerzauber! Pass auf! Only four bars more! He draws the breathbow: that arrownote’s coming. Aim well, Arnold, and mind puur blind Jemmy in the stalls! But, great Scott, whas is thas for a larm! Half a ton of brass in the band, ten thousand throats from Thalwyl: Libertay. libertay lauded over the land (Tay!) And pap goes the Calville!

* * * *

Saving is believing but can thus be? Is this our model vicar of Saint Wartburgh’s, the reverend Mr Townhouser, Mus.Bac., discovered flagrant in a montagne de passe? She is obvious and is on her threelegged sofa in a half yard of casheselks, Madame de la Pierreuse. How duetonically she hands him his harp that once, bitting him, whom caught is willing: do blease to, fickar! She’s as only roman as any puttana maddonna but the trouble is that the reverend T is reformed. She, simplicissima, wants her little present from the reverend since she was wirk worklike never so nice with him. But he harps along about Salve Regina Terrace and Liza, mine Liza, and sweet Marie. Till she cries: bilk! And he calls: blak! O.u.t. spells out!

* * * *

Since we are bound for a change of supper, was that really in faith the reverend Townhouser for he seemed so verdamnably like? Ecco trovato! Father Lucullus Ballytheacker, the parish priest of Tarbert. He was a songful soul at the keyboard and could achieve his Château Kirwan with cigar thuriferant, without ministrance from platform or pulpit, chase or church. Nor used he to deny his Mary neither. Nullo modo. Up to maughty London came a muftimummed P.P. Censored.

* * * *

Have you got your knife handy? asks the bellman Saint Andy. Here he is and brandnew, answers Bartholomew. Get ready, get ready, scream the bells of Our Lady. And make sure they’re quite killed, adds the gentle Clotilde. Your attention, sirs, please, bawls big Brother Supplice. Pour la foi! Pour la foi! booms the great Auxerrois.

* * * *

Grand spectacular exposition of gorge cutting, mortarfiring and general martyrification, bigleighted up with erst classed instrumental music. Pardie! There’s more sang in that Sceine than mayer’s beer at the Guildhall. Is he a beleaper in Irisk luck? Can he swhipstake his valentine off to Dublin and weave her a frock of true blue poplin to be neat for the time Hugenut Cromwell comes over, gentlest lovejesus as ever slit weasand? Their cause is well sainted and they are centain to won. Still I’ll pointe half my crown on Raoul de Nangis, doublet mauve and cuffs of buff. Attagirl! Ah ah ah ah ah ah viens! Piffpaff, but he’s done it, the bully mastiff again. And woops with him through the window tallyhoed by those friers pecheurs who are self-barked. Dominie’s canes. Can you beat that, you papish yelpers? To howl with the pups!

* * * *

Enrico, Giacomo and Giovanni, three dulcetest of our songsters, in liontamers overcoats, holy communion ties and cliqueclaquehats, are met them at a gaslamp. It is kaputt and throws no light at all on the trio’s tussletusculums. Rico is for carousel and Giaco for luring volupy but Nino, the sweetly dulcetest, tuningfork among tenors, for the best of all; after hunger and sex comes dear old somnium, brought on by prayer. Their lays, blent of feastings, June roses and ether, link languidly in the unlit air. Arrives a type in readymade, dicky and bowler hat, manufactured by Common Sense and Co. Ltd., carrying a bag of tools. Preludingly he conspews a portugaese into the gutter, recitativing: now then, gents, by your leave! And, to his job. Who is this hardworking guy? No one but Geoge, Geoge who shifts the garbage can, Geoge who stokes in the engine room, Geoge who has something to say to the gas (tes gueules!) and mills the wheel go right go round and makes the world grow lighter. Lux! The aforesung Henry. James and John stand mouthshut. Wot did I say? Hats off, primi assoluti! Send him canorious, long to lung over us, high topseasoarious! Guard safe our Geoge!

1932

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Ad-Writer

2, avenue Saint-Philibert, Passy,
Paris

Dear Mr. Huntington,

I do not think I can usefully add anything to what my learned friend, the professor of English at the University of Trieste (see titlepage) has written in his preface to Senilita, (As) A man grows older.

With regard to the other book by the author of Senilita the only things I can suggest as likely to attract the British reading public are a preface by Sir J. M. Barrie, author of My Lady Nicotine, opinions of the book (to be printed on the back of its jacket) from two deservedly popular personalities of the present day, such as the rector of Stiffkey and the Princess of Wales and (on the front of the jacket) a coloured picture by a Royal Academician representing two young ladies, one fair and the other dark but both distinctly nice-looking, seated in a graceful though of course not unbecoming posture at a table on which a book stands upright, with title visible, and underneath the picture three lines of simple dialogue, for example:

Ethel: Does Cyril spend too much on cigarettes?

Doris: Far too much.

Ethel: So did Percy (points)—till I gave him zeno.

Sincerely yours, 22-5-1932 James Joyce

Transition, March 1932

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On the Moral Right of Authors

A particular point in the history of the publication of Ulysses in the United States seems to me both interesting and noteworthy: it makes explicit one aspect of an author’s right over his work which has not been brought to light until now. The importation of Ulysses had been forbidden since 1922, and this ban was not lifted until 1934. In such circumstances it had been impossible to secure copyright for the United States. In 1925 an unscrupulous American publisher circulated a truncated edition of Ulysses over which the author, unable to secure copyright, had no control. An international protest signed by 167 writers was published and legal proceedings were begun. The result of these proceedings was the judgement delivered at a sitting of the Supreme Court of New York on 27 December 1928, a judgement which forbade the defendants (the publishers) ‘from using the name of the plaintiff (Joyce), first, in any journal, periodical or other publication published by them; second, in relation to any book, piece of writing, manuscript, understood to be the work entitled Ulysses’ (Joyce against Two Worlds Monthly and Samuel Roth, II Dep. Supreme Court New York, 27 December 1928).

It is, I believe, possible to reach a judicial conclusion from this judgement to the effect that, while unprotected by the written law of copyright and even if it is banned, a work belongs to its author by virtue of a natural right and that thus the law can protect an author against the mutilation and the publication of his work just as he is protected against the misuse that can be made of his name.

1937

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O T H E R
W R I T I N G S

c o n t e n t s — o t h e r

Fragments from Work in Progress

Drafts for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

The Cat and the Devil

Giacomo Joyce

Stephen Hero

Epiphanies

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Fragments from Work in Progress

c o n t e n t s — f r a g m e n t s

From Work in Progress
the transatlantic review N°4, April 1924

Opening Pages of a Work in Progress
transition N°1, April 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°2, May 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°3, June 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°4, July 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°5, August 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°6, September 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°7, October 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°8, November 1927

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°12, March 1928

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°13, July 1928

Continuation of a Work in Progress
transition N°15, February 1929

Anna Livia Plurabelle
Faber & Faber, 1932

The Mookse and the Gripes
The Ondt and the Gracehoper
Two Tales of Shem and Shaun, Faber & Faber, 1932

Haveth Childers Everywhere
Fountain Press, 1930

The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies
The Servire Press, 1934

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From Work in Progress

the transatlantic review N°4, April 1924
[chapter II.4 from Finnegans Wake]

And there they were too listening in as hard as they could to the solans and sycamores and the wild geese and gannets and the migratories and mistlethrushes and the auspices and all the birds of the sea, all four of them, all sighing and sobbing, and listening.

They were the big four, the four master waves of Erin, all listening, four. There was old Matt Gregory and then besides old Matt was old Marcus Lyons, the four waves, and oftentimes they used to be saying grace together right enough: here now we are the four of us: old Matt Gregory and old Marcus and old Luke Tarpey: the four of us and sure thank God there are no more of us: and sure now you wouldn’t go and forget and leave out the other fellow, and old Johnny Mac Dougall: the four of us and no more of us and so now pass the fish for Christ sake, Amen: the way they used to be saying their grace before fish repeating itself for auld lang syne. And so there they were spraining their ears listening and listening to the oceans of kissening with their eyes glistening all the four when he was kiddling and cuddling his colleen bawn, the hero, that was very wrong and most improper and cuddling her and kissing her with his poghue like Arrah-na-poghue, the dear dear annual, they all four remembored who made the world and how they used to be at that time in the vulgar era cuddling and kiddling her from under her mistlethrush and kissing and listening in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault the elder in Arrah-na-pogue in one of the farback, pitchblack centuries when who made the world when they knew O’Clery, the man on the door, when they were all four collegians on the nod, whiteboys and oakboys, peep of day boys and peeping tom boys, with their slates and satchels playing Florian’s fables in the queen’s Ultonian colleges with another fellow. Ah ho! It brought the dear prehistoric scenes all back again as fresh as of yore, Matt and Marcus, and after that now there he was and his Arrah-na-poghue before the four of them so shocking and scandalous and now thank God there were no more of them and he poghuing and poghuing and there they were listening, as tired as they were, the three jolly topers, with their mouths watering along with the other fellow so pass the poghue for Christ’ sake Amen. Listening and poghuing and watering all the four, the old connubial men of the sea, Luke and Johnny Mac Dougall and all wishening for anything at all of the bygone times for a cup of kindness yet, for four farback tumblerfuls of woman squash with them all four listening and spraining their ears for the millennium and all their mouths making water.

Johnny. Ah well sure that’s the way (up) and it so happened there was poor Matt Gregory (up), their paterfamilias, and (up) the others and now really and (up) truly they were four dear old heladies and really they looked so nice and bespectable with their grey half a tall hat and tailormade frock coat and after that they had their fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms and their half a tall hat just now like the old marquess of Powerscourt, the determined old despot, only for the saltwater or the auctioneer there in front of the place near O’Clery’s beside that ancient Dame street where the statue of Mrs Dana O’Connell behind the Trinity college that arranges all the auctions of the valuable colleges. Battersby Sisters, like the auctioneer Battersby Sisters that sells all the emancipated statues and powerscourts, James H. Tickell, the jaypee, off Hoggin Green going to the horse show before the flood along with another fellow and the shoeblacks and the redshanks and plebeians and everyone highstepping to get out of his way and all the tercentenary horses and priesthunters, from the Curragh and confusionaries and the authorities over from England and American cattleraiders (so they say) all over in his grey half a tall hat (how do you do, jaypee?) and his gallowglasses to find out all the improper colleges (and how do you do, Mr Dame James? get out of my way!) and all the horsepowers. But now that reminds me of the poor Marcus of Lyons and poor Johnny, the patrician, and what do you think of the four of us and there they were now listening right enough, the four saltwater widowers, and all they could remembore long long ago in the olden times Momonian and Lally when my heart knew no care and after that then there was the official landing of Lady James Casement in the year of the flood 1132 S.O.S. and the christening of Queen Battersby the Fourth according to her grace the bishop, alderwoman J.P. Bishop, Senior, and then there was the drowning of Pharoah and all his pedestrians and they were all completely drowned into the sea, the red sea, and then poor Martin Cunningham, the official out of the castle on pension, when he was completely drowned off Dunleary at that time in the red sea and a lovely mourning paper and thank God there were no more of him. And that now was how it was. Ay, ay! And so he was.

Marcus. And after that, not forgetting, there was the Flemish armada all scattered and all officially drowned there and then on a lovely morning after the universal flood at about eleven thirtytwo (was it?) off the coast of Cunningham and Saint Patrick the anabaptist and Saint Kevin the lacustrian and Powerscourt and Dana our first marents and Lapoleon the equestrian, and all they remembored and then there was the French fleet round about the year of Notre Dame 1132 P.P.C. or so landing from under Madam general Bonaboche in his half a grey traditional hat and after that there he was, so terrestrial, poghuing her scandalous and very wrong, in single combat, under the sycamores and all the gallowsbirds in Arrah-na-Poghue, so silvestrious, near the queen’s colleges in 1132 Bride street behind the century man on the door. And then again they used to give the grandest universal lectures (hello, Hibernia!) from sea to sea (Matt speaking!) according to the pictures postcard in the Latimer Roman history of Latimer repeating himself (Marcus Lyons speaking!) to the oceanfuls of collegians green and high classes and the poor scholars and all the old trinitarian senate and saints and sages and the Plymouth brethren nodding and sleeping away there like forgetmenots round their twelve tables in the four trinity colleges of Ulcer, Moonster, Leanstare and Cannought, the four grandest colleges of Killorcure and Killthemall and Killeachother and Killkelly-on-the-Flure. Those were the grandest gynecollege histories (Lucas calling, hold the line!) in the Jane Andersdaughter universary for auld acquaintance sake (this unitarian lady lived to a great age at or in or about No. 1132 or No. 1169 bis Fitzmary Round where she was seen by many and widely liked) for teaching the Fatima Woman history of Fatimiliafamilias repeating herself of the spirit of nature as difinely developed in time by psadatepholomy, the past and present (Johnny MacDougall speaking, give me trunks, miss!) and present and absent and past and present and perfect arma virumque romano. Ah, dearo, dear! How it all came back to them to hear him there kissling and cuddling her so nefarious before the four of us in his Roman catholic arms by the Cornelius Nepos, Mnepos, Anumque, Umque.

Queh? Quos?

Ah, dearo dearo dear! It was so sorry for all the whole twice two four of us and Lally when he lost part of his half a hat and repeating himself and telling him now to forget the past and contradicting all about Lally and his old fellow the Lagener all the old drakes ever he had up in the bohereen and the old folks at home and Duignan and Lapole and the grand confarreation and he couldn’t stop laughing over Tom Tim Tarpey, the Welshman, and the four middleaged widowers. And now that reminds me not to forget the four of the Welsh waves, leaping laughing, in their half a Roman hat with an ancient Greek gloss on it in Chichester college auction and thank God they were all summarily divorced four years before, or so they say, by their dear poor shehusbands in dear byword days and never brought to mind, to see no more the rainwater on the floor but still they parted, raining water laughing, on the best of terms and be forgot which was plainly foretold by their old pilgrim song As I was going to Ballymacarett we fell in with a lout by the name of Peebles as also in another place by their orthodox proverb That old fellow knows milk though he’s not used to it latterly. And so they parted. Ay, ay. The good go and the wicked is left over. Ay, ay. Ah, well, sure that’s the way. Woman. Squash. Part. Ay, ay. By decree absolute.

Lucas. And O so well they could remembore at that time Mrs Dowager Justice Squalchman in her fullbottom wig and beard, in or aring or around about the year of buy in disgrace 1132 or 1169 or 1768 Y.W.C.A. at the Married Male Familyman’s Auctioneer’s court in Arrahnacuddle. Poor Johnny of the clan of Dougals, the poor Scotsman, dinna forget, so frightened on account of her fullbottom and the four masters because he was so slow grooming her ladyship instead of backscratching her materfamilias proper like any old methodist, and all divorced according to their dear faithful. Ah now, it was too bad! And poor Mark or Marcus Bowandcoat, the poor old chronometer, all persecuted by everybody by decree absolute because he forgot himself making wind and water and made a mess of all of himself and because he forgot to remember to sign an old morning proxy paper, a request in writing to herself on stamped parchment before saying his grace before fish and then and there and too there was poor Dion Cassius Poosycomb all drowned too before the world and her husband, because it was most improper and most wrong when he attempted to— well, he was shocking bad in his health, he said, with the shingles falling off him— because he— ah, well now, we won’t be too hard on him as an old Manx presbyterian, and after that he made his last will and went to confession on his two bare marrowbones to Mother Evangelist Sweainey and he was so sorry, he was really, because he left the bootbutton in the hansom cab and now, tell the truth, there were faults on both sides— well, he attempted (or so they say)—ah, now, forget and forgive, (don’t we all?) and sure he was only funning with his andrewmartins and his old age coming over him— well, he attempted or, the Connachy, he was tempted to attempt some hunnish familiarities after eating a bad crab in the red ocean and sure he was deadseasickabed (it was really too bad!) her poor old divorced male, in the hospice for the dying and trying to hold the nursetender’s hand, (ah, the poor old coax!) and count the buttons and her hand and frown on a bad crab and dying to remembore who made a who a snore. Ah dearo dearo dear!

And where do you leave Matt? They were all so sorry for poorboir Matt in his saltwater hat that she grew all out of, too big for him, of Mnepos and his overalls all falling over her in folds—sure, he hadn’t the heart in her to pull them up—poor Matt, the old peregrine matriarch, and a queenly man, sitting there, a family all to himself, under geasa, Themistletocles, on his multilingual tombstone with her face to the wall in sight of the poorhouse, under all the auspices, amid the rattle of hailstorms, k with her ivyclad hat and gripping an old pair of curling tongs belonging to Mrs Duna O’Connell to blow his brains with, with his can of tea from Anne Lynch and two cuts of Shackleton’s brown loaf and dilisk, waiting for the end to come—God of heaven, when you think of it! Ah ho! It was too bad entirely! All devoured by active parlourmen laudabiliter of woman squelch and all on account of the smell of Shakleton and scratchman and his mouth watering and so now pass the loaf for Christ sake, Amen. And so. And all.

Matt. And loaf. So that was the end. And it can’t be helped. Ah, God be good to us! Poor Andrew Martin Cunningham! Ay! Ay!

And still and all at that time they were always thinking (up) and not forgetting about auld lang syne (up) their four hosenbands that were four (up) beautful sister masters, now happily married, and there they were always counting and contradicting every night the lovely mother-of-periwinkle buttons according to the lapper part of their anachronism (up one up two up one up four) and after that there now she was in the end, the deary, the beautfour sisters and that was her modern republican name right enough and they used to be getting up from under at the kookaburra bell ringing all wrong inside of them (come in, come on, you lazy loafs!) all inside their poor old Shandon bellbox (come out to hell, you lousy louts!) so frightened, at all hours every night on their mistletoes, the four old oldsters, when nobody wouldn’t even let them rest and getting into their way something barbarous, changing the one wet underdown bed or they used to sleep under and putting on their half a hat and falling over all synopticals and a panegyric and repeating themselves, look all round the stool, walk everywhere for a jool to break fire to all the rancers, to collect all and bits of brown, the rathure’s evelopmen in spirits of time in all fathom of space and slooping around in a bath slipper and go away to Oldpatrick and see a doctor Walker. And after that so glad they had their night tentacles and there they used to be flapping and cycling around the waists of the ships, as tired as they were, the clipperbuilt and the five fourmasters and Lally and Roe and he telling him before he forgot that one abut a goose a love a goldeny egg and and Johnny Mac Gory, dear mister John, and all the other analist, the steamships and the women-o’-war, and playing ocean ladies’ foursome and their pair of green eyes and peering in, so they say, through the steamy windows into the honeymoon cabins on board the big steamadories made by Fumadory and the saloon ladies’ modern toilet chambers lined over prawn silk and rub off the salty catara off a windows and hee hee listening, the poor old quakers, to see all the hunnishmooners and the firstclass ladies enfamillias and shee shee all improper in a lovely mourning toilet under all their familiarities, forgetting to say their grace before chambadory so pass the poghue for grace sake, Amen. And all hee hee hee quaking, so fright, and shee shee shaking. Aching. Ay, ay.

And then after that they used to be so forgetful counting motherpeributts (up one up four) to membore her beaufu modern maiden name by the dream. From Greg and Doug on poor Greg and Mat and Mar and Lu and Jo, now happily buried, our four sisters. And there she was now right enough, that lovely sight enough, the girleen bawn asthore as for days galore of planxty Gregory. Egory. Ay, ay.

But sure that reminds me now, like another tellmastory repeating yourself, how they used to be at the end of it all at that time (up) always, tired and all, over their singing (up) the top of the voice of Mamalujo sitting round two by two, the four confederates, (up) the wet air register in Old Man’s House with their cold knees and their poor (up) quadrupedsfast sleep and all dolled up for their blankets and materny mufflers and plimsoles and their bowl of brown schackle and milky and clots for a cup of kindest yet with hold take hand and nurse and only touch of eat a lovely munkybown and wait the pinch and prompt poor Mucus Lyons to pass the teeth for choke sake Amensch when it so happen they were all sicamore and by the world forgot since the phlegmish hoopicough for all a possabed after eat a bad cramp and johnny magories and backscrat the poor bedsores and their farthing dip and read a letter or two every night before going to sleep in the twilight, a capitaletter for further auspices on their old one page codex book of old year’s eve 1132, M.M.L.J. old style, their Senchus Mor by Mrs Shemans, final buff lunch edition, and Lally through their gangrene spentacles and all the good they did in their time for Roe and O’Mulconry a Conry ap Mul or Lap ap Morion and Buffler ap Matty Mac Gregory for Marcus on Podex by Daddy de Wyer, old bagabroth, and one by one and sing a mamalujo.

And after that now in the future please God all start repeating ourselves and all now united sansfamillias say oremus prayer for auld acquaintance to Peregrine and Michael and Farfassa and Peregrine for navigants at peregrinantibus in all the old and imperial sea and sing a lovasteamadorion in her doaty ducky little blue and roll a hoop and how she ran we never never shall forget and old Luke and Senchus Mor and another more for auld luke syne and she haihaihail her kobbor kohinor sehehet on the praze savohole shanghai.

Hear, O hear, Iseult la belle! Tristan, sad hero, hear!

Anno Domini nostri sancti Jesu Christi

Nine hundred and ninetynine million pound sterling in the blueblack bowels of the bank of Ulster.

Braw bawbees and good gold pounds, galore, my girleen, a Sunday’ll prank thee finely

And no damn lout’ll come courting thee or by the mother of the Holy Ghost there’ll be murder!

O, come all ye sweet nymphs of Dingle beach to cheer Brinabride queen from Sybil surfriding

In her curragh of shells of daughter of pearl and her silverymoonblue mantle round her.

Crown of the waters, brine on her brow, she’ll dance them a jig and jilt them fairly.

Yerra, why would she bide with Sir Sloomysides or the grogram grey barnacle gander?

You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering

Nor wake in winter, widow machree, but snore sung in my old Balbriggan surtout.

Wisha, won’t you agree now to take me from the middle, say, of next week on, for the balance of my days, for nothing, (what?) as your own nursetender?

A power of highsteppers died game right enough—but who, acushla, ’ll beg coppers for you?

I tossed that one long before anyone.

It was of a wet good Friday too she was ironing and, as I’m given now to understand, she was always mad gone on me.

Grand goosegreasing we had entirely with an allnight eiderdown bed picnic to follow.

By the cross of Cong, says she, rising up Saturday in the twilight from under me, Mick, whatever your name is, you’re the most likable lad that’s come my ways yet from the barony of Bohermore.

 ® 

Opening Pages of a Work in Progress

transition N°1, April 1927
[chapter I.1 from Finnegans Wake]

riverrun brings us back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios, while they went doublin their mumper all the time; nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac; not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the waterface.

The fall (badalgharaghta-kamminarronn-konnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarr-hounawnskawntoo-hoohoordenenthur-nuck!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the schute of Finnigan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since Devlins first loved livy.

What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Úalu Úalu Úalu! Quáouauh! What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired and ventilated! What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers! What true feeling for their’s hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup! O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, O my shining stars and body! how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! But waz iz? Is ent? Ere were sewers? The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper’s Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso. He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher. Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neat light of the liquor wheretwin ’twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tombles a’buckets clottering down.

Of the first was he to bare arms and a name. His crest of huroldry, in vert with ancillars, troublant, argent, a hegoak, poursuivant, horrid, horned. His scutchum, fessed, with archers strung, helio, of the second. Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe. Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? It may half been a missfired brick, as some say, or it mought have been due to a collupsus of his back promises, as others looked at it. (There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same). But so sore did abe ite ivvy’s holired abbles, (what with the wallhall’s horrors of rollsrights, carhacks, stonengens, kisstvanes, tramtrees, fargobawlers, autokinotons, hippohobbilies, streetfleets, tournintaxes, megaphoggs, circuses and wardsmoats and basilikerks and aeropagods and the hoyse and the jollybrool and the peeler in the coat and the mecklenburk bitch bite at his ear and the merlinburrow burrocks and his fore old porecourts, the bore the more, and his blightblack workingstacks at twelvepins a dozen and the noobibusses sleighding along Safetyfirst Street and the derryjellybies snooping around Tell-No-Tailors’ Corner and the fumes and the hopes and the strupithump of his ville’s indigenous romekeepers, homesweepers, domecreepers thurum and thurum in fancymud murumd and all the uproor from all the aufroofs, a roof for may and a reef for hugh butt under his bridge suits tony) wan warning Phill filt tippling full. His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see.

Shize? I should shee! Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diii? of a trying thirstay mournin? Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain’s chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation, and their duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too. And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality. Agog and magog and the round of them agrog. ’Twas he was the dacent gaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap up his bier! E’erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? With their deepbrow fundigs and the dusty fidelios. They laid him brawdawn alanglast bed. With a bockalips of finisky fore his feet. And a barrowload of guenesis hoer his head. Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O!

Hurrah, there is but young glebe for the owl globe wheels in view which is tautaulogically the same thing. Well, Him a being so on the flounder of his bulk like an overgrown babeling, let wee peep, see, at Hom, well, see peegee ought he ought? platterplate. C Hum! From Shopalist to Bailywick or from ashtun to baronoath or from Buythebanks to Roundthehead or from the foot of the bill to ireglint’s eye he calmly extensolies. And all the way (a horn!) from fjord to fjell his baywinds’ oboboes shall wail him rockbound (hoahoahoah!) in swimswamswum and all the livvylong night, the delldale dalppling night, the night of bluerybells, her flittaflute in tricky trochees (O carina! O carina!) wake him. With her issavan essavans and her patterjackmartins about all them inns and ouses. Tilling a teel of a tum, telling a toll of a teary turty Taubling. Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs à gross if we are, about to believe. So pool the begg and pass the kish for crawsake. Omen. So sigh us. Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord. Whase on the joint of a desh? Finfoefom the Fush. Whase be his baken head? A loaf of Singpantry’s Kennedy bread. And whase hitched to the hop in his tayle? A glass of Danu U’Dunnell’s foamous olde Dobbelin ayle. But, lo, as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey, behold of him as behe moth for he is noewhemoe. Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene. Almost rubicund Salmosalar, ancient fromout the ages of the Agapemonides, he is smolten in our mist, woebecanned and packt away. So that meal’s dead off for summan, schlook, schlice and goodridhirring.

Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined, aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on. Hic cubat edilis. Apud libertinam parvulam. Whatif she be in flags or flitters, reekierags or sundyechosies, with a mint of monies or beggar a pinnyweight. arrah, sure, we all love little Anny Ruiny, or, we mean to say, lovelittle Anna Rayiny, when unda her brella, mid piddle med puddle she ninnygoes nannygoes nancing by. Yoh! Brontolone slaaps yoh snoores. Upon Benn Heather, in Seeple Iseut too. The cranic head on him, caster of his reasons, peer yuthner in yondmist. Whooth? His clay feet, swarded in verdigrass, stick up starck where he last fellonem, by the mund of the magazine wall, where our maggy seen all, with her sisterin shawl. While over against this belles’ alliance beyind Ill Sixty, ollollowed ill! bagsides of the fort, bom, tarabom, tararabom, lurk the ombushes, the site of the lyffing-in-wait of the upjock and hockums. Hence when the clouds roll by, jamey, a proudseye view is enjoyable of our mounding’s mass, now Wallinstone national museum, with, in some greenish distance, the charmful waterloose country and they two quitewhite villagettes who hear show of themselves so gigglesomes minxt the follyages, the prettilees! Penetrators are permitted into the museomound, free. Welsh and the Paddy Patkinses, one shelenk. For her passkey supply to the janitrix, the mistress Kathe. Tip.

This the way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in! Now yiz are in the Willingdone Museyroom. This is a Prooshious gunn. This is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the flag of the Prooshious, the Cap and Soracer. This is the bullet that byng the flag of the Prooshious. This is the ffrinch that fire on the Bull that bang the flag of the Prooshious. Saloos the Crossgunn! Up with your pike and fork! Tip. (Bullsfoot! Fine!) This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum. Tip. Lipoleumhat. This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape. This is the big Sraughter Willingdone, grand and magentic in his goldtin spurs and his ironed dux and his quarterbrass woodyshoes and his magnate’s gharters and his bangkok’s best and goliar’s goloshes and his pulluponeasyan wartrews. This is his big wide harse. Tip. This is the three lipoleum boyne grouching down in the living detch. This is an inimyskilling inglis, this is a scotcher grey, this is a davy, stooping. This is the bog lipoleum mordering the lipoleum beg. This is the petty lipoleum boy that was nayther bag nor bug. Touchole Fitz Tuomush. Dirty Mac Dyke. And Hairy O’Hurry. All of them arminus-varminus. This is Delian alps. This is Mont Tivel, this is Mont Tipsey, this is the Grand Mons Injun. This is the crimmealine of the alps hooping to sheltershock the three lipoleums. This is the jinnies with their legahorns feinting to read in their handmade’s book of stralegy while making their war undisides the Willingdone. The jinnies is a cooin her hand and the jinnies is a ravin her hair and the Willingdone git the band up. This is big Willingdone mormorial tallowscoop Wounderworker obscides on the flanks of the jinnies. Sexcaliber hrosspower. Tip. This is me Belchum sneaking his phillippy out of his most toocisive bottle of Tilsiter. This is the libel on the battle. Awful Grimmest Sun’shat Cromwelly. Looted. This is the jinnies’ hastings dispatch for to irrigate the Willingdone. Dispatch in thin red lines cross the shortfront of me Belchum. Yaw, yaw, yaw! Leaper Orthor. Fear siecken! Fieldgaze thy tiny frow. Hugacting. Nap. That was the tictacs of the jinnies for to fontannoy the Willingdone. Shee, shee, shee! The jinnies is jillous over all the lipoleums. And the lipoleums is gonn boycotton onto the one Willingdone. And the Willingdone git the band up. This is me Belchum, bonnet to busby, breaking his secred word with a ball up his ear to the Willingdone. This is the Willingdone’s hurold dispitchback. Dispitch desployed on the regions rare of me Belchum. Ayi, ayi, ayi! Cherry jinnies. Figtreeyou! Damn fairy ann, Voutre. Willingdone. That was the first joke of Willingdone, tic for tac. Hee, hee, hee! This is me Belchum in his twelvemile cowchooks footing the camp for the jinnies. Drink a sip, drankasup, for he’d as sooner buy a guinness than he’d stale store stout. This is Rooshious balls. This is a ttrinch. This is mistletropes. This is Canon Futter with the popynose. This is the blessed. This is jinnies in the bonny bawn blooches. This is lipoleums in the rowdy howses. This is the Willingdone, by the splinters of Cork, order fire. Tonnerre! (Bullsear! Play!) This is camelry, this is floodens, this is panickburns. This is Willingdone cry. Brum! Brum! Cumbrum! This is jinnies cry. Underwetter! Goat strip Finnlambs! This is jinnies rinning away dowan a bunkersheels. With a trip on a trip on a trip on a trip so airy. This is me Belchum’s tinkyon tankyou silvoor plate for citchin the crapes in the cool of his canister. Poor the pay! This is the bissmark of the marathon merry of the jinnies they left behind them. This is the Willingdone branlish his same marmorial tallowscoop Sophy-Key-Po on the rinnaway jinnies. This is the pettiest of the lipoleums. Toffeethief, that spy on the Willingdone from his big white harse, the Capeinhope. Stonewall Willingdone is an old maxy montrumeny. Lipoleums is nice hung bushellors. This is hiena hinnessy laughing alout at the Willingdone. This is lipsyg dooley krieging the funk from the hinnessy. This is the hinndoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy. Tip. This is the wixy old Willingdone picket up the half of the threefoiled hat of lipoleums fromoud of the bluddle filth. This is the hinndoo waxing ranjymad for a bombshoob. This is the Willingdone hanking the half of the hat of lipoleums up the tail on the buckside of his big white harse. Tip. That was the last joke of Willing done. Hit, hit, hit! This is the same white harse of the Willingdone, Culpenhelp, waggling his tailoscrupp with the half of a hat of lipoleums to insoult on the hinndoo seeboy Hney, hney, hney! (Bullsrag! Foul!) This is the seeboy, madrashattaras, upjump and pumpim, cry to the Willingdone: Ap Pukkaru! Pukka Yurap! This is the Willingdone, bornstable ghentleman tinders his maxbotch to the cursigan Shimar Shin. This is the dooforhim seeboy blow the whole of the half of the hat of lipoleums off of the top of the tail on the back of his big wide harse. Tip (Bullseye! Game!) How Copenhagen ended. This way the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out.

Phew!

What a warm time we were in there but how keling is here the airabouts! And such reasonable weather too! The wagrant wind’s awalt’zaround the piltdowns and on every blasted knollyrock there’s that gnarlybird ygathering, a runalittle, doalittle, preealittle, pouralittle, wipealittle, kicksalittle, severalittle, eatalittle, whinealittle, kenalittle, helfalittle, pelfalittle gnarlybird. She niver comes out when Thon’s on shower or when Thon’s flash with the Nixy girls or when Thon’s blowing toomcracks down the gaels of Thon. Her would be too moochy averd. Of Burymeleg and Bindmerollingeyes and all the deed in the woe. She jest does hopes till byes will be byes. Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody’s bird, a peri potmother, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy. But it’s the armitides toonigh and toomourn we wish for a muddy kissmans to the minutia workers and there’s to be a gorgeups truce for all the childers . She’s burrowed the coacher’s lamp the better to pry and all spoiled goods go into her nabsack: curtrages and rattlin buttins, nappy spattees and flasks of all nations, clavicures and scampulars, maps, keys and woodpiles of haypennies and moonled brooches with bloodstaned breeks in em and boaston nightgarters and masses of shoesets and nickelly nacks and foder allmicheal and a lugly parson of cates and howitzer muchears and midgers and maggets, wells and wails, and the last sigh that come fro the hart and the fairest sin the sun saw . With Kiss. Kiss Criss. Cross Criss. Kiss Cross. Undo lives ’end. Slain.

How bootifull and how truetowife of her, when strengly forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. She is livving in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for us (her birth is uncontrollable), with a naperon for her mask and her sabboes kickin arias (so sair! so solly!) if yous ask me and I saack you. Hou! Hou! Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall (there being two sights for ever a picture) for in the byways of high improvidence that’s what makes lifework leaving and the world’s a cell for citters to cit in. Let young wimman run away with the story and let young min talk smooth behind the butteler’s back she knows her knight’s duty while Luntum sleeps. Did ye save any tin? says he. Did I what? with a grin says she. And we all like a marriedann because she is mercenary. Though the length of the land lies under liquidation (floote!) and there’s nare a hairbrow nor an eyebush on this glaubrous phace of Herrschuft Whatarwelter she’ll loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat and she’ll do all a turfwoman can to piff the business on. Paff. To puff the blaziness on. Poffpoff. And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care. So true is it that therewhere’s a turnover the tay is wet too and when you think you ketch sight of a hind make sure but you’re cocked by a hin.

Then as she is on her behaviourite job we may take our review of the two mounds to see nothing of the himples here as at elsewhere, by sixes and sevens, like so many heegills and collines, sitton aroont, scentbreeched ant somepotreek, in their swishawish satins and their taffetaffe tights, playing Wharton’s Folly, at a treepurty in the purk. Stand up, mickos! Make strake for minnas! By order, Nicholas Proud. We may see and hear nothing if we choose of the shortlegged bergins off Corkhill or the bergamoors of Arbourhill or the bergagambols of Summerhill or the bergincellies of Miseryhill or the countrybossed bergones of Constitutionhill though every crowd has its several tones and every trade has its clever mechanics and each harmonical has a point of its own, Olaf’s on the rise and Ivor’s on the lift and Sitric’s place’s between them. But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life’s robulous rebus, hopping round his middle like kippers on a griddle, O, as he lays dormont from the macroborg of Holdhard to the microbirg of Pied de Poudre. Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One sovereign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!

So This Is Dyoublong?

Hush! Caution! Echoland!

How charmingly exquisite! It reminds you of the outwashed engravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall of his innkempt house. Used they? (I am sure that tiring chabelshoveller with the mujikal chocolat box, Miry Mitchel, is listening) I say, the remains of the outworn gravemure where used to be blurried the Ptollmens of the Incabus. Used we? (He is only pretendant to be stugging at the jubalee harp from a second existed lishener, Fiery Farrelly.) It is well known. Lokk for himself and see the old butte new. Dbln. W. K. O. O. Hear? By the mausolime wall. Fimfim fimfim. With a grand funferall. Fumfum fumfum. They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves.

Four things therefore, saith our herodotary Mammon Lujius in his grand old histoiorum wrote near Boriorum, bluest book in baile’s annals, f. t. in Dyfflinarsky ne’er sall fail til heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s ile sall pall. And here now they are the fear of um. Unum. A bulbenboss surmounted upon an alderman. Ay, ay! Duum. A shoe on a puir old wobban. Ah, ho! Triom. An auburn mayde, o’brine a’bride, to be desarted. Adear, adear! Quodlibus. A penn no weightier nor a polepost. And so. And all.

So, how idlers’ wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles , bring fassilwise to pass how.

1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.

566 A.D. On Baalfire’s of this year after deluge a crone that hadde a wickered Kish for to hale dead turves from the bog lookit under the blay of her Kish as she ran and be me sawl but she found hersell sackvulle of swart goody quickenshoon and small illigant brogues, so rich in sweat. Blurry works at Hurdlesford.

(Silent.)

566 A.D. At this time it fell out that a brazenlockt damsel grieved (sobralasolas!) because that Puppette her minion was ravisht of her by the ogre Puropeus Pious. Bloody wars in Ballyaughacleeaghbally.

1132 A.D. Two sons at an hour were born until a goodman and his man and his hag. These sons called themselves Caddy and Primas. Primas was a santryman and drilled all decent people. Caddy went to Winehouse and wrote o peace a farce. Blotty words for Dublin.

Somewhere, parently, in the ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant the copyist must have fled with his scroll. The billy flood rose or an elk charged him or the sultrup worldwright from the excelsissimost empyrean (bolt, in sum) earthspake or the Dannamen gallous banged pan the bliddy duran. A scribicide then and there is led off under old’s code with some fine covered by six marks or ninepins in metalmen for the sake of his labour’s dross while it will be only now and again in our rear of our era, as an upshoot of military and civil engagements, that a gynecure was let on to the scuffold for taking that same fine sum covertly by meddlement with the drawers of his neighbour’s safe.

Now after all that farfatch’d and peragrine or dingnant or clere lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness from the tome of Liber Lividus and, (toh!), how paisibly eirenical, all dimmering dunes and gloamering glades selfstretches afore us our fredeland’s plain! Lean neath stone pine the pastor lies with his crook; young pricket by pricket’s sister nibbleth on returned viridities; amaid her rocking grasses the herb trinity shams lowliness; skyup is of evergrey. Thus, too, for donkey’s years. Since the bouts of Hebear and Hairyman the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown’s hedges, twolips have pressed togatherthem by sweet Rush, townland of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the redthorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon, and though for rings round them, during a chiliad of perihelygangs, the Formoreans have brittled the tooath of the Danes and the Oxman has been pestered by the Firebugs and the Joynts have thrown up jerrybuilding to the Kevanses and Little on the Green is childsfather to the City (Year! Year! And laughtears!), these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles as on the eve of Killallwho.

The babbelers with their thangas vain have been (confusium hold them!) they were and went; thigging thugs were and houhnhymn songtoms were and comely norgels were and pollyfool fiansees. Menn have thawed, clerks have surssurhummed, the blond has sought of the brune: Elsekiss thou may, mean Kerry piggy?: and the duncledames have countered with the hellish fellows: Who ails tongue coddeau, aspace of dumbillsilly? And they fell upong one another: and themselves they have fallen. And still nowanights and by nights of yore do all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lovers say only: Cull me ere I wilt to thee!: and, but a little later: Pluck me whilst I blush! Well may they wilt, marry, and profusedly blush, be troth! For that saying is as old as the howitts. Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn’t it the truath I’m tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmycan timped hir, tampting Tam.

Hop!

In the name of Anem this carl on the kopje a parth a lone who the joebiggar be he? Forshapen his pigmaid hoagshead, shroonk his plodsfoot. Me seemeth a dragon man … He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the ramping riots of pouriose and froriose. What a quhare soort of a mahan. It is evident the michindaddy. He can prapsposterus the pillory way to Hirculos pillar. Scuse us, chorley guy! You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! ’Tis a Jute. Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks.

Jute.—Yutah!

Mutt.—Mukk’s pleasurad.

Jute.—Are you jeff?

Mutt.—Somehards.

Jute.—But you are not jeffmute?

Mutt.—Noho. Only an utterer.

Jute.—Whoa? Whoat is the mutter with you?

Mutt.—I became a stun a stummer.

Jute.—What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! How, Mutt?

Mutt.—Aput the buttle, surd.

Jute.—Whose poddle? Wherein?

Mutt.—The Inns of Dungtarf where Used awe to be he.

Jute.—You that side your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you.

Mutt.— Urp, Boohooru! Booru Usurp! I trumple from rath in mine mines when I rimimirim!

Jute.— Let me cross your qualm with trink gilt. Here have sylvan coyne, a piece of oak.

Mutt.—Louee, louee! How wooden I not know it, the intellible greytcloak of Cedric Silkyshag! Cead mealy faulty rices for one dabblin bar. Old grilsy growlsy! He was poached on in that eggtentical spot. Here where the liveries, Monomark. There where the missers moony, Minnikin passe.

Jute.—Simply because as Taciturn pretells, our wrongstoryshortener, he dumptied the wholeborrow of rubbages on to soil here.

Mutt.—Just how a puddinstone inat the brookcells by a riverpool.

Jute.—Load Allmarshy! Wid wad for a norse like?

Mutt.—Somular with a bull on a clompturf. Rooks roarum rex roome! I could snore to him of the spumy horn, with his woolseley side in, by the neck I am sutton on, did Brian d’ of Linn.

Jute.—Boildoyle and rawhoney on me when I can beuraly forsstand a weird from sturk to finnic in such a patwhat as your rutterdamrotter. Onheard of and umscene! Gut aftermeal! See you doomed.

Mutt.—Quite agreem. Bussave a sec. Walk a dun blink roundward this albutisle and you skull see how olde ye plaine of my Elters, hunfree and ours, where wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o’er the saltings, where wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory, icefloe was from his Inn the Byggning to whose Finishthere Punct. Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr. Mearmerge two races, swete and brack. Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize!

Jute.—’Stench!

Mutt.—Fiatfuit! Hereinunder lyethey. Llarge by the smal an’ everynight life olso th’estrange, babylone the greatgrandhotelled with tit tit tittlehouse, alp on earwig, drukn on ild, likeas equal to anequal in this sound seemetery which iz leebez luv.

Jute.—’Zmorde!

Mutt.—Meldundleize! And thanacestross mound have swollup them all. This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns. He who runes may rede it on all fours. O’c’stle, n’wc’stle, tr’c’stle, crumbling! Sell me sooth the fare for Humblin! Humblady Fair. But speak it allsosiftly, moulder! Be in your whisht!

Jute.—Whysht?

Mutt.—The gyant Forficules with Amni the fay.

Jute.—Howe?

Mutt.—Here is viceking’s graab.

Jute.—Hwaad!

Mutt.—Ore you astoneaged, jute you?

Jute.—Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud.

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! A terricolous vivelyonview this; queer and it continues to be quaky. A hatch, a celt, an earshare the pourquose of which was to cassay the earthcrust at all of hours, furrowards, bagawards, like yoxen at the turnpath. Here say figurines billycoose arming and mounting. Mounting and arming bellicose figurines see here. Futhorc, this liffle effingee is for a firefing called a flintforfall. Face at the eased! O I fay! Face at the waist! Ho, you fie! Upwap and dump em, Face to Gace! When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. Here (please to stoop) are selveran cued peteet peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make the tomtummy’s payroll. Right rank ragnar rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that’s thuck in its thoil like thumfool’s thraitor thrust for vengeance. What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects! Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies, alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons. Owlets’ eegs (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from age and all now quite epsilene, and oldwolldy wobblewers, haudworth a wipe o grass. Sss! See the snake wurrums everyside! Our durlbin is sworming in sneaks. They came to our island from triangular Toucheaterre beyond the wet prairie rared up in the midst of the cargon of prohibitive pomefructs but along landed Paddy Wippingham and the his garbagecans cotched the creeps of them pricker than our whosethere outofman could quick up her whatsthats. Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise. One by one place one be three dittoh and one before. Two nursus one make a plausible free and idim behind. What a meanderthalltale to unfurl and with what an end in view of squattor and anntisquattor and postproneauntisquattor! To say too us to be every tim, nick and larry of us, sons of the sod, sons, littlesons, yea and lealittlesons, when usses not to be, every sue, siss and sally of us, dugters of Nan! Accusative ahnsire! Damadam to infinities!

True there was in nillohs dieybos as yet no lumpend papeer in the waste and mightmountain Penn still groaned for the micies to let flee. You gave me a boot (signs on it!) and I ate the wind. I quizzed you a quid (with for what?) and you went to the quod. But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses . A bone, a pebble, a ramskin; chip them, chap them, cut them up allways; leave them to terracook in the muttheringpot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till we finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined till Daleth, who oped it, closeth thereof the dor.

Cry not yet! There’s many a smile to Nondum, with sytty maids per man, sir, and the park’s so dark by kindlelight. But look what you have in your handself! The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for every busy eerie whig’s a bit of a torytale to tell. Of a noarch and a chopwife; of a pomme full grave and a fammy of levity; or of golden youths that wanted gelding; or of what the mischievmiss made a man do. Hohore! Het wis if ee newt. Lissom! lissom! I am doing it. Hark, the corne entreats! And the larpnotes prittle.

It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybuddy to his lovesaking eyes and everybilly lived alove with everybiddy else, and Jarl van Hoother had his burnt head high up in his lamphouse, laying cold hands on himself. And his two little jiminies, cousins of ourn, Tristopher and Hilary, were kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse. And, be dermot, who come to the keep of his inn only the niece-of-his-in-law, the prankquean. And the prankquean pulled a rosy one and made her wit foreninst the dour. And she lit up and fireland was ablaze. And spoke she to the dour in her petty perusienne: Mark the Wans, why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease? And that was how the skirtmisshes began. But the dour handworded her grace in dootch nossow: Shut! So her grace o’malice kidsnapped up the jiminy Tristopher and into the shandy westerness she rain, rain, rain. And Jarl van Hoother warlessed after her with soft dovesgall: Stop deef stop come back to my earin stop. But she swaradid to him: Unlikelihud. And there was a brannewail that same sabboath night of falling angles somewhere in Erio. And the prankquean went for her forty years’ walk in Tourlemonde and she washed the blessings of the lovespots off the jiminy with soap sulliver suddles and she had her four owlers masters for to tauch him his tickles and she convorted him to the onesure allgood and he became a luderman. So then she started to rain and to rain and, be redtom, she was back again at Jarl van Hoother’s in a brace of samers and the jiminy with her in her pinafrond, lace at night, at another time. And where did she come but to the bar of his bristolry. And Jarl von Hoother had his baretholobruised heels drowned in his cellarmalt, shaking warm hands with himself and the jimminy hilary and the dummy in their first infancy were below on the tearsheet, wringing and coughing, like brodar and histher. And the prankquean nipped a paly one and lit up again and redcocks flew flackering from the hillcombs; And she made her witter before the wicked, saying: Mark the Twy, why do I am alook alike two poss of porterpease? And: Shut! says the wicked, handwording her madesty. So her madesty a ’forethought set down a jiminy and took up a jiminy and all the lilipath ways to Woeman’s Land she rain, rain, rain. And Jarl von Hoother bleethered atter her with a loud finegale: Stop domb stop come back with my earring stop. But the prankquean swaradid: Am liking it. And there was a wild old grannewwail that laurency night of starshootings somewhere in Erio. And the prankquean went for her forty years’ walk in Turnlemcem and she punched the curses of cromcruwell with the nail of a top into the jiminy and she had her four larksical monitrix to touch him his tears and she provorted him to the onecertain allsecure and he became a tristian. So then she started raining, raining, and in a pair of changers, be dom ter, she was back again at Jarl von Hoother’s and the Larryhill with her under her abromette. And why would she halt at all if not by the ward of his mansionhome of another nice lace for the third charm? And Jarl von Hoother had his hurricane hips up to his pantrybox, ruminating in his holdfour stomachs (Dare! O dare!), and the jiminy Toughertrees and the dummy were belove on the watercloth, kissing and spitting, and roguing and poghuing, like knavepaltry and naivebride and in their second infancy. And the prankquean picked a blank and lit out and the valleys lay twinkling. And she made her wittest in front of the arkway of trihump, asking: Mark the Tris, why do I am alook alike three poss of porter pease? But that was how the skirtmishes endupped. For like the campbells acoming with a fork lance of lightning, Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed, like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill. And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordered and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop, dappy. And the duppy shot the shutter clup (gok-gorlayorgromgremmitghundhurth-rumathunaradidillifaiti-tillibumullunukkunun!) And they all drank free. For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts. And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend, floody, flatuous world. Saw fore shalt thou sea. Betoun ye and be. The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up. Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis.

O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum. Hill, rill, ones in company, billeted, less be proud of. Breast high and bestrid! Only for that these will not breathe upon Norronesen or Irenean the secrest of their soorcelossness. Quarry silex, Homfrie Noanswa! Undy gentian festyknees, Livia Noanswa? Wolkencap is on him, frowned; audiurient, he would evesdrip, were it mous at hand, were it dinn of bottles in the far ear. Murk, his vales are darkling. With lipth she lithpeth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow. Hairfluke, if he could bad twig her! Impalpabunt, he abhears. The soundwaves are his buffeteers; they trompe him with their trompes; the wave of roary and the wave of hooshed and the wave of hawhawhawrd and the wave of neverheedthemhorseluggarsandlistletomine. Landloughed by his neaghboormistress and perpetrified in his offsprung, sabes and suckers, the moaning pipers could tell him to his faceback, the louthly one whose loab we are devorers of, how butt for his hold halibutt, or her to her pudor puff, the lipalip one whose libe we drink at, how biff for her tiddywink of a windfall, our breed and washer givers, there would not be a holey spier on the town nor a vestal flouting in the dock, nay to make plein avowels, nor a yew nor an eye to play cash cash in Novo Nilbud by swamplight nor a’ toole o’ tall o’ toll and noddy hint to the convaynience.

He dug in and dug out by the skill of his tilth for himself and all belonging to him and he sweated his crew beneath his auspice for the living and he urned his dread and he made louse for us and delivered us to boll weevils amain, that mighty liberator, Unfru-Chikda-Uru-Wukru and begad he did till he thought of a better one in his windower’s house with that blushmantle upon him from earsend to earsend. And would again could whispring grassies wake him . Usqueadbaugham!

Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink me dead? Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir! And take your laysure and don’t be walking abroad. Sure, you’d only lose yourself the way your roads are that winding now and wet your feet maybe . You’re better off, sir, where you have all you want and we’ll be bringing you presents, won’t we? Honey is the holiest thing ever was (mind you keep the pot!) or some goat’s milk, sir? The menhere’s always talking of you . The grand old Gunne, they do be saying, that was a planter for you! He’s duddandgunne now but peace to his great limbs with the long rest of him! Everything’s going on the same . Coal’s short but we’ve plenty of bog in the yard. And barley’s up again. The boys is attending school nessans regular, sir. Hetty Jane’s a child of Mary. And Essie Shanahan has let down her skirts. You remember Essie in Our Lunas convent. ’Twould delight your heart to see. Aisy now, you decent man, with your knees, and lie quiet and repose your honour’s lordship! I’ve an eye on queer Behan and old Kate and the butter, trust me. And we put on your clock again, sir, for you. And it’s herself that’s fine, too! don’t be talking, and fond of the concertina of an evening. Her hair’s as brown as ever it was. And wivvy and wavy. Repose you now! Finn no more!

For, be the hooky salmon, there’s already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises of his haunt of the hungred bordles, as it is told me. Shop Illicit, flourishing like a lord-major or a buaboabaybohm, litting flop a deadlop (aloose!) to lee but lifting a bennbranch a yardalong (ivoeh!) on the breezy side (for showm!), the height of Brewster’s chimpney and as broad below as Phineas Barnum; humphing his share of the showthers on him he’s such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that’s a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle. And aither he cursed and recursed and was everseen doing what your fourfootlers saw or he was never done seeing what you coolpigeons know, weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses, and that’ll do now about the fairyhees and the frailyshees. Very much so! But however ’twas ’tis sure for one thing that the man, Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, came at this timecoloured place where we live in one tide on another, with a bumrush in a hull of a wherry, the dhow, The Bey for Dybbling, and has been repreaching himself like a fishmummer these siktyten years ever since, growing hoarish under his turban and changing cane sugar into sethulose starch (Tuttut’s cess to him!) as also that, batin the bulkihood he bloats about when innebbiated, our old offender was humile, commune and ensectuous from his nature, which you may gauge after the bynames was put under him, (praisers be!) and, totalisating him, that he, sober serious, he is ee and no counter he who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°2, May 1927
[chapter I.2 from Finnegans Wake]

Now , concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen and discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham in the hundred of manhood or proclaim him offsprout of vikings who had founded wapentake and seddled hem in Herrick or Eric, the best authenticated version has it that it was this way. We are told how in the beginning it came to pass that like cabbaging Cincinnatus the grand old gardener was saving daylight under his redwoodtree one sultry sabbath afternoon in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of ye olde marine hotel when royalty was announced by runner to have been pleased to have halted itself on the highroad along which a leisureloving dogfox had cast followed, also at walking pace, by a lady pack of cocker spaniels. Forgetful of all save his vassal’s plain fealty to the ethnarch Humphrey or Harold stayed not to yoke or saddle but stumbled out hotface as he was (his sweatful bandanna loose from his pocketcoat) hasting to the forecourts of his public in topee, surcingle, solascarf , plus fours and bulldog boots ruddled with red marl, jingling his turnpike keys and bearing aloft amid the fixed pikes of the hunting party a high perch atop of which a flowerpot was fixed earthside hoist with care. On his majesty, who was, or often feigned to be, noticeably longsighted from green youth and had been meaning to inquire what, in effect, had caused yon causeway to be thus potholed, asking substitutionally to be put wise as to whether paternoster and silver doctors were not now more fancied bait for lobstertrapping honest blunt Haromphreyld answered in no uncertain tones very similarly with a fearless forehead: Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers. Our sailor king, who was draining a gugglet of obvious adamale, upon this, ceasing to swallow, smiled most heartily beneath his walrus moustaches and indulging that none too genial humour which William the Conk on the spindle side had inherited with the hereditary whitelock and some shortfingeredness from his greataunt Sophy, turned towards two of his retinue of gallowglasses, Michael, etheling lord of Leix and Offaly and the jubilee mayor of Drogheda, Elcock, (the two scatterguns being Michael M. Manning, protosyndic of Waterford and an Italian excellency named Ginbilei according to a later version cited by the learned scholarch Canavan of Canmakenoise) and remarked dilsydulsily: Holybones, how our red brother of Pouringrainia would audibly fume did he know that we have for trusty bailiwick a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger! Comes the question are these the facts as recorded in both or either of the collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives. We shall perhaps not so soon see. The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hungerlean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation, every time he continually surveyed from good start to happy finish the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in the house of satin from their assbawlveldts and oxgangs unanimously to clapplaud Mr Wallenstein Washington Semperkelly’s immergreen tourers in the problem passion play of the millentury A Royal Divorce with ambitious interval band selections from The Bo’ Girl and The Lily on all gala command nights from his viceregal booth where, a veritable Napoleon the Nth, this folksforefather all of the time sat having the entirety of his house about him, with the invariable broadstretched kerchief cooling his whole neck, nape and shoulderblades and in a wardrobe panelled tuxedo completely thrown back from a shirt well entitled a swallowall, on every point far outstarching the laundered clawhammers and marbletopped highboys of the pit stalls and early amphitheatre. A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers that he suffered from a vile disease. To such a suggestion the one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one should like to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors, who, an imperfectly warmblooded race, apparently conceive him as a great white caterpillar capable of any and every enormity in the calendar recorded to the discredit of the Juke and Kellikek families, mended their case by insinuating that, alternately, he lay at one time under the ludicrous imputation of annoying Welsh fusiliers in the people’s park. To anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his long existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous. Truth compels one to add that there is said to have once been some case of the kind implicating, it is sometimes believed, a quidam, about that time walking around Dublin with a bad record, who has remained completely anonymous but (let us call him Abdullah Gamellaxarksky) was, it is stated, posted at Mallon’s, at the instance of watch warriors of the vigilance committee, and years afterwards, writes one, even greater, seemingly dropped dead whilst waiting for a chop somewhere near Hawkins Street. Slander, let it lie its flattest, has never been able to convict that good and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker, as a pious author called him, of any graver impropriety than that, advanced by some woodwards or regarders, who did not dare deny that they had that day consumed the soul of the corn, of having behaved in an ungentlemanly manner opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow whither, or so the two gown and pinners pleaded, dame nature in all innocency had spontaneously and about the same hour of the eventide sent them both but whose published combinations of silkinlaine testimonies are, where not dubiously pure, visibly divergent, as warpt from wept, on minor points touching the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison which was admittedly an incautious but, at its wildest, a partial exposure with such attenuating circumstances (garthen gaddeth green hwere sokeman hrideth girling) as an abnormal Saint Swithin’s summer and a ripe occasion to provoke it.

Guiltless of much laid to him he was clearly for so once at least he clearly expressed himself as being with still a trace of his erstwhile burr and hence it has been received of us that it is true. They tell the story how one happygogusty ides-of-April morning (the anniversary as it fell out of his first assumption of his mirthday suit and rights in appurtenance to the confusioning of human races) ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour when the tried friend of nature , tigerwood roadstaff to his stay, was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park in his caoutchouc kepi and rubberised inverness, he met a cad with a pipe. The latter (who, the odds are, is still going about in the same straw bamer, carryin his coat under his arm so as to look like a gentleman and signing the pledge as gaily as you please) hardily accosted him with: Guinness thaw tool in jew me dinner ouzel fin? (a nice how-do-you-do in Poolblack at the time as some of our oldclimers may still tremblingly recall) to ask could he tell him how much a clock it was that the clock struck had he any idea by cock’s luck as his watch was bradys. The Earwicker of that spurring instant, realising on fundamental liberal principles the supreme importance of physical life (the nearest help relay being pingping K. O. Sempatrick’s Day and the fenian rising) and unwishful as he felt of being sent into eternity , plugged by a softnosed bullet from the sap, halted, quick on the draw and, replyin that he was feelin tipstaff, cue, prodooced from his gunpocket his Jurgensen’s shrapnel waterbury but, on the same stroke, hearing above the skirling of harsh Mother East old Fox Goodman, the bellmaster, over the wastes to south, at work upon the ten ton tenor toller in the speckled church told the inquiring kidder, by Jehova, it was twelve of em sidereal adding, buttall, as he bended deeply with smoked sardinish breath to give more pondus to the copperstick he presented, that whereas the hakusay accusation againstm had been made, what was known in high quarters , by a creature in youman form who was quite beneath parr and several degrees lower than yore triplehydrad snake. In greater support of his word (it, quaint anticipation of a famous phrase, has been reconstricted and toosammenstucked from successive accounts by Noah Webster in the redaction known as the Sayings Attributive of H. C. Earwicker, prize one schillings, postlots free), the flaxen Gygos tapped his chronometrum drumdrum and, now standing full erect, above the ambijacent floodplain, with one Berlin gauntlet chopstuck in the hough of his ellboge (by ancientest signlore his gesture meaning: E!) pointed at an angle of thirtytwo degrees towards his duc de Fer’s overgrown milestone as fellow to his gage and after a rendypresent pause averred with solemn emotion’s fire: Shsh shake, co-comeraid! I have won straight. Hence my nonation wide hotel and creamery establishments which for the honours of our mewmew mutual daughters, credit me, I am woowoo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption, any hygienic day to this hour and to make my hoath to my sinnfinners, even if I get life for it, upon the Open Bible and before the Great Taskmaster’s (I lift my hat!) and in the presence of the Deity Itself andwell of Bishop and Mrs Michan of High Church of England as of all such of said my immediate withdwellers and of every living sohole in every corner wheresoever of this globe in general which useth of my British to my backbone tongue and commutative justice that there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications. Gaping Gill, (diagnosing through eustacetube that it was to make with a markedly postpuberal hypertituitary type of Heidelberg mannleich cavern ethics) bad him good murrough and like a sensible ham thanked um for guilders received and time of day (not a little token abock all the same that that was owl the God’s clock it was) and went about his business, whoever it was, accompanied by his trusty snorler and his permanent reflection verbigracious; I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early: and repeated in his secondmouth language as many of the bigtimer’s verbaten words which he could balbly call to memory that same kveldeve when suppertide and souvenir to Charlatan Mall jointly kem gently and along the quiet darkenings of Grand and Royal, ff, flitmansfluh, and, kk, ’t crept i’ hedge whenas to many a softongue’s pawkytalk mude unswer u sufter poghyogh, while he spat in careful convertedness about his hearthstone, if you please, (Irish saliva, mawshe dho hole, but would a respectable prominently connected fellow who knew the correct thing such as Mr Shallwesigh or Mr Shallwelaugh expectorate after such a callous fashion, no thank you! when he had his belcher spuckertuck in his pucket, pthuck?) musefed with his thockits, after having supped of the dish sot and pottage which he snobbishly dabbed Peach Bombay , a supreme of excelling peas, balled into whitemalt winesour, a proviant he frankly relished, chaff it, in the raw season Our cad’s bit of strife (knee Bareniece Maxwelton) with a quick ear for spittoons (as the aftertale hath it) glaned up as usual with dumbestic husbandry but broke of the matter among a hundred and eleven others in her usual curtsey , the next night nudge one over a hup a’ chee to her particular reverend, the director, whom she had been meaning in her mind primarily to speak with , trusting, between cuppled lips and annie lawrie promises it would go no further than his jesuit’s cloth, yet it was this overspoiled priest Mr Browne, disguised as a vincentian, who, when seized of the facts, was overheard, in his secondary personality as a Nolan and by accident—if, that is, the incident it was an accident —to pianissime a slightly varied version of the words, hands between hands, in fealty sworn and hushly pierce the rubiend ear of one Philly Thurncton, a layteacher of rural science and orthophonethics of a nearstout figure and about the middle of his forties during a priestly flutter for safe and sane lds at the hippic runfields of breezy Baldoyle on a date easily capable of rememberance by all pickersup of Dublin details when the classic Encourage Hackney Plate was captured by two lengths from Bold Boy Cromwell after a clever getaway by Captain Chaplain Blount’s roe hinny Saint Dalough, Drummer Coxon, third, at breakneck odds, thanks to you great little Winny Widger! who in his neverrip mud and purpular cap was surely leagues unlike any other phantomweight that ever toppitt our timber maggies.

It was two coves of the name of Treacle Tom as was just out of pop following the theft of a leg of Kehoe, Donnelly and Packenham’s Finnish pork and his own blood and milk brother Frisky Shorty, a tipster, come off the hulks, both of them awful poor, what was out on the bumaround for an ooffbird game for a jimmy o’goblin or a small thick un as chanced to ear the passon in the motor clobber make use of his language which he was rubbing noses with and having a gurgle off his own along of the butty bloke in the specs. This Treacle Tom to whom reference has been made had been absent from his usual wild and woolly haunts for some time previous to that (he was, in fact, in the habit of frequenting common lodginghouses where he slept in a nude state, hailfellow with meth, in strange men’s cots) but on racenight, blotto after divers tots of rum , he sought his wellwarmed bed in a housingroom Abide With Oneanother at Block W.W., Pump Court, The Liberties, and resnored alcoherently the substance of the tale of the evangelical bussybozzy in parts oft in the chilly night during uneasy slumber in their hearings of a small and stonybroke cashdraper’s executive, Peter Cloran (discharged), O’Mara, an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (locally known as Mildew Lisa), who had passed several nights, funnish enough, in a doorway under the blankets of homelessness on the bunk of iceland, pillowed upon the stone of des tiny colder than man’s knee or woman’s breast, and Hosty, an illstarred beachbusker, who, sans rootie and sans scrapie, feeling as how he was on the verge of selfabyss with melancholia over everything in general, had been tossing on his shakedown, devising ways and manners of means, of somehow or other getting a hold of some chap’s parabellum in the hope of taking a tuppence sociable and lighting upon a dive somewhere off the Dullkey Downlairy and Bleakrooky tramaline where he could go and blow the sibicidal napper off himself in peace and quietude , he having been trying all he knew for upwards of eighteen calanders to get out of Sir Patrick Dun’s, through Sir Humphrey Jervis’s and into Adelaide’s hosspittles (from without having been able to wangle it anysides. Lisa O’Dara and Roche Moran (who had so much incommon, if the phrase be permitted hostis et odor insuper petroperfractus) as an understood thing slept in the one tumblerbunk with Hosty just how the shavers in the shaw and the bustling tweeny dawn-of-all-works had not been many jiffies furbishing potlids, doorbrasses, scholars’ applecheeks and linkboy’s metals when the rejuvenated busker (for after a goodnight’s rave and rumble with his coexes he was not the same man) and his broadawake bedroom suite were up and ashuffle cross Ebblinn’s chilled hamlet to the thrummings of a crewth fiddle which caressed the ears of the subjects of King Finnerty the Festive who, in brick homes of their own and in their flavory, fraiseberry beds, heeding hardly cry of honeyman, soed lavender or foyneboyne salmon alive, with their priggish mouths all open , were only halfpast asleep and after a prolonged visit to a house of call at Cujas Place not a thousand or one national leagues from the site of the statue of Primewer Glasstone setting a match to the march of a maker , where, the tale rambles along, the trio of whackfolthediddlers was joined by a further—intentions—apply—tomorrow casual and à decent sort of the hadbeen variety who had just been touching the weekly insult, phe wit, and all figblabbers had stimulants in the shape of gee and gees stood by the damn decent sort after which stag luncheon and a few ones more just to celebrate yesterday, flushed with their firestufffostered friendship, the rascals came out of the licensed premises, (Browne’s first, the small p.s. ex-ex-executive capahand in their sad rear like a lady’s postscript: I want money. Pleasend), wiping their laughleaking lipes on their sleeves and the world was the richer for a wouldbe ballad This, more krectly lubeen was first poured forth under the shadow of the monument of the shouldhavebeen legislator to an overflow meeting of all the nations in Lenster fullyfilling the visional area and easily representative of all sections and cross sections of our liffeyside people ranging from slips of young dublinos from Cutpurse Row having nothing better to do than walk about with their hands in their kneepants side by side with truant officers, three woollen balls and poplin in search of a croust of pawn to busy professional gentlemen, a brace of palesmen with dundrearies fresh from snipehitting and mallardmissing on Rutland heath, exchanging cold sneers, massgoing ladies from Hume Street in their chairs, some wandering hamalegs out of the adjacent cloverfields of Mosse’s Gardens, an oblate father from Skinner’s Alley, bricklayers, a fleming, in tabinet fumant, with spouse and dog, an aged hammersmith who had some chisellers by the hand, not a few sheep with the braxy, two bluecoat scholars, four broke gents out of Simpson’s on the Rocks, Peter Pim and Paul Fry and then Elliot and, O, Atkinson, suffering hell’s delights from the blains of their annuitant’s horns not forgetting a deuce of dianas ridy for the hunt, a particularist prebendary pondering on the roman easter, the tonsure question and greek uniates, plunk em, and so on down to a few good old souls evipently under the spell of liquor, a fair girl, a jolly postboy thinking off three flagons and one a half sir from the weaver’s almshouse who clings and clings and clings to her, a wholedam’s cloudhued pittycoat, as child, as curiolater, as Caoch O’Leary. The wararrow went round, so it did, and the ballad, on a slip of blancovide and headed by a rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville, soon fluttered its secret on white highway, and brown byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, from archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village, through the five pussyfours green of the united states of Scotia Picta. To the added strains of his majesty the floote which Delaney anticipating a perfect downpour of plaudits among the rapsods, drew out of his decentsoort hat, looking still more like his namesake as men noted the snowycrested curl amoist his wild and moulting hair, Hitchcock hoisted his fezzy fuzz at bludgeon’s height for silentium in curia! and the canto was chantied there by the old tollgate. And around the lawn the rann it raun and this is the rann that Hosty made. Spoken. Arrah, leave it to Hosty, frosty Hosty, leave it to Hosty for he’s the mann to rhyme the rann, the rann, the rann, the king of all ranns. Have you here? Have we where? Have you hered? Have we whered It’s cumming It’s brumming! The clip, the clop! The (klikkaklakka klaska klopatz-klatschabattacreppycrotty-graddagh semmih sammihnouihpkonpkor!).

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty

How he fell with a roll and a rumble

And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple

By the butt of the Magazine Wall,

Of the Magazine Wall,

Hump, helmet and all?

He was one time our King of the Castle

Now he’s kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.

And from Green street he’ll be sent by order of His Worship

To the penal jail of Mountjoy

To the jail of Mountjoy!

Jail him and joy

He was father of all schemes for to bother us

Slow coaches and immaculate contraceptives for the populace,

Mare’s milk for the sick, seven dry Sundays a week,

Openair love and religion’s reform,

And religious reform,

Hideous in form.

Arrah, why, says you, couldn’t he manage it?

I’ll go bail, my fine dairyman darling,

Like the bumping bull of the Cassidys

All your butter is in your horns.

His butter is in his horns.

Butter his horns!

Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye,

rhyme the rann, the king of all ranns!

We had chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chickenpox and china chambers

Universally provided by this soffsoaping salesman.

Small wonder He’ll Cheat E’erawan our local lads nicknamed him

When Chimpden first took the floor

With his bucketshop store

Down Bargainweg, Lower.

So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous

But soon we’ll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery

And’tis short till sheriff Clancy’ll be winding up his unlimited company

With the bailiff’s bom at the door,

Bumbum at the door.

Then he’ll bum no more.

Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island

The hooker of that hammerfast viking

And Gall’s curse on the day when Eblana bay

Saw his black and tan man-o’-war.

Saw his man-o’-war.

On the harbour bar.

Where from? roars Poolbeg. Cookingha’pence, he bawls Donnez-moi scampitle, wick an wipin’fampiny

Fingal Mac Oscar Onesine Bargearse Boniface

Thok’s min gammelhole Norveegickes moniker

Og as ay are at gammelhore Norveegickers cod.

A Norwegian camel old cod.

He is, begod.

Lift it, Hosty, lift it, ye devil ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann!

It was during some fresh water garden pumping

Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys

That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey

Made bold a maid to woo

Woohoo, what’ll she doo!

The general lost her maidenloo!

He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher,

For to go and shove himself that way on top of her

Begob, he’s the crux of the catalogue

Of our antediluvial zoo,

Messrs Billing and Coo.

Noah’s larks, good as noo.

He was joulting by Wellinton’s monument

Our rotorious hippopopotamuns

When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus

And he caught his death of fusiliers,

With his rent in his rears.

Give him six years.

’Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children

But look out for his missus legitimate!

When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker

Won’t there be earwigs on the green?

Big earwigs on the green,

The largest ever you seen.

Then we’ll have a free trade Gaels’ band and mass meeting

For to sod the brave son of Scandiknavery.

And we’ll bury him down in Oxmanstown

Along with the devil and Danes,

With the deaf and dumb Danes,

And all their remains.

And not all the king’s men nor his horses

Will resurrect his corpus

For there’s no true spell in Connacht or hell

That’s able to raise a Cain.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°3, June 1927
[chapter I.3 from Finnegans Wake]

’Sdense! Therewith was released a poisoning volume of cloud indeed. Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then notever been. Canbe in some future we shall presently here the zitherer of the past with his merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim. Of the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga (which is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this applies to its whole wholume) of Osti, quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an exceedingly niced ear, no one end is known. Ei fù. A’Hara, crestfallen by things and down at heels at the time, they squeak, accepted the (Zassnoch!) ardree’s shilling at the conclusion of the Crimean war and, having flown his wild geese, enlisted in Tyrone’s horse, the Irish whites, and soldiered a bit with Wolsey under the assumed name of Blanco Fusilovna Bucklovitch (spurious) after which the cawer and the marble halls of Pump Court Columbarium looked upon each other no more for it transpires that on the other side of the water it came about that on the field of Vasileff’s Cornix inauspiciously with his unit he perished. Booil. Paul Horan, at the suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity lunacy was thrown into a Ridley’s for inmates in the northern counties. He was. Sordid Sam, haunted always by his ham, passed away painlessly after life’s upsomdowns one hallowe’en night, ebbrous and in the state of nature, propelled from Behind into the great Beyond by footblows upon his oyster and atlas on behanged and behooved and behicked and behulked of his last fishandblood bedscrappers, a Northwegian and his mate of the Sheawolving class. Though the last straw glimt his baring this stage thunkhard is said to have solemnly said — as had the brief thot but fell in till his head like a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate (cogged!): Me drames, O’Loughlins, has come through! Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, — of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me — by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns and this outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese! Han var. Disliken as he was to druriodrama Langley, the prophet, disappeared from the sourface of this earth so entirely spoorlessly as to tickle the speculative to all but opine that the hobo (who possessed a large amount of the humoresque) had transtuled his latitat to its finsterest interrimost. Bhi she. Again, was the reverend, the sodality director, that eupeptic viceflayer, a barefaced carmelite, to whose pulpit sinning society sirens (see the presspassim) fortunately became so enthusiastically attached and was an objectionable ass who very occasionally wore a raffles ticket on his hat and was semiprivately convicted of malpractices with his hotwashed table knife (glossing over the cark in his pocket) that same snob of the dunhill, fully several yearschaums riper, encountered by the General on that redletter morning or maynoon jovesday and were they? Fuitfuit.

It is wellvouchedfor fact of the commonest that the shape of the average human cloudyphiz frequently altered its ego with the possing of the showers. (Not original!) Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility, to idendifine the individuone in baggy pants and shufflers with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness (one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all sorts of ages!) who was asked by free boardschool shirkers in drenched coats overawall to tell them overagait that fishabed story of the Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums in their Bearskin ghoats! girles, but he has changed alok syne Thorkill’s time! Those many warts, those slummy patches, wrinkles, (what has come over the face of E?), and the large fungopark he has grown! Drink! It was the Lord’s own day for damp and the request was put to the porty (a native of the sisterisle — Meathman? — by his brogue and local odour which are said to have been average clownturkish who had made the southeast bluffs of the stranger stepshore his hindquarters) as he paused at evenchime for ten or so minutes amid the devil’s one duldrum for a fragrend culubosh during his week- end pastime of executing with Anny Oakley deadliness empties which had not very long before contained Reid’s family (you ruad that before, soaky, but all the bottles in sodemd histry will not soften your bloodathirst!) stout. Having reprimed his repeater and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances rose to his feet and there, far from Tolkaheim, in a quiet English garden (commonplace!) his simple intensive curolent vocality called up before the triad of precoxious caremakers the now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen! The first Humphrey’s latitudinous baver with puggaree behind, his fourinhand bow, his gruff woolselywellesly with the finndrinn knopfs and the gauntlet upon the hand which in an hour not for him solely evil had struck down the mighthe mighthavebeen d’Esterre of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to have need. Then, stealing his thunder, but in the befitting legomena of the smaller country, a bit duskish and flavoured with a smile, seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents (sukand see whybe!) the touching seene. It scenes like a landescape from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum’s mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no œdor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (Prigged!) The augustan peacebetothem oaks, the monolith rising stark from the moonlit pinebarren, the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm usetensiles, the soft belling of the fallow deers (doerehmoose genuane!) advertising their milky approach as midnight was striking the hours (letate!), and how brightly the great tribune outed the smokewallet (imitation!) from his frock, kippers, and by Joshua, he tips im a topping swank cheroot, none of your swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and he says he was to just pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana. How he met Master, he mean to say, on Lorenzo Tooley street and how he wished his Honour the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, yore Loudship, — a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times, when they were turrified by the hitz.

Any dog’s life you list you may still hear them at it, ulemamen, sobranjewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: Huru more Nee, minny frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue. Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib? Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son succo, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A’Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily? Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tuvavnr dans lptit boing coing. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de portocallie. O. O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O piccolo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and you? Gomagh, thak.)

And, Cod, says he with mugger’s tears: Meggeg, m’gay fellow, as sicker as moyliffey eggs is known by our good househalters from yorehunderts of mamooth to be which they commercially are in ahoy high British quarters (conventional!) my guesthouse and cowhaendel credits will immediately stand ohoh open as straight as that neighbouring monument’s fabrication before the hygienic gllll (this was where the reverent sabboth and bottlebreaker with firbalk forthstretched touched upon his tricoloured boater, cordially inwiting the adullescence who he was wising up to do in like manner what all did so as he was able to add) lobe before the Great Schoolmaster’s. Smile!

Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather. The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten for later in the century one of that puisne band of factferreters, (then an excivily (retired), (hurt), under the sixtyfives act in a dressy black modern style and wewere shiny tan burlingtons) rehearsed it with a dignified (copied) bow to a namecousin of the late archdeacon F. X. Preserved Coppinger in a pullwoman of our first transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a dirkandurk heartskewerer if ever. Cycloptically through the windowdisks and with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers beheld the clad pursue the bare, the bare the green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig’s lifetree, our fireleaved loverlucky blomsterbohm, phoenix in our woodlessness, haughty, cacuminal, erubescent (repetition!) whose roots they be asches with lustres of peins. For as often as the Archicadenus spoke of it by request all, hearing the copycus’s description of that fellowcommuter’s play upon countenants, could simply imagine themselves in their bosom’s inmost core, timesported acorss the yawning (abyss), as once they were seasiders, listening to the cockshyshooter’s evensong evocation of the doomed but always ventriloquent Agitator, (nonot more plangorpound the billows o’er Thounawahallya Reef!) silkhouatted, a whallrhosmightiadd, aginsst the dusk of skumring, his manslayer’s gunwielder protended towards that overgrown leadpencil which was soon, monumentally at least, to rise as Molyvdokondylon to, to be, to be his mausoleum (O’dan stod tillsteyne at meisies aye skould show pon) while olover his exculpatory features, as Roland rung, the ghost of resignation diffused a spectral appealingness, similar in origin and in effective to a beam of sunshine upon a coffin plate.

Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Traveller remote, unfriended, from van Demon’s Land, some lazy skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wildbroom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally quasi-begin to presquesm’ile to queasithin’ (Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)

But in the pragma what formal cause made a smile of that tothink? Who was he to whom? Whose are the placewheres? They answer from their Zoans; Hear the four of them! Hark torroar of them! I, says Armagh, and a’m proud o’it. I, says Clonakilty, God help us! I, says Deansgrange, and say nothing. I, says Barna, and whatabout it? Hee haw! Before he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um, cool of her curls: We were but thermites then, wee, wee. Our antheap we sensed as a Hill of Allen, the Barrow for an People, one Jotnursfjaell: and it was a grummelung amung the porktroop that wonderstruck us as a thunder, yunder.

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus twos. Yet certes one is. Eher the following winter had overed the pages of nature’s book the shadow of the huge outlander had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals in manor hall as in thieves’ kitchen, mid pillow talk and chit house chat, here sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted con- testimony with benefit of clergy. His Thing Mod have undone him: and his madthing has done him man. His beneficiaries are legion in the part he created: they number up his years. Greatwheel Dunlop was the name was on him: behung, all we are his bisaacles. As hollyday in his house so was he priest and king to that: ulvy came, envy saw, ivy conquered. Lou! Lou! They have waved his green boughs o’er him as they have torn him limb from lamb. For his muertification and uxpiration and dumnation and annuhulation. But, lo! lo! human, erring and condonable, the unforgettable treeshade looms up behind the jostling judgements of those, as all should owe, malrecapturable days.

Tap and pat and tapatagain, three tommix, soldiers free, cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream guards were walking, in (pardonnez-leur, je vous en prie, eh?) Montgomery Street. One voiced an opinion in which on either wide (pardonnez!), nodding, all concurred (je vous en prie, eh?) It was the first woman, they said, souped him, that fatal wellesday, Lili Coninghams. Wroth mod eldfar, ruth redd stilstand, wrath wrackt wroth, confessed private Pat Marchison retro. (Terse!) One of our coming Vauxhall ontheboards who is resting for the moment (she has been callit by a noted stagey elecutioner a wastepacket Sittons) was interfeud in a waistend pewty parlour. Looking perhaps even more pewtyflushed Mrs F... A... said, while recoopering her cartwheel hat, she hoped he would git a Chrissman’s portrout with hollegs and ether as the worryld had been uncained. Then it has been such a wonderful noyth untirely, added she. (Tart!) A dustman nocknamed Sevenchurches in the employ of Messrs Achburn, Soulpetre and Ashreborn, prairmakers, Glintalook, was asked by the sisterhood the vexed question during his midday collation of the spuds and tripes in a hashhoush and, thankeaven, responsed impulsively: We have just been propogandering his nullity suit among my own crush. All our fellows at O’Dea’s say he is a cemented brick, buck it all! A more nor usually sober cardriver, who was jauntingly hosing his runabout, Ginger Jane, took a strong view. Lorry hosed her as he talked and this is what he told rewritemen: Irewaker is just a plain pink joint reformee in private life but folks all have it he has parliamentary honours. A railways barmaid’s view (they call her Spilltears Rue) was thus expressed: Ehim! It is ever too late to whissle when Phyllis floods her stable. It would be a skarlot shame to jailahim in lockup what matter what merrytricks went off with his revulverher in connections with ehim being a norphan and enjoining such wicked illth, ehim! Well done, Drumcollakill, was the reply of a B.O.T. official while the Daughters Benkletter murmured in uniswoon: Golforgilhisjurylegs! Brian Lynsky, the cub curser, was questioned at his shouting box, Bawlonabraggat, and gave a snappy comeback, when saying: Paw! Once more I’ll hellbowl! I am for caveman chase and sahara sex, burk you! Them two bitches ought to be leashed, canem! Up hog and hoar hunt! Paw! A wouldbe martyr, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be there would be fights all over Cuxhaven. (Tosh!) Missioner Ida Wombwell, the seventeenyearold revivalist, said concerning the coincident of interfizzing with grenadines and other respectable and disgusted peersons using the park: That perpendicular person is a brut! But a magnificent brut! Sylvia Silence, the girl detective, when supplied with informations as to the several facets of the case in her cozydozy bachelure’s flat, quite overlooking John a’Dream’s mews, leaned back in her really truly easy chair to query restfully through her vowelthreaded syllabelles: Have you evew thought, wepowtew, that sheew gweatness was his twadgedy? Nevewtheless accowding to my considewed attitudes fow this act he should pay the full penalty, pending puwsuance, as pew Subsec. 32, section 11, of the C. L. A. act 1885, anything in this act to the contwawy notwithstanding. Meagher, a naval rating, seated on one of the granite cromlech setts of our new fishshambles after the ever popular act, was encouraged by one of his affianced to get your breath, Walt, and thus replied to her thankskissing: I lay my two fingerbuttons, fiancee Meagher, he was to blame about your two velvetthighs up Horniman’s Hill — as hook and eye blame him or any other piscman? — but I also think by the siege of his trousers there was someone else behind it — you bet your boughtem blarneys — about their three drummers down Keysars Lane. (Trite!).

Be these meer marchant taylor’s fablings of a race referend with oddman rex? Can it was, one is fain in this leaden age of letters now to wit, that so diversified outrages (they have still to come!) were planned and partly carried out against so staunch a covenanter if it be true than any of those recorded ever took place for many, we trow, beyessed to and denayed of, are given to us by some who use the truth but sparingly and we, on this side ought to sorrow for their pricking pens on that account. The seventh city, his citadear of refuge, whither (would we believe the laimen and their counts), beyond the outraved gales of Atreeatic, he had fled, shipalone, a raven of the wave, from the ostmen’s dirtby on the old vic, to forget in expiating manslaughter; the wastobe land in which by the fourth commandment with promise his days apostolic were to be long by the abundant mercy of Him Which Thundereth From On High, murmured, would rise against him with all which in them were, franchisables and inhabitands, do him hurt, poor jink, ghostly following bodily, as were he made a curse for them, the corruptible lay quick, all saints of incorruption of an holy nation, the common or ere-in-garden castaway, in red resurrection to condemn so they might convince him, first pharoah, Humpheres Cheops Exarchas, of their proper sins. Business bred to speak with a stiff upper lip to all men and most occasions the Man we wot of took little short of fighting chances but for all that he or his or his care were subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland. (perorhaps!)

We seem to us (the real Us!) to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black. It was after the show at Wednesbury that one tall man, humping a suspicious parcel, when returning late amid a dense particular on his home way from the second house of the Boore and Burgess Christy Menestrels by the old spot, Roy’s Corner, had a barkiss revolver placed to his faced with the words: you’re shot!; by an unknowable assailant (masked) against whom he had been jealous over Lotta Crabtree or Pomona Evlyn? More than that Whenn the Waylayer (not a Lucalizod diocesan or even of the Glendalough see, but hailing fro’ the prow of Little Britain), mention- ing in a bytheway that he had a loaded Hobson’s which left only twin alternatives as, viceversa, either he would surely shoot her by pistol, (she could be okaysure of that!) or, failing of such, bash in Patch’s blank face beyond recognition, pointedly asked with gaeilish gall wodkar blizzard’s business Thornton had with that Kane’s fender only to be answered by the aggravated assaulted that that that was the snaps for him, Midweeks, to sultry well go and find out if he was showery well able. But how transparingly nontrue, gentle writer! His feet one is not a tall man, not at all. Was it supposedly in connection with a girls, Myramy Huey or Iris Archer, under Flaggy Bridge (for ann there is but one lidff and hir newbridge is her old) or to explode his twelvechamber and force a shrievalty entrance that the heavybuilt Abelbody in a butcherblue blouse from One Life One Suit (a men’s wear store), with a most decisive bottle of single in his possession, seized after dark by the town guard at Haveyou-caught-emerod’s temperance gateway was there in a gate’s way. Fifthly, how truetoned on his first time of hearing the wretch’s statement that, muttering Irish, he had had had o’gloriously a’lot too much horseshoe fine to drink in a ship hotel and was only falling fluthered up against the gatestone pier which, with the cow’s bonnet a’top o’it, he falsetook for a cattlepillar with purest peaceablest intentions. Yet how lamely hobbles the hoy of his then pseudojocax axplanation how, according to his own story, he was a process server and was merely trying to open zozimus a bottlop stoub by hammering his magnum bonum (the curter the club the sorer the savage) against the bludgey gate for the boots about the swan Maurice Behan, who hastily threw on a pair of old sir Bunchamon’s pants, stepped into his shoes and came down to the tiltyard from the wastes a’sleep in his obi ohny overclothes or choker, attracted by the norse of gunplay, said war’ prised safe in bed when wokenp by a fourth loud snore out of his land of byelo by hearing hammerang emanating from the blind pig and anything like it in the whole history of the Mullingcan Inn he never. This battering babel allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like the belzey babble of a bottle of boose which would not rouse him out o’slumber deep but reminded him loads more of marses of foreign musikants’ instrumongs or the overthrewer to the third last days of Pompery, if anything.

Just one moment. A pinch in time of the ideal, musketeers! And roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world! And call all your smokeblushes, Snowwhite and Rosered, if you will have the real cream! Now for a strawberry frolic! Cherchons la flamme! Take an old geeser who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek hair, so elegant, tableau vivant. He vows her to be his own honeylamb, swears they will be papa pals, by Sam, and share good times way down west in a guaranteed happy lovenest when May moon she shines and they twit twinkle all the night, combing the comet’s tail up right and shooting popguns at the stars. For dear old grumpapar, he’s gone on the razzledar, through gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars. She wants her wardrobe to hear from above by return with cash so as she can buy her Peter Robinson trousseau and cut a dash with Arty, Bert or possibly Charley Chance (who knows?) so tolloll Mr Hunker you’re too dada for me to dance (so off she goes!) and that’s how half the gels in town has got their bottom drars while grumpapar he’s trying to hitch his braces on to his trars. But old grum he’s not so clean dippy between sweet you and yum (not on your life, boy! not in those trousers! not by a large jugful!) for someplace on the sly old grum has his gel number two (bravevow, our Grum!) and he would like to canoodle her too some part of the time for he is downright fond of his number one but O he’s fair mashed on peaches number two so that if he could only canoodle the two all three would feel genuinely happy, it’s as simple as A. B. C., the two mixers, we mean, with their cherrybum chappy (for he is simply shamming dippy) if they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat, hugging two by two in his zoo-doo-you-doo, a tofftoff for thee, missymissy for me and howcameyou-e’enso for Farber, in his tippy, upindown dippy, tiptoptippy canoodle, can you?

With which clap, trap and soddenment our mutual friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem to be implicitly in the same bateau, so to put it, bearing also several of the earmarks of design, for there is in fact no use in putting a tooth in a thing of that sort and the amount of all those sort of things which has been going on among all kinds of promiscious individuals at all ages every other nightinday in private homes and reeboos publikiss and allover all and elsewhere throughout secular sequence the country over and overabroad has been particularly stupendous. To be continued. Federals’ Uniteds’ Transports’ Unions’ for Exultations’ of Triumphants’ Ecstasies.

But resuming inquiries. Will it ever be next morning the postal unionist’s (officially called carrier’s, Letters Scotch, Limited) strange fate (Fierceendgiddyrich he’s hight, d.e., the losel that hucks around missivemaids’ gummibacks) to hand in an envelope, written in divers stages of ink, superscribed and subpencilled by yours A Laughable Party, with afterwite, to Hyde and Cheek, Edenberry, Dubblenn, WC? Will whatever will be written in lappish language with inbursts of Maggyer always seem semposed, black looking white and white guarding black, in that siamixed twoatalk used twist stern swift and jolly roger? Always and ever till Cox’s wife, twice Mrs Hahn, pokes her beak into the matter with Owen K. after her, to see whawa smutter after, will this kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch of that halpbrother of a herm, a pillarbox? The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist’s art, at first blench naturally taken for a handharp (it is handwarp to tristinguish jubabe from jabule or either from tubote when all three have just been invened) had been removed from the hardware premises of Oetzmann and Nephew, a noted house of the gonemost west, which in the natural course of all things continues to supply funeral requisites of every needed description. Why needed, though? Indeed needed because the flash brides or bride in their lily boleros one games with at the Nivynubies’ finery ball and your upright grooms that always come right up with you (and by jingo when they do!) what else in this mortal world, now ours, when meet there night, mid their nackt, me there naket, made their nought the hour strikes, would bring them rightcame back in the flesh, thumbs down, to their orses and their hashes.

To proceed In the bottled heliose case continuing, Long Lally Tobkids, the special, sporting a fine breast of medals, and a conscientious scripturereader to boot in the brick and tin choorch round the coroner, swore like a Norewheezian on the stand before the proper functionary that he was up against a right querrshnorrt of a mand in the butcher of the blues who, he guntinued, on last epening after delivering some carcasses and meatjutes on behalf of Messrs. Otto Sands and Eastman, Limericked, Victuallers, went and, with his unmitigated astonissment, hickicked at the dun and dorass against all the runes and, when challenged about the pretended hick (it was kickup and down with him) on his solemn by the imputant imputed, said simply: I appop pie oath, Phillyps. You did, as I sostressed before. You are deepknee in error, sir, Mrs. Tomkins, let me then tell you, replied with a gentlewomanly salaam MackPartland, (the meatman’s family, and the oldest in the world except nick, name.) And Phelps was flayful with his peeler. But his phizz fell.

Now to the obverse. From velveteens to dimities is barely a fivefinger span and hence these camelback excesses are thought to have been instigated by one or either of the causing causes of all, those rushy hollow heroines in their skirtsleeves, be she magretta be she the posque. Oh! Oh! Because it is a horrible thing to have to say to say to day but one dilalah, Lupita Lorette, shortly after in a fit of the unexpectednesses drank carbolic with all her dear placid life before her and paled off while the other soiled dove that’s her sister-in-love, Luperca Latouche, finding one day while dodging chores that she stripped teasily for binocular man and that her galbs were glad to see each other, the nautchy girly soon found her fruitful hat too small for her and rapidly taking time look she rapidly took to necking, partying and selling herspare favours in the haymow or in lumber closets or in the greenawn ad huck or in the sweet churchyard close itself for a bit of soft coal or an array of thin trunks, serving whom in fine that same hot coney a la Zingara which our own little Graunya of the chilired cheeks dished up to the greatfather of Oscar, that son of a Coole. Houri of the coast of emerald, arrah of the lacessive poghue, did not she, come leinster’s eve, true dotter of a dearmud, with so valkirry a licence as sent many a poor pucker packing to perdition, again and again, ay, and again sfidare him, tease fido, eh tease fido, eh eh tease fido, toos topples topple, stop, ye dog ye! Angealousmei! And did not he, like Arcoforty, farfar off Bissavolo, missbrand her behaveyous with iridescent huecry of down right mean false sop lap sick dope? Tawfulsdreck! A reine of the shee, a shebeen quean, a queen of pranks, a kingly man, of royal mien, regally robed. So gave so take: Now not, not now! He would just a min. Suffering trumpet! He thought he want. Whath? Hear, O hear, living of the land! Hungreb, dead era, hark! He hea, eyes ravenous on her lippling lills. He hear her voi of day gon by. He hears! Zay, zay, zay! But cannot answer. Nor needs none shaft ne stele from Phenicia or Little Asia to obelise on the spout, neither pobalclock neither folksstone, nor sunkenness in Tomar’s Wood to bewray how erpressgangs score off the rued. If violence to life, limb and chattels, often as not, has been the expression, direct or through an agent male, of womanhid offended, (ah! ah!), has not levy of blackmail from the times the fairies were in it and fain for daisyroot followed private reputation for whispered sins?

Now turn wheel again to the whole of the wall. There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wallhole did exist. A stonehinged gate then was for another thing while the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack under fair rental of one yearlyng sheep, (prime) value of sixpence, and one small yearlyng goat (cadet) value of eightpence, to grow old and happy (hogg it and kidd him) for the reminants of his years; and when everything was got up for the purpose he put a gate on the place by no means as some pretext a bedstead in loo thereof to keep out donkeys (the pigdirt hanging from the jags to this hour makes that clear) and just thenabouts the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent the cats from getting at the gout, was triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly in case he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade’s eggday, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded. O, by the by, it ought to be always remembered in connection with what has gone before that there was a northroomer digging in number 32 at the Rum and Puncheon in Laxlip (where the Sockeye Sammons were stopping at the time) prior to that, a commercial from Osterich, the U.S.E. paying 11/- in the week, (Gosh, these wholly romads!) of conscience money in the first deal of July and er, consstated that one had on him the melton disturbed, and wider he might that zurichschicken other he would one monkey’s damages become. Now you must know that the gate and bandstand butchery was merely a tissue of threats and abuse and after this sort. Humphrey’s unsolicited visitor from the middle west, after having blew some quaker’s (for you!) in through the keyhole to attract attention, bleated through the gale outside which he was howling, first, be the hirsuiter, that he would break his head for him, next, be the heeltapper, that he would break the gage over his lankyduckling head the same way he would crack a nut with a monkeywrench and, last of all, be the stirabouter, that he would give him his (or theumperom’s) blood to drink. He demanded more wood alcohol to pitch in with, alleging that his granfather’s was all taxis and that it was only after ten o’connell, and then, not easily discouraged, opened the floodgates of his wrath and went on at a wicked rate, weathering against him, from eleven thirty to two in the afternoon without even a luncheonette interval for House, son of Clay, to come out to be Executed. Earwicker, longsuffer- ing, under restraint in the sititout corner of his conservatory, behind faminebuilt walls, his thermos flask and ripidian flabel by his side and a walrus whiskerbristle for a tuskpick, compiled a long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all abusive names he was called (we have been compelled etcetera by Josephine Brewster in the collision known as Contrastations with Inkermann and so on and sononward, lacies in loo water, flee, celestials, one clean turv): Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit, Yellow Whigger, Wheatears, Goldy Geit, Bogside Beauty, Yass We’ve Had His Badannas, York’s Porker, Funnyface, Grease with the Butter, Opendoor Ospices, Cainandabler, Ireland’s Eighth Wonderful Wonder, Beat My Price, Godsoilman, Moonface the Murderer, Hoary Hairy Hoax, Midnight Sunburst, Swad Puddlefoot, Gouty Ghibeline, Loose Luther, Hatches Cocks’ Eggs, Muddle the Plan, Luck before Wedlock, I Divorce Thee Husband, Tanner and a Make, Barebarean, Peculiar Person, Grunt Owl’s Facktotem, Twelve Months Aristocrat, Lycanthrope, Left Boot Sent on Approval, Cumberer of Lord’s Holy Ground, Scuttle to Cover, Twitchbratschballs, Bombard Street Bester, Sublime Porter, And at Number Wan Wan Wan, Ruin of the Small Trader, He — — Milkinghoneybeaverbrooker, Vee was a Vindner, Sower Rapes, Armenian Atrocity, Sickfish Bellyup, Edomite, — ’Man Devoyd of the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature, Bad Humborg, Hraabhraab, Coocoohandler, Dirt, Micher from your Home, Woolworth’s Worst, Guineapig’s Bastard, Boose in the Bed, Mister Fatmate): but did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity, though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in the booth he was in to reach for the hello grip and ring up Kimmage Outer 17.67, because, as the fundamentalist explained touchin his woundid feelins in the fuchsiar the dominican mission was on at the time and he thought the rowmish devowtion known as the howly rowsary might reeform ihm, Gunn. That more than considerably unpleasant bullocky before he rang off drunkishly pegged a few polished stones, all of a size, at the wicket in support of his words but reconnoitring through his semisubconscious the seriousness of what he might have done had he really carried out his terrible intentions finally caused him to change the bawling and leave downg the whole grumus of brookpebbles pangpung and, having sobered up a bit, this backblocks boor bruskly left the paleologic scene after exhorting Earwicker or, in slightly modified phraseology, Mr. Earwicker, Seir, his name of multitude, to cocoa come outside to Mockerloo out of that for the honour of Crumlin, with his broody old flishguds, Gog’s curse to thim, so as he could brianslog and burst him all up, like Potts Fracture did with Keddle Flatnose and nobodyatall with Wholyphamous and build rocks over him, or if he didn’t, for two and thirty straws, be Cacao Campbell he didn’t know what he wouldn’t do for him nor nobody else nomore nor him after which, playing on the least change of his manjester’s voice, the first heroic couplet from the fuguall tropical, Opus Elf, Thortytoe: My schemes into obeyance for This time has had to fall: he bit goodbye to his thumb and proceeded with a Hubbleforth slouch in his slips backwords (Et Cur Heli!) in the directions of the duff and demb institutions about ten or eleven hundred years lurch away in the moonshiny gorge of Patself on the Bach.

Yed he made leave to many a door beside of Finglas wold for so witness his chambered cairns silent that are at browse up hill and down coombe and on eolithostroton, at Howth or at Coolock or even at Enniskerry. Olivers lambs we do call them and they shall be gathered unto him, their herd and paladin, in that day hwen he skall wake from earthsleep in his valle of briers and o’er dun and dale the Wulverulverlord (protect us!) his mighty horn skall roll, orland, roll.

Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes coolt parritch, his pelt nassy, his heart’s adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff, his extremeties extremely so Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°4, July 1927
[chapter I.4 from Finnegans Wake]

As the lion in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile it may be the besieged bedreamt him stil and solely of those lililiths undeveiled which had undone him, gone for age, and knew not the watchful treachers at his wake, and theirs to stay. It may be that he reglimmed? presaw? the fields of heat and yields of wheat where corngold Ysit? shamed and shone. It may be that with his deepseeing insight (had not wishing oftbeen but good time wasted), within his patriarchal shamanah, broadsteyne ’bove citie (Twillby! Twillby!) he conscious of enemies, a kingbilly whitehorsed in a Finglas mill, prayed, as he sat on anxious seat, during that three and a hellof hours’ agony of silence, ex profundis malorum, and bred with unfeigned charity that his wordwounder (a born engles who would go anyold where on his mottled belly for milk, music or married missusses) might, mercy to providential benevolence’s who hates prudencies’ astuteness unfold into the first of a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors, blackfaced connemaras not of the fold but elder children of his household, his most besetting of ideas (pace his twolve predamanant passions) being the formation, as in more favoured climes, of a truly criminal stratum, Ham’s cribcracking yeggs, thereby at last eliminating from the oppidump much desultory delinquency from all classes and masses with directly derivative decasualisation: sigarius (sic!) vindicat urbes terrorum (sicker!): and so to mark the hobedience of the citizens elp the ealth of the ole.

Let us leave theories there and return to here’s here. Now hear. The coffin, feets to the east, was to turn in later, materially effecting the cause, And this is the thinghowe. Any number of conservative public bodies, through select and other committees, before voting themselves by a fit and proper resolution once for all out of plotty existence, made him, while his body still persisted, their present of a grave in Moyelta of the best Lough Neagh pattern, then as much in demand among misonesans as the Isle of Man today among limniphobes. It was in a fairly fishy condition, after the Fianna’s foreman had taken his handful, enriched with ancient woods and dear dutchy deeplinns mid which were an old knoll and a troutbeck, vainyvain of her osiery and chatty with any Wilt or Walt who would ongle her as Izaak did to the tickle of his rod and watch her waters: and there now brown peater arripple (may their quilt gild lightly over his somnolulutent form!) Whoforyou lies his last, by the wrath of Bog, like the erst curst Hun in the bed of his trueblue Donawhu.

This wastohavebeen underground heaven, first in the west, our misterbilder openly damned and blasted by means of a hydromine, system Sowan and Belting, exploded from a reinvented bombingpost up ahoy of eleven and thirty wingrests (circiter) to sternbooard out of his aerial thorpeto, Auton Dynamon, contacted with the expectant minefield by tins of improved ammonia lashed to her shieldplated gunwale, and fused into tripupcables, slipping through tholes and playing down from the conning tower into the ground battery fuseboxes, all differing as clocks from keys since nobody appeared to have the same time of beard, some saying by their Oorlog it was Sygstryggs to nine, more holding with the Ryan wacht it was Dane to pfife. He afterwards carefully lined the ferroconcrete result with rotproof bricks and mortar, fassed to fossed, so encouraging additional useful councils public such as the Breeders’ Union, the Guild of Merchants of the Staple et, a.u.c. to present unto him over and above that a stone slab with the usual Mac Pelah address of velediction: We have done with you, Heer Herewhippit, skidoo! Show coffins, winding sheets, goodbuy bierchepes cinerary urns, liealoud blasses, snuffchests, poteentubbs and for that matter any kind of funeral bric au brac would naturally follow, halas, in the ordinary course, enabling that roundtheworlder to live all safeathomely the presenile days of his life of opulence, ancient ere decrepitude, whaling away the whole of the while, lethelulled between explosion and reexplosion from grosskopp to megapod, embalmed, of grand age, rich in death anticipated.

The other spring offensive on the heights of Abraham may have come about all quite by accidence, Foughtarundser (for Breedabrooda had at length presuaded him to have himself to be buried in Finntown), had not been three monads in his watery grave when portrifaction, dreyfussed as ever, began to ramp, ramp, ramp, the boys are parching. From both Celtiberian camps (granting at the onset for the sake of argument that men on the two sides in New South Ireland and Vetera Uladh, bluemin and pillfaces, during the ferment With the Pope or On the Pope, had, moors or letts, grant ideas, grunted) all conditions, poor cons and dives mor, were drawn toowards their Bellona’s Black Bottom, once Woolwhite’s Waltz (Ohiboh, how becrimed, becursekissed and bedumbtoit!) some for want of proper feeding in youth, others already caught in the honourable act of slicing careers for family and carvers in conjunction; and, if emaciated nough, the person garrotted may have suggested to whomever he took the ham of, the plain being involved in darkness, low cirque waggery, nay, even the first old wugger of himself in the flesh, whiggissimus incarnadined, when falsesighted by the ifsuchhewas bully on the hill for there had circulated freely fairly among his opposition the feeling that in so hibernating Massa Ewacka, who, previous to that demidetached life, had been known of barmicidal days, cook said, between soups and savours, to get outside his own length of rainbow trout and taerts atta tarn as no man of woman born, was, like the salmon of his ladderleap all this time of totality, secretly and by suckage feeing on his own misplaced fat.

Ladies did not disdain those pagan ironed times of the first city (called after the ugliest Danadune) when a frond was a friend indeed to carry, as earwigs do their dead, their soil to the earthball. Venuses were gigglibly temptatrix, vulcans guffawably eruptious and the whole wives’ world frockful of fickles. Fact, any human inyon you liked any erenoon or efter would take her bare godkin out, or an even pair of hem, and prettily pray with him (or with em even) everyhe to her taste, long for luck, tapette and tape petter and take pettest of all. Wells she’d woo and wills she’s win but how the deer knowed where she’d marry! Arbour, bucketroom, caravan, ditch? Coach, carriage, wheelbarrow, dungcart? Kate Strong, a widow — she pulls a picture for us, glowing and very vidual, of old dumplan as she nosed it, a homelike cottage of elvanstone with droppings of biddies, stinkend pusshies, rotten witchawubbles and festering rubbages, if not worse, sending salmofarious germs in gleefully through the smithereen panes — Widow Strong, then, did most all the scavenging from good King Hamlaugh’s gulden dayne though her lean besom cleaned but sparingly and her bare statement reads that, there being no macadamised Sidetracks on those old nekropolitan nights in, barring a footbatter, Bryant’s Causeway, bordered with speedwell, white clover and sorrel a wood knows, which left off where the plaintiff was struck, she left down, as scavengers, who will be scavengers must, her filthdump near the Serpentine in Phornix Park (at her time called Finewell’s Keepsacre but later tautaubapptossed Pat’s Purge), all over which fossil footprints, bootmarks, fingersigns, elbowdints, breechbowls, a. s. o. were all successively traced of a most envolving description. What subtler timeplace of the weald than such wolfsbelly castrament to will hide a leabhar from Thursmen’s brandihands or a loveletter, lostfully hers, that would be lust on Ma, than then when ructions ended, than here where race began: and by four hands of forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle of hume sweet hume. Give over it! And no more of it! So pass the pick for child sake! O men!

For hear Allhighest sprack: and his nuptial eagles sharped their beaks of prey: and every murphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine: as it was let it be, says he! And it is as though the obluvial waters of our noarchic memory withdrew, windingly goharksome, at his rude word. Lave that bloody stone as it is! What are you doing your dirty minx and his big treeblock way up your path? Slip around, you, by the rare of the ministers’! And, you, take that barrel back where you got it, Mac Shane’s, and go the way your old one went, Hatchettsbury Road! And gish! how they gushed away, the pennyfares, a whole school for scamper, with their sashes flying sish behind them, all the little pirlypettes! Issy-la-Chapelle! Any lucans, please?

Yes, it was hard by the howe’s there, plainly on this disoluded spot, rupestric then, resurfaced that now is, in the saddle of the Brennan’s pass, versts and versts from true civilisation, where livland yontide meared with the wilde, saltlea with flood, that the attackler, though under medium and between colours with truly native pluck, engaged the Adversary whom for plunder sake, he mistook in the heavy rain to be Oglethorpe or somebody else to whom he bore some Michelangiolesque resemblance, making use of sacrilegious languages to the effect that he would cannonise the b — y b — r’s life out of him and lay him out contritely as soon as the b — r had his b — y nightprayers said, at the same time catching holst of an oblong bar he had and with which he usually broke furnitures he rose the stick at him. They struggled for some considerable time around the booksafe, fighting like purple top and tipperuhry Swede, and in the course of their tussle the toller man said to the miner who was carrying the worm : Let me go, Pautheen! I hardly knew ye. Later on the same man (or a different and younger him of the same ham) asked in the vermicular with a very eggly chew-chin-grin: Was six victolios fifteen pigeon takee offa you, tell he me, stlongfella, by picky-pocky ten to foul months behindaside? There were some further collidabanter and severe tries to convert for the best part of an hour and now a woden affair in the shape of a webley fell from the intruser who whereupon became friendly and wanted to know, laying all joking and knobkerries aside, if his change companion who stuck still to the invention of his strongbox, happened to have the loots change of a tenpound crickler about him at the moment, addling thatm hap so, he would pay him back the six vics odd, do you see, out of that for what was taken on the man of samples last Yuni or Yuly, do you follow me, Major? To this the other who had mummed and mauled up to that rather amusedly replied: Woowoo would you be grossly surprised, Hill, to learn that, as it so happens, I honestly have not such a thing as the loo, as the least chance of a tinpanned crackler anywhere about me at the present mohomoment but I believe I can see my way, as you suggest, to advance you something like four and sevenpence between hopping and trapping which you might just as well have to buy J. J. and S. with. Heart alive! Which at very first wind of gay gay and whiskwigs wick’s ears pricked up, the starving gunman, strike him pink, became strangely calm and forthright said he would go good to him suntime and remarking in languidoily, apparently much more highly pleased than tongue could tell at this opening of a lifetime and the foretaste of the Dun Bank pearlmothers and the boy to wash down which he would feed to himself in the Ruadh Cow at Tallaght and then into the Good Woman at Ringsend and after her inat Conway’s Inn at Blackrock and, first to fall, cursed be all, where appetite would keenest be, atte Adam and Eve’s in Quantity Street : You stunning little southdowner! I’d know you anywhere, Declaney, let me truthfully tell you and who the hell else, be your blanche patch! Goalball I’ve struck this night of nights, by golly! My hat, you have some bully German grit, sundowner! With that the queer mixture exchanged the pax in embrace or poghue puxy as practised between brothers of the same breast, hillelulia, killelulia, and levanted off over the assback bridge with the four and seven in danegeld and his humoral hurlbat or other uncertain weapon of lignum vitæ picked up to keep some crowplucking appointment while this poor delaney, who he left along with the fender behind and who bore up wonderfully wunder all of it with a whole number of plumsized contusiums, plus alasalah bruised coccyx, all over him, reported the occurance in the best way he could, giving the military salute, in justifiable hope that some lotion or fomentation of poppyheads would be exhibited to the parts, at the nearest watchhouse in Vicar Lane, his face all covered with nonfatal mammalian blood as proofpositive of the seriousness of his character and that he was bleeding from the nostrils, lips, pavilion and palate, while some of his hairs had been pulled off his head by Colt though otherwise his allround health appeared to be middling along as it proved most fortunate that not one of the two hundred and six bones and five hundred and one muscles in his corso was a whit the whorse for her whacking.

Nowthen, leaving clashing ash, brawn and muscle and brassmade to oust earthernborn and rockcrystal to wreck isinglass but wurming along gradually to the question of boney’s unlawfully obtaining a pierced paraflamme and claptrap fireguard there crops out the still more salient point of the politish leanings and town pursuits of our forebeer, who, when within the black of your toenail, sir, of being mistakenly ambushed and as close as made no matter, mam, to being kayoed offhard when the hyougono heckler with the Peter the Painter wanted to hole him, was consistently practising the first of the primary liberties of the pacific subject by circulating (be British, and give a chum a chance!) alongst one of our umphrohibited semitary thrufahrts, open to buggy and bike, to walk, Wellington Park road, with the curb under his auxter and his alpenstuck in his redhand, a highly commendable exercise, or, number two of our acta legitima plebeia, on the brink (beware to baulk a man at his will!) of taking place upon a public seat, to what, bare by Butt’s, most easterly of blackpool bridges, as a public protest and naturlikevice, without intent to annoy either, being praisegood thankfully for the wrathbereaved ringdove and the fearstung boaconstrictor and all the more right jollywell pleased, which he was, at having other people’s weather.

But to return to the atlantic. As if that were not to be enough for anyone but little headway, if any, was made in solving the wasnottobe crime cunundrum when a child of Maam, Festy King, who gave an address in old plomansch Mayo of the Saxons in the heart of a foulfamed potheen district, was subsequently haled up at the Old Bailey on the calends of Mars, under an improperly framed indictment of both the counts. When the prisoner, soaked in methylated, appeared in dry dock, wearing his fight shirt, souwester and a policeman’s corkscrew trowswers, all out of the true (as he had purposely torn up all his cymtrymanx clothes ), deposing for his exution in the royal Irish vocabulary how the whole suet had fallen off him unaccountably while he was trying for to stick fire to himcell, it was attempted by the crown to show that King, impersonating a climbing boy, rubbed any luvial mud o’er his face with a clanetourf as the best means of disguising himself and was to the middlewhite fair in Mudford of a Thoorsday under the illassumed names of Tykingfest, picked out of a tellafun book, ellegedly with a pedigree pig (unlicensed) and a hyacinth. The gathering, convened by the Irish Angricultural and Prepostoral Ouraganisations, to help the Irish muck to look his brother dane in the face and attended by large numbers, tospite of the deluge, was distinctly of a scattery kind when the ballybricken ate some of the doorweg, the pikey later selling the gentleman ratepayer because she ate a whole side of his (the animal’s) sty, on a struggle Street, Qui Sta Troia, in order to pay off six doubloons fifteen arrears of his, the villain’s not the rumbler’s, rent. Remarkable evidence was given, anon, by an eye, ear, nose and throat witness, W.P., situate at Nullnull, Medical Square, who, upon letting down his rice and peacegreen coverdisk, smiled and stated to his eliciter under his morse mustaccents, that he slept with a bonafides and that he would be there that night and how doorbringing he was pleased to remember the filth of November, hatinaring, rowdy O, which, with the jiboulees of Juno, was going, please the Rainmaker, to decemb into the ephemerides of profane history and one thing which would particulary strike a person of such sorely tried observational powers as Sam, him and Moffat, the striking thing about it was that he was patrified to see, hear, taste and smell, as his time of night, how Hyacinth O’Donnell, B.A., described in the calendar as a mixer and wordpainter, with part of a sivispacem (Gaeltact for dungfork) on the fair green at the hour of twenty-four o’clock sought to sack, sock, stab and slaughter singlehanded another two of the old kings, Gush Mac Gale and Roaring O’Crian, Jr., both changelings, unlocalised, of no address and in noncommunicables, between him and whom, ever since wallops before the Mise of Lewes, bad blood existed on the ground of trespass on the bull, or because he firstparted his polarbeeber hair in twoways, or because they could not say meace, meathe. The litigants, he said, local kingsmen and donalds, were egged on by their supporters in the shape of bitterwomen waving crimson petties and shouting from Isod’s towertop. There were cries from the thicksets in court and from the macdublins on the bohernabreen of: Mind the bank from Banagher, Mick, sir! Prodooce O’Donner. A! Bu! But it oozed out in crossexanimation of the casehardened testis that when and where that knife of knifes the treepartied ambush was laid (roughly speaking around halfhours twixt dusk in dawn, by Waterhose’s Meddle Europeic Tune, near Stop and Think, high chief evervirens and only abfalltree in auld the land) there was not as much light from the widowed moon as would dim a child’s altar. The mixer, accordingly, was bluntly broached as to whether he was one of those lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed. That he was only too sure of it because, living, loving, breathing and sleeping norphomelosophopancreakes, as he most significantly did, whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper. Whether he was practically sure too of his names in this King and blouseman business? That he was pediculously so. Certified? As cad could be. It was Morbus O’ Somebody? A’Quite. And how did the greeneyed mister arrive at the B.A.? That it was like his poll. A crossgrained trapper with murty odd oogs, awlpierced ares, inquiline nase and a twithcherous mouph? He would be. And with a stopper head, bottle shoulders, a barrel belly and tumblerous legs, redipnominated Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa Vercingetorix Ethelwulf Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann? The very fellow. Rooskayman kamerad? Sooner Gallwegian he would say. Not unintoxicated, fair witness? Drunk as a fishup. The gracious miss was not doubt sensible how he was altered? That she generally was. As to his religion, if any? It was the see-you-Sunday sort. Exactly what he meant by a pederast prig? Just a gent who prayed his lent. And of middleclassed portavorous was a usual beast? Bynight as useful as a vomit to a shorn man. The grazing rights (Mrs Magistra Martinetta) expired with the expiry of the goat’s sire, if they were not mistaken? That he exactly could not tell the worshipfuls but his mother-in-waders had the recipis for the price of the coffin and that he was there to tell them that herself was the velocipede that could tell them kitcat. Quare hircum? No answer. Unde gentium fe . . . ? No ah. And, changing the venders, as to the pugnaxities evinxed during the effrays round fatherthyme’s beckside and the regents in the plantsown raining they appealed to him then? That it was wildfires night on all the bettygallaghers, Mickmichael’s soords shrieking shrecks through the wilkinses and neckanicholas’ toastingforks pricking prongs up the tunnybladders. Let there be fight? And there was. Foght. The devoted couple was or were only two disappa’not’o’ ainted solicitresses on the job of the unfortunate class on Saturn’s mountain fort? That was about it, jah! And if it was all about that, egregious sir? About that and the other. Briefly, how such beginall finally struck him now? Like the crack that bruck the bank in Multifarnham. Whether he fell in with what they meant? Cursed that he suppoxed he did. If it was, in yappanoise language, ach bad clap? Oo! bloody awful? Shocking! Whurawhorascortastrumpa-pornanennykocksapastippata-ppatupperstrip-puckputtanach, eh? You have it alright.

But a new complexion was put upon the matter. when to the perplexedly uncondemnatory bench the senior king of all, Pegger Festy, as soon as the outer layer of stucckomuck had been removed at the request of a few live jurors, declared in a loudburst of poesy, through his Brythonic interpreter on his oath, whereas take notice be the relics of the bones of the story bouchal that was ate be Cliopatrick (the sow), afore God and all their honours and king’s commons that yif live thurkells folloged him about sure that was no steal and that, he did not fire a stone either before or after he was born down and up to that time. And this the sockdologer had the neck to endorse with the head bowed on him over his outturned noreaster by protesting to his lipreaders with a justbeencleaned barefacedness, abeam of moonlight’s hope, in the same trelawney what he would impart, pleas bench, to Jesus and the gentlemen in Jury’s that he skuld never ask to see sight or light of this world or the other world or any either world, as true as he was there in that jackabox that minute, or wield or wind (no thanks t’yous!) the inexousthausthible wassailhorn tot of iskybaush the hailth up the wailth of the endknown abgod of the fire of the moving way of the hawks with his heroes in Warhorror if ever in all his exchequered career he up or lave a chancery hand to take or throw the sign of a mortal stick or stone at man, yoelamb or salvation army either before or after being puptised down to that most holy and every blessed hour. Here, upon the halfkneed castleknocker’s attempting kithoguishly to lilt his holymess the paws and make the sign of the Roman Godhelic faix, outbroke much yellachters from the heall (Ha!) in which, under the mollification of methaglin, the testifighter reluctingly, but with ever so ladylike indecorum, joined. (Ha! Ha!)

The hilariohoot of Pegger’s Windup cumjustled as neatly with the tristitone of the Wet Pinter’s as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies. Distinctly different were their duasdestinies. Whereas the maidies of the bar, when the eranthus myrrmyrred: Show’m the Posed: fluttered and flattered around the willingly pressed, complimenting him on his having all his senses about him, stincking thyacinths through his curls (O feen! O deur!) and bringing busses to his cheeks, their masculine Oirisher Rose (his neece cleur!), and legando round his nice new neck for him and pizzicagnoling his woolywags, it was not unobserved of those presents, their worships, how, of one among all, Gentia Gemma of the Makegiddyculling Reeks, he, wan and pale in his unmixed admiration, seemed blindly, mutely, tastelessly, tactlessly, innamorate with heruponhim in shining aminglement, the shaym of his hisn shifting into the shimmering of her hers, till the wild wishwish of her sheeshea melted most musically mid the dark deepdeep of his shayshaun.

And whereas distracted (for was not just this in effect which had just caused that the effect of that which it had caused to occur?) the four justicers laid their wigs together, Untius, Muncius, Punchus and Pylax but could do no worse than promulgate their standing verdict of Nolans Brumans whereoneafter King, having murdered all the English he knew, left the tribunal scotfree, trailing his tunic in his hurry, thereinunder proudly showing off the blink patch to his britgits to prove himself (an’t plase yous!) a rael genteel. To the Switz bobbyguard’s curial but courtlike: Commodore valley O hairy, Arthre jennyrosy?: the firewaterloover returted with such a vinesmelling fortytudor ages rawdownhams tanyouhide as would the latten stomach even of a tumass equinous so that all the twofromthirty advocatesses within echo, pulling up their briefs at the krigkry: Shun the Punman!: safely and soundly soccered that fenemine Parish Poser, (how dare he!) umprumptu rightoway hames, much to his thanks, gratiasagam, to all the wrong donatrices, biss Drinkbattle’s Dingy Dwellings where (for like your true venuson Esau he was dovetimid as the dears at Bottome) he shat in (zoo), like the muddy goalbind who he was (dun), the chassetitties belles conclaiming: Your garbage abaht our father!: and gaingridando: Hon! Verg! Nau! Putor! Skam! Schams! Shames!

And so it all ended. And so everybody heard their plaint and all listened to their plause. Wind broke it. Wave bore it. Reed wrote of it. Syce ran with it. Hand tore it and wild went war. Hen trieved it and plight pledged peace. It was folded with cunning, sealed with crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? The old hunks on the hill read it to perlection. It made ma make merry and sissy so shy and rubbed some shine off Shem and put some shame into Shaun. And that was how framm Sin fromm Son, acity arose, finfin funfun, a sitting arrows. Now tell me, tell me, tell me then!

               What was it?

                A . . . . . . . . . . !

                ? . . . . . . . . . O!

So there you are now there they were, when all was over again, the four with them, setting around upin their judges’ chambers, in the muniment room, of their marshalsea, under the suspices of Lally, around their old traditional tables of the law like Somany Solans to talk it over rallthesameagain. Well and druly dry. Suffering law the dring. Accourting to king’s evelyns. So help her goat and kiss the bouc. Festives and highajinks and jintyaun and her beetyrossy bettydoaty and not to forget now a’duna o’darnel. The four of them and thank court now there were no more of them. So pass the push for port sake. Be it soon. Ah ho! And do you remember, Singabob, the badfather, the same, the great Howdoyoucallem, and his old nickname, Dirty Daddy Pantaloons, in his monopoleums, behind the war of the two roses, with Michael Victory, the sheemen’s preester, before he caught his paper dispillsation from the poke, old Minace and Minster York? Do I mind? I mind the gush off the mon like Ballybock manure works on a tradewinds day. And the O’Moyly gracies and the O’Briny rossies chaffing him bluchface and playing him pranks. How do you do, todo, North Mister? Get into my way! Ah dearome forsailoshe! Gone over the bays! When ginabawdy meadabawdy! Yerra, why would he heed that old gasometer with his hooping coppin and his dyinboosycough and all the birds of the southside after her, Minxy Cunningham, their dear divorcee darling, jimmies and jonnies to be her jo? Sure, ’tis well I can telesmell him H₂ C E₃ that would take a township’s breath away! Gob and I nose him too well as I do meself, heaving up the Kay Wall by the 32 to 11 with his limelooking horsebags full of sesameseed, the Whiteside Kaffir, and his sayman’s effluvium and his scentpainted voice, puffing out his thundering big brown cabbage! Pa! Thawt I’m glad a gull for his pawsdeen fiunn! Goborro, sez he, Lankyshied! Gobugga ye, sez I! O breezes! I sniffed that lad long before anyone. It was when I was in my farfather out at the west and she and myself, the redheaded girl, firstnighting down Sycomore Lane. Fine feelplay we had of it mid the kissabetts frisking in the kool kurkle dusk of the lushiness. My perfume of the pampas, says she (meaning me) putting out her netherlights, and I’d sooner one precious sip at your pure mountain dew than enrich my acquaintance with that big brewer’s belch.

And so they went on, the fourbottle men, the analists, unguam and nunguam and lunguam again, about her whosebefore and his whereafters and how she was lost away away in the fern and how he was founded deap on deep in anear, and the rustlings and the twitterings and the raspings and the snappings and the sighings and the paintings and the ukukuings and the (hist!) the springapartings and the (hast!) the bybyscuttlings and all the scandalmunkers and the pure craigs that used to be (up) that time living and lying and rating and riding round Nunsbelly Square. And all the buds in the bush. And the laughing jackass. Harik! Harik! Harik! The rose is white in the darik! And Sunfella’s nose has got rhinoceritis from haunting the roes in the parik! And contradrinking themselves about Lillytrilly law pon hilly and Mrs Niall of the Nine Corsages and the old markiss their besterfar, and, arrah, sure there was never a marcus at all at all among the manlies and dear Sir armoury, queer Sir rumoury, and the old house by the churpelizod, and all the goings on so very wrong long before when they were going on retreat, in the old gammeldags, the four of them, in Milton’s Park under lovely Father Whisperer and making her love with his stuffstuff in the languish of flowers and feeling to find was she mushymushy, a drahereen o machree!, and (peep!) meeting waters most improper (peepette!) ballround the garden, trickle trickle trickle triss, please, miman, may I go flirting? farmers gone with a groom and how they used her, mused her, licksed her and cuddled. I differ with ye! Are you sure of yourself now? You’re a liar, excuse me! I will not and you’re another! And Lully holding their breach of peace for them. Pool loll Lolly! To give and to take! And to forego the pasht! And all will be forgotten! Ah ho! It was too too bad to be falling out about her kindness pet and the shape of OOOOOOOO Ourang’s time. Well, all right, Lelly. And shakeahand. And schenkusmore. For Craig sake. Be it suck.

Well? Well, even should not the framing up of such figments in the evidential order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as a dim seer’s setting of a starchart might (heaven helping it!) uncover the nakedness of an unknown body in the fields of blue or as forehearingly as the sibspeeches of all mankind have foliated (earth seizing them!) from the root of some funner’s stotter all the soundest sense to be found immense our special mentalists now holds (securus indicat orbis terrarum) that by such playing possum our hagious curious encestor bestly saved his brush with his posterity, you, charming coparcenors, us, heirs of his tailsie. Gundogs of all breeds were beagling with renounced urbiandorbic bugles, hot to run him, given law, on a scent breasthigh, keen for the worry. View! From his holt outratted across the Juletide’s genial corsslands of Humfries Chase from Mullinahob and Peacockstown, then bearing right upon Tankardstown, the outlier, a white noelan which Mr Lœwensteil Fitz Urse’s basset beaters had first misbadgered for a bruin of some swart, led bayers the run, then through Raystown and Horlockstown and, louping the loup, to Tankardstown again. Ear canny hare for doubling through Cheeverstown they raced him, through Loughlinstown and Nutstown to wind him by the Boolies. But from the good turn when he last was lost, check, upon Ye Hill of Rut in full winter coat with ticker pads, pointing for his rooming house in his rolltoproyal hessians a deaf fuchser’s volponism hid him close in covert, miraculously ravenfed and buoyed up, in rumer, reticule, onasum and abomasum, upon (may Allbrewham have his mead!) the creamclotted sherriness of cinnamon syllabub, Mikkelraved, Nikkelsaved. Hence hounds hied home. Preservative perseverance in the reeducation of his intestines was the rebuttal by whilk he sort of git the big bulge on the whole bunch of spasoakers in that sometime prestreet protown. Vainly violence, virulence and vituperation sought wellnigh utterly to attax and abridge, to derail and depontify, to enrate and inroad, to ongoad and unhume the great shipping mogul and underlinen overlord. Assembly men murmured.

Reynard is slow!

One feared for his days. He had laid violent hands on himself, it was brought in Fugger’s Newsletter, lain down, all in fagged out, with equally melancholy death. Big went the bang: then wildewide was quiet: a report: silence: last Fama put it under ether. The noase or the loal had dreven him blem, blem, stun blem. Sparks flew. He had fled again (open shunshema!) this country of exile, sloughed off home via the subterranean shored with bedboards, stowed away in a dutch bottom tunk the Arsa, hod S.S. Finlandia, and was even now occupying, in his seventh generation, a physical body lornelius Magrath’s in Asia Major. Wires hummed. Peacefully general astonishment assisted by regrettitude had put a term till his existence: he saw the family saggarth, resigned, put off his remainders, was recalled and scrapheaped by the Maker. Chirpings crossed. An infamous private ailment (vulgovarioveneral) had claimed endright, closed his vicious circle, snap. Jams jarred. He had walked towards the middle of an ornamental lilypond when innebriated up to the point where braced shirts meet knickerbockers when rodmen’s firstaiding hands had rescued un from very possibly several feel of demifrish water. Mush spread. On Umbrella Street a kind workman, Mr Whitlock, gave him a piece of wood. Cracklings cricked. A human pest cycling (pist!) and recycling (past!) about the sledgy streets, here he was (pust!) again! Morse nuisance noised. He was loose at large and might be anywhere when a disguised nun of huge standbuild and masculine manners, Mother Gygasta, hattracted hattention by harbitrary conduct with a homnibus. Aerials buzzed to coastal listeners of an eartax bror collector’s budget and bloody antichill cloak, its tailor’s (Baernfather’s) tab reading V.P.H., found nigh Scaldbrothar’s Hole, and divers shivered to think what kaind of beast, wolves, croppis’s or fourpenny friars, had devoured him. C.W. cast wide. Hvidfinns lyk, drohneth svertgleam, Valkir lockt. On his pinksir’s postern, the boys had it, at Whitweekend had been nailed an inkedup name and title, inscribed in the national cursives, accelerated, regressive, filiform, turreted and envenomoloped in piggotry: Move up. Mumpty! Mike room for Rumpty! By order, Nickekellous Plugg; and this go, no pentecostal jest about it, there had been real murder, the MacMahon chaps, it was, that had done him in. Indeed not a few thick and thin wellwishers even ventured so far as to loan or beg copies of D. Blayncy’s trilingual triweekly, Scatterbrains’ Aftening Posht so as to make certain sure onetime and be satisfied of his having become genuinely quite beetly dead whether by land whither by water. Transocean atalaclamoured him; The latter! The latter! He lay under leagues of it in deep Bartholoman’s Deep.

Achdung! Pozor! Attenshune! Vikeroy Besights Smucky Yung Pigeschoolies. Tri Paisdinernes Eventyr Med Lochlanner Fathach I Fiounnisgehaven. Bannalanna Bangs Ballyhooly Out Of Her Buddaree Of A Bullavogue.

But, their bright little contemporaries notwithstanding, on the morrowing morn of the suicidal murder of the unrescued expatriate a quarter of nine, imploring his resipiency, saw the infallible spike of smoke’s jutstiff punciual from the seventh gable of our Quintus Centimachus’ buttertower and then thirsty p.m. with oaths upon his lastingness, the lamps of maintenance, innerhalf the zuggurat, all brevetnamed, the wasting wyvern, the tawny of his mane, the swinglowswaying bluepaw, the outstanding man, the lolllike lady, being litten for the long (O land, how long!) lifesnight, with suffusion of fineglass transom and leadlight panes. Wherefore let it hardly by any being thinking be said either or thought that the prisoner of that sacred edifice, were he an Ivor the Boneless or an Olaf the Hide, was at his best a onestone parable, a rude breathing on the void of to be, or, more strictly, but tristurned initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract.

Dispersal women wondered. Was she fast?

Now listed to one aneither and liss them down and smoothen out your leaves of rose. The war is o’er. Wimwim wimwim! Was it Unity Moore or Estella Swifte or Varina Fay or Quarta Quaedam? Who, but who (for second time of asking) was then the scourge of the parts about folkrich Lucalizod it was wont to be asked, as, in ages behind of the Homo Capite Erectus, what price Peabody’s money, or, to put it bluntly, whence is the herringtons’ white cravat, as, in epochs more cainozoic, who struck Buckley though nowadays as thentimes every schoolfilly of sevenscore moons or more who knowher intimologies and every colleen bawl aroof and every redflammelwaving warwife and widowpeace upon Dublin Wall for ever knows how it was Buckleyself who struck and the Russian generals, da! da!, instead of Buckley who was caddishly struck by him when be herselves. What fullpay poinsonspy or which hatefilled crookedrib? And that such a vetriol of vnomi a quiet stinkingplaster zeal could cover! The loungelizards of the pumproom had their nine days’ jeer when, still believing in her owenglass that the upper reaches of her mouthless face and her impermanent waves were the better half of her, one nearer him, dearer than all, first warming creature of his early morn, bondwoman of the man of the house, and murrmurr of all the mackavicks, she who had given his eye for her bed and a tooth for a child till one one and one ten and one hundred again, O me and O ye! cadet and prim, the hungray and anngreen (and if she is older now than her teeth she has hair that is younger than thighne, my dear!) she who will not rast her from her running to seek him till some such time that she shall have been after hiding the crumbends of his enormousness in the areyou-lookingfor-Pearlfar sea, stood forth, dragging the countryside in her train, with pawns and prelates and pookas in her piecebag, to crush the slander’s head.

Wery weeny wight, plead for Morandmor! Notre Dame de la Ville, mercy of thy balmheartsyheat! Let him rest, thou wayfarer, and take no gravespoil from him! Neither mar his mound! The bane of Tut is on it. Ware! But there’s a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P. And you’ll agree. She must be she. He spenth his strenth amok haremscarems. Poppy Narancy, Giallia, Chlora, Marinka, Anileen, Parme. And ilk a those dames had her rainbow huemoures yet for whilko her whims but he coined a cure. Tifftiff today, kissykissy tonay and agelong pine tomauranna. Then who but Crippled-with-Children would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?

Sold him her lease of ninenineninetee,

Tresses undresses so dyedyedaintee,

Goo, the groot gudgeon, gulped it all.

Hoo was the C. O. D.?

Bum!

At Island Bridge she met her tide.

Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!

The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride.

Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!

We’re all up to the years in hues and cribies.

That’s what she’s done for wee!

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°5, August 1927
[chapter I.5 from Finnegans Wake]

Her untitled memorial to the Allhighest has gone by many names at disjointed times. Thus we hear of, Amoury Treestam and Icy Siseule, Saith a Sawyer til a Strame, Ik dik dopedope et tu mihimihi, Buy Birthplate for a Bite, Which of your Hesterdays Mean Ye to Morra? Hoebegunne the Hebrewer Hit Waterman the Brayned, Arcs in His Ceiling Flee Chinx on the Flur Rebus de Hibernicis, The Crazier Letters, Groans of a Britoness, An Apology for a Big (the nonoun Husband is probably understood ), Ought We To Visit Him? For Ark see Zoo, Cleopater’s Nedlework Ficturing Aldborougham on the Sahara with the Coombing of the Cammmels, and the Parlourmaids of Aegypt, Cock in the Pot for Father, Placeat vestrae, A New Cure for an Old Clap, Twenty of Chambers Weighty Ten Beds and a Wan Ceteroom, The Following Fork, He’s my O’Jerusalem and I’m his Po, The Best in the West, Try Our Taal on a Taub, Pickedmeup Peters, Lumptytumtumpty had a Big Fall, Pimpimp Pimpimp, Measly Ventures of Two Lice and the Fall of Fruit, Seen Aples and Thin Dyed, si big U to beleaves from Love and mother, Fine’s Fault was no Felon, Exat Delvin Renter Life, His is the House that Malt Made, Divine Views from Back to the Front, Allfor Guineas, Sounds and Compliments Libidous, Seven Wives Awake Aweek, Airy Ann and Berber Blut, Amy Licks Porter While Huffy Chops Eads, Abbrace of Umbellas or a Trippple of Caines, Buttbutterbust, From the Manorlord Hoved to the Misses O’Mollies and from the Dames to their Sames, Manyfestoons for the Colleagues on the Green, First and Last Only True Account all about the Honorary Mr. Earwicker, L.S.D., and the Snake by a Woman of the World who only can Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Man and all his Conspirators how they all tried to fall him putting it all around Lucalizod about Earwicker and a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly showing all the Unmentionability falsely accusing about the Redcoats.

The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naïf alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput. Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along. In fact, under the close eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against free thinker our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it’s as semper as oxhousehumper!) generations, more generations and still more generations.

Say, who in hell wrote the durn thing anyhow? Erect, be seated, ahorseback, against a partywall, below zero, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind, accompanied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted by visit of seer to scribb or of scribb to site, atwixt two showers or atosst of a trike, rained upon or blown around, by a rightdown regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning?

Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience. A good plan used by worried business folk is just to think of all the sinking fund of patience possessed in their conjoint names by both brothers Bruce with whom is incorporated their Scotch spider. If after years upon years of delving in ditches dark one tubthumper more than others has got up for the purpose of reassuring us that our great ascendant was properly speaking three syllables less than his own surname (yes, less!), that the ear of Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker local cant for an ace’s patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!) then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which we must ceaselessly return whereabouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet is that bright soandsuch to slip us the dinkum oil?

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Luckily there is another cant to the questy. Has any fellow, it might with some profit some dull evening quietly be hinted — has any usual sort of ornery josser ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face is its fortune: it exhibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passionpallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck itself under its flap. Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the latter’s acquaintance straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard’s eyes to the fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations, a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessary or a trifle irritating here and there, but for all that suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts separated don’t they now, for better survey by the deft hand of an expert, don’t you know? Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up and considered in turn apart from the other?

Here let a few artifacts speak in their own favour. That stern chuckler, Mayhappy Mayhapnot, once said to repeation that Lucalizod was the one place in this vaal of tares where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable. If the proverbial bishop of our holy and undivided havvermashed head his two nails on the head we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles though possibly nobody after having grubbed up a lock of cwold cworn aboove his subject probably in Harrystotalies or the vivle will go out of his way to applaud him on the back of his remark for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.

About that original hen. Midwinter was in the offing when an iceclad shiverer, merest of bantlings, observed a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short) afterwards changed into the orangery when in the course of deeper demolition unexpectedly one bushman’s holiday its limon threw up a few spontaneous fragments of orangepeel, the last remains of an outdoor meal by some unknown sunseeker or placehider illico way back in his mistridden past. What child of a strandlooper but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up on a strate that was called strete a motive for future saintity by euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice by another heily innocent and beachwalker whilst trying with pious clamour to wheedle Tipperaw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spight of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the Jacobiters. The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome’s health well only the hate turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general’s elections with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael don’t forget unto life’s & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twinns with four crosskisses for holy paul holey corner holipoli whollyisland pee ess from affectionate largelooking tache of tch. The stain, and that a teastain, marked it off on the spout of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as a hurry-me-o’er-the-hazy.

Why then how?

Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesque distortion of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive (there’s a sod of a turb for you! please wisp off the grass!) unfilthed from the boucher by the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen. Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip.

Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluffballs safe through din and danger!); lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is all game and no gammon, she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman’s part every time. Let us auspice it! Yes, before all this has time to end the golden age must return with its vengeance. Man will become dirigible, age will be rejuvenated, woman with her ridiculous white burden will reach by one step sublime incubation, the manewanting human lioness with her dishorned discipular manram will lie down together publicly flank upon fleece. No, assuredly, they are not justified, those gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday in bleak Janiveer when, to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked ad literature.

Let us now if perfectly convenient, if you police, after you, policepolice, pardoning mein, ich been so free, bey? talk straight turkey as man to man for while the ears may sometimes be inclined to believe others the eyes find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. Habes aures et num videbis? Habes oculos ac mannepalpabuat? Tip! Drawing nearer to take our slant at it (since after all it has met with misfortune while all underground), let us see all there may remain to be seen. One cannot help noticing that rather more than half of the lines run north-south while the others go west-east for tiny tot though it looks alongside other incunabula it has its cardinal points for all that. These ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lampblack and blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian of course, but the use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism. It is seriously believed by some that the intention may have been geodetic, or, in the view of the cannier, domestic economical. But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom? Another point, in addition to the original sand, pounce powder, drunkard paper or soft rag used it has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past. The teatimestained terminal is a cosy little brown study all to oneself and its importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexus (for if the hand was one, the minds of active and agitated were more than so) will be best appreciated by never forgetting that both before and after the battle of the Boyne it was a habit not to sign letters always. Tip. The end? Say it with missiles then and thus arabesque the page. You have your cup of scalding Souchong, your taper’s waxen drop, your cat’s paw, the clove or coffinnail you chewed or champed as you worded it, your lark in clear air. So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own? A true friend is known much more easily, and better into the bargain, by his personal touch, habits of full or undress, movements, response to appeals for charity than by his footwear, say. And, speaking anent Tiberias and other incestuish salacities among gerontophils, a word of warning about the tenderloined passion hinted at. Some softnosed peruser might mayhem take it up erogenously as the usual case of spoons, prostituta in herba plus dinky pinks deliberatively summersaulting off her bisexycle, at the main entrance of curate’s perpetual soutane suit with her one to see and awoh! who picks her up as gingerly as any balmbearer would to feel whereupon the virgin was most hurt and nicely asking: whyre have you been so grace a mauling and where were you chaste me child? Be who, farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old psychoes who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices in the penumbra of the procuring room could (did we care to sell our feebought silence in camera) tell our very moistnostrilled one that father in such virgated contexts is not always that undemons trative relative (often held up to our contumacy) who settles our hashbill for us and what an innocent allabroad’s adverb such as Michaelly looks like can be suggestive of under the pudendascope and, finally, what a neurasthene nympholept, endocrine-pineal typus, of inverted parentage with a prepossessing drauma present in her past and a priapic urge for congrres with agnates before cognates fundamentally is feeling for under her lubricitous meiosis when she refers with liking to some feeler she fancie’s face. And Mm. We could. Yet what need to say? Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry. But. Est modest in verbos. Let a prostitute be whoso stands before a door and the curate one who brings strong waters. For if the lingo gasped between kicksheets were to be preached from the mouths of wickerchurchwardens and metaphysicians in the row and advokaatoes, allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths, lesbiels, dentelles, gutterhowls and furtz, where would their practice be or where the human race itself were the Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, ppppfff, over country stiles, behind slated dwellinghouses, down blind lanes, or, when all fruit fails, under some sacking left on a coarse cart?

So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages. Thief us the night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest, mine! Here, Ohere, insult the fair! Traitor, bad hearer, brave! The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times. Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun shine on menday’s daughter; a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well; such is manowife’s lot of lose and win again, like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s chin again, she plucketed them out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about it? O dear!

If juness she saved! Ah ho! And if yulone he pouved! The olold stoliolum! From quiqui quinet to michemiche chelet and a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo! Since nozzy Nanette tripped palmyways with Highho Harry there’s a spurtfire turf a’kind o’kindling when oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve: and whathough billiousness has been billiousness during milliums of millenions and our mixed racings have been giving two hoots or three jeers for the grape, vine and brew and Pieter’s in Nieuw Amsteldam and Paoli’s where the poules go and rum smelt his end for him and he dined off sooth american this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections has combled tumbled down to us fersch and made-at-all-hours like an ould cup on tay. As I was hottin me souser. Haha! And as you was caldin your dutchy hovel. Hoho! She tole the tail or her toon. Huhu!

Now while we in our wee free state may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness. On the face of it and to your rough mind the affair is a thing once for all done, and there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time, be it a day or a year or even supposing, it should eventually turn out to be a serial number of goodness gracious alone knows how many days or years. Anyhow, somehow and somewhere, before the bookflood or after her ebb, somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop. O, undoubtedly yes, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?

Because, if it goes to that, every person, place and thing anyway connected with it was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns. No, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars an balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and all it has gone through and by all means cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, this will never do.

For who that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign T, called Hec which, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller U, called alp or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside the consort: the steady monologuy of the interiors; the pardonable confusion for which some blame the cudgel and more blame the soot but unthanks to which the pees with their caps awry are quite as often as not taken for kews with their tails in their are puite as often as not taken for pews with their tails in their mouths, thence your pristopher polombos, hence our Kat Kresbyterians; the curt witty wotty dashes never quite just right at the truth letter; the sudden spluttered petulance of some capjtaljsed mJddle; a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons: that absurdly bullsfooted bee declaring with an even plainer dummpshow than does the mute commoner with us how hard a thing it is to mpe mporn a gentlerman: and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens: and the geegees too, jesuistically formed at first but afterwards genuflected aggrily toewards the occident: the Ostrogothic kakography affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line’s end: the headstrength (at least eleven men of thirtytwo palfrycraft) revealed by a constant labour to make a ghimel pass through the eye of an iota: this, for instance, utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past; those throne open doubleyous (of an early muddy terranean origin whether man chooses to damn them agglutinatively loo — too — blue — face — ache or illvoodawpeehole or, kants koorts, topplefouls) seated with such floprightdown determination and reminding uus ineluctably of nature at her naturalest while that fretful fidget eff, the hornful digamma of your bornabarbar, rarely heard now save when falling from the unfashionable lipsus of some hetaro-sexual (used always in two boldfaced print types — one of them as wrongheaded as his Claudian brother, is it worth while interrupting to say? — throughout the papyrus as the revise mark) stalks all over the page, broods H sensationseeking an idea, amid the verbiage, gaunt, stands dejectedly in the diapered window margin, with its basque of bayleaves all aflutter about its forksfrogs, paces with a frown, jerking to and fro, flinging phrases here, there, or returns, inhibited, with some half-halted suggestion, I, dragging its shoestring; the curious warning sign before our protoparent’s ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the Aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired; those haughtypitched disdotted aiches easily of the rariest inasdroll as most of the jaywalking eyes we do plough into halve as pipless as threadworms: the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings: that strange exotic serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture, about as freakwind a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a corkhorse, which, in its invincible insolence ever longer more and of more morosity, seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily before our eyes under pressure of the writer’s hand; the ungainly musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsounder ah ha as blackartful as a podatus and dumbfounder oh ho oaproariose as ten canons in skelterfugue: the studious omission of year number and era name from the date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint; the lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first: the gipsy mating of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns (an interpolation: these munchables occur only in the Bootherbrowth family of MSS., Bb — Cod IV, Pap II, Brek XI, Lun III, Dinn XVII, Sup XXX, Fullup M D C X C: the scholiast has hungrily misheard a deadman’s toller as a muffinbell): the four shortened ampersands under which we can glypse at and feel for ourselves across all those rushyears the warm soft short pants of; the quickscribbler: the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative hole in which it ends itself; the aphasia of that heroic agony of recalling a once loved number leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia of misnomering one’s own: next those ars, rrrr! those ars all bellical, the highpriest’s hieroglyph of kettletom and oddsbones, wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed rubric prayer for truce with booty, O’Remus pro Romulo, and rudely from the fane’s pinnacle tossed down by porter to within an aim’s ace of their quatrain of rubyjets among Those Who arse without the Temple nor since Roe’s Distillery burn’d have quaff’d Night’s firefill’d Cup But jig jog jug as Day the Dicebox Throws, whang, loyal six I lead, out wi’ yer heart’s bluid, blast ye, and there she’s for you, sir, whang her, the fine ooman, rouge to her lobster locks, the rossy, whang, God and O’Mara has it with his ruddy old Villain Rufus, wait, whang, God and you’re another he hasn’t for there’s my spoil five of spuds’s trumps, whang, whack on his pigsking’s Kisser for him, K.M. O’Mara where are you?; then (coming over to the left aisle corner down) the cruciform postscript from which three basia or shorter and smaller oscula have been overcarefully scraped away, plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells (and then it need not be lost sight of that there are exactly three squads of candidates for the crux awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of Columkiller, chugged in their three ballotboxes, then set apart for such hanging committees, where two was enough for anyone, starting with old Matthew himself, as he with great distinction said then just as since then people speaking have fallen into the custom, when speaking to a person, of saying two is company when the third person is the person darkly spoken of, and then that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium if whoever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his (or perhaps her) cheek as the case may have been then); and the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imperfectible moral blindness; the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness of all those fourlegged ems: and why spell dear god with a big thick dhee (why, O why, O why?): the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso — who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?

Duff-Muggli, who now may be quoted by very kind arrangement, first called this kind of paddygoeasy partnership the ulykkhean or tetrachiric or quadrumane or ducks and drakes perplex (v. Some Forestallings over that Studium of Sexophonologistic Schizophrenesis, vol. xxiv, pp. 2-555) after the wellinformed observation, made miles apart from the Master by Tung-Toyd (cf. Later Frustrations amengst the Neomugglian Teachings abaft the Semiunconscience, passim) that in the case of the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner a Punic admiralty report had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to tickle me gander as game as your goose.

The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast duplex came to light in the most devious of ways. The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush it responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out → that they ad bîn “provoked” ay Y fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! Deeply religious by nature and position, and warmly attached to Thee, and smearbread and better and Him and newlaidills, it was rightly suspected that such ire could not have been visited by him Brotfressor Prenderguest even underwittingly, upon the ancestral pneuma of one whom, with rheuma, he venerated shamelessly at least once a week at Cockspur Common as his apple in his eye and her first boys’ best friend and, though plain English for a married lady misled heaps by the way, yet when some peerer or peeress detected that the fourleaved shamrock or quadrifoil jab was more recurrent wherever the script was clear and the term terse and that these two were the selfsame spots naturally selected for her perforations by Dame Partlet on her dungheap, thinkers all put grown in waterungspillfull Pratiland only and a playful fowl and musical me and not you in any case, two and two together, and a sigh for shyme separated modest mouths. So be it. And it was. Though not yet had the sailor sipped that sup nor the humphar foamed to the fill. Small need after that for quizzing your weekenders with: shoots off in a hiss, muddles up in a mussmass and his whole’s a dismantled noondrunkard’s son. Maybe growing a moustache, did you say? And uses noclass billiardhalls? Not Hans the Curier though had he had have only had some little laughings and some less of cheeks and were he not so warried by his bulb of persecussion he could have, ay, and would have, as true as Essex bridge. And not Gopheph go gossip, I declare to man! Noe! To all’s much relief one’s half hypothesis of that jabberjaw ape amok the showering jestnuts of Bruisanose was hotly dropped and his room taken up by that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher, Shem the Penman.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°6, September 1927
[chapter I.6 from Finnegans Wake]

So?

Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman?

The echo is where in the back of the wodes; callhim forth!

(Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger, for the concern of Messrs Jhon Jhamieson and Song, rated one hundrick and thin per storehundred on this nightly quisquiquock of the twelve apostrophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak. He misunderstruck an aim of number three of them and left his free natural ripostes to four of them in their own fine artful disorder.)

1.  What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the bluegum baobabbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia; went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies; was well known to claud a conciliation cap onto the esker of his hooth; sports a chainganger’s albert solemenly over his hullender’s epulence; thought he weighed a new ton when there felled his first lapapple; gave the heinousness of choice to everyknight betwixt yesterdicks and twomaries; had sevenal successivecoloured serebanmaids on the same big white drawringroam horthrug; is a Willbeforce to this hour at house as he was in heather; pumped the catholick wartrey and shocked the prodestung boyne; killed his own hungery self in anger as a young man; found fodder for five when allmarken rose goflooded; bred manyheaded stepsons for one leapyourown taughter; is too funny for a fish and has too much outside for an insect; like a heptagon crystal emprisoms trues and fruss for us; is infinite swell in unfitting induments; once was he shovelled and once was he arsoned and once was he inundered and she hung him out billbailey; has a quadrant cin his tile to tell Toler ead a’clog it is; bears a raaven geulant on a fjeld duiv; ruz the halo off his varlet when he appeared to his shecook; as Haycock, Emmet Boaro, Toaro, Osterich, Mangy and Skunk; pressed the beer of aled age out of the nettles of rashness; put a roof on the lodge for Hymn and a coq in his pot pro homo; was dapifer then pancircensor then hortifex magnus; went puffing from king’s brugh to new customs, doffing the topper off him to every breach of all size; has his seat of justice, his house of mercy, his corn o’copious and his stacks a’rye; won the freedom of new yoke for the minds of jugoslaves; acts active, meddles in passivism and is a monster of selfridgeousness; pours a laughsworth of his illformation over a larmsworth of salt; he stands in a lovely park, sea is not far, importunate towns of X, Y and Z are easily over reached; is an excrescence to civilised humanity and but a wart on Europe; wanamade singsigns to soundsense an yit he wanna git all his flesch nuemaid motts truly prural and plusible; lusteth ath he listeth the cleah whithpeh of a themise; is a prince of the fingallian in a hiberniad of hoolies; has a hodge to wherry him and a francy to curry him and a brabanson for his beeter and a fritz at his switch; was waylaid of a parker and beschotten by a buckeley; kicks lintils when he’s cuppy and casts Jacob’s arroroots, dime after dime, to poor childer on his parish reads the charms of H. C. Endersen, all the weaks of his evenin and the crimes of Ivaun the Taurrible every strongday morn; stocks dry puder for the Ill people and gilt pills for all the Pale; gave his mundyfoot to Miserius, her pinch to Anna Livia, that superfine pigtail to Cerisia Cerosia and quid rides to Titius, Caius and Sempronius; made the man who had no notion of shopkeepers feel he’d rather play the duke than play the gentleman; shot two queans and shook three caskles when he won his game of dwarfs; soaps you soft to your face and slaps himself when he’s badend; owns the bulgiest bungbarrel that ever was tiptapped in the privace of the Mullingar Inn; was born with a nuasilver tongue in his mouthe and went round the coast of Iron with his lift hand to the scene; raised but two fingers and yet smelt it would day; for whom it is easier to found a see in Ebblannah than for I or you to find a dubbeltye in Dampsterdamp; to live with whom is a lifemayor and to know whom a liberal education; was dipped in Hoily Olives and chrysmed in Scent Otooles; hears cricket on the earth but annoys the life out of predikants; still turns the durc’s ear of Darius to the now thoroughly infurioted one of God; made Man with juts that jerk and minted money mong maney; likes a six acup pudding when he’s come whome sweetwhome; has come through all the eras of livsadventure from moonshine and shampaying down to clouts and pottled porter; with one touch of nature set a veiled world agrin and went within a sheet of tissuepaper of the option of three gaols; who could see at one blick a saumon taken with a spear, hunters pursuing a doe, a swallowship in full sail, a whyterobe lifting a host; faced flappery like old King Cnut and turned his back like Cincinnatus; is a farfar and morefar and a hoar father Nakedbucker in villas old as new; sits aquart and cracks aquaint when it’s flaggin in town and on haven; blows whiskery around the head but thinks stout upon his feet; stutters fore he falls and goes mad entirely when he’s waked; is Timb to the pearly morn and Tomb to the mourning night; and an he had the best bunbaked bricks in bould Babylon for his lusting-plays he’d be lost for the want of his wan wubblin wall?

Answer: Finn MacCool!

2.  Does your mutter know your mike?

Answer — When I turn meoptics, from suchurban prospects, ’tis my filial’sb osom, doth behold with pride, that pontificator, and circumvallator, with his dam night garrulous slipt by his side. Ann alive, the lisp of her, ’twould grig mountains whisper her and the bergs of Iceland melt in waves of fire, and her spoon-me-spondees, and her dirckle-me-ondenees, make the Rageous Ossean, kneel and quaff a lyre! If Dann’s dane, Ann’s dirty, if he’s plane she’s purty, if he’s fane, she’s flirty, with her auburnt streams, and her coy cajoleries, and her dabblin drolleries, for to rouse his rudderup, or to drench his dreams. If hot Hammurabi, or cowld Clesiastes, could espy her pranklings, they’d burst bounds agin, and renounce their ruings, and denounce their doings, for river and iver, and a night. Amin!

3.  Which title is the true-to-type motto-in-lieu for that Tick for Teac thatchment painted witt wheth one darkness, where asnake is under clover and birds aprowl are in the rookeries and a magda went to monkishouse and a riverpaard was spotted, which is not Whichcroft Whorort not Ousterholm Dreyschluss not Haraldsby, grocer, not Vatandcan, vintner, not Houseboat and Hive not Knox-atta-Belle not O’Faynix Coalprince not Wohn Squarr Roomyeck not Ebblawn Downes not Le Decer Le Mieux not Benjamin’s Lea not Tholomew’s Whaddingtun gnot Antwarp gnat Musca not Corry’s not Weir’s not The Arch not The Smug not The Dotch House not The Uval nothing Grand nothing Splendid (Grahot or Spletel) nayther Erat Est Erit noor Non michi sed lucefro?

Answer — Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!

4.  What Irish capitol city (a dea o dea!) of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) can boost of having a) the most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing industry in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world, d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paùpulation in the world: and harmonise your responses?

Answer: a) Delfas. And when ye’ll hear the gould hommers of my heart, my floxy loss, bingbanging again the ribs of yer resistance and the tenderbolts of my rivets working to your destraction ye’ll be sheverin wi’ all yer dinful sobs when we’ll go riding acope-acurly, you with yer orange garland and me with my conny cordial, down the greaseways of rollicking into the waters of wetted life. b) Dorhqk. And sure where can you have such good old chimes anywhere, and leave you, as on the Mash and how’tis I would be engaging you with my plovery soft accents and descanting upover the scene beunder me of your loose vines in their hairafall with them two loving loofs braceleting the slims of your ankles and your mouth’s flower rose and sinking ofter the soapstone of silvry speech. c) Nublid. Isha, why wouldn’t we be happy, avourneen, on the mills’ money he’ll soon be leaving you as soon as I’ve my own owned brooklined Georgian mansion’s lawn to recruit upon by Doctor Cheek’s special orders and my copper’s panful of soybeans and Irish in my east hand and a James’s Gate in my west, after all the errears and erroriboose of embottled history, and your goodself churning over the newleaved butter (more power to you), the choicest and the cheapest from Atlanta to Oconee, while I’ll be drowsing in the gaarden. d) Dalway. I hooked my thoroughgoing trotty the first down Spanish Place, Mayo I make, Tuam I take, Sligo’s sleek but Galway’s grace. Holy eel and Sainted Salmon, chucking chub and ducking dace, Rodiron’s not your æqual! says she, leppin half the lane. abcd) A bell a bell on Shalldoll Steepbell, ond be’ll go massplon pristmoss speople, Shand praise gon ness our fayst moan neople, our prame Shandeepen, pay name muy feepence, moy nay non Aequallllllll!

5.  Whad slags of a loughladd would retten smuttyflesks, emptout old mans, melk vitious geit, scareoff jackinjills fra tiddle anding, smoothpick waste papish pastures, insides man outsiders angell, sprink dirted water around village, newses, tobaggon and sweeds, plain general kept, louden on the kirkpeal, foottreats given to malafides, outshriek hyelp hyelp nor his hair efter buggelawrs, innhome daymon, outhouse dinell, might underhold three barnets, putzpolish crotty bottes, nightcoover all fireglims, serve’s time till baass, grindstone his kniveses, fullest boarded, lewd man of the method of godliness, perchance he nieows and thans sits in the spoorwaggen, X.W.C.A. on Z.W.C.U., will, on advices, be bacon or stable hand, must begripe fullstandingly irers’ langurge, jublander or northquain bigger prefurred, all duties, kine rights, family fewd, outings fived, may get earnst, no get combitsch, profusional drinklords to please obstain, he is fatherlow soundigged inmoodmined pershoon but aleconnerman, nay, that must he isn’t?

Answer — Pore ole Joe!

6.  What means the saloon slogan Summon In The Housesweep Dinah?

Answer — Galory bit of the sales of Cloth nowand I have to beeswax the bringing in all the claub of the porks to us how I thawght I knew his arthurgruff stain on the flowers of the liloleum if me ask and can could speak like Big Whittingdon and he called by me midden name I am your honey honeysugger phwhtphwht tha Bay and who bruk the dandleass and who seen the blackcullen jam for Tomorrha’s big pickneck I hope it’ll pour prais the Climate of all Ireland I heard the grackles and I skimming the crock on all your sangwidges fippence per leg per drake and who eight the last of the goosebellies that was mowlding from hoopincoff years and who leff that there and who put that here and who let the kilkenny stale the chop and whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith Shite! will you have a plateful?

7.  Who are those component partners of our societate, the doorboy, the cleaner, the sojer, the crook, the squeezer, the lounger, the curman, the tourabout, the mussroomsniffer, the bleakablue tramp, the funpowtherplother, the christymansboxer, from their pres sales and Donnybrook prater and Roebuck’s campos and the Ager Arountown and Crumglen’s grassy but Kimmage’s champ and Ashtown fields and Cabra fields and Finglas fields and Santry fields and the feels of Raheny and their fails and Baldoygle to them who are latecomers all the year’s round by anticipation, are the porters of the passions in virtue of retroratiocination, and, contributting their conflingent controversies of differentiation, unify their voxes in a vote of vaticination, who crunch the crusts of comfort due to depredation, drain the mead for misery to incur intoxication, condone every evil by practical justification and condam any good to its own gratification, who are ruled, roped, duped and driven by those numen fateful changending constancies the feedkeekers at our free laws, Fors Forsennat Finds Clusium! nightly consternation, fortnightly fornication, monthly miserecordation and omniannual recreation, Matey, Teddy, Simon, Jorn, Pedher, Andy, Barty, Philly, Jamesy Mor and Tom, Matt and Jakes Mac Carty?

Answer — The Morphios!

8.  And how war yore maggies?

Answer — They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt daring, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeking, as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile and rile by rule of ruse ’reathed rose and hose hol’d home, yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more.

9.  Now, to be on anew and basking again in the panaroma of all flores of speech, if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands and vacants of space at his sleepish feet and as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk, were at this auctual futule preteriting unstant, in the states of suspensive exanimation, accorded, through the eye of a noodle, with an earsighted view of old hopeinhaven with all the ingredient and egregiunt whights and ways to which in the curse of his persistence the course of his tory will had been having recourses, the reverberration of knotcracking awes, the reconjungation of nodebinding ayes, the redissolusingness of mindmouldered ease and the thereby hang of the Hoel of it, could such a none, whiles even led comesilencers to comeliewithhers and till intempestuous Nox should catch the gallicry and spot lucan’s dawn, byhold at ones what is main and why tis twain, how one once meet melts in tother wants poignings, the sap rising, the foles falling, the nimb now nihilant round the girlyhead so becoming, the wrestless in the womb, all the rivals to allsea, shakeagain, O disaster! shakealose, Ah how starring! but Heng’s got a bit of Horsa’s nose and Jeff’s got the signs of Ham round his mouth and the beaù that spun beautiful pales as it palls, what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it! Violet’s dyed! then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?

Answer — A collideorscape!

10.  What bitter’s love but yurning, what’ sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes dothe smoake retourne?

Answer: I know, pepette, of course, dear, but listen, precious! Thanks, pette, those are lovely, delicious! But mind the wind, sweet! What exquisite hands you have, you angiol, if you didn’t gnaw your nails, isn’t it a wonder you’re not achamed of me, you pig, you perfect little pigaleen! I’ll nudge you in a minute! I bet you use her best French cream to make them look so rosetop glowstop nostop. When I think of that Clancarbry, the foodbrawler, of the sociationist party and all his fourteen other maulers. Stoop a little closer, fealse! Delicious simply! I haven’t fell so turkish for ages and ages! Extraordinary! Why, what are they all, the mucky lot of them only? Peppt! That’s right, hold it steady! Poo! What are you nudging for? No, I just thought you were. Listen, loviest! Of course it was too kind of you, miser, to remember my sighs in shockings and look what the fool bought and I’ll always in always remind of snappy new girters with my very best gloves even if he was to be vermillion miles my youth to live on, creaking around on his old shanks axle like a crosty old cornquake. Airman, waterwag, terrier, blazer! I’m fine, thanks ever! O mind you poo fingies. Mummum. I’m terribly sorry, I swear to you I am! May you never see me in my birthday pelts and that her blanches mainges may rot leprous off her whatever winking maggis I’ll bet by your cut you go chasting after with all the glass on her and the jumps in her stomewhere! Of course I know, pettest, you’re so learningful and considerate in yourself, you long cold cat you! Please to meek my acquointance! Codling, snakelet, iciclist! My diaper has more life to it! Who drowned you in drears, man, or are you pillale with ink?. Can’t you read my dazzled eyes through me true? Count all your quick of my rhythmic ticks, pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning, transname me loveliness, now and here me for all times! I’d risk a policeman passing by, Magrath or even that beggar of a boots at the Post. The flame? O, pardone! That was what? Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? More poestries from Sakespeare’s. Holy bug, how my highness would jump to make you flame your halve a bannan in two when I’d run my blazing torchight through (to adore me there and then cease to be?) Your hairmejig if you had one. If I am laughing with you? No, lovingest, I’m not so dying to take my rise out of you. It’s only because I’m only any girl, you lovely fellow of my dreams, and because old somebooby is not a roundabout, my trysting of the tulipies, like that puff pape bucking Daveran assoiling us behinds, and because, you pluckless lankaloot, I hate the very thought of the thought of you and because, dearling, of course, adorest, was always meant for an engindear which please business now won’t be long. Ever so sorry! I beg your pardon, I was listening to every treasuried word I said fell from my dear mot’s lip otherwise how could I seee what you were thinking of our granny? Move your mouth towards minth, more, preciousest, more on more! Don’t be a, I’m not going to! Sh! nothing! A cricri somewhere! Buybuy! I’m fly! Let them, their whole four courtships! Let them, Bigbawl and his boosers’ eleven makes twelve. And my waiting twenty classbirds, sitting on their stiles! There’s Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia, Ena, Fretta, Gilda, Hilda, Ita, Jess, Katty, Lou, Mina, Nippa, Opsy, Poll, Queeniee, Ruth, Saucy, Trix, Una, Vela, Wanda, Xenia, Yva, Zulma, Phoebe, Thelma. And Mee! When their bride was married all my belles began to ting. A ring a ring a rosaring! Then everyone will hear of it. Bright pigeons all over the whirrld will fly. We keeps all and sundry papers. In the limelight, O my darling! No, I swear to you by all I hold secret from my world and in my underworld and all the other wonderwearlds! Close your, nutmust look! Now open, pet, your lips, pepette, like I used my sweet parted lipsabuss with Dan Holohan taught me, pipetta mia, when you learned me the linguo to melt. Whowham would! have ears like ours, the blackhaired. Do you like that, silenziosa? Are you enjoying, my life, my love? Is it not divinely deluscious? Misi, misi! I am enjoying it still, I swear I am! Why do you prefer its in these dark nets, if why may ask, my sweetykins? Sh sh! Longears is flying. No, sweetissest, why would that ennoy me? But don’t! Your delighted lips, love, be careful! Mind my duvetyne dress above all! So, so, my precious! O, I know the cost, chare! Don’t tell me! If I sell whose, dears? Was I sold here’ tears? How awful! I wouldn’t not for all the juliettes in the twinkly way! Shshsh! Don’t start like that, you wretch! I thought ye knew all and more, ye ancthor It’s only another queer fish or other in the damned old river again, God bless us and spare her! Excuse me for swearing, love, I swear I didn’t mean to! Did you really never in all our lives speak clothse to a girl’s before? No! How marfellows! Of course I believe you, my own dear doting liest, when you tell me. As I’d live to, O, I’d love to! Liss, liss! I muss whiss! Never that ever or I can remember dearstreaming faces! Never in all my whole white life of my matchless and pair. With my whiteness I thee woo and bind my silk breasths I thee bound! Always, Amory, amor andmore! Till always, thou lovest! Shshshsh! So long as the lucksmith Laughs!

11.  If you met on the binge a poor acheseyeld from Ailing, when the tune of his tremble shook shimmy on shin, while his countrary raged in the weak of his wailing, like a rugilant pugilant Lyon O’Lynn; if he maundered in misliness, plaining his plight or, played fox and lice, pricking and dropping hips teeth, or wringing his handcuffs for peace, the blind blighter, praying Dieuf and Domb Nostrums foh thomethinks to eath; if he weapt while he leapt and guffalled quith a quhimper, made cold blood a blue mundy and no bones without flech, taking kiss, kake or kick with a suck, sigh or simper, a diffle to larn and a dibble to lech; if the fain shinner pegged you to shave his immartial, wee skillmustered shoul with his ooh, hoodoodoo! broking wind that to wiles, woemaid sin he was partial, we don’t think, Jones, we’d care to this evening, would you?

Answer: No, blank ye! So you think I have impulsivism? Did they tell you I am one of the fortysixths? And I suppose you heard I had a wag on my ears? And I suppose they told you too that my roll of life is not natural? But before proceeding to conclusively confute this begging question it would be far fitter for you, if ye dare! to hasitate to consult with and consequentially attempt at my disposale of the same dime-cash problem elsewhere naturalistically of course, from the blinkpoint of so eminent a spatialist. From it you will here notice, Schott, upon my for the first remarking you that the sophology of Bitchson while driven as under by a purely dime-dime urge is not with out his cash-cash characktericksticks, borrowed for its nonce ends from the fiery goodmother Miss Fortune (who the lost time we had the pleasure we have had our little recherché brush with, what, Schott?) and as I further could have told you as brisk as your D.B.C. behaviouristically pailleté with a coat of homoid icing which is in reality only a done by chance ridiculisation of the whoo-whoo and where’s hairs theorics of Winestain. To put it all the more plumbsily. The speechform is a mere sorrogate. Whilst the quality and tality (I shall explex what you ought to mean by this with its proper when and where and why and how in the subsequent sentence) are alternativomentally harrogate and arrogate, as the gates may be.

Talis is a word often abused by many passims. A pessim may frequent you to say: Have you been seeing much of Talis and Talis those times? optimately meaning: Will you put up at hree of irish? Or a ladyeater may perhaps have casualised as you temptoed her à la sourdine: Of your plates? Is Talis de Talis, the swordswallower, who is on at the Craterium the same Talis von Talis, the penscrusher, no funk you! who runs his duly mile? Or this is a perhaps cleaner example. At a recent postvortex piece infustigation of a determinised case of chronic spinosis an extension lecturer on The Ague who out of matter of form was trying his seesers, Dr’s Het Ubeleeft, borrowed the question: Why’s which Suchman’s talis qualis? to whom, as a fatter of macht, Dr Gedankje of Stoutgirth, who was wiping his whistle, toarsely retoarted: While thou beast’ one zoom of a whorl! (Talis and Talis originally mean the same thing, hit it’s: Qualis.)

Professor Levis-Brueller (though as I shall promptly prove his whole account of the Sennacherib as distinct from the Shalmanesir Sanitational reforms and of the Mr Skekels and Dr Hydes problem in the same connection differs toto coelo from the fruit of my own investigations — though the reason I went to Jericho must remain for certain reasons a political secret — especially as I shall shortly be wanted in Cavautry, I congratulate myself, for the same and other reasons — as being again hopelessly vitiated by what I have now resolved to call the dime and cash diamond fallacy) in his talked off confession which recently met with such a leonine uproar on its escape after its confinement Why am I not born like a Gentileman and why am I now so speakable about my own eatables (Feigenbaumblatt and Father, Judapest, 5688, A.M.) whole-heartedly takes off his gabbercoat and wig, honest draughty fellow, in his public interest, to make us see how though, as he says: ‘by Allswill’ the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity, looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the, sphericity of these globes (I am very pressing for a parliamentary motion which, under my guidance, would establish the deleteriousness of decorousness in the morbidisation of the modern mandaboutwoman type) is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum. I need not anthrapologise for any obintentional (I must here correct all that school of neoitalian or paleoparisien schola of tinkers and spanglers who say I’m wrong parcequeue I want to be) downtrodding on my foes. Professor Levis-Brueller, F.D. finds, because the number of squeer faiths in weekly circulation will not be appreciably augmented by the notherslogging of my cupolar clods. What the romantic in rags pines after and what het importunes our Mitleid for is the poorest waste of time. His everpresent toes are always out throuth his overpast boots. Hear him squak! When Mullocky won the couple of colds, when we were stripping in number three, I would like the neat drop that would malt in my mouth but I fail to see when (I am purposely refraining from expounding the obvious fallacy as to the specific gravitates of the two liquids implied through students of mixed hydrostatics and pneumodipsics will after some difficulties grapple away with my meinungs). But, on Professor Levis-Brueller, F.D., Ph. Dr’s Showings, the plea, if he pleads, is all posh and robbage on a melodeontic scale since his man’s when is no otherman’s quandour (Mine, dank you?) while, for aught I care for the contrary?, the all is where in love as war and the plane where me arts soar you’d aisy rouse a thunder from and where I cling true’tis there I climb tree and where Innocent looks best (pick!) there’s holly in his ives.

As my explanations here are probably above your understandings I shall revert to a more expletive method which I frequently use when I have to sermo with muddleclass pupils. Imagine for my purpose that you are a squad of urchins, snifflynosed, goslingnecked, clothyheaded, tangled in your lacings, tingled in your pants, etc. etc.. And you, Smith, take your tongue out of your inkpot! As none of you knows javanese I will give you a free translation of the old fibulist’s parable. Audi, Joe Peters! Audi Fax!

The Mookse and The Gripes.

A Mookse he would a walking go (My hood! cries Antony Romeo), so one evening, after his good supper of gammon and spittish, having drubbed his eyes, ascented his nostrils, packed up his ears and comforted his throats, he put on his impermeable, seized his impugnable, harped on his crown and stepped out of his immobile De Rure Albo and set off a spasso to see how badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways. As he set off with his father’s sword he was girded on, and with that between his legs and his tarkeels, our great and only Breakspeare, he clanked, to my clinking, every inch of an immortal. He had not walked over a pair of parsecs when at the turning of the wrong lane near Saint Patrick’s-without-his-Walls he came upon the most unconsciously boggylooking stream he ever locked his eyes on It looked little and it smelt of brown and it thought in narrows and it talked showshallow. And as it rinn it dribbled like any lively purlit-easy: My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don’t I love thee! And, I declare, what was there on the yonder bank of the stream that would be a river, parched on a limb of the olum but the Gripes? And no doubt he was fit to be dried for why had he not been having the juice of his times?

His pips had been neatly all drowned on him; his polps were charging odours every older minute; he was quickly for getting the dresser’s desdaign on the flyleaf of his frons; and he was quietly for giving the bailiff’s distrain on to the bulkside of his cul de Pompe. In all his specious heavings, as be lived by Optimus Maximus, the Mookse had never seen his brooder-on-low so nigh to a pickle.

Adrian (that was the Mookse’s restingname) stuck still phiz-à-phiz to the Gripes in an outfit of Aurignacian. He sor a stone, and on that he sate his seat which it filled to its fullest justotoryum and whereopum with his unfallable upon his alloilable and the pederect he always walked with cheek by jowl with his fresherman’s blague, Bellua Triumphanes, he looked the first and last laical lakeness of Quartus the Fifth and Quintus the Sixth and Sixtus the Seventh giving allnight sitting to Leo the Faultyfindth.

— Good appetite us, sir Mookse! How do you do it? cheeped the Gripes in a wherry whiggy woice and the jackasses all within bawl laughed and brayed for his intentions for they knew their sly toad lowry now. I am blessed to see you, my dear mister. Will you not perhopes tell me everything if you are pleased, sanity?

Think of it! A gripes!

— Rats! roared the Mookse and the mice quailed to hear him at all for you cannot wake a silken noise out of a hoarse oar. Blast yourself and your infairioriboos! No, hang you! I am superbly in my supremest poncif! Rot!

— I am till infinity obliged with you, bowed the Gripes, his whine having gone to his head. I am still always having a wish on all my extremities. By the watch, what is the time, pace?

Figure it! To a Mookse!

— Ask my index.’ answered the Mookse, rapidly by turning clement, urban and celestian in the highest of goodhumour. Quote awhore? That is quite about what I came with my intentions to settle with you. Let there be orlog. Let here be Irene. Let you be Beeton. And let me be Los Angeles. Now measure your length.’ Now estimate my capacity.’ Well, sour? Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? Will you give you up?

Sancta Patientia!’ You should have heard the voice that answered him!’

— I was just thinking upon that, noble Mooksey, but I can never give you up, the Gripes whimpered from nethermost of his wanhope. My temple is my own. But I will never be abler to tell you (here he near lost his limb) whose o’cloak you ware.

Incredible! Well, hear the inevitable.

— My building space is always to let to Men, the Mookse concluded. (What a crammer for the Shapewrecked Gripes!) And I regret to announce that I cannot see my way to help you from being killed by time, (what a thrust.’), as we first met each other never so early. (Poor little squashed gripes! I begin to feel contemption for him!) My side is as safe as houses, he continued, and I can see what it is to be seen. Parysis, tu sais, belongs to him who parises himself. I can prove that against you, my good enemy! I bet you this dozen tomes.

He proved it to the extinction of Niklaus altogether (Niklaus Alopysius having been the Gripes’s hinder nimbum) by Neuclidius and by Inexagoras, by Mummsen and Thumpson, by Orasmus and by Amenius and after that he reproved it altogether by the binomial dioram and the penic walls and the inklespill legends and the rule of the hoop and the blessons of expedience and the jugicants of Puncher’s Pylax.

“In a years, oh Gripes, you will be blind to the world” said the Mookse.

“In a thousand years” replied the Gripes “you may be still more bothered.” “I shall be chosen as the first of the last by the electress of Vale Hollow” said the Mookse nobly “for I am in the stabulary and that’s what they all like best.”

“I” confessed the Gripes limply “shall not even be the last of the first, I hope, when we are visited by the veiled horror” And he added “I am relying entirely upon the weightiness of my breath.”

And they villainised each other with the wildest ever wielded since Tarriestinus lashed Pissasphallium.

— Unicorn!

— Ungulant!

— Uvuloid!

— Uskybeak!

And bullfolly answered volleyball.

Nuvoletta in her lightdress was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. She was alone. All her nubied compinions were asleeping with the squirrels. Their mivver, Mrs Moonau, was off in the Fuerst quarter scrubbing the backsteps of Number 28 fuvver, that Skard! he was up in Norwood’s sokaparlor, eating oceans of Voking’s Blemish. Noveletta listened as she reflected herself, though the heavenly one with his constellatria and his emanations, stood between and she tried all she tried to make the Mookse look up at her (but he was far too far-seeing) and to make the Gripes hear how coy she could be (though he was much too auricular about himself to heed her) but it was all mild’s vapour moist. Not even her dimmed reflection, Nuvoluccia, could they take their noses off for their minds were beset with Heliogobbleus and Commodus and Enobarbarus and whatever they did as they said. She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus. But she might just as well have carried her daisy’s worth to Florida. For the Mookse were not amused and the Gripes was painfully obliviscent. “I see” she sighed “There are menner.”

The shades began to glidder along the banks, dusk unto dusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds. The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear. The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see. He ceased. And he ceased and it was ever so dusk of both of them. But still one thought of the deeps he would profound on the morrow and still the other thought of the scrapes he would escape if he had luck enough.

Oh! how it was dusk It was so dusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and two, then bye threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of seven’s, as we weep, now, with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie! for the tired ones were wecking.

Then there came down to the hither bank a woman of no appearance (I believe she was a Black with oills at her feet) and she gathered up the Mookse where he was spread and carried him away to her invisible dwelling for he was the holy sacred solemn spit of her bushop’s apron. So you see the Mookse he had reason as I knew and you knew and he knew all along. And there came down to the thither bank a woman to all important (though they say that she was cooly spite the cold in her heed) and, for he was as like it as blow it to a hawker’s hank, she plucked down the Gripes from his limb and carried him away with her to her unseen shieling. And so the poor Gripes got wrong for that is always how a Gripes is, always was and always will be. And it was never so thoughtful of either of them. And there were left now an only elm tree and but a stone. O! Yes! And Nuvoletta, a lass.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone on her and come on her) there fell a tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those who are ‘keen’ on the pretty-pretty sort of thing you meet by Harrod’s) for it was a leap tear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, Why, Why, Weh, O! Weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

As I have now successfully explained to you my own naturalborn rations which are even in excise of my vaultybrain insure me that I am a mouth’s more deserving case by genius I’m Armory, so herald me, but he’s merely the size of his shirt. The Jonases were juanizers in Lyoness before the first Schmied started to forge. For see my stitchwork! A boche benglant in a field flam. Motto: Twist im ann insulte! Mookse makes for Muth and his Muth makes for Mastery wile Gripes Yidds to Guile but his Guile’ll yield the faster he is Faced in Front and Forced to acknowledge that the Roarer Rules the Knaves Leonidas! Mookse, Mookse, Mookse! I could face a phalanx philistine! And Gripes, Gripes, Gripes. I could chor em wiv zis jor of mine. For I feel like Samsen. Hamsen and Yan Yammesen but nevertheless also I feel in symbathos for my ever devoted friend and halfaloafonwashed (darling germ! darling smallfox! I could love that man! I want him to go and live on Tristan da Cunha where he’ll make Number 106 and be near Inaccessible. If I weren’t a jones in myself I’d elect myself to be his dolphin in the wildsbillow) because he is such a barefooted rubber with my supersocks pulled over his face which I publicked in my bestback garden for the laetification of siderodromites and to the irony of the stars. And he wants my addition of meal, meat, bread, butter, dripping, eggs, tea and cabbage with a doorstep! I onght not to indulge on this stage still I will think he is so very allirigh! You will say it is most unenglish and I shall hope to hear that you will not be wrong about it. But I further, feeling a bit husky in my truths

Will you please come over and let us mooremoore murgessly to each’s other down below our vices. i am underheerd by old billfaust. wilsh is full of curks. the coolskittle is philip deblinite. mr wist is thereover beyeind the wantnot. wilsh and wist are as thick of thins udder as faust on the deblinite. And from the poignt of fun where I am crying to arrive you at they are on all fore as foibleminded as you can feel they are fablebodied.

My heeders will recoil with a great leisure how at the outbreak before trespassing on the space question where even michelangelines have fooled to dread I proved to mindself as to your sotisfiction how his abject all through (the quickquid of Professor Ciondolone’s too frequently hypothecated Bettlermensch) is nothing so much more than a mere cashdime however genteel he may want ours, if we please (I am speaking to us in the second person), for to this graded intellecktuals dime is cash and the cash system (you must not be allowed to forget that this is all contained, I mean the system, in the dogmarks of origen on spurios) means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps in your pocket at the same time and with the same manners as you can now nothalf or half the cheek apiece I’ve in mind unless Burrus and Caseous have not or not have seemaultaneously sysentangled themselves, selldear to soldthere, once in the dairy days of buy and buy.

Burrus, let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace, the mildest of milkstoffs yet unbeaten as a risicide and, of course, obsoletely unadulterous whereat Caseous is obversely the revise of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals, though the betterman of the two is meltingly addicted to the more casual side of the arrivaliste case and, let me say it at once, as zealous over him as is passably he. The seemsame home and histry seeks and hidepence which we used to be reading for our prepurgatory, hot, Schott? till Duddy shut the shopper op and Mutti, poor Mutti! brought us our poor suppy, (ah who! eh how!) in Acetius and Oleosus and Sellius Volatilis and Petrus Papricus! Our Old Party quite united round the Slatbowel at Commons: Pfarrer Salamoss himself and that sprog of a Pedersill and his Sprig of Thyme and a dozen of the Murphybuds and a score and more of the hat young Capels and Lettucia in her greensleeves and you too and me three, twinsome bibs but hansome ates, like shakespill and eggs! But there’s many a split pretext bowl and jowl; and (snob screwing that cork, Schott!) to understand this as well as you can, feeling how backward you are in your down-to-the-ground benches, I have completed the following arrangement for the coarse use of stools. The older Kaeser, become unbeurrable from age, having been sort-of-nineknived and chewly removed the twinfreer types are billed to make their reupprearance on the deserted champ de bouteilles. I could paint you to that butter if you had some wash. Caseous may bethink himself a thought of a caviller but Burrus has the reachly roundered head that goes best with thofthinking defensive fideism. He has the lac of wisdom under every dent in his lofter, while the other follow’s. It was aptly and corrigidly stated (and, it is royally needless for one ex ungue Leonem to say by whom) that his seeingscraft was that clarety as were the wholeborough of Poutresbourg to be averlaunched over him pitchbatch he could still make out with his augstritch the green moat in Ireland’s Eye. Let me sell you the fulltroth of Burrus when he wore a younker. Here it is, and chorming too, in six by sevens! A cleanly line, by the gods! Aking off duty and a jaw for ever! What brunoesque poportiums, me Ercles! And what a cheery ripe outlook, good help me Deus v Deus! If I were to speak my ohole mouthful to arinam about it you should call me the Ormuzd aliment in your midst of faime. Eat ye up, heat ye up! sings the somun in the salm. Butyrum et mel comedet ut sciat reprobare malum et eligere bonum, This, of course, also explains why we were taught to play in the childhood: Der Haensli ist ein Butterbrot, fein Butterbrot, mein Butterbrot! Und Koebi iss dein Schtinkenkot! Ja! Ja! Ja!

This in fact, just to show you, is Caseous, the brutherscutch or puir tyron: a hole or two, the highstinks aforefelt and anygo prigging wurms. Cheesugh! you complain. And Hi Hi High must say you are not Hoa Hoa Hoally in the wrong!

Thus we cannot escape our likes and mislikes, exiles or ambusheers, beggar and neighbour and — this is where the dimeshow advertisers advance the temporal relief plea — let us be tolerant of antipathies. Nex quovis burro num fit mercaseus? I am not hereby giving my final endorsement to the learned ignorants of the Cusanus philosophism in which old Nicholas pegs it down that the smarter the spin of the top the sounder the span of the buttom (what the worthy old auberginiste ought to have meant was: the more stolidly immobile in space appears to me the bottom which is presented to use in time by the top primomobilisk &c.). And I shall be misunderstord if understood to give an unconditional Sinequam nune to the heroicised furibouts of the Nolanus theory, or, at any rate, of that substrate of apart from hissheory where the Theophil swoors by his Father Familiaritas and his Mother Contumelia and by the soul in his suit and the animus in his soul and the mind in his animus and the good in his mind that on principial he was the pointing start of his odiose by comparison and that whiles eggs will fall cheapened all over the walled the Bure will be dear on the Brie.

Now, while I am not out now to be taken up as unintentionally recommending the Silkebjorg turondunamon machine for the more economical helixtrolysis of these amboadipates until I can find space to look into it myself a little more closely first I shall go on with my decisions after having shown to you in good time how both products of our social stomach are mutuearly polarised. Positing, as above, too males pooles, the one the pictor of the other and the omber the okotia of the one, and looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males we feel we must waistfully woent a female to focus and on this stage there pleasantly appears the cowrymaid M. whom we shall often meet below who introduces herself upon us at some precise hour which we shall again agree to call absolute zero or the bubbling point of platinism. And so like that former son of a kish who went up and out to found his farmer’s ashes we come down home gently on our own turnedabout asses to meet Margareen.

We now romp through a period of pure lyricism of shamebred music evidenced by such words in distress as I cream for thee, Sweet Margareen, and the more hopeful O Margareena! O Margareena! Still in the bowl is left a lump of gold! The pawnbreaking pathos of the first of these shoddy pieces reveals it as a Caseous effort. Burrus’s bit is often used for a toast. Of course the unskilled singer continues to pervert our wiser ears by subordinating the space-element, that is to sing, the aria, to the time-factor, which ought to be killed, ill tempor. I should advise any unborn singer who may still be among my heeders to forget her temporal diaphragm at home (the best thing that could happen to it!) and attack the roulade with a swift colpo di glottide to the lug (though Maace I will insist was reclined from overdoing, this, his recovery often being slow) and then, O! on the third dead beat, O! to cluse her eyes and aiopen her oath and see what spice I may send her.

I shall have a word to say in a few yards about the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall but it will be very convenient for me for the emolument to pursue Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle. Every admirer of my “blank manner” has seen with eyes watered my goulache of Marge which I titled The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman. The hatboxes which composed Rhomba, lady Trabezond, (Marge in her excelsis) also comprised the climactogram up which B and C may fondly be imagined ascending and are suggestive of gentlemen’s spring modes, these modes carrying us back to the superimposed claylayers of eocene and pleastoseen formation and the gradual morphological changes in our body politic which Professor Ebahi-Ahuri of Philadespoinis (Ill) — whose bluebutterbust I have just given his coupe de grass to — neatly names a boîte à surprises. The boxes, if I may break the subject gently, are worth about fourpence pourbox but I am inventing a more patent process after which they can be reduced to a fragment of their true crust by even the youngest of Margees if she will take plase to be seated and smile if I please.

Now there can be no question about it either that I having done as much, have quitegot the size of that young woman whose types may be met with in any public garden ostentatiously hemming apologetically over the briefness of some “sweet” garment or at the movies swallowing sobs and blowing bixed mixcuits over “Childe” chaplain’s “latest” or on the verge of the gutter with some bobbedhair babyma’s infant held hostage at armslength, teaching His Majesty how to make waters worse.

(I am closely watching Master Pules, us I have regions to suspect from my post that her “little man” is a secondary schoolteacher under the boards of education, a voted disciple of Infantulus who is being utilised thus publicly by the seducente infanta to conceal her own more mascular personality. My solotions for the proper parturience of matres and the education of micturious mites must stand over from the moment till I tackle this tickler hussy for occupying my uttentions.)

Margareena she’s very fond of Burrus but, alick and alack! She velly fond of chec. (The important influence exercised on everything by this eastasian import has not been till now fully flavoured though we can comfortably taste it in this case. I shall come back for a little more say farther on.) A cleopatrician in her own right she at once complicates the position while Burrus and Caseous are contending for her misstery by implicating herself with an elusive Antonius, a wop who would appear to hug a personal interest in refined chees of all chades at the same time as he wags an antomine art of being rude like the boor. This Antonius—Burrus—Caseous grouptriad may be said to equate the qualis equivalent with the older socalled talis on talis. And this is why any simple fool you like to dress may be awfully green to one side of him and fruitfully blue on the other which will not screen him however from appealing to my gropesarching eyes as a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesphorous idiot.

No! Twelve tabular times till now have I said it. Merus Genius to Careous Caseous! Moriture, te salutat! My unchanging Word is sacred. The word is my Wife and may the curlews crown our nuptias! Till Breath us depart! Beware would you change with my years. Be as young as your grandmother! The ring man in the rong shop but the rite words by the rote order! Ubi lingua nuncupassit, ibi fas! Adversus hostem, semper sac! She that will not feel my fulmoon let her peel to thee as the hoyden and the impudent! That mon that hoth no moses in his sole nor is not awed by conquists of word’s law, who never with humself was fed and leaves his soil to lave his head, when his hope’s in his highlows from whisking his woe, if he came to my preach, a proud pursebroken ranger, when the heavens were welling the spite of their spout, to beg for a bite in our bark Noisdanger, would meself and Jaffe Jeffet, four-in-hand, foot him out? — ay! — were he my own breastbrother, my doubled withd love and my singlebiassed hate, were we bread by the same fire and signed with the same salt, had we tapped from the same master and robbed the same till, were we tucked in the one bed and bit by the one flea, though it broke my heart to pray it, still I’d fear I’d hate to say!

12. Sacer esto?

Answer: Semus sumus!

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°7, October 1927
[chapter I.7 from Finnegans Wake]

Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming (he was an outlex between the lines of Ragonar Blaubarb ant Horrild Hairwire and an inlaw to Mr. Bbyrdwood de Trop Blogg was among his most distant connections) but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white. Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at. Shem’s bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin, the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one glad stone avoirdupoider for him, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt’s thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes, a bladder Tristended, so much so that young Master Shemmy at the very dawn of prehistory seeing himself such and such, when playing with thistlewords in their garden nursery, Griefotrofio, at Phig Streat 111, Shuvlin, Old Hoeland, (would we go back there now for sounds, pillings and sense? would we now for annas and annas? Would we for fullscore eight and a liretta? for twelve blocks one bob? for four testers one groat? not for a dinar? not for jo!) asked of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe: when is a man not a man?: telling them take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab to the winner. One said when the heavens are quakers, a second said when Bohemeand lips, a third said when he, no, when hold hard a jiffy, when he is a gnawstick and detarmined to, the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket of life, still another said when the wine’s at witsends, and still another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him, one of the littlest said me, me, Sem, when pappa papared the harbour, still one said when you are old I’m grey fall full wi sleep, and still another when wee deader walkner, and another when he is just only after having being semisized, another when yea, he hath no mananas, and one when dose pigs they begin now that they will flies up intil the looft. All were wrong, so Shem himself took the cake, the correct solution being — all give it up? —; when he is a — yours till the rending of the rocks, — Sham.

Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs. So low was he that he preferred Gibsen’s teatime salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time he repeated in his botulism that no junglagrown pineapple ever smacked like the whoppers you shook out of Ananias’ cans. None of your inchthick blueblooded Balaclava fried-at-beliefstakes or juicejelly legs of the Grex’s molten mutton or greasilygristly grunters’ goupons or slice upon slab of luscious goosebosom with lump after load of plumpudding stuffing all aswim in a swamp of bogoakgravy for that yude! He even ran away with himself, and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland splits little pea. Once when in a state of hopelessly helpless intoxication the piscivore strove to lift a citron peel to either nostril, hiccupping, apparently impromptued by his glottal stop that he could live for ever by the smell, as the citr, as the cedron, like a cedar, of the founts, on mountains, with lemon on, of Lebanon. O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to! No likedbylike firewater or firstserved firstshot or gutburn gin or honest brewbarrett beer either. O dear no! Instead the tragic jester sobbed himself wheywhingingly sick of life on some sort of a rhubarbaros maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice and, to hear him twixt his sedimental cupslips when he had gulfed down mmmmuch too mmmmany gourds of it retching off to almost as low withswillera, who always knew notwithstanding when they had had enough and were rightly indignant at the wretch’s hospitality when they found to their horror they could not carry another drop, it came straight from the noble white fat, openwide sat, her why hide that, the winevat, of the most serene archduchess, if she is a duck, she’s a douches, snot her fault, now is it? artstouchups funny you’re grinning at, fancy you’re in her yet, Fanny Urinia. Aint that swell, hey? Talk about lowness! Any dog’s quantity of it visibly oozed out thickly from this dirty little blacking beetle for the very first instant the Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her kodak shotted the as yet unremuneranded national apostate, who was cowardly gun and camera shy, taking what he fondly thought was a short cut to Soak Amerigas, after having buried a hatchet not so long before, by the wrong goods exeunt into Patatapapaveri’s, fruiterers and musical florists, she knew he was a bad fast man by his walk on the spot.

[Johns is a different butcher’s. Next place you are up town pay him a visit. Or better still, come tobuy.

You will enjoy cattlemen’s spring meat. Johns is now quite divorced from baking. Fattens, kills, flays, hangs, draws, quarters and pieces. Feel his lambs! Feel how sheap! His liver too is great value, A spatiality! Communicated.]

Around that time one generally hoped or at any rate suspected among morticians that he would early turn out badly, develop hereditary pulmonary T.B., and do for himself one dandy time, nay, of a pelting night blanketed creditors, hearing a coarse song and splash off Eden Quay sighed and rolled over, sure all was up, but, though he fell heavily and locally into debit, not even then could such an antinomian be true to type. With the foreign devil’s leave the fraid born fraud diddled even death. Anzi, cabled from his asylum to his jonathan for a brother: Here today, gone tomory, do something, Fireless. And had answer: Inconvenient, David. You see, chaps, he was low. All the time he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each and every crumb of trektalk, covetous of his neighbour’s word, and if ever, during a conversazione commoted in the nation’s interest, delicate hints were thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers, vainly pleading by scriptural arguments with the opprobrious papist about what about trying to, brace up and be a men instead of a dem scrounger, desh it all, such as: Pray, what is the meaning, sousy, of that continental expression, if you ever came across it, we think it is a word transpiciously like canaille?: or: Did you anywhere, kennel, on your gullible’s travels or during your rural troubadouring, happen to stumble upon a certain gay young nobleman whimpering to the name of Low Swine who always addresses women out of the one corner of his mouth lives on loans and is furtivefree yours of age? without one sign of haste like the supreme prig he was, and not a bit sorry, he would pull a vacant landlubber’s face, root with earwaker’s pensile in the outer of his lauscher and then, lisping, the prattlepate parnella, to kill time, and swatting his deadbest to think what under the canopies of God would any decent son of a shedog who had bin to an university think, begin to tell all the intelligentsia admitted to that conclamazzione (since, still and before physicians, lawyers merchant, belfry pollititians, agricolous manufraudurers, philanthropicks lodging on as many boards round the panesthetic at the same time as possible) the whole lifelong story of his entire low existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were and one moment tarabooming great blunderguns (poh!) about his farfamed fine Poppamore Mr. Humhum, whom history, climate and entertainment made the first of his sept and always up to debt, though Eavens ears ow many fines he faces, and another moment croaghing three jeers (pah!) for his rotten little ghost of a Peppybeg, Mr. Himmyshimmy, a blighty, a reeky, a lighty, a scrapy, a babbly, a ninny, dirty seventh among thieves and always bottom sawyer, till nowan knowed how howmely howme could be, giving unsolicited testimony on behalf of the absent as glib as eaveswater to those present (who meanwhile with increasing lack of interest in his semantics, allowed various subconscious smickers to drivel slowly across their fichers), unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused and cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the other people in the story leaving out, of course, foreconsciously, the simple word and plague and poison they had cornered him about until there was not a snoozer among them but was utterly undeceived in the heel of the reel by the recital of the rigmarole.

He wint without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row and as often as he was called in to umpire any octagonal argument among slangwhangers the accomplished washout always used to rub shoulders with the last speaker and agree to every word as soon as half uttered, command me!, your servant, good, I revere you, how, my seer? be drinking that! quite truth, gratias, I’m yoush, see wha’m hearing?, also goods, please it, me sure?, be filling this!, quiso, you said it, muchas grassyass, is there firing-on-me?, is their girlic-on-you?, to your good self, your sulphur, and then at once focuss his whole unbalanced attention upon the next octagonist who managed to catch a listener’s eye, asking and imploring him out of his piteous onewinker whether there was anything in the world he could do to please him and to overflow his tumbletantaliser for him yet once more. One hailcannon night as very recently as some thousand rains ago he was therefore treated with what closely resembled parsonal violence, being soggert all unsuspectingly through the deserted village of Tumblin-on-the-Leafy from Mr. Vanhomrigh’s house at 82 Mabbot’s Mall as far as Green Patch beyond the brickfields of Salmon Pool by rival teams of slowspiers counter quicklimers who finally, as rahilly they had been deteened out rawther laetich, thought they had better be streaking for home after their Auborne-to-Auborne, with thanks for the pleasant evening, one and all disgustedly, instead of ruggering him back, and awake, reconciled (though they were as jealous as could be cullions about all the truffles they had brought on him) to a friendship, fast and furious, which merely arose out of the noxious pervert’s perfect lowness. Again there was a hope that people, looking on him with the contemp of the contempibles, after first gaving him a roll in the dirt, might pity and forgive him, if properly deloused, but the pleb was born a Quicklow and sank alowing till he stank out of sight. All Saints beat Belial! Mickil Goals to Nichil! Notpossible! Already?

In Nowhere has yet the Whole World taken part of himself for his Wife;

By Nowhere have Poorparents been sentenced to Worms, Blood and thunder for Life

Not yet has the Emp from Corpsica forced the Arth out of Engleterre;

Not yet have the Sachsen and Judder on the Mound of a Word man Warre;

Not yet Witchywithcy of Wench struck fire of his Heath from on Hoath;

Not yet his Arcobaleine forespoken Peacepeace upon Oath;

Cleftfoot from Hempal must tumpel, Blamefool Gardener’s bound to fall;

Broken Eggs will poursuive bitten Apples for where theirs is Will there’s his Wall;

But the Mountstill frowns on the Millstream while their Madsons leap his Bier

And her Rillstrill liffs to His Murkesty all her daft Daughters laff in her Ear.

Till the four shores of deff Tory Island let the douze dumm Eirewhiggs raille!

Hirp! Hirp! for their Missed Understandings! chirps the ballat of Perce-Oreille.

O fortunous casualitas! Darkies never done tug that coon out to play flesh and blood games same as piccaninnies play all day, those old games we used to play with Dina and old Joe kicking her behind and before and, the yellow girl kicking him behind old Joe, games like Thom Thom the Thonderman, Put the wind up the Peeler, Hat in the ring, Hely Baba and the Forty Thieves, Mikel on the luckypig, Nickel in the slot, Sheila Harnett and her Cow, Handmarried but once in my life and I’ll never Commit such a Sin agin, This is the way we sow the Seed of a long and lusty Morning, Hops of Fun at Miliken’s Make, I seen the toothbrush with Pat Farrel, Here’s the fat to graze the priest’s boots, When his Steam was like a Raimbrandt round Mac Garvey. Now it is notoriously known how on that surprisingly bloody Unity Sunday when the grand germogall allstar bout was harrily the rage between our weltingtoms extraordinary and our pettythicks the marshalaisy and Irish eyes of welcome were smiling daggers down their backs, when the roth vice and blanse met the noyr blank and rogues and the grim white and cold bet the black fighting tans, a rank funk getting the better of him, the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives, pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles and, without having struck one blow, corked himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay for the life, where, as there was not a moment to be lost, after he had boxed around with his fortepiano till he was whole bach and blues, he collapsed carefully under a bedtick from Switzer’s, his face enveloped into a dead warrior’s telemac, with a whotwaterwottle at his feet to stoke his energy of waiting, moaning feebly that his pawdry’s purgatory was more than a nigger bloke could bear, hemiparalysed by all the shemozzle, (Daily Maily, fullup lace! Holy Maly, Mothelup joss!) his cheeks and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked. How is that for low, laities and gentlenuns? Why, whole continents rang with this lowness! Sheols of houris in chems upon divans, (revolted stellas pertine vesamong them) at a bare (O!) mention exclaimed: Fish!

But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookisonester himself, ever nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective (here perhaps at the vanessance of his lownest) who was known to grognt rather than gunnard upon one occasion while drinking heavily of spirits to that interlocutor a latere he used to pal around with, one Davy Browne-Nowlan, his heavenlaid twin, in the porchway of a gipsy’s bar (Shem always blaspheming, so holy writ, Billy, he would try, old Belly, and pay this one manjack congregant of his four soups every lass of nexmouth, Bolly, so sure as thair’s a tail on a commet, as a taste for storik’s fortytooth, that is to stay, to listen out, ony twenny minnies moe, Bully, his Ballade Imaginaire which was to be dubbed Wine, Woman and Waterclocks, or How u Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty, by Maistre Sheames de la Plume, some most dreadful stuff in a murderous handwriting) that he was avoopf (parn me!) aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard, cither prexactly unlike his polar andthisishis or procisely the seem as woops (parn!) as what he fancied or guessed the sames as he was himself and that, though he was foxed fux to fux with all the teashop lionses of Ludmrum up gagainst him, andallthatsortofthing, if reams stood to reason he would wipe alley english spooker off the face of the erse. After the thorough fright he got that bloody, Swithun’s day, though every doorpost in muchtried Lucalizod was smeared with generous erstborn gore and every free for all cobbleway slippery with the bloods of beroes, crying to Welkins for others, and noahs and cul verts agush with tears of joy, our low waster never had the common baalamb’s pluck to stir out and about the compound while everyone else of the torchlit throng, slashers and sliced alike, waaded and baaded around, chanting the Gillooly chorus, O pura e pia bella! in junk et sampam or in secular sinkalarum, heads up, on his bonafide avocation and happy belongers to the fairer sex on their usual quest for higher things went stonestepping their bickerrstaffs across the sevenspan ponte dei colori set up over the slop by Messrs a charitable government for the only once he did take a tompeep throug a threedraw eighteen hawkspower telescope out of his westernmost keyhole, spitting at the impenetrable wetter, with an eachway hope in his shivering soul of finding out for himself whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back after the celestious intemperance and why he got the charm of his optical life when he found himself at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver of the bulldog with a purpose pattern, handled by an unknown quarreler who, supposedly, had been told off to shade and shoot shy Shem should the shit show his shiny shnout out awhile to look facts in the face before being hosed and creased (uprip and jack him!) by six or a dozen of the gayboys.

What, in the names of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the incensed privy and the licensed pantry gods and Stator and Victor and Kutt and Runn was this disinterestingly low human type, this Calumnious Column of Cloaxity, this Bengalese Beacon of Biloxity, this Annamite Aper of Atroxity, really at, for he seems in a badbad case? The answer would sound: from pulling himself on his most flavoured canal the huge chesthouse of his elders he had flickered up and flinnered down into a drug and drunkery addict growing megalomane of a loose past. This explains the litany of septuncial lettertrumpets honorific, highpitched, erudite, neoclassical which he so loved as patricianly to manuscribe after his name. It would have diverted if ever seen the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, édition de ténèbres, (even yet sighs the Most Different Dr Poindejenk, authorised bowdler and censor, it can’t be repeated!) turning over three sheets at a time, telling himself delightedly that every splurge on the vellum he blundered over was an aisling vision more gorgeous than the one before t.i.t.s., a roseschelle cottage by the sea for nothing for ever, a ladies tryon hosiery raffle at liberty, a sewerful of guineagold wine and sickcylinder oysters worth a billion a bite, an entire operahouse of enthusiastic noblewomen flinging every coronetcrimsoned stitch they had off at his probscenium one after the others, in their gaiety pantheomime, when, egad, sir, he sang the topsquall im Deal Lil Shemlockup Yellin (geewhiz, jew ear that far! soap ewer! juice like a boyd!) for fully five minutes infinitely better than Barton Mc. Guckin with a scrumptious cocked hat and three green trinity plumes on his head, a sponiard’s digger at his ribs, and a dean’s crozier that he won from Cardinal Lindundarri and Cardinal Carchingarri and Cardinal Loriotuli and Cardinal Occidentaccia (ah ho!) in the dearby darby doubled for falling first over the hurdles, madam, in the odder hand, a.a.t.s.o.t., but what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lieabed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his mindfrag, the buzz in his braintree, the tic of his conscience, the height up his rage, the gush down his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears since it took him a month to steal a march he was hardset to mumorise more than a word a week. Was there ever heard of such lowdown blackguardism? Positively it woolies one to think over it. Yet the bumpersprinkler used to boast aloud alone to himself with a haccent on it when Mynfadher was a boer constructor and Hoy was a lexical student, parole, and corrected with the blackboard (trying to copy the stage Englesemen he broughts their house down on, shouting: Bravure, surr Chorles! Letter purfect! Culossal, Loose Wallor! Spache!) how he had been toed out of all the schicker families of the klondykers from Pioupiouland, Swabspays, the land of Nod, Shruggers’ Country, Pension Danubierhome and Barbaropolis, who had settled and stratified in the capital city after its hebdomodary metropoliarchialisation as sunblistered, moonplastered, gory, wheedling, joviale, litcherous and full, ordered off the gorgeous premises in most cases on account of his smell which all cookmaids eminently objected to as ressembling the bombinubble smell that came out of the sink. Instead of chuthoring those model households plain wholesome pothooks (a thing he never possessed of his Nigerian own) what do you think Vulgariano did but study with stolen fruit how cutely to copy all their various styles of signature so as one day to utter a colossal forged cheque on the public for his own private profit until, as just related, the Dustbin’s United Scullerymaid’s and Househelp’s Sorority turned him down and assisted nature by unitedly shoeing the source of annoyance out of the place altogether on the heat of the moment, holding one another’s gonk for no-one hound or scrublady, not even the Turk, ungreekable in purscent of the armenable, dared whiff the polecat at close range) and making some pointopointing remarks as they done so at the prrfects of the Sniffey aboon the lyow why a stunk.

[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and onthergarmenteries to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist. Superior built, domestic, regular layer. Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies. Abortisement.]

One cannot even begin to post figure out how slow in reality the Drumcondriac, nate Hamis, really was. Who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?

Be that as it may, but for his gnose’s glow as it slid within an inch of its page (he would touch at its from time to other to ensign the colours by the beerlitz in his mathness and his educandees to outhue to themselves in the cries of girlglee: gember! inkware! chonchambre! cinsero! zinnzabar! tincture and gin!) Nibs never would have quilled a seriph to sheepskin. By that rosy lampoon’s effluvious burning and with help of the simulchronic flush in his pann he scribbled and scratched nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met, even sharing a precipitation under the dog’s umbrella of a showerproof wall, while all over up and down the four margins of this rancid Shem stuff the evilsmeller (who was devoted to Sardanapalus) used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself in the act of reciting old Nichiabelli’s monolook interyerear Hanno, o Nonanno, acce’l brubblemm’as, ser Autore, q.e.d., a heartbreakingly handsome young paolo with love lyrics for the goyls in his eyols, a plaintiff’s tanner voarse, a jucal inkome of one hundred and thirtytwo dranchmas per yard from Broken Hill stranded estate, Camebreech mannings, cutting a great dash in a brandnew two guinea dress suit and a burled hogsford hired for a Fursday evenin merry pawty, anna loavely long pair of inky Italian moostarshes glistering with boric vaseline and frangipani. Puh! How unwhisperably so!

The house O’Shea or O’Shame, Quivapieno, known as the Haunted Inkbottle no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland, as it was infested with the raps, with his penname SHUT sepiascraped on the doorplate and a blind of black sailcloth over its wan phwinshogue, in which he groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers, dejected into day and night with jesuit bark and bitter bite by full and forty Queasisanos, every day in everyone’s way more exceeding in violent abuse of self and others, was the worst, it is hoped, even in our western playbovish world for pure mousefarm filth. Smatterafact, Angles aftanon browsing there thought not Edam reeked more rare. My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers, flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless raisins alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars, neverworn breeches, cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes, upset latten tintacks, unused mill and stumpling stones, twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts, schoolgirl’s, young ladies’, milkmaids’, washerwomen’s, shopkeepers’ wives, merry widows’ ex nuns’, vice abbess’s, pro virgins’, super whores’, silent sisters’, Charleys’ aunts’, grandmothers’ mothers’-in-law, fostermothers’ godmothers’ garters, tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes, presents from pickpockets, borrowed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises, lees of whine, deoxodised carbons, convertible collars, broken wafers, unloosed shoe latchets, crooked strait waistcoats, fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury, undeleted glete, glass eyes for an eye, gloss teeth for a tooth, war moans, special sighs, longsufferings of longstanding, ahs ohs ouis sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos yeses and yeses and èeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, self exiled in upon his ego a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.

Of course our low hero was a self valeter by choice of need so up he got up whatever is meant by a kitchenette and fowlhouse for the sake of eggs which the jigsmith brooled and cocked and potched in an athanor with cinnamon and locusts and wild beeswax and liquorice and Carrageen moss and blaster of Barry’s and Yellownan’s embrocation and stardust and Sinner’s tears, chanting his cantraps, of fermented words, abracadabra calubra culorum, (his oewfs à la Madame Gabrielle de l’Eglise, his oewfs à la Mistress B. de B. Meinfelde, his oewfs Usquadmala à la pomme de ciel, his oewfs à la Sulphate de Soude, his oewfs sowtay sowmmonay à la Monseigneur, his soufflosion à la Mère Puard, his Frideggs à la Tricarême) in what was meant for a closet (Ah ho! If only he had listened better to the four masters that infanted him Father Mathew and Le Père Noble and Pastor Lucas and Padre Aguilar — not forgetting Layteacher Baudwin! Ah ho!) His costive Satan’s nature never needed such an alcove so when Robber and Mumsell, the pulpic dictators on the nudgment of their legal advisers, Messrs Codex and Podex, and under his own benefiction of their pastor Father Flammeus Falconer, boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose he winged away on a wildgoup’s chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit’s waste. You ask, in Sam Hill, how? Let manner and matter of this for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushfed porpurates that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude dunsky tunga, may ever behold the brand of scarlet on the brow of her of Babylon and feel not the pink one in his own damned cheek.

Primum opifex, altus prosator, ad terram viviparam et cunctipotentem sine ullo pudore nec venia, suscepto pluviali atque discinctis perizomatis, natibus nudis uti nati fuissent, sese adpropinquans, flens et gemens in manum suam evacuavit (highly prosy, crap in his hand, sorry!), postea, animale nigro exoneratus, classicum pulsans stercus proprium, quod appellavit deiectiones suas, in vas olim honorabile tristitiae posuit, eodem sub invocatione fratrorum geminorum Medardi et Godardi laete ac melliflue minxit psalmum qui incipit: Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis: magna voce cantitans (did a piss, says he was dejected, asks to be exonerated), demum ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, frigorique exposito, encaustum sibi fecit indelibile (faked O’Ryan’s, the indelible ink).

Then, pious Eneas, conformant to the fulminant firman which enjoins on the tremylose terrian that, when the call comes, he shall produce nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Urania or bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him, with this double dye gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, faithly, nastily, appropriately, this esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to all flesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud. So perhaps after all on his last public misappearance, circling the square, for the deathfête of Saint Ignaceous Poisonivy, of the Fickle Crowd (hopon the sexth day of Hogsober, killim our king, layum low!) and brandishing his bellbearing stylo, the shining keyman of the wilds of change, the blond cop who thought it was ink was out of his depth but bright in the main. Petty constable Sistersen of the Kruis-Kroon-Kraal it was who had been detailed to save him from the effects of foul clay and mobmauling on looks, that wrongcountered the tenderfoot an eveling near Knockmaree, Comty Mea, on his way from a protoprostitute (he would always have a little pigeoness somewhure with an arch girl) just as he was butting in rand the coyner of bad times under a hideful through his boardelhouse fongster, greeting as usual: Where ladies have they that a dog meansort herring? Search me, the incapable reparteed and, raising his hair, after the grace, in he skittled. The allwhite poors guardiant was literally astundished over the painful sake wherend the whole current of the afternoon and staggered thereto in his countryports at the capacity for of his wineskin and even more so during, looking his bigmost astonishments, it was said him fun the concerned outgift of the dead med dirt how that he was namely coon at bringer at home two gallonts as per royal full poultry till his murder. Polthergeistkotzdondherhoploits! What mother? Whose porter? Which pair? Why namely coon? But enough of such porterblack lowneess, too base for printink! We cannot in mercy or justice stay here for the residence of our lives discussing Mr. Ham of Tenman’s thirst.

Justius (to himother): Brawn is my name and broad is my nature and I’ve breit on my brow and all’s right with every feature and I’ll brune this bird or Brown Bess’s bung’s gone bandy. Stand forth Nayman of Noland (for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular and the moods and hesitensies of the deponent but address myself to you, with the imperative of my vindicative, provocative and out direct), stand forth, come boldly, jolly me, move me, zwilling though I am, to laughter in your true colours ere you be back for ever till I give you your talkingto! Shem Macadamson, you know me and I know you and all your shemeries. Where have you been in the uterim, enjoying yourself all the morning since your last wetbed confession? I thought so! Let me see. It is looking pretty black against you, we suggest, Sheem avick. You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two easter island on the plejaw of hilarious heaven and roaring the other place (plunders to night of you, blunders what’s left of you, flash as flash can!) and now, forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, heresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul. Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger, Shehohem, that you will neither serve not let serve, pray nor let pray? While yet an adolescent (what do I say?), while still puerile in your tubsuit with buttonlegs you got a handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders (you know, my friend, to your cost as well as I do (and don’t try to hide it) the penals lots I am now poking at) and the wheeze sort of was you should (il you were as bould a stroke now as the curate that christened you, sonny douth-the-candle!) repopulate the land of your birth and count up your progeny by the hungered head an the angered thousand but you thwarted the wious pish of your cogodparents, soph, among countless occasions of failing and have added the morosity of your delectations — a philtred love, trysting by tantrums, small peace in ppenmark — to your lubbock’s other fear pleasures of a butler’s life, sensibility, sponsability, passibility and probability, even extruding your strabismal apologia, when legibly depressed, upon defenceless paper and thereby adding to the already unhappiness of this our popeyed world, scribblative! — all that too with cantreds of countless catchaleens, the mannish as many as the minneful, congested around and about you for acres and roods and poles or perches, struggling to possess themselves of your boosh, one son of Sorge for all danghters of Anguish, mutely aying for that natural knot, for what would not have cost you ten bolivars of collarwork or the price of one ping pang, just a lilt, let us trillt, of the oldest song in the wooed woodworld, (two-we! to-one!), accompanied by a plain gold band! Hail! Hail! Her eye’s so gladsome we’ll all take shares in the bridegroom!

Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word, you, who sleep at our vigil and fast for our feast, you with your dislocated reason, have cutely foretold, a jophet in your own absence, by blind poring upon your many scalds and burns and blisters, impetiginous sore and pustules, by the auspice of that raven cloud, your shade, and by the auguries of rooks in parlament, death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot of sweetempered gunpowdered didst unto dudst but it never stphruck your mudhead’s obtundity (O hell, here comes our funeral! O pest, I’ll miss the post!) that the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel, the more onions you weep over, the more bullbeef you butch, the more mutton you crackerhack, the more potherbs you pound, the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon and the harder you gruel with more grease to your elbow the merrier fumes your new Irish stew.

Another thing occurs to me, You, let me tell you, were very ordinarily designed, your birthwrong was, to do a certain office (what I will not tell you) in a certain holy office (nor will I say where) during certain agonising office hours from such a year to such an hour on such ad such a date at so and so much a week pro anno and do your little thruppenny bit right here in our place of burden where after a divine’s prodigence you drew the first watergasp in your life, from the crib where you once was bit to the crypt you’ll be twice as shy of, same as we, long of us, where you set fire like Boulanger from Galway (but he combed the grass against his stride) to sing us a song of alibi, nomad, mooner by lamplight, antinos, shemming amid everyone’s repressed laughter to conceal your scatchophily by mating, like a thoroughpaste prosodite, masculine monosyllables of the same numerical mus, an Irish emigrant the wrong awy out sitting on your crooked sixpenny stile, an unfrillfrocked quackfriar, you (will you for the love of Shikespoor just help me with the epithet?) semisemitic serendipitist, you (thanks, I think that describes you) Europasianised Afferyank!

Shall we follow each others a steplonger whiles our liege is taking, his refreshment? There grew up beside you amid our orisons of the speediest in Novena Lodge, Novara Avenue, in fltwaspridùùm—am—Bummel oaf, outofwork, one remove from an unwashed savage, on his keeping and in yours, that other, Immaculatus, that pure one, he who was well known to celestine circles before he sped aloft, a chum of the angels, a youth they so tickerly wanted as gamefellow that they asked his mother for iittle earps brupper to let him tome to Tindertarten, pease, and hing his scooter ’long and ’tend they were all real brothers in the big justright home where Dodd lives, that mothersmothered model, that goodlooker with not a flaw whose spiritual toilettes were the talk of half the town, and him you laid low with one hand one fine May in the Meddle of your Might, your bosom foe, (not one did you slay, no, but a continent!) to find out how his innards worked! Ever read of that greatgrand landfather of our visionbuilders Baaboo, the bourgeoismeister, who thought to touch both himmels at the punt of his risen stiffstaff and how wishywashy sank the waters of his thought? Ever hear of that foxy that lupo and that monkax and the virgin heir of the Morrisons, eh, blethering ape?

Malingerer in luxury, what has Your Lowness done in the mealtime with all the hamilkcars of cooked vege tables, the hatfuls of stewed fruit, the suitcases of coddled ales, the Parish funds, me schamer, man, that you kittycoaxed so flexibly out of charitable butteries by yowling heavy with a hollow voice drop of your horrible awful poverty of mind and as how you was bad no end so you was, so whelp you Sìnner Pitre and Sinner Poule, with the chicken’s gape and pas mal de siècle, which, by the by, Reynaldo, is the ordinary emetic French for grenadier’s drip. To let you have your plank and your bonewash (O the hastroubles you lost!), to give you your pound of platinum and a thousand thongs a year (O, you were excruciated, in honour bound to the cross of your own fiction!) to let you have your Sarday spree and holinight sleep and leave to lie till paraskivee and the cockcock crows for Danmark. (O Jonathan, your estomach!) Weep cataracts for all me, Pain the Shamman! Oft in the smelly night will they wallow for a clutch of the famished hand, I say, them bearded jezabelles you hired to rob you, while on your sodden straw impolitely you encored (Airish and nawboggaleesh!) those hornmade ivory dreams you reved of the flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylebone. But the dormer moonshee smiled selene and the lightthrowers knickered: who’s whinging we? Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day? Is it not the fact (gainsay me, cakeeater!) that you squandered among underlings the overload of your extravagance and made a hottentot of dulpeners crawsick with your crumbs? Am I not right? Yes? Yes? Yes? Don’t tell me, Leon of the fold, that you are not a loanshark! Look up, old jap, be advised by me and take your medicine. Let me finish! Just a little judas tonic, my ghem of all jokes, to make you go green in the gazer. Do you hear what I’m seeing, hammet? And remember that golden silence gives consent, Mr. Anklegazer! Cease to be civil, learn to say nay! Whisht! Come here, Herr Studiosus, till I tell you a wig in your ear. Look! Do you see your dial in the rockingglass? Look well! Bend down a stigmy till I! It’s secret! I had it from Lamppost Shawe. And he had it from the Mullah. And Mull took it from a Bluecoat schooler. And Gay Socks jot it from Potapheu’s wife. And Rantipoll tipped the wink from old Mrs Tinbullet. And as for she was confussed by pro-Brother Thacolicus. And the good brother feels he would need to defecate you... And the Flimsy Follettes are simply beside each other. And Kelly, Kenny and Keogh are up up and in arms. That a cross may crush me if I refuse to believe in it. That I may rock anchor through the ages if I hope it’s not true. That the host may choke me if I beneighbour you without my charity! Sh! Shem, you are. Sh! You are mad!

He points the deathbone and the quick are still.

Musteus (of hisself): Domine vopiscus! My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault! Pariah, cannibal Cain, I who oathily forswore the womb that bore you and the paps I sometimes sucked, you who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams, haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been or you meant to becoming, bewailing like a man that innocence which I could not defend like a woman, lo you there, and thank Movies from the innermost depths of my still attrite heart for it is to you, firstborn and firstfruit of woe, to me, branded sheep, pick of the wasterpaperbaskel, to you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil, ay, to me unseen blusher in an obscene coalhole, because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because, O me lonly son, ye are forgetting me!, that our turfbrown mummy is acoming, alpilla, beltilla, ciltilla, deltilla, running with her tidings, all the news of the great big world, sonnies had a scrap, woewoewoe! bab’s baby walks at seven months, waywayway! bride leaves her raid at Punchestime, stud stoned before a racecourseful, two belles that make the one appeal, dry yanks will visit old sod, and fourtiered skirts are up, mesdames, and twelve hows to mix a tipsy wake, did ye hear, colt Cooney? did ye ever, filly Fortescue? with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking, rocks drops in her tachie, tramtickets in her hair, all waived to a point and then all inuendation, little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght’s green hills and the pools of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington and slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.!

He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°8, November 1927
[chapter I.8 from Finnegans Wake]

O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old chap went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash away and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. Or whatever it was they try to make out he tried to do in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old rep. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wek. How many times is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to soil. Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. Wallop it well with your battle and clean it. My wrists are rusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it! What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under lough and neagh? It was put in the papers what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But time will tell. I know it will. Time untamed will hist for no man. O, the old old rep! And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous old duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking rat. And his derry’s own drawl and his corksown blather and his doubling stutter and his gullaway swank. Ask Lictor Hackett or Lector Reade of Garda Growley or the Boy with the Billyclub. How eld is he a called at all? Huges Caput Earlyfouler? Or where was he born or how was he found? Urgothland, Tvistown, on the Kattekat? New Hunshire, Concord on the Merrimake? Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve’s and were him and her spliced Flowey and Mount on the brink of time makes wishes and fears for a happy isthmass? O, pass me that and oxus another! Don Dom Domb domb and his wee follyo! I heard he dug good tin with his doll when he raped her home, Sabrine asthore, in a parakeet’s cage, by dredgerous lands and devious delts, playing catched and mythed with the gleam of her shadda, past auld min’s manse, and Maisons Allfou and the rest of incurables and the last of immurables, the quaggy way for stumbling. Who sold you that jackalantern’s tale? In a gabbard he barqued it, the boat of life, from the harbourless Ivernikan Okean, till he spied the loom of his landfall and he loosed two croakers from under his tilt, the old Phenician rover. By the smell of her kelp they made the pigeonhouse. Like fun they did! But where was Himself, the timoneer? That marchantman he follied their scutties right over the wash, his cameleer’s burnous breezing up on him, till with his runagate bowmpriss he roade and borst her bar. Pilcomayo! Suchcaughtawan! And the whale’s away with the grayling! Tune your pipes and fall ahumming, you born ijypt, and you’re nothing short of one! Well, ptellomey soon and curb your froth. When they saw bim shoot swift up her sheba sheath, like any gay lord salomon, her bulls they were ruhring, surfed with spree. Nooknoorum nyroo! Nooknoorum nyroo! He erned his lille Bunbath hard, our staly bred, the trader. He did. Look at here. In this wet of his prow. Don’t you know he was a bairn of the, Wasserbourne the waterbaby? Havemmarea, so he was. H.C.E. has a briny ee. Sure she’s nearly as bad as him herself. Who? Anna Livia? Ay, Anna Livia. Do you know she was calling backwater girls from all around to go in till him, her erring man, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy? She was? Gota pot! Well, that the limmat! As El Negro said when he looked in La Plate. O, tell me all I want to hear. Letting on she didn’t care, the proxenete! Proxenete and phwhat is phthat? Tell us in franca langua. Did they never sharee you ebro at skol, you anti-abecedarian? It’s just the same as if I was to go for examplum now out of telekinesis and proxenete you. For coxyt’ sake and is that what she is? Little I thought she’d act that low. Didn’t you spot her in her windeye, wubbling up on an osiery chair, with a meusic before her all cunniform letters, pretending to ribble a reedy derg on a fiddle she bows without a band on? Sure she can’t fiddan a dee, with bow or abandon! Sure, she can’t! Just a suck. Well, I never heard the like of that! Tell me more. Tell me most. Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus, with the tares at his thor and the buboes for ages and neither bowman nor shot abroad, and bales ablaze on the crests of rockies and devil a lamp in kitchen or church and giant’s holes in Grafton’s causeway, setting moping on his benk, drammen and drummm, his childlinen scarf to encourage his obsequies. where he’d check their debths in that mormon’s thames, hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over him self, dreeing his weird, with his dander up, and his fringe combed over his eygs and keeking on loft till the sight of the sternes, after zwarthy kowse and weedy broeks and the tits of buddy and the loits of pest and to peer was Parish worth thette mess. You’d think all was dead belonging to him how he satt in durance vaal. He had been belching for severn years. And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of a child, in a Lapsummer skirt and damazon cheeks, for to wiss a bonzour to her dear dubber Dan. With neuphraties and sault from his maggias. And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or mokau to order or Si-kiang or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shink for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters and as rash as she’d rush with her peakload of vivers up on her tray (his towering rage it swales and rises!) my bold Hek he’d kast them from him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you this and you that, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her taw, believe you me, she was safe enough. And then she’d esk to vistule a hymn, The Heart Bowed Down or The Rakes of Mallow or Chelli Michele’s La Calumnia è un Vermicelli or a balfy bit or old Jo Robidson. Sucho fuffing a fifeing twould cut you in two! She’d bate the hen that crowed on the turrace of Babbel. What harm if she knew how to cockle her mouth. And not a mag out of Hum no more than out of the mangle weight. Is that a faith? That’s a fact. Then doing the ricka and queen of queens, Annona, gebroren Nivia, with Sparks’ pirryphlickathims funkling her fan, her frostified tresses lit with fireflies, while the prom beauties sreeked in their bearers’ skins! — in a period gown of changeable jade that would clothe the wood of two cardinals’ chairs and crush poor Cullen and smother Mac Cabe. And brahming to him down the feedchute, with all kinds of fondling endings, the poother rambling off her nose: Vuggybarney, Wickerymandy! Hello, ducky, please don’t die! Do you know what she started cheeping then, the voice of her like a watergluck? You’ll never guess. Tell me. Tell me. Phoebe, dearest, tell, O tell me and I loved you better nor you knew. And letting on she was daft about the warbly sangs from over holmen: High hellskirt saw ladies hensmoker lilyhung pigger: and Oom Bothar below in his sandy cloak as deaf as a yawn. Go away! Poor deef, old derry! Yare only teasing! Anna Liv? As chalk is my judge! And didn’t she up and rise and go and trot down and stand in her douro, puffing her old dudheen, and every country wench or farmerette walking the pilend roads Sawy, Fundally, Daery or Maery, Milucre, Awny or Graw, usedn’t she make her a sign to slip inside by the sullyport? You don’t say the sillypost? do! Calling them in one by one (To Blockbeddum! here! Here the Shoebenacaddie!) and legging a jig or so on the sihl to show them how to shake their benders and the dainty how to bring to mind the gladdest garments out of sight and all the way of a maid with a man and making a sort of a cackling noise like two and a penny or half a crown and holding up a silliver shiner. Lordy, lordy, did she so? Well, of all the ones ever I heard! Throwing all the nice little whores in the world at him! To any captured wench you wish of no matter what sex of playful ways two add a tammar a lizzy alass to hug and have haven in Humpy’s apron!

And what was the wyerye rhyme she made! O that Tell me the trent of it while I’m lathering hail out of Denis Florence MacCarthy’s combies. I’m dying down off my iodine feet until I hear Anna Livia’s cushingloo! I can see that, I see you are. How does it tummel? Listen now. Are you listening? Yes, yes! Idneed I am! Tarn your ear ouse! Essonne inne!

By earth and the cloudy but I badly want a brandnew bankside, bedamp and I do, and a plumper at that!

For the putty affair I have is wore out, so it is, sitting, yaping and waiting for my old Dane the dodderer, my life in death companion, my frugal key of our larder, my much-altered camel’s hump, my jointspoiler, my maymoon’s honey, my fool to the last Decemberer, to wake himself out of his winter’s doze and bore me down like he used to.

Is there irwell a lord of the manor or a knight of the shire at strike, I wonder, that’d dip me a pound or two in cash for washing and darning his worshipful socks for him now we’re run out of horsemeat and milk?

Only for my short Brittas bed made is as snug as it smells it’s out I’d lep and offwith me to the slobs of the Tolka or the shores of Clontarf to hear the gay aire of my salttroublin bay and the race of the saywint up me ambushure.

O go on! Tell me more. Tell me every tiny bit. I want to know every single thing. Well, now comes the hazelhatchery part. After Clondalkin the Kings’s Inns. We’ll soon be there with the freshet. How many aleveens had she in tool? I can’t rightly tell you that. Close only knows. Some say she had three figures to fill and confined herself to a hundred eleven She can’t remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them by the grace of her boxing bishop’s infallible slipper. A hundred and how? They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle. O loreley! What a loads! She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most. Shoal she was, gidgad. She had a flewmen of her owen. Tell me, tell me, how could she cam through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? Linking one and knocking the next, tapping a flank and tipping a jutty and palling in and petering out and clyding by on her eastway. Waiwhou was the first that ever burst? Someone he was, whoever they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tailor, soldier, salor, Paul Pry or polishman. That’s the thing I always want to know. Push up and push upper and come to headquarters! Was it waterlows year, after Grattan or Flood, or when maids were in Arc or when three stood hosting? Faith will find where the Doubt arises like Nemo from Nirgends found the Nihil. Worry you sighin foh, Albern, O Anser? Untie the gemman’s fistiknots, Qwic and Nuancee! She can’t put her hand on him for the moment. It’s a long long way, walking weary! Such a long way backwards to row! She says herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how young she played or when and where and how often he jumnped her. She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for the sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, that forstfellfoss with a plash across her. She thought she’d sink under the ground with nymphant shame when he gave her the tigris eye! O happy fault! Me wish it was he! You’re wrong there, corribly wrong! Tisn’t only tonight you’re anacheronistic! It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere, in county Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she’d lave Kilbride and go foaming under Horsepass bridge with the great southerwestern windstorming her traces and the midlands’ grainwaster asarch for her track, to wend her ways byandby, rebecca or worse, to spin and to grind, to swab and to thrash, in the barleyfields and pennylotts of Humphrey’s fordofhurdlestown and lie with a landleaper, wellingtonorseher. Alas the lakes of girly days! For the dove of the dunas! Wasut? Izod? Are you sarthin suir? Not where the Finn fits into the Mourne, not where the Nore takes lieve of Blœm, not where the Bray divarts the Farer, not where the Moy changes her minds between Cullin and Conn and Conn and Cullin? Neya, narev, naux and no! Then whereabouts in Ow and Ovoca? Was it north by south or Lucan Yokan or where the hand of man has never set foot? Dell me where, the very first time! I will if you listen. You know the dingling dale of Luggelaw? Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one venersderg in junojuly so sweet and so fresh and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands up to his wrists in the her singing saffron streams of her hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like the red bog at sundown. Maass! He cuddle not help himself, thurst was too hot on him, he had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he cooled his lips in smiling mood, kiss akiss after kisokiss (as he warned her never to, never to,never)on Anna-na-Poghue’s of the freckled forehead. O, wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy? Nautic Naama’s now her navn. Two lads in their breeches went through her before that, Barefoot Burn and Wary Wade, Lugnaquillia’s noble pair, before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler not to mention a bulgy porterhouse barge. And ere that again, ledy, ledy, all unredy, too faint to buoy the fairiest rider, too frail to flirt with a cygnet’s plume, she was licked by a hound Chirripa-Chirrauta, while poing her pee, pure and simple, on the spur of the hill in old Kippure, in birdsong and shearingtime, but first of all, worst of all, the wiggly livvly, she sideslipped out by a gap in the Devil’s glen while Sally her nurse was sound asleep in a sloot and fell over a spillway before she found her stride and lay and wriggled in all the stagnant black pools of rain under a fallow coo and she laughed innocefree with her limbs aloft and a whole drove of maiden hawthorns blushing and looking askance upon her.

Drop me the sound of the findhorn’s name, And drip me why in the flenders was she freckled. And trickle me through was she marcellewaved or was it weirdly a wig she wore. And whitside did they droop their glows in their florry, aback to wist or affront to sea? In fear to hear the dear so near or longing loth and loathing longing? Are you in the swim or are you out? O go on, go on, go on! I mean about what you know. I know right well what you mean. What am I rinsing now and I’ll thank you? Is it a pinny or is it a surplice? Arran, where’s your nose? And where’s the starch? That’s not the benediction smell. I can tell from here by their eau de Colo and the scent of her oder they’re Mrs Magrath’s. And you ought to have aired them. They’ve moist come off her. Creases in silk they are, not crampton lawn. Through her catchment ring she freed them easy, with her hips’hurrahs for her knees’dontelleries. The only pair with frills in old the plain. So they are. Well, well! And here is her nubilee letters too. Ellis on quay in scarlet thread. Linked for the world on a flushcoloured field. Annan exe after to show they’re not Laura Kehoe’s. O, may the diabolo twisk your seifety pin! You child of Mammon, Kinsella’s Lilith! Now who has been tearing the leg of her drawars on her? Which leg is it? The one with the bells on it. Rinse them out and aston along with you! Where did I stop? Never stop! Continuarration! You’re not there yet. Garonne, garonne!

Well, after it was put in the Beggars’ Sitterday Journal (for once they sullied their white kid gloves with their show us it here and, their mind out of that and their when youre quite finished with the reading matarial), even the snee that snowdon his hoaring hair had a skunner against him. Thaw, thaw, sava, savuto! Everywhere ever you went and every bung you ever dropped into, in cit or in sub or in added areas, the Rose and Bottle or Phœnix Tavern or Power’s Inn or Jude’s Hotel, or wherever you scoured the countryside from Nannywater to Vartryville, or from Porta Lateen to the lootin quarter you found his pixture etsched tipside down or the cornerboys burning his guy and Morris the Man, with the role of a royss in his turgos the turrible, Evropeahahn cheic house, unskimmed sooit and yahoort, hamman now cheekmee, Ahdahm this way make, Fatima, half turn, reeling and railing around the local with oddfellow’s triple tiara busby rotundarinking round his scalp. Like Pate-by-the-Neva or Pete-over-Meer. This is the Hausman all paven and stoned, that cribbed the Cabin that never was owned, that cocked his leg and hennad his Egg. And the mauldrin rabble around him in areopage, making a great fracas with their timpan crowders. Mind, your Grimmfather. Think of your Ma! She swore on croststyx she’s be level with all the snags of them yet. Par the Vulnerable Virgin’s Mary del Dam! So she said to herself she’d frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you never heard. What plan? Tell me quick and don’t be so crould! What the mischief did she make? Well, she bergened a bag, a shammy mailbag, off one of her swapsons, Shaun the Post, and then she went and consulted her chapbooks, old Mot Moore, Casey’s Eùclid and the Fashion Display and made herself tidal to join in the mascarete. O goggle of gigglers. I can’t tell you how! It’s too screaming funny, rabbit it all! O but you must, you must really! By the holy well of Mulhuddart I swear I’d pledge my chance of getting to heaven to hear it all, every word! O, leave me my faculties, woman, a while. If you don’t like my story get out of the punt. Well, have it your own way, so. Here, sit down and do as you’re bid. Lisp it slaney and crisp it quiet. Tell me longsome. Take your time now. Breathe deep. That’s the fairway. Hurry slow and scheldt you go. Give us your blessed ashes here till I scrub the canon’s underpants. Flow now. Ower more.

First she let her hair fall and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and mudsoap, upper and lower from crown to sole. Next she greased the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentine and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and islets dun all over her little mary. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rare, of Irish rhinestones and shellmarble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey and the lellipos cream to her lippeleens and the pick of the paintbox for her pommettes, from strawbirry reds to extray violates, and she sent her boudeloire maids to His Affluence-Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request she might leave him for a minnikin. A call to pay, and light a taper, in Brie-on-Arrose, back in a sprizzling, The cock striking mine, the stalls bridely sign, there’s Zambosy waiting for me. She said she wouldn’t be half her length away. Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slung over her shoulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, out of her basin came.

Describe her! Hustle along, why can’t you? Spitz on the iern while it’s hot. I wouldn’t miss her for the world. Oceans of God, I mussel hear that! Ishekarry and washe toney? What had she on, the little old oddity? How much did she scallop, harness and weights? Here she is. Amnisty Ann. Call her calamity electrifies man.

No electress at all, but old Moppa Necessity, mother of injins. I’ll tell you now. But you must sit still. Will you hold your peace and listen well to what I am going to say now? It might have been ten or twenty to one of the night of All close or the nexth of April when the flip of her hoogly igloo fluttered and out stepped a fairy woman, the dearest little mother ever you saw, nodding around her, all smiles, with ems of embarras and aùes to awe, between two ages, a judyqueen, not up to your elb. And look at her sharp and seize her quirk for the bicker she lives the slicker she grows. Save us and tagus! No more? Why where in ourthe did you ever pick a Lambay chop as big as a battering ram? Ay, you’re right. I’m epte to forgetting, Like Liviam Liddle did Loveme Long. The height of my hough, I say! She wore a ploughboy’s nailstudded clogs, a pair of ploughfields in themselves: a sugarloaf hat with a gaudyquiviry peak and a band of gorse for an arnoment and a hundred streamers dancing off it and a golden pin to pierce it: owlglassy bicycles boggled her eyes: and a fishnetzeveil she had to keep the sun from spoiling her wrinkles: potatorings boucled the loose lobs of her listeners: her nude cuba stockings were salmospotspeckled: she sported a shimmy of hazegrey tinto that never was fast till it ran in the washing: stout stays, the rivals, lined her length: her bloodorange bockknickers, a two in one garment, showed natural nigger boggers, fancyfastened, free to undo: her blackstripe tan joseph was sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy rushgreen epaulettes and a leadown here and there of royal swansruff: a brace of gaspers stuck in her hayrope garters: her civvy codroy coat with alpheubett buttons was boundaried round with a twobar tunnel belt: a fourpenny bit in each pocketside weighed her safe from the blowaway windrush; she had a clothespeg tight astride on her joki’s nose and she kep on grinding a sommething quaint in her fiumy mouth and the rrreke of the fluve of the tail of the gawan of her snuffdrab siouler’s skirt trailed ffiffty Irish miles behind her long the road.

Hellsbells, I’m sorry I missed her! Sweet umptyum and nobody fainted. But in whelk of her mouths? Was her naze alight? Everyone that saw her said the dowse little delia looked a bit queer. Lotsy trotsy, mind the poddle! Missus, be good and don’t fol in the say! Funny poor frump she must have charred. Kickhams a rummier ever you saw. Making saft mullet’s eyes at her boys dobelong. And they crowned her the queen of the may. Of the may? You don’t say! Well for her she couldn’t see herself. I warrant that’s why the darling murrayed her mirror. She did? Mersey me! There was a koros of drouthdropping surfacemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of her filimentation, lolling and leasing on Lazy Wall by the Jook of Yoick’s and as soon as they saw her meander by in her grasswinter’s weeds and twigged who was under her deaconess bonnet, Avondale’s fish and Clarence’s poison, says one to another, Wit-upon-Crutches to Master Bates: Between me and you and the granite we’re warming, as round as a hoop, Alp has doped.

But what was the game in her mixed bag? And where in thunder did she plunder? Fore the battle or efter the ball? I want to get it frisk from the soorce. I aubette my beard it’s worth while poaching on. Shake it up, do, do! That’s a good old son of a ditch! I promise. I’ll make it worth your while. And I don’t mean maybe. Spey me pruth and I’ll tale you true.

Well, arundgirond in a waveney line aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder through narrows of mosses, the diliskydrear on our drier side and the vilde vetchvine agin us, curaro here careero there, not knowing wich medway or weser to strike it making chattahoochee all to herself, like Santa Claus at the call of the pale and puny, bending to hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romus and Remes, then bathing Dirty Hans’ spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for each and everyone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her. The rivulets ran to see, the glashaboys, the pollynooties. Out of the paunshaup on to the pyre. And they all about her, youths and maidens, rickets and riots, like the Smyly boys at their vicereine’s levee, long live, little Anne, old Anna, high life, chipping her and raising a bit of a jeer or cheer every time she’d neb in her culdee sack of rubbish she robbed and reach out her maundy merchandise, stinkers and heelers, laggards and primelads, her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them. For evil and ever. And kiks the buch. A tinker’s bann and a barrow to boil his billy for Gipsy Lee: a cartridge of cockaleekie soup for Tommy the Soldier: for sulky Pender’s acid nephew deltoïd drops, curiously strong: a cough and a rattle and wildrose cheeks for poor little Petite MacFarlane: a jigsaw puzzle of needles and pins and blankets and shins between them for Isabel, Jezebel and Llewelyn Marriage: a brazen nose and pigiron mittens for Johnny Walker Beg: a papal flag of the saints and stripes for Kevineen O’Dea: a puffpuff for Pudge Craig and a nightmarching hare for Toucher Thumb: waterleg and gumboots each for Bully Hayes and Hurricane Hartigan: a prodigal heart and fatted calves for Buck Jones, the pride of Clonliffe; a loaf of bread and a father’s early aim for Tim from Skibereen: a jauntingcar for Larry Doolin, the Ballyclee jackeen: a seasick trip on a government ship for Teague O’Flanagan: a louse and trap for Jerry Coyle: slushmincepies for Andy Mackenzie: a hairclip and clackdish for Penceless Peter; that twelve sounds look for G. V. Brooke; a drowned doll for Sister Anne Mortimer: altar falls for Blanchisse’s bed; Wildairs’ breechies for Magpeg Woffington; to Sue Dot a big eye to Sam Dash a false step; a snake in clover and a vaticanned vipercatcher’s visa for Patsy Presbys: a rise every morning for Standfast Dickand a drop every minute for Stumblestone Davy; scruboak beads for beatified Biddy: two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely: for Saara Philpot a jordan vale tearjar: a pretty box of pettyfib’s powder for Eileen Alannah to whiten her teeth and outflash Helen Arhone: a whippingtop for Eddy Lawless: for Kitty Coleraine of Butterman’s Lane a penny wise for her foolish pitcher: a putty shovel for Terry the Puckaun: a potamus mask for Promoter Dunne: a niester egg with a twicedated shell and a dynamight right for Pavl the Curate; a collera morbous for Mann in the Cloack; a starr and girton for Draper and Deane; for Will-of-the-Wisp and Barny the Bark two mangolds noble to sweeden their bitters; for Oliver Bound a way in the frey; for Seumas, thought little, a crown he feels big; a tibertine’s pile with a Congoswood cross on the back for Sunny Twimjim: a praises be and spare me days for Brian the Bravo; plenty of pity with lashings of lust for Lona Lena Magdalena; for Camilla, Dromilla, Ludmilla, Mamilla, a bucket, a packet, a book and a pillow: for Nancy Shannon a Tuami brooch: for Dora Riparia Hopeandwater a cooling douche and a warmingpan: a pair of Blarney braggs for Wally Meagher: a hairpin slatepencil for Elsie Oram to scratch her toby, doing her best with her volgar fractions: an old age pension for Betty Bellezza: a bag of the blues for Funny Fitz: a Missa pro Messa for Taff de Taff; Jill, the spoon of a girl, for Jack, the broth of a boy: a Rogerson Crusoe Friday fast for Caducus Angelus Rubiconstein: three hundred and sixtysix poplin tyne for revery warp in the weaver’s woof for Victor Hugonot: a stiff steaded rake and good varians muck for Kate the Cleaner: a hole in the ballad for Hosty: two dozen of cradles for J.F.X.P. Coppinger; tenpomten on the pop for the daulphins born with five spoiled squibs for Infanta: a letter tolast a lifetime for Maggi beyond by the ashpit: the heftiest frozenmeat woman from Lusk to Livienbad for Felim the Ferry: spas and speranza and symposium’s syrup for decayed and blind and gouty Gough: a change of naves and joys of ills for Armoricus Tristram Amoor Saint Lawrence a guillotine shirt for Reuben Redbreast and hempen suspendeats for Brennan on the Moor; an oakanknee a for Conditor Sawyer and musquodoboits for Tropical Scott; aC₃ peduncle for Karmalite Kane: a sunless map of the month, including the sword and stamps for Shemus O’Shaun the Post: a jackal with hide for Browne but Nolan: a stonecold shoulder for Donn Joe Vance: all lock and no stable for Honorbright Meretrix: a big drum for Billy Dunboyne: a guilty goldeny bellows, below me blow me for Ida Ida and a hushaby rocker Elletrouvetout for Who is silvier — Where is he?: whatever you like to swilly to drink, Yuinness or Yennessy, Lagen or Niger, for Festus King and Roaring Peter and Frisky Shorty and Treacle Tom and O. B. Behan and Sully the Thug and Master Magrath and Peter Cloran and O’Delawarr Rossa and Nerone MacPeace and whoever you chance to meet knocking around: and a bladder balloon for Selina Susquehanna Stakelum. But what did she give to Pruda Ward and Katty Kanel and Peggy Quilty and Briery Brosna and Teasy Kieran and Ena Lappin and Muriel Mosel and Susy Camac and Melissa Bradogue and Flora Ferns and Fauna Fox-Goodman and Una and Bina and Trina La Mesme and Philomena O’Farrell and Irmak Elly and Josephine Foyle and Snakeshead Lily and Fountainoy Laura and Mary Xavier Agnes Daisy Francis de Sales MacCall? She gave them every mother’s daughter a moonflower and a bloodleaf. So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears as from Shem, her penmight, life past befoul his prime.

My colonial, wardha bagful! That’s what you may call a tale of a tub. All that and more under one crinoline envelope if you dare to break the porkbarrel seal. No wonder they’d run from her pison plague. Throw us your hudson soap for the honour of Clane. The wee taste the water left. I’ll raft it back, first thing in the marne. Ay, and don’t forget the reckitts I lent you. You’ve all the swirls your side of the current. Well, am I to blame for that if I have? Who said you’re to blame for that if you have? Only snuffers’ cornets drifts my way that the cracka dvine chucks out of his cassock, with her estheryear’s marsh narcissus to make him recant his vanitty fair. Foul strips of his chinook’s bible I do be reading, dodwell disgustered but, chickled with chuckles. Senior ga dito Faciasi Omo. Omo fu fo. Ho! Ho! Senior ga dito: Faciasi Hidamo! Hidamo se ga facessà! Ha! Ha! And Die Windermere Dichter and Lefanu (Sheridens) Old House by the Coachyard and Mill (J) On Woman with Ditto on the Floss. O, a swamp for your Miller and a stone for his flossies. I know how racy they move his wheel. My hands are blawcauld between isker and soda like that piece of pattern chayney there, lying below. Or where is it? Lying beside the sedge I saw it. Hoangho, my sorrow, I’ve lost it! With that turbary water who could see? But O, gihon! I love a gabber. I could listen to more and maure again. Rain onder river. Flies do your float. Thick is the life for mere.

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every story has an end and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ’Tis endless now since I or anyone last saw Waterhouse’s clock. They took it asunder, I heard them say. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my back! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari vert the showers! And grant of Thy grace. Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins twelve, one baby’s shawl. Where are all her childer now? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost to the stranger I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbing till she rounded up last histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghere in the loop of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me that now? I do in troth. And didn’t you hear it a deluge of times? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stuck in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest sound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Is it that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper. It’s well I know your sort of slop. Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Your prayers. Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Amn’t I up since the damp dawn with Corrigan’s pulse and varicose veins, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavander flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I saw it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! There! Subdue your noise, you poor creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I mean now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny Mac Dougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant or a fireboat coasting nigh the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I’ll sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Tow will I too, rathmine.

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes. And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds, for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Before! Before! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. In Elvenland? Teems of times and happy returns. The same anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Tom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Tell me tale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

 ® 

Continuation of A Work in Progress

transition N°12, March 1928
[chapter III.1 from Finnegans Wake]

Hark!

Tolv two elf kater ten (it can’t be) sax.

Hork!

Pedwar pemp foify tray, (it must be) twelve.

And low stole o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep.

White fogbow spans. The arch embattled. Mark as capsules. The nose of the man who was nought like the nasoes. It is selftinted, wrinkling, ruddled. His kep is a gorsecone. He am Gascon Titubante of Tegmine – sub – Fagi whose fixtures are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts. She, exhibit next, his Anastashie. She has prayings in lowdelph. Zeehere green eggbrooms. What named blautoothdmand is you who stares? Gugurtha! Gugurtha! He has becco of wild hindigan. Ho, he hath hornhide! And hvis now is for you. Pensée! The most beautiful of woman of the veilch veilchen veilde. She would kidds to my voult of my palace, her aal in her dhove’s suckling. Apagemonite! Come not nere! Black!

Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please I heard at zero hour as ’twere the peal of vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church tolling so faint a goodmantrue as nighthood’s unseen violet rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewable to human watchers save ’twere perchance anon some glistery gleam darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation. And as I was jogging along in a dream as dozing I was dawdling arrah methought broadtone was heard and the creepers and the gliders and flivvers of the earth breath and the dancetongues of the woodfires and the hummers in their ground all vociferated echoating: Shaun! Shaun! Post the post! with a high voice and O, the higher on high the deeper and low, I heard him so. And lo mescemed somewhat came of the noise and somewho might amove allmurk. Now! twas as clump, now mayhap. When look was light and now’twas as flasher, now more as the glow. Ah, in unlitness ’twas in very similitude, bless me, ’twas his belted lamp! Ay, he who so swayed a will of a wisp before me, dressed like an earl in just the correct wear, in a classy mac Frieze o’coat of far suparior ruggedness, indigo braw, tracked and tramped, and an Irish ferrier collar, freeswinging with mereswin lacers from his shoulthern and thick welted brogues on him hammered to suit the scotsmost public and climate, iron heels and sparable soles, and his jacket of providence wellprovided woolies with a softrolling lisp of a lapel to it and great sealingwax buttons, a good helping bigger than the slots for them, of twentytwo carrot krasnapoppsky red and his invulnerable burlap whiskcoat and his popular choker, Tamagnum sette-and-forte and his loudboheen-toy and the damasker’s overshrit he sported inside, a starspangled zephyr with a decidedly surpliced crinklydoodle front with his motto through dear life embrothred over it in peas, rice, and yeggyyolk, R for royal, M for Mail, R.M.D. hard cash on the nail and the most successfully carried gigot turnups now you ever, breaking over the ankle and hugging the shoeheel, everything the best’ — none other from (Ah, then may the turtle’s blessings of God and Mary and Haggispatrick and Huggisbrigid be souptumbling all over him!) other than (and may his hundred thousand welcome stewed letters multiply, ay faith, and plultiply!) Shaun himself.

Had I the concordant wiseheads of Messrs Gregory and Lyons alongside of Dr Tarpey’s and the reverend Mr Mac Dougall’s but I, poor ass, am but as their fourpart tinckler’s dunkey. Yet methought Shaun (holy messonger angels be uninterruptedly nudging him among and along the winding ways of random ever!) Shaun in proper person (now may all the blueblacksliding constellations continue to shape his changeable timetable!) stood before me. And I pledge you my agricultural word by the hundred and sixty odds rods and cones of this even’s vision that young fellow looked the stuff, the Bel of Beaus’ Walk, a prime card if ever was! Pep? Now without deceit it is hardly too much to say he was looking grand, so fired smart, in much more than his usual health. No mistaking that beamish brow, those jehovial oyeglances! The heart of the rool! He was immense, topping swell for he was after having a great time of it in a porterhouse scutfrank if you want to know, Saint Lawzenge of toole’s, leave your clubs in the hall and wait on yourself (the house the once queen of Bristol and Balrothery twice admired because her frumped door looked up Dacent Street) where in the sighed of lovely eyes while his knives of hearts made havoc he had recruited his strength by meals of spadefuls of mounded food constituting his threepartite meals plus a collation, his breakfast of first, a bless us O blood and thirsthy orange next the half of a pint of becon with newled googs, and a segment of riceplummy padding, met of sunder suigar and some cold forsoaken steak from the batblack night o’erflown then came along merendally his dinner of a half a pound of round steak very rare, Blong’s best from Portarlington’s Butchery with a side of riceypeasy and Corkshire alla mellonge and bacon with a pair of chops and thrown in from the silver grid by the proprietoress of the roastery who lives on the hill and gaulusch gravy and pumpernickel to wolp up and a gorger’s bulby onion (Margareter; Margaretar margarasticandeatar) and as well with second course and then finally, after his lunch oclock snack of saddlebag steak and a Botherham with old phœnix portar and praties sweet and Irish too to his regret his soupay avic nightcap, vitellusit a carusal consistent with second course eier and becon (the rich of) with broad beans and steak and pepper the diamond’ bone hotted up and while’twas after that he scoffed a drakeling snuggily stuffed following cold loin of veal more cabbage and in their green free state a clister of peas, soppositorily petty, last. P.S. but a fingerhot of rheingenever to give the Pax cum Spiritututu. Drily thankful. Burud and dulse and typureely jam, all free of charge and. And the best of wine avec. While the loaves are aflowering and the nachtingale jugs. All St Jilian’s of Berry, hurrah there for tobies! Mabhrodaphne, brown pride of our custard house quay, amiable with repastful, cheerus graciously cheer us! Ever of thee, Anne Lynch. he’s deeply draiming! Houseanna! Tea is the Highest! For auld lang Ayternitay! Thus thicker will he grow now, grew new. And better and better on butter and butter. At the sign of Mesthress Vanhungrig. However. Mind you, I don’t mean to say for the moment that he was guilbey or gluttonous as regards chewable swallowbobbles but upon the whole when not off his oats given prelove appetite and postlove pricing good coup, goodcheap he grubbed his tuck all right deah smorregos, every time he felt like a bottle of ardilaun arongwhith a smag of a lecker taart or. And he was so jarvey jaunty with a romp of a schoolgirl’s completion sitting pretty over his Oyster Monday print face and he was plainly out on the ramp and mash, as you might say, for he sproke.

When lo (whish, O whish!) mesaw mestreamed through deafths of durkness I heard a voice, the voce of Shaun, vote of the Irish, voise from afar (and cert no purer puer palestrine e’er chanted panangelical mid the clouds of Tu es Petrus, not Michaeleen Kelly, not Mara O’Mario, and sure, what more numerose Italicuss ever rawsucked frish uov in urinal?) from Inchigeela call the way how it suspired (morepork! morepork!) to scented nightlife as softly as the loftly marconimasts from Clifden sough open tireless secrets (mauveport! mauveport!) to Nova Scotia’s listing sisterwands. Tubetube!

His handpalm lifted, his handshell cupped, his handsign pointed, his handheart mated, his handaxe risen, hishandleaf fallen. Helpsome hand that holemost heals! What is het holy! It gested.

And it said:

— Alo, alass, aladdin, amobus! Does she lack salt fat meat rests dud? Shaun yawned, that was antepropreviousday’s pigeons-in-a-pie with rough dough for the carrier and the hash-say-ugh of overgestern pluzz the ’stuesday’s shampain in his head, addressing himself ex alto and complaining with vocal discontent it was so close as of the fact of him to dye his paddycoats to morn his hesternmost earning his board in the swealth of his fate as, having moistened his mandibles upon the quiet and scooping molars and grinders clean with his two fore fingers, he sank down to resk at once, it was all he could do (disgusted with himself that the combined weight was too much for him), upon the native heath he loved covered kneehigh with virgin bush, for who who e’er trod sod of Erin could ever sleep off the turf. Well, I’m liberally dished seeing myself in this trim! How all too unwordy am I, a mere mailman of peace, a poor hastehater of the first degree the principot of Candia, no legs and a title, for such eminence, or unpro promenade rather, to be much more exact, as to be the bearer extraordinary of these postoomany missive on his majesty’s service. It should of been my other with his leickname for he’s the head and I’m an everdevoting fiend of his. We shared the twin chamber and we winked on the one wench and what Sim sobs todie I’ll reeve tomorry for’twill be, I have hopes of, Sam Dizzier’s feedst. He looks rather thin. I’m very fond of that other of mine. Fish hands! Macsorley! We’re the musichall pair. I ought not to laugh with him on this stage. But he’ such a game loser! I lift my disk to him. How is your napper, Andy and hownow does she stand? Take this John’s Lane in your toastingfourch. Shaunti and shaunti and shaunti again! And twelve colander moons! I revere her! She has studied! Piscisvendolor! But, Gemini hes looking frightfully thin! I heard the banshee singing in the pantry bay. Down among the dustbins let him lie! Ear! Ear! Not ay! Eye! Eye! For I’m at the heart of it. Yet I cannot on my solemn merits as a recitativer recollect ever having done of anything of the kind to deserve of such. Saint Anthony Guide!

— But have we until now ever besought you, dear Shaun, we remembered, who it was, good boy, to begin with, who out of symphony gave you the permit?

— Goodbye now, Shaun replied, in echo rightdainty with a good catlick tug at his cocomoss candylock. Athiacaro! Comb his tar odd gee sing your mower O meeow? Greet thee Good? How are them columbuses! Lard have mustard on them! My heaviest crux and dairy lot it is. I have it from whowho but Hagios Columbkiller’s prophecies. Solvitur palumballando!

— Then, we explained, you possibly might be so by order?

— Forgive me, Shaun repeated from his liquid lipes, it was condemned on my primatially by Hireark Books and Chiefoverseer cooks and there does be a power coming over me that is put upon me from on high and so as it is becoming hairydittary I have nothing in view to look forward at unless it is Swann and beating the blindquarters out of my oldfellow’s orologium oloss olorium Almost might I say of myself I am now becoming about fed up be going circulating about and was veribally complussed by thinking of the Dublin river as away out or to isolate i from my multiple Mes on the spits of Lumbage Island or bury meself deep in my wineupon pontoon as it is a tithe fish so it is and where on dearth to turn since it came into my hands I am hopeless to be doing anything concerning.

— We expect you are, Honest Shaun we agreed, but a whisper reaches us that in the end it may well turn out to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter.

— As, Shaun replied patly, to that I have the gumpower and that has a lock to say with everything, my beloved.

— Would you mind telling us, Shaun honey, we proposed to such a dear youth, where mostly are you able to work. Whimper and we shall.

— Here! Shaun replied, while he was fondling one of his cowheel cuffs, I mostly was able to walk being too soft for work proper. I am always telling those pedestriasts now how it was forstold for me by brevet while possessing stout legs to be disbarred after holy orders from unnecessary servile work of all sorts for the relics of my time for otherwise I would get into a blame there where thieves fall out, Excelsior tips the best. Go thou this island, one housesleep there, then go thou other island two housesleep there, then catch one nightmaze, then home to dearies. Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend never make face to a foe till he’s rife and never get stuck to another mans pfife. Amen, ptah. His hungry will be done! On the continent as in Eironesia. But believe me in my simplicity I am awful good, I believe, so I am, at the root of me. And I can now truthfully-declaret before my Geity’s Pantokreator with my fleshfettered palms on the epizzles of the apossels that I do my reasonabler’s best to recite my grocery beans for mummy mit dummy regular, genuflections enclosed. Hek domov muy, there thou beest on the hummock, ghee up, ye dog, for your daggily broth, etc. Happy Maria and Glorious Patrick, etc., etc. In fact, always, have I believe. Greedo! Her’s me hongue!

—  Yet one minute’s observation, dear dogmestic Shaun, as we point out how you have while away painted our town a wearing greenridinghued.

— O murder mere, how did you hear? Shaun replied, smoiling the ily way up his lampsleeve, so shy of light was he then. Well, so be it! The gloom hath rays, her lump is love. And I will confess to have, yes. Thrubedore Idid! And I am afraid it wouldn’t be my first coat’s wasting after striding on the vampire and blazing on the focoal. See! blazing on the focoal. As see! blazing upon the foe. Like the regular redshank I am. Somebody may perhaps hint at an aughter impression of I was wrong. No such a thing! You never made a more freudful mistake, excuse your self! But it is grandiose by my ways of thinking from the prophecies. New worlds for all! And they were scotographically arranged for gentlemen only by a scripchewer in whofoundland who finds he is a relative. And it was with my extravert davy. Like glue. Be through. Moyhard’s daynoight, tomthumb. Phwum!

— How mielodorous is thy bel chant, O songbird, and how exqueezit thine after draught! Buccinate in Emenia tuba insigni volumnitatis tuae. But do you mean, we gathered substantively whether furniture would or verdure varnish?

— It is a confoundyous injective so to say, Shaun the fiery boy shouted, naturally incensed, as he shook the red pepper out of his auricles. And another time please confine your glaring intinuations to some other mordant body. What on the physiog of this furnaced planet would I be doing besides your verjuice? That is more than I can fix anyway. So let I and you now kindly drop that, angryman! That’s not French pastry. Understand me when I tell you that under the past purcell’s office, so deeply deplored by my erstwhile elder friend, Miss Enders, poachmistress and gay receiver ever for in particular to the Scotic Poor Men’s Cow Society (I was thinking of her in sthore) allbethey blessed with twentytwo thousand sor ters out of a biggest poss of twentytwo thousand mine’s won too much privet stationery and safty quipu was ate up larchly by those nettlesome goats out of pension greed. Proceding, I will say it is also one of my avowal’s intentions at some time pease Pod (when I am not prepared to say) to comprose quite the makings of a verdigrease savingsbook in the form of a pair of boxing gloves surrounding this matter for my publickers Nolaner and Browno, Nickil Hopstout, Christcross so long as, thanks to force of destiny, my selary as a paykelt is propaired, and there is a peg under me and there is a tum till me.

To the Very Honourable The Memory of Disgrace the Most Noble, Sometime Sweepyard at the Service of the Writer. The just defunct Mrs Sanders who (the Loyd insure her!) I was shift and shuft too. She was the niceliest person of a wellteached nonparty woman that I ever acquired her letters, used to babies and tottydean verbish this is her entertermentdags for she shuk the bottle and tuk the medascene all times a day. She was well under ninety poor late Mrs. and had tastes of the poetics, me having stood the pilgarlick a fresh at sea when the moon also was standing in a corner of sweet Standerson my ski. P.L.M. Mevrouw von Andersan was her whogave me a muttonbrooch, stakkers for her begfirst party. Honour thy farmer and my litters. This, my tears, is my last will intesticle wrote off in the strutforit about their absent female assauciations which I, or perhaps any other person, have the honour to had upon their polite sophykussens in the real presence of devouted Mrs Grumby when her skin was exposed to the air. O what must the grief of my mund be for two little ptpt coolies worth twenty thousand quad herewitdnessed with both’s maddlemass wishes to Pepette for next match from their dearly beloved Rugger, M.D.D.O.D. May doubling drop of drooght! Writing.

—  Otherwise, frank Shaun, we pursued, what would be the autobiography of your softbodied fumiform?

— Hooraymost! None whomsoever, Shaun replied, (he had intentended and was peering now rather close to the paste of his rubiny winklering) though it ought to be more or less rawcawcaw romantical. By the wag, how is Mr Fry? All of it, I might say, pay and perks and wooden halfpence, some rhino, rhine, O joyoust rhine was handled over spondaneously by me (and bundle end to Miss Anders! she woor her wraith of ruins the night she lost I left!) in the ligname of Mr van Howten of Tredcastles, Clowntalkin, timbreman among my prodigits nabobs and navious of every subscription entitled the Bois in the Boscoor our evicted tenemants. What I say is (and I am noen roehorn or culkilt permit me to tell you if uninformed), I never spont it. Nor have I the ghuest of a nation on me the way to. It went anyway like hot pottagebake. And this brings me to my fresh point. Quoniam, I am as plain as portable enveloped, inhowmuch, you will now parably receive, care of one of Mooseyeare Guinness’s registered andouterthus barrels. Quick take um whiffat andrainit.

— So vi et! we responded. Song! Shaun, song!

— I apologuise, Shaun began, but I would rather spinooze you one from the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup, fable one, feeble too. Let us here consider the casus, my dear little cousis (husstenhasstencaffincoffintussem-tossemdamandamnamcossaghcussa-ghhobixhatoux) of the Ondt and the Gracehoper. The Gracehoper was always jigging a jog, hoppy, on akkant of his joyicity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him) or if not he was always making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla to play pupa-pupa and pulicy-pulicy and to commence insects with him even if only in chaste, ameng the everlastings, behold a watering pot. He would of curse melissciously, by his fore antennas, lamely, harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me till she was puce for shame and allso fourmish her in Spinner’s housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his cottage, which was cald fourmilierly Singsomingenting, groped up. Or, if he was not done doing that, he was always striking up funny funereels with Besterfarther zeuts inscythe his wormcasket, attended to by a mutter and deffer baxing motch and a myrmidins of pszozlers-anything above ground so as anywhy to kick time. Grouscious me! what a bagateller it is! Pou! what a Zeit for the goths! vented the Ondt, who not being a sommerfool, was making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhome, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix. We shall not come to party, that lopp’s, he decided, for he is not on our social list. The Ondt was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces, in his psyche, but laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche moore secred and wisechairmanlooking. Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the waps, drikking with the drones, bilking with bugs and horing after hornets, he fell joust as sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo as a churchprince, and wheer the midges to wend hemsylph, alick, he wist nit! Iomio! Iomio! brick which a plight. He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mouthballs of the ephemerids and voracioused with the very timeplace in the ternitary — not too dusty a cicada for a little chip so mity. But when Chrysalmas was on the bare branches off he went from Tingsomingenting. He took a round stroll and he took a stroll round and he took a round strollagain till the grillies in his head and the leivnits in his hair made him thought he had the Tossmania. The June snow was flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes and a lugly tournedos, the Boraborayellers blasting tilehuts up to tetties and the sleets off the coppeehouses The Gracehoper, who knew his entymology, promptly tossed himself in the vico, phthin and phthir, on top of his buzzer and the next time he makes the aquinatance of the Ondt he will beheld a world of differents. Behailed the Ondt with unshrinkables draping from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o’monkynous and a confucion of minthe (for he was a conformed aristotaller) as appi as a oneysucker or a baskerboy on the Libido with Floh biting his big thigh and Luse lugging his left leg and Bienie bussing him under his bonnet and Vespatilla blowing cosy fond tutties up the large of his smalls. Emmet and demmet and be jiltses crazed and be jadeses whipt! schneezed the Gracehoper at his wittol’s end what have eyeforsight! The Ondt was making the greatest spass a body could for he was spizzing all over him in formicolation, boundlessly blissfilled in an allallahbath of houris. He was ameising himself hugely, chasing Floh out of charity and tickling Luse) I hope too, and tackling Bienie, faith, as well, and catching Vespatilla by the end. Never did Dorcan from Dunshangan dance it with more devilry! The veripatetic figure of the Gracehoper on his odderkop in the myre, actually and presumptuably sinctifying chronic’s despair, was sufficiently too much for his chorous of gravitates.

He larved and he larved and he merd such a naus

That the Gracehoper feared he would misplace his jaws

I forgive you, dear Ondt, said the Gracehoper, weeping,

For their sukes of the sukes you are safe in whose keeping.

Teach Floh and Luse polkas, show Bienie what’s sweet

And be sure Vespatilla fines fat ones to heat.

As I once played the piper I must now pay the count

So saida to Moyhammlet and marhaba to your Mount!

S pick up your reproof as the gift of a friend

For the prize of your save is the price of my spend.

We are Wastenot with Want, precondamned, two and true,

Till Nolans go volants and Bruneyes come blue.

In my risible universe where could you find

Such prodigious advancement with so much behind?

Your feats are enormous, you volumes immense

(May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!),

Your genus is worldwide, your spaces sublime!

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?

In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.

—  How good you are! But could you, of course, decent Lettrechaun, we knew (to change your name of not your nation) while still in the barrel, read the strangewrote anaglyptics of those shemletters patent for His Christian’s Em?

— Greek! Hand, it to me! Shaun replied, plosively pointing to the cinnamon quistoquill behind his acoustrolobe. I’m as afterdusk nobly Roman as pope and water could christen me. Look at that for a ridingpin! I am Sing Larynx letter potent to play the sem backwards like Oscan wild or unshent Persse or from the Ottoman or off the Toptic or anything off the types of my finklers in the draught or with buttles, with my oyes thickshut and all. But hellas it is horrebrew bad on the corns and callouses. As far as that goes I associate myself with your remark just now from theodicy re’furloined notepaper and quite agree in your prescriptions for indeed I am, pay Gay, in juxtaposition to say it is not a nice production. It is a pinch of scribble, not wortha bottle of cabbage. Overdrawn! Besides its auctionable all about crime and libel! Nothing beyond clerical horrors et omnibus to be entered for the foreign as secondclass matter. Flummery is what I would call it if you were to ask me to put it on a single dimension what pronounced opinion I might possibly orally have about them bagses of trash which the mother and Mr Unmentionable has reduced to writing without making news out of my sootynemm. When she slipped under her couchman. And where he made a cat with a peep. How they wore two madges on the makewater. And why there were treefellers in the shrubrubs. Then he hawks his handmud figgers from Francie to Fritzie down in the kookin. Phiz is me mother and Hair’s me father. Bauv Betty’Famm and Pig Pig Pike. Comme bien Comme bien! Feefeel! Feefeel! And the Dutches dyin loffin at his pon peck de Barec. And all the mound reared. Till he wot not what to begin he should. An infant sailing eggshells on the floor of a wet day would have more sabby.

Letter, carried of Shaun, son of Hek, written of Shem brother of Shaun, for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun. Initialled. Gee. Gone. 29 Hardware Saint. Here Commerces Enville. Tried Apposite House. 13 Fitzgibbets. Loco. Dangerous. Tax 9d. B.L. Guineys, esqueer. L.B. Not known as 1132 a. 12 Norse Richmound. Nave unlodgeable. Loved noa’s dress. Sinned, Jetty Pierrse. Noon sick parson. 92 Winsewer. Ave. No such no. Vale. Finn’s Hot. Exbelled from 1014 d. Pulldown. Fearview. Opened by Miss Take. 965 nighumpledan sextiffits. Shout at Site. Roofloss. Mr. Domnall O’Domnally. Q.V. 8 Royal Terrors. None so strait. Shutter up. Dining with the Danes. Removed to Philip’s Burke. At sea. D.E.D. Place scent on. Clontalk. Father Jacob, Rice Factor. 3 Castlewoos. P.V. Arrusted. J.P. Converted to Hospitalism. Once Bank of Ireland’s. Return to City Arms. 2 Milchbroke. Wrongly spilled. Traumcondraws. Now Bunk of England’s. Drowned in the Laffey. Here. The Reverest Adam Foundlitter. Shown geshotten. 7 Streetpetres. Since Cabranke. Seized of the Crownd. Well, Sir Arthur. Unto his promisk hands. House Condamned by Ediles. Back in Few Minutes. Closet for Repeers. 60 Shellburn. Key at Kate’s. Kiss. Isaac’s Butt, Poor Man. Dalicious arson. Caught. Missing. Justiciated. Kainly forewarred. Abraham Badly’s King, Park Bogey. Salved. All reddy berried. Hollow and eavy. Desert it. Overwayed. Understumped. Back to the P.O. Ownes owe M.O. Too Let. To Be Soiled. Cohabited by Unfortunates. Lost all Licence. His Beef Toe is Frozen Over. X, Y and Z, Ltd, Destinied Tears. A.B, ab, Sender. Razed. Lawyered. Vacant. Mined. Here’s the Bayleaffs. Step out to Hull out of that, Ereweaker, with your Bloody Big Bristol. Bung. Stop. Bung. Stop. Cumm Bumm. Stop. Came Baked to Auld Aireen. Stop.

— Kind Shaun, we all requested, much as we hate to say it but since you rose to the use of money have you not, without suggesting for an instant, millions of moods used up slanguage tun times as words as the penmarks used out in sinscript with such hesitancy by your cerebrated brother — excuse me not mentioningahem?

— CelebrAted! Shaun replied under the sheltar of his broguish vigorously rubbing his magic lantern to a glow of fullconsciousness. HeCitEncy! Your words grates on my ares. Notorious I rather would feel inclined to myself in the first place to describe Mr O’Shem the Draper as should I be accentually called upon to pass my opinions into impulsory irelitz. But I would not care to be so unfruitful to my own part as to swear for the moment positively as to the views of Denmark. No, sah! But let me say my every belief before my high Gee is that I much doubt of it. I’ve no room for that fellow. I just can’t. As I hourly learn from Rooters and Havers through Gilligan’s maypoles he is on his last, boasting always of his ruddy complexious! She, the mammy far, was put up to it, by him, the iniquity that ought to be depraved of his libertins and placed in irons into some drapyery institution off the antipopees for wordsharping only if he could pass the panel fleischcurers. For that is well celibated before the four divorce courts and all the King’s paunches how he has the solitary from seeing Scotch snakes and has consumption and dalickey cyphalos on his brach premises where he can dejeunerate into a skillyton be thinking himself to death. Rot him! Flannelfeet! Flattyro! I will describe you in a word. Homo! Then putting his bedfellow on me! The criniman: I’ll give it to him for that! Is he on whosekeeping or are my! With his unique hornbook and his prince of the apauper’s pride, blundering all over the two worlds! If he waits till I buy him a mosselman’s present! Ho’s nos halfcousin of mine, pigdish! nor wants to! I’d famish with the cuistha first. Aham!

— May we petition you, Shaun illustrious, then to unravel in your own sweet words of style to your very and most obsequient, we suggested, as to how?

— You may, ought and welcome, Shaun replied, taking at the same time as his hunger got the bitter of him a hearty bite out of the honeycomb, of his Braham and Melosedible hat, tryone, tryon and triune. Ann wunkum. Sure I thunkum you knew all about that through thelemontary channels long agum. Sure that is as commonpleas now and bunkum as Nelson his pillar. Beerman’s bluff was what begun it, Old Knoll and his borrowing! And then the liliens of the veldt, Nancy Nickies and Folletta Lajambe. Then mem and hem and the jaquejack. I regret to announce for two days she kept squealing down for noisy priors and bawling out in Shemish about the Balt and his loyal divorces, tse tse and him, the cribibber like an ambitrickster, fast aslooped in the intrance to his polthronechair with his sixth finger between his catseye and the index, engrossing to his ganderpan what the idioglossary he invented under hicks hyssop! Hock! Ickick gav him that toock, imitator! And it was entirely theck latter to blame. Does he-drink because I am sorely there shall be no more Kates and Nells. It was given meeck to assist at the whole thing byck special chancery licence. As often as I think of that unbloody housewarmer Shem Skrivenitch, always cutting my prhose to please his phrase, bigorror, I declare I get the jawache! You know he’s peculiar, that eggschicker. He was grey at three when he made his boo to the public and barnacled up to the eyes when he repented at seven. He’s weird, I tell you, and middayevil. That’s why he was forbidden tomate and was warmed off the ricecourse of marrimoney. Then he was pusched out of Thingamuddy’s school by Miss Garterd for itching. Then he caught the europicolas, and went into the society of jewses. One temp when he foiled to be killed the freak wanted to put his bilingual head intentionally through the Irish Tames and go and join the clergy as a dominical skyterrier. Then he went to cecilia’s treat on his solo to pick up Galen. Inkupot! I have the outmost contempt for. Your puddin is cooked! You’re served, cram ye! Fatefully yaourth . . . Ex. Ex. Ex. Ex.

— But for what, Shaun of grace? weakly we went on to ask now of the gracious one. Vouchsafe to say. You will now, goodness, won’t you? Why?

— For his root language if you ask me whys, Shaun replied as he blessed himself devotionally like a crossbun making act of oblivion, footinmouther! (what the thickuns else?) which he picksticked into his lettruce invrention.

—  But you could come near it, we do suppose, strong Shaun O’, we foresupposed. How?

— Peace! Peace! Shaun replied in vealar penultimatum. ’Tis perils before Sweeney’s as he swigged a slug of Jon Jacobsen from his treestem sucker cane. Mildbut likesome! I might as well be talking to the four waves till tibbes grey eves and the rests asleep. Frost! Nope! No-one in his seven senses could, as I have before said, only you missed my drift, for it’s being incendiary. Every dimmed letter in it is a copy and not a few of the silbils and wholly words I can show you in my Kingdom of Heaven. The lowquacity of him! With his threestar monothong! Thaw! The last word in stolentelling! And what’s more rightdown lowbrown schisthematic robblemint! Yes. As he was rising my lather. Like you. And as I was plucking his goosybone. Like yea. He store the tale of me shur. Like yup.

— Still in a way, not to flatter you, we fancy you that you are so strikingly brainy and well letterread in yourshelves could use worse of yourself, ingenious Shaun, we still fancied, if only you would take your time and the trouble of so doing it.

— Undoubtedly but that is show, Shaun replied, the muttermelk of his blood donor beginning to work, it would be a bad day I could not so you can keep your space and by the power of blurry wards I am loyable to do it (I am convicted of it!) any time ever I liked (bet ye fippence off me boot allowance!) with the greatest transfusiasm as you see, while I can soroquise better than most, it is an openear secret, be it said, how I am extremely ingenuous at the clerking even with my badily left and I’d pinsel it as easy as I’d perorate a chickerow of peas and my trifolium librotto, the authordux Book of Life, would if given to daylight far exceed what that bogus bolshy of a Shame, my soambeis brother, is conversant with in audible black and prink. And one of these fine days, man dear, that I may willhap cut my throat with my tongue tonight but I will be ormuzd moved to take potlood and introvent it Paatryk just like a work of merit, mark my words, that will open your pucktricker’s ops for you, broather brooher, only for as a papst and an immature and a spaciaman spaciosum and a hundred and eleven other things I would never for anything take so much trouble of such doing. And why so? Because I am altogether a chap too fly and hairyman for to infradig the like of that ultravirulence. And by all I hold sacred on earth clouds and in heaven I swear to you on my piop and oath by the awe of Shaun (and that’s a howl of a name!) that I will commission to the flames any incendiarist whosoever or ahriman howsoclever who would endeavour to set ever anny roner moother of mine on fire. Rock me julie but I will soho!

And big hottempered husky fusky pugiliser such as he was he all but broke down on the moorherhead, getting quite jerry over her, overpowered by himself with the love of the tearsilver that he twined through her hair for sure he was the soft slob of the world and as innocent and undesignful as the freshfallen calef. Still he laughed it off with a wipe at his pudgies and a gulp apologetic. Mind you, that he was in the dumpest of earnest orthough him jawr war hoo hleepy hor halk urthing hurther. Like that only he stopped short in looking up up up from his tide shackled wrists through the ghost of an ocean the wieds of pansiful heathvens of joepeter as they are telling not but were and will be, all told, scruting foreback into the fargoneahead to feel out what age in years tropical, ecclesiastic, civil or sidereal he might find by the sirious pointstand of Charley’s Wain (what betune the spheres sledding along the lacteal and the mansions of the blest turning on old times) his thumbs fell into his fists and, losing the harmonical balance of his ballbearing extremities, by the holy kettle like a flask of lightning over he careened (O the sons of the fathers!) by the mightyfine weight of his barrel (all that prevented the happering of who if not the asterisks betwink themselves shall ever?) and, as the wisest postlude course he could playact collaspsed in ensemble and rolled buoyantly backwards in less than a twinkling via Rattigan’s corner out of farther earshot with his highly curious mode of slipashod motion, surefoot, sorefoot, slickfoot, slackfoot, and by Killesther’s lapes and falls, with corks staves and treeleaves and more bubbles to his keelrow a fairish and easy way enough as the town cow cries behind times in the direction of Mac Auliffe’s, the crecethouse, before he was really uprighted ere in a dip of the downs he miraculously disappaled and vanesshed from circular circulatio. Ah, mean!

And the stellas were shinings, And the earthnight strewed aromatose. His pibrook creppt mong the donkness. A reek was waft on the luftstream. He was ours, all fragrance. And we were his for a lifetime. O dulcid dreamings languidous! Taboccoo!

It was sharming! But sharmeng!

Well, it is to bedowern that thou art passing hence mine bruder, able Shaun beyond cods’ cradle and porpoise plain, from carnal relations undfamiliar faces, to the inds of Tuskland where the oliphants scrum from orwtill the ousts of Amiracles where the toll stories grow proudest more is the pity, but for all your deeds of goodness you were for ever doing, as our humbler classes, whose virtue is humility, can tell, it is hardly we in the country of the old, Sean Moy, can part you for you were the walking saint, you were, the graced of gods and pittites and the salus of the wake. Musha, beminded of us out there in Cockpit, poor twelve o’clock scholars sometime or other anywhen you think the time. Wisha, becoming back to us way home in Biddy-house one way or either anyhow we miss your smile. Sireland calls you. Mery Loye is saling moonlike. And Slyly mamourneen’s ladymaid at Gladshouse Lodge. Turn your coat, strong character, and tarry among us down the vale, seat, only once more! And may the mosse of prosperousness gather you rolling home May foggy dews bediamondise your hooprings! May the fireplug of filiality reinsure your bunghole! May the barleywind behind glow luck to your bathershins! ’Tis well we know you were loth to leave us, winding your hobbledehorn, right royal post, but sure, pulse of our slumber, by the grace of Votre Dame, you will shiff across the Moylendsea and round up in your own escapology some canonisator’s day or other, sack on back, alack! digging snow, not so? like the good man you are with your picture pockets turned knockside out in the rake of the rain for fresh remittances and from that till this in any case may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercops.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°13, July 1928
[chapter III.2 from Finnegans Wake]

Jaunty Jaun, as I was shortly before that made aware, next halted to fetch a breath, the first leg of his nightstride being pulled through, and to loosen (let God’s son now be looking down on the poor preambler!) both of his bruised brogues that were plainly made a good bit before his hosen were at the weir by Lazar’s Walk (for far and wide, as large as he was lively, was he noted for his humane treatment of any kind of abused footgear), a matter of maybe nine score or so barrelhours distance off as truly he merited to do. He was there, I could planemetrically see, when I took a closer look at him, that was to say, greatly altered for the brighter, though still the graven image of his squarer self as he was used to be, perspiring but happy notwithstanding his foot was still asleep on him the way he thought by the holy januarious he had a bullock’s hoof in his buskin, with his halluxes so splendid, through Ireland untranscended, bigmouthed poesther, propped up, restant, against a butterblond warden of the peace, one comestabulish Sigurdsen, who, buried upright like the Osbornes, had tumbled slumbersomely on sleep at night duty behind the curing station, equilebriated amid the embracings of a monopolized bottle.

Now, there were as many as twentynine hedge daughters out of Saint Brigid’s national nightschool (for I seemed to remember how it was still a look before you leap year) learning their antemeridian lesson of life, beseated as they were upon the brinkspondy, attracted to the rare sight of the first human yellowstone landmark while they paddled away keeping time magnetically with their eight and fifty pedalettes, playing foolufool jouay allo misto posto, all barely in their typtap teens, describing a charming dactylogram of nocturnes though repelled by the snores of the log who looked stuck to the sod as ever and oft, when liquefied, he murmoaned abasourdly in his Dutchener’s native, visibly unmoved, over his treasure trove for the crown: Dotter dead bedstead mean diggy smuggy flasky.

Jaun (after he had in the first place doffed a hat with a reinforced crown and bowed to all the others in that chorus of praise of goodwill girls on their best beehiviour who all they were girls all rushing sowarmly for the post as buzzy as sie could bie to read his kisshands, kittering all about, rushing and making a tremendous girlsfuss over him pellmale and his rosyposy smile, mussing his frizzy hair and the golliwog curls of him all done in loveletters like a trayful of cloudberry tartlets and smilingly smelling, pair and pair about, broad by bread and slender to slimmer, the nice perfumios that came peeling off him (nice!) which was angelic simply, savouring of wild thyme and parsley jumbled with breadcrumbs (O nice!) and feeling his full fat pouch for him so tactily and jingaling his jellybags for he was just the killingest ladykiller all by kindness now you, Jaun, asking kindlily (hillo, missies!) after their howareyous at all with those of their dollybegs (and where’s Agatha’s lamb? and how are the two columbillas?) he next went on (finefeelingfit!) to drop a few stray remarks anent their personal appearances and the contrary tastes displayed in their tight kittycasques and their smart frickyfrockies, asking coy one after sloy one had she read Irish legginds and gently reproving one that the ham of her hom could be seen below her hem and whispering another aside that the hook of her hum was open a bittock at her back to have a sideeye to that, hom, (and all of course just to fill up a form out of pure human kindness and in a sprite of fun) for Jaun, by the way, was by the way of becoming (I think, I hope he was) the most purely human being that ever was called man, Jaun, after those few prelimbs made out through his horoscope the apparition of his fond sister Izzy for he knowed his love by her waves of splabashing and she showed him proof by her way of blabushing nor could he forget her so tarnelly easy as all that since he was brotherbesides her benedict godfather and heaven knows he thought the world and his life of her sweet heart could buy, poor, good, true, Jaun.

— Sister dearest, Jaun delivered himself with express cordiality, marked by clearance of diction and general delivery, as he began to take leave of his scolastica at once so as to gain time with deep affection, we honestly believe you sorely will miss us the moment we exit yet we feel as a martyr to the dischurch of all duty that it is about time, by Great Harry we would shove off to stray on our long last journey and not be the load on ye. This is the gross proceeds of your teachings in which we were raised, you, sis, that used to write to us the exceeding nice letters for presentation and would be telling us anon (full well do we wont to recall to mind) thy oldworld tales of homespinning and derringdo and dieobscure and daddyho, those tales which reliterately whisked off our heart so narrated by thou, gesweest, to perfection, our pet pupil of the whole rhythmetic class and the mainsay of our erigenal house the time we younkers twain were fairly tossing ourselves (O Phoebus! O Pollux!) in bed, having been laid up with Castor’s oil on the Parrish’s syrup (the night we will remember) for to share our hard suite of affections with thee.

I rise, o, fair assemblage. Andcommincio. Now then, after this introit of exordium, my galaxy girls, quiproquo, of directions to henservants I was asking his advice on the strict T.T. from Father Mike, P.P. my orational dominican, (buyd the birds, he was saying sermon in an offrand way and confidence petween peas like ourselves in soandso many nuncupiscent words about how he had been confarreating teat-a-teat with two viragos intactas about what an awful life he led, poorish priced, and what a lawful day it was, there and then, for a consommation with an effusion and how, by all the manny larries ate pignatties, how he’d marry me any old buckling time as flying quick as hed look at me) and I am giving youth now in words of style byaway of offertory hisand mikeadvice as those words he said to me. Comeallyedimseldamsels, siddle down and lissle all! Follow me close! Keep me in view! Understeady me saries! Which is to all practising massoeurses from a preaching free and be a gentleman without a duster before a parlourmade without a spitch. During our brief apsence from this furtive feugtig season adhere to as many as probable of the ten commandments and in the long run they will prove for your better guidance along your path of right of way. Where the lisieuse are we and whats the first sing to be sung? Several sindays after whatsintime. I’ll sack that sick server the minute I bless him. Here she’s, is a bell, virginwhite. Doremon’s! The same or similar to be kindly observed within the affianced dietcess of Gay O’Toole and Gloamy Gwenn du Lake from Manducare Monday up till farrier’s siesta in china dominos. Words taken in triumph from the sufferant pen of our jocosus inkerman militant of the reed behind the ear. Never miss your lostsomewhere mass for the couple in Myles you butrose to brideworship. Never hate mere pork which is bad for your knife of a good friday. Never let a hog of the hill trample underfoot your lily of killarney. Never play lady’s game for the Lord’s stake. Never lose your heart away till you win his diamond back. Make a strong point of never kicking up your rumpus over the scroll end of sofas in the Dar Bey Coll Cafeteria by tootling risky apropos songs at commercial travellers’ smokers for their Columbian nights entertainments the like of White limbs they never stop teasing or Minxy was a Manxmaid when Murry wor a Man. And, by the bun, is it you goes bisbuiting His Esaus and Cos and then throws them bag in the box? Why the tin’s nearly empty. First thou shalt not smile. Twice thou shalt not love. Lust, thou shalt not commix idolatry. Never park your brief stays in the men’s convenience. Never clean your buttoncups with your dirty pair of sassers. Never ask his first person where’s your quickest cut to our last place. Never let the promising hand usemake free of your oncemaid sacral. The soft side of the axe! Never dip in the ern while you’ve browsers on your suite. Never slip the silver key through your gate of golden age. Ere you sail foreget my prize. Never christen medlard apples till a swithin is in sight. Wet your thistle where a weed is and you’ll rue it despyneedis. Especially beware please of being at a party to any demoralizing home life. That saps a chap. Keep cool faith in the firm, have warm hoep in the house and begin frem athome to be chary of charity. Recollect the yella perals that beset green gerils, Rhidarhoda and Daradora once, they gethobbyhorsical playing breeches parts for Bessy Sudlow in fleshcoloured pantos instead of earthing down in the coalhole trying to boil the big gun’s dinner. Leg-before-Wicked lags-behind-Wall where here Mr. Whicker whacked a great fall. Femorafamilla feeled it a candleliked but Hayes, Conyngham and Robinson sware it’s an egg. Forglim mick aye! Stay, forestand and tillgive it! Remember the biter’s bitters I shed the hour I buried our Harlotte Quai from poor Mrs Mangain’s of Britain Court on the feast of Marie Maudlin. Sold in her heyday, laid in the straw bought for one puny petunia. Moral if you can’t point a lily get to henna out of here. Put your swell foot foremost on foulardy pneumonia shertwaists, irriconcilible with true féminin risirvition and ribbons of lace, limenick’s disgrace. Sure what is it on the whole only holes tied together, the merest and transparent washingtones to make Languid Lola’s lingery longer? Whalebones and busk butts may hurt you but never lay bare your breast secret to joy Jonas in the Dolphin’s Barncar. There you’ll fix your eyes darkled on the autocart of the bringfast cable but here till youre martimorphysed please sit still face to face. For if the shorth of your skorth falls down to his knees pray how wrong will he look till he rises? Not before Gravesend is commuted. But now reappears Autist Algy, the pulcherman, stated to be well known in and near the ciudad of Buellas Arias, taking you to the playguehouse to see the Smirching of Venus and asking in a very low bearded voice, with a nice little manner and in a very nice little way, won’t you be an artist’s moral and pose in your nudies as a local esthetic before voluble old masters, introducing you, to hogarths and Bottisilly and Titteretto and Vergognese and Coraggio! And the volses of lewd Buylan for innocence! And the phyllisophies of Bussup Bulkeley. All blah! Put off the old man at the very font and get right on with the nutty sparker round the back. Stick wicks in your earshells when you hear the prompter’s voice. Look on a boa in his beauty and you’ll never more wear your strawberry leaves. Rely on the relic. What bondman ever you bind on earth I’ll be bound twas combined in hemel. Keep airly hores and the worm is yores. Go to doss with the poulterer and shake up with the milchmand. The Sully van vultures are on the prowl. And the hailies fingringmaries. Tobaccos tabu and toboggan’s a back seat. Secret satieties and onanymous letters make the great unwatched as bad as their betters. Don’t on any account acquire a paunchon for that alltoocommon fagend habit of frequenting and chumming together with the pairs of couples in Mr Tunnelly’s hall-door-ways wriggling with lowcusses and cockchafers and vamps and rodants, with the end to commit acts of interstipital indecency as between twineties and tapegarters under the coverfew act. Three minutes I’m counting you. Woooooon. No triching now! Give me that when I tell you! And is that any place to be smuggling his madam’s apples up? Gee wedge! Begor, I like the way they’re half cooked. Hold, flay, grill, fire that laney feeling for kosenkissing disgenically within the proscribed limits like Population Peg on a hinter too does be doing to Temptation Tom, atkings questions in barely and snakking smuth like a nursemagd. While the re’s men-o’-war on the say there’ll be loves-o’- women on the do. Love cisternbrothelly when properly disinfected and taken neat in the generable way upon retiring to roost in the company of a husband-in-law or other respectable relative of an apposite sex does a felon good, suspiciously if he has a slugger’s liver but I cannot belabour the point too ardently (and after the lessions of experience I speak from inspiration) that fetid spirits is the thief of prurities so none of your twenty rod cherry-whisks, me daughter. At the Cat and Rabbit. And at 2bis Lot’s Road. When parties get tight for each other they lose all respect together. By the stench of her fizzle an the glib of her gab know the drunken draggletail Dublin drab. You’ll pay for each bally sorraday night every billing sumday morning. When the night is in May and the moon shines might. We won’t meeth in Navan till you try to give the kellsfireclub the goby. Hill or hollow, Hull or Hague! And beware how you dare of wet cocktails in Kildare or the same may see your wedding driving home from your wake. Nor must you omit to screw the lid firmly on that jazz jiggery and kick starts. Bumping races on the flat and point to point over obstacles. Ridewheeling that acclivisciously up windy Rutland Rise and insighting rebellious northers before the saunter of the city of Dunlop. Then breretonbiking on the free with your airs of go-be-dee and your heels upon the handlebars. Should you feel as though you needed healthy physicking exercise to flush your kidneys, you understand, and move the bowel, lassy and perspire freely, why out you go, on the dirt track and skip. Deal with Nature the great greengrocer and pay regularby the monthlies. Your Punt’s Perfume’s only in the hatpinny shop beside the reek of the rawny. It’s more important than air—I mean than food—air and promotes that natural emotion. Likewise if I were in your envelope shirt I’d keep my weathereye well cocked open for your furnished lodgers paying for their feed on tally with company and piano tunes. The too friendly friend sort who he’s kommen from olt Pannonia on this porpoise and who mix himself so at home mid the musik and spanks the ivory that lovely, Mistro Melosiosus Mac Shine Mac Shane may soon prove your undoing and bane through the succeeding years of rain should you, whilst Jaun is from home, get used to basking in his loverslowlap when closehended together behind locked doors kissing steadily, ( it’s not the thing you know) with the calfloving selfseeker under the influence of woman inching up to you, disarranging your modesties and fumbling with his forte paws in your bodice after your billy doos twy as a first go off (take care, would you stray and spliton me!) and going on doing his idiot every time you gave him his chance to get thick and play pigglywiggly, making much of you, bilgetalking like a ditherer about your glad neck and the round globe and the white milk and the red raspberries (O horrifier!) and prying down furthermore to chance his lucky arm with his pregnant questions up to our past lives. It would be a whorable state of affairs altogether for the redcolumnists Peter Paragraph and Paulus Puff to get ahold of for their balloons and shoot you private by surprise, considering the marriage slump that’s on this oil age and pulexes three shillings a pint and wives at six and seven when domestic calamities belame par and newlaid bellow mar for in the slack march of civilisation were you, becoming guilty of unleckylike intoxication to have and to hold, to pig and to pay direct connection qua intervener with a prominent married member of the vicereeking squad and in consequence of the therinunder subpenas be flummoxed to the second degree by becoming a detestificated companykeeper on the dammymonde of Lucalamplight. Anything but that, for the fear and love of gold. Once and for all I’ll have no college swankies (you see I am well voiced in love’s arsenal so I have every reason to know that rogues’ gallery of nightbirds and bitchfanciers, lucky duffs and light lindsays, haughty hamiltons and gay gordons dosed, doctored and otherwise, messing around skirts and what their fickling intentions look like, you make up your mind to that) trespassing on your danger zone in the dancer years. If ever I catch you at it, mind, it’s you that will cocottch it! I’ll give it to you, hot, high and heavy before you can say sedro! Or may the maledictions of Lousyfear fall like nettlerash on the white friar’s father that converted from moonshine the fostermother of the first nancyfree that ran off after the trumpadour that mangled Moore’s melodies and so upturned the tubshead of the stardaft journalwriter to inspire the prime finisher to fellhim the firtree out of which Cooper Funnymore planed the flat of the beerbarrel on which my grandydad’s lustiest sat his seat of unwisdom with my tante’s petted sister for the cause of his joy! Amene.

Poof! There’s puff for ye, begor, all abound me breadth! As broad as its lung and as long as a line! Whoo? Now something nice Dear Sister in perfect leave again I say take a brokerly advice that we, Jaun, first of our name here now make all receptacles of free of price. Easy, my dear, if they tingle you either say nothing or nod. Be vacillant over those vigilant who would leave you to belave black on white. Perousse instate your Weekly Standerd, our verile organ that is red allover. Apply your five wits to the four verilatest. Swear aloud by pious fiction the like of Lentil Lore by Carnival Cullen, or Pease in Plenty by the Curer of Wars licensed and censered by Their Graces of Linzen and Petit bois, licet ut lebanus, for expansion on the promises, the two best sells on the market, set up by Gill the father, put out by Gill the son and circulating disimally at Gilly de hooly’s Cost. Strike up a nodding acquaintance f with the works of old Mrs Trot, senior and Manoel Canter junior, and Loper de Figas, nates maximum. Sifted science will do your arts good. Egg Laid by Former Cock and With flageolette in Send Fanciesland. Trip over sacramental tea into the long lives of our Saints and saucerdotes with vignettes, cut short into instructual primers by those in authority for the bittermint of your soughts. Forget not the palsied. Light a match for poor old Contrabally and send some balmoil for the schizmatics. Remember, maid, thou dust art powder but Cinderella thou must return, (what are you robbing her sleeve for Ruby? And pull in your tongue, Polly!) Cog that out of your teen times, everyone. How dare ye be laughing out of your mouthshine at the lack of that? Keep cool your fresh chastity which is far better far. Sooner than part with that vestalite emerald of the first importance, descended to me by far from our family, which you treasure up so closely where extremes meet, nay, rather let the whole ekumene universe belong to merry Hal and do whatever his Mary well likes. You can take all the lard you care for in these lassitudes if you’ve parents and things to look after. There’s nothing to touch it we are taucht unless she’d care for a mouthpullof white pudding for the wish is on her rose marine and the lunchlight in her eye. Guard that gem, Sissy, rich and rare, ses he. In this cold old worold who’ll feel it. Hum! The jewel you’re all so cracked about there’s flitty few of them gets it for there’s nothing now but the sable stoles and a runabout to match it. Sing him a ring. Touch me low. And I’ll lech ye so, my soandso. Show and show. Show on show. She. Shoe. Shone.

Divulge, sjuddenly jouted out hardworking Jaun, clenching his manlies, so highly strong was he, man, and gradually quite warming to her divorce into me and say the curname in undress of any lapwhelp or sleevemongrel who talks to you upon the road where he tuck you to be a roller, O, and volunteers to trifle with your roundlings for profferred glass and dough without taking out his proper password from the eligible ministriss for affairs with the black fremdling, that enemy of our country, in a cleanlooking light and I don’t care a gotthamn tongser’s tammany hang who the mucky is nor twoo hoots in the corner nor three shouts on a hill, (were he even a constantineal namesuch of my very own and like enoch to my townmajor ancestors, Rere Uncle Remus, the Baas of Eboracum and Old Father Ulissabon Knickerbocker, the lanky sire of Wolverhampton about their bristelings) but as true as there’s a soke for sakes in Twoways Peterborough and sure as home we come to newsky prospect from west the wave on schedule time from the land of breach of promise with March’s pebbles spinning from beneath our footslips rest insured that as we value the very name in sister that as soon as we do possibly it will be a poor lookout for that insister. He’s a markt man from that hour. And why do we say that, you may query me? Quary? Guess! Wrong! Because then probably we’ll dumb well soon show him what the Shaun way is like how we’ll go a long way towards breaking his outsider’s face for him for making up to you and getting my ward’s head under his chancery before feeling with his two dimensions for your nuptial dito. Ohibow, if I was Blonderboss I’d gooandfrighthisdualman! Now, we’ll tell you what we’ll do to be sicker instead of compensation. We’ll burst his mouth like Leary to the Leinsterface, and reduce his liniments to a poolp. You’ll hear him calling you, bump, like a blizz, in the muezzin of the turkest night. That’ll be it, even should I have to coomb the brash of the libs round Close Saint Patrice to lay my louseboob on his behaitch like solitar. I have his quoram of images all on my retinue, Mohomadhawn Mike. Brassup! Moreover after that bad manners to me if I don’t think strongly about giving the brotherkeeper in to custody to the first police brebey cunstabless in the field I might chance to follopon. Or for that matter if I get the wind up what do you bet I mightn’t even take it into my head to swing for your perfect stranger in the meadow of heppiness and then wipe the street up with the clonmellian, pending my bringing proceedings before a bunch of magistrafes and twelve good and gleeful men. It should prove more or less of an event. He’ll have pansements then for his pensamientos. Dumnlimn wimn humn. In which case I’ll not be complete in fighting lust until I contrive to half kill your Charley you’re my darling for you and send him to Home Surgeon Hume, the algebrist, before his appointed time particularly should he turn out to be a man in brown about town of about fifty six or so, pithecoid proportions, with perhops five foot eight, the usual X Y Z type, R.C. Toc H, nothing but claret, not in the studbook by a long stortch, with a toothbrush moustache and jawcrockeries, alias grinner through collar, and of course no beard, meat and colmans suit, washing tie, sipping some Wheatley’s on a barstool, always trying to buy movables by hebdomedaries for to putt in a new house to loot, cigarette in his holder, with a good job and pension in Buinness’s, blueygreen eyes a bit scummy developing a series of angry boils with certain references to the Deity, seeking relief in alcohol and so on, general omnibus character with a dash of railwaybrain, stale cough and an occasional twinge of claudication, having his favourite fecundclass family of upwards of a decade to boot and care for Imean.

So let it be a knuckle or an elbow, I hereby admonish you. And lest there be no misconception, Miss Forstowelsy, over who to fasten the plightforlifer on when the nice little smellar squalls in his crydle what the dirty old bigger’ll be squealing through his coughin you better keep in the gunbarrel straight as I recommence you to (you gypseyeyed baggage, do you hear what I’m praying?) or Gosh I’ll be all over you myselx horizontally for knocking me with my name and yourself and your babybag down at such a greet sacrifice with a rap of the gavel to a third price cowhandler as cheap as the niggerd’s dirt (for sale!) or I’ll smack your jujube lips well for you so I will well for you if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your pigeonhouse. I’ll teach you bed minners tip for tap to be playing your oddaugghter tangotricks with micky dazzlers if I find corsehairs on your river-frock and the squirmside of your burberry lupitally covered with chiffchaff and shavings. You’ll ging naemaer wi’wolf the Ganger. Lonely went to play your mother isod? You was wiffriends? Hay, dot’s a doll yarn! Mark mean then! I’ll homeseek you, Luperca as sure as there’s a palatine in Limerick, and in striped conference here’s how. Nerbu de Bios! If yous twos goes to walk upon the railway God and I’ll goad to beat behind the bush. Snip! I’ll tear up your limpshades and lock all your tailors in the closet, I will, and cut your silkskin into garters. I’ll have plenary sadisfaction, plays the bishop, for your partial’s indulgences if your my rodeo gell. Fair man and foul suggestion. There’s a lot of lecit pleasure coming bangslanging your way. You’ll rebmemer your mottob ‘Aveh Tiger Roma’ mikely smarter the nickst time. For I’ll just draw my prancer and give you one splitpuck in the crupper, you understand, that will bring the poppy blush of shame to your peony hindmost till you yelp papa-pardon and radden your rhodatantarums to the beat of calorrubordolon, I am, I do and I suffer (do you here me now, lickspoon, and stop looking at your bussycat bow in the slate?) that you won’t obliterate for the bulkier part of a running year, failing to give a good account of yourself, if you think I’m so tan cupid as all that. Lights out now (bouf!), tight and sleep on it. And that’s how I’ll bottle your greedypuss beautibus for ye, me bullin heifer, for tis I that have the peer of arrams that carry a wallop. Between them.

How (from the sublime to the ridiculous) times out of oft, my future, shall we think with deepest of love and recollection by rintrospection of thee but me far away on the pillow breathing foundly o’er my names all through the empties whilst moidhered by the rattle of the doppeldoorknockers. Our homerole poet to Ostelinda, Fred Wetherly, puts it somewhys better. You’re sitting on me style, maybe, whereoft I helped your ore. Littlegame rumilie from Liffalidebankum, Toobliqueme!, but roomy a big corner fill you do in this unadulterated seat of our affections. Sevenheavens O heaven! Iy waount yiou! yore ways to melittleme were wonderful so Ickam purseproud in sending yum loveliest pansiful thoughts touching me dash in-you through wee dots Hyphen, the so pretty arched godkin of beddingnights. How I shall should I survive as, please the uniter of U.M.I. hearts, I am living in hopes to do, replacing mig wandering handsup in yawers so yeager for mitch, positively cover the two pure chicks of your comely plumpchake with zuccherikissings hong, kong, and so gong that I’d scare the bats out of the ivfry one of those puggy mornings, honestly, by my rantandog and daddyoak I will, become come coming when, upon the mingling of our meeting waters, wish to wisher, like massive mountains to part no more, you will there and then in those happy moments of ouryour soft accord rainkiss on me back for full marks with shouldered arms and in that united I.R.U. stade when I come (touf! touf!) wildflier’s fox into my own greengeese again swap sweetened smugs six of one for half a dozen of the other when cherries next come back to Ealing as come they must as they musted in their past as they must for my pressing season as hereinafter must they chirrywill immediately suant on my safe return to ignorance and bliss in my horseless Coppal Poor through suirland and noreland kings country and queens, with my ropes of pearls for gamey girls the way ye’ll hardly. Knowme.

’Tis post purification we will and render social service, missus. Let us all ignite in our prepurgatory grade as aposcals and help our Jakeline sisters clean up the hogshole. Burn only what’s Irish, accepting their coals, Write me your essayest but cursorily for Henriet a’sake on mortinatality in the life of jewries and the sludge of King Haarington’s at its height running boulevards over the whole of it. I’d write it all by mownself if I only had here of my jolly young watermen. Bear in mind by Michael all the provincial’s bananas peels and elacock eggs making drawadust jubilee along Henry, Moore, Earl and Talbot Streets. Luke at all the memmer manning he’s dung for the pray of birds, our priest-mayor-king-merchant, strewing the Castleknock Road till the first glimpse of Wales and from Ballses Breach Harshoe up to Dumping’s Corner with the Marist Fathers eleven versus White Friars out on a rogation stag party. Compare them caponchin trowbers with the Bridge of Belches in Fairview, noreast Dublin’s favourite souwest wateringplatz and ump as you lump it. What do you mean by Jno Citizen and how do you think of Jas Pagan? Explain why there is such a number of orders of religion in Asa! Why such an order number in preference to any other number? Why any number in any order at all? Where is the greenest island off the black coats of Spaign? Overset into universal: I am perdrix and upon my pet ridge. Oralmus! Hailfellow some wellmet boneshaker or trust and take the Drumgondola tram and, wearing the trotteur and vestee endorsed by the hierarchy fitted with ecclastics, stand on, say, Aston’s, I advise you strongly, along quaith a copy of the Seeds and Weeds Act when you have procured one for yourself and take a good longing gaze into any nearby shopswindow you may select at suppose, let us say, the hoyth of number eleven, Kane or Keogh’s, and in the course of about thirtytwo minutes’ time proceed to turn aroundabout on your heehills towards the previous causeway and I shall be very cruelly mistaken indeed if you will not be jushed astunshed to see how you will be meanwhile durn weel topcoated with kakes of slush occasioned by the mush jam of the cross and blackwalls traffic in transit. Wheres Cowtends Kateclean the woman with the muckrake? When will the W.D. face of our sow muckloved d’lin, the Troia of towns and Carmen of cities, crawling with mendiants, get its wellbelavered white like l’pool and m’chester? Who’ll disasperaguss Pape’s Avignue or who’ll uproose the Opian Way? Who’ll brighton Brayhowth and bait the Bull Bailey and never despair of Lorcansby? The rampant royal commissioner! Tis an ill weed blows no poppy good. And this labour’s worthy of my higher. If I hope not charity what profiteers me? Nothing! Do you know what, liddle giddles? One of those days I am advised by the smiling voteseeker who’s now snoring elued to positively strike off hiking for good and all until such temse as some mood is made under privy-sealed orders to get me an increase of automoboil and footwear and a bourse from bon Somewind for a cure at Bad anuweir (though where it’s going to come from this time —) as I sartunly think now, honest to John, for an income plexus that that’s about the sanguine boundary limit. Amean.

Sis dearest, Jaun added, with voise somewhit murky as he turned his dorse to her to pay court to it, melancholic this time whiles his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction followed swift to an imaginary swellaw, O, the vanity of Vanissy! All ends vanishing! Pursonally, Grog help me, I am in no violent hurry. If time enough lost the ducks walking easy found them. I’ll nose a blue fonx with any tristys blinking upon this earthlight of all them that pass by the way of the deerdrive or wilfrid’s walk but I’d turn back as lief as not if I could only spoonfind the nippy girl of my heart’s appointment, Mona Vera Toutou Ipostila, my lady of Lyons, to guide me by gastronomy under her safe conduct. That’s more in my line. I’d ask no kinder of fates than to stay where I am, under the invocation of Saint Jamas Hanway, servant of Gamp, lapidated, and Jacobus A Pershawm, intercissous, for my thurifex, with Peter Roche that frind of my boozum, leaning on my cubits, at this passing moment by localoption in the birds’ lodging me pheasants among, with me hares standing up well and me longears dittoes till well on into the beausome of the exhaling night, pinching stopandgo jewels out of the hedges and catching dimtop brilliants on the tip of my wagger for them breezes zipping round by Drumsally do be devils to play fleurt. I could sit on safe side till the bark of Saint Grousers for hoopoe’s hours, laughing lazy at the sheep’s lightning, hearing the mails across the nightrives (peepet! peepet!) and whippoor willy in the woody (moor park! moor park!) as peacefed as a philopotamus, and crekking jugs at the grenoulls, leaving tea for the trout and belleeks for the wary, till I’d followed through my upfielded neviewscope the rugaby moon cumuliously godrolling himself westasleep amuckst the cloudscrums for to watch how carefully my nocturnal goosemother would lay her new golden sheegg for me down under in the shy orient. What wouldn’t I poach — the rent in my riverside my otther shoes, my beavery, honest! — for a dace feast of grannom with the finny ones, flashing down the swansway, leaps ahead of the swift macEels and the pursewinded carpers, rearin antis rood perches astench of me, or, when I’d like own company best, with the help of a norange and bear, to be reclined by the lasher on my logansome, my g.b.d. in my f.a.c.e., solfanelly in my shellyholders and lov’d latakia the benuvolent, for my nosethrills with the jealosomines wilting away to their heart’s deelight and the king of saptimber letting down his humely odours for my consternation, dapping my griffeen, burning water in the spearlight, or catching trophies of the king’s royal college of sturgeone by the armful for to bake pike and pie while, O twined me abower in L’Alouette’s Tower, all Adelaide’s naughtingerls, juckjucking benighth me, I’d tonic my twittyfour Dorian blackbudds off my singasongapiccolo to pipe musicall airs on numberous fairyaciodes. I give, a king, to me, she does alone up there, yes see, I double give till the spinney all eclosed asong with them. Isn’t that lovely though? I give to me alone I trouble give! And what sensitive coin I’d be possessed of, at Latouche’s begor I’d sink it sumtotal, every dolly farting, in vestments of subdominal poteen at prime cost and I bait you the whole ounce you half on your backboard that I’m the gogetter that’d make it pay like cash registers. And, what with one man’s fish and a dozen men’s poissons, I’d come out with my magic fluke in close time, fair, free and frolicky, zooming tophole on the mart as a factor. And I tell you the Bective’s wouldn’t hold me. By the unsleeping Solman Annadromus, ye god of little pescies, nothing would stop me for mony makes multimony like the brogues and the kishes. Not the Ulster Rifles and the Cork Milice and the Dublin fusees and Connacht Rangers ensembled. I’d axe the channon and leip a liffey and drink annyblack water that rann onme way. Yip! How’s thats for scats, mine shatz, for a lovebird? To funk is only peternatural its daring feers divine. Bebold! Like Varian’s sweeping all behind me. And before you knew where you weren’t I stake my ignitial’s davy, cash-and-cash can-again, I’d be staggering humanity and loyally rolling you over, my sponse, in my tons of red clover, fiehigh and fiehigher and fiehighest of all. I’d spoil you altogether. Not a spot of my hide but you’d love to seek and scanagain. There’d be no standing me, I tell you. And as gameboy as my pagan name K.C. is what it is I’d never say let fly till I’d plant you, my Gizzygay, on the electric ottoman in the lap of lechery simpringly stitchles with admiracion among the most uxuriously furnished compartments with sybarate cham bers just as I’d run my shoestring into near a million of them as a firstclass dealer and everything. Only for one thing that I’d be awful anxious, you understand, about shoepisser pluvious and in assideration of the terrible luftsucks playing around in the coold amstophere till the borting that would perish the Dane and his chapter of accidents to be atramental to the better half of my alltoolyrical health, not considering my capsflap, an that’s the truth now out of the cackling bag for truly sure for another thing I never could tell the leest falsehood that would truthfully give sotisfiction. I’m not talking apple sauce eithou. Or up in my hat. I earnst. Schue!

Sissibis dearest, as I was reading to myself not very long ago in Tennis Flonnels Mac Courther, his correspondance, besated upon my tripos, and just thinking like thauthor how long I’d like myself to be continued at Hothelizod peeking into the focus and pecking at thumbnail reveries, ’tis tramsported with grief I am this night sublime as you may see by my size and my brow that’s all forehead to go forth, frank and hoppy from our nostorey house upon this benedictine errand but it is historically the most glorious mission secret or profund, through all the annals of our, — as you so often term her — efferfreshpainted livy in beautific repose upon the silence of the dead from pharoph the nextfirst down to ramescheckles the last bust thing. The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and onappalled by the recoursers we feel all serene, never you fret, as regards our dutyful cask. Full of my breadth from pride I am for ’tis a grand thing (superb!) to be going to meet a king, not an everynight king, nenni, by gannies, but the overking of Hither on Thither Erin himself, pardee, I’m saying. Before there was man at all on Ireland there was a lord at Lucan. We only wish everyone was as sure of anything in this watery world as we are of everything in the newlywet fellow that’s bound to follow. I’ll lay you a guinea for a hayseed now. Tell mother that. Twill amuse her.

Well, to the figends of Annanmeses with the wholeabolish business! The fine ice so temperate of our, alas those times are not so far off as you might wish to be congealed. So now, I’ll ask of you, let ye create no scenes in my poor primmafore’s wake. I don’t want yous to be billowfighting your biddy moriarty duels over me till you spit stout, you understand, after soused mackerel nor you ugly lemoncholic gobs round the hobs in a sewing circle, with the painters in too, curse luck, with your rags up turning breakfarts into lost soupirs and salon thay nor you flabbies on your groaning chairs of a bluemoondag, steamin your damp ossicles, praying Jaun Dyspeptist while Ole Clo goes through the wood with Shep togather touting for Goodboy Sommers and Mistral Blownowse hugs his kindlings when voiceyversey it’s my gala bene fit robbing leaves out of my taletold book. Once upon a drunk and a fairly good drunk it was and the rest of your blatherumskite. Just a plain shays by the fire for absenter Sh the Po and I’ll make ye all an eastern beauty of myself the moment that you name the way. Sussumcordials all round, let ye alloyiss and ominies, while I stray and let ye not be getting grief out of it on my poor headsake even should we forfeit our life. Lo, improving ages wait ye! In the orchard of the bones. Some time very presently now when yon clouds are dissipated after their forty years shower the odds are we shall all be hooked and happy communionistically among the fieldnights eliceam élite of the elect in the land of lost of time. Johannisburg’s a revelation! Deck the diamants that never die. So cut out the lonesome stuff. Drink it up, ladies, please, as smart as you can lower it! Your sole and myopper must hereupon part company. Parting’s fun haugh! Sure, treasures, a letterman does be often thought reading ye between lines that do have no sense at all. I sign myself. With much leg. Inflexibly yours. Ann Posht the Shorn. To be continued. Huck!

Something of a sidesplitting nature must have occurred to westminstrel Jaunathaun for a grand big, blossy, hearty stenorious laugh hopped out of him at the bare thought of how jolly they’d like to be rolling his hoop and all of them truetotypes in missammen massness were just starting to spladher splodher with the jolly magorios, hicky hecky hock, huges huges huges, hughy hughy hughy, O’Jaun, so jokable and so geepy, O, when suddenly (how like a woman!), swifter as mercury he wheels right round starnly on the Rizzies suddenly, with his gimlets blazing rather sternish (how black like thunder!), to see what’s loose. So they stood still and wondered. Till first he sighed (and how ill soufered!) and they nearly cried (the salt of the earth!) and finally he replied:

— There is some-thing more. All I can tell you is this, my sorellies. It’s prayers in layers all the thumping time begor in the suburrs of the heavenly gardens, once we shall have passed through to our snug eternal reward (the scorchhouse). Shunt us! shunt us! shunt us! If you want to be felixed come and be parked. Sacred ease There! The seanad and pobbel queue’s remainder. No petty family squabbles Up There, nor homemade hurricanes in our Cohortyard, no cupahurling nor apuckalips nor no nothing. With the Byrns which is far better and eve for ever your idle be. Iereny allover irelands. Hogmanny di’yegut? Hogmanny di’yesmellygut? And hogmanny di’yesmellyspatterygut? You take Joe Hanny’s tip for it. Postmartem is the goods. With Jollification a good second. Toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow! That’s our crass, hairy and evergrim life! We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends. Here we moult in moy Kain and flop on the seemy side living sure of hardly a doorstep for a stopgap, with Whogoesthere and a live sandbag round the corner. But upmeyant you sprout all your abel and woof your wings dead certain however of neuthing whatever to aye forever while Hyam Hyam’s in the chair. Ah, sure, pleasantries aside, in the tail of the cow what a humpty daum earth looks our miseryme heretoday as compared beside the Hereweareagain Gaieties of the Afterpiece when the Royal Revolver of these real globoes lets regally fire of his mio colpo for the chrisman’s pandemon to give over and the Harlequinade to begin properly SPQueaRking Mark Time’s Finist Joke. Putting Allspace in a Notshall.

Well, home cooking everytime. Mountains good mustard and I’ve eaten a griddle. But I fill twice as stewhard what I felt before when I’m after eating a few natives. I ingoyed your pick of hissing hot luncheon fine, I did, thank awfully, (sublime!) Tenderest bully ever I ate with the boiled protestants (allinoilia allinoilia!) only for your peas again was a taste tooth psalty and return with my best savioury condiments and a penny in the plate for the jemes. For quid we have recipimus, recipe, O lout! And save that, Oliviero, for thy sunny day! Soupmeagre! Couldn’t look at it! But if you’ll buy me yon coat of the vairy furry best I’ll try and pullll it awn mee. It’s in fairly good order and no doubt ’twill sarve to turn. Remove this boardcloth! Next stage, tell, the tabler, for a variety I’ll try crackling a potroast, grilled over birchenrods, with a few bloomancowls in albies. I want to get outside monasticism. Mass and meat mar no man’s journey. Eat a missal lest. All the vitalmines is beginning to sozzle in chewn, fudgem, kates and eaps and naboc and erics and oinnos on kingclud and xoxxoxo and xooxox xxoxoxxoxxx till I’m fustfed like fungstif and very presently from now posthaste it’s off yourll see me ryuoll on my usual rounds again to draw Terminus Lower and Killadown and Letternoosh, Letterspeak, Lettermuck to Littorananima and the roomiest house even in Ireland, if you can understamp that and my next item’s platform it’s how I’ll try and collect my extraprofessional postages owing to me by Thaddens Kellyesque Squire, dr, for nondesirable printed matter. But I know what I’ll do. Great pains off him I’ll take and that’ll be your redletterday calendar, window machree. I’ll knock it out of him! I’ll stump it out of him! I’ll rattattatter it out of him before I’ll quit the doorstep of old Con Connolly’s residence! By the horn of twenty of both of the two Saint Collopys blackmail him I will in arrears or my name’s not penitent Ferdinand! And it’s daily and hourly I’ll nurse him till he pays me fine fee. Ameal.

Well, Here’s looking at ye! If I never leave you biddies till my stave is a bar I’d be tempted rigidly to become a passionate father. Me hunger’s weighed. Hungkung! Me anger’s suaged! Hangkang! Ye can stop as ye are, little lay mothers, and wait in wish and wish in vain till the grame reaper draws nigh, with the sickle of the sickles, as a blessing in disguise. Devil a curly hair I care! If any marauding Clod Dewvale was to hold me up dicksturping me and relieving me of my rights to my onus. yan, tyan, tethera, methera, pimp, I’d let him have my best pair of galloper’s heels in the creamsourer. He will have better manners I’m dished if he won’t Console yourself, drawhure deelish! There’s a refond of eggsized coming to you out of me so mind you do me duty on me! And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly. Oneday truly, twosday newly, till Whensday. Look for me always at my west and I will think to dine. A tear or two in time is all there’s toot. And then in a click of the clock, toot toot, and doff doff we pop with sinnerettes in silkettes lining longroutes for His Diligence Majesty, our longdistance laird that likes creation. To whoosh!

— Meesh, meesh, yes, pet, I understand but listen, drawher nearest, Tizzy intercepted, flushing but flashing from her dove and dart eyes as she tactilifully grapbed her male corrispondee to flusther sweet nunsongs in his quickturned ear I know, benjamin brother, But listen, I want to whisper my whish. Of course, engine dear, I’m ashamed for my life over this lost moment’s gift of memento nosepaper which I’m sorry, my precious, is allathome I with grief can call my own but all the same, listen, Jaunick, accept this witwee’s mite, though a jennyteeny witween piece torn in one place from my hands in second place of a linenhall valentino with my fondest and much left to tutor. X. X. X. X. It was heavily indulgenced for young Fr. Ml., my pettest parriage, priest, and you know who between us by your friend the pope, forty ways in forty nights, look, scene it, ratty. And, listen, now do enhance me, oblige my fiancy and bear it with you morn till life’s e’ en and, of course, when never you make usage of it, listen, please kindly think galways again or again, never forget, of one absent one, not sester Maggy. And this, Joke, a sprig of blue speedwell just a spell of floralora so you’ll mind your veronique. Of course, Jer, I know you know who sends it, mercy, on the face of the waters like that film obote, awfly charmig of course but it doesn’t do her justice, in the magginbottle. Of course, please, too write, won’t you, and, thank you, forward it back by return pigeon’s pneu in case I couldn’t think who it was or any funforall happens I’ll be so curiose to see in the Homesworth breakfast papers so as I’ll know etherways by pity bleu what exquisite buttons gorgiose in case I don’t hope to soon hear from you as I iven now to understand it will be worth my price in money one day so don’t trouble to ans unless sentby special as I am getting his pay and wants for nothing so I can live simply and solely for my wonderful kinkless Flee a girl says it is her colour. So does B and L and as for V! And listen to it! Cheveluir! Bow your boche! Absolutely perfect! I will pack my comb and mirror to praxis oval ohs and artless ahs and it will follow you pulpicly as far as come back under all my eyes like my sapphire chaplets of ringarosary I will say for you to the All michael and solve qui pu while the dovedoves pick my mouthbuds (msch! msch!) with nurse Madge, she’s a fright, poor old dutch in her sleeptalking but you’ll love her for her hessians and sickly black stockies, simply killing, I call her Sosy because she’s sosiety for me but she’s nice considering she breaksin me shoes for me when I’ve arch trouble, and she would kiss my white arms for me so gratefully but apart from that she’s terribly nice really, my sister, round the elbow of Erne street Lower and I’ll be strictly forbidden always and true in my own way and private where I will long long to betrue you along with one who will so betrue you that not once while I betreu him not once will he be betray himself. And, of course, dear professor, you can trust me that though I change thy name though not the letter never while I become engaged with my first horsepower I will give your lovely face of mine away to my second mate, with the twirlers the engineer of the passioflower, (O the wicked untruth! whot a tell! that he has bought me in his wellingtons what you haven’t got!) in one of those pure clean lupstucks of yours thankfully, Arrah of the passkeys no matter what. So don’t keep me now for a good boy you villain, peppering with fear my goodless graceless, or I’ll first murder you but, hvisper, meet me after by next appointment near you know Ships just there beside the Ship at the future poor fool’s circuts of lovemountjoy square to show my disrespects now, let me just you caroline for you, I must really so late. Sweet pig, he’ll be furious! My prince of the courts who’ll beat me to love! And I’ll be there when who knows where with the objects of which I’ll knowor forget. The Dargle shall run dry the sooner I you deny. Whoevery heard of such a thingk? Till the ulmost of all elmoes shall stele our harts asthone! And Mrs. A’Mara, makes it up and befriends with Mrs. O’ Morum! Everyday, precious, while m’m’ry’s leaves are falling deeply on my Jungfraud’s Messongebook I will dream telepath posts dulcets on this isinglass stream (but don’t tell him, or I’ll be the mort of him!) under the libans and the sickamours, the cyprissis and babilonias, where the frondoak rushes to the ask and the yewleaves too kisskiss themselves and ’twill carry on my hearz’waves my still waters reflections in words over Margrate von Hungaria, her Quaidy ways and her Flavin hair to thee, Jack, ahoy, beyond the boysforus. And what’s this I was going to say, dean? O, I understand. Listen here I’ll wait on thee till Thingavalla with beautiful do be careful teacakes, more stuesser flavoured than Vanilla and blackcurrant there’s a cure in, like a born gentleman till you’ll resemble me all the time you’re awhile way, I swear to you, I will, by Candlemas! And listen, joey, my old evernew, when, by the end of your chapter, you citch water on the wagon for me being turned a star I’ll dubeurry my two fesces under Pouts Vanisha Creme, their way for spilling cream, and, accent, umto extend my personnalitey to the latents, I’ll boy me for myself only of expensive rainproof of pinked elephant’s breath grey of the loveliest sheerest, dearest widowshood over airforce blue I am so wild for, my precious once, as the bee loves her skyhighdeed and listen. And never mind me laughing at what’s atever! Always about this hour, I’m sorry, when afterdoon my lickle pussiness I stheal heimlick in my russians from the attraction park with my terriblitall boots calvescatcher Pinchapoppapoff, at my nape, drenched, love, with dripping to affectionate slapmamma but last at night look, after my golden Violents wetting in my upperstairs splendidly welluminated with such lidlylac curtains wallpapered to match the cat and a fireplease keep looking of priceless pearlogs I just want to see will he or are all Michaels like that, I’ll strip straight after devotions before his fondstare (and I mean it too, thy gape to my gazing I’ll bind and makeleash) and poke stiff under my isonbound with my soiedisante chineknees cheeckchubby chambermate for the night’s foreign males and your name of Shane will come forth between my shamefaced whasen with other lipth I nakest open my thight when just woken by his toccatootletoo my first morning. So now, to thalk thildish, thome, theated with Mag at the oilthan we are doing to thay one little player before doing to deed. An a tiss to the tassie for lu and for tu! Coach me how to tumble, Jaime, and listen, Juan, in haste, warn me which to ah ah ah ah. . .

— MEN! Juan responded fullchantedly to her sororal sonority, with his chalished drink now well in hand. Ever gloriously kind! And I truly am eucherised to yous. Also sacré père and maître d’autel. Well, ladies upon gentlermen and toastmaster general, health to song for Erin go Dry! To stir up love’s young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne, dimming douce from her peepair of hideseeks tightsqueezed on my snowybreasted and while my pearlies in their sparkling wisdom are nippling her bubblets I swear (and let you swear!) by the bumper round of my poor old snaggletooth’s solidbowel I ne’er will prove I’m untrue to your liking (theare!) so long as my hole looks. Down.

So gullaby, me poor Isley! But I’m not for forgetting me innerman monophone for I’m leaving my darling proxy behind for your consolering, lost Dave the Dancekerl, a squamous runaway and a dear old man pal of mine too. He will arrive incessantly in the fraction of a crust. He’s the mightiest penumbrella I ever flourished on behond the shadow of a post! Be sure and link him, me O treasauro, as often as you learn provided there’s nothing between you but a plain deal table only don’t encourage him to cry lessontimes over Leperstown. Talk of wolf in a stomach by all that’s verminous! Eccolo me! Isn’t Jaunstown, Ousterrike, the small place after all? I knew I smelt the garlic league! Why, bless me swits, here he its, darling Daye, like the catoninelives just in time as if he fell out of space, all draped in mufti, coming home to mourn mountains from his old continence and not on one foot either or on two feet aether but on quinquisecular cycles after his French evolution and a blindfold passage by the 4.32 with the pork’s pate in his suicide paw and the gulls laughing lime on his natural skunk, blushing like Pat’s pig, begob. He’s not too tom well ashamed to carry out onaglibtograbakelly in his showman’s sinister the testymonicals he gave his twenty annis orf, showing the three white feathers, as a home cured emigrant in Paddyouare far below on our sealevel. Bearer may leave the church, signed, Figura Porca, Lictor Magnaffica. He’s the sneaking likeness of us, faith, me altar’s ego in miniature and every Auxonian aimer’s ace as nasal a Romeo as I am, fur ever cracking quips on himself, that merry, the jeenjakes, he’d soon arise mother’s roses mid bedewing tears under those wild wet lashes onto anny living girl’s laftercheeks. That’s his little flailing. And his unpeppeppediment. He has novel ideas I know and he’s a jarry queer fish betimes, I grant you, and cantanberous, the poisoner of his word, but lice and all and semicoloured stainedglasses, I’m enormously full of that foreigner, I’ll say I am! Got by the one goat, suckled by the same nanna, one twitch, one nature makes us oldworld kin. We’re as thick and thin now as two tubular jawballs. I hate him about his patent henesy blasfh it, but I love him. I love his old portugal’s nose. There’s the nasturtium for ye now that saved manny a poor sinker from water on the grave. Isn’t he after borrowing all before him, touching every distinguished Irishman he could ever distinguish before or behind from a Yourishman for the customary halp of a crown and peace? He is looking aged with his pebbled eyes, and johnnythin too, but I pass no remark. Hope he hasn’t the cholera. Bravo, senior chief! Famose! Sure there’s nobody else in touch anysides to hold a chef’s cankle to the darling at all for sheer dare with that prisonpotstill of spanish breans on him like the knave of trifles! A jollytan fine demented brick and the prince of goodfilips! Dave knows I have the highest of respect of annyone in my oweand smooth way for that intellectual debtor David R. Crozier. Canwyll y Cymry the marmade’s flamme! The most important man! Shervos! Ho, be the holy, snakes, someone has shaved his rough diamond skull for him as clean as Nuntius’ piedish! Thunderweather, khyber schinker escapa sansa pagar. He’s the spatton spit, so he is, with his blackguarded eye, and the goatsbeard in his buttinghole of Shemuel Tulliver, me grandsourd, the old cruxader, when he off with his paudeen! That was to let the crowd of the Flu Flux Fans behind him see me proper. Ah, he’s very thoughtful and sympatrico that way when he’s not absintheminded with his Paris addresse! He is, really. Holdhard till you’ll ear him clicking his bull’s bones! Some toad klakkin! You’re welcome back. Wilkins to red berries in the frost! I’m tired hairing of you. Hat yourself! Give us your dyed hand here, frother, where’s your watch keeper!? I’m better pleased than ten guidneys! Faith, I’m proud of you, french davit! You’ve surpassed yourself! Be introduced to yes! This is me aunt Julia Bride, dying to have you languish to scandal in her bosky old manor. You don’t reckoneyes him? That’s his penals. Shervorum! You haven’t seen her since she stepped into her drawoffs. Come on spinister, do your stuff! Don’t be shoy, husbandmanvir! Weih: what’s on you, wip? Up the shamewaugh! She has plenty of woom in the smallclothes for the bothsforus, nephews push! Hatch yourself well! Enjombyourselves thurily! Embrace her bashfully by almeans at my frank incensive and tell her in your semiological agglutinative yez how Idos be asking after her. Let us be holy and evil and let her be peace on the bough. Sure, she fell in line with our tripertight photos when we were stablelads together like the corks again brothers, hungry and angry, in the Black Watch, or like boyrun to sibster, me and you, shinners true and pinchme our tertius quiddus, that never talked or listened. Always raving how we had the wrinkles of a snailcharmer, and the slits and sniffers of a fellow that fell foul of the county de Loona and the meattrap of the first vegetarian. Take her out of poor tuppeny luck before she goes off in pure treple licquidance. I’d give three shillings a pullet to the canon for the conjugation to shadow you kissing her liberally all over as if she was crucifix. It’s good for her bilabials, you under stand. There’s nothing like the mistletouch for finding a queen’s earring false. Lets have a fuchu all round! And as he’s boiling with water I’ll light your pyre. Turn about, skeezy Sammy, out of metaphor till we feel are you still tropeful of popetry. If you doubt of his love of darearing his feelings you’ll very much hurt for mishmash mastufractured on europe you can read off the tail of his. Rip ripper rippest and jac jac jac. Dwell on that my hero and lander! That’s the side that appeals to em, the wring wrong way to wright woman. Shuck her! Let him! What he’s good for. Shuck her more! Let him again! All she wants! Could you wheedle a staveling encore out of your imitationer’s jubalharp, hey, Mr Jinglejoys? Uck! He’s so sedulous to singe always if prumpted. Grunt unto us I pray your foreboden article in our own deas dockandoilish introducing the death of Nelson with coloraturas! Coraio, fra! And I’ll string second to harmanize. My loaf and pottage neaheaheahear Rochelle. With your dumpsey diddely dumpsey die, fiddeley fa. Diavoloh! Or come on and we’ll scrap, rug and mat and then be as chummy as two bashed spuds. Bitrial bay holmgang or betrayal buy jury. Attaboy! Fee gate has Heenan hoity, mind uncle Hare? What, sir? Poss, myster? thou, thou! Taurus periculosus, morbus pedeiculosus. Miserere mei in miseribilibus! There’s uval lavguage for you. Begob, there’s not so much green in his Ireland’s eye! The bark is still there but the molars are gone. The misery billyboots I used to lend him before we split. But I told him make your will be done and go to a general, and I’d pray confessions for him. Areesh! Areesh! Did you note that worrid expressionism on his megalogue? A full octavium below me! And did you hear his browrings rattlemaking when he was preaching to himself? And, whoa! do you twig the schamlooking leaf greeping ghastly down his blousyfrock? Areesh! He won’t. He’s shoy. My old faher’s onkel that was garotted, Caius Cocoa Codinhand, used to chop that tongue of his, japlatin, with my yuonkle’s owlseller Woowoolfe Woodenbear, that went stomebathred, in the Tower of Balbus as brisk, man as I’d scoff up muttan chepps and lobscouse. But it’s all deafman’s duff to me, begob. Sam knows miles bettern me how to work the miracle. And I see by his diarrhio he’s dropping the stammer out of his silenced bladder since I bonded him off more as a friend and as a brother to try and grow a muff and canonise his dead feet down on the river airy and placed the ocean between his and ours, after he was capped out of college for the sin against the past participle and earned the factitation of cutting chapel and being swift B.A.A. Twas the quadra sent him and Trinity too. He’ll prisckly soon hand tune your Erin’s ear for you, p.p. a mimograph at a time, numan bitter with his ancomartins to read the road roman with false steps ad Pernicious from rhearsilvar ormolus to torquinions superbers while I’m far away from wherever thou art serving my tallyhos and tullying my hostilious by going in by the most holy recitatandas ffff for my varsatile exawinations. P? F? In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says, for the end is with woman, flesh-without-word, while the man to be is in a worse case after than before since sheon the supine satisfies the verb to him! Toughtough, tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, an imperfect subjunctive. Paltry, flappent, had serious. Miss Smith onamatterpoetic. Hammisandivis axes colles waxes warmas like sodullas. So pick your stops with fondnes snow. And mind you twine the twos noods of your nicenames. And pull up your furbelovs as farabove as you’re farthingales. Show you shall and won’t he will! His hearing is indoubting just as my seeing is onbelieving. So dactylise him up to blankpoint and let him blink for himself where you speak the best ticklish. Fond namer, let me never see thee blame a kiss for shame a knee!

— Well, I hate to look at alarms but however they put on my watchcraft must now close as I hear from by seeless socks ’tis time to be up and ambling. Tempus fidgets. This shack’s not big enough for me now. And there’s the witch on the heath, sistra! ’Bansheeba peeling hourihaared while her Orcotron is hoaring ho. And whinn muinnuit flittsbit twinn her ttittshe cries tallmidy!’ I’m going. I know I am. I could bet I am. Somewhere I must get far away from Banbashore, wherever I am. So I think I’ll take freeboots’ advise. Psk! I’ll borrow a path to lend me wings quickquack and from Jehusalem’s wall clickclack me courser’s clear to Cheerup street I’ll travel the void world over. It’s Winland for moyne, bickbuck! Geejakevs! I hurt meself nettly that time! Come, my good frogmarchers! We felt the fall but we’ll front the defile. Was not my oltu mutther, Sereth Maritza, a Runningwater? And the bould one that quickened her the seaborne Fingale? Squall aboard for Kew, hop! Farewell awhile to her and thee! The brine’s my bride to be. It’s nunc or nimmer, siskinder! Here goes the enemy! Bennydick hotfoots onimpudent stayers! Sorry! I bless alls to the wished with this panromain apological which Watllwewhistlem sang to the kerrycoys. Break ranks! Fik yew! I’m through. Won. Toe. Adry. You watch my smoke.

After poor Jaun the Boast’s last fireless words of his soapbox speech ending in’sheaven, twentyaid add one with a flirt of wings were pouring to his bysistance but, repulsing all attempts at first hands on, our greatly misunderstood one we perceived to give himself some sort of a hermetic prod or kick to sit up and take notice which acted like magic while the phalanx of daughters of February Filldyke, embushed and climbing, ramblers and weeps voiced approval in their customary manner by dropping kneedeep in tears over their concelebrated meednight sunflower and splattering together joyously the pats of their tappyhands as with a cry of genuine distress they viewed him, the just one, their darling, away.

Eh jourd’weh! Oh jourd’wo! dosiriously it psalmodied. Guesturn’s lothlied answring to-maronite’s wail.

Oasis, cedarous esaltarshoming Leafboughnoon!

Oisis, coolpressus onmountof Sighing!

Oasis, palmost esaltarshoming Gladdays!

Oisis, phantastichal roseway anjerichol!

Oasis, newleavos spaciosing encampness!

Oisis, plantainous dewstuckacqmirage playtennis!

Pipetto, Pipetta has misery unnoticed!

But the strangest thing happened. Backscuttling for the hop off Jaun just then I saw to collect from the gentlest weaner among the weiners, (who by this were in half droopleaflong mourning for the passing of the last post) the familiar yellow label into which he let fall a drop, smothered a curse, choked a guffaw, spat expectoration and blew his own trumpet. And next thing was he gummalicked the stickyback side and stamped the oval badge of belief to his agnelows brow with a genuine dash of irrepressible piety that readily turned his ladylike typmanzelles capsy curvy, (the holy scamp!) with half a glance of Irish frisky from under the shag of his parallel brows. It was then he made as if be but waved instead a handacross thesea as notice to quit while the pacifettes made their armpacts widdershins (Frida! Freda! Paza! Paisy! Irine! Areinette! Bridomay! Bentamai! Sososopky! Bebebekka! Bababadkessy! Ghugugoothoyou! Dama! Damadomina! Takiya! Tokaya! Scioccara! Siuccherillina! Peocchia! Peucchia! Ho Mi Hoping! Ha Me Happinice! Mirra! Myrha! Solyma! Salemita! Sainta! Sianta! O Peace!) but in selfrighting the balance of his corporeity to reexchange widerembrace with the pillarbosom of the Dizzier he loved prettier, between estellos and venoussas, bad luck to the lie but when next to nobody expected, their star and gartergazer, he toppled a lipple on to the off and, making a brandnew start for himself by blessing hes sthers with the sign of the southern cross, his bungaloid borsaline with the hedgy-green bound blew off in a loveblast and Jawjon Redhead, bucketing after meccamaniac (the headless shall have legs!) kingscouriered round with an easy rush by the bridge beyond Ladycastle (and he narrowly missed fouling her buttress for her but for he acqueducked) and then away with him at the double, the hulk of a garron, pelting after the road, on Shanks’s mare let off like a wind hound loose (the bouchal! you’d think it was that moment they gave him the jambos!) with a posse of tossing hankerwaves to his windward like seraph’s summonses and a tempest of good things in packetshape teeming from all accounts into the funnel of his shrimpnet along the highroad of the nation, Traitor’s Trot, following which he was quickly lost to sight through the statuemen though without a doubt he was all the more on that same head to memory dear while Sickerson. la garde auxiliaire she murmured full of woe: Where maggot Harvey kneeled till bags? Ate Andrew coos hogdam farvel!

Wethen, may the good people now speed you, rural Haun, export stout fellow that you are, ay, and heart in hand of Shamrogueshire! May your bawny hair grow rarer and fairer, our own only wide-headed boy! Rest your voice! Feed your mind! Mint your peas! Coax your qyous! Come to disdoon blarney and walk our groves so charming and see again the sweet rockelose where first you hymned O Ciesa Mea! and touch the light theorbo. Good by nature and natural by design, had you but been spared to us. Hauneen lad, but sure where’s the use my talking quicker when I know you’ll hear me all astray? My long farewell I send to you, fair dream of sport and game and always something new. Gone is Haun! My grief, my ruin! Our Joss-el-Jovan! Our Chris-na-Murty! Tis’well you’ll be looked after from last to first as yon beam of light we follow receding on your photophoric pilgrimage to your antipodes in the past, you who so often consigned your distributory tidings of great joy into our nevertoolatetolove box, mansuetudinous manipulator, victimisedly victorihoarse, dearest Haun of all, you of the boots, true as adie, stepwalker, pennyatimer, lampaddyfair, postanulengro, our rommanychiel. Thy now paling light lucerne we ne’er may see again. But could it speak how nicely would it splutter to the four cantons praises be to thee! For you had — may I dare to say it? — the nucleus of a glow of a zeal of soul of service such as rarely if ever have I met with single men. There are a dozen of folks still unclaimed by the death angel in this country of ours today humble indivisibles in this grand continuum, overlorded by fate and interlarded with accidence who while there are hours and days will fervently pray to the spirit above that they may never depart this earth of theirs till in his long run from that place where the day begins, on that day that belongs to joyful Ireland, after decades of longsuffering and decennia of brief glory to mind us of what was when and to matter us of the withering of our ways, their Janyouare Fibyouare wins true from Sylvester (only Walker himself is like Waltzer, whimsicalissimo they go murmurand) comes marching ahome on the summer crust of the flagway. Life it is true will be a bank without you, to nomore cares from nomad knows, a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark, rived by darby’s chilldays embers, spatched fun Juhn that dandyforth, from the night we are and feel and fade with to the yesterselves we tread to turnupon.

But, boy, you did your strong nine furlong mile in slick and slapstick record time and a farfetched deed it was in troth, champion docile with your high bouncing gait of going, and your feat of passage will be contested with you and through you, for centuries to come. Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished! Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain.

 ® 

Continuation of a Work in Progress

transition N°15, February 1929
[chapter III.3 from Finnegans Wake]

Lowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the hillock lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshape, brief wallet to his side, and arm loose, by his staff of citron briar, tradition stick-pass—on. Most distressfully (but, my dear, how successfully!) to wail he did, his locks of a Lucan tinge, quickrich ripely rippling, unfilleted, those lashbetasselled lids on the verge of closing time, whiles ouze of his sidewiseopen mouth the breath of him, evenso languishing as the princeliest treble treacle or lichee chewchow purse could buy. Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead! (phew!) which earpiercing dulcitude! As were you suppose to go and push with your bluntblank pin in hand upinto his fleshasplush cushionettes of some chubby boybold love of an angel. Hwoah!

When as the buzzer brings the light brigade, keeping the home fires burning, so on the churring call themselves came at him, three kings of three suits and a crowner, from all their cardinal parts, along the amber way where Brosna’s furzy. To lift them they did, senators four, by the first quaint skreek of the gloaming and they hopped it up the mountainy molehill, traversing climes of old times gone by of the days not worth remembering; inventing some excuse thems, any sort, having a sevenply sweat of night blues moist upon them-feefee! phopho!! foorchtha!!! aggala!!!! jeeshee!!!!! paloola!!!!!! ooridiminy!!!!!!! Afeared themselves were to wonder at the class of a crossroads puzzler he would likely be, length by breadth nonplussing his thickness, ells upon ells of him, making so many square yards of him, one half of him in Conn’s half but the whole of him nevertheless in Owenmore’s five quarters. There would he lay till they would him descry spancelled down upon blossomy bed, at one foule stretch, amongst the daffydowndillies, the flowers of narcosis fourfettering his footlights, a halohedge of wild spuds hovering over him, epicures waltzing with gardenfillers, puritan shoots advancing to Aran chiefs. Phopho!! The meteor pulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel, Aggala!!!! His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel! Paloola!!!!!! And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members! Ooridiminy!!!!!!! His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt!

Those four claymen clomb together to hold their sworn starchamber quiry on him. Up to the esker ridge it was, Mullinger parish to a mead that was not far, the son’s rest. First klettered Shanator Gregory seeking spoor through the deep timefield, Shanator Lyons tailing the wavy line of his partition footsteps (something in his blisters was telling him all along how he had been in that place one time), then his Recordership Dr Shunadure Tarpey, caperchasing after honourable sleep, hot on to the aniseed and, up out of his prompt corner, old Shunny Mac, Mac Dougal the hiker, in the rere of them on the run to make a quorum. Roping their ass he was, their skygrey globe-trotter, by way of an afterthought and such legs on him they were that much oneven it was tumbling he was by four lengths, the big ass, to hear with his unaided ears the harp in the air, the bugle dianablowing, wild as wild, the mockingbird whose word is misfortune, so ’tis said, the bulbul down the wind.

The proto was traipsing through the tangle then, Mathew Walker, and his station was a few perch to the weatherside of the knoll Usnach and it was from no other place unless there how and ever that he proxtended aloof upon the ether Mesmer’s Manuum, the hand making silence. The buckos beyond on the lea, then stopped wheresoever they found their standings and that way they set ward about him, upholding their broadawake prober’s hats on their firrum heads. And a crack quatyouare of stenoggers they made of themselves, solons and psychomorers, all told, with their hurts and daimons, spites and clops, not even to the seclusion of their beast by them that was the odd trick of the pack, trump and no friend of carrots. And what do you think who should be laying there above all other persons forenenst them only Yawn! All of asprawl he was laying too amengst the poppies and, I can tell you something more than that, drear writer, he was profoundly asleep. And it was far more similar to a satrap he lay there with unctuous beauty all surrounded or for whatall I know like Lord Lumen; coaching his preferred constellations in faith and doctrine for old Matt Gregory ’tis he had the starmenagerie, Marcus Lyons and Lucas Metcalfe Tarpey and the mack that never forgave the ass that lurked behind him, Jonny na Hossaleen.

More than their good share of their five senses ensorcelled you would say themselves were, fuming censor, the way they could not rightly tell their heels from their stools as they cooched down a mamalujo by his cubical crib to, play tops or kites or hoops or marblies, curchycurchy gawking on him, for the issuance of his pnum and softnoising one of them to another one, the boguaqueesthers. And it is what they began to say to him then, the masters, what way was he.

— He’s giving, the wee bairn. Yun has lived.

— Yerra, why dat, my leader?

— Wisha, is he boosed or what, alannah?

— Or his wind’s from the wrong cut, says Ned of the Hill.

— Lesten!

— Why so and speak up, do you hear me, you sir?

— Or he’s rehearsing somewan’s funeral.

— Whisht outathat! Hubba’s up!

And as they were spreading abroad on their octopuds their drifter nets, the chromous, gleamy seiners’ nets and no lie, there was word of assonance being softspoken among those quartermasters.

— Get busy, kid!

— Chirpy, come now!

— The present hospices is a good time.

— I’ll take on that chap.

for it was in the back of their mind’s ear, temptive lissomer, how they would be spreading in quadriliberal their azurespotted fine attractable net from Matt Senior to the thurrible mystagogue after him and from thence to the neighbour and that way to the puisny donkeyman and his crucifer’s cauda. And in their minds years backslibris so it was, slipping beauty, how they would be meshing that way when he rose to it the quivers of scaly silver and their clutches of chromes of the highly lucid spanishing gold whilst, as hour gave way to mazing hour, with Yawn himself keeping time with his thripthongue to ope his blurbeous lips he would a let out classy the way myrrh of the moor and molten moonmist would be melding mellifond indo his mouth.

— Y!

— Before You!

— Friends first if yu don’t mind. Name yur historical grouns.

— This same prehistoric barrow ’tis, the orangery.

— I see. Very good now. It is in your orangery, I take it, you have your letters. Can you hear here me, you Sir?

— Throsends, For my darling. Typette!

— So long aforetime? Can you hear better?

— Millions. For godsends. For my darling dearling one.

— Now, to come nearer zone; I would like to raise my deuterous point audibly touching this. There is this maggers. I am told by our interpreter Hanner Esellus that there are fully six hundred and six ragwords in your malherbal Magis landeguage in which wald wand rimes alpman and there is resin in all roots for monarch but yav hace not one pronouncable teerm that blows in all the vallums of tartallaght to signify majestate even provisionally nor no rheda rhoda or torpentine path or hallucinian via nor aurellian gape nor sunkin rut nor grossgrown trek nor crimeslaved cruxway and no moorhens cry or mooner’s plankgang there to lead us to hopenhaven. Is such the unde derivatur casematter messio! Frankly, Magis megis enerretur mynus hoc intelligow.

— How? C’est mal prononsable, tartagliano, perfrances. Vous n’avez pas d’o dans votre boche provenciale, mousoo. Je m’incline mais Moy jay trouvay la clee dang les champs. Hay sham nap poddy velour, come on!

— Hep there! bommong, sa na pa de valure? Whu’s teit dans yur jambs? Whur’s that inclining and talkin about the messiah so cloover? A true’s to your trefling! Whure yu!

— Trinathan partnick dieudonnay. Have you seen her? Typette, my tactile o!

— Are you in your fatherick, lonely one?

— The same. Three persons. Have you seen my darling only one? I am sohohold!

— What are yu shevering about ultramontane, like a houn? Is there cold on ye, doraphobian? Or do yu want yur primafairy schoolmam?

— The woods of fogloot! O mis padredges!

— Whisht awhile! I know that place better than anyone. Sure I used to be always overthere on the fourth day at my grandmother’s place in Tear-nan-Ogre with the long dog coursing the marches. Tortoiseshell for a guineagould! Burb! Burb! Burb! Follow me up Observer! That’s the place for the oysters Puldudy County Gallwey. I never knew how rich I was like another story in the Zoedone of the Zephyros strolling and strolling, carrying my dragoman, Meads Marvel, thass withumpronouceable tail, along the shore. Do you know my cousin, Mr. Jasper Dougal that keeps the Anchor on the Mountain, Jasper of the Tuns, Pat Whateveryournameis?

— The wolves of Fochlut! By Whydoyoucallme? Do not flingamejig to the twolves!

— Turcafiera amd that’s a good wan right enough! Wooluvs no less!

— One moment now, since you invocate austers. I would like to put a question. Tell me now this. You told my larned friend rather previously a moment since about this mound or barrow. Now I suggest to you that ere there was this plagueburrow, as you seem to call it, there was a burialboat. Would you bear me out in that relatively speaking. The Frenchman I say was an orangeboat. He is a boat. You see him. The both how you see is they! Draken af Danemork! What! Spake ab laut!

— Couch cortege ringbarrow dungcairn. Beseek the runes and see the longurn. All maun away when you hear the Ganghorn. Norsker. Her Raven flag was out, the slaver. I trow pon good, jordan’s scaper, good’s barnet and trustyman. Crouch low you pigeons three! Say, call that girl with the tan tress awn! Call Wolfhound! Wolf of the sea. Folchu! Folchu!

— Very good now. That folklore’s straight from the ass his mouth. I will crusade on with the parent ship far away from those green hills a station, Ireton tells me bonofide for keeltappers. now to come to the midnight middy on this levanthine ponenter. From Daneland sailed the oxeyed man now mark well what I say.

— Magnus Spadebeard, korsets krosser. Signed to me with his baling scoop. Laid bare his breastpaps to give suck, to suckle me. Ecce Hagios Chrisman!

— Oh, Jeyses, fluid! Says the poisoned well. Hootchcopper’s enkel!

— Hep! Hello there, Bill of old Bailey! Whu’s he? Whu’s this lad wy’ the pups?

— Hunkalus Childared Easterheld. It’s his lost chance, Emania. Ware him well.

— Hey! Did you dream you were ating your own tripe, acushla, that you tied yourself up that wrynecky fix?

— I see now. Grimbarb and pancercrucer! You took the words out of my mouth. A child’s dread for a dragon vicefather. Hillcloud encompass us! You mean you lived as milky at their lyceum, couard, while you learned, volp volp to howl yourself wolfwise. Dyb! Dyb! Do your best.

— I am dob dob dobbling like old boots, courteous. The cubs are after me, the whole totem pack, for Robinson’s shield.

— Scents and gouspils! Find the fingall harriers! Here howl me wiseacres hat till I gang die of the milkman’s lupus!

— What? Wolfgang? Whoah! Talk very slowe!

— Hail him heathen, heal him holystone!

Courser, Recourser, Changechild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eld as endall earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

— Was this Totem Fulcrum est Ancestor yu hald in Dies Eirae where no spider webbeth or Anno Mundi ere bawds plied in Skiffstrait? Be fair, Chris!

— Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a sunday. Of a monday I shall wake. Ah! May he have now of here fearfilled me! Sinflowed, O! Sinflowed! Fia! Fia! Befurcht christ!

— I have your tristich now it recurs in three times the same differently. (There is such a fui fui story of him) comming nown from the asphalt to the concrete, to this same vulganized hillsir from yours, Mr. Tupling Toun of Morning de Heights with his lavast flow and his rambling undergroands, would he reoccur Ad Horam as old Romeo Rogers in city or county, and your sure ob, or by, with or from an urb, of you know the differenciabus, as brauchbarred in apabhramsa, sierrah! We speak of Gun, the farther. And in the locative. Bap! Bap!

— Ouer Tad, Hellig Babbau, whom certayn orbits assertant re humeplace of Chivitats Ei, Smithwick, Rhonnda, Kaledon, Salem (Mass), Childers, Argos and Duthless. Well I am advised he might in a sense be both nevertheless every at man like myself, suffix it to say, Abrahamsk and Brookbear! By him it was done bapka, by me it was gone into, to whom it will beblive, Mushame, Mushame! I am afraid you could not heave ahore one of your own old stepstones, barnabarnabarn, over a stumbledown wall here in Huddlestown to this classic Noctuber night but itandthey woule binge much as vecious off the dosshouse back of a racerider in his truetoflesh colours either handicapped on her flat or barely repeating himself. That is a tiptip tim oldy faher now the man I go in fear of, Tommy Terracotta and he could be all your and my das, the brodar of the founder of the father of the finder of the pfander of the pfunder of the furst man in Ranelagh, fué! fué!

— Breeze softly. Aures are aureas. Hau’s his naun?

— Me das has or oreils. Piercey, Piercey, Piercey, Piercey!

— White eyeluscious and muddyhorsebroth! Pig Pursy riley! but where do we get off, chiseller?

— Haltstille, Lucas and Dublinn! Vulva! Vulva! Vulva! Vulva!

— Macdougal, Atlantic City, or his onagrass that is chuam and coughan. I would go near identifying you from your stavrotides, Jong of Maho, and the weslarias round your yokohahat. And that O’mulanchonry plucher you have from the worst curst of Ireland, Glwlwd of the Mghtwg Grwpp, is no use to you either, Johnny my donkeyschott. Number four fix up your spreadeagle and pull your weight!

— D’ye ken a young stepschuler psychical chirography, the name of Keven, that was shooing a Guiney gagag Poulepinter that found the dogumen number one, I suggest, an illegible downfumbed by an unelgible?

— I no way need you, stroke oar, nor your quick handles. Your too farfar a cock of the north there, Matty Armagh and your south so.

— South I see. You’re up-in-Leal-Ulster and-I’m-free-Down-in-Easia this is much better. He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta still more learned who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology I reach for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest, twist the penman’s tale posterwise. The gist is the Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas. There is a strong suspicion on counterfeit Kevin and we all rememberye in childhood’s reverye. Tis the bells of scandal that gave tune to grumble over him and someone between me and thee. He would preach to the two turkies and dipdip all the dindians, this master the abbey, and give gold tidings to all that are in the bonze age of anteproresurrectionism to entrust their easter neappearance to Borsaiolini’s house of hatcraft. He is our sent on the firm. Now have you reasonable hesitancy in your mind about him after fourpriest redmass or are you in your post? Tell me andat sans dismay. Leap, pard!

— Fierappel putting years on me! I’ll see you moved farther, blarneying Marcantonio! We were wombful of mischief and initiumwise, everliking a liked, that babe, imprincipially, the Puer, ens innocens of but fifteen primes.

Ya all in your kalblionized so trilustriously at the real school, to be upright as his match, healtheous as is egg, saviour so the salt and good wee broad, did I altermobile him to a flare in hogsfat. Been ike hins kindergardien? »I know not, O cashla, I am sure of, meis enfins, but the first mover knows by whom I came into being as to I was eltered in postulance of my future state to thrice myself in the childhide when I received the habit and was verted and, a palegrim, circumcised my hairs, Oh laud, and removed my clothes, meas minimas culpads. If this ick crouched in humble down, dead thrue in mean scatological past, making so smell of myself to confess in clean of my mansuetude before him and Audeon’s to mine sore with my thrain tropps for meye eyesalt, what I (the person whomin I now am) did not do, how he to say essied and how he was making errand and how he all locutey sunt, why did you my sexth best friend, blabber always you would be so delated to back me to Humphrey and Nephew, old beggelaut for such post in his night office? and then, by Saint Momuluius, you snub around in your moving motion to the other catachumens and say with append of signature quoniam you will celebrand my dirthdags quoniam I am twosides uppish and none meer hyber irish. Well before avtokinatown, forasmuch as many have tooken in hand to, I may as well humbly correct that vespian now in case of temporalities. I’ve my pockets full comeplay of you laycreated cardonals, ap rince, ap Rowler, ap Rancer, ap Rowdey! Improperial! I saved you fore of the Hekkites and you loosed me hind bland Harry to the burghmote of Aud Dub. I teachet you in fair time, my elders, the W.X.Y.Z. and P.Q.R.S. Of legatine powers and you, Ailbey and Ciardeclan, I learn, episcoping me altogether, circumdeditioned me. I brought you from the loups of Lazary and you have remembered my lapsus langways. Watacooshy lot! My ruridecanal caste is a cut above you peregrines. Aye vouchu to rumanescu. See the leabhour of my generations! I’m of the ochlocracy with prestopher Palumbus and Porvus Parrio. Soa koa Kelly Terry per Chelly Derry lepossette. Ho look at my jailbrand Exquovis and sequencias High marked on me fakesimilar in the foreign by Pappagallus and Pumpusmugnus: ahem! Anglicey: Eggs squawfish lean yoe nun feed marecurious. I can self laud nilobstant to my patrician morning coat of arms with my High tripenniferry cresta and caudal mottams: Itch dean: which Gaspey, Otto and Sauer, he renders: echo stay so! And, Mind, praisegad, is the first praisonal Egoname Yod heard boissboissy in Moy Bog’s domesday. Hastan the vista! Or in alleman: Suck at!

— Suck it yourself sugarstick! Misha, Yid think whose was asking to luckat your sore toe or to taste your gaspy, hot and sour! Bo ba bi bo bum! Ichthyan! Hegvat tosser! Gags be plebsed! Are we speachin d’anglas landadge or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch? What about your thruppenny croucher of an old fellow, me boy, through the ages, tell us, eh? What about Brian’s the Vauntand-onlieme, Master Monk, eh, eh, Spira in Me Domino, spear me Doyne! fat prize the bonafide peach umpidgeon-lover, eh, eh, eh, esquire earwugs, escusado of Jenkins’ Area, with his I’ve Ivy under his tangue and the hohallo to his dullaphone, before there was a sound in the world? How big was his boost friend? The swaaber! The twicer! Loud’s curse to him! If you hored him outerly as we harum lubberintly with his drums and bones and hums in drones your innereer’d heerdly heer he.

— Ho ha hi he hung! Me no angly mo, me speakee Yellman’s lingas. Nicey Doc Mistel Lu, please! me no pigey ludiments all same numpa one Topside Tellmastoly fella, me pigey savvy a singasong anothel time Pleasie, Mista Lukie Walkie! Josadam cowbelly maam belongame shepullamealahmalong, begolla, Jackinaboss belongashe; plentymuch boohoomeo.

— Hell’s Confucium and the Elements! Thot’s never the postal cleric! Halt there sob story to your lambdad’s tale! Are you roman cawthrick 432?

— Quadrigue my yoke.

      Triple my tryst.

      Tandem my sire.

— Tantris, hattrick, I feel your thrilljoy Mouths overtspeaking hands understudium. Plunger words what paddle verbed. Mere man’s mime: God has jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first. Now my little psychosinology, poor armer in slingslang. Now I am placing that inital T square upright to your temple a moment. Do you see anything templar?

— I see a blackfrinch pliestrycook . . . who is carrying on his brainpan . . . a cathedral of lovejelly for his . . . Tiens, how he is like somebodies!

— What sound of tistress isoles my ear? I horizont the same and lay it lightly to your lip a little. What do you feel, liplove?

— I feel a fine lady . . . . . . . . . floating on a stillstream of isisglass . . . with gold hair to the bed . . . and white arms to the twinklers . . . . . . O la la!

O, sey but swift and still a vain essaying! I invert the initial of your tripartite and sign it sternly on your breast. What do you hear, breastplate?

— I ahear of a hopper behidin the door slappin his feet in a pool of bran.

— Again am I deliciated by the picaresqueness of your irmages. Now I feel called upon to ask did it ever occur to you, qua you, prior to this, by a stretch of your iberborealic imagination when it’s quicker than this quacking that you might bar accidens be very largely substituted in potential secession from your next life by a complementary character, voices apart. Upjack! I shudder for your thought! Think! The next word depends on your answer.

— I’m trying to, thogged be thenked! I might have. I cannot say. Once or twice when I was in odinburgh with my addlefoes, when I thinkled I wore trying on my garden substisuit, boy’s apert, at my nexword nighboor’s, and maybe more largely nor you quosh yet you, messmate realise. A few times so to shape I chance to be stretching, in the shadow as I thought, the liferight out of myself in my ericulous imaginating. I felt feeling a half Scotch and pottage like roung my middle ageing so that I indicate out to myself and I swear my gots how that I’m not meself at all, no jolly fear, when I realise bimiselves how becomingly I to be going to become.

— O, is that the way with you, you craythur? In the becoming was the weared, wontnat! The voice is the voice of jokeup, I fear. Are you imitation Roma now or Amor now You have all our empathies, eh, Mr. Trickpat, if you don’t mind, that is, answering to my straight question?

— I won’t mind this is, answering to your strict crossqueets whereas it would be as unethical for me now to answer as it would have been nonsensical for you then not to have asked. Same no can, home no will, gangin I am. Gengang is Mine and I will return. Out of my name you call me, Leelander. You knew me once but you won’t know me twice. I am simpliciter arduus, ars of the schoo, Freeday’s child in loving and thieving.

— Let us hear, Art simplicissime!

— Dearly beloved brethren: Bruno and Nola; leymon bogholders and stationary lifepartners off orangey Saint Nessau Street were explaining it avicendas all round each other ere yesterweek out of Ibn Sen and Ipanzussch. When himupon Nola Bruno monopolises his egobruno most unwillingly seses by the mortal powers alionolan equal and opposite brunoipso, ipso, id est. Eternally provoking alio opposite equally as provoked as bruno at being eternally opposed by Nolan. Poor omniboose, singalow singelearum: so is he!

— Bruin goes to noble, aver who is? If is itsen? Or you mean Nolans but Volans, an alibi, do you Mutemalice, suffering unegoistically from the singular but positively enjoying on the plural?

— I mean in australian someplace, mults deeply belubdead; my allaboy brother Negoist Cabler of this city, the skipgod, expulled for looking at churches from behind who is sender of the Hullo Eve Cenograph in prose and worse every Allso’s night. High Brazil Brandan’s Deferred, Noughtnoughtnought nein. Assass. Dublire. Starving today opening tomorrow wire splosh Cabler. Have you forgotten poor Alby Sobrinos, Geoff? Won’t you join me in a small halemerry for wellmet Capeler, united Irishmen for of his was the patriots mistaken. Yet be there some who mourn him and more there be that wait astand. His fuchs up the staires and the ladgers in his haires he ought to win that V.V.C. Fullgrapce for an endupper, half muxy on his whole! Oremus poor fraternibus that he may still remain ours faithfully departed. I want to know with much thanks, here’s ditto. If he lives sameplace in austrasia or anywhere on his hooshmoney, safe and damned or has hopped it or who can throw any lime on the subject, my fond fosther, E. Obiit Nolan, N.S.W., off the Venerable Jerrybuilt, not belonging to these parts, who I remember ham to me, when we were like bro and sis over our castor and porridge, with his roamin I suppose a teetotum obstainer. I am no scholar but I loved that man with the moonshane in his profile, my shemblable! My freer. I call you my half brother because you in your soberer moments remind me deeply of my natural saywhen brothel in feed, hop and jollity, S. H. Devitt, that benighted irismaimed, who is tearly belaboured by Sydney and Alibany.

— Whoewaxed he so anquished? Was he vector victored of victim vexed?

— Way way for his wehicul! A parambolator ram into his bagsmall when he was reading alawd, with two ecolites and he’s been failing of that kink in his arts over sense.

— Madonagh and Chiel! But who is the Nolan as appearant nominally?

— Mr. Nolan is pronuminally Mr. Gottgab.

— I get it. You reeker, he stands pat for you before a direct object in the feminine. I see. By maiden sname. Now, I am earnestly asking you, will just you search through your gabgut memoirs for all of two minutes for this impersonating pronolan. Would it be in twofold truth an untaken mispatriate, too fullfully true and rereally a doblinganger much about your own medium with a sandy whiskers?

— Treble Stauter of Holy Baggot Street formerly Swordmeat, who I surpassed him lately for four and six bringing home the Christmas as heavy as music, hand to eyes on the peer for Noel’s Arch, in blessed foster’s place is doing the dirty on me with his tantrums and all these godforgiven kilowatts I’d be better off without. She’s write to him she’s levt by me, Jenny Rediviva! Toot! Detter for you, Mr. Nobru. Toot toot! Better for you, Mr. Anol! This is the way we. Of a Redtettetterday morning.

— When your contraman is looking for righting that is not a good sign? Not?

— I speak truly, it’s not.

— Tugbag is Baggut’s, a luckchange, I see. We can cop that with our straat that is called corkscrewed. It would be the finest boulevard billy for a mile in every direction from Lismore to Cape Brendan, Patrick’s if they took the bint out of the mittle of it. You told of a tryst too, two a tutu. I wonder now without releasing seeklets of the alcove, turturs or raabraabs have I heard mention of whose name anywhere? Mallowlane or Demaasch?

— Marak! Marak! Marak!

— He drapped has draraks an Mansianhase parak.

And he had ta barraw the watarcrass

Shartclaths aff the arkbashap af Yarak!

— O Tara’s thrush, the sharepusher! And he said he was only taking the grass temperature for green Thurdsday. Who you know the musselman, his musclemum and mistlemam? Maomi, Mamie, My Mo Mum! He loves a drary lane. Feel Phylliscitations to daff Mr. Hairwigger who has just hadded twinned little curls! He was resting between horrockses’, sheets, wailing for white warfare, and unbiassed by the embarrassment of disposal but, the first woking day by Thunder, he put on his recriution trousers and riding apron in Baltic Bygrad, the old soggy, was when the bold bhuoys of Iran wouldn’t join up.

— How voice you that, nice Sandy man? Not large goodman is he, Sandy nice. Ask him this one minute upthrow his burly ear womit he dropped his Bass’s to P. flat. And for that he was allaughed? And then baited? The whole gammat?

— Loonacied! Marterdyed!! Madwakemiherculossed!!! Judascessed!!!! Pairaskivvymenassed!!!!! Luredogged!!!!!! And, needatellye, faulscrescendied!!!!!!!

— Dias domnas! Dolled to dolthood? And Annie Delittle, his daintree diva, singing him rusish through the bars?

— Well, I beg to traverse same above statement as my dodear devere revered mainhirr was confined to guardroom, I hindustand, by my pint of his Filthered pilsens bottle, Which I was bringing up my quee in my sedown chair with my mudfacepacket to our aural surgeon, Afamado Doctor Achmed Borumborad, of a 1001 Umbrilla Street, Alleypulley to see what was my watergood, my mesical wasserguss for repairs done by bollworm in the rere of pilch knickers, seven yerds to his pole on perch, property of my deeply forfear revebereared who is costing us mostfortunes when he was sitting in dry dryfilthyheat to his trinidads pinslers at their orpentings entailing a laxative tendency especially with him being forbidden fruit and Certified, by his sexular clergy to have emotional volvular with a basketful of priesters crossing the singorgeous to aroint him and thereinafter liable to succumb when served with letters of below the belch if my rupee repure riputed husbandship took a brief one in his shirtsails out of the alleged given mineral telling me see his Sunday feactures of a welcomed aperrytiff he never battered one eagle’s before paying me his duty to my nil ensemble in his lazychair but he hidded up my hemifaces in all my mayarannies and he locked plum into my mirrymouth like the end of time with the so light’s hope on his ruddycheeks and rawjaws and, my charmer, whom I dipped my hand in he simply showed me his propendiculous loadpoker, Seaserpents hisses sissastones, which was as then is produced in his mansway by this wisest of the wise with the remere remind remure remark: Lithia as this is for Sneak.

— Fantasy! funtasy! on fantasy amnaes fintasies! and there is nihil nuder under the clothing moon. The massstab whereby Ephialtes has exceeded is the measure by which our Outis cuts his thruth.

— What a surprise, dear Mr. Preacher, I to hear from your strawnummical modesty!

— Ophiuchus being visible above thorizon, muliercula occluded by Saturn’s ring system the pisciolinnies Nova Ardonis and Prisca Parthenopea, are a bonnies feature in the northern sky, Ers, Mores and Merkery are surgents below the rim of the Zenith Part while Arctura, Anatolia, Hesper and Mesembria weep in their mansions over Noth, Haste, Soot and Waste.

— Holy snakes, chase me charley, Eva’s got barley under her fluencies. The Ural Mount he’s on the move and he’ll quivvy her with his strombolo. Creeping through the bul’ srusshius before the Emfang de Maurya’s class, in Bill Shasser’s Shotshrift writing academy camouflaged as a blancmange and maple syrop! Obeisance so their sitinins is the follicity of this Orp. The treadmill pebbledropper haha halfahead overground and she’d only chitschats in her spanking bee bonetry, Allapolloosa! Up the slanger! Three cheers and a heva heva for the name Dan Magraw!

— He will kitssle me on melbaw. I would misdemean to rebuke to the libels of snots the from the fleshmarket. Two overthirties. She’s askapot at Nile Lodge and she’s citchincarry at the left Mrs. Hamazum’s. Will you warn your old habasund, barking at baggermen his chokefull chewing his chain? Responsif you plais. The said sully, a barracker, the black hand, who is Magrath’s thug, and smells cheaply of Power’s spirits, like a deepsea dibbler and he is not fit enough to throw guts down to a bear. If they cut his nose on the stitcher they had their siven good reasons. Here’s to the length of my snuff and trout stocking orange fin with a mosaic of dispensations and a froren black patata, from my church milliner. When Lynch Brother friends and Company is prepared to stretch him sacred by the starlight. Inasmuch as I am delightful to be able to state that a handsome sovereign was freely pledged in their pennis in the sluts maschine alonging wath a cherrywickerkishabrack under Shadow La Rose to both lady performers of display unquestionable Elsebett and Marryetta Gunning, by that noblesse of leechers at his Saxontannery with motto O’Neill saw queen Molly’s pants and much admired engraving meaning complete manly parts during alleged recent act of our chief mergey margey magistrades five itches above the kneecap as required by statues. If you won’t release me stop to please me up the leg of me. Now you see! Respect. Your wife. Amn. Anm. Amm. Ann.

— Sure, that old humbugger was boycotted and girlcutted in debt and doom, on hill and haven, as I’m given now to understand, illscribed in all the gratuitouses and conspued in the takeyourhandaways. Bumbty, Tumbty Sot on a Wall Mute art for the Million. There wasn’t an Archimandrite of Dane’s Island and the townlands nor a minx from the Isle of Woman nor a one of the four cantins nor any on the whole wheel of his ecunemical conciliabulum nor nogent ingen meid on allad the hold scarface of the jorth would come next or nigh him or his allgas bumgalowre Auxilium Meum Solo A Domine, (Amsad), for rime or rota after that.

— Or, but, now, and, ariring out of her mirgery, margery, and to change that subjunct for once in a while and darting back to stuff, that fluctuous neck merchamtur, bloodfadder and milkmudder, since then our too many of her Abha na Lifé and getting on to dadaddy again as them we’re ne’er free of, was he in tea e’er he went on the bier or didn’t he ontime do something seemly heavy in sugar. He sent out Christy Columb and he came back with a jailbird’s unbespokables in his beak and then he sent out Le Caron Crow and the peacies are still looking for him. Speak to the right! Rotacist ca canny! If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at quinnigan’s quake!

— Arra irrara hirrara man, weren’t they arriving in clansdestinies for the Oructions of Ad Regias Agni Dapes, fogabawlers in all their centuries, after the crack and the lean years scalpjaggers and houthhunters, like the messicals of the great god a scarlet trainful, the Twoedged Petrard, totalling leggats and prelaps in their aggregate ages two and thirty plus undecimmed centries of them with insiders, extraomnes and tuttifrutties allcunct, from Rathgar, Rathangan, Rountown and Rush, from America Avenue and Asia Place and the Affrian Way and Europa Parade and besogar the wallies of Noo Soch Wilds and from Vico, Mespil Rock and Sorrento, for the lure of his weal and the fear of his oppidumic, to his salon de espera in the keel of his kraal like lodes of ores flocking fast to Mount Maximagnetic afeerd he was a gunner but affaird to stay away, Merrionites, Dumstdumbdrummers Luccanicans Ashtoumers, Batterysby, Parkes and Krumlin boyards, Phillipsburgs, Cabraists and Finglossies, Ballymunites Raheniacs and the bettlers of Clontarf, for to contemplate in manifest and pay their firstrate duties before the both of him twelve stone a side with their Thieve le Roué! and their Shvr yr Thrst! and their Uisgue ad Inferos! and their Usque ad Ebbraios! at and in the licensed boosiness primises of his delhightful bazar and reunited magazine hall, by the magazine wall, Hosty’s and Co, Exports, for his five hundredth and sixtysixth borthday the grand old Magennis Mor, Persee and Rahli taker of the tributes, there Rinseky Poppakork and Piowtor the Grape holding Dunker’s durbar boot kings and indiarubber umpires and shawhs from paisley and muftis in muslim and sultana reiseines and Jordan almonders and a row of jam sahibs and a odd principeza in her pettedcoat and the queen of knight’s sclubs and the claddagh ringleaders and the two salaames and the Halfa Ham and the Hanzas Khan with two fat Maharashers and the German selver geyser and he polished up protemptible, tintanambulating to himsilf so silfrich, and there was J. B. Dunlop, the best tyrent of ourish times and a swanks of French wine stuarts and Tudor keepsakes and the Cesarevitch for the current counter Leodegarius Sant Legerleger riding lapsaddlelonglegs up the oakses staircase on muleback like Amaxodias Isteroprotos, hindquarters to the fore and kick to the lift, and he handygrabbed on to his trulley natural anthem:

Horsibus, keep your tailyup, and as much as the halle of the vacant fhroneroom, Oldloafs Buttery, could safely accomadate of the houses of Orange and Betters, M.P. permeated by Druids D.P. Brehons, B.P. and Flawhoolags, and Agiapommenites, A.P. and Antepummelites, P.P. and Ulster Kong and Munster’s Herald with Athclee Ensigning and Athlone Poursuivant and his Imperial Catchering, his fain awan, and his gemmynosed sanctsons in epheud and ordilawn and his diamondskulled granddaucher, Adamantaya, Liubokovskva, all murdering Irish amok and amak out of their boom companions in paunchjab and dogril and pammel and gougerotty after plenty of his fresh stout and his good balls of malt, socializing and communicanting for to nobble or salvage their herobit of him, the poohpooher old bossaloose, with his arthurious, clayroses Dodderick Ogonoch Wrack busted to the wurld at large on the table round with the floodlight switched back, as true as the Vernons have Brian’s sword and a dozen and one tilly round in ringcampf, lying high as he lay in all dimensions in court dress and ludmers chain with a Hogo fluorescent round him like an italian warehouse, erica’s clustered on his hayir, the spectrem of his prisent mocking the candiedights of his dadtid, bagpuddingpodded to the deafspot, with his buttend up, expositoed for sale after referee’s inspection, bulgy and blowrious, bunged to ignorious, healed cured and embalsemate, most highly astounded, as it turned up at thus being reduced to nothing.

— And all his morties calisenic, tripping a trepas, neniatwantyng Mulo Mulelo! Homo Humilo! Dauncy a deady O! Dood dood dood! O Bawse! O Bawse! O Muerther! O Mord! Mahmato! Moutmaro! O Smirtsch! O Smertz! Wo Hillill! Wo Hallall! Thou Thuoni! Thou Thaunaton! Umartir! Udamnor! Tschitt! Mergue! Eulumu! Huam Khuam! Malawinga! Malawunga! Ser Oh Ser! See ah See! Hamovs! Hemoves! Mamor! — Rockquiem eternuel give donal aye in dolmeny! Bad luck’s perpepperpot loosen his eyis! (Psich!)

— God save you king! Muster of the Hidden Life!

— God serf yous kingly! And, your saouls to the dhaoul, do ye. Finnk. Fime. Fudd?

— D’yu mean to sett there where y’are now, wi’that bizar tongue in yur tolkshap, and your hindies and shindies, like a muck in a market, Sorley boy, repeating yurself, and tell me that?

— I mean to sit here on this altknoll where you are now, Surly guy, replete in myself as long as I live in my homespins like a sleepingtop with all that’s buried ofsins insince insensed insidesofme. If I can’t upset this pound of pressed ollaves I can sit up zounds of sounds upon him.

— Oliver! He may be an earthpresence. Was that a groan or did I hear the Dingle bagpipes Wasting war and? Watch!

— Tris tris a ni ma mea! Prisoner of Love! Bleating. Hart! Lowlaid Herd! Aubain Hand! Wonted Foot! Usques! Usque! Usque! Lignum in . . .

— Is the world moving mound or what babel is this, tell us?

— Whoishe whoishe whoishe whoishe linking in? Whoishe whoishe whoishe?

— Lay yer lug till the groun man. They’re playing thimbles and bodkins. Clan of the Gael! Hop! Whu’s within?

— Dovegall and finshark, they are Ring to the rescune!

Zinzin. Zinzin.

Crum abu! Cromwell to victory.

We’ll gore them and gash them and gun them and gloat on them.

Zinzin.

— O, widows and orphans, it’s the yeomen! Redshanks for ever! Up Lancs!

— The cry of the roedeer it is! The white hind. Their slots, linklink, the hound hunthorning! Send us and peace! Title! Title!

— Christ in our irish times! Christ on the airs independence! Christ hold the freedman’s Chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!

— Slog and slaughter! Rape the daughter! Choke the pope!

— Aure! Cloudy father! Unsure! Nongood!

— Zinzin.

— Sold! I am sold! Brinabride! My ersther! My sidster! Brinabride, Goodbye! Brinabride! I sold!

— Pipette dear! Us! Us! Me! Me!

— Fort! Fort! Bayroyt! March!

— Me! I’m true. True! Isolde. Pipette. My precious!

— Zinzin.

— Brinabride, Get my price! Brinabride!

— My price, my precious?

— Zin.

— Brinabride, My price! When you sell get my price!

— Zin.

Pipette! Pipette, my priceless one!

O! Mother of my tears! Believe for me’. Fold Thy son!

Zinzin. Zinzin.

— Now we’re gettin it. Hello!

— Zinzin.

— Hello! Tittit! Tell your title?

Abride!

— Hellohello! Ballymacarett! Am I thru’ Iss? miss?

True?

— Tit! What is the ti . . .?

SILENCE.

— Now, just permit me a moment. Clear the line, Priority call! Sybil! Better that or this? Sybil Head this end! Better that way? Yes. Very good now. Do you remember on a particular lukesummer night following a crying fair day? Moisten your lips and begin again. Better?

— Well.

— There were fires on every bald hill in holy Ireland that night. Better so?

— You may say they were, Son of a cove!

— Were they bonfires? That clear?

— No other name would at all befit them unless that. Bonafieries! With their blue beards streaming to the heavens.

— Was it a high white night now?

— Whitest night mortal ever saw.

— Lewd’s Carol! Was there rain by any chance, mistandew?

— Plenty.

— There fell some fall of littlewinter snow, holy-as-ivory, I Gather, Jesse?

— The nicest at all. In hilly-and-even Zimalayars.

— Did it not blow some gales, westnass or ostscent, rather strongly to less, allin humours out of turn jusse as they rose and sprungen?

— Out of all jokes it did. Lieto Galumphantes!

— Do you happen to recollect whether Muna, that highlucky nackt, was shining at all?

— Sure she was, my darling.

— Quando? Quonda? Go datey!

— Latearly! Latearly! Latearly! Latearly!

— That was latterlig certainly. And was there frostwork about and thick weather and hice, soon calid, soon frozen, cold on warm but moistly dry, and a boats haped blanket of Bruma airsighs and hellstohns and flammballs and vodashouts and everything?

— There was, so plays your ahrtides. Absolutely boiled. Obsoletely cowled. Julie and Lulie at their parkiest.

— And the firmness of the formous of the famous of the fumous of the first fog in Maidanvale?

— Catchecatche and couchamed!

— One expects that kind of rimey feeling in the sire season?

— One certainly does. Desire, for hire, would tire a shire, phone, phunkel, or wire. And mares.

— I see. Now do you know the wellknown kikkinmidden where the illassorted first couple first met with each other? The place where Ealdermann Fanagan? The time when Junkermenn Funagin?

— Deed then I do, W.K.

— Is it a place fairly exspoused to the four last winds?

— Well I Faithly sincerely believe so indeed if all what I hope to charity is half true.

— Is it Woful Dane Bottom?

— It is woful in need whatever about anything else.

— There used to be a tree stuck up?

— There used, sure enough. And the crandest consecrated maypole in all the reignladen history of Wilds. Squiremade and damesman of plantagenets, high and holy.

— What was it doing there, for instance?

— Standing foreninst us.

— You saw it visibly from your hidingplace?

— No. From my invisibly lyingplace.

— And you then took down in stereo what took place being tunc committed?

— I then tuk my takenplace lying down, I thunk i told you. Solve it!

— Remounting aliftle towards the ouragan of spaces. Just how grand in cardinal rounders is this preeminent giant, sir Arber? your bard’s highview, avis on valley! I would like to hear you burble to us in strict conclave, purpurando, and without too much italiote interfairance, what you know in petto about our sovereign beingstalk, Tonans Tomazeus. O dite!

— Corcor Andy, Udi, Udite! Your Ominence, Your Imminence and delicted fraternitrees! There’s tuodore queensmaids and Idahore shopgirls and they woody babies growing upon her and bird flamingans sweenyswinging fuglewards on the tipmast and Orania epples playing hopptociel bommptaterre and Tyburn fenians snoring in his quickenbole and crossbones strewing its holy floor and culprines of Erasmus Smith’s boys with their underhand leadpencils climbing to her crotch for the origin of spices and charlotte darlings with silk blue askmes chattering in dissent to them and the killmaimthem pensioners chucking overthrown milestones up to her to fall her cranberries for their unnatural refection and cock robins muchmore hatching most out of his missado eggdrazzles for him, the sun and moon pegging honeysuckle and white heather down and tomtits tapping resin there and tomahawks watching tar elsewhere, creatures of the wold approaching him, hollow mid ivy, for to claw and rub, hermits of the desert barking their infernal shins over her triliteral roots and his acorns and pinecorns shooting wide all sides out of him after the truants of the air and her leaves, my darling dearest sinsinsinning since the night of time an each and all of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world. And encircle him circuly. Evovae:

— I’ve got that now. Finight mens midinfinite true. The form masculine. The gender feminine. I see. Now, are you derevatov of it yourself in any way? The true tree I mean? Let’s hear what science has to say, pundit—the—next—best—king.

— Upfellbowm.

— Now you are nearer the mark, Lansdowne Road. She’s threwed her pippin’s thereabouts and they’ve cropped up teeth on edge. Now, follow the spotlight, please! Are you acquainted with a pagany better known as Toucher Thom who is. I suggest Finglas as his habitat. Consider yourself on the stand now and wath your words, take my advice. Let your motto be: Inter Nubila Numbum.

— Never you mind about my mother or her hopitout. I consider if I did, I would feel frightfully ashamed of admired vice.

— He is a man of around fifty, struck on Anna Lynsha’s Pekoe with milk and whisky, who does messuages? Have you ever heard of this old boy Thom who belongs to Kimmage, a crofting district, and is not all there, and is all the more himself since he is not so, being most of his time down at the Green Man with the coat on him skinside out against rapparitions and systematically mixing with the public going for groceries, slapping greats and littlegets soundly with his cattegut belts and waltzywembling about in his accountrements always in font of the tubbernickles, like a longarmed lugh, when he would be finished with his tea?

— Is it that fellow? As mad as the brambles he is. Touch him. O wait till I tell you!

— We are not going yet.

— And look here! Here’s what he done.

— Get out! You’re not! Unhindered and odd times? Mere thumbshow? Lately?

— How do I know? Ask the horneys.

— Now, just wash and brush up your memoirias a little bit. So I find, referring to the pater of the present man, I am wondering to myself in my mind was Toucher a methodist whose name is not really Thom, was this old son of a century from Batterstown, Shivering William, wearing false clothes of a brewer’s grains pattern with back buckons with his motto on, Yule Remember, ostensibly for that occasion only of the twelfth day Pax and Quantum wedding I’m wondering.

— I bet you are. Well he was wandering, whatever was his matter, in his mind too, give him his due, for I am sorry to have to tell you, hullo and evoe! they were coming down from off him.

— How culious an epiphany!

— Hodie casus esobhrakonton?

— It looked very like it.

— And were P. and Q., Clopatrick’s cherierapest, Mutatis mutandis, in pretty much the same pickle?

— Prettiest pickles of Mute aunties I ever bopeeped at.

— Were they now? And were they watching you as watcher as well?

— They were watching the watched watching. Vechers all.

— Good. Now, retouching friend Tomsky, did you gather much from what he let drop? We are sitting here for that.

— I was rooshian mad, no lie.

— I suspect you must have been.

— But I was dung sorry for him too.

— O Schaum! Not really? Were you sorry you were mad with him then?

— When I tell you I was rooshiamarodnimad with myself altogether, so I was, for being sorry for him.

— So?

— Absolutely.

— The tail as you tell it nearly takes your own breath away. How many were married on that top of all strapping mornings, My good watcher?

— That’d be telling.

— Everybody in the leather world was thomistically drunk, two by two, trou Normend fashion, I have been told, down to the clorks? A few plates were being thrown about for the ehren of fyn’s Insul and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven annd Covenant, Eh? Would that be a talltale too?

— Well naturally he was. Whiskway and mortem. But the right reverend priest, Mr. Hopsinbond, and the reverent bride eleft, Frizzy Fraufrau, were sober enough.

— I think you’re wrong there about the right reverence. Magraw was best wedding man, papers beforeus carry. You saw him hurriedly or did you if thatseme’s not irrelevant? With Slater’s hammer perhaps? Or he was in serge?

— I horridly did. On the stroke of the dozen. I’m sure I’m wrong but I heard the irreverend, Mr. Magraw in search of a stammer, kuckkuck kicking the bedding out of the old sexton red Fox-Good-man around the sacristy while I and flood and the other men was gickling his missus to gaggles in the hall, the divileen, with her cygncygn leckle and her twelve pound lach.

— In epexegesis or on a point of order?

— I think it was about a pint of porter.

— Lollgoll! You don’t soye so! All upsydown her whole creation? So there was nothing serigal between you? And Drysalter, father of Izod, how was he now?

— In the pink, man, like an allmanox. Squeezing the life out of the liffey.

— The must of his glancefull coaxing the beam in her eye?

— Aye aye, she was lithe and pleasable.

— Date as?

— A laughin hunter and Purty Sue.

— And crazyheaded Jorn?

— Fluteful as his orkan.

— And Jambs, of Delphin’s Bourne?

— Dancing like an easter sun round the colander.

— And whit what was Lillabil Issabil maideve, maid at?

— Trists and thranes and trinies and traines.

— The quobus quartet were there too, if I mistake not, well to the fore, in an amenessy meeting metandmorefussed to decide whereagainwhen to meet themselves, mastersinging always with that consecutive fifth of theirs, eh?

— They were simple scandalmongers! Normand, Desmond, Osmund and Kenneth. Making history all over the show!

— You are sure it was not a rebel’s redding winker’s wake you were at?

— Precisely.

— Flood’s. The pinkman the squeeze, the pint with the kick. He was culping for penance while you were ringing his belle. Did the kickee, goodman roed fox, say anything important? Mmm?

— Nnn ttt wrd?

— Fortitudo eius rhodammum tenuit?

— Five maim! Or something very similar.

— That sounds an isochronism. But it is good laylaw. We may take those wellmeant kicks for free granted. Happily you were not quite so successful in the process verbal whereby you would sublimate your blepharospasmockical suppressions, it seems?

— What was that?

— Were you or were you not? Ask yourself the answer, I’m not giving you a short question.

— Now, not to mix up, cast your eyes around capel court. I want you, witness, to reconstruct for us as briefly as you can inexactly the same as a mind’s eye view how these funeral games took place.

— Which? Sure I told you that afoul.

— Well, tell it to me befair in that bamboozelem mincethrill voice of yours. Let’s have it, christie!

— Ah, sure, I eyewitness forget ’tis all around me bebattersbid hat.

— Ah, go on now Masta Bones, with your impendements and your parrotrickes! Blank memory of darky in blued suit. You were ever the gentle poet. Be nice about it! Look chairful!

— Faith, then, Meesta Cheeryman, first he come up badgeler’s rake with a cock on his Tattersull and the horrid contrivance as seen above dragging his feet in the usual course, and was ever so naas telling him clean his nagles and fex himself up and so on and so fort, and to take the coomb to his grizzlies, and hang me if he wasn’t wanting his calicub body back before he’d to take his life or so save his life. Then, begor, counting as many as thrity seconds with his pocket browning like I said he kept forecursing at him foul Fanden, for the key of John Dunn’s field fore it was for sent and the way Montague was robbed and wolfling to know all what went off and who burned the hay, perchance wilt thoult say, which the man who was raging with the thirst and so far as him was concerned was only standing to the corner of Turbot Street, Pupparing to spit, wanting to know whelp the henconvention he wanted with him new nothing about.

— A sarsencruxer, moor and burgess medley? In other words was that how in the annusual curse of things their celicolar subtler angelic warfare or photoplay finister started?

— Truly. That I may never!

— Did one scum then in the auradrama, the deff, mention to the other undesirable, a dumm, that upon the resume after the angelus, how for his deal he was a pigheaded Swede and to wend himself to a medicis?

— To be sore he did, the huggornut. Only it was turniphodded dunce and he would blow him off the green.

— Did Box then try to shine his puss?

— No but Cox did to shin the punman.

— That forte carlysle touch breaking the campdens pianoback.

— Are you of my meaning that would be going on to about half noon, pip emma Greenwicker time, by your querqcut quadrant?

— You will be asking me and I wish to higgins you wouldn’t. Would it?

— Let it be twelve-thirty after a somersautch of the tardest!

— And it was eleven thirsty too befour in soandsuch reloy on it!

— By which of your chronos, I my man of four watches, larboard, starboard, dog or dath?

— You can imagine;

— Will you swear all the same you saw their shadows struggling diabolically over this, that and the other, their virtues pro and his principality con near the Ruins, Drogheda Street, and kicking up the devil’s own dust for the Milesian wind?

— I will. I did. They were. I swear. Like the heavenly militia. With my tongue through my toecap on the headlong stone of kismet if so ’tis the will of Whose B. Dunn.

— They must have put in some wonderful work on the quiet like. Dost thou not think so?

— Ay.

— In the beginning was their war? They were only berebelling or bereppelling one another by chance or necessity with sham bottles, mere and woiney, as betwinst Picturshirts and Scutticules, like their caractacurs in an irish Roman to soorowbrate the expeltsion of the Danos? What sayest thou?

— That’s all. Farcing gutterish.

— I mean the Morgans and the dorans.

— I know you do.

— The mujic of the footure on the barbarihams of the bashed?

— Da.

— All the same you sound it twould clang houlish like Hull hopen for christmians?

— But twill cling hellish like engels opened to neuropeans, if you’ve sensed, whole the sum.

— And this pootsch went on hog and minne, night after larry’s night, ormonde caught butler, the artillery of the O’Hefferns answering the cavalry of the Mac Clouds, fortey and more fortey, a thousand and one times according to your cock and a biddy story? Lludillongi for years and years perhaps?

— That’s ri. This is his largos life, this is me timtomtum and this is her two peekweeny ones. From the last finger on the second foot of the fourth man to the first one on the last one of the first. That’s right.

— Finny. Vary vary finny!

— It may look funny but fere it is.

— This is not guid enough

— Didget think I was asleep at the wheel? D’yu mean to tall grand jurors of thathens of tharctic on your oath, me lad, and ask us to believe with yur last foot foremouthst, that yur moon was shining on the tors and on the cresties and winblowing night after night for years and years perhaps after you swearing to it a while back before your Corth examiner, Markwalther, that there was reen in planty all the teem?

— Perhaps so, as you grand duly affirm. I never thought over it, faith. I most certainly think about it. I hope. It would be a charity for me to think about something. It was told me by a friend of myself, Tarpey, after three o’clock mass that some rain was promised to Mrs. Lyons, the invalid of Aunt Tarty Villa, and he told me as was what’s follows. He was doing a walk, says she, in the feelmick’s park, says he, like a tarrable Turk, says she, letting loose on his nursery and, begalla, he meet Mr. Michael Clery of a Tuesday who said Father Mac gregor was desperate to the bad place about thassbawls and all the stairrods and thinconvenience being locked up for months owing to being putrenised by stragglers abusing the apparatus and for Tarpeyto go to the tumple and see Father Mac Gregor and he was to saluate that clergyman and to tell his holiness about the three shillings in the confusional and to say how Mrs. Lyons, the cuptosser was the infidel who promised to pose three shillings off her tocher from paraguais and albs by the yard, to Mr. Martin Clery for Father Mathew to put up a midnight mask saints withins of a Thrushday for all the nuisances committed by soldats and nonbehavers and missbelovers for N.D. de l’ecluse to send more heehaw hell’s flutes, my prodder again! And I never brought my cat’s in dogs’ blanket! Foueh!

— Quatsch! what hill ar yu fluking about ye lame Fyats! I’ll discipline ye! Will you swear or affirm the day to yur second sight noo and recant that all yu affirmed to at first sight for his southerly accent was all paddyflaherty? Will ye, ay or nay?

— Ay. I affirmly swear to it that it rooly and cooly was with my holyhagionous lips continuously poised upon the rubricated annuals of saint ulstar.

— That’s very guid of ye, R.C.! Maybe yu wouldn’t mind talling us, my labrose lad, how very much bright Cabbage or papermint comfirts d’yu draw for all yur swearin?

— There you have me! Vurry nothing, O potators, I call it for I might as well tell yous Essexelcy the Golden Bridge’s truth. It amounts to nada in pounds or pence. Not a glass of Lucan nor as much as the cost price of a highlandman’s trousertree or the three crowns round your draphole, isn’t it disgusting? for the whole dumb plodding thing!

— Come now Johnny! We weren’t born yesterday. Pro tanto quid retribuamus? I ask you to say you were promised some staggerjuice on strip or in larges at the Raven and Sugarloaf, either Jones’s lame or Jamesy’s gait, anyhow?

— Yes, by the way. How very necessarily true! When?

— How would you like to hear yur right name now, my tristy minstrel, if yur not freckened of frank comment?

— Not afrightened of Frank Annybody.

— Will you repeat that to me outside?

— I will when it suits me.

— Guid! We make fight! Raddy?

— But no, from: exemple! What mean you? Tell Queen’s road I am seilling. Buy!

— Ef I chuse to put a bullet like yu through the grill for heckling what business is that of yours, yu bullock?

— I don’t know, sir. Don’t ask me, your honour!

— Gently, gently Northern Ire! love that red hand! Let me once more. There are sordidly tales within tales, you clearly understand that? Now my other point. Did you know whether by melanodactylism or purely libationally that one of these two Crimeans with the fender, the taller man, was accused of a certain offence or of a choice of two serious charges, if you like it better that way? You did, you rogue, you?

— You hear things. Besides (and serially now) bushes have eyes, don’t forget. Hah!

— Which moral turpitude would you select of the two, for choice, if you had your way? Playing bull before shebears or the hindlegs off a clotheshorse? Did any orangepeelers or greengoaters appear periodically up your sylvan family tree?

— Buggered if I know. It all depends on how much family silver you want for a nass-and-pair. Hah!

— What do you mean, sir, behind your Hah!

— Nothing, sir. Only a bone moving into place. Hahah!

— Whahat?

— I didn’t say it aloud, sir. I have something inside of me talking to myself.

— You’re a nice third degree witness, faith! Do you think we are tonedeafs in our noses to boot? Can you not distinguish the sense, prain from the sound, bray? Yon have homosexual catheis of empathy between narcissism of the expert and steatopygic invertedness. Get yourself psychoanolised!

— O, begor, I want no expert nursis symaphy and I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want without your interferences or any other pigeonstealer.

— Sample! Sample!

— Have you ever weflected, wepowtew, that the evil what though it was willed might nevewtheless lead somehow on to good towawd the genewality?

— A pwopwo of haster meets waster and talking of plebiscites by a show of hands, whether declaratory or effective, in all seriousness has it become to dawn in you yet that the deponent, the man from Saint Yves, may have been (one is reluctant to use the passive voiced) may be been as much sinned against as sinning, for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being — Please read this mufto — is becoming in its owntown eyeballs. Now the long form and the strong form and reform alltogether!

— Hotchkiss Culthur’s Everready, one brother to neverreached, well over countless hands, sieur of many winners and losers, groomed by S. Samson and son, bred by dilalahs, will stand at Bay (Dublin) from nun till dan and vites inversion and at Miss or Mrs’s McMannigan’s Yard.

Perhaps you can explain, sagobean?

— Pro general continuation and in particular explication to your singular interrogation our asseveralation. Ladiegent, me and Frisky Shorty, my inmate friend as is uncommon struck on poplar poetry, and a few fleabesides round at West Pauper Bosquet was just arguing friendlylike at the Doddercan Easehouse over the old Middlesex party and his moral turps, meaning flu, pock, pox and mizzles, grip, gripe gleet and sprue, caries, rabies, numps and dumps. What me and Frisky a nd the whole double gigscrew notto say the burman having successfully concluded our tour of bibel wants to know is thisahere. Supposing him, which the findings showed, to have taken his epscene licence before the norsect’s divisional respectively as regards them male privates and or concomitantly with all common or neuter respects to them public exess females as was very properly detained by the metropolitan in connection with this regrettable nuisance, touching arbitrary conduct, being in strict contravention of schedule in board of forests and works bylaws regulationing sparkers’ and succers amusements section of our beloved naturpark in pursuance of which police agence me and shorty have approached a reverend gentlman of the name of Mr. Coppinger with reference to a piece of fire fittings as was most obliging in this matter of his explanations affirmative, negative and limitative, given to me and Shorty touching what the good book says of toooldaisymen concerning the merits of early bisectualism besides him citing example given by a valued friend of the name of Mr. J. P. Cockshott as owns a pretty maisonette quis ut Deus, fronting on to the Soussex Bluffs as was telling us categoric how Mr. Cockshott, as he had his assignation with, present holder by deedpoll and indenture of the swearing belt, he tells him Hypothetic, the reverend Mr Coppinger he reckons himself disjunctively up to a dozen miles of a cunifarm school of herring passing themselves supernatently by the Bloater Naze from twelve and them mayridinghim by the silent hour. Butting, charging, bracing, backing, springing, shrinking, swaying, darting, bucking, shooting and sprinkling their dossies sodouscheock with the twinx of their taylz. And reverend, he says, summat problematical, by yon socialist sun gut me but them errings was as gladful as Wissixy kippers could be considering, flipping their little coppingers, pot em, the fresh little flirties, the dirty little gillybrighteners, pickle their spratties, the little smolty Gallockers, and, reverend, says he, more assertltoff, zwelf me Zeus, says he, lettin olfac be the extench of the supperfishies, lamme the curves of their scaligerance and pesk the everurge flossity of their pectoralium them little salty populators, says he, most apodictic as sure as my briam eggs is on cockshot under noose, all them little upandown dippies they was all of a libidous pickpuckparty and raid on a wriggolo finsky doodah in testimonials to their early bisectualism. Watsch yourself tillicately every morkning in your bracksullied twilette. The use of cold water may be warmly recommended for the sugjugation of cungunitals loosed.

— Ta hell and Barbados wi ye and your coprulation! Pelagiarist! Y’are absexed, so y’are, with macroglosia and mickroocyphyllicks.

— Wait now, leixlep. I don’t follow you that far. Was it esox lucius or salmo ferax? You are taxing us into the driven future, are you not with, this fishery?

— Gubbernathor! Spawning all over his seven parish churches!

— Lift it now, Hosty! Hump’s your mark! Es hit neat Zoo?

— There’s an old psalmsobbing lax salmoner

Fogeyboren Herrin Plundehowse.

Who went floundering with his boatloads

Of spermin spunk about leaping freck after every long tom and wet

Lissy between Howth adn Humbermouth.

Our Human Conger Eel!

— Hep! I can see him in the fesh! Up wi’ yer whippy! Hold that lad! Play him! Bullhead!

— Pull you, sir! Olive quill does it. Longeal of Malin, hé’ll cry before he’s flayed. Did a rise? Way, lungfish!

— He missed her mouth and stood into Dee? No, he skid like a skate and berthed on her byrnie and never a fear but they’ll land him yet, slitheryscales on liffeybank, times and times and halve a time with a pillow of sand to polster him. Do you say they will? I bet you they will. Among the shivering sedges so? Weedy waving. Or tulipbeds of Rush below?

— Grenadiers. And tell me now. Were these anglers or angelers coexistent and compresent with or without their tertium quid?

— Three in one, one and three.

Shem and Shaun and the shame that sunders em.

Wisdom’s son, folly’s brother.

— God bless your ginger, wigglewaggle! That’s! Three slots and no burners. You’re forgetting the jinnyjos for the fayboys. What, Walker John Referent?

— Woe on woe, says Warden Daly. Sure I thought it was larking in the clover of the furry glans with two stripping baremaids, Stilla Underwood and Moth Mc Garry, he was, hand to dagger, that time and their mother a rawkneepudsfrowse, I was given to understand, begum, there was that one that was always mad gone on him, her first king of cloves, in Carrick-on-Shannon, county Leitrim. Sure she was near drowned in lakest coldstreams of admiration forherself making faces at her likeness in the brook after, all tossed, as she was, the playactric.

— Listen, meme mearest! So sorry you lost him, poor lamb! Of course I know you are a very wicked girl and it was a very wrong thing to do, dare all grandpassia! And your soreful miseries first come on you. Still everybody knows you do look lovely, Eulogia, a perfect apposition with the coldcream, Assoluta, from Boileau’s I always use in the wards after I am burned a rich egg and derive the greatest benefit, sign of the cause. My, you do. Simply adorable! The way they taper under nue charmeen cuffs, I am more divine like that when I’ve two of everything. Handsome in a way, only my arms are whiter, dear. Whitehands, idler. Fairhair, frail one. Listen! meme sweety. O be joyfold! My veil will save it undyeing from his etnernal fire! It’s meemly us two, meme, idoll. Of course it was downright wickred of him, reely meeting me disguised, Bortolo mio, peerfectly appealling, D.V., with my lovebirds, my colombinas. Their sinsitives shrinked. Even netta and Linda our seeyu tities and they’ve sin sumtim, tankus! My rillies were liebeneaus, my aftscents embre. How me adores eatsother simply, (mon ishebeau! Ma reinebelle!) in his storm collar, as I leaned yestreen from his muskished lips, even my little pom got excited, when I turned his head on his same manly bust and kissed him more. Only he might speak to a person, lord so picious, taking up my worths ill wrong! May I introduce! This is my futuous, lips and looks lovelast. Still me with you, you poor chilled! Will make it up with mother Concepcion and a glorious lie between us, sweetness, so as not a novene in all the convent for mercy’s sake need ever know, what passed our lips or. Yes sir, we’ll will! Clothea wind! Fee o fie! Covey us niced! Bansh the dread! Alitten’s looking; low him lovly. Make me feel good in the moontime. It will all take bloss as oranged at St Audiens rosan chocolate chapelry with my diamants blickfeast after at minne owned hos and Father blesius Mindelsinn will be beminding hand. Kyrielle elation! Crystal elation! Kyrielle elation! Elation immanse! Sing to us, sing to us, sing to us! Amam! So meme nearest, languished hister, be free to me! And listen, you, you beauty, esster, I’ll be clue to who knows you, pray Magda, Marthe with Luz and Joan, while I lie with warm lisp on the Tolka.

— Eusapia! Fais-le, tout-tait! Languishing hysteria? The clou historique? How is this at all? Alicious through alluring glass or alas in jumboland? Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her Annupciacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, immacolacion. Knock and it shall appall unto you. Who shone yet shimmers will be e’er scheining. Cluse her, voil her hild her hindly. After liryc and themodius soft aglo-iris of the vals. This young barlady what euphemiasly. Is she having an ambidual act herself in apparition with herself?

— Your crackling out of your turn, my Moonster firefly. And sir my queskins first, foxyjack! Ye’ve as much skullabogue cheek on you now as would boil a caldron kalebrose. Did the market missioners Hyde and Wombwell, when given the raspberry, fine more than sands teen per cent of chalk in the purity, promptitude and perfection flour of this raw materialist, and less than a seventh pro mile in his meal? We young chaps are briefed here by Committalman Number Underfifteen to know had the peeress of generals who have been getting nose money cheap and stirring up the public opinion about private balls with their legs, Misses Mirtha and Merry the two dreeper’s assistents, had they their service books in order and duly signed J. H. North and Company when discharged from their last situations? Will ye gup and tell the board in the anterim how in the name of the three tailors on Tooley Street did O’Bejorumsen or Mockmacmahonitch, ex of Butt and Hocksett’s, violating the bushel standard, come into awful position of the barrel of bellywash? And why is it any harm to ask was this hackney man in the coombe, Fauxfitzhuorson, carrying his ark across his back when he might have been setting on his jonass inside like a Glassthure cabman? Where were the doughboys three by nombres, won in ziel, cavehill exers or hearts of steet, Hansen, Morfydd and O’Dyar, V.D., with their glenagearries directing their steps according to the liaison officer with their trench ulcers open and their hands in their pockets contrary to military rules when confronted with his lifesize obstruction? When did he live off rooking the pooro and how did start pfuffpfaffing at his Paterson and Hellicott’s? Is it a factual fact this fancydress nordic in shaved lamb breeches, child’s kilts, bibby buntings and wellingtons, preholder of the Bar Ptolomei, is coowner of a hengster’s circus near North Great Denmark Street and the shamshemshowman has been complaining to the police barracks and applying for an order of certiorari and crying about him being molested after him having triplets by offers of vacancies from females in this city neighing after the man ever since they seen his X ray picture turned out in wealthy red in the sabbath sheets? Was it him that suborned that deafmute son of his, a litterydistributer in Saint Patrick’s Lavatory, to turn a Roman and leave the chayr and gout in his bare socks, the sweep, and buy the usual jar of porter at the Morgue and Cruses and set it down before the wife with her fireman’s halmet on her, bidding her mine the hoose, the strumpet, while him and his lagenloves were rampaging the roads in all their paroply under the noses of the Heliopolitan constabulary. Prepare the way! Where’s that gendarm auxiliar, arianautic sappertillery, that reported on the whole hoodlum, relying on his morse-erse wordybook and the trunchein up his tail? Roof Seckesign van der Deckel and get his story from him! Recall Sickerson, the lizzyboy! Seckersen, man of Errick. Sackerson!

— Day shirker four vanfloats he verdants market.

— High liquor made lust torpid dough hunt her orchid.

Hunt her orchid! Gob and he found it on her right enough! A disgrace to the homely protestant religion! Bloody old preadamite with his twohandled umberella!

— Wallpurgies! And it’s this’s your deified city? And it’s we’s to pray for his conversions? Call Kitty the Beads! He’s cookinghagar. She’s deep, that one.

— A farternoiser for his tuckish armenities. And then the confisieur for the boob’s indulligence. As sunctioned for his salmenbog by the Councillors-om-Trent. Pave Pannem at his gaiter’s bronze. Nummer half dreads Log Laughty. Master’s gunne he warrs the bedst. I messaged his dilltoyds sausepander mussels on the kisschen table. With my ironing duck through his rollpins of gansyfett, do dodo doughdy dough, till he was braising red in the toastface with lovensoft eyebulbs and his kiddledrum steeming and rattling like the roasties in my mockamill. I awed to have scourched his Abarm’s brack for him. For the loaf of Obadiah take your pastryart’s noas out of me flouer bouckuet. Of the strainger scene you given squeezers to me skillet! As cream of the hearth thou reinethst alhome. His lapper and libbers was glue goulewed as he sizzled there watching me lautterick’s pitcher by Wexford-Atelier as Katty and Lanner, the refined souprette, with my bust alla brooche and the padbun under my matelote, showing my jigotty sleeves and all my new toulong touloosies. Whisk! There’s me shims and here’s me hams and this is me juppettes, gause be the meter. Whisk! What’s this? Whisk! And that? He never cotched finer, balay me, at Romiolo Frullini’s flea pantamine out of Griddle-the-Sink or Shusies- with- her-Soles-Up or La Sauzerelly, the pucieboots, when I started so hobmop ladlelike, highty tighty, to kick the time off the cluckclock lucklock quamquam camcam potapot panapan kickakickkack.

— That’s enough. By sylph and salamander and all the trolls and tritons I mean to tap the top of this, at last. And will too, if I have at first to down every mask in Trancenania from Terreterry’s Hole to Stutterers’ Corner to find that Yokeoff his leiter this Yohan his da. Let pass the jousters of the king! the governor-general and eirenarch’s custos himself no less’! Off with your persians’! Search ye the Finn! Fi Fa Fe Fo Fum! Ho, croak, evildoer. Doff’!

— Amtsadam, Sir, to you! Here we are again. I am bubub brought up under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric Shilkanbeard, but I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken by Sall and Will from Augustanus to Ergastulus, as this is, protested by saints and sinners eyeeye alike as a cleanliving man and, as a matter of fact, by my halfwife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up. On my very wife I never was nor can afford to be guilty of crim crig con, of malfeasance trespass against parson with the person of a youthful gigirl frifrif friend chirped Apples acted by Miss Dashe when I would touch to her dot and feel most greenily of her unripe ones as it should prove most anniece and far too baad to my reputation for daughters-in-trade being lightly clad. And as a mere matter of fact I tell of myself how I popo possess the ripest littlums wifukie around the globelettes globes upon which she was raping away first with the consolation prize in my serial dreams of faire women. Mannequins Passe handicapped by two breasts in opera tops a remarkable little garment. I kickkick keenly love such particularly, while savouring of their flavours at their most perfect best when served with heliotrope eyelips, as this is, where I do drench my jolly soul of the pupure beauty of hers past.

She is my bestpreserved wholewife, Sowell her as herafter, in Evans’s eye with, the smallest shoenumber outside chinatins. They are jolly dainty. May we not recommend them? And, alas, our private chaplain of Lambeyth and Dolekey, and always sadfaced man, who has visited our various hard hearts and reins by imposition of fufuf fingers, can speak loud to you some quite complimentary things about my clean charactering even when detected in the dark, painful though such recital prove to me as this is, when I introduced her to our fourposter singing with euphonium in our altogether duckyheim homesweetened First Murkiss, or so they sang. Dodo! O Clearly. And the gregorio at front with Johannes far in back. Aw aw! gleeglom there’s gnome sweepplaces like theresweep Norwage. By whom as my Church Findlaters enjoineth and as you all know of a child, dear humans, one of the ambitions of my yuungend from an early peepee period intended for broad church, I was confirmed in bed by our bujibuji beloved curate-author Michael Angel is your man. Ket Michael tell you people here itwas remarketable in his clairaudience as this is as only our own Michael can when reacherout at superstation to bring ruptures to our roars how I am amp amplify Guinness’s Ornery fortninehalf Shaun Shemsen saywhensaywhen. Livpoomark lloyrge hoggs one four tupps noying. Sorry’! Thnkyou’! That’ll beall fortody. Cal it off! Godnat, Vryboily Abbreciades York gustoms. Kyow! Tak.

— Calm has entered. Big big Calm, announcer! It is most ernst terooly moresome immusin. Colt’s tooth. I protest there is not one teaspoonspill of evidence at bottomlie to my baad as you shall see, as this is Keemun Lapsang of first pickings. And I contango can take off my dudud my dirtynine article of quoting here before those in heaven to provost myself I mean veryman enter into my preprotestant Caveat against the pupup publication of libel by any Ticks Tipsyloon to that highest personage at moments holding down the throne. So to speak of beauty scouts, and the celluloid art! The caca cad! I protest it that he is by my wipehalf! Shame upon private M! Shames on his fulsomeness! Shamus on his lulul lying suulen! And mine it was Barktholed von Hunarig Soesown af Furrows, when to my lot it fell on my sexsex, my sexencentaurnary, when I holdet up to His Mam His Maman, His Maggerstick the keys of our city when hrossbucked on his pricelist charger with my allbum’s greethims: handshakey congrandyoulikethems, excellency!

Whosaw dares at handgripper thisa breast? Dose makkers ginger! Some ome we was with us all fours. Adversarian. First liar in landend. And those meisies! Sulk e’ en taarts! Man sicker at I are bluffit konservateve? Shucks’! Such bughouse filth so I cannot barely conceive of! The broken hearted villain’! Hole affair is rotten pig’s draff;

— Is that yu Whitehed?

— Have you Headnoise now?

— Give us your mucdy reception, will yous?

— Pass the fish for Christ’ sake!

Old Whitehowth is speaking again. Pity poor Whiteoath’! Dear gone mummeries, goby. Tell the woyld I have lived true thousand hells. Pity please, lady, for poor O.W. in this profoundust snobbing I have caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs white mummery failling deaf as Adder. I askt you dear lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits. I gave you of the tree. I gave two smells, two eats: my happy bossoms, my allfalling fruits of my boom. Pity poor Haveth Children Everywhere with Mudder.

That was Communicator a former colonel. A disincarnated spirit called Sebastiam may phone shortly. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appointment for a future date. Hello, Communicate! how’s the butts? Everseptic! He does not believe in psychous. He has had some indiejestings, poor thing, for quite a little while. Poor Felix culapert! I deplore over him! So enjoying of old thick whiles, in tall white hat of four reflections he would puffout a smokeful bock. He shall have his glad stein of our beerbest The voice is still flutish and his mounth still wears that soldiers scarlet though the hairs are peppered with silvern. It is because of what he was ascend into his prisons on account of. I wit it wel. Hence he’s deepraised words. Some day I may tell the story. Mood! Mood! It looks like someone else bearing my burdens. I cannot let it. cans nought.

Well, sir, I have bared my whole past on both sides Give me even my two months by laxlaw in second division and my first broadcloth is business will be to protest if it does not occur again. I am here to tell you I am thougthful to become a Selt. A man should stump up and I will pay my pretty decent trade price for my gluegleu glucose, peebles, were it even as this is, the legal eric for infelicitous conduct and, as a matter of fact, I undertake to discontinue all practices and I deny wholewiping in toto at my own request in all stoutness to have confermentated and agreed as it is laid to me with a friend from mine, Mr. Billups, whom I have called clean, at goodbuy cootcoops a mouthless niggeress, Blanchette Brewster or to illsell my fourth part in her which although allowed of in deuterogamy, would seem eggseggs excessively haroween to my feelimbs for twa punt scotch or three pipples on the bitch. Thou, Frick’s Flame, Uden Sulfer, who strikest only on the marryd bokks enquick me if so be I did cophetuise milady’s maid! The preemption of her, by Juno Moneta! If she has been disposed of for her consideration I am tradefully unintiristid. And if she is still further talc slopping over her cocoa contours I am strongly of opinion why I should not be. Inprobable! Or to have resold same means help, best Brixton high yellow, no outings, cent for cent on Auction’s Bridge. Utterly improperable! So help me cash! I meanit.

My herrings! The surdity of it, Amean to say. Her bare idears, it is too chucklesome. Absurd bargain, mum, will call. One line with! One line, with with! The tew cherrypickers, Lizzy and Lissy my ways Mycock I would not know to contact such gretched youngsters in from Hadem or any suistersees or heiresses of theirn, claiming by, through or under them. What a shrubbery trick to play! I will put my oathhead unner my whitepot and willstand me where I stood mine in all free heat between Pelagios and little Chistaias by our mostmonolith after my both earstoear and brebreeches buybibles and public testify to my unclothed virtue by the longstone erectheion of our allfirst manhere. I should tell you that honesty, on my honour of a Nearwicked. I always think in a wordworth of that favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and shopkeeper, A. G. As my best policy I have had my best master’s lessons as the public he knows and do you know homesters, I honestly think if I have failed lamentably by accident benefits though shintoed, spitefired, perplagued and cramkrieged I have made of my prudentials good. I have been told I own stolemines or something of that sorth in the sooth of Spainien. Hohohoho! Have I said ogso how I abhor myself vastly (truth to tell) and do repent to my netherheart of sundry clothing! The amusin part is I will say, hotelmen, that since I ran a brixtol selection here, in common soccage, ameng strange and enemy, among these building sites, in Hoplinstown, then-on-sea, in that year which I have called mirabellous, and overdrave these marken, under our good kingsabout T. R. H., Urban first and Champaign Chollyman and Hungry the Loaved and Hangry the Hathed here where my toils of domestication first began, with weight of woman wund my nack famine has completely seceded from this landleague of many nations. New highs for all! Our bourse and politico-ecomedy are in safe with good Jock Shepherd; our lives are on sure in sorting with Jonathans wild and great. Been so free! Thankyou, besters! Hattentats have mindered, thuggeries are rere as glovers meeting, lepers lack, iegnerants show beneath suspicion like the bitterharfs of esculapuloids. All is waldly bonums. Aeros, we luft to you! Firebugs, good blazes! lubbers, kepp your poudies drier! Seamen, we bless your ship and wives! Seven ills havd I habt; seaventy seavens are your prospect. The chort of Nicholas Within was my guide and I raised a dom on the bog of Michan. By fineounce I grew and by grossscruple gat I grew outreachesly. To Milud old money, to Madame fresh advances. Dutch floriners moved against us and I met them Bartholomew; milreys onfell and I arose Daniel in Leonden. Who can tell their tale whom I filled ad liptum on the plain of soulsbury? The more secretely bui built, the more openly plastered. I have reared my hut in the night and at morn I was encompassed of mushroofs I considered the lilies on the veldt and unto Balkis did I disclothe mine glory. This mayde my taughters, and these man my son, from my the villa of the ostmanorum to thostan’s recte Thomars Sraid they are my villeins, with chartularies I have talledged them. Lo, I have looked upon my pompadours in their easancies and my drummers have told tall tales of me in the land. Fulgent I funked forth (drat it!); voldsom (veh!) they veered. Wherefore has my sovereign lord regards for me and he has given to me my neckname which is second fiddler to nomen. Idle were it repassing to the elder disposition to inquire whether I, draggedasunder, be the forced outcome of group marriage holocryptogam, of my essenes, or carried of cloud from land of locust. I, huddled together be the massproduct of teamwork for surrounded by obscurity, by virtue of creation and by boon of promise by natural born freeman’s journeymanright and my otherchurch’s inher light in so and such a manner as me it so besitteth most surely I pretend to opt for simultaneous. Till daybowbreak and showshadows flee. Thus be hek. Verily! verily!

— What is your numb? Bun!

— Who gave you that nums? Poo!

— Have you put in all your sparepennies? I’m listening. Sree!

— Keep clear of propennies! Kore!

— Invisible friends, I maymay mean to say. Annoyin part of it was, had faithful Fulvia: Following the courses of this world turned her back on her ways to gon on the hills in search of brunette men of Iarland, Chief North Paw and Chief Goes in Black water and Chief Brown Pool and Chief Night Cloud by the Deeps or again had Fluvia left her crookcrook crocus bed at the bare suggestions of some bywaymen who could have abused of her might acrue advantage to ask. Yet know it was vastly otherwise which I have heard it by my goods waif as I, Chiefly endmost heartyly aver for fulvia fluvia ever did ensue tillstead the things that pertained unto fairnesse. Even so, for I waged love on her; and spoiled her undines. And she wept: O my lors!

— Till we meet!

— Ere we part!

— Tollollall!

— This time a hundred years!

— But I was firm with her: and I did take the reached of my delights, my jealousy, and did raft her Riverworthily and did leftlead her overland the pace whimpering by Kevin’s port and Hurdlesford and Gardener’s mall to Ringsend ferry and there on wavebrink by mace to masthigh, did I uplift my magicianer’s puntpole and I bade those polyfizzyboisterous seas to retire with hemselves from us (rookwards, thou seasea stammerer!) and I abridged with domfine norsemanship her maiden race, my baresark bride, and knew her fleshly when with all my bawdy did I her whorship, min bryllupswipe. Heaven, he hallthundered; heydays, he flung blissforhers. And I cast my tenspan joys on her by dint of strongbow, so strong we were in one, malestream and shegulf: and I thumbringed her with iren of ierne and tradesmanmarked her lieflang mine for all and singular, iday, igone, imorgens and for ervighatd (what screech of shippings! what low of dampfbulls) and I chained a name and wedlock round her the which to carry till her grave, my dirty deary: and fortiffed by my right I did encompass her about, my vermincelly vinegarette, with all loving kindness as far as in man’s might it lay and enfranchised her to liberties of fringes: and I gave until my lilienyounger turkeythighs soft goods and hardware and ladderproof hosiery lines and potted fleshmeats and penningsworths of the best of taste of knaggs of jets and silvered waterroses and geegaws of my pretty novelties and wispyy frocks of redferns and lauralworths such as women cattle wear, the pick of Pim’s and Slynes and Sparrow’s, La Primamère, Pyrrha Pyrrhine, Or de Reinebeau, Sourire d’Hiver, and a crinoline, wide a shire, and pattens for her trilibies for all daintiness by teatime; and I wound around my swanchen’s neckplace a school of joys of moyles marine to sing their seasangs in her silence: and upping her at king’s count, I pierced her beak with order of the Danabrog; and I hung up at Yule my pigmy suns helphelped of Kettil Flashnose, for the supperhour of my frigid one, coulomba mea, frimosa mia, through all Livania’s volted ampire from anods to cathods and from the topazolites of Mourne by Arklow’s sapphire seamans lure and Waterford’s hook and crook lights to the polders of Hy Kinsella: and I fed her, my carleen, my little lean steer, upon spiceries for her garbage breath, italics of knobbyleek and swinespepper and gothskraut and the drugs of Kafa and Jelupa and Shallots out of Ascalon; and to my saffronbreathing mongoloid I gave powlver and gentle oils for the swarthy face on her with handewers and loinscrubbers and a currycomb to tease her tuzzy out and clubmoss and wolvesfoot for her more moister wards: and for my shopsoiled doveling I did devise my telltale sports at avenbread to wring her withers limberly, wheatears, slapbung, draper-cut-dean, bray, nap, spinado and ranter-go-round: I foredreamed for thee and more than fullmaked: I prevened for thee in the haunts that joybelled frail light-a-leaves for sturdy traemen: pelves ad hombres sumus; I said to the shiftless prostitute: Let me be your fodder; and I said to the roadies: Chau, Camerade! And I built in Urbs in Rure for mine elskede my shiny brows, an earthcloset wherewithin to be quit in most covenience from her sabbath needs: did not I festfix my unniversiries, wholly rational and gottalike; was I not rosetted on two stelas of little egypt? had not (I) rockcut reders, hieros, gregos and democriticos; and by my syvendialed changing charties Hibernska Ulitzas made not I, to pass through 12 Threadneedles and Newgade and Vicus Veneris to cooinsight: Oi polled ye many but my fews were chousen: and I set up twinminsters, the pro and the con, woven of peeled wands and attachatouchy floodmud, arched for covenanters and shinners’ rifuge; all truant trulls made I comepull, all rubbeling gnomes I pushed, go, go; and thirdly for ewigs I did reform and restore for my smuggy piggiesknees her paddypalace on the crossknoll and added thereunto a shallow laver to put out her hellfire and posied windows for her oriel house and she sass her nach, chillybombom and forty bonnets, upon the altarstane, may all have mossyhonours!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— And hail or rain or drizzle or sleet with fairskin book and ruling rod, vain of my vergin page, I did learn my little anna countrymouse in alphabeater cameltemper from alderbirch to tannenyou with my rattan at her drum ooah ooah oyir, oyir; and I did spread before my Livvy, where Lord street lolls and ladies linger, my selvage mats of softest lawn, my carpet gardens of guerdon city; and I planted for my own hot lass a vineyard and I fenced it about with huge Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops against lickybudmonth and gleanermonth: and (hush! hush!) I brewed for my alpine plurabelle (speakeasy!) my brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, puss, puss, pussyfoot, to split the spleen of her maw; and I laid down before the trotters to my eblanite my stony battered waggonways, my nord-soud circulums, my eastmoreland and westlandmore, whereon, in mantram of truemen like yahoomen, claudesdales withe arabinstreeds, the mule and the hinny and the jennet and the mustard nag and piebald shjelties and skewbald awknees steppit lively (lift ye the left and rink ye the right!) for her pleashadure and she lafaughed in her diddydid domino to the switcheries of the whip. Down with them! Kick! Playyup!

Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!

 ® 

Anna Livia Plurabelle

O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all

about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talk-tapes. And don’t butt me—hike!—when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil! Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. Wallop it well with your battle and clean it. My wrists are rwusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it! What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under loch and neagh? It was put in the newses what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But toms will till. I know he well. Temp untamed will hist for no man. As you spring so shall you neap. O, the roughty old rappe! Minxing marrage and making loof. Reeve Gootch was right and Reeve Drughad was sinistrous! And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous eld duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking rat. And his derry’s own drawl and his corksown blather and his doubling stutter and his gullaway swank. Ask Lictor Hackett or Lector Reade or Garda Growley or the Boy with the Billyclub. How elster is he a called at all. Qu’appelle? Huges Caput Earlyfouler? Or where was he born or how was he found? Urgothland, Tvistown on the Kattekat? New Hunshire, Concord on the Merrimake? Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve’s or were him and her but captain spliced? For mine ether duck I thee drake. And by my wildgaze I thee gander. Flowey and Mount on the brink of time makes wishes and fears for a happy isthmass. O, passmore that and oxus another. Don Dom Dombdomb and his wee follyo! Was his help inshored in the Stork and Pelican against bungelars, flu and third risk parties? I heard he dug good tin with his doll when he raped her home, Sabrine asthore, in a parakeet’s cage, by dredgerous lands and devious delts, playing catched and mythed with the gleam of her shadda, past auld min’s manse and Maisons Allfou and the rest of incurables and the last of immurables, the quaggy waag for stumbling. Who sold you that jackalantern’s tale? Pemmican’s pasty pie! In a gabbard he barqued it, the boat of life, from the harbourless Ivernikan Okean, till he spied the loom of his landfall and he loosed two croakers from under his tilt, the gran Phenician rover. By the smell of her kelp they made the pigeonhouse. Like fun they did! But where was Himself, the timoneer? That marchantman he suivied their scutties right over the wash, his cameleer’s burnous breezing up on him, till with his runagate bowmpriss he roade and borst her bar. Pilcomayo! Suchcaughtawan! And the whale’s away with the grayling! Tune your pipes and fall ahumming, you born ijypt, and you’re nothing short of one! Well, ptellomey soon and curb your escumo. When they saw him shoot swift up her sheba sheath, like any gay lord salomon, her bulls they were ruhring, surfed with spree. Boyarka buah! Boyana bueh! He erned his lille Bunbath hard, our staly bred, the trader. He did. Look at here. In this wet of his prow. Don’t you know he was kalled a bairn of the brine, Wasserbourne the waterbaby? Havemmarea, so he was! H.C.E. has a codfisck ee. Shyr she’s nearly as badher as him herself. Who? Anna Livia? Ay, Anna Livia. Do you know she was calling backwater sals from all around to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy? She was? Gota pot! Well, that’s the limmat! As El Negro winced when he wonced in La Plate. O, tell me all I want to hear, how loft she was lift a laddery dextro. A coneywink after the bunting fell. Letting on she didn’t care, the proxenete! Proxenete and phwhat is phthat? Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate. Did they never sharee you ebro at skol, you antiabecedarian? It’s just the same as if I was to go for examplum now out of telekinesis and proxenete you. For coxyt sake and is that what she is? Botlettle I thought she’d act that loa. Didn’t you spot her in her windaug, wubbling up on an osiery chair, with a meusic before her all cunniform letters, pretending to ribble a reedy derg on a fiddle she bogans without a band on? Sure she can’t fiddan a dee, with bow or abandon! Sure, she can’t! Tista suck. Well, I never heard the like of that! Tell me moher. Tell me moatst. Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus, with the tares at his thor and the buboes for ages and neither bowman nor shot abroad and bales allbrant on the crests of rockies and nera lamp in kitchen or church and giant’s holes in Grafton’s causeway , sittang sambre on his benk, drammen and drommen, his childlinen scarf to encourage his obsequies where he’d check their debths in that mormon’s thames, be questing and handset, hop, step and a deepend, with his berths in their toiling moil, his swallower open from swolf to fore and the snipes of the gutter pecking his crocs, hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over hunselv, dreeing his weird, with his dander up, and his fringe combed over his eygs and droming on loft till the sight of the sternes, after zwarthy kowse and weedy broeks and the tits of buddy and the loits of pest and to peer was Parish worth thette mess. You’d think all was dodo belonging to him how he durmed adranse in durance vaal. He had been belching for severn years. And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of a child, in a Lapsummer skirt and damazon cheeks, for to ishim bonzour to her dear dubber Dan. With neuphraties and sault from his maggias. And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or a dzoupgan of Kaffue mokau an sable or Sikiang sukry or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shinkobread for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters and as rash as she’d russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve (his towering rage it swales and rieses) my hardey Hek he’d kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough. And then she’d esk to vistule a hymn, The Heart Bowed Down or The Rakes of Mallow or Chelli Michele’s La Calumnia è un Vermicelli or a balfy bit ov old Jo Robidson. Sucho fuffing a fifeing ’twould cut you in two! She’d bate the hen that crowed on the turrace of Babbel. What harm if she knew how to cockle her mouth! And not a mag out of Hum no more than out of the mangle weight. Is that a faith? That’s the fact. Then riding the ricka and roya romanche Annona, gebroren aroostokrat Nivia, dochter of Sense and Art, with Sparks’ pirryphlickathims funkling her fan, anner frostivying tresses dasht with virevlies,—while the prom beauties sreeked nith their bearers’ skins!—in a period gown of changeable jade that would robe the wood of two cardinals’ chairs and crush poor Cullen and smother MacCabe. O blazerskate! Theirs porpor patches! And brahming to him down the feedchute, with all kinds of fondling endings, the poother rambling off her nose: Vuggybarney, Wickerymandy! Hello, ducky, please don’t die! Do you know what she started cheeping then, with a choicey voicey like water-glucks? You’ll never guess. Tell me. Tell me. Phoebe, dearest, tell, O tell me and I loved you better nor you knew. And letting on hoon var daft about the warbly sangs from over holmen: High hellskirt saw ladies hensmoker lilyhung pigger: and soay and soan and so firth and so forth in a tone sonora and Oom Bothar below in his sandy cloak, so umvolosy, as deaf as a yawn, the stult! Go away! Poor deef, old deary! Yare only teasing! Anna Liv? As chalk is my judge! And didn’t she up in sorgues and go and trot doon and stand in her douro, puffing her old dudheen, and every shirvant siligirl or wensum farmerette walking the pilend roads Sawy, Fundally, Daery or Maery, Milucre, Awny or Graw, usedn’t she make her a simp or sign to slip inside by the sullyport? You don’t say the sillypost? I did. And do! Calling them in one by one (To Blockbeddum here! Here the Shoebenacaddie!) and legging a jig or so on the sihl to show them how to shake their benders and the dainty how to bring to mind the gladdest garments out of sight and all the way of a maid with a man and making a sort of cackling noise like two and a penny or half a crown and holding up a silliver shiner. Lordy, lordy, did she so? Well, of all the ones ever I heard! Throwing all the neiss little whores in the world at him! To inny captured wench you wish of no matter what sex of pleissful ways two adda tammar a lizzy a lossie to hug and hab haven in Humpy’s apron!

And what was the wyerye rima she made! Odet! Odet! Tell me the trent of it while I’m lathering hail out of Denis Florence MacCarthy’s combies. Rise it, flut ye, pian piena! I’m dying down off my iodine feet until I lerryn Anna Livia’s cushingloo! I can see that, I see you are. How does it tummel? Listen now. Are you listening? Yes, yes! Idneed I am! Tarn your ore ouse! Essonne inne!

By earth end the cloudy but I badly want a brandnew bankside, bedamp and I do, and a plumper at that!

For the putty affair I have is wore out, so it is, sitting, yaping and waiting for my old Dane hodder dodderer, my life in death companion, my frugal key of our larder, my much-altered camel’s hump, my jointspoiler, my maymoon’s honey, my fool to the last Decemberer, to wake himself out of his winter’s doze and bore me down like he used to.

Is there irwell a lord of the manor or a knight of the shire at strike, I wonder, that’d dip me a pound or two in cash for washing and darning his worshipful socks for him now we’re run out of horsemeat and milk?

Only for my short Brittas bed made’s as snug as it smells it’s out I’d lep and off with me to the slobs della Tolka or the plage au Clontarf to feale the gay aire of my salt troublin bay and the race of the saywint up me ambushure.

Onon! Onon! tell me more. Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul. Down to what made the potters fly into jagsthole. And why were the vesles vet. Well, now comes the hazelhatchery part. After Clondalkin the Kings’s Inns. We’ll soon be there with the freshet. How many aleveens had she in tool? I can’t rightly rede you that. Close only knows. Some say she had three figures to fill and confined herself to a hundred eleven, wan bywan bywan. Olaph lamm et, all that pack? We won’t have room in the kirkeyaard. She can’t remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them by the grace of her boxing bishop’s infallible slipper, the cane for Kund and abbles for Eyolf and ayther nayther for Yakov Yea. A hundred and how? They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle. O loreley! What a loddon lodes! Heigh ho! But it’s quite on the cards she’ll shed more and merrier, twills and trills, sparefours and spoilfives, nordsihkes and sudsevers and ayes and neins to a litter. Grandfarthring nap and Messamisery and the knave of all knaves and the joker. Heehaw! She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most. Shoal she was, gidgad. She had a flewmen of her owen. Then a toss nare scared that lass, so aimai moe, that’s agapo! Tell me, tell me, how cam she camlin through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pietaring out and clyding by on her eastway. Waiwhou was the first thurever burst? Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tilar, souldrer, salor, Pieman Peace or Polistaman. That’s the thing I always want to know. Push up and push upper and come to headquarters! Was it waterlows year, after Grattan or Flood, or when maids were in Arc or when three stood hosting? Fidaris will find where the Doubt arises like Nieman from Nirgends found the Nihil. Worry you sighin foh, Albern, O Anser? Untie the gemman’s fistiknots, Qvic and Nuancee! She can’t put her hand on him for the moment. Tez thelon langlo, walking weary! Such a loon way backwards to row! She says herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how blyth she played or how, when, why, where and who offon he jumpnad her. She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her. She thought she’s sankh neathe the ground with nymphant shame when he gave her the tigris eye! O happy fault! Me wish it was he! You’re wrong there, corribly wrong! Tisn’t only tonight you’re anacheronistic! It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere, in county Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she’d lave Kilbride and go foaming under Horsepass bridge with the great southerwestern windstorming her traces and the midland’s grainwaster asarch for her track, to wend her ways byandby, robecca or worse, to spin and to grind, to swab and to thrash, for all her golden lifey in the barleyfields and pennylotts of Humphrey’s fordofhurdlestown and lie with a landleaper, wellingtonorseher. Alesse, the lagos of girly days! For the dove of the dunas! Wasut? Izod? Are you sarthin suir? Not where the Finn fits into the Mourne, not where the Nore takes lieve of Blœm, not where the Braye divarts the Farer, not where the Moy changez her minds twixt Cullin and Conn tween Cunn and Collin? Neya, narev, nen and nos! Then whereabouts in Ow and Ovoca? Was it yst with wyst or Lucan Yokan or where the hand of man has never set foot? Dell me where, the fairy ferse time! I will if you listen. You know the dinkel dale of Luggelaw? Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands the core of his cushlas in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deep-dark and ample like this red bog at sundown. By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, the reignbeau’s heavenarches arronged orranged her. Afrothdizzying galbs, her enamelled eyes indergoading him on to the vierge violetian. Wish a wish! Why a why? Mavro! Letty Lerck’s lafing light throw those laurals now on her daphdaph teasesong petrock. Maass! He cuddle not help himself, thurso that hot on him, he had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he baised his lippes in smiling mood, kiss akiss after kisokushk (as he warned her never to, never to, never) on Anna-na-Poghue’s of the freckled forehead. While you’d parse secheressa she hielt her souff’. But she ruz two feet hire in her aisne aestumation. And steppes on stilts ever since. O, wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy? Nautic Naama’s now her navn. Two lads in scoutsch breeches went through her before that, Barefoot Burn and Wallowme Wade, Lugnaquillia’s noblesse pickts, before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler not to mention a bulgic porterhouse barge. And ere that again, leada, laida, all unraidy, too faint to buoy the fairiest rider, too frail to flirt with a cygnet’s plume, she was licked by a hound, Chirripa-Chirruta, while poing her pee, pure and simple, on the spur of the hill in old Kippure, in birdsong and shearingtime, but first of all, worst of all, the wiggly livvly, she sideslipped out by a gap in the Devil’s glen while Sally her nurse was sound asleep in a sloot and feefee fiefie fell over a spillway before she found her stride and lay and wriggled in all the stagnant black pools of rainy under a fallow coo and she laughed innocefree with her limbs aloft and a whole drove of maiden hawthorns blushing and looking askance upon her.

Drop me the sound of the findhorn’s name. And drip me why in the flenders was she frickled. And trickle me through was she marcellewaved or was it weirdly a wig she wore. And whitside did they droop their glows in their florry, aback to wist or affront to sea? In fear to hear the dear so near or longing loth and loathing longing? Are you in the swim or are you out? O go in, go on, go an! I mean about what you know. I know right well what you mean. Rother! You’d like the coifs and guimpes, snouty, and me to do the greasy jub on old Veronica’s wipers. What am I rancing now and I’ll thank you? Is it a pinny or is it a surplice? Arran, where’s your nose? And where’s the starch? That’s not the vesdre benediction smell. I can tell from here by their eau de Colo and the scent of her oder they’re Mrs. Magrath’s. And you ought to have aird them. They’ve moist come off her. Creases in silk they are, not crampton lawn. Baptiste me, father, for she has sinned! Through her catchment ring she freed them easy, with her hips’hurrahs for her knees’dontelleries. The only parr with frills in old the plain. So they are, I declare! Welland well! If tomorrow keeps fine who’ll come tripping to sightsee? How’ll? Ask me next what I haven’t got! The Belvedarean exhibitioners. In their sculling caps and oarsclub colours. What hoo, they band! And what hoa, they buck! And here is her nubilee letters too. Ellis on quay in scarlet thread. Linked for the world on a flushcoloured field. Annan exe after to show they’re not Laura Kehoe’s. O, may the diabolo twisk your seifety pin! You child of Mammon, Kinsella’s Lilith! Now who has been tearing the leg of her drawers on her? Which leg is it? The one with the bells on it. Rinse them out and aston along with you! Where did I stop? Never stop! Continuarration! You’re not there yet. Garonne, garonne!

Well, after it was put in the Mericy Cordial Mendicants’ Sitterdag-Zindeh-Munaday Wakeschrift (for once they sullied their white kidloves, chewing cuds after their dinners of cheeckin and beggin, with their show us it here and their mind out of that and their when you’re quite finished with the reading matarial), even the snee that snowdon his hoaring hair had a skunner against him. Thaw, thaw, sava, savuto! Score Her Chuff Exsquire! Everywhere erriff you went and every bung you arver dropped into, in cit or suburb or in addled areas, the Rose and Bottle or Phoenix Tavern or Power’s Inn or Jude’s Hotel or wherever you scoured the countryside from Nannywater to Vartryville or from Porta Lateen to the lootin quarter you found his ikom etsched tipside down or the cornerboys burning his guy and Morris the Man, with the role of a royss in his turgos the turrible, (Evropeahahn cheic house, unskimmed sooit and yahoort, hamman now cheekmee, Ahdahm this way make, Fatima, half turn!) reeling and railing round the local with oddfellow’s triple tiara busby rotundarinking round his scalp. Like Pate-by-the-Neva or Pete-over-Meer. This is the Hausman all paven and stoned, that cribbed the Cabin that never was owned, that cocked his leg and hennad his Egg. And the mauldrin rabble around him in areopage, fracassing a great bingkan cagnan with their timpan crowders. Mind your Grimmfather! Think of your Ma! Hing the Hong is his jove’s hangnomen! Lilt a bolero, bulling a law! She swore on croststyx nyne wyndabouts she’s be level with all the snags of them yet. Par the Vulnerable Virgin’s Mary del Dame! So she said to herself she’d frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you niever heard. What plan? Tell me quick and dongu so crould! What the meurther did she mague? Well, she bergened a bag, a shammy mailsack, off one of her swapsons, Shaun the Post, and then she went and consulted her chapboucqs, old Mot Moore, Casey’s Euclid and the Fashion Display and made herself tidal to join in the mascarete. O gig goggle of gigguels. I can’t tell you how! It’s too screaming to rizo, rabbit it all! Minneha, minnehi minaaehe, minneho! O but you must, you must really! Make my hear it gurgle gurgle, like the farest gargle gargle in the dusky dirgle dargle. By the holy well of Mulhuddart I swear I’d pledge my chanza getting to heaven through Tirry and Killy’s mount of impiety to hear it all, aviary word! O, leave me my faculties, woman, a while. If you don’t like my story get out of the punt. Well, have it your own way, so. Here, sit down and do as you’re bid. Take my stroke and bend to your bow. Forward in and pull your overthepoise! Lisp it slaney and crisp it quiet. Deel me longsome. Tongue your time now. Breathe thet deep. Thouat’s the fairway. Hurry slow and scheldt you go. Lynd us your blessed ashes here till I scrub the canon’s underpants. Flow now. Ower more.

First she let her hair fall and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greased the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and islats dun quincecunct allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rehr, of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shell-marble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey, Annushka Lutetiavitch Pufflovah, and the lellipos cream to her lippeleens and the pick of the paintbox for her pommettes, from strawbirry reds to extra violates, and she send her boudeloire maids to His Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, the two chirsines, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin. A call to pay, and light a taper, in Brie-on-Arrosa, back in a sprizzling. The cock striking mine, the stalls bridely sign, there’s Zambosy waiting for me. She said she wouldn’t be half her length away. Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slang over her shulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came.

Describe her! Hustle along, why can’t you? Spitz on the iern while it’s hot. I wouldn’t miss her for irthing on nerthe. Oceans of Gaud, I mussel hear that! Ogowe presta! Leste, before Julia sees her! Ishekarry and washemeskad, the carishy caratimaney? Whole lady fair? Duodecimoroon? Bon a ventura? Malagassy? What had she on, the liddel oud oddity? How much did she scallop, harness and weights? Here she is, Amnisty Ann! Call her calamity electrifies man.

No electress at all, but old Moppa Necessity, angin mother of injons. I’ll tell you a test. But you must sit still. Will you hold your peace and listen well to what I am going to say now? It might have been ten or twenty to one of the night of Allclose or the nexth of April when the flip of her hoogly igloo flappered and out toetippit a bushman woman, the dearest little moma ever you saw, nodding around her, all smiles, with ems of embarras and aues to awe, between two ages, a judyqueen, not up to your elb. Quick, look at her cute and saise her quirk for the bicker she lives the slicker she grows. Save us and tagus! No more? Werra where in ourthe did you ever pick a Lambay chop as big as a battering ram? Ay, you’re right. I’m epte to forgetting, Like Liviam Liddle did Loveme Long. The linth of my hough, I say! She wore a ploughboy’s nailstudded clogs, a pair of ploughfields in themselves: a sugarloaf hat with a gaudyquiviry peak and a band of gorse for an arnoment and a hundred streamers dancing off it and a guildered pin to pierce it: owlglassy bicycles boggled her eyes: and a fishnetzeveil she had to keep the sun from spoiling her wrinkles: potatorings boucled the loose laubes of her laudsnarers: her nude cuba stockings were salmospotspeckled: she sported a galligo shimmy of hazevaipar tinto that never was fast till it ran in the washing: stout stays, the rivals, lined her length: her bloodorange bockknickers, a two in one garment, showed natural nigger boggers, fancyfastened, free to undo: her blackstripe tan joseph was sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy rushgreen epaulettes and a leadown here and there of royal swansruff: a brace of gaspers stuck in her hayrope garters: her civvy codroy coat with alpheubett buttons was boundaried round with a twobar tunnel belt: a fourpenny bit in each pocketside weighed her safe from the blowaway windrush; she had a clothespeg tight astride on her joki’s nose and she kep on grinding a sommething quaint in her fiumy mouth and the rrreke of the fluve of the tail of the gawan of her snuffdrab siouler’s skirt trailed ffiffty Irish miles behind her lungarhodes.

Hellsbells, I’m sorry I missed her! Sweet gumptyum and nobody fainted! But in whelk of her mouths? Was her naze alight? Everyone that saw her said the dowce little delia looked a bit queer. Lotsy trotsy, mind the poddle! Missus, be good and don’t fol in the say! Fenny poor hex she must have charred. Kickhams a frumpier ever you saw! Making saft mullet’s eyes at her boys dobelong. And they crowned her their chariton queen, all the maids. Of the may? You don’t say! Well for her she couldn’t see herself. I recknitz wharfore the darling murrayed her mirror. She did? Mersey me! There was a koros of drouthdropping surfacemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of her filimentation, lolling and leasing on North Lazers’ Waal all eelfare week by the Jukar Yoick’s and as soon as they saw her meander by that marritime way in her grasswinter’s weeds and twigged who was under her deaconess bonnet, Avondale’s fish and Clarence’s poison, sedges an to aneber, Wit-upon-Crutches to Master Bates: Between our two southsates and the granite they’re warming, or her face has been lifted or Alp has doped.

But what was the game in her mixed baggyrhatty? And where in thunder did she plunder? Fore the battle or efter the ball? I want to get it frisk from the soorce. I aubette my bearb it’s worth while poaching on. Shake it up, do, do! That’s a good old son of a ditch! I promise. I’ll make it worth your while. And I don’t mean maybe. Nor yet with a goodfor. Spey me pruth and I’ll tale you true.

Well, arundgirond in a waveney lyne aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder through narrowa mosses, the diliskydrear on our drier side and the vilde vetchvine agin us, curara here careero there, not knowing which medway or weser to strike it, edereider making chattahoochee all to her ain chichiu, like Santa Claus at the cree of the pale and puny, nistling to hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romas and Reims, then bathing Dirty Hans’ spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door! On the matt, by the pourch and inunder the cellar. The rivulets ran aflod to see, the glashaboys, the pollynooties. Out of the paunschaup on to the pyre. And they all about her, youth and maidens, rickets and riots, like the Smyly boys at their vicereine’s levee. Vivi vienne, little Annchen vielo Anna, high life! Sing us a sula, O, susuria! Ausone sidulcis! Hasn’t she tambre! Chipping her and raising a bit of a chir or a jary every dive she’d neb in her culdee sacco of wabbash she raabed and reach out her maundy meerschaundize, poor souvenir as per ricorder and all for sore aringarung, stinkers and heelers, laggards and primelads, her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them. For evil and ever. And kiks the buch. A tinker’s bann and a barrow to boil his billy for Gipsy Lee; a cartridge of cockaleekie soup for Chummy the Guardsman; for sulky Pender’s acid nephew deltoïd drops, curiously strong; a cough and a rattle and wildrose cheeks for poor Piccolina Petite MacFarlane; a jigsaw puzzle of needles and pins and blankets and shins between them for Isabel, Jezebel and Llewelyn Mmarriage; a brazen nose and pigiron mittens for Johnny Walker Beg; a papar flag of the saints and stripes for Kevineen O’Dea; a puffpuff for Pudge Craig and a nightmarching hare for Techer Tombigby; waterleg and gumboots each for Bully Hayes and Hurricane Hartigan; a prodigal heart and fatted calves for Buck Jones, the pride of Clonliffe; a loaf of bread and a father’s early aim for Tim from Skibereen; a jauntingcar for Larry Doolin, the Ballyclee jackeen; a seasick trip on a government ship for Teague O’Flanagan; a louse and trap for Jerry Coyle; slushmincepies for Andy Mackenzie; a hairclip and clackdish for Penceless Peter; that twelve sounds look for G. V. Brooke; a drowned doll, to face downwards for modest Sister Anne Mortimer; altar falls for Blanchisse’s bed; Wildairs’ breeketties for Magpeg Woppington; to Sue Dot a big eye; to Sam Dash a false step; snakes in clover, picked and scotched, and a vaticanned viper-catcher’s visa for Patsy Presbys; a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick and a drop every minute for Stumblestone Davy; scruboak beads for beatified Biddy; two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely; for Saara Philpot a jordan vale tearorne; a pretty box of Pettyfib’s Powder for Eileen Aruna to whiten her teeth and outflash Helen Arhone; a whippingtop for Eddy Lawless; for Kitty Coleraine of Butterman’s Lane a penny wise for her foolish pitcher; a putty shovel for Terry the Puckaun; a apotamus mask for Promoter Dunne; a niester egg with a twicedated shell and a dynamight right for Pavl the Curate; a collera morbous for Mann in the Cloack; a starr and girton for Draper and Deane; for Will-of-the-Wisp and Barny the Bark two mangolds noble to sweeden their bitters; for Oliver Bound a way in his frey; for Seumas, thought little, a crown he feels big; a tibertine’s pile with a Congoswood cross on the back for Sunny Twimjim; a praises be and spare me days for Brian the Bravo; penteplenty of pity with lubilashings of lust for Olona Lena Magdalena; for Camilla, Dromilla, Ludmilla, Mamilla, a bucket, a packet, a book and a pillow; for Nancy Shannon a Tuami brooch; for Dora Riparia Hopeandwater a cooling douche and a warmingpan; a pair of Blarney braggs for Wally Meagher; a hairpin slatepencil for Elsie Oram to scratch her toby, doing her best with her volgar fractions; an old age pension for Betty Bellezza; a bag of the blues for Funny Fitz; a Missa pro Messa for Taff de Taff; Jill, the spoon of a girl, for Jack, the broth of a boy; a Rogerson Crusoe’s Friday fast for Caducus Angelus Rubiconstein; three hundred and sixtysix poplin tyne for revery warp in the weaver’s woof for Victor Hugonot; a stiff steaded rake and good varians muck for Kate the Cleaner; a hole in the ballad for Hosty; two dozen of cradles for J.F.X.P. Coppinger; tenpounten on the pop for the daulphins born with five spoiled squibs for Infanta; a letter to last a lifetime for Maggi beyond by the ashpit; the heftiest frozenmeat woman from Lusk to Livienbad for Felim the Ferry; spas and speranza and symposium’s syrup for decayed and blind and gouty Gough; a change of naves and joys of ills for Armoricus Tristram Amoor Saint Lawrence; a guillotine shirt for Reuben Redbreast and hempen suspendeats for Brennan on the Moor; an oakanknee for Conditor Sawyer and musquodoboits for Great Tropical Scott; a C3 peduncle for Karmalite Kane; a sunless map of the month, including the sword and stamps for Shemus O’Shaun the Post; a jackal with hide for Browne but Nolan; a stonecold shoulder for Donn Joe Vance; all lock and no stable for Honorbright Meretrix; a big drum for Billy Dunboyne; a guilty goldeny bellows, below me blow me for Ida Ida and a hushaby rocker Elletrouvetout for Who-is-silvier—Where-is-he?; whatever you like to swilly to swash Yuinness or Yennessy, Laagen or Niger, for Festus King and Roaring Peter and Frisky Shorty and Treacle Tom and O. B. Behan and Sully the Thug and Master Magrath and Peter Cloran and O’Delawarr Rossa and Nerone MacPacem and whoever you chance to meet knocking around; and a pig’s bladder balloon for Selina Susquehanna Stakelum. But what did she give to Pruda Ward and Katty Kanel and Peggy Quilty and Briery Brosna and Teasy Kieran and Ena Lappin and Muriel Mosel and Zusan Camac and Melissa Bradogue and Flora Ferns and Fauna Fox-Goodman and Grettna Greaney and Penelope Inglesante and Lezba Licking like Leytha Liane and Roxana Rohan with Simpatica Sohan and Una Bina Laterza and Trina La Mesme and Philomena O’Farrell and Irmak Elly and Josephine Foyle and Snakeshead Lily and Fountainoy Laura and Marie Xavier Agnes Daisy Frances de Sales Macleay? She gave them ilcka madre’s daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein: but the grapes that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress. So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears as from Shem, her penmight, life past befoul his prime.

My colonial, wardha bagful! A bakereen’s dusind with tithe tillies to boot. That’s what you may call a tale of a tub! All that and more under one crinoline envelope if you dare to break the porkbarrel seal. No wonder they’d run from her pison plague. Throw us your hudson soap for the honour of Clane! The wee taste the water left. I’ll raft it back, first thing in the marne. Merced mulde! Ay, and don’t forget the reckitts I lohaned you. You’ve all the swirls your side of the current. Well, am I to blame for that if I have! Who said you’re to blame for that if you have? You’re a bit on the sharp side. I’m on the wide. Only snuffers’ cornets drifts my way that the cracka dvine chucks out of his cassock, with her estheryear’s marsh narcissus to make him recant his vanitty fair. Foul strips of his chinook’s bible I do be reading, dodwell disgustered but chickled with chuckles at the tittles is drawn on the tattle-page. Senior ga dito: Faciasi Omo! E omo fu fò. Ho! Ho! Senior ga dito: Faciasi Hidamo! Hidamo se ga facessà. Ha! Ha! And Die Windermere Dichter and Lefanu (Sheridan’s) Old House by the Coachyard and Mill (J.) On Woman with Ditto on the Floss. Ja, a swamp for Altmuehler and a stone for his flossies! I know how racy they move his wheel. My hands are blawcauld between isker and suda like that piece of pattern chayney there, lying below. Or where is it? Lying beside the sedge I saw it. Hoangho, my sorrow, I’ve lost it! Aimihi! With that turbary water who could see? So near and yet so far! But O, gihon! I lovat a gabber. I could listen to maure and moravar again. Regn onder river. Flies do your float. Thick is the life for mere.

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ’Tis endless now since eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest sound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper. It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine.

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

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The Mookse and the Gripes

Eins within a space and a weary wide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse. The onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsitslike, broady oval, and a Mookse he would a walking go (My hood! cries Antony Romeo), so one grandsumer evening, after a great morning and his good supper of gammon and spittish, having flabelled his eyes, pilleoled his nostrils, vacticanated his ears and palliumed his throats, he put on his impermeable, seized his impugnable, harped on his crown and stepped out of his immobile De Rure Albo (socolled becauld it was chalkfull of masterplasters and had borgeously letout gardens strown with cascadas, pintacostecas, horthoducts and currycombs) and set off from Ludstown a spasso to see how badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways. As he set off with his father’s sword, his lancia spezzata, he was girded on, and with that between his legs and his tarkeels, our once in only Bragspear, he clanked, to my clinking, from veetoes to threetop, every inch of an immortal. He had not walked over a pentiadpair of parsecs from his azylium when at the turning of the Shinshone Lanteran near Saint Bowery’s-without-his-Walls he came (secunding to the one one oneth of the propecies, Amnis Limina Permanent) upon the most unconsciously boggylooking stream he ever locked his eyes with. Out of the colliens it took a rise by daubing itself Ninon. It looked little and it smelt of brown and it thought in narrows and it talked showshallow. And as it rinn it dribbled like any lively purliteasy: My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don’t I love thee! And, I declare, what was there on the yonder bank of the stream that would be a river, parched on a limb of the olum, bolt downright, but the Gripes? And no doubt he was fit to be dried for why had he not been having the juice of his times?

His pips had been neatly all drowned on him; his polps were charging odours every older minute; he was quickly for getting the dresser’s desdaign on the flyleaf of his frons; and he was quietly for giving the bailiff’s distrain on to the bulkside of his cul de Pompe. In all his specious heavings, as be lived by Optimus Maximus, the Mookse had never seen his Dubville brooder-on-low so nigh to a pickle.

Adrian (that was the Mookse now’s assumptinome) stuccstill phiz-à-phiz to the Gripes in an accessit of aurignacian. But Allmookse must to Moodend much as Allrouts, austereways or wastersways, in roaming run through Room. Hic sor a stone, singularly illud, and on hoc stone Seter satt huc sate which it filled quite poposterously and by acclammitation to its fullest justotoryum and whereopum with his unfallable encyclicling upom his alloilable, diupetriark of the wouest, and the athemystsprinkled pederect he always walked with, Deusdedit, cheek by jowel with his frisherman’s blague, Bellua Triumphanes, his everyway addedto wallat’s collectium, for yea longer he lieved yea broader he betaught of it, the fetter, the summe and the haul it cost, he looked the first and last micahlike laicness of Quartus the Fifth and Quintus the Sixth and Sixtus the Seventh giving allnight sitting to Lio the Faultyfindth.

— Good appetite us, sir Mookse! How do you do it? cheeped the Gripes in a wherry whiggy maudelenian woice and the jackasses all within bawl laughed and brayed for his intentions for they knew their sly toad lowry now. I am rarumominum blessed to see you, my dear mouster. Will you not perhopes tell me everything if you are pleased, sanity? All about aulne and lithial and allsall allinall about awn and liseias? Ney?

Think of it! O miserendissimest retempter! A Gripes!

— Rats! bullowed the Mookse most telesphorously, the concionator, and the sissymusses and the zozzymusses in their robenhauses quailed to hear his tardeynois at all for you cannot wake a silken nouse out of a hoarse oar. Blast yourself and your anathomy infairioriboos! No, hang you for an animal rurale! I am superbly in my supremest poncif! Abase you, baldyqueens! Gather behind me, satraps! Rots!

— I am till infinity obliged with you, bowed the Gripes, his whine having gone to his palpruy head. I am still always having a wish on all my extremities. By the watch, what is the time, pace?

Figure it! The pining peever! To a Mookse!

— Ask my index, mund my achilles, swell my obolum, woshup my nase serene, answered the Mookse, rapidly by turning clement, urban, eugenious and celestian in the formose of good grogory humours. Quote awhore? That is quite about what I came on my missions with my intentions laudibiliter to settle with you barbarousse. Let thor be orlog. Let Pauline be Irene. Let you be Beeton. And let me be Los Angeles. Now measure your length. Now estimate my capacity. Well, sour? Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? Will you give you up? Como? Fuert it?

Sancta Patientia. You should have heard the voice that answered him! Culla vosellina.

— I was just thinkling upon that, swees Mookse, but, for all the rime on my raisins, if I connow make my submission, I cannos give you up, the Gripes whimpered from nethermost of his wanhope. Ishallassoboundbewilsothoutoosezit. My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own. My velicity is too fit in one stockend. And my spetial inexshellsis the belowing things ab ove. But I will never be abler to tell Your Honoriousness (here he near lost his limb) though my corked father was bott a pseudowaiter, whose o’cloak you ware.

Incredible! Well, hear the inevitable.

—Your temple, sus in cribro! Semper-excommunicambiambisumers. Tugurios-in-Newrobe or Tukurias-in-Ashies. Novarome, my creature, blievend bleives. My building space in lyonine city is always to let to leonlike Men, the Mookse in a most consistorous allocution pompifically with immediate jurisdiction constantinently concludded (what a crammer for the shapewrucked Gripes!). And I regret to proclaim that it is out of my temporal to help you from being killed by inchies, (what a thrust!), as we first met each other newwhere so airly. (Poor little sowsieved subsquashed Gripes! I begin to feel contemption for him!). My side thank decretals, is as safe as motherour’s houses, he continued, and I can seen from my holeydome what it is to be wholly sane. Unionjok and be joined to yok! Parysis, tu sais, crucycrooks, belongs to him who parises himself. And there I must leave you subject for the pressing. I can prove that against you, weight a momentum, mein goot enemy! or Cospol’s not our star. I bet you this dozen odd. This foluminous dozen odd. Quas primas—but ’tis bitter to compote my knowledge’s fructos of. Tomes.

Elevating, to give peint to his blick, his jewelled pederect to the allmysty cielung, he luckystruck blueild out of a few shouldbe santillants, a cloister of starabouts over Maples, a lucciolys in Teresa street and a stopsign before Sophy Barratt’s, he gaddered togodder the odds docence of his vellumes, gresk, letton and russicruxian, onto the lapse of his prolegs, into umfullth onescuppered, and sat about his widerproof. He proved it well whoonearth dry and drysick times, and vremiament, tu cesses, to the extinction of Niklaus altogether (Niklaus Alopysius having been the once Gripes’s popwilled nimbum) by Neuclidius and Inexagoras and Mumfsen and Thumpsem, by Orasmus and by Amenius, by Anacletus the Jew and by Malachy the Augurer and by the Cappon’s collection and after that, with Cheekee’s gelatine and Alldaybrandy’s formolon, he reproved it ehrltogether when not in that order sundering in some different order, alter three thirty and a hundred times by the binomial dioram and the penic walls and the ind, the Inklespill legends and the rure, the rule of the hoop and the blessons of expedience and the jus, the jugicants of Pontius Pilax and all the mummyscrips in Sick Bokes’ Juncroom and the Chapters for the Cunning of the Chapters of the Conning Fox by Tail.

While that Mooksius with preprocession and with proprecession, duplicitly and diplussedly, was promulgating ipsofacts and sadcontras this raskolly Gripos he had allbust seceded in monophysicking his illsobordunates. But asawfulas he had caught his base semenoyous sarchnaktiers to combuccinate upon the silipses of his aspillouts and the acheporeoozers of his haggyown pneumax to synerethetise with the breadchestviousness of his sweeatovular ducose sofarfully the loggerthuds of his sakellaries were fond at variance with the synodals of his somepooliom and his babskissed nepogreasymost got the hoof from his philioquus.

— Efter thousand yaws, O Gripes con my sheepskins, yow will be belined to the world, enscayed the Mookse.

— Ofter thousand yores, amsered the Gripes, be the goat of MacHammud’s, yours may be still, O Mookse, more botheared.

— Us shall be chosen as the first of the last by the electress of Vale Hollow, obselved the Mookse nobily, for par the unicum of Elelijiacks, Us am in Our stabulary and that is what Ruby and Roby fall for, blissim.

The Pills, the Nasal Wash (Yardly’s), the Army Man Cut, as british as bondstrict and as straightcut as when that brokenarched traveller from Nuzuland....

— Wee, cumfused the Gripes limply, shall not even be the last of the first, wee hope, when oust are visitated by the Veiled Horror. And, he added: Mee are relying entirely, see the fortethurd of Elissabed, on the weightiness of mear’s breath. Puffut!

Unsightbared embouscher, relentless foe to social and business succes! (Hourihaleine) It might have been a happy evening but....

And they viterberated each other, canis et coluber with the wildest ever wielded since Tarriestinus lashed Pissasphaltium.

— Unuchorn!

— Ungulant!

— Uvuloid!

— Uskybeak!

And bullfolly answered volleyball.

Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. How she was brightened when Shouldrups in his glaubering hochskied his welkinstuck and how she was overclused when Kneesknobs on his zwivvel was makeacting such a paulse of himshelp! She was alone. All her nubied companions were asleeping with the squirrels. Their mivver, Mrs Moonan, was off in the Fuerst quarter scrubbing the backsteps of Number 28. Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood’s sokaparlour, eating oceans of Voking’s Blemish. Nuvoletta listened as she reflected herself, though the heavenly one with his constellatria and his emanations stood between, and she tried all she tried to make the Mookse look up at her (but he was fore too adiaptotously farseeing) and to make the Gripes hear how coy she could be (though he was much too schystimatically auricular about his ens to heed her) but it was all mild’s vapour moist. Not even her feignt reflection, Nuvoluccia, could they toke their gnoses off for their minds with intrepifide fate and bungless curiasity, were conclaved with Heliogobbleus and Commodus and Enobarbarus and whatever the coordinal dickens they did as their damprauch of papyrs and buchstubs said. As if that was their spiration! As if theirs could duiparate her queendim! As if she would be third perty to search on search proceedings! She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her sfumastelliacinous hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus. But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy’s worth to Florida. For the Mookse, a dogmad Accanite, were not amoosed and the Gripes, a dubliboused Catalick, wis pinefully obliviscent. I see, she sighed. There are menner.

The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the softzing at the stir of the ver grose O arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing, duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds. Metamnisia was allsoonome coloroform brune; citherior spiane an eaulande, innemorous and unnumerose. The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear. The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see. He ceased. And he ceased, tung and trit, and it was neversoever so dusk of both of them. But still Moo thought on the deeps of the undths he would profoundth come the morrokse and still Gri feeled of the scripes he would escipe if by grice he had luck enoupes.

Oh, how it was duusk! From Vallee Maraia to grasyaplaina, dormimust Echo! Ah dew! Ah dew! It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie!

Then there came down to the thither bank a woman of no appearance (I believe she was a Black with chills at her feet) and she gathered up his hoariness the Mookse motamourfully where he was spread and carried him away to her invisible dwelling, thats hights, Aquila Rapax, for he was the holy sacred solem and poshup spit of her boshop’s apron. So you see the Mookse he had reason as I knew and you knew and he knew all along. And there came down to the hither bank a woman to all important (though they say that she was comely, spite the cold in her heed) and, for he was as like it as blow it to a hawker’s hank, she plucked down the Gripes, torn panicky autotone, in angeu from his limb and cariad away its beotitubes with her to her unseen shieling, it is, De Rore Coeli. And so the poor Gripes got wrong; for that is always how a Gripes is, always was and always will be. And it was never so thoughtful of either of them. And there were left now an only elmtree and but a stone. Polled with pietrous, Sierre but saule. O! Yes! And Nuvoletta, a lass.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those who are “keen” on the pretty-pretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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The Ondt and the Gracehoper

The Gracehoper was always jigging a jog, hoppy, on akkant of his joyicity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him), or, if not, he was always making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla to play pupa-pupa and pulicy-pulicy and langtennas and pushpygyddyum and to commence insects with him, there mouthparts to his orefice and his gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste, ameng the everlistings, behold a waspering pot. He would of curse melissciously, by his fore feelhers, flexors, contractors, depressors and extensors, lamely, harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me, till she was puce for shame and allso fourmish her in Spinner’s housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his cottage, which was cald fourmillierly Tingsomingenting, groped up. Or, if he was not done doing that, improbably he was always striking up funny funereels with Besterfarther Zeuts, the Aged One, with all his wigeared corollas, albedinous and oldbuoyant, inscythe his elytrical wormcasket and Dehlia and Peonia, his druping nymphs, bewheedling him, compound eyes on hornitosehead, and Auld Letty Plussiboots to scratch his cacumen and cackle his tramsitus, diva deborah (seven bolls of sapo, a lick of lime, two spurts of fussfor, threefurts of sulph, a shake o’ shouker, doze grains of migniss and a mesfull of midcap pitchies. The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the whorl of the Boubou from Bourneum has thus come to taon!), and with tambarins and cantoridettes soturning around his eggshill rockcoach their dance McCaper in retrophœbia, beck from bulk, like fantastic disossed and jenny aprils to, the ra, the ra, the ra, the ra, langsome heels and langsome toesis, attended to by a mutter and doffer duffmatt baxingmotch and a myrmidins of pszozlers pszinging Satyr’s Caudledayed Nice and Humbly, Dumbly Sod We Awhile but Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake! For if sciencium (what’s what) can mute uns nought, ’a thought, abought the Great Sommboddy within the Omniboss perhops an artsaccord (hoot’s hoot) might sing ums tumtim abutt the Little Newbuddies that ring his panch. A high old tide for the barheated publics and the whole day as gratiis! Fudder and lighting for ally looty, any filly in a fog for O’Cronione lags acrumbling in his sands but his sunsunsuns still tumble on. Erething above ground, as his Book of Breathings bed him, so as everwhy, sham or shunner, zeemliangly to kick time.

Grouscious me and scarab my sahul! What a bagateller it is! Libelulous! Inzanzarity! Pou! Ptah! What a zeit for the goths! vented the Ondt, who, not being a sommerfool, was thothfolly making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix. We shall not come to party at that lopp’s, he decided possibly, for he is not on our social list. Nor to Ba’s berial nether this oldeborre’s yaar ablong as there’s a khul on a khat. Nefersenless, when he had safely looked up his ovipository, he loftet hails and prayed: May he me no voida water! Seekit Hatup! May no he me tile pig shed on! Suckit Hotup! As broad as Beppy’s realm shall flourish my reign shall flourish! As high as Heppy’s hevn shall flurrish my haine shall hurrish! Shall grow, shall flourish! Shall hurrish! Hummum.

The Ondt was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairmanlooking. Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the bimblebeaks, drikking with nautonects, bilking with durrydunglecks and horing after ladybirdies (ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon) he fell joust as sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo quant a churchprince, and wheer the midges to wend hemsylph or vosch to sirch for grub for his corapusse or to find a hospes, alick, he wist gnit! Bruko dry! fuko spint! Sultamont osa bare! And volomundo osi videvide! Nichtsnichtsundnichts! Not one pickopeck of muscowmoney to bag a tittlebits of beebread! Iomiol! Iomiol! Crick’s corbicule, which a plight! O moy Bog, he contrited, I am heartily hungry!

He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids and voracioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the ternitary—not too dusty a cicada of neutriment for a chittinous chip so mitey. But when Chrysalmas was on the bare branches off he went from Tingsomingenting. He took a round stroll and he took a stroll round and he took a round strollagain till the grillies in his head and the leivnits in his hair made him thought he had the Tossmania. Had he twicylched the sees of the deed and trestraversed their revermer? Was he come to hevre with his engiles or gone to hull with the poop? The June snows was flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes, millipeeds of it and myriopoods, and a lugly tournedos, the Boraborayellers blohablasting tegolhuts up to tetties and ruching sleets off the coppeehouses with an irritant, penetrant, siphonopterous spuk. Grausssssss! Opr! Grausssssss! Opr!

The Gracehoper who, though blind as batflea, yet knew his good smetterling of entymology promptly tossed himself in the vico, phthin and phthir, on top of his buzzer and the next time he makes the aquinatance of the Ondt after this they have met themselves it shall be motylucky if he will beheld not a world of differents. Behailed His Gross the Ondt prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his Papylonian babooshkees, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o’monkynous and a confucion of minthe (for he was a conformed aceticist and aristotaller) as appi as a oneysucker or a baskerboy on the Libido with Floh biting his leg thigh and Luse lugging his luff leg and Bieni bussing him under his bonnet and Vespatilla blowing cosy fond tutties up the large of his smalls. Emmet and demmet and be jiltses crazed and be jadeses whipt! schneezed the Gracehoper, aguepe with ptchjelasys and at his wittol’s indts, what have eyeforsight!

The Ondt, that true and perfect host, was making the greatest spass a body could with his queens laceswinging for he was spizzing all over him like thingsumanything in formicolation, boundlessly blissfilled in an allallahbath of houris. He was ameising himself hugely at crabround and marypose, chasing Floh out of charity and tickling Luse, I hope too, and tackling Bienie, faith, as well, and jucking Vespatilla jukely by the chimiche. Never did Dorsan from Dunshanagan dance it with more devilry! The veripatetic imago of the impossible Gracehoper on his odderkop in the myre, sans mantis ne shooshooe, feather weighed animule, actually and presumptuably sinctifying chronic’s despair, was sufficiently and probably coocoo much for his chorous of gravitates. A darkener of the threshold. Haru? Orimis, capsizer of his antboat, sekketh rede from Evil-it-is, lord of loaves in Amongded. Be it! So be it! Thou-who-thou-art, the fleet-as-spindhrift, impfang thee of mine wideheight. Haru!

The thing pleased him andt, andt andt,

He larved ond he larved onn he merd such a nauses

The Gracehoper feared he would mixplace his fauces.

I forgive you, grondt Ondt, said the Gracehoper, weeping,

For their sukes of the sakes you are safe in whose keeping.

Teach Floh and Luse polkas, show Bienie where’s sweet

And be sure Vespatilla fines fat ones to heat.

As I once played the piper I must now pay the count

So saida to Moyhammlet and marhaba to your Mount!

Let who likes lump above so what flies be a full’un;

I could not feel moregruggy if this was prompollen.

I pick up your reproof, the horsegift of a friend,

For the prize of your save is the price of my spend.

Can castwhores pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake ’em

Or Culex feel etchy if Pulex don’t wake him?

A locus to loue, a term it t’embarass,

These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris.

Has Aquileone nort winged to go syf

Since the Gwyfyn we were in his farrest drewbryf

And that Accident Man not beseeked where his story ends

Since longsephyring sighs sought heartseast for their orience?

We are Wastenot with Want, precondamned, two and true,

Till Nolans go volants and Bruneyes come blue.

Ere those gidflirts now gadding you quit your mocks for my gropes

An extense must impull, an elapse must elopes,

Of my tectucs takestock, tinktact, and ail’s weal;

As I view by your farlook hale yourself to my heal.

Partiprise my thinwhins whiles my blink points unbroken on

Your whole’s whercabroads with Tout’s trightyright token on.

My in risible universe youdly haud find

Sulch oxtrabeeforeness meat soveal behind.

Your feats end enormous, your volumes immense

(May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!),

Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?

In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.

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Haveth Childers Everywhere

Amtsadam, sir, to you! Eternest cittas, heil! Here we are again! I am bubub brought up under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric Shilkanbeard (or is it Owllaugh MacAuscullpth the Thord?), but, in pontofacts massimust, I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken by Sall and Will from Augustanus to Ergastulus, as this is, whether in Farnum’s rath or Condra’s ridge or the meadows of Dalkin or Monkish tunshep, by saints and sinners eyeeye alike as a cleanliving man and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up. On my verawife I never was nor can afford to be guilty of crim crig con, of malfeasance trespass, against parson with the person of a youthful gigirl frifrif friend chirped Apples, acted by Miss Dashe, in Kissilov’s Slutsgartern or Gigglotte’s Hill, when I would touch to her dot and feel most greenily of her unripe ones as it should prove most anniece and far too bahad, nieceless to say, to my reputation on Babbyl Malket for daughters-in-trade being lightly clad. I should her have awristed under my duskguise of whippers through toombs and deempeys, lagmen, was she but tinkling of such a tink. And, as a mere matter of ficfect, I tell of myself how I popo possess the ripest littlums wifukie around the globelettes globes upon which she was romping off on Floss Mundai out of haram’s way round Skinner’s circusalley first with her consolation prize in my serial dreams of faire women, Mannequins Passe, handicapped by two breasts in operatops, a remarkable little endowment garment. Fastened at various places. What spurt! I kickkick keenly love such, particularly while savouring of their flavours at their most perfect best when served with heliotrope ayelips, as this is, where I do drench my jolly soul on the pu pure beauty of hers past.

She is my bestpreserved wholewife, sowell her as herafter, in Evans’s eye, with incompatibly the smallest shoenumber outside chinatins. They are jolly dainty spekin tluly. May we not recommend them? It was my proofpiece from my prentice serving. And, alas, our private chaplain of Lambeyth and Dolekey bishopregionary, an always sadfaced man, in his lutestring pewcape with tabinet band, who has visited our various hard hearts and reins by imposition of fufuf fingers, olso haddock’s fumb, in that Upper Room can speak loud to you some quite complimentary things about my clean charactering, even when detected in the dark, distressful though such recital prove to me, as this is, when I introduced her (Frankfurters, numborines, why drive fear?) to our fourposter tunies chantreying under Castrucci Sinior and De Mellos, those whapping oldsteirs, with sycamode euphonium in either notation in our altogether cagehaused duckyheim on Goosna Greene, that cabinteeny homesweetened through affection’s Hoardpayns (First Murkiss, or so they sankeyed. Dodo! O Clearly! And Gregorio at front with Johannes far in back. Aw, aw!) gleeglom there’s gnome sweepplaces like theresweep Nowhergs. By whom, as my Kerk Findlater’s, ye litel chuch rond ye coner, and K. K. Katakasm, enjoineth in the Belief and, as you all know, of a child, dear Humans, one of my life’s ambitions of my youngend from an early peepee period while still to hedjeskool, intended for broad church, I, being fully alive to it, was parruchially confirmed in Caulofat’s bed by our bujibuji beloved curate-author. Michael Engels is your man. Let Michael relay Sutton and tell you people here who have the phoney habit (it was remarketable) in his clairaudience as this is as only our own Michael can, when reicherout at superstation, to bring ruptures to our roars how I am amp amp amplify. Hiemlancollin. Pimpim’s Ornery forninehalf Shaun Shemsen saywhen saywhen Holmstock unsteaden. Livpoomark lloyrge hoggs one four tupps noying. Big Butter Boost! Sorry! Thnkyou! Thatll beall fortody. Cal it off! Godnotch, vryboily. End a muddy crushmess! Abbreciades anew York gustoms. Kyow! Tak.

— Tiktak. Tikkak.

— Awind abuzz awater falling.

— Poor a cowe his jew placator.

— It’s the damp damp damp.

— Calm has entered. Big big Calm, announcer. It is most ernst terooly a moresome intartenment. Colt’s tooth! I will give tandsel to it. I protest there is luttrelly not one teaspoonspill of evidence at bottomlie to my babad as you shall see, as this is. Keemun Lapsang of first pickings. And I contango can take off my dudud dirtynine articles of quoting here in Pynix Park before those in heaven to provost myself, by gramercy of justness I mean veryman and moremon, stiff and staunch for ever, and enter under the advicies from Misrs Norris, Southby, Yates and Weston inc., to their favoured client, into my preprotestant caveat against the pupup publication of libel by any tix tipsyloon or tobtomtowley of Keisserse Lean (a bloweyed lanejoymt, waring lowbelt suit, with knockbrecky kenees and bullfist rings round him and a fallse roude axehand (he is cunvesser to Saunter’s Nocelettres and the Poe’s Toffee’s Directory in his pisness), the best begrudged man in Belgradia who doth not belease to our paviour); to my nonesuch, that highest personage at moments holding down the throne. So to speak of beauty scouts in elegant pursuit of flowers searchers for tabernacles and the celluloid art! Happen seen sore eynes belived? The caca cad! He walked by North Strand with his Thom’s towel in hand. Snakeeye! Strangler of soffiacated green parrots! I protest it that he is by my wipehalf. He was leaving out of my double inns while he was all teppling over my single ixits. So was keshaned on for his recent behaviour. Sherlook is lorkin forhim. Allare beltspanners. Get your air curt! Shame upon Private M! Shames on his fulsomeness! Shamus on his atkinscum’s lulul lying suulen for an outcast mastiff littered in blood currish! Eristocras till Hanging Tower. Steck a javelin through his advowtried heart! Instaunton! Flap, my Larrybird! Dangle, my highflyet! Jiggety fig my jackadandyline! Let me never see his waddphez again! And mine it was Barktholed von Hunarig, Soesown of Furrows (hourspringlike his joussture, immitiate my chry! as urs now, so yous then!), when to our lot it fell on my poplar Sexsex, my Sexencentaurnary, whenby Gate of Hal, before his hostel of the Wodin Man, I hestened to freeholdit op to his Mam his Maman, Majuscules, His Magnus Maggerstick, first city’s leasekuays of this Nova Tara, our most noble, when hrossbucked on his pricelist charger Pferdinamd Allibuster (Yeddonot need light oar till Noreway for you fanned one oer every doorway) with my allbum’s greethims through this whole of my promises, handshakey congrandyoulikethems, ecelesency.

Whosaw the jackery dares at handgripper thisa breast? Dose makkers ginger. Some one we was with us all fours. Adversarian! The spiking Duyvil! First liar in Londsend! Wulv! See you scargore on that skeepsbrow! And those meisies! Sulken taarts! Man sicker at I ere bluffet konservative? Shucks! Such ratshause bugsmess so I cannot barely conceive of! Lowest basemeant in hystry! Ibscenest nansence! Noksagt Per Peeler and Pawr! The brokerheartened Shugon! Hole affair is rotten muckswinish porcupig’s draff. Enouch!

— Is that yu, Whitehed?

— Have you headnoise now?

— Give us your mespilt reception, will yous?

— Pass the fish for Christ’s sake!

— Old Whitehowth he is speaking again. Ope Eustace tube! Pity poor whiteoath! Dear gone mummeries, goby! Tell the woyld I have lived true thousand hells. Pity, please, lady, for poor O. W. in this profundust snobbing I have caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs hoar, mummery failend, snowdrift to my ellpow, deff as Adder. I askt you, dear lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits. I gave you of the tree. I gave two smells, three eats. My freeandies, my celeberrimates: my happy bossoms, my allfalling fruits of my boom. Pity poor Haveth Childers Everywhere with Mudder!

That was Communicator, a former Colonel. A disincarnated spirit, called Sebastion, from the Rivera in Januero, (he is not all hear) may fernspreak shortly with messuages from my deadported. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appunkment for a future date. Hello, Commudicate! How’s the buttes? Everscepistic! He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby. He has had some indiejestings, poor thing, for quite a little while, confused by his tonguer of baubble. A way with him! Poor Felix Culapert! Ring his mind, ye staples, (bonze!) in my ould reekeries’ ballyheart and in my Krumlin and in aroundisements and stremmis! Sacks eleathury! Sacks eleathury! Bam! I deplore over him ruely. Mongrieff! O Hone! Guestermed with the nobelities, to die bronxitic in achershous! So enjoying of old thick whiles, in haute white toff’s hoyt of our formed reflections, with stock of eisen all his prop, so buckely hosiered from the Royal Leg, and his puertos mugnum. He would puffout a dhymful bock. And the how he would husband her that verikerfully, his cigare divane! (He would redden her with his vestas, but ’tis naught). With us his nephos and his neberls mest incensed and befogged by him and his smoke thereof. But he shall have his glad stein of our zober beerbest in Oscarshal’s winetavern. Buen retiro! The boyce voyce is still flautish and his mounth still wears that soldier’s scarlet though the flaxafloyeds are peppered with salsedine. It is bycause of what he was ascend into his prisons on account off. I whit it wel. Hence his deepraised words. Some day I may tell of his second storey. Mood! Mood! It looks like someone other bearing my burdens. I cannot let it. Kanes nought.

Well, yeamen, I have bared my whole past, I flatter myself, on both sides. Give me even two months by laxlaw in second division and my first broadcloth is business will be to protest to Recorder at Thing of all Things, or court of Skivinis, with marchants grey, antient and credibel, Zerobubble Barrentone, Jonah Whalley, Determined Codde or Cucumber Upright, my jurats, if it does not occur again. O rhyme us! Haar Faagher, wild heart in Homelan; Harrod’s be the naun. Mine kinder come, mine wohl be won. There is nothing like leuther. O Shee! And nosty mens in gladshouses they shad not peggot stones. The elephant’s house is his castle. I am here to tell you indeed to goodness that, allbe I discountenanced beallpersuasions, in rinunciniation of pomps of heretofore, with a wax too held in hand, I am thorgtfulldt to do dope me of her miscisprinks and by virchow of those filthered Ovocnas presently like Browne umbracing Christina Anya, after the Irishers, to convert me into a selt (but first I must proxy babetise my old antenaughties), when, as Sigismond Stolterforth, with Rabbin Robroost for my auspicer and Leecher Rutty for my lifearst and Lorencz pattern (Ehren til viktrae!), when I will westerneyes those poor sunuppers and outbreighten their land’s eng. A man should stump up and I will pay my pretty decent trade price for my glueglue gluecose, peebles, were it even as this is, the legal eric for infelicitous conduict (here incloths placefined my pocketanchoredcheck) and, as a matter of fact, I undertake to discontinue entyrely all practices and I deny wholeswiping in toto at my own request in all stoytness to have confermentated and confoederated and agreed in times prebellic when here were waders for the trainsfolk, as it is now nuggently laid to me, with a friend from mine, Mr Billups, pulleter, my quarterbrother, who sometimes he is doing my locum for me on a grubstake and whom I have cleped constoutuent, for so it was felt by me, at goodbuy cootcoops byusucapiture a mouthless niggeress, Blanchette Brewster from Cherna Djamja, Blawlawnd-via-Brigstow, or to illsell my fourth part in her, which although allowed of in Deuterogamy as in several places of Scripture (copyright) and excluded books (they should quite rightly verbanned be) would seem eggseggs excessively haroween to my feelimbs for two punt scotch, one pollard and a crockard or three pipples on the bitch. Thou, Frick’s Flame, Uden Sulfer, who strikest only on the marryd bokks, enquick me if so be I did cophetuise milady’s maid, in spect of her beavers she is a womanly and sacret. Such wear a frillick for my comic strip, Mons Meg’s Monthly, comes out aich Fanagan’s wake, to bray at by clownsillies in Donkeybrook Fair. It would lackin mackin Hodder’s and Cocker’s erithmatic. The unpurdonable preempson of all of her of yourn, by Juno Moneta! If she, irished Marryonn Teheresiann, has been disposed of for her consideration, I, Ledwidge Salvatorious, am tradefully unintiristid. And if she is still further talc slopping over her cocoa contours, I hwat mick angars, am strongly of opinion why I should not be. Inprobable! I do not credit one word of it. Just feathers! Nanenities! Or to have ochtroyed to resolde or borrough by exchange same super melkkaart, means help; best Brixton high yellow, no outings, cent for cent on Auction’s Bridge. ’Twere a honnibel crudelty wert so tentement to their naktlives and scatab orgias we devour about in the mightyevil roohms of enceint cartage. Utterly improperable! Not for old Crusos or white soul of gold! A pipple on the panis, two claps on the cansill, or three pock pocks cassey knocked on the postern! Not for one testey tickey culprik’s coynds ore for all ecus in cunziehowffse! So hemp me Cash! I meanit.

My herrings! The surdity of it! Amean to say. Her bare idears, it is choochoo chucklesome. Absurd bargain, mum, will call. One line, with! One line, with with! Will ate everadayde saumone like a boyne alive O. The tew cherripickers, with their Catheringnettes, Lizzy and Lissy Mycock from Street Fleshshambles, were they moon at aube with hespermun and I their covin guardient, I would not know to contact such gretched youngsters in my ways from Haddem or any suistersees or heiresses of theirn, claiming by, through, or under them. Ous of their freiung pfann into myne foyer. Her is one which rassembled to mein enormally. The man what shocked his shanks at contey Carlow’s. He is Deucollion. Each habe goheerd, uptaking you are innersence, but we sen you meet sose infance. Deucollion! Odor. Evilling chimbes is smutsick rivulverblott but thee hard casted thereass pigstenes upann Congan’s shootsmen in Schottenhof, ekeascent? Igen Deucollion! I liked his Gothamm chic! Stuttertub! What a shrubbery trick to play! I will put my oathhead unner my whitepot for ransom of beeves and will stand me where I stood mine in all free heat between Pelagios and little Chistayas by Roderick’s our mostmonolith, after my both earstoear and brebreeches buybibles and minhatton testify to my unclothed virtue by the longstone erectheion of our allfirst manhere. I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked. I always think in a wordworth’s of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A. G. whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come. Like as my palmer’s past policy I have had my best master’s lessons as the public he knows, and do you know, homesters, I honestly think if I have failed lamentably by accident benefits though shintoed, spitefired, perplagued and cramkrieged, I am doing my dids bits and have made of my prudentials good. I have been told I own stolemines or something of that sorth in the sooth of Spainien. Hohohoho! Have I said ogso how I abhor myself vastly (truth to tell) and do repent to my netherheart of suntry clothing? The amusin part is I will say, hotelmen, that since I, over the deep drowner athacleeath to seek again Irrlanding, shamed in mind, with three plunges of my ruddertail, yet not a bottlenim, vanced imperial standard by weaponright and platzed mine residenze, taking bourd and burgage under starrimisty and ran and operated my brixtol selection here at thollstall for mean straits male with evorage fimmel, in commune soccage among strange and enemy, among these plotlets, in Poplinstown, alore Fort Dunlip, then-on-sea, hole of Serbonian bog, now city of magnificent distances, goodwalldabout, with talus and counterscarp and pale of palisades, upon martiell siegewin with Abbot Warre to blesse on yon slauchterday of cleantarriffs, in that year which I have called myriabellous, and overdrave these marken (the soord on whencehislaws was mine and mine the prusshing stock of Allbrecht the Bearn), under patroonshaap of our good kingsinnturns T. R. H. Urban First and Champaign Chollyman and Hungry the Loaved and Hangry the Hathed here where my tenenure of office and my toils of domestication first began, with weight of woman my Skat and Skuld but Flukie of the Ravens as my sure piloter, famine with Englisch sweat and oppedemics the twotoothed dragon worms with allsort serpents, has compolitely seceded from this landleague of many nations and open and notorious naughty livers are found not on our rolls. This seat of our city it is of all sides pleasant, comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills, they are not far off. If champain land, it lieth of all parts. If you would be delited with fresh water, the famous river called of Ptolemy the Libnia Labia runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand. Give heed!

— Do Drumcollogher whatever you do!

— Visitez Drumcollogher-la-Belle!

— Be suke and sie so Ersed Drumcollogher!

— Vedi Drumcollogher e poi moonis.

Things are not as they were. Let me briefly survey. Pro clam a shun! Pip! Peep! Pipitch! Ubipop jay piped, ibipep goes the whistle, here Tyeburn throttled, massed murmars march: where the bus stops there shop I: here which ye see, yea reste. On me, your sleeping giant, Estoesto! Estote sunto! From the hold of my capt in altitude till the mortification that’s my fate. The end of aldest mosest ist the beginning of all thisorder so the last of their hansbailis shall the first in our sheriffsby. New highs for all! Redu Negru may be black in tawn but under them lintels are staying my horneymen meet each his mansiemagd. For peers and gints, quaysirs and galleyliers, fresk letties from the say and stale headygabblers, gaingangers and dudder wagoners, pullars off societies and pushers on Rothmere’s homes. Obeyance from the townsmen spills felixity by the toun. Our bourse and politico-ecomedy are in safe with good Jock Shepherd, our lives are on sure in sorting with Jonathans wild and great. Been so free! Thank you, besters! Hattentats have mindered. Blaublaze devilbobs have gone from the mode and hairtrigger nicks are quite out of time now. Thuggeries are reere as glovars’ metins, lepers lack, ignerants show beneath suspicion like the bitterhalves of esculapuloids. In midday’s mallsight let Miledd discurverself. Meludd in her hide park seek Minuinette. All is waldy bonums. Blownose aerios we luft to you! Firebugs good blazes! Lubbers, kepp your poudies drier! Seamen, we segn your skivs and wives. Seven ills so barely as centripunts havd I habt, seaventy seavens for circumference inkeptive are your hill prospect. Braid Blackfordrock, the Calton, the Liberton, Craig and Lockhart’s, A. Costofino, R. Thursitt. The chort of Nicholas Within was my guide and I raised a dome on the wherewithouts of Michan: by awful tors my well worth building sprang sky spearing spires, cloud cupoled campaniles: further this. By fineounce and imposts I got and grew and by grossscruple gat I grown outreachesly: murage and lestage were my mains for Ouerlord’s tithing and my drains for render and prender the doles and the tribute: I was merely out of my mint with all the percussors on my braincap till I struck for myself and muched morely by token: to Sirrherr of Gambleden ruddy money, to Madame of Pitymount I loue yous. Paybads floriners moved in hugheknots against us and I matt them, pepst to papst, barthelemew: milreys (mark!) onfell, and (Luc!) I arose Daniel in Leonden. Bulafests onvied me, Corkcuttas graatched. Atabey! I braved Brien Berueme to berow him against the Loughlins, all her tolkies shraking: Fugabollags! Lusqu’au bout! If they had ire back of eyeball they got danage on front tooth: theres were revelries at ridottos, here was rivalry in redoubt: I wegschicked Duke Wellinghof to reshockle Roy Shackleton: Walhalloo, Walhalloo, Walhalloo, mourn in plein! Under law’s marshall and Warschouw did I thole till lead’s plumbate, ping on pang, reliefed me. I made praharfeast upon acorpolous and fastbroke down in Neederthorpe. I let faireviews in on Slobodens but ranked rothgardes round wrathmindsers: I bathandbaddend on mendicity and I corocured off the unoculated. Who can tell their tale whom I filled ad liptum on the plain of Soulsbury? With three hunkered peepers and twa and twas! For sleeking beauties I spinned their nightinveils, to slumbred beast I tummed the thief air. Round the musky moved a murmel, but mewses whinninaird and belluas zoomed: tendulcis tunes like water parted fluted up from the westinders while from gorges in the east came the strife of ourangoontangues. All in my thicville Escuterre ofen was thorough fear but in the meckling of my burgh Belvaros was the site forbed: tuberclerosies I reized spudfully from the murphyplantz Hawkinsonia and berriberries from the pletoras of the Irish shou. I heard my libertilands making free through their curraghcoombs, my trueblues hurusalaming before Wailingtone’s Wall: I richmounded the rainelag in my bathtub of roundwood and conveyed it with cheers and cables, roaring mighty shouts, through my longertubes of elm: out of fundness for the outozone I carried them amd curried them in my Putzemdown cars to my Kommeandine hotels: I made sprouts fontaneously from Philuppe Sobriety in the coupe that’s cheyned for noon inebriates: when they weaned weary of that bibbing I made infusion more infused: sowerpacers of the vinegarth, obtemperate unto me! When you think me in my coppeecuffs look in ware would you meckamockame, as you pay in caabman’s sheltar tot the ites like you corss the tees. Wherefore watch ye well! For, while I oplooked the first of Janus’s straight, I downsaw the last of Christmas steps: syndic podestril and on the rates, I for indigent and intendente: in Forum Foster I demosthrenated my folksfiendship, enmy pupuls felt my burk was no worse than their brite: Sapphrageta and Consciencia were undecidedly attached to me but the maugher machrees and the auntieparthenopes my schwalby words with litted spongelets set their soakye pokeys and botchbons afume: Fletcher-Flemmings, elisaboth, how interquackeringly they rogated me, their golden one, I inhesitant made replique: Mesdememdes to leursieuresponsor: and who in hillsaide, don’t you let flyfire till you see their whites of the bunkers’ eyes! Mr Answers: Brimgem young, bringem young, bringem young!: in my bethel of Solyman’s I accouched their rotundaties and I turnkeyed most insultantly over raped lutetias in the lock: I gave bax of biscums to the jacobeaters and pottage bakes to the esausted; I dehlivered them with freakandesias by the constant droppings from my smalls instalmonths while I titfortotalled up their farinadays for them on my slataper’s slate with my chandner’s chauk: I jaunted on my jingelbrett rapt in neckloth and sashes, and I beggered about the amnibushes like belly in a bowle. In the humanity of my heart I sent out heyweywomen to refresh the ballwearied and then, doubling megalopolitan poleetness, my great great greatest of these charities, devaleurised the base fellows for the curtailment of their lower man: with a slog to square leg I sent my boundary to Botany Bay and I ran up a score and four of mes while the Yanks were huckling the Empire: I have been reciping om omominous letters and widelysigned petitions full of pieces of pottery about my monumentalness as a thingabolls and I have been inchanting causeries to the feshest cheoilboys so that they are allcalling on me for the song of a birtch: the more secretely bi built, the more openly palastered. Attent! Couch hear! I have becket my vonderbilt hutch in sunsmidnought at morningrise was encampassed of mushroofs. Rest and bethinkful, with licence, thanks. I considered the lilies on the veldt and unto Balkis did I disclothe mine glory. And this. This missy, my taughters, and these man my son, from my fief of the villa of the Ostmanorum to Thorstan’s, recte Thomars Sraid and from Huggin Pleaze to William Inglis his house that man de Loundres, in all their barony of Saltus, bonders and foeburghers, helots and zelots, strutting oges and swaggering macks, the darsy jeamses, the drury joneses, redmaids and bleucotts, in hommage all and felony, all who have received tickets, fair home overcrowded, tidy but very little furniture, respectable, whole family attends daily mass and is dead sick of bread and butter, sometime in the militia, mentally strained from reading work on german physics, shares closet with eight other dwellings, more than respectable, getting comfortable parish relief, wageearner freshly shaven from prison, highly respectable, planning new departure in mountgomery cyclefinishing, eldest son will not serve but peruses Big-man-up-in-the-sky scraps, anoopanadoon lacking backway, quasi respectable, pays ragman in bones for faded windowcurtains, staircase continually lit up with guests, particularly respectable, house lost in dirt and blocked with refuse, getting on like roe’s distillery on fire, slovenly wife active with the jug, in business for himself, has a tenth illegitimate coming, partly respectable, following correspondence courses, chucked work over row, both cheeks kissed at levee by late marquess of Zetland, sharing closet which is profusely written over with eleven other subscribers, once respectable, open hall-way pungent of Baltic dishes, bangs kept woman’s head against wall thereby disturbing neighbours, private chapel occupies return landing, removal every other quarter day, case one of peculiar hopelessness, most respectable, nightsoil has to be removed through snoring household, excentric naval officer not quite steady enjoys weekly churchwarden and laugh while reading foreign pictorials on clugstrump before door, known as the trap, widow rhumatic and chars, haunted, condemned and execrated, of dubious respectability, tools too costly pledged or uninsured, reformed philanthropist whenever feasable takes advantage of unfortunates against dilapidating ashpits, serious student is eating his last dinners, floor dangerous for unaccompanied old clergymen, thoroughly respectable, many uncut pious books in evidence, nearest water tap two hundred yards run away, fowl and bottled gooseberry frequently on table, man has not had boots off for twelve months, infant being taught to hammer flat piano, outwardly respectable, sometimes hears from titled connection, one foot of dust between banister and cracked wall, wife cleans stools, eminently respectable, ottawark and regular loafer, should be operated would she consent, deplorable rent in roof, claret cellar cobwebbed since the pontificate of Leo, wears drill trousers and collects rare buddhas, underages very treacly and verminous have to be separated, sits up with fevercases for one and threepence, owns two terraces (back to back breeze), respectable in every way, harmless imbecile supposingly weakminded, a sausage every Sunday, has a staff of eight servants, lieabed sons go out with sisters immediately after dark, has never seen the sea, travels always with her eleven trunks of clothing, starving cat left in disgust, the pink of respectability, resting after colonial service, labours at plant, the despair of his many benefactresses, calories exclusively from rowntrees and dunplings, one bar of sunlight does them all january and half february, the V. de V’s (animal diet) live in five storied semidetached but rarely pay tradesmen, went security for friend who absconded, shares same closet with fourteen similar cottages and an illfamed lodging house, more respectable than some, teawidow pension but held to purchase, inherited silk hat from father-in-law, head of domestic economy never mentioned, queery how they live, reputed to procure, last four occupants carried out, mental companionship with mates only, respectability unsuccessfully aimed at, copious holes emitting mice, decoration from Uganda chief in locked ivory casket, grandmother has advanced alcoholic amblyopia, the terror of goodmen’s field, and respected and respectable, as respectable as respectable can respectably be, though their orable amission were the herrors I have expected, all, let them all come they are my villeins, with chartularies I have talledged them. Wherfor I will and firmly command, as I willed and firmly commanded upon my royal word and cause the great seal now to be affixed, that from the farthest of the farther of their fathers to their children’s children’s children they do inhabit it and hold it for me unencumbered and my heirs firmly and quietly, amply and honestly, and with all the liberties and free customs which the men of Tolbris a city of Tolbris, have at Tolbris, in the county of their city and through whole my land. Hereto my vouchers, knive and snuffbuchs. Fee for farm. Enwreak us wrecks. Struggling forlongs I have livramentoed milles on milles of mancipelles. Lo I have looked upon my pumpadears in their easancies and my drummers have tattled tall tales of me in the land: in morgenattics litt I hope: in seralcellars louched I bleakmealers on my siege of my mighty I was parciful of my subject but in street wauks that are darkest I debelledem superb: I deemed the drugtails in my pettycourts and domstered dustyfeets in my husinclose: at Guy’s they were swathed, at Foulke’s slashed, the game for a Gomez, the loy for a lynch: if I was magmonimoss as staidy lavgiver I revolucanized by my eructions: the hye and bye wayseeds I scattered em, in my graben fields sew sowage I gathered em: in Sheridan’s Circle my wits repose, in black pitts of the pestered Lenfant he is dummed. (Hearts of Oak, may ye root to piece! Rechabites obstain! Clayed sheets, pineshrouded, wake not! walk not!) Quo warranto has his greats my soliven and puissant lord V. king regards for me and he has given to me my necknamesh (flister it!) which is second fiddler to nomen. These be my genteelician arms. At the crest, two young frish, etoiled flappant, devoiled of their habiliments, vested sable, withdrewers argent. For the boss a Coleopter, pondant, partifesswise, blazoned sinister, at the slough, proper. In the lower field a terce of lanciers, shaking unsheathed shafts, their arms crossed in saltire, embusked, sinople. Motto, in letters portent: Hery Crass Evohodie. Idle were it repassing from elserground to the elder disposition, to inquire whether I, draggedasunder, be the forced generation of group marriage holocryptogam, of my essenes, or carried of cloud from land of locust, in ouzel galley borne, I, huddled til summone be the massproduct of teamwork, three surtouts wripped up in itchother’s, two twin pritticoaxes lived as one, troubled in trine or dubildin too, for abram nude be I or roberoyed with the faineans, of Feejeean grafted ape on merfish, surrounded by obscurity, by my virtus of creation and by boon of promise, by my natural born freeman’s journeymanright, and my otherchurch’s inher light, in so and such a manner as me it so besitteth, most surely I pretend and reclam to opt for simultaneous. Till daybowbreak and shoshadows flee. Thus be hek. Verily! Verily! Time, place!

— What is your numb? Bun!

— Who gave you that numb? Poo!

— Have you put in all your sparepennies? I’m listening. Sree!

— Keep clear of propennies! Kore!

— Mr Televox, Mrs Taubiestimm and invisible friends! I maymay mean to say. Annoyin part of it was, had faithful Fulvia, following the wiening courses of this world turned her back on her ways to gon on uphills upon search of louvers, brunette men Earalend, Chief North Paw and Chief Goes in Blackwater and Chief Brown Poole and Chief Night Cloud by the Deeps, or again had Fluvia, amber whitch she was, left her chivily crookcrook crocus bed at the bare suggestions of some prolling bywaymen from Moabit who could have abused of her, the foxrogues, there might accrue advantage to ask wher in pellmell her deceivers sinned. Yet know it was vastly otherwise which I have heard it by my goods waif, as I, chiefly endmost, hartyly aver, for Fulvia Fluvia iddle woman to the plusneeborn, ever did ensue tillstead the things that pertained unto fairnesse, this wharom I am fawned on, that which was loost. Even so, for I waged love on her: and spoiled her undines. And she wept: O my lors!

— Till we meet!

— Ere we part!

— Tollollall!

— This time a hundred years!

— But I was firm with her. And I did take the reached of my delights, my jealousy, and did raft her flumingworthily and did leftlead her overland the pace, from lacksleap up to liffsloup, tiding down, as portreeve should, whimpering by Kevin’s creek and Hurdlesford and Gardener’s Mall, long Rivierside Drive, embankment large, to Ringsend Flott and Ferry, where she began to bump a little bit, my dart to throw: and there, by wavebrink, on strond of south, with mace to masthigh, taillas Cowhowling quailless Highjakes, did I upriesed my magicianer’s puntpole and I bade those polyfizzyboisterous seas to retire with hemselves from os (rookwards, thou seasea stamoror!) and I abridged with domfine norsemanship till I had done abate her maidan race, my baresark bride, and knew her fleshly when with all my bawdy did I her whorship, min bryllupswibe: Heaven, he hallthundered, Heydays, he flung blissforhers. And I cast my tenspan joys on her, arsched overtupped, from bank of call to echobank, by dint of strongbow (Galata! Galata!) so streng we were in one, malestream in shegulf: and to ringstresse I thumbed her with iern of Erin and tradesmanmarked her lieflang mine for all and singular iday, igone, imorgans, and for ervigheds: base your peak, you! you, strike your flag!: (what screech of shippings! What low of dampfbulls!) from Livland hoks zivios, from Lettland skall vives! With Impress of Asias and Queen Columbia for her pairanymphs and the singing sands for herbrides’ music goosegaze annoynted uns, canailles canzoned and me to she her shyblumes lifted: and I pudd a name and wedlock boltoned round her the which to carry till her grave, my durdin dearly, Appia Lippia Pluviabilla, whiles I herr lifer amstell and been: I chained her chastemate to grippe fiuming snugglers, her chambrett I bestank so to spunish furiosos: I was her hochsized, her cleavunto, her everest, she was my annie, my lauralad, my pisoved: who cut her ribbons when nought my prowes? who expoused that havenliness to beachalured ankerrides when not I, freipforter?: in trinity huts they met my dame, pick of their poke for me: when I foregather twas my sumbad, if I farseeker itch my list: had I not workit in my cattagut with dogshunds’ crotts to clene, and, had I not gifted of my coataways, constantonoble’s aim: and, fortiffed by my right as man of capitol, I did umgyrdle her about, my vermincelly vinagerette, with all loving kindness as far as in man’s might it lay, and enfranchised her to liberties of fringes: and I gave until my lilienyounger turkeythighs soft goods and hardware (catalogue, passim) and ladderproof hosiery lines (see stockinger’s raiment), cocquette coiffs (see Agnes’ hats) and peningsworths of the best of taste of knaggs of jets and silvered waterroses and geegaws of my pretty novelties and wispywaspy frocks of redferns and lauralworths, trancepearances such as women cattle bare ande peltries piled, the peak of Pim’s and Slyne’s and Sparrow’s loomends day, lumineused luxories on looks, La Primamère, Pyrrha Pyrrhine, Or de Reinebeau, Sourire d’Hiver, and a crinoline, wide a shire, and pattens for her trilibies that know she might the tortuours of the boots and bedes of wampun with to toy and a murcery glaze of shard to mirrow, for all daintiness by me and theetime, the cupandnaggin hour: and I wound around my swanchen’s neckplace a school of shells of moyles marine to swing their saysangs in her silents: and, upping her at King’s count, her aldritch cry olos unheading, what though exceeding bitter, I pierced her beak with order of the Danabrog (Cunnig’s great! Soll leve! Soll leve! with mare’s greese cressets at Leonard’s and Dunphy’s and Madonna lanthorns before quintacasas and tallonkindles spearhead syngeing nickendbookers and mhutton lightburnes dipdippingdownes in blackholes, the tapers of the topers and his buntingpall at hoist!): for days there was no night for nights were days and our folk had rest from Blackheathan and the pagans from the prince of pacis: what was trembling sod quaked no more, what were frozen loins were stirred and lived: gone the septuor, dark deadly dismal doleful desolate dreadful desperate, no more the tolvmaans, bloody gloomy hideous fearful furious alarming terrible mournful sorrowful frightful appalling: peace, perfect peace: and I hung up at Yule my duindleeng lunas, helphelped of Kettil flashnose, for the souperhore of my frigid one, coloumba mea, frimosa mea, in Wastewindy Tarred strate and Elgin’s marble halles lamping limp from black to block through all Livania’s volted ampire from anodes to cathodes and from the topazolites of Mourne, Wykinloeflare, by Arklow’s sapphire siomen’s lure and Waterford’s hook and crook lights to the polders of Hy Kinsella: avenyue ceen my peurls ahumming, the crown to my estuarine munipicence?: three firths of the sea I swept with draughtness and all ennempties I bottled em up in bellomport. When I stabmarooned jack and maturin I was a bad boy’s bogey but it was when I went on to sankt piotersbarq that they gave my devil his due: what is seizer can hack in the old wold a sawyer may hew in the green: on the island of Breasil the wildth of me perished and I took my plowshure sadly feeling pity for me sored: where bold O’Conee weds on Alta Mahar, the tawny sprawling beside that silver burn, I sate me and settled with the little crither of my hearth: her intellects I charmed with I calle them utile thoughts, her turlyhyde I plumped with potatums for amiens pease in plenty: my biblous beadells shewed her triumphs of craftygild pageantries, loftust Adam duffed our cousterclother, Conn and Owel with cortoppled baskib, Sire Noeh Guinass, exposant of his bargeness and lord Joe Starr to hump the body of the camel: I screwed the Emperor down with ninepins gaelic with sixpennyhapennies for his hanger on: my worthies were bissed and trissed from Joshua to Godfrey but my processus prophetarum they would have plauded to perpetuation. Moral: book to besure, see press.

— He’s not all buum and bully.

— But his members handly food him.

— Steving’s grain for’s greet Collegtium.

— The S. S. Paudraic’s in the harbour.

And after these things, I fed her, my carlen, my barelean linsteer, upon spiceries for her garbage breath, italics of knobby lauch and the rich morsel of the marrolebone and shains of garleeks and swinespepper and gothakrauts and pinkee dillisks, primes of meshallehs and subleties in jellywork, come the feast of St Pancreas, and shortcake nutrients for Paas and Pingster’s pudding, bready and nutalled and potted fleshmeats from store dampkookin, and the drugs of Kafa and Jelupa and Shallots out of Ascalon, feeding her food convenient herfor, to pass then into earth: and to my saffronbreathing mongoloid, the skinsyg, I gave Biorwik’s powlver and uliv’s oils, unguents of cuticure, for the swarthy searchall’s face on her, with handewers and groinscrubbers and a carrycam to teaze her tussy out, the brown but combly, a mopsa’s broom to duist her sate, and clubmoss and wolvesfoot for her more moister wards (amazing efficiencies!): and, my shopsoiled doveling, when weeks of kindness kinly civicised, in our saloons esquirial with fineglas bowbays, draped embrasures, and giltedged librariums I did devise my telltale sports at evenbread to wring her withers limberly, wheatears, slaphung, drapier-cutdean, bray, nap, spinado and ranter-go-round: we had our lewd mayers and our lairdie meiresses kiotowing and smuling fullface on us out of their framous latenesses, oilclothed over for cohabitation and allpointed by Hind: Tamlane the Cussacke, Dirk Wettingstone, Pi ten Stuyvesant, Outlawrie O’Niell, MrsCurrens, Mrs Reyson-Figgis, Mrs Dattery and Mrs Pruny-Quetch: in hym we trust, footwash and sects principles, apply to overseer, Amos five six: she had dabblingtime for exhibiting her grace of aljambras and duncingk the bloodanoobs in her vauxhalls while I, dizzed and dazed by the lumpty thumpty of our interloopings, fell clocksure off my ballast. In our windtor palast it vampared for Elenders, we lubded Sur Gudd for the sleep and the ghoasts. She chauffed her fuesies at my Wigan’s jewels while she skalded her mermeries on my Snorryson’s Sagos: in paycook’s thronsaale she domineered, lecking icies off the dormer panes all admired her in camises: on Rideau Row Duanna, dwells, you merk well what you see: let wellth were I our pantocreator would theirs be tights for the gods: in littlered ridinghats and cindery yellows and tinsel and glitter and bibs under hoods: I made nusance of many well pressed champdamors and peddled freely in the scrub: I foredreamed for thee and more than fullmaked: I prevened for thee in the haunts that joybelled frail light-a-leaves for sturdy traemen: pelves ad hombres sumus: I said to the shiftless prostitute; let me be your fodder; and to rodies and prater brothers; Chau, Camerade!: evangel of good tidings omnient as the Healer’s word, for the lost, loathsome and whomsoever will; who, in regimentation through liberal donation in coordination for organisation of their installation and augmentation plus some annexation and amplification without precipitation towards the culmination in latification of what was formerly their utter privation, competence, cheerfulness, usefulness and the meed, shall in their second adams all be made alive. My tow tugs steered down canal grand, my lighters lay longside on Regalia Water. And I built in Urbs in Rure, for minne elskede my shiny brows, under astrolobe from my upservatory, an erdcloset with showne ejector wherewithin to be squatquit in most covenience from her sabbath needs, when open noise should stilled be: did not I festfix with mortarboard my unniversiries, wholly rational and gottalike, sophister agen sorefister, life sizars all?: was I not rosetted on two stellas of little egypt? had not I rockcut readers, hieros, gregos and democriticos?: triscastellated, bimedallised: and by my sevendialled changing charties Hibernska Ulitzas made not I to pass through 12 Threadneedles and Newgade and Vicus Veneris to cooinsight?: my camels walk, kolossa kolossa! no porte sublimer benared my ghates: oi polled ye many but my fews were chousen (Voter, voter, early voter, he was never too oft for old Sarum): terminals four my staties were, the Geenar, the Greasouwea, the Debwickweck, the Mifgreawis. And I sept up twinminsters, the pro and the con, my stavekirks wove so norcely of peeled wands and attachatouchy floodmud, now all loosebrick and stonefest, freely masoned, arked for covennanters and shinners’ rifuge: descent from above on us, Hagiasofia of Astralia, our orisons thy nave and absedes, our aeone tone aeones thy studvaast vault; Hams, circuitise! Shemites, retrace!: horns, hush! no barkeys! hereround is’t holied!: all truanttrulls made I comepull, all rubbeling gnomes I pushed, gowgow: Cassels, Redmond, Gandon, Deane, Shepperd, Smyth, Neville, Heaton, Stoney, Foley, Farrel, Vnost with Thorneycroft and Hogan too: sprids serve me! gobelins guard!: tect my tileries, (O tribes! O gentes!) keep my keep, the peace of my four great ways: oathiose infernals to booth Salvation, arcane celestials to Sweatenburgs Welhell! My seven wynds I trailed to maze her and ever a wynd had saving closes and all these closes flagged with the gust, hoops for her, hatsoff for him and ruffles through Neeblow’s garding: and that was why Blabus was razing his wall and eltering the suzannes of his nighboors: and thirdly, for ewigs I did reform and restore for my smuggy piggiesknees my sweet coolocked my auburn coyquailing one, her paddypalace on the crossknoll with massgo bell, sixton, clashcloshant duominous and muezzatinties to commind the fitful: doom adimdim adoom adimadim: and the oragel of the lauds to tellforth’s glory: and added thereunto a shallow laver to slub out her hellfire and posied windows for her oriel house: gospelly pewmillieu christous pewmillieu: zackbutts babazounded, ollguns tararulled: and she sass her nach, chillybombom and forty bonnets, upon the altarstane. May all have mossyhonours.

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

— Hoke!

And wholehail snaeffell, dreardrizzle or sleetshowers of blessing where it froze in chalix eller swum in the vestry, with fairskin book and ruling rod, vien of my vergin page, her chastener ever I did learn my little ana countrymouse in alphabeater cameltemper, from alderbirk to tannenyou, with myraw rattan atter dundrum; ooah, oyir, oyir, oyir: and I did spread before my Livvy, where Lord street lolls and ladies linger and Cammomile Pass cuts Primrose Rise and Coney Bend bounds Mulbreys Island but never a blid had bledded or bludded since long agore when the whole blighty acre was bladey well pessovered, my selvage mats of lecheworked lawn, my carpet gardens of Guerdon City, with chopes pyramidous and mousselimes and beaconphires and colossets and pensilled turisses for the busspleaches of the summiramies and esplanadas and statuesque and templeogues the Pardonell of Maynooth, Fra Teobaldo, Nielsen, rare admirable, Jean de Porteleau, Conall Gretecloke, Guglielmus Caulis and the eiligh ediculous Passivucant (glorietta’s inexellsiored!): for irkdays and for folliedays till the comple anniums of calendarias, gregoromaios ant gypsyjuliennes as such are pleased of theirs to walk: and I planted for my own hot lisbing lass a quikset vineyard and I fenced it about with huge Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops and rigs of barlow and bowery nooks and greenwished villas and pampos animos and (N. I.) necessitades iglesias and pons for aguaducks: a hawthorndene, a feyrieglenn, the hallaw vall, the dyrchace, Finmark’s Howe, against lickybudmonth and gleanermonth with a magicscene wall (rimrim! rimrim!) for a Queen’s garden of her phoenix: and (hush! hush!) I brewed for my alpine plurabelle wigwarming wench, (speakeasy!) my granvilled brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, puss, puss, pussyfoot, to split the spleen of her maw: and I laid down before the trotters to my eblanite my stony battered waggonways, my nordsoud circulums, my eastmoreland and westlandmore, running boullowards and syddenly parading, (hearsemen, opslo! nuptiallers, get storting!): whereon, in mantram of truemen like yahoomen (expect till dutc cundoctor summoneth him all fahrts to pay, velkommen all hankinhunkn in this vongn of Hoseyeh!) claudesdales withe arabinstreeds, Roamer Reich’s rickyshaws with Hispain’s king’s trompateers, madridden mustangs, buckarestive bronchos, poster shays and turnintaxis, and tall tall tilburys and nod nod noddies, others gigging gaily, some sedated in sedans: my priccoping gents aroger, aroger, my damsells softsidesaddled, covertly, covertly, and Lawdy Dawe a perch behind: the mule and the hinny and the jennet and the mustard nag and piebald Shjelties and Skewbald awknees steppit lively (lift ye the left and rink ye the right!) for her pleashadure: and she lalaughed in her diddydid domino to the switcheries of the whip. Down with them! Kick! Playup!

Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!

 ® 

The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies

Every evening at lighting up o’clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open.) With nightly redistribution of parts and players and daily dubbing of ghosters under the distinguished patronage of their Elserships the Oldens from the four coroners of Findrias, Murias, Gorias and Falias. Messoirs the Coarb, Clive Sollis, Galorius Kettle, Pobiedo Lancey and Pierre Dusort, while the Caesar-in-Chief looks. On. Sennet. The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, featuring:

glugg (Mr Seumas McQuillad, hear the riddles between the robot in his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues’ gallery), the bold bad black boy of the storybooks, who has been divorced into disgrace court by

the floras (Girl Scouts from St. Bride’s Finishing Establishment, demand acidulateds) a month’s bunch of pretty maidens who, while they pick on her, form the guard for

izod (Miss Butys Pott, ask the attendantess for a leaflet), a bewitching blonde who dimples delightfully and is approached in loveliness only by her grateful sister reflection in a mirror, the cloud of the opal, who having jilted Glugg, is being fatally fascinated by

chuff (Mr Sean O’Mailey, see the chalk and sanguine pictograph on the safety drop), the fine frank fairhaired fellow of the fairytales, who wrestles with the bold bad black boy Glugg geminally about caps or something until they adumbrace a pattern of somebody else or other, after which they are both brought home to be well soaped, sponged and scrubbed again by

ann (Miss Corrie Corriendo, bring the babes, she mistributes mandamus monies), their poor little old mother-in-lieu, who is woman of the house to

hump (Mr Makeall Gone, read the sayings from Laxdalesaga in the programme about King Ericus of Schweden and the spirit’s whispers in his magical helmet), cap-a-pipe with watch and topper, the cause of all our grievances, the whirl, the flash and the trouble, who, having partially recovered from a recent impeachment due to egg everlasting, is engaged in entertaining in his customhouse

the customers (Components of the Afterhour Courses at St Patricius’ Academy for Grownup Gentlemen, consult the annuary), a bundle of a dozen of representative locomotive civics inn quest of outings, who are sloppily served by

saunderson (Mr Knut Oelsvinger, imitation of flatfish, torchbearing supperaape, bad halfsovereign, rolly pollsies, Glen of the Downs, the Gugnir, his geyswerks, his earsequack, his lokistroki, o.s.v.), a spoilcurate and butt of

kate (Miss Rachel Lea Varian, she tells forkings for baschfellors, under purdah of card palmer Madam d’Elta, during the pawses), kook-and- general.

With ballet pictures and the Pageant of History worked up by Messrs Thud and blunder. Shadows by the film folk, masses by the good people. Promptings by Elanio Vitale. Longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stagetolets by Hexenschuss, Coachmaher, Incubone and Rocknarrag. Creations tastefully designed by Madame Berthe Delamode. Dances arranged by Harley Quinn and Coldlimbeina. Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties of the late cemented Mr T. M. Finnegan R.I.C. Lipmasks and hairwigs by Ouida Nooikke. Limes and Floods by Crooker and Toll. Kopay pibe by Kappa Pedersen. Hoed Pine hat with twentyfour ventholes by Morgen. The crack (that’s Cork!) by a smoker from the gods, The interjection (Buckley!) by the firement in the pit, accidental music providentially arranged by L’Archet and Laccorde. To start with in the beginning, we need barely say, a community prayer, everyone for himself, and to conclude with as an exodus, we think it well to add, a chorale in canon, good for us all for us all us all all. Songs betune the acts by the ambiamphions of Annapolis, Joan Mock-Comic, male soprano, and Jean Souslevin, bass noble, respectively, O, Mester Sogermon, ef thes es whot ye deux, then l’m not surpleased ye want that bottle of Sauvequipeu and Oh Off Nunch Der Rasche Ver Lasse Mitsch Nitscht. The whole thugogmagog to be wound up by a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radium Wedding of Neid and Moorning and the Dawn of Peace, Pure, Perfect and Perpetual, Waking the Weary of the World.

An argument follows.

Chuffy was a nangel then and his soard fleshed light like likening. Fools top! Singty, sangty, meeky loose, defendy nous from prowlabouts. Make a shine on the curst. Emen.

But the duvlin sulph was in Glugger, that lost-to lurning. Punct. He was sbuffing and sputing, tussing like anisine, whipping his eyesoult and gnatsching his teats over the brividies from existers and the outher liubbocks of life. He halth kelchychosen a clayblade and makes prayses to his three of clubs. To part from these, my corsets, is into overlusting fear. Acts of feet, hoof and jarrety. Djowl, uphere!

Aminxt that nombre of evelings, but how pierceful in their sojestiveness were those first girly stirs, with zitterings of flight released and twinglings of twitchbells in rondel after. with waverings that made shimmershake rather naightily all the duskcended airs and shylit beaconings, from shehind hims back. Sammy, call on. Mirrylamb, she was shuffering all the diseasinesses of the unherd of. Mary Louisan Shousapinas! If Arck could no more salve his agnois from the wiles of willy wooly woolf! If all the signics of her dipandump helpabit could not that Glugg to catch her by the calour of her brideness! Not Rose, Sevilla nor Citronelle; not Esmeralde, Pervinca nor Indra; not Viola even nor all of them four themes over. But up tighty in the front, down again on the loose, drim and drumming on her back and a pop from her whistle. What is that, O holytroopers?

Up he stulpled glee you gees with search a fling did die near sea, beamy owen and calmy hugh and if you what you my call for me I will wishyoumaycull for you.

And they are met, face a facing. They are set, force to force. And no such Copenhague-Marengo was less so fated for a fall since in Glenasmole of Smiling Thrushes Patch Whyte passed O’Sheen ascowl.

Arrest thee, scaldbrother! Came the evangelion, sabre accusant, from all Saint Joan’s Wood to kill or maim him, and be dumm but ill s’arrested. Et would proffer to his delected one the his trifle from the grass.

A space. Who are you? The cat’s mother. A time. What do you lack? The look of a queen.

But what is that which is one going to prehend? Seeks buzzling is brains the feinder.

He askit of the hoothed fireshield but it was untergone into the matthued heaven. He soughed it from the luft but that bore ne mark ne message. He luked upon the bloomingrund where ongly his corns were growning. At last he listed back to beckline how she pranked alone so johntily.With nought a wired from the wordless either.

Ah ho! This poor Glugg! It was so said of him about of his old fontmouther. Truly deplurabel! A dire, O dire! And all the freightfullness whom he inhebited after his colline born janitor. Sometime towerable! With that hehry antlets on him and the baublelight bulching out of his sockets whiling away she sprankled his allover with her noces of interregnation: How do you do that lack a lock and pass the poker, please: so that Glugg, the poor one, in that limbopool which was his subnesciousness he could scares of all knotknow whither his morrder had bourst a blabber or if the vogalstones that hit his tynpan was that nearly his skoll missed her. Misty’s trompe or midst his flooting? Ah, ho! Cicely, awe!

The youngly delightsome frilles-in-pleyurs are now showen drawen, if bud one, or, if in florileague, drawens up consociately at the hinder sight of their commoner guardian. Her boy fiend or theirs, if they are so plurielled, cometh up as a trapadour sinking how he must fand for himself by gazework what their colours wear as they are all showen drawns up. Tireton, cacheton, tireton, ba! Doth that not satisfy youth, sir? Quanty purty bellas here, Madama Lifay! And what are you going to charm them to, Madama, do say? Cinderynelly angled her slipper; it was cho chiny yet braught her a groom. He will angskt of them from their commoner guardian at next lineup (who is really the rapier of the two own, though thother brother can hold his own, especially for he bandished it with his hand the hold time, mamain, a simply gracious: O la!), and reloose that thong off his art: Hast thou feel liked carbunckley ones? Apun which his poohoor pricoxity theirs is a little tittertit of hilarity (Lad-o’-me-soul! Lad-o’-me-soul, see!) and the wordchary is atvoiced ringsoundinly by their toots ensembled, though not meaning to be clever, but just with a shrug of their hips to go to troy and harff a freak at himself by all that story to the ulstramarines. Otherwised they insinuate quiet private he make peace in his preaches and play with esteem.

Warewolff! Olff! Toboo!

So olff for his topheetuck the ruck made raid, aslick aslegs would run; and he ankered on his hunkers with the belly belly prest. Asking: What’s my muffinstuffinaches for these times? To weat: Breath and bother and whatarcurss. Then breath more bother and more whatarcurss. Then no breath no bother but worrawarrawurms. And Shim shallave shome.

As Rigagnolina to Mountagnone, what she meaned he could not can. All she meaned was golten sylvup, all she meaned was some Knight’s ploung jamn. It’s driving her dafft like he’s so dumnb. If he’d lonely talk instead of only gawk as thought yateman hat stuck hits stick althrough his spoke, and if he woold nut wolly so! Hee. Speak, sweety bird! Mitzymitzy! Though I did ate tough turf I’m not the bogdoxy.

— Have you monbreamstone?

— No.

— Or Hellfeuersteyn?

— No.

— Or Van Diemen’s coral pearl?

— No.

He has lost.

Off to clutch, Glugg! Forwhat! Shape your reres, Glugg! Foreweal! Ring we round, Chuff! Fairwell! Chuffchuff’s inners even. All’s rice with their whorl!

Yet, ah tears, who can her mater be? She’s promised he’d eye her. To try up her pretti. But now it’s so longed and so fared and so forth. Jerry for jauntings. Alabye! Fled.

The flossies all and mossies all they drooped upon her draped brimfall. The bowknots, the showlots, they wilted into woeblots. The pearlagraph, the pearlagraph, knew whitchly whether to weep or laugh. For always down in Carolinas lovely Dinahs vaunt their view.

Poor Isa sits a glooming so gleaming in the gloaming; the tincelles a touch tarnished wind no lovelinoise awound her swan’s. Hey, lass! Woefear gleam she so glooming this pooripathete I solde? Her beauman’s gone of a cool. Be good enough to symperise. If he’s at anywhere she’s therefor to join him. If it’s to nowhere she’s going to too. Buf if he’ll go to be a son to France’s she’ll stay daughter of Clare. Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue. She is fading out like Journee’s clothes so you can’t see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve’s now wearing she’ll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline’s to be. In the Dee dips a dame and the dame desires a demselle but the demselle dresses dolly and the dolly does a dulcydamble. The same renew. For though she’s unmerried she’ll after truss up and help that hussyband how to hop. Hip it and trip it and chirrub and sing. Lord Chuffy’s sky sheraph and Glugg’s got to swing.

So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round, for they are the ingelles, scattering nods as girls who may, for they are an angel’s garland.

Catchmire stockings, libertyed garters, shoddyshoes, quicked out with selver. Pennyfair caps on pinnyfore frocks and a ring on her fomefing finger. And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light. And they look so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious night. Withasly glints in. Andecoy glants out. They ramp it a little, a lessle, a lissle. Then rompride round in rout.

Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. Though they’re all but merely a schoolgirl yet these way went they. I’ th’ view o’ th’avignue dancing goes entrancing roundly. Miss Oodles of Anems before the luvium doeslike. So. And then again doeslike. So. And miss Endles of eons efter Dies of Eirae doeslike. So. And then again doeslike. So. The many wiles of Winsure.

The grocer’s bawd she slips her hand in the haricot bag, the lady in waiting sips her sup from the paraffin can, Mrs Wildhare Quickdoctor helts her skelts up the casuaway the flasht instinct she herds if a tinkle of tunder, the widow Megrievy she knits cats’ cradles, this bountiful actress leashes a harrier under her tongue, and here’s the girl who she’s kneeled in coldfashion and she’s told her priest (spt!) she’s pot on a chap (chp!) and this lass not least this rickissime woman who she writes foot fortunes money times over in the nursery dust with her capital thumb. Buzz. All runaway sheep bound back bopeep, trailing their teenes behind them. And these ways wend they. And those ways went they. Winnie, Olive and Beatrice, Nelly and Ida, Amy and Rue. Here they come back, all the gay pack, for they are the florals, from foncey and pansey to papavere’s blush, foresakeme-nought, while there’s leaf there’s hope, with primtim’s ruse and marrymay’s blossom, all the flowers of the ancelles’ garden.

But vicereversi thereout from those palms of perfection to anger arbour, virid with woad, what tornaments of complementary rages rocked the diviun from his punchpoll to his tummy’s shentre as he displaid all the oathword science of his visible disgrace. He was feeling so funny and floored for the cue, all over which girls as he don’t know whose hue. If goosseys gazious would but fain smile him a smile he would be fondling a praise he ate some nice bit of fluff. But no geste reveals the unconnouth. They’re all odds against him, the beasties. Scratch. Start.

He dove his head into Wat Murrey, gave Stewart Ryall a puck on the plexus, wrestled a hurry-come-union with the Gille Beg, wiped all his sinses, martial and menial, out of Shrove Sundy MacFearsome, excremuncted as freely as any frothblower into Macisaac, had a belting bout, chaste to chaste, with McAdoo about nothing and, childhood’s age being aye the shameleast, imbretelated, himself for any time untellable with what hung from the MacSiccaries of the Breeks. Home!

Allwhile preying in his mind he swure. Cross of a coppersmith bishop! He would split. He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte. Seek hells where absolation. He take skiff with three shirts and a wind, the bruce, the coriolano and the ignacio. Mum’s for’s maxim, ban’s for’s book and Dodgesome Dora for hedgehung sheolmastress. He wholehog himself care of Pencylmania, Bretish Armerica, to melt Mrs Gloria of the Bunkers’ Trust, recorporated, by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin, quit to catch the Paname-Turricum and regain that tarry easty, his citta immediata, by an alley and detour with farecard awailable getrennty years. From the safe side of distance! Libera, nostalgia! Beate Laurentie O’Tuli, Euro pra nobis! Every monk his own cashel with inclined jambs in full purview to his pronaose and to the deretane at his reredoss. Fuisfinister, fuyerescaper! He would fire off his farced epistol to the hibruws. No more turdenskaulds! Free leaves for ebribadies! All tinsammon in the yord! With harm and aches till Farther alters! Wild primates not stop him. Nom de plume! Gout strap Fenlanns! And send Jarge for Mary Inklenders! For he is the general, make no mistake in he. He is General Jinglesome.

Go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs in S.P.Q.R.ish and inform to the old sniggering publicking press and its nation of sheepcopers about the whole plighty troth between them, she, the lalage of lyonesses, and him, her knave arrant. For all within crystal range.

Ukalepe. Loathers’ leave. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids’ Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt.

He would bare to untired world how wholefallows, his guffer, the sabbatarian (might faction split his beard!), he too had a great big oh in the megafundum of his tomashunders and how her Lettyshape, his gummer, that congealed sponsar, she had never cessed at waking malters among the jemassons since the cluft that meataxe delt her made her microchasm as gap as down low. So they fished in the kettle and fought free and if she bit his tailibout all hat tiffin for thea. He would jused sit it all write down just as he would jused set it up all writhefully rate in blotch and void, yielding to no man in hymns ignorance seeing how heartsilly sorey he was, owning to the condrition of his bikestool. And, reading off his fleshskin and writing with his quillbone, fillfull ninequires with it for his auditers, Caxton and Pollock, a most moraculous jeeremyhead sindbook for all the peoples, under the presidency of the suchess of sceaunonsceau, a hadtobe heldin, thoroughly enjoyed by many so meny on block at Boyrut season and for their account ottorly admired by her husband in sole intimacy, about whose told his innersense and the grusomehed’s yoeureeke of his spectrescope and why he was off colour and how he was ambothed upon by the very spit of himself first on the cheekside by Michelangelo and over on the owld jowly side by Bill C. Babby, and the suburb’s formule why they eggspilled him out of his homey dometry narrowedknee domum because all his creature comfort was in an ark and he could not join the flood of cecialism and the best and schortest way of blacking out a caughtalock of all the sorrors of Sexton until he would accoster her coume il fou in teto-dous as a wagoner would his mudheeldy wheesindonk at their trist in Parisise after tourments of tosend years, bread cast out on waters, Mondamoiseau of Casanuova, and Mademoisselle from Armentières. He would si through severalls of sanctuaries, so as to meet somewhere if produced on a demi panssion for his whole lofetime, payment in goo to slee music and poisonal comfany, following which, like Ipsey Secumbe, when he fingon to foil the fluter, she could have all the g. s. M. she moohooed after fore and rickwards to hersIF, including science of sonorous silence while he have recourse of course to poetry. With tears, for his coronaichon, such as engines weep. Was liffe worth leaving? Nej!

Arty, reminiscensitive, dreaming largesse of lifesighs over early lived offs—all old Sator’s of the Sowsceptre highly nutritius family histrionic, genitricksling with Avus and Avia, that simple pair, and descendant down on veloutypads by a vuncular process to Nurus and Noverca, those notorious nepotists, circumpictified in their sobrine census, patriss all of them by the glos on their germane faces, and their socerine eyes like transparents of vitricus, patruuts to a man, the archimade levirs of his ekonome world.

— My God, alas, that dear olt tumtum home

Whereof in youthfood port I preyed

Amook the verdigrassy convict vallsall dazes.

And cloitered for amourmeant in thy boosome shede!

His mouthfull of ecstasy herepong (maladventure!) shot pinging up through the errooth of his wisdom as thought it had been zawhen intwo. Wholly sanguish blooded up disconvulsing the fixtures of his fizz. Apang which his tempory chewer med him a crazy chump of a Haveajube Sillayass. Joshua Croesus, son of Nunn! Though he shall live for millions of years a life of billions of years, he shall not forget it. Howlsballs and bloody acres! Like gnawthing unheardh!

But, by Jove Chronides, Seed of Summ, after at he had bate his breastplates for, forforget, forforgetting his birdsplace, it was soon that, that he, that he rehad himself. By a prayer? No, that comes later. By contrite attrition? Nay, that we passed. Mid eserciziam? So is richt.

He threwed his fit up to his aers, rolled his poligone eyes, snivelled from his snose and blew the guff out of his hornypipe. Lookery looks, how he’s knots in his entrails! Mookery mooks, it’s a grippe of his gripes. Seekeryseeks, why his biting he’s head off? Cokerycokes, it’s his spurt of coal. The worst is over. Wait! For he would himself deal a treatment as might be trusted in anticipation of his inculmination unto fructification for the major operation. When a message interfering intermitting interskips from them on herzian waves, a butterfly from her zipclasped handbag, awounded dove astarted from, escaping out her forecotes. And around its scorched cap she has twilled a twine of flame to let the laitiest know she’s marrid. And pim it goes backballed. Tot burns it so leste. Hers before his even, posted ere penned. He’s your change, thinkyou methim. Go daft noon madden, mind the step. Please stoop O to please. Stop. What saying? I have soreunder from to him now, dearmate ashore, so, so compleasely till I can get redressed, which means the end of my stays in the languish of Tintangle. Is you zealous of mes, brother? Did you boo moiety lowd? You suppoted to be the on conditiously rejected? Satanly, lade! Can that sobstuff, whingeywilly! Stop up, mavrone, and sit in my lap, Pepette, though I’d much rather not. Like things are m. ds. is all in vincibles. Decoded.

Now a run for his money! Now a dash to her dot! Like a waft to wingweary one, or a sos to a coastguard. For directly with his whoop, stop and an upalepsy didando a tishy, in appreciable less time than it takes a glaciator to submerger an Atlangthis, was he again, agob, before the trembly ones, a spark’s gap off, gotten orlop in a simplasailormade and shaking the storm out of his hiccups. The smartest vessel you could find would elazilee him on her knee as her lucky for the Rio Grande. He’s a pigtaiI tarr and if he hadn’t got it toothick he’d a telltale tall of his pitcher on a wall with his photure in the papers for cutting moutonlegs and capers letting on he’d jest be japers and his tail cooked up.

Goal! It’s one by its length.

Angelinas, hide from light those hues that your sin beau may bring to light! Though down to your dowerstrip he’s bent to knee he maun’t know ledgings here.

For a haunting way will go and you need not make your mow. Find the frenge for frocks and translace it into shocks of such as touch with show and show.

He is guessing at hers for all he is worse, the seagoer. Hark to his wily geeses goosling by, and playfair. Lady. And note that they who will for exile say cam for dog while them that won’t leave ingle end says now for know.

For he faulters how he hates to trouble them without.

But leaving codhead’s mitre and the heron’s plumes sinistrant to the server of servants and rex of regums and making a bolderdash for lubberty of speech he asks not have you seen a match being struck nor is this powder mine but, letting punplays pass to ernest:

— Haps thee jaoneofergs?

— Nao.

— Haps thee mayjaunties?

— Naohao.

— Haps thee per causes nunsibelli?

— Naohaohao.

— Get!

And he did a get and slink his hook away. For he could chew upon a skarp snakk of pure undefallen engelsk as raskly and as baskly as your cow cudd spanich. He had his sperrits all foulen on him; to vet, most griposly, he was bedizzled and debuzzled; he had his tristiest cabaleer on; and looked like bruddy Hal. A shelling a cockshy and be donkey shot at? Or a peso besant to join the armada?

But, Sin Showpanza, could anybroddy have looked twinsomer than the kerl he left behind him? Candidatus, viridosus, aurilucens, sinelab? How he stud theirs mookst kevinly, inwreathed of his near cissies, a mickly dazzly eely oily with looiscurrals, a soulnetzer by zvesdals priestessd, with his gamecox spurts and his smile likequid glue (the suessiest sourir ever weanling wore), whiles his host of spritties they went peahenning around him in neuchoristic congressulations, quite purringly excited, allauding to him by all the licknames in the litany with the terms in which no little dulsy nayer ever thinks about implying except to her future’s year and sending him perfumed prayerpuffs to setisfire more then to teasim (shall we help you to rigolect a bit?) that he, the finehued, the fairhaired, the farahead, might bouchesave unto each but everyone the havemercyonhurs of his kissier licence. Meanings: We know you like Latin with essies impures so tell that old bellows to bellow upthe tumtum argan and give us a gust of his gushy old. Goof!

Hymnumber twentynine. O the singing! Happy little girlycums to have adolphted such an Adelphus. O, the swinginging hopops so goholden, they’ve come to chant en chor. They say their salat, the madiens’ prayer to the messiager of His Nabis, prostitating their selfs eachwise and combinedly. Fateha, fold the hands. Be it honoured, bow the head. As we so hope for ablution. For the sake of the farbung and of the scent and of the holiodrops. Amems.

A pause. Then:

—Xanthos! Xanthos! Xanthos! We thank to thine, mighty innocent, that diddest bring it off fuitefuite. Should in ofter years it became about you will after desk jobduty becoming a bank midland mansioner we and I shall reside with our obeisant servants among Burke’s mobility at La Roseraie, Ailesbury Road. Red bricks are all hellishly good values if you trust to the roster of ads but we’ll save up ourselves and nab what’s nicest in the nebohood. We’ll have our private palypeachum pillarposterns for lovesick letterines fondly affianxed to our front railings and swings, hammocks, tighttaught balletlines, accomodationnooks and prismic bathboites, to make Envyeyes mouth water and wonder when they binocular us from their embrassured windows in our garden rare. Fyat-Fyat shall be our number on the autokinaton and Chubby in his Chuffs oursforownly chuffeur. T will be waiting for uns as I sold U at the first antries. Our cousin gourmand, Percy, the pup, will denounce the sniffnomers of all callers where among our Seemyease Sister, Tabitha, the ninelived, will extend to the full her hearthy welcome. Lady Marmela Shortbred will walk in for supper with her marchpane switch on, her necklace of almonds and her poirette Sundae dress with bracelets of honey and her cochineal hose with the caramel dancings, the briskly best from Bootiestown, and her suckingstaff of ivorymint. You mustn’t miss it or you’ll be sorry. Charmeuses chloes, glycering juwells, lydialight fans and puffumed cynarettes. And the Prince Lemonade has been graciously pleased. His six chocolate pages will run bugling before him and Cococream toddle after with his sticksword in a pink cushion. We think His Sparkling Headiness ought to know Lady Marmela. He’s not going to Cork till Easter or mayhope till Saint Tibble’s Day. The Fomor’s in his Fin, the Momor’s her and hin. A paaralone! A paaralone! And Dublin’s all adin. So come on, ye wealthy gentrymen wibfrufrocksfull of fun! Thin thin! Thin thin! Thej olly and thel ively, thou billy with thee coo, for to jog a jig of a crispness nice and sing a missal too. Hip champouree! Hiphip champouree! O you longtailed blackman, polk it up behind me! Hip champouree! Hiphip champouree! And, jessies, push the pumkik round. Anneliuia!

Since the days of Roamaloose and Rehmoose the pavanos have been strident trough their struts of Chapelldiseut, the vaulsies have meed and youdled through the purly ooze of Ballybough, many a mismy cloudy has tripped taintily along that hercourt strayed reelway and the rigadoons have held ragtimed revels on the platauplain of Grangegorman; and, though since then sterlings and guineas have been replaced by brooks and lions and some progress has been made on stilts and the races have come and gone and Thyme, that chef of seasoners, has made his usual astewte use of endadjustables and whatnot willbe isnor was, those danceadeils and cancanzanies have come stimmering down for our begayment through the bedeafdom of po’s taeorns, the obcecity of pa’s teapucs, as lithe and limbfree limber as when momie mummed at ma.

Just so stylled with the nattes are their flowerheads now and each of all has a lovestalk onto herself and the tot of all the tits of their understamens is as open as he can posably she and is tournesoled straightcut or sidewaist, accourdant to the coursets of things feminite, towooerds him in heliolatry, so they may catchcup in their calyzettes, alls they go troping, those parryshoots from his muscalone pistil, for he can eyespy through them, to their selfcolours, nevertheleast their tissue peepers, as leichtly as see saw (O my goodmiss! O my greatmess! O my prizelestly preshoes!) while, dewyfully as dimb dumbelles, all alisten to his elixir. Lovelyt!

— Enchainted, dear sweet Stainusless, young confessor, dearer dearest, we herehear, aboutobloss, O coelicola, thee salutant. Pattern of our unschoold, pageantmaster, deliverer of softmissives, round the world in forty mails, send us, your adorables, a wise and letters play of all you can ceive from your holy post now you hast ascertained ceremonially our names. Unclean you art not. Outcaste thou are not. Leperstower, the karman’s loki, has not blanched at our pollution and your intercourse at ninety legsplits does not defile. Untouchable is not the scarecrown is on you. You are pure. You are pure. You are in your puerity. You have not brought stinking members into the house of Amanti. Elleb Inam, Titep Notep, we name them to the Hall of Honour. Your head has been touched by the god Enel-Rah and your face has been brightened by the goddes Aruc-Ituc. Return, sainted youngling, and walk once more among us. The Great Cackler comes again. Sweetstaker, Abel lord of all our haloease, we, toutes philomelas as well as magdelenes, were drawpairs with two pinmarks, BVD and BVD dot, so want lotteries of ticklets posthastem (you appreciate?) from you. We will be constant (what a word!) and bless the day, for whole hours too, yes, the day you befell, you dreadful temptation! Now promisus you will remain ignorant of all what you hear and draw a veil till we next time! How many months or how many years! Bashfulness be tupped! May he colp, may he colp her, may he mixandmass colp her! List! Kicky Lacey, the pervergined, and Bianca Mutantini, her conversa, drew their fools longth finnishfurst. Herzog van Vellentam, but me and meother ravin have good three chancers after Bohnaparts. Eer’s wax for Sur Soord, dongdong bollets for the iris riflers, queemswellth of coocome in their combs for the jennyjos. Will bee all buzzy one another minnies for the mere effect that you are so fuld of pollen yourself. We feel unspeechably thoughtless over it all so pleasekindly communicake with the original sinse we are only yearning as yet how to burgeon. It’s meant milliems of centiments deadlost or mislaid on them but we can change in the nip of a napple solongas we can allsee your quick. It’s game, ma chère, be off with your shepherdress on! Upsome cauda! Behose our handmades for the lured! To these nunce we are but yours in ammatures yet well come that day we shall ope to be ores. No more hoaxites! Nay more gifting in mennage! Vania, Vania Vaniorum, Domne Vanias!

Hightime is ups be it down into outs according! When there shall be foods for vermin as full as feeds for the fett, eat on earth as there’s hot in oven. When every Klitty of a scolderymeid shall hold every yardscullion’s right to stimm her uprecht for whimsoever, whether on privates, whather in publics. And when all us romance catholeens shall have ones for all amanseprated. And the world is maidfree. So till Coquette to tell Cockotte to teach Connie Curley to touch Cattie Hayre and tip Carminia to tap La Cherie though where the diggings he dwellst amongst us here’s nobody knows save Mary. Whyfor we go ringing hands in hands in gyrogyrorondo.

These bright elects, consentconsorted, they were waltzing up their willside with their princesome handsome angeline chiuff while in those wherebus there wont helds way oaths and screams and bawley groans with a belchybubhub and a hellabelow bedemmed and bediabbled the arimaining lucisphere. Lonedom’s breach lay foulend up uncouth not be broched by punns and reedles. Yet the ring gayed rund rorosily with a drat for a brat you. Yasha Yash ate sassage and mash. So found he bash, poor Yasha Yash. And you wonna make one of our micknick party. For poor Glugger was dazed and late in his crave, ay he, laid in his grave.

But low, boys low, he rises, shrivering, with his spittyful eyes and his whoozebecome woice. Ephthah! Cisamis! Examen of conscience scruples now he to the best of his memory do. He dooly redecant allbigenesis henesies. He proform penance. He make polentay rossum out of bianconies, hiking ahake like any nudgemeroughgorude all over Terracuta. No more throw acids, face all lovabilities. He make clean breast of goody girl now as ever drank milksoep from a spoen, weedhearted boy of potter and mudder, chip of old flint, twig of the hider that tanned him. He relation belong this remarklable moliman, Anaks Andrum, pure blood Jebusite. Intrance on back. Most open on the laydays. He, A. A., possible sooth to say he gaining fish considerable, to look most prophitable out of smily skibluh eye. He repeat of him as pious alios cos he ast for shave and haircut people said he’d shape of hegoat where he just was sheep of herrgott with his tile togged. Top. Not true his portemanteau priamed full potatowards. Big dumm crumm digaditchies say he coaxyorum offering bloadonages with candid zuckers on Spinisters’ Walk in presents to lilithe maidinettes for at bloo his noose for him with pruriest pollygameous inatentions, he having that pecuniarity spectacularly on gale days because souffrant chronic from a plentitude of house torts. Collosul rhodomantic lie Scholarina say as he walk in her sleep his pig indicks weg femtyfem funts. How could one classically? One could naught critically. Ininest lightingshaft only for lovalit smugpipe, his Mistress Mereshame, of cupric tresses, the formwhite foaminine, the ambersandalled. A mish he is as good as a mountain and everybody he know Meister Wikingson, with complexion of blushing dolomite fanned by ozeone brisees, have his ignomen of being Master Milchku, queerest man in the benighted queendom, and how he found the kids. Other accuse him as lochkneeghed forsunkener, all ameltingmoult after rhomatism, purely simply tommy ratkins. They whiteliveried ragsups, two Whales of the Sea of Deceit, they bloodiblabstard shooters, three Dromedaries of the Sands of Calumdonia. In his contrary this Mr Heer Assassor Neelson, laxtleap great change of retiring family buckler, highly accurect in his everythinks, from tencents coupoll to bargain basement, live with howthold of nummer seven, wideawake, woundabout, wokinbetts, weeklings, in black velvet sidden mangy years and got a babyboy bucktooth coming on ever so nursely at 81. That why all parks up excited about his gunnfodder. That why he, persona erecta, glycorawman arsenicful feminister, with two purses agitatating his theopot with wokklebout shake, rather incoherend, from one 18 to one 18 biss. Old grand tuttut toucher up of young poetographies and he turn aroundabrupth red altfrumpishly falls some make one noise. It’s his last lap, Gigantic, fare him weal! A fact. True bill. By a jury of matrons. Hump for humbleness, dump for dirts. And, to make a long stoney badder, his Thing went the wholyway retup Suffrogate Strate.

Helpmeat too, contrasta toga, his fiery goosemother, woman who did, he tell princes of the age about. You sound on me, judges! Suppose we brisken up. Kings! Meet the Mem, Avenlith, all viviparous out of couple of lizards. She just as fenny as he is fulgar. How laat soever her latest still her logs come up all standing. His cheekmole of allaph foriverever her allinall and his Kuran never teachit her the be the owner of thyself. So she not swop her eckcot hjem for Howarden’s Castle, Englandwales. But be the alleance of iern on his flamen vestacoat, the fibule of broochbronze to his wintermantle of pointefox. Who not knows she, the Madame Coolley-Couley, spawife to laird of manna, when first come into the pictures more as hundreads elefents yahrds of annams call away, factory fresh and fiuming at the mouth, wronged by Hwemwednoget (he take a rap for that early party) and whenceforward Ani Mama and her forty bustles terrified of gmere gnomes of gmountains and furibound to be back in her mytinbeddy? Yet jackticktating all around her about his poorliness due to pannellism and grime for that he harboured her when feme sole and led her in antient consort ruhm and bound her durant coverture so as she could not steal from him so as if ever she’s beleaved by chickenbrooth death since both was parties to the feed it’s Hetman MacCumhal foots the funeral. Mealwhile she feed him jacent from her elmer’s almsdish when his favourites were all beruffled on him and her own undesirables justickulating, it was such a blowick day. The why if he but would bite she would delicate her nutbrown glory cloack to Mayde Berenice and hang herself in Ostmannstown Saint Mary’s and make no more mulierage before mahatmas or moslemans, but would ondulate her shookerloft hat like any purple cardinal’s princess to the papal legate from the Vatucum, Monsaigneur Rabbinsohn Crucis, on account of all he quaqueduxed and the nations abhord him and wop mezzo scudo to Sant Pursy Orelli to be offered up missas for vowts for widders.

Hear, O worldwithout! Tiny tattling!

But who comes yond with pire on poletop? He who relights our spearing torch, the moon. And the hag they damename Coverfew hists from her lane. And haste ’tis time for bairns ta hame. Chickchilds, comeho to roo. Comehome to roo, wee chickchilds doo, when the wildworewolf’s abroad. Ah, let’s away and let’s gay and let’s stay chez where the log foyer’s burning!

It darkles, all this our funnominal world. Yon marshpond is visited by the tide. We are circumveiloped by obscuritads. Man and beastes frieren. There is a wish on them to be not doing or anything. Or just for rugs. Zoo koud! Where is our highly honourworthy salutable spousefounderess? The foolish one of the family is within. Huzoor, where’s he? At house, to’s pitty. With Nancy Hands. Nought stirs in spinney. The swayful pathways of the dragonfly spider stay still in reedery. Quiet takes back her folded fields. In deerhaven, imbraced, alleged, injoynted and unlatched, the birds, tommelise too, quail silent. Was avond ere a while. Now conticinium. The time of lying together will come and the wildering of the nicht till cockeedoodle aubens Aurore. No chare of beagles, frantling of peacocks, no muzzing of the camel, smuttering of apes. Lights, pageboy, lights! When otter leaps in outer parts then Yul remembers Mei. Her hung maid mohns are bluming, look, to greet those loes on coast of amethyst; arcglow’s seafire siemens lure and warnerforth’s hookercrookers. And now the pesciolines in Liffeyetta’s bowl have stopped squiggling feriaquintaism and if Lubbernabohore laid his harker to the ribber he would not hear a flip flap in all Finnyland. Witchman, watch of your night? It goes. It does not go. Darkpark’s acoo with sucking loves. Rosimund’s by her wishing well. Soon tempt-in-twos will stroll at venture and hunt-by-threes sirut musketeering. But meetings mate not as forsehn. Hesperons! And if you wand to Livmouth, wenderer, here lurks no iron welcome. Bing. Bong. Bangbong. Thunderation! Were you Marely quean of Scuts or but Christien the Last, here’s dapplebellied mugs and troublebedded rooms and sawdust strown in expectoration and for ratification your information, Mr Knight, tuntapster, buttles; his alefru’s up to his hip. And Watsy Lyke sees after all rinsings and don’t omiss Kate homeswab homely, put in with the bricks. A’s the sign and one’s the number. De oud huis bij de kerkegaard. So who over comes ever for whoopee week must put up with the Jug and Chambers.

But heed! Our thirty minutes war’s alull. All’s quiet on the felled of Gorey. Housefather calls enthreateningly. Ansighosa pokes in her potstill to souse at the sop be sodden enow and to hear to all the bubbles besaying: the coming man, the future woman, the food that is to build, what he with fifteen years will do, the ring in her mouth of joyous guard, stars astir and stirabout. A plague for hirs, a saucy for hers and ladlelike spoons for the wonner. But ein and twee were never worth three. So they must have their final since he’s on parole. Et la pau’ Leonie has the choice of her lives between Josephinus and Mario-Louis for who is to wear the lily of Bohemey, Florestan, Thaddeus, Hardress or Myles. Ready! Now for la bella! Icy-la-Belle!

The campus calls them. Childs will be wilds. And vamp, vamp, vamp, the girls are merchand. For these are not on terms, they twain, since their baffle of Whatalose when Adam Leftus and the devil took our hindmost, gegifting her with his painapple, nor will not be atoned at all in fight to no finish, that dark deed doer, this wellwilled wooer, Jerkoff and Eatsoup, Yem or Yan, while felixed is who culpas does and harm’s worth healing and Brune is bad French for Jour d’Anno. Tiggers and Tuggers they’re all for tenzones. For she must walk out. And it must be with who. Teaseforhim. Toesforhim. Tossforhim. Two. Else there is danger of. Solitude.

Postreintroducing Jeremy, the flowing taal that brooks no brooking runs on to say how, as it was mutualiter foretold of him by a timekiller to his spacemaker, velos ambos and arubyat knychts, with their tales within wheels and stucks between spokes, on the hike from Elmstree to Stene and back, how, running awage with the use of reason (sics) and ramming amok at the brake of his voice (secs), his lasterhalft was set for getting the besterwhole of his yougendtougend, for control number thrice was operating the subliminal of his invaded personality. He nobit smorfi and go poltri and let all the tondo gang bola del ruffo. Barto no know him mor. Eat larto altruis with most perfect stranger.

Boo, you’re through!

Hoo, I’m true!

Men, teacan a tea simmering, hamo mavrone kerry O?

Teapotty. Teapotty.

He wept indeiterum. With such a tooth he seemed to love his wee tart when abuy. Highly momourning he see the before him. Melained from nape to kneecap though vied from her girders up. Holy Santalto cursing saint, sight most deletious. An they bare falls witless against thee how slight becomes a hidden wound? It will paineth him in that where of his whence he had loseth his once for every, even though mode grow moramor maenneritsch and the Tarara boom decay. Immaculacy, give but to drink to his shirt and all skirtaskortas must change her tunics. So warred he from first to last forebanned and betweenly a smuggler for lifer. Lift the blank ve veered as heil! Split the hvide and aye seize heaven! He knows for he’s seen it in black and white through his eyetrompit trained upon jenny’s and all that sort of thing which is dandymount to a clearobscure. Prettimaid tints may try their taunts: apple, bacchante, custard, dove, eskimo, feldgrau, hematite, isingglass, jet, kipper, lucile, mimosa, nut, oysterette, prune, quasimodo, royal, sago, tango, umber, vanilla, wisteria, xray, yesplease, zaza, philomel, theerose. What are they all by? Shee.

If you nude her in her prime, make sure you find her complementary or, on your very first occasion, by Angus Dagdasson and all his piccions, she’ll prick you where you’re proudest with her unsatt speagle eye. Look sharp, she’s signalling from among the asters. Turn again, wistfultone, lode mere of Doubtlynn! Arise, Land-under-Wave! Clap your lingua to your pallet, drop your jowl with a jolt, tambourine until your breath slides, pet a pout and it’s out. Have you got me, Allysloper?

My top it was brought Achill’s low, my middle I ope before you, my bottom’s a vulser if ever there valsed and my whole the flower that stars the day and is solly well worth your pilger’s fahrt. Where there’s a hitch, a head of things, let henker’s halter hang the halunkenend. For I see through your weapon. That cry’s not Cucullus. And his eyelids are painted. If my tutor here is cut out for an oldeborre I’m Flo, shy of peeps, you know. But when he beetles backwards, ain’t I fly? Pull the boughpee to see how we sleep. Bee Peep! Peepette! Would you like that lump of a tongue for lungeon, or this Turkey’s delighter, hys hyphen mys? My bellyswain’s a twalf whulerusspower though he knows as much how to man a wife as Dunckle Dalton of matching wools. Shake hands through the thicketloch, Sweet swanwater! My other is mouthfilled. This kissing wold’s full of killing fellows kneeling voyantly to the cope of heaven. And somebody’s coming, I feel for a fect. When you’ll next have the mind to retire to be wicked this is as dainty a way as any. Underwoods spells bushment’s business. So if you sprig poplar you’re bound to twig this. ’Twas my lord of Glendalough benedixed the gape for me that time at Long Entry, commanding the approaches to my intimast innermost. Look how they’re browthered! Six thirteens at Blanche de Blanche’s of 3 Behind Street and 2 Turnagain Lane. Awabeg is my callby, Magnus here’s my Max, Wonder One’s my cipher and Seven Sisters is my nighbrood. Radouga, Rab will ye na pick them in their pink of panties. You can colour up till you’re prawn while I go squirt with any cockle. But if this could see with its backsight he’d be the grand old greeneyed lobster. He’s my first viewmarc since Valentine. Wink’s the winning word.

Luck!

In the house of breathings lies that word, all fairness. The walls are of rubinen and the glittergates of elfinbone. The roof herof is of massicious jasper and a canopy of Tyrian awning rises and still descends to it. A grape cluster of lights hangs therebeneath and al the house is filled with the breathings of her fairness, the fairness of fondance and the fairness of milk and rhubarb and the fairness of roasted meats and uniomargrits and the fairness of promise with consonantia and avowals. There lies her word, you reder! The height herup exalts it and the lowness her down abaseth it. It vibroverberates upon the tegmen and prospiodes from pomaeria. A window, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sign, a head and keep your other augur on her paypaypay. And you have it, old Sem, pat as ah be seated! And Sunny, my gander, he’s coming to land her. Oh backed von dem zug! Make weg for their tug!

With a ring ding dong, they raise clasped hands and advance more steps to retire to the saum. Curtsey one, curtsey two, with arms akimbo, devotees.

Irrelevance.

All sing:

— I rose up one maypole morning and saw in my glass how nobody loves me but you. Ugh. Ugh.

All point in the shem direction as if to shun.

— My name is Misha Misha, but call me Toffey-Tough. I mean Mettenchough. It was her, boy the boy that was loft in the larch. Ogh! Ogh!

Her reverence.

All laugh.

They pretend to helf while they simply shauted at him sauce to make hims prich. And ith ith noth cricquette, Sally Lums. Not by ever such a lot. Twentynines of bloomers geging een man arose. Avis was there and trilled her about it. She’s her sex, for certain. So to celebrate the occasion:

— Willest thou rossy banders havind?

He simules to be tight in ribbings round his rumpffkorpff.

— Are you Swarthants that’s hit on a shorn stile?

He makes semblant to be swiping their chimbleys.

— Can you ajew ajew fro’ Sheidam?

He finges to be cutting up with a pair of sissers and to be buytings of their maidens and spitting their heads into their facepails.

Spickspuk! Spoken.

So now be hushy, little pukers! Side here roohish cleany fuglers! Grandicellies, all stay zitty! Adultereux, rest as befour! When ye colf tantoncle’s hat then’ll be largely temts for that. Yet’s the time for being now, now, now.

For a burning would is come to dance inane. Glamours hath moidered’s lieb and herefore Coldours must leap no more. Lack breath must leap no more.

Lel lols for libelman libling his lore. Lolo Lolo liebermann you loved to be leaving Libnius. Lift your right to your Liber Lord. Link your left to your lass of liberty. Lala Lala, Leapermann, your lep’s but a loop to lee.

A fork of hazel o’er the field in vox the verveine virgins ode. If you cross this rood as you roamed the rand I’m blessed but you’d feel him a blasting rod. Behind, me, frees from evil smells! Perdition stinks before us.

Aghatharept they fleurelly to Nebnos will and Rosocale. Twice is he gone to quest of her, thrice is she now to him. So see we so as seed we sow. And their prunktqueen kilt her kirtles up and set out. And her troup came heeling, O. For ever they scent where air she went. While all the fauns’ flares widens wild to see a floral’s school.

Led by Lignifer, in four hops of the happiest. ach beth cac duff, the few fly the farbetween! Attilad! Attattilad! Cet up, Goth’s scourge on you! There’s a visitation in your impluvium. Hun! Hun!

He stanth theirs mun in his natural, oblious of his very proprium, the wont to be wanton maid a will to be wise. Thrust from the light, he spoors loves from her heats. He blinkth. But’s wrath’s the higher where those wreathe charity. For all of these have been thisworlders, time liquescing into state, pitiless age grows angelhood. Though, as he stehs, most anysing may befallhim from a song of a witch to the totter of Blackarss, given a fammished devil, a young sourceress and (eternal conjunction) the permission of overalls with the cuperation of nightshirt. If he spice east he seethes in sooth and if he pierce north he wilts in the waist. And what wonder with the murkery viceheid in the shade? The specks on his lapspan are his foul deed thougths, wishmarks of mad imogenation. Take they off! Make the off! But Funnylegs are leanly. A bimbamb bum! They vain would convert the to be hers in the word. Gash, they’re fair ripecherry!

As for she could shake him. An oaf, no more. Still he’d be good tutor two in his big armschair lerningstoel, and she be waxen in his hands. Turning up and fingering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous longerous book of the dark. Look at this passage about Galilleotto. I know it is difficult, but when your goche I go dead. Turn now to this patch upon Smacchiavelluti. Soot allours, he’s sure to spot it! ’Twas ever so in monitorology since Headmaster Adam became Eva Harte’s toucher, in omnibus moribus et temporibus, with man’s mischief in his mind whilst her pupils swimmed too heavenlies, let his be exaspirated, letters be blowed, I is a femaline person. O, of provocative gender. U unisingular case.

Which is why trumpers are mixed up in duels and here’s B. Rohan meets N. Ohlan for the prize of a thou.

As he was queering his shoolthers. So was I. And as I was cleansing my fausties. So was he. And as way ware puffiing our blowbags. Souwouyou.

Come, thrust! Go, parry!

— Now may Saint Mowy of the Pleasant Grin be your everglass and even prospect!

— Feeling dank.

Exchange, reverse.

— And may Saint Jerome of the Harlots’ Curse make family three of you which is much abedder!

— Grassy ass ago.

The bivitellines, obscindgemeinded biekerers, varying directly, uruseye each oxesother, superfetated (never cleaner of lamps frowned fiercelier on anointer of hinges), while their treegrown girls, king’s game, if he deign so, are in such transfusion just to know who is artthoudux from whose heterotropic, the sleepy or the glouch, for, shyly bawn and showly nursured exceedingly nice girls can strike exceedingly bad times unless so richtly chosen’s by (what though of riches he have none and hope dashes hope on his heart’s horizon) to gar their great moments greater. The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere waterstichystuff in a selfmade world that you can’t believe a word he’s written in but one’s only owned by naturel rejection. Charley, you’re my darwing. So sing they sequent the assent of man. Till they go round if they go roundagain before breakparts and all dismissed. They keep. Step keep. Step. Stop.

Creedless, crownless hangs his haughty. He does not know how his grandson’s grandson’s grandson’s grandson will stammer up in Peruvain for in the ersebest idiom I have done it equals I so shall do. He dares not think why the grandmother of the grandmother of his grandmother’s grandmother coughed Russky with suchky husky accent since in the mouthart of the slove look at me now means I once was otherwise. Nor that the mappamund has been changing pattern as youth plays moves from street to street since time and races were and wise ants hoarded and sauterelles were spendthrifts. Nor that the turtling of a London’s alderman is ladled out by the waggerful to the regionals of pigmyland. His part should say in honour bound: So help me symethew, sammarc, selluc and singin, I will stick to you, by gum, no matter what and in case of the event coming off beforehand even so you was to release me for the sake of the other cheap girl’s baby’s name plaster me but I will pluckily well pull on the buckskin gloves. But Noodynaady’s actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines.

Evidentament he has failed as tiercely as the deuce before for she is wearing none of the three. And quite as patenly there is a hole in the ballet trough which the rest fell out. Because to explain why the residue is, was, or will not be, according to the eighth axiom, proceeded with, namely, the shifting about of the lassies, the tug of love of their lads ending with a great deal of merriment, hoots, screams, scarf drill, cap fecking, ejaculation of urine, reechoable mirthpeals and, one must recken with the sudden and gigantesquesque appearance unwithstandable as a general election in Barnado’s bearskin amongst the brawlmiddle of this village childergarten of the largely longsuffering laird of Lucanhof.

But, god of all machineries and tomestone of Barnstaple, by mortisection or vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded, how accountibus for him?

Was he pitssched as certain have dognosed of him against our seawall by Rurie, Thoath and Cleaver, Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means, as might occur to anyone, or so yclept from Clio’s clippings, for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends, have done, do and will again while monks sell yew to archers or the water of the livvying goes the way of all fish from Sara’s drawhead the corralsome to Isaac’s the lauphed butt one, with her minnelisp extorreor to his moanolothe inturned?

The mar of murmury mermers to the mind’s ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed. Only the caul knows his thousandfirst name, Hocus Crocus, Esquilocus, Finnfinn the Faineant, how feel full foes in furrinarr. Doth it not all come aft to you, puritysnooper, in the way television opes longtimes ofter when Potollomuck Sotyr or Sourdanapplous the Lollapaloosa? The charges are, you will remember, the chances are, you won’t bit it’s old Joe, the Java Jane, older even than Odam Costollo, and we are recurrently meeting em in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture. Greets Godd, Groceries! Merodach! Defend the King! Hoet of the rough throat attack but whose say is soft but whose ee has a cute angle, he whose hut is a hissarlik even as her hennin’s aspire. For now at last is Longabed going to be gone to, that more than man, shoehanded slaughterer of the shader of our leaves.

Attach him! Hold!

Why wilt thou erewaken him from his earth, O summonorother: he is weatherbitten from the dusts of ages? The hour of his closing hies to hand; the tocsin that shall claxonise his wareabouts. If one who remembered his webgoods and tealofts were to ask of a hooper for whose it was the storks were quitting Aquileyria, this trundler would not wot; if other who joined faith when his depth charge bombed our barrel spillway were to —!

Jehosophat, what doom is here! Rain ruth on them, sire. Even if you are the kooper of the winkel over measure never lost a licence. And for the honour of Alcohol drop that you-know-what-I’ve-come-about-I-saw-your-act air! Punch may be pottleproud but his Judy’s a wife’s wit better.

For the producer (Mr John Baptister Vickar) caused a deep abuliousness to descend upon the Father of Truants and, as a side issue, pluterpromptly brought on the scene the cutletsized consort, weighing ten pebble ten, scaling five footsy five and spanning thirtyseven inchettes round the good companions, twentynine ditties round the wishful waistress, thirtyseven alsos round the answer to everything, twentythree of the same round each of the quis separabits, fourteen round the beginning of happiness and nicely nine round her shoed for slender.

And eher you could pray mercy to goodness or help to the rescue, Gallus’s hen has collared her pullets. Their bone of contention, flesh to their thorns, prest as Prestissima, makes off in a thinkling, while Bier, Wijn, Spirituosen for consumption on the premises, advokaat withouten pleaders, is hued and cried of each’s colour.

Home all go.

’Tis goed. Het best.

For they are now tearing, that is, teartoretorning. Too soon are coming tasbooks and goody, hominy bread and bible bee, Fine’s French phrases from the Grandmère des Grammaires and what happened to our eleven in thirtytwo and why is limbo where is he and what are the sound waves saying ceased ere they all wayed wrong and Amnist anguished axes Collis not to mention define the hydraulics of common salt and where G.P.O. is zentrum and D.U.T.C. are radients write down by the frequency of your refractions the on N.C.R. and S.C.R.

That little cloud still hangs isky. Singabed cries before slumber. Light at night has an alps on his druckhouse. Thick head and thin butter or after you with me. What is amaid today todo? So angelland all weeping bin that Izzy most unhappy is. Fain Essie fie onhapje? laughs her stella’s vispirine.

While they jeerilied along about old Father Barley how he got up of a morning arley and he met with a plattonem blondes named Hips and Haws and fell in with a fellows of Trinity some header Skowood Shaws like auld Daddy Deacon who could stow well his place of beacon but he never could hold his kerosene’s candle to bold Farmer Burleigh who wuck up in a hurlywurly where he huddly could wuddle to wallow his weg tillbag of the baker’s booth to beg of illed Diddiddy Achin for the prize of a pease of bakin for Wold Forrester Farley who was found of the round of the sound of the lound of the

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdy-looshoofermoyportertooryzooysphal-nabortansakroidverjkapakkapuk.

Byfall.

Upploud!

The play thou schouwburgst, Game, here endeth. The curtain drops by deep request.

For the Clearer of the Air from on high has spoken and the unhappitents of the earth have terrerumbled from fimament unto fundament and from tweedledeedumms down to twiddledeedees.

Loud, hear us!

Loud, graciously hear us!

Now have thy children entered into their habitations. Thou hast closed the portals of the habitations of thy children and thou hast set thy guards thereby that thy children may read in the book of the opening of the mind to light and err not in the darkness which is the afterthought of thy nomatter by the guardiance of those guards which are thy bodemen, Pray-your-Prayers Timothy and Back-to-Bunk Tom.

O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour’s time, O Loud!

That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall not gomeet madhowiatrees.

Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!

Ha he hi ho hu.

Mummum.

 ® 

Drafts for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

c o n t e n t s — d r a f t s

Drafts for Ulysses

[Proteus]

[Cyclops]

[Circe]

Drafts for Finnegans Wake

[Roderick O’Conor]

[Saint Kevin]

[Berkeley and Patrick]

[Tristan and Isolde]

[H.C.E.]

[Mamalujo]

[The Cad Kernel]

[The Revered Letter]

 ® 

[Proteus]

[late 1917]

Ineluctable modality of the visible: it must be that at least if no more. My eyes do not see it: they think it rather than see. These signs I am read and reader: furrows of seawrack, the tide coming in, that rusty boot. Bottlegreen, bluesilver, rust. Yes, coloured signs, limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he has become aware of them before of their colours. How? By knocking his head against them. Go easy. Yes, he was bald and a multimillionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Wait now: limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it is a gate, if you cannot it is a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes hearing his boots crushing the crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it anyhow. Yes I am: a foot at a time. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a precipice now. Fell through the Nebeneinander. Ineluctably. I am getting on very nicely in the dark. My two feet are at the ends of my two legs: nebeneinander. Solid no doubt: made by the hammer of Los. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick.

Won’t you come to Sandymount

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm is beginning, you see. I hear. Marching iambs. No agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. Yes, I will. One moment. Has all vanished in the meantime? If I open and see the black adiaphane. Enough. I will see if I can see.

See now. It was there all the time and will be, world without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy’s terrace prudently. Frauenzimmer. And flabbily down the shelving shore, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me. Like Algy coming down to the mighty mother. One carried her midwife’s bag, the other a gamp with which she poked and turned over shells of the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all go back, stranded and twined cables of all flesh. Hello. Telegraphic address: Navel, Paradise. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your navel. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville, one, one, one.

Heva, helpmate of Adam Kadmon, naked Eve. She had no navel. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, or whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Mother, womb of sin.

Wombed in darkness I was too, made not begotten by them, the man with my strange eyes and the ghost with a breath of ashes. They clasped and sundered, they did the coupler’s will from before all ages. He willed me and may not will me away now or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and son are consubstantial? Where is Arius to answer? Luckless heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last with mitre and crozier on his throne, with trussed up vestments, with foul hinder parts.

The seawind romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming: waves. The whitemaned horses, tossing, hundredbridled.

I mustn’t forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship half twelve. By the way, go easy with that money. Yes, I must.

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Strasburg terrace or not? My consubstantial father’s voice. Did you see anything of your brother Stephen lately? No? Sure, he’s not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn’t he find something better than that eh? And and and and tell me, and how’s uncle Si now. O, weeping God! The things I married into. Sir. No, sir. Agonizing God!

I pull the rusty bell of their shuttered house: and wait. Twice. They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

— It’s Stephen, sir.

— Let him in. Let him in.

A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

— We thought you were someone else.

Uncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed in the broad bed extends over the hill of his knees a sturdy forearm. Clean: chested. He has washed the upper moiety.

— Morrow, Stephen.

He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bill of costs for the eyes of master Goff and master Tandy, filing consents and common searches and a writ of Duces Tecum. The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back.

— Yes, sir?

— Whisky for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?

— She’s bathing Crissie, sir.

— No, uncle Richie.....

— Call me Richie. Malt!

— Uncle Richie look.... Really....

— Sit down or will you be knocked down?

Walter squints vainly for a chair.

— He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

— He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring our chippendale chair.

All’erta

He drones bars of Fernando’s aria di sortita. The grandest number, Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.

His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded and with rushes of air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

This air is sweeter.

Houses of decay, mine and his and all. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The ragtail rabblement in the liberties. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houhynhym: horsenostrilled Dean, and abbas father what offence set fire to their brains? Paff! Descendo, calve, ut ne nimium decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (Descende) clutching a basilisk monstrance. Get down, baldpoll. A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of priests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. And two streets off another one locking it into a pyx. And in a side chapel another one taking housel all to his own cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back: Occam thought of that. That’s all right fair and square. It must have been one misty English morning. The devil’s thought crossed his brain. He gave a side eye in the transept as he brought his host down (he is lifting his) and heard (I am lifting mine) the bells again twang together. Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine Avenue that the woman in front might lift her skirts more in the rain. O si, certo. Sell your soul for that, dyed rags tied round a squaw. More, more than that tell me. On the top of the Howth tram crying to the rain: Naked women! Naked women! What about that, eh?

What about what? What else were they invented for?

You are a highly intellectual fellow, with your Oxford manners. Reading two pages apiece of ten books every night. I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward so seriously, striking looking. Hooray for the God damned idiot! Ay! Ray! Noone saw: tell no one. And your epiphanies, written on green paper leaves, so deeply deep, to be sent to all the libraries of the world if you died, including Alexandria. Someone would read them there in about a thousand years’ time, you thought. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these faded pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once..... The fine sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod razorlike, stuck empty shells, unnumbered pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, watercrusted wood. Cakey damp sandflats waited to suck his treading boots, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them walking warily. On his left a bottle stood up pitted to its waist in the cakey sand. A sentinel. Isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops farther, and beyond a maze of dark cunning nets: Ringsend: houses of brown sailors and master mariners. Human shells.

He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Dora’s. Am I not going there? Seems not. No-one about the strand. He turned and crossed the firmer sand towards the Pigeon House.

— Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?

— C’est le pigeon, Joseph!

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar Minerva. Son of the wild goose. My father’s a bird. He lapped the sweet lait chaud inoffensively, a pink young tongue, a plump white rabbit’s face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win something in the gros lots. He tells me all about the nature of woman that he read in Michelet. He will send me la Vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil. He has lent it to a friend. C’est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas en l’existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon pere.

— Il croit?

— Mon pere, oui.

Schluss. He laps.

My Latin quarter hat. God, we must simply dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? P.C.N. Eating fourpenceworth of mou en civet beside belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone. When I was in Paris I used to. Yes, you used to carry old punched tramtickets for weeks in your pocket to be able to prove an alibi if you were arrested on a charge of murder somewhere. Other fellow did it. My double: hat, tie, overcoat, face. Lui, c’est moi. Allee samee.

You walked proudly. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget now who. You were going to do wonders, weren’t you? Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged your valise across the slimy pier at Newhaven. Comment? The booty you brought back. Five numbers of Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge: and a blue French telegram curiosity to show.

Nother dying. Come home.

Father.

The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That’s the reason why she won’t.

Then here’s a health to Mulligan’s aunt

And I’ll tell you the reason why

She always kept things decent in

The Hannigan family.

His feet marched in sudden gay rhythm over the sand along by the boulders of the South Wall. Gold light on the sea, the sand, the boulders, sewage of my brain behind me. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses. Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, froggreen wormwood, her matin incense court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Polidon’s Yvonne and Madeleine, belated, newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chausons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of the Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores. Noon is near. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us the hungry fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi setier. A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron and around the marbleslabbed tables, the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang thrusting between his scandalous lips. Of Ireland of the city of the Dalcassians, hopes, conspiracies. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its neck tassels at his secrets. Maud Gonne, Felix Faure, licentious men, the ?froken who washed and rubbed his naked body in the bath at Upsala, most licentious custom, bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you! Fang, I feel. Lascivious thing. The blue fuse burns deadly between his hands and burns clear. The loose tobacco shreds catch fire and flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his Spaniard’s hat. Spurned lover. I was a strapping young bouchal then at that time. I’ll show you my likeness one day. Lover, for her love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, his tanist, under Clerkenwell’s walls and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upwards in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. The Paris multitude now he bides, unsought by any save by me. Making his day’s stations, the dim printingcase, his three taverns, the lair he sleeps short night in, in rue de la Goutte d’or, damascened with old cartoons. Loveless, landless, wifeless, soulless. She is all right without her castoff man, madame in rue ?Git les coeur, canary and two lodgers. ???Geyaroy uin cheeks, a skirt, frisky as a girls’. Spurned lover and undespairing. Mon fils, soldier of France. I taught him ?Oh, the boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Do you know that old song? ???Thus I taught Patrice that old Kilkenny.

— O, the boys of Kilkenny

They have cast him outward forgotten not he them?, Kevin Egan. Remembering thee, O Sion.

He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots. The wild air greeted him, ?sighing ?on wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of fire. Here. I am not walking out to the Kish am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back. Turning he looked southward along the shore, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbacans shafts of light will move ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping this side that side over.the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushed back chairs my obelisk valise, round a table of abandoned platters. Who would clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind bodies, the panther sahib and his gunbearer. Call: no answer. He lifted his feet from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all, my soul walks with me. So in the moon’s mid watches I walk by the path above the rocks, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood. The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back then by the road again to the higher strand behind. He climbed over the ?salvage of weed and sat on a stool of rock, laying his ashplant by him.

The bloated carcass of a dog lay among the oily sedge. Before him the gunwale of a boat, buried in sand. Un coche ensable’ Louis Veuillot called Gautier’s unwieldy prose. These heavy sands are language that tide and wind have silted here. And these the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Sands and stones. Why am I angered? A fool’s wrath is heavier than them both. A live dog came into sight across the sweep of sand. Lord, is he going to attack me? I have me stick. Sit still. From farther away walking shoreward across from the coming tide, figures. He is running back to them ?two.

The galleys of the Danes ran here to land, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding the low waves. A school of turlehide whales stranded in the noon, spouting, flapping in the shallows. Then from the cobbled starving city a horde of jerkined dwarfs with flaying knives, running, scaling, hacking ?the green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughter. Their blood is in me, their thoughts are my waves. I was among them on the frozen Liffey, among the hissing resin fires. I spoke to none: none to me.

The dog’s bark ran toward him, ceased, ran back. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Then live their lives, ?coward as they. He saved men from drowning and you shake at this barking of a cur? But the courtiers who mocked Guido Cavalcanti were in their own house, he meant ?An house of.... We don’t want any more of medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? There would be a boat near or a lifebuoy. Ay, of course, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned last week off Maiden’s Rock whose body they are waiting. The truth now. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Do you see the tide flowing on all sides swiftly sheeting the stretches of sand? If I had land under my feet. I want his life to be still his but mine to be mine. A man. His eyes are fixed on me in horror of death. I... With him together... I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

A man and a woman. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.

The dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something he lost here in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowflying gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling legs. At the verges of the tides he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His head lifted barked against the noise of the waves. They came towards his feet, shaking ?their ?crests, plashing, breaking, from farther, from far out, waves and waves.

The man and woman waded a few paces into the water and, stooping, soused their bags. Cocklepickers. They lifted their bags from the water and waded out again. The dog yelped and running to them, reared up and pawed them ?+ then, falling on all fours, and again reared up with mute bearish ?efforts. Unheeded he kept beside them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of red tongue lolling from a side of his wolf’s jaws. His speckled body ambled in front and then set off forward at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, nosing closer, went round it sniffing rapidly like a dog points.

— Tatters! Here, you mongrel!

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He ambled back in a curve and on by the edge of the mole, smelt a rock and under a heaved hindleg pissed against it. He trotted on and heaving again his hindleg, pissed against an unsmelt rock. His hind paw then scattered the sand: then his forepaw dabbled and delved. Something he buried there. He scraped in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his paws, soon ceasing. A pard, a panther, vulturing the dead.

With their bags they passed. His large feet out of turned up trousers slapped the damp sand, a dull red muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With slender steps she followed him : the bully and his strolling mort: her spoils slung on her back. Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet and loose her ?hang trailed about her windraw face. Behind her lord his helpmeet trudging to Romeville. When night hides her body’s flaws calling under her fringed shawl from an archway where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two redcoats in O’Loughlin’s of Blackpitts. A shefiend’s whiteness under her rancid rags. Fumbally’s Lane that night, the tanyard smells. My dimber wapping dell.

White thy fambles, red thy gan

And thy quarrons dainty is.

Couch a hogshead with me then

In the darkmans clip and kiss.

A side eye at my Latin quarter hat walking across the sands of this world, driven by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, to evening lands she trudges; schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn in her wake. Moondrawn tides within her a winedark sea, myriadislanded. Behold the handmaid of the moon. The wet sign rules her courses, ?visits her. Rise up, according to the word. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, the pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss. No, you must have two of em. Glue em well together : Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air : Mouth to her moombh. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy’s. Here, tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent across far to a slab of rock and scribbled the words. That’s twice I forgot to take some slips from the library. So.

His shadow lay dark over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? To throw an ended shadow from me and call it back to me. Endless, would it be mine? Who watches me here? Who will read ever anywhere these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your nicest voice. For the bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat, the flat cloth of space with signs and emblems hatched on its field. Hold on. Coloured on a flat: yes, that’s right. She trusts me; the gentle hand, softlashed eyes. Where am I supposed to be bringing her beyond the veil? The ineluctable modality of ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. Who? Tell that to someone else: ten to one she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and brown stockings. Talk about apple dumplings. Have you no sense? Where are your wits?

Touch me. Soft eye, soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here alone. O, touch me soon or now! What is that word all others know. I will be quiet to leave alone. Sad too. Touch. O touch me now!

He stretched backward at full over the sharp boulders, his hat tilted down on his eyes, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket. Under its leaf he watched through ?widening peacock lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan’s hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpent plants, milk: oozing fruits, where leaves lie wide on waters. Pain is far.

And no more turn aside and brood

Below his feet the water flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No they are passing on up the low rocks, swirling, passing.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the long weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, in whispering water sway upturning coy fronds. Day by day, night by night lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniursias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered, vainly then released, forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too, naked before men, naked and unravished, she draws her toil of waters.

At one the boatman said. Five fathoms deep there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fish, loose ?silly shells. A corpse. rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward. There it is. Hook it quick. Pull. We have him. Easy now.

The drowned manbundle, bag of corpsegas, sopping of foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fatfed, flashing through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. His leprous nosehole ?fronting the sun.

Hauled stark over the gunwale. A seachange this seadeath, mildest of all deaths. Paris medal awarded : beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves no end.

My pilgrim’s staff waits to be picked up. On then. Where? To evening land. Evening will find itself. He took the handle of his ashplant, dallying with it still. Yes, evening will find itself, in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when will it be Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. The ?oxford gentleman rhymes. Lawn Tennyson. Gia. For the old hag with the yellow fangs. French gentleman journalist. My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder.

He had taken a dry snot from his nostril and holding it on the crook of his finger, groped vainly for his handkerchief. Forgot it in the Tower. He laid the snot carefully on a ledge of rock. For the rest let look who will.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned and saw passing through the air the mast of a ship, her sails braced up, passing on towards Dublin, silently.

 ® 

[Cyclops]

[mid-1919]

Scene 1

In green Erin of the west there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld from afar. There sleep the dead as they slept in life, warriors and princes of high renown. There wave the lofty trees of sycamore; the eucalyptus, giver of good shade, is not absent: and in their shadow sit the maidens of that land, the daughters of princes. They sport with silvery fishes, caught in silken nets; their fair white fingers toss the gems of the sea, ruby and purple of Tyre. And men come from afar, heroes, the sons of kings, to woo them for they are beautiful and all of noble stem.

O’Bloom went by through Inn’s quay ward, the parish of saint Michan. It is O’Bloom, the son of Rudolph, the son of Leopold Peter, son of Peter Rudolph, he of the intrepid heart, impervious to all fear, a noble hero, eastward towards Pill Lane, among the squatted fishgills, and by the gutboards where lay heaps of red and purple fishguts. He went by the city market, O’Bloom of the intrepid heart. Gurnard and plaice those are. Speckled backs. One after another hook in their gills. Can’t be hunger drives them. Probably curiosity. Curiosity killed the fish.

There rises a shining palace with crystal glittering roof, beheld from afar by mariners who traverse the sea in barks: and thither come the herds, the first fruits and the offerings of that land, for O’Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them there, a chieftan descended from chieftans. Thither the wains bring foison of fruits and vegetables in their seasons, golden potatoes and seagreen kale and onions, pearls of the earth, and lustrous apples and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes. And thither wend the heavyuddered kine, from pastures of Lusk and Ossory and Coosbaragh, their udders swollen with abundance of milk and butter and rich cheese and eggs, the agate and the dun.

[trimmed passage]

And on the dexter hand in solemn array are set forth the accoutrements of noble heroes: there hangs the breastplate of Brian, by whose might the Vikings were brought to nought: there, the helm of Oscar, son of Finn: there the bardic cloak of Ossian, the sightless seer, wanderer to many shores.

Bloom went by Mary’s Lane and saw the sordid row of old clothes’ shops, the old hucksterwomen seated by baskets of battered hats, amid the dangling legs of men, culprits limp coats hung by the neck.

Like culprits. Be taken to the prison from whence you came and there be hanged by the neck till you are bought and may the Lord. Emmet. Martyrs. They want to be? My life for Ireland. Romance. Girl in a window watching. Wipe away a tear. Hung up for scarecrows. Quite the contrary effect. Of course—Where was it battle of Fontenoy they charged. Remember Limerick. Hard times those were in Holles street when Molly tried that game. Nothing in it: blind ?rut. Chiefly women, of course. Devils to please. Come back tomorrow. Ta, ta.

Scene 2

Lo, as they spoke, a godlike youth came in running on swift feet, radiant as the eye of heaven, a laughing youth. And lo there passed behind him an elder of noble mien and visage, bearing the scrolls of law, and with him his lady wife, a comely dame of beauteous lineage, the fairest of her race.

Little Alf Bergan popped in and hid behind Barney’s snug, squeezed up laughing. He made signs to —— pointing out. And what was it but that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bath slippers and two bloody big lawbooks tucked under his oxter and the wife, unfortunate wretched creature, trotting after him like a poodle.

I thought Alf Bergan’d split.

— Look at him, he said. Breen. He’s traipsing all round Dublin with a postcard someone sent him with U.P: up on it. To take a libe...

He squirmed laughing.

— To take a what?

— A libel action for 10,000 pounds.

— O, Christ!

— He was in John Henry Menton’s and then he went to Collis and Ward’s and then Tom Rochford met him and for lark sent him on to the subsheriff’s. And long John sent him up to Greek street to look for a G division man.

— Is long John going to hang that fellow up in Mountjoy?

— By God, he’ll have to by law or send a fellow round with a bell. Look at till I show you. Here, Terry, give us a pony of stout.

Terence O’Ryan heard him and forthwith he brought him a crystal cup full of the foam-crowned ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Iveagh and Ardilaun brew ever in their divine ale vats. He poured it forth the nectarous beverage, and reached out the crystal goblet, in beauty akin to the immortals. But he, the young chief of the O’Bergans, would not brook to be less generous but gave him with noble mien a talent of costliest bronze. Thereon embossed by cunning smith work was made the image of a fair and gracious queen, Victoria her name, who bears rule, a victress well-beloved, over countless peoples, pale and dark, ruddy and ethiop.

— Here you are, Alf Bergan said, chucking out a copper. Talking about hanging now I’ll show you something you never saw. Hangmen’s letters. Look at here.

He drew forth and tossed on the counter a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes.

— Are you codding?

The young chieftan O’Bergan, comely in his youth, quaffed the divine nectar of Iveagh.

— Honest injun. Read them.

— How is Tommy these times and his great invention, Stagger the World.

— I don’t know, Alf Bergan said, I saw him just now on Essex Bridge with Paddy Dignam. Boylan is going to...

— You what! Ned Lambert said. With who?

— Dignam, Alf Bergan said.

— Is it Paddy?

— Yes. Why?

— Don’t you know he’s dead?

— Paddy Dignam dead! Alf Bergan cried. Are you codding?

— I am not, Ned Lambert said.

— Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago on Essex bridge talking to Tommy...

— You saw his ghost then if you did.

— What? Good Christ, only five... What...? And Tommy with him, the two of them there near what you call him’s. Dead? He’s no more dead than you are.

— I don’t know, Ned Lambert said reflectively. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.

— Paddy?

— Ay. God be merciful to him.

Bob Doran bent over with the hat on the back of his poll. “Who’s dead?” says he. “Dignam” says Ned Lambert. “Is it little Dignam that was in Menton’s office.” “Ay, poor chap, he’s gone to a better world,” says Ned.

Bob kept gaping at him with the glass in his hand. He’s on a hell of a bend those times. Bloody safe if he doesn’t finish up in Saint John of God’s. That bloody little sleepwalking bitch he married. Mooney, the bailiff’s daughter. The mother kept a kind of a kip in Hardwicke Street. He was damn well had anyhow. Ask Bantam Lyons. Walking about the house at two in the morning in her shift. Open to all comers. A fair field and no favour.

He is gone from mortal haunts, the beamy sun of our morning. Light was his foot on the bracken, Patrick of the beamy countenance. Mourn, O Inisfail, with your wind! Mourn, O ocean, with your whirlwind.

In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when thought had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of dark ruby light became visible, the apparition being particularly lifelike in consequence of the discharge of jivic rays from the head and face. Communication was made through the pituitary body and also through the orange-fiery and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral and solar plexi. Questioned he stated that he was now on the path of pralaya or return but was submitted to trial by some bloodthirsty entities on the lower astrals. Questioned as to his first sensations he stated that before he had seen in a glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities of atmic development. Interrogated as to whether life there resembled our experience here he stated that he had heard from more favoured beings that their abodes were equipped with all modern comfort and that the highest adepts were steeped in volupcy of the purest kind. Having requested a jug of buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he had any message for the living he exhorted all men to acknowledge the true path for it was reported that Mars and Jupiter the Ram were out for mischief on the extreme horn of the western horizon. It was then queried whether there were any special desires of the defunct and the reply was: Watch Corny. It was understood that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, a friend of the defunct who had been responsible for the interment arrangements. Before departing he requested that it should be made known to Patsy, his dear son, that the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the commode and that the pair should be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had greatly disturbed his peace of mind and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known. Assurances were given that this matter would be seen to and it was intimated that this had given satisfaction.

X perused the missive of the avenger, Rambold the hand of the law. No Man of Guilt may scape him. Dread is his Ire.

— O, Christ MacKeon, says he, will you listen to this.

— He read:

7 Hunter street
Liverpool

To the Sheriff of Dublin

Dublin

Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful case. i hanged Joe Gann in Holloway jale on the 12th of february 1900 and i hanged...

— O, God! says Z, peering over.

— ...Arthur Chace for the murder of Jessie Tilsit in Dartmoor prison and I was assistant when...

— God Almighty!

— ...Billington hanged the awful murderer J. Smith...

Z made a grab at it.

— Wait, says X, i have a special nack of putting the noose once in he can’t get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my terms is five guinees.

H. Rambold
barber

— And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too. Look at the dirty scrawl of the...

— O, put them away to hell out of that, says X. Here take them out of my sight.

Alf stuck them all back in his pocket.

— They’re all barbers from the black country. One chap sent in a mourning card with a black border on it. Five guineas is the fee but they make a good bit cutting up the rope in bits and selling it. Do you not believe me? That’s a fact. They do, faith.

In the dark Regions they bide: the vengeful Knights of the Razor. Their deadly Coil they grasp: yea, and therein lead to Erebus whomsoever hath done a deed of blood for I will in nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.

— I wonder has it a deterrent effect, X said.

— There’s one thing it hasn’t a deterrent effect on, Alf said.

— What’s that?

— The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged, Alf said.

— Do you mean he...

— That’s God’s truth, Alf Bergan said. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady.

— The invincible?

— Ay. He told me when they cut him down it was standing out like a poker in their faces.

— Good Christ!

— Fact. Horrible it must be.

— What’s the cause of it. I suppose the shock or...

— The ruling passion strong in death.

XY tendered medical evidence to the effect that the fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, in the opinion of science, be calculated to produce a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus thereby causing the pores of the corpus spongiosum to rapidly dilate in such a way as to facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been called by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis.

— And these are the swine that want to govern us here in Ireland, —— cried. Set of barbarians. Sure they have nothing, blast them, a race of mongrels with their mongrel bloody language. We want no mongrels here. Eh, Garryowen?

He heard the voice of his lord: and raised his head in pride. Short brow, quick eye, black palate: proud of his noble sires.

—— caught the setter by the scruff of the neck and says he:

— Eh, Garry, old boy, what do you think?

— Garan

— Eh?

He shook the setter’s nape.

— What’s that? What are you saying?

Garryowen made answer and thus he spake, not in beurla, I ween:

The curse of my curses

Seven times every day

And seven dry Thursdays

On you, Barney Biernan

Has no sup of water

To cool my courage

And my guts red roaring

After Buckley’s lights.

— Did you hear that? —— cried.

He clasped the noble friend of man.

— God, peòg mo hon is all the Irish I know, —— said.

— Shame on you, shoneen, then —— cried.

I’ll tell you what he said.

He opened his mouth and spoke in the tongue of the hated stranger:

The curse of my curses

Seven times every day

And seven dry Thursdays

On you Barney Kiernan

Has no sup of water

To cool my courage

And my guts red roaring

After Buckley’s lights

— Bring us a saucer of water, young chap, —— cried.

And at his behest the youthful Terence came and bare a silver ewer inwrought with findrinny and therein sparkled water of the most pure springs of Vartry and the glens and Lugnaquilla.

The poor brute lapped it up like old boots. He must have had a hell of a thirst. Good old doggy!

— That’s the language we want here, —— cried. Down with the beurla. We want an Irish speaking Ireland. There was a meeting of those shoneens in the city hall today to have the Irish language... Here’s the man can tell us.

John Wyse O’Power, clad in shining armour, hastened in and low bending, he made obeisance to the high chief of Erin and bore him tidings of what had befallen, how that the grave elders of the city had met them in the tholsel and there, after meet prayer to the gods who dwell in realms supernal, had taken counsel whereby they might if so be bring once more to honour among mortals the winged speech of the Gael. And —— gave ear, a chieftan excellent in counsel. And they had bethought them of how it might come to pass for great is their wisdom, and thereat were all right glad and joyous.

— It’s on the match, —— cried, dark Rosaleen’s hour of triumph. What about the scoffers now? A nation once again. To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their language!

— But still English, —— said, we must keep it also, for culture, I mean.

— To hell with them, —— bawled, they have no culture, no music, no literature, no nothing. All they’re good for is making waterclosets. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Yes, from us. The curse of a lopsided God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whore’s gets. The closetmakers of Europe.

He smote his cudgel upon the resounding winekeg, awful in ire as he spoke of the race of foemen, a race of mighty, valorous heroes begotten of Bullybull the Bull, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster, silent as the deathless gods.

Scene 3

— He has shares in the Tivoli, —— said, and it was he got up that Keogh-Bennett boxing match. I heard he made a hundred quid over it, laying the odds. He spread the report Myler was on the beer and, by God, he was training all the time. Did you see that match?

— I did not.

— Myler dusted the floor with him. A grand sight it was, to see the little chap standing up to him not up to his navel, and the big fellow swiping. Jesus, he gave him one puck in the wind made him puke what he never ate.

Handicapped as he was by lack of poundage Dublin’s pet lamb made up for it by superlative skill in ringcraft. The final round was a grueling for both champions. Bennett had tapped some claret in the previous mix up and Myler came on looking groggy. The soldier got to business, leading off with a powerful left jab to which Myler retaliated by shooting out a stiff one to Bennett’s face. The latter ducked but the Dubliner lifted him with a left hook, the punch being a fine one. The men came to grips and the round ended with Bennett on the ropes and Myler punishing him. The Englishman was well drenched with water and when the whistle went came on refreshed and full of pluck. It was a fight to the finish. The men fought like tigers and the excitement was terrific. After a rapid exchange of blows during which a clever upper cut of the military man brought blood freely from his opponent’s mouth the lamb suddenly landed a terrific left to Bennett’s stomach which floored him flat. Amid tense excitement the Shropshire boy was counted out and Myler declared the winner amid the frenzied plaudits of the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him with delight.

— I wouldn’t like to see that, —— said. And those butting matches they have in California, going for each heads down like a bull at a gate.

— And bullfighting, Mr B——, and cockfighting, all those sports are terribly inhuman, and hare hunting...

— Well, yes, of course...

— What about bughunting, —— asked with a grin.

— Cimex lectularius, L—— put in.

— Isn’t it what you call brain versus brawn...

— They are simply disgusting, Bloom said. Brutal.

He walked to...

— Did you twig the one I gave him? —— said, about the buggy jews?

— Still and all, —— said, he’s a humane chap.

— He is that, —— said sourly. He’d shove a soft hand under a hen. But I’d like to see him in the nine acres in a hurley scrap.

Gara, Klooklooklook. Black Liz is our hen. She lays eggs for us. When she lays her egg she is so glad. Gara Klooklooklook. Then comes good uncle Leo. She puts his hand under black Liz and takes her fresh egg. Gara Klooklooklook.

He sang the Paean of the Games of the Gael: he sang the Deeds of his Prowess. Youthful he drove the Wolf and the Boar: in the chace he led the knights of Uladh. From his godlike shoulder sped the Stone: terrible, swift as the Glance of Balor.

— Ay, that’s a fact, —— bore out. How many feet could you put it?

— And that’s what you want in Ireland today. Fine open air games. Irish games. Irish strength and skill. Hurley, Gaelic slogger, soccer. Racy of the soil. That’s what’ll build up men. Ireland a nation once again.

A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of —— under the auspices of Cumann na Gadhael on the revivial of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient times for the development of the race. The venerable president of the ancient order of hibernians brother Michael Cusack was in the chair and the attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by the chairman a most instructive discussion ensued as to the desirability of reviving the ancient games and sports of our Irish forefathers. J. Hynes made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes handed down to us from ancient times. L. Bloom having espoused the negative the chairman brought the discussion to a close and, in response to repeated requests from all parts of the house, by a remarkably noteworthy rendering of Thomas Osborne Davis’s immortal anthem A Nation Once Again. His stentorian notes were heard to the greatest advantage and the timehonoured anthem was vociferously applauded by the audience among whom were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press and the bar and of the other learned professions. The proceedings then terminated.

Scene 4

...and up with him on the bloody car.

The milkwhite Dolphin tossed his Mane and, rising in the golden Poop the Helmsman spread the glorious Sail upon the Wind. A many comely Nymphs drew nigh to starboard and to Larboard and linked their shining Forms as doth the cunning Wheelwright when he fashions about the Heart of his Wheel the equidistant Rays whereof each one is Sister to the next and he binds them all with an outer Ring and giveth Speed to the Feet of Men whenas they ride to an Hosting or contend for a Prize. Even so did they come and set them, those willing nymphs, foamwhite sisters. And they laughed sporting in a Circle of their Foam: and the bark clave the Waves.

Martin and Jack Power did their level best to keep him quiet but Bloom had his rag out, all the ragamuffins and guttersnipes of the place were jeering round the car and says one of the fishgirls:

— Ay, mister. Look at your hat, mister!

What was it but Cusack had stuck two of the bloody betting tickets in the front of Bloom’s topper and what was on it but: W.C.13. And Terry, the curate, and Alf Bergan were doubled up laughing:

— O, mister! Look at what’s on your hat, mister.

Arra sure Bloom didn’t know what was up till Jack stood up and took off the tickets and all the sluts began to yell:

— Eh, mister, give us a speech!

And the mudlarks screaming the Boys of Wexford. And Martin trying to get the jarvey to drive on. But Bloom was on his high horse speeching about the jews.

— Mendelsohn was a jew, he says, and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza and your god was a jew, he shouted, and his father was a jew.

— What? says Cusack.

— He had no father, says Jack Power trying to pull him down.

Sure Bloom didn’t know about father or mother, only shouting:

— Yes, your god was a jew, Jesus Christ was a jew.

Cusack made one bound in:

— By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain the bloody jewman for using the holy name. Give us that biscuit tin here. By Jesus, I will. Give it here.

God there was meila murder.

— Stop! Stop! says Alf

However the jarvey began lashing the bloody nag and the street arabs began to peg cabbage stumps, yelling like blazes.

— Three cheers for the jew’s droppings!

— Get your hair cut.

A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances assembled to bid farewell to Mr Leopold Bloom on the occasion of his departure. The ceremony which was characterized by the most affecting cordiality was rendered all the more picturesque by the presence of numerous delegates from all parts of the provinces whose traditional national costumes lent a welcome note of colour to the scene. An illuminated address, the work of Irish artists, was presented to the distinguished orientalist on behalf of a large section of the community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects credit on the makers, Messrs. Jacob and Jacob. The departing guest was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those present being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes struck up the wellknown strains of Come back to Erin as a sendoff. Amid the echoing cheers of the multitude the vessel slowly put off, saluted by a final floral tribute from the representatives of the fair sex who were present in large numbers. Gone but not soon forgotten!

It was the mercy of God the sun was in his eyes. Anyway he made a swipe in the air and let fly. God, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody tin fell on the cobblestones with a crash that would waken the dead. You know he’s a powerful fellow Cusack. Best man in Ireland in his time at putting the fifty six pound shot. That’s a fact. He won prizes and cups and medals. O, Cusack was a famous man in his day, faith.

Well you should have heard the yells of the crowd and the horse took fright and off with him and all the ragtag and bobtail after the car, warhooping.

The explosion was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks and there is no record of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the great earthquake of 1534. The epicentre appears to have been that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn’s Quay Ward and parish of saint Michan. All the palatial residences in the immediate vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and the noble edifice itself is literally a mass of ruins beneath which, it is only to be feared, all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of eyewitnesses it would seem that the seismic waves were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. An article of headgear, since ascertained to belong to the much respected clerk of the crown and peace, Mr George Fottrell, and a silk umbrella with gold handle with the engraved initials, crest, coat of arms and genealogical tree of the worshipful recorder of Dublin, sir Frederick Falkiner, were discovered by search parties in remote parts of the island respectively, the former on the third basaltic ridge of the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim, the latter embedded to the extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach beneath the old head of Kinsale, latitude 64’, longitude, ’17. Other eyewitnesses state that they observed an incandescent object of huge volume hurtling through the atmosphere in a trajectory directed southwest by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received from all parts of the various continents and the sovereign pontiff has been graciously pleased to order that a special missa pro defunctis shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of all parish churches of all dioceses subject to the spiritual authority of the holy see in suffrage of the souls of those faithful departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst. The work of salvage and of removal of debris, human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son of 4 Great Brunswick Street and to Messrs T. and C. Martin, 18 North Wall assisted by the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry under the general supervision of rear admiral sir Heracles Hannibal Blitzblank Anderson, K.G., K.P., K.T., P.C., K.C.B., M.P., J.P., M.B., D.S.O., M.F.H., M.R.I.A., B.L., Mus. Doc., P.L.G., F.R.C.S.I. and F.R.C.P.I.

Tare an ouns it was the grandest sight you ever seen in all your born puff. Bloom up on the bloody car, trying to blather out of him and the mudlarks yelling like old boots and the bloody tin bursting open and the horse galloping like mad man, and the sparks flying out of his hoofs. God, if he got that tin on the head he would have been carted off to Jervis Street and, by God, Cusack would have pulled for assault and battery. The jarvey saved his life as sure as God made little apples. What? O, he did, faith. Where is he? says he. Did I kill him or what? Terry and little Alf Bergan took him by the arm to bring him back but he kept shouting to the bloody dog, after him, Garryowen. After him, boy. And the last we saw was the car turn the corner and the bloody dog after it for all he was worth.

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld a golden chariot which held Him ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him therein, clothed upon in the Glory of the Brightness, with Raiment as of the Sun, fair as the Moon and terrible that they durst not look upon him. And there came a Voice out of Heaven, saying, Elijah! Elijah ben Reuben! And He answered, Abba. And they beheld Him in His Glory ascend to Heaven in the direction of a beeline over Hogan’s in Little Green Street.

Scene 5

Cusack read on.

— A distinguished gathering assembled to do honour to a ruler of Africa, the Alaki of Abekuta. A delegation from the chief cotton magnates of the district was presented to His Majesty by Gold Stick in Waiting, Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs and tendered their best thanks to His Majesty for the facilities afforded to British traders in His Majesty’s dominion. The negro potentate in the course of a gracious speech, translated by the British Chaplain from Alakamekohaptla, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones, emphasised the cordial relations existing between his people and the British empire and stated that he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible presented to him by her late Majesty, Queen Victoria. Amid general applause the Alaki then drank a lovingcup to the toast of “The King, God bless him” from the skull of his immediate predecessor Kakachakachak, surnamed Bull’s Eye. The ceremony was brought to a close by a musical setting of the versicle I am black but comely excellently rendered by the royal musicians with native instruments, alligator carapaces strung with the guts of vanquished Zulu warriors and the thighbones of early christian missionaries, the effect of these latter being quite remarkably similar to the dulcet tones of the Italian ocarina.

— Wonder what he did with the bible, says Ned Lambert. I could have put it to good use.

— The same only more so, says Lenehan, and thereafter in Abeakuta the broadleaved palm flourished exceedingly.

— Is that by Griffith? says ——.

— I don’t know, says ——, it’s initalled “P.”

— Bloody good initial too, says ——.

— No, Griffith’s stuff is signed Shanganagh, says O’Madden Burke.

— Are you going to write that pantomime? asked ——.

— Yes, by God, I heard about that. Brian Boru or Finn MacCool?

— Well, says O’MB, we’re sick of those puling pantomimes with their musichall songs and girls in tights.

— Do you know it was Bloom gave Griffith the hard word about that Hungarian lay he’s on.

— Using the county councils, is it?

— Yes and sending no more members over to London.

— Leaders of the Irish people at home and abroad, says ——.

— Well, isn’t it sensible. If Peter the Packer, he says, can pack a jury why can’t you pack the civil service and the police and constabulary and boycott the post too, that was an idea of his, have your own private post that they can’t open the letters.

— And they want to send Irish consuls to the continent to open up direct trade.

— What about the kudos? says ——.

— Well, and wouldn’t Irish Americans put their money into it.

Then did you speak, noble Cusack, and all men heard:

— They were driven out of house and home. Their roadside cabins were laid low by the battering rams of the Sassenach. And the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered English public that there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in India and suggested to ship off the few of us that still lived to the banks of the Ganges. Twenty thousand of the poor wretches died in the coffin ships. And the land full of harvest and the nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon called them, selling the harvest of our peasants in rio de Janeiro, hoarded it up in famine time till it rotted. They departed with tears and wailing for the land of the brave and free to build up there a greater Ireland beyond the waves. They departed: but they will come again. And with a vengeance. The sons of Granuaile.

— We’re a long time waiting for that, says ——. One time it was the French have landed at Killala, then the Yankees now it’s the Germans or the Japanese.

— The French! says ——. Do you know what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Now they’re going to make an alliance with England. Aren’t they the firebrands of Europe and always were.

— Conspuez les anglais says Lenehan.

He knows a bit of French he picked up in the smutty papers.

— The Germans! says ——. Haven’t we had enough of them on the throne since George the Elector, and the flatulent old bitch that’s dead.

— And Edward the Peacemaker, says ——.

— Tell that to a fool, says ——, there’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about him if you ask me. And when he was over here last year in Maynooth what about the priests and bishops that killed our rightful king, Charles Stewart Parnell, sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys rode. They ought to have stuck up pictures of all the married women he rode himself.

— Considerations of space, says J.J. O’M, no doubt influenced their lordships’ choice.

— We want no king or crown, says

The Royal Stuarts were as bad

— Strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest. We want neither French nor Germans.

— I tell you what it is, says ——, there’s a war coming for the English and the Germans will give them a hell of a gate of going.

— But aren’t you after saying? says ——.

— I know what I’m after saying, says ——. But this time, whether they win or lose, they’ll have to fight their match not naked Zulus to mow them down with machine guns or Ashantimen with tomahawks in their hands. Not likely! They’ll be up against an army that’ll kill a man for every man they kill. Wait till you see.

Thus did they laud the prowess of those farfamed races, the lordly Gauls, a noble nation descended from the gods, nimble of foot, who dwell in the land of Oui-Oui, and of their neighbours, the lordly Teutons, a noble race of the seed of the gods, feasters at the board, whose dwelling is in the land of Ja-Ja.

Scene 6

—— wanted to get him away before Bloom came back for the next round and he took him by the arm.

— Come on, Michael. Come where the boose is cheaper.

But Cusack was blue mouldy for a fight.

— His country! says Cusack. Is it a bloody jew? His country is no man’s land.

— Hath not a jew eyes? says O’Madden Burke.

He’s one of those literary fellows buys secondhand books always coming out with a bit from Shakespeare or the Melodies about Ireland a nation. Know what I mean? Gentleman, patriot and scholar and judge of malt.

— Well, says JJ O’Molloy, if you grant him human impulses like ours why can he not love his country? I mean logically, why not?

— Why not? says young Dedalus, when he is quite sure which country it is.

Old MacHugh began laughing and gave him a bear’s hug and says he, settling his specs “That’s Gallic,” says he, “Paris did that for you.” The young chap stood another. “Talking about Gaelic,” says Ned. “You should see our friend chopping up raw onions for the missus for her complexion the time he was in Cuffe’s, the salesmaster’s. They were staying up in the City Arms hotel in Prussia street next to the cattle market.” “O, don’t tell me,” says N. “Gaffney was stopping there. He gives a great —— of the two of them chewing the fat. Bloom with his but don’t you see and but if you consider and the wife screeching his head off. She’s a bloody awful bitch, by all accounts.” “O, I don’t know about that” says Ned “She was the handsomest girl in Dublin in her day. I think the fault is on the other side.” “How’s that.” “Well, Gaffney says she used to be in tears there sometimes. I don’t think our friend does the trick of the loop at all. Weren’t they going to be divorced or something. Maybe that’s what they were going to be divorced for. Restitution of conjugal rights.” “Still, he’s very attentive to her,” says ——, “brings her up her grub into the bed and nibbles his own bit down in the kitchen. —— told me that for a fact.” “Separatio a mensa et a thoro, says JJ O’Molloy. “Arra what good is that for a woman,” says ——, “she wants something else in her bed.”

— I’ll tell you a bloody good one —— told me. There was an old one up in the hotel, a Mrs Riordan with some money and Bloom of course got inside her to be the whitehaired boy. Doing the molly coddle, same as he made up to his mother-in-law.

— Is that how he got to marry her?

— Commend me to a jewman, says

— I see, says ——, That explains the milk in the cocoanut and the absence of hair on the animal’s chest. Playing bézique with her every night. Suppose he thought he’d be remembered in the will. Anyway she had a young chap there, grandnephew of hers, and Bloom put in for giving him German lessons—

— Is he a German? says ——.

— I don’t know what he isn’t, says ——. One day, by God, he took the young chap out for a walking lesson but, by God, when they came back to tea he was boosed.

— Who? Bloom?

— No, the young fellow laughing in their faces like a fool. You should have heard the old one and Bloom’s missus and the landlady. Gave him all torts. And Bloom said he did it to teach him the evils of drink.

— Bloody good idea too, says ——. Will you join us, P-?

— I don’t mind, Joe.

— Give it a name, then.

— Two d of stout.

— Two d stout, Terry. Here, Tom, says he handing him the boose. Take that in your right hand and repeat after me the following words.

— Which is which? says ——.

— That’s mine, says ——, taking his boose, as the devil said to the dead policeman.

[Later draft]

Hynes wanted to get him away before Bloom came back for the next round.

— Change the venue, citizen, says he. Come where the boose is cheaper.

But Cusack was blue mouldy for a fight. The porter was up in him.

— His country, says he. A bloody jew. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His country. No man’s land.

— Hath not a jew eyes, says O’Madden Burke.

He’s always coming out with a quotation from Shakespeare or the melodies. He was a school teacher one time. Don’t know how he knocks it out now. Always the silk umbrella on show. Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of malt.

— Well, says JJ, if you grant the jew human impulses why can’t he love his country too. I mean, logically, why not?

— Why not? says young Dedalus, when he is quite sure which country it is.

Old MacHugh began laughing and says he, settling his specs:

— That’s Gallic, says he. Paris did that for you, says he.

Bit of a shaper that fellow, son of Si Dedalus. He was in Paris in the quartier latin and he came back an atheist. He’ll never be as good a man as his father anyhow.

— Talking about Gaelic, says Ned, you should see our friend B. chopping up raw onions for the missus for her complexion.

— When was that? says Hynes.

— When he had a job up in the knacker’s yard then, says Ned. Cuffe’s the salesmaster’s. He was staying in the City Arms Hotel then near the markets in Prussia street. Stink Burke was there at the time. He told me about our friend chopping the onions in the kitchen. You should hear him taking off the two of them chewing the fat. Bloom with his but don’t you see and but on the other hand and the wife screeching his head off.

— She’s a bloody awful bitch by all accounts, says Ned.

— I don’t know about that, says J.J. She was the belle of Dublin in her day. Black hair down to her middle. I suspect the fault is on the other side.

— How’s that? says Hynes.

— I know what you mean, says Ned. Ay, Gaffney told me a wrinkle about that. Said she used to be in tears there with Mrs O’Dowd that keeps the hotel. I don’t think our friend does the trick of the loop, at all.

— I heard some talk one time that they were going to be divorced, says Hynes.

— Restitution of conjugal rights, says MacHugh. What, Jack?

— Still, they say he’s always dancing attendance on her. Brings her up her breakfast in the bed every morning and has his own bit down in the kitchen.

— Separatio a mensa et a thoro, says JJ.

Thus did they speak of her: the ravenlocked daughter of Tweedy. A rockbound isle of ocean bare her where the middle sea changes its name. There grew she to peerless beauty where the wafty groves of orange and olivegarths scent the air. The chaste spouse of Leopold she is: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.

— Same again, Terry, says Joe.

— I’ll tell you a bloody good one Gaffney told me, says Ned. There was an old one in the hotel, a Mrs Riordan that had some money of her own and no child or chick belonged to her only a nephew of hers and a bloody mangy terrier she had. And Bloom of course got the soft side of her doing the molly coddle. Playing bezique with her every night, and wouldn’t eat meat of a Friday because she was an old bitch that was thumping her craw.

— Suppose he thought he’d get some of the wampum in the will, says Joe.

— What else? says Ned. The whitehaired boy. Same as he sucked up to his mother-in-law.

— Ah, is that how he managed? says J.J. That was always a mystery to me. Commend me to a jewman. Ah, I see. The mother-in-law.

— Ah, says Lenehan. That explains the milk in the cocoanut and the absence of hair on the animal’s chest.

Terry brought the boose.

— Anyway, says Ned. The young chap, the nephew, came to stop with her and my brave Bloom put in for giving him lessons in German.

— Is he a German? says Joe.

— Yerra, I don’t know what he isn’t, says Ned. But anyhow, as I was saying, one day he took the young chap out for a walking lesson but, by God, when they came back to tea, he was drunk as a boiled owl.

— Who? says Lenehan. Bloom drunk?

— No, says Ned, the young chap, blind to Jaysus and laughing in their faces like a bloody fool. O, Gaffney says, you should have heard the three women, the old one, Mrs Bloom... and the landlady. Gave him all torts. Roasted him, by herrings. What did he do a thing like that for? Was he mad? Sha, poor Bloom said he did it to teach him the evils of drink.

— Bloody good idea too, says Joe. Will you join us, Alf?

— I don’t mind, Joe.

— Give it a name, then.

— Uphander, says Alf. Imperial yeomanry, Terry.

— Right, says Joe. Terry, bottle of Allsopp. Here Ned, says he, handing the boose. Take that in your right hand and repeat after me the following words.

— Which is which? says Ned.

— After you with the push. That’s mine, says Joe, as the devil said to the dead policeman.

Scene 7

— Buncombe, says ——. Can you point to any part of the wide world where the population has decreased fifty per cent in fifty years under a civilised government? Where are the twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four? They killed one wool trade and our textiles and our potteries, the finest in the world. Where is the government would leave half a million acres of marsh in the middle of the country to make us all die of consumption. Not a ship to be seen in our harbours, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Killybegs, the third harbour in the world for size. First. First they tried to slaughter, then to banish us, then to make us paupers and to starve us, but they’re as far off as they were 700 years ago when they first began—and damn well they know it. But they’ll know more than that when the first Irish battleship breasts the sea with the green flag at her helm.

— That’s a long way off, says ——.

— Long or short it’ll come, says Cusack. Our history that Geoffrey Keating wrote, as an outlaw, hiding in the fastnesses of the Galtees is not finished yet. What did John Mitchel say: the last conquest of Ireland (perhaps).

— And what about the British Navy? says ——?

— What about it? says ——. Read the revelations that are going on in the papers.

— What’s that? says ——.

— The Navy regulations about flogging, says ——. Didn’t you read Bernard Shaw’s letter?

— I thought that was abolished by Parnell.

— You thought wrong then, says ——. He gives them chapter and verse. The whole crew drawn up on the lower deck and the parson with his bible and the officers. Then they lug out the young chap to give him what the bloody old scoundrel Beresford called a rump and dozen. And they tie him down over a gun, with his legs straddled out...

— Stripped, is it?

— He has a pair of duck trousers on him—

— Yes, says J.J. They distinguish caning on the breech and caning on the bare breech.

O’Madden Burke put in his goo

— Tis a custom more honoured in the breech than in the observance, says he.

— And then the master-at-arms takes a long cane and flogs the bloody backside off the poor chap till he yells.

— Bloody in all senses of the word, says ——.

— As in ancient Sparta, says —— MacHugh.

— The battle of Trafalgar, says ——, was won on the whipping stools of Portsmouth.

— That’s your British navy for you! says ——. Those are the fellows that never will be slaves. Serfs they are still, with the only hereditary chamber in the world and their country in the hands of twenty five nobleman. Would we ever stand that in Ireland, eh? What about the land league, eh? And they prate of the liberty of their empire of drudges.

— On which the sun never rises, says young D——.

— And they believe it, says ——. The poor buggers believe it.

Scene 8

There entered a noble and grave hero of the tribe of the O’Molloy’s, his majesty’s counsel learned in the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble house of Lambert.

— Hello, Ned.

— Hello, Alf.

— Hello, Jack.

— Hello, Tom.

— How did that swindle case go off? Were you round there?

— Remanded. Yes, I was.

Bloody jewman it was called himself James Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the paper saying he’d give you a passage to Canada for one quid. What? Course it was a barney. Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and his own kidney too. J.J. was telling there was an ancient Hebrew Zaretsky or something got badly landed. Put on his hat to swear in the witness box.

— Who tried the case?

— The recorder.

And on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess, ruler of the heavens, the daughter of the skies being then in her first quarter, the lady moon, the learned judge Frederick the Falconer, repaired them to the halls of justice. And there he sat to

 ® 

[Circe]

[Summer of 1920]

(Night town. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare smoky lamps. Little men and women squabble for ices round a halted gondola. They receive wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and coppery snow. The little men and women scatter slowly, sucking up the melting coloured snow. They are children. The high reared comb of the gondola pushes on through the dark, passing under the lamplight, white and blue. Whistles are heard in the distance, calling and answering: Wait, my lover, and I’ll be with you. On a step a ragpicker crouches to shoulder a sack. A crone standing by with a guttering oil lamp rams a last bottle in the neck of his sack. He shoulders it and lurches off mutely, tugging his peaked cap askew on his eyes. The crone goes back in her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandylegged child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in jerks, and clutching her skirt it scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, swaying heavily to and fro. At a corner two night patrols, in shoulder capes, stand tall and silent, their hands at rest on their staff holsters. In an openwindowed room, lit by a candlestick in a bottleneck, a slut combs the natts out of another slut’s hair. A plate is heard to crash: a woman’s scream follows. Figures, male and female, continue to pass through the murk, round corners, into doorways. Heads are thrust out of windows to listen. A child is heard crying. The oaths of a man are roared out indistinctly. They die away. A girl’s voice sings out, high and still young, from a lane:

I gave it to Molly

Because she was jolly

The leg of the duck

The leg of the duck.

Three redcoats, swaggersticks tight in their oxters, turn about towards the voice and, without halting, emit in chorus a loud fart from their mouths. Laughter of men in the lane. A hoarse hag calls:

— Signs on you, dirtyarse. More power, the Kildare girl.

The redcoats turn as before and reply. They march on. The girl’s voice rises higher:

I gave it to Nelly

To stick in her belly

The leg of the duck

The leg of the duck.

The redcoats halt beside the patrol and talk. Their tunics are bloodbright near the lamp, their blond heads close cropped, their biscuit caps set on the side lobes are round ballsockets. A girl with hair on the wind rushes across the street, her shawl flapping from her arms. She shrieks, laughing, rushing, and is engulfed in a doorway. A burly navvy pursues with long strides. He stumbles on the steps but recovers and plunges into the doorway after her. Weaker shrieks of laughter are heard: they stop. A young man in black with a wide hat, pointing ahead with a flourish of his stick, passes through the figures, talking. A broader young man wearing a jockey cap walks beside him. A sneer of discontent is seen on his beaked face. An elderly woman lolled against a doorframe looks out as they pass and calls in a discreet whisper:

— Sst! (wait) Come here till I tell you. Sst! Maidenhead inside. They pass on, unseeing. She calls after them:

— Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube.

Still unheeded she spits. A redhaired girl seated with a friend on a doorstep draws her shawl rapidly across her nostrils as she relates:

— And says the one: I seen you Faithful place with your squarepusher in the come-to-bed hat. That’s not for you to say, says I. You never seen me in the mantrap with a highlander, says I. And her walking with two fellows the one time.

Lynch

So that?

Stephen

So that the art of gesture renders visible not the lay sense but the first formal rhythm. Who wants a gesture to illustrate a loaf, a jug? This movement illustrates thou and the loaf and jug of bread, or wine, I mean, in Omar. Hold my stick.

Lynch

Damn your yellow stick.

Stephen gives the stick quickly and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span or so from his breast, downturned in planes at an angle, the fingers about to open, the left hand being higher.

Lynch

Which is the jug of bread? Illustrate thou. Here take your stick.

They pass out of sight. A barefoot urchin scrambles to a street lamp and clasping climbs it in jerks. From the top he slides down to his ring of urchin friends. Another starts to climb. The navvy, leaving hold of the railings, lurches against the lamp. The urchin slides down: all scuttle off in the darkness. The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his nose. Swaying, he ejects from the other nostril a long dribbling jet of snot.

Bloom comes round the corner hastily and stops. In each hand he has a paper parcel, one containing a lukewarm pig’s crubeen and a cold sheep’s trotter sprinkled with wholepepper, the other two slices of quatern loaf and a tablet of Fry’s chocolate. He frowns slightly and hesitates. A stooped bearded figure appears beside him, in horned spectacles dressed in a long caftan embroidered with dogs’ heads and wearing a smoking cap with crimson tassel.

Rudolph

Half crown wasted. I told you not go with drunken goys ever.

Bloom

I know.

He looks down, conscious of error, feeling through the paper a warm crubeen and a cold trotter.

Rudolph

What are you doing? Are you not my son Leopold?

Bloom

Yes, father.

Rudolph

(severely) One night they bring you home drunk as a dog after spend your good money. What you call those running chaps?

Bloom

Harriers. Only that once.

Rudolph

Once! All mud head to foot. Cut your hand open.

Bloom

(weakly) They asked me to race them. I slipped.

Rudolph

(with contempt) Goim Nachez. Nice spectacles for your mother.

The Mother’s Voice

(in shrill alarm) O, blessed Redeemer, where were you at all?

Bloom looks down at his clothes and bestows the chocolate and bread in a side pocket. A handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Her opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face and hair leaving free only her large dark eyes.

Marion Bloom

Poldy!

He breathes in deep agitation, wavering. Questions throng to his lips. He swallows them down. He wishes to sink to the ground near her slippers. He wishes to tell her that he bought the crubeen, the trotter, the bread and the chocolate for her supper. He wishes and unwishes, is warm, then cold, knows then knows not, stands helpless, spellbound by her eyes and dress. Beneath her turreted turban a coin gleams on her brow. Her anklets are linked together by a fetterchain. Beside her a camel waits, with hood and palanquin, a ladder of countless steps reaching to his hump. A slow friendly mockery steals into her eyes.

Marion Bloom

Poldy!

Bloom

Yes.

Marion

Ti trema un poco il core?

She saunters away in disdain. He follows, followed by a sniffing terrier. She is gone. The elderly woman seizes his sleeve. Instinctively he tightens his grip on the crubeen and trotter. The woman pours into his ear a fetid husky message.

— Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing that was never touched. Fifteen.

Her mouldy sweat promises obscenities. She indicates the doorway. He looks. In the dark hall, furtive, secret, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands. She calls to him:

— Any good in your mind?

He thinks of giving the crubeen and trotter to the procuress. Gertie Mac Dowell limps to his side. Leering, she draws from behind her, shows him coyly something. It is a bloodied clout. She whispers:

— You did that.

Bloom

There is some mistake. I? When?

Gertie

(pawing his coat) Dirty married man. I love you for doing that.

The Procuress

(hurriedly) Come. Don’t be all night. You won’t get a virgin in the flash houses. The polis will see us. 33 is a bitch.

Mrs Breen stands in the middle of the street. She throws open her mouth, eyes and arms, astonished.

Mrs Breen

You down here? Wait till I see Molly.

Bloom

(confused) How do you do? It’s a short cut home. I just was buying something for supper. Very good place round there for hot pigs’ feet.

Richie Goulding stands by, weighted with the black legal bag of Collis & Ward on which a skull and crossbones are painted in limewash. He opens it and shows it full of white pudding, kippered herring. Pills rattle.

Richie Goulding

Best value in Dublin.

Bloom

Best value in Dublin. Feel how hot.

Mrs Breen

(shouts with laughter) Glory Alice! You do look a holy show. O, you ruck! You should see yourself.

Bloom

(cautiously) Don’t attract the attention of these people. I want to tell you a little secret about how I came here. But between ourselves. You must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a special reason.

Mrs Breen

O, not for worlds. Tell me.

He shakes himself free from the procuress and walks on with Mrs Breen. The dog slinks at their heels, sniffing.

Bloom

(mysteriously) Do you remember a long long time ago when we all went to Fairyhouse races just after Milly was weaned when Molly won seven shillings on a horse named Nevertell and coming home in the wagonette you were sitting beside me and you wore a new hat Denis had just bought you that didn’t become you at all as well as the toque and Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallagher’s basket and laughing because Rogerson and Maggot O’Reilly were mimicking this cock as we passed a farmhouse on the road and Marcus Tertius Moses, the tea merchant, drove past us with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and began to bark and you asked me if I ever heard or read or came across.........

Mrs Breen

(eagerly) Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

She fades from his side. He walks on alone, displeased, uncertain, mistrustful, excited, towards hell’s gates. In an archway a woman standing, her feet planted apart, pisses noisily. Outside a shuttered pub a group of loiterers listen to the end of a story which a broken snouted man relates with rasping humour. He half crouches to show them and laughs raucously.

The Man

And what was he after doing it into only into the bucket of porter that was there for Derwan’s plasterers.

The Loiterers

(guffawing) O, jays! Jays, that’s a good one! Glauber salts. O, jays, into the men’s porter.

They laugh in all voices, indifferent to the scene about them. Cheap whores, bold, disshevelled, singly and in couples call from hallways, laneways, doorsteps.

— Come here, queer fellow.

— How is your middle leg?

— That you, love?

— Have you a match on you?

— He’s going down to Mrs Mack’s.

— Sh! Come here till I feel it for you.

Bloom passes through the swamp into the lower street. The housedoors are open. Gaudy women loll in the lighted halls or about the doors smoking birdseye cigarettes. The odour of the sicksweet weed floats round Bloom. Kisses are chirped towards him. Ashamed, fluttered he tries to hide his parcel.

Bloom

I cannot go back. In which house have they gone? I could ask a woman. But this parcel. Shall I eat it? Where? Get myself all sticky. Useless waste.

He perceives the dog. An idea strikes him. He returns a few yards to a dark corner, followed by the terrier, and opens the parcel. He throws the crubeen softly in the corner. He would like to eat the trotter but, after a moment, throws it down regretfully. The terrier, snarling with famine, gluts himself greedily, crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach. They lay hands on his shoulders.

First Watch

Commit no nuisance.

Bloom

(stammers) I am doing good to others.

He points. Bob Doran sways over the dog.

Doran

Give us the paw. Give the paw, doggy.

The dog growls ominously. Bob Doran falls softly sideways into an area.

First Watch

Name and address.

Bloom

(takes off his hat and salutes) Bloom. I can identify myself. Leopold Bloom.

First Watch

Proof.

Bloom hastily takes a card from inside the leather headband of his hat and gives it.

Second Watch

(reading) Henry Flower.

First Watch

An alibi!

Bloom

(producing a yellow flower, murmurs privately, confidentially) This is the flower. We are engaged, you see. Change of name. Virag.

Martha

(veiled, in tone of reproach, pointing) Henry! Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one!

First Watch

Come to the station.

Bloom

(in alarm) No, no. Let me explain. My wife! I live in Eccles street. I am a respectable married man. A journalist. I write for the Freeman.

Mrs Brereton Barry

(in a lowcut opal dress) Arrest him, officer. He wrote me an anonymous letter when my husband was on circuit signed James Lovebirch. He said he saw me in a box at the Gaiety. That inflamed him. He made improper overtures to me.

Mrs Bellingham

(in a fur mantle, steps out of her carriage) Also to me. Because he closed my carriage door one rainy day outside sir Thornley Stoker’s. He wrote urging me to commit adultery whenever possible. He offered me a work by Paul de Kock, The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.

Second Watch

(produces handcuffs) Here are the darbies.

The Honourable Mrs Paget Butler

(in riding costume, topboots, hard hat, long train, and riding crop with which she strikes her boot constantly) Also to me. He saw me on the polo ground in the Phoenix park. He sent me in an envelope an obscene photograph insulting to any lady. I have it still. He urged me to sin with officers of the army and navy. He implored me to chastise him as he deserved.

Mrs Bellingham

Me too.

Mrs Brereton Barry

Me too.

The Honourable Mrs Paget Butler

(suddenly, furiously) I will. I will thrash him black and blue in the public street. He is a wellknown cuckold. Take down his trousers. Quick!

The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle

The Quoits

Jigjag jigajigajigjag.

The faces of Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Ned Lambert, Tom Kernan, John Henry Menton, Myles Crawford, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, Lenehan, McCoy and a Nameless One appear simultaneously in the jurybox.

The Nameless One

(snarls) Didn’t I tell he’d organise her? Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five!

The Others

(gravely) We all thought so.

First Watch

(awed, whispers) He is in black. An anarchist! A bomb it is.

Bloom

(desperately) No, no. Pig’s feet. I was at a funeral.

Second Watch

(draws his truncheon) Liar!

The dog lifts his face. He has devoured all. He grows to a great size suddenly. His terrier coat becomes a brown habit. He has the face of Paddy Dignam. He speaks in a loud hollow voice:

Dignam

It is true. It was my funeral. (He lifts an ashen face and bays lugubriously.)

Bloom

(triumphantly) You see!

First Watch

But how is that possible?

Second Watch

It is not in the catechism.

Dignam

By metempsychosis.

He crawls and worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing after him. The women grow dark. The watch recede. Bloom goes forward again. New louder kisses are chirped to him. A piano sounds. He stands before the house, listening. The kisses fly about him, twittering.

The Kisses

Leo! Icky sticky licky micky for Leo! Coo coo-coo! Yummy yum womwom big come big pirouette, Leolee! O Leo!

Bloom

A man’s touch that is. Perhaps they are here. Sad music. Church music. Yes, it is here.

Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip closed with four bronze bucklepins, nods to him. She comes down the steps and accosts him.

Zoe

Are you looking for someone? He’s inside with his friend.

Bloom

Is this Mrs Mack’s?

Zoe

No, Mrs Cohen’s. You’re not his father, are you?

Bloom

O, no.

Zoe

(suspiciously) I thought from your both being in black.

She takes his arm, cuddling him. Strange oriental music is played slowly, note by note. He looks into her brown eyes, gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Black shadows of cedar forests file round them. A perfume of resin rises from the strong hairgrowth. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it the woman city lies nude, white, cool in luxury. A fountain murmurs among purple roses. The roses of mammoth scarlet winegrapes murmur. A wine of shame, blood, lust exudes from them. Within a sepulchre, the gold of kings, their mouldering bones. She smiles, showing her goldstopped teeth.

Zoe

(murmuring, her lips smeared lusciously with pomade of swinefat and rosewater, in singsong with the music) Schorah ani wenowah, benoith Hierushaloim.

Bloom

(mechanically caressing her left bub with free hand) I knew. Are you a Dublin girl?

Zoe

(as she catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil) Not bloody much. I’m English. Have you a swaggerroot for me?

Bloom

(as before) I don’t smoke, dear. Where are you from? London?

Zoe

Hog’s Norton where the pigs plays the organs. (catching his hand which is feeling for her nipple) I say! Stop that and begin worse. Have you money for a short time? Ten shillings.

Bloom

(smiles, nods slowly) More. More.

Zoe

And more’s mother? Coming in?

He stands listening to music, inhaling scents, seeing colours, feeling being tempted.

Zoe

Silent means consent.

She leads him up the steps by his hand, the odours of her armpits and the vice of her eyes, the rustle of her slip in which lurks the leonine reek of all the males that have possessed her.

The Males

(roaring faintly) Good!

They reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously, lazily and at last smile to his hasty bow.

Bloom

(at the threshold standing aside) After you is good manners.

Zoe

Ladies first, gentlemen after.

She goes first into the house: he goes after. On the return landing a door is thrown open. A man in shirt and trousers crosses, his braces undone dangling behind him making him like a twotailed ape. Bloom averting his face follows Zoe into the parlour. The gaslamp is covered with a mauve tissue paper so that the light is dim. A moth flies round and round, colliding against it. On the mantelpiece lie two large china dogs. On the flank of each is painted a woodland glade. Between them a vase with peacock feathers. In the grate is a Japanese parasol screen. On a rug of matted sheepskin before the fireplace Lynch is seated crosslegged, his cap back to the front. He beats time to the music with a wand in his hand. Kitty Lawrence, a bony pallid whore in street costume, sits on the side of a high armchair, swinging her leg. Lynch indicates derisively the other group.

Kate

(behind her hand) She’s a little imbecillic.

Lynch tips up her skirt and white petticoat with his wand.

Kate

(settling it down quickly) Respec (she hiccups, bending quickly a [] hat from under which her hennared hair glowers) O, excuse. Respect yourself.

Zoe

(going to the chandelier, turns the gas full on) More limelight, Charley.

The wand in Lynch’s hand flashes: it is a brass poker. Stephen stands by the piano, on which lie his stick and hat. He repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florrie Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat white whore in a mildewed gown of strawberry, lolls spreadeagle over a sofa corner, listening, a heavy stye drooping over her sleepy eyelid.

Stephen

As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet’s rest. It may be an ancient Greek song to Demeter or it may illustrate the eighteenth psalm Coeli enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible of modes so far apart as the hyperphrygian and the mixoldyian because, of texts so divergent as the haihooping of priests round Ceres altars, David’s tip from the stable to his chief tomtom player concerning God’s glory, night to night shewing knowledge. Lord Mayor...

Lynch’s Cap

Bah! It is because it is. Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!

Stephen

You remember quite accurately all my little errors, boasts, mistakes, faults. Whetstone!

The Cap

Bah!

Stephen

Here is another. It is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest interval which...

The Cap

Which? Finish if you can. Which?

Stephen

(with an effort) ...interval which is the greatest elipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return, octave. In which.

The Cap

(interested) Ha!

Stephen

What went forth to traverse not itself having itself traversed itself becomes that self which is itself.

Lynch

(whinnies with laughter, grinning at Florrie Talbot) What a learned speech, eh?

Zoe

(briskly) He knows more than you have forgotten.

Florrie Power with obese stupour regards Stephen.

Florrie

What can it all mean?

A female stream leaks out from her, obfuscating the sight of all, redolent of sex. In the obscurity Elijah’s voice is heard, shrill as a cock’s.

Elijah’s Voice

Just one more word. Are you a god or a clod? Florrie Christ, Stephen Christ, Bloom Christ, you have that Something Within. It’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. It is immense. All goin on in this vibration. It vibrates. It restores. I know. And I am some vibrator. Harmonial Philosophy. Have you got that? You call me up by sunphone any old time.

Kate

(hiccups again) O, excuse.

She bends again more quickly. A brown feather boa uncoils and slides, glides over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground and coils, a catterpillar. Stephen glances behind and sees Lynch’s squatted figure with the cap back to the front.

Zoe

Tie a knot on your shift and stick it back. Who has a fag?

Lynch offers her one. She stretches up and lights it over the gasjet. With his poker he lifts up a side of her gown boldly. Bare from her shoes up her flesh between the sapphire ?reddening is lizard green.

Zoe

(calmly) Can you see the beauty spot of my behind?

Litpold Virag, Bloom’s double, wearing Stephen’s hat, Buck Mulligan’s primrose vest, and a brown mackintosh under which he holds a book in two tomes stands somewhat behind Bloom who sees him.

Virag

(points to Zoe Higgins, and with a cough speaks in a dry voice) There is a lot of nakedness knocking about, what? You perceive that she is not wearing what you like. On the other hand the seated one is in walking costume and I always understood that the act performed so pleased you by reason of its exhibitionistic procedure, especially, I believe, in the furs of beasts. Am I right?

Bloom

But she is terribly lean.

Virag

True. And the effect of those pannier pockets of the skirt is intended to give the impression of breadth. Well then, the third. Her beam is broad. She is coated with a considerable layer of fat. You perceive that she has in front two protuberances which are of respectable dimensions and on the other side, lower down, two protuberances which are even larger. When they are coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new breadpills with fenugreek, swamped down by draughts of green tea produce natural cushions on them, a colossal blubber. That suits your taste, eh?

Bloom

The stye I dislike.

Virag

(coughs) Perhaps it is a wart. I presume you remember what I told you on that subject. Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg is a sure cure.

Bloom

(reflecting) It has been a fatiguing day. Wait. Bloodwarts, I mean wartsblood spreads warts.

Virag

(severely) Exercise your mnemotechnic.

Bloom

Mnemno? Rosemary also.

Virag

Technic. (with energy) Caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with a horsehair under the denned neck. But to change the subject have you made up your mind yet whether you like or dislike women in male costume, pyjamas, let us say? Or those complicated combinations, camiknickers? You intended to devote one year to a study of the religious problem. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.

Bloom looks uncertainly, uncertainly watches the everflying moth. Virag whispers in his ear, Bloom repeats.

Bloom

Insects of the day spend their brief existence chiefly in repeated coitions. The smell of the female attracts them. But these night insects which follow light are the victims of error. Their movements are automatic. It suits him. Night bird to night town. The Midnight sun. They no longer pursue and fecundate the female. That bee, as I observed the other day, was butting against his own shadow on the wall. He dazed himself and drowsed me. He made me drowsy. In a dazed condition he wandered into my shirt and reached my belly. It was well I woke. A woman’s case is still worse. That is why they fear all vermin. They feel themselves always open. Eve v Serpent?

The Moth

I’m a tiny tiny thing

Ever flying in the spring

Round and round in ringaring.

Long ago I was a king

Now I do this sort of thing

On the wing, on the wing

Bing!

He rushes against the red tissue paper, flapping noisily.

The Moth

Pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.

Henry Flower stands between Bloom and Virag, both of whom he resembles. He wears a drooping black sombrero and a black velvet cloak under which he holds a dulcimer.

Henry

(in a low voice) All is lost now.

Virag stares at the lamp, Bloom regards Zoe’s neck, Henry turns to the piano.

Stephen

(to himself) I am slightly drunk

He touches the keys again. Florrie Power regards him with stupour.

Florrie

Are you out of Maynooth?

Stephen

I am out of it now. (to himself) Clever. By the way, have you the lamp, the key, the stick. (he sees it) Yes.

Zoe

There was a priest here on Monday to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up. You needn’t try to hide, I says to him, I know you’ve a Roman collar.

Bloom

(unctuously) []

Zoe

He couldn’t get connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.

Stephen

(over his shoulder) You would have preferred the founder of the protestant error.

Zoe

(lightly) All one and the same God to me.

Lynch

He is. He is a cardinal’s son.

His Eminence Cardinal Simon Dedalus appears in the doorway. He is all in red, shoes, socks, soutane and berretta. He has a battered silk hat sideways on his head and a corkscrew hanging on his breast. Seven massboys, the seven cardinal sins, also in red, hold up his train. He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed, his left cheek puffed out.

The Cardinal

(struggling to suppress his merriment, proclaims with bloated pomp)

Conservio lies captured

He lies in the lowest dungeon,

With manacles and chains around his limbs,

Weighing upwards of three tons.

He shuffles off, muttering comically, the massboys giggling zigzag behind him till he shrinks to the size of the massboys and disappears. Bloom advances, and taking the chocolate from his pocket offers it to Zoe Higgins.

Zoe

Thank your mother for the rabbits.

She takes a piece and nibbles. Kate Ricketts does the same.

Zoe

(invitingly to Lynch) No objections to French lozenges?

As he opens his mouth, she tosses him a piece of the chocolate. He catches it and chews. Kate Ricketts offers a piece to Bloom.

Bloom

What if it were aphrodisiac? But no, I bought it. Vanilla too is a sedative. Mnemotechnic. Possibly the confused light here confuses the memory. It seems to influence the taste also of this chocolate. This colour influences lupus. It encourages hypochondriacs. My figure is sad here in black. The choice of colours is important, suggestive. Let me eat and rejoice here. Or is it because I have not tasted chocolate for a long time. I shall look for some truffles tomorrow.

Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters the room. She is dressed in a black evening gown and carries a black fan of plumes which she flutters. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has an incipient moustache. Her face is heavy, full-nosed, olive complexioned. She has huge pendent earrings.

Bella

My word! I’m all of a mucksweat!

She glances round her at the young couples. Then her eye rests on Bloom with hard insistency. He large fan winnows cooler wind towards her face and neck and bosom. Her falcon eyes glitter.

The Fan

(flirting slowly) Married, I see.

It closes together and rests against her left earring.

The Fan

Have you forgotten me?

Bloom

Nes. Yo.

The Fan

Is this was as you thought before? She were then what you here since knew? Am all one and the same now me?

Bloom

(with deep humility) Powerful being! In my eyes read that slumber which women love. The submission of my soul is absolutely unlimited. Awe and despair possess me.

Bella

(approaches, furling her fan)

Bloom

(winces) Enormously I desire your domination. But I fear also. I am alone, exhausted, abandoned. The door and window open in a right line cause a draught. I have felt a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. Long exposure on the rocks in the late evening may have occasioned it. Would, O would, I were young! O, Embrace of universal woman! Queen, marvellous commanding woman, restore me to my youth! Abundantly I will eat from your hands. Feed me with miracleworking truffles.

Bella

(with a hard stare) Hound of dishonour!

Bloom

Empress!

Bella

Adorer of the adulterous rump!

Bloom

Hugeness!

Bella

Dungdevourer!

Bloom

Magnificence!

Bella

(tips him playfully on the shoulder with her fan) Down!

Bloom

(sinks on all fours, with a piercing cry) Truffles! (he grovels, grunting, snuffling, rooting at her feet)

Bella

(comfortably) Which of you was playing the dead march? (to Zoe) You?

Zoe

(promptly) Me. Ever see me running? Mind your cornflowers. (she runs to the piano and thumps the keyboard up and down, laughing) Do you know that?

Lynch

Beethoven?

Zoe

The cat’s rambles through the slag. (suddenly runs back to the table, to grab chocolate, to Kitty) Easy all. Who’s making love to my sweeties. What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own. (Kitty, disconcerted, takes the silver paper and coats her teeth with it, grinning.)

 ® 

[Roderick O’Conor]

[used in chapter II.3 from Finnegans Wake]

[First draft, March 1923]

So anyhow to wind up after the whole beanfeast was all over poor old King Roderick O’Conor the last king of all Ireland who was anything you like between fiftyfour and fiftyfive years of age at the time after the socalled last supper he gave or at least he wasn’t actually the last king of all Ireland for the time being because he was still such as he was the king of all Ireland after the last king of all Ireland Art MacMurrough Kavanagh who was king of all Ireland before he was anyhow what did he do King Roderick O’Conor the respected king of all Ireland at the time after they were all of them gone when he was all by himself but he just went heeltapping round his own right royal round rollicking table and faith he sucked up sure enough like a Trojan in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue one after the other in strict order of rotation whatever happened to be left in the different bottoms of the various drinking utensils left there behind them by the departed honourable guests such as it was either Guiness’s or Phoenix Brewery Stout or John Jameson and Sons or for that matter O’Connell’s Dublin ale as a fallback of several different quantities amounting in all to I should say considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry and liquid measure.

[Fourth draft, July 1923]

So anyhow after that to wind up that long to be chronicled get together day, the anniversary of his first holy communion, after that same barbecue beanfeast was all over poor old hospitable King Roderick O’Conor, the paramount chief polemarch and last preelectric king of all Ireland who was anything you say yourself between fiftyfour and fiftyfive years of age at the time after the socalled last free supper he greatly gave in his umbrageous house of the hundred bottles or at least he wasn’t actually the then last king of all Ireland for the time being for the jolly good reason that he was still such as he was the eminent king of all Ireland himself after the last preeminent king of all Ireland, the whilom joky old top that went before him in the dienasty King Art MacMurrough Kavanagh of the leather leggings, now of parts unknown, God guard his generous soul that put a poached fowl in the poor man’s pot before he took to his pallyass with the weeping eczema for better and worse until he went and died nevertheless the year the sugar was scarce and himself down to three cows that was meat and drink and dogs and washing to him ’tis good cause we have to remember it anyhow wait till I tell you what did he do poor old Roderick O’Conor Rex the auspicious waterproof monarch of all Ireland when he found himself all alone by himself in his grand old historic pile after all of them had all gone off with themselves as best they could on footback in extended order a tree’s length from the longest way out down the switchbackward road, the unimportant Parthalonians with the mouldy Firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan googs and all the rest of the notmuchers that he didn’t care the royal spit out of his ostensible mouth about well what do you think he did, sir, but faix he just went heeltapping through the winespilth and weevily popcorks that were kneedeep round his own right royal round rollicking topers’ table with his old Roderick Random pullon hat at a cant on him, the body, you’d pity him, the way the world is, poor he, the heart of Midleinster and the supereminent lord of them all, overwhelmed as he was with black ruin like a sponge out of water and singing all to himself through his old tears starkened by the most regal belches I’ve a terrible errible lot todo today todo toderribleday well what did he go and do at all His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick O’Conor but arrah bedamnbut he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him as keen as mustard and leave it if he didn’t suck up sure enough like a Trojan in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue whatever surplus rotgut sorra much was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premises, by the departed honourable homegoers and other slygrogging suburbanites such as it was no matter whether it was chateaubottled Guinness’s or Phoenix brewery stout it was or John Jameson and Sons or Roob Coccola or for the matter of that O’Connell’s famous old Dublin ale that he wanted like hell as a fallback of several different quantities and qualities amounting in all to I should say considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry or liquid measure.

 ® 

[Saint Kevin]

[used in chapter IV.1 from Finnegans Wake]

[First draft, April 1923]

St Kevin born on the Island of Ireland goes to lough glendalough to live on an Island in the the lake and as there is a pond on the Island and a little island in the pond he builds his hut on the islet and then scoops out the floor to a dept of one foot after which he goes to the brink of the pond and fills his tub with water which he emptys time after time into a cavity of his hut thereby forming a pool having done which he half fills the tub sets it in the middle of the pool, pulls up his frock and seats himself in the tub and mediates with burning zeal the sacrament of baptism or regeneration by water

[Second draft, ?May 1923]

?E Kevin born on the island of Ireland in the Irish ocean goes to Lough Glendalough where pious Kevin lives alone on an isle in the lake on which isle is a pond in which is an islet whereon holy Kevin builds a beehive hut the floor of which most holy Kevin excavates to a depth of one foot which done venerable Kevin goes to the lakeside and fills time after time a tub with water which time after time most venerable Kevin empties into the cavity of his hut thereof creating a pool having done which blessed Kevin half fills the tub once with water which tub then most blessed Kevin sets in the centre of the pool after which Saint Kevins pulls up his frock to his loins and seats himself, blessed S. Kevin, in his hiptubbath where, doctor solitarius, he meditates with ardour the sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of man by water

[Abandoned extension, ?May 1923]

As an infant shortly after coming into the world, the little stranger Kevineen delighted himself by playing with the sponge on tubbing night. As a growing boy under the influence of holy religion which had been instilled into him across his grandmother’s knee he grew more and more pious and abstracted like the time God knows he sat down on the plate of mutton broth. He simply had no time for girls and often used to say to his dearest mother and dear sister that his dearest mother and his dear sisters were good enough for him. At the age of six years and six months he wrote a prize essay on kindness to fishes.

[?Fourth draft, ?July 1923]

Of Kevin, of God the servant, the miracles, death and life are these......

Born on the island of Ireland in the Irish ocean, come his feast of holy angels, Kevin, having been granted the privilege of a priest’s portable altare cum bath, came to midmost Glendalough by archangelical guidance where amiddle of the river Slaney and the Liffey river on this lone lake piously Kevin amidships of his conducible altar super bath centripetally rafted servant diaconal of orders Hibernian, to its lake isle, whereof its lake is principality, whereon, powerful in knowledge, Kevin came to where its centre is among the circumfluent watercourses of Ishgagrana and Ishgacarrara a lakelet islanding an islet whereupon with beached raft subdiaconal bath propter altar, with oil anointed, accompanied by prayer, holy Kevin bided but to build a honey beehivehut wherein to live in fortitude, acolyte of virtues, whereof the floor most holy Kevin excavates as deep as a depth of a seventh of a full fathom which excavated venerable Kevin, taking counsel, proceeds to the lakeside of the isletshore whereat seven several times he fills with Gregorian water and with eucharistic joy of heart recedes carrying the lustral domination contained within his most portable privileged altar unacumque bath which severally seven times, a lector of water levels, most venerable Kevin effuses into the cavity excavated thereby letting there be water where before there was dry land having created which, confirmed a strong and perfect Christian, blessed Kevin exorcises holy water so that understanding it may fill to midheight his tubbath altar which handbathtub most blessed Kevin enthrones in the intercentre of the translated water whereamid saint Kevin, having girded his frock to his cherubical loins, solemnly seats himself in his seat of wisdom, that hiptubbath, whereverafter, doctor solitarius, keeper of the door of meditation, he meditates with seraphic ardour the initial sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of man by water.

[August 1923 (corrected)]

of Kevin, of Increate God the servant, of the Lord Creator a filial fearer, the miracles, death and life are these.

Procreated eugenically on the ultimate island of Ireland in the encyclical Irish polynesian archipelago, come their feast of precreated holy whiteclad angels, voluntarily poor Eugene Kevin, having been granted the privilege of a priest’s postcreated portable altare cum balneo when espousing the one true cross, invented and exalted, in celibate matrimony, at matin chime arose and westfrom went and came in alb of cloth of gold to our own midmost Glendalough le Vert by archangelical guidance where amiddle of meeting waters of river Slaney and Liffey river on this one lone navigable lake piously Kevin, lauding the Triune Trishagion, amidships of his conducible miraculoid altar super bath rafted centripetally, diaconal servant of orders Hibernian, midway across the subject lake surface to its supreme epicentric lake isle, whereof its lake is the centrifugal principality, whereon by prime, powerful in knowledge, Kevin came to where its centre is among the circumfluent watercourses of Ishgagrania and Ishgadectera, an enisled lakelet islanding a lacustrine islet, whereupon with beached raft subdiaconal bath propter altar, with oil extremely anointed, accompanied by prayer, holy Kevin isolated bided till the third morn hour but to build a rubric penitential honeybeehivecashelhut in whose enclosure to live in fortitude, acolyte in heroicity of cardinal virtues, whereof the arenary floor most holy Kevin excavated as deep as to a depth of a seventh part of one full fathom, which excavated venerable Kevin anchorite, taking counsel, proceded towards the lakeside of the isletshore whereat seven several times he eastward genuflecting in entire obedience at sextnoon collected infusion of Gregorian water sevenfold and with Ambrosian eucharistic joy of heart as many times receded carrying the lustral domination contained within that most portable privileged altar unacumque bath which severally seven times into the cavity excavated, a lector of waterlevels, most venerable Kevin then effused, thereby letting there be water where was theretofore dry land by him so concreated who now, confirmed a strong perfect christian, blessed Kevin exorcised his holy sister water, perpetually chaste, so that well understanding she should fill to midheight his tubbath altar, which handbathtub most blessed Kevin ninthly enthroned in the interconcentric centre of the translated water whereamid, when violet vesper vailed, Saint Kevin Hydrophilus, having girded his sable cappa magna as high as to his cherubical loins, at solemn compline sat in his seat of wisdom, that hipbathtub whereverafter, recreated doctor insularis insulae continentis of the universal church, keeper of the door of meditation, memory extempore proposing and intellect formally considering, recluse, he, finally persevering, meditated continuously with seraphic ardour the primal sacrament of baptism or the regeneration of all man by affusion of water.

 ® 

[Berkeley and Patrick]

[used in chapter IV.1 from Finnegans Wake]

[First draft, July 1923]

The archdruid then explained the illusion of the colourful world, its furniture, animal, vegetable and mineral, appearing to fallen men under but one reflection of the several iridal gradations of solar light, that one which it had been unable to absorb while for the seer beholding reality, the thing as in itself it is, all objects showed themselves in their true colours, resplendent with the sextuple glory of the light actually contained within them. To eyes so unsealed King Leary’s fiery locks appeared of the colour of sorrel green, His Majesty’s saffron kilt of the hue of brewed spinach, the royal golden breasttorc of the tint of curly cabbage, the verdant mantle of the monarch as of the green of laurel boughs, the commanding azure eyes of a thyme and parsley aspect, the enamelled gem of the ruler’s ring as a rich lentil, the violet contusions of the prince’s feature tinged uniformly as with an infusion of sennacassia.

[Second draft]

Topside joss pidgin fella Berkeley, archdruid of the Irish josspidgin, in his heptachromatic sevenhued roranyellgreeblindigan mantle then explained to Patrick the albed, the illusiones of hueful world of joss its furniture mineral through vegetable to animal appearing to fallen men under but one reflectione of the several iridal gradationes of solar light that one which that part of it had shown itself unable to absorbere whereas for the seer beholding interiorly the true inwardness of reality, the thing as in itself it is, all objects showed themselves in their true coloribus resplendent with the sextuple gloria of light actually retained within them. In other words, to vision so unsealed King Leary’s fiery locks appeared of the colour of sorrel green while, to pass on to his sixcoloured costume His Majesty’s saffron kilt seemed of the hue of boiled spinach the royal golden breast torc of the tint of curly cabbage the verdant cloak of the mouth as of the viridity of laurel leaves, the commanding azure eyes of a thyme upon parsley look, the enamelled Indian gem of the ruler’s maledictive ring as an olive lentil, the violaceous warwon contusions of the prince’s features tinged uniformly as with a brew of sennacassia.

[Fourth draft, August 1923 (corrected)]

Bymby topside joss pidgin fella Luchru Berkeley, archdruid of Irish chinchinjoss, in the his heptachromatic sevenhued septicoloured roranyellgreeblindigan mantle finish he show along the his mister guest Patrick with alb the whose throat he fast all time what time all him Italyman monkfellas with Patrick he drink up words belongahim all too much illusiones of hueful panepiphanal world of lord Joss the of which zoantholithic furniture from mineral through vegetal to animal not appear to full up together fallen man than under but one photoreflection of the several iridals gradationes of solar light that one which that part of it (furnit of huepanepi world) had shown itself (part of fur of huepanwor) unable to absorbere whereas for numpa one seer in seventh degree of wisdom of Entis-Onton he savvy inside true inwardness of reality, tha Ding hvad in idself id ist, all damfool objects (of panepiwor) alloside showed themselves in trues coloribus resplendent with sextuple gloria of light actually retained inside them (goddam obs of epiwo). Patfella no catch all that preachybook belong Luchru Berkeley bymby topside joss pidgin fella Luchru Berkeley say him two time with other words verbigratia to vision so thoroughsighty for Os of E W High King Leary his fiery grassbelonghead all show colour of sorrel green, again of the his sixcolour costume the his fellow saffron pettikilt look same hue of boiled spinasses, other thing the his royal golden breast torc look justsamelike curlicabbis, moreafter verdant readyrainroof belongahim High King Leary very dead spit of plenty laurel leaves, afterthat commander bulopent eyes of Highest King same thing like thyme choppy upon parsley, alongside that enamel Indian gem in maledictive fingerfondler of High High Emperor all same like one fellow olive lentil, otherlongsidethat violaceous warwon contusiones of facebits of Highup Big Autocrat tinged uniformly allaroundside very like you see chowchow of plentymuch sennacassia.

 ® 

[Tristan and Isolde]

[used in chapter II.4 from Finnegans Wake, mixed with ‘Mamalujo’]

[March 1923]

...strewing, the strikingly shining, the twittingly twinkling, and (as he truly remarked) the lamplights of lovers.

Up they gazed, skyward, while in her ear that loveless lover breathed:

Gaunt in gloom

The pale stars their torches

Enshrouded wave

Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume

Arches on soaring arches,

Night’s sindark nave

Seraphim

The pale stars awaken

To service till

In muted gloom each lapses, muted, dim

Raised when she has and shaken

Her thurible

And long and loud

To night’s nave upsoaring

A starknell tolls

As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,

Voidward from the adoring

Waste of souls

— Go away from me instantly, she cried.

— Perfect, he said.

He took leave of her and went before many instants had passed.

— No, come back, she cried. I can’t live without you.

— It’s important, he said, stopped and circulated at walker’s pace in an opposed direction.

[June 1923]

...strewing, the strikingly shining, the twittingly twinkling, our true home and (as he uranographically remarked) the lamplights of lovers in the Beyond.

Up they gazed, skyward to stardom, while in his girleen’s ear that loveless lover, sinless sinner breathed:

— How gentle and kind I am, Issy. I never hurt the feelings of another. And I say, what a lovely nature is mine!

It wasn’t exactly anything he said or it wasn’t anything he exactly did but all the same it was something about him like the way he was always sticking his finger into his trousers pocket and then sticking it into his eyes like a borny baby, the great big slob that she let out a whistle or the once she dropped her ittle hankyfuss and the way so graceful he picked it up with his hoof and footed it up politefully to her ittle nibblenose.

— Go away from me instantly you thing, she roared. Curse your stinking putrid soul and all belonged to you, you scum. Forget me not!

— Perfect, you bloody bitch, he said.

He took leave of her and circulated as bidden. Hearing his name called before many instants had passed he most sagaciously ceased to walk about and turned, his look now charged with purpose.

— No, come back, she cried. How sweetly you have responded to us. I so want you!

— It’s important, her nephew, who was very continental, said, stopped and circulated at walker’s pace in an opposed direction.

[August 1923]

The handsome sixfoottwo rugger and soccer champion and the belle of Chapelizod in her ocean blue brocade bunnyhugged scrumptiously in the dark behind the chief steward’s cabin while with sinister dexterity he alternately rightandlefthandled fore and aft her palpable rugby and association bulbs. She murmurously asked for some but not too much of the best poetry reflecting on the situation her reason being that by the light of the moon of the silvery moon she loved to spoon before her honeymoomoon. He promptly then elocutioned to her in decasyllabic iambic hexameter: Roll on, thou deep and darkblue ocean, roll!

It was a gorgeous sensation he being exactly the right man in the right place and the weather conditions could not possibly have been improved. Her role was to roll on the darkblue ocean roll that rolled on round the round roll Robert Roly rolled round. She gazed while his deepsea peepers gazed O gazed O dazedcrazedgazed into her darkblue rolling ocean eyes.

He then having dephlegmatised his throat uttered as follows from his voicebox:

— Isolde!

By elevation of eyelids that she addressed insinuated desideration of his declaration.

— Isolde, O Isolde, when theeupon I oculise my most inmost Ego most vaguely senses the profundity of multimathematical immaterialities whereby in the pancosmic urge the Allimmanence of That Which Is Itself exteriorates on this here our plane of disunited solid liquid and gaseous bodies in pearlwhite passionpanting intuitions of reunited Selfhood in the higher dimensional Selflessness.

Hear, O hear, all ye caller herrings! Silent be, O Moyle! Milky Way, strew dim light!

She reunited milkymouthily his hers and their disunited lips and quick as greased lightning the Breton champion drove the advance messenger of love with one virile tonguethrust past the double line of ivoryclad forwards fullback rightjingbangshot into the goal of her gullet.

Now what do you candidly suppose she, a strapping young Irish princess scaling nine stone twelve in her pelt, cared at that precise physiological moment about tiresome old King Mark, that tiresome old pantaloon in his tiresome old twentytwoandsixpenny shepherd’s plaid trousers? Not as much as a pinch of henshit and that’s the meanest thing that was ever known. No, on the contrary, if the truth must be told lovingly she lovegulped his pulpous propeller and both together in the most fashionable weather they both went all of a shiveryshaky quiveryquaky mixumgatherum yumyumyum. After which before the traditional ten seconds were up Tristan considerately allowed his farfamed chokegrip to relax and precautiously withdrew the instrument of rational speech from the procathedral of amorous seductiveness.

— I’m real glad to have run on to you, Trist, you fascinator, you! she said, awfully bucked by her gratifying experience of the love embrace from a bigtimer like him with an interesting tallow complexion from whom great things were expected as he was evidently a notoriety in the poetry department as well for he never saw an orange but he thought of a porringer and to cut a long story short taking him by and large he meant everything to her just then, her beau ideal of a true girl’s friend neither big ugly nor small nice.

[August 1923]

As slow their ship, the sea being slight, upon the face of waters moved by courtesy of God that handsome brineburnt sixfooter Gaelic, rugger and soccer champion and the dinkum belle of Lucalizod quite charming in her oceanblue brocade and an overdress of net darned with gold well in advance of the newest fashion exhibits bunnyhugged scrumptiously when it was dark whilst they dissimulated themself on the eighteen inch loveseat behind the chieftaness stewardess’s cabin whilst also with sinister dexterity he alternately rightandlefthandled fore and aft, on and offside her palpable rugby and association bulbs. She, after a cough, murmurously then gave her firm order for tootsweet if he wouldn’t please mind some though not too much of the six best national poetry quotations reflecting on the situation so long as it was a stroke or two above it’s a fine night and yon moon shines bright and all to that, the plain fact of the matter being that being a natural born lover of nature in all her moods and senses, by the light of the moon, of the silvery moon she longed to spoon before her honeyoldmoon at the same time drinking in long draughts of purest air serene and revelling in the great outdoors. That mouth of mandibles vowed to pure beauty promptly elocutionised to her a favourite lyrical bloom bellclear in iambic decasyllabic hexameter:

— Rollon thoudeep andamp anddark blueo ceanroll!

Lady, it was just too gorgeous for words, the whole sensation. The sea, of a lovely tint embellished by the best charms of nature, with its wellmannered wavelets (the dirty horrid rude ones from the Belfast and Lagan Lough neighbourhood being very properly locked up in cubbyhole) looked really awfully pretty at the mid hour of night and more especially he being emphatically the right man in the right place, the weather conditions could not possibly have been improved upon. Praises be to fair sea. Her rôle was to roll onthedark blueo ceanroll that rolled on round the round roll that Robert Roly rolled round. Breathtaking beauty, Ireland’s bonniest, she did but gaze while from his altitude of onehundredandthirtytwo lines his deepseapeepers gazed O gazed O dazedcrazedgazed into her darkblue rolling ocean orbs.

— Thanks ever so much she sighed, thrilled by that olive throb of his nude neck, and ever so much again for that tiny quote. It sort of made everything ever so much more delightful. How perfectly sweet of you!

Nothing if not amorous, he, rosecrumpler, thrilldriver, sighinspirer, having prealably dephlegmatised his guttur of that ticklish frog in the throat, his useful arm getting busy on the touchline due south of her western shoulder, uttered what was to follow with grand passion from his toploftical voicebox:

— Isolde!

By elevation of eyelids t’ward her dear coolun that She invoked insinuated desideration of more declaration.

He was instant and he declared:

— Isolde! O Isolde! Sister soul and hand! When theeuponthus Sir Tristan binoculises his most unwitting ego most subconsciously senses the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities whereby in the pancosmic urge the allimmanence of That Which Itself is Itself Alone exteriorates on this here our plane in disunited solid, liquid and gaseous bodies in pearlwhite passionpanting intuitions of reunited selfhood in the higherdimensional selfless Allself.

Hear, O hear, all ye caller herring! Silent be, O Moyle! Milky Way, strew dim light!

Right here a pretty thing happened. When her flattering hand of pure diversion mayhap had jessaminely at the just right moment shut his duckhouse the vivid girl, deaf with love, (you know her, that angel being, one of passion’s fadeless wonderwomen! You dote on her! You love her to death!) with a queer little cry reunited milkymouthily his her then their disunited lips when, tonguetasting the golden opportunity of a lifetime, quick as greased pigskin the Armorican champion with one virile tonguethrust drove the advance messenger of love flash past the double line of eburnean forwards rightjingbangshot into the goal of her gullet.

Now, I am just putting it direct to you as one manowoman to another, what the blankety blank diggings do you for example candidly suppose that she, a strapping young modern old ancient Irish princess a good eighteen hands high and scaling nine stone twelve paddock weight in her madapolam smock with nothing under her hat but red hair and solid ivory not forgetting a firstrate pair of bedroom eyes of most unholy hazel cared at that precise psychoanalytical moment about tiresome old King Mark that tiresome old milkless ram with his duty peck and his bronchial tubes, the tiresome old ourangoutan beaver in his tiresome old twentytwoandsixpenny shepherd’s plaid trousers? Not as much as a pinch of henshit and that’s the meanest thing now was ever known since Adam was in the boy’s navy. No, heaven knows, far from it, if the unvarnished truth must be told at the very first blush lovingly she lovegulped her American’s pulpous propeller and both together in the most fashionable weather they all went off a lulliloving a dither me die me dandy O after which, believing in safety first, before the regulation ten seconds were up volatile Brittany considerately allowed his farfamed sparking plug chokegrip to relax and precautiously withdrew the instrument of rational speech from the procathedral of amorous seductiveness.

— I’m right glad I ran on to you, Tris, you fascinator you! Miss Erin said, when she had won free, laughing at the same time delightfully in dimpling bliss, being awfully bucked by her gratifying experience of the love embrace from a highly continental bigtimer the like of him possessed of a handsome face well worth watching with an interesting tallow complexion from which great things very expected as a film star for she fully realised that he was evidently a notoriety in the poetry department as well for he never saw her to drink an orange but he offered to bring her a porringer and to cut a long story short taking him by and large the onliest boy of her choice meant pretty well everything to her just then, her beau ideal of a true girl’s friend with red blood in his veins neither big ugly nor small nice.

Over them the winged ones screamed shrill glee: seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercailzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.

So sang seaswans:

— Three quarks for Muster Mark

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark

But O Wreneagle Highflighty wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark

To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark

And un hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerston Park.

Hohohoho moulty Mark

You’re the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah’s ark

And you think you’re cock of the wark.

Fowls, up! Tristy’s the spry young spark

That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her

Without even winking the tail of a feather

And that’s how that chap’s going to make his money and mark!

 ® 

[H.C.E.]

[used in chapter I.2 from Finnegans Wake]

[First draft, August 1923]

...genesis of Humphrey Coxon’s agnomen the most authentic version has it that like Cincinnatus he was one day at his plough when royalty was announced on the highroad. Forgetful of all but his fealty he hastened out on to the road, holding aloft a long perch atop of which a flowerpot was affixed. On his majesty, who was rather longsighted from early youth, inquiring whether he had been engaged in lobstertrapping Humphrey bluntly answered ‘No, my liege, I was only a cotching of them bluggy earwigs’. The King upon this smiled heartily and, giving way to that none too genial humour which he had inherited from his great aunt Sophy, turned to two of his retinue the lord of Offaly and the mayor of Waterford (the syndic of Drogheda according to a later version) remarking ‘How our brother of Burgundy would fume did he know that he have this trusty vassal a turnpiker who is also an earwicker’. True facts as this legend may be it is certain that from that date all documents initialled by Humphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and whether he was always Coxon for his cronies and good duke Humphrey for the ragged tiny folk of Lucalizod it was certainly a a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those initials the nickname ‘Here Comes Everything’. Imposing enough indeed he looked and worthy of that title as he sat on gala nights in the royal booth with wardrobepanelled coat thrown back from a shirt wellnamed a swallowall far outstarching the laundered lordies and marbletopped highboys of the pit. A baser meaning has been read into these letters, the literal sense of which decency can but touch. It has been suggested that he suffered from a vile disease. To such a suggestion the only selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one would like to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors mended their case by insinuating that he was at one time under the imputation of annoying soldiers in the park. To anyone who knew and loved H - C - E—the suggestion is preposterous. Slander, let it do its worst, has never been able to convict that good and great man of any greater misdemeanour that that of an incautious exposure (and partial at that) in the presence of certain nursemaids whose testimony is, if not dubious, at any rate slightly divergent.

[Fourth draft, September 1923 (corrected)]

Now, concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen and discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham in the hundred of manhood or proclaim him a descendant of vikings who had founded or settled in Herrick or Eric the best authenticated version has it that it was this way. We are told how in the beginning it came to pass that, like cabbaging Cincinnatus, the grand old gardener was saving daylight one sultry sabbath afternoon in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of ye olde marine hotel when royalty was announced by runner to have been pleased to have halted itself on the highroad along which a leisureloving dogfox had cast followed, also at walking pace, by a lady pack of cocker spaniels. Forgetful of all save his vassal’s plain fealty to the ethnarch Humphrey or Harold stayed not to yoke or saddle but stumbled out hotface as he was (his sweatful bandanna loose from his pocketcoat) hasting to the forecourts of his public in topee, surcingle, plus fours and bulldog boots ruddled with red marl, jingling his turnpike keys and bearing aloft amid the fixed pikes of the hunting party a high perch atop of which a flowerpot was fixed earthside up with care. On his majesty, who was, or often feigned to be, noticeably longsighted from green youth, and had been meaning to inquire what, in effect, had caused yon causeway to be so potholed, asking, substitutionally, to be put wise as to whether paternoster and silver doctors were not now more fancied bait for lobstertrapping honest blunt Haromphreyld answered in no uncertain tones very similarly with a fearless forehead: Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers. Our Sailor King, who was draining a gugglet of obvious water, upon this, ceasing to swallow, smiled most heartily beneath his walrus moustaches and indulging that none too genial humour which William the Conk on the spindle side had inherited with the hereditary whitelock and some shortfingeredness from his great aunt Sophy, turned towards two of his retinue of gallowglasses, Michael, etheling lord of Leix in Offaly and the jubilee mayor of Drogheda, Elcock, (the two scatterguns being Michael Manning, protosyndic of Waterford and an Italian excellency named Giubilei according to a later version cited by the learned scholarch Canavan of Canmakenoise) and remarked dilsydulsily: Holybones, how our red brother of Pouringrainia would audibly fume did he know that we have for trusty bailiwick a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger! Comes the question are these the facts as recorded in both or either of the collateral andrewpomurphyc narratives. We shall perhaps not so soon see. The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good dook Umphrey for the hungerlean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation, every time he continually surveyed from good start to happy finish the truly catholic assemblage gathered together from all quarters unanimously to applaud Mr. W.W. Semperkelly’s immergreen tourers in the problem passion play of the millentury a Royal Divorce with ambitious interval band selections from the Bo Girl and The Lily on all gala command nights from his viceregal booth where, a veritable Napoleon the Fourth, this father of the people all of the time sat having the entirety of his house about him with the invariable broadstretched kerchief cooling his whole neck, nape and shoulderblades and in a wardrobepanelled tuxedo completely thrown back from a shirt well entitled a swallowall, on every point far outstarching the laundered clawhammers and marbletopped highboys of the pit stalls and early amphitheatre. A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecracks that he suffered from a vile disease. To such a suggestion the one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one should like to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors, who, an imperfectly warmblooded race, apparently conceive him as a great white catterpillar capable of any and every enormity in the calendar recorded to the discredit of the Juke and Kellikek families, mended their case by insinuating that, alternatively, he lay at one time under the ludicrous imputation of annoying Welsh fusiliers in the people’s park. To anyone who knew and loved the Christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H.C. Earwicker throughout his long existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous. Truth compels one to add that there is said to have once been some case of the kind implicating, it is sometimes believed, a quidam about that time walking around Dublin with a bad record who has remained completely anonymous but was, it is stated, posted at Mallon’s at the instance of watch warriors of the vigilance committee, and years afterwards, writes one, seemingly dropped dead whilst waiting for a chop somewhere near Hawkins street. Slander, let it lie its flattest, has never been able to convict that good and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker, as a pious author calls him, of any graver impropriety than that, advanced by some woodward or regarder who did not dare deny that he had that day consumed the soul of the corn, of having behaved in an ungentlemanly manner opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the greenth of the rushy hollow, whither, or so the two gown and pinners pleaded, dame nature in all innocency had spontaneously and about the same hour of the eventide sent them both but whose published combinations of testimonies are, where not dubiously pure, visibly divergent on minor points touching the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison which was admittedly an incautious but, at its widest, a partial exposure with such attenuating circumstances as an abnormal Saint Martin’s summer and a ripe occasion to provoke it.

 ® 

[Mamalujo]

[used in chapter II.4 from Finnegans Wake, mixed with ‘Tristan and Isolde’]

[First draft, September 1923]

So there they were listening in as hard as they could all four of them they were the big four the four waves of Erin all listening four there was old ?wran Gregory and then besides old Tom there was old Phelim O’ Hogan the four waves and oftentimes they used to be saying here now we are the four of us old Tom and Old Phelim and old Jeremy the four of us and sure thank God there are no more of us and old Jeff O’Gorman the four of us and no more of us and so now pass the fish for the Lord’s sake amen the way they used to be saying grace before fish for auld lang syne there they were spraining their ears listening and listening to all the kissening with their eyes glistening all the four when he was cuddling his colleen not the cullen no the colleen bawn cuddling her and kissing her with his pogue like Arrah na pogue they all four used to be cuddling and kissing and listening in the good days Dion Boucicault of Arrah na Pogue when they were all four collegians in the queen’s colleges it brought it all back again as fresh as ever Matt and Marcus and now there he was and his Arrah na Pogue before the four of them and now thank God there were no more of them and he poguing and poguing they were listening with their mouths watering so pass the pogue for Christ sake Amen listening and watering all the four Luke and Johnny MacDougall for anything at all for a cup of of kindness yet for four big tumblers of woman squash with them all four listening and spraining their ears and their mouths making water

Ah well sure that s the way and there was poor Matt Gregory leaning on his staff of memory and Gregory and the others and now really and truly they were four dear old heladies and they looked so nice and respectable with their grey half tall hat and tailormade frock coat and then they had their fathom glasses to find out the fathoms and their tall hats just now like lord Powerscourt or the auctioneer there near the place near that street Trinity College that arranges all the auctions of valuable houses Smith like the auctioneer Smith or not Smith that sells all the fine houses and mansions James H North Mike North the auctioneer going to the horse show with all the people over from England and American visitors in his grey half tall hat and his fathom glasses to find out all the horses. And poor Marcus Lyons and poor Johnny and the four of us and there they were now listening the four saltwater widowers and all they could remember long long ago when my heart knew no care the landing of sir Arthur Casement in 1132 and the coronation of Brian by the bishop and then there was the drowning of Pharaoh and they were drowned in the sea the red sea and then poor Martin Cunningham out of the castle when he was drowned off Dunleary in the red sea and and then there was the Flemish Armada all scattered and all drowned off the coast of Cunningham and Saint Patrick and all they remembered and then there was the French fleet in 1132 landing under general Boche and there he was cuddling and poguing her in Arranapogue behind the queen’s colleges. And then they used to give the lectures in Roman history in all the four collegians in the four trinity colleges Killorcure and Killthemall and Killeachother and Kilkelly-on-the-Flure those were the four great history colleges for auld lang syne all the Roman history past and present and present and absent and past and present and future arma virumque romano. Ah dearo a dear how it all came back to them to hear him there kissing her and cuddling her in his Roman arms ah dearo dear it was so sorry for the four of us Tim Tom Tarpey and the four shehusbands the four waves in their hat and thank God they were all summarily divorced by their shehusbands in the bygone days but still they parted on the best of terms by decree absolute well they could remember Justice Squelchman in 1132 at the Married Male Offenders’ Court in Arrahnapogue. Poor Johnny MacDougall and the four masters because she was backscratching all divorced by their four master and poor Marcus Powerscourt by decree absolute because he broke wind in the pew and because he forgot to make a request in writing on stamped paper before saying his grace before fish and then there was poor Dion Boucicault all divorced too poor Dion because he attempted to well he ah well now sure we won’t be too hard on him attempted some hunnish familiarities after eating a bad crab in the red sea ah dearo dearo dear and where do you leave Matt poor Matt in his grey frock hat all divorced by woman squelch and all on account the appearance of his face poor Matt Gregory. of his mouth watering so now pass the face for Christ’ sake Amen. Poor Matt Gregory

Poor Martin Cunningham! And still and all they were always thinking of their four masters that were four beautiful sisters and there they were always counting the lovely periwinkle buttons in the front part of their dresses and there she was the beautiful four sisters and that was her name and they were looking for her everywhere in all the fathoms and then they had their night tentacles and they used to be all hanging around all the waists of the ships the steamships and peering in through the steaming windows into the honeymoon cabins on board the big steamers and saloon ladies toilet apartments and rubbing off the cataract off the windows to see all the honeymooners and all the toilet ladies and their familiarities saying their grace before meals and watering and there they used to be counting all their peributtons to remember her beautiful name poor Gregory and Johnny the four sisters and there she was now asthore as in days of yore of planxty Gregory they used to be always singing and so now they started their singing and old Luke for auld luke syne and we make a cupboard coinerset for the pays savole shanghai..

Hear, Isolde la belle! Tristan, sad hero, hear!

[An early version of the song]

Anno Domini nostri sancti Jesu Christi

Nine hundred and ninetynine pound sterling in the black bowels of the bank of Ulster.

Braw pennies and good gold pounds, by God, my girleen, ’ll prank thee finely

And no damn lout ’ll come courting thee or, by the Holy Ghost, there’ll be murder!

O come all ye sweet nymphs of Dingle beach to cheer Brinabride from Sybil a - riding

In her curragh of shells of daughter-of-pearl and her silverymoonblue mantle round her!

Crown of the waters, brine on her brow, she’ll dance them a jig and jilt them fairly.

Yerra, why would she ride with Sir Sloomysides or the gogram grey barnacle gander?

You’ll not be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your yank is the worst for his steel and his soldiering

Nor wake in winter, widow machree, for you’ll have my old Balbriggan surtout.

Wisha, won’t you agree now to take me for nothing at all as your own nursetender?

A power of fine fellows died game right enough. But who lives for you?

I had that one long before anyone in this place.

It was of a good Friday too and as I’m given now to understand, she was clean mad gone on me.

Grand goosegreasing we had entirely with an eiderdown picnic to follow

’By the cross of Christ, Mac Dougall’ says she after ‘but you’re the most likable lad that’s come my ways yet from the barony of Bohermore’.

 ® 

[The Cad Kernel]

[November 1923]

[First section, used in chapter I.2 from Finnegans Wake]

Guiltless he was clearly for so once at least he clearly and with still a trace of his erstwhile burr declared himself to be and we know that it is true. They tell the story that one happy-go-gusty April morning long after the alleged misdemeanour when billowing across the wide expanse of our great park in his rubberised inverness he met a cad with a pipe. The latter hardily accosted him to ask could he say how much o’clock it was that the clock struck had he any idea. Earwicker, realising on fundamental principles the supreme importance of physical life and unwishful of being sent into eternity plugged by the sap’s bullet, halted and, quick on the draw, produced from his gunpocket his shrapnel-Waterbury and, at the same instant hearing above the skirling of harsh Mother East old Fox Goodman working the tenor bell in the speckled church, told the cad it was twelve punctual, adding however, as he bent to give weight to the utterance that the accusation against him had been made, as was well known in high quarters, by a creature in human form who was several degrees lower than a snake. In greater support of his words the flaxen giant tapped his chronometer and, now standing erect with one Berlin gauntlet pointed towards the duke’s overgrown milestone solemnly averred: Credit me, my friend. I have won straight. Hence my nationwide business and I am prepared to take my stand upon the monument any hygienic day at this hour and to declare upon the open bible before the Great Taskmaster’s eye and in the presence of the deity and my immediate neighbours and every living soul in every corner of this globe in general acquainted with the British tongue that there is not one tittle of truth in that purest of fabrications. The cad, perceiving that he had to do with a plainly postpuberal hyperpituitary type, thanked for the time of day, not a little taken aback all the same that that was all the time it was, and repeated as many of the words as he could call to mind that same evening at his fireside where he spat in museful thought after having eaten very excellent peas boiled with malt vinegar, a plateful he frankly relished in raw weather. The cad’s wife (as the aftertale has it) spoke of the matter the next night but one after sodality meeting to the reverend, the director, a freshcomplexioned clergyman, yet it was he in all human probability who, when seized of the facts, was overheard by accident—if indeed, it was an accident—repeating a slightly different version of the words to a layteacher of organic chemistry in the middle forties during a priestly flutter for safe and sane bets at the racecourse of Baldoyle on a date easily capable of remembrance by good turfites when the Portmarnock plate was captured by two lengths from Bold Boy Cromwell after a clever getaway by Captain Blount’s fresh colt Drummer Coxon at short odds. It was two coves of the name of Treacle Tom and his own blood and milk brother Frisky Shorty come off the hulks what was out on the bum around for an oofbird game for a jimmyogoblin or a small thick as heard the reverend parson make use of the language which he was having a gurgle off his own along of the bloke in the specs. This Treacle Tom, to whom reference has just been made, had been absent from his usual wild and woolly haunts for some time previous to that (he was, in fact, in the habit of frequenting common lodginghouses where he slept in a nude state in strange men’s bunks) but revisiting on racenight his house of call at Block W, Pump square, the Liberties, he repeated the tale in parts more than once during uneasy slumber in the joint hearing of a discharged drapery executive Peter Cloran, O’Donnell, a secretary of no fixed abode who had passed several nights in a doorway and Hosty, an illstarred busker who, feeling suicidal, had been tossing on his shakedown devising ways and means of somehow getting ahold of some chap’s parabellum in the hope of lighting upon a dive somewhere off the main tramline where he could go and blow the napper off himself in peace and quietness, he having been trying all he knew for over eighteen months to get into Jervis street hospital without having been able to wangle it anyway. O’Donnell and Peter Cloran, as an understood thing, slept in the one bed with Hosty, and the housewife dawn-of-all-work had not been very many hours furbishing potlids, doorbrasses, scholars’ applecheeks and livery metals when the rejuvenated busker and his bedroom suite were up and afoot crosstown to the thrumming of a crewth fiddle and, after a visit to a publichouse not a thousand leagues from the site of Parnell’s statue where, the tale runs on, the trio were shortly joined by a further casual and a decent sort who had just pocketed the weekly insult and all had stimulants in the shape of five gee and gees stood by the decent sort after which all came out of the licensed premises wiping their mouth on their sleeve and the world was the richer for a new halfpenny ballad which was first sung under the shadow of the monument of the dead legislator to an overflow meeting fully filling the visional area and easily representative of all sections and cross sections of the Irish people ranging from slips of boys with pocketed hands and corporation bucket emergency men in search of an honest crust to busy professional gentlemen, massgoing ladies in their chairs and a few old souls obviously under the spell of liquor. Word went round and the ballad printed on a strip of blue paper headed by a rough woodcut soon fluttered on highway and byway to the rose of the winds from lane to lattice and from mouth to ear throughout the five corners of the land of Ireland. And around the land this rann it ran and this is the ran that Hosty made: [...]

[Second section, used in chapter I.3 from Finnegans Wake]

A cloud of witnesses indeed! Yet all of these are now as much no more as were they not yet now or had they then not ever been. Of Hosty, quite a musical genius in a small way, the end is unknown. O’Donnell, somewhat depressed by things, is said to have accepted the (Saxon) king’s shilling on the outbreak of the Crimean war, enlisting under the name of Blanco Buckley. Peter Cloran, at the suggestion of the master in lunacy, became an inmate of an asylum. Treacle Tom passed away painlessly one hallow e’en in a state of nature, propelled into the great beyond by footblows of his last bedfellows, three Norwegians of the seafaring class. Shorty disappeared from the surface of the earth so entirely as to lead the speculative to opine that it came to pass that he (who possessed a large amount of the humorous) had removed his habitat to the interior. Again, was the reverend, the sodality director that fashionable vice preacher to whom sinning society sirens (vide the daily press) at times became so enthusiastically attached and was an objectionable ass who very occasionally wore a raffle ticket in his hat and was openly convicted of malpractices with his tableknife that same cad with a pipe encountered by Humphrey Chimpden?

It is a well authenticated fact that the average human face changes its shape with the passing of years. Hence it is no easy matter to identify the individual with already an inclination to baldness who was asked by some boardschool children to tell them the story. It was the Lord’s day and the request was put to the party as he paused for a smoke in his pastime of executing empty bottles. One sad circumstance the narrator mentioned which goes at once to the heart of things. He rose to his feet and told of it in the simplest of language to a group of little caremakers of the great mythical figure in his widewinged hat, the four-in-hand cravat and the gauntlet upon the hand which had struck down Destrelle. In words a bit duskish he aptly described the scene, the monolith rising stark from the twilit pinebarren, the fallow doe belling softly her approach and how brightly he outed his wallet and gives him a topping cheroot and says he was to suck that one and spend a half hour in Havana. And says he: As sure as eggs is what they are in high quarters my business credit will stand as straight as that monument’s fabrication before the hygienic globe (and here the reverent sabbath and bottle breaker uncovered himself of his boater cordially inviting the adolescents whom he was wising up to do in like manner) globe of the great Pastmaster’s eye. The scene was never forgotten for later in the same century one of that little band of factferreters, then an ex civil servant retired under the sixtyfive act, rehearsed it to a cousin of the late archdeacon Coppinger in a pullman of the transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a heartskewer if ever was. For when the archdeacon spoke of it by request all hearing the cousin’s description of that fellow-traveller’s features could really imagine themselves as listening to the cockshy shooter’s evensong evocation of the doomed liberator, his hand protended towards the monumental leadpencil which as the Molyvdokondylon was to be his mausoleum while over his exculpatory features the ghost of a resignation diffused a spectral appealingness similar in origin and in effect to a beam of sunshine upon a coffinplate.

The data, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the testifiers too untrustworthily irreperible but certain one thing is, that ere the following winter turned the leaves of the book of nature, the shadow of the huge outlander had stood at the bar of a hundred tribunals, here sentenced before trial with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted against evidence by benefit of clergy. Big, human, erring, forgivable the unforgettable shade looms up behind the varied judgments of those unrecapturable days. Three soldiers of the Coldstream guards were walking in Montgomery Street. One gave an opinion in which all concurred. It was the first woman, they said. He showed himself a man afterwards. A coming actress (who has been called by one critic a vestpocket Siddons) was interviewed in a beauty parlour and said, while righting her cartwheel hat, she hoped he would get a Christmas pardon because the world had been unkind. Then he has been so truly wonderful, she added. A dustman named Sevenchurches in the employ of Bullwinkle and M’Tigue was asked the question in a hashhouse and replied: We have been discussing this case. All our fellows say that he is a gamey one. A more than usually sober taxidriver said: Earywigger is a pink joint scoundrel in private life but folks say he has parliamentary privilege. A barmaid’s view was: It would be a crying shame to jail him in consequence of his health. Brian Linskey, the boy curser, was questioned and gave a snappy comeback when saying: I am for caveman sex, curse it! Them two women ought to be strangled, I say! Miss Ida Wombwell, the seventeen year old revivalist, said concerning the fusiliers incident: That man is a brute—but a magnificent brute. Sylvia Silence, the girl detective, when told of the different facts in her easy bachelor’s flat overlooking Anderson’s mews, asked quietly: Have you thought that sheer greatness was his tragedy? But in my view he should pay the full penalty. A sailor, seated on the granite setts of the fishmarket, was encouraged to talk by his fiancée and said: I lay he was to blame about the two slaveys as he had his perfect right but I think there was someone else behind it about the three drummers.

Can it be that so diversified outrages were planned and partly carried out against a staunch covenanter if it is true those recorded ever took place? The city of refuge whither he had fled to forget in expiating manslaughter, the land in which by the commandment with promise his days apostolic were to be long murmured, would rise against him, do him, poor jink, ghostly upon bodily, as were he made a curse for them, the corruptible lay quick, all saints of incorruption of an holy nation, the common or garden castaway in resurrection of damnation so they convince him of their proper sins. Businessbred to a stiff upper lip he took nothing but good fighting chances. Yet he or his was or were subjected to terror. One tall man humping a suspicious parcel when returning late to the old spot had a barking revolver put to his face by an unknown assailant (masked) against whom he had been jealous. More than that when the waylayer (not a Lucalizodite) mentioning that he had a loaded pistol which left only two alternatives as either he would surely shoot him or, failing of that, bash in his face beyond all recognition, pointedly asked him how he came by the fender he was answered by the aggravated assaulted that that was for him to find out. But how transparently untrue! Six feet one is not tall. Was it supposedly to explode or to force an entrance that the man in a butcher blue blouse from a men’s wear store with a bottle of single stout in his possession seized by the town guard in H.C.E.’s very gateway, was in the gateway? How true on first time of hearing his statement that he had had a lot too much to drink and was only falling against the gate yet how lamely proceeds his then explanation that he was merely trying to open the bottle of stout by hammering it against the gate for the boots in the place, Maurice Behan, who hastily threw on a pair of pants and came down in his socks without coat or collar, attracted by the noise of gunplay, said he was safe in bed when he was wakened up out of the land of byelo by hearing hammering emanating from the gate. This battering all over the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like a bottle of stout which would not rouse him out of sleep but far more like the overture to the last day, if anything. Notice a fellow who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek hair so elegant, tableau vivant. He vows her to be his own honeylamb, swears they will be pals, by Sam, and share good times way down west in a happy lovenest when May moon shines but that guy is not so dippy between you and I (not on your life! not in these trousers! not by a large jugful!) for somewhere on the sly this guy has his girl number two and he would like to canoodle her too some part of the time for he is downright fond of his own number one but he is fair mashed on peachy number two so that if he could only canoodle the two all three would be genuinely happy, the two numbers, that is, with their mutual chappy (for he is simply shamming dippy) if they were afloat in a dreamboat, his tippy canoe, his tippy upanddowndippy tiptoptippy canoodle canyou. With this our friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem on an identical basis, bearing several of the earmarks of a plot for there is in fact no use putting a tooth on a thing of that sort and the amount of that sort of thing which was then going on was simply stupendous.

Next morning the postman handed in a letter superscribed to Humpty, Pot and gallows king. The coffin, at first sight mistaken for a fender, had been removed from hardware premises, a noted house of the middle east which, as an ordinary everyday transaction, supplied funeral requisites of every description. In the parallel case Laddy Cummings, the conscientious guard and a scripture reader to boot, swore before the proper functionary that the butcher in the blouse, after delivering some carcasses, went and kicked at the door and when challenged about it on his oath by the imputed, said simply: I am on my oath. You did, as I stressed before. You are deeply mistaken, sir, let me then tell you, denied MacPartland (the meat man’s name).

These outrages were thought to have been instigated by either or both of the rushy hollow heroines but one shortly after drank carbolic with all her life before her while her sister-in-love finding while one day doing her chores that she stripped well began to feel her hat too small for her and took to selling her spare time in the haymow and elsewhere. But a little thought ought to allow the facts to fall in and take up their due places. If violence to life, limb and chattels has as often as not been an expression, direct or through a male agency, of offended womanhood has not levy of blackmail from the earliest ages followed in worldlywise a whispered reputation. First, a gateway there was for the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack under fair rental of one yearly sheep, value of sixpence, and one small yearly pig, value of eightpence, to grow old and happy in for the remaining years and when everything was got up for the purpose he put a gate on the place and thenabouts the gate was locked purposely by his faithful people to keep him inside in case he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence. It ought to be always remembered that there was a commercial stopping in the hotel before that and he missed six pounds fifteen and found his overcoat disturbed. The gate business was in fact all threats and abuse and in this sort. Humphrey’s unsolicited visitor promised through the gate outside which he was first, that he would break his head for him, next, that he would break the gate over his head the way he would crack a nut with a monkey wrench and, last of all, that he would give him his (Humphrey’s) blood to drink. He went on at a great rate abusing him from ten thirty up to one in the afternoon without even a lunch interval. Earwicker, longsuffering, under restraint in the sittingout corner of his conservatory, his thermos flask by his side, compiled a long list (now feared lost) to be kept on file of all the abusive names he was called (informer, old fruit, yellow whigger, wheatears, goldygoat, funnyface, bogside beauty, muddle the plan, mister fatmeat) but did not otherwise respond beyond such sedentarity, though it was as easy as kisshands for him to reach for the hello grip and ring up Crumlin exchange, because as he explained, touching his wounded feelings in the future, the dominican mission was on at the time and he thought it might reform him. The more than considerably unpleasant bullocky before he rang off pegged a few stones all of a size, but possibly seeing the seriousness of what he had not done made him leave down the stones and having sobered up a bit, he left the scene, after exhorting him to come outside so as he could burst him all up and proceeded in the direction of the deaf and dumb institution.

[Third section, used in chapter I.4 from Finnegans Wake]

It may be that with his deepseeing insight (had not wishing been but good time wasted) H.C.E. prayed all that time in silence that his wordwounder might become the first of a distinguished dynasty, his most cherished of all ideas being the formation, as in more favoured climes, of a truly criminal stratum, thereby at last eliminating much general delinquency from all classes and masses.

The coffin was to come in handy later. This is the how of that. A number of public bodies made him a present of a grave in a fair state of repair which nobody had ever been able to dig much less occupy. This grave he blasted with a landmine and carefully lined the result with bricks and mortar, encouraging the same and other public bodies to present him over and above that with a stone. Coffins, windingsheets, cinerary urns and any kind of funeral bric a brac would naturally follow in the ordinary course.

The other spring offensive may have come about all quite by accident. From both camps (granted at once for the sake of argument that men on both sides had grand ideas) all conditions were drawn into the conflict, some for lack of proper feeding, others already caught in the act of carving honourable careers for self and family, and, if emaciated, the person garotted may have suggested incarnate whiggery or even the grand old whig himself in the flesh when falsesighted by the wouldbe burglar, a tory of the tories, for there then circulated pretty freely the feeling that in so hibernating Earwicker was secretly feeding on his own fat.

Kate Strong, a widow, did all the scavenging from good King Charles golden days down but she cleaned only sparingly and her statement was that, there being no macadamized sidewalks in those R.I.C. days barring a footpath which left off where the man was struck, she left, as scavengers will, a filth dump near the dogpond in the park, all over which bootmarks, fingerprints, elbowdints, kneecaves, breechbowls were all successively found of a very involved description. It was on this resurfaced spot evidently that the attacker, though under medium, with truly native pluck tackled him whom he mistook to be somebody else, making use of sacrilegious language to the effect that he would have his life and lay him out at the same time catching hold of a long bar he had and with which he usually broke furniture. They struggled for some considerable time and in the course of it the masked man said to the other: Let me go, Pat. Later on the same man asked: Was six pounds fifteen taken off you by anyone 2 or 3 months ago? There was some further severe mauling and then a wooden affair in the shape of a revolver fell from the intruder who thereupon became friendly and wanted to know whether his chance companion who still had the fender happened to have the change of a ten pound note about him as, if so, he would pay the six pounds odd out of that for what was taken on last July. To this the other then said: Would you be surprised to hear that I honestly have not such a thing as the loose change of a ten pound note about me at the moment but I believe I can see my way to advance you four and sevenpence between hopping and trotting to buy whisky. At the mention of whisky the gunman became calm and remarking, apparently highly pleased: You stunning little southdowner! Goalball I’ve struck this day, by golly! You have some grit, south downer! he went off with the four and seven and the hurlbat, picked up, while the man who was left with the fender who bore up under it with a number of plumsized bruises on him, reported the occurrence at the watch house in Vicar Street, his face all covered with blood as good proof of his serious character and that he was bleeding from the nose, mouth and two ears while some of his hair had been pulled off his head though other wise his allround health was middling enough.

Now coming on to the question of unlawfully obtaining a pierced fender and fireguard there crops up like a shot the far more capital point of the political bias of a person who, when mistakenly ambushed, was simply exercising one of the most primary liberties of the subject by walking along a public thoroughfare in broad daylight.

As if that was not enough for anyone but little headway was made when a countryman, Festy King, who gave an address in Joyce’s country in the heart of a wellfamed poteen district, was subsequently brought up on an improperly framed indictment. It was attempted to show that King rubbed some dirt on his face to disguise himself and was at the fair of a Monday with a pig when the animal ate some of the doorpost, King selling it because she ate a lot of the woodwork of her sty in order to pay off arrears of rent. An eyewitness said he remembered the fifth of November which was going to go down in the annals of history and that one thing which particularly struck him was that he saw or heard Pat O’Donnell beat and murder another of the Kings, Simon, between whom bad blood existed but it turned out in crossexamination that where the ambush was laid there was not as much light as would dim a child’s altar and to the perplexedly uncondemnatory bench the first King, Festy, declared through his interpreter on his oath and before God and all their honours that he did not fire a stone either before or after he was born down to that day and this he supplemented by postasserting what he would impart that he might never ask to see sight or light of this world or the next world or any other world if ever he up with a hand to take or throw the sign of a stone at man, sheep or salvation army either before or after being baptised down to that holy and blessed hour.

 ® 

[The Revered Letter]

[?Fourth draft, January 1924,
used in chapter IV.1 from Finnegans Wake]

Revered

Majesty well Ive heard all those muckbirds what they are bringing up about him and they will come to no good. The Honourable Mr Earwicker, my devout husband, and he is a true gentleman who changes his two shirts a day which is what none of the sneakers ever will be because as sings the royal poet their likes must be first born like he was, my devout, and it was between Williamstown and the Ailesbury road I first saw the lovelight in your eyes like a pair of candles on the top of the longcar I think he is looking at me yet as if he would pass away in a cloud when he woke up all of a sweat beside me and told me his true opinion to pardon him golden one, but he dreamt about me I had got a lovely face that day and I simply thought I was back again in paradise lost when all the world was June, love, where us two walked hand in hand.

Well, revered majesty, I hereafter swear never in his life did my husband send out the swags with a drop of anything in them but milk as it came from the natural cow and that is all a pure makeup by a snake in the grass and his name is McGrath Brothers against that dear man, my honorary husband. If I was to let out to your revered all that caffler whispered to me was it this time last year as I told Mrs Pat for his accomodation McGrath Brothers I’m saying and his bacon not fit to look at never mind butter which is strictly forbidden by the ten commandments thou shalt not unbare your false witness against thy neighbour’s wife. Aha, McGrath, the lies is out on him like freckles. But I could read him. When I think what that slime had the shame to suggest about my dearly respected husband can I ever forget that? Never! So may the Lord forget McGrath Brothers for all his trespasses against the Honorary Mr Earwicker. For two straws, yes and less, I could let out to someone I know and they would make a corpse of him with the greatest of pleasure by private shooting and not leave enough of McGrath Brothers for the peelers to pick up.

Lies! There never was any girl in my house expecting trouble off my esteemed husband never! Those pair of prostitutes that committed all the nuisance, neither of them were virtuous, pursuant to said declaration of their medical officer out of the Lock whereas I shall bring under revered notice the above Honourable Earwicker to possess from a child a chest seemed to none very hairy with eyebrows of same for it to be able to be seen which I am the most privileged to behold and pursuant to same very affectionate after salesladies’ company. I will not have a wriggling reptile the like of the McGraths to be sprinkling his lies all around where we live if he thinks he is the big noise here about the prostitutes as I simply agree to it. There, you wurrum, you! I know you now. I would hate to have to say what I think about him. I exgust sneak McGrath, purveyors and Italian warehouseman by royal appointment, wanting to live on me and my noblest husband like a dirty pair of parachutes. I wouldn’t dream of a sausage of his to poison a cat and it was in all the Sunday papers about Earwicker’s farfamed fatspitters that they were eaten and appreciated by over fifteen thousands of people in Dublin this weekend. The obnoxious liar! First he was a Scotchman at one time and then he was fired out of Clunne’s where he was only one of your common floorwalkers for giving guff.

Moreover I have heard a certain remark stated about setting his bad example before those military but did space permit it is the best of my belief I could show that it was from the earliest wish of his mind to mitigate the King’s evil and I hereinafter swear by your revered majesty that it was him gave me the price of my new bulletproof dress with the angel sleeves for my looking about twentyone and he said to my presence in these words : Just as there is a God of all, Livvy, my mind is a complete blank.

Well, revered, I tender your heartbroken thanks with regrets for lettering you and will now close, hoping you are in the best. I don’t care a fig for such and erronymous letter about an experience on the part of me as girl, alleged unpleasant, with a handsome prepossessing clerical friend. How about it! I was young and easy then and my shape admired from the first to feast his eyes on with my sweet auburn hair hanging to my innocent thighs and I can do just as I simply please with them because now it’s my own by married women’s impropery act. Never mind poor Father Michael now (the Lord reward him!) but chat me instead. If McGrathBrothers could only handle virgins like he used he would simply jump out of his dirty skin. When next you see M.G. ask him what about his wife, Lily Kinsella who became the wife of Mr Sneak, with the kissing solicitor, at present engaging attention by private detectives being hidden under the grand piano to find out whether nothing beyond kissing goes on. Lily is a lady, liliburlero bullenalaw! And she had a certain medicine brought her in a licensed victualler’s bottle. Shame! Thrice shame! I only wish he would look in through his letterbox one day and he would not say that that was a solicitor’s business. What ho, she bumps! My, he would be so surprised to see his old girl in the hands of a solicitor with Mr Brophy, solicitor, quite affectionate together, kissing and looking into a mirror.

So much for sneakery talk that I was treated not very grand by the thicks off Bully’s Acre. If any of Sully’s thicks was to pull a gun on me he will know better manners the way I’ll sully him. I will herewith lodge my complaint on him to police sergeant Laracy who does be on the corner of Buttermilk Lane with the Rafferty’s nurse and he will take such steps so as to have his head well and lawfully broken in consequence by a Norwegian who has been expelled from christianity.

Dear Majesty, I hope you are quite well. How are ye all? We are always talking of all of ye in bed. I am anxious myself about ye all. I’m feeling the cold more than I used and has to wear flannels to the skin. To speak truth I was rather put out latterly in my health about the thugs got up for McGrath by Sully. I am advised the waxy is at the present in hospital with palpitations from all he drunk and it’s seldom I saw him any other way. That he may never come out but he is a rattling fine bootmaker in his profession. And now whereas I will let all whom it may concern to know that I am perfectly proud of this great civilian, A.L.P. Earwicker, long life to him my once handsome husband who is as gentle as a mushroom to be seen from my improved looks and a greatly attractable when he always sits fornenst me, poor ass, for his wet to resume our polite conversations with Earwicker over lawful business and pleasures when he is after a good few mugs of four ale and shag and he never chained me to a chair or followed me about with a fork on Thanksgiving Day ever since this native island was born and that is why all the police and everybody is all bowing around to me whenever I go out in all directions. Earwicker is a hundred percent human, I tell slysneakers and you, Master McGrath, pale bellies our mild cure, back and streaky, ninepence. I can hereby show whoever likes original bag of one apiece cakes and Adam Findlater’s choice figrolls which was given to me when so fondly remembered on occasion of our last golden wedding by Mr Earwicker. Thank you, beloved, for your beautiful parcel. Always the born gentleman can be plainly seen by all from such behaviour.

Well I simply like their damn cheek for them to go and say about he being as bothered as he possible could. I must beg to contradict in the strongest as indeed I think I may add at this stage in the matter of hearing that he is after his manner and certified of so being quite agreeable deef. I’d give him his answer if he was to dare to say my revered husband was never a true widower in the eyes of the law on consideration of his diseased obsolete inasmuch as the present Mr Earwicker Esquire has often given said deponent full particulars answering to description of the late diseased in dear delightful twilit hours when this truly timehonoured man is a great warrant to play slapsam and population peg and Sally Shortclothes when he can proudly hold his own always whilst we frankly enjoyed more than anything the secret workings of nature (thank heaven for it, I humbly pray!) and was really so delighted of the nice time. Who would stoop to argue with a particularly mean stinker called McGrath Brothers. If I am credibly informed cannonballs is the only true argument with a low sneak. Ping! Ping! Hit him again! Ping! That ought to make him hop it. Ha! Ha! Ha! I must simply laugh. Sneak McGrath has stuffed his last black pudding. 3.p.m. Wednesday. Grand funeral by torchlight of McGrath Brothers. Don’t forget. His funeral will now shortly take place. Remains must be removed before 3 sharp. R.I.P.

Well, revered majesty, I take this liberty of cherishing expectations that the clouds will soon dissipate looking forward to the fine day we had and will now conclude above epistle with best thanks and my thousand blessings for your great kindest and all the trouble to took for self and dearest of husbands who I’ll be true to you unto life’s end as long as he has a barrel full of Bass with love to Majes and all at home in the earnest hopes you will soon enjoy perusal of same most completely.

So help me witness to this day to my hand and mark from your revered Majesty’s most duteous I remain

Your affectionate

Dame Anna Livia Plurabelle Earwicker
(Only lawful wife of A.L.P. Earwicker)

N.B. This simply puts the tin hat on M.G.

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The Cat and the Devil

To Stephen Joyce

Villers sur Mer
10 August 1936

My dear Stevie,

I sent you a little cat filled with sweets a few days ago but perhaps you do not know the story about the cat of Beaugency.

Beaugency is a tiny old town on the bank of Loire, France’s longest river. It is also a very wide river, for France at least. At Beaugency it is so wide that if you wanted to cross it from one bank to the other you would have to take at least one thousand steps. Long ago the people of Beaugency, when they wanted to cross it, had to go in a boat for there was no bridge. And they could not make one for themselves or pay anybody else to make one. So what were they to do?

The devil, who is always reading the newspapers, heard about this sad state of theirs so he dressed himself and came to call on the lord mayor of Beaugency, who was named Monsieur Alfred Byrne. This lord mayor was very fond of dressing himself too. He wore a scarlet robe and always had a great golden chain round his neck even when he was fast asleep in bed with his knees in his mouth.

The devil told the lord mayor what he had read in the newspaper and said he could make a bridge for the people of Beaugency so that they could cross the river as often as they wished. He said he could make a bridge as good as ever was made, and make it in one single night.

The lord mayor asked him how much money he wanted for making such a bridge. No money at all, said the devil, all I ask is that the first person who crosses the bridge shall belong to me. Good, said the lord mayor.

The night came down, all the people in Beaugency went to bed and slept. The morning came. And when they put their heads out of their windows they cried: O Loire, what a fine bridge! For they saw a fine strong stone bridge thrown across the wide river.

All the people ran down to the head of the bridge and looked across it. There was the devil, standing at the other side of the bridge, waiting for the first person who should cross it. But nobody dared to cross it for fear of the devil. Then there was the sound of bugles—that was a sign for the people to be silent—and the lord mayor M. Alfred Byrne appeared in his great scarlet robe and wearing his heavy golden chain round his neck. He had a bucket of water in one hand and under his arm—the other arm—he carried a cat.

The devil stopped dancing when he saw him from the other side of the bridge and put up his long spyglass. All the people whispered to one another and the cat looked up at the lord mayor because in the town of Beaugency it was allowed that a cat should look at a lord mayor. When he was tired of looking at the lord mayor (because even a cat gets tired of looking at a lord mayor) he began to play with the lord mayor’s heavy golden chain.

When the lord mayor came to the head of the bridge every man held his breath and every woman held her tongue. The lord mayor put the cat down on the bridge and, quick as a thought, splash! he emptied the whole bucket of water over it.

The cat who was now between the devil and the bucket of water made up his mind quite as quickly and ran with his ears back across the bridge and into the devil’s arms.

The devil was as angry as the devil himself. Messieurs les Balgentiens, he shouted across the bridge, vous n’ etes pas de belles gens du tout! Vous n’ ete que des chats!*

And he said to the cat: Viens ici, mon petit chat! Tu as peur, mon petit chou-chat! Viens ici, le diable t’ emporte! On va se chauffer tous les deuex. And off he went with the cat.

And since that time the people of that town are called le chats de Beaugency.

But the bridge is there still and there are boys walking and riding and playing upon it.

I hope you will like this story.

Nonno

P.S. The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well, though some who have heard him, say that he has a strong Dublin accent.

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Giacomo Joyce

[The text follows Poems and Shorter Writings, Faber & Faber, London 1991, Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson, eds.]

Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-glasses. Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.

Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation: a young person of quality.

I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech: Swedenborg, the pseudo-Areopagite, Miguel de Molinos, Joachim Abbas. The wave is spent. Her classmate, retwisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese Italian: Che coltura! The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.

High heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs. Wintry air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail, rude iron sconces over the windings of the winding turret stairs. Tapping clacking heels, a high and hollow noise. There is one below would speak with your ladyship.

She never blows her nose. A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.

Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of intermarriage and ripened in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her race.

A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. The wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.

A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.

Padua far beyond the sea. The silent middle age, night, darkness of history sleep in the Piazza delle Erde [Erbe] under the moon. The city sleeps. Under the arches in the dark streets near the river the whores’ eyes spy out for fornicators. Cinque servizi per cinque franchi. A dark wave of verse, again and again and again.

Mine eyes fail in darkness, mine eyes fail,

Mine eyes fail in darkness, love.

Again. No more. Dark love, dark longing. No more. Darkness.

Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder ....... Hillo! Ostler! Hilloho!

Papa and the girls sliding downhill, astride of a toboggan: the Grand Turk and his harem. Tightly capped and jacketted, boots laced in deft crisscross over the flesh-warmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake:

And when she next doth ride abroad

May I be there to see!

I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light. Nay, nay, be not afraid!

Mio padre: she does the simplest acts with distinction. Unde derivatur? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammirazione per il suo maestro inglese. The old man’s face, handsome, flushed, with strongly Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns towards me as we walk down the hill together. O! Perfectly said: courtesy, benevolence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?

Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded molluscs

Moving mists on the hill as I look upward from night and mud. Hanging mists over the damp trees. A light in the upper room. She is dressing to go to the play. There are ghosts in the mirror ..... Candles! Candles!

A gentle creature. At midnight, after music, all the way up the via San Michele, these words were spoken softly. Easy now, Jamesy! Did you never walk the streets of Dublin at night sobbing another name?

Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of their holy field. Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence without hope ..... Pimply Meissel brought me here. He is beyond those trees standing with covered head at the grave of his suicide wife, wondering how the woman who slept in his bed has come to this end ..... The tomb of her people and hers: black stone, silence without hope: and all is ready. Do not die!

She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow .... Fingers, cold and calm and moving .... A touch, a touch.

Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world! ....... Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!

Great bows on her slim bronze shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.

The lady goes apace, apace, apace ..... Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Belluouro rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand ..... Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!

The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jewelled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls, its wheel-spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father and his son sit in the carriage. They have owls’ eyes and owls’ wisdom. Owlish wisdom stares from their eyes brooding upon the lore of their Summa contra Gentiles.

She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is.

She listens: virgin most prudent.

A skirt caught back by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking. Si pol?

I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland’s languid song. Loth to depart: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now. Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James. Here are wines all ambered, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths, the pox-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again.

In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I cross the Pont Saint Michel the steelblue waking waters chill my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men have lived since the stone age ..... Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: quia frigus erat. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea. Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulatione sua mane consurgent ad me. Venite et revertamur ad Dominum .... She stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!

I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste: Hamlet, quoth I, who is most courteous to gentle and simple is rude only to Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist, he can see in the parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of nature to produce her image ........... Marked you that?

She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls. Slowly uncoiling, falling hair! She does not know and walks before me, simple and proud. So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice, to her death:

....... Tie

My girdle for me and bind up this hair

In any simple knot.

The housemaid tells me that they had to take her away at once to the hospital, poveretta, that she suffered so much, so much, poveretta, that it is very grave ...... I walk away from her empty house. I feel that I am about to cry. Ah, no! It will not be like that, in a moment, without a word, without a look. No, no! Surely hell’s luck will not fail me!

Operated. The surgeon’s knife has probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of its passage on her belly. I see her full dark suffering eyes, beautiful as the eyes of an antelope. O cruel wound! Libidinous God!

Once more in her chair by the window, happy words on her tongue, happy laughter. A bird twittering after storm, happy that its little foolish life has fluttered out of reach of the clutching fingers of an epileptic lord and giver of life, twittering happily, twittering and chirping happily.

She says that, had The Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read. O you would, would you? A lady of letters.

She stands black-robed at the telephone. Little timid laughs, little cries, timid runs of speech suddenly broken .... Parlerò colla mamma .... Come! chook, chook! come! The black pullet is frightened: little runs suddenly broken, little timid cries: it is crying for its mamma, the portly hen.

Loggione. The sodden walls ooze a steamy damp. A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms: sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men ...... All night I have watched her, all night I shall see her: braided and pinnacled hair and olive oval face and calm soft eyes. A green fillet upon her hair and about her body a green-broidered gown: the hue of the illusion of the vegetable glass of nature and of lush grass, the hair of graves.

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame shall glow for ever. Quiet and cold and pure fingers. Have they never erred?

Her body has no smell: an odourless flower.

On the stairs. A cold frail hand: shyness, silence: dark langour-flooded eyes: weariness.

Whirling wreaths of grey vapour upon the heath. Her face, how grey and grave! Dark matted hair. Her lips press softly, her sighing breath comes through. Kissed.

My voice, dying in the echoes of its words, dies like the wisdom-wearied voice of the Eternal calling on Abraham through echoing hills. She leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed ...... Take her now who will! ....

As I come out of Ralli’s house I come upon her suddenly as we both are giving alms to a blind beggar. She answers my sudden greeting by turning and averting her black basilisk eyes. E col suo vedere attosca l’uomo quando lo vede. I Thank you for the word, messer Brunetto.

They spread under my feet carpets for the son of man. They await my passing. She stands in the yellow shadow of the hall, a plaid cloak shielding from chills her sinking shoulders: and as I halt in wonder and look about me she greets me wintrily and passes up the staircase darting at me for an instant out of her sluggish sidelong eyes a jet of liquorish venom.

A soft crumpled peagreen cover drapes the lounge. A narrow Parisian room. The hairdresser lay here but now. I kissed her stocking and the hem of her rustblack dusty skirt. It is the other. She. Gogarty came yesterday to be introduced. Ulysses is the reason. Symbol of the intellectual conscience .... Ireland then? And the husband? Pacing the corridor in list shoes or playing chess against himself. Why are we left here? The hairdresser lay here but now, clutching my head between her knobby knees .... Intellectual symbol of my race. Listen! The plunging gloom has fallen. Listen!

—I am not convinced that such activities of the mind or body can be called unhealthy—

She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars. Voice of wisdom. Say on! O, say again, making me wise! This voice I never heard.

She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.

—Jim, love!—

Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!

—Nora!—

Jan Pieters Sweelink. The quaint name of the old Dutch musician makes all beauty seem quaint and far. I hear his variations for the clavichord on an old air: Youth has an end. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard. Youth has an end: the end is here. It will never be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?

“Why?”

“Because otherwise I could not see you.”

Sliding—space—ages—foliage of stars—and waning heaven—stillness—and stillness deeper—stillness of annihilation—and her voice.

Non hunc sed Barabbam!

Unreadiness. A bare apartment. Torbid [?Torpid] daylight. A long black piano: coffin of music. Poised on its edge a woman’s hat, red-flowered, and umbrella, furled. Her arms: a casque, gules, and blunt spear on a field, sable.

Envoy: Love me, love my umbrella.

(1907)

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Stephen Hero

written 1904-06

c o n t e n t s — s t e p h e n

[Start of text]

XVI      XVII      XVIII

XIX      XX      XXI

XXII      XXIII      XXIV

XXV      XXVI      [Add. pages]

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[The text follows the New Directions edition, Norfolk 1963, edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer, incorporating the Additional Manuscript Pages in the Yale University Library and the Cornell University Library, edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon.]

[Start of text]

anyone spoke to him mingled a too polite disbelief with its expectancy. His [stiff] coarse brownish hair was combed high off his forehead but there was little order in its arrangement. [The face] A girl might or might not have called him handsome: the face was regular in feature and its pose was almost softened into [positive distinct] beauty by a small feminine mouth. In [the] a general survey of the face the eyes were not prominent: they were small light blue eyes which checked advances. They were quite fresh and fearless but in spite of this the face was to a certain extent the face of a debauchee.

The president of the college was a sequestrated person who took the chair at reunions and inaugural meetings of societies. His visible lieutenants were a dean and a bursar. The bursar, Stephen thought, fitted his title: a heavy, florid man with a black-grey cap of hair. He performed his duties with great unction and was often to be seen looming in the hall watching the coming and going of the students. He insisted on punctuality: a minute or so late once or twice—he would not mind that so much; he would clap his hands and make some cheery reproof. But what made him severe was a few minutes lost every day: it disturbed the proper working of the classes. Stephen was nearly always more than a quarter of an hour late and [so] when he arrived the bursar had usually gone back to his office. One morning, however, he arrived at the school earlier than usual. Walking up the stone steps before him was a fat [young] student, a very hard-working, timorous young man with a bread-and-jam complexion. The bursar was standing in the hall with his arms folded across [the] his chest and when he caught sight of the fat young man he looked significantly at the clock. It was eight minutes past eleven.

—Now then, Moloney, you know this won’t do. Eight minutes late! Disturbing your class like that—we can’t have that, you know. Must be in sharp for lecture every morning in future.

The jam overspread the bread in Moloney’s face as he stumbled over some excuses about a clock being wrong and then scurried upstairs to his class. Stephen delayed a little [while] time hanging up his overcoat while the large priest eyed him solemnly. Then he turned his head quietly towards the bursar and said

—Fine morning, sir.

The bursar at once clapped his hands and rubbed them together and clapped them together again. The beauty of the morning and the appositeness of the remark both struck him at the same time and he answered cheerily:

—Beautiful! Fine bracing morning now! and he fell to rubbing his hands again.

One morning [he] Stephen arrived three quarters of an hour late and he thought it his decenter plan to wait till the French lecture should begin. As he was leaning over the banisters, waiting for the twelve o’clock bell to ring a young man began to ascend the winding-stairs slowly. At a few steps from the landing he halted and turned a square rustic face towards Stephen.

—Is this the way to the Matriculation class, if you please, he asked in a brogue accenting the first syllable of Matriculation.

Stephen directed him and the two young men began to talk. The new student was named Madden and came from the county of Limerick. His manner without being exactly diffident was a little scared and he seemed grateful for Stephen’s attentions. After the French lecture the two walked across the green together and Stephen brought the newcomer into the National Library. Madden took off his hat at the turnstile and as he leaned on the counter to fill up the docket for his book Stephen remarked the peasant strength of his jaws.

The dean of the college was professor of English, Father Butt. He was reputed the most able man in the college: he was a philosopher and a scholar. He had read a series of papers at a total abstinence club to prove that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic: he had also written against another Jesuit father who had very late in life been converted to the Baconian theory of the authorship of the plays. Father Butt had always his hands full of papers and his soutane very soiled with chalk. He was an elderly greyhound of a man and his vocal ligaments, like his garb, seemed to be coated with chalk. He had a plausible manner with everyone and was particularly——

[Two pages missing]

of verse are the first conditions which the words must submit to, the rhythm is the esthetic result of the senses, values and relations of the words thus conditioned. The beauty of verse consisted as much in the concealment as in the revelation of construction but it certainly could not proceed from only one of these. For this reason he found Father Butt’s reading of verse and a schoolgirl’s accurate reading of verse intolerable. Verse to be read according to its rhythm should be read according to the stresses; that is, neither strictly according to the feet nor yet with complete disregard of them. All this theory he set himself to explain to Maurice and Maurice, when he had understood the meanings of the terms and had put these meanings carefully together, agreed that Stephen’s theory was the right one. There was only one possible way of rendering the first quatrain of Byron’s poem:

My days are in the yellow leaf

The flowers and fruits of love are gone

The worm, the canker and the grief

Are mine alone.

The two brothers tried this theory on all the verse they could remember and it yielded wonderful results. Soon Stephen began to explore the language for himself and to choose, and thereby rescue once for all, the words and phrases most amenable to his theory. He became a poet with malice aforethought.

He was at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words. He read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotised by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly. And pace by pace as this indignity of life forced itself upon him he became enamoured of an idealising, a more veritably human tradition. The phenomenon seemed to him a grave one and he began to see that people had leagued themselves together in a conspiracy of ignobility and that Destiny had scornfully reduced her prices for them. He desired no such reduction for himself and preferred to serve her on the ancient terms.

There was a special class for English composition and it was in this class that Stephen first made his name. The English essay was for him the one serious work of the week. His essay was usually very long and the professor, who was a leader-writer on the Freeman’s Journal, always kept it for the last. Stephen’s style of writing, [that] though it was over affectionate towards the antique and even the obsolete and too easily rhetorical, was remarkable for a certain crude originality of expression. He gave himself no great trouble to sustain the boldnesses which were expressed or implied in his essays. He threw them out as sudden defence-works while he was busy constructing the enigma of a manner. For the youth had been apprised of another crisis and he wished to make ready for the shock of it. On account of such manoeuvres he came to be regarded as a very unequilibrated [youth] young man who took more interest than young men usually take in theories which might be permitted as pastimes. Father Butt, to whom the emergence of these unusual qualities had been duly reported, spoke one day to Stephen with the purpose of ‘sounding’ him. Father Butt expressed a great admiration for Stephen’s essays all of which, he said, the professor of English composition had shown him. He encouraged the youth and suggested that in a short time perhaps he might contribute something to one of the Dublin papers or magazines. Stephen found this encouragement kindly meant but mistaken and he launched forth into a copious explanation of his theories. Father Butt listened and, even more readily than [Stephen] Maurice had done, agreed with them all. Stephen laid down his doctrine very positively and insisted on the importance of what he called the literary tradition. Words, he said, have a certain value in the literary tradition and a certain value in the market-place—a debased value. Words are simply receptacles for human thought: in the literary tradition they receive more valuable thoughts than they receive in the market-place. Father Butt listened to all this, rubbing his chalky hand often over his chin and nodding his head and said that Stephen evidently understood the importance of tradition. Stephen quoted a phrase from Newman to illustrate his theory.

—In that sentence of Newman’s, he said, the word is used according to the literary tradition: it has there its full value. In ordinary use, that is, in the market-place, it has a different value altogether, a debased value. “I hope I’m not detaining you.”

—Not at all! not at all!

—No, no ...

—Yes, yes, Mr Daedalus, I see ... I quite see your point ... detain ...

The very morning after this Father Butt returned Stephen’s monologue in kind. It was a raw nipping morning and when Stephen, who had arrived too late for the Latin lecture, strolled into the Physics Theatre he discovered Father Butt kneeling on the hearthstone engaged in lighting a small fire in the huge grate. He was making neat wisps of paper and carefully disposing them among the coals and sticks. All the while he kept up a little patter explaining his operations and at a crisis he produced from the most remote pockets of his chalkey soutane three dirty candle-butts. These he thrust in different openings and then looked up at Stephen with an air of triumph. He set a match to a few projecting pieces of paper and in a few minutes the coals had caught.

—There is an art, Mr Daedalus, in lighting a fire.

—So I see, sir. A very useful art.

—That’s it: a useful art. We have the useful arts and we have the liberal arts.

Father Butt after this statement got up from the hearthstone and went away about some other business leaving Stephen to watch the kindling fire and Stephen brooded upon the fast melting candle-butts and on the reproach of the priest’s manner till it was time for the Physics lecture to begin.

The problem could not be solved out of hand but the artistic part of it at least presented no difficulties. In reading through ‘Twelfth Night’ for the class Father Butt skipped the two songs of the clown without a word and when Stephen, determined on forcing them on his attention, asked very gravely whether they were to be learned by heart or not Father Butt said it was improbable such a question would be on the paper:

—The clown sings these songs for the duke. It was a custom at that time for noblemen to have clowns to sing to them ... for amusement.

He took ‘Othello’ more seriously and made the class take a note of the moral of the play: an object-lesson in the passion of jealousy. Shakespeare, he said, had sounded the depths of human nature: his plays show us men and women under the influence of various passions and they show us the moral result of these passions. We see the conflict of these human passions and our own passions are purified by the spectacle. The dramas of Shakespeare have a distinct moral force and ‘Othello’ is one of the greatest of tragedies. Stephen trained himself to hear all this out without moving hand or foot but at the same time he was amused to learn that the president had refused to allow two of the boarders to go to a performance of ‘Othello’ at the Gaiety Theatre on the ground that there were many coarse expressions in the play.

The monster in Stephen had lately taken to misbehaving himself and on the least provocation was ready for bloodshed. Almost every incident of the day was a goad for him and the intellect had great trouble keeping him within bounds. But the episode of religious fervour which was fast becoming a memory had resulted in a certain outward self-control which was now found to be very useful. Besides this Stephen was quick enough to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance for him. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem impolitely curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic. Already while that fever-fit of holiness lay upon him he had encountered but out of charity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces. These shocks had driven him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards and the most that devotional exercises could do for him was to soothe him. This soothing he badly needed for he suffered greatly from contact with his new environment. He hardly spoke to his colleagues and performed the business of the class without remark or interest. Every morning he rose and came down to breakfast. After breakfast he took the tram for town, settling himself on the front seat outside with his face to the wind. He got down off the tram at Amiens St Station instead of going on to the Pillar because he wished to partake in the morning life of the city. This morning walk was pleasant for him and there was no face that passed him on its way to its commercial prison but he strove to pierce to the motive centre of its ugliness. It was always with a feeling of displeasure that he entered the Green and saw on the far side the gloomy building of the College.

As he walked thus through the ways of the city he had his ears and eyes ever prompt to receive impressions. It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure-house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables. He was determined to fight with every energy of soul and body against any possible consignment to what he now regarded as the hell of hells—the region, otherwise expressed, wherein everything is found to be obvious—and the saint who formerly was chary of speech in obedience to a commandment of silence could just be recognised in the artist who schooled himself to silence lest words should return him his discourtesy. Phrases came to him asking to have themselves explained. He said to himself: I must wait for the Eucharist to come to me: and then he set about translating the phrase into common sense. He spent days and nights hammering noisily as he built a house of silence for himself wherein he might await his Eucharist, days and nights gathering the first fruits and every peace-offering and heaping them upon his altar whereon he prayed clamorously the burning token of satisfaction might descend. In class, in the hushed library, in the company of other students he would suddenly hear a command to begone, to be alone, a voice agitating the very tympanum of his ear, a flame leaping into divine cerebral life. He would obey the command and wander up and down the streets alone, the fervour of his hope sustained by ejaculations until he felt sure that it was useless to wander any more: and then he would return home with a deliberate, unflagging step piecing together meaningless words and phrases with deliberate unflagging seriousness.

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XVI

Their Eminences of the Holy College are hardly more scrupulous solitaries during the ballot for Christ’s vicar than was Stephen at this time. He wrote a great deal of verse and, in default of any better contrivance, his verse allowed him to combine the offices of penitent and confessor. He sought in his verses to fix the most elusive of his moods and he put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter. He read Blake and Rimbaud on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions. To none of his former fervours had he given himself with such a whole heart as to this fervour; the monk now seemed to him no more than half the artist. He persuaded himself that it is necessary for an artist to labour incessantly at his art if he wishes to express completely even the simplest conception and he believed that every moment of inspiration must be paid for in advance. He was not convinced of the truth of the saying [Poeta nascitur, non fit] “The poet is born, not made” but he was quite sure of the truth of this at least: [Poema fit, non nascitur] “The poem is made not born.” The burgher notion of the poet Byron in undress pouring out verses [like] just as a city fountain pours out water seemed to him characteristic of most popular judgments on esthetic matters and he combated the notion at its root by saying solemnly to Maurice—Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy.

Stephen did not attach himself to art in any spirit of youthful dillettantism but strove to pierce to the significant heart of everything. He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and caught glimpses of emergent art as one might have a vision of the pleisiosauros emerging from his ocean of slime. He seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar, to see the rude scrawls and the portable gods of men whose legacy Leonardo and Michelangelo inherit. And over all this chaos of history and legend, of fact and supposition, he strove to draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram. The treatises which were recommended to him he found valueless and trifling; the Laocoon of Lessing irritated him. He wondered how the world could accept as valuable contributions such [fantas] fanciful generalisations. What finer certitude could be attained by the artist if he believed that ancient art was plastic and that modern art was pictorial—ancient art in this context meaning art between the Balkans and the Morea and modern art meaning art anywhere between the Caucasus and the Atlantic except in the sacrosanct region. A great contempt devoured him for the critics who considered “Greek” and “classical” interchangeable terms and so full was he of intemperate anger that [all week Saturday] when Father Butt gave ‘Othello’ as the subject for the essay of the week Stephen lodged on the following Monday a profuse, downright protest against the ‘masterpiece.’ The young men in the class laughed and Stephen, as he looked contemptuously at the laughing faces, thought of a self-submersive reptile.

No-one would listen to his theories: no-one was interested in art. The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice and they said in effect, “If we must have art are there not enough subjects in Holy Writ?”—for an artist with them was a man who painted pictures. It was a bad sign for a young man to show interest in anything but his examinations or his prospective ‘job.’ It was all very well to be able to talk about it but really art was all ‘rot’: besides it was probably immoral; they knew (or, at least, they had heard) about studios. They didn’t want that kind of thing in their country. Talk about beauty, talk about rhythms, talk about esthetic—they knew what all the fine talk covered. One day a big countrified student came over to Stephen and asked:

—Tell us, aren’t you an artist?

Stephen gazed at the idea-proof young man, without answering.

—Because if you are why don’t you wear your hair long?

A few bystanders laughed at this and Stephen wondered for which of the learned professions the young man’s father designed him.

In spite of his surroundings Stephen continued his labours of research and all the more ardently since he imagined they had been put under ban. It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he conceived converging to him the deeds and thoughts of his microcosm. Is the mind of youth medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field-sports (or their equivalent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure and Anglo-Saxon educators favour rather a system of hardy brutality. But for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic warfare was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage. Behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered: Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to my highlands after their game. There was his ground and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.

Indeed he felt the morning in his blood: he was aware of some movement already proceeding out in Europe. Of this last phrase he was fond for it seemed to him to unroll the measurable world before the feet of the islanders. Nothing could persuade him that the world was such as Father Butt’s students conceived it. He had no need for the cautions which were named indispensable, no reverence for the proprieties which were called the bases of life. He was an enigmatic figure in the midst of his shivering society where he enjoyed a reputation. His comrades hardly knew how far to venture with him and professors pretended to think his seriousness a sufficient warrant against any practical disobedience. On his side chastity, having been found a great inconvenience, had been quietly abandoned and the youth amused himself in the company of certain of his fellow-students among whom (as the fame went) wild living was not unknown. The Rector of Belvedere had a brother who was at this time a student in the college and one night in the gallery of the Gaiety (for Stephen had become a constant ‘god’) another Belvedere boy, who was also a student in the college, bore scandalous witness into Stephen’s ear.

—I say, Daedalus ...

—Well?

—I wonder what MacNally would say if he met his brother—you know the fellow in the college?

—Yes ...

—I saw him in Stephen’s Green the other day with a tart. I was just thinking if MacNally saw him ...

The informant paused: and then, afraid of over-implication and with an air of a connoisseur, he added seriously:

—Of course she was ... all right.

Every evening after tea Stephen left his house and set out for the city, Maurice at his side. The elder smoked cigarettes and the younger ate lemon drops and, aided by these animal comforts, they beguiled the long journey with philosophic discourse. Maurice was a very attentive person and one evening he told Stephen that he was keeping a diary of their conversations. Stephen asked to see the diary but Maurice said it would be time enough for that at the end of the first year. Neither of the youths had the least suspicion of themselves; they both looked upon life with frank curious eyes (Maurice naturally serving himself with Stephen’s vision when his own was deficient) and they both felt that it was possible to arrive at a sane understanding of so-called mysteries if one only had patience enough. On their way in every evening the heights of argument were traversed and the younger boy aided the elder bravely in the building of an entire science of esthetic. They spoke to each other very decisively and Stephen found Maurice very useful for raising objections. When they came to the gate of the Library they used to stand to finish some branch of their subject and often the discussion was so protracted that Stephen would decide that it was too late to go in to read and so they would set their faces for Clontarf and return in the same manner. Stephen, after certain hesitations, showed Maurice the first-fruits of his verse and Maurice asked who the woman was. Stephen looked a little vaguely before him before answering and in the end had to answer that he didn’t know who she was.

To this unknown verses were now regularly inscribed and it seemed that the evil dream of love which Stephen chose to commemorate in these verses lay veritably upon the world now in a season of damp violet mist. He had abandoned his Madonna, he had forsaken his word and he had withdrawn sternly from his little world and surely it was not wonderful that his solitude should propel him to frenetic outbursts of a young man’s passion and to outbursts of loneliness? This quality of the mind which so reveals itself is called (when incorrigible) a decadence but if we are to take a general view of [life] the world we cannot but see a process to life through corruption. There were moments for him, however, when such a process would have seemed intolerable, life on any common terms an intolerable offence, and at such moments he prayed for nothing and lamented for nothing but he felt with a sweet sinking of consciousness that if the end came to him it was in the arms of the unknown that it would come to him:

The dawn awakes with tremulous alarms,

How grey, how cold, how bare!

O, hold me still white arms, encircling arms!

And hide me, heavy hair!

Life is a dream, a dream. The hour is done

And antiphon is said.

We go from the light and falsehood of the sun

To bleak wastes of the dead.

Little by little Stephen became more irregular in his attendances at the college. He would leave his house every morning at the usual hour and come into the city on the tram. But always at Amiens St Station he would get down and walk and as often as not he would decide to follow some trivial indication of city life instead of entering the oppressive life of the College. He often walked thus for seven or eight hours at a stretch without feeling in the least fatigued. The damp Dublin winter seemed to harmonise with his inward sense of unreadiness and he did not follow the least of feminine provocations through tortuous, unexpected ways any more zealously than he followed through ways even less satisfying the nimble movements of the elusive one. What was that One: arms of love that had not love’s malignity, laughter running upon the mountains of the morning, an hour wherein might be encountered the incommunicable? And if the heart but trembled an instant at some approach to that he would cry, youthfully, passionately “It is so! It is so! Life is such as I conceive it.” He spurned from before him the stale maxims of the Jesuits and he swore an oath that [never] they should never establish over him an ascendancy. He spurned from before him a world of the higher culture in which there was neither scholarship nor art nor dignity of manners—a world of trivial intrigues and trivial triumphs. Above all he spurned from before him the company of [the] decrepit youth—and he swore an oath that never would they establish with him a compact of fraud. Fine words! fine oaths! crying bravely and passionately even in the teeth of circumstances. For not unfrequently in the pauses of rapture Dublin would lay a sudden hand upon his shoulder, and the chill of the summons would strike to his heart. One day he passed on his homeward journey through Fairview. At the fork of the roads before the swampy beach a big dog was recumbent. From time to time he lifted his muzzle in the vapourous air, uttering a prolonged sorrowful howl. People had gathered on the footpaths to hear him. [and] Stephen made one of them till he felt the first drops of rain, and then he continued his way in silence under the dull surveillance of heaven, hearing from time to time behind him the strange lamentation.

It was natural that the more the youth sought solitude for himself the more his society sought to prevent his purpose. Though he was still in his first year he was considered a personality and there were even many who thought that though his theories were a trifle ardent they were not without meaning. Stephen came seldom to lectures, prepared nothing and absented himself from term examinations and not merely was no remark passed on these extravagances but it was supposed probable that he represented really the artistic type and that he was, after the fashion of that little known tribe, educating himself. It must not be supposed that the popular University of Ireland lacked an intelligent centre. Outside the compact body of national revivalists there were here and there students who had certain ideas of their own and were more or less tolerated by their fellows. For instance there was a serious young feminist named McCann—a blunt brisk figure, wearing a Cavalier beard and shooting-suit, and a steadfast reader of the Review of Reviews. The students of the college did not understand what manner of ideas he favoured and they considered that they rewarded his originality sufficiently by calling him ‘Knickerbockers.’ There was also the College orator—a most amenable young man who spoke at all meetings. Cranly too was a personality and Madden had soon been recognised as the spokesman of the patriotic party. Stephen may be said to have occupied the position of notable-extraordinary: very few had ever heard of the writers he was reported to read and those who had knew them to be mad fellows. At the same time as Stephen’s manner was so unbending to all it was supposed that he had preserved his sanity entire and safely braved temptations. People began to defer to him, to invite him to their houses and to present serious faces to him. His were simply theories and, as he had as yet committed no breach of the law, he was respectfully invited to read a paper before the Literary and Historical Society of the College. The date was fixed for the end of March and the title of the paper was announced as ‘Drama and Life.’ Many risked the peril of rebuff to engage the young eccentric in talk but Stephen preserved a disdainful silence. One night as he was returning from a party a reporter of one of the Dublin papers, who had been introduced that evening to the prodigy, approached him and after a few exchanges said to him tentatively:

—I was reading of that writer ... what’s this you call him ... Maeterlinck the other day ... you know?

—Yes ...

—I was reading, The Intruder I think was the name of it ... Very ... curious play ...

Stephen had no wish to talk to the man about Maeterlinck and on the other hand he did not like to offend by the silence which the remark and the tone and the intention all seemed to deserve so he cast about quickly in his mind for some non-committal banality with which to pay the debt. At last he said:

—It would be hard to put it on the stage.

The journalist was quite satisfied at this exchange as if it was just this impression and no other which Maeterlinck’s play had produced upon him. He assented with conviction:

—O yes! ... next to impossible ...

Allusions of such a kind to what he held so dear at heart wounded Stephen deeply. It must be said simply and at once that at this time Stephen suffered the most enduring influence of his life. The spectacle of the world which his intelligence presented to him with every sordid and deceptive detail set side by side with the spectacle of the world which the monster in him, now grown to a reasonably heroic stage, presented also had often filled him with such sudden despair as could be assuaged only by melancholy versing. He had all but decided to consider the two worlds as aliens one to another—however disguised or expressed the most utter of pessimisms—when he encountered through the medium of hardly procured translations the spirit of Henrik Ibsen. He understood that spirit instantaneously. Some years before this same instantaneous understanding had occurred when he had read the very puzzled, apologetic account which Rousseau’s English biographer had given of the young philosopher’s stealing his mistress’s spoons and allowing a servant-girl to be accused of the theft at the very moment when he was beginning his struggle for Truth and Liberty. Just as then with the [perverted] perverse philosopher so now: Ibsen had no need of apologist or critic: the minds of the old Norse poet and of the perturbed young Celt met in a moment of radiant simultaneity. Stephen was captivated first by the evident excellence of the art: he was not long before he began to affirm, out of a sufficiently scanty knowledge of the tract, of course, that Ibsen was the first among the dramatists of the world. In translations of the Hindu or Greek or Chinese theatres he found only anticipations of or attempts and in the French classical, and the English romantic, theatres anticipations less distinct and attempts less successful. But it was not only this excellence which captivated him: it was not that which he greeted gladly with an entire joyful spiritual salutation. It was the very spirit of Ibsen himself that was discerned moving behind the impersonal manner of the artist: [Ibsen with his profound self-approval, Ibsen with his haughty, disillusioned courage, Ibsen with his minute and wilful energy.] a mind of sincere and boylike bravery, of disillusioned pride, of minute and wilful energy. Let the world solve itself in whatsoever fashion it pleased, let its putative Maker justify Himself by whatsoever processes seemed good to Him, one could scarcely advance the dignity of the human attitude a step beyond this answer. Here and not in Shakespeare or Goethe was the successor to the first poet of the Europeans, here, as only to such purpose in Dante, a human personality had been found united with an artistic manner which was itself almost a natural phenomenon: and the spirit of the time united one more readily with the Norwegian than with the Florentine.

The young men of the college had not the least idea who Ibsen was but from what they could gather here and there they surmised that he must be one of the atheistic writers whom the papal secretary puts on the Index. It was a novelty to hear anyone mention such a name in their college but as the professors gave no lead in condemnation they concluded that they had better wait. Meanwhile they were somewhat impressed: many now began to say that though Ibsen was immoral he was a great writer and one of the professors was heard to say that when he was in Berlin last summer on his holidays there had been a great deal of talk about some play of Ibsen’s which was being performed at one of the theatres. Stephen had begun to study Danish instead of preparing his course for the examination and this fact was magnified into a report that he was a competent Danish scholar. That youth was astute enough to profit by rumours which he took no trouble to contradict. He smiled to think that these people in their hearts feared him as an infidel and he marvelled at the quality of their supposed beliefs. Father Butt talked to him a great deal and Stephen was nothing loth to make himself the herald of a new order. He never spoke with heat and he argued always as if he did not greatly care which way the argument went, at the same time never losing a point. The Jesuits and their flocks may have said to themselves: the youthful seeming-independent we know, and the appeasable patriot we know, but what are you? They played up to him very well, considering their disadvantages, and Stephen could not understand why they took the trouble to humour him.

—Yes, yes, said Father Butt one day after one of these scenes, I see ... I quite see your point ... It would apply of course to the dramas of Turgénieff?

Stephen had read and admired certain translations of Turgénieff’s novels and stories and he asked therefore with a genuine note in his voice:

—Do you mean his novels?

—Novels, yes, said Father Butt swiftly, ... his novels, to be sure ... but of course they are dramas ... are they not, Mr Daedalus?

Very often Stephen used to visit at a house in Donnybrook the atmosphere of which was compact of liberal patriotism and orthodox study. There were several marriageable daughters in the family and whenever any promise [was] on the part of a young student was signalled he was sure to receive an invitation to this house. The young feminist McCann was a constant visitor there and Madden used to visit occasionally. The father of the family was an elderly man who played chess on week evenings with his grown-up sons and assisted on Sunday evenings at a round of games and music. The music was supplied by Stephen. There was an old piano in the room and when the room was tired of games one of the daughters used to come over smilingly to Stephen and ask him to sing them some of his beautiful songs. The keys of the piano were worn away and sometimes the notes would not sound but the tone was soft and mellow and Stephen used to sit down and sing his beautiful songs to the polite, tired, unmusical audience. The songs, for him at least, were really beautiful—the old country songs of England and the elegant songs of the Elizabethans. The ‘moral’ of these songs was sometimes a little dubious and Stephen’s ear used to catch at once the note of qualification in the applause that followed them. The studious daughters found these songs very quaint but Mr Daniel said that Stephen should sing operatic music if he wanted to have his voice heard properly. In spite of the entire absence of sympathy between this circle and himself Stephen was very much at ease in it and he was, as they bade him be, very much ‘at home’ as he sat on the sofa counting the lumps of horsehair with the ends of his fingers, and listening to the conversation. The young men and the daughters amused themselves tolerably under Mr Daniel’s eye but whenever there was an approach to artistic matters during the process of their games Stephen with egoistic humour imagined his presence acting as a propriety. He could see seriousness developing on the shrewd features of a young man who had to put a certain question to one of the daughters:

—I suppose it’s my turn now ... Well ... let me see ... (and here he became as serious as a young man, who has been laughing very much for a full five minutes, can become) ... Who is your favourite poet, Annie?

Annie thought for a few moments: there was a pause. Annie and the young man were ‘doing’ the same course.

—... German?

—... Yes.

Annie thought for another few moments while the table waited to be edified.

—I think ... Goethe.

McCann used very often to organise charades in which he used to take the most violent parts. The charades were very farcical and everyone took his part with goodwill, Stephen as well as the others. Stephen would [play often] play his quiet deliberative manner off against McCann’s uproarious acting and for this reason the two were often ‘picked’ together. These charades wearied Stephen a little but McCann was very much given to organising them as he was of the opinion that amusement is necessary for the bodily welfare of mankind. The young feminist’s Northern accent always excited laughter and his face, adorned with its Cavalier beard, was certainly capable of brazen grimaces. In the college McCann [was] had never been assimilated on account of his ‘ideas’ but here he partook of the inner life of the family. In this house it was the custom to call a young visitor by his Christian name a little too soon and though Stephen was spared the compliment, McCann was never spoken of as anything but ‘Phil.’ Stephen used to call him ‘Bonny Dundee’ nonsensically associating [the] his brisk name and his brisk manners with the sound of the line:

Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can.

Whenever the evening assumed the character of a serious affair Mr Daniel would be asked to recite something for the company. Mr Daniel had formerly been the manager of a theatre in Wexford and he had often spoken at public meetings through the country. He recited national pieces in a stern declamatory fashion amid attentive silence. The daughters also recited. During these recitations Stephen’s eye never moved from the picture of the Sacred Heart which hung right above the head of the reciter’s head. The Miss Daniels were not so imposing as their father and their dress was [illegible word] somewhat colleen. Jesus, moreover, exposed his heart somewhat too obviously in the cheap print: and Stephen’s thoughts were usually fascinated to a pleasant stupor by these twin futilities. A parliamentary charade was frequent. Mr Daniel had sat for his county some years before and for this reason he was chosen to impersonate the Speaker of the House. McCann always represented a member of the Opposition and he spoke point-blank. Then a member would protest and there would be a make-believe of parliamentary manners.

—Mr Speaker, I must ask ...

—Order! Order!

—You know it’s a lie!

—You must withdraw, Sir.

—As I was saying before the honourable gentleman interrupted we must ...

—I won’t withdraw.

—I must ask honourable members to preserve order in the House.

—I won’t withdraw.

—Order! Order!

Another favourite was “Who’s Who.” A person goes out of the room and the rest of the company choose the name of someone who is supposed to have special attractions for the absent player. This latter, when he returns to the company, has to ask questions all round and try to guess the name. This game was generally used to the discomfiture of the young male guests for the manner in which it was played suggested that each young student had an affair of the heart with some young lady within tolerable distance of him: but the young men, who were at first surprised by these implications, ended by looking as if they thought that the sagacity of the other players had just forestalled them in an unexpected, not unpleasant, discovery. No such suggestion could be seriously made by the company to fit Stephen’s case and so the first time he played the game they chose differently for him. The [company was] players were unable to answer his questions when he returned to the room: such questions as: “Where does the person live?” “Is the person married or single?” “What age is the person?” could not be answered by the circle until McCann had been consulted in a swift undertone. The answer “Norway” gave Stephen the clue at once and so the game ended and the company proceeded to divert themselves as before this serious interruption. Stephen sat down beside one of the daughters and, while admiring the rural comeliness of her features, waited quietly for her first word which, he knew, would destroy his satisfaction. Her large handsome eyes looked at him for a while as if they were about to trust him and then she said:

—How did you guess it so quickly?

—I knew you meant him. But you’re wrong about his age.

Others had heard this: but she was impressed by a possible vastness of the unknown, complimented to confer with one who conferred directly with the exceptional. She leaned forward to speak with soft seriousness.

—Why, how old is he?

—Over seventy.

—Is he?

Stephen now imagined that he had explored this region sufficiently and he would have discontinued his visits had not two causes induced him to continue. The first cause was the unpleasant character of his home and the second was the curiosity occasioned by the advent of a new figure. One evening while he was musing on the horsehair sofa he heard his name called and stood up to be introduced. A dark full-figured girl was standing before him and, without waiting for Miss Daniel’s introduction, she said:

—I think we know each other already.

She sat beside him on the sofa and he found out that she was studying in the same college with the Miss Daniels and that she always signed her name in Irish. She said Stephen should learn Irish too and join the League. A young man of the company, [with] whose face wore always the same look of studied purpose, spoke with her across Stephen addressing her familiarly by her Irish name. Stephen therefore spoke very formally and always addressed her as ‘Miss Clery.’ She seemed on her part to include him in the general scheme of her nationalising charm: and when he helped her into her jacket she allowed his hands to rest for a moment against the warm flesh of her shoulders.

 ® 

XVII

Stephen’s home-life had by this time grown sufficiently unpleasant: the direction of his development was against the stream of tendency of his family. The evening walks with Maurice had been prohibited for it had become evident that Stephen was corrupting his brother to idle habits. Stephen was harassed very much by enquiries as to his progress at the College and Mr Daedalus, meditating upon the evasive answers, had begun to express a fear that his son was falling into bad company. The youth was given to understand that if he did not succeed brilliantly at the coming examination his career at the University would come to a close. He was not greatly troubled by this warning for he knew that his fate was, in this respect, with his godfather and not with his father. He felt that the moments of his youth were too precious to be wasted in a dull mechanical endeavour and he determined, whatever came of it, to prosecute his intentions to the end. His family expected that he would at once follow the path of remunerative respectability and save the situation but he could not satisfy his family. He thanked their intention: it had first fulfilled him with egoism; and he rejoiced that his life had been so self-centred. He felt [also] however that there were activities which it would be a peril to postpone.

Maurice accepted this prohibition with a bad grace and had to be restrained by his brother from overt disobedience. Stephen himself bore it lightly because he could ease himself greatly in solitude and for human channels, at the worst, he could resort to a few of his college-companions. He was now busily preparing his paper for the Literary and Historical Society and he took every precaution to ensure in it a maximum of explosive force. It seemed to him that the students might need only the word to enkindle them towards liberty or that, at least, his trumpet-call might bring to his side a certain minority of the elect. McCann was the Auditor of the Society and as he was anxious to know the trend of Stephen’s paper the two used often to leave the Library at ten o’clock and walk towards the Auditor’s lodgings, discussing. McCann enjoyed the reputation of a fearless, free-spoken young man but Stephen found it difficult to bring him to any fixed terms on matters which were held to be dangerous ground. McCann would talk freely on feminism and on rational life: he believed that the sexes should be educated together in order to accustom them early to each other’s influences and he believed that women should be afforded the same opportunities as were afforded to the so-called superior sex and he believed that women had the right to compete with men in every branch of social and intellectual activity. He also held the opinion that a man should live without using any kind of stimulant, that he had a moral obligation to transmit to posterity sound minds in sound bodies, and that he should not allow himself to be dictated to on the subject of dress by any conventions. Stephen delighted to riddle these theories with agile bullets.

—You would have no sphere of life closed to them?

—Certainly not.

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

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

—I believe you.

—At the same time they should be allowed to follow any civil profession for which they have an aptitude.

—Doctors and lawyers?

—Certainly.

—And what about the third learned profession?

—How do you mean?

—Do you think they would make good confessors?

—You are flippant. The Church does not allow women to enter the priesthood.

—O, the Church!

Whenever the conversation reached this point McCann refused to follow it further. The discussions usually ended in [an impasse] a deadlock:

—But you go mountain-climbing in search of fresh air?

—Yes.

—And bathing in the summertime?

—Yes.

—And surely the mountain air and the salt water act as stimulants!

—Natural stimulants, yes.

—What do you call an unnatural stimulant?

—Intoxicating drinks.

—But they are produced from natural vegetable substances, aren’t they?

—Perhaps, but by an unnatural process.

—Then you regard a brewer as a high thaumaturgist?

—Intoxicating drinks are manufactured to satisfy artificially induced appetites. Man, in the normal condition, has no need for such props to life.

—Give me an example of man in what you call ‘the normal condition.’

—A man who lives a healthy, natural life.

—Yourself?

—Yes.

—Do you then represent normal humanity?

—I do.

—Then is normal humanity short-sighted and tone-deaf?

—Tone-deaf?

—Yes: I think you are tone-deaf.

—I like to hear music.

—What music?

—All music.

—But you cannot distinguish one air from another.

—No: I can recognise some airs.

—For instance?

—I can recognise ‘God save the Queen.’

—Perhaps because all the people stand up and take off their hats.

—Well, admit that my ear is a little defective.

—And your eyes?

—They too.

—Then how do you represent normal humanity?

—In my manner of life.

—Your wants and the manner in which you satisfy them, is it?

—Exactly.

—And what are your wants?

—Air and food.

—Have you any subsidiary ones?

—The acquisition of knowledge.

—And you need also religious comforts?

—Maybe so ... at times.

—And women ... at times?

—Never!

This last word was uttered with a moral snap of the jaws and in such a business-like tone of voice that Stephen burst out into a fit of loud laughter. As for the fact, though he was very suspicious in this matter, Stephen was inclined to believe in McCann’s chastity and much as he disliked it he chose to contemplate it rather than the contrary phenomenon. He almost trembled to think of that unhorizoned doggedness working its way backwards.

McCann’s insistence on a righteous life and his condemnation of licence as a sin against the future both annoyed and stung Stephen. It annoyed him because it savoured so strongly of paterfamilias and it stung him because it seemed to judge him incapable of that part. In McCann’s mouth he considered it unjust and unnatural and he fell back on a sentence of Bacon’s. The care of posterity, he quoted, is greatest in them that have no posterity: and for the rest he said that he could not understand what right the future had to hinder him from any passionate exertions in the present.

—That is not the teaching of Ibsen, said McCann.

—Teaching! cried Stephen.

—The moral of Ghosts is just the opposite of what you say.

—Bah! You regard a play as a scientific document.

—Ghosts teaches self-repression.

—O Jesus! said Stephen in agony.

—This is my lodging, said McCann, halting at the gate. I must go in.

—You have connected Ibsen and Eno’s fruit salt forever in my mind, said Stephen.

—Daedalus, said the Auditor crisply, you are a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.

Stephen had decided to address himself to Madden to [find out] ascertain where Miss Clery was to be found. He set about this task carefully. Madden and he were often together but their conversations were rarely serious and though the rustic mind of one was very forcibly impressed by the metropolitanism of the other both young men were on relations of affectionate familiarity. Madden who had previously tried in vain to infect Stephen with nationalistic fever was surprised to hear these overtures of his friend. He was delighted at the prospect of making such a convert and he began to appeal eloquently to the sense of justice. Stephen allowed his critical faculty a rest. The so-desired community for the realising of which Madden sought to engage his personal force seemed to him anything but ideal and the liberation which would have satisfied Madden would by no means have satisfied him. The Roman, not the Sassenach, was for him the tyrant of the islanders: and so deeply had the tyranny eaten into all souls that the intelligence, first overborne so arrogantly, was now eager to prove that arrogance its friend. The watchcry was Faith and Fatherland, a sacred word in that world of cleverly inflammable enthusiasms. With literal obedience and with annual doles the Irish bid eagerly for the honour which was studiously withheld from them to be given to nations which in the [present] past, as in the [past] present, had never bent the knee but in defiance. While the multitude of preachers assured them that high honours were on the way and encouraged them ever to hope. The last should be first, according to the Christian sentiment, and whosoever humbled himself, exalted and in reward for several centuries of obscure fidelity the Pope’s Holiness had presented a tardy cardinal to an island which was for him, perhaps, only the afterthought of Europe.

Madden was prepared to admit the truth of much of this but he gave Stephen to understand that the new movement was politic. If the least infidelity were hoisted on the standard the people would not flock to it and for this reason the promoters desired as far as possible to work hand in hand with the priests. Stephen objected that this working hand in hand with the priests had over and over again ruined the chances of revolutions. Madden agreed: but now at least the priests were on the side of the people.

—Do you not see, said Stephen, that they encourage the study of Irish that their flocks may be more safely protected from the wolves of disbelief; they consider it is an opportunity to withdraw the people into a past of literal, implicit faith?

—But really our peasant has nothing to gain from English Literature.

—Rubbish!

—Modern at least. You yourself are always railing ...

—English is the medium for the Continent.

—We want an Irish Ireland.

—It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

—I do not entirely agree with your modern notions. We want to have nothing of this English civilisation.

—But the civilisation of which you speak is not English—it is Aryan. The modern notions are not English; they point the way of Aryan civilisation.

—You want our peasants to ape the gross materialism of the Yorkshire peasant?

—One would imagine the country was inhabited by cherubim. Damme if I see much difference in peasants: they all seem to me as like one another as a peascod is like another peascod. The Yorkshireman is perhaps better fed.

—Of course you despise the peasant because you live in the city.

—I don’t despise his office in the least.

—But you despise him—he’s not clever enough for you.

—Now, you know, Madden that’s nonsense. To begin with he’s as cute as a fox—try to pass a false coin on him and you’ll see. But his cleverness is all of a low order. I really don’t think that the Irish peasant represents a very admirable type of culture.

—That’s you all out! Of course you sneer at him because he’s not up-to-date and lives a simple life.

—Yes, a life of dull routine—the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and the weekly piety—a life lived in cunning and fear between the shadows of the parish chapel and the asylum!

—The life of a great city like London seems to you better?

—The [English] intelligence of an English city is not perhaps at a very high level but at least it is higher than the mental swamp of the Irish peasant.

—And what about the two as moral beings?

—Well?

—The Irish are noted for at least one virtue all the world over.

—Oho! I know what’s coming now!

—But it’s a fact—they are chaste.

—To be sure.

—You like to run down your own people at every hand’s turn but you can’t accuse them ...

—Very good: you are partly right. I fully recognise that my countrymen have not yet advanced [to] as far as the machinery of Parisian harlotry because ...

—Because ... ?

—Well, because they can do it by hand, that’s why!

—Good God, you don’t mean to say you think ...

—My good youth, I know what I am saying is true and so do you know it. Ask Father Pat and ask Dr Thisbody and ask Dr Thatbody. I was at school and you were at school—and that’s enough about it.

—O, Daedalus!

This accusation laid a silence on the conversation. Then Madden spoke:

—Well, if these are your ideas I don’t see what you want coming to me and talking about learning Irish.

—I would like to learn it—as a language, said Stephen lyingly. At least I would like to see first.

—So you admit you are an Irishman after all and not one of the red garrison.

—Of course I do.

—And don’t you think that every Irishman worthy of the name should be able to speak his native tongue?

—I really don’t know.

—And don’t you think that we as a race have a right to be free?

—O, don’t ask me such questions, Madden. You can use these phrases of the platform but I can’t.

—But surely you have some political opinions, man!

—I am going to think them out. I am an artist, don’t you see? Do you believe that I am?

—O, yes, I know you are.

—Very well then, how the devil can you expect me to settle everything all at once? Give me time.

So it was decided that Stephen was to begin a course of lessons in Irish. He bought the O’Growney’s primers published by the Gaelic League but refused either to pay a subscription to the League or to wear the badge in his buttonhole. He had found out what he had desired, namely, the class in which Miss Clery was. People at home did not seem opposed to this new freak of his. Mr Casey taught him a few Southern songs in Irish and always raised his glass to Stephen saying “Sinn Fein” instead of “Good Health.” Mrs Daedalus was probably pleased for she thought that the superintendence of priests and the society of harmless enthusiasts might succeed in influencing her son in the right direction: she had begun to fear for him. Maurice said nothing and asked no questions. He did not understand what made his brother associate with the patriots and he did not believe that the study of Irish seemed in any way useful to Stephen: but he was silent and waited. Mr Daedalus said that he did not mind his son’s learning the language so long as it did not keep him from his legitimate work.

One evening when Maurice came back from school he brought with him the news that the retreat would begin in three days’ time. This news suddenly delivered showed Stephen his position. He could hardly believe that in a year his point of view had changed so completely. Only twelve months ago he had been clamouring for forgiveness and promising endless penances. He could hardly believe that it was no other than he who had clung so fiercely to the sole means of salvation which the Church vouchsafes to her guilty children. He marvelled at the terror which had then possessed him. One evening during the retreat he asked his brother what kind of sermons the priest was giving. The two were standing together looking into the window of a stationer’s shop and it was a picture of S. Anthony in the window which had led to the question. Maurice smiled broadly as he answered:

—Hell today.

—And what kind of a sermon was it?

—Usual kind of thing. Stink in the morning and pain of loss in the evening.

Stephen laughed and looked at the square-shouldered boy beside him. Maurice announced facts in a dry satirical voice and his cloudy complexion did not change colour when he laughed. He made Stephen think of the pictures in ‘Silas Verney.’ His sombre gravity, his careful cleansing of his much-worn clothes, and the premature disillusionment of his manner all suggested the human vesture of some spiritual or philosophic problem transplanted from Holland. Stephen did not know in what stage the problem was and he thought it wiser to allow it its own path of solution.

—Do you know what the priest told us also? asked Maurice after a pause.

—What?

—He said we weren’t to have companions.

—Companions?

—That we weren’t to go for walks in the evenings with any special companions. If we wanted to take a walk, he said, a lot of us were to go together.

Stephen halted in the street and struck the palms of his hands together.

—What’s up with you? said Maurice.

—I know what’s up with them, said Stephen. They’re afraid.

—Of course they’re afraid, said Maurice gravely.

—By the bye of course you have made the retreat?

—O, yes. I’m going to the altar in the morning.

—Are you really?

—Tell the truth, Stephen. When mother gives you the money on Sunday to go in to short twelve in Marlboro’ St do you really go to Mass?

Stephen coloured slightly.

—Why do you ask that?

—Tell the truth.

—No ... I don’t.

—And where do you go?

—O anywhere ... about the town.

—So I thought.

—You’re a ’cute fellow, said Stephen in a sidewise fashion. Might I ask do you go to mass yourself?

—O, yes, said Maurice.

They walked on [then] for a short time in silence. Then Maurice said:

—I have bad hearing.

Stephen made no remark.

—And I think I must be a little stupid.

—How’s that?

In his heart Stephen felt that he was condemning his brother. In this instance he could not admit that freedom from strict religious influences was desirable. It seemed to him that anyone who could contemplate the condition of his soul in such a prosaic manner was not worthy of freedom and was fit only for the severest shackles of the Church.

—Well today the priest was telling us a true story. It was about the death of the drunkard. The priest came in to see him and talked to him and asked him to say he was sorry and to promise to give up drink. The man felt that he was going to die in a few moments but he sat upright in the bed, the priest said, and pulled out a black bottle from under the bedclothes ...

—Well?

—And said “Father, if this was to be the last I was ever to drink in this world I must drink it.”

—Well?

—So he drained the bottle dry. That very moment he dropped dead, said the priest lowering his voice. “That man fell dead in the bed, stone dead. He died and went ...” He spoke so low that I couldn’t hear but I wanted to know where the man went so I leaned forward to hear and hit my nose a wallop against the bench in front. While I was rubbing it the fellows knelt down to say the prayer so I didn’t hear where he went. Amn’t I stupid?

Stephen exploded in laughter. He laughed so loudly that the people who were passing turned to look at him and had to smile themselves by attraction. He put his hands to his sides and the tears almost fell out of his eyes. Every glimpse he caught of Maurice’s solemn olive-coloured face set him off on a new burst. He could say nothing between times but—“I’d have given anything to have seen it—‘Father, if this was the last’ ... and you with your mouth open. I’d have given anything to have seen it.”

The Irish class was held every Wednesday night in a back room on the second floor of a house in O’Connell St. The class consisted of six young men and three young women. The teacher was a young man in spectacles with a very sick-looking face and a very crooked mouth. He spoke in a high-pitched voice and with a cutting Northern accent. He never lost an opportunity of sneering at seoninism and at those who would not learn their native tongue. He said that Beurla was the language of commerce and Irish the speech of the soul and he had two witticisms which always made his class laugh. One was the ‘Almighty Dollar’ and the other was the ‘Spiritual Saxon.’ Everyone regarded Mr Hughes as a great enthusiast and some thought he had a great career before him as an orator. On Friday nights when there was a public meeting of the League he often spoke but as he did not know enough Irish he always excused himself at the beginning of his speech for having to speak to the audience in the language of the [gallant] ‘Spiritual Saxon.’ At the end of every speech he quoted a piece of verse. He scoffed very much at Trinity College and at the Irish Parliamentary Party. He could not regard as patriots men who had taken oaths of allegiance to the Queen of England and he could not regard as a national university an institution which did not express the religious convictions of the majority of the Irish people. His speeches were always loudly applauded and Stephen heard some of the audience say that they were sure he would be a great success at the bar. On enquiry, Stephen found that Hughes, who was the son of a Nationalist solicitor in Armagh, was a law-student at the King’s Inns.

The Irish class which Stephen attended was held in a very sparely furnished room lit [with] by a gasjet which had a broken globe. Over the mantelpiece hung the picture of a priest with a beard who, Stephen found, was Father O’Growney. It was a beginners’ class and its progress was retarded by the stupidity of two of the young men. The others in the class learned quickly and worked very hard. Stephen found it very [hard] troublesome to pronounce the gutturals but he did the best he could. The class was very serious and patriotic. The only time Stephen found it inclined to levity was at the lesson which introduced the word ‘gradh.’ The three young women laughed and the two stupid young men laughed, finding something very funny in the Irish word for ‘love’ or perhaps in the notion itself. But Mr Hughes and the other three young men and Stephen were all very grave. When the excitement of the word had passed Stephen’s attention was attracted to the younger of the stupid young men who was still blushing violently. His blush continued for such a long time that Stephen began to feel nervous. The young man grew more and more confused and what was worst was that he was making all this confusion for himself for no-one in the class but Stephen seemed to have noticed him. He continued so till the end of the hour never once daring to raise his eyes from his book and when he had occasion to use his handkerchief he did so stealthily with his left hand.

The meetings on Friday nights were public and were largely patronised by priests. The organisers brought in reports from different districts and the priests made speeches of exhortation. Two young men would then be called on for songs in Irish and when it was time for the whole company to break up all would rise and sing the Rallying-Song. The young women would then begin to chatter while their cavaliers helped them into their jackets. A very stout black-bearded citizen who always wore a wideawake hat and a long bright green muffler was a constant figure at these meetings. When the company was going home he was usually to be seen surrounded by a circle of young men who looked very meagre about his bulk. He had the voice of an ox and he could be heard at a great distance, criticising, denouncing and scoffing. His circle was the separatist centre and in it reigned the irreconcilable temper. It had its headquarters in Cooney’s tobacco-shop where the members sat every evening in the ‘Divan’ talking Irish loudly and smoking churchwardens. To this circle Madden who was the captain of a club of hurley-players reported the muscular condition of the young irreconcilables under his charge and the editor of the weekly journal of the irreconcilable party reported any signs of Philocelticism which he had observed in the Paris newspapers.

By all this society liberty was held to be the chief desirable; the members of it were fierce democrats. The liberty they desired for themselves was mainly a liberty of costume and vocabulary: and Stephen could hardly understand how such a poor scarecrow of liberty could bring [to their] serious human beings to their knees in worship. As in the Daniels’ household he had seen people playing at being important so here he saw people playing at being free. He saw that many political absurdities arose from the lack of a just sense of comparison in public men. The orators of this patriotic party were not ashamed to cite the precedents of Switzerland and France. The intelligent centres of the movement were so scantily supplied that the analogies they gave out as exact and potent were really analogies built haphazard upon very inexact knowledge. The cry of a solitary Frenchman (A bas l’Angleterre!) at a Celtic re-union in Paris would be made by these enthusiasts the subject of a leading article in which would be shown the imminence of aid for Ireland from the French Government. A glowing example was to be found for Ireland in the case of Hungary, an example, as these patriots imagined, of a long-suffering minority, entitled by every right of race and justice to a separate freedom, finally emancipating itself. In emulation of that achievement bodies of young Gaels conflicted murderously in the Phoenix Park with whacking hurley-sticks, thrice armed in their just quarrel since their revolution had been blessed for them by the Anointed, and the same bodies were set aflame with indignation [at] by the unwelcome presence of any young sceptic who was aware of the capable aggressions of the Magyars upon the Latin and Slav and Teutonic populations, greater than themselves in number, which are politically allied to them, and of the potency of a single regiment of infantry to hold in check a town of twenty thousand inhabitants.

Stephen said one day to Madden:

—I suppose these hurley-matches and walking tours are preparations for the great event.

—There is more going on in Ireland at present than you are aware of.

—But what use are camàns?

—Well, you see, we want to raise the physique of the country.

Stephen meditated for a moment and then he said:

—It seems to me that the English Government is very good to you in this matter.

—How is that may I ask?

—The English Government will take you every summer in batches to different militia camps, train you to the use of modern weapons, drill you, feed you and pay you and then send you home again when the manoeuvres are over.

—Well?

—Wouldn’t that be better for your young men than hurley-practice in the Park?

—Do you mean to say you want young Gaelic Leaguers to wear the redcoat and take an oath of allegiance to the Queen and take her shilling too?

—Look at your friend, Hughes.

—What about him?

—One of these days he will be a barrister, a Q.C., perhaps a judge—and yet he sneers at the Parliamentary Party because they take an oath of allegiance.

—Law is law all the world over—there must be someone to administer it, particularly here, where the people have no friends in Court.

—Bullets are bullets, too. I do not quite follow the distinction you make between administering English law and administering English bullets: there is the same oath of allegiance for both professions.

—Anyhow it is better for a man to follow a line of life which civilisation regards as humane. Better be a barrister than a redcoat.

—You consider the profession of arms a disreputable one. Why then have you Sarsfield Clubs, Hugh O’Neill Clubs, Red Hugh Clubs?

—O, fighting for freedom is different. But it is quite another matter to take service meanly under your tyrant, to make yourself his slave.

—And, tell me, how many of your Gaelic Leaguers are studying for the Second Division and looking for advancement in the Civil Service?

—That’s different. They are only civil servants: they’re not ...

—Civil be danmed! They are pledged to the Government, and paid by the Government.

—O, well, of course if you like to look at it that way ...

—And how many relatives of Gaelic Leaguers are in the police and the constabulary? Even I know nearly ten of your friends [that] who are sons of Police inspectors.

—It is unfair to accuse a man because his father was so-and-so. A son and a father often have different ideas.

—But Irishmen are fond of boasting that they are true to the traditions they receive in youth. How faithful all you fellows are to Mother Church! Why would you not be as faithful to the tradition of the helmet as to that of the tonsure?

—We remain true to the Church because it is our national Church, the Church our people have suffered for and would suffer for again. The police are different. We look upon them as aliens, traitors, oppressors of the people.

—The old peasant down the country doesn’t seem to be of your opinion when he counts over his greasy notes and says “I’ll put the priest on Tom an’ I’ll put the polisman on Mickey.”

—I suppose you heard that sentence in some ‘stage-Irishman’ play. It’s a libel on our countrymen.

—No, no, it is Irish peasant wisdom: he balances the priest against the polisman and a very nice balance it is for they are both of a good girth. A compensative system!

—No West-Briton could speak worse of his countrymen. You are simply giving vent to old stale libels—the drunken Irishman, the baboon-faced Irishman that we see in Punch.

—What I say I see about me. The publicans and the pawn-brokers who live on the miseries of the people spend part of the money they make in sending their sons and daughters into religion to pray for them. One of your professors in the Medical School who teaches you Sanitary Science or Forensic Medicine or something—God knows what—is at the same time the landlord of a whole streetful of brothels not a mile away from where we are standing.

—Who told you that?

—A little robin-redbreast.

—It’s a lie!

—Yes, it’s a contradiction in terms, what I call a systematic compensation.

Stephen’s conversations with the patriots were not all of this severe type. Every Friday evening he met Miss Clery, or, as he had now returned to the Christian name, Emma. She lived near Portobello and any evening that the meeting was over early she walked home. She often delayed a long time chatting with a low-sized young priest, a Father Moran, who had a neat head of curly black hair and expressive black eyes. This young priest was a pianist and sang sentimental songs and was for many reasons a great favourite with the ladies. Stephen often watched Emma and Father Moran. Father Moran, who sang tenor, had once complimented Stephen saying he had heard many people speak highly of his voice and hoping he would have the pleasure of hearing him some time. Stephen had said the same thing to the priest adding that Miss Clery had told him great things of his voice. At this the priest had smiled and looked archly at Stephen. “One must not believe all the complimentary things the ladies say of us” he had said. “The ladies are a little given to—what shall I say—fibbing, I am afraid.” And here the priest had bit his lower rosy lip with two little white even teeth and smiled with his expressive eyes and altogether looked such a pleasant tender-hearted vulgarian that Stephen felt inclined to slap him on the back admiringly. Stephen had continued talking for a few minutes and once when the conversation had touched on Irish matters the priest had become very serious and had said very piously “Ah, yes. God bless the work!” Father Moran was no lover of the old droning chants, he told Stephen. Of course, he said, it is very grand music severe style of music [sic]. But he held the opinion that the Church must not be made too gloomy and he said with a charming smile that the spirit of the Church was not gloomy. He said that one could not expect the people to take kindly to severe music and that the people needed more human religious music than the Gregorian and ended by advising Stephen to learn “The Holy City” by Adams.

—There is a song now, beautiful, full of lovely melody and yet—religious. It has the religious sentiment, a touching melody, power—soul, in fact.

Stephen watching this young priest and Emma together usually worked himself into a state of unsettled rage. It was not so much that he suffered personally as that the spectacle seemed to him typical of Irish ineffectualness. Often he felt his fingers itch. Father Moran’s eyes were so clear and tender-looking, Emma stood to his gaze in such a poise of bold careless pride of the flesh that Stephen longed to precipitate the two into each other’s arms and shock the room even though he knew the pain this impersonal generosity would cause himself. Emma allowed him to see her home several times but she did not seem to have reserved herself for him. The youth was piqued at this for above all things he hated to be compared with others and, had it not been that her body seemed so compact of pleasure, he would have preferred to have been ignominiously left behind. Her loud forced manners shocked him at first until his mind had thoroughly mastered the stupidity of hers. She criticised the Miss Daniels very sharply, assuming, much to Stephen’s discomfort, an identical temper in him. She coquetted with knowledge, asking Stephen could he not persuade the President of his College to admit women to the college. Stephen told her to apply to McCann who was the champion of women. She laughed at this and said with genuine dismay “Well, honestly, isn’t he a dreadful-looking artist?” She treated femininely everything that young men are supposed to regard as serious but she made polite exception for Stephen himself and for the Gaelic Revival. She asked him wasn’t he reading a paper and what was it on. She would give anything to go and hear him: she was awfully fond of the theatre herself and a gypsy woman had once read her hand and told her she would be an actress. She had been three times to the pantomime and asked Stephen what he liked best in pantomime. Stephen said he liked a good clown but she said that she preferred ballets. Then she wanted to know did he go out much to dances and pressed him to join an Irish dancing-class of which she was a member. Her eyes had begun to imitate the expression of Father Moran’s—an expression of tender significance when the conversation was at the lowest level of banality. Often as he walked beside her Stephen wondered how she had employed her time since he had last seen her and he congratulated himself that he had caught an impression of her when she was at her finest moment. In his heart he deplored the change in her for he would have liked nothing so well as an adventure with her now but he felt that even that warm ample body could hardly compensate him for her distressing pertness and middle-class affectations. In the centre of her attitude towards him he thought he discerned a point of defiant illwill and he thought he understood the cause of it. He had swept the moment into his memory, the figure and the landscape into his treasure-room, and conjuring with all three had brought forth some pages of sorry verse. One rainy night when the streets were too bad for walking she took the Rathmines tram at the Pillar and as she held down her hand to him from the step, thanking him for his kindness and wishing him good-night, that episode of their childhood seemed to magnetise the minds of both at the same instant. The change of circumstances had reversed their positions, giving her the upper hand. He took her hand caressingly, caressing one after another the three lines on the back of her kid glove and numbering her knuckles, caressing also his own past towards which this inconsistent hater of [antiquity] inheritances was always lenient. They smiled at each other; and again in the centre of her amiableness he discerned a [centre] point of illwill and he suspected that by her code of honour she was obliged to insist on the forbearance of the male and to despise him for forbearing.

 ® 

XVIII

Stephen’s paper was fixed for the second Saturday in March. Between Christmas and that date he had therefore an ample space of time wherein to perform preparative abstinences. His forty days were consumed in aimless solitary walks during which he forged out his sentences. In this manner he had his whole essay in his mind from the first word to the last before he had put any morsel of it on paper. In thinking or constructing the form of the essay he found himself much hampered by the sitting posture. His body disturbed him and he adopted the expedient of appeasing it by gentle promenading. Sometimes during his walks he lost the train of his thought and whenever the void of his mind seemed irreclaimable he forced order upon it by ejaculatory fervours. His morning walks were critical, his evening walks imaginative and whatever had seemed plausible in the evening was always rigorously examined in the light of day. These wanderings in the desert were reported from different points and Mr Daedalus once asked his son what the hell had brought him out to Dolphin’s Barn. Stephen said he had [been] gone part of the way home with a fellow from the college whereupon Mr Daedalus remarked that the fellow from the college [must] should have gone all the way into the county Meath to live as his hand was in. Any acquaintances that were encountered during these walks were never allowed to intrude on the young man’s meditations by commonplace conversation—a fact which they seemed to recognise in advance by a deferent salute. Stephen was therefore very much surprised one evening as he was walking past the Christian Brothers’ School in North Richmond St to feel his arm seized from behind and to hear a voice say somewhat blatantly:

—Hello, Daedalus, old man, is that you?

Stephen turned round and saw a tall young man with many eruptions on his face dressed completely in heavy black. He stared for a few moments, trying to recall the face.

—Don’t you remember me? I knew you at once.

—O, yes now I do, said Stephen. But you’ve changed.

—Think so?

—I wouldn’t know you ... Are you ... in mourning?

Wells laughed.

—By Jove, that’s a good one. Evidently you don’t know your Church when you see it.

—What? You don’t mean to say ... ?

—Fact, old man. I’m in Clonliffe at present. Been down in Balbriggan today on leave: the boss is very bad. Poor old chap!

—O, indeed!

—You’re over in the Green now, Boland told me. Do you know him? He said you were at Belvedere with him.

—Is he in too? Yes I know him.

—He has a great opinion of you. He says you’re a litterateur now.

Stephen smiled and did not know what subject to suggest next. He wondered how far this loud-voiced student intended to accompany him.

—See me down a bit of the way, will you? I’ve just come off the train at Amiens St. I’m making for dinner.

—Certainly.

So they walked on side by side.

—Well, and what have you been doing with yourself? Having a good time, I suppose? Down in Bray?

—Ah, the usual thing, said Stephen.

—I know: I know. After the esplanade girls, isn’t that it? Silly game, old man, silly game! Get tired of it.

—You have, evidently.

—Should think so: time too ... Ever see any of the Clongowes fellows?

—Never one.

—That’s the way. We all lose sight of each other after we leave. You remember Roth?

—Yes.

—Out in Australia now—bushranger or something. You’re going in for literature, I suppose.

—I don’t know really what I’m going in for.

—I know: I know. On the loose, isn’t that it? I’ve been there myself.

—Well, not exactly ... began Stephen.

—O, of course not! said Wells quickly with a loud laugh.

Passing down Jones’s Road they saw a gaudy advertisement in strong colours for a melodramatic play. Wells asked Stephen had he read Trilby.

—Haven’t you? Famous book, you know; style would suit you, I think. Of course it’s a bit ... blue.

—How is that?

—O, well, you know ... Paris, you know ... artists.

—O, is that the kind of book it is?

—Nothing very wrong in it that I could see. Still some people think it’s a bit immoral.

—You haven’t it in the library in Clonliffe?

—No, not likely ... Don’t I wish I was out of the show!

—Are you thinking of leaving?

—Next year—perhaps this year—I go to Paris for my theology.

—You won’t be sorry, I suppose.

—You bet. Rotten show, this place. Food is not so bad but so dull, you know.

—Are there many students in it now?

—O, yes ... I don’t mix much with them, you know ... There are a good lot.

—I suppose you’ll be a parish priest one of these days.

—I hope so. You must come and see me when I am.

—Very good.

—When you’re a great writer yourself—as the author of a second Trilby or something of that sort ... Won’t you come in?

—Is it allowed?

—O, with me ... you come in, never mind.

The two young men went into the grounds of the College and along the circular carriage-drive. It was a damp evening and rather dark. In the uncertain light a few of the more adventurous were to be seen vigorously playing handball in a little side-alley, the smack of the wet ball against the concrete wall of the alley alternating with their lusty shouts. For the most part the students were walking in little groups through the ground, some with their berretas [sic] pushed far back to the nape of their necks and others holding their soutanes up as women do with their skirts when they cross a muddy street.

—Can you go with anyone you like? asked Stephen.

—Companions are not allowed. You must join the first group you meet.

—Why didn’t you go to the Jesuit order?

—Not likely, my boy. Sixteen years of noviciate and no chance of ever settling down. Here today, there tomorrow.

As Stephen looked at the big square block of masonry looming before them through the faint daylight, he re-entered again in thought the seminarist life which he had led for so many years, to the understanding of the narrow activities of which he could now in a moment bring the spirit of an acute sympathetic alien. He recognised at once the martial mind of the Irish Church in the style of this ecclesiastical barracks. He looked in vain at the faces and figures which passed him for a token of moral elevation: all were cowed without being humble, modish without being simple-mannered. Some of the students saluted Wells but got scanty thanks for the courtesy. Wells wished Stephen to gather that he despised his fellow-students and that it was not his fault if they regarded him as an important person. At the foot of the stone steps he turned to Stephen:

—I must go in to see the Dean for a minute. I’m afraid it’s too late for me to show you round the show this evening ...

—O, not at all. Another time.

—Well, will you wait for me. Stroll along there towards the chapel. I won’t be a minute.

He nodded at Stephen for a temporary farewell and sprang up the steps. [Wells] Stephen wandered on towards the chapel meditatively kicking a white flat stone along the grey pebbly path. He was not likely to be deceived by Wells’ words into an acceptance of that young man as a quite vicious person. He knew that Wells had exaggerated his airs in order to hide his internal sense of mortification at meeting one who had not forsaken the world, the flesh and the devil and he suspected that, if there were any tendency to oscillation in the soul of the free-spoken young student, the iron hand of the discipline of the Church would firmly intervene to restore equipoise. At the same time Stephen felt somewhat indignant that anyone should expect him to entrust spiritual difficulties to such a confessor or to receive with pious feelings any sacrament or benediction from the hands of the young students whom he saw walking through the grounds. It was not any personal pride which would prevent him but a recognition of the incompatibility of two natures, one trained to repressive enforcement of a creed, the other equipped with a vision the angle of which would never adjust itself for the reception of hallucinations and with an intelligence which was as much in love with laughter as with combat.

The mist of the evening had begun to thicken into slow fine rain and Stephen halted at the end of a narrow path beside a few laurel bushes, watching at the end of a leaf a tiny point of rain form and twinkle and hesitate and finally take the plunge into the sodden clay beneath. He wondered was it raining in Westmeath, [were the cattle standing together patiently in the shelter of the hedges]. He remembered seeing the cattle standing together patiently in the hedges and reeking in the rain. A little band of students passed at the other side of the laurel bushes: they were talking among themselves:

—But did you see Mrs Bergin?

—O, I saw her ... with a black and white boa.

—And the two Miss Kennedys were there.

—Where?

—Right behind the Archbishop’s Throne.

—O, I saw her—one of them. Hadn’t she a grey hat with a bird in it?

—That was her! She’s very lady-like, isn’t she.

The little band went down the path. In a few minutes another little band passed behind the bushes. One student was talking and the others were listening.

—Yes and an astronomer too: that’s why he had [built] that observatory built over there at the side of the palace. I heard a priest say once that the three greatest men in Europe were Gladstone, Bismarck (the great German statesman) and our own Archbishop—as all-round men. He knew him at Maynooth. He said that in Maynooth ...

The speaker’s words were lost in the crunch of the heavy boots on the gravel. The rain was spreading and increasing and the vagrant bands of students were all turning their steps towards the college. Stephen still waited at his post and at last saw Wells coming down the path quickly: he had changed his outdoor dress for a soutane. He was very apologetic and not quite so familiar in manner. Stephen wanted him to go in with the others but he insisted on seeing his visitor to the gate. They took a short cut down beside the wall and were soon opposite the lodge. The [gate] side-door was shut and Wells called out loudly to the lodge-woman to open it and let the gentleman out. Then he shook hands with Stephen and pressed him to come again. The lodge-woman opened the side-door and Wells looked out for a second or two almost enviously. Then he said:

—Well, goodbye, old man. Must run in now. Awfully glad to see you again—see any of the old Clongowes set, you know. Be good now: I must run. Goodbye.

As he tucked up his soutane high and ran awkwardly up the drive [and] he looked a strange, almost criminal, fugitive in the dreary dusk. Stephen’s eyes followed the running figure for a moment: and as he passed through the door into the lamplit street he smiled at his own impulse of pity.

 ® 

XIX

He smiled because it seemed to him so unexpected a ripeness in himself—this pity—or rather this impulse of pity for he had no more than entertained it. But it was the actual achievement of his essay which had allowed him so mature a pleasure as the sensation of pity for another. Stephen had a thorough-going manner in many things: his essay was not in the least the exhibition of polite accomplishments. It was on the contrary very seriously intended to define his own position for himself. He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude. The programme of the patriots filled him with very reasonable doubts; its articles could obtain no intellectual assent from him. He knew, moreover, that concordance with it would mean for him a submission of everything else in its interest and that he would thus be obliged to corrupt the springs of speculation at their very source. He refused therefore to set out for any task if he had first to prejudice his success by oaths to his patria and this refusal resulted in a theory of art which was at once severe and liberal. His Esthetic was in the main applied Aquinas, and he set it forth plainly with a naïf air of discovering novelties. This he did partly to satisfy his own taste for enigmatic rôles and partly from a genuine predisposition in favour of all but the premisses of scholasticism. He proclaimed at the outset that art was the human disposition of intelligible or sensible matter for an esthetic end, and he announced further that all such human dispositions must fall into the division of three distinct natural kinds, lyrical, epical and dramatic. Lyrical art, he said, is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relation to himself; epical art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; and dramatic art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relations to others. The various forms of art, such as music, sculpture, literature, do not offer this division with the same clearness and he concluded from this that those forms of art which offered the division most clearly were to be called the most excellent forms: and he was not greatly perturbed because he could not decide for himself whether a portrait was a work of epical art or not or whether it was possible for an architect to be a lyrical, epical or dramatic poet at will. Having by this simple process established the literary form of art as the most excellent he proceeded to examine it in favour of his theory, or, as he rendered it, to establish the relations which must subsist between the literary image, the work of art itself, and that energy which had imagined and fashioned it, that centre of conscious, re-acting, particular life, the artist.

The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams—a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty. To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist. This perfect coincidence of the two artistic faculties Stephen called poetry and he imagined the domain of an art to be cone-shaped. The term ‘literature’ now seemed to him a term of contempt and he used it to designate the vast middle region which lies between apex and base, between poetry and the chaos of unremembered writing. Its merit lay in its portrayal of externals; the realm of its princes was the realm of the manners and customs of societies—a spacious realm. But society is itself, he conceived, the complex body in which certain laws are involved and overwrapped and he therefore proclaimed as the realm of the poet the realm of these unalterable laws. Such a theory might easily have led its deviser to the acceptance of spiritual anarchy in literature had he not at the same time insisted on the classical style. A classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them. The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. In this method the sane and joyful spirit issues forth and achieves imperishable perfection, nature assisting with her goodwill and thanks. For so long as this place in nature is given us it is right that art should do no violence to the gift.

Between these two conflicting schools the city of the arts had become marvellously unpeaceful. To many spectators the dispute had seemed a dispute about names, a battle in which the position of the standards could never be foretold for a minute. Add to this internecine warfare—the classical school fighting the materialism that must attend it, the romantic school struggling to preserve coherence—and behold from what ungentle manners criticism is bound to recognise the emergence of all achievement. The critic is he who is able, by means of the signs which the artist affords, to approach the temper which has made the work and to see what is well done therein and what it signifies. For him a song by Shakespeare which seems so free and living, as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening, discovers itself as the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least not so fitly. But to approach the temper which has made art is an act of reverence before the performance of which many conventions must be first put off for certainly that inmost region will never yield its secret to one who is enmeshed with profanities.

Chief among these profanities Stephen set the antique principle that the end of art is to instruct, to elevate, and to amuse. “I am unable to find even a trace of this Puritanic conception of the esthetic purpose in the definition which Aquinas has given of beauty” he wrote “or in anything which he has written concerning the beautiful. The qualifications he expects for beauty are in fact of so abstract and common a character that it is quite impossible for even the most violent partizan to use the Aquinatian theory with the object of attacking any work of art that we possess from the hand of any artist whatsoever.” This recognition of the beautiful in virtue of the most abstract relations afforded by an object to which the term could be applied so far from giving any support to a commandment of Noli Tangere was itself no more than a just sequence from the taking-off of all interdictions from the artist. The limits of decency suggest themselves somewhat too readily to the modern speculator and their effect is to encourage the profane mind to very futile jurisdiction. For it cannot be urged too strongly on the public mind that the tradition of art is with the artists and that even if they do not make it their invariable practice to outrage these limits of decency the public mind has no right to conclude therefrom that they do not arrogate for themselves an entire liberty to do so if they choose. It is as absurd, wrote the fiery-hearted revolutionary, for a criticism itself established upon homilies to prohibit the elective courses of the artist in his revelation of the beautiful as it would be for a police-magistrate to prohibit the sum of any two sides of a triangle from being together greater than the third side.

In fine the truth is not that the artist requires a document of licence from householders entitling him to proceed in this or that fashion but that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. When the poetic phenomenon is signalled in the heavens, exclaimed this heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to verify their calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivification the force to live, the security for life which can come to it only from them. Thus the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation.

Except for the eloquent and arrogant peroration Stephen’s essay was a careful exposition of a carefully meditated theory of esthetic. When he had finished it he found it necessary to change the title from “Drama and Life” to “Art and Life” for he had occupied himself so much with securing the foundations that he had not left himself space enough to raise the complete structure. This strangely unpopular manifesto was traversed by the two brothers phrase by phrase and word by word and at last pronounced flawless at all points. It was then safely laid by until the time should come for its public appearance. Besides Maurice two other well-wishers had an advance view of it; these were Stephen’s mother and his friend Madden. Madden had not asked for it directly but at the end of a conversation in which Stephen had recounted sarcastically his visit to Clonliffe College he had vaguely wondered what state of mind could produce such irreverences and Stephen had at once offered him the manuscript saying “This is the first of my explosives.” The following evening Madden had returned the manuscript and praised the writing highly. Part of it had been too deep for him, he said, but he could see that it was beautifully written.

—You know Stevie, he said (Madden had a brother Stephen and he sometimes used this familiar form) you always told me I was a country buachail and I can’t understand you mystical fellows.

—Mystical? said Stephen.

—About the planets and the stars, you know. Some of the fellows in the League belong to the mystical set here. They’d understand quick enough.

—But there’s nothing mystical in it I tell you. I have written it carefully ...

—O, I can see you have. It’s beautifully written. But I’m sure it will be above the heads of your audience.

—You don’t mean to tell me, Madden, you think it’s a ‘flowery’ composition!

—I know you’ve thought it out. But you are a poet, aren’t you?

—I have ... written verse ... if that’s what you mean.

—Do you know Hughes is a poet too?

—Hughes!

—Yes. He writes for our paper, you know. Would you like to see some of his poetry?

—Why, could you show me any?

—It so happens I have one in my pocket. There’s one in this week’s Sword too. Here it is: read it.

Stephen took the paper and read a piece of verse entitled Mo Náire Tù (My shame art thou). There were four stanzas in the piece and each stanza ended with the Irish phrase—Mo Náire Tù, the last word, of course, rhyming to an English word in the corresponding line. The piece began:

What! Shall the rippling tongue of Gaels

Give way before the Saxon slang!

and in lines full of excited patriotism proceeded to pour scorn upon the Irishman who would not learn the ancient language of his native land. Stephen did not remark anything in the lines except the frequency of such contracted forms as “e’en” “ne’er” and “thro’ “ instead of “even” “never” and “through” and he handed back the paper to Madden without offering any comment on the verse.

—I suppose you don’t like that because it’s too Irish but you’ll like this, I suppose, because it’s that mystical, idealistic kind of writing you poets indulge in. Only you mustn’t say I let you see ...

—O, no.

Madden took from his inside pocket a sheet of foolscap folded in four on which was inscribed a piece of verse, consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, entitled “My Ideal.” Each stanza began with the words “Art thou real?” The poem told of the poet’s troubles in a ‘vale of woe’ and of the ‘heart-throbs’ which these troubles caused him. It told of ‘weary nights’ and ‘anxious days’ and of an ‘unquenchable desire’ for an excellence beyond that ‘which earth can give.’ After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:

Art thou real, my Ideal?

Wilt thou ever come to me

In the soft and gentle twilight

With your baby on your knee?

The [combined] effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining blush of anger. The tawdry lines, the futile change of number, the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes’s “Ideal” weighed down by an inexplicable infant combined to cause him a sharp agony in the sensitive region. Again he handed back the verse without saying a word of praise or of blame but he decided that attendance in Mr Hughes’s class was no longer possible for him and he was foolish enough to regret having yielded to the impulse for sympathy from a friend.

When a demand for intelligent sympathy goes unanswered [it] he is a too stern disciplinarian who blames himself for having offered a dullard an opportunity to participate in the warmer movement of a more highly organised life. So Stephen regarded his loans of manuscripts as elaborate flag-practices with phrases. He did not consider his mother a dullard but the result of his second disappointment in the search for appreciation was that he was enabled to place the blame on the shoulders of others—not on his own: he had enough responsibilities thereon already, inherited and acquired. His mother had not asked to see the manuscript: she had continued to iron the clothes on the kitchen-table without the least suspicion of the agitation in the mind of her son. He had sat on three or four kitchen chairs, one after another, and had dangled his legs unsuccessfully from all free corners of the table. At last, unable to control his agitation, he asked her point-blank would she like him to read out his essay.

—O, yes, Stephen—if you don’t mind my ironing a few things ...

—No, I don’t mind.

Stephen read out the essay to her slowly and emphatically and when he had finished reading she said it was very beautifully written but that as there were some things in it which she couldn’t follow, would he mind reading it to her again and explaining some of it. He read it over again and allowed himself a long exposition of his theories garnished with many crude striking allusions with which he hoped to drive it home the better. His mother who had never suspected probably that “beauty” could be anything more than a convention of the drawingroom or a natural antecedent to marriage and married life was surprised to see the extraordinary honour which her son conferred upon it. Beauty, to the mind of such a woman, was often a synonym for licentious ways and probably for this reason she was relieved to find that the excesses of this new worship were supervised by a recognised saintly authority. However as the essayist’s recent habits were not very re-assuring she decided to combine a discreet motherly solicitude with an interest, which without being open to the accusation of factitiousness was at first intended as a compliment. While she was nicely folding a handkerchief she said:

—What does Ibsen write, Stephen?

—Plays.

—I never heard of his name before. Is he alive at present?

—Yes, he is. But, you know, in Ireland people don’t know much about what is going on out in Europe.

—He must be a great writer from what you say of him.

—Would you like to read some of his plays, mother? I have some.

—Yes. I would like to read the best one. What is the best one?

—I don’t know ... But do you really want to read Ibsen?

—I do, really.

—To see whether I am reading dangerous authors or not, is that why?

—No, Stephen, answered his mother with a brave prevarication. I think you’re old enough now to know what is right and what is wrong without my dictating to you what you are to read.

—I think so too ... But I’m surprised to hear you ask about Ibsen. I didn’t imagine you took the least interest in these matters.

Mrs Daedalus pushed her iron smoothly over a white petticoat in time to the current of her memory.

—Well, of course, I don’t speak about it but I’m not so indifferent ... Before I married your father I used to read a great deal. I used to take an interest in all kinds of new plays.

—But since you married neither of you so much as bought a single book!

—Well, you see, Stephen, your father is not like you: he takes no interest in that sort of thing ... When he was young he told me he used to spend all his time out after the hounds or rowing on the Lee. He went in for athletics.

—I suspect what he went in for, said Stephen irreverently. I know he doesn’t care a jack straw about what I think or what I write.

—He wants to see you make your way, get on in life, said his mother defensively. That’s his ambition. You shouldn’t blame him for that.

—No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.

—Of course life isn’t what I used to think it was when I was a young girl. That’s why I would like to read some great writer, to see what ideal of life he has—amn’t I right in saying “ideal”?

—Yes, but ...

—Because sometimes—not that I grumble at the lot Almighty God has given me and I have more or less a happy life with your father—but sometimes I feel that I want to leave this actual life and enter another—for a time.

—But that is wrong: that is the great mistake everyone makes. Art is not an escape from life!

—No?

—You evidently weren’t listening to what I said or else you didn’t understand what I said. Art is not an escape from life. It’s just the very opposite. Art, on the contrary, is the very central expression of life. An artist is not a fellow who dangles a mechanical heaven before the public. The priest does that. The artist affirms out of the fulness of his own life, he creates ... Do you understand?

And so on. A day or two afterwards Stephen gave his mother a few of the plays to read. She read them with great interest and found Nora Helmer a charming character. Dr Stockmann she admired but her admiration was naturally checked by her son’s light-heartedly blasphemous description of that stout burgher as ‘Jesus in a frock-coat.’ But the play which she preferred to all others was the Wild Duck. Of it she spoke readily and on her own initiative: it had moved her deeply. Stephen, to escape a charge of hot-headedness and partizanship, did not encourage her to an open record of her feelings.

—I hope you’re not going to mention Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop.

—Of course I like Dickens too but I can see a great difference between Little Nell and that poor little creature—what is her name? ...

—Hedvig Ekdal?

—Hedvig, yes ... It’s so sad: it’s terrible to read it even ... I quite agree with you that Ibsen is a wonderful writer.

—Really?

—Yes, really. His plays have impressed me very much.

—Do you think he is immoral?

—Of course, you know, Stephen, he treats of subjects ... of which I know very little myself ... subjects ...

—Subjects which, you think, should never be talked about?

—Well, that was the old people’s idea but I don’t know if it was right. I don’t know if it is good for people to be entirely ignorant.

—Then why not treat them openly?

—I think it might do harm to some people—uneducated, unbalanced people. People’s natures are so different. You perhaps ...

—O, never mind me ... Do you think these plays are unfit for people to read?

—No, I think they’re magnificent plays indeed.

—And not immoral?

—I think that Ibsen ... has an extraordinary knowledge of human nature ... And I think that human nature is a very extraordinary thing sometimes.

Stephen had to be contented with this well-worn generality as he recognised in it a genuine sentiment. His mother, in fact, had so far evangelised herself that she undertook the duties of missioner to the heathen; that is to say, she offered some of the plays to her husband to read. He listened to her praises with a somewhat startled air, observing no feature of her face, his eyeglass screwed into an astonished eye and his mouth poised in naïf surprise. He was always interested in novelties, childishly interested and receptive, and this new name and the phenomena it had produced in his house were novelties for him. He made no attempt to discredit his wife’s novel development but he resented both that she should have achieved it unaided by him and that she should be able thereby to act as intermediary between him and his son. He condemned as inopportune but not discredited his son’s wayward researches into strange literature and, though a similar taste was not discoverable in him, he was prepared to commit that most pious of heroisms namely the extension of one’s sympathies late in life in deference to the advocacy of a junior. Following the custom of certain old-fashioned people who can never understand why their patronage or judgments should put men of letters into a rage he chose his play from the title. A metaphor is a vice that attracts the dull mind by reason of its aptness and repels the too serious mind by reason of its falsity and danger so that, after all, there is something to be said, nothing voluminous perhaps, but at least a word of concession for that class of society which in literature as in everything else goes always with its four feet on the ground. Mr Daedalus, anyhow, suspected that A Doll’s House would be a triviality in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy and, as he had never been even unofficially a member of that international society which collects and examines psychical phenomena, he decided that Ghosts would probably be some uninteresting story about a haunted house. He chose the League of Youth in which he hoped to find the reminiscences of like-minded roysterers and, after reading through two acts of provincial intrigue, abandoned the enterprise as tedious. He had promised himself, arguing from the alienated attitudes and half-deferential half-words of pressmen at the mention of the name, a certain extravagance, perhaps an anomalous torridity of the North and [he] though the name beneath Ibsen’s photograph never failed to reawaken his sense of wonder, the upright line of the “b” running so strangely beside the initial letter as to suspend [one] the mind amid incertitudes for some oblivious instants, the final impression made upon him by the figure to which the name was affixed, a figure which he associated with a solicitor’s or a stockbroker’s office in Dame St, was an impression of [disappointment mixed] relief mixed with disappointment, the relief for his son’s sake prevailing dutifully over his own slight but real disappointment. So that from neither of Stephen’s parents did respectability get full allegiance.

A week before the date fixed for the reading of the paper Stephen consigned a small packet covered with neat characters into the Auditor’s hands. McCann smacked his lips and put the manuscript into the inside pocket of his coat:

—I’ll read this tonight and I’ll see you here at the same hour tomorrow. I think I know all that is in it beforehand.

The next [evening] afternoon McCann reported:—Well, I’ve read your paper.

—Well?

—Brilliantly written—a bit strong, it seems to me. However I gave it to the President this morning to read.

—What for?

—All the papers must be submitted to him first for approval, you know.

—Do you mean to say, said Stephen scornfully, that the President must approve of my paper before I can read it to your society!

—Yes. He’s the Censor.

—What a valuable society!

—Why not?

—It’s only child’s play, man. You remind me of children in the nursery.

—Can’t be helped. We must take what we can get.

—Why not put up the shutters at once?

—Well, it is valuable. It trains young men for public speaking—for the bar and the political platform.

—Mr Daniel could say as much for his charades.

—I daresay he could.

—So this Censor of yours is inspecting my essay?

—Well. He’s liberal-minded ...

—Ay.

While the two young men were holding this conversation on the steps of the Library, Whelan, the College orator came up to them. This suave rotund young man, who was the Secretary of the Society, was reading for the Bar. His eyes regarded Stephen now with mild, envious horror and he forgot all his baggage from Attica:

—Your essay is tabu, Daedalus.

—Who said so?

—The Very Reverend Dr Dillon.

The delivery of this news was followed by a silence during which Whelan slowly moistened his lower lip with saliva from his tongue and McCann made ready to shrug his shoulders.

—Where is the damned old fool? said the essayist promptly.

Whelan blushed and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. Stephen in a moment was half across the quadrangle. McCann called after him:

—Where are you going?

Stephen halted but, discovering that he was too angry to trust himself to speak, he merely pointed in the direction of the College, and went forward quickly.

So after all his trouble, thinking out his essay and composing his periods, this old fogey was about to prohibit it! His indignation settled into a mood of politic contempt as he crossed the Green. The clock in the hall of the College pointed to half past three as Stephen addressed the doddering door-porter. He had to speak twice, the second time with a distinct, separated enunciation, for the door-porter was rather stupid and deaf:

—Can—I—see—the—President?

The President was not in his room: he was saying his office in the garden. Stephen went out into the garden and went down towards the ball-alley. A small figure wrapped in a loose Spanish-looking black cloak presented its back to him near the far end of the side-walk. The figure went on slowly to the end of the walk, halted there for a few moments, and then turning about presented to him over the edge of a breviary a neat round head covered with curly grey hair and a very wrinkled face of an indescribable colour: the upper part was the colour of putty and the lower part was shot with slate colour. The President came slowly down the side-walk, in his capacious cloak, noiselessly moving his grey lips as he said his office. At the end of the walk he halted again and looked inquiringly at Stephen. Stephen raised his cap and said “Good evening, sir.” The President answered with the smile which a pretty girl gives when she receives some compliment which puzzles her—a ‘winning’ smile:

—What can I do for you? he asked in a [wonderfully] rich deep calculated voice.

—I understand, said Stephen, that you wish to see me about my essay—an essay I have written for the Debating Society.

—O, you are Mr Daedalus, said the President more seriously but still agreeably.

—Perhaps I am disturbing ...

—No, I have finished my office, said the President.

He [started] began to walk slowly down the path at such a pace as implied invitation. Stephen kept therefore at his side.

—I admire the style of your paper, he said firmly, very much but I do not approve at all of your theories. I am afraid I cannot allow you to read your paper before the Society.

They walked on to the end of the path, without speaking. Then Stephen said:

—Why, sir?

—I cannot encourage you to disseminate such theories among the young men in this college.

—You think my theory of art is a false one?

—It is certainly not the theory of art which is respected in this college.

—I agree with that, said Stephen.

—On the contrary, it represents the sum-total of modern unrest and modern freethinking. The authors you quote as examples, those you seem to admire ...

—Aquinas?

—Not Aquinas; I have to speak of him in a moment. But Ibsen, Maeterlinck ... these atheistic writers ...

—You do not like ...

—I am surprised that any student of this college could find anything to admire in such writers, writers who usurp the name of poet, who openly profess their atheistic doctrines and fill the minds of their readers with all the garbage of modern society. That is not art.

—Even admitting the corruption you speak of I see nothing unlawful in an examination of corruption.

—Yes, it may be lawful—for the scientist, for the reformer ...

—Why not for the poet too? Dante surely examines and upbraids society.

—Ah, yes, said the President explanatorily, with a moral purpose in view: Dante was a great poet.

—Ibsen is also a great poet.

—You cannot compare Dante and Ibsen.

—I am not doing so.

—Dante, the lofty upholder of beauty, the greatest of Italian poets, and Ibsen, the writer above and beyond all others, Ibsen and Zola, who seek to degrade their art, who pander to a corrupt taste ...

—But you are comparing them!

—No, you cannot compare them. One has a high moral aim—he ennobles the human race: the other degrades it.

—The lack of a specific code of moral conventions does not degrade the poet, in my opinion.

—Ah, if he were to examine even the basest things, said the President with a suggestion of tolerance in store, [that] it would be different if he were to examine and then show men the way to purify themselves.

—That is for the Salvationists, said Stephen.

—Do you mean ...

—I mean that Ibsen’s account of modern society is as genuinely ironical as Newman’s account of English Protestant morality and belief.

—That may be, said the President appeased by the conjunction.

—And as free from any missionary intention.

The President was silent.

—It is a question of temper. Newman could refrain from writing his Apologia for twenty years.

—But when he came out on him! said the President with a chuckle and an expressive incompletion of the phrase. Poor Kingsley!

—It is all a question of temper—one’s attitude towards society whether one is poet or critic.

—O, yes.

—Ibsen has the temper of an archangel.

—It may be: but I have always believed that he was a fierce realist like Zola with some kind of a new doctrine to preach.

—You were mistaken, sir.

—This is the general opinion.

—A mistaken one.

—I understood he had some doctrine or other—a social doctrine, free living, and an artistic doctrine, unbridled licence—so much so that the public will not tolerate his plays on the stage and that you cannot name him even in mixed society.

—Where have you seen this?

—O, everywhere ... in the papers.

—This is a serious argument, said Stephen reprovingly.

The president far from resenting this hardy statement seemed to bow to its justice: no-one could have a poorer opinion of the half-educated journalism of the present day than he had and he certainly would not allow a newspaper to dictate criticism to him. At the same time there was such a unanimity of opinion everywhere about Ibsen that he imagined ...

—May I ask you if you have read much of his writing? asked Stephen.

—Well, no ... I must say I ...

—May I ask you if you have read even a single line?

—Well, no ... I must admit ...

—And surely you do not think it right to pass judgment on a writer a single line of whose writing you have never read?

—Yes, I must admit that.

Stephen hesitated after this first success. The President resumed:

—I am very interested in the enthusiasm you show for this writer. I have never had any opportunity to read Ibsen myself but I know that he enjoys a great reputation. What you say of him, I must confess, alters my view of him considerably. Some day perhaps I shall ...

—I can lend you some of the plays if you like, sir, said Stephen with imprudent simplicity.

—Can you indeed?

Both paused for an instant: then—

—You will see that he is a great poet and a great artist, said Stephen.

—I shall be very interested, said the President with an amiable intention, to read some of his work for myself. I certainly shall.

Stephen had an impulse to say “Excuse me for five minutes while I send a telegram to Christiania” but he resisted his impulse. During the interview he had occasion more than once to put severe shackles on this importunate devil within him whose appetite was on edge for the farcical. The President was beginning to exhibit the liberal side of his character, but with priestly cautiousness.

—Yes, I shall be most interested. Your opinions are somewhat strange. Do you intend to publish this essay?

—Publish it!

—I should not care for anyone to identify the ideas in your essay with the teaching in our college. We receive this college in trust.

—But you are not supposed to be responsible for everything a student in your college thinks or says.

—No, of course not ... but, reading your essay and knowing you came from our college, people would suppose that we inculcated such ideas here.

—Surely a student of this college can pursue a special line of study if he chooses.

—It is just that which we always try to encourage in our students but your study, it seems to me, leads you to adopt very revolutionary ... very revolutionary theories.

—If I were to publish tomorrow a very revolutionary pamphlet on the means of avoiding potato-blight would you consider yourself responsible for my theory?

—No, no, of course not ... but then this is not a school of agriculture.

—Neither is it a school of dramaturgy, answered Stephen.

—Your argument is not so conclusive as it seems, said the President after a short pause. However I am glad to see that your attitude towards your subject is so genuinely serious. At the same time you must admit that this theory you have—if pushed to its logical conclusion—would emancipate the poet from all moral laws. I notice too that in your essay you allude satirically to what you call the ‘antique’ theory—the theory, namely, that the drama should have special ethical aims, that it should instruct, elevate and amuse. I suppose you mean Art for Art’s sake.

—I have only pushed to its logical conclusion the definition Aquinas has given of the beautiful.

—Aquinas?

—Pulcra sunt quae visa placent. He seems to regard the beautiful as that which satisfies the esthetic appetite and nothing more—that the mere apprehension of which pleases ...

—But he means the sublime—that which leads man upwards.

—His remark would apply to a Dutch painter’s representation of a plate of onions.

—No, no; that which pleases the soul in a state of sanctification, the soul seeking its spiritual good.

—Aquinas’ definition of the good is an unsafe basis of operations: it is very wide. He seems to me almost ironical in his treatment of the “appetites.”

The President scratched his head a little dubiously—

—Of course Aquinas is an extraordinary mind, he murmured, the greatest doctor of the Church: but he requires immense interpretation. There are parts of Aquinas which no priest would think of announcing in the pulpit.

—But what if I, as an artist, refuse to accept the cautions which are considered necessary for those who are still in a state of original stupidity?

—I believe you are sincere but I will tell you this as an older human being than you are and as a man of some experience: the cult of beauty is difficult. Estheticism often begins well only to end in the vilest abominations of which ...

—Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur.

—It is insidious, it creeps into the mind, little by little ...

—Integritas, consonantia, claritas. There seems to me to be effulgence in that theory instead of danger. The intelligent nature apprehends it at once.

—S. Thomas of course ...

—Aquinas is certainly on the side of the capable artist. I hear no mention of instruction or elevation.

—To support Ibsenism on Aquinas seems to me somewhat paradoxical. Young men often substitute brilliant paradox for conviction.

—My conviction has led me nowhere: my theory states itself.

—Ah, you are a paradoxist, said the President smiling with gentle satisfaction. I can see that ... And there is another thing—a question of taste perhaps rather than anything else—which makes me think your theory juvenile. You don’t seem to understand the importance of the classical drama ... Of course in his own line Ibsen also may be an admirable writer ...

—But, allow me, sir, said Stephen. My entire esteem is for the classical temper in art. Surely you must remember that I said ...

—So far as I can remember, said the President lifting to the pale sky a faintly smiling face on which memory endeavoured to bring a vacuous amiability to book, so far as I can remember you treated the Greek drama—the classical temper—very summarily indeed, with a kind of juvenile ... impudence, shall I say?

—But the Greek drama is heroic, monstruous. [sic] Eschylus is not a classical writer!

—I told you you were a paradoxist, Mr Daedalus. You wish to upset centuries of literary criticism by a brilliant turn of speech, by a paradox.

—I use the word ‘classical’ in a certain sense, with a certain definite meaning, that is all.

—But you cannot use any terminology you like.

—I have not changed the terms. I have explained them. By ‘classical’ I mean the slow elaborative patience of the art of satisfaction. The heroic, the fabulous, I call romantic. Menander perhaps, I don’t know ...

—All the world recognises Eschylus as a supreme classical dramatist.

—O, the world of professors whom he helps to feed ...

—Competent critics, said the President severely, men of the highest culture. And even the public themselves can appreciate him. I have read, I think, in some ... a newspaper, I think it was ... that Irving, the great actor, Henry Irving produced one of his plays in London and that the London public flocked to see it.

—From curiosity. The London public will flock to see anything new or strange. If Irving were to give an imitation of a hard-boiled egg they would flock to see it.

The President received this absurdity with unflenching gravity and when he had come to the end of the path, he halted for a few instants before leading the way to the house.

—I do not predict much success for your advocacy in this country, he said generally. Our people have their faith and they are happy. They are faithful to their Church and the Church is sufficient for them. Even for the profane world these modern pessimistic writers are a little too ... too much.

With his scornful mind scampering from Clonliffe College to Mullingar Stephen strove to make himself ready for some definite compact. The President had carefully brought the interview into the region of chattiness.

—Yes, we are happy. Even the English people have begun to see the folly of these morbid tragedies, these wretched unhappy, unhealthy tragedies. I read the other day that some playwright had to change the last act of his play because it ended in catastrophe—some sordid murder or suicide or death.

—Why not make death a capital offence? said Stephen. People are very timorous. It would be so much simpler to take the bull by the horns and have done with it.

When they reached the hall of the College the President stood at the foot of the staircase before going up to his room. Stephen waited silently:

—Begin to look at the bright side of things, Mr Daedalus. Art should be healthy first of all.

The President gathered in his soutane for the ascent with a slow hermaphroditic gesture:

—I must say you have defended your theory very well ... very well indeed. I do not agree with it, of course, but I can see you have thought it all out carefully beforehand. You have thought it out carefully?

—Yes, I have.

—It is very interesting—a little paradoxical at times and a little juvenile—but I have been very interested in it. I am sure too that when your studies have brought you further afield you will be able to amend it so as to—fit in more with recognised facts; I am sure you will be able to apply it better then—when your mind has undergone a course of ... regular ... training and you have a larger, wider sense of ... comparison ...

 ® 

XX

The President’s indefinite manner of closing the interview had left some doubts in Stephen’s mind; he was unable to decide whether the retreat upstairs was a breach of friendly relations or a politic confession of inability. However as no definite prohibition had been pronounced upon him he determined to proceed calmly on his way until he encountered a substantial check. When he met McCann again he smiled and waited to be questioned. His account of the interview went the rounds of the undergraduate classes and he was much amused to observe the startled expression of many pairs of eyes which, to judge from their open humiliated astonishment, appeared to behold in him characteristics of a moral Nelson. Maurice listened to his brother’s account of his battle with recognised authority but he made no remark upon it. Stephen himself, in default of another’s service, began to annotate the incident copiously, expending every suggestive phase of the interview. He consumed much imaginative fuel in this diverting chase of the presumable and his rapid changeful courses kindled in him a flame of discontent for Maurice’s impassiveness:

—Are you listening to me at all? Do you know what I’m talking about?

—Yes, it’s all right ... You can read your paper, can’t you?

—Yes, of course, I can ... But what’s up with you? Are you bored? Are you thinking of anything?

—Well ... yes, I am.

—What?

—I have found out why I feel different this evening. Why, do you think?

—I don’t know. Tell us.

—I have been walking [on] from the ball of my left foot. I usually walk from the ball of my right foot.

Stephen looked sideways at the speaker’s solemn face to see if there were any signs thereon of a satirical mood but, finding only steadfast self-analysis, he said:

—Indeed? That’s damned interesting.

On the Saturday night which had been fixed for the reading of the paper Stephen found himself facing the benches in the Physics’ Theatre. While the minutes were being read out by the secretary he had time to observe his father’s eyeglass glimmering high up near the window and he divined more than saw the burly form of Mr Casey hard by that observant centre. He could not see his brother but in the front benches he noticed Father Butt and McCann and two other priests. The chairman was Mr Keane, the professor of English composition. When the formal business was ended the chairman called on the essayist to read his paper and Stephen stood up. He waited until a compliment of discreet applause had subsided, and until McCann’s energetic hands had given four resounding claps as a concluding solo of welcome. Then he read out his essay. He read it quietly and distinctly, involving every hardihood of thought or expression in an envelope of low innocuous melody. He read it on calmly to the end: his reading was never once interrupted with applause: and when he had read out the final sentences in a tone of metallic clearness he sat down.

The first single thought that emerged through a swift mood of confusion was the bright conviction that he should never have written his essay. While he was gloomily taking counsel with himself as to whether he should fling the manuscript at their heads and march home or remain as he was shading his face from the light of the candles on the Chairman’s table he became aware that the discussion on his paper had begun: this discovery surprised him. Whelan, the orator of the College, was proposing a vote of thanks and wagging his head in time to ornate phrases. Stephen wondered did anyone else observe the infantile movements of the orator’s mouth. He wished that Whelan would shut his jaws with a clap so as to reveal the presence of solid teeth; the mere sound of the speech reminded him of the noise Nurse Sarah used to make when she mashed Isabel’s bread-and-milk in the blue bowl which his mother now used to hold starch. But he at once corrected himself for such a manner of criticism and strove to listen to the words of the orator. Whelan was profusely admiring: he felt (he said) during the reading of Mr Daedalus’ essay as though he had been listening to the discourse of angels and did not know the language that they spoke. It was with some diffidence that he ventured to criticise but it was evident that Mr Daedalus did not understand the beauty of the Attic theatre. He pointed out that Eschylus was an imperishable name and he predicted that the drama of the Greeks would outlive many civilisations. Stephen noticed that Whelan said ‘yisterday’ twice instead of ‘yesterday’ in imitation of Father Butt who was a South of England man and he speculated as to whether it was a Dominican preacher or a Jesuit preacher [that] who had given the orator his final phrase. “Greek art” said Whelan “is not for a time but for all times. It stands aloof, alone. It is imperial, imperious and imperative.”

McCann seconded the vote of thanks which had been so ably proposed by Mr Whelan and he desired to add his tribute to Mr Whelan’s eloquent tribute to the essayist of the night. There were perhaps many things in the paper which Mr Daedalus had read to them with which he could not agree, but he was not such a blind partizan of antiquity for antiquity’s sake as Mr Whelan seemed to be. Modern ideas must find their expression: the modern world had to face pressing problems: and he considered that any writer who could call attention to those problems in a striking way was well worthy of every serious person’s consideration. He considered that he was speaking for one and all of those present when he said that Mr Daedalus, by reading his frank and earnest essay that night, had conferred a benefit on the society.

The general diversion of the night began when these two opening speeches had ended. Stephen was subjected to the fires of six or seven hostile speakers. One speaker, a young man named Magee, said he was surprised that any paper which was conceived in a spirit so hostile to the spirit of religion itself—he did not know if Mr Daedalus understood the true purport of the theory he propounded—should find approval in their society. Who but the Church had sustained and fostered the artistic temper? Had not the drama owed its very birth to religion? That was indeed a poor theory which tried to bolster up the dull dramas of sinful intrigues and to decry the immortal masterpieces. Mr Magee said he did not know as much about Ibsen as Mr Daedalus did—nor did he want to know anything about him—but he knew that one of his plays was about the sanitary condition of a bathing-place. If this was drama he did not see why some Dublin Shakespeare should not pen an immortal work dealing with the new Main Drainage Scheme of the Dublin Corporation. This speech was the signal for a general attack. The essay was pronounced a jingle of meaningless words, a clever presentation of vicious principles in the guise of artistic theories, a reproduction of the decadent literary opinions of exhausted European capitals. The essayist was supposed to intend parts of his essay as efforts at practical joking: everyone knew that Macbeth would be famous when the unknown authors of whom Mr Daedalus was so fond were dead and forgotten. Ancient art loved to uphold the beautiful and the sublime: modern art might select other themes: but those who still preserved their minds uncontaminated by atheistic poisons would know which to choose. The climax of aggressiveness was reached when Hughes stood up. He declared in ringing Northern accents that the moral welfare of the Irish people was menaced by such theories. They wanted no foreign filth. Mr Daedalus might read what authors he liked, of course, but the Irish people had their own glorious literature where they could always find fresh ideals to spur them on to new patriotic endeavours. Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the Nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country—you must first have a nation before you have art. Mr Daedalus might do as he pleased, kneel at the shrine of Art (with a capital A), and rave about obscure authors. In spite of [his] any hypocritical use of the name of a great doctor of the Church Ireland would be on her guard against the insidious theory that art can be separated from morality. It they were to have art let it be moral art, art that elevated, above all, national art,

Kindly Irish of the Irish,

Neither Saxon nor Italian.

When the time had come for the Chairman to sum up and to put the motion before the house there was the usual pause. In this pause Father Butt rose and begged leave to say a few words. The benches applauded with excitement and settled themselves to hear a denunciation ex cathedra. Father Butt excused himself amid cries of “No, no” for detaining his audience at such an advanced hour but he thought he should enter a word in favour of the much-abused essayist. He would be advocatus diaboli and he felt the uncomfortableness of his office all the more since one of the speakers had, not unjustly, described the language in which Mr Daedalus’ essay had been couched as a language of angels. Mr Daedalus had contributed a very striking paper, a paper which had filled the house and entertained them by the lively discussion which it had provoked. Of course everyone could not be of the same opinion in matters artistic. Mr Daedalus admitted the conflict between romantics and classicals as the condition of all achievement and they had certainly proof that night that a conflict between antagonistic theories had been able to produce such distinct achievements as the essay itself, a remarkable piece of work, on the one hand and the memorable attack delivered by Mr Hughes, as leader of the opposition, on the other hand. He thought that one or two of the speakers had been unduly severe with the essayist but he was confident that the essayist was well able to take care of himself in the matter of argument. As for the theory itself Father Butt confessed that it was a new sensation for him to hear Thomas Aquinas quoted as an authority on esthetic philosophy. Esthetic philosophy was a modern branch and if it was anything at all, it was practical. Aquinas had treated slightly of the beautiful but always from a theoretic standpoint. To interpret his statements practically one needed a fuller knowledge than Mr Daedalus could have of his entire theology. At the same time he would not go so far as to say that Mr Daedalus had really, intentionally or unintentionally, misinterpreted Aquinas. But just as an act which may be good in itself may become bad by reason of circumstances so an object intrinsically beautiful may be vitiated by other considerations. Mr Daedalus had chosen to consider beauty intrinsically and to neglect these other considerations. But beauty also has its practical side. Mr Daedalus was a passionate admirer of the artistic and such people are not always the most practical people in the [side] world. Father Butt then reminded his audience of the story of King Alfred and the old woman who was cooking cakes—of the theorist, that is, and of the practical person and concluded by expressing the hope that the essayist would emulate King Alfred and not be too severe on the practical persons who had criticised him.

The chairman in his summing-up speech complimented the essayist on his style but he said the essayist had evidently forgotten that art implies selection. He thought that the discussion on the paper had been very instructive and he was sure they were all thankful to Father Butt for his clear, concise criticism. Mr Daedalus had been somewhat severely handled but he thought that, considering the many excellences of his paper, he (the Chairman) was well justified in asking them to agree unanimously that the best thanks of this society [are] were due and [are] were hereby tendered to Mr Daedalus for his admirable and instructive paper! The vote of thanks was passed unanimously but without enthusiasm.

Stephen stood up and bowed. It was customary for the essayist of the night to avail himself of this occasion for replying to his critics but Stephen contented himself with acknowledging the vote of thanks. Some called on him for a speech but, when the Chairman had waited in vain for a few moments, the proceedings ran on rapidly to a close. In five minutes the Physics’ Theatre was empty. Downstairs in the hall the young men were busy putting on their coats and lighting cigarettes. Stephen looked for his father and Maurice but could see them nowhere so he set out for home alone. At the corner of the Green he came up with a group of four young men, Madden, Cranly, a young medical student named Temple, and a clerk in the Custom-House. Madden caught Stephen’s arm and said consolingly in private:

—Well, old man, I told you those fellows wouldn’t understand it. I knew it was too good for them.

Stephen was touched by this show of friendship but he shook his head as if he wished to change the subject. Besides, he knew that Madden really understood very little of the paper and disapproved of what he understood. When Stephen came up with the four young men they were strolling very slowly, discussing a projected trip to Wicklow on Easter Monday. Stephen walked beside Madden at the edge of the footpath and thus the group advanced abreast along the wide footpath. Cranly in the centre was linking Madden and the clerk from the Custom-House. Stephen listened vaguely. Cranly was speaking (as was his custom when he walked with other gentlemen of leisure) in a language the base of which was Latin and the superstructure of which was composed of Irish, French and German:

—Atque ad duas horas in Wicklowio venit.

—Damnum longum tempus prendit, said the clerk from the Custom-House.

—Quando ... no, I mean ... quo in ... bateau ... irons-nous? asked Temple.

—Quo in batello? said Cranly, in “Regina Maris.”

So after a little talk the young men agreed to take a trip to Wicklow on the Sea-Queen. Stephen was much relieved to listen to this conversation: in a few minutes the sting of his disaster was no longer felt so acutely. Cranly at last observed Stephen walking at the edge of the path and said:

—Ecce orator qui in malo humore est.

—Non sum, said Stephen.

—Credo ut estis, said Cranly.

—Minime.

—Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendax estis quia facies vestra mostrat [sic] ut vos in malo humore estis.

Madden who could not talk this language well led the group back to English. The clerk from the Custom-House seemed to have it on his conscience to express admiration for Stephen’s style. He was a big stout young man with a lardy face and he carried an umbrella. He was several years [younger] older than any of his companions but he had decided to read for his degree in Mental and Moral Science. He was a constant companion of Cranly’s and it was the latter’s eloquence which had induced him to enter the night-classes in the College. Cranly spent a great part of his time persuading young men to adopt different lines of life. The clerk from the Custom-House was named O’Neill. He was a very amiable person, always laughing asthmatically at Cranly’s serious fooling, but he was interested to hear of any occasion whereby he might improve himself mentally. He attended the Debating Society and the meetings of the College Sodality because he was thus brought into ‘touch’ with University life. He was a circumspect young man but he allowed Cranly to ‘chaff’ him about girls. Stephen tried to dissuade the company from alluding to his essay but O’Neill had accepted the occasion as one to be availed of. He asked Stephen questions such as are to be found in the pages of young ladies’ confession-albums and Stephen thought that his mental heaven must greatly resemble a confectioner’s shop. Temple was a raw Gipsy-looking youth with a shambling gait and a shambling manner of speaking. He was from the West of Ireland and he was known to be very revolutionary. When O’Neill had spoken for some time to Cranly, who had answered him more politely than Stephen, Temple after a few false starts got in a phrase:

—I think ... was a bloody fine paper.

Cranly turned a vacant face in the direction of the speaker but [O’Neill] Temple continued:

—Made ’em sit up too.

—Habesne bibitum? asked Cranly.

—’Scuse me, sir, said [O’Neill] Temple to Stephen across the intervening bodies, do you believe in Jesus ... I don’t believe in Jesus, he added.

Stephen laughed loudly at the tone of this statement and he continued when Temple began to shamble through a kind of apology:

—’Course I don’t know ... if you believe in Jesus. I believe in Man ... If you b’lieve in Jesus ... of course ... I oughtn’t to say anything the first time I met you ... Do you think that?

O’Neill preserved a solemn silence until Temple’s speech had faded into indistinct mutterings; then he said, as if he were beginning an entirely new subject:

—I was very much interested in your paper and in the speeches too ... What did you think of Hughes?

Stephen did not answer.

—Bloody cod, said Temple.

—I thought his speech was in very bad taste, said O’Neill sympathetically.

—Bellam boccam habet, said Cranly.

—Yes, I think he went too far, said Madden, but, you see, he gets carried away by his enthusiasm.

—Patrioticus est.

—Yes, he is a patriotic ’eus, said O’Neill laughing wheezily. But I thought Father Butt’s speech very good, very clear and philosophical.

—Did you think that? cried Temple from the inside of the path, to Stephen ... ’Scuse me ... I wanted to know what he thought of Butt’s speech, he explained at the same time to the other [four] three ... Did you think ... he was a bloody cod too?

Stephen could not help laughing at this novel form of address though Father Butt’s speech had put him into anything but a charitable mood.

—It was just the kind of thing he gives us every day, said Madden. You know the style.

—His speech annoyed me, said Stephen curtly.

—Why was that? said Temple eagerly. Why was it he annoyed you?

Stephen made a grimace instead of answering:

—Bloody cod of a speech, said Temple ... I’m a rationalist. I don’t b’lieve in any religion.

—I think he meant part of his speech kindly, said Cranly slowly after a pause, turning his face full towards Stephen. Stephen answered his gaze, [and met] looking steadily into a pair of bright dark eyes, and at the moment when their eyes met he felt hope. There was nothing in the phrase to encourage; he doubted its justice very much: yet he knew that hope had touched him. He walked on beside the four young men, pondering. Cranly stopped before the window of a little huckster’s shop in one of the mean streets through which they passed, staring fixedly at an old yellow copy of the Daily Graphic which was hanging sideways on the glass. The illustration was a winter scene. No-one said anything and as silence seemed about to set in permanently Madden asked him what he was looking at. Cranly looked at his questioner and then looked back again at the dirty picture, towards which he nodded his head heavily:

—What is ... what is? asked Temple, who had been looking at some cold crubeens in the next window.

Cranly turned his vacant face again towards his questioner and pointed to the picture, saying:

—Feuc an eis super stradam ... in Liverpoolio.

Stephen’s family circle was now increased by Isabel’s return from her convent. For some time she had been in delicate health and the nuns had recommended that she should have home care. She came home a few days after the famous day of Stephen’s paper. Stephen was standing at the little front window that looked towards the mouth of the river when he saw his parents walking from the tram with a thin pale girl walking between them. Stephen’s father did not like the prospect of another inhabitant in his house, particularly a daughter for whom he had little affection. He was annoyed that his daughter would not avail herself of the opportunity afforded her in the convent, but his sense of public duty was real if spasmodic and he would by no means permit his wife to bring the girl home without his aid. The reflection that his daughter, instead of being a help to him would be a hindrance, and the suspicion that the burden of responsibility which he had piously imposed on his eldest son’s shoulders was beginning to irk that young man troubled his vision of the future. He had a taste for contrasts, perhaps, which led him to expect industry and sobriety in his offspring, [and] but it cannot be said that he desired any material re-exaltation. It was just this impalpable excellence which he wished his son to assert again in the teeth of circumstances which gained him a conditional pardon at Stephen’s hands. But this slight threat of union between father and son had been worn away by the usages of daily life and, by reason of its tenuity and of the [failure] gradual rustiness which had begun to consume the upper station, it bore fewer and feebler messages along it.

Stephen’s father was quite capable of talking himself into believing what he knew to be untrue. He knew that his own ruin had been his own handiwork but he had talked himself into believing that it was the handiwork of others. He had his son’s distaste for responsibility without his son’s courage. He was one of those illogical wiseacres with whom no evidence can outreason the first impression. His wife had fulfilled her duties to him with startling literalness and yet she had never been able to expiate the offence of her blood. Misunderstanding such as this, which is accepted as natural in higher social grades, is wrongly refused recognition in the burgher class where it is often found to issue in feuds of insatiable, narrow hatred. Mr Daedalus hated his wife’s maiden name with a medieval intensity: it stunk in his nostrils. His alliance therewith was the only sin of which, in the entire honesty of his cowardice, he could accuse himself. Now that he was making for the final decades of life with the painful consciousness of having diminished comfortable goods and of having accumulated uncomfortable habits he consoled and revenged himself by tirades so prolonged and so often repeated that he was in danger of becoming a monomaniac. The hearth at night was the sacred witness of these revenges, pondered, muttered, growled and execrated. The exception which his clemency had originally made in favour of his wife was soon out of mind and she began to irritate him by her dutiful symbolism. The great disappointment of his life was accentuated by a lesser and keener loss—the loss of a coveted fame. On account of a certain income and of certain sociable gifts Mr Daedalus had been accustomed to regard himself as the centre of a little world, the darling of a little society. This position he still strove to maintain but at the cost of a reckless liberality from which his household had to suffer both in deed and in spirit. He imagined that while he strove to retain this infatuating position his home affairs would, through the agency of a son whom he made no effort to understand, in some divine manner right themselves. This hope when indulged in would sometimes embitter his affection for a son whom he thereby acknowledged as superior but, now that he was led to suspect that his hope was fatuous, an embitterment of that affection seemed likely to fix itself permanently among his emotional landmarks. His son’s notion of aristocracy was not the one which he could sympathise with and his son’s silence during the domestic battles no longer seemed to him a conveyed compliment. He was, in fact, sufficiently acute to observe here a covert menace against castellar rights and he would not have been wrong if he had imagined that his son regarded [these] assistance at these tortuous and obscene monologues as the tribute exacted by a father for affording a wayward child a base of supplies ...

Stephen did not consider his parents very seriously. In his opinion they had opened up misleading and unnatural relations between themselves and him and he considered their affection for him requited by a studious demeanour towards them and by a genuine goodwill to perform for them a great number of such material services as, in his present state of fierce idealism, he could look upon as trifles. The only material services he would refuse them were those which he judged to be spiritually dangerous and it is as well to admit that this exception all but nullified his charity for he had cultivated an independence of the soul which could brook very few subjections. Divine exemplars abetted him in this. The phrase which preachers elaborate into a commandment of obedience seemed to him meagre, ironical and inconclusive and the narrative of the life of Jesus did not in any way impress him [with] as the narrative of the life of one who was subject to others. When he had been a Roman Catholic in the proper sense of the term the figure of Jesus had always seemed to him too remote and too passionless and he had never uttered from his heart a single fervent prayer to the Redeemer: it was to Mary, as to a weaker and more engaging vessel of salvation, that he had entrusted his spiritual affairs. Now his enfranchisement from the discipline of the Church seemed to be coincident with an [natural] instinctive return to the Founder thereof and this impulse would have led him perhaps to a consideration of the merits of Protestantism had not another natural impulse inclined him to bring even the self-contradictory and the absurd into order. He did not know, besides, whether the haughtiness of the Papacy was not as derivable from Jesus himself as the reluctance to be pressed beyond “Amen: I say to you” for an account of anything but he was quite sure that behind the enigmatic utterances of Jesus there was a very much more definite conception than any which could be supposed [to] discoverable behind Protestant theology:

—Put this in your diary, he said to transcriptive Maurice. Protestant Orthodoxy is like Lanty McHale’s dog: it goes a bit of the road with everyone.

—It seems to me that S. Paul trained that dog, said Maurice.

One day when Stephen had gone to the College by accident he found McCann standing in the hall holding a long testimonial. Another part of the testimonial was on the hall-table and nearly all the young men in the College were signing their names to it. McCann was speaking volubly to a little group and Stephen discovered that the testimonial was the tribute of Dublin University students to the Tsar of Russia. World-wide peace: solution of all disputes by arbitration: general disarming of the nations: these were the benefits for which the students were returning their thanks. On the hall table there were two photographs, one of the Tsar of Russia, the other of the Editor of the Review of Reviews: both of the photographs were signed by the famous couple. As McCann was standing sideways to the light Stephen amused himself in tracing a resemblance between him and the pacific Emperor whose photograph had been taken in profile. The Tsar’s air of besotted Christ moved him to scorn and he turned for support to Cranly who was standing beside the door. Cranly wore a very dirty yellow straw hat of the shape of an inverted bucket in the shelter of which his face was composed to a glaucuous [sic] calm.

—Doesn’t he look a wirrasthrue Jaysus? said Stephen pointing to the Tsar’s photograph and using the Dublin version of the name as an effective common noun.

Cranly looked in the direction of McCann and replied, nodding his head:

—Wirrasthrue Jaysus and hairy Jaysus.

At that moment McCann caught sight of Stephen and signalled that he would be with him in a moment:

—Have you signed? asked Cranly.

—This thing? No—have you?

Cranly hesitated and then brought out a well deliberated ‘Yes.’

—What for?

—What for?

—Ay.

—For ... Pax.

Stephen looked up under the bucket-shaped hat but could read no expression on his neighbour’s face. His eyes wandered up to the dinged vertex of the hat.

—In the name of God what do you wear that hat for? It’s not so terribly hot, is it? he asked.

Cranly took off the hat slowly and gazed into its depths. After a little pause he pointed into it and said:

—Viginti-uno denarios.

—Where? said Stephen.

—I bought it, said Cranly very impressively and very flatly, last summer in Wickla.

He looked back into the hat and said, smiling with a sour affection:

—It’s not ... too bloody bad ... of a hat ... D’ye know.

And he replaced it on his head slowly, murmuring to himself, from force of habit ‘Viginti-uno denarios.’

—Sicut bucketus est, said Stephen.

The subject was not discussed further. Cranly produced a little grey ball from one of his pockets and began to examine it carefully, indenting the surface at many points. Stephen was watching this operation when he heard McCann addressing him.

—I want you to sign this testimonial.

—What about?

—It’s a testimonial of admiration for the courage displayed by the Tsar of Russia in issuing a rescript to the Powers, advocating arbitration instead of war as a means of settling national disputes.

Stephen shook his head. Temple who had been wandering round the hall in search of sympathy came over at this moment and said to Stephen:

—Do you believe in peace?

No-one answered him.

—So you won’t sign? said McCann.

Stephen shook his head again:

—Why not? said McCann sharply.

—If we must have a Jesus, answered Stephen, let us have a legitimate Jesus.

—By hell! said Temple laughing, that’s good. Did you hear that? he said to Cranly and McCann both of whom he seemed to regard as very hard of hearing. D’you hear that? Legitima’ Jesus!

—I presume then you approve of war and slaughter, said McCann.

—I did not make the world, said Stephen.

—By hell! said Temple to Cranly. I believe in universal brotherhood. ’Scuse me, he said, turning to McCann, do you believe in universal brotherhood?

McCann took no heed of the question but continued addressing Stephen. He began an argument in favour of peace which Temple listened to for a few moments, but, as he spoke with his back to Temple, that revolutionary young man who could not hear him very well began to wander round the hall again. Stephen did not argue with McCann but at a convenient pause he said:

—I have no intention of signing.

McCann halted and Cranly said, taking Stephen’s arm:

—Nos ad manum ballum jocabimus.

—All right, said McCann promptly, as if he was accustomed to rebuffs, if you won’t, you won’t.

He went off to get more signatures for the Tsar while Cranly and Stephen went out into the garden. The ball-alley was deserted so they arranged a match of twenty, Cranly allowing Stephen seven points. Stephen had not had much practice at the game and so he was only seventeen when Cranly cried out ‘Game Ball.’ He lost the second game also. Cranly was a strong, accurate player but Stephen thought too heavy of foot to be a brilliant one. While they were playing Madden came into the alley and sat down on an old box. He was much more excited than either of the players and kept kicking the box with his heels and crying out “Now, Cranly! Now, Cranly!” “But it, Stevie!” Cranly who had to serve the third game put the ball over the side of the alley into Lord Iveagh’s grounds and the game had to wait while he went in search of it. Stephen sat down on his heels beside Madden and they both looked up at the figure of Cranly who was holding on to the netting and making signals to one of the gardeners from the top of the wall. Madden took out smoking materials:

—Are you and Cranly long here?

—Not long, said Stephen.

Madden began to stuff very coarse tobacco into his pipe:

—D’ye know what, Stevie?

—What?

—Hughes ... doesn’t like you ... at all. I heard him speaking of you to someone.

—‘Someone’ is vague.

—He doesn’t like you at all.

—His enthusiasm carries him away, said Stephen.

On the evening of the Saturday before Palm Sunday Stephen found himself alone with Cranly. The two were leaning over the marble staircase of the Library, idly watching the people coming in and going out. The big windows in front of them were thrown and the mild air [entered] came through: [them]

—Do you like the services of Holy Week? said Stephen.

—Yes, said Cranly.

—They are wonderful, said Stephen. Tenebrae—it’s so damned childish to frighten us by knocking prayerbooks on a bench. Isn’t it strange to see the Mass of the Presanctified—no lights or vestments, the altar naked, the door of the tabernacle gaping open, the priests lying prostrate on the altar steps?

—Yes, said Cranly.

—Don’t you think the Reader who begins the mass is a strange person. No-one knows where he comes from: he has no connection with the mass. He comes out by himself and opens a book at the right hand side of the altar and when he has read the lesson he closes the book and goes away as he came. Isn’t he strange?

—Yes, said Cranly.

—You know how his lesson begins? Dixit enim Dominus: in tribulatione sua consurgent ad me; venite et revertamur ad Dominum.

He chanted the opening of the lesson in mezza voce and his voice went flowing down the staircase and round the circular hall, each tone coming back upon the ear enriched and softened.

—He pleads, said Stephen. He is what that chalk-faced chap was for me, advocatus diaboli. Jesus has no friend on Good Friday. Do you know what kind of a figure rises before me on Good Friday?

—What kind?

—An ugly little man who has taken into his body the sins of the world. Something between Socrates and a Gnostic Christ—A Christ of the Dark Ages. That’s what his mission of redemption has got for him: a crooked ugly body for which neither God nor man have pity. Jesus is on strange terms with that father of his. His father seems to me something of a snob. Do you notice that he never notices his son publicly but once—when Jesus is in full dress on the top of Thabor?

—I don’t like Holy Thursday much, said Cranly.

—Neither do I. There are too many mammas and daughters going chapel-hunting. The chapel smells too much of flowers and hot candles and women. Besides girls praying put me off my stroke.

—Do you like Holy Saturday?

—The service is always too early but I like it.

—I like it.

—Yes, the Church seems to have thought the matter over and to be saying “Well, after all, you see, it’s morning now and he wasn’t so dead as we thought he was.” The corpse has become a paschal candle with five grains of incense stuck in it instead of its five wounds. The three faithful Mary’s too who thought all was over on Friday have a candle each. The bells ring and the service is full of irrelevant alleluias.t It’s rather a technical affair, blessing this, that and the other but it’s cheerfully ceremonious.

—But you don’t imagine the damned fools of people see anything in these services, do you?

—Do they not? said Stephen.

—Bah, said Cranly.

One of Cranly’s friends came up the stairs while they were talking. He was a young man who was by day a clerk in Guinness’s Brewery and by night a student of mental and moral philosophy in the night classes of the College. It was, of course, Cranly who had induced him to attend. This young man, who was named Glynn, was unable to keep his head steady as he suffered from inherited nervousness and his hands trembled very much whenever he tried to do anything with them. He spoke with nervous hesitations and seemed to obtain satisfaction only in the methodic stamp of his feet. He was a low-sized young man, with a nigger’s face and the curly black head of a nigger. He usually carried an umbrella and his conversation was for the most part a translation of commonplaces into polysyllabic phrases. This habit he cultivated partly because it saved him from the inconvenience of cerebrating at the normal rate and perhaps because he considered it was the channel best fitted for his peculiar humour.

—Here is Professor Bloody-Big-Umbrella Glynn, said Cranly.

—Good evening, Gentlemen, said Glynn, bowing.

—Good ... evening, said Cranly vacantly. Well, yes ... it is a good evening.

—I can see, said Glynn shaking a trembling forefinger in reproof, I can see that you are about to make obvious remarks.

On Spy Wednesday night Cranly and Stephen attended the office of Tenebrae in the Pro-Cathedral. They went round to the back of the altar and knelt behind the students from Clonliffe who were chanting the office. Stephen was right opposite Wells and he observed the great change which a surplice made in that young man’s appearance. Stephen did not like the office which was gabbled over quickly. He said to Cranly that the chapel with its polished benches and incandescent lamps reminded him of an insurance office. Cranly arranged that on Good Friday they should attend the office in the Carmelite Church, Whitefriar’s St where, he said, the office was much more homely. Cranly accompanied Stephen part of the way home and explained very minutely, using his large hands for the purpose, all the merits of Wicklow bacon.

—You are no Israelite, said Stephen, I see you eat the unclean animal.

Cranly replied that it was nonsense to consider the pig unclean because he ate dirty garbage and at the same time to consider the oyster, which fed chiefly on excrements, a delicacy. He believed that the pig was much maligned: he said there was a lot of money to be made out of pigs. He instanced all the Germans who made small fortunes in Dublin by opening porkshops.

—I often thought seriously, he said stopping in his walk to give emphasis to his remark, of opening a pork-shop, d’ye know ... and putting Kranliberg or some German name, d’ye know, over the door ... and makin’ a flamin’ fortune out of pig’s meat.

—God bless us! said Stephen. What a terrible idea!

—Ay, said Cranly walking on heavily, a flamin’ bloody fortune I’d make.

On Good Friday as Stephen was wandering aimlessly about the city he caught sight of a placard on a wall which announced that the Three Hours’ Agony would be preached by the Very Reverend W. Dillon S.J. and the Very Reverend J. Campbell S.J. in the Jesuit Church, Gardiner St. Stephen felt very solitary and purposeless as he traversed empty street after empty street and, without being keenly aware of it, he began to proceed in the direction of Gardiner St. It was a warm sunless day and the city wore an air of sacred torpor. As he passed under S. George’s Church he saw that it was already half past two;—he had been three hours wandering up and down the city. He entered the Church in Gardiner St and, passing by without honouring the table of the lay-brother who roused himself from a stupefied doze in expectation of silver, arrived in the right wing of the chapel. The chapel was crowded from altar to doors with a well-dressed multitude. Everywhere he saw the same flattered affection for the Jesuits who are in the habit of attaching to their order the souls of thousands of the insecurely respectable middle-class by offering them a refined asylum, an interested, a considerate confessional, a particular amiableness of manners which their spiritual adventures in no way entitled them to. Not very far from him in the shelter of one of the pillars Stephen saw his father and two friends. His father had directed his eyeglass upon the distant choir and his face wore an expression of impressed piety. The choir was executing some florid tracery which was intended as an expression of mourning. The walk, the heat, the crush, the darkness of the chapel overcame Stephen and, leaning against the lintel of the door, he half closed his eyes and allowed his thoughts to drift. Rhymes began to make themselves in his head.

He perceived dimly that a white figure had ascended the pulpit and he heard a voice saying Consummatum est. He recognised the voice and he knew that Father Dillon was preaching on the Seventh Word. He took no trouble to hear the sermon but every few minutes he heard a new translation of the Word rolling over the congregation. “It is ended” “It is accomplished.” This sensation awoke him from his day-dream and as the translations followed [each] one another more and more rapidly he found his gambling instinct on the alert. He wagered with himself as to what word the preacher would select. “It is ... accomplished” “It is ... consummated” “It is ... achieved.” In the few seconds which intervened between the first part and the second part of the phrase Stephen’s mind performed feats of divining agility “It is ... finished” “It is ... completed” “It is ... concluded.” At last with a final burst of rhetoric Father Dillon cried out that it was over and the congregation began to pour itself out into the streets. Stephen was borne along in the crowd and everywhere about him he heard the same murmurs of admiration and saw the same expressions of satisfaction, discreet murmurs, subdued expressions. The special charges of the Jesuits were congratulating themselves and one another on a well-spent Good Friday.

To avoid his father Stephen slipped round towards the body of the chapel and waited in the central porch while the common people came shuffling and stumbling past him. Here also there was admiration, satisfaction. A young workman passed out with his wife and Stephen heard the words “He knows his thayology, I tell ye.” Two women stopped beside the holy water font and after scraping their hands vainly over the bottom crossed themselves in a slovenly fashion with their dry hands. One of them sighed and drew her brown shawl about her:

—An’ his language, said the other woman.

—Aw yis.

Here the other woman sighed in her turn and drew her shawl about her:

—On’y, said she, God bless the gintleman, he uses the words that you nor me can’t intarpit.

 ® 

XXI

Between Easter and the end of May Stephen’s acquaintance with Cranly progressed night by night. As the time of the Summer Examinations was approaching Maurice and Stephen were both supposed to be hard at work. Maurice retired to his room carefully every evening after tea-time and Stephen repaired to the Library where he was supposed to be engaged in serious work. As a matter of fact he read little or nothing in the Library. He talked with Cranly by the hour either at a table, or, if removed by the librarian or by the indignant glances of students, standing at the top of the staircase. At ten o’clock when the library closed the two returned together through the central streets exchanging banalities with the other students.

It would seem at first somewhat strange and improbable that these two young men should have anything in common beyond an incurable desire for leisure. Stephen had begun to regard himself seriously as a literary artist: he professed scorn for the rabblement and contempt for authority. Cranly’s chosen companions represented the rabblement in a stage of partial fermentation when it is midway between vat and flagon and Cranly seemed to please himself in the spectacle of this caricature of his own unreadiness. Anyhow towards rabblement and authority alike he behaved with submissive deference and Stephen would have been disposed to regard this too mature demeanour as a real sign of interior corruption had he not daily evidence that Cranly was willing to endanger his own fair name as a member of the Sodality and as a general lay-servant of the Church by association with one who was known to be contaminated. Cranly, however, might have wished the fathers to suppose that he went with the rebellious young artist with the secret purpose of leading him back again to good ways and, as if from a secret appreciation of his own fitness for such a task, he always enlarged and interpreted the doctrines of the Church side by side with Stephen’s theories. Thus confronted, it was a trick of the pleader for orthodoxy to suggest a possible reconciliation between neighbours and to suggest [even] further that the Church would not be over hasty in condemning vagaries of architecture or even the use of pagan emblems and flourishes so long as her ground rent was paid quarterly in advance. These accommodating business terms, which would have seemed of suspicious piety to more simple souls, were not likely to startle two young men who were fond of tracing even moral phenomena back to the region of their primal cells. The moral doctrine of Catholicism [with] so cunningly lined and interwoven with a studious alloy of conscience was capable under the management of a nimble spirit of performing feats of extension and contraction. After a thousand such changes of form this elastic body was suddenly detected in a change of position and a point hitherto external was now seen to be well enclosed within it: and all this imperceptibly, while the eye was lulled by the mere exhibition of so many variations executed with a certain amoeboid instinct.

As for artistic sympathies Cranly could hardly be said to offer these. He had all the rustic’s affection for the prosaic things of the six days of the week and, in addition to this, he lacked the hypocritical taste which the rustic affects for the fine arts on the seventh day. In the Library he read nothing but the weekly illustrated papers. Sometimes he took a big book from the counter and carried it solemnly to his place where he opened it and studied the title-page and preface for an hour or so. Of fine literature he had, almost literally speaking, no knowledge. His acquaintance with English prose seemed to be limited to a hazy acquaintance with the beginning of Nicholas Nickleby and of English verse he had certainly read Wordsworth’s poem which is called “Advice to a Father.” Both of these accomplishments he divulged to Stephen one day when he had been discovered reading with great attention the title-page of a book which was called Diseases of the Ox. He offered no comment on what he had read and simply stated the achievement not without wonder at his having achieved it. He had a straggling regiment of words at his command and he was thus enabled to express himself: but he spoke flatly and frequently made childish errors. He had a defiant manner of using technical and foreign terms as if he wished to suggest that for him they were mere conventions of language. His receptiveness was not troubled by any nausea; he received everything that came in his way and it was purely instinctive of Stephen to perceive any special affinity in so indiscriminate a vessel. He was fond of leading a philosophical argument back to the machinery of the intellectual faculty itself and in mundane matters he did likewise, testing everything by its food value.

It was in favour of this young man that Stephen decided to break his commandment of reticence. Cranly, on his side, must have been above all the accidents of life if he had not suffered a slight commotion from such delicately insistent flattery. Stephen spoke to his impoverished ear out of the plenitude of an amassed vocabulary, and confronted the daring commonplaces of his companion’s moods with a complex radiance of thought. Cranly seldom or never obtruded his presence upon these monologues. He listened to all, seemed to understand all, and seemed to think it was the duty of his suppositious character to listen [to] and understand. He never refused his ear. Stephen claimed it in and out of season as he felt the need for intelligent sympathy. They promenaded miles of the streets together, arm-in-arm. They halted in wet weather under spacious porches, desisting at the sight of some inviting triviality. They sat sometimes in the pit of a music-hall and one unfolded to the other the tapestry of his poetical aims while the band bawled to the comedian and the comedian bawled to the band. Cranly grew used to having sensations and impressions recorded and analysed before him at the very instant of their apparition. Such concentration upon oneself was unknown to [Cranly] him and he wondered at first with the joy of solitary possession at Stephen’s ingenuous arrogance. This phenomenon, which called all his previous judgments to account, and opened out a new system of life at the last limit of [Cranly’s] his world, rankled somewhat in [Cranly’s] his mind. It irritated him also because he knew too well the large percentage of Christian sentiment which concealed itself under [a] his veneer of Stoicism to suspect himself of any talent for a similar extravagance. And yet, hearing the whole-hearted young egoist pour out his pride and anger at his feet like some costly ointment, and benefiting by a liberality which seemed to keep nothing in reserve, much as he would have liked to hold himself aloof from such ties he felt himself gradually answering the appeal by a silent, perverse affection. He affected more brutality than was in his nature and, as if infected by his companion’s arrogance, seemed to expect that the practice of aggressive criticism would be suspended in his case.

A licence which he allowed himself rather freely was that of impolite abstraction, so deep as to suggest great mental activity but issuing at last in some blunt actuality. If a [conversation] monologue which had set out from a triviality seemed to him likely to run on unduly he would receive it with a silence through which aversion was just discernible and at a lull bring his hammer down brutally on the poor original object. At times Stephen found this ultra-classical habit very unpalatable. One evening the monologue was interrupted time after time. Stephen had mentioned his sister’s illness and had spread out a few leagues of theory on the subject of the tyranny of home. Cranly never actually broke in upon the oration but he continued inserting question after question whenever he had an opening. He asked Isabel’s age, her symptoms, her doctor’s name, her treatment, her diet, her appearance, how her mother nursed her, whether they had sent for a priest or not, whether she had ever been sick before or not. Stephen answered all these questions and still Cranly was not satisfied. He continued his questions until the monologue had in all decency to be abandoned: and Stephen, thinking over his manner, was unable to decide whether such conduct was to be considered the sign of a deep interest in a human illness or the sign of irritated dissatisfaction with an inhuman theorist.

Stephen did not in the least shrink from applying the reproach to himself but he found himself honestly unable to admit its justice. His sister had become almost a stranger to him on account of the way in which she had been brought up. He had hardly spoken a hundred words to her since the time when they had been children together. He could not speak to her now except as to a stranger. She had acquiesced in the religion of her mother; she had accepted everything that had been proposed to her. If she lived she had exactly the temper for a Catholic wife of limited intelligence and of pious docility and if she died she was supposed to have earned for herself a place in the eternal heaven of Christians from which her two brothers were likely to be shut out. Calamities in this world are reported to sit lightly on the shoulders of the true Christian who can bide his time until the Creator institutes the kingdom of the good. Isabel’s case moved Stephen’s anger and commiseration but he saw at once how hopeless it was and how vain it would be for him to interfere. Her life had been and would always be a trembling walk before God. The slightest interchange of ideas between them must be either a condescension on his part or an attempt to corrupt. No consciousness of their nearness in blood troubled him with natural, unreasoning affection. She was called his sister as his mother was called his mother but there had never been any proof of that relation offered him in their emotional attitude towards him, or any recognition of it permitted in his emotional attitude towards them. The Catholic husband and wife, the Catholic father and mother, are allowed to be natural at discretion but the same grace is not vouchsafed to Catholic children. They must preserve an unquestioning orderliness even at the risk of being upbraided as unnatural by the very preachers who assert that nature is the possession of Satan. Stephen had felt impulses of pity for his mother, for his father, for Isabel, for Wells also but he believed that he had done right in resisting them: he had first of all to save himself and he had no business trying to save others unless his experiment with himself justified him. Cranly had all but formulated serious charges against him, calling up by implication the picture of Isabel with her gradually wasting flame, her long dark hair and great wondering eyes, but Stephen stood up to the charges and answered in his heart that it was injustice to point a finger of reproach at him and that a vague inactive pity from those who upheld a system of mutual servile association towards those who accepted it was only a play upon emotions as characteristic of the egoist as of the man of sentiment. Isabel, moreover, did not seem to Stephen to be in any great danger. He told Cranly she was probably growing too fast; many girls were delicate at that age. He confessed that the subject tired him a little. Cranly stood still and looked at him fixedly:

—My dear man, said he, d’ye know what it is ... You’re an extraordinary ... man.

A week before the examination Cranly explained to Stephen his plan for reading the course in five days. It was a carefully made plan, founded upon an intimate knowledge of examiners and examination papers. Cranly’s plan was to study from ten in the morning until half past two in the afternoon, then from four to six, and then from half past seven to ten. Stephen declined to follow this plan as he imagined he had a fair chance of passing on what he called ‘roundabout’ knowledge but Cranly said that the plan was perfectly safe.

—I don’t quite see that, said Stephen, how can you manage to pass—in Latin composition, say—after such a cursory run over it? If you like I’ll show you some things—not that I can write so marvellously ...

Cranly meditated without seeming to observe the offer. Then he averred flatly that his plan would work:

—I’ll take my dyin’ bible, he said, I’ll write them as good a thing, d’ye know, ay—as good a thing as they want. What do they know about Latin prose?

—Not much, I suppose, said Stephen, but they may not be quite ignorant of Latin grammar.

Cranly thought this over and then found his remedy:

—D’ye know what, he said, whenever I can’t think of the grammar I’ll bring in a piece out of Tacitus.

—Apropos of what?

—What the flamin’ hell does it matter what it’s apropos of?

—Quite right, said Stephen.

Cranly’s plan neither succeeded nor failed for the very good reason that it was never followed. The nights before the examination were spent sitting outside under the porch of the Library. The two young men gazed up into the tranquil sky and discussed how it was possible to live with the least amount of labour. Cranly suggested bees: he seemed to know the entire economy of bee-life and he did not seem as intolerant towards bees as towards men. Stephen said it would be a good arrangement if Cranly were to live on the labour of the bees and allow him (Stephen) to live on the united labours of the bees and of their keeper.

—“I will watch from dawn to gloom

    The lake-reflected sun illume

    The yellow bees in the ivy bloom.”

—“Illume”? said Cranly.

—You know the meaning of “illume”?

—Who wrote that?

—Shelley.

—Illume—it’s just the word, d’ye know, for autumn, deep gold colour.

—A spiritual interpretation of landscape is very rare. Some people think they write spiritually if they make their scenery dim and cloudy.

—That bit you said now doesn’t seem to me spiritual.

—Nor to me: but sometimes Shelley does not address the eye. He says “many a lake-surrounded flute.” Does that strike your eye or your sense of colour?

—Shelley has a face that reminds me of a bird. What is it? “The lake-surrounded sun illume”? ...

—“The lake-reflected sun illume

    The yellow bees in the ivy bloom.”

—What are you quoting? asked Glynn who had just come out of the Library after several hours of study.

Cranly surveyed him before answering:

—Shelley.

—O, Shelley? What was the quotation again?

Cranly nodded towards Stephen.

—What was the quotation? asked Glynn. Shelley is an old flame of mine.

Stephen repeated the lines and Glynn nodded his head nervously several times in approval.

—Beautiful poetry Shelley wrote, didn’t he? So mystical.

—D’ye know what they call them yellow bees in Wickla? asked Cranly suddenly, turning to Glynn.

—No? what?

—Red-arsed bees.

Cranly laughed loudly at his own remark and struck his heels on the granite steps. Glynn, conscious of a false position, began to fumble with his umbrella and to search for one of his stock witticisms.

—But that is only, he said, if you will pardon the expression, that is only so to speak ...

—”The lake-surrounded sun illume

    The red-arsed bees in the ivy bloom.”

—It’s every bit as good bloody poetry as Shelley’s, said Cranly to Glynn. What do you think?

—It seems to me undeniable, said Glynn driving his unsteady umbrella before him as an emphasis, that the bees are in the bloom. Of that we may say that it is distinctly so.

The examination lasted five days. After the first two days Cranly did not even go through the form of entering the examination hall but after each paper he was to be seen outside the University going over all the questions carefully with his more diligent friends. He said that the papers were very easy and that anyone could pass them on a fair knowledge. He did not ask Stephen any particular questions but said merely “I suppose you’re through.” “I expect so” said Stephen. McCann usually came to meet the students who had been under examination. He came partly because he considered it was part of his duty to show an interest in all that concerned the College, and partly because one of Mr Daniel’s daughters was under examination. Stephen who did not care very much whether he succeeded or failed in the examination was very much amused observing the jealousies and nervous anxieties which tried to conceal themselves under airs of carelessness. Students who had studied hard all the year pretended to be in the same case as idlers and idle and diligent both appeared to submit to the examination with great unwillingness. Those who were rivals did not speak to each other, being afraid to trust their eyes, but one questioned wandering acquaintances privily about the other’s success. Their excitement was so genuine that even the excitement of sex failed to overcome it. The girl students were not the subject of the usual sniggers and jokes but were regarded with some aversion as sly enemies. Some of the young men eased their enmity and vindicated their superiority at the same time by saying that it was no wonder the women would do well seeing that they could study ten hours [all] a day all the year round. McCann, who acted as go-between, told them the gossip from the other camp and it was he who [had] spread the report that Landy would not get first class honours in English because Miss Reeves had written an essay of twenty pages on The Use and Abuse of Ridicule.

The examination ended on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning Stephen’s mother seemed to be rather anxious. Stephen had not given his parents much satisfaction as to his conduct at the examination but he could not think that this was the cause of his mother’s trouble: he waited, however, for the trouble to declare itself. His mother waited till the room was clear and then she said casually:

—You have not made your Easter duty yet, have you, Stephen?

Stephen answered that he had not.

—It would be better for you to go to confession in the daytime. Tomorrow is Ascension Thursday and the chapels are sure to be crowded tonight by people who have left off making their Easter duty till the last moment. It’s a wonder people wouldn’t have more shame in them. Goodness knows they have time enough from Ash Wednesday, without waiting till the stroke of twelve to go to the priest ... I’m not speaking of you, Stephen. I know you have been studying for your examination. But people who have nothing to do ...

Stephen made no answer to this but went on scraping diligently in his eggshell.

—I have made my Easter duty already—on Holy Thursday—but I’m going to the altar in the morning. I am making a novena and I want you to offer up your communion for a special intention of mine.

—What special intention?

—Well, dear, I’m very much concerned about Isabel ... I don’t know what to think ...

Stephen stuck his spoon angrily through the bottom of the shell and asked was there any more tea.

—There’s no more in the pot but I can boil some water in a minute.

—O, never mind.

—It won’t be a jiffy.

Stephen allowed the water to be put on as it would [allow] give him time to put an end to the conversation. He was much annoyed that his mother should try to wheedle him into conformity by using his sister’s health as an argument. He felt that such an attempt dishonoured him and freed him from the last dissuasions of considerate piety. His mother put on the water and appeared to be less anxious as if she had expected a blunt refusal. She even ventured on the small talk of religious matrons.

—I must try and get in to town tomorrow in time for High Mass in Marlborough St. Tomorrow is a great feast-day in the Church.

—Why? asked Stephen smiling.

—The Ascension of Our Lord, answered his mother gravely.

—And why is that a great feast-day?

—Because it was on that day he showed Himself Divine: he ascended into Heaven.

Stephen began to plaster butter over a crusty heel of the loaf while his features settled into definite hostility:

—Where did he go off?

—From Mount Olivet, answered his mother reddening under her eyes.

—Head first?

—What do you mean, Stephen?

—I mean he must have been rather giddy by the time he arrived. Why didn’t he go by balloon?

—Stephen, are you trying to scoff at Our Lord? I really thought you had more intelligence than to use that kind of language: it’s only what people who believe only in what they can see under their noses say. I’m surprised.

—Tell me, mother, said Stephen between mouthfuls, do you mean to tell me you believe that our friend went up off the mountain as they say he did?

—I do.

—I don’t.

—What are you saying, Stephen?

—It’s absurd: it’s Barnum. He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

—Stephen!

—I don’t believe it: and it would be no credit if I did. It’s no credit to me that I don’t. It’s drivel.

—The most learned doctors of the Church believe it and that’s good enough for me.

—He can fast for forty days ...

—God can do all things.

—There’s a fellow in Capel St at present in a show who says he can eat glass and hard nails. He calls himself The Human Ostrich.

—Stephen, said his mother, I’m afraid you have lost your faith.

—I’m afraid so too, said Stephen.

Mrs Daedalus looked very discomposed and sat down helplessly on the nearest chair. Stephen fixed his attention on the water and when it was ready made himself another cup of tea.

—I little thought, said his mother, that it would come to this—that a child of mine would lose the faith.

—But you knew some time ago.

—How could I know?

—You knew.

—I suspected something was wrong but I never thought ...

—And yet you wanted me to receive Holy Communion!

—Of course you cannot receive it now. But I thought you would make your Easter duty as you have done every year up till now. I do not know what led you astray unless it was those books you read. John, too, your uncle—he was led astray by books when he was young but—only for a time.

—Poor fellow! said Stephen.

—You were religiously brought up by the Jesuits, in a Catholic home ...

—A very Catholic home!

—None of your people, neither your father’s nor mine, have a drop of anything but Catholic blood in their veins.

—Well, I’ll make a beginning in the family.

—This is the result of being left too much liberty. You do as you like and believe what you like.

—I don’t believe, for example, that Jesus was the only man that ever had pure auburn hair.

—Well?

—Nor that he was the only man that was exactly six feet high, neither more nor less.

—Well?

—Well, you believe that. I heard you tell that years ago to our nurse in Bray—do you remember nurse Sarah?

Mrs Daedalus defended the tradition in a half-hearted way.

—That is what they say.

—O, they say! They say a great deal.

—But you need not believe that if you don’t want to.

—Thanks very much.

—All you are asked to believe in is the word of God. Think of the beautiful teachings of Our Lord. Think of your own life when you believed in those teachings. Weren’t you better and happier then?

—It was good for me at the time, perhaps, but it is quite useless for me now.

—I know what is wrong with you—you suffer from the pride of the intellect. You forget that we are only worms of the earth. You think you can defy God because you have misused the talents he has given you.

—I think Jehovah gets too high a salary for judging motives. I want to retire him on the plea of old age.

Mrs Daedalus stood up.

—Stephen, you may use that kind of language with your companions whoever they are but I will not allow you to use it with me. Even your father, bad as he is supposed to be, does not speak such blasphemy as you do. I am afraid that you are a changed boy since you went to that University. I suppose you fell in with some of those students ...

—Good Lord, mother, said Stephen, don’t believe that. The students are awfully nice fellows. They love their religion: they wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

—Wherever you’ve learnt it I will not allow you to use such language to me when you speak of holy things. Keep that for the street-corners at night.

—Very well, mother, said Stephen. But you began the conversation.

—I never thought I would see the day when a child of mine would lose the faith. God knows I didn’t. I did my best for you to keep you in the right way.

Mrs Daedalus began to cry. Stephen, having eaten and drunk all within his province, rose and went towards the door:

—It’s all the fault of those books and the company you keep. Out at all hours of the night instead of in your home, the proper place for you. I’ll burn every one of them. I won’t have them in the house to corrupt anyone else.

Stephen halted at the door and turned towards his mother who had now broken out into tears:

—If you were a genuine Roman Catholic, mother, you would burn me as well as the books.

—I knew no good would come of your going to that place. You are ruining yourself body and soul. Now your faith is gone!

—Mother, said Stephen from the threshhold, I don’t see what you’re crying for. I’m young, healthy, happy. What is the crying for? ... It’s too silly ...

Stephen went over to the Library that evening expressly to see Cranly and [tell him of] narrate his latest conflict with orthodoxy. Cranly was standing under the Library porch announcing the results of the examinations beforehand. He was surrounded, as usual, by a little group among whom were his friend, the clerk from the Custom House, and another bosom friend, a very grave-looking elderly student named Lynch. Lynch was of a very idle disposition and had allowed six or seven years to intervene between [his] leaving school and beginning a course in medicine at the College of Surgeons. He was much esteemed by his colleagues because he had a deep bass voice, never ‘stood’ any drinks in return for those which he accepted from others, and seldom uttered any remarks in return for those he listened to. He always kept both his hands in his trousers’ pockets when he walked and jutted out his chest in a manner which was intended as a criticism of life. He spoke, however, to Cranly principally about women and for this reason Cranly had nicknamed him Nero. It was possible to accuse his mouth of a Neronic tendency but he destroyed the illusion of imperialism by wearing his cap very far back from a shock forehead. He had unbounded contempt for medical students and their ways and, if he had not absorbed so much Dublin into his mind, he would have been a lover of the fine arts. He was, in fact, very interested in the art of singing. [and] He used this interest to attempt an intimacy with Stephen and, his gravity covering a shame-faced idealism, he had already begun to feel through Cranly the influence of Stephen’s vivifying disorderliness. His objection, singular enough in a lax character, to trite and meaningless execrations, to the facile iniquities of the lips, had resulted for him in two moments of inspiration. He execrated in yellow in protest against the sanguine adjective of uncertain etymology and, to describe the hymeneal tract, he had one invariable term. He called it oracle and all within the frontiers he called oracular. The term was considered distinguished in his circle and he was careful never to explain the process which had discovered it.

Stephen stood on one of the steps of the porch but Cranly did not honour him with any kind of welcome. Stephen inserted a few phrases into the conversation but his presence was still unhonoured by Cranly. He was not in the least daunted by this reception, much as he was puzzled by it, and waited quietly for his opportunity. Once he addressed Cranly directly but got no answer. His mind began to ruminate upon this and at last his ruminations expressed themselves in a prolonged smile. While he was enjoying his smile he saw that Lynch was observing him. Lynch came down from the group and said ‘Good evening.’ He then took a packet of Woodbine cigarettes from his side pocket and offered one to Stephen, saying:

—Five a penny.

Stephen, who knew that Lynch was a very poor young man, accepted the cigarette appreciatively. They smoked in silence for some minutes and at length the group under the porch fell silent also:

—Have you a copy of your essay? said Lynch.

—Do you want it?

—I’d like to read it.

—I’ll bring it to you tomorrow night, said Stephen going up the steps.

He went up to Cranly who was leaning against a pillar and gazing straight before him and touched him lightly on the shoulder:

—I want to speak to you, he said.

Cranly turned slowly round and looked at him. Then he asked:

—Now?

—Yes.

They walked together up along Kildare St without speaking. When they came to the Green Cranly said:

—I’m going home on Saturday. Will you come as far as Harcourt St Station? I want to see the hour the train goes at.

—All right.

In the station Cranly spent a great deal of time reading the time-tables and making abstruse calculations. Then he went up to the platform and watched for a long time the shunting of the engine of a goods train on to a passenger train. The engine was steaming and blowing a deafening whistle and rolling billows of thick smoke towards the roof of the station. Cranly said that the engine-driver came from his part of the country and that he was the son of a cobbler in Tinahely. The engine executed a series of indecisive movements and finally settled itself on to the train. The engine-driver stuck his head out through the side and gazed languidly along the train:

—I suppose you would call him sooty Jaysus, said Cranly.

—Cranly, said Stephen, I have left the Church.

Cranly took his arm at the word and they turned away from the platform and went down the staircase. As soon as they had emerged into the street he said encouragingly:

—You have left the Church?

Stephen went over the interview phrase by phrase.

—Then you do not believe any longer?

—I cannot believe.

—But you could at one time.

—I cannot now.

—You could now if you wanted to.

—Well, I don’t want to.

—Are you sure you do not believe?

—Quite sure.

—Why do you not go to the altar?

—Because I do not believe.

—Would you make a sacrilegious communion?

—Why should I?

—For your mother’s sake.

—I don’t see why I should.

—Your mother will suffer very much. You say you do not believe. The Host for you is a piece of ordinary bread. Would you not eat a piece of ordinary bread to avoid causing your mother pain?

—I would in many cases.

—And why not in this case? Have you any reluctance to commit a sacrilege? If you do not believe you should not have any.

—Wait a minute, said Stephen. At present I have a reluctance to commit a sacrilege. I am a product of Catholicism; I was sold to Rome before my birth. Now I have broken my slavery but I cannot in a moment destroy every feeling in my nature. That takes time. However if it were a case of needs must—for my life, for instance—I would commit any enormity with the host.

—Many Catholics would do the same, said Cranly, if their lives were at stake.

—Believers?

—Ay, believers. So by your own showing you are a believer.

—It is not from fear that I refrain from committing a sacrilege.

—Why then?

—I see no reason for committing sacrilege.

—But you have always made your Easter Duty. Why do you change? The thing for you is mockery, mummery.

—If I mum it is an act of submission, a public act of submission to the Church. I will not submit to the Church.

—Even so far as to mum?

—It is mumming with an intention. The outward show is nothing but it means a good deal.

—Again you are speaking like a Catholic. The host is nothing in outward show—a piece of bread.

—I admit: but all the same I insist on disobeying the Church. I will not submit any longer.

—But could you not be more diplomatic? Could you not rebel in your heart and yet conform out of contempt? You could be a rebel in spirit.

—That cannot be done for long by anyone who is sensitive. The Church knows the value of her services: her priest must hypnotise himself every morning before the tabernacle. If I get up every morning, go to the looking-glass and say to myself “You are the Son of God” at the end of twelve months I will want disciples.

—If you could make your religion pay like Christianity I would advise you to get up every morning and go to the looking-glass.

—That would be good for my vicars on earth but I would find crucifixion a personal inconvenience.

—But here in Ireland by following your new religion of unbelief you may be crucifying yourself like Jesus—only socially not physically.

—There is this difference. Jesus was good-humoured over it. I will die hard.

—How can you propose such a future to yourself and yet be afraid to trust yourself to perform even the simplest mumming in a church? said Cranly.

—That is my business, said Stephen, tapping at his forehead.

When they had come to the Green they crossed the streets and began to walk round the enclosure inside the chains. A few mechanics and their sweethearts were sitting on the swinging-chains turning the shadows to account. The footpath was deserted except for the metallic image of a distant policeman who had been posted well in the gaslight as an admonition. When the two young men passed the college they both looked up at the same moment towards the dark windows.

—May I ask you why you left the Church? asked Cranly.

—I could not observe the precepts.

—Not even with grace?

—No.

—Jesus gives very simple precepts. The Church is severe.

—Jesus or the Church—it’s all the same to me. I can’t follow him. I must have liberty to do as I please.

—No man can do as he pleases.

—Morally.

—No, not morally either.

—You want me, said Stephen, to toe the line with those sycophants and hypocrites in the college. I will never do so.

—No. I mentioned Jesus.

—Don’t mention him. I have made it a common noun. They don’t believe in him; they don’t observe his precepts. In any case let us leave Jesus aside. My sight will only carry me as far as his lieutenant in Rome. It is quite useless: I will not be frightened into paying tribute in money or in thought.

—You told me—do you remember the evening we were standing at the top of the staircase talking about ...

—Yes, yes, I remember, said Stephen who hated Cranly’s method of remembering the past, what did I tell you?

—You told me the idea you had of Jesus on Good Friday, an ugly misshapen Jesus. Did it ever strike you that Jesus may have been a conscious impostor?

—I have never believed in his chastity—that is since I began to think about him. I am sure he [is] was no eunuch priest. His interest in loose women is too persistently humane. All the women associated with him are of dubious character.

—You don’t think he was God?

—What a question! Explain it: explain the hypostatic union: tell me if the figure which that policeman worships as the Holy Ghost is intended for a spermatozoon with wings added. What a question! He makes general remarks on life, that’s all I know: and I disagree with them.

—For example?

—For example ... Look here, I cannot talk on this subject. I am not a scholar and I receive no pay as a minister of God. I want to live, do you understand. McCann wants air and food: I want them and a hell of a lot of other things too. I don’t care whether I am right or wrong. There is always that risk in human affairs, I suppose. But even if I am wrong at least I shall not have to endure Father Butt’s company for eternity.

Cranly laughed.

—Remember he would be glorified.

—Heaven for climate, isn’t that it, and hell for society ... the whole affair is too damn idiotic. Give it up. I am very young. When I have a beard to my middle I will study Hebrew and then write to you about it.

—Why are you so impatient with the Jesuits? asked Cranly.

Stephen did not answer and, when they arrived in the next region of light Cranly exclaimed:

—Your face is red!

—I feel it, said Stephen.

—Most people think you are self-restrained, said Cranly after a pause.

—So I am, said Stephen.

—Not on this subject. Why do you get so excited: I can’t understand that. It is a thing for you to think out.

—I can think out things when I like. I have thought this affair out very carefully though you may not believe me when I tell you. But my escape excites me: I must talk as I do. I feel a flame in my face. I feel a wind rush through me.

—‘Like a mighty wind rushing,’ said Cranly.

—You urge me to postpone life—till when? Life is now—this is life: if I postpone it I may never live. To walk nobly on the surface of the earth, to express oneself without pretence, to acknowledge one’s own humanity! You mustn’t think I rhapsodise: I am quite serious. I speak from my soul.

—Soul?

—Yes: from my soul, my spiritual nature. Life is not a yawn. Philosophy, love, art will not disappear from my world because I no longer believe that by entertaining an emotion of desire for the tenth part of a second I prepare for myself an eternity of torture. I am happy.

—Can you say that?

—Jesus is sad. Why is he so sad? He is solitary ... I say, you must feel the truth of what I say. You are holding up the Church against me ...

—Allow me ...

—But what is the Church? It is not Jesus, the magnificent solitary with his inimitable abstinences. The Church is made by me and my like—her services, legends, practices, paintings, music, traditions. These her artists gave her. They made her what she is. They accepted Aquinas’ commentary on Aristotle as the Word of God and made her what she is.

—And why will you not help her to be so still—you as an artist?

—I see you recognise the truth of what I say though you won’t admit it.

—The Church allows the individual conscience to have great ... in fact, if you believe ... believe, that is, said Cranly stamping each heavy foot on the words, honestly and truly ...

—Enough! said Stephen gripping his companion’s arm. You need not defend me. I will take the odds as they are.

They paced along three sides of the Green in silence while the couples began to leave the chains and return meekly to their modest resting-places and after a while Cranly began to explain to Stephen how he too had felt a desire for life—a life of freedom and happiness—when he had been younger and how at that time he too had been about to leave the Church in search of happiness but that many considerations had restrained him.

 ® 

XXII

Cranly went to Wicklow at the end of the week leaving Stephen to find another auditor. Luckily Maurice was enjoying his holidays and though Stephen spent a great deal of his time roaming through the slums of the city while Maurice was out on the Bull the two brothers often met and discoursed. Stephen reported his long conversations with Cranly of which Maurice made full notes. The younger sceptic did not seem to share his brother’s high opinion of Cranly though he said little. It was not from jealousy but rather from an over-estimate of Cranly’s rusticity that Maurice allowed himself this prejudice. To be rustic, in his eyes, was to be a mass of cunning and stupid and cowardly habits. He had spoken with Cranly only once but he had often seen him. He gave it as his opinion that Cranly never thought until someone spoke to him and then he [gives] gave birth to some commonplace which he would have liked to have been able to disbelieve. Stephen thought this exaggerated [and] saying that Cranly was daringly commonplace, that he could talk like a pint, and that it was possible to credit him with a certain perverse genius. Cranly’s undue scepticism and his heavy feet moved Maurice to hit the rustic in him with a name. He called him Thomas Squaretoes and he would not even admit that [Cranly] he had to a certain extent the grand manner. Cranly, in his opinion, went to Wicklow because it was necessary for him to play the god to an audience. He will grow to dislike you, said the shrewd young heathen, when you begin to play the god to someone else. He will give you nothing in exchange for what you give him whether he has it or not because his [nature] character is naturally overbearing. He cannot possibly understand half of what you say to him and yet he would like to be thought the only one who could understand you. He wants to become more and more necessary to you until he can have you in his power. Be careful never to show any weakness to him when you are together. You can have him in your power so long as you hold the whip-hand. Stephen replied that he thought this was a very novel conception of friendship which could not be proved true or false by debate alone but that he was himself the conscious possessor of an intuitive instrument which might be trusted to register any enmity as soon as it appeared. He defended his friend and his friendship at the same time.

The summer was dull and warm. Nearly every day Stephen wandered through the slums watching the sordid lives of the inhabitants. He read all the street-ballads which were stuck in the dusty windows of the Liberties. He read the racing names and prices scrawled in blue pencil outside the dingy tobacco-shops, the windows of which were adorned with scarlet police journals. He examined all the book-stalls which offered old directories and volumes of sermons and unheard-of treatises [for] at the rate of a penny each or three for twopence. He often posted himself opposite one of the factories in old Dublin at two o’clock to watch the hands coming out to dinner—principally young boys and girls with colourless, expressionless faces, who seized the opportunity to be gallant in their way. He drifted in and out of interminable chapels in which an old man dozed on a bench or a clerk dusted the woodwork or an old woman prayed before the candle she had lighted. As he walked slowly through the maze of poor streets he stared proudly in return for the glances of stupid wonder that he received and watched from under his eyes the great cow-like trunks of police constables swing slowly round after him as he passed them. These wanderings filled him with deep-seated anger and whenever he encountered a burly black-vested priest taking a stroll of pleasant inspection through these warrens full of swarming and cringing believers he cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism: an island [whereof] the inhabitants of which entrust their wills and minds to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis, an island in which all the power and riches are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar [professes] confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may wax fat upon a starveling rabblement which is bidden ironically to take to itself this consolation in hardship “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

This mood of indignation which was not guiltless of a certain superficiality was undoubtedly due to the excitement of release and it was hardly countenanced by him before he realised the dangers of being a demagogue. The attitude which was constitutional with him was a silent self-occupied, contemptuous manner and his intelligence, moreover, persuaded him that the tomahawk, as an effective instrument of warfare, had become obsolete. He acknowledged to himself in honest egoism that he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignity of a bad line of verse: but at the same time he was nothing in the world so little as an amateur artist. He wished to express his nature freely and fully for the benefit of a society which he would enrich and also for his own benefit, seeing that it was part of his life to do so. It was not part of his life to undertake an extensive alteration of society but he felt the need to express himself such an urgent need, such a real need, that he was determined no conventions of a society, however plausibly mingling pity with its tyranny, should be allowed to stand in his way, and though a taste for elegance and detail unfitted him for the part of demagogue, [in] from his general attitude he might have been supposed not unjustly an ally of the collectivist politicians, who are often very seriously upbraided by [believers] opponents who believe in Jehovahs, and decalogues and judgments [for] with sacrificing the reality to an abstraction.

That kind of Christianity which is called Catholicism seemed to him to stand in his way and forthwith he removed it. He had been brought up in the belief of the Roman supremacy and to cease to be a Catholic for him meant to cease to be a Christian. The idea that the power of an empire is weakest at its borders requires some modification for everyone knows that the Pope cannot govern Italy as he governs Ireland nor is the Tsar as terrible an engine to the tradesmen of S. Petersburg as he is to the little Russian of the Steppes. In fact in many cases the government of an empire is strongest at its borders and it is invariably strongest there in the case when its power at the centre is on the wane. The waves of the rise and fall of empires do not travel with the rapidity of waves of light and it will be perhaps a considerable time before Ireland will be able to understand that the Papacy is no longer going through a period of anabolism. The bands of pilgrims who are shepherded safely across the continent by their Irish pastors must shame the jaded reactionaries of the eternal city by their stupefied intensity of worship in much the same way as the staring provincial newly arrived from Spain or Africa may have piqued the loyalty of some smiling Roman for whom [the his past had but] the future of his race was becoming uncertain as its past had already become obvious. Though it is evident on the one hand that this persistence of Catholic power in Ireland must intensify very greatly the loneliness of the Irish Catholic who voluntarily outlaws himself yet on the other hand the force which he must generate to propel himself out of so strong and intricate a tyranny may often be sufficient to place him beyond the region of re-attraction. It was, in fact, the very fervour of Stephen’s former religious life which sharpened for him now the pains of his solitary position and at the same time hardened into a less pliable, a less appeasable enmity molten rages and glowing transports on which the emotions of helplessness and loneliness and despair had first acted as chilling influences.

The tables in the Library were deserted during the summer months and whenever Stephen wandered in there he found few faces that he knew. Cranly’s friend [O’Neill] Glynn, the clerk from [the Custom House] Guinness’, was one of these familiar faces: he was very busy all the summer reading philosophical handbooks. Stephen had the misfortune to be captured one night by [O’Neill] Glynn, who at once attempted a conversation on the modern school of Irish writers—a subject of which Stephen knew nothing—and he had to listen to an inconstant stream of literary opinions. These opinions were not very interesting: Stephen, for instance, [was] grew rather weary of [O’Neill’s] Glynn’s telling him what beautiful poetry Byron and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Tennyson wrote, and of hearing that Ruskin and Newman and Carlyle and Macaulay were the greatest modern English prose stylists. At last when [O’Neill] Glynn was about to begin an account of a literary paper which his sister had read to the Girls’ Debating Society in Loreto Convent Stephen thought he was justified in putting a closure on the conversation, somewhat in Cranly’s manner, by asking [O’Neill] Glynn very pointedly could he manage to get him a ‘pass’ to see the Brewery. The request was made in such a tone of subdued thirsty curiosity that [O’Neill] Glynn was too discouraged to continue his literary criticism and promised to do his best to get the ‘pass.’ Another reader in the Library who seemed to wish to be very friendly with Stephen was a young student named Moynihan who had been elected Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society for the following year. He had to read his inaugural address in November and he had chosen as his subject “Modern Unbelief and Modern Democracy.” He was an extremely [small] ugly young man with a wide mouth which gave the idea that it was under his chin until the face was seen at close quarters, eyes of an over-washed olive green colour set viciously close together, and large rigid ears standing far apart. He took a most agitated interest in the success of his paper as he was going to be a solicitor and he relied on this inaugural address to make his name known. He had not yet developed the astuteness of the legal mind in as much as he imagined that Stephen shared his agitated interest concerning the inaugural address. Stephen came upon him one night while he was busily ‘making-up’ his subject. He had some bulky volumes by Lecky at his side and he was reading and making notes upon an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica under the heading of ‘Socialism.’ He desisted from his labours when he saw Stephen and began to explain the preparations which the committee were making. He showed the letters which had been received from various public men who had been written to by the committee to know if they would speak. He showed the patterns of the cards of invitation which they had decided to have printed and he showed a copy of the notice which was to be sent to all the papers. Stephen who did not know Moynihan very well was surprised at all these confidences. Moynihan said he was sure Stephen would be the auditor who would be elected after him and added how much he had admired the style of Stephen’s paper. After this he began to discuss his own and Stephen’s prospects for the degree. He said German was more useful than Italian (though, of course, Italian was more beautiful as a language) and that he had always studied it for that reason. When Stephen rose to go Moynihan said he might as well go too and put up his books. He came along Nassau St to catch his tram for Palmerston Park and on the way, the night being wet and the streets black and glistening with rain, he united himself still more intimately with his successor-designate by little ejaculations and glances in the wake of a hospital nurse who wore brown stockings and pink petticoats. Stephen was not at all displeased by the spectacle which he had been quietly observing for a long time before Moynihan had caught sight of it but Moynihan’s [ejaculatory desi] desirous ejaculations reminded him of the clicking of a type-writing machine. Moynihan who by this time was on famous terms with him said he would like to know Italian on account of Boccaccio and the other Italian writers. He told Stephen that if he wanted to read something ‘smutty’ [that] the Decameron took the biscuit for ‘smut.’

—I wish I was like you, he said, it must be ten times as bad in the original. I can’t tell you now because here’s my tram ... but it takes the biscuit for downright ... you know? ... well, Tooraloo!

Mr Daedalus had not an acute sense of the rights of private property: he paid rent very rarely. To demand money for eatables seemed to him just but to expect people to pay for shelter the exorbitant sums which are demanded annually by house-owners in Dublin seemed to him unjust. He had now been a year in his house in Clontarf and for that year he had paid a quarter’s rent. The writ which had been first served on him had contained a legal flaw and this fact enabled him to prolong his term of occupancy. Just now matters were drawing to a head and he was scouring the city for another house. A private message from a friend in the Sheriff’s office gave him exactly five days of grace and every morning he brushed his silk hat very diligently and polished his eyeglass and went forth humming derisively to offer himself as a bait to landlords. The halldoor was often banged loudly on these occasions as the only possible close of an altercation. The results of the examination had awarded Stephen a mere pass and his father told him very confidentially that he had better look out for some kind of a doss because in a week’s time they would all be out on the street. The funds in the house were very low for the new furniture had fetched very little after its transport piecemeal to a pawn-office. Tradesmen who had seen it depart had begun a game of knocking and ringing which was very often followed by the curious eyes of street-urchins. Isabel was lying upstairs in the backroom, day by day growing more wasted and querulous. The doctor came twice a week now and ordered her delicacies. Mrs Daedalus had to set her wits to work to provide even one substantial meal every day and she certainly had no time to spare between accomplishing this feat, appeasing the clamour at the halldoor, parrying her husband’s ill-humour and attending on her dying daughter. As for her sons, one was a freethinker, the other surly. Maurice ate dry bread, muttered maledictions against his father and his father’s creditors, practised pushing a heavy flat stone in the garden and raising and lowering a broken dumb-bell, and trudged to the Bull every day that the tide served. In the evening he wrote his diary or went out for a walk by himself. Stephen wandered about morning, noon and night. The two brothers were not often together [until after]. One dusky summer evening [when] they walked into each other very gravely at a corner and both burst out laughing: and after that they sometimes went for walks together in the evening and discussed the art of literature.

Stephen had lent his essay to Lynch as he had promised to do and this loan had led to a certain intimacy. Lynch had almost taken the final vows in the order of the discontented but Stephen’s unapologetic egoism, his remorseless lack of sentiment for himself no less than for others, gave him pause. His taste for fine arts, which had always seemed to him a taste which should be carefully hidden away, now began to encourage itself timidly. He was also very much relieved to find Stephen’s estheticism united with a sane and conscienceless acceptance of the animal needs of young men for, being a shrewd animal himself, he had begun to suspect from Stephen’s zeal and loftiness of discourse at least an assertion of that incorrigible virginity which the Irish race demands alike from any John who would baptise it or from any Joan who would set it free as the first heavenly proof of fitness for such high offices. Daniel’s household had become so wearisome to Stephen that he had discontinued his Sunday visits there and had substituted rambles with Lynch through the city. They made their way with difficulty along the crowded streets where underpaid young men and flaunting girls were promenading in bands. After a few of these rambles Lynch had absorbed the new terms which expressed the new point of view and he began to feel that he was justifying the contempt to which the spectacle of Dublin manners had always moved him. Many times they stopped to confer in scrupulous slang with the foolish virgins of the city, whose souls were almost terrified out of their naughty intentions by the profundity of the tones of the elder of the young men, and Lynch, sunning himself in a companionship which was so alert and liberal, so free from a taint of secret competition or patronage, began to wonder how he could ever have thought Stephen an affected young man. Everyone, he thought now, who has a character to preserve must have a manner to preserve it with.

One evening as Stephen was coming down the Library staircase after idling away a half-hour at [a dictionary of music] a medical treatise on singing, he heard a dress brushing the steps behind him. The dress belonged to Emma Clery who, of course, was very much surprised at seeing Stephen. She had just been working at some old Irish and now she was going home: her father didn’t like her to stay in the Library until ten o’clock as she had no escort. The night was so fine that she thought she would not take the tram. Stephen asked her might he not see her home. They stood under the porch for a few minutes, talking. Stephen took out a cigarette and lit it but at once knocked off the lighted end [very] meditatively and put the cigarette back into his case: her eyes were very bright.

They went up Kildare St and when they came to the corner of the Green she crossed the road and they continued to walk, but not quite so quickly, along the gravel path beside the chains. The chains bore their nightly burden of amorousness. He offered her his arm which she took, leaning appreciably upon it. They talked gossip. She discussed the likelihood of McCann’s marrying the eldest of Mr Daniel’s daughters. She seemed to think it very amusing that McCann should have a desire for matrimony but she added quite seriously that Annie Daniel was certainly a nice girl. A feminine voice called out from the dusky region of the couples “Don’t!”

—‘Don’t,’ said Emma. Isn’t that Mr Punch’s advice to young men who are about to marry ... I hear you are quite a woman-hater now, Stephen.

—Wouldn’t that be a change?

—And I heard you read a dreadful paper in the college—all kinds of ideas in it. Isn’t that so?

—Please don’t mention that paper.

—But I’m sure you’re a woman-hater. You’ve got so standoffish, you know, so reserved. Perhaps you don’t like ladies’ company?

Stephen pressed her arm a little by way of a disclaimer.

—Are you a believer in the emancipation of women too? she asked.

—To be sure! said Stephen.

—Well, I’m glad to hear you say that, at any rate. I didn’t think you were in favour of women.

—O, I am very liberal—like Father Dillon—he is very liberal-minded.

—Yes? Isn’t he? she said in a puzzled manner ... Why do you never go to Daniel’s now?

—I ... don’t know.

—What do you do with yourself on Sunday evenings?

—I ... stay at home, said Stephen.

—You must be morose when you’re at home.

—Not I. I’m as happy as if the divil had me.

—I want to hear you sing again.

—O, thanks ... Some time, perhaps ...

—Why don’t you study music? Have your voice trained?

—Strange to say I was reading a book on singing tonight. It is called ...

—I am sure you would make a success with your voice, she said quickly, evidently afraid to allow him control of the conversation ... Have you ever heard Father Moran sing?

—No. Has he a good voice?

—O, very nice: he sings with such taste. He’s an awfully nice man, don’t you think?

—Very nice indeed. Do you go to confession to him?

She leaned a little more appreciably on his arm and said:

—Now, don’t be bold, Stephen.

—I wish you would go to confession to me, Emma, said Stephen from his heart.

—That’s a dreadful thing to say ... Why would you like that?

—To hear your sins.

—Stephen!

—To hear you murmur them into my ear and say you were sorry and would never [do] commit them again and ask me to forgive you. And I would forgive you and make you promise to commit them every time you liked and say “God bless you, my dear child.”

—O, for shame, Stephen! Such a way to talk of the sacraments!

Stephen had expected that she would blush but her cheek maintained its innocence and her eyes grew brighter and brighter.

—You’d get tired of that too.

—Do you think so? said Stephen making an effort not to be surprised at such an intelligent remark.

—You’d be a dreadful flirt, I’m sure. You get tired of everything so quickly—just the way you did in the Gaelic League.

—People should not think of the end in the beginning of flirtations, should they?

—Perhaps not.

When they came to the corner of her terrace she stopped and said:

—Thanks ever so much.

—Thank you.

—Well, you must reform, won’t you, and come next Sunday to Daniel’s.

—If you expressly ...

—Yes, I insist.

—Very good, Emma. In that case, I’ll go.

—Mind. I expect you to obey me.

—Very good.

—Thanks again for your kindness coming across with me. Au revoir!

—Good night.

He waited till he had seen her enter the fourth garden of the terrace. She did not turn her head to see if he was watching but he was not cast down because he knew she had a trick of seeing things without using her eyes frankly.

Of course when Lynch heard of this incident he rubbed his hands together and prophesied. By his advice Stephen went to Daniel’s on the following Sunday. The old horsehair sofa was there, the picture of the Sacred Heart was there, she was there. The prodigal was welcomed. She spoke to him very little during the evening and seemed to be in deep conversation with Hughes, who had lately been honoured by an invitation. She was dressed in cream colour and the great mass of her hair lay heavily upon her cream-coloured neck. She asked him to sing and when he had sung a song of Dowland’s she asked him would he not sing them an Irish song. Stephen glanced from her eyes to Hughes’s face and sat down again at the piano. He sang her one of the few Irish melodies which he knew “My love she was born in the North Countree.” When his song was over she applauded loudly and so did Hughes.

—I love the Irish music, she said a few minutes afterwards, inclining herself towards him with an air of oblivion, it is so soul-stirring.

Stephen said nothing. He remembered almost every word she had said from the first time he had met her and he strove to recall any word which revealed the presence of a spiritual principle in her worthy of so significant a name as soul. He submitted himself to the perfumes of her body and strove to locate a spiritual principle in it: but he could not. She seemed to conform to the Catholic belief, to obey the commandments and the precepts. By all outward signs he was compelled to esteem her holy. But he could not so stultify himself as to misread the gleam in her eyes as holy or to interpret the [motions] rise and fall of her bosom as a movement of a sacred intention. He thought of his own [fervid religiousness] spendthrift religiousness and airs of the cloister, he remembered having astonished a labourer in a wood near Malahide by an ecstasy of oriental posture and no more than half-conscious under the influence of her charm he wondered whether the God of the Roman Catholics would put him into hell because he had failed to understand that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without in the least ordering one’s life in accordance with them and had failed to appreciate the digestive value of the sacraments.

Among the guests was an elder brother of Mrs Daniel’s, Father Healy. He had just come back from the United States of America where he had been for seven years collecting money to build a chapel near Enniscorthy. He was being fêted on his home-coming. He sat in the armchair which Mr Daniel insisted on giving him and joined the tips of his fingers lightly together and smiled on the company. He was a little fat white priest whose body reminded one of a new tennis-ball and as he sat in his chair with one leg thrown smartly over the other he kept agitating quickly a fat little foot which was encased in a fat little creaky leather shoe. He spoke with a judicious American accent and when he spoke the room was all ears. He was greatly interested in the new Gaelic revival and in the new literary movement in Ireland. He paid particular attention to McCann and to Stephen, asking both of them many questions. He agreed with McCann that Gladstone was the greatest man of the nineteenth century and then Mr Daniel, who was glowing with pride at the honour he was paying so honourable a guest, told a dignified story of Gladstone and Sir Ashmead Bartlett and deepened his voice to reproduce the oratory of the grand old man. During the charades [he] Father Healy kept asking Mr Daniel to repeat to him the witticisms of the players and very often he shook laughing when Mr Daniel had told him what a player had said. He let no opportunity for increasing his knowledge of the interior life of the University escape him and every allusion was beaten out into an unmistakeable flatness before he nodded a head in satisfaction. Attacking Stephen on the literary side he began a monologue on the writings of John Boyle O’Reilly but finding Stephen too polite he began to depreciate an exclusively literary training for young men. Stephen thereupon began to tell him of the alley in the college and of the hand-ball tournament and all with discreet earnestness.

—I am sure now, said Father Healy putting his head shrewdly on one side and looking genially at the youth, I am sure you would make a good player. You’re just the build.

—O, no, said Stephen longing for Cranly’s presence, I’m a poor player.

—So you say, said Father Healy laughing, so you say.

—Really, said Stephen, smiling at this clever detection of [the] his merits as a handball-player and at the recollection of Cranly’s execrations at his play.

At last Father Healy began to yawn a little and this was taken as a signal for handing round cups of milk and slices of bread and butter to the young men and women, none of whom took anything stronger. Hughes, indeed, was so frugal that he declined to eat or drink anything at all whereat Stephen was somewhat disappointed as he could have had a good view of the idealist. McCann who represented the practical view of life ate rather noisily and asked for jam. This remark made Father Healy, who had never heard it before, laugh very heartily and made the others smile but Hughes and Stephen looked at each other very gravely across the uninhabited tablecloth. The young women were all sitting at one end of the table and the young men at the other end with the result that one end of the table was very lively and the other end very serious. Stephen after having failed to engage in conversation a maiden aunt of the family who had fulfilled her office by bringing in two tumblers of punch, one for Father Healy and the other for Mr Daniel, retired silently to the piano where he began to strum old airs and hum them to himself until someone at the table said “Do sing us something” and then he left the piano and returned to the horsehair sofa.

Her eyes were very bright. Stephen’s way through self-examinations had worn him out so much that he could not but long to repose himself in the neighbourhood of her beauty. He remembered the first mood of monstrous dissatisfaction which had overcome him on his entrance into Dublin life and how it was her beauty that had appeased him. Now she seemed to offer him rest. He wondered did she understand him or sympathise with him and was the vulgarity of her manners only a condescension of one who was consciously playing the game. He knew that it was not for such an image that he had constructed a theory of art and life and a garland of verse and yet if he could have been sure of her he would have held his art and verses lightly enough. The longing for a mad night of love came upon him, a desperate willingness to cast his soul away, his life and his art, and to bury them all with her under fathoms of lust-laden slumber. The ugly artificiality of the lives over which Father Healy was comfortably presiding struck this outrageous instant out of him and he went on repeating to himself a line from Dante for no other reason except that it contained the angry disyllable “frode.” Surely, he thought, I have as much right to use the word as ever Dante had. The spirits of Moynihan and O’Neill and Glynn seemed to him worthy of some blowing about round the verges of a hell which would be a caricature of Dante’s. The spirits of the patriotic and religious enthusiasts seemed to him fit to inhabit the fraudulent circles where hidden in hives of immaculate ice they might work their bodies to the due pitch of frenzy. The spirits of the tame sodalists, unsullied and undeserving, he would petrify amid a ring of Jesuits in the circle of foolish and grotesque virginities and ascend above them and their baffled icons to where his Emma, with no detail of her earthly form or vesture abated, invoked him from a Mohammadan paradise.

At the door he had to resign her to others and see her depart with insignificant courtesies and as he came home alone he led his mood through mazes of doubts and misgivings. After that evening he did not see her for a little time as home affairs were rather engrossing. His father’s days of grace were exciting days. It seemed likely that the family would not have where to lay its heads when at the eleventh hour Mr Daedalus found a roof with a friend from the North of Ireland who was traveller for an ironmonger. Mr Wilkinson was in possession of an old-fashioned house containing perhaps fifteen rooms of which he was nominally a tenant but, the landlord, an old miser without kith or kin in the world, having died very opportunely, Mr Wilkinson’s tenancy was untroubled by considerations of time or money. Mr Daedalus was allowed a set of apartments in this dilapidated mansion for a small weekly payment and on the night before the day fixed for his legal eviction he moved his camp by night. The little furniture which remained to them was carried on a float and Stephen and his brother and his mother and his father carried the ancestral portraits themselves as the draymen had drunk a good deal more than was good for them. It was a clear night of late summer freshened with cold as they walked in a body beside the sea-wall. Isabel had been removed earlier in the day and put in Mrs Wilkinson’s charge. Mr Daedalus was a long way in front with Maurice and in high spirits with his successful manoeuvre. Stephen followed with his mother and even she was light-hearted. The tide was lapping softly [at] by the wall, being at the full, and through the clear air Stephen heard his father’s voice like a muffled flute singing a love-song. He made his mother stop to listen and they both leaned on the heavy picture-frames and listened:

Shall carry my heart to thee

Shall carry my heart to thee

And the breath of the balmy night

Shall carry my heart to thee

In Mr Wilkinson’s house there was a lofty drawing-room panelled in oak, entirely bare of furniture except for a piano. During the winter Mr Wilkinson had been paid seven shillings a week by a dancing club for the use of the room on Tuesdays and Fridays but now he used the lower end of the room as a place of general storage for hardware samples. He was a tall one-eyed man with a silent manner and a great power of holding his drink. He had a deep appreciation of his guest whom he never addressed without the prefix “Mr.” He was married to a tall woman as silent as himself who read a great many novelettes and hung half her body out of the windows while her two young children entangled themselves in pieces of wire-netting and coils of gas-pipes. She had a long white face and she laughed at everything. Mr Daedalus and Mr Wilkinson went to town every morning together and often came back together and, during the day, Mrs Wilkinson hung out of the windows or talked with messenger boys and milkmen while Mrs Daedalus sat by Isabel’s bedside. There could be no doubt now that the girl was in a bad way. Her eyes were piteously enlarged and her voice had become hollow. She sat half propped-up by pillows in the bed all day, her damp-looking hair hanging in wisps about her face, turning over the pages of an illustrated book. She began to whimper when she was told to eat or when anyone left her bedside. She showed very [few] little animation except when the piano was playing in the room below and then she made them leave the bedroom door open and closed her eyes. Money was still scarce and still the doctor ordered her delicacies. The lingering nature of her illness had spread a hopeless apathy about the household and, though she herself was little more than a child, she must have been aware of this. Stephen alone with persistent kindness preserved his usual manner of selfish cheerfulness and strove to stir a fire out of her embers of life. He even exaggerated and his mother reproved him for being so noisy. He could not go in to his sister and say to her “Live! live!” but he tried to touch her soul in the shrillness of a whistle or the vibration of a note. Whenever he went into the room he asked questions with an indifferent air as if her illness was of no importance and once or twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from the bed had guessed his meaning.

The summer closed in sultry weather. Cranly was still in Wicklow and Lynch had begun to study for an examination in October. Stephen was too concerned with himself to talk much with his brother. In a few days Maurice was to return to school, that event having been delayed a fortnight on account of what he himself called the ‘boot and clothes’ complaint. Mr Wilkinson’s household dragged out day after day, Mrs Wilkinson hanging herself out of the windows and Mrs Daedalus watching her daughter. Very often Mr Wilkinson brought his guest home after a day’s carouse and the two would sit in the kitchen for the rest of the night talking politics loudly. When Stephen turned the corner of the avenue he could often hear his father’s voice shouting or his father’s [voice] fist banging the table. When he came in the two disputants would ask him for his opinion but he always ate what supper there was without remark and [went up] retired to his room and as he went up the stairs he could hear his father say to Mr Wilkinson “Queer chap, you know, queer chap!” and he could imagine the heavy stare of Mr Wilkinson’s eyes.

Stephen was very lonely. As at the beginning of the summer so now: he wandered vaguely through the streets. Emma had gone away to the Isles of Aran with a Gaelic party. He was hardly unhappy and yet not happy. His moods were still waited upon and courted and set down in phrases of prose and verse: and when the soles of his feet were too tired [or] his mood too dim a memory or too timid a hope, he would wander into the long lofty dusty drawing-room and sit at the piano while the sunless dusk enwrapped him. He could feel about him and above him the hopeless house and the decay of leaves and in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane. The chords that floated towards the cobwebs and rubbish and floated vainly to the dust-strewn windows were the meaningless voices of his perturbation and all they could do was flow in meaningless succession through all the chambers of sentience. He breathed an air of tombs.

Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger upon every falsehood it contained: [an] egoism which proceeded bravely before men to be frighted by the least challenge of the conscience, freedom which would dress the world anew in [the] vestments and usages begotten of enslavement, mastery of an art understood by few which owed its very delicacy to a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours. Cemeteries revealed their ineffectual records to him, records of the lives of all those who with good grace or bad grace had accepted an obvious divinity. The vision of all those failures, and the vision, far more pitiful, of congenital lives, shuffling onwards amid yawn and howl, beset him with evil: and evil, in the similitude of a distorted ritual, called to his soul to commit fornication with her.

One evening he sat [silent] at his piano while the dusk enfolded him. The dismal sunset lingered still upon the window-panes in a smoulder of rusty fires. Above him and about him hung the shadow of decay, the decay of leaves and flowers, the decay of hope. He desisted from his chords and waited, bending upon the keyboard in silence: and his soul commingled itself with the assailing, inarticulate dusk. A form which he knew for his mother’s appeared far down in the room, standing in the doorway. In the gloom her excited face was crimson. A voice which he remembered as his mother’s, a voice of a terrified human being, called his name. The form at the piano answered:

—Yes?

—Do you know anything about the body? ...

He heard his mother’s voice addressing him excitedly like the voice of a messenger in a play:

—What ought I do? There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s ... stomach ... Did you ever hear of that happening?

—I don’t know, he answered trying to make sense of her words, trying to say them again to himself.

—Ought I send for the doctor ... Did you ever hear of that? ... What ought I do?

—I don’t know ... What hole?

—The hole ... the hole we all have ... here.

 ® 

XXIII

Stephen was present in the room when his sister died. As soon as her mother had been alarmed the priest was sent for. He was a diminutive man who carried his head mostly on his right shoulder and spoke in a lisping voice which was not very easily heard. He heard the girl’s confession and went away saying “Leave it to God: He knows best: leave it to God.” The doctor came with Mr Daedalus on a car, examined the girl and asked had she seen a priest. He went away saying that while there was life there was hope but that she was very low: he would call in the morning. Isabel died a little after midnight. Her father who was not quite sober walked about the room on tiptoe, cried in little fits every time his daughter showed a change and kept on saying “That’s right, duckey: take that now” whenever her mother forced her to swallow a little champagne and then nodded his head until he began to cry afresh. He kept telling everyone to keep her spirits up. Maurice sat down by the empty fireplace and gazed in the grate. Stephen sat at the head of the bed and held his sister’s hand, her mother bending over her offering her the glass and kissing her and praying. Isabel seemed to Stephen to have grown very old: her face had become a woman’s face. Her eyes turned constantly between the two figures nearest to her as if to say she had been wronged in being given life and, at Stephen’s word, she gulped down whatever was offered her. When she could swallow no more her mother said to her “You are going home, dear, now. You are going to heaven where we will all meet again. Don’t you know? ... Yes, dear ... Heaven, with God” and the child fixed her great eyes on her mother’s face while her bosom began to heave loudly beneath the bedclothes.

Stephen felt very acutely the futility of his sister’s life. He would have done many things for her and, though she was almost a stranger to him, he was sorry to see her lying dead. Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain. His sister had enjoyed little more than the fact of life, few or none of its privileges. The supposition of an allwise God calling a soul home whenever it seemed good to Him could not redeem in his eyes the futility of her life. The wasted body that lay before him had existed by sufferance; the spirit that dwelt therein had literally never dared to live and had not learned anything by an abstention which it had not willed for itself. She had not been anything herself and for that reason had not attached anything to herself or herself to anything. When they were children together people had spoken of ‘Stephen and Maurice’ and her name had been added by an afterthought. Even her name, a certain lifeless name, had held her apart from the plays of life. Stephen remembered the voices of children crying with glee and venom:

Stephen, the Reephen, the Rix-Dix Deephen!

but it was always with half-hearted glee and shamefaced venom that they had called out her name:

Isabel, the Risabel, the Rix-Dix Disabel.

Isabel’s death was the occasion of bringing to the house many of Mrs Daedalus’ relatives. They knocked a little timidly at the hall-door and though they were very retiring in manner their host convicted them—the females, at least—privately of making a cunning use of their eyes. The males he received in the long empty drawingroom in which an early fire had been lit. During the two nights of the girl’s wake a big company assembled in the drawingroom: they did not smoke but they drank and told stories. [Every] The morning after the table looked like a marine-stores so crowded was it with empty bottles, black and green. Isabel’s two brothers assisted at this wake. The discussions were often general. One of the boys’ uncles was a very shock-headed asthmatic man who had in his youth been rather indiscreet with his landlady’s daughter and the family had been scarcely appeased by a tardy marriage. One of Mr Daedalus’ friends, a clerk in the Police Courts, told the company of the task which a friend of his in the Castle had in examining prohibited books:

—Such filth, he said. You’d wonder how any man would have the face to print it.

—When I was a boy, said Uncle John in a very flat accent, and had more of a taste for reading than now and much less money I used to go to a bookshop near Patrick’s Close. One day I went there to buy a copy of the Colleen Bawn. The man asked me in and he showed me a book ...

—I know, I know, said the clerk from the Police Courts.

—Such a book to put into the hands of a young lad! Such ideas to put in his head! Scandalous!

Maurice let a moment of respectful approval pass and then he asked:

—Did you buy the book, Uncle John?

Everyone seemed inclined to laugh but Uncle John grew very red and angry and went on:

—They should be prosecuted for putting such books on sale. Children should be kept in their places.

Standing beside the closed piano on the morning of the funeral Stephen heard the coffin bumping down the crooked staircase. The mourners followed it out and seated themselves in the four carriages. Stephen and Maurice carried the three wreaths into the mourning coach. The hearse made for Glasnevin Cemetery at a smart trot. At the cemetery gates six hearses were drawn up. The funeral which had drawn up immediately before Isabel’s was a funeral of someone of the poor class. The mourners, who were huddled in sixes on outside cars, were just scrambling down from the cars as Mr Daedalus and his fellow-mourners drove up. The first funeral went in through the gates where a little crowd of loungers and officials were grouped. Stephen watched them pass in. Two of them who were late pushed their way viciously through the crowd. A girl, one hand catching the woman’s skirt, ran a pace in advance. The girl’s face was the face of a fish, discoloured and oblique-eyed; the woman’s face was square and pinched, the face of a bargainer. The girl, her mouth distorted, looked up at the woman to see if it was time to cry: the woman, settling a flat bonnet, hurried on towards the mortuary chapel.

At the mortuary chapel Mr Daedalus and his friends had to wait until the poor mourners had first been served. In a few minutes the service was over and Isabel’s coffin was carried up and laid on the bier. The mourners scattered in the seats and knelt timidly on their handkerchiefs. A priest with a great toad-like belly balanced to one side came out of the sacristy, followed by an altar boy. He read the service rapidly in a croaking voice and shook the aspergill drowsily over the coffin, the boy piping responses at intervals. When he had read the service he closed the book, crossed himself, and made back for the sacristy at a swinging [gate] gait. Labourers came in and bore out the coffin to a barrow and pushed it along the gravel-path. The superintendant of the cemetery shook hands with Mr Daedalus at the door of the chapel and followed the funeral slowly. The coffin slid evenly into the grave and the grave-diggers began to shovel in the earth. At the sound of the first clods Mr Daedalus began to sob and one of his friends came to his side and held his arm.

When the grave had been covered in the grave-diggers laid their shovels upon it and crossed themselves. The wreaths were put on the grave and after a pause for prayer the mourning party returned through the trim alleys of the cemetery. The unnatural tension of condolence had been somewhat relieved and the talk was becoming practical again. They got into the carriages and drove back along the Glasnevin road. At Dunphy’s corner the carriage drew up behind the carriages of other funerals. In the bar Mr Wilkinson stood the party the first drink: the drivers of the carriages were called in and they stood by the door in a clump and rubbed their coat-sleeves across their bony battered-looking faces until they were asked to name their drink. They all chose pints and indeed their own bodily tenements were not unlike hardly used pewter measures. The mourners drank small specials for the most part. Stephen, when asked what he would drink, answered at once:

—A pint.

His father ceased talking and began to regard him with great attention but, Stephen feeling too cold-hearted to be abashed, received his pint very seriously and drank it off in a long draught. While his head was beneath the tankard he was conscious of his startled father and he felt the savour of the bitter clay of the graveyard sharp in his throat.

The inexpressibly mean way in which his sister had been buried inclined Stephen to consider rather seriously the claims of water and fire to be the last homes of dead bodies. The entire apparatus of the State seemed to him at fault from its first to its last operation. No young man can contemplate the fact of death with extreme satisfaction and no young man, specialised by fate or her stepsister chance for an organ of sensitiveness and intellectiveness, can contemplate the network of falsities and trivialities which make up the funeral of a dead burgher without extreme disgust. For some days after the funeral Stephen, clothed in second-hand clothes of two shades of black, had to receive sympathies. Many of these sympathies proceeded from casual friends of the family. Nearly all the men said “And how is the poor mother bearing it?” and nearly all the women said “It’s a great trial for your poor mother”: and the sympathies were always uttered in the same listless unconvincing monotone. McCann was also sympathetic. He came over to Stephen while that young man was looking into a haberdasher’s window at some ties and wondering why the Chinese chose yellow as a colour of mourning. He shook hands briskly with Stephen:

—I was sorry to hear of the death of your sister ... sorry we didn’t know in time ... to have been at the funeral.

Stephen released his hand gradually and said:

—O, she was very young ... a girl.

McCann released his hand at the same rate of release, and said:

—Still ... it hurts.

The acme of unconvincingness seemed to Stephen to have been reached at that moment.

The second year of Stephen’s University life opened early in October. His godfather had made no comment on the result of the first year but Stephen was told that this opportunity would be the last given him. He chose Italian as his optional subject, partly from a desire to read Dante seriously, and partly to escape the crush of French and German lectures. No-one else in the college studied Italian and every second morning he came to the college at ten o’clock and went up to Father Artifoni’s bedroom. Father Artifoni was an intelligent little moro, who came from Bergamo, a town in Lombardy. He had clean lively eyes and a thick full mouth. Every morning when Stephen rapped at his door [he] there was the noise of chairs being disarranged before the “Avanti!” The little priest never read in the sitting posture and the noise which Stephen heard was the noise of an improvised lectern returning to its constituent parts, namely, two cane chairs and a stiff blotting-pad. The Italian lessons often extended beyond the hour and much less grammar and literature was discussed than philosophy. The teacher probably knew the doubtful reputation of his pupil but for this very reason he adopted a language of ingenuous piety, not that he was himself Jesuit enough to lack ingenuousness but that he was Italian enough to enjoy a game of belief and unbelief. He reproved his pupil once for an admiring allusion to the author of The Triumphant Beast.

—You know, he said, the writer, Bruno, was a terrible heretic.

—Yes, said Stephen, and he was terribly burned.

But the teacher was a poor inquisitor. He told Stephen very slyly that when he and his clerical companions attended public lectures in the University the lecturer was shrewd enough to add a trifle of salt to his criticisms. Father Artifoni accepted the salt with a relish. He was unlike many of the citizens of the third Italy in his want of affection for the English and he was inclined to be lenient towards the audacities of his pupil, which, he supposed, must have been the outcome of too fervid Irishism. He was unable to associate audacity of thought with any temper but that of the irredentist.

Father Artifoni had to admit one day to Stephen that the most reprehensible moment of human delight in as much as it had given pleasure to a human being was good in the sight of God. The conversation had been about an Italian novel. A priest in the house had read the novel and condemned it to the dinner-table. It was bad, he said. Stephen urged that it had given him at least esthetic pleasure and that, for that reason, it could be said to be good:

—Father Byrne does not think so.

—But God?

—For God it might be ... good.

—Then I prefer to side against Father Byrne.

They argued very acutely of the beautiful and the good. Stephen wished to amend or to clarify scholastic terminology: a contrast between the good and the beautiful was not necessary. Aquinas had defined the good as that towards the possession of which an appetite tended, the desirable. But the true and the beautiful were desirable, were the highest, most persistent orders of the desirable, truth being desired by the intellectual [appeased] appetite which was appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible, beauty being desired by the esthetic appetite which was appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. Father Artifoni admired very much the whole-hearted manner in which Stephen vivified philosophic generalisations and encouraged the young man to write a treatise on esthetic. It must have been a surprise for him to find in such latitudes a young man who could not conceive a divorce between art and nature and that not for reasons of climate or temperament but for intellectual reasons. For Stephen art was neither a copy nor an imitation of nature: the artistic process was a natural process. In all his talk about artistic perfection it was impossible to detect an artificial accent. To talk about the perfection of one’s art was not for him to talk about something agreed upon as sublime but in reality no more than a sublime convention but rather to talk about a veritably sublime process of one’s nature which had a right to examination and open discussion.

It was exactly this vivid interest which kept him away from such places of uncomely dalliance as the debating society and the warmly cushioned sodality. Mr Moynihan’s inaugural address was held in the Aula Maxima in November. The President took the chair, surrounded by his professors. The platform was given up to notabilities and the body of the hall to the irregular intellectuals who go from address to address during the winter season and never miss attendance at the theatre when the play is not played in English. The end of the hall was packed with the students of the college. Nine-tenths of them were very serious and nine-tenths of the remainder were serious at intervals. Before the paper was read Whelan received from the president a gold medal for oratory, and one of Mr Daniel’s sons a silver medal for oratory. Mr Moynihan was in evening dress and the front of his hair was curled. [The president clapped him] When he stood up to read his paper the president clapped him and then the hall clapped. Moynihan’s paper showed that the true consoler of the afflicted was not the self-seeking demagogue with his ignorance and lax morality but the Church and that the true way to better the lot of the working classes was not by teaching them to disbelieve in a spiritual and material order, working together in harmony, but by teaching them to follow in humility the life of One who was the friend of all humanity, great and lowly, rich and poor, just and unjust, lettered and unlettered, of One who though above all other men was Himself the meekest of men. Moynihan alluded also to the strange death of a French atheistic writer and implied that Emmanuel had chosen to revenge himself on the unhappy gentleman by privily tampering with his gas-stove.

Among the speakers who followed Moynihan were a County Court Judge and a retired colonel of reactionary sympathies. All the speakers praised the work done by the Jesuits in training the youth of Ireland for the higher walks of life. The essayist of the night was adduced as an example. From his post beside Cranly in an angle of the hall Stephen glanced along the ranks of students. The faces which were now composed to seriousness all bore the same stamp of Jesuit training. For the most part they were free from the more blatant crudities of youth; they were not without a certain inoffensive genuine distaste for the vices of youth. They admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare: and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the Church diplomatic. Without displaying an English desire for an aristocracy of substance they held violent measures to be unseemly and in their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (whenever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism. They respected spiritual and temporal authorities, the spiritual authorities of Catholicism and of patriotism, and the temporal authorities of the hierarchy and the government. The memory of Terence MacManus was not less revered by them than the memory of Cardinal Cullen. If the call to a larger and nobler life ever came to visit them they heard it with secret gladness but always they decided to defer their lives until a favourable moment because they felt unready. They listened to all the speakers attentively and applauded whenever there was an allusion to the President, to Ireland or to the faith. Temple shambled into the hall in the middle of the proceeding and introduced a friend of his to Stephen:

—’Scuse me, this is Fitz, decent fellow. He admires you. ’Scuse me for introducing him, decent fellow.

Stephen shook hands with Fitz, a grey-headed young man with a puzzled flushed face. Fitz and Temple stood against the wall for support as they were both a little unsteady. Fitz began to doze quietly.

—He’s a revolutionist, said Temple to Stephen and Cranly. D’ye know what, Cranly, I believe you’re a revolutionist too. Are you a revolutionist ... Ah, by hell, you don’t like answering that ... I’m a revolutionist.

At this moment a speaker was applauded for mentioning the name of John Henry Newman.

—Who is he, said Temple to everyone near him, who’s this chap?

—Colonel Russell.

—O, is this Colonel ... What did he say? What was it he said?

Nobody answered him so he shambled through a few more incoherent questions and at last, unable to satisfy himself as to the Colonel’s way of thinking, called out “Hurrah for the Mad Mullah” and then asked Cranly did he not think the Colonel was a ‘bloody cod.’

Stephen studied even less regularly during the second year than he had done during the first. He attended lectures oftener but he seldom went to the Library to read. The Vita Nuova of Dante suggested to him that he should make his scattered love-verses into a perfect wreath and he explained to Cranly at great length the difficulties of the verse-maker. His love-verses gave him pleasure: he wrote them at long intervals and when he wrote it was always a mature and reasoned emotion which urged him. But in his expressions of love he found himself compelled to use what he called the feudal terminology and as he could not use it with the same faith and purpose as animated the feudal poets themselves he was compelled to express his love a little ironically. This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal fealty because we recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy. It is not possible for the modern lover to think the universe an assistant at his love-affair and modern love, losing somewhat of its fierceness, gains also somewhat in amiableness. Cranly would not hear of this: for him a distinction between ancient and modern was a trick of words because he had in his own mind reduced past and present to a level of studious ignobility. Stephen tried to sustain against him that though humanity may not change beyond recognition during the short eras known as the ages of man yet these ages are the preys of different ideas in accordance with which every activity, even the least, which they engender is conceived and directed. The distinction, he argued, between the feudal spirit and the spirit of humanity at present is not a phrase of the men of letters. Cranly, like many cynical romanticists, held that the civil life affected in no way the individual life and that it was possible for men to preserve ancient superstitions and prejudices in the midst of a machinery of modernity, just as it was possible for men to live in the medley of machines a life of conformity and yet to be in his heart a rebel against the order he upheld: human nature was a constant quantity. As for the scheme of making a wreath of songs in praise of love he thought that if such a passion really existed it was incapable of being expressed.

—We are not likely to know whether it exists or not if no man tries to express it, said Stephen. We have nothing to test it by.

—What can you test it by? said Cranly. [Jesus] The Church says the test of friendship is to see if a man will lay down his life for a friend.

—You do not believe that, surely?

—No; bloody fools of people will die for different things. McCann, for instance, would die out of sheer obstinacy.

—Renan says a man is a martyr only for things of which he is not quite sure.

—Men die for two sticks put crosswise even in this modern age. What is a cross but two common sticks?

—Love, said Stephen, is a name, if you like, for something inexpressible ... but no, I won’t admit that ... I believe it might be a test of love to see what exchanges it offers. What do people give when they love?

—A wedding breakfast, said Cranly.

—Their bodies, isn’t it: that, at the very least. It is something to give one’s body even for hire.

—Then you think that women who give their bodies for hire, as you say, love the people they give them to?

—When we love, we give. In a way they love too. We give something, a tall hat or a book of music or one’s time and labour or one’s body, in exchange for love.

—I’d a damn sight sooner them women gave me a tall hat than their bodies.

—A matter of taste. You may like tall hats. I don’t.

—My dear man, said Cranly, you know next to nothing about human nature.

—I know a few elementary things and I express them in words. I feel emotions and I express them in rhyming lines. Song is the simple rhythmic liberation of an emotion. Love can express itself in part through song.

—You idealise everything.

—You make me think of Hughes when you say that.

—You imagine that people are capable of all these ... all this beautiful imaginary business. They’re not. Look at the girls you see every day. Do you think they would understand what you say about love?

—I don’t know really, said Stephen. I do not idealise the girls I see every day. I regard them as marsupials ... But still I must express my nature.

—Write the verses, anyway, said Cranly.

—I feel rain, said Stephen stopping under a branch and waiting for the fall of raindrops.

Cranly stood beside him and watched his pose with an expression of bitter satisfaction on his face.

During his wanderings Stephen came on an old library in the midst of those sluttish streets which are called old Dublin. The library had been founded by Archbishop Marsh and though it was open to the public few people seemed aware of its existence. The librarian, [was] delighted at the prospect of a reader, showed Stephen niches and nooks inhabited by dusty brown volumes. Stephen went there a few times in the week to read old Italian books of the Trecento. He had begun to be interested in Franciscan literature. He appreciated not without pitiful feelings the legend of the mild heresiarch of Assisi. He knew, by instinct, that S. Francis’ love-chains would not hold him very long but the Italian was very quaint. Elias and Joachim also relieved the naïf history. He had found on one of the carts of books near the river an unpublished book containing two stories by W. B. Yeats. One of these stories was called The Tables of the Law and in it was mentioned the fabulous preface which Joachim, abbot of Flora, is said to have prefixed to his Eternal Gospel. This discovery, coming so aptly upon his own researches, induced him to follow his Franciscan studies with vigour. He went every Sunday evening to the church of the Capuchins whither he had once carried the disgraceful burden of his sins to be eased of it. He was not offended by the processions of artizans and labourers round the church and the sermons of the priests were grateful to him inasmuch as the speakers did not seem inclined to make much use of their rhetorical and elocutionary training nor anxious to reveal themselves, in theory, at least, men of the world. He thought, in an Assisan mood, that these men might be nearer to his purpose than others: and one evening while talking with a Capuchin, he had over and over to restrain an impulse which urged him to take the priest by the arm, lead him up and down the chapel-yard and deliver himself boldly of the whole story of The Tables of the Law, every word of which he remembered. Considering Stephen’s general attitude towards the Church, there was certainly a profound infection in such an impulse which it needed great efforts of his intelligent partner to correct. He satisfied himself by leading Lynch round the enclosure of Stephen’s Green and making that young man very awkward by reciting Mr Yeats’s story with careful animation. Lynch said he didn’t know what the story was about but, afterwards, when safely secluded in a ‘snug’ he said that the recitation had given him immense pleasure.

—These monks are worthy men, said Stephen.

—Full, round men, said Lynch.

—Worthy men. I went a few days ago to their library. I had great trouble getting in: all the monks came out of different corners to spy at me. Father [Abbot] Guardian asked me what I wanted. Then he brought me in and gave himself a great deal of trouble going over books. Mind you, he was a fat priest and he had just dined so he really was good-natured.

—Good worthy man.

—He didn’t know in the least what I wanted or why I wanted it but he went up one page and down the next with his finger looking for the name and puffing and humming to himself “Jacopone, Jacopone, Jacopone, Jacopone.” Haven’t I a sense of rhythm, eh?

Stephen was still a lover of the deformations wrought by dusk. Late autumn and winter in Dublin are always seasons of damp gloomy weather. He went through the streets at night intoning phrases to himself. He repeated often the story of The Tables of the Law and the story of the Adoration of the Magi. The atmosphere of these stories was heavy with incense and omens and the figures of the monk-errants, Ahern and Michael Robartes strode through it with great strides. Their speeches were like the enigmas of a disdainful Jesus; their morality was infrahuman or superhuman: the ritual they laid such store by was so incoherent and heterogeneous, so strange a mixture of trivialities and sacred practices that it could be recognised as the ritual of men who had received from the hands of high priests, [who had been] anciently guilty of some arrogance of the spirit, a confused and dehumanised tradition, a mysterious ordination. Civilisation may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws but the least protest against the existing order is made by the outlaws whose creed and manner of life is not renewable even so far as to be reactionary. These inhabit a church apart; they lift their thuribles wearily before their deserted altars; they live beyond the region of mortality, having chosen to fulfil the law of their being. A young man like Stephen in such a season of damp and unrest [had] has no pains to believe in the reality of their existence. They lean pitifully [above] towards the earth, like vapours, desirous of sin, remembering the pride of their origin, calling to others to come to them. Stephen was fondest of repeating to himself this beautiful passage from The Tables of the Law: Why do you fly from our torches which were made out of the wood of the trees under which Christ wept in the gardens of Gethsemane? Why do you fly from our torches which were made of sweet wood after it had vanished from the world and come to us who made it of old tunes with our breath?

A certain extravagance began to tinge his life. He was aware that though he was nominally in amity with the order of society into which he had been born, he would not be able to continue so. The life of an errant seemed to him far less ignoble than the life of one who had accepted the tyranny of the mediocre because the cost of being exceptional was too high. The young generation which he saw growing up about him regarded his manifestations of spiritual activity as something more than unseemly and he knew that, under their air of fearful amiableness, the representatives of authority cherished the hope that his unguided nature would bring him into such a lamentable conflict with actuality that they would one day have the pleasure of receiving him officially into some hospital or asylum. This would have been no unusual end for the high emprise of youth often [leads] brings one to premature senility and [De Nerval’s] a poet’s boldness [was] is certainly proved an ill keeper of promises when it induces him to lead a lobster by a bright blue ribbon along the footpath reserved for the citizens. He felt acutely the insidious dangers which conceal themselves under the guise of extravagance but he was convinced also that a dull discharge of duties, neither understood nor congenial, was far more dangerous and far less satisfactory.

—The Church believes that in every act a man does he seeks some good, said Cranly. The publican wants to make money, Whelan wants to become a County Court judge, that girl I saw you talking to yesterday ...

—Miss Clery?

—She wants a man and a little house to live in. The missioner wants to make heathens [into] Christian, the librarian of the National Library wants to make the Dublin people [into] students and readers. [What good] I understand the good which these men seek but what do you seek?

—The Church differentiates between the good which this man seeks and the good which I seek. There is a bonum simpliciter. Then men you mention seek a good of that kind because they are impelled by [direct] passions which are direct even if they are menial: lust, ambition, gluttony. I seek a bonum arduum.

—It might be a bonum very much simpliciter. I don’t think you know, said Cranly.

 ® 

XXIV

About this time there was some agitation in the political world concerning the working of the Royal University. It was proposed to institute a commission to examine into the matter. The Jesuits were accused of working the machine for their own ends without a just sense of impartiality. To parry the charge of obscurantism a monthly review was started under the editorship of McCann. The new editor was in high spirits over this event.

—I have got nearly all the ‘copy’ for the first number, he said to Stephen. I’m sure it will be a success. I want you to write us something for the second number—but something we can understand. Condescend a little. You can’t say we are such barbarians now: we have a paper of our own. We can express our views. You will write us something, won’t you? We have an article by Hughes in this month.

—Of course there is a censor? said Stephen.

—Well, said McCann, the person who originated the idea of the paper in the first instance was Father Cummins.

—The director of your sodality?

—Yes. He originated the idea so you see he acts as a kind of sponsor to us.

—He is the Censor then?

—He has discretionary powers but he is not at all narrow-minded. You needn’t be afraid of him.

—I see. And tell me, will I be paid?

—I thought you were an idealist, said McCann.

—Good luck to the paper, said Stephen waving his hand in adieu.

The first number of McCann’s paper contained a long article by Hughes on The Future of the Celt. It contained also an article in Irish by Glynn’s sister and an editorial article by McCann in which was narrated the history of the inception of the paper. The article began “It was a happy thought of the director of our sodality to unite the various elements of our college life by affording them the opportunity of interchanging ideas and criticisms through the medium of a University magazine. Thanks to the zeal and enterprise of Father Cummins the initial difficulties have been surmounted and we make our bow to the public in the expectation that the public will give us a hearing.” The paper also contained several pages of notes from various sporting and intellectual societies in which celebrities were ‘chaffed’ under the thin disguise of their Latinised surnames. The “Medical Memoes” which were signed “H₂0” [and] consisted of several congratulatory paragraphs about medicoes who had passed their final examinations and a few complimentary paragraphs about the genial professors of the medical school. The paper also contained some verses: The Female Fellow: (a swallow-flight of song) which were signed “Toga Girilis.”

Stephen was shown the new review in the Library by Cranly who seemed to have read it from the first line to the last. Cranly took his friend from one item to another with great persistence, paying no heed to Stephen’s exclamations of impatience. At the “Medical Memoes” Stephen execrated with such smothered fervour that Cranly began to laugh between the pages of the paper and a red-faced priest who was sitting opposite stared indignantly across his copy of The Tablet. In the porch of the Library were a little knot of young men and a little knot of young women, all provided with copies of the new review. All were laughing and talking, making the rain an excuse for lingering under shelter. McCann, brisk and heated with his cycling-cap sideways on his head, went to and fro between the groups. When he saw Stephen he approached with an air of expectancy.

—Well? Have you seen ... ?

—It is a great day for Ireland, said Stephen, seizing the Editor’s hand and shaking it gravely.

—Well ... it is something, said McCann with a suffused forehead.

Stephen leaned against one of the stone pillars and regarded the farther group. She stood in a ring of her companions, laughing and talking with them. The anger with which the new review had filled him gradually ebbed away and he chose to contemplate the spectacle which she and her companions offered him. As on his entrance into the grounds of Clonliffe College a sudden sympathy arose out of a sudden reminiscence, a reminiscent sympathy toward a [sheltered] protected seminarist life the very virtues of which seemed to be set provokingly before the wild gaze of the world, so provokingly that only the strength of walls and watchdogs held them in a little circle of modish and timid ways. Though their affectations often lacked grace and their vulgarity wanted only lungs to be strident the rain brought him charity. The babble of the young students reached him as if from a distance, in broken pulsations, and lifting his eyes he saw the high rain-clouds retreating across the rain-swept country. The quick light shower was over, tarrying, a cluster of diamonds, among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation ascended from the blackened earth. The company in the colonnade was leaving shelter, with many a doubting glance, with a prattle of trim boots, a pretty rescue of petticoats, under umbrellas, a light armoury, upheld at cunning angles. He saw them returning to the convent—demure corridors and simple dormitories, a quiet rosary of hours—while the rain-clouds retreated towards the west and the babble of the young men reached him in regular pulsations. He saw far away amid a flat rain-swept country a high plain building with windows that filtered the obscure daylight. Three hundred boys, noisy and hungry, sat at long tables eating beef fringed with green fat like blubber and junks of white damp bread, and one young boy, leaning upon his elbows, opened and closed the flaps of his ears while the noise of the diners reached him rhythmically as the wild gabble of animals.

—There should be an art of gesture, said Stephen one night to Cranly.

—Yes?

—Of course I don’t mean art of gesture in the sense that the elocution professor understands the word. For him a gesture is an emphasis. I mean a rhythm. You know the song “Come unto these yellow sands?”

—No.

—This is it, said the youth making a graceful anapaestic gesture with each arm. That’s the rhythm, do you see?

—Yes.

—I would like to go out into Grafton St some day and make gestures in the middle of the street.

—I’d like to see that.

—There is no reason why life should lose all grace and nobility even though Columbus discovered America. I will live a free and noble life.

—Yes?

—My art will proceed from a free and noble source. It is too troublesome for me to adopt the manners of these slaves. I refuse to be terrorised into stupidity. Do you believe that one line of verse can immortalise a man?

—Why not one word?

—‘Sitio’ is a classical cry. Try [and] to improve on it.

—Do you think that Jesus when he hung on the cross appreciated what you would call the rhythm of that remark? Do you think that Shakespeare when he wrote a song went out into the street to make gestures for the people?

—It is evident that Jesus was unable to illustrate his remark by a correspondingly magnificent gesture but I do not imagine he uttered it in a matter-of-fact voice. Jesus had a very pure tragic manner: his conduct during his trial was admirable. Do you imagine the Church could have erected such elaborately artistic sacraments about his legend unless the original figure had been one of a certain tragic majesty?

—And Shakespeare ... ?

—I don’t believe he wanted to go out into the street but I am sure he appreciated his own music. I don’t believe that beauty is fortuitous. A man might think for seven years at intervals and all at once write a quatrain which would immortalise him seemingly without thought or care—seemingly. Then the groundling will say: “O, he could write poetry”: and if I ask “How was that?” the groundling will answer “Well, he just wrote it, that’s all.”

—In my opinion you imagine all this about rhythm and gesture. A poet according to you, is a terribly mixed-up fellow.

—The reason you say that is because you have never seen a poet in action before.

—How do you know that?

—You think my theorising very high-flown and fantastical, don’t you?

—Yes, I do.

—Well, I tell you you think me fantastical simply because I am modern.

—My dear man, that’s rubbish. You’re always talking about “modern.” Have you any idea of the age of the earth? You say you’re emancipated but, in my opinion, you haven’t got beyond the first book of Genesis yet. There is no such thing as “modern” or “ancient”: it’s all the same.

—What’s all the same?

—Ancient and modern.

—O, yes, I know, everything is the same as everything else. Of course I know the word ‘modern’ is only a word. But when I use it I use it with a certain meaning ...

—What do you mean, for instance?

—The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient spirit accepted phenomena with a bad grace. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day. Italy has added a science to civilisation by putting out the lantern of justice and considering the criminal in [action] production and in action. All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive States, [and] presumptive Redeemers and Churches. [and] It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption. If you were an esthetic philosopher you would take note of all my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the esthetic instinct in action. The philosophic college should spare a detective for me.

—I suppose you know that Aristotle founded the science of biology.

—I would not say a word against Aristotle for the world but I think his spirit would hardly do itself justice in treating of the “inexact” sciences.

—I wonder what Aristotle would have thought of you as a poet?

—I’m damned if I would apologise to him at all. Let him examine me if he is able. Can you imagine a handsome lady saying “O, excuse me, my dear Mr Aristotle, for being so beautiful”?

—He was a very wise man.

—Yes but I do not think he is the special patron of those who proclaim the usefulness of a stationary march.

—What do you mean?

—Have you not noticed what a false and unreal sound abstract terms have on the lips of those ancients in the college? You see what talk they have now about their new paper. McCann is supposed to lead them out of captivity. Doesn’t that paper of theirs make you say to yourself “O Lord, I’m glad I had no hand in this”? The toy life which the Jesuits permit these docile young men to live is what I call a stationary march. The marionette life which the Jesuit himself lives as a dispenser of illumination and rectitude is another variety of the stationary march. And yet both these classes of puppets think that Aristotle has apologised for them before the eyes of the world. Kindly remember the monstrous legend upon which all their life is regulated—how Aristotelian it is! Kindly remember the minute bylaws they have for estimating the exact amount of salvation in any good work—what an Aristotelian invention!

A week or so before Christmas Stephen was standing one night in the porch of the Library when Emma came out. She stopped to talk with him. She was dressed cosily in warm tweeds and the long even coils of her white boa presented her smiling face to the wintry air. Any young man of reasonable sanity, seeing so happy and so glowing a figure in a cheerless landscape, would have longed to take it in his arms. She wore a little brown fur cap which made her look like a Christmas doll and her incorrigible eyes seemed to say “Wouldn’t you like to fondle me?” She began to chatter at once. She knew the girl that had written The Female Fellow—an awfully smart girl at that kind of thing. They had a magazine in her convent too; she wrote “skits” for it.

—By the way I hear dreadful things about you.

—How is that?

—Everyone says you have dreadful ideas, that you read dreadful books. You’re a mystic or something. Do you know what I heard a girl say?

—No. What?

—That you didn’t believe in God.

They were walking along the Green inside the chains and as she said this she gave more of her body’s warmth to him and her eyes looked at him with an expression of solicitude. Stephen looked into them steadfastly.

—Never mind God, Emma, he said. You interest me much more than that old gentleman does.

—What gentleman? said Emma frankly.

—The middle-aged gentleman with the aviary—Jehovah the Second.

—You must not say such things to me, I told you that before.

—Very good, Emma. I see you are afraid you will lose the faith. But you needn’t be afraid of my influence.

They walked from the Green as far as the South Circular Road without an attempt at further conversation. At every step that they took Stephen’s resolution to leave her and see no more of her became more deeply rooted. Even as a diversion her company was slightly degrading to his sense of dignity. As they passed under the tall trees of the Mall she slackened her pace and, when safe from the lights of the bridge, halted deliberately. Stephen was very much surprised as the hour and the place made their position equivocal and, though she had chosen the broad shadow of the trees to halt in, she had committed this audacity in sight of her own house. They listened for a moment to the quiet flowing of the water and saw the tram begin to crawl off the apex of the bridge.

—Do I interest you so much as that? she said, speaking at last in a rich significant voice.

—Of course you do, said Stephen trying to match her tone. I know that you are alive and human.

—But so many people are alive.

—You are a woman, Emma.

—Would you call me a woman now? Don’t you think I am still a girl?

Stephen’s gaze traversed the provoking territory for a few moments during which her half-closed eyes suffered the trespass without remonstrating.

—No, Emma, he said. You are not a girl any longer.

—But you are not a man, are you? she said quickly for pride and youth and desire were beginning to inflame her cheek even in the shadow.

—I am a hobbledehoy, said Stephen.

She leaned a little more towards him and the same expression of tender solicitude appeared in her eyes. The warmth of her body seemed to flow into his and without a moment’s hesitation he put his hand into his pocket and began to finger out his coins.

—I must be going in, she said.

—Good night, said Stephen smiling.

When she had gone in he went along by the canal bank, still in the shadow of the leafless trees, humming to himself the chant of the Good Friday Gospel. He thought of what he had said to Cranly that when people love they give and he said aloud “I will never speak to her again.” As he came near the lower bridge a woman emerged from the shadows and said “Good-night, love.” Stephen stood still and looked at her. She was an undersized woman and even in that chilly season her clothes gave off an odour of ancient sweats. A black straw hat was set rakishly [upon] above her glazed face. She asked him to come for a little walk. Stephen did not speak to her but, still humming the chant of the passion, transferred his coins to her hand and continued on his way. He heard her benedictions at his back as he walked and he began to wonder which was better from the literary point of view: Renan’s account of the death of Jesus or the account given by the evangelists. He had once heard a preacher allude in horrified piety to the theory put forward by some literary agent of the devil that Jesus was a maniac. The woman in the black straw hat would never believe that Jesus was a maniac and Stephen shared her opinion. He is certainly a great exemplar for bachelors, he said to himself, but he is a little too careful of himself for a divine person. The woman in the black straw hat has never heard of the name of Buddha but Buddha’s character seems to have been superior to that of Jesus with respect to unaffected sanctity. I wonder how she would like that story of Yasodhara’s kissing Buddha after his illumination and penance. Renan’s Jesus is a trifle Buddhistic but the fierce eaters and drinkers of the western world would never worship such a figure. Blood will have blood. There are some people in this island who sing a hymn called “Washed in the blood of the Lamb” by way of easing the religious impulse. Perhaps it’s a question of [impulse] diet but I would prefer to wash in rice-water. Yeow! what a notion! A blood-bath to cleanse the spiritual body of all its sinful sweats ... The sense of decorum makes that woman wear a black straw hat in midwinter. She said to me “Good night, love.” The greatest lover of all time could not say more than that. Think of it. “Good night, love.” Mustn’t the devil be annoyed to hear her described as an evil creature?

—I am not going to see her any more, said Stephen a few nights later to Lynch.

—That is a great mistake, said Lynch expanding his chest.

—It’s only waste of time. I’ll never get what I want from her.

—And what do you want from her?

—Love.

—Eh?

—Love.

Lynch halted abruptly, saying:

—Look here, I have fourpence ...

—You have?

—Let us go in somewhere. But if I give you a drink you must promise not to say that any more.

—Say what?

—That word.

—‘Love’ is it?

—Let us go in here.

When they were sitting in the squalid gloom of a tavern Stephen began to rock his [chair] stool from leg to leg meditatively.

—I see I have educated you too much, my good Lynch?

—But that was an atrocity, said Lynch enjoying the luxury of entertaining and rebuking his companion.

—You do not believe me?

—Of course not.

Stephen concerned himself with his pewter measure for a little time.

—Of course, he said at last, I would take something less if she would give it to me.

—O, I know you would.

—Would you like me to seduce her?

—Very much. It would be very interesting.

—Ah, it wouldn’t be possible!

Lynch laughed.

—The sorrow-stricken tone you say that in. I wish McCann could hear you.

—You know, Lynch, said Stephen, we may as well acknowledge openly and freely. We must have women.

—Yes: I agree. We must have women.

—Jesus said “Whoso looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart”: but he did not condemn “adultery.” Besides it is impossible not to commit “adultery.”

—Quite impossible.

—Consequently if I see a woman inclined for oracle I go to her: if she has no inclination I stay away.

—But that girl has an inclination for oracle.

—That’s the tantalising part of it: I know she has. It’s very unfair of her to tantalise me. I must go to where I am sure of my ground.

—But that costs money; and besides it is dangerous. You may get a dose that will last you your life. I wonder you have not got it before this.

—Ah, yes, isn’t it a nuisance. And yet I must go somewhere ... She is a human being, you know. I can’t say I consider harlots as human beings. Scortum and moechus are both neuter nouns.

—Of course a human being would be much better. But you could get her, if you liked.

—How?

—In marriage.

—I’m glad you reminded me of that, said Stephen. I was almost forgetting it.

—You may be sure she doesn’t forget it, said Lynch, or let anyone else forget it either.

Stephen sighed.

—You remember in The Adoration of the Magi—“When the immortals wish to overthrow the things that are today and to bring the things that were yesterday they have no-one to help them except one whom the things that are today have cast out.”

—Yes.

—Who have I to help me except the woman in the black straw hat? And yet I wish to bring to the world the spiritual renewal which the poet brings to it ... No, I have decided. I will not see her any more.

—The woman in the black straw hat?

—No, the virgin.

—Still I think you are making a mistake, said Lynch, finishing his pint.

One raw misty morning after Christmas Stephen was reading Oreste in Father Artifoni’s bedroom. He asked questions mechanically and listened to answers mechanically. He devised the following question and answer for the pseudo-classical catechism:

Question—What great truth do we learn from the Libation-Pourers of Eschylus?

Answer—We learn from the Libation-Pourers of Eschylus that in ancient Greece brothers and sisters took the same size in boots.

He looked wearily from the wretched Italian binding of his book towards the desolate gardens of S. Stephen’s Green. Above him and beneath him and around him in little dark dusty rooms the intellectual heart of Ireland was throbbing—young men were engaged in the pursuit of learning. Above and beneath and around him were posted Jesuits to guide the young men amid the perilous ways of knowledge. The hand of Jesuit authority was laid firmly upon that intellectual heart and if, at times, it bore too heavily thereon what a little cross was that! The young men were sensible that such severity had its reasons. They understood it as an evidence of watchful care and interest, assured that in their future lives this care would continue, this interest be maintained: the exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never. Who, therefore, readier than these young men to acknowledge gratefully the sallies of some genial professor or the surliness of some door-porter? Who more solicitous to cherish in every way and to advance in person the honour of Alma Mater?

The mortifying atmosphere of the college crept about Stephen’s heart. For his part he was at the difficult age, dispossessed and necessitous, sensible of all that was ignoble in such manners, who in revery, at least, had been acquainted with nobility. As a remedy for so untoward a malady an earnest Jesuit [had some days before] was to prescribe a clerkship in Guinness’s: and doubtless the clerk-designate of a brewery would not have had scorn and pity only for an admirable community had it not been that he desired, in the language of the schoolmen, an arduous good. Impossible that he should find his soul’s sufficient good in societies for the encouragement of thought among laymen, or any other than bodily solace in the warm sodality, in the company of those foolish and grotesque virginities! Impossible that a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy should submit to acquiesce, that a soul should decree servitude for its portion over which the image of beauty had fallen as a mantle.

The deadly chill of the atmosphere of the college paralysed Stephen’s heart. In a stupor of powerlessness he reviewed the plague of Catholicism. He seemed to see the vermin begotten in the catacombs in an age of sickness and cruelty issuing forth upon the plains and mountains of Europe. Like the plague of locusts described in Callista they seemed to choke the rivers and fill the valleys up. They obscured the sun. Contempt of [the body] human nature, weakness, nervous tremblings, fear of day and joy, distrust of man and life, hemiplegia of the will, beset the body burdened and disaffected in its members by its black tyrannous lice. Exultation of the mind before joyful beauty, exultation of the body in free confederate labours, every natural impulse towards health and wisdom and happiness had been corroded by the pest of these vermin. The spectacle of the world in thrall filled him with the fire of courage. He, at least, though living at the farthest remove from the centre of European culture, marooned on an island in the ocean, though inheriting a will broken by doubt and a soul the steadfastness of whose hate became as weak as water in siren arms, would live his own life according to what he recognised as the voice of a new humanity, active, unafraid and unashamed.

He followed his Italian lesson mechanically, feeling the unintermittent deadliness of the atmosphere of the college in his throat and lungs, obscuring his eyes and obfuscating his brain. The little iron watch on the table had barely passed the half hour: eleven o’clock seemed so far off. He had to open his Machiavelli and read out a paragraph until the teacher’s ear was satisfied. The dingy chronicle fell piecemeal from his lips, dull wooden words. From time to time he glanced up from the page to see the thick mouth of the priest correct his slovenly ‘o’s now with a sudden harsh ejaculation of the vowel sound, now with a slow mute protrusion of the lips. The little iron watch ticked on for another five minutes. Then the teacher began to correct the exercise. Stephen gazed wearily out of the window, across the mist-laden gardens. The air was webbed with water vapours and all the flower-beds and walks confronted the grey of the sky with a truculent sodden brown. Mackintoshes and overcoats came along the walks or down the steps of the monument under their umbrellas or surmounted by a muffled human head. The footpath inside the chains where Stephen had so often walked with his friends at night glistened like a grey mirror. Stephen watched the feet pass along the polished surface: he wondered if it was his moments of excessive vitality which cast back by revulsion on such hours of despair. He felt that he was looking at the world with Cranly’s eyes and still he continued gazing along the footpath.

—You cannot say, said the teacher running his pencil under a phrase. It is not Italian.

Stephen withdrew his eyes from the window suddenly and stood up:

—Will you please excuse me, sir. I am ... I forgot to tell you that today I must go away earlier ... I am afraid I shall be late, he added looking at the watch. Will you excuse me?

—You have an appointment now?

—Yes, I nearly forgot. You must excuse me for today ...

—Certainly, certainly. You can go now.

—Thanks. I am afraid I ...

—Certainly, certainly.

With a flying hand for the banisters he ran down the stairs, taking five steps at a time. He struggled into his raincoat in the hall and emerged panting and half-dressed on to the front steps. He ran out into the middle of the muddy roadway and peered through the dull light towards the eastern side of the square. He walked on swiftly in the middle of the road with his eyes fixed on the same point and then came in again on the footpath and began to run. When he reached the corner of Earlsfort Terrace he stopped running and turning to the right walked on again swiftly. Outside of the University he came alongside of the object which he had been pursuing.

—Good morning!

—Stephen! ... Have you been running?

—Yes.

—Where are you going to?

—I saw you from the window.

—What window?

—In the college. Where are you going?

—I am going to Leeson Park.

—This way, said Stephen taking her arm.

She seemed as if she were about to resent such an act in broad daylight but after a quick glance of remonstrance allowed him to escort her. Stephen held her arm tightly to his side and discomposed her somewhat by speaking very close to her face. Her face was glistening with mist and it had begun to glow in answer to his excited and passionate manner.

—Where did you see me?

—I was in the window at my Italian lesson with Father Artifoni. I saw you come through the Green and cross the road.

—Did you?

—So I jumped up at once and asked him to excuse me as I had to keep an appointment and flew downstairs and out after you.

The colour had begun to deepen very much on her cheek and it was plain that she was trying to appear quite at her ease. At first she had been flattered but now she was becoming a little nervous. She laughed nervously when he told her [why] that he had run out after her.

—Goodness! Why did you do that?

Stephen did not answer but he pressed her arm fiercely to his side. At the end of the terrace she turned into a side street instinctively. Here she walked more slowly. The street was very quiet and they both lowered their voices.

—How did you know it was I? she said. You must have good sight.

—I was gazing out of the window, he answered, looking at the sky and the Green. Lord God! I felt so full of despair. Sometimes I am taken that way: I live such a strange life—without help or sympathy from anyone. Sometimes I am afraid of myself. I call those people in the college not men but vegetables ... Then while I was cursing my own character I saw you.

—Yes? she said looking at the disorderly figure beside her out of her large oval eyes.

—You know I was delighted to see you. I had to jump up and rush out. I couldn’t have sat there another minute ... I said, Here is a human creature at last ... I can’t tell you how delighted I was.

—You strange boy! she said. You mustn’t go running about like that. You must have more sense.

—Emma! cried Stephen, don’t start talking to me like that today. I know you want to be very sensible. But you and I—we are both young, aren’t we?

—Yes, Stephen.

—Very good, then. If we’re young we feel happy. We feel full of desire.

—Desire?

—Do you know when I saw you ...

—Yes, how did you know me?

—I knew the stride.

—Stride!

—Do you know, Emma, even from my window I could see your hips moving inside your waterproof? I saw a young woman walking proudly through the decayed city. Yes, that’s the way you walk: you’re proud of being young and proud of being a woman. Do you know when I caught sight of you from my window—do you know what I felt?

There was no use in her essaying indifference now. Her cheeks were covered with a persistent flush and her eyes shone like gems. She gazed straight before her and her breath began to be agitated. They stood together in the deserted street and he continued speaking, a certain ingenuous disattachment guiding his excited passion.

—I felt that I longed to hold you in my arms—your body. I longed for you to take me in your arms. That’s all ... Then I thought I would run after you and say that to you ... Just to live one night together, Emma, and then to say goodbye in the morning and never to see each other again! There is no such thing as love in the world: only people are young ...

She tried to take her arm away from his and murmured as if she were repeating from memory:

—You are mad, Stephen.

Stephen let go her arm and took her hand in his, saying:

—Goodbye, Emma ... I felt that I wanted to say that to you for my own sake but if I stand here in this stupid street beside you for much longer I shall begin to say more ... You say I am mad because I do not bargain with you or say I love you or swear to you. But I believe you hear my words and understand me, don’t you?

—I don’t understand you indeed, she answered with a touch of anger.

—I will give you a chance, said Stephen, pressing her hand close in his two hands. Tonight when you are going to bed remember me and go to your window: I will be in the garden. Open the window and call my name and ask me to come in. Then come down and let me in. We will live one night together—one night, Emma, alone together and in the morning we will say goodbye.

—Let go my hand, please, she said pulling her hand away from him. If I had known [if] it was for this mad talk ... You must not speak to me any more, she said moving on a pace or two and plucking her waterproof out of his reach. Who do you think I am that you can speak to me like that?

—It is no insult, said Stephen colouring suddenly as the reverse of the image struck him, for a man to ask a woman what I have asked you. You are annoyed at something else not at that.

—You are mad, I think, she said, brushing past him swiftly without taking any notice of his salute. She did not go quickly enough, however, to hide the tears that were in her eyes and he, surprised to see them and wondering at their cause, forgot to say the goodbye that was on his lips. As he watched her walk onward swiftly with her head slightly bowed he seemed to feel her soul and his falling asunder swiftly and for ever after an instant of all but union.

 ® 

XXV

Lynch chuckled very much over this adventure. He said it was the most original attempt at seduction of which he had ever heard, so original that ...

—You know, he said, I must tell you that to the ordinary intelligence ...

—To you, that is?

—To the ordinary intelligence it looks as if you had taken leave of your senses for the time being.

Stephen stared fixedly at his toes: they were sitting on a bench in the Green.

—It was the best I could do, he said.

—A very bad best, in my opinion. No girl with an ounce of brains would listen to you. That’s not the way to go about it, man. You run out suddenly after her, come up sweating and puffing and say “Let us lie together.” Did you mean it as a joke?

—No, I was quite serious. I thought she might ... In fact I don’t know what I thought. I saw her, as I told you, and I ran after her and said what was in my mind. We are friends for a long time ... Now it seems I have acted like a lunatic.

—O, no, said Lynch, expanding his chest, not like a lunatic but you went about the affair so strangely.

—If I had run after her and proposed to her, proposed marriage that is, you would not say I had acted strangely.

—[No, no] Even in that case ...

—No, no, don’t deceive yourself, you would not. You would find an excuse for me.

—Well, you see, there is something relatively sane about marriage, isn’t there?

—For a man of your ordinary intelligence there may be: not for me. Have you ever read the Form of Solemnization of Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer?

—Never.

—You should then. Your everyday life is Protestant: you show yourself a Catholic only when you discuss. Well, to me that ceremony is not acceptable: it is not so sane as you imagine. A man who swears before the world to love a woman till death part him and her is sane neither in the opinion of the philosopher who understands what mutability is nor in the opinion of the man of the world who understands that it is safer to be a witness than an actor in such affairs. A man who swears to do something which it is not in his power to do is not accounted a sane man. For my part I do not believe that there was ever a moment of passion so fierce and energetic that it warranted a man in saying “I could love you for ever” to the adored object. Please understand the importance of Goethe ...

—Still marriage is a custom. To follow a custom is a mark of sanity.

—It is a mark of ordinariness. I admit that many ordinary people are sane just as I know that many ordinary people have delusions. But a capacity for being deceived by others or by oneself cannot be said to constitute the essential part of sanity. It is rather a question whether a man does encourage an insane condition in himself by deceiving himself voluntarily or allowing himself to be deceived by others voluntarily.

—Anyhow your move was not diplomatic.

—We all know that, said Stephen standing up, but all genuine diplomacy is with a view to some particularly excellent plum. What plum do you think Cranly is likely to gain by a diplomacy which is highly meritorious in itself? What plum would I be likely to get by proposing a diplomatic marriage except a partner “to behold my chaste conversation, coupled with fear”—eh?

—The juice of the fruit, answered Lynch standing up in his turn and looking very thirsty and tired.

—The woman herself, you mean?

—Exactly.

Stephen walked along the path without saying anything for about twenty yards: then he said:

—I like a woman to give herself. I like to receive ... These people count it a sin to sell holy things for money. But surely what they call the temple of the Holy Ghost should not be bargained for! Isn’t that simony?

—You want to sell your verses, don’t you, said Lynch abruptly, and to a public you say you despise?

—I do not want to sell my poetical mind to the public. I expect reward from the public for my verses because I believe my verses are to be numbered among the spiritual assets of the State. That is not a simoniacal exchange. I do not sell what Glynn calls the divine afflatus: I do not swear to love, honour and obey the public until my dying day—do I? A woman’s body is a corporal asset of the State: if she traffic with it she must sell it either as a harlot or as a married woman or as a working celibate or as a mistress. But a woman is (incidentally) a human being: and a human being’s love and freedom is not a spiritual asset of the State. Can the State buy and sell electricity? It is not possible. Simony is monstrous because it revolts our notion of what is humanly possible. A human being can exert freedom to produce or to accept, or love to procreate or to satisfy. Love gives and freedom takes. The woman in the black straw hat gave something before she sold her body to the State. Emma will sell herself to the State but give nothing.

—You know even if you had proposed to buy her decently—for State purposes—said Lynch, kicking his toes moodily at the gravel, she would not have sold at the price.

—You think not. Not even if I ...

—Not likely, said the other definitely. What a damn fool she is!

Stephen blushed ingenuously:

—You have such a nice way of putting things, he said.

The next time Stephen met Emma in the street she did not salute him. He did not tell the incident to anyone but Lynch. From Cranly he expected scant sympathy and he was deterred from speaking of it to Maurice because he had still the elder brother’s wish to appear successful. The conversation with Lynch had revealed to him with distressing effect the commonplace side of the adventure. He asked himself seriously and often had he expected that she would have answered ‘Yes’ to his proposal. His mind, he thought, must have been somewhat unbalanced that morning. And yet when he reconsidered his own defence of his conduct he found it just. The economic aspect of the affair did not present itself to him very vividly and, indeed, was only vivid enough to make him deplore the fact that the solution of moral problems should be so hopelessly entangled with merely material considerations. He was not sufficiently doctrinaire to wish to have his theory put to the test by a general [revulsion] revolution of society but he could not believe that his theory was utterly impracticable. The Roman Catholic notion that a man should be unswervingly continent from his boyhood and then be permitted to achieve his male nature, having first satisfied the Church as to his orthodoxy, financial condition, [and] prospects and general intentions, and having sworn before witnesses to love his wife for ever whether he loved her or not and to beget children for the kingdom of heaven in such manner as the Church approved of—this notion seemed to him by no means satisfactory.

During the train of these reflections the Church sent an embassy of nimble pleaders into his ears. These ambassadors were of all grades and of all types of culture. They addressed every side of his nature in turn. He was a young man with a doubtful future and an unusual character: this was the first salient fact. The ambassadors met it without undue pretence or haste. They stated that it was in their power to make smooth many of the ways which promised to be rough and, by diminishing the hardships of the material nature, to allow the unusual character scope and ease to develop and approve itself. He had deplored the entanglement of merely material considerations in a problem of morals and here, at least, was a warrant that if he chose to give ear to the pleadings of the embassy the moral problem in his case would be set on the road of solving itself free from minor and unworthier cares. He had what he called a ‘modern’ reluctance to give pledges: no pledges were required. If at the end of five years he still persevered in his obduracy of heart he could still seize upon his individual liberty without fear of being called oath-breaker therefor. The practice of due consideration was an old one and a wise one. He himself was the greatest sceptic concerning the perfervid enthusiasms of the patriots. As an artist he had nothing but contempt for a work which had arisen out of any but the most stable mood of the mind. Was it possible that he would exercise less rigour on his life than he desired to exercise on his art? How could he be guilty of such foolishness, of such cynical subordination of the actual to the abstract, if he honestly believed that an institution is to be accounted valuable in proportion to its nearness to some actual human need or energy and that the epithet ‘vivisective’ should be applied to the modern spirit as distinguished from the ancient or category-burdened spirit. He desired for himself the life of an artist. Well! And he feared that the Church would obstruct his desire. But, during the formulation of his artistic creed, had he not found item after item upheld for him in advance by the greatest and most orthodox doctor of the Church and was it anything but vanity which urged him to seek out the thorny crown of the heretic while the entire theory, in accordance with which his entire artistic life was shaped, arose most conveniently for his purpose out of the mass of Catholic theology? He could not accept whole-heartedly the offers of Protestant belief: he knew that the liberty it boasted of was often only the liberty to be slovenly in thought and amorphous in ritual. No-one, not the most rabid enemy of the Church, could accuse it of being slovenly in thought: the subtlety of its disquisitions had become a byword with demagogues. No-one again could accuse the Church of being amorphous in ritual. The Puritan, the Calvinist, the Lutheran were inimical to art and to exuberant beauty: the Catholic was the friend of him who professed to interpret or divulge the beautiful. Could he assert that his own aristocratic intelligence and passion for a supremely satisfying order in all the fervours of artistic creation were not purely Catholic qualities? The ambassadors did not labour this point.

Besides, they said, it is a mark of the modern spirit to be shy in the presence of all absolute statements. However sure you may be now of the reasonableness of your convictions you cannot be sure that you will always think them reasonable. If you sincerely regard a pledge as an infringement of human liberty you cannot pledge yourself against following a reactionary impulse which is certain to overtake you some day. You cannot leave out of sight the possibility that your views of the world will change to such an extent that you will regard all interference with the course of affairs as the part of such [who] as can still be deluded by hope. In that case what will have become of your life? You will have wasted it in efforts to save people who have neither inclination nor aptitude for freedom. You believe in an aristocracy: believe also in the eminence of the aristocratic class and in the order of society which secures that eminence. Do you imagine that manners will become less ignoble, intellectual and artistic endeavour less conditioned, if the ignorant, enthusiastic, spiritual slovens whom we have subjected subject us? Not one of those slovens understands your aims as an artist or wants your sympathy: we, on the contrary, understand your aims and often are in sympathy with them and we solicit your support and consider your comradeship an honour. You are fond of saying that the Absolute is dead. If that be so it is possible that we are all wrong and if once you accept that as a possibility what remains for you but an intellectual disdain? With us you can exercise your contemptuous faculties when you are recognised as one of the patrician order and you will not even be obliged to grant a truce to the very doctrines, the success of which in the world has secured you your patricianship. Make one with us. Your life will be insured from grosser troubles, your art will be safeguarded against the intrusions of revolutionary notions which no artist of whom history tells us has ever made himself champion. Make one with us, on equal terms. In temper and in mind you are still a Catholic. Catholicism is in your blood. Living in an age which professes to have discovered evolution, can you be fatuous enough to think that simply by being wrong-headed you can recreate entirely your mind and temper or can clear your blood of what you may call the Catholic infection? A revolution such as you desire is not brought about by violence but gradually: and, within the Church you have an opportunity of beginning your revolution in a rational manner. You can sow the seeds in the careful furrows entrusted to you and if your seed is good it will prosper. But by going into the unnecessary wilderness and scattering your seed broadcast on all soils what harvest will you have? Everything seems to urge you to a course of moderation, of forbearance; and the purified will can surely display itself quite as well in acceptance as in rejection. The trees do not resent autumn nor does any exemplary thing in nature resent its limitations. Neither then do you resent the limitations of compromise.

These pleadings which Stephen so punctiliously heard out were supplemented by Cranly’s influence. Neither of the young men [were] was studying for [their] his examination and they spent their evenings as usual in aimless walking and talking. Their walks and talks led nowhere because whenever anything definite threatened to make its appearance in their talk Cranly promptly sought the company of some of his chosen companions. The billiard-room of the Adelphi Hotel was now a favourite resort of the two friends. After ten o’clock every night they went into the billiard-room. It was a big room well furnished with ill-kept inelegant tables and poorly furnished with players. Cranly played protracted matches with one or other of his companions while Stephen sat on the seat that ran alongside of the table. A game of fifty cost sixpence which was duly paid by each of the players in equal parts, Cranly producing his threepence very deliberately from a leather heart-shaped purse. The players sometimes sent their balls on to the floor and Cranly occasionally swore at his flamin’ cue. There was a bar attached to the billiard-room. In the bar was a stout barmaid who wore badly made stays, served bottles of stout with her head on one side, and conversed in an English accent with her customers about the theatrical companies of the different theatres. Her customers were young men who carried their hats sideways far back on their heads and walked with their feet far apart. Their trousers were usually turned up high above their tan boots. One of the regular customers at this bar (though he did not mix with the young gentlemen mentioned above) was a friend of Cranly’s, a young man who was a clerk in the Agricultural Board Office. He was a bandy-legged little man who spoke very little when he was sober but very much when he was drunk. When he was sober he was very orderly but his tipsiness, signalled by a dark-coloured ooze upon his pock-marked face, was boastful and disorderly. One night he engaged in a fierce argument about Tim Healy with a thick set medical student who had a taste for the art of self-defence. The argument was nearly entirely one-sided inasmuch as the medical student’s contributions were derisive laughs and such remarks as “Is he handy with the mits?” “Can he put up his props?” “Is he a good man with the mits?” At last the clerk from the Agricultural Board Office called the medical student a dirty name whereupon the medical student immediately knocked down all the drinks on the counter in his efforts to ‘smash’ the offender. The barmaid ran screaming for the proprietor, the medical student was soothed and restrained by considerate friends and the offender was escorted out by Cranly and Stephen and a few others. At first he lamented that his new cuffs were stained with porter and expressed a great desire to go back and fight it out but, dissuaded by Cranly, he began to tell Stephen in an indistinct undertone that he had got the highest marks in Pure Mathematics ever given in the degree examination. He advised Stephen to go to London to write for the papers and said he could put him in the right way to get on. When Cranly had begun a conversation with the others concerning the interrupted game of billiards Stephen’s companion again announced that he had got the highest marks ever given in the degree in Pure Mathematics.

Stephen continued making his book of verses in spite of these distracting influences. He had come to the conclusion that nature had designed him for a man of letters and therefore he determined that, in spite of all influences, he would do as nature counselled. He had begun to consider Cranly a bad influence. Cranly’s method in argument was to reduce all things to their food values (though he himself was the most impractical of theorists) and Stephen’s conception of art fared very badly from such a method. Stephen held the test of food values an extreme one and one which in its utter materialism suggested a declination from the heights of romanticism. He knew that Cranly’s materialism was only skin-deep and he surmised that Cranly chose to express himself in language and conduct of direct ugliness simply because his fear of ridicule and more than diplomatic wish to be well with men urged him to refrain from beauty of any kind. He fancied moreover that he detected in Cranly’s attitude towards him a certain hostility, arising out of a thwarted desire to imitate. Cranly was fond of ridiculing Stephen to his bar companions and though this was supposed to be no more than banter Stephen found touches of seriousness in it. Stephen refused to close with this trivial falsehood of his friend and continued to [disclose] share all the secrets of his bosom as if he had not observed any change. He no longer, however, sought his friend’s opinion or allowed the sour dissatisfaction of his friend’s moods to weigh with him. He was egoistically determined that nothing material, no favour [of] or reverse of fortune, no bond of association or impulse or tradition should hinder him from working out the enigma of his position in his own way. He avoided his father sedulously because he now regarded his father’s presumptions as the most deadly part of a tyranny, internal and external, which he determined to combat with might and main. He argued no further with his mother, persuaded that he could have no satisfactory commerce with her so long as she chose to set the shadow of a clergyman between her nature and his. His mother told him one day that she had spoken of him to her confessor and asked his spiritual advice. Stephen turned to her and remonstrated hotly with her for doing such a thing.

—It is a nice thing, he said, that you go and discuss me behind my back. Have you not your own nature to guide you, your own sense of what is right, without going to some Father Jack-in-the-Box to ask him to guide you?

—Priests know a great deal of the world, said his mother.

—And what did he advise you to do?

—He said if there were any young children in the house he would advise me to get out away from there as quickly as I could.

—Very nice! said Stephen angrily. That’s a pretty thing for you to come and say to a son of yours!

—I am simply telling you what the priest advised me to do, said his mother quietly.

—These fellows, said Stephen, know nothing of the world. You might as well say that a rat in a sewer knew the world. Anyway you won’t repeat what I say to your confessor in future because I won’t say anything. And the next time he asks you “What is that mistaken young man, that unfortunate boy, doing?” you can answer “I don’t know, father. I asked him and he said I was to tell the priest he was making a torpedo.”

The general attitude of women towards religion puzzled and often maddened Stephen. His nature was incapable of achieving such an attitude of insincerity or stupidity. By brooding constantly upon this he ended by anathemising (sic) Emma as the most deceptive and cowardly of marsupials. He discovered that it was a menial fear and no spirit of chastity which had prevented her from granting his request. Her eyes, he thought, must look strange when upraised to some holy image and her lips when poised for the reception of the host. He cursed her burgher cowardice and her beauty and he said to himself that though her eyes might cajole the half-witted God of the Roman Catholics they would not cajole him. In every stray image of the streets he saw her soul manifest itself and every such manifestation renewed the intensity of his disapproval. It did not strike him that the attitude of women towards holy things really implied a more genuine emancipation than his own and he condemned them out of a purely suppositious (sic) conscience. He exaggerated their iniquities and evil influence and returned them their antipathy in full measure. He toyed also with a theory of dualism which would symbolise the twin eternities of spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and female and even thought of explaining the audacities of his verse as symbolical allusions. It was hard for him to compel his head to preserve the strict temperature of classicism. More than he had ever done before he longed for the season to lift and for spring—the misty Irish spring—to be over and gone. He was passing through Eccles’ St one evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a “Vilanelle of the Temptress.” A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

The Young Lady—(drawling discreetly) ... O, yes ... I was ... at the ... cha ... pel ...

The Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I ...

The Young Lady—(softly) ... O ... but you’re ... ve ... ry ... wick ... ed ...

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:

—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.

—What?

—Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.

—Yes? said Cranly absently.

—No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.

—Yes ...

—You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn’t that so?

—And then?

—That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see?

—Let us turn back, said Cranly.

They had reached the corner of Grafton St and as the footpath was overcrowded they turned back northwards. Cranly had an inclination to watch the antics of a drunkard who had been ejected from a bar in Suffolk St but Stephen took his arm summarily and led him away.

—Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly’s hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend’s company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:

—It has not epiphanised yet, he said.

Cranly stared stolidly down the river and held his peace for a few minutes during which the expounder of the new esthetic repeated his theory to himself all over again. A clock at the far side of the bridge chimed and simultaneously Cranly’s thin lips parted for speech:

—I wonder, he said ...

—What?

Cranly continued to stare towards the mouth of the Liffey like a man in a trance. Stephen waited for the sentence to be finished and then he said again “What?” Cranly then faced about suddenly and said with flat emphasis:

—I wonder did that bloody boat, the Sea-Queen ever start?

Stephen had now completed a series of hymns in honour of extravagant beauty and these he published privately in a manuscript edition of one copy. His last interview with Cranly had been so unsatisfactory that he hesitated to show the manuscript to him. He kept the manuscript by him and its presence tormented him. He wanted to show it to his parents but the examination was approaching and he knew that their sympathy would be incomplete. He wanted to show it to Maurice but he was conscious that his brother resented having been forsaken for plebeian companions. He wanted to show it to Lynch but he dreaded the physical labour of urging that torpid young man into a condition of receptiveness. He even thought for a moment of McCann and Madden. He saw Madden rarely; the salute which the young patriot gave him on those rare occasions was not unlike the salute which [one] a friend who has failed gives to a friend who has succeeded. Madden spent the greater part of his day in Cooney’s tobacco-shop, sampling and discussing camàns, smoking very heavy tobacco and speaking Irish with [one] newly arrived provincials. McCann was still busily occupied in editing his magazine [for] to which he had himself contributed an article entitled “Rationalism in Practice.” In this article he expressed the hope that mankind in the not too distant future would use mineral, [as] instead of animal [and] or vegetable diet. The tone of the editor’s writing had become much more orthodox than his speech had been wont to be. In the report of the general meeting of the College Sodality which occupied a column and a half of the College magazine it was stated that Mr McCann, in a forcible speech, had [suggested] made many valuable suggestions for the working of the society on a more practical basis. Stephen was surprised at this and when one day, [when Mc] walking through Nassau St with Cranly, he encountered the editor striding vigorously towards the Library he said to Cranly:

—What is Bonny Dundee at?

—How—at?

—I mean ... this sodality business he’s mixing himself up in. He can’t be stupid enough to think he can use the sodality for any good purpose.

Cranly eyed Stephen quizzically but, after considering the matter, decided to make no remark.

The examination resulted in Cranly’s being ‘stuck’ again and in Stephen’s securing a low pass. Stephen did not think it necessary to take the results of these examinations very bitterly to heart inasmuch as he [judged] knew that Father Artifoni, who had presented himself for the matriculation examination, had been awarded higher marks for his English paper than for his Italian paper, having been tested in the latter language by a polyglot examiner who examined in French, Italian, Arabic, [Jewish] Hebrew, Spanish and German. Stephen sympathised with his teacher who was ingenuous enough to express his astonishment. One evening during the examinations Stephen was talking to Cranly under the arcade of the University when Emma passed them. Cranly raised his ancient straw hat (which he had once more resurrected) and Stephen followed suit. In reply she bowed very politely across Stephen at his friend. Cranly replaced his hat and proceeded to meditate in the shade of it for a few minutes.

—Why did she do that? he said.

—An invitation, perhaps, said Stephen.

Cranly stared continuously at the air through which she had passed: and Stephen said smilingly:

—Perhaps she meant it as an invitation.

—Perhaps.

—You’re incomplete without a woman, said Stephen.

—Only she’s so flamin’ fat, said Cranly, d’ye know ...

Stephen kept silent. He was not pleased that anyone else should speak against her and he did not smile when Cranly took his arm saying “Let us eke go” which [he] was always intended as an old English expression inviting departure. Stephen had long ago debated with himself the advisability of telling Cranly that the expression should be amended but Cranly’s persistent emphasis of the word ‘eke’ acted as a deterrent.

The announcement of the result of the examination led to a domestic squabble. Mr Daedalus ransacked his vocabulary in search of abusive terms and ended by asking Stephen what were his plans for the future.

—I have no plans.

—Well then the sooner you clear out the better. You’ve been having us I see. However with the help of God and His Holy Mother I’ll write to Mullingar the first thing in the morning. There’s no use in your god-father wasting any more of his money on you.

—Simon, said Mrs Daedalus, you always go to the fair with the story. Can’t you be reasonable?

—Reasonable be damned. Don’t I know the set he has got into—lousy-looking patriots and that football chap in the knickerbockers. To tell you the God’s truth, Stephen, I thought you’d have more pride than to associate with such canaille.

—I don’t think Stephen has done so badly in his examination: he hasn’t failed and after all ...

—She will put in her word, you know, said Mr Daedalus to his son. That’s a little hereditary habit. Her family, you know, by God they know anything you can ask them down to the making of the mainspring of a watch. Fact.

—You oughtn’t to run away with the story, Simon. Many fathers would be glad to have such a son.

—You needn’t interfere between me and my son. We understand each other. I’m not saying anything to him; but I want to know what he has been doing for twelve months.

Stephen continued tapping the blade of his knife on the edge of his plate.

—What have you been doing?

—Thinking.

—Thinking? Is that all?

—And writing a little.

—Hm. I see. Wasting your time, in fact.

—I don’t consider it waste of time to think.

—Hm. I see. You see I know these Bohemian chaps, these poets, who don’t consider it waste of time to think. But at the same time they’re damn glad to borrow an odd shilling now and then to buy chops with. How will you like thinking when you have no chops? Can’t you go for something definite, some good appointment in a government office and then, by Christ, you can think as much as you like. Study for some first-class appointment, there are plenty of them, and you can write at your leisure. Unless, perhaps, you would prefer to be a loafer eating orange-peels and sleeping in the Park.

Stephen made no reply. When the harangue had been repeated five or six times he got up and went out. He went over to the Library to look for Cranly and, not finding him in the reading-room or in the porch, went to the Adelphi Hotel. It was a Saturday night and the rooms were crowded with clerks. [and] The clerk from the Agricultural Board Office was sitting in the corner of the bar with his hat pushed well back from his forehead and at once Stephen recognised the dark ooze which was threatening to emerge upon his heated face. He was occupied in twirling his moustache in the crook of his index finger, and in glancing between the barmaid’s face and the label of his bottle of stout. The billiard-room was very noisy: all the tables were engaged and the balls hopped on to the floor every minute or so. Some of the players played in their shirt-sleeves.

Cranly was sitting stolidly on the seat that ran alongside the tables, watching a game [of]. Stephen sat beside him in silence, also watching the game. It was a three-handed game. An elderly clerk, evidently in a patronising mood, was playing two of his junior colleagues. The elderly clerk was a tall stout man who wore gilt spectacles on a face like a red shrivelled apple. He was in his shirt-sleeves and he played and spoke so briskly as to suggest that he was drilling rather than playing. The young clerks were both clean shaven. One of them was a thickset young man who played doggedly without speaking, the other was an effervescent young man with white eyebrows and a nervous manner. Cranly and Stephen watched the game progress, creep from point to point. The heavy young man put his ball on to the floor three times in succession and the scoring was so slow that the marker came and stood by the table as a reminder that the twenty minutes had passed. The players chalked their cues oftener than before and, seeing that they were in earnest about finishing the game, the marker did not say anything about the time. But his presence acted upon them. The elderly clerk jerked his cue at his ball, making a bad stroke, and stood back from the table blinking his eyes and saying “Missed that time.” The effervescent young clerk hurried to his ball, made a bad stroke and, looking along his cue, said “Ah!” The dogged young man shot his ball straight into the top pocket, a fact which the marker registered at once on the broken marking-board. The elderly clerk peered for a few critical seconds over the rim of his glasses, made another bad stroke and, at once proceeding to chalk his cue [briskly], said briefly and sharply to the effervescent young man “Come on now, White. Hurry up now.”

The hopeless pretence of those three lives before him, their unredeemable servility, made the back of Stephen’s eyes feel burning hot. He laid his [arm] hand on Cranly’s shoulder and said impetuously:

—We must go out at once. I can’t stand it any longer.

They crossed the room together and Stephen said:

—If I had remained another minute I think I would have begun to cry.

—Yes, it is bloody awful, said Cranly.

—O, hopeless! hopeless! said Stephen clenching his fists.

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XXVI

A few nights before Cranly went to the country to [recruit] refresh himself in body after his failure in the examination, Stephen said to him:

—I believe this will be an important season for me. I intend to come to some decision as to my course of action.

—But you will go for Second Arts next year?

—My godfather may not pay. They expected I would get an exhibition.

—And why didn’t you? said Cranly.

—I will think things out, said Stephen, and see what I can do.

—There are a hundred things you can do.

—Are there, faith? We’ll see ... I might want to write to you. What is your address?

Cranly affected not to hear this question. He was picking his teeth with a match, very deliberately and scrupulously, occasionally halting to insert his tongue carefully into some crevice before continuing the process of picking. He spat out what he dislodged. His straw hat rested mainly on the nape of his neck and his feet were planted far apart. After a considerable pause he returned to his last phrase, as if he had been inwardly reviewing it:

—Ay, hundreds of things.

Stephen said:

—What is your address in the country?

—My address? ... O ... You see ... it’s really impossible, d’ye know, to say what my address would be. But you won’t come to any decision before I come back ... I’m almost sure I’ll go in the morning but I want to see at what time there’s a train.

—We looked before, said Stephen. Half past nine.

—No ... I think I must go up to Harcourt St to see what time there’s a train.

They walked slowly in the direction of Harcourt St. Stephen, refusing to nurse ill-feeling, said:

—What mysterious purpose is concealed under your impossible prosiness? Please tell me that. Have you anything in your mind’s eye?

—If I had a mysterious purpose, said Cranly, I wouldn’t be likely to tell you, (would I?), what it was.

—I have told you a great deal, said Stephen.

—Most people have some purpose or other in their lives. Aristotle says that the end of every being is its greatest good. We all act in view of some good.

—Couldn’t you be a bit more precise? You don’t wish me to write gospels about you, do you? ... Are you really thinking of being a pork-butcher?

—Yes, really. Would you not think of it. You could wrap your sausages in your love-poems.

Stephen laughed.

—You mustn’t think you can impose on me, Cranly, he said. I know you are damnably romantic.

At Harcourt St Station they went up to the time-table and after a glance at it Stephen said mischieviously [sic]:

—Half past nine, as I told you. You see you wouldn’t take a fool’s word for it.

—That’s another train, said Cranly impatiently.

Stephen smiled with enjoyment while Cranly began to examine the chart, murmuring the names of the stations to himself and calculating time. In the end he seemed to arrive at some decision for he said to Stephen “Let us eke go.” Outside the station Stephen pulled his friend’s coat-sleeve and pointed to a newsbill which was exposed to public gaze on the roadway, held down at the corners by four stones.

—Have you seen this?

[Cranly] They stopped to read the [items] bill and four or five people also stopped to read it. Cranly read out the items in his flattest accent, beginning at the headline:

EVENING TELEGRAPH

[Meeting]                   

Nationalist Meeting at Ballinrobe.

Important Speeches.

Main Drainage Scheme.

Breezy Discussion.

Death of a Well-known Solicitor

Mad Cow at Cabra,

Literature &.

—Do you think it requires great ability to live that life successfully? asked Stephen when they were once more on the way.

—I suppose you consider literature the most important thing there?

—You take up that view of the world, I am sure, out of pure perversity. You try to prove me abnormal and diseased but it is as easy to prove that the well-known solicitor was diseased and abnormal. Insensibility is a mark of disease.

—He may have been what you would call an artist.

—Yes, of course ... And as for the temptation which Satan was allowed to dangle before the eyes of Jesus it is, in reality, the most ineffectual temptation to offer to any man of genius. That well-known solicitor might succumb to it but for Jesus the kingdom of this world must have been a very empty phrase indeed—at least when he had outgrown a romantic youth. Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment. I had a romantic youth, too, when I thought it must be a grand thing to be a material Messias: that was the will of my father who will never be in heaven. But now such a thought arises in my mind only in moments of great physical weakness. So I regard that view of life as the abnormal view—for me. A few days ago I walked out to Howth for a swim and while I was going round the side of the Head I had to take a little ribbon of a path that hung high over the rocks ...

—What side of Howth?

—Near the Bailey ... Very good. As I looked down on those rocks beneath me the thought arose in my mind to cast myself down upon them. The thought made me shiver with pleasure for a moment but, of course, I recognised our old friend. All these temptations are of a piece. To Jesus, to me, to the excitable person who adopts brigandage or suicide after taking the suggestions of literature too seriously, Satan offers a monstrous life. It is monstrous because the seat of the spiritual principle of a man is not transferable to a material object. A man only pretends to think his hat more important than his head. That view of life, I consider, is abnormal.

—You cannot call that abnormal which everyone does.

—Does everyone jump off the Hill of Howth? Does everyone join secret societies? Does everyone sacrifice happiness and pleasure and peace to honour in the world? Father Artifoni told me of a society of mutual assistance in Italy the members of which had the right to be thrown into the Arno by their fellow-members on signing a paper proving that their case was past curing.

At Noblett’s corner where they always halted, they found Temple declaiming to a little ring of young men. The young men were laughing very much at Temple who was very drunk. Stephen kept his eyes fixed on Temple’s shapeless mouth which at moments was flecked with a thin foam as it strove to enunciate a difficult word. Cranly stared at the group and said:

—I’ll take my dyin’ bible Temple has been standing those medicals drinks ... The bloody fool! ...

Temple caught sight of them and at once broke off his discourse to come over to them. One or two of the medicals followed him.

—Good evening, said Temple, fumbling at his cap.

—Druncus es.

The two medicals laughed while Temple began to search his pockets. During the search his mouth fell asunder.

—Who has the money? said Cranly.

The two medicals laughed and nodded towards Temple who desisted from his search disconsolately, saying:

—Ah, by hell, ... I was going to stand a drink ... Ah, by hell! ... Where’s the other bob I had? ...

One of the medicals said:

—You changed it in Connery’s.

The other medical said:

—He got stuck in his first today. That’s why he went on the beer tonight.

—And where did you raise the money? said Cranly to Temple, who began to search his pockets again.

—He popped his watch for ten bob.

—It mustn’t be a bad watch, said Cranly, if he got ten bob on it. Where did he get ten bob?

—Ah no! said the second medical. I popped it for him. I know a chap named Larkin in Granby Row.

The big medical student who had had the political discussion in the Adelphi with the clerk from the Agricultural Board Office came over to them and said:

—Well, Temple, are you going to take us down to the kips?

—Ah, blazes, said Temple, all my money’s gone ... Ah, by hell, I must have a woman ... By hell, I’ll ask for a woman on tick.

The big student roared laughing and turning to Cranly, against whom he had a grudge on account of the affair in the Adelphi he said:

—Will you have a woman too if I stand?

Cranly’s chastity was famous but the young men were not quite impressed by it. At the same time the [little] group did not betray its opinion by laughing at the big student’s invitation. Cranly did not answer; and so the second medical student said:

—Mac got through!

—What Mac? said Cranly.

—Mac ... you know ... the Gaelic League chap. He brought us down to the kips last night.

—And had you all women?

—No ...

—What did you go there for?

—He suggested we’d walk through. Fine tarts there, too. They were running after us, man: it was fine skit. Ay, and one of them hit Mac because she said he insulted her.

—What did he do?

—I don’t know. He said “Gellong, you dirty [whore] hure” or something like that.

—And what did Mac say?

—Said he’d charge her if she followed him any further.

—Well, I’ll stand women all round if Cranly has one, said the big student who was in the habit of making a single inspiration serve him for a half-hour’s conversation.

—Ah, by hell, said Temple suddenly, have you heard the new parable ... about the monkeys in Barbary? ... Mar ... vellous parable ... Flanagan told me ... O, (he said to Stephen) he wants to be introduced to you ... wants to know ... Fine fellow ... doesn’t care a damn for religion or priests ... By hell, I’m a freethinker ...

—What is the parable? said Stephen.

Temple took off his cap and, bareheaded, he began to recite after the fashion of a country priest, prolonging all the vowels [and] jerking out the phrases, and dropping his voice at every pause:

—Dearly beloved Brethren: There was once a tribe of monkeys in Barbary. And ... these monkeys were as numerous as the sands of the sea. They lived together in the woods in polygamous ... intercourse ... and reproduced ... their species ... But, behold there came into Barbary ... the holy missionaries, the holy men of God ... to redeem the people of Barbary. And these holy men preached to the people ... and then ... they went into the woods ... far away into the woods ... to pray to God. And they lived as hermits ... in the woods ... and praying to God. And, behold, the monkeys of Barbary who were in the trees ... saw these holy men living as hermits ... as lonely hermits ... praying to God. And the monkeys who, my dearly beloved brethren, are imitative creatures ... began to imitate the actions ... of these holy men ... and began to do likewise. And so ... they [left their wives] separated from one another ... and went away far away, to pray to God ... and they did as they had seen the holy men do ... and prayed to God ... And ... they did not return ... any more ... nor try to reproduce the species ... And so ... gradually... these po ... or monkeys ... grew fewer and fewer ... and fewer and fewer ... And today ... there is no monkey in all Barbary.

Temple crossed himself and replaced his hat while the audience began to clap their hands together. Just then a policeman moved on the group. Stephen said to Cranly:

—Who is this Flanagan?

Cranly did not answer but followed Temple and his companions, walking emphatically and saying “’M, yes” to himself. They could hear Temple bemoaning his poverty to his companions and repeating snatches of his parable.

—Who is this Flanagan? said Stephen again to Cranly.

—Another bloody fool, said Cranly in a tone which left the comparison open.

A few days later Cranly went to Wicklow. Stephen spent his summer with Maurice. He told his brother what troubles he anticipated when the college term reopened and together they discussed plans for living. Maurice suggested that the verses should be sent to a publisher.

—I cannot send them to a publisher, said Stephen, because I have burned them.

—Burned them!

—Yes, said Stephen curtly, they were romantic.

In the end they decided that it would be best to wait until Mr Fulham made his intentions known. Mrs Daedalus called one day to see Father Butt. She did not report her interview fully but Stephen understood that Father Butt had at first prescribed a clerkship in Guinness’s as a solution of the young man’s difficult case and, when Mrs Daedalus had shaken her head incredulously, he had asked to see Stephen. He had thrown out hints about some new arrangement of the college which would necessitate new appointments. These hints were fed upon by Stephen’s parents. The next day Stephen called to the college to see Father Butt.

—O, come in, my dear boy, said Father Butt when Stephen appeared at the door of the little uncarpeted bedroom.

Father Butt began to talk a great deal about general topics, without saying anything definite but asking Stephen over and over again for an expression of opinion which was always studiously withheld. The young man was very much bewildered. At last, after much rubbing of his chin and many blinkings of the eyes, Father Butt asked what were Stephen’s intentions ...

—Literature, said Stephen.

—Yes, yes ... of course ... but meanwhile, I mean ... of course you will continue your course until you have got a degree—that is the important point.

—I may not be able, said Stephen, I suppose you know that my father is unable to ...

—Now, said Father Butt joyfully, I’m so glad you’ve come to the point ... That is just it. The question is whether we can find anything for you to enable you to finish your course here. That is the question.

Stephen said nothing. He was convinced that Father Butt had some offer or suggestion to make but he was determined not to help him in bringing it out. Father Butt continued blinking his eyes and rubbing his chin and murmuring to himself “That is the difficulty, you see.” In the end, as Stephen held his peace sacredly, Father Butt said:

—There might be ... it has just occurred to me ... an appointment here in the college. One or two hours a day ... that would be nothing ... I think, yes ... we shall be ... let me see now ... It would be no trouble to you ... no teaching or drudgery, just an hour or so in the office here in the morning ...

Stephen said nothing. Father Butt rubbed his hands together and said:

—Otherwise there would be a danger of your perishing ... by inanition ... Yes, a capital idea ... I shall speak to Father Dillon this very night.

Stephen, somewhat taken by surprise though he had anticipated some such proposal, murmured his thanks and Father Butt promised to send him a letter in the course of a day or two.

Stephen did not give a very full account of this interview to his father and mother: he said that Father Butt had been vague and had suggested that he should look for tuitions. Mr. Daedalus thought this a highly practical notion:

—If you will only keep your head straight you can get on. Keep in touch with those chaps, I tell you, those Jesuits: they can get you on fast enough. I am a few years older than you.

—I am sure they will do their best to help you, said Mrs Daedalus.

—I don’t want their help, said Stephen bitterly.

Mr Daedalus put up his eyeglass and stared at his son and at his wife. His wife began an apology:

—Give it up, woman, he said. I know the groove he has got into. But he’s not going to fool me nor his godfather, either. With the help of God I won’t be long till I let him know what a bloody nice atheist this fellow has turned out. Hold hard now a moment and leave it to me.

Stephen answered that he did not want his godfather’s help either.

—I know the groove you’re in, said his father. Didn’t I see you the morning of your poor sister’s funeral—don’t forget that? Unnatural bloody ruffian. By Christ I was ashamed of you that morning. You couldn’t behave like a gentleman or talk or do a bloody thing only slink over in a corner with the hearsedrivers and mutes by God. Who taught you to drink pints of plain porter, might I ask? Is that considered the proper thing for an a ... artist to do?

Stephen clasped his hands together and looked across at Maurice who was convulsed with laughter.

—What are you laughing at? said his father. Everyone knows you’re only this fellow’s jackal.

—Stephen was thirsty, said Maurice.

—By God, he’ll be hungry as well as thirsty one of these days, if you ask me.

Stephen gave details of his interview to Maurice:

—Don’t you think they are trying to buy me? he asked.

—Yes, that’s evident. But I’m surprised at one thing ...

—What is that?

—That the priest lost his temper when speaking to Mother. You must have annoyed the good man a great deal.

—How do you know he lost his temper?

—O, he must have when he suggested to her to put you on the books of a brewery. That gave the show away. Anyhow we can see what right these men have to call themselves spiritual counsellors of their flocks ...

—Yes?

—They can do nothing for a case like yours which presents certain difficulties of temperament. You might as well apply to a policeman.

—Perhaps his notion was that my mind was in such a state of disorder that even routine would do it good.

—I don’t think that was his notion. Besides they must all be liars in that case for they have all expressed great admiration for your clearness in argument. A man’s mind is not in intellectual disorder because it refuses assent to the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity.

—By the way, said Stephen, do you notice what understanding and sympathy exist between me and my parents?

—Isn’t it charming?

—Yet, there are plenty of people who would consider them my best friends for having advised me as they have done. It seems absurd to call them enemies or to denounce them. They want me to secure what they consider happiness. They would like me to accept anything in the way of money at whatever a cost to myself.

—And will you accept?

—If Cranly were here I know how he would put that question.

—How?

—“Of course, you will accept?”

—I have already told you my opinion of that young gentleman, said Maurice tartly.

—Lynch, too, would say “You’d be a damn fool if you didn’t take it.”

—And what will you do?

—Refuse it, of course.

—I expected you would.

—How could I take it? asked Stephen in astonishment.

—Not well, I suppose.

The following day a letter arrived for Stephen:

Dear Mr Daedalus,

I have spoken to our President re what we discussed a few days ago. He is greatly interested in your case and would like to see you at the College any day this week between 2 and 3. He thinks it may be possible to find something for you such as I suggested—a few hours or so daily—to enable you to continue your studies. That is the main point.

Sincerely Yours
D. Butt SJ.

Stephen did not call to see the President but replied to Father Butt by letter:

Dear Father Butt,

Allow me to thank you for your kindness. I am afraid, however, that I cannot accept your offer. I am sure you will understand that in declining it I am acting as seems best to me and with every appreciation of the interest you have shown in me.

Sincerely Yours
Stephen Daedalus.

Stephen spent the great part of his summer on the rocks of the North Bull. Maurice spent the day there, stretching idly on the rocks or plunging into the water. Stephen was now on excellent terms with his brother who seemed to have forgotten their estrangement. At times Stephen would half clothe himself and cross to the shallow side of the Bull, where he would wander up and down looking at the children and the nurses. He used to stand to stare at them sometimes until the ash of his cigarette fell on to his coat but, though he saw all that was intended, he met no other Lucy: and he usually returned to the Liffey side, somewhat amused at his dejection and thinking that if he had made his proposal to Lucy instead of to Emma he might have met with better luck. But as often as not he encountered dripping Christian Brothers or disguised policemen, apparitions which assured him that whether Lucy or Emma was in question the answer was all one. The two brothers walked home from Dollymount together. They were both a little ragged-looking but they did not envy the trim dressed clerks [that] who passed them on their way home. When they came to Mr Wilkinson’s house they both paused outside to listen for [the] sounds of wrangling and even when all seemed peaceful Maurice’s first questions to his mother when she opened the door was “Is he in?” When the answer was “No” they both went down to the kitchen together but when the answer was “Yes” Stephen only went down, Maurice listening over the banisters to judge from his father’s tones whether he was sober or not. If his father was drunk Maurice retired to his bedroom but Stephen, who was untroubled, discoursed gaily with his father. Their conversation always began:

—Well (in a tone of extreme sarcasm) might I ask where were you all day?

—At the Bull.

—O (in a mollified tone). Had a dip?

—Yes.

—Well, there’s some sense in that. I like to see that. So long as you keep away from those canaille (in a suspicious tone). Sure you weren’t with Knickerbockers or some of those noblemen?

—Quite sure.

—That’s all right. That’s all I want. Keep away from them ... Was Maurice with you?

—Yes.

—Where is he?

—Upstairs, I think.

—Why doesn’t he come down here?

—I don’t know.

—Hm ... (again in a tone of ruminative sarcasm). By God, you’re a loving pair of sons, you and your brother!

Lynch pronounced Stephen all the asses in Christendom for having declined the Jesuits’ offers:

—Look at the nights you could have had!

—You are a distressingly low-minded person, answered Stephen. After all I have dinned into that mercantile head of yours you are sure to come out on me with some atrocity.

—But why did you refuse? said Lynch.

The summer was nearly at an end and the evening had grown a little chilly. Lynch was walking up and down the Library porch with his hands in his pockets and his chest well protruded. Stephen kept at his side:

—I am a young man, isn’t that so?

—That—is—so.

—Very well. My entire aptitude is for the composition of prose and verse. Isn’t that so?

—Let us suppose it is.

—Very good. I was not intended to be a clerk in a brewery.

—I think it would be very dangerous to put you in a brewery ... sometimes.

—I was not intended for that: that is enough. I went to this University day-school in order to meet men of a like age and temper ... You know what I met.

Lynch nodded his head in despair:

—I found a day-school full of terrorised boys, banded together in a complicity of diffidence. They have eyes only for their future jobs: to secure their future jobs they will write themselves in and out of convictions, toil and labour to insinuate themselves into the good graces of the Jesuits. They adore Jesus and Mary and Joseph: they believe in the infallibility of the Pope and in all his obscene, stinking hells: they desire the millennium which is to be [a] the season for glorified believers and fried atheists ... Sweet Lord Almighty! Look at that beautiful pale sky! Do you feel the cool wind on your face? Listen to [my] our voices here in the porch—not because [it is] they are mine or yours but because they are human voices: and doesn’t all that tomfoolery fall off you like water off a duck’s back?

Lynch nodded his head and Stephen continued:

—It is absurd that I should go crawling and cringing and praying and begging to mummers who are themselves no more than beggars. Can we not root this pest out of our minds and out of our society that men may be able to walk through the streets without meeting some old stale belief or hypocrisy at every street corner? I, at least, will try. I will not accept anything from them. I will not take service under them. I will not submit to them, either outwardly or inwardly. A Church is not a fixture like Gibraltar: no more is an institution. Subtract its human members from it and its solidity becomes less evident. I, at least, will subtract myself: and remember that if we allow a dozen for one’s progeny the subtraction of oneself may mean a loss to the Church of 12n members.

—Aren’t you rather liberal about the progeny? said Lynch.

—Did I tell you I met Father Healy this evening? asked Stephen.

—No, where?

—I was walking along the Canal with my Danish grammar (because I am going to study it properly now. I’ll tell you why later on) and whom should I meet but this little man. He was walking right into the golden sunset: all his creases and wrinkles were scattered with gold. He looked at my book and said it was very interesting: he thought it must be so interesting to know and compare the different languages. Then he looked far away into the golden sun and all of a sudden—imagine!—his mouth opened and he gave a slow, noiseless yawn ... Do you know you get a kind of shock when a man does a thing like that unexpectedly?

—He’ll have something to do shortly, said Lynch pointing to a little group which was laughing and chatting in the doorway, and that’ll keep him from walking in his sleep.

Stephen glanced over at the group. Emma and Moynihan and McCann and two of the Miss Daniels were evidently in high spirits.

—Yes, I suppose she will do it legitimately one of these days, said [Lynch] Stephen.

—I was talking of the other pair, said Lynch.

—O, McCann ... She is nothing to me now, you know.

—I don’t believe that, let me tell you.

[The Manuscript ends here]

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Additional Pages

[The additional pages of the Manuscript begin here]

nations. They were held out to say: We are alone—come: and the voices said with them: We are your people: and the air grew thick with their company as they called to him, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

[Departure for Paris]

From the Broadstone to Mullingar is a journey of some fifty miles across the midlands of Ireland. Mullingar, the chief town of Westmeath, is the midland capital and there is a great traffic of peasants and cattle between it and Dublin. This fifty-mile journey is made by the train in about two hours and you are therefore to conceive Stephen Daedalus packed in the corner of a third-class carriage and contributing the thin fumes of his cigarettes to the already reeking atmosphere. The carriage was inhabited by a company of peasants nearly every one of whom had a bundle tied in a spotted handkerchief. The carriage smelt strongly of peasants, (an odour the debasing humanity of which Stephen remembered to have perceived in the little chapel of Clongowes on the morning of his first communion) and indeed so pungently that the youth could not decide whether he found the odour of sweat [unpleasant] offensive because the peasant sweat is monstrous or because it did not now proceed from his own body. He was not ashamed to admit to himself that he found it [unpleasant] offensive for both of these reasons. The peasants played with blackened edgeless cards from Broadstone onward and whenever it was time for a peasant to leave the company he took up his bundle and went out heavily through the door of the carriage, never closing it behind him. The peasants spoke little and rarely looked at the scene they passed but [at] when they came to Maynooth Station a gentleman dressed in a frock-coat and tall hat who was giving loud directions to a porter concerning a case of machines attracted their wondering attention for several minutes.

At Mullingar Stephen took his neat little valise down from the rack and descended to the platform. When he had passed through the claws of the ticket-collectors he paused for a few moments in indecision before he was sighted by the driver of a small dark-green trap. The driver asked was he the young gentleman for Mr Fulham and on Stephen’s answering “yes” invited him to climb up beside him on the seat. So they set off easily. The trap which was not very clean [and it] jolted a good deal and Stephen looked once or twice anxiously at his oscillating valise but the driver said he need have no fear. The driver when he had said this a few times in the same words fell silent a while and then asked didn’t Stephen come from Dublin. Re-assured on this point he fell silent again⁠[st] and began [to] with a deliberate whip to flick flies off the ill-groomed hide between the shafts.

The trap went up the long crooked main street of the town and crossing over the bridge of the canal made out for the country. Stephen remarked that the houses were very small but catching sight of a large square building that stood in grounds closely walled he asked the driver what building it was. The driver told him it was the lunatic asylum and added impressively that there were a great many patients in it. The road wound through heavy pasture lands and in [mea] field after field Stephen saw herds of cattle fattening. Sometimes these cattle were in the charge of a drowsy peasant but oftener they were left to themselves and moved slowly from marsh to dry land and from dry land to marsh as the will took them. The little cottages along the road were covered with overblown roses and in many of the doorways there would stand a woman gazing silently over the flat country. Now and again a peasant plodding along the road would give the driver the time of day and if he judged Stephen worthy of the honour fumble at his hat. Proceeding in this manner along the dusty road the trap gradually drew near Mr Fulham’s house.

It was an old irregular house, barely visible from the road, and surrounded by a fair plantation. It was reached by an untended drive and the ground behind it thick with clumps of faded rhododendrons sloped down to the shore of Lough Owel. The lodge was a whitewashed cottage at the door of which a little child in a chemise sat eating a big crust of bread. The gate was open and the trap turned up the drive. After a circular tour of a few hundred yards the trap reached the door of the old discoloured house.

As the trap drew up to the door a young woman advanced to meet it with a quiet dignified gait. She was dressed completely in black and her dark hair was brushed plainly off her temples. She held out her hand:

—Welcome, she said. My uncle is in the orchard. We heard the noise of the wheels.

Stephen touched her hand slightly and bowed.

—Dan, leave that valise in the hall for the present and you, Mr Daedalus, are to come along with me. I hope you are not fatigued by your journey: it is so tiresome travelling.

—Not in the least.

She led the way along the hall and through a little glass door into a great square orchard, the nearer half of which was still a sunny region. Here, screened by a broad straw hat Mr Fulham was discovered sitting in a basket-chair. He greeted Stephen very warmly and made the usual polite enquiries. Miss Howard had brought out a little tray containing fruit and milk and the visitor gladly ate and drank for the dust of the roads [was] had invaded his throat. Mr Fulham asked a great many questions about Stephen’s studies and tastes while Miss Howard stood beside his chair in silence. At a pause in the interrogation she took up the tray and carried it into the house. When she came back she offered to show Stephen the orchard and, Mr Fulham returning at the same moment to his newspaper, she led the way down a walk of currant-bushes. Stephen had found his godfather’s questions a somewhat severe ordeal and he revenged himself on Miss Howard by a counter-fire of questions concerning the names and seasons and prospects of her plants. She answered all his questions carefully but with the same air of indifferent exactness which marked all her acts. Her presence did not awe him as it had done when he had last met her and he thought that perhaps the uncontaminated nature which he had then imagined accusing him was no more than an unusual dignity of manner. He did not find this dignity of hers very congenial and his new fervour of youth was vitally piqued by her lack of animation. He decided in favour of some definite purpose of hers and against [the] a mechanical discharge of duties and said to himself that it would be an intellectual game for him to discover it. He set this task to himself all the more readily since he suspected that this purpose guiding her conduct must be inimical to his present genial impulses and would probably elude him out of instantaneous distrust and seek natural safety in flight. This fugitive impulse would be prey for him and at once he summoned all his faculties to the chase.

Dinner was served at half past six in a long plainly-furnished room. The table spread under a tall lamp of elegant silver-work wore an air of chaste elegance. It was a slight trial on Stephen’s hunger to accept these cold manners and in the warmth of his relish for food he condemned this strange attitude of human beings as ungrateful and unnatural. The conversation was also a little mincing and Stephen heard the words ‘charming’ and ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’ too often to find them agreeable. He discovered the weak point in Mr Fulham’s armour very soon; Mr Fulham, like most of his countrymen, was a persuaded politician. Most of Mr Fulham’s neighbours were primitive types and he, in spite of the narrowness of his ideas, was regarded by them as a man of ripe culture. In a discussion which took place over a game of bézique Stephen heard his godfather explain to a more rustic proprietor the nature of the work done by the missionary fathers in civilising the Chinese people. He sustained the propositions that the Church is also the chief repository of secular culture and that the tradition of learning must derive from the monks. He saw in the pride of the Church the only refuge of men against a threatening democracy and said that Aquinas had anticipated all the discoveries of the modern world. His neighbour was puzzled to discover the whereabouts of the souls of the Chinese people in the other life but Mr Fulham left the problem at the door of God’s mercy. At this stage of the discussion Miss Howard, hitherto silent, said that there were three kinds of baptism and her statement was accepted as a closure.

Stephen was a long time in doubt as to the motive of his godfather’s patronage. The second day after his arrival as they were driving back from a tennis-tournament Mr Fulham said to him.

—Isn’t Mr Tate your English professor, Stephen?

—Yes, sir.

—His people are Westmeath. We often see him during holiday time. He seems to take a great interest in you.

—O, you know him then?

—Yes. He is laid up at present with a bad knee or I’d write to him to come over here. Perhaps we may drive over to see him one of these days ... He is a very well-read man, Stephen.

—Yes, said Stephen.

Tennis-tournaments, military bands, rustic cricket-matches, little flower shows were [devised] resorted to for Stephen’s entertainment. At these functions he remarked that his godfather was very openly humoured and Miss Howard very respectfully courted and he began to suspect that there was money somewhere in the background. These entertainments did not amuse the youth; his manner was so quiet that often he passed unnoticed and remained unintroduced. Sometimes an officer would send a glance of impolite inquiry at the cheap-looking white shoes he wore but Stephen always looked his enemy in the face. After a short trial of eyes the youth could usually procure a truce. He was surprised to find that Miss Howard discharged her social duties with such apparent goodwill. He was displeased and disappointed to hear her make a pun one day—a pun which though it was not very clever [but caused] raised a polite laugh from two scrupulous lieutenants. Mr Fulham was old and honoured enough to allow himself the luxury of admonishing publicly whenever occasion arose. [When] One day an officer told a humorous story which was intended to poke fun at countrified ideas [Mr Fulham said:

—Our peasants may be ignorant of many things]

The story was this. The officer and a friend found themselves one evening surprised by a heavy shower far out on the Killucan road and forced to take refuge in a peasant’s cabin. An old man was seated at the side of the fire smoking a dirty cutty-pipe which he held upside down in the corner of his mouth. The old peasant invited his visitors to come near the fire as the evening was chilly and said he could not stand up to welcome them decently as he had the rheumatics. The officer’s friend who was a learned yound lady observed a figure scrawled in chalk over the fireplace and asked what it was. The peasant said:

—Me grandson Johnny done that the time the circus was in the town. He seen the pictures on the walls and began pesterin’ his mother for fourpence to see th’ elephants. But sure when he got in an’ all divil elephant was in it. But it was him drew that there.

The young lady laughed and the old man blinked his red eyes at the fire and went on smoking evenly and talking to himself:

—I’ve heerd tell them elephants is most natural things, that they has the notions of a Christian ... I wanse seen meself a picture of niggers riding on wan of ’em—aye and beating blazes out of ’im with a stick. Begorra ye’d have more trouble with the childre is in it now that with one of thim big fellows.

The young lady who was much amused began to tell the peasant about the animals of prehistoric times. The old man heard her out in silence and then said slowly:

—Aw, there must be terrible quare craythurs at the latther ind of the world.

Stephen thought that the officer told this story very well and he joined in the laugh that followed it. But Mr Fulham was not of his opinion and spoke out against the moral of the story rather sententiously.

—It is easy to laugh at the peasant. He is ignorant of many things which the world thinks important. But we mustn’t forget at the same time, Captain Starkie, that the peasant [is] stands perhaps nearer to the true ideal of a Christian life than many of us who condemn him.

—I do not condemn him, answered Captain Starkie, but I am amused.

—Our Irish peasantry, continued Mr Fulham with conviction, is the backbone of the nation.

Backbone or not, it was in the constant observance of the peasantry that Stephen chiefly delighted. Physically, they were almost Mongolian types, tall, angular and oblique-eyed. Stephen whenever he walked behind a peasant always looked first for the prominent cheek-bones that seemed to cut the air and the peasants in their turn must have recognised metropolitan features for they stared very hard at the youth as if he were some rare animal⁠[s]. One day Dan was sent into the town to buy some medicine at the druggist’s and Stephen went in with him. The trap stopped in the main street before the druggist’s and Dan handed down the order to a ragged boy telling him to take it into the shop. The ragged boy first showed the paper to an equally ragged friend and then went into the shop. When they came out they stood at the door of the shop gazing alternately from Stephen to the horse’s tail and back again. While they were thus gazing they were confronted by a lame beggar who advanced towards them gripping his stick:

—It was yous called out names after me yestherday. The two children huddling in the doorway, gazed at him and answered:

—No, sir.

—O yes it was, though.

The beggar thrust his malign face down at their faces and began moving his stick up and down.

—But mind what I’m tellin’ you. D’ye see that stick?

—Yes, sir.

—Well, if ye call out after me the next time I’ll cut [yous] yez open with that stick. I’ll cut the livers out of ye.

He proceeded to explain himself to the frightened children.

—D’ye hear me now? I’ll cut yez open with that stick. I’ll cut the livers and the lights out of ye.

This incident was stolidly admired by a few bystanders who made way for the beggar as he limped along the footpath. Dan, who had watched the scene from the trap, now descended to the ground and asking Stephen to look to the horse went into a very dirty public-house. Stephen sat alone in the car thinking of the beggar’s face. He had never before seen such evil expressed in a face. He had sometimes watched the faces of prefects as they ‘pandied’ boys with a broad leather bat but those faces had seemed to him less malicious than stupid, dutifully inflamed faces. The recollection of the beggar’s sharp eyes struck a fine chord of terror in the youth and he set himself to whistle away the keen throb of it.

After a few moments a fat young man with a very red head came out of the druggist’s shop holding two neat parcels. Stephen recognised Nash and Nash testified that he recognised Stephen by changing complexion very painfully. Stephen could have enjoyed his old enemy’s discomfiture had he chosen but disdaining to do so he held out his hand instead. Nash was junior assistant in the shop and when he learned that Stephen was on a visit to Mr Fulham his manner was tinged with discreet respectfulness. Stephen, however, soon put him at his ease and when Dan emerged from the grimy public-house the two were engaged in familiar chat. Nash said Mullingar was the last place God made, a God-forgotten hole, and asked Stephen how he could stick it.

—I only wish I was back again in Dublin, that’s all I know.

—How do you amuse yourself here? asked Stephen.

—Amuse yourself! You can’t. There’s nothing here.

—But haven’t you concerts sometimes. The first day I came here I saw some bills up about a concert.

—O, that’s off. Father Lohan put the boots on that—the P.P. you know.

—Why did he?

—O, you better ask him that. He says his parishioners don’t want comic songs and skirt dances. If they want a decent concert, he says, they can get one up in the school-house,—O, he bosses them, I tell you.

—O, is that the way?

—They’re afraid of their life of him. If he hears any dancing in a house at night he raps at the window and pouf! out goes the candle.

—By Jove!

—Fact. You know he has a collection of girl’s hats.

—Girl’s hats!

—Yes. Of an evening when the girls go out walking with the soldiers he goes out too and any girl he catches hold of he snaps off her hat and takes it back with him to the priest’s house then if the girl goes to ask him for it he gives her a proper blowing-up.

—Good man! ... Well, we must be off now. I suppose I’ll see you again.

—Come in tomorrow, will you: it’s a short day. And I’ll tell you I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine here—very decent sort—on the Examiner. You’ll like him.

—Very good. Until then!

—So long! About two o’clock.

As they drove home together Stephen asked Dan some questions which Dan pretended not to hear and when Stephen pressed him for answers he gave the shortest possible answers. It was plain that he did not care to discuss his spiritual superior and Stephen had to desist.

That evening at dinner Mr Fulham was in genial spirits and began to address his conversation pointedly to Stephen. Mr Fulham’s method of ‘drawing’ his interlocutor was not a very delicate method but Stephen saw what was expected of him and merely waited till he was directly addressed. A neighbour had come to dinner, a Mr Heffernan. Mr Heffernan was not at all of his host’s way of thinking and therefore the evening brought out some lively disputes. Mr Heffernan’s son was learning Irish because he believed that the Irish people should speak their own language and not the language of their conquerors.

—But the people of the United States who are more emancipated than Ireland is ever likely to be are content to speak English, said Mr Fulham.

—The Americans are different. They have no language to revive.

—For my part I am content with my conquerors.

—Because you occupy a good position under them. You are not a labourer. You enjoy the fruits of Nationalist agitation.

—Perhaps you are going to tell me that all men are equal, said Mr Fulham satirically.

—In a sense they may be.

—Nonsense, my dear sir. Our countrymen know nothing of the Reformation, as they call it, and I hope [it] they will know nothing of the French Revolution either.

Mr Heffernan returned to the charge.

—But surely it is no harm for them to know something about their country—its traditions, its local history, its language!

—For those who have leisure it may be good. But you know I am a great enemy of disloyal movements. Our lot is thrown in with England.

—The young generation is not of your opinion. My son, Pat, is studying at Clonliffe at present and he tells me all the young students there, those who are to be our priests afterwards, have these ideas.

—The Catholic Church, my dear sir, will never incite to rebellion. But here is one of the young generation. Let him speak.

—I care nothing for these principles of nationalism, said Stephen. I have enough bodily liberty.

—But do you feel no duty to your mother-country, no love for her? asked Mr Heffernan.

—Honestly, I don’t.

—You live then like an animal without reason! exclaimed Mr Heffernan.

—My own mind, answered Stephen, is more interesting to me than the entire country.

—Perhaps you think your mind is more important than Ireland!

—I do, certainly.

—These are strange ideas of your godson’s, Mr Fulham. May I ask did the Jesuits teach you them.

—The Jesuits taught me other things, reading and writing.

—And religion also?

—Naturally. “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lose his soul?”

—Nothing, of course. That is quite so. But humanity has claims on us. We have a duty to our neighbour. We have received a commandment of charity.

—I hear so, said Stephen, at Christmas. Mr Fulham laughed at this and Mr Heffernan was stung.

—I may not have read as much as you, Mr Fulham, or even as much as you, young man, but I believe that the noblest love a man can have, of course after the love of God, is love of his native land.

—Jesus was not of your opinion, Mr Heffernan, said Stephen.

—You speak very boldly, young man, said Mr Heffernan reprovingly.

—I am not afraid to speak openly, answered Stephen, even of the parish priest.

—You use the Holy Name glibly for one so young.

—Not in execration. I mean what I say. The ideal presented to mankind by Jesus is one of self-denial, of purity, and of solitude; the ideal you present to us is one of revenge, of passion and of immersion in worldly affairs.

—It seems to me that Stephen is right, said Miss Howard.

—I can see, said Mr Fulham, what these movements tend to.

—It is impossible for us all to live the lives of hermits! exclaimed Mr Heffernan desperately.

—We can combine the two lives by living as a Catholic should, doing our duty to God first and then the duties of our station in life, said Mr Fulham, leaning comfortably on the last phrase.

—You can be a patriot, Mr Heffernan, said Stephen, without accusing those who do not agree with you of irreligion.

—I never accused ...

—Come now, said Mr Fulham genially, we all understand each other.

Stephen had enjoyed this little skirmish: it had been a pastime for him to turn the guns of orthodoxy upon the orthodox ranks and see how they would stand the fire. Mr Heffernan seemed to him a typical Irishman of the provinces; assertive and fearful, sentimental and rancourous, idealist in speech and realist in conduct. Mr Fulham was harder to understand. His championing of the Irish peasant was full of zealous patronage, his ardour for the Church was implicit with his respect for feudal distinctions, and his natural submission to what he regarded as the dispenser of these distinctions. He would enforce his aristocratic notions in a homely way:

—Come now, Mr So and So, you buy cattle on fair-day in the town?

-Yes.

—And you go the racecourse and make a bet or two as you fancy?

—I must admit I do.

—And you pride yourself on knowing a thing or two about coursing?

—I think I do.

—Then how can you say there is no aristocracy of breed in men since you know it exists in animals?

Mr Fulham’s pride was the pride of the burgher in the costly burdensome canopy which he has exerted and loves to sustain. He had affection for the feudal machinery and desired nothing better than that it should crush him—a common wish of the human adorer whether he cast himself under Juggernaut or pray God with tears of affection to mortify him or swoon under the hand of his mistress. To the sensitive inferior his charity would have offered intolerable pain of mind and yet the giver would use neither the air nor the language of the self-righteous. His conceptions of human relations [would] might perhaps have passed for a progressive conception in the ages when the earth was thought to be scaphoid and had he lived then he might have been reputed the most [tenderhearted] enlightened of slave-owners. As Stephen watched the old man gravely handing his snuff-box to Mr Heffernan, and the latter perforce appeased, inserting a large hand therein [Stephen] he thought: [to]

—My godfather is the Papal ambassador to Westmeath.

Nash was waiting for him at the door of the shop and they walked down the main street together towards the Examiner office. In the window [was] a white fox-terrier’s [muzzle] head could be seen over a dirty brown blind and his intelligent eyes were the only signs of life in the office. Mr Garvey was sent for and presently sent in word that his two visitors were to come into the Greville Arms. Mr Garvey was found sitting at the bar with his hat pushed far back from a glowing forehead. He was “chaffing” the barmaid but when his visitors entered he stood up and shook hands with them. Then he insisted on their joining him in a drink. The barmaid was “chaffed” again by Mr Garvey and by Nash but always within limits. She was a genteel young person of a very tempting figure. While she was polishing glasses she indulged in flirty, gossipy conversation with the young men: she seemed to have the life of the town at her fingers’ ends. She reproved Mr Garvey once or twice for levity and asked Stephen wasn’t it a shame for a married man. Stephen said it was and began to count the buttons of her blouse. The barmaid said Stephen was a nice sensible young man not a gadabout fellow and smiled very sweetly over her brisk napkin. After a while the young men left the bar, first touching the fingertips of the barmaid and raising their hats.

Mr Garvey whistled the terrier out of the office and they set out for a walk. Mr Garvey wore heavy boots and he plodded along sturdily in them, tapping the road with his stick. The road and the actual sultry day had made him sensible and he gave the younger men some sound advice.

—After all, there’s nothing like marriage for making a fellow steady. Before I got this sit on the Examiner here I used knock about with the lads and boose [a] bit ... You know, he said to Nash—[Na]⁠sh nodded.

—Now I’ve a good house, said Mr Garvey, and ... I go home in the evening and if I want a drink ... well, I can have it. My advice to every young fellow that can afford it is: marry young.

—There’s something in that, said Nash, when you’ve had your fling, that is.

—O, yes, said Mr Garvey. By the bye I hope you’ll come and see me some evening and bring your friend. You’ll come, Mr Daedalus? The missus’ll be glad to see you: she plays a bit, you know.

Stephen mumbled his thanks and decided that he would endure severe bodily pain rather than visit Mr Garvey.

Mr Garvey began then to tell some press stories. When he heard from Nash that Stephen was inclined for writing he said:

—You take my tip: shorthand.

He told many stories illustrating his own smartness at his business and said that he had once got a ‘par’ into a London morning paper and got paid well for it by return of post.

—These English chaps, you know, they how how to do business. Pay good money too.

The day was very hot and the town seemed dozing in the heat but when the young men came to the canal bridge they noticed a crowd collected some fifty yards off on the canal bank. A butcher’s boy was telling a circle of workmen about it.

—I seen her first. I noticed something—a long-looking green thing lying among the weeds and I went for Joe Coghlan. Him and me tried to get it up but it was too heavy. So then what did we do but I thought if we could only get the lend of a pole off someone. So Joe and me, then, went down to the back of Slater’s yard ...

A pace or two from the brink of the water a thing was lying on the bank partly covered by a brown sack. It was the body of a woman: the face was to the ground and from the thick black hair a pool of water had oozed out. The body was curved upwards with legs abroad but over [word torn away] someone had drawn down the [word torn away] nightdress. The woman had esca⁠[ped] from the asylum the night before and Stephen hea⁠[rd] many criticisms of the nurses.

—It’s be better for ’em mind the patients than traipsing about with every Tom, Dick and Harry of a doctor.

—It’s them has the style.

Mr Garvey’s dog wanted to sniff the body but Mr Garvey kicked him heavily and the dog curled up yelping. Then there was silence for some time, everyone remaining at his post watching the corpse, until a voice said ‘Here’s the doctor!’ A stout well-dressed man came down the path quickly without acknowledging the salutes of the people and after a few moments Stephen heard him saying the woman was dead and telling the people to get a cart and have the body taken away. The three young men then continued their walk but Stephen had to be waited for and called to. He remained behind gazing into the canal near the feet of the body, looking at a fragment of paper on which was printed: The Lamp a [mazn] magazine for ... the rest was torn away and several other pieces of paper were floating about in the water.

The afternoon was well advanced before the young men separated. Stephen bade his friends goodbye, promising to renew acquaintance very soon, and took a path through the fields. The ground was very treacherous and he slipped often into bog-water. However he found a broad highway over the bog and here he was as secure as on the road. The sun was declining and against the deep gold of the western sky the figures of some bending turf-cutters were outlined. He reached Mr Fulham’s house by a back road and climbing over the fence came up through a little wood. As he walked on the soft grass he made no noise. At the edge of the wood he stood still. Miss Howard was leaning on the high painted gate facing the sunset. The full glow of the sunset had covered her sombre vesture with streaks of rust and scattered spangles of rust upon her sombre hair. Stephen came towards her but when he was a few paces

[The additional pages of the Manuscript end here]

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Epiphanies

written 1903/04

c o n t e n t s — e p i p h a n i e s

1      2      3      4      5

6      7      8      9      10

11      12      13      14      15

16      17      18      19      20

21      22      23      24      25

26      27      28      29      30

31      32      33      34      35

36      37      38      39      40

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[The text follows Poems and Shorter Writings, Faber & Faber, London 1991, Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson, eds.]

1

[Bray: in the parlour of the house in Martello Terrace]

Mr Vance—(comes in with a stick) ... O, you know, he’ll have to apologise, Mrs Joyce.

Mrs Joyce—O yes ... Do you hear that, Jim?

Mr Vance—Or else—if he doesn’t—the eagles’ll come and pull out his eyes.

Mrs Joyce—O, but I’m sure he will apologise.

Joyce—(under the table, to himself)

—Pull out his eyes,

Apologise,

Apologise,

Pull out his eyes.

Apologise,

Pull out his eyes,

Pull out his eyes,

Apologise.

2

No school tomorrow: it is Saturday night in winter: I sit by the fire. Soon they will be returning with provisions, meat and vegetables, tea and bread and butter, and white pudding that makes a noise on the pan .... I sit reading a story of Alsace, turning over the yellow pages, watching the men and women in their strange dresses. It pleases me to read of their ways; through them I seem to touch the life of a land beyond them to enter into communion with the German people. Dearest illusion, friend of my youth! ....... In him I have imaged myself. Our lives are still sacred in their intimate sympathies. I am with him at night when he reads the books of the philosophers or some tale of ancient times. I am with him when he wanders alone or with one whom he has never seen, that young girl who puts around him arms that have no malice in them, offering her simple, abundant love, hearing and answering his soul he knows not how.

3

The children who have stayed latest are getting on their things to go home for the party is over. This is the last tram. The lank brown horses know it and shake their bells to the clear night, in admonition. The conductor talks with the driver; both nod often in the green light of the lamp. There is nobody near. We seem to listen, I on the upper step and she on the lower. She comes up to my step many times and goes down again, between our phrases, and once or twice remains beside me, forgetting to go down, and then goes down ..... Let be; let be .... And now she does not urge her vanities—her fine dress and sash and long black stockings—for now (wisdom of children) we seem to know that this end will please us better than any end we have laboured for.

4

[Dublin: on Mountjoy Square]

Joyce—(concludes) ... That’ll be forty thousand pounds.

Aunt Lillie—(titters)—O, laus! .... I was like that too.........When I was a girl I was sure I’d marry a lord ... or something...

Joyce—(thinks)—Is it possible she’s comparing herself with me?

5

High up in the old, dark-windowed house: firelight in the narrow room: dusk outside. An old woman bustles about, making tea; she tells of the changes, her odd ways, and what the priest and the doctor said ..... I hear her words in the distance. I wander among the coals, among the ways of adventure .......Christ! What is in the doorway? .....A skull—a monkey; a creature drawn hither to the fire, to the voices: a silly creature.

—Is that Mary Ellen?—

—No, Eliza, it’s Jim—

—O...... O, goodnight, Jim—

—D’ye want anything, Eliza?—

—I thought it was Mary Ellen ..... I thought you were Mary Ellen, Jim—

6

A small field of stiff weeds and thistles alive with confused forms, half-men, half-goats. Dragging their great tails they move hither and thither, aggressively. Their faces are lightly bearded, pointed and grey as india-rubber. A secret personal sin directs them, holding them now, as in reaction, to constant malevolence. One is clasping about his body a torn flannel jacket; another complains monotonously as his beard catches in the stiff weeds. They move about me, enclosing me, that old sin sharpening their eyes to cruelty, swishing through the fields in slow circles, thrusting upwards their terrific faces. Help!

7

It is time to go away now—breakfast is ready. I’ll say another prayer ..... I am hungry; yet I would like to stay here in this quiet chapel where the mass has come and gone so quietly ..... Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope! Tomorrow and every day after I hope I shall bring you some virtue as an offering for I know you will be pleased with me if I do. Now, goodbye for the present ..... O, the beautiful sunlight in the avenue and O, the sunlight in my heart!

8

Dull clouds have covered the sky. Where three roads meet and before a swampy beach a big dog is recumbent. From time to time he lifts his muzzle in the air and utters a prolonged sorrowful howl. People stop to look at him and pass on; some remain, arrested, it may be, by that lamentation in which they seem to hear the utterance of their own sorrow that had once its voice but is now voiceless, a servant of laborious days. Rain begins to fall.

9

[Mullingar: a Sunday in July: noon]

Tobin—(walking noisily with thick boots and tapping the road with his stick) .... O there’s nothing like marriage for making a fellow steady. Before I came here to the Examiner I used knock about with fellows and boose .... Now I’ve a good house and ..... I go home in the evening and if I want a drink ...... well, I can have it .... My advice to every young fellow that can afford it is: marry young.

10

[Dublin: in the Stag’s Head, Dame Lane]

O’Mahony—Haven’t you that little priest that writes poetry over there—Fr Russell?

Joyce—O, yes...I hear he has written verses.

O’Mahony—(smiling adroilly)...Verses, yes...that’s the proper name for them....

11

[Dublin: at Sheehy’s, Belvedere Place]

Joyce—I knew you meant him. But you’re wrong about his age.

Maggie Sheehy—(leans forward to speak seriously). Why, how old is he?

Joyce—Seventy-two.

Maggie Sheehy—Is he?

12

[Dublin: at Sheehy’s, Belvedere Place]

O’Reilly—(with developing seriousness)....Now it’s my turn, I suppose.....(quite seriously)....Who is your favourite poet?

(a pause)

Hanna Sheehy—.......German?

O’Reilly—......Yes.

(a hush)

Hanna Sheehy—..I think.....Goethe.....

13

[Dublin: at Sheehy’s, Belvedere Place]

Fallon—(as he passes)—I was told to congratulate you especially on your performance.

Joyce—Thank you.

Blake—(after a pause)..I’d never advise anyone to...O, it’s a terrible life! ....

Joyce—Ha.

Blake—(between puffs of smoke)—of course...it looks all right from the outside...to those who don’t know....But if you knew....it’s really terrible. A bit of candle, no...dinner, squalid....poverty. You’ve no idea simply....

14

[Dublin: at Sheehy’s, Belvedere Place]

Dick Sheehy—What’s a lie? Mr Speaker, I must ask...

Mr Sheehy—Order, order!

Fallon—You know it’s a lie!

Mr Sheehy—You must withdraw, sir.

Dick Sheehy—As I was saying....

Fallon—No, I won’t.

Mr Sheehy—I call on the honourable member for Denbigh.... Order, order! ...

15

[In Mullingar: an evening in autumn]

The Lame Beggar—(gripping his stick)....It was you called out after me yesterday.

The Two Children—(gazing at him)...No, sir.

The Lame Beggar—O, yes it was, though....(moving his stick up and down)....But mind what I’m telling you....D’ye see that stick?

The Two Children—Yes, sir.

The Lame Beggar—Well, if ye call out after me any more I’ll cut ye open with that stick. I’ll cut the livers out o’ye....(explains himself) ... D’ye hear me? I’ll cut ye open. I’ll cut the livers and the lights out o’ye.

16

A white mist is falling in slow flakes. The path leads me down to an obscure pool. Something is moving in the pool; it is an arctic beast with a rough yellow coat. I thrust in my stick and as he rises out of the water I see that his back slopes towards the croup and that he is very sluggish. I am not afraid but, thrusting at him often with my stick drive him before me. He moves his paws heavily and mutters words of some language which I do not understand.

17

[Dublin: at Sheehy’s, Belvedere Place]

Hanna Sheehy—O, there are sure to be great crowds.

Skeffington—In fact it’ll be, as our friend Jocax would say, the day of the rabblement.

Maggie Sheehy—(declaims)— Even now the rabblement may be standing by the door!

18

[Dublin, on the North Circular Road: Christmas]

Miss O’Callaghan—(lisps)—I told you the name, The Escaped Nun.

Dick Sheehy—(loudly)—O, I wouldn’t read a book like that...I must ask Joyce. I say, Joyce, did you ever read The Escaped Nun?

Joyce—I observe that a certain phenomenon happens about this hour.

Dick Sheehy—What phenomenon?

Joyce—O...the stars come out.

Dick Sheehy—(to Miss O’Callaghan)..Did you ever observe how...the stars come out on the end of Joyce’s nose about this hour? ...(she smiles)..Because I observe that phenomenon.

19

[Dublin: in the house in Glengariff Parade: evening]

Mrs Joyce—(crimson, trembling, appears at the parlour door)...Jim!

Joyce—(at the piano)...Yes?

Mrs Joyce—Do you know anything about the body? ...What ought I do?...There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Georgie’s stomach.... Did you ever hear of that happening?

Joyce—(surprised)...I don’t know....

Mrs Joyce—Ought I send for the doctor, do you think?

Joyce—I don’t know......What hole?

Mrs Joyce—(impatient)...The hole we all have.....here (points)

Joyce—(stands up)

20

They are all asleep. I will go up now ..... He lies on my bed where I lay last night: they have covered him with a sheet and closed his eyes with pennies.... Poor little fellow! We have often laughed together—he bore his body very lightly .... I am very sorry he died. I cannot pray for him as the others do ..... Poor little fellow! Everything else is so uncertain!

21

Two mourners push on through the crowd. The girl, one hand catching the woman’s skirt, runs in advance. The girl’s face is the face of a fish, discoloured and oblique-eyed; the woman’s face is small and square, the face of a bargainer. The girl, her mouth distorted, looks up at the woman to see if it is time to cry; the woman, settling a flat bonnet, hurries on towards the mortuary chapel.

22

[Dublin: in the National Library]

Skeffington—I was sorry to hear of the death of your brother....sorry we didn’t know in time.....to have been at the funeral.....

Joyce—O, he was very young....a boy....

Skeffington—Still.....it hurts....

23

That is no dancing. Go down before the people, young boy, and dance for them.... He runs out darkly-clad, lithe and serious to dance before the multitude. There is no music for him. He begins to dance far below in the amphitheatre with a slow and supple movement of the limbs, passing from movement to movement, in all the grace of youth and distance, until he seems to be a whirling body, a spider wheeling amid space, a star. I desire to shout to him words of praise, to shout arrogantly over the heads of the multitude ‘See! See!’ ..... His dancing is not the dancing of harlots, the dance of the daughters of Herodias. It goes up from the midst of the people, sudden and young and male, and falls again to earth in tremulous sobbing to die upon its triumph.

24

Her arm is laid for a moment on my knees and then withdrawn, and her eyes have revealed her—secret, vigilant, an enclosed garden—in a moment. I remember a harmony of red and white that was made for one like her, telling her names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal, and come away, bidding her look forth, a spouse, from Amana and from the mountain of the leopards. And I remember that response whereunto the perfect tenderness of the body and the soul with all its mystery have gone: Inter ubera mea commorabitur.

25

The quick light shower is over but tarries, a cluster of diamonds, among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation arises from the black earth. In the colonnade are the girls, an April company. They are leaving shelter, with many a doubting glance, with the prattle of trim boots and the pretty rescue of petticoats, under umbrellas, a light armoury, upheld at cunning angles. They are returning to the convent—demure corridors and simple dormitories, a white rosary of hours—having heard the fair promises of Spring, that well-graced ambassador .......

Amid a flat rain-swept country stands a high plain building, with windows that filter the obscure daylight. Three hundred boys, noisy and hungry, sit at long tables eating beef fringed with green fat and vegetables that are still rank of the earth.

26

She is engaged. She dances with them in the round—a white dress lightly lifted as she dances, a white spray in her hair; eyes a little averted, a faint glow on her cheek. Her hand is in mine for a moment, softest of merchandise.

—You very seldom come here now.—

—Yes I am becoming something of a recluse.—

—I saw your brother the other day ...... He is very like you.—

—Really?—

She dances with them in the round—evenly, discreetly, giving herself to no one. The white spray is ruffled as she dances, and when she is in shadow the glow is deeper on her cheek.

27

Faintly, under the heavy summer night, through the silence of the town which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the Dublin road. Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment as they pass the dark windows the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow. They are heard now far away—hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as diamonds, hurrying beyond the grey, still marshes to what journey’s end—what heart—bearing what tidings?

28

A moonless night under which the waves gleam feebly. The ship is entering a harbour where there are some lights. The sea is uneasy, charged with dull anger like the eyes of an animal which is about to spring, the prey of its own pitiless hunger. The land is flat and thinly wooded. Many people are gathered on the shore to see what ship it is that is entering their harbour.

29

A long curving gallery: from the floor arise pillars of dark vapours. It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Their hands are folded upon their knees, in token of weariness, and their eyes are darkened for the errors of men go up before them for ever as dark vapours.

30

The spell of arms and voices—the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces, and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone,—come. And the voices say with them, We are your people. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

31

Here are we come together, wayfarers; here are we housed, amid intricate streets, by night and silence closely covered. In amity we rest together, well content, no more remembering the deviousness of the ways that we have come. What moves upon me from the darkness subtle and murmurous as a flood, passionate and fierce with an indecent movement of the loins? What leaps, crying in answer, out of me, as eagle to eagle in mid air, crying to overcome, crying for an iniquitous abandonment?

32

The human crowd swarms in the enclosure, moving through the slush. A fat woman passes, her dress lifted boldly, her face nozzling in an orange. A pale young man with a Cockney accent does tricks in his shirtsleeves and drinks out of a bottle. A little old man has mice on an umbrella; a policeman in heavy boots charges down and seizes the umbrella: the little old man disappears. Bookies are bawling out names and prices; one of them screams with the voice of a child—‘Bonny Boy!’ ‘Bonny Boy!’ ... Human creatures are swarming in the enclosure, moving backwards and forwards through the thick ooze. Some ask if the race is going on; they are answered ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ A band begins to play...... A beautiful brown horse, with a yellow rider upon him, flashes far away in the sunlight.

33

They pass in twos and threes amid the life of the boulevard, walking like people who have leisure in a place lit up for them. They are in the pastry cook’s, chattering, crushing little fabrics of pastry, or seated silently at tables by the café door, or descending from carriages with a busy stir of garments soft as the voice of the adulterer. They pass in an air of perfumes: under the perfumes their bodies have a warm humid smell ..... No man has loved them and they have not loved themselves: they have given nothing for all that has been given them.

34

She comes at night when the city is still; invisible, inaudible, all unsummoned. She comes from her ancient seat to visit the least of her children, mother most venerable, as though he had never been alien to her. She knows the inmost heart; therefore she is gentle, nothing exacting; saying, I am susceptible of change, an imaginative influence in the hearts of my children. Who has pity for you when you are sad among the strangers? Years and years I loved you when you lay in my womb.

35

[London: in a house at Kennington]

Eva Leslie—Yes, Maudie Leslie’s my sister an’ Fred Leslie’s my brother—yev ’eard of Fred Leslie? ... (musing) ... O, ’e’s a whoite-arsed bugger...’E’s awoy at present.......

(later)

I told you someun went with me ten toimes one noight....That’s Fred—my own brother Fred.... (musing)...’E is ’andsome ...O I do love Fred....

36

Yes, they are the two sisters. She who is churning with stout arms (their butter is famous) looks dark and unhappy: the other is happy because she had her way. Her name is R.... Rina. I know the verb ‘to be’ in their language.

—Are you Rina?—

I knew she was.

But here he is himself in a coat with tails and an old-fashioned high hat. He ignores them: he walks along with tiny steps, jutting out the tails of his coat.... My goodness! how small he is! He must be very old and vain.....Maybe he isn’t what I...It’s funny that those two big women fell out over this little man....But then he’s the greatest man in the world....

37

I lie along the deck, against the engine-house, from which the smell of lukewarm grease exhales. Gigantic mists are marching under the French cliffs, enveloping the coast from headland to headland. The sea moves with the sound of many scales.... Beyond the misty walls, in the dark cathedral church of Our Lady, I hear the bright, even voices of boys singing before the altar there.

38

[Dublin: at the corner of Connaught St, Phibsborough]

The Little Male Child—(at the garden gate)..Na..o.

The First Young Lady—(half kneeling, takes his hand)—Well, is Mabie your sweetheart?

The Little Male Child—Na...o.

The Second Young Lady—(bending over him, looks up)—Who is your sweetheart?

39

She stands, her book held lightly at her breast, reading the lesson. Against the dark stuff of her dress her face, mild-featured with downcast eyes, rises softly outlined in light; and from a folded cap, set carelessly forward, a tassel falls along her brown ringletted hair ...

What is the lesson that she reads—of apes, of strange inventions, or the legends of martyrs? Who knows how deeply meditative, how reminiscent is this comeliness of Raffaello?

40

[Dublin: in Hamilton Long’s the chemists’s, in O’Connell St:]

Gogarty—Is that for Gogarty?

The Assistant—(looks)—Yes, sir...Will you take it with you? pay for it now?

Gogarty—No, send it put it in the account; send it on. You know the address.

The Assistant—Yes (takes a pen) Ye–es.

Gogarty—5 Rutland Square.

The Assistant—(half to himself as while he writes) .. 5...Rutland...Square.

 ® 

L E T T E R S

Vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert,
Vols. II&III, edited by Richard Ellmann,
published 1957 & 1966 by
Faber & Faber Limited, London

c o n t e n t s — l e t t e r s

1890    1900    1901    1902    1903

1904    1905    1906    1907    1908

1909    1910    1911    1912    1913

1914    1915    1916    1917    1918

1919    1920    1921    1922    1923

1924    1925    1926    1927    1928

1929    1930    1931    1932    1933

1934    1935    1936    1937    1938

1939    1940

 ® 

Part I. Dublin and Paris (1882–1904)

 ® 

1890

From REVEREND T.P. BROWN, S.J., to MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 March 1890

 ® 

1900

From W.L. COURTNEY, 19 January 1900

From W.L. COURTNEY, 3 February 1900

From WILLIAM ARCHER, 23 April 1900

To WILLIAM ARCHER, 28 April 1900

To WILLIAM ARCHER, 30 August 1900

From WILLIAM ARCHER, 15 September 1900

 ® 

1901

To HENRIK IBSEN, March 1901

From WILLIAM ARCHER, [About 15 September 1901]

From WILLIAM ARCHER, 26 September 1901

 ® 

1902

From GEORGE RUSSELL, [Early August 1902]

From GEORGE RUSSELL to W.B. YEATS, [?11 August 1902] Monday

From GEORGE RUSSELL to SARAH PURSER, 15 August 1902

From GEORGE RUSSELL, [Early October 1902]

From W.B. YEATS (Fragment of a dictated letter), [October? 1902]

From W.B. YEATS, 3 November 1902

From the SECRETARY of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, 20 November 1902

From GEORGE RUSSELL, [About 20 November 1902]

From LADY GREGORY, [? 23 November 1902]

From WILLIAM ARCHER, 25 November 1902

From W.B. YEATS, [? 25 November 1902] Tuesday

Letter from T.C. HARRINGTON to whom it may concern, 29 November 1902

To LADY GREGORY, N.D. [November 1902]

To LADY GREGORY, 1 December 1902

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 December 1902

To his FAMILY in Dublin, 6 December 1902

From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), [About 12 December 1902]

To J.F. BYRNE (Postcard with photograph of Joyce), Postmark 15 December 1902

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1902

From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 17 December 1902]

From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), [? 18 December 1902]

From W.B. YEATS (Dictated letter), 18 December 1902

To LADY GREGORY, 21 December 1902

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Sunday, 21 December 1902

 ® 

1903

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 21 January 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 January 1903

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 January 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 February 1903

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 February 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 21 February 1903

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 February 1903

From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 2 March 1903

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 March 1903

To [MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE], [? 8 March 1903] Sunday 2.30 p.m.

From J.M. SYNGE, [5 March 1903] Sunday

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 March 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 17 March 1903

From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), 19 March 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 March 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 23 March 1903 Monday 1.45

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 March 1903

From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 27 March 1903]

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 April 1903

To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 10 April 1903

To [JOHN STANISLAUS] JOYCE (Telegram), 11 April 1903

To J.F. BYRNE, [18 April 1903] Saturday Night

From FRANCIS SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON (Postcard), 29 September 1903

 ® 

1904

To OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY, [Late March or early April 1904]

From ARTHUR SYMONS, 21 April 1904

From ARTHUR SYMONS, 4 May [1904]

To OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY, 3 June 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 15 June 1904

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 23 June 1904

From NORA BARNACLE, 23 June 1904

From GEORGE RUSSELL, [? June or July 1904]

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, Postmark: 3 July 1904 [Postcard]

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, N.D. (?) 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 8 July 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [? 12 July 1904]

To GEORGE ROBERTS, N.D. Postmark, 13 July 1904, [Letter card in pencil]

To NORA BARNACLE, 21 July 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [? Late July 1904]

To NORA BARNACLE, [Late July? 1904]

To NORA BARNACLE (Postcard), Postmark 2 August 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 3 August 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [About 13 August 1904]

From DUBLIN PRINTING COMPANY, 14 August 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 15 August 1904

From NORA BARNACLE, 16 August 1904

From J.F. BYRNE, 19 August 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [26 August 1904]

To NORA BARNACLE, 29 August 1904

To C.P. CURRAN, 30 August 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [About 1 September 1904]

To NORA BARNACLE, 10 September 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 12 September 1904

From NORA BARNACLE, 12 September 1904

To JAMES S. STARKEY, 15 September 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 16 September 1904

From NORA BARNACLE, 16 September 1904

From E. GILFORD, 17 September 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [? 18 September 1904]

To NORA BARNACLE, 19 September 1904

From the BERLITZ SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES, London, 23 September 1904

From [POLICE], Market Rasen, Lincolnshire (Telegram), 23 September 1904

To GRANT RICHARDS, 26 September 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, [26 September 1904]

From NORA BARNACLE, 26 September 1904

To NORA BARNACLE, 29 September 1904

From W.B. YEATS, 2 October 1904

From E. GILFORD (Telegram), 4 October 1904

To GEORGE RUSSELL, 4 October 1904

To GEORGE ROBERTS, 5 October 1904

From E. GILFORD (Telegram), [6?] October 1904

To JAMES S. STARKEY, [5 October 1904]

To GEORGE ROBERTS, N.D. [? 7 October 1904]

 ® 

Part II. Pola, Rome, Trieste (1904–1915)

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 11 October 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 October 1904

From STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 14 October 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 20 [October] 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 October 1904

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 November 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19 November 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 3 December 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 12 December 1904

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 15 December 1904

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [? December 1904]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 December 1904

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, New Year’s Eve 1904

 ® 

1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 13 January 1905

To the Manager, GRANT RICHARDS, London, 16 January 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19 January 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 January 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 February 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 9 February 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 20 February 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 February 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 March 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 April 1905

To GRANT RICHARDS, 2 May 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 2 or 3 May 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 27 May 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 June 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 7 June 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 11 June 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 8 July 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 July 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 15 July 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), 19 July 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 24 [July 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), [27 July 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 29 July 1905

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 July 1905

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 17 August 1905

TO STANISLAUS JOYCE (POSTCARD), [? 18 August 1905] Thursday

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 1 September 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 [September] 1905 Sunday night

To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 September 1905

To WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 23 September 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 24 September 1905]

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 28 September 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 30 September 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 2 October 1905 Monday

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 3 October 1905 Sunday. 11. a.m.

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 7 October 1905 Saturday 2.30 P.M.

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 October 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 12 October 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 15 October 1905 Sunday. 11 a.m.

To GRANT RICHARDS, 15 October 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [16 October 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 18 October 1905]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 Whitworth Place, Dublin (Telegram), 21 October 1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 27 October 1905 Monday night

To JOYCE [FAMILY], 7 Whitworth Place, Dublin (Telegram), 27 October 1905

From VINCENT COSGRAVE, [About 29 October 1905]

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 27 November 1905

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 4 December 1905

 ® 

1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 27 January 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 12 February 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 20 February 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 22 February 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 28 February 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 13 March 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 15 April 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 22 April 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 26 April 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 5 May 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 13 May 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 20 May 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 3 June 1906

From MRS WILLIAM MURRAY to STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 June 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 10 June 1906

From OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY, 14 June 1906 Thursday

To GRANT RICHARDS, 16 June 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 June 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 9 July 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 31 July 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 31 July 1906 Tues. 9.30 p.m.

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 2 August 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 August 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 12 August 1906]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 16 August 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 19 August 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 24 August 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 29 August 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 August 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 3 September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 4 September 1906 Tuesday noon

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 September 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 9 September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 12 September 1906]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 14 September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 16 September 1906 Sunday evg.

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18[–20] September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 22 September 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 30 September 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 October 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [9 October 1906]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 10 October 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS (Draft of a letter), 10 October 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 12 October 1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 13 October 1906

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 17 October 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 October 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 21 October 1906 Sunday noon.

To GRANT RICHARDS, 22 October 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 November 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 13 November 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 14 November 1906 Wed evg. 8.25

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 November 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 3 December 1906 Sunday noon

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 December 1906 Tuesday evg

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 15 December 1906

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 24 December 1906

 ® 

1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 10 January 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 15 January 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 January 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 24 January 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [?1 February 1907]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 11 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 14 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Berlitz School, Trieste (Telegram), 14 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [Postmark 16 February 1907]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 16 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 18 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 19 February 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 20 February 1907

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 1 March 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 1 March 1907]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Berlitz School, Trieste (Telegram), 7 March 1907

To ELKIN MATHEWS (Postcard), 21 March 1907

To ELKIN MATHEWS (Postcard), 28 March 1907

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 24 April 1907

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 10 May 1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note on Joyce’s visiting card), [? 10 May 1907]

From STANISLAUS JOYCE to ELKIN MATHEWS, 19 July 1907

From STANISLAUS JOYCE to G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 20 July 1907

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 24 September 1907

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 2 December 1907

 ® 

1908

To ELKIN MATHEWS (Express Postcard), 9 February 1908

To ELKIN MATHEWS (Postcard), 10 July 1908

To MARGARET JOYCE, 8 December 1908

 ® 

1909

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 8 February 1909

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 13 February 1909

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 13 February 1909

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER(24), 26 April 1909

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 16 May 1909

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 12 July 1909

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 19 July 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 29 July 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 6 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 7 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 8 August 1909

To A.E. CLERY, 9 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 16 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 19 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 20 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 21 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 21 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 22 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 25 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Illustrated letter card), 26 August 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 31 August 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 2 September 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 2 September 1909

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 3 September 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 3 September 1909

To GRANT RICHARDS, 4 September 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 September 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 5 September 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 7 September 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 September 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 7 September 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 9 September 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 12 September 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), 20 October 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 21 October 1909 Thursday morn

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 22 October 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [? 25 October 1909]

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 27 October 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 2 October 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 30 October 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 1 November 1909

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 2 November 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 November 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 November 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 8 November 1909

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 9 November 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 November 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 17 November 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 18 November 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 19 November 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 19 November 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 22 November 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 27 November 1909 Saturday evg.

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 2 December 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 2 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 3 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 6 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 8 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 9 December 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 9 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 10 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 11 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), [? 13 December 1909]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 14 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 15 December 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 16 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 20 December 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 22 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 22 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 23 December 1909

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 23 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 24 December 1909

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), [26 December 1909]

 ® 

1910

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note probably delivered by hand), 12 February 1910

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 March 1910

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 March 1910

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 4 April 1910

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 15 May 1910

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 21 May 1910

To MRS JOHN MURRAY, 3 June 1910

To THEODORE SPICER-SIMSON, 8 June 1910

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 11 June 1910

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 13 June 1910

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 15 June 1910

To ADOLPH MANN, 24 June 1910

 ® 

1911

To GEORGE ROBERTS, 3 January 1911

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 January 1911

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 22 January 1911

To J.M. HONE, 10 July 1911

To MAUNSEL and COMPANY, 10 July 1911

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 July 1911

To the EDITOR, 17 August 1911

To MARIA KIRN, 30 August 1911

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER (Postcard), 23 December 1911

 ® 

1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 25 April 1912

To EILEEN JOYCE, 30 May 1912

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 30 May 1912

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 11 July 1912

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), [? 12 July 1912]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 July 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 27 July 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 7 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 10 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 14 August 1912

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to EILEEN JOYCE, 14 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 August 1912

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Telegram), 17 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark?18 August 1912

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, Postmark 19 August 1912

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 19 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [? 20 August 1912]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [20 August 1912]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [21 August 1912]

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [21 August 1912]

From JOHN G. LIDWELL (Copy), [21 August 1912]

To GEORGE ROBERTS, 21 August 1912

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [Postmark 22 August 1912]

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, Postmark 23 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 23 August 1912

From GEORGE ROBERTS (Copy), 23 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [Postmark?25 August 1912]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark?26 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 30 August 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 3 September 1912

From CHARLES JOYCE to STANISLAUS JOYCE, 5 September 1912

From CHARLES JOYCE to STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 September 1912

From CHARLES JOYCE to STANISLAUS JOYCE with a note from JAMES JOYCE, 11 September 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 11 September 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), [13 September 1912]

To PADRAIC COLUM (Postcard), 14 September 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 15 September 1912

To W.B. YEATS, 19 September 1912

To PADRAIC COLUM, 19 September 1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note on James Joyce’s visiting card), [October 1912?]

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 7 October 1912

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 9 December 1912

To W.B. YEATS, 16 December 1912

To W.B. YEATS, 25 December 1912

 ® 

1913

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [January 1913?]

To ELKIN MATHEWS, 26 February 1913

To ELKIN MATHEWS, Easter Day 1913

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 September 1913

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 6 October 1913

To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 November 1913

A Curious History, 30 November 1913

From EZRA POUND, 15 December 1913

 ® 

1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 January 1914

From EZRA POUND, 17–19 January 1914 Saturday

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 19 January 1914

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER (Postcard), 20 January 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 24 January 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 3 February 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 2 March 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 4 March 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 26 March 1914

To KATHARINE TYNAN, 15 April 1914

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 5 May 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 May 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 14 May 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 16 May 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 19 June 1914

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 26 June 1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 3 July 1914

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 November 1914

 ® 

1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, [Late January 1915]

To GRANT RICHARDS, 2 February 1915

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 March 1915

To EZRA POUND [1014a], 17 March 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 17 March 1915

To H.L. MENCKEN, 23 March 1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, 24 March 1915

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 March 1915

From JAMES B. PINKER (Enclosure to letter of 24 March 1915), [March 1915]

To JAMES B. PINKER, 1 April 1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, 5 April 1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, 19 April 1915

From H.L. MENCKEN to JAMES JOYCE, 20 April 1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, 22 April 1915

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 April 1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, 7 May 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 May 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 May 1915

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 9 May 1915

From B.W. HUEBSCH to JAMES JOYCE, 2 June 1915

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 16 June 1915

 ® 

Part III. Zurich, Trieste (1915–20)

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 June 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 30 June 1915

From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, [6 July 1915]

To H.L. MENCKEN, 7 July 1915

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 7 July 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 July 1915

To H.G. WELLS, 8 July 1915

From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, [5 July 1915] Thursday

To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 July 1915

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 July 1915

From W.B. YEATS to EZRA POUND, [? 15 July 1915

To EZRA POUND, [About 15 July 1915]

To W.B. YEATS, 17 July 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 17 July 1915

From EZRA POUND to W.B. YEATS, [About 22 July 1915]

From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, [24 July 1915] Saturday

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 July 1915

From EDMUND GOSSE to A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, 25 July 1915

From W.B. YEATS to the SECRETARY of the ROYAL LITERARY FUND, 29 July [1915]

To A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, SECRETARY, ROYAL LITERARY FUND, 30 July 1915

To EZRA POUND (Postcard), [30 July 1915]

To EZRA POUND, 31 July 1915

From EZRA POUND to A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, 3 August 1915

To A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS (Fragment of a letter), [About 7 August 1915]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 10 August 1915

From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, 21 August [1915]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 August 1915

From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, 28 August [1915]

To A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, 31 August 1915

To W.B. YEATS, 1 September 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 1 September 1915

From W.B. YEATS, 7 September [1915]

From EZRA POUND, [About 7 September 1915]

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), Postmark 13 September 1915

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 28 October 1915

To H.L. MENCKEN, 30 October 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 31 October 1915

To MICHAEL HEALY(40), 2 November 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 10 November 1915

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 22 November 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 22 November 1915

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 November 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 6 December 1915

To JAMES B. PINKER, 6 December 1915 [Postcard]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 December 1915 [Postcard]

To EMMA CUZZI, 7 December 1915

 ® 

1916

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 9 January 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 January 1916

From JONATHAN CAPE to JAMES B. PINKER, 26 January 1916

From EZRA POUND to JAMES B. PINKER, 30 January 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 5 February 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 7 February 1916

To ALLAN WADE, 10 February 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 March 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER, 10 March 1916

From EZRA POUND to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 March 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 March 1916

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to E. BYRNE HACKETT, 31 March 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER, 31 March 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER, 2 April 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 20 April 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, [22 April 1916]

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 17 May 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 May 1916

To JAMES B. PINKER, 28 May 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 June 1916

From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 June 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 July 1916

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 24 July 1916

From GEORGE MOORE to EDWARD MARSH, 3 August 1916

From W.B. YEATS to EDWARD MARSH, 20 August 1916

From EZRA POUND to EDWARD MARSH, 21 August 1916

From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 August 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 August 1916

From MAY JOYCE, 1 September 1916

From EZRA POUND, 2 September 1916

To EDWARD MARSH, 13 September 1916

To W.B. YEATS, 14 September 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 September 1916

To MRS THOMAS KETTLE, 25 September 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 October 1916

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 24 October 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 October 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 November 1916

To EZRA POUND, 8 November 1916

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 19 November 1916

 ® 

1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 14 January 1917

From W.B. YEATS to EZRA POUND, II February 1917

From SLACK, MONRO, SAW & Co., 22 February 1917

From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 February 1917

To H.G. WELLS, 3 March 1917

To [HARRIET SHAW WEAVER], 6 March 1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 March 1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 March 1917

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 14 March 1917

To ERNEST BOYD, 15 March 1917

To C.P. CURRAN, 15 March 1917

To JOHN QUINN, 19 March 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 30 March 1917

To EZRA POUND, 9 April 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 10 April 1917

To J.C. SQUIRE, 11 April 1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 April 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 22 April 1917

To J.C. SQUIRE (‘SOLOMON EAGLE’), 25 April 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to JOHN QUINN, 30 April 1917

To FORREST REID, 10 May 1917

To JOHN QUINN, 13 May 1917

To MARGARET ANDERSON, [? May 1917]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 June 1917

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 20 June 1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 July 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 8 July 1917

To JOHN QUINN, 10 July 1917

To FORREST REID (62), 17 July 1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 July 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 1 August 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [About 4 August 1917]

To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 August 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 8 August 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [About 10 August 1917]

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [About 12 August 1917]

To HARRIET MONROE, 12 August 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 15 [August] 1917

To EZRA POUND, 20 August 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 20 August 1917

From W.B. YEATS, 26 August [1917]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, (From MRS JOYCE), 28 August 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to EZRA POUND (Postcard), Postmark 28 August 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 5 September 1917

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 September 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 10 September 1917 Sunday

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to EDWARD MARSH, 11 September 1917

To EZRA POUND [1171a], [22 October 1917]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1917

To THOMAS STURGE MOORE(63), 26 October 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 27 October 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [? 27 October 1917] Saturday

To EDOUARD DUJARDIN, 10 November 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES(64), N.D. (?) November 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [November 1917]

To JAMES B. PINKER, 16 November 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 24 November 1917

To STURGE MOORE, 24 November 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 27 November 1917 [Postcard]

To GRANT RICHARDS, 30 November 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. (?) December 1917 [Postcard]

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 6 December 1917 [Postcard]

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), Postmark 12 December 1917

To JAMES B. PINKER, 16 December 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [? 16 December 1917] Sunday

From EZRA POUND, 19 December 1917

To FORREST REID (Dictated letter), 20 December 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [?22 December 1917]

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [? 23 December 1917]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 December 1917

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 27 December 1917

 ® 

1918

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [Late January? 1918]

To FANNY GUILLERMET, 26 January 1918

To FANNY GUILLERMET, 11 February 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 1 March 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 March 1918

To STURGE MOORE, 15 April 1918

To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 3 May 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 May 1918

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 31 May 1918

To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 June 1918

To JAMES B. PINKER, 29 July 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 July 1918

To FORREST REID, 1 August 1918

To [?](72), 5 August 1918

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 11 August 1918

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 21 August 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 August 1918 [Postcard]

To MADEMOISELLE GUILLERMET, 5 September 1918

To FRANK BUDGEN, 5 September 1918

To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 September 1918

From STEFAN ZWEIG, 12 September 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 October 1918

To CARLO LINATI(75), 31 October 1918 [In Italian]

From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 October 1918

COURT RECORD, Zurich, 16 November 1918

From EZRA POUND, 22 November 1918

To SIR HORACE RUMBOLD BART., 30 November 1918

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 December 1918

Four Letters To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN by Heinrich Straumann

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [? Early December 1918]

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [? December 1918]

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [9 December 1918]

 ® 

1919

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [2 February 1919]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 February 1919

To MADEMOISELLE GUILLERMET, 28 February 1919

From EZRA POUND to SIR HORACE RUMBOLD, British Minister to Berne, 11 April 1919

OPEN LETTER, 28 April 1919

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 30 April 1919

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 3 May 1919

To JAMES B. PINKER, 14 May 1919

To JAMES B. PINKER, 17 May 1919

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 23 May 1919

To C.P. CURRAN, 23 May 1919

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 May 1919

From MONRO, SAW &AMP; COMPANY, 3 June 1919

From B.W. HUEBSCH to JAMES JOYCE, 10 June 1919

To HENRY DAVRAY, 17 June 1919

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 19 June 1919

To FRANK BUDGEN, 19 June 1919

From MONHO, SAW & Company, 24 June 1919

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 July 1919

To B.W. HUEBSCH (Cablegram), 2 July 1919

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 7 July 1919

To FRANK BUDGEN, 11 July 1919

To HENRY DAVRAY, 14 July 1919

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 July 1919

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [31 July 1919]

To JOHN QUINN, 3 August 1919

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 August 1919

To MES WILLIAM MURRAY (Postcard), Postmark 6 August 1919

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 August 1919

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 August 1919

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 September 1919

To G. HERBERT THRING, 21 September 1919

From MRS EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK, 10 October 1919

From MRS EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK, 13 October 1919

From G. HERBERT THRING (of the Society of Authors), 15 October 1919

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 16 October [1919]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 October 1919

To FRANK BUDGEN, 7 November 1919 [Postcard]

To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 November 1919

To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 December 1919

To CARLO LINATI, 10 December 1919

To FRANK BUDGEN, N.D. (?) end 1919

To CARLO LINATI, 19 December 1919 [In Italian]

 ® 

1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 3 January 1920

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 5 January 1920 [Postcard]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 January 1920

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, N.D. (?) early 1920

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 17 [January?] 1920

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 January 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [? February 1920]

To FRANK BUDGEN, [Early February 1920]

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), \18 February 1920]

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), Postmark 24 February 1920

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 February 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 8 March 1920 [In Italian]

To JOHN QUINN, 11 March 1920

To HENRY DAVRAY, 11 March 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 11 March 1920

To JAMES B. PINKER, 13 March 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 13 March 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 23 March 1920

To KURT WOLFF, 1 May 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 2 May 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 11 May 1920 [In Italian]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 May 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 18 May 1920

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 24 May 1920

To HENRY DAVRAY, 2 June 1920

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 3 June 1920

To EZRA POUND, 5 June 1920

From EZRA POUND to CARLO LINATI with a postscript from JAMES JOYCE, 9 June 1920

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY (Postcard), 17 June 1920

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 22 June 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 1 July 1920 [In Italian]

 ® 

Part IV. Paris (1920–39)

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 July 1920

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 12 July 1920

To JAMES B. PINKER, 15 July 1920

To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI (Postcard), 19 July 1920

From EZRA POUND to JENNY SERRUYS, Postmark 20 July 1920

To JENNY SERRUYS, 22 July 1920

To STANISLAUS JOYCE with a note to FRANTISEK SCHAUREK, 25 July 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 27 July 1920

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 29 July 1920

To EZRA POUND, 31 July 1920

To JENNY SERRUYS, 5 August 1920

From T.S. ELIOT, 11 August 1920

To HENRY DAVRAY, 11 August 1920

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 August 1920

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [27 August 1920]

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [27 August 1920]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 29 August 1920

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 31 August 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, N.D. (?) September 1920

To JOHN QUINN, 3 September 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 6 September 1920 [In Italian]

To NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY, 6 September 1920

To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI, [? 8 September 1920]

To JOHN RODKER, 13 September 1920

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 14 September 1920

To CARLO LINATI, 21 September 1920 [In Italian]

To FRANK BUDGEN, Michaelmas 1920

To JOHN RODKER, 29 September 1920 Michaelmas

To JENNY SERRUYS, [7 October? 1920]

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 11 October 1920

To ANDRÉ SUARÈS (Written on Joyce’s visiting card), [20 October 1920]

To JENNY SERRUYS, 20 October 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 24 October 1920

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 October 1920

To CARLO LINATI (Postcard), 3 November 1920

To EZRA POUND, 5 November 1920

To JENNY SERRUYS, 5 November 1920

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 November 1920

To JOHN RODKER, 10 November 1920

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 November 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [? November 1920]

To John Quinn, 24 November 1920

To MME Yasushi Tanaka, 24 November 1920

To MME Yasushi Tanaka, 29 November 1920

To JOHN MCCORMACK, 8 December 1920

To JOHN RODKER (Postcard), Postmark 9 December 1920

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 December 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 10 December 1920

To EZRA POUND, 12 December 1920

To JOHN MCCORMACK, 17 December 1920

To EZRA POUND (Christmas card), 20 December 1920

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, Postmark 20 December 1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, [?20 December 1920]

To MICHAEL HEALY, 30 December 1920

To ERNEST A. BOYD, 30 December 1920

 ® 

1921

To ITALO SVEVO(119), 5 January 1921

To JOHN QUINN, 7 January 1921

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 16 January 1921

From JACQUES NATANSON to JENNY SERRUYS, 2 February 1921

To JENNY SERRUYS, 3 February 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 February 1921

To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. Early 1921

To JENNY SERRUYS, 6 February 1921

To DANIEL HUMMEL, 14 February 1921

To CARLO LINATI (Postcard), 18 February 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, 23 February 1921

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 23 February 1921

To FRANK BUDGEN, End February 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 March 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 April 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 9 April 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 April 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 April 1921

To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. Spring 1921

To JOHN QUINN, 19 April 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 April 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 May 1921

To FRANK BUDGEN, [31 May 1921]

To VALERY LARBAUD, 5 June 1921

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 6 June 1921

To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI, 7 June 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 21 June 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 June 1921

To FRANK BUDGEN, [Late June 1921]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 August 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, N.D. [Summer, 1921]

To EZRA POUND, [12 August 1921]

To CARLO LINATI (Postcard), Postmark 14 August 1921

To FRANK BUDGEN, 16 August 1921

To ROBERT MCALMON, 27 August 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 August 1921

To ROBERT MCALMON, 3 September 1921

To FRANK BUDGEN, 6 September 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 September 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, [24 September 1921] Saturday

From REVEREND CHARLES DOYLE, S.J., 3 October 1921

To ROBERT MCALMON, 6 October 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 October 1921

To ROBERT MCALMON, 10 October 1921

From BERNARD SHAW to SYLVIA BEACH, 10 October 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, 11 October 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 October 1921

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 14 October 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, 20 October 1921

To ROBERT MCALMON, 29 October 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, 30 October 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 November 1921

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 2 November 1921

To ROBERT MCALMON, 6 November 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 November 1921

To FRANK BUDGEN, 6 November 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, 6 November 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, 11 November 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, [About 15 November 1921]

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [23 November 1921]

To VALERY LARBAUD, 26 November 1921

To ARTHUR POWER, [? November 1921]

From SHERWOOD ANDERSON, 3 December 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 December 1921

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 December 1921

To VALERY LARBAUD, [About 14 December 1921]

To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI, 30 December 1921

 ® 

1922

To VALERY LARBAUD, 5 January 1922

To MYBON C. NUTTING (Postcard), 9 January 1922

To ROBERT MCALMON, 23 January 1922

To FRANK BUDGEN, 31 January 1922

From MAURICE DARANTIÈRE, 1 February 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 February 1922

To ROBERT MCALMON, 11 February 1922

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 February 1922

To ROBERT McALMON, 1 March 1922

To ROBERT McALMON, N.D. March 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 March 1922

To FERDINAND REYHER, 14 March 1922

To ROBERT MCALMON, 17 March 1922

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 March 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 March 1922

To [NORA BARNACLE JOYCE], [April 1922]

To JACQUES BENOIST-MÉCHIN, 8 April 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 April 1922

To MYRON C. NUTTING, 24 April 1922

To MRS MYRON C. NUTTING, 26 April 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 April 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 May 1922

To ERIC PINKER, 17 May 1922

To MR EDMUND WILSON, N.D. (?) July 1922 Paris

To LADY GREGORY (Dictated letter), 8 August 1922

To RICHARD WALLACE, 15 August 1922

To THEODORE SPICER-SIMSON (Dictated letter), 25 August 1922

To ROBERT MCALMON, 2 September 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 September 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 September 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 October 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 October 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1922

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 23 October 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Dictated to Lucia Joyce) 27 October 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 November 1922 [Dictated to Lucia Joyce]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 November 1922 [Dictated to Lucia Joyce]

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 10 November 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 November 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 November 1922

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 21 December 1922

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 December 1922

 ® 

1923

To FORD MADOX FORD, 10 January 1923

To VALERY LARBAUD, 17 January 1923

To VALERY LARBAUD, 5 February 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 February 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 February 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 March 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 March 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 March 1923

To EMILIO CECCHI, 2 April 1923

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 3 April 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 May 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 June 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 June 1923

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 11 June 1923

From W.B. YEATS, 26 June [1923]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 July 1923

To SYLVIA BEACH, 12 July 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 July 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 July 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 August 1923

To T.S. ELIOT, 15 August 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 August 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 August 1923

From J.F. BYRNE, 8 October 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 October 1923

To LILY BOLLACH, 10 October 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 October 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 October 1923

To MRS RICHARD SHEEHY, 21 October 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 October 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 November 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 November 1923

To FORD MADOX FORD (Postcard), 13 December 1923

To JOHN QUINN, 15 December 1923

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1923

To FORD MADOX FORD (Postcard), 17 December 1923

To VALERY LARBAUD, 17 December 1923

To LILY BOLLACH, 18 December 1923

To ROBERT MCALMON, [19 December 1923]

 ® 

1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, 5 January 1924

To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [? 5 January 1924]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 January 1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, N.D. (early 1924)

To ETTORE SCHMITZ, 30 January 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, [? February 1924]

To JOHN QUINN, 5 February 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 February 1924

To A.J. LEVENTHAL [‘Lawrence Emery’], 8 February 1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, [18 February 1924]

To ITALO SVEVO, 20 February 1924

To FORD MADOX FORD (Postcard), 25 February 1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, 29 February 1924

To FORD MADOX FORD, 6 March 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 March 1924

To FORD MADOX FORD, 14 March 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 March 1924

To FORD MADOX FORD, [?16 March 1924]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 March 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 May 1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, 24 March 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, 24 March 1924

To LILY BOLLACH, 24 March 1924

To ETTORE SCHMITZ, 1 April 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 April 1924

To FORD MADOX FORD, 8 April 1924

To LILY BOLLACH, 24 April 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD Bib. Municipale, Vichy, 2 May 1924

To LILY BOLLACH, 21 May 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, 22 May 1924

To LEON FLEISCHMAN, 27 May 1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, 30 May 1924

To MYRON C. NUTTING, [? 30 May 1924]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 June 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, 6 June 1924

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 10 June 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 June 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 July 1924

To W.B. YEATS, 12 July 1924

To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI (Postcard), 23 July 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, 28 July 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 July 1924

To RELATIVES OF JOHN QUINN, 5 August 1924

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 August 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 August 1924

To SYLVIA BEACH, 17 August 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 September 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 October 1924

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY (Telegram), 1 November 1924

To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 2 November 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, 4 November 1924

From VALERY LARBAUD, 6 November 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 9 November 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 November 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 November 1924

To VALERY LARBAUD, 20 November 1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, 21 November 1924

To ETTORE SCHMITZ and FAMILY (Postcard), 22 December 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 December 1924

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 December 1924

 ® 

1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 January 1925

To LILY BOLLACH, 18 January 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 January 1925

To VALERY LARBAUD, 2 February 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Dictated), 23 February 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Dictated to Lucia Joyce), 26 February 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Written with black pencil in large letters), 7 March 1925

To ERNEST WALSH (Dictated letter), 13 March 1925

To ERNEST WALSH, 13 March 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, (Dictated to Lucia Joyce), 25 March 1925

To LILY BOLLACH (Written with black pencil in large letters), 1 April 1925

To ROBERT MCALMON, 4 April 1925

To ROBERT MCALMON, 8 April 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Written with black pencil in large letters), 11 April 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 April 1925

To ROBERT MCALMON, [?25 April 1925]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (In rather large handwriting), 1 May 1925

To VALERY LARBAUD, [?1 June 1925]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 June 1925

To LÉON-PAUL FARGUE, 13 June 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 July 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 July 1925

To SYLVIA BEACH, 25 July 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 July 1925

To RICHARD WALLACE (Postcard), Postmarked 27 July 1925

To SYLVIA BEACH, [31 July] 1925 S. Ignaceous’ [sic] Day

To HERBERT GORMAN, 31 July 1925

To W.S. KENNEDY, Chairman, Incorporated Stage Society, London, 8 August 1925

To ERNEST WALSH, 10 August 1925

To HERBERT GORMAN (Telegram), 13 August 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 August 1925

To ERNEST WALSH, 15 August 1925

To SYLVIA BEACH, [?22 August 1925]

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 23 August 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 August 1925

To HERBERT GORMAN, [About 4 September 1925]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 6 September 1925

To HERBERT GORMAN (Telegram), 8 September 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 September 1925

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 September 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 October 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1925

To DÁMASO ALONSO, 31 October 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 November 1925

To HERBERT GORMAN, 5 November 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 November 1925

To ERIC PINKER, N.D. [?] Autumn 1925

To ETTORE SCHMITZ (Dictated letter), 21 November 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 November 1925

To LILY BOLLACH, 5 December 1925

From LUCIA JOYCE to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 December 1925

 ® 

1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 January 1926 [In large handwriting]

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 15 February 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 March 1926

To IVAN OPFFER, 9 March 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 March 1926

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 March 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 April 1926

To LILY BOLLACH, 2 May 1926

To LILY BOLLACH, 16 May 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 May 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 June 1926

To LILY BOLLACH, 7 June 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 July 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 July 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 August 1926

To SYLVIA BEACH, 24 August 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 August 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 September 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVEE, 26 September 1926

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 30 September 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 October 1926

To EZRA POUND, [Early November 1926]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 5 November 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 November 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 November 1926

From EZRA POUND, 15 November 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 November 1926

To BERNARD SHAW, 26 November 1926

To LILY BOLLACH, 29 November 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 November 1926

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 December 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 December 1926

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1926

To MRS MYRON C. NUTTING, 17 December 1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 December 1926

 ® 

1927

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 January 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 January 1927

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [Late January 1927]

To VALÉRY LARBAUD, 26 January 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 February 1927

Statement regarding the piracy of Ulysses, 2 February 1927

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 10 February 1927

To VALERY LARBAUD, 10 February 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 February 1927

To EZRA POUND, 23 February 1927

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 26 February 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 March 1927

To EZRA POUND, 2 March 1927

To GEORG GOYERT, 6 March 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 March 1927

To GEORG GOYERT, Postmark 31 March 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 April 1927 [Postcard]

To RICHARD ALDINGTON, [? Late April 1927]

From STUART GILBERT, 9 May 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 May 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 May 1927

To SYLVIA BEACH, N.D. 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 May 1927

To SYLVIA BEACH, 27 May 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 May 1927

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 10 June 1927

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 10 June 1927

To MICHAEL HEALY, 1 July 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 July 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 July 1927

To GEORG GOYERT, Postmark 25 July 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 July 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 14 August 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 14 September 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 8 October 1927

To VALERY LARBAUD, [? 18 October 1927]

To GEORG GOYERT, 19 October 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 October 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 October 1927

To ROBERT MCALMON, 29 October 1927

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 November 1927

To DANIEL BRODY, 7 November 1927

To EZRA POUND, [? 8 November 1927]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 November 1927

To MRS J.F. BYRNE, 10 November 1927

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 19 November 1927

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 29 November 1927

To FRANK BUDGEN, 14 December 1927

 ® 

1928

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 13 January 1928

To ELLIOT PAUL, [About January 1928]

To VALERY LARBAUD, 19 January 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 29 January 1928

To the EDITOR of the Revue Nouvelle, 10 February 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 February 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [16 March 1928]

To DONALD FRIEDE (Cablegram), 20 March 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 22 March 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, Postmark 26 March 1928

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 27 March 1928

To VALERY LARBAUD, 28 March 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 March 1928

To VALERY LARBADD, 5 April 1928

Το ETTORE SCHMITZ, 6 April 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 April 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 April 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 26 April 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 April 1928

TO HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 20 May 1928

To SYLVIA BEACH, 22 May 1928

To FRANK BUDGEN, 27 May 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 June 1928

To VALERY LARBAUD, 4 June 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 June 1928

To VALERY LARBAUD, 26 June 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 30 June 1928

To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, 11 July 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 31 July 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 5 August 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 August 1928

From SYLVIA BEACH to EDMUND WILSON, 20 August 1928

To BENJAMIN CONNER (Dictated letter), 1 September 1928

To ADRIENNE MONNIER and SYLVIA BEACH, 3 September 1928

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Dictated postcard), Postmark 9 September 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 September 1928

To LIVIA SVEVO, 24 September 1928

To VALERY LARBAUD (Dictated letter), [? 7 October 1928]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 October 1928

To VALERY LARBAUD (Written in heavy black pencil), 16 November 1928

From H.G. WELLS, 23 November 1928

To RALPH PINKER, 28 November 1928

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 December 1928 [Dictated]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1928

To FRANK BUDGEN, [15 December 1928]

COURT INJUNCTION, 27 December 1928

 ® 

1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 January 1929

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 January 1929

From VLADIMIR DIXON, 9 February 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 12 April 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 18 April 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 26 April 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 May 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 May 1929 [Continuation]

To the EDITOR of Solaria, 31 May 1929

To T.S. ELIOT, 2 July 1929

To SIGNORA LIVIA SCHMITZ, 14 July 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 July 1929

Το CARESSE CROSBY (Postcard), Postmark 17 July 1929

To GEORG GOYERT (Postcard), Postmark 20 July 1929

From EDOUARD DUJARDIN, 22 July 1929

To ERIC PINKER, [About 25 July 1929]

To VALERY LARBAUD, 30 July 1929

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [? Early August 1929]

From FRANK CROWNINSHIELD to CARESSE CROSBY, 12 August 1929

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), Postmark 15 August 1929

From GEORGE MOORE, 11 September 1929

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), [? Late September 1929]

To VALERY LARBAUD, [20 September 1929]

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 22 September 1929

From GEORGE MOORE, 11 October 1929

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 13 October 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 October 1929 [Dictated]

To ERIC PINKER, 7 November 1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 November 1929 [Dictated]

To CARESSE CROSBY (Telegram), 12 December 1929

 ® 

1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 March 1930 [Dictated]

From LUCIA JOYCE to ADRIENNE MONNIER, 16 April [1930]

To JO DAVIDSON (Cablegram), 3 May 1930

From GEORGE MOORE, 10 May 1930

Report of DR ALFRED VOGT on Joyce’s eyes, June 1930

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, Postmark 15 June 1930

From JOHN SULLIVAN TO JO DAVIDSON, 23 June 1930

To SYLVIA BEACH (Postcard), 18 July 1930

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 28 July 1930

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 August 1930

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 2 September 1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 September 1930

To GEORGE ANTHEIL(303), 7 September 1930

To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 September 1930

To GEORGE ANTHEIL(304), 23 September 1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 September 1930 [Dictated]

To MRS HERBERT GORMAN, 5 October 1930

To JAMES STEPHENS (Postcard), 6 October 1930

To HERBERT GORMAN, 11 October 1930

To HERBERT GORMAN (Cablegram), 13 October 1930

To MRS HERBERT GORMAN, 22 October 1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1930

To HERBERT GORMAN, 28 October 1930

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 30 October 1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 November, 1930 [Dictated]

To SIGNORA LIVIA SCHMITZ, 25 November 1930

To GEORGE ANTHEIL (Postcard), Postmark 25 November 1930

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 26 November 1930

To MICHAEL LENNON, 27 November 1930

From DR ALFRED VOGT, 1 December 1930

To GEORGE ANTHEIL, 7 December 1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Typed by Joyce), 22 December 1930

 ® 

1931

To GEORGE ANTHEIL, 3 January 1931

From LOUIS GILLET, 7 January 1931

To VALERY LARBAUD (Typed by Joyce), 10 January 1931

From VALERY LARBAUD, 20 January 1931

To HERBERT GORMAN, 24 January 1931

From LUCIA JOYCE to SIGNORA LIVIA SVEVO, 25 January 1931

To JAMES STEPHENS, 31 January 1931

From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 January 1931

To JO DAVIDSON, 8 February 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 February 1931 [Dictated]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 February 1931 [Dictated]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 March 1931 [Dictated]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 March 1931 [Dictated]

To SIGNORA LIVIA SCHMITZ, 11 March 1931

To HERBERT GORMAN, [? 19 March 1931]

To MICHAEL LENNON (Typed by Joyce), 29 March 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 April 1931

To VALERY LARBAUD, 13 April 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 14 April 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 April 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 April 1931

To ROBERT MCALMON, 27 April 1931

From ANDRÉ GIDE, 30 April 1931

To EZRA POUND (Typed by JOYCE), 7 May 1931

To SYLVIA BEACH, 10 May 1931

To Mrs MAY JOYCE MONAGHAN, 11 May 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 May 1931

To JO DAVIDSON, 13 May 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 22 May 1931

To DESMOND HARMSWORTH, 17 June 1931

To DANIEL BRODY, 26 June 1931

To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 26 June 1931

To ADRIENNE MONNIER, ‘St Swithin le Bandit’ [i.e. 15 July] 1931

To PADRAIC and MARY COLUM, 18 July 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 July 1931

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to JOHN SULLIVAN, 19 July 1931

To DANIEL BRODY, 30 July 1931

To IVAN GOLL, 30 July 1931

To JONATHAN CAPE, 30 July 1931

To GEORG GOYERT, 31 July 1931

From STANISLAUS JOYCE to HERBERT GORMAN, 8 August 1931

To T.S. ELIOT, 11 August 1931

From THE EDITORS of the Frankfurter Zeitung to ERNST HITSCHMANN, 13 August 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 22 August 1931

To T.S. ELIOT, 27 August 1931

To MICHAEL JOYCE, 6 September 1931

To MICHAEL JOYCE, 8 September 1931

To SYLVIA BEACH, [Mid-September 1931]

To ERNST ROBERT CURTIUS, [About 17 September 1931]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 September 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 October 1931

From MONRO, SAW & COMPANY, 6 October 1931

To GEORG GOYERT, 9 October 1931

To T.S. ELIOT, [About 15 October 1931]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 October 1931

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19 November 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 November 1931

To T.S. ELIOT, 22 November 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 November 1931

To CARESSE CROSBY, 28 November 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 December 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 December 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1931

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 December 1931

From EZRA POUND, 21 December 1931

To T.S. ELIOT, 23 December 1931

To DR KENNETH REDDIN, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, 27 December 1931

 ® 

1932

To EZRA POUND, 1 January 1932

To T.S. ELIOT, 1 January 1932

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 2 January 1932

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 14 January 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 January 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 January 1932

To GEORG GOYERT, 12 February 1932

To EZRA POUND, 13 February 1932

To T.S. ELIOT, 13 February 1932

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 15 February 1932

To T.S. ELIOT, 22 February 1932

To FRANK BUDGEN, 1 March 1932

To T.S. ELIOT, 4 March 1932

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 29 March 1932

To BENNETT CERF, 2 April 1932

To the MAYOR OF FLORENCE, 9 April 1932

To VALERY LARBAUD, 13 May 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 April 1932

To JAMES STEPHENS, 7 May 1932

To FRANK BUDGEN, 17 June 1932

To CONSTANT HUNTINGTON, 22 May 1932

To JOHN SULLIVAN, 26 May 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 June 1932

To T.S. ELIOT, 20 June 1932

To EDOUAED DUJARDIN, 26 June 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 June 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 July 1932

To PAUL LÉON, 12 July 1932

To T.S. ELIOT, 13 July 1932

From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 14 July 1932

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 14 July 1932

To MR and MRS ROBERT KASTOR (Postcard), 16 July 1932

To STUART GILBERT, 22 July 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 July 1932

To FRANK BUDGEN, 1 August 1932 Bundesfeier

To ROBERT MCALMON, [August 1932?]

To ALFRED BERGAN, 5 August 1932

From C.G. JUNG, [? August 1932] Küsnacht

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 August 1932

To LUCIA JOYCE, 8 August 1932

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 August 1932

To ALFRED BERGAN (Dictated letter), [? Late August 1932]

To JOHN SULLIVAN, 25 August 1932

To DANIEL BRODY, 29 August 1932

To ALFRED BERGAN (Dictated letter), 1 September 1932

From W.B. YEATS, 2 September 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 September 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 September 1932

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 28 September 1932

To ALFRED BERGAN, 1 October 1932

To W.B. YEATS, 5 October 1932

To FRANK BUDGEN, 9 October 1932

To JOHN SULLIVAN (Postcard), 9 October 1932

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [About 18 October] 1932

To ALFRED BERGAN, 18 October 1932

To GEORG GOYERT, 22 October 1932

From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 26 October 1932

To ALFRED BERGAN, 27 October 1932

To FRANK BUDGEN, 29 October 1932

From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 31 October, 1932

To DANIEL BRODY, 3 November 1932

To F.V. MORLEY, 3 November 1932

To F.V. MORLEY, 10 November 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 November 1932

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 November 1932 [Dictated]

From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 27 December 1932

 ® 

1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 January 1933

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 January 1933 [Dictated]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 January 1933 [Telegram sent by Mr Paul Léon]

From Miss MOSCHOS to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 January 1933

To W.K. MAGEE, 6 February 1933

To PADRAIC COLUM, 19 February 1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 March 1933

To W.K. MAGEE, 21 March 1933

To JAMES STEPHENS, 21 March 1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 March 1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 March 1933

To ARNOLD BAX, 29 March 1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 April 1933

To VALERY LARBAUD, 4 May 1933

From PAUL LÉON to FRANK BUDGEN, 7 May 1933

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 29 May 1933

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 30 May 1933

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 6 July 1933

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 8 July 1933

To DANIEL BRODY, 8 July 1933

To FRANK BUDGEN, 17 July 1933

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 13 August 1933

To FRANK BUDGEN, 21 August 1933

To FRANK BUDGEN, 28 August 1933

From LUCIA JOYCE to FRANK BUDGEN, 3 September 1933

To FRANK BUDGEN, 10 September 1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 September 1933

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 October 1933

To JOHN SULLIVAN, 18 October 1933

From PAUL LÉON to F.V. MORLEY, 19 November 1933

From PAUL LÉON to HERBERT GORMAN, 22 November 1933

From T.S. ELIOT to MONRO, SAW & COMPANY, 28 November 1933

To T.S. ELIOT, 5 December 1933

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 8 December 1933]

From T.S. ELIOT, 11 December 1933

To T.S. ELIOT, 18 December 1933

To ALFRED BERGAN, 20 December 1933

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 20 December 1933

From T.S. ELIOT, 28 December 1933

To FRANK BUDGEN, 30 December 1933

 ® 

1934

From GEOFFREY FABER to DONALD SOMERVELL, 5 January 1934

From T.S. ELIOT to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 January 1934

From DONALD SOMERVELL to T.S. ELIOT, 6 January 1934

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to T.S. ELIOT, 7 January 1934

From T.S. ELIOT, 9 January 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 1 April 1934

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 April 1934

To MME FRANCE RAPHAEL, 24 April 1934

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 25 April 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 25 April 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 2 May 1934

To ROBERT MCALMON, 6 May 1934

To LUCIA JOYCE, [Late May 1934]

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 1 June 1934

To LUCIA JOYCE, 1 June 1934 [In Italian]

To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 June 1934 [In Italian]

From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, [About 15 June 1934]

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 1 July 1934

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 July 1934

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 13 July 1934

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 22 July 1934

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 22 July 1934

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 July 1934

To LOUIS GILLET, 28 Juillet 1934

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 29 July 1934

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 30 July 1934

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 July 1934

To T.W. PUGH, 6 August 1934

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE NEW YORK HERALD, 8 August 1934

To HELEN JOYCE, 9 August 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [?9] August 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 13 August 1934

To GEORGE JOYCE, 13 August 1934

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, [Mid-August 1934]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [Mid-August 1934]

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 21 August 1934

To GEORGE JOYCE, 28 August 1934

From ALLEN LANE to RALPH PINKER, 29 August 1934

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 2 September 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 2 September 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 5 September 1934

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 7 September 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 8 September 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 22 September 1934

To T.W. PUGH, 22 September 1934

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 September 1934

From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 25 September 1934

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 16 October 1934

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 20 October 1934

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 October 1934

To GEORGE JOYCE, 29 October 1934

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 30 October 1934

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 20 November 1934

To GEORGE JOYCE, 21 November 1934

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 28 November 1934

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE MS, Kastor, 6 December 1934

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1934

To FRANK BUDGEN, 18 December 1934

To ALFRED BERGAN, 20 December 1934

To GEORGE JOYCE, 24 December 1934

To LUCIA JOYCE, [About 27 December 1934]

To GEORGE JOYCE, 27 December 1934

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 28 December 1934

 ® 

1935

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 8 January 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 15 January 1935

To HELEN JOYCE, 18 January 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 5 February 1935

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, [About 18 February 1935]

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 19 February 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 26 February 1935 Tuesday

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 26 February 1935

To MRS EILEEN JOYCE SCHAUREK, 13 March 1935

To MRS EILEEN JOYCE SCHAUREK, [16 March 1935]

To MRS EILEEN JOYCE SCHAUREK, [? 17 March 1935]

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 19 March 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 26 March 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 28 March 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, N.D. [?] March 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 1 April 1935

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 April 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, [About 7 April 1935]

To GEORGE JOYCE (Postscript to a missing letter), [About 10 April 1935]

To FRANK BUDGEN, 15 April 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 27 April 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 27 April 1935 [In Italian]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 May 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 4 May 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, [9] May 1935 Thursday

To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 May 1935

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 15 May 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 May 1935 [In Italian]

To LUCIA JOYCE, 22 May 1935 [In Italian]

To LUCIA JOYCE, 29 May 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 1 June 1935 [In Italian]

To GEORGE JOYCE, 3 June 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 June 1935

To MICHAEL HEALY, [? 15 June 1935]

To HELEN JOYCE, 17 [June] 1935

To GIORGIO JOYCE, 17 June 1935 [In Italian]

To GIORGIO JOYCE, 25 June 1935 [In Italian]

To HELEN JOYCE, 25 June 1935

To MICHAEL HEALY, 28 June 1935

To MICHAEL HEALY, 1 July 1935

To STUART GILBERT, 1 July 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, N.D. July, 1935 [In Italian]

To LUCIA JOYCE, N.D. (Summer 1935)

To LUCIA JOYCE, N.D. (? July 1935)

To GEORGE JOYCE, 10 July 1935

To MICHAEL HEALY, [13 July 1935]

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 16 July 1935

To JOHN HOWLEY, 29 July 1935

To MR and MRS CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 31 July 1935

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 10 August 1935

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 13 August 1935

To GEORGE JOYCE, 13 August 1935

To HERBERT GORMAN (Express letter), 14 August 1935

To JOHN SULLIVAN, 28 August 1935

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 28 August 1935

To HELEN JOYCE, 28 August 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 9 September 1935 [In Italian]

To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 September 1935 [In Italian](400)

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 18 September 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 29 September 1935

To FRANK BUDGEN, 8 October 1935

To MRS HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 9 October 1935

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 October 1935

To LUCIA JOYCE, 17 October 1935

To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 23 October 1935

To GEORGE JOYCE, 28 October 1935

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 4 November 1935

To W.B. YEATS, Postmark 20 November 1935

To ALFRED BERGAN, 21 December 1935

To MICHAEL HEALY, 21 December 1935

 ® 

1936

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 April 1936

From STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 24 April 1936

To MR and MRS FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 April 1936

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 11 May 1936

To W.B. YEATS, 18 May 1936

To T.S. ELIOT, 3 June 1936

To MARY M. COLUM, 5 June 1936

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 June 1936

To SEAN O’FAOLAIN, 16 July 1936

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 22 July 1936

To STEPHEN JOYCE, 10 August 1936

To MR and MRS CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 26 August 1936

To JOHN SULLIVAN (Postcard), 26 August 1936

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 31 August 1936

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 1 September 1936

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 13 September 1936

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 17 September 1936

To JAMES STEPHENS, 18 September 1936

From JAMES STEPHENS, 20 September 1936

To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H. HARTLEY), 21 September 1936

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (POSTCARD), 22 September 1936

To JAMES STEPHENS, 25 September 1936

To KATHLEEN BARNACLE, 30 September 1936

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 4 October 1936

To MRS BARNACLE, 15 October 1936

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 November 1936

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 18 November 1936

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 1 December 1936

 ® 

1937

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 18 February 1937

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 February 1937

To T.G. KEOHLER, 9 March 1937

To STEPHEN JOYCE (Postcard), 6 April 1937

To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H, HARTLEY), 8 April 1937

To GEORGE JOYCE, 11 April 1937 Sunday

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 9 May 1937

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, [18? May 1937]

To C.P. CURRAN, 19 May 1937

To THOMAS KEOHLER, 23 May 1937

To ALFRED BERGAN, 25 May 1937

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [? June 1937]

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN(409), 8 June 1937

To C.P. CURRAN, 10 June 1937

To MR and MRS MYRON C. NUTTING, 30 June 1937

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 14 July 1937

To HELEN JOYCE, 25 July 1937

To HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 2 August 1937

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 6 August 1937

To DAVID FLEISCHMAN, 8 August 1937

To FRANK BUDGEN, 9 August 1937

To GEORGE JOYCE (Postcard), 9 August 1937

To C.P. CURRAN, Postmark 17 August 1937

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 19 August 1937

To MRS JOHN SULLIVAN, 27 Ausrust 1937

To FRANK BUDGEN, 28 August 1937

To ADOLPH KASTOR, 30 August 1937

To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H. HARTLEY), 30 August 1937

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 31 August 1937

To FRANK BUDGEN, 9 September 1937

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 14 September 1937

To FRANK BUDGEN, 20 September 1937

To MRS JOHN SULLIVAN, 24 September 1937

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 13 October 1937

To EZRA POUND, 28 October 1937

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 1 November 1937

To EZRA POUND, 12 November 1937

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 5 December 1937

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 December 1937

To ALFRED BERGAN, 21 December 1937

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 31 December 1937

 ® 

1938

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), Postmark 2 January 1938

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 12 January 1938

To HELEN JOYCE, 20 January 1938

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 January 1938

From PAUL LÉON to FRANK BUDGEN (Largely dictated by Joyce),?29 January 1938

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 7 February 1938

To EZRA POUND, 9 February 1938

To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H. HARTLEY), 22 February 1938

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 22 February 1938

To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 8 March 1938 [Typewritten—not by Joyce]

From PAUL LÉON to CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 9 March 1938

From PAUL LÉON to CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 10 March 1938

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 March 1938

To HELEN JOYCE, 6 April 1938

To HELEN JOYCE, 20 April 1938

To MR and MRS HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 11 May 193S Paris

To FERDINAND PRIOR, 29 May 1938

To FERDINAND PRIOR, 30 May 1938

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, Postmark 3 June 1938

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 6 June 1938

To DANIEL BRODY, 16 June 1938

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, Postmark 17 June 1938

To HELEN JOYCE, 4 July 1938

To HELEN JOYCE, 17 July 1938

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 6 August 1938

To HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 17 August 1938

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), Postmark 21 August 1938

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 23 August 1938

To MAURICE JAMES CRAIG, 24 August 1938

To PAUL RUGGIERO, 4 September 1938 [In Italian]

To LOUIS GILLET, 8 Septembre 1938

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 8 September 1938

From JACQUES MERCANTON to MAURICE JAMES CRAIG, 9 September 1938

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 11 September 1938

To PAUL RUGGIERO, [September 1938]

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 20 September 1938

To JACQUES MERCANTON, 21 September 1938

To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 21 September 1938

To MAURICE JAMES CRAIG (Postcard), 23 September 1938

To DANIEL BRODY, 5 October 1938

To GEORG GOYERT, 11 October 1938

To PAUL RUGGIERO, 18 November 1938

To EDOUARD DUJARDIN, 5 December 1938

To PAUL RUGGIERO, 9 December 1938

To GEORG GOYERT (Postcard), 23 December 1938

 ® 

1939

To LIVIA SVEVO, [2 January 1939]

To VISCOUNT CARLOW (Express letter), 28 January 1939

To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 23 February 1939

To JOAN BUDGEN, 27 February 1939

To DANIEL BRODY, 5 March 1939

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 5 March 1939

To MARY M. COLUM, 29 March 1939

To LIVIA SVEVO, 4 April 1939

To T.S. ELIOT, N.D. [? April 1939]

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 April 1939

To LIVIA SVEVO, [1 May 1939]

To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 4 May 1939

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 7 May 1939

To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 12 May 1939

To SEAN O’CASEY, Postmark 26 May 1939

From SEAN O’CASEY, 30 May 1939

To GEORGE ROGERS, 5 June 1939

From PAUL LEON to HERBERT GORMAN (Dictated by James Joyce), 6 June 1939

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 7 June 1939

To GEORGE ROGERS (Postcard), Postmark 10 June 1939

To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 12 June 1939 Monday

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 June 1939

To MRS VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 3 July 1939

To GEORG GOYERT, 8 July 1939

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 15 July 1939

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 22 July 1939

To FRANK BUDGEN, 22 July 1939

To C.P. CURRAN, Postmark 23 July 1939

To MRS VICTOR A. SAX, 28 July 1939

To FRANK BUDGEN, End July 1939

To GEORGE ROGERS, Postmark 3 August 1939

To MRS VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 5 August 1939

To CECIL FFRENCH SALKELD, 10 August 1939

To GEORG GOYERT, 12 August 1939

To MR and MRS GEORGE TURNER (Postcard), 12 August 1939

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, Postmark 12 August 1939

To FRANK BUDGEN, 20 August 1939

To PAUL LÉON, 2 September 1939

To GEORGE JOYCE (Telegram), 3 September 1939

To MR and MRS STUART GILBERT, 6 September 1939

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 8 September 1939 Fête de Marion Bloom

To SELSKAR MICHAEL GUNN, 15 September 1939

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 18 September 1939

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 18 September 1939

To FARRAR & RINEHART (Cablegram), 21 September 1939

To JOHN FARRAR, 21 September 1939

To FARRAR & RINEHART (Cablegram), 3 October 1939

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 4 November 1939

To MR and MRS VICTOR A. SAX, 6 November 1939

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note on scrap of paper), Postmark 16 December 1939

 ® 

Part V. Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, Zurich (1939–41)

 ® 

1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON, 9 January 1940

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 9 January 1940

To DANIEL BRODY (Postcard), 10 January 1940

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), [? 19 January 1940]

To FRANK BUDGEN, 8 February 1940

To C.P. CURRAN, 11 February 1940

To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 11 February 1940

To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY(438), 15 February 1940

To DARIO DE TUONI, 20 February 1940

To JAMES LAUGHLIN (Postcard), 21 February 1940

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), Postmark 26 February 1940

To DANIEL BRODY, 3 March 1940

To NINO FRANK (Postcard), Postmark 13 March 1940

To FRANK BUDGEN, 13 March 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 14 March 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 14 March 1940

To VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 14 March 1940

To FRITZ VANDERPYL, 14 March 1940

To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, S. Patrick’s Day 1940

To SELSKAR GUNN, 19 March 1940

To FRITZ VANDERPYL (Postcard), [? 20 March 1940]

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 March 1940

To ETTORE SETTANNI, 26 March 1940

To MRS VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 9 April 1940

To NINO FRANK (Postcard), Postmark 9 Aprili 1940

To MARY COLUM, 13 April 1940

To MARY COLUM, [April 1940]

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 17 April 1940

To NINO FRANK, 18 April 1940

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 April 1940

To MRS VICTOR A. SAX, 28 April 1940

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 June 1940

To MRS BARNACLE, 18 June 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 July 1940

To NINO FRANK (Postcard), [July 1940]

To NINO FRANK (Postcard), 28 July 1940

To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 30 July 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, 4 August 1940 [In Italian]

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 5 August 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON, 5 August 1940

To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, 7 August 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON, Postmark 13 August 1940

To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 19 August 1940

To NINO FRANK (Postcard), Postmark 29 August 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (POSTCARD), 30 August 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 6 Septembre 1940

To MARIA JOLAS, 7 September 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), Postmark 11 September 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON, 14 September 1940

To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG (Dictated letter), 16 September 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 18 September 1940

To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, 22 September 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 September 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (POSTCARD), 13 October 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), Postmark 14 October 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 15 Octobre 1940

To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 17 October 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 25 Octobre 1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 29 October 1940

To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, 29 October 1940

To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, 31 October 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 1 November 1940

To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 3 November 1940

To LOUIS GILLET, le 3 Novembre 1940

From CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 8 Nov. 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 10 Novembre 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 11 November 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, 19 November 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 20 November 1940

To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, 22 November 1940

To ARMAND PETITJEAN, 23 November 1940

To LOUIS GILLET, le 23 Novembre 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO (Telegram), 25 November 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 26 Novembre 1940

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 November 1940

To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 1er Decembre 1940 [Postcard]

To ARMAND PETITJEAN, 3 December 1940

To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, [? 5 December 1940]

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 6 Decembre 1940. 3 p.m.

To PAUL RUGGIERO (Telegram), 13 December 1940

To EDMOND JALOUX, 17 December 1940

To THE MAYOR OF ZURICH, Der 20 Dezember 1940

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1941

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 1 January 1941

To ERNST WERTHEIMER (Cablegram), 1 January 1941

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 January 1941

Part I

Dublin and Paris
1882–1904

1890

From REVEREND T.P. BROWN, S.J., to MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 March 1890

Clongowes Wood College

MS. Yale

My dear Mrs Joyce Jim is getting a formidable letter into shape for you—if he has not already sent it. I attacked him, on getting your letter, for his silence. He met me by saying that he had written but had not given the letter to be posted.

He is very well—his face being, as usual, very often well marked with any black thing that comes within reach. He has been taking the cod liver oil regularly.

With best wishes and kindest regards to Mr Joyce Yours very sincerely

T P Brown

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1900

From W.L. COURTNEY, 19 January 1900

Fortnightly Review, 11 Henrietta Street Covent Garden, London

TS. Cornell

My dear Sir, I am sorry to say that my February Number is complete, and that I could not possibly find room for any additional article. I am sorry for this, as I should have liked to have got in some reference to Ibsen’s new Play. I suppose it would be too late for the following Issue, as Mr Heinemann tells me that it will shortly appear in several languages?

With many thanks and regrets, Believe me, Faithfully yours,

W.L. Courtney

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From W.L. COURTNEY, 3 February 1900

Fortnightly Review, 11 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London

TS. Cornell

My dear Sir, I think I shall be able to use your article on Ibsen’s New Drama. I am asking Mr Heinemann, the publisher, for Mr Archer’s English translation, as I do not fancy the French translation is very good. If I get it in time, I will send it on to you, and you will perhaps be able to substitute English for French, but I am afraid I must ask you to kindly cut out the reference to Mr Pinero on pages 41 & 42. Faithfully yours,

W.L. Courtney

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From WILLIAM ARCHER, 23 April 1900

2 Vernon Chambers, Southampton Row, W.C.

MS. Cornell

Dear Sir I think it will interest you to know that in a letter I had from Henrik Ibsen a day or two ago he says ‘I have read, or rather spelt out, a review by Mr James Joyce in the Fortnightly Review which is very benevolent (“velvillig”) and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ Yours truly

William Archer

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To WILLIAM ARCHER, 28 April 1900

13 Richmond Avenue, Fairview, Dublin

MS. British Museum

Dear Sir I wish to thank you for your kindness in writing to me. I am a young Irishman, eighteen years old, and the words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life. Faithfully yours

Jas A. Joyce

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To WILLIAM ARCHER, 30 August 1900

8 Royal Terrace, Fairview, Dublin

MS. British Museum

Dear Mr Archer I send you here my play. I hope that the MS will not give you any trouble in the reading. I am most anxious to hear your judgment upon it. Faithfully yours

Jas A. Joyce

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From WILLIAM ARCHER, 15 September 1900

2 Vernon Chambers, Southampton Row, W.C.

TS. Yale

Dear Mr. Joyce, I have at last found time to read your play. It has interested me and puzzled me a good deal—indeed, I scarcely know what to say of it. You seem to me to have talent—possibly more than talent—and yet I cannot say that I think this play a success. For the stage, of course,—the commercial stage at any rate—it is wildly impossible—no doubt you realize that. But taking it simply as a dramatic poem, I cannot help finding the canvas too large for the subject. It narrows down in the last act into a sort of love tragedy—almost a duologue—but in order to reach that point you construct a huge fable of politics and pestilence, in which the reader—one reader at any rate—entirely loses sight of what I presume you intend for the central interest of the drama. I have been trying to read some elaborate symbolism into the second and third acts to account for their gigantic breadth of treatment, but if you had a symbolic purpose, I own it escapes me. It may be very good symbolism for all that—I own I am no great hand at reading hieroglyphics.

On the other hand you have certainly a gift of easy, natural and yet effective dialogue, and a certain sense of scenic picturesqueness. The scene between Paul and Angela in the last act is curiously strong and telling, if only it were led up to or, in its turn, led to anything definite. On the whole, however, you seem to me to be deficient as yet in the power of projecting characters so as to seize upon the reader’s attention and kindle his imagination. It is true that you unduly handicap yourself in this respect by crowding your stage with such a multitude of figures that Shakespeare himself could scarcely individualize them. At the end of the first act I didn’t begin to know one of your characters from another, and as for guessing that the interest of the play was to centre in the ‘dépit amoureux’ of Paul and Angela, I had no such divination. You may say that I clearly didn’t read with sufficient attention. Perhaps not—but then it was your business to arouse my attention. Indeed it was only in the third act that the characters began to stand out for me at all. I tell you frankly what I felt—no doubt other people might be more keenly perceptive, but it is always something to know the effect you have produced upon one entirely well-disposed reader.

I don’t know whether you want really to write for the stage. If you do, I have no hesitation at all in advising you, by way of practice, to choose a narrower canvas and try to work out a drama with half a dozen clearly designed and vividly projected characters. If you could show me such a play, I should at least be able to form a fair judgment of your real talent. At present I am interested and a good deal impressed, but also, I must confess, a good deal bewildered.

If you do not think me too much of a wet blanket, I shall be very glad to read anything else in the dramatic way that you care to send me. Yours very truly

William Archer

I will return the MS on Monday.

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1901

To HENRIK IBSEN, March 1901

8 Royal Terrace, Fairfield, Dublin

Honoured Sir: I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play, When We Dead Awaken, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews—The Fortnightly Review—over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in The Fortnightly Review by Mr James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held as high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your works at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.

What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through the college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence—your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims—your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony—these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper—I am not so. And when I spoke of you in debating societies and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.

But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me—not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now. Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way—though you have gone as far as you could upon it—to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth—but your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.

As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting—not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly, because you are an old man and I am a young man, not presumptuously nor sentimentally—but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.

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From WILLIAM ARCHER, [About 15 September 1901]

71 Alleyn Park, West Dulwich S.E.

TS. Yale

Dear Mr. Joyce, I confess myself a good deal puzzled what to say about your verses; and it is that uncertainty which has kept me silent so long. I think, if you will forgive my saying so, that there is as yet more temperament than anything else in your work—you feel and you imagine poetically, but I do not find that as yet you have very much to say. Perhaps this is a mere narrowness of taste on my part; but I confess to a preference for poetry embodying a definite thought, or a distinct picture, rather than poetry which suggests only a mood. You will say that this criticism would equally apply to most of Verlaine and a good deal of Shelley. Well, perhaps it would; but you have got to write as exquisitely as they before you can validly plead their precedent.

The pieces I like best are Wanhope, The Final Peace, Commonplace, The Passionate Poet and Tenebrae. In all of these I see very real promise. But do pray let me beg you not to cultivate metrical eccentricities such as abound especially in the opening lines of the collection. In the first piece, for instance, I have marked four lines that seem to me mere stumbling-blocks and rocks of offense. I have also marked a line in Tenebrae which I almost think you must have miscopied—didn’t you mean to write ‘unto our call’? Also such rhymes as ‘clothes’ and ‘those’ will scarcely pass muster in serious verse—and to my thinking you are much too fond of identical rhymes—I mean ending two lines with absolutely the same word—a trick to be very sparingly employed in English verse. But enough of these pedantries.

My book of Poets, as you will see from the enclosed announcement, is long ago finished and will be out very soon. I had not heard of Mr. Gregan’s work; but indeed my list of poets was completed and the book to all intents and purposes finished, two years ago. Yours very truly

William Archer

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From WILLIAM ARCHER, 26 September 1901

71 Alleyn Park, West Dulwich S.E.

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Joyce What you say about your verse is no doubt very true. There is only one tangible point on which I think you are not quite right, and that is a trifle. Of course an inverted stress (or a trochee) is, as you say, so common in the first place in an iambic line as to be the rule rather than the exception; but it is very uncommon, and to my ear very unpleasing, in the second place, as in your ‘Open, open’ etc. If you shd ever come across my book of Poets, you will find this matter discussed at some length in the article on Stephen Phillips. As to identical rhymes, they are of course freely accepted in French poetry, but not in English—a difference in national taste which is probably inexplicable, but is an unquestioned fact.

I think the probability is that if you published these poems now you would one day regret it—that is, if your talent develops freely and normally. But it is not always wise to refrain from action in the present because we think we may regret it in the future. Perhaps the publication of the poems might expedite your development—who knows? As to the method of setting about it, I know no more than you do. Ask someone who has published poetry; or if you don’t know any one who has experience to guide you, simply send the MS to a publisher and see what he says. Yours very truly

W. Archer

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1902

From GEORGE RUSSELL, [Early August 1902]

[22 Lincoln Place]

MS. Yale

Dear Joyce Could you come on Monday evening next to see me? I think it would be better than Sunday. No one will disturb us and I want to have a good talk with you. Please let me know if you can come then. I am threatened with an invasion of other folk on Sunday evening and it is impossible to talk while there is a general gatherings of odds and ends of acquaintances. Yours sincerely

Geo. W. Russell

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From GEORGE RUSSELL to W.B. YEATS, [?11 August 1902] Monday

22 Lincoln Place

MS. Yale

Dear W.B.Y., I have been so busy here that I do not know what the Fays are doing except that they are rehearsing very energetically. I expect to see W. Fay in a day or so and will talk to him about the matters referred to in your letter with which I agree. I heard nothing about the comedy by ‘Mise’ before. I think however it stands no chance of being acted at present as I know they will hardly be able to get through the programme already fixed. I have been so busy that I was unable to get at Lady Gregory’s pastel but hope to do so this week. My Sundays are engaged sitting to your father who is working on a portrait some eccentric American wants painted of me.

I want you very much to meet a young fellow named Joyce whom I wrote to Lady Gregory about half jestingly. He is an extremely clever boy who belongs to your clan more than to mine and more still to himself. But he has all the intellectual equipment, culture and education which all our other clever friends here lack. And I think writes amazingly well in prose though I believe he also writes verse and is engaged in writing a comedy which he expects will occupy him five years or thereabouts as he writes slowly. Moore who saw an article of this boy’s says it is preposterously clever. Anyhow I think you would find this youth of 21 with his assurance and self-confidence rather interesting. He is I think certainly more promising than Magee.

I am glad to hear you are working on a poem about Maeve. I have escaped from my brief folly of play writing and am working away at lyrics which come rapidly after a long silence of a couple of years. I will write you after seeing Fay. Kind regards to Hyde and Lady Gregory. Yours ever,

Geo. W. Russell

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From GEORGE RUSSELL to SARAH PURSER, 15 August 1902

22 Lincoln Place

Dear Miss Purser, Thanks for your letter and cheque which I shall hand to Fay on his return to Dublin on Sunday. He is in Cork stagemanaging some Gaelic Plays today. I am sure the account will be good by then. The fiery youths of the company are rehearsing up to 12 o’c and they have every intention of making Dublin quake. I cant go and start a bank while you are at Mallenmow I am sorry. Norman is away for a couple of days, and I am Editor and Miss Mitchell rolled into one. The latter is getting better and is in good spirits. She seems to be having a good time and will be back here 25th about. I expect to see my young genius on Monday and will find out more about him. I wouldn’t be his Messiah for a thousand million pounds. He would be always criticising the bad taste of his deity. Yours ever,

Geo. W. Russell

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From GEORGE RUSSELL, [Early October 1902]

[22 Lincoln Place]

MS. Yale

My dear Joyce Yeats will be in Dublin all this week and will be at the Ancient Concert Rooms every night. He would like to meet you, and if you could come here on Tuesday at 5.00 I will bring you to his hotel. I told him I would try to get you to come at that hour if possible. If this will not suit you you could call some other time on him yourself with this letter. He is staying at Nassau Hotel, South Frederick St. He will be glad to see you.

Geo. W. Russell

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From W.B. YEATS (Fragment of a dictated letter), [October? 1902]

MS. Yale

but I cannot say more than this. Remember what Dr Johnson said about somebody ‘let us wait until we find out whether he is a fountain or a cistern.’ The work which you have actually done is very remarkable for a man of your age who has lived away from the vital intellectual centres. Your technique in verse is very much better than the technique of any young Dublin man I have met during my time. It might have been the work of a young man who had lived in an Oxford literary set. However men have started with as good promise as yours and have failed and men have started with less and have succeeded. The qualities that make a man succeed do not show in his work, often, for quite a long time. They are much less qualities of talent than qualities of character—faith (of this you have probably enough), patience, adaptability (without this one learns nothing), and a gift for growing by experience and this is perhaps rarest of all.

I will do anything for you I can but I am afraid that it will not be a great deal. The chief use I can be, though probably you will not believe this, will be by introducing you to some other writers who are starting like yourself, one always learns one’s business from one’s fellow-writers, especially from those who are near enough one’s own age to understand one’s own difficulties. Yrs scy

W B Yeats

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From W.B. YEATS, 3 November 1902

Nassau Hotel, South Frederick St, Dublin

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Joyce: Lady Gregory begs me to ask you to come and dine with her at the Nassau Hotel to-morrow (Monday) at 6.45. to meet my father. Yrs scy

W B Yeats

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From the SECRETARY of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, 20 November 1902

Paris

TS. Yale

Monsieur, Ce n’est point la Faculté de médecine, mais le Ministère de l’Instruction publique qui statue dans chaque cas particulier, sur les demandes formées par les étrangers, dans le but d’obtenir des facilités pour la recherche du diplôme universitaire français de docteur en médecine.

Je ne puis que vous conseiller de vous mettre en instance auprès de M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique, en vous conformant aux indications contenues dans la note ci-jointe.

La décision de M. le Ministre dont vous recevrez avis, vous fixera sur les conditions qui vous sont faites.

Recevez, Monsieur, l’assurance de ma considération très distinguée.

Pr Le Doyen:
Le Secrétaire de la Faculté

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From GEORGE RUSSELL, [About 20 November 1902]

[Dublin]

MS. Yale

Dear Joyce I have written Miss Gonne and Lady Gregory, and will let you know anything further I may hear from them. George Moore is useless. I saw him today and he was in one of his bad moods, irritable about everything, and as I expected before I went, he said his friends in Paris would wonder why the devil he sent anybody to see them who was not in their craft. I think Miss Gonne is more hopeful as an acquaintance there. Yeats may know more people in Paris than I and I think you should write to him now and give him time to meet people before you go to London. If I can think of anybody or anything likely to help you there I will write you and hope to see you again before you go. Yours sincerely

Geo. W. Russell

P.S. There was a M. Dubois who wrote an article in ‘Revue des 2 Mondes’ (I think) about Irish literature modern writers, who is a professor in some College. Could you get a letter to him?

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From LADY GREGORY, [? 23 November 1902]

Coole Park, Gort, Co. Galway

MS. Cornell

Dear Mr Joyce Indeed I will help you in any way I can—though I am not yet quite clear in what way that may be, as my only real friend in Paris is a very devout Catholic Churchman. But I am writing to consult other friends. I suppose the real help would be a chance of giving some lessons? And I am writing to a friend J.M. Synge (but am not sure if he is in the isles of Aran—he will not be in Paris this year—so there may be a delay) who has lived for a good many years in Paris on very small means and could probably give you practical advice. I will ask him to write direct to you.

I am very sorry indeed that you cannot stay in Ireland. I don’t like to lose you for us here. Was there not an idea of your entering Trinity? I suppose you are pressed for time, or I would ask you to come here for a day or two and talk things over. Have you written to Mr Yeats? His rooms are close to Euston, and it would not be at all out of your way to go to breakfast with him when you get to London. He was very much interested in you and I am sure would do anything he could. I have no doubt of success for you some day, but you may have a hard fight first and ‘knock your ribs against the earth.’ I think, from what you said, that you would not like to publish those poems till the sequence is complete, but you should probably be able to get something for them from a magazine. Please write and tell me more—why you do not think of Trinity? What do your people say? I do hope you will get on well without too long a wait. I often think of those lovely verses, and try to remember lines of them. I will write again before you go. Yours sincerely

Augusta Gregory

Do you know Longworth, ed. of the Express? He has French connections and might be useful to you.

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From WILLIAM ARCHER, 25 November 1902

71 Alleyn Parle, West Dulwich, S.E.

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Joyce I am going to Italy on Friday, so cannot see you as you pass through London. If you carry out your intention of going to Paris, and care to call upon Miss Blanche Taylor at 28 Avenue Friedland, I will write to her asking her to give you any information she can. But I am sure she will only tell you that you are in a hopeless quest. Indeed I cannot dissuade you too strongly from making this attempt, if you are really dependent on earning money by teaching English. The market for such teaching is, I believe, extravagantly overstocked in Paris, and even if you did ultimately get a little teaching, you could not possibly combine it with medical studies. It is hard enough by giving lessons all day to keep body and soul together in Paris; and how you can expect to do that, and at the same time qualify as a doctor, passes my comprehension.

Forgive my frankness. It is, of course, no business of mine; but I am sure you are making a mistake. Yours faithfully

William Archer

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From W.B. YEATS, [? 25 November 1902] Tuesday

18 Woburn Buildings, Euston Road

MS. Cornell

My dear Joyce. I have just heard from Lady Gregory about your plan of going to Paris to study. It seems that you leave Dublin Monday night, and cross to Paris Tuesday night. If I am right I hope you will breakfast with me on Tuesday morning. I shall set my alarm clock and be ready for you as soon as the train gets in. You can lie down on my sofa afterwards and sleep off the fatigue of the journey. You can dine with me and catch your Paris train afterwards. I hope you will come to me as I should like a good talk. I think you should let me give you one or two literary introductions here in London as you will find it much easier to get on in Paris (where perhaps a great many people do not want to learn English) if you do some writing, book reviews, poems etc. for the papers here. This kind of work never did anybody any harm. Your poems will bring you something at once, I should think. Yours sincerely

W B Yeats

PS. I could get ‘The Speaker’ I have little doubt to take verse from you and to give you a chance of doing some reviewing. I brought them a young man a while back, whom they look upon as one of their best writers and I have no doubt they will be quite ready to expect as good from you. But we can talk over these things.

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Letter from T.C. HARRINGTON to whom it may concern, 29 November 1902

Mansion House, Dublin

TS. Private

I know the bearer Mr. Joyce since his childhood, and I am also well acquainted with his family. He is a young man of excellent character and whose career as a student has been distinguished by industry and talent.

He goes abroad to have an opportunity of further pursuing his studies and I look forward with very great hopes to his having the same brilliant success that he has had at home.

T.C. Harrington
Lord Mayor.

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To LADY GREGORY, N.D. [November 1902]

7 St Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

Dear Lady Gregory: I have broken off my medical studies here and am going to trouble you with a history. I have a degree of B.A. from the Royal University, and I had made plans to study medicine here. But the college authorities are determined I shall not do so, wishing I dare say to prevent me from securing any position of ease from which I might speak out my heart. To be quite frank I am without means to pay my medical fees and they refuse to get me any grinding or tuitions or examining—alleging inability—although they have done and are doing so for men who were stuck in the exams I passed. I want to get a degree in medicine, for then I can build up my work securely. I want to achieve myself—little or great as I may be—for I know that there is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris. I intend to study medicine at the University of Paris supporting myself there by teaching English. I am going alone and friendless—I know of a man who used to live somewhere near Montmartre but I have never met him—into another country, and I am writing to you to know can you help me in any way. I do not know what will happen to me in Paris but my case can hardly be worse than it is here. I am leaving Dublin by the night boat on Monday 1st December and my train leaves Victoria Station for Newhaven the same night. I am not despondent however because I know that even if I fail to make my way such failure proves very little. I shall try myself against the powers of the world. All things are inconstant except the faith of the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.

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To LADY GREGORY, 1 December 1902

7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra

Dear Lady Gregory, I am leaving tonight for Paris and I am to meet Mr Yeats tomorrow morning. Mr Longworth wrote to me and I saw Mr Synge. Dr MacLagan also wrote to me. I have not any definite news yet but as soon as I have any I shall tell you. You have been kind to me and only for you I don’t know how I should be. I hope you will forgive me for giving you so much trouble. I am sorry I could not write more often during the week but I am dead tired at present from constant moving about. Let me thank you again for your great kindness. Faithfully yours

Jas. A. Joyce

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To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 December 1902

Hôtel Corneille, 5 rue Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Pappie I have arrived safely but am so busy seeing people that I shall not be able to write till Sunday. I expect by then to have definite news. Mr O’Connell was out of town but I left a note for him. Mr Yeats is to write me the result today or tomorrow. I send in reviews tomorrow and hope to receive Stannie’s letter in the morning. Tell Mother that Dr Rivière gave me a déjeuner of seven courses today. So much saved!

Jim

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To his FAMILY in Dublin, 6 December 1902

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Everybody, Mr Yeats went to see the editor of ‘The Speaker’ in London but he was ill and I expect a letter every day: he is also to go to the editor of the ‘Academy’. He wrote to Miss Gonne, a letter of whose I enclose. He also introduced me to Arthur Symons and wants me to review for the Speaker a book of Symons’s—a translation of Francesca da Rimini. I breakfasted, lunched and dined with him and he paid all the hansoms and busses. I sent in my reviews to the ‘Express’ a day or two ago, so look out in the Express at the beginning of the week. I have certain definite information about the medical course. The first thing is to have a French baccalauréat but those who have foreign degrees may be dispensed therefrom by the Minister of Public Instruction. I have written to the Minister and this morning called at the Ministry and was told there that the dispensation would probably be accorded me in a few days. Thereupon I went to the Secretary of the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne and he gave me a provisional card of admission to the course for the certificate in physics, chemistry and biology (the whole year’s work). There are no fees to pay for lectures but the lectures begin at 9 in the morning continuing for an hour or two hours and practical work begins in the afternoon at 1.30 and goes on for two or three hours. There are no written exams: all exams are oral and last about a quarter of a⁠[n] hour. My exam for the certificate will come off July next. I am somewhat late as the last day for demands to the Minister was 1 Dec, but I daresay, as I am a foreigner, I will be excused. I can therefore have a fortnight or so to work between this and Christmas. I have bought an alarm-clock (4 francs) to waken me in time in the mornings as the school is some distance away. I had a bath just now (7½): warm. I can get breakfast for 3d, dejeuner (soup, meat, dessert, coffee) for 8d or 9d and dinner (soup, fish, meat and vegetables, dessert, coffee) for 1s/–. But I am obliged to take coffee constantly through the day. Coffee is taken here during the day without milk but with sugar. This I find to my taste as the weather here is very severe, sometimes going down to 7 or 9 degrees below zero. The wind too is very keen but there is neither fog nor rain. Tell Stannie to go to Eason’s in Abbey St where I ordered and paid for a certain quantity of paper, and tell them to forward it to me. They will do this if the carriage is paid. I forgot it in the hurry of going away. I have not had time yet to work up my letters of introduction—except some—but I shall do so during the week. I have to get an apron and sleeves and a dissecting case at once if I begin work on Monday, and my money will not be due in Paris from Lloyd’s till Thursday. However I daresay I shall manage. I intend next week to look around for a room at about 1£ or 8£ the year—35s/– the three months and engage it from January 1st, and my month will be up in the hotel here on January 3rd and I think the courses will begin again on January 4th. There is magnificent Norman furniture in a shop here—heavy wooden presses with panelled doors—5£ for one about twice as big as your wardrobe and though I cannot buy these yet for my room I shall certainly get them as soon as I can when I have definitely settled myself in Paris for my medical course. No information is to be given about me to anybody except—‘O, Very Nicely, thank you.’ Tell Stannie to send me the December no of S. Stephen’s and to write to the Unicorn Press and to be careful of the books in my room.

Jim

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From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), [About 12 December 1902]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

you against drinking the water of Paris unless it is either well-filtered or boiled. Don’t forget this. Your Papie and the children and myself unite in sending you there fondest love. With fondest love Your fond

Mother

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To J.F. BYRNE (Postcard with photograph of Joyce), Postmark 15 December 1902

Hotel Corneille, 5 Rue Corneille, Paris

MS. Yale

Second Part—Opening which tells of the journeyings of the soul.

All day I hear the noise of waters

Making moan,

Sad as the sea-bird is when going

Forth alone

He hears the winds cry to the waters’

Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing

Where I go;

I hear the noise of many waters

Far below,

All day, all night I hear them flowing

To and fro.

[Unsigned]

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1902

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I enclose a letter I had a day or two ago from Mr Yeats. I answered saying I had left my manuscripts in Ireland but sent him a poem. I have at my disposal a position in the Ecole Berlitz, beginning at 150 francs a month (£7–10–0), but I should be at the school all day. However I am giving two or three lessons a week to a M Douce who gives me or will give me 20 or 25 francs a month (£1 or £1–5–0).

The weather is milder. I hardly know if I have anything to say. I received both your letters and see that I have alarmed you very much. My curious state has been followed by an equally curious weariness which is however painless. For instance I would prefer you wrote and I read. Write again if you like and say if I should go home for Christmas. Please ask Stannie to go to Hodges, Figgis, say I am here and have written to him to order ‘A Book of British Song’ by I don’t know whom, published recently by John Murray, London. I would like to go asleep now yet I did not get up till eleven, and it is now only two. I also feel as if I should not seek to express but simply listen to people. I am afraid I shall not easily settle down. I should not like to live in Paris but I should like to divide my existence. I shall set you some music in a few days which I want you to learn. M Douce will give me 10s/, the ‘Express’ £1–1–0, and the Academy, I daresay, £1–0–0: that is £2–11–0. Could you get a set of teeth for that? Do not be offended please because I cannot write.

Jim

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From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 17 December 1902]

7 St Peters Terrace, Cabra

MS. Cornell

My dearest Jim  Your photo postcard just reed. It will be time enough to decide about the Berlitz School after Xmas I am sorry to hear your funds are so low Your Pappie is not home yet so I cannot reply to this question at all events it is settled that you are to come home I think a great deal of your offer to get me my teeth out of yr first earnings and will not forget it. I do not like to hear you say you are not robust enough for the Dieppe route, you must be run down a good deal and the change home will do you good.

You will have a decisive letter from here not later than Monday morning possibly before which wd it be better to send ticket from here or let you get it yrself The encld came this morning answer it carefully and at once I opened it to see if there was an enclosure in which case I should have wired you Am short for time and cannot write more Yr loving

Mother

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From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), [? 18 December 1902]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

at night and if you buy a little spirit stove such as I use you could boil water for different purposes also a lamp to read by if lit early would take the chill off the atmosphere of the room. I only wish I was near you to look after and comfort you but we will be united very soon again thank God for home you must come if only for a week.

My dear Jim if you are disappointed in my letter and if as usual I fail to understand what you would wish to explain, believe me it is not from any want of a longing desire to do so and speak the words you want but as you so often said I am stupid and cannot grasp the great thoughts which are yours much as I desire to do so. Do not wear your soul out with tears but be as usually brave and look hopefully to the future Let me have a letter by return and for Gods sake take care of your health and if you get the little stove be very careful with it

Your Pappie and I are both upset about you so do not neglect writing and believe me Ever your loving

Mother

I enclose a letter which came from Charlie the morning after you left it may be some small comfort to know what the fond hearts at home think of you.

Return it carefully as I wish to preserve it amongst my keepsakes

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From W.B. YEATS (Dictated letter), 18 December 1902

#1 Montague Mansions, Portman Square, London

MS. Cornell

My dear Joyce, The last time I went to the ‘Speaker,’ and I think I have been twice since I wrote, I succeeded in finding somebody in. But when I spoke of my business, the man asked me to see the Editor, as he alone could act in such a matter and told me that the Editor would not be in town till after Xmas. I am sorry, but for the present you can send some prose to the ‘Academy’ if you feel an impulse to write. You had better mention my name so as to remind the Editor of what I told him. I won’t give him your little poem, for I gathered from his conversation that he does not like publishing verse, unless it has an obvious look of importance. He told me, for instance, that he would prefer two columns of verse if it were good, to a little lyric. If I had had all your MS I might have picked a little bundle of lyrics, but I think you had really better keep such things for the ‘Speaker’ which makes rather a practice of publishing quite short scraps of verse. I think the poem that you have sent me has a charming rhythm in the second stanza, but I think it is not one of the best of your lyrics as a whole. I think that the thought is a little thin. Perhaps I will make you angry when I say that it is the poetry of a young man, of a young man who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops. It went very nicely in its place with the others, getting a certain richness from the general impression of all taken together and from your own beautiful reading. Taken apart by itself it would please a reader who had got to know your work, but it would not in itself draw attention to that work. It has distinction and delicacy but I can remember that several of the other poems had more subject, more magical phrases, more passion. I would strongly recommend you to write some little essays. Impressions of books, or better still, of artistic events about you in Paris, bringing your own point of view in as much as possible, but taking your text from some existing interest or current event. You could send some of these at once to the Academy and others later on to the ‘Speaker.’ It is always a little troublesome getting one’s first start in literature; but after the first start, one can make a pittance if one is industrious, without a great deal of trouble. Yours sncly

W B Yeats

I am keeping the little poem as I have no doubt you have a copy.

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To LADY GREGORY, 21 December 1902

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

Hotel Corneille, Paris

Dear Lady Gregory Your letter has been forwarded to me but I have yet no definite news to give you except that I am going back to Dublin for the Christmas and leave Paris tomorrow night. Your friend Mr Longworth asked me to review two books. I did so, the reviews appeared a fortnight ago but I have received no money. My prospects for studying medicine here are not inviting. Mr Yeats is to see the editor of ‘The Speaker’ some time after Christmas and he suggested to the editor of the ‘Academy’ to take verses of mine but the editor of the ‘Academy’ wants columns of ‘really good verse’. When I have any definite news be sure I shall tell you. O yes—I am teaching a man here and he gives me 10 fr every fortnight. Paris amuses me very much but I quite understand why there is no poetry in French literature; for to create poetry out of French life is impossible. I have no sympathy with the ‘gallant’ French. I am glad the Germans beat them and hope they will beat them again. But heaven forbid the French should perish and the world lose such cooks and dancing masters. But—

Es war ein Konig in Thule

Gar treu bis an das Grab

the whole menagerie, beginning with round little M Loubet, couldn’t produce that because the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation Faithfully yours

James A Joyce

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To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Sunday, 21 December 1902

Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

My funds are low because among other things the little Parisian shopkeepers passed old louis off on me and once or twice Italian lire. I did not receive your telegram till I was going to dinner and as I had an engagement at the Paris Thespians at 9 o’c I could not go to Cook’s. I went today; it was shut. If my ticket is Calais–Dover, I leave here 9 o’c Monday evg, travel without stop and am in Dublin Tuesday evg 8.10 o’c. No use staying a day in London at this time of year as I had another letter from Mr Yeats (whom, however, I shall see) saying editor of ‘Speaker’ will not be back till after Christmas

Jim

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1903

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 21 January 1903

London

MS. Cornell

I have been appointed writer of literary and dramatic notes in Paris (with a suggestion that I should become Paris correspondent if my work pleases) for a new sixpenny weekly but the first no. will not appear till March. I have however to submit my contribution as soon as possible and the payment is very high (£2–2–0 per 1000 words or twice the pay of the ‘Academy’) I have seen the editor of the ‘Academy’ too and have left my article with him and he is to tell me whether he thinks I will suit his paper. I cannot see Mr Tuohy till late tonight. Be sure to push on the ‘Irish Times’ and to let me know how the matter is going and also what exactly O’Hara said. I have written also to Courtney and expect letters from him and from Archer (if he is in London) in the morning.

Jim

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 January 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I didn’t write before this as I was expecting the parcel which has not yet (Monday morning) arrived. I have sent in the review of that book to the Express so let Stannie look out for it. The name of the new paper is ‘Men and Women’ and the editor described it to me as something between the ‘Spectator’ and the ‘Tatler’ so if you buy these papers you can see for yourself. It will be a weekly, price sixpence. Tell Stannie to send me at once (so that I may have it by Thursday night) my copy of Wagner’s operas and if he can to enclose with it a copy of Grant Allen’s ‘Paris’. By the way at page 100 of ‘La Femme en Gris’ he will find a pawn-ticket for two books which must be seen to without delay. I am afraid I have let it lie too long. I hope Stannie is recovered by now and I hope you are doing what I told you. I met Archer at the Liberal Club but our talk though it lasted a long time was not very business-like. I also met Lady Gregory and had just time to see Mr O’Connell before I caught my train. The ‘Speaker’, I understand, though a good paper is a poor paper and so is the ‘Academy’ but perhaps I shall send them something. However I intend to explore among papers myself without any introduction. Don’t forget to urge on matters at home—I mean about Charlie’s preparing for that exam (sometime in the spring) and about Stannie. I hope you will write to me and if you do write also about the things that interest us. Tell Pappie I expect to hear how he is getting on with the ‘Irish Times’.

Jim

I delayed this letter till today (Tuesday) thinking there might be a letter in the parcel which would require an answer.

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 January 1903

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

My dear Jim May I be permitted to offer you my best wishes for your future which I, at one time, fancied may have been more rosey on your attaining your majority but, circumstances alter cases, and as my cases are circumcised I must ask you to forgive me, Jim, for the ‘might have been’ However I hope you will beleive [sic] me that I am only now, under I may tell you, very trying times, endeavouring to do my little best, but Jim you are my eldest Son I have always looked up to your being a fitting representative of our family one that my father would be proud of. I now only hope that you may carry out his ideas through your life and if you do, you may be sure you will not do anything unbecoming a gentleman, but that I am pressed for time I should write you more fully but tomorrow, Jim, I will write to you again. Your fond

Father

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 February 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I received the budget of cards &c on Monday morning but did not answer as the letters led me to expect something else. On Sunday night I did some washing (I could not spare any money for laundry) and hung it out to dry. On Monday I borrowed a few francs and took the train out to Saint-Cloud and came back to Paris in one of the little river-steamers. In the evening I went to the theatre. I had a letter and a cigarette-case from Aunt Josephine. The editor of the ‘Speaker’ wrote to [me] a day or so ago asking me to write a review of the French translation of Ibsen’s ‘Catilina’. I am doing so and hope to send it tomorrow if I can pay the postage I have not yet been paid by the ‘Express’ but I am sending them a critique of a première at Sarah Bernhardt’s theatre and a letter with it. Tell Pappie that when I was in London I went twice to see ‘Jimmy’ Tuohy but ‘Jimmy’ Tuohy was not there. I left a note for ‘Jimmy’ Tuohy saying I had to go on to Paris that night, telling him why I had called to see him, asking him could he be of any help, and giving him my address in Paris but ‘Jimmy’ Tuohy has not written to me yet. I expected to have had some definite news from you about the ‘Irish Times’. It would be quite easy for me to send any kind of news to that intelligent organ—motor news, dead men’s news, any news—for I have all the Paris papers at my disposal. It is strange that I have been able to do more with strangers that [sic] you can do with friends. I am naturally very pressed for money at present until ‘Men and Women’ starts so that sometimes I innocently seek out my acquaintance to ask after their health about lunch-time—a plan which succeeds with Frenchmen but fails with English and American. If you can wire me some money when you get this I shall be glad as I doubt if I can last till Tuesday. If ‘Men and Women’ allows me a thousand words a week that is £2–2–0– (I have sent them in my first contribution) and I do reviewing for the ‘Express’ and the ‘Speaker’ and if the ‘Irish Times’ is worked successfully I think I should make something over £200 a year. Tell Stannie to send me Grant Allen’s book and the February no of ‘S. Stephen’s’

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 February 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I send you two poems. The first one is for the second part and I fancy it will pique Eglinton’s curiosity. By the way I wrote nothing in my review of Everyman’s book (damn Everyman anyhow!) about the printing and binding. My little editor must have added that but I wrote about the people ‘who are beginning to talk a little vaguely about their friends the French’ which is pretty well—Was that in it?—I am feeling very intellectual these times and up to my eyes in Aristotle’s Psychology. If the editor of the ‘Speaker’ puts in my review of ‘Catilina’ you will see some of the fruits thereof. Words cannot measure my contempt for AE at present (I believe he didn’t write to Lady Gregory) and his spiritual friends. I did well however to leave my MSS with him for I had a motive. However I shall take them back as my latest additions to ‘Epiphany’ might not be to his liking. And so help me devil I will write only the things that approve themselves to me and I will write them the best way I can. It is the same way with boots. O, I have revelled in ties, coats, boots, hats since I came here—all imaginary! So damn Russell, damn Yeats, damn Skeffington, damn Darlington, damn editors, damn free-thinkers, damn vegetable verse and double damn vegetable philosophy!

Jim

I hear an army charging upon the land

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees,

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry amid the night their battle-name;

I moan in sleep, hearing afar their whirling laughter.

They ride through the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,

With hoofs clanging upon the heart, as upon an anvil.

They come triumphantly shaking their long green hair,

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore—

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?

Little white breast, O why have you left me alone?

When the shy star goes forth in heaven,

All maidenly, disconsolate,

Hear you amid the drowsy even,

One who is singing by your gate.

His song is softer than the dew

And he is come to visit you.

O bend no more in revery

When he at eventide is calling,

Nor muse who may this singer be

Whose song about my heart is falling?

Know you by this, the lover’s chant,

’Tis I that am your visitant.

JAJ Paris, 1903

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 21 February 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother Your order for 3s/4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two). Today I am twenty hours without food. But these spells of fasting are common with me now and when I get money I am so damnably hungry that I eat a fortune (Is/–) before you could say knife. I hope this new system of living won’t injure my digestion. I have no news from ‘Speaker’ or ‘Express’. If I had money I could buy a little oil-stove (I have a lamp) and cook macaroni for myself with bread when I am hard beat. I hope you are doing what I said about Stannie—but I daresay you are not. I hope the carpet that was sold is not one of the new purchases that you are selling to feed me. If this is so sell no more or I’ll send the money back to you by return of post. I think I am doing the best I can for myself but it’s pulling the devil by the tail the greater part of the time. I expect to be served with my bill (£1–6–0– with oil) any day and then my happiness is complete. My condition is so exciting that I cannot go asleep at night often till four in the morning and when I wake I look at once under the door to see if there is a letter from my editors and I assure you when I see the wooden floor only morning and morning I sigh and turn back to sleep off part of my hunger. I have not gone to Miss Gonne nor do I intend to go. With the utmost stretching your last order will keep me Monday midday (postage half a franc probably)—then, I suppose, I must do another fast. I regret this as Monday and Tuesday are carnival days and I shall probably be the only one starving in Paris.

Jim

Upa–Upa

Pierre Loti

[This is an air played on a flute by a single player, followed by a chorus of women. It is played before the queen of some Indian island on occasions of state and her women sing the chorus.]

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To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 February 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Pappie I received your telegraph order on Tuesday afternoon and dined. As it was the evening of the carnival, I allowed myself some luxuries—a cigar, confetti to throw, and a supper. I bought a stove, a saucepan, a plate, a cup, a saucer, a knife, a fork, a small spoon, a big spoon, a bowl, salt, sugar, figs, macaroni, cocoa &c and got my linen from the laundry. I now try to do my own cooking. For instance last night for dinner I had two hard-boiled eggs (these are sold here hard-boiled during Lent in red shells) bread and butter, macaroni; a few figs and a cup of cocoa. Today for dejeuner I had some cold ham, bread and butter, Swiss cream with sugar; for dinner I had two poached eggs and Vienna bread, macaroni and milk, a cup of cocoa and a few figs. On Sunday for dinner I shall make a mutton stew—mutton, a few potatoes, mushrooms and lentils, with cocoa and biscuits after. Tomorrow (for dejeuner) I shall finish my ham with bread and butter, Swiss cream and sugar, and finish my figs. I think I shall reduce my expenses in this way. Anyhow I hope I shall not fall asleep now as I used dreaming of rice-pudding, which for one who is fasting is not a nice dream. I am sorry to say that after my dinner on Tuesday I became very ill and at night I had a fit of vomiting. I felt very bad the whole of the following day but I am better today except for attacks of neuralgia—induced, I imagine, by my constant periods of fasting.

On Tuesday morning I received from the ‘Speaker’ the proof-sheets of my article which will therefore appear Sat. Feb. 28th if I am right. I suppose I shall be paid some time next week. I have no news from the ‘Express’. Stannie tells me my four reviews appeared. I sent them a fortnight ago a criticism of a performance of Sarah Bernhardt’s, as I told you, and a letter with it. I sent today an account of the carnival. As for my other paper it has not come out yet and until the Syndicate approves of the dummy copy no appointments can be made and there is no money. I understand that this dummy is now ready and I have consequently to wait. I shall try to let my tuition money (20 francs and 10 frs) remain intact till the end of March so as to pay my hotel-bill. I was favoured with my hotel-bill on Tuesday (£1–10–0 as I used seven candles (3s/–) before I got a lamp) I hope you will send this to me on the 1ST as the lady here is rather black in the face and has a whimsical way of looking at me when she sees me going up the stairs with milk sticking out of one pocket and bread and provisions out of another. I hope I won’t have to bother you for any more money if I get on all right. I am 18s/– in debt but that be hanged for the present. Your (and my) good friend Mr Tuohy took no notice of my letter as I told you. I see that nothing has been done at the ‘Irish Times’ and if I am [a] good judge of heavy heads nothing will be done with its manager who is, I think, very heavy in the head. I am seriously thinking of entering the church if I find editors and managers and ‘practical’ people so very stubborn as they appear to be.

Jim

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From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 2 March 1903

7 St Peters Terrace, Cabra

>MS. Cornell

My dearest Jim, Your Pappie has given me the enclosed to send to you (£1–12–0) which will make you safe with yr landlady until the end of this month he was very pleased you wrote to him and I hope you will do so frequently do not mind me I will hear all the news about you and will understand yr Pappie has been in a curious state of mind for some time past and would not trust me with any money whatever he is not so bad for the last few days so I hope it may pass away. I wrote to M. Kane and he spoke to O’Hara for you he O’H says you may send him any fresh news you can pick up in Paris under cover to himself Matthew O’Hara and he will work it up for you, so try him with the first thing you can find (quite new laid) Was yr article on the Carnival accepted or is there any news yet from Daily Express You will surely hear soon now and it is a good idea to safe your tuition money for yr rent I think your future life in Paris will chiefly depend on the new paper, as without some certainty to live on it would be misery to keep struggling in such a way and your health would suffer. Do not despair though for I feel still full of hope for you and this month will tell a great deal keep all your friends and in a suitable time call on Mrs McBride who received you well and whose marriage and love making naturally kept her from looking after more serious business and you will make a big mistake by not keeping as yr Pappie says ‘in touch with her’ you cannot get on in your line without friends. Stannie works steadily and fumes because he has no money to send you he is pulling up well and eats heartily Charlie is a conundrum I cant make him out, he simply refuses to take any appointment and says he will act as he likes and if we wish to put him out we can do so and talks about singing in the streets Stannie sets him sums and exercises in writing and french and marvellous to say is gentle and does his best with him so things are going on in this way for the present C— is very bitter against your Pappie on different accounts (drink etc) and seems to forget that anything whatever was ever done for him he speaks cruelly of his father. My dear Jim I cannot say I like these dispositions in Charlie but he may not be happy and this may cause him to act as he does he turns on me sometimes but that does not last but I often wonder how he can do so. He has been expecting a letter from you and seems disappointed Write an advice to him but dont allude to this letter from me which is purely for his good and private he believes implicitly in you and all you say to him. Your Pappie is not urging him to work but to study and get up his writing C. refuses to go to Maguires and any other academy so is as you see hard to deal with, everyone is doing the best they know for him but his hand is against us all except Stannie and of course you. I am troubled about him. The others are at school and May and Mabel showing cleverness the former anxious to advance herself and do well for the future the latter the peacemaker in troublesome times and invaluable to us all in this way though we fear her heart may suffer from frights. Florrie too does her part in this respect and your Pappie shows affection to both.

Poppie is beginning to cry out about herself she would go to any business or give time to be taught I would like to put her to some thing by which she would learn and have something for herself. The girl cannot even get shoes or a pair of gloves. Do not think my dearest Jim there is any meaning towards you in these lines it is simply talking just as we would do at the fire here I know you are doing your very best and have suffered actual want and if it were the last meal I had would share it with you

Remember to write every bit of news you have to your Pappie he is jealous of your letters and you could enclose a few in the one envelope if no money is sent to you when will you be run out I pray constantly for your spiritual and temporal welfare and am joined by Pappie and the children in this devotion.

God will bless you and prosper you my dear Jim till we meet again Your loving

Mother

To telegraph money costs between 3 and 4 shillings The suit you spoke of taking to the P.O. you said was too soiled if you send it to me by the Globe I could get it cleaned and sent back. I wd pay here on delivery

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To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 March 1903

Hotel Corneille, 5 Rue Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Pappie I have paid Baa-baa black sheep her bill 30s/– and have enough money to last me till Friday morning. Then I shall have finished the first half of my second month and I shall send you a table showing reduction of expenses. Stannie is to go tonight after you get this (not before eleven) to the ‘Express’, ask to see the editor and say from me that I should like to receive payment for my articles. Stannie could also suggest another batch of books to review. I am annoyed to hear that my article is not yet in the ‘Speaker’ as this defers payment for a week at least. I hear no news of O’Hara—no news on which I can act.

Jim

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To [MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE], [? 8 March 1903] Sunday 2.30 p.m.

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

I cannot cash your order today. I do not understand in the least what you write about Gaze’s. When you spend only three minutes at a letter it cannot be very intelligible. In any case Gaze’s was shut. My next meal therefore will be at 11 a.m. tomorrow (Monday): my last meal was 7 pm last (Saturday) night. So I have another fast of 40 hours—No, not a fast, for I have eaten a pennyworth of dry bread. My second last meal was 20 hours before my last. 20 and 40 = 60—Two meals in 60 hours is not bad, I think. As my lenten regulations have made me somewhat weak I shall go up to my room and sit there till it is time to go to bed. Your order will last me till Tuesday morning, as I shall be very hungry tomorrow. Douce has already paid me—how else did you think I was living so the only money coming to me here is 5 francs from my new pupil, Auvergniot.

Jim

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From J.M. SYNGE, [5 March 1903] Sunday

90 rue d’Assas

MS. Yale

Dear Joyce Very sorry to have missed you this morning. I did not get your card on my way out as there was no one in the ‘loge’ and I did not expect anything. When I got it at midday it was too late. Can you meet me tomorrow (Monday) under the Odeon Cloisters in front of your door at 10. A.M.? I will be there. I am only here for a week as I go back to London on Thursday or Friday, à demain

J.M. Synge

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 March 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I enclose you self-explaining documents though it costs something to send them. Write at once to the ‘Unicorn Press’. Get also the following books if you possibly can. ‘Everyman’ Is/– and 12 Elizabethan Songs (edited with original music by Janet Dodge) 3s/6— both published A H Bullen, 47 Great Russell St, London. I have written fifteen epiphanies—of which twelve are insertions and three additions. I was paid 25 frs on Sat—of which 8 went to pay off a part of my debts.—I shall have to use my tuition money when I am paid, I fear. Synge is here for a few days selling out—he can’t get on either and is going back to Ireland. He says the ‘Speaker’ is always slow but once you get a proof the article is sure to appear. He has written four plays—one of which ‘Riders to the Sea’ Arthur Symons and W B Yeats admire very much—Yeats told me it was quite Greek: and I suppose Synge will be boomed now by the Irish Theatre—the plays are all in one act. Synge gave me the MS of ‘Riders to the Sea’ and I have read it: it is a play of Aran in peasant dialect. I am glad to say that ever since I read it I have been riddling it mentally till it has [not] a sound spot. It is tragic about all the men that are drowned in the islands: but thanks be to God Synge isn’t an Aristotelian. I told him part of my esthetic: he says I have a mind like Spinosa. I cannot write a long letter as I am running for the post. I shall write to Charlie at the end of the week: tell him so. If you can knock out a few shillings on your own hook, do so and send them in God his name. I am half planning an entertainment. Tell me what you think of all this. Tell mother to go out now that spring is come and take walks. Damnably cold here.

Jim

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 17 March 1903

5.45 Grand Boulevard

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I have not been ‘home’ since morning so perhaps there is a letter there. I am afraid I must ask you to send me something as I do not know if my article has yet appeared in ‘Speaker’. Today makes my second month . .. I sent in the review of Lady Gregory’s book and shall send the others in a day or two. I thought someone would have sent me some shamrock. However Mr Casey gave me a bit. It is a pity I have no dress suit as he had an invitation to the Irish Ball tonight at the Salle Hoche. I am always on the fringes of things. I try to eat as much as I can, for Synge told me fasting cost him £30 for an operation.

Jim

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From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), 19 March 1903

S. Peters Terrace, Cabra

MS. Cornell

My dearest Jim I was glad to get yr postcard last night and to see you are at least keeping afloat I enclose money order for 9 shillings your article was not in last Sat Speaker it is very tedious but cannot in all conscience be much longer Have you any more news from Men and Women or do you think the idea is abandoned? Is there so far as you can see any prospect of more work for you from any source. This letter must be full of questions. How are yr clothes and boots wearing? and does the food you eat nourish you? Also have you drawn on yr tuition money yet? I want to know clearly what state you are in so be definite when writing and explain fully. I am sorry you missed that Irish ball as it might have benefited you in many ways The house here was upset at the time I should have sent the shamrock which I intended doing. Matters here are much as usual. Yr Pappie is still employed at Mnt. Sq. but I scarcely think it can last much longer Stannie attends his office steadily and seems to like it they should give him even a small salary it seems shabby to take his time for nothing however we must only hope for the best. His whole thought is to help you. Charlie is changed and is improved in his demeanour he speaks more sensibly and wishes to get something to do I earnestly hope he may succeed as I cannot see how things here are to be managed in the future. He was immensely pleased that you wrote him that letter which was religiously guarded except from Stannie.

The children are all in fairly good health I have just come from Eye Hospital Mays eyes were giving trouble the Dr says she has small ulcers but did not alarm us. (Dr Benson same as prescribed yr glasses) My own sight has become so bad that I can hardly see what I am writing glasses and all, my general health is better I am glad to say. How are yr teeth could you manage to have them attended to free you should make an effort I hope you have got yr face shaved otherwise you must be a dreadful sight [manuscript breaks off]

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 March 1903

Grand Hotel Corneille, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I have not heard anything yet from the paper you call ‘Men and Women’ but I shall write early next month—perhaps next week. I still continue with M Douce and M Auvergniot but I do not see any likelihood of my getting any more tuitions. I have drawn on my tuition money and am paid by M Douce up to 27 March and by M Auvergniot up to 16 March. Therefore when my hotel bill falls due I cannot meet it as I thought I could. However last night I made up my second month’s account and I have reduced my expenses from 161 francs to 106 francs (Hotel bills included)—a reduction that is of 56 francs—about £2–3–0. As against this however my debts in France remain now 19 francs: they were 18 francs at the end of last month. I paid off 7 francs as I told you and borrowed as much again. My reduction of expenses, however, is accompanied by a lack of clean linen—I have had one handkerchief for three weeks—but I have a grey tie which is something under a mile in length—it floats all over me so that it is difficult for the world to discover the state of my shirt. One boot is beginning to go—I knew that that bootmaker wouldn’t put leather in them. I have taken to wearing the ‘good’ black suit as the ‘other’ is impossible. The trouser-buttons of the ‘good’ black suit are falling out one after the other—however I have two safety pins and I shall stitch in buttons now that I have money to buy them. As for the food I get—I do not always get food only when I can. Sometimes I take one meal in the day and buy potatoes cooked and dry bread in the street. I do not know if I am getting lean or not. But, I can assure you, I have a most villainous hunger. Today I came laughing and singing to myself down the Boulevard Saint-Michel without a care in the world because I felt I was going to have a dinner—my first dinner (properly speaking) for three days. This shows what simpletons we all are. I sent in my review of Lady Gregory’s book a week ago. I do not know if Longworth put it in as I sent it: the review was very severe. I shall write to Lady Gregory one of these days. I am sending the two other reviews with this letter. I have not shaved nor do I intend to. When the ‘Speaker’ pays me I shall have a bath. I answered Fr Ghezzi’s letter. I shall answer Aunt Josephine on Monday. Every Sunday I try and get out into the country. Last Sunday I went out to the woods of Clamart and walked through them to Sèvres—coming back by steamer. I read every day in the Bibliothèque Nationale and every night in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. I often go to vespers at Notre Dame or at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. I never go to the theatre—as I have no money. I have no money either to buy books. Synge was over here selling out and gave me his play to read—a play which is to be produced by the Irish Literary Theatre. I criticised it. Synge says I have a mind like Spinoza! (Spinoza was a great Hebrew philosopher): I am at present up to the neck in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and read only him and Ben Jonson (a writer of songs and plays). Gogarty wrote to me a day or two [ago] and tells me that ‘John Eglinton’ said the other day (Stannie will tell you who he is) ‘There is something sublime in Joyce’s standing alone.’ My book of songs will be published in the spring of 1907. My first comedy about five years later. My ‘Esthetic’ about five years later again. (This must interest you!) Yeats (who is impressionable) said he knew me only a little time and in that time I had roared laughing at the mention of Balzac, Swinburne &c. I have more than once upset a whole French café by laughing. An old woman shook her umbrella in my face one day in Dublin—I was laughing so loudly. Come what may I will lunch tomorrow. You will oblige me very much if you will write to me and tell what you think of me. I shall read your letter with great anxiety.

Jim

Ask Benson about your own glasses, I am sure they are ruining your sight. Get him to prescribe proper glasses for you. Don’t fail to do this. Do you go out as I told you? I think you are in good health. I never saw you look better than the night I went home and you came into the hall. I never saw Pappie look better than on S. Stephen’s Day. Tell him so. He looked brown and healthy and neat. I hope he is still in good health. I was sorry to hear about poor old Thornton. However no-one that has raised up a family has failed utterly in my opinion. You understand this, I think. Why did you ask Stannie about the Irish Literary Theatre plays?

Jim

Georgie understood me, I am beginning to think.

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 23 March 1903 Monday 1.45

Avenue de l’Opéra, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I received on yesterday morning a copy of the ‘Speaker’ with my review in it. Out of the money you sent me I paid 2 frs to Mr Casey and have promised him the rest (5 frs) of what I owe him by Saturday as he says he has a bill to meet. I can get along until Wednesday noon on what I have. Of course the ‘Speaker’ may send me money tomorrow or Wednesday morning—I hope they won’t be as long in paying as they Avere in printing. In any case you might send something small as soon as you get this and I can let you know if the ‘Speaker’ has paid me or not. I sent in the two other reviews to the ‘Express’ on Saturday. Tell Stannie to look out for the three reviews. He can call soon to the ‘Express’ to get payment and some more books—not before I tell him. I shall send some notes to Mr O’Hara on Wednesday (or Thursday if I get only your money)

Jim

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 March 1903

Hotel Corneille

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother I am sending some notes to Mr O’Hara by this post. I called yesterday to see M. Fournier. He is at Monte Carlo but will be back tomorrow when I hope to see him. I am to go with Mr Casey’s son to visit the Comtesse Vercelli-Rawson next week. Is there any possibility of my paying Mr Casey on Saturday as I promised if the ‘Speaker’ does not send me some money? Can the ‘Express’ be afraid to insert my review of Lady Gregory’s book? Have either of the other reviews gone in? Tell Stannie to look well through the back nos. I could not cash your order today. You must have been late with it.

Jim

Blackface served up my bill this morning.

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From MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 27 March 1903]

7 St Peters Terrace

MS. Cornell

My dearest Jim I enclose 5/– pay Casey he must have worried you Stannie was not paid today and is furious on account of it I am hastening for post send me word when you hear from ‘Speaker’ I am waiting for yr measurements to get a suit. I will forward a parcel next week. You will hear from me on Wednesday I hope. I will write fully. Love from all. Your loving

Mother

don’t take any wrong meaning from this writing

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 April 1903

, [Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother, I am sending by this post to Mr O’Hara my interview with M Fournier. Did he get and insert my notes. I have paid my bill and can get on for two days more. No news from ‘Speaker’. Have any other reviews appeared in ‘Express’. Measure Stannie for my suit and have mine a little longer in the arms, leg 32½. A jacket (such as I wear at present) not any other kind of coat. I would prefer a blue suit. Send also a blue felt hat (to match)—the same shape as the one I wear now—Plasto’s, Brunswick St—no other kind. When you send the pudding make it into a strong-box-parcel, securely packed. It will be opened by the Douane and I don’t want it to come here half open. Tell Stannie to send me at once the March and April nos of ‘S. Stephen’s’ and a Holy Week Book—8°—large black print and no references (such as—‘see Psalm 13, p 104)—He will understand. When you send an order get it at G.P.O. before 6 o’c. I will explain later. Mr Casey says I owe him 3 frs more than I do. Send Holy Week Book in time for Tenebrae on Wednesday.

Jim

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To MRS JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 10 April 1903

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Mother Please write to me at once if you can and tell me what is wrong.

Jim

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To [JOHN STANISLAUS] JOYCE (Telegram), 11 April 1903

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Arrive morning

Jim

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To J.F. BYRNE, [18 April 1903] Saturday Night

7 S Peter’s Terrace, Cabra

Dear Byrne Would you care to meet me tomorrow (Sunday) in Prince’s St. at one o’clock? Perhaps you will not get this tomorrow morning as the post is upset.

J A J

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From FRANCIS SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON (Postcard), 29 September 1903

[Dublin]

MS. Yale

Could you take a few French classes (Matric & First Arts) for three or four days, while Mr. Merriman is engaged at Studentship examination? It would only be about four hours in all. Please let me know by return whether you will do this, and oblige

F.S. Skeffington
Registrar

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1904

To OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY, [Late March or early April 1904]

60 Shelbourne Road

MS. Colby College

Dear Gogarty If you have still any desire to aid me meet me tomorrow in the smoke-room Bewley’s, Westmoreland St.

JAJ

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From ARTHUR SYMONS, 21 April 1904

134 Lauderdale Mansions, Maida Vale, W.

MS. Cornell

Dear Mr. Joyce I have only just returned to England after an absence of nearly nine months in Italy, and in the middle of an immense crowd of letters I find one from you dated 14 November of last year. I am extremely sorry not to have been able to answer it sooner. What have you done with the poems? If they are still unpublished, it would interest me to see them, and if I can advise you what to do with them, I will gladly. Yours truly

Arthur Symons

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From ARTHUR SYMONS, 4 May [1904]

134 Lauderdale Mansions, Maida Vale, W.

MS. Cornell

Dear Mr. Joyce The poems seem to me remarkably good. They certainly ought to be published. I don’t know whether I can do anything, but I will try. I will write to you again as soon as I hear anything. Yours very truly

Arthur Symons

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To OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY, 3 June 1904

60 Shelbourne Road, Dublin

Dear Gogarty: I sent you back the budget. I am still alive. Here is a more reasonable request. I am singing at a garden fête on Friday and if you have a decent suit to spare or a cricket shirt send it or them. I am trying to get an engagement in the Kingstown Pavilion. Do you know anyone there? My idea for July and August is this—to get Dolmetsch to make me a lute and to coast the south of England from Falmouth to Margate singing old English songs. When are you leaving Oxford? I wish I could see it. I don’t understand your allusion. Chamber Music is the title for the suite. I suppose Jenny is leaving in a day or so. I shall call to say farewell and adieu. Her letter did not annoy me. The others did. I enclose one lest you should plume yourself. Ellwood is nearly cured. I have a rendezvous with Annie Langton. But you forget her? I have no news to report. Their Intensities and Their Bullockships continue to flourish. His Particular Intensity walks now unencumbered. Headley [?] is going for Greenwood Pim’s job in C P I—desires to be remembered to you. You will not have me faithfully. Adieu then, Inconsequent.

Stephen Daedalus

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To NORA BARNACLE, 15 June 1904

60 Shelbourne Road

MS. Cornell

I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!

James A Joyce

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 23 June 1904

No address

Dear Curran: The Accountant-General would not like me at present—black eye, sprained wrist, sprained ankle, cut chin, cut hand. I enclose eloquent note from Saturday Review. For one rôle at least I seem unfit—that of man of honour. However I will not groan through the post. Here is the marvellous novel delivered upon you by my twenty-third sister. An amiable creditor waited on me at breakfast yesterday for the return of fourpence which he had ‘lent’ me. If you are too busy to read the novel now, no harm. But as soon as you have read it send me word to meet you on some altitude where we can utter our souls unmolested. The ‘Titania’ people paid me in nods & becks & wreathed smiles. The Celbridge concert fell through. Nok sagt! Yours heroically, Stephen Daedalus.

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From NORA BARNACLE, 23 June 1904

2 Leinster Street

MS. Cornell

My Precious Darling a line to let you know I cant possibly meet you this evening as we are busy but if it is convenient for you on Saturday evening 8.30 same place with love from

N Barnacle

excuse writing in haste

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From GEORGE RUSSELL, [? June or July 1904]

The Irish Homestead, Dublin, Editorial Department

MS. Yale

Dear Joyce Look at the story in this paper The Irish Homestead. Could you write anything simple, rural?, livemaking?, pathos?, which could be inserted so as not to shock the readers. If you could furnish a short story about 1800 words suitable for insertion the editor will pay £1. It is easily earned money if you can write fluently and don’t mind playing to the common understanding and liking for once in a way. You can sign it any name you like as a pseudonym. Yours sincerely

Geo. W. Russell

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, Postmark: 3 July 1904 [Postcard]

No address

Je serai … votre bureau demain. Suis dans un trou sanguinaire.

J.A.J.

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, N.D. (?) 1904

The Rain, Friday (sic)

Dear Curran: Invaluable! A thousand feudal thanks! I have finished the awful chapter—102 pages—and Russell (A.E.) has the book now. I shall send you the chapter in a week. I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city. Look out for an edition de luxe of all my limericks instantly. More anon S.D.

S D (sic)

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To NORA BARNACLE, 8 July 1904

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Little Pouting Nora I can [not] meet thee tonight as I have to go out to Sandymount to some Italian who wants to see me. Be at corner of Merrion Sq. tomorrow at 8.30 Adieu, dear little brown head

J.A.J.

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To NORA BARNACLE, [? 12 July 1904]

60 Shelbourne Ed, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dear little Goodie-Brown-Shoes I forgot—I can’t meet you tomorrow (Wednesday) but will on Thursday at same hour. I hope you put my letter to bed properly. Your glove lay beside me all night—unbuttoned—but otherwise conducted itself very properly—like Nora. Please leave off that breastplate as I do not like embracing a letter-box. Do you hear now? (She is beginning to laugh). My heart—as you say—yes—quite so

A twenty-five-minutes kiss upon thy neck

Aujey.

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To GEORGE ROBERTS, N.D. Postmark, 13 July 1904, [Letter card in pencil]

G.O.P. [Dublin]

Dear Roberts: Be in the ‘Ship’ tomorrow at 3.30 with £1. My piano is threatened. It is absurd that my superb voice should suffer. You recognise a plain duty—Well then—

James Overman.

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To NORA BARNACLE, 21 July 1904

60 Shelbourne Rd

MS. Cornell

Dear Nora Excuse the paper. Please accept these as exchange is no robbery. Will you meet me tomorrow evening at 8.30? Hope my letter sleeps well every night. Most well-behaved glove—still.

Aujey.

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To NORA BARNACLE, [? Late July 1904]

60 Shelbourne Road, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My particularly pouting Nora, I told you I would write to you. Now you write to me and tell me what the deuce was the matter with you last night. I am sure something was wrong. You looked to me as if you were sorry for something which had not happened—that would would [sic] be very like you. I have been trying to console my hand ever since but can’t. Where will you be on Saturday night, Sunday night, Monday night, that I can’t see you? Now, adieu, dearest. I kiss the miraculous dimple at thy neck, Thy Christian Brother-in-Luxuriousness

J.A.J.

When you come next leave sulks at home—also stays

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To NORA BARNACLE, [Late July? 1904]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

My dear Nora I found myself sighing deeply tonight as I walked along and I thought of an old song written three hundred years ago by the English King Henry VIII—a brutal and lustful king. The song is so sweet and fresh and seems to have come from such a simple grieving heart that I send it to you, hoping it may please you. It is strange from what muddy pools the angels call forth a spirit of beauty. The words express very delicately and musically the vague and tired loneliness which I feel. It is a song written for the lute.

Jim

Song
(for music)

Ah, the sighs that come from my heart

They grieve me passing sore!

Sith I must from my love depart

Farewell, my joy, for evermore.

I was wont her to behold

And clasp in armes twain.

And now with sighes manifold

Farewell my joy and welcome pain!

Ah methinks that could I yet

(As would to God I might!)

There would no joy compare with it

Unto my heart to make it light.

Henry VIII.

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To NORA BARNACLE (Postcard), Postmark 2 August 1904

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Down by the sally gardens my love and I did meet

She paced the sally gardens with little snow-white feet;

She bade me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bade me take love easy as the grass grows on the weirs,

But I was young and foolish and now am full of tears.

W.B. Yeats

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To NORA BARNACLE, 3 August 1904

60 Shelbourne Road

MS. Cornell

Dear Nora Will you be ‘let out’ tonight at 8.30? I hope you will because I have been in such a whirl of trouble that I want to forget everything in your arms. So come if you can. In virtue of apostolic powers vested in me by His Holiness Pope Pius the Tenth I hereby give you permission to come without skirts to receive the Papal Benediction which I shall be pleased to give you Yours in the Agonising Jew

Vincenzo Vannutelli
(Cardinal Deacon)

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To NORA BARNACLE, [About 13 August 1904]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

My dear Nora You will find a sketch in this by me (‘Stephen Daedalus’) which may interest you. I believe there was hardly a thought in my head all day but one.

JAJ

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From DUBLIN PRINTING COMPANY, 14 August 1904

50 Mid. Abbey Street, Dublin

MS. Yale

Dear Sir Enclosed please find Proof of ‘The Holy Office’. Kindly correct and return for press at once. Faithfully yrs,

The Dublin Printing Co.

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To NORA BARNACLE, 15 August 1904

60 Shelbourne Road

MS. Cornell

My dear Nora It has just struck one. I came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me ‘Dear’. I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs.

When I am with you I leave aside my contemptuous suspicious nature. I wish I felt your head over my shoulder now. I think I will go to bed.

I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won’t sign anything at all, because I don’t know what to sign myself.

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From NORA BARNACLE, 16 August 1904

Leinster Street

MS. Cornell

My dearest My loneliness which I have so deeply felt, since we parted last night seemed to fade away as if by magic, but, alas, it was only for a short time, and I then became worse than ever, when I read your letter from the moment that I close my eyes till I open them again in the morning. It seems to me that I am always in your company under every possible variety of circumstances talking to you walking with you meeting you suddenly in different places until I am beginning to wonder if my spirit takes leave of my body in sleep and goes to seek you, and what is more find you or perhaps this is nothing but a fantasy. Occasionally too I fall into a fit of melancholy that lasts for the day and which I find almost impossible to dispel it is about time now I think that I should finish this letter as the more I write the lonelier I feel in consequence of you being so far away and the thought of having to write write [sic] what I would wish to speak were you beside me makes me feel utterly miserable so with best wishes and love I now close Believe me to be ever yours

xxxxxxx Norah Barnacle

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From J.F. BYRNE, 19 August 1904

Carrigmore, Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow

MS. Yale

Non possum tibi dare libram, quia maxima in impecuniosa conditione sum. Miro cur habes satirizatum amicos vestros, num pecunia eorum defuit? aut habent illi tecum pugnatum quando in periculis fuistis, et tibi datum nigrum oculum aut nasum fractum. Fleo quod non habeo pecuniam, sed impossibile est ex petro trahere lactam, aut ab ille qui summis in locis terrae nudus vivet, arripere quod non habet super crures ejus. Sum, sicut dicunt populi, vester

S.S. Joannes

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To NORA BARNACLE, [26 August 1904]

60 Shelbourne Rd

MS. Cornell

My dear Nora I hope you will accept these. Mr Cosgrave will meet you at 7.30 tomorrow (Saturday) evening. You will perhaps hear nothing wonderful from me as I shall be nervous. I hope you are not killed by this week. What a long time since I have seen you!

JAJ

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To NORA BARNACLE, 29 August 1904

60 Shelbourne Road

MS. Cornell

My dear Nora I have just finished my midnight dinner for which I had no appetite. When I was half way through it I discovered I was eating it out of my fingers. I felt sick just as I did last night. I am much distressed. Excuse this dreadful pen and this awful paper.

I may have pained you tonight by what I said but surely it is well that you should know my mind on most things? My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity—home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines. How could I like the idea of home? My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited. My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin—a face grey and wasted with cancer—I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim. We were seventeen in family. My brothers and sisters are nothing to me. One brother alone is capable of understanding me.

Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do. I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond. I started to study medicine three times, law once, music once. A week ago I was arranging to go away as a travelling actor. I could put no energy into the plan because you kept pulling me by the elbow. The actual difficulties of my life are incredible but I despise them.

When you went in tonight I wandered along towards Grafton St where I stood for a long time leaning against a lamp-post, smoking. The street was full of a life which I have poured a stream of my youth upon. While I stood there I thought of a few sentences I wrote some years ago when I lived in Paris—these sentences which follow—‘They pass in twos and threes amid the life of the boulevard, walking like people who have leisure in a place lit up for them. They are in the pastry cook’s, chattering, crushing little fabrics of pastry, or seated silently at tables by the café door, or descending from carriages with a busy stir of garments soft as the voice of the adulterer. They pass in an air of perfumes. Under the perfumes their bodies have a warm humid smell’—

While I was repeating this to myself I knew that that life was still waiting for me if I chose to enter it. It could not give me perhaps the intoxication it had once given but it was still there and now that I am wiser and more controllable it was safe. It would ask no questions, expect nothing from me but a few moments of my life, leaving the rest free, and would promise me pleasure in return. I thought of all this and without regret I rejected it. It was useless for me; it could not give me what I wanted.

You have misunderstood, I think, some passages in a letter I wrote you and I have noticed a certain shyness in your manner as if the recollection of that night troubled you. I however consider it a kind of sacrament and the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy. You will perhaps not understand at once why it is that I honour you so much on account of it as you do not know much of my mind. But at the same time it was a sacrament which left in me a final sense of sorrow and degradation—sorrow because I saw in you an extraordinary, melancholy tenderness which had chosen that sacrament as a compromise, and degradation because I understood that in your eyes I was inferior to a convention of our present society.

I spoke to you satirically tonight but I was speaking of the world not of you. I am an enemy of the ignobleness and slavishness of people but not of you. Can you not see the simplicity which is at the back of all my disguises? We all wear masks. Certain people who know that we are much together often insult me about you. I listen to them calmly, disdaining to answer them but their least word tumbles my heart about like a bird in a storm.

It is not pleasant for me that I have to go to bed now remembering the last look of your eyes—a look of tired indifference—remembering the torture in your voice the other night. No human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand, it seems, and yet you can treat my words with painful rudeness (‘I know what is talking now’ you said). When I was younger I had a friend to whom I gave myself freely—in a way more than I give to you and in a way less. He was Irish, that is to say, he was false to me.

I have not said a quarter of what I want to say but it is great labour writing with this cursed pen. I don’t know what you will think of this letter. Please write to me, won’t you? Believe me, my dear Nora, I honour you very much but I want more than your caresses. You have left me again in an anguish of doubt.

JAJ

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To C.P. CURRAN, 30 August 1904

60 Shelbourne Road

MS. Curran

My dear Curran, I am in double trouble, mental and material. Can you meet me tomorrow at half past four at smoke-room Bewley’s in Westmoreland Street? Yours truly,

James Joyce

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To NORA BARNACLE, [About 1 September 1904]

7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

MS. Private

Sweetheart I am in such high good humour this morning that I insist on writing to you whether you like it or not. I have no further news for you except that I told my sister about you last night. It was very amusing. I am going out in half an hour to see Palmieri who wants me to study music and I shall be passing your windows. I wonder will you be there. I also wonder if you are there will I be able to see you. Probably not.

What a lovely morning! That skull, I am glad to say, didn’t come to torment me last night. How I hate God and death! How I like Nora! Of course you are shocked at these words, pious creature that you are.

I got up early this morning to finish a story I was writing. When I had written a page I decided I would write a letter to you instead. Besides, I thought you disliked Monday and a letter from me might put you in better spirits. When I am happy I have an insane wish to tell it to everyone I meet but I would be much happier if you gave me one of those chirruping kisses you are fond of giving me. They remind me of canaries singing.

I hope you haven’t that horrible pain this morning. Go out and see old Sigerson and get him to prescribe for you. You will be sorry to hear that my grand-aunt is dying of stupidity. Please remember that I have thirteen letters of yours at present.

Be sure you give that dragoon’s stays to Miss Murphy—and I think you might also make her a present of the dragoon’s entire uniform. Why do you wear these cursed things? Did you ever see the men that go round with Guinness’s cars, dressed in enormous frieze overcoats? Are you trying to make yourself like one of them?

But you are so obstinate, it is useless for me to talk. I must tell you about my nice brother, Stannie. He is sitting at the table ½-dressed reading a book and talking softly to himself ‘Curse this fellow’—the writer of the book—‘Who in the devil’s name said this book was good’ ‘The stupid fuzzy-headed fool!’ ‘I wonder are the English the stupidest race on God’s earth’ ‘Curse this English fool’ etc etc

Adieu, my dear simple-minded, excitable, deep-voiced, sleepy, impatient Nora. A hundred thousand kisses.

Jim

 ® 

To NORA BARNACLE, 10 September 1904

The Tower, Sandy cove

MS. Cornell

My dear, dear Nora I suppose you have been very much upset since last night. I will not speak of myself for I feel as if I had acted very cruelly. In a way I have no right to expect that you should regard me as anything more than the rest of men—in fact in view of my own life I have no right at all to expect it. But yet I seemed to have expected it if only because I myself had never regarded anyone as I regarded you. There is something also a little devilish in me that makes me delight in breaking down people’s ideas of me and proving to them that I am really selfish, proud, cunning and regardless of others. I am sorry that my attempt last night to act according to what I believed to be right should have given you so much pain but I do not see how I could have acted otherwise. I wrote you a long letter explaining as well as I could how I felt that night and it seemed to me that you were putting aside what I said and treating me as if I were simply a casual comrade in lust. You will perhaps object to the brutality of my words but, believe me, to treat me as that is, so far as my attitude towards you is concerned, to dishonour me. Surely to God you are a woman and can understand what I say! I know that you have acted very nobly and very generously to me but try and answer my frankness with like frankness. Above all do not go about brooding as it will make you ill and you know that you are in delicate health. Perhaps you will be able to send me even a line tonight to say that you can forgive me for all the pain I have caused you.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE, 12 September 1904

The Tower, Sandycove

MS. Private

Dear Nora It is such a dreadful morning that I suspect we shall not be able to meet tonight. It is pouring rain here and the sea is flying up along the rocks. I should like to sit down here at the fire by myself, but I have to go into town shortly to meet Mr Cosgrave. It is just possible that it may become fine by evening, and, if so, I shall expect you, but do not come out unless it is fine. I hope you are getting better every day. Have you found that place on the map? If we don’t meet tonight—tomorrow at 8.

Jim

 ® 

From NORA BARNACLE, 12 September 1904

Leinster St

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim I received your letter which I return you many thanks I hope you did not get wet if you were in town to day I will be expecting to see you 8–15 to morrow evening hoping it will be fine I feel much better since last night but feels [sic] a bit lonely to night as it is so wet I was reading your letters all day as I had nothing else to do I read that long letter over and over again but could not understand it I think I will take it to you to morrow eve—and perhaps you might make me understand it

no more at present from your loving Girl

Nora x x x x x

excuse writing in haste

I suppose you will be lighting the fire when you get this

 ® 

To JAMES S. STARKEY, 15 September 1904

7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cobra, Dublin

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Starkey My trunk will be called for at the Tower tomorrow (Saturday) between 9 and 12. Kindly put into it—a pair of black boots, a pair of brown boots, a blue peaked cap, a black cloth cap, a black felt hat, a raincoat and the MS of my verses which are in a roll on the shelf to the right as you enter. Also see that your host has not abstracted the twelfth chapter of my novel from my trunk. May I ask you to see that any letters coming to the Tower for me are redirected to my address at once? Please rope the trunk as it has no lock. Faithfully Yours

Jas A Joyce

 ® 

To NORA BARNACLE, 16 September 1904

103 North Strand Road, Fairview

MS. Cornell

Dearest Nora—Letter-writing is becoming almost impossible between us. How I detest these cold written words! I thought I should not mind not seeing you today but I find that the hours spin out very long. My brain seems to be very empty now. When I was waiting for you last night I was even more restless. It seemed to me that I was fighting a battle with every religious and social force in Ireland for you and that I had nothing to rely on but myself. There is no life here—no naturalness or honesty. People live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end they are as far apart as ever. Are you sure you are not under any misapprehension about me? Remember that any question you ask me I shall answer honourably and truly. But if you have nothing to ask I shall understand you also. The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy. I hope you are not breaking all before you today. Perhaps you will relieve the slowness of tomorrow morning by letting me have a letter. It is only a week ago, you said, since we had our famous interview about the letters but is it not through such things that we have approached so closely to each other? Allow me, dearest Nora, to tell you how much I desire that you should share any happiness that may be mine and to assure you of my great respect for that love of yours which it is my wish to deserve and to answer.

Jim

 ® 

From NORA BARNACLE, 16 September 1904

Leinster Street

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim I feel so very tired to night I can’t say much many thanks for your kind letter which I received unexpectedly this evening I was very busy when the Postman came I ran off to one of the bedroom’s to read your letter I was called five times but did not pretend to hear it is now half past eleven and I need not tell you I can hardly keep my eyes open and I am delighted to sleep the night away when I cant be thinking of you so much when I awake in the morning I will think of nothing but you Good night till 7.- P M to morrow eve

Nora xxxxxxxxx

 ® 

From E. GILFORD, 17 September 1904

MIDLAND SCHOLASTIC AGENCY, MARKET RASEN, Lincs.

TS. Yale

Dear Sir, I have reserved for you a post as English Teacher in a Berlitz School ‘Continent’.

Please remit Com. Fee £2–2 so as to avoid delay and I will send name of town I am sending you to and all details. Yrs Truly

E. Gilford

 ® 

To NORA BARNACLE, [? 18 September 1904]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dearest Nora I have been in such a glow of pleasure since last night that I am quite restless today. I want to hear you say it a hundred times. How can you think I do not appreciate anything? Perhaps it is because my manner is so cheerful. My life has made me very reserved in what I say but you must not be disheartened by that. I dreamed of you last night. What is the good of my writing this stupid letter. I want simply to be beside you. I expect to see my brother in an hour or so to find out. Just this moment I have received a letter I was expecting but I shall not know definitely for a few days. Tonight 8.30.

Jim

 ® 

To NORA BARNACLE, 19 September 1904

103 North Strand Road, Fairview

MS. Cornell

Carissima It was only when I had left you some time that the connection between my question ‘Are your people wealthy?’ and your uneasiness afterwards struck me. My object, however, was to find out whether with me you would be deprived of comforts which you have been accustomed to at home. After thinking a good while I found a solution for your other question—this, that you were undecided whether I should be living in or out of the college. I slept very, very badly last night, waking four times. You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to ‘love’ then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.

I intended to tell you that if you receive the least hint of any act on the part of your people you must leave the Hotel at once and send a telegram to me (at this address) to say where I can see you. Your people cannot of course prevent you from going if you wish but they can make things unpleasant for you. I have to meet my father today and shall probably stay in his house until I leave Ireland so if you write write there. The address is 7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin. Adieu then, dear Nora, till tomorrow evening.

Jim

 ® 

From the BERLITZ SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES, London, 23 September 1904

231 Oxford Street, London

TS. Yale

Dear Sir, We have duly received your letter of yesterday, and according to your instruction, we have wired to you this morning that we don’t know the man you refer to and that we have no official agents for the engagement of teachers.

However, as we only control the Berlitz Schools of the United Kingdom, there might be on the Continent and especially in Germany, a few of our main branches, who, being independent as regards the engagement of the teachers, might have instructed the person you name to engage teachers on their behalf. However, we would not advise you to deal with any person until they have shown you the proper authority.

As regards your application for a post in France, we may be in a position to secure you one free of charge, as we are in direct relations with all the directors of the Berlitz Schools in France, and therefore, if you will kindly fill in the Registration Form enclosed and also your photo, if you have one, I shall then be able to let you know something definite. Yours truly,

G. Abraham
Director General

 ® 

From [POLICE], Market Rasen, Lincolnshire (Telegram), 23 September 1904

MS. Yale

Person well known respectable know nothing about question at issue

 ® 

To GRANT RICHARDS, 26 September 1904

7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

Dear Sir: Mr Arthur Symons has written to me saying that you have my book of verses Chamber Music under consideration. As a publishing business here (in conjunction with Macmillan) has offered to bring it out and as I myself shall probably be leaving Ireland in a fortnight for Holland I shall be glad if you will let me know whether you have come to any decision on the matter.

 ® 

To NORA BARNACLE, [26 September 1904]

7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dearest Nora I must tell you how desolate I have felt since last night. I was thinking, with my usual way of regarding things, that I had a cold but I am sure it is more than a physical ailment. How little words are necessary between us! We seem to know each other though we say nothing almost for hours. I often wonder do you realise thoroughly what you are about to do. I think so little of myself when I am with you that I often doubt if you do realise it. The mere recollection of you overpowers me with some kind of dull slumber. The energy which is required for carrying on conversations seems to have left me lately and I find myself constantly slipping into silence. In a way it seems to me a pity that we do not say more to each other and yet I know how futile it is for me to remonstrate either with you or with myself for I know that when I meet you next our lips will become mute. You see how I begin to babble in these letters. And yet why should I be ashamed of words? Why should I not call you what in my heart I continually call you? What is it that prevents me unless it be that no word is tender enough to be your name?

Jim

Write if you can find time.

 ® 

From NORA BARNACLE, 26 September 1904

2 Leinster St

MS. Cornell

Dearest Jim I hope your cold is better I notice you have got very silent lately I felt last night as if I had not seen you at all in consequence of you having to leave me so early when I came in I thought I could get to retire and not think of you so much but there was a great spree here and I need not tell you I did not like going amongst people whom I did not care for it was two o Clock when I got to bed I sat all the time like a fool thinking of you I longed for the time to come when I would not have to leave you

Dear Jim I feel so lonely to night I dont know what to say it is useless for me to sit down to write when I would prefer to be with you I hope you will have good news when I see you to morrow night I will try and get out 8–15 Giving you all my thoughts till then

Nora;

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To NORA BARNACLE, 29 September 1904

Michaelmas Day 7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

MS. Cornell J

My dearest Nora I have written to those people in London stating your willingness to accept their offer. I do not like the notion of London and I am sure you won’t like it either but at the same time it is on the road to Paris and it is perhaps better than Amsterdam. Besides I may have some business to do in London which can be best done personally. Still I am very sorry we must begin in London. Perhaps I may be sent direct to Paris, I hope I will.

I was speaking afterwards to Mr Cosgrave and I discover that I have unintentionally wronged him. He appears to have believed what he said to you. Consequently I did not report your advice to him about the way he carries his head. Mr Cosgrave is what is called a ‘solid’ man and he always looks at things from the most sensible point of view.

Sometimes this adventure of ours strikes me as almost amusing. It amuses me to think of the effect the news of it will cause in my circle. However, when we are once safely settled in the Latin quarter they can talk as much as they like.

I do not like the prospect of spending today without seeing you—last night hardly counts. I hope you are happier in your mind now that the boat is really beginning to whistle for us. You asked me to write you a long letter but really I hate writing—it is such an unsatisfactory way of saying things. At the same time remember that I expect you to write if you can at all. I discover now reading this letter that I have said nothing in it. However I may as well send it since it may relieve the dulness of your evening.

The sun is shining coldly through the trees in the garden here. The gentleman in the chapel has just rung the Angelus. My brother is grinning at me from the other side of the table. Now make yourself a picture of me if you can. Adieu donc, ma chérie,

Jim

 ® 

From W.B. YEATS, 2 October 1904

Coole Park, Gort, Co Galway

TS. Yale

My dear Joyce, I cannot send you your plays today, as it is Sunday, and the post won’t take parcels. I shall send them tomorrow, but have not quite finished them. I gave them to a friend who is a German scholar to read some time ago, and she saw, what indeed you know yourself, that you are not a very good German scholar. I have been meaning however myself to go over them, and have just got into them. I think however it is very unlikely that we can make any use of them for the theatre. I have already a translation of a Sudermann play made by a friend who seems anxious to do anything of that kind. You see at present we have absolutely no fund out of which we can pay for work of any kind. We are given a theatre but we shall have to make out of our performances every penny of our working capital. Later on of course we hope to be able to pay. Nor do I think it very likely we could attempt German work at present. We must get the ear of our public with Irish work. I am very sorry I cannot help you with money. I did my best to get you work as you know, but that is all I can do for you. Yours scy

W.B. Yeats

 ® 

From E. GILFORD (Telegram), 4 October 1904

Market Rasen

TS. Yale

Can you go Switzerland Thursday immediately send photo immediately wire reply

Gilford

 ® 

To GEORGE RUSSELL, 4 October 1904

7 S. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Mr Russell Since I saw you last I have received a telegram asking me to go to Switzerland by the end of the week. I am, as you may imagine, very much pressed for money. I am sure that if you can you will assist me. I gave Mr Norman my third story ‘After the Race’ today and I think he will pay me for it tomorrow. But the mere fare to Switzerland is a considerable thing and this is why I have again to ask you to help me. Faithfully Yours

Jas A Joyce

 ® 

To GEORGE ROBERTS, 5 October 1904

7 St Peter’s Terrace, Cabra, Dublin

Dear Roberts: I received another telegram telling me to start for Zurich in Switzerland on Saturday. The cheapest fare is £3.15.0.

£3.15.0

2

————

£7.10.0

I am counting for £1 between you and Ryan. That is not exorbitant, I think, as it is my last. May I count on you for this early on Friday? Answer kindly. I may call.

 ® 

From E. GILFORD (Telegram), [6?] October 1904

Market Rasen

MS. Yale

Appointment Zurich Go Saturday

Gilford

 ® 

To JAMES S. STARKEY, [5 October 1904]

Dublin

MS. S.Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Starkey I am going tonight. I shall call here in twenty minutes. As you cannot give me money will you do this for me: Make up a parcel of—

1 toothbrush and powder

1 nail brush

1 pair of black boots and any coat and vest you have to spare These will be very useful. If you are not here meet me outside Davy Byrne’s with the parcel at 10 past 7. I have absolutely no boots

J A J.

 ® 

To GEORGE ROBERTS, N.D. [? 7 October 1904]

[Dublin]

Dear Roberts: For God’s sake give me that 10/- to bearer or meet me at North Wall boat at 9 o’clock.

J.A.J.

 ® 

Part II

POLA, ROME, TRIESTE
1904–1915

1904 (cont.)

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 11 October 1904

Gasthaus Hoffnung, Lagerstrasse, Zürich, Switzerland

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie We arrived here safely this morning and shall probably stay at this address. I have not yet gone to the Berlitz School but am going there in a half an hour. Douce was in Spain on holidays but Riviere was very kind (soixante francs) and wanted me to go back at 3.30 to meet the son of the richest banker in Zürich. Nora, however, felt naturally very lonely whenever I was away and besides her boot was pinching her. So I let the matter rest. Write here and give me detailed accounts of all the news. Devan came on the boat afterwards and caught us together so perhaps it is public property now. She has written to her mother from Paris a delightfully vague postcard. Has she been advertised for in the papers in Dublin? If anything has come for me send it on here. I met Curran and Murnaghan in Paris but really feared to do anything so hardy. If any money comes for me between this and Saturday wire it on here. I hope you sent the key to Rivière. I called to see Symons but failed.

Jim

Send on my B.A. certificate and registration for me.

Part to be detached.

Go about the highways of the city but not to any of my touched friends and make up £1 before Saturday which send me on that day without fail. Say nothing of this to Pappie. Finalement, elle n’est pas encore vierge; elle est touchée.

Jim

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 October 1904

Gasthaus Hoffnung, Lagerstrasse, Zürich, Switzerland

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I went to the Berlitz School yesterday. No vacancy. The director read the letter and could not understand, he said. Perhaps the director-general in Vienna had engaged me. He would write. He also gave me a letter to Gilford which I enclosed to that person yesterday with a letter asking for immediate explanation. His letter to Gilford was—

Dear Sir

Mr J A Joyce arrived here this morning but I cannot understand why you have sent him as I have no vacancy at present—(and something else which I forget).

This letter does not look to me a letter from a stranger to a stranger and I am sure there is a mistake somewhere. The director said if I could stay on in Zürich for a week or ten days he would certainly get me a post either in Switzerland or in Italy and pay my expenses on from here and that if the director-general at Vienna had engaged me through the agency he could advance me money. I am awaiting the result

Jim

 ® 

From STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 14 October 1904

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Impossible get advance.

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 20 [October] 1904

Berlitz School of Languages, Via S Nicolo 32, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Located here. Write at once by letter c/o above address. Send B A and birth and medical certificates—also no of Irish Homestead containing my ‘After the Race’. Am writing another ‘Xmas Eve’. Have finished Chap. XII. Write fully. If you have sent money, say—I shall have it transferred. Arrived this morning. Will write when have leisure. Letter only as am not sure of my address here yet.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 October 1904

Via Giulia 2, s. piano, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie The school in Trieste and the school here in Pola are the private property of Signor Artifoni, who manages the Trieste school through Signor Bertelli. When I was told to leave I spent days looking for a post as English correspondent in a commercial house. We had a terrible time for some days, I of course borrowing in Trieste right left and centre. I succeeded however in getting one tuition and could have done well in private lessons if I had had money to keep me alive. However the proprietor of the two schools happened to come to Trieste on business and I went to see him. By good luck he is a socialist like myself and explained to me that it would be necessary for me to sign all papers as for married people. He offered me then a post in Pola and I accepted. I left Trieste by the first boat on Saturday morning and as you will see my entrance into Pola was signalised by the enclosed magnificent notice. You will find Pola on the Adriatic coast down towards Turkey. It is a large naval station of Austria and was yesterday en fête during the unveiling of a monument to the Empress Elizabeth.

As I had at least four addresses in Trieste, my correspondence is very complicated. I have not yet received the certificates you sent to Switzerland but a friend of mine in Zürich sends on anything that goes there for me. Please send me on at once the number of the ‘Irish Homestead’ which contains my ‘After the Race’. My trunk which I left in Zürich is to arrive here tomorrow or next day. Send on the key at once.

Settled here in a furnished room and kitchen, surrounded by pots, pans and kettles. The school is just across the road. Please send on at once a long and documented letter containing all the news as it is nearly a month since I left Ireland and I have had none yet. I have finished (in Zürich) chap. XII and have written part of a new story ‘Christmas Eve’. If you meet any of the mystics or Byrne or Curran you can be airily happy. Tell Pappie I shall write in a day or so, as I want him to do a thing for Dr Rivière.

Jim

 ® 

To JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 November 1904

Via Giulia 2, II° piano, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Pappie I am safely settled here after a good deal of wandering and a good deal of trouble. I am unable to tell you what I want you to do for Riviere till I get my trunk from Switzerland tomorrow. This is a new school here and nearly all my pupils are officers in the Austrian navy. This is the principal naval station on the Adriatic and there are ten or twelve men-o’-war always in the harbour. The town itself is very small. They speak three languages here—Italian, German (the official language) and Slav. The Italian they speak is however very corrupt. I am going to exchange exchange [sic] lessons with the German teacher here as I wish to speak it also. There are not more than three or four English people in the town and all are ‘lions’. I sent you an advt from the ‘Giornaletto’ and I had another one—a huge thing—in which I am billed as ‘dottore in filosofia’—Doctor of Philosophy—the Italian degree answering to mine. I shall send you a picture-card of Pola one of these days. It would be quite easy for Stannie to get a position in a Berlitz school in Europe if he cared to take it as they cannot get English teachers to come abroad: If he considers it tell him consult me as I now know the way these Berlitz schools are worked. He would not have to pay any fee. The weather is good summer here but I am pestered with mosquitoes all night. There was a little disturbance here after the Innsbrück [sic] riots but not much. I could have started in Trieste by myself as I had two tuitions but I preferred to come on here for the present. A Berlitz teacher is not allowed to give private lessons. Stannie tells me that the ‘Speaker’ has printed another poem of mine (and wrongly) and when I get my trunk I intend to send off more. I am enclosing a letter for Stannie. Please give it to him. I hope you are still in good health. Addio.

Jim

P.S. A letter will be read with pleasure.

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19 November 1904

Via Giulia 2, II, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie About Russell: I have written to my printer in Dublin and am to release my ‘Holy Office’ in a week. I shall send the money order to you with a list of addresses. You can deliver many in person. But first of all I hope you have gone to the ‘Homestead’ and found out if he will pay me now for a new story ‘Xmas Eve.’ Kindly send me on a copy of the ‘Speaker’, which contains my last poem and also a copy of the no which contains my other poem. Also send me address of ‘Harper’s’ and of ‘Westminster Gazette’. If you can send a copy or so of the latter so much the better.

I have heard from Symons that Grant Richards has become bankrupt for an immense amount of money and consequently I have written for the return of the MS. No key arrived with B A certificate. By the way you might send on the others. Tell Aunt Josephine to let me know her address. I am fairly fixed here £2 a week for sixteen hours weekly.

I have not written much of the novel—only the end of the 11th [sic] chapter in Zürich. I have written about half of ‘Xmas Eve’ and about five long pages of ‘Esthetic Philosophy’. I am at present reading some Italian translations of Lassalle but it is difficult to get to the bottom of a science like political science through pamphlets of too vivid actuality. I think then that after a short course in Aristotle I will shut up the books and examine for myself in a cafe. By the way Nora makes my cigarettes for me by machine: 70 of good Turkish tobacco cost me about 8d. She is still very well and wishes to be remembered to you. She is however interested to know what went on in the Hotel. Do you know nothing? As for the comments of ‘Irish Ireland’—she seems to have as high an opinion of them as I have. She wonders how you can live at home and often asks me to help you to go abroad.

I have read Moore’s ‘Untilled Field’ in Tauchnitz. Damned stupid. A woman alludes to her husband in the confession-box as ‘Ned’. Ned thinks &c! A lady who has been living for three years on the line between Bray and Dublin is told by her husband that there is a meeting in Dublin at which he must be present. She looks up the table to see the hours of the trains. This on DW and WR where the trains go regularly: this after three years. Isn’t it rather stupid of Moore. And the punctuation! Madonna!

I am going to buy Henry James’s ‘Madonna of the Future’ today. I am afraid I cannot finish my novel for a long time. I am discontented with a great deal of it and yet how is Stephen’s nature to be expressed otherwise. Eh? I am getting rather stout and mannish.

I really can’t write. Nora is trying on a pair of drawers at the wardrobe

Excuse me

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 3 December 1904

Via Giulia 2, II, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I have not yet received the papers you were to despatch to me and I shall be glad if you will also send the old ‘Speaker’ as Nora has lost the one I gave her. Have you any news of Grant Richards or of the ‘Venture’. I have written to Baillie but no reply. I am half way through Chap XIII and if you like will send you Chaps XII and XIII before Xmas for your opinion. What of H J have you read? I have read ‘Madonna of the Future’ and found it very pleasant reading. I am reading the Souvenirs of Renan. Damme if I understand him. ‘Un Celte, mêlé de Gascon, mâtiné de Lappon’ ‘un prêtre manqué’. He professes romanticism, love for Brittany, affection for old masters, regret at having to abandon dear old Grandmother Church—I fancy his life of Jesus must be very maudlin stuff. No wonder Huysmans calls him a comedian. Have you any news from the Hotel.

Nora’s father is a baker. They are seven in family. Papa had a shop but drank all the buns and loaves like a man. The mother’s family are ‘toney’ and (by the way, do you ever see Paddy Lee?) intervened. Sequestration of Papa. Uncle Michael supports Mrs and the children, while Papa bakes and drinks in a distant part of Connacht. Uncle M is very rich. Papa is treated very contemptuously by the family. Nora says her mother would not lie with him. Nora has not lived at home but with her grandmother who has left her some money.

She has told me something of her youth, and admits the gentle art of self-satisfaction. She has had many love-affairs, one when quite young with a boy who died. She was laid up at news of his death. Her uncles are worthy men as you shall hear. When she was sixteen a curate in Galway took a liking to her: tea at the presbytery, little chats, familiarity. He was a nice young man with black curly hairs on his head. One night at tea he took her on his lap and said he liked her, she was a nice little girl. Then he put his hand up under her dress which was shortish. She however, I understand, broke away. Afterwards he told her to say in confession it was a man not a priest did ‘that’ to her. Useful difference. She used to go with Mulvey (he was a Protestant) and walk about the roads with him at time⁠[s]. Says she didn’t love him and simply went to pass the time. She was opposed at home and this made her persist. Her uncle got on the track. Every night he would be at home before her. ‘Well, my girl, out again with your Protestant.’ Forbade her to go any more. She went. When she came home uncle was there before her. Her mother was ordered out of the room (Papa of course was away) and uncle proceeded to thrash her with a big walking-stick. She fell on the floor fainting and clinging about his knees. At this time she was nineteen! Pretty little story, eh?

With regard to the Holy Office you may imagine I have not much money to spare. They have sent me a bill for 10s/6d but [if you l]⁠ook among my papers I [am sure] you will find a bill for 7/6 [and you] ought to be able to raise [that much] now since there is money [coming]. I think the Holy Office is so clever that I shall however send you next week an order for 2s/– leaving you to get the rest.

I should like you to study by yourself or with Cosgrave some midwifery and embryology and to send me the results of your study. I sent a picture card to May and if you like I will send you one too. As for our way of living. We get out of bed at nine and Nora makes chocolate. At midday we have lunch which we (or rather she) buys, cooks (soup, meat, potatoes and something else) in a locanda opposite. At four o’clock we have chocolate and at eight o’clock dinner which Nora cooks. The⁠[n] [we go] to the Caffé Miramar w⁠[here we read] the ‘Figaro’ of Paris and we [come] back about midnight. Eyers, [the] other English teacher, is a lovely pianist and we sometimes have music. He too, though very unripe, is falling under the Daedalean spell, I fancy. I have got somewhat fat and am going to the dentist next week. I shall spend the ‘Speaker’ cheque on my teeth and I hope in six months to have all my teeth settled. Do you ever see Dana and did they print my obscene song ‘Bid adieu’? I read Nora Chap XI which she thought remarkable but she cares nothing for my art. Ask hairy Jaysus what am I to do? He ought to know.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 12 December 1904

Via Giulia 2, II, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Best wishes for 17th. Have finished Chap XIII. Am waiting for your answer to my letter and for the papers.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 15 December 1904

2 Via Giulia II, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Send on by return my music as I am getting in a piano and want the music for Xmas: the present of a diminutive plum-pudding I thank you for. I am setting about (with the aid of the Director, Francini) the translation into Italian of ‘Celibates’ for a big publisher in Florence. I have been taking German lessons for the past month and have made good progress. I am tight for money as I have bought a new suit.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [? December 1904]

Caffé Miramar, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Nora For God’s sake do not let us be any way unhappy tonight. If there is anything wrong please tell me. I am beginning to tremble already and if you do not soon look at me as you used I shall have to run up and down the café. Nothing you can do will annoy me tonight. I will not be made unhappy by anything. When we go home I will kiss you a hundred times. Has this fellow annoyed you or did I annoy you by stopping away?

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 December 1904

Via Giulia 2, II, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Please send me the ‘Irish Homestead’ containing my story and the Xmas no. At the end of the week I send you Chaps XII. XIII. XIV. I am now at Chap XV. and have begun the Italian version of ‘Mildred Lawson’. I wish you to write at once about these chapters. You may lend them to Cosgrave or to Curran as you please but to no-one else. You may read them to Aunt Josephine. Say I write to her tomorrow.

You are perhaps surprised to receive such bare letters from me but I find I have not much to report. The weather is bitterly cold and we have no stove. I write chiefly in the cafés. Fräulein Globocnik, the secretary of the school, has a piano and invites us for some evening⁠[s]. She is a melancholy little Androgyne and very sentimental with me. I daresay there is something in me which interests women. I desire more money and liberty than I have at present and for this reason I am working at the novel and at the translation.

You notice a fall in my spirits. This is not quite well expressed by you. My new relation has made me a somewhat grave person and I have got out of the way of dissertations. I drink little or nothing, smoke vastly, sing rarely. I have become very excitable. Nora says I have a saint’s face. Myself I think I have the face of a debauchee. But I am no longer so—at least I think I am not.

One night I had a severe cramp in my stomach and Nora prayed ‘O my God, take away Jim’s pain.’ The other evening we went to a bioscope. There were a series of pictures about betrayed Gretchen. In the third last [act] Lothario throws her into the river and rushes off, followed by rabble. Nora said ‘0, policeman, catch him’.

We have had quarrels—funny affairs. Nora says they were lovers’ quarrels and says I am very childish. She says I have a beautiful character. She calls me simple-minded Jim. Complimenti, Signor!

Our house is unhealthy and I am looking for new quarters. Nora has conceived, I think, and I wish her to live as healthily as possible. My child, if I have one, will of course not be baptised but will be registered in my name. I do not like talking of this subject yet.

I am not much changed in appearance: a little stouter, new brown clothes, a slight moustache, and a loose scarlet tie. My voice has disimproved greatly for want of practice and from too much smoking as well as from chronic cold. I shall go to an oculist next month to get pincenez glasses which I can use on occasions as my sight is lamentable.

I don’t think I have many spiritual moments to chronicle. I do not believe I shall write any more songs. You might look up every English review for the past year and see if there is an article on D’Annunzio’s ‘Figlia di Jorio’. If there is not I would prepare an article. I expect your reply to my ‘Speaker’ postcard this week. If you could get a key for my trunk in Duke St I wish you would as I never received the key you sent. I have also lost that old ‘Speaker’ which I should like to have.

You must be contented with this letter and write fully, as I am now going home. It is very late and it is a cold walk.

Jim

Caffé Miramar.

Nora Joyce

Im sorry they are not natural

Nora xxxxx

Best wishes for New Year

xxxxx

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, New Year’s Eve 1904

Via Giulia 2, Pola, Austria

Dear Aunt Josephine: A thousand apologies for my usual impoliteness and a thousand best wishes to you and Uncle Willie for the New Year. My letters to Stannie will have shown you how very busy I am at all kinds of drudgery and how difficult it is for me to write long letters. Add to this my lovely laziness of temper. My publisher has smashed, my cheques go astray, you may have heard. Have you read ‘After the Race’? I send Chaps XII, XIII, XIV tonight or tomorrow. The money here is all irregular for some weeks and I have not been able to send them off. It is probable that I shall leave this address next week as the house is unhealthy and I want as much health as possible for Nora.

By the way, if the request does not revolt your delicacy you might write to Signora Joyce at this address (letters will be sent on). She is away from all women except a little Fräulein and is of course adorably stupid on these points. You might write some kind of a generalising ‘Don’t-be-alarmed-my-dear’ letter as my own steely cheerfulness in what does not afflict me personally is in need of some feminine supplement.

Stannie writes to me that Alice has had to undergo some operation. I hope it has been successful. He sends me also a diverting account of some mourners near the Cattlemarket. I am trying to move on to Italy as soon as possible as I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races and thousand languages, governed by a parliament which can transact no business and sits for a week at the most and by the most physically corrupt royal house in Europe. Pola is a back-of-God-speed place—a naval Siberia—37 men o’war in the harbour, swarming with faded uniforms. Istria is a long boring place wedged into the Adriatic peopled by ignorant Slavs who wear little red caps and colossal breeches.

I shall be glad to hear from you any news you may have—that is if my lax manners have not displeased you too much. I have nothing to relate about myself except that though I am quickly disillusioned I have not been able to discover any falsehood in this nature which had the courage to trust me. It was this night three months ago that we left the North Wall. Strange to say I have not yet left her on the street, as many wise men said I would. In conclusion—I spit upon the image of the Tenth Pius.

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1905

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 13 January 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I received your tardy letter with its budget of Cabra news. I enclose Chaps XII. XIII. XIV. I have finished Chap. XV and am now at Chap XVI. Send me all documents dealing with University College period from your diary &c. I should also like a translation (18/6d) Scott Library of Strauss’s Life of Jesus. I am ordering Renan. I want a long critical letter on these chapters. You may lend them as I said. Tell Curran I shall shortly send him a complete MS copy of my verses. I am waiting for the papers. I have written to ‘Speaker’ again and shall write also to Grant Richards and Baillie. This is our new room—very cosy stove and writing-desk. Return these chapters as early as you can. I shall not send others till the college episode is complete. Tell me about my literary friends—the theatre &c. I have no time to write you more now as I am hurrying back to a lesson. Nora has written to Aunt Josephine and again wishes to salute you. What the devil are you doing with yourself. Nora curls my hair up with a tongs—it is now properly en brosse. I look a very pretty man—O that nice old Henry James! Have you read his review on Baudelaire? It is damn funny.

Jim

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To the Manager, GRANT RICHARDS, London, 16 January 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Sir I wrote to you at the beginning of October last from Dublin asking you to let me know what you had decided to do with the book of my verses (‘Chamber Music’) which Mr Arthur Symons gave you to consider and in reply I received a card from you saying that you would let me know definitely in a day or two. May I ask you to tell me by return whether you intend to print them or not and, in case you do not intend to print them, to send them to me without delay as I want to try to publish them somewhere as soon as possible and I have already refused to accept the offer of another publishing firm because I thought there was a prospect of your bringing the book out? Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19 January 1905

7 Via Medolino, I°. Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I send you the fourth story of ‘Dubliners’—‘Hallow Eve’—which I want you to offer at once to the Editor of the Irish Homestead. Perhaps they are annoyed with me and won’t honour me by printing any more. In case it is accepted I enclose a receipt—you can receive the money yourself and post it to me. Say you will be glad to be paid as soon as convenient. The ‘Irish Independent’ is really awful—I could not read any of the Celtic Christines except the verse which seemed to be almost unbearably bad except Collumb’s piece which wasn’t too bad, I thought. But ask the good young gentlemen can they beat ‘Hallow Eve’. I have written to Grant Richards and have sent a song ‘Bid adieu’ to Harper’s. Is there any news of Irish Voices?—try and see O’Donoghue. Have any of the volumes of Roberts’ press appeared and are they still disposed to print me. I expect you to write to me much oftener than you do. You know I have no-one to talk to. Nora, of course, doesn’t care a rambling damn about art. When she read ‘Mildred Lawson’ she said Moore didn’t know how to finish a story—when she saw me copy Epiphanies into my novel she asked would all that paper be wasted—which made me think of Heine. She wants me to hurry up the novel and get rich and go to live in Paris. Paris and Zurich she likes very much but Pola is a queer old place. You are not to give my address to anyone without first asking my leave—this is why I want you to receive the money from the Homestead. What is wrong with all these Irish writers—what the blazes are they always snivelling about? Isn’t it funny to read Roberts’ poems about a mother pressing a baby to her breast? O, blind, snivelling, nose-dropping, calumniated Christ wherefore were these young men begotten?

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 January 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

I want as many documents as possible and at once: also the key of my trunk. The ‘Speaker’ sent my cheque to Cabra 30 Nov last therefore it has been cashed(?). Examine Charlie. I write to ‘Speaker’ tonight. Your letter is very dull. Send criticisms of my chapters and story. I do not like so much talk about prospective human beings. Could you send on a photograph or two. Do not delay so long executing my requests as I waste a lot of ink. What about the Strauss?

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 February 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Your card announcing your receipt of my story relieves me greatly. I expect a dilated reference thereto. I have also received birthday honours from you, Charlie and Aunt J—thanks. On the 2nd Nora, Eyers, Fräulein Globocnik and I went by a little steamer to the island of Brioni (famous for cheese). Every tiny feast is a holiday in this country. It seems a long two years since I was in Paris.

Your criticism of my novel is always interesting. The sentence ‘to sustain in person &c’ is not legitimate if the phrase, ‘and to protect thereby’ is between commas but is legitimate if the phrase is in brackets. I shall change the verb however. Mrs Riordan who has left the house in Bray returns you have forgotten, to the Xmas dinner-table in Dublin. The immateriality of Isabel is intended. The effect of the prose piece ‘The spell of arms’ is to mark the precise point between boyhood (pueritia) and adolescence (adulescentia)—17 years. Is it possible you remark no change? Again, no old toothless Irishman would say ‘Divil an elephant’: he would say ‘divil elephant’ Nora says ‘Divil up I’ll get till you come back’. Naïf sequence! Your criticism of the two aposopeias is quite just but I think full dress is not always necessary. Stephen’s change of mind is not effected by that sight as you seem to think, but it is that small event so regarded which expresses the change. His first skin falls. Fulham is not old Sheehy—he comes in later. Are my documents on the road?

The elaborate intentions of your antepenultimate and penultimate frigidities are a compliment. But you are not careful or just. Curran, in my opinion, behaved to me in a generous fashion: Cosgrave, whom you must recognise as a torpid animal once for all, was, so far as I can remember, guilty of no duplicity towards me. Do you think I am saying what is true? You are harsh with Nora because she has an untrained mind. She is learning French at present—very slowly. Her disposition, as I see it, is much nobler than my own, her love also is greater than mine for her. I admire her and I love her and I trust her—I cannot tell how much. I trust her. So enough.

You might amplify the allusion you make to Finn’s Hotel as she wants to know what went on there. I sent a song ‘Bid adieu’ to Harper’s but it was returned. I wrote to Baillie of the Venture twice but no answer. I wrote to Grant Richards (who, Symons wrote to me, was bankrupt) and he answers:—I must apologise for not having sooner answered your letter with reference to the MS of your verses. I regret to say that it is not at present possible for me to make any arrangements for the publication of the book: but I may say that I admire the work exceedingly and if you would leave the matter open for a few weeks it is possible that I might then be able to make you some offer. The MS, I regret to say, has by some mistake been packed up with some furniture of mine that has been warehoused and it is not easy for me at the moment to get at it, so that in any case I shall be glad if you can leave the whole question over for a short time—You might find out [if] he is really in business still and also get me the address of the English 111. Magazine.

Is Skeffington still registrar? Is Maggie Sheehy married? I wrote postcard once to May—why did she never answer me? Are the ‘girls’ ‘snotty’ about Nora? Look through the reviews to see if ‘La Figlia di Jorio’ has been reviewed. I want to write an article to get money. There is an anxiety at the back of my mind for which I want to be ready materially. I wish some damn fool would print my verses. I intend to dedicate ‘Dubliners’ to you—do you mind—because you seem to find the stories to your taste. Do you think they are good? or are they only as good as the stories in French daily papers. You must know that I can’t answer such questions in my worse than solitude of the intellect. It is fine spring weather here. I wish I could get to Italy by summer. An Austrian officer and his mistress live in the next room. She is pretty and cheerful: they laugh at night and chase each other about the room. I am ‘working in’ Hairy Jaysus at present. Do you not think the search for heroics damn vulgar—and yet how are we to describe Ibsen? I have written some fine critical sentences lately. They have discovered a novel of Disraeli’s.

I find your letters dull only when you write about Nora or Henry James but no doubt both of these subjects bore you as you have no special affinity for either of them. No damn nonsense about writing short letters in future. I write short letters because I have a lot to do. I have English to teach, German to learn (I have learnt a good deal) a novel to translate, a novel to write besides letters and stories, marketing to do—Jaysus. I think I’m a hell of an industrious chap lately. And then Nora! So no more bile beans, brother John, and please smile your citron smile.

I have finished Chap XV and Chap XVI and am now at Chap XVII. I was examined by the doctor of the Naval Hospital here last week and I now wear pince-nez glasses on a string for reading. My number is very strong—could you find out what is Pappie’s. As soon as I get money I shall have my teeth set right by a very good dentist here. I shall then feel better able for my adventures. I am anxious to know if you think my writing has suffered any change. My life is far less even than formerly in spite of its regularity. I reach prostrating depths of impersonality (multiply 9 by 17—the no of weeks) but on the other hand I reach levels of great satisfaction. I am sure however that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for the individual passion as the motive power of everything—art and philosophy included. For this reason Hairy Jaysus seems to be the bloodiest impostor of all I have met. Tell him, if you meet him, that I am about to produce a baboon baby by sitting for six hours on a jug full of soda water and ask him will he be godfather.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 9 February 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

The ‘Speaker’ has written saying the cheque has been returned to their bank Charing X bearing my endorsement and wishes to know if I have signed it. I must have an explanation by return

Jas A Joyce.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 20 February 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie The cheque was posted to me on 30 Nov last was cashed by the Speaker’s Bank on 5 Dec. The cheque bears the stamp of the National Bank, Charing Cross: it was drawn for five shillings and is endorsed ‘James A Joyce’. Please send some of my verses to Macmillan’s Magazine in my name mentioning Sat. Review &c. I have finished Chaps XV. XVI and XVII, and am now at Chap XVIII. Why are there no letters?

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 February 1905

7 Via Medolino, Pola, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Why do you put a note of exclamation after the sentence about Doran’s article? It seems to me a strange subject: I should like to read the article. Your mention of Ibsen leads me to enclose you this cutting from a Trieste paper. I wish I knew enough Danish to read the volumes. What kind is the article on Ibsen in T P? I notice that articles on Ibsen have very attractive titles. On what authority did you write to me ‘All they said at Finn’s Hotel was that Miss Barnacle had gone away’? Is Mrs Wright a fixture there. (This is putrid ink) Your compliment (Coppée and myself) is rather chilly: but I have not my instruments with me (as you know) or I should not be forced to apply to others for help. I thought Curran knew the proposed length of the opus—what is this about care or cure? I have read Renan’s ‘Life of Jesus’ (I asked you to send me Strauss): it is a model of good writing in many ways: the temper is delightful. The narrative of the death I may perhaps translate for you. He calls John the Baptist the absinthe of the divine feast. I have read the Sorrows of Satan, A Difficult Matter (Mrs Lovett Cameron) The Sea Wolves (Max Pemberton) Resurrection and Tales (Tolstoy) Good Mrs Hypocrite (Rita) Tragedy of Korosko (Conan Doyle) Visits of Elizabeth (Elinor Glyn) and Ziska. I feel that I should be a man of letters but damn it I haven’t the occasion yet. You have nothing to do—why don’t you write full letters? I am getting some stories of Jakobsen (in German) and the Feast at Solhoug (also in German) to read. I have progressed a great deal in German. Read Siren Voices and report. ‘There would be’ (il y aurait) tell the torpid one is not an inversion. Tell him also that I am going to write a ‘Dubliner’ on him. Where is ‘Hallow Eve’ at present? Take it to the I.H. again and kiss Russell from me. You might send me some report of modern English literature. Why doesn’t Aunt Josephine write? I have sent you all information I have about the cheque and expect your reply to cross this.

It seems to me that what astonishes most people in the length of the novel is the extraordinary energy in the writer and his extraordinary patience. It would be easy for me to do short novels if I chose but what I want to wear away in this novel cannot be worn away except by constant dropping. Gogarty used to pipe ‘63’ in treble when I told him the number of the chapters. I am not quite satisfied with the title ‘Stephen Hero’ and am thinking of restoring the original title of the article ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ or perhaps better ‘Chapters in the Life of a Young Man’. If I had a phonograph or a clever stenographist I could certainly write any of the novels I have read lately in seven or eight hours.

Your satirical surprise at my proposed ‘dedication’ of ‘Dubliners’ to you arises, I imagine from an exaggerated notion you have of my indifference to the encouragement I receive. It is difficult for anyone at my age to be indifferent. I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.

I think that by the time my novel is finished I shall be a good German and Danish scholar and, if Brandes is alive, I shall send it to him. I have come to accept my present situation as a voluntary exile—is it not so? This seems to me important both because I am likely to generate out of it a sufficiently personal future to satisfy Curran’s heart and also because it supplies me with the note on which I propose to bring my novel to a close.

I suppose you will receive this letter on Saturday or Sunday. Address your next letter to the Trieste school, Via S. Nicolo, 32, as I am transferred there. I leave Pola on Sunday morning for Trieste, but if any letters from you are on the way they will follow me. I shall see at once about your entering the Berlitz School. Here are some particulars: England, Ireland and Scotland are controlled from London. France, Spain, Portugal and, I think, Germany are controlled from Paris. Austria-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Egypt are controlled from Vienna. You should apply to these centres according to where you want to go. This is not a good time as all posts are usually full but there may be vacancies. In September you would have no difficulty. If it is your intention to wait till September enter at once and pass the Matric. Exam of the Royal University, as a University certificate would be very useful to you. Collect besides all your other certificates and your birth-certificate. If you decide to go you must study colloquial French as you will then be able to pass anywhere in the continent except of course with the common people. If you want to go before September write and let me know and I will see if there are at present any vacancies under the control of the Vienna office. An agent would charge you three guineas, but if you go to an agent send me his name first and I will tell you if you can trust him. The following from experience: grow a moustache, pretend to know everything, and dress magnificently. If you do this you will get on better. What country do you want to go to? I will tell you where you will have most to do. You can easily live on half the pay you receive in France, Italy or Germany, but this place is very dear. Answer this letter as quickly and as fully as you can. I have suffered a good deal from the lack of the papers I asked you for. Faithfully Yours Jaysus! amn’t I stupid to write that.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 March 1905

Piazza Ponterosso 3, III, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie My memory has got so damn bad that I forgot to enclose you the cutting from a Trieste paper about the publication of Ibsen’s letters under the editorship of his son, Sigurd: here it is. Hauptmann’s last play ‘Elga’ was produced the night before last in Berlin. In D’Annunzio’s new play ‘The Light under the Bushel’ his son is an actor. I have read in the Figaro of the divorce of the Irish Joan of Arc from her husband. Pius the Tenth, I suppose, will alter Catholic regulations to suit the case: an Italian comment says Irish genius is not domestic. Poor little U.I.: indignant little chap. What in my letter did Pappie find lunatic? Damn you, I don’t want ‘Hallow Eve’ back again. Sell it to Mighty AUM, and forward the money. Renan is a good writer but he makes me think of a Parisian gentleman who said to me one night in great flurry at parting time, ‘Alors, monsieur, au plaisir. Ici je prendrai tramway mais d’abord faut que je prenne water-closet’. Your account of your own boredom often amuses me. What is this I hear about Charlie and philosophy? I am not letting my beard grow. Nora sings sometimes when she is dressing—is that what you mean? At present she is licking jam off a piece of paper. She is very well, wears a veil now and looks very pretty. Just now she came in and said ‘The landlady has her hen laying out there. O, he’s after laying a lovely egg.’ Jaysus! O Jaysus! By the bye—in case I forget it—do not omit to slap Skeffington three times smartly on the bottom when you meet him next and say you ‘My brother that was in Polà is going to send you your two guineas, he says’.

I have been reading ‘Confidence’, ‘Monsieur Bergeret à Paris’ by Anatole France and ‘Peter Simple’ by Capt. Marryat: and I prefer the last of the three. It seems to me much better than most of the modern scamped adventure-stories. ‘Confidence’ is almost readable on account of its inoffensiveness but it is neither delicate nor rich enough for my taste and I found it in no way interesting. Anatole France has a very high reputation but silence is my comment after reading two books—perhaps his worst. He is an intellectual socialist, I understand. In ‘Elga’ Hauptmann again uses the mechanism of a dream or vision. He is a very beautiful type of civilisation, in my opinion, and I wish I had leisure enough to interpret him. I have read (in German) a play by Hejermans—Ahasver but it is nothing, I have read H.J. consecutively and am now hesitating between De Amicis, A. France and Maupassant for a plunge. I think I shall take De Amicis. Would you be surprised if I wrote a very good English grammar some day? I have been sending you and Aunt J some picture postcards. It is a rather pretty game, don’t you think?

I have finished Chapters XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII and will send them if you like. The U. College episode will take about ten chapters and I thought of keeping all till it was ended. On the other hand that is a hell of a time for you to wait. I have received your letter which interested me very much but if you knew what the feuilletons and short sketches in French papers [are] you would understand my embarrassment. Is Starkey’s book any good? I think Gogarty must use a typewriter: I do not think he could write consecutively enough for an article without some mechanical aid. I have become very cautious with money. Lothair bought a jewel cross for his wife which cost him £10,000: this I can understand. One evening he ‘threw the cabman a sovereign’—this I cannot understand. He cannot have had a very fine conscience on some points. You would smile to see me holding for a lower price in goloshes or reckoning a waiter’s bill after him. Nora is looking at ‘T.P.’s Weekly’ and asks ‘Is this the Ibsen you know?’ I believe that Ibsen and Hauptmann separate from the herd of writers because of their political aptitude—eh?

.Jim

Nora says I am to tell you she is axing at you!

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 April 1905

Piazza Ponterosso 3, III, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie While I was attending the Greek mass here last Sunday it seemed to me that my story The Sisters was rather remarkable. The Greek mass is strange. The altar is not visible but at times the priest opens the gates and shows himself. He opens and shuts them about six times. For the Gospel he comes out of a side gate and comes down into the chapel and reads out of a book. For the elevation he does the same. At the end when he has blessed the people he shuts the gates: a boy comes running down the side of the chapel with a large tray full of little lumps of bread. The priest comes after him and distributes the lumps to scrambling believers. Damn droll! The Greek priest has been taking a great eyeful out of me: two haruspices.

I have now finished another chapter and am at Chapter XX. This is a terrible opus: I wonder how I have the patience to write it. Do you think other people will have the patience to read it? The other English teacher here said to me last night as he looked at my suit ‘I often notice that eccentric people have very little taste: they wear anything. I give you a tip. If you have no taste you go in for grey. Stick to grey. Doesn’t matter what kind—always looks gentlemanly’. Now, this seems to me on mature reflection a bloody awful position for me to be in. Some day I shall clout my pupils about the head, I fear, and stalk out.

I wish you would send me the key of my trunk as I want to sell it and buy a valise. A trunk here is a third passenger to pay for. My trunk from London to Trieste cost me about £1. If you do not dispose of ‘Hallow Eve’ at once, send the MS back as I shall send it to the London ‘Daily Mail.’ Get me at once a copy of the will of Catherine Healy—born Mortimer—who was married to—Healy and died in Abbeygate St, Galway, in the year 1895, 6 or 7. Read the will yourself and send me a copy at once. You can get the will in the Record Office of the Four Courts in Dublin. Also find out if Nora can get her birth certificate by writing to the Registrar General’s office as we may want it. If you see Cosgrave tell him that he is in my novel under the name of Lynch. Address your next letter to Berlitz School 32 Via S. Nicolo as I leave here on Sunday.

I have received your letter. I see three London papers regularly so some of it was not news but I am damn glad to get letters. While I was reading it in the school, one of my pupils passed through, a vulgar little Hungarian, saying flatly ‘Good morning, sar’ to which I replied with intention ‘The divil bite your bottom’. Honestly it is awful! Send that will on at once and the key. ‘Sometime fornicator … spiritual love’ O, fie! fie! is that one for me? How did Buckley kill the Russian general? I have now finished Chaps XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX and XX and am now at Chap XXI. Why don’t you send me back my chapters? My health is not very good. I do not like Confidence: it bores me dreadfully and Peter Simple doesn’t. Read the end of Chap XVII: I think it is well written. O blast Rincora! Nora is reading the slip by fits and starts to a tune of ‘Old Tom Gregory, Has a big menagerie’, which seems to me what old Thornton would have called a double entente.

Jim

Nora says she hopes you’re well and have a nice girl. JAYSOOS!

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 2 May 1905

Via S. Nicolo 30, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Sir I have read with regret in the ‘Standard’ of a week or so back that you are in money difficulties at present. I shall be glad if you will send me back the manuscript of my verses if there is no longer a possibility of your printing them. I hope you will excuse me for troubling you about such a matter but I want to try to have my verses published this autumn. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

P.S. The MS ‘Chamber Music’ was given to you by Mr Symons in September last.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 2 or 3 May 1905]

Via S. Nicolo 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I have read in the ‘Standard’ of London that Grant Richards is bankrupt for £53,100–0–0. What do you think I ought to do? I want my verses to be published in the autumn. I have finished Chaps XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX and XXI. I am now at Chap XXII. I would write another ‘Dubliner’ if I knew definitely the result of ‘Hallow Eve’. I do not think I can write any more verse. I have great difficulty getting a room as the landladies shunt us as soon as they perceive Nora’s state: but I don’t care a rambling curse of Christ what any one does or what happens. I can’t write any more now because Nora is dabbing me with inky paper.

I have been waiting for a letter confirming your news of E.H. Nora is positive that you are making a mistake. As you may have heard I am entering for a missing letter puzzle in ‘Ideas’. There are to be 48 words in batches of six. As yet 42 words have appeared and I have solved all. I am waiting for the last six. The prize is £250. I shall send you a sealed and registered letter containing a copy of my answers. You are not to open the letter but keep it carefully. In case I solve all or nearly all I shall also seal and register my letter to the paper so that if they do not give me a prize I can take an action against them.

My entering for this competition has kept me a very long time on Chapter XXII but you may expect to receive the chapters of the University College episode in a few weeks. I have written to Grant Richards asking for my manuscript and if he is done for I shall send a copy of the verses to John Lane as I want them published by the end of the year. I am writing (imagine!) a summary of English literature for a Berlitz Book for the Japanese: five or six pages. The German teacher here is going to Japan.

You must be surprised to get such bald letters from me but then you see that I am very busy. Skeffington, poor youth, is in a bad way. What surprises me is that these wise ones should have said that there is money in my novel. I hardly believe there is. It is a mistake for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover: but they are those of a socialistic artist. I cannot tell you how strange I feel sometimes in my attempt to live a more civilised life than my contemporaries. But why should I have brought Nora to a priest or a lawyer to make her swear away her life to me? And why should I superimpose on my child the very troublesome burden of belief which my father and mother superimposed on me? Some people would answer that while professing to be a socialist I am trying to make money: but this is not quite true at least as they mean it. If I made a fortune it is by no means certain that I would keep it. What I wish to do is to secure a competence on which I can rely, and why I expect to have this is because I cannot believe that any State requires my energy for the work I am at present engaged in.

If you look back on my relations with friends and relatives you will see that it was a youthfully exaggerated feeling of this maldisposition of affairs which urged me to pounce upon the falsehood in their attitude towards me as an excuse for escape. The English teacher here says I think of nothing but eating: and in reality I do not eat much at all. He says I will die of a brain disease: whereas in spite of the afflicting delicacy of that organism it does not seem to me to be diseased in any way. He says I will die a Catholic because I am always moping in and out of the Greek Churches and am a believer at heart: whereas in my opinion I am incapable of belief of any kind.

Have you ever reflected what an important sea the Mediterranean is? In the canal here the boats are lined along the quays. They are the same old galley-looking affairs which were in use during the Middle Age. The men row the row-boats from the standing posture. Inside the great bosom of the prow every sailing ship has an image of some saviour, Saint Nicholas or the Madonna or Jesus walking on the waters. Perhaps the Baltic will replace the Mediterranean but till now importance seems to have been in the direct ratio of nearness to the Mediterranean.

I have sent in solutions of the puzzle—all correct but owing to distance and time a day late. I have finished the ‘history of Eng. Literature’ for this German chap. I did not write because I was expecting a letter from you. I am reading Ecclesiastical History in the intervals of teaching. I am thinking of studying grammar. I think it would be a better whetstone for youth than geometry. I have written to Grant Richards and expect a reply. In my history of literature I have given the highest palms to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley. Have you read Turgénieff’s ‘Lear of the Steppes.’ He does many things well and is useful technically but in European literature he has not so high a place as you seem to think he has.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 27 May 1905

Via S. Nicolo 30, II, Trieste

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Please send me my chapters back at once. In a few days you will receive fifty copies of The Holy Office and in a fortnight the University College episode of eleven chapters. I have offered my book of verse to John Lane. Why the devil don’t you write? You know the martyrdom my life is here and its dullness. I think the title of the novel is justified. I wish you could get on to a boat and work out here for even a week. I have changed the scope of the novel very much and intend to rewrite some of the beginning which, I think is not well written. I am going to the conservatory about my voice. Randegger is a Trieste man. I think I have done a great deal during the last seven months but yet I have not satisfied myself.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 June 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie You will receive tomorrow copies of ‘The Holy Office’. Go to the ‘Homestead’. Get ‘Hallow Eve’ or the money for it. Tell Norman I am publishing ‘Eveline’ and ‘The Sisters’ and ask him to write for you permission for me to reprint them. I have written to John Lane: he has answered asking me to send on my verses for consideration. Keep these sheets of The Holy Office till you get directions from me in a day or two. I am expecting a letter from you. I send my verses to Lane on Wednesday.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 7 June 1905

Wed Via S. Nicolo 30, II

MS. Cornell

I posted you 50 copies of ‘Holy Office’ on Saturday to your old address. Get them at once. I send instructions on Saturday. Do as you say with ‘Hallow Eve’. Send back my other chapters. Have now finished Chapter XXIV. Will send the episode in about a week. Do not let such a long time pass again without writing.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 11 June 1905

Via S. Nicolo 30, II°, Trieste

MS. Cornell

Put copies of ‘Holy Office’ into different envelopes and deliver with the flaps closed, and addressed upon all interested. Do not omit Skeffington and Cousins. You will find addresses in directory. Byrne, Ellwood and Cosgrave also. The ‘Leprechaun’ disturbed my peace. I am studying Danish again with constancy. Do you know that Ibsen’s married life ended by his leaving his wife? He is a curious lyrical poet. I think Wordsworth of all English men of letters best deserves your word ‘genius’. Read his poem to his lost son in ‘Excursion’ I think which begins ‘Where art thou my beloved son.’ I am now definitely studying for the theatre. Sinico, a maestro here, tells me that after two years I can do so. My voice is extremely high: he says it has a very beautiful timbre. I shall report on success of my verses with Lane. I changed the last couplet of ‘Though I thy Mithridates were’ and I have omitted the words ‘To Nora’ from the first poem. Write long letters. Was going to Venice this morning but it began to rain.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 8 July 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Could you possibly come here for a few days—by hook or crook? I want to speak to you on a very serious matter and it is so unsatisfactory writing. I hope you will not omit to answer this by return of post and, except to Aunt Josephine, you needn’t say anything about the matter. If you come in August or September I shall probably be able to give you board and lodgings and perhaps pay your fare back. Write at once.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 July 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I send you tomorrow the fifth story of ‘Dubliners’ that is, ‘The Boarding-House’. You are to dispose of it if you, can to an English or American paper. I have a copy by me. I have also written the sixth story ‘Counterparts’ and shall send it to you on Saturday if I have made a copy by then. It is my intention to complete ‘Dubliners’ by the end of the year and to follow it by a book ‘Provincials’. I am uncommonly well pleased with these stories. There is a neat phrase of five words in The Boarding-House: find it. John Lane has refused my verses and I have offered them to Elkin Mathews. You will recieve a volley of correspondence from me within the next week or so of which this letter is the first.

I expect you have received by now the postcard I sent you on Saturday last, asking you to come here to Trieste as I wanted to speak to you on a serious matter. I have thought since that it might be too difficult for you to manage that and so I am going to discuss affairs by letter. You are to consider all that I write as intended solely for yourself and Aunt Josephine, and I shall be anxiously waiting for your replies.

You will remember the circumstances in which I left Ireland nine months ago. Like everything else that I have done in my life it was an experiment. I can hardly say with truth that it was an experiment which has failed seeing that in those nine months I have begotten a child, written 500 pages of my novel, written 3 of my stories, learned German and Danish fairly well, besides discharging the intolerable (to me) duties of my position and swindling two tailors. I believe, besides, that I write much better now than when I was in Dublin and the incident in Chap. XXIII (?) where Stephen makes ‘love’ to Emma Clery I consider a remarkable piece of writing. Add to this that I have eaten and drunk enough to live upon, secured glasses and a watch, and am having my teeth attended to at last. I do not think that I have wasted my time but even if I had done so it would not affect what I am about to explain.

I must, first of all, tell you that Trieste is the rudest place I have ever been in. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the incivility of the people. The girls and women are so rude to Nora that she is afraid to go out in the street. Nora can speak about thirty words of Triestine dialect (I tried and failed to teach her French) and so whenever she goes out I must accompany her and I have often to spend an afternoon looking for a very simple thing at a reasonable price. I must tell you also that as soon as she began to be any way noticeable we were turned out of our lodgings. This happened three times until I conceived the daring plan of living in the house next the school and astonishing the landlady by the glamour of that wonderful establishment. This ruse has succeeded so far but we are still in imminent danger of being put out. The director of the school and the sub-director (a vegetarian, and a German) have both wives but—no children. The director when he saw Nora said he thought I must be stark mad. The sub-director is also appalled. He has written in German and published at his own expense a ‘booklet of spring flowers’ in which there is a poem which begins

‘In drinking I did never lag’

and another (a pure feat of the imagination in the circumstances) which begins:

‘O, can there be for mother’s heart A fairer poem

Than when her child after many an effort Lisps the first word.’

You will see from this what an interesting atmosphere I breathe but—to go on. Nora is almost always complaining. She can eat very few of the sloppy Italian dishes and whatever she eats gives her a pain in her chest. She drinks beer but the least thing is enough to make her sick. In Pola during the winter she suffered dreadfully from the cold and now (the thermometer being at 100° F or so) she lies nearly all day on the bed powerless with fatigue. The Trieste people are great ‘stylists’ in dress, often starving themselves in order to be able to flaunt good dresses on the pier and she with her distorted body (Eheu! peccatum?) and her short four crown skirt and hair done over the ears is always nudged at and sniggered at. I was thinking lately of renting a quarter (that is, two or three rooms and a kitchen) but a house-agent told me that it was very difficult to get into a quarter in Trieste if you have children. We have kitchen utensils here in the bedroom but we never use them as Nora does not like to cook in other people’s kitchens. So we dine out and lunch out with the result that I am continually borrowing money from the director and the other English ‘professor’ and paying it back the next day. Trieste is not very cheap and the difficulties of an English teacher living with a woman on a salary fit for a navvy or a stoker and expected to keep up a ‘gentlemanly’ appearance and to ease his intellectual heart by occasional visits to a theatre or a bookshop are very great. Having heard the first part of the story you can understand that the regime of these schools is a reign of terror and that I should be in a much more terrorised position were it not that many of my pupils (noblemen and signori and editors and rich people) have praised me highly to the director who being a socialist is very sensible of my deservingness in consequence. As it is I cannot look for a position in another school or, indeed, for any position. He gave me to understand one day very pointedly that whenever he found a teacher trying to get a post elsewhere he packed him off. He locked up my BA certificate in his safe where he said he had the certificates of the other ‘professors’ (a lie, of course, since I am the only qualified teacher here so far as Austrian law goes—being a doctor) and informed me that whereas his copy of my contract was stamped my copy of his contract was unstamped. The slightest disapproval on the part of my genteel pupils would be sufficient to obtain for me dismissal and with my ‘immorality’ belled about the town I should find it next to impossible to get anything to do here. There is no hope of advancement and a continual fear of collapse. This is the economic position.

The moral position is not very re-assuring. Reserving my own case for the present I must tell you some more things about Nora. I am afraid that she is not of a very robust constitution. In fact she is not in good health. But more than this I am afraid that she is one of those plants which cannot be safely transplanted. She is continually crying. I do not believe that she wants to have anything more to say to her people but I am quite sure (it is her own statement) that she cannot live this life with me much longer. She has nobody to talk to but me and, heroics left aside, this is not good for a woman. Sometimes when we are out together (with the other English ‘professor’) she does not speak a word during the whole evening. She seems to me to be in danger of falling into a melancholy mood which would certainly injure her health very much. I do not know what strange morose creature she will bring forth after all her tears and I am even beginning to reconsider the appositeness of the names I had chosen (‘George’ and ‘Lucy’). She is also sensitive and in Pola I had once to turn the English teacher, a thoughtless young chap named Eyers, out of the room (much as I dislike such an office) for making her cry. I asked her today would she like to rear a child for me and she said very convincingly that she would, but, in my present uncertain position I would not like to encumber her with a family. Her knowledge of even ordinary affairs is very small and she cries because she cannot make the clothes for the child even after Aunt Josephine has sent her the patterns and I have bought the stuff for her. I have no time or patience now for theories as to what the State should do in such cases but I am simply trying to do what I think is best.

I think it is best for people to be happy and honestly I can see no prospect of her being happy if she continues to live this life here. You know, of course, what a high esteem I have for her and you know how quietly she gave our friends the lie on the night when she came with us to the North Wall. I think that her health and happiness would be much improved if she were to live a life more suited to her temperament and I don’t think it right that even I should complain if the untoward phenomenon of ‘love’ should cause disturbance, even in so egoistically regulated a life as mine. The child is an unforgettable part of the problem. I suppose you know that Nora is incapable of any of the deceits which pass for current morality and the fact she is unhappy here is explained when you consider that she is really very helpless and unable to cope with any kind of difficulties. I do not know exactly the attitude of your mind towards her or towards the child which will be hers and mine but I think that in most essential things you share my opinions. As a matter of fact I know very little about women and you, probably, know less and I think you ought to submit this part of the case to Aunt Josephine who knows more than either of us. One of the English teachers said that she was not worthy of me and I am sure this would be many people’s verdict but it requires such a hell of a lot of self-stultification to enter into the mood which produces such a verdict that I am afraid I am not equal to the task. After all, it is only Skeffington, and fellows like him, who think that woman is man’s equal. Cosgrave, too, said I would never make anything of her, but it seems to me that in many points in which Cosgrave and I are deficient she does not require any making at all. I have certainly submitted myself more to her than I have ever done to anybody and I do not believe I would have begun this letter but that she encouraged me. Her effect on me has so far been to destroy (or rather to weaken) a great part of my natural cheerfulness and irresponsibility but I don’t think this effect would be lasting in other circumstances. With one entire side of my nature she has no sympathy and will never have any and yet once, when we were both passing through an evening of horrible melancholy, she quoted (or rather misquoted) a poem of mine which begins ‘O, sweetheart, hear you your lover’s tale’. That made me think for the first time in nine months that I was a genuine poet. Sometimes she is very happy and cheerful and I, who grow less and less romantic, do not desire any such ending for our love-affair as a douche in the Serpentine. At the same time I want to avoid as far as is humanly possible any such apparition in our lives as that abominable spectre which Aunt Josephine calls ‘mutual tolerance’. In fact, now that I am well on in my letter I feel full of hope again and, it seems to me, that if we can both allow for each other’s temperaments, we may live happily. But this present absurd life is no longer possible for either of us.

[Sheet missing here]

my writing does not excuse him, in my opinion, for having behaved towards me treacherously. I often think to myself that, in spite of the seeming acuteness of my writing, I may fail in life through being too ingenuous, and certainly I made a mistake in thinking that, with an Irish friendship aiding me, I could carry through my general indictment or survey of the island successfully. The very degrading and unsatisfactory nature of my exile angers me and I do not see why I should continue to drag it out with a view to returning ‘some day’ with money in my pocket and convincing the men of letters that, after all, I was a person of talent. After a great dealing [sic] of hunting and searching I have thought of [a] plan which might be adopted as a temporary solution of the question and I am now going to set it out to you.

It is now the month of July and next month the interesting event is to take place. From now to next Easter I could save perhaps twenty pounds, at least twelve. I can offer my thirty-three poems and my nine stories broadcast. My verses may be accepted by a publisher and when Dubliners is complete I intend to offer it to Heinemann, who, I am sure, will take it. Independently of this I could send home to you a certain fraction of my salary every month and by next Easter I am sure that I could have twenty pounds in Ireland besides the prospect of my verses and stories and novel selling. It would be possible for you to save, at least, the same sum in the same time and with the two we might take a small cottage outside Dublin in the suburbs, furnish it and pay the rent for a half-year in advance. I simply suggest this as an experiment which need not continue longer than twelve months if it were found to be unsuccessful.

This suggestion, however, I am very reluctant to make for many reasons. First of all, it involves a serious infringement of your liberty but on the other [hand] I do not see that you would suffer very much economically since everything could be yours. You cannot tell when you may be forced to ‘compromise’ your liberty as I have been forced and certainly if you did entertain the idea of leaving Ireland and living in a Berlitz School on the continent you may entertain this idea. If you had a job of thirty shillings a week and we had put our saved sums together I think we could give my proposal a year’s trial. The second reason why I am reluctant to make this proposal is that I am uncertain whether you would like it or not. Not that I imagine that the atmosphere of our suppositious [sic] cottage could by any vagaries on the part of the two arrivals from Trieste become more unpleasant to you than the atmosphere you are at present breathing, but I am quite in the dark as to the attitude of your mind towards me and ‘my companion’. By the way, is there no method you can suggest of annihilating Hairy Jaysus? Isn’t he an insufferable object! The third reason why I am reluctant to propose this is that I have proposed so many things which are now considered follies of mine and done so few of them that I am beginning to think it is not right for me to expect people to help me out in my notions since I have become a settled person. However, in spite of my reluctance, I have made the proposal and there’s an end of it. I shall expect your reply and if you think well of it I can send you my first instalment at the beginning of August. I hope your letter will not delay in coming.

Kindly believe that if there is anything abnormally unpleasant to you in this confession and letter it arises from my foolishness which is now to be reckoned one of my permanent assets. It is possible that my idea is really a terrible one but my mind’s eye is so distracted after nine months of my present life that I am unable to see things with my former precision. Of one thing, however, I am made aware from the obscure depths of my consciousness and that is, whether my present life end this way or another way, it will end shortly: and that will be a great relief to everybody concerned.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 15 July 1905

Via S Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Before this you will have got my letter and my story ‘The Boarding-House’. I am awaiting your reply as well as your criticism on my novel and story. I send you tomorrow the 6th story ‘Counterparts’. You are to make a copy of it at once and return it to me on the same day if possible, recommending it in the post. I have written to Heinemann offering my verses. I continue my letter to you which I expect will cross your reply to mine. You see I am writing to you fully as you wish me to do. What is hidden under ‘Do not work too hard!’ Is it in good faith. I think I am rather preoccupied just now.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), 19 July 1905

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

and tomorrow (Monday) for example in this torrid weather I have to give eight lessons during which I must keep continually on the alert and interested. Many of the frigidities of The Boarding-House and Counterparts were written while the sweat streamed down my face on to the handkerchief which protected my collar. I have had only two swims because it is far out to the baths and I very seldom have more than two hours free at any time.

I will confess to you in confidence that I should very much like to eat a slice of boiled leg of mutton with turnips and carrots. Also desirables are a slice of corned beef and cabbage, a sizeable beefsteak prepared on a gridiron, and (excuse the hierarchy) an intelligent supra-burgher like yourself to share the meal. Nora desires to see a kettle on the side of a fire and, though my desire is perhaps a passing one, I fear that hers is permanent. But I will not dilate on this point because it is possible that a letter of yours, on its way here now, I hope, will be so full of sensible statements that I shall have to obliterate corned beef and boiled leg of mutton from the bill of fare indefinitely.

The director told me yesterday that as soon as the other English ‘professor’ went away he would raise my salary. This, you will see, would help me greatly in carrying out my designs. If you agree, you are to dispose of my verses and stories broadcast. I am so far away that I can do little or nothing but you are on the spot. Nine stories and twenty verses should yield at the lowest ten pounds and I can easily send you another ten pounds: that makes £20. I am now beginning to be afraid that some such move must be made. Nora seems to me to be in very poor health. All yesterday and the day before she has been laid up with neuralgia and pains and today she seems to be dropping down with weakness. It is very difficult for either of us to enjoy life in these circumstances.

The preface to The Vicar of Wakefield which I read yesterday gave me a moment of doubt as to the excellence of my literary manners. It seems so improbable that Hardy, for example, will be spoken of in two hundred years. And yet when I arrived at page two of the narrative I saw the extreme putridity of the social system out of which Goldsmith had reared his flower. Is it possible that, after all, men of letters are no more than entertainers? These discouraging reflections arise perhaps from my surroundings. The stories in Dubliners seem to be indisputably well done but, after all, perhaps many people could do them as well. I am not rewarded by any feeling of having overcome difficulties. Maupassant writes very well, of course, but I am afraid that his moral sense is rather obtuse. The Dublin papers will object to my stories as to a caricature of Dublin life. Do you think there is any truth in this? At times the spirit directing my pen seems to me so plainly mischievous that I am almost prepared to let the Dublin critics have their way. All these pros and cons I must for the nonce lock up in my bosom. Of course do not think that I consider contemporary Irish writing anything but ill-written, morally obtuse formless caricature.

The struggle against conventions in which I am at present involved was not entered into by me so much as a protest against these conventions as with the intention of living in conformity with my moral nature. There are some people in Ireland who would call my moral nature oblique, people who think that the whole duty of man consists in paying one’s debts; but in this case Irish opinion is certainly only the caricature of the opinion of any European tribunal. To be judged properly I should not be judged by 12 burghers taken at haphazard, judging under the dictation of a hidebound bureaucrat, in accordance with the evidence of policeman but by some jury composed partly of those of my own class and of my own age presided over by a judge who had solemnly forsworn all English legal methods. But why insist on this point? I do so only because my present lamentable circumstances seem to constitute a certain reproach against me.

Jim

P.S. I have just received a postcard from Heinemann declining my verses.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 24 [July 1905]

Via S. Nicolò 30, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Do not send the song ‘In the Pinewood’ to any paper as I have offered it to ‘Saturday Review’. Do not send ‘Hallow Eve’ to any paper as I have sent it to ‘Literary World’ which offers prize of £10.10.0. Send me at once copies of this paper. Am awaiting story and remarks upon it. You are to show chapters to Curran and Cosgrave as before. What of The Holy Office? I shall continue correspondence on receipt of your next. Nora thanks Aunt Josephine for her kind letter.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), [27 July 1905]

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

Son born

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 29 July 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie The child was born on Thursday last the 27th July at nine o’clock in the evening. It was almost by accident I was in the city that day as I had had the intention of going away to a bathing-place. When I came back from the café at three o’clock I found Nora in pain. I had no notion it was for birth but when it continued for a long time I went to the landlady and told her. She sent for her midwife and then there was proper confusion if you like. The room was all pulled about. Nora had hardly anything made not expecting the event till the end of August. However, our landlady is a Jewess and gave us everything we wanted. I told her to get everything that was wanted and gave her all the money I could lay hands on. Then I went for Dr Sinigaglia who is one of my pupils. He came at once and returned in time to help Nora to give birth to the child. He says I must have miscalculated the time as it is a perfectly normal child. The people here made me go in to dinner with them and at about nine in came the old aunt Jewess smiling and nodding ‘Xe un bel maschio, Signore’. So then I knew an heir was born.

It was not very pleasant for me—the six hours—but it must have been a damn sight worse for Nora. But Dr Sinigaglia told me she was very brave and hardly uttered a cry, only clapped her hands when she heard it was a boy. She is very well. The child appears to have inherited his grandfather’s and father’s voices. He has dark blue eyes. He has a great taste for music because while I was nursing him yesterday he eyed me with great fixity as I whistled several operatic airs for him. Nora gives him her own milk.

I wonder would you mind applying to the much lamented Curran. I am in a slight fix, as you may suppose. I hardly like to do this but perhaps he will allow me to ‘borrow’ a pound from him. It’s very expensive for me and I was quite unprepared. Many thanks for your telegram in reply. I am expecting a letter from you and a parcel, long overdue. I enclose a fortune which a white mouse picked for me this morning. I intended it for the child but it seems applicable to myself. Please attend to the material side of this letter. I hope that you are all delighted now that you have all been made uncles and aunts of.

Jim

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 July 1905

7 Whitworth Place, Drumcondra

MS. Cornell

My dear Jim The postman knocked us up at about 12.30 on Friday morning with your telegram. I got up and answered the door and while I knelt down to read it by the light of my candle which I had stuck on the stairs, heads appeared at the nursery door, Charlie came out shivering on the landing in his shirt, and Pappie who was sober whistled one never knows what one is going to hear next from you. I brought the telegram upstairs with a Christmas morning feeling. It gave me such unmixed pleasure that I didn’t hesitate to show it to Pappie first and knew that you intended that I should. He said nothing while I was in the room but read the telegram two or three times. When I went out, however, he wept and on Saturday he went to some trouble to get me the money to send the telegram in reply to yours. I am very glad it is a son and so I suppose are you. I am very much interested; I didn’t expect to be interested at all but then you know how little imagination I have. By the Lord you’re a very interesting person; you remind me strongly of your own eucharistie announcement to Byrne: ‘This is life.’ You have, perhaps, a faint idea how much your name is respected here, but this news, which will spread through Cosgrave, will overwhelm these pale ‘would be’s’. Gogarty, I believe, even waxes sentimental over you, not that I think for that reason that he would be less treacherous to you again if he got an opportunity. I have said I am interested but that sounds to me too like that torpid but polite selfishness which I find a little irritating in Cosgrave because I think it conceals the ossified unreliability of a mind which is still intelligent, an inadaptability to certain (the most important) occasions of life. I am more than interested; I have a personal wish in the matter. My affections are sluggish and ignoble, they do not please me, so I give them little rein, but my appreciations are better stuff. It would give me continual pleasure then, to see how that ingenuous dignity, nobility and amiability which I think are really in your character, will affect the most proving relationship in life (albeit a relationship about which I can imagine nothing) and how a son who inherits your character will respond to you. I find myself now ready to give your son no other feeling than I have ever given you. It is not a small thing either that one human being is born, to whom the churches can lay no claim, whose commonsense will not be worried by the necessity of taking seriously the fable of Jesus of Nazareth. In a mood it seems to me that no-one takes that fable seriously, but then the fact remains that few sons are born as free as yours because the priest and the king are so seldom tied in a tether. If your conduct all through has been the rather obvious consequence of your mind, it seems to be a rare example all the same. I hope Nora is recovering strength quickly; you will see now how easily her melancholy will disappear. Aunt Josephine says I should say ‘Bravo, Nora!’ You certainly lost no time but be careful of the first of the ‘liberal progeny’—they’re brittle. Nora, too, who is so ignorant about herself will want advice. Aunt Josephine will write she says as soon as she is well. She has had another attack of that kidney trouble again, a more severe attack than before and has been in the Whitworth Hospital for the last week. She is getting better now, however, slowly. She told me that mother, notwithstanding her seventeen children was affraid [sic] of her life of a newborn baby. She could never be persuaded to give one a bath until it was a month old—the nurses did it. Once she essayed the feat and locked herself up with it alone in a room. I was looking over her letters to you in Paris, lately. Can you imagine how delighted she would be now! Aunt Josephine I needn’t tell you is pleased beyond measure. She says she would give anything to nurse it or to see you nursing it. Poppie or Pappie have not said much to me but they seem to take a very friendly interest perhaps pride in it and to be glad inconsistently. Cosgrave says it is good news and that he will bear it in person to Skeffington. All he has told up to the present have expressed approval but he expects jealousy.

Cosgrave has read your chapters which pleased him greatly, he was even quite lively about them. He says he burst out laughing at some parts of it, in fact he intended writing you a long letter but I suppose he will be too lazy to do that. He knows nothing like your novel, it aroused him out of his torpidity (I am afraid only for a time) In sheer courage it is far beyond anything he knows. He thinks it is hardest on Byrne. He says Byrne and Pappie will love me, by the bye. You have fulfilled Byrne⁠[’s] prophecy that ‘the bloody felleh would put you in a book or something.’ Byrne seeing me with Cosgrave asked him how was the novel getting on. Cosgrave disclaimed having seen it. Byrne said ‘Parts of it he’ll write better d’ye know, for being away, an’ parts of it he’ll write worse’! He agreed with me that it will be one of the novels of the century and that there is a very logical intellect behind the apparently rambling conversations, and that the number and differentiation of characters is astonishing especially the way you make a minor character—Glynn for instance—stand out. Ellwood is capital. He admires your satire very much but says he can hardly think you are not malicious sometimes. He says he would not like to be Gogarty when you come to the Tower episode. Thanks be to God he never kicked your arse or anything. The book won’t be liked at all, at all. Byrne is done for. Poor Ireland! He expects more amusement from Byrne and the mystics. With regard to himself, the idea of being called grave-looking ‘buggered’ him. He is going to take a libel action for the name Lynch. He alluded to you calling him ‘the poor man,’ from the arseless Joyce is also absurd. The allusion, too, to his not standing drinks is unfair. In fact he was going to write you a long indictment. He doesn’t think the critics will approve, or the people satired, but he agrees that if you can get it published you will get a following amongst those who are better worth having. By the bye, did I say Byrne uttered commonplaces he would like to be able to disbelieve. I forget what I said when you told me he was daringly commonplace. My recollection is such that I fancy I may have said it and yet if I did I would not be so generous as to forget it. Is it yours or mine? Cosgrave says it’s unfair for you to frig the one idea about love, which he had before he met you, and say ‘you have educated him too much’. I think he is wrong. You put the idea into his mouth anyhow and if you do borrow ideas now and again from a person you certainly replace them with others. Cosgrave doesn’t care what you do with him in the book and I can’t think to what use you are going to turn me. I can’t see either what use those notes I sent you have been. Would a selection from your old letter⁠[s] be of any use to you?

Story and criticism follow tomorrow. Criticism of chapters will be sent back with them.

I hope things have changed for the better with you already. Kindly give my congratulations and best wishes for good health to Nora or also remember me to little—what’s his name.

Stannie

Aug 1st: Your letter received this morning. I shall be giving your chapters to Curran tomorrow or next day. It’s a very difficult thing you ask me for I haven’t a ‘touching’ manner. I doubt if it will be successful. If I had the money myself, of course, I’d send it but Pappie who could have got me on to an election last Monday didn’t for fear of ‘spurring the willing horse’. He’s on a drunk at present: the cheque. If Curran fails I don’t think I have any other resource. Did you get those books of Ibsen’s I sent you?

S.

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 17 August 1905

Via S. Nicolo 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Sir I send you by this post the copy of Chamber Music for which you have asked me and I hope to hear from you soon. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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TO STANISLAUS JOYCE (POSTCARD), [? 18 August 1905] Thursday

Via S. Nicolò 30, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie After three weeks of intolerable waiting I receive your letter. Nora is discontented because it is all about books and even I regret to notice that you have not struck the rock. You may suspect how pushed I am for money. I send you by this post A Painful Case which you are to copy and send back by return of post. I must insist on this as my nerves get an attack of ‘jim-jams’ when you say ‘tomorrow’ and write within the month. I am preparing to submit ‘Dubliners’ to Heinemann. Grant Richards, who is in business under another name, I think (say nothing about this), wrote to me saying he had mislaid my verses and could I make another copy for him. I have done so. Has O.G. published under the name of Oliver Grey? I am replying to your letter but hope to receive something from you by any post now.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 1 September 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Thanks for your prompt return of the story with appendage. I send you by this post the eighth story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee-Room’ which I hope you will return as promptly. I would be glad to have detailed account of your interview with Koehler [sic]. The child has no name yet—I am waiting for funds. I do not want so much as you think but a little would do no harm. If Dubliners is published next spring I hope to be able to help you to get out of your swamp. Do you think it will make money? Nora is writing today to Aunt Josephine. I would be glad of some news of your house generally. Do you think an English publisher will take Dubliners? Is it not possible for a few persons of character and culture to make Dublin a capital such as Christiania has become? Is Cosgrave going to become a dispensary doctor by sacerdotal favour? Are you going to become a despised clerk? I hope to be able to prevent this—but what about myself?

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 [September] 1905 Sunday night

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I am surprised that you have not written to me as you said you would or sent back my manuscript. I must ask you to exert your imagination a little with regard to me. My average number of lessons (and what lessons!) per day will now be from 8 to 10 and I am trying to finish Dubliners. So if you and Aunt Josephine are piqued by my not writing you must not forget these facts. I really wish you would answer me promptly, money or no money.

I am much obliged for your careful criticisms of my stories. Your comparison of them with certain others is somewhat dazzling. The authors you mention have such immense reputations that I am afraid you may be wrong. Lermontoff says, apropros of the Confessions of Rousseau, that they were vitiated by the fact that Rousseau read them to his friends. I hardly think, arguing from the conditions in which they are written, that these stories can be superlatively good. I wish I could talk to you fully on this as on many other subjects. Your remark that Counterparts shows a Russian ability in taking the reader for an intracranial journey set me thinking what on earth people mean when they talk of ‘Russian’. You probably mean a certain scrupulous brute force in writing and, from the few Russians I have read, this does not seem to be eminently Russian. The chief thing I find in nearly all Russians is a scrupulous instinct for caste. Of course, I don’t agree with you about Turgénieff. He does not seem to me to be very much superior to Korolenko (have you read any of his?) or Lermontoff. He is a little dull (not clever) and at times theatrical. I think many admire him because he is ‘gentlemanly’ just as they admire Gorky because he is ‘ungentlemanly’. Talking of Gorky what do you think of him? He has a great name with Italians. As for Tolstoy I disagree with you altogether. Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical! He is head and shoulders over the others. I don’t take him very seriously as a Christian saint. I think he has a very genuine spiritual nature but I suspect that he speaks the very best Russian with a St Petersburg accent and remembers the Christian name of his great-great-grandfather (this, I find, is at the bottom of the essentially feudal art of Russia). I see that he wrote a 13 column letter to The Times of London attacking governments. Even the English ‘liberal’ papers are indignant. Not merely does he attack armaments, he even alludes to the Tsar as a ‘weak-minded Hussar officer, standing below the intellectual level of most of his subjects, grossly superstitious and of coarse tastes’. The English liberals are shocked: they would call him vulgar but that they know he is a prince. A writer in the Illustrated London News sneers at Tolstoy for not understanding WAR. ‘Poor dear man!’ he says. Now, damn it, I’m rather good-tempered but this is a little bit too much. Did you ever hear such impudence? Do they think the author of Resurrection and Anna Karenin is a fool? Does this impudent, dishonourable journalist think he is the equal of Tolstoy, physically, intellectually, artistically or morally? The thing is absurd. But when you think of it, it’s cursedly annoying also. Perhaps that journalist will undertake to revise Tolstoy more fully—novels, stories, plays and all. I agree with you, however, about Maupassant. He is an excellent writer. His tales are sometimes a little slipshod but that was hardly to be avoided, given the circumstances of his life.

To return to myself. Do you think it is likely an English publisher will publish Dubliners? Mr T. Fisher Unwin, who ‘regretted &c …’ my verses has an advertisement in today’s Daily Mail for Florence Warden’s new thrilling story The House by the River. The advertisement begins with a quotation from some sensitive reviewer ‘Up and down your spine’ in moderate capitals. I am sure that in ‘private life’, as they say of the lady highkickers, Mr T. Fisher Unwin is a most ‘cultured’ person. Sometimes I ask myself, when similar enormities reach me, is it worth while conquering this. On the other hand, as perhaps Mr Magee and Mr Gogarty are beginning to suspect, my nature is artistic and I cannot be happy so long as I try to stifle it. You did not seem to take my statement—viz, that my present absurd life is no longer possible for me—very seriously. Therefore I repeat the remark: and I may also remind you that I have a habit (an inconvenient one for myself, it seems) of following up a conviction by an act. If I once convince myself that this kind of life is suicidal to my soul, I will make everything and everybody stand out of my way as I did before now. However I am doing what I can to live without causing unhappiness to the few people for whom I have affection.

The child has got no name yet, though he will be two months old on Thursday next. He is very fat and very quiet. I don’t know who he’s like. He’s rather like that pudgy person of two years old who frowns at the camera in my first photograph but he has the ‘companion’s’ eyes. How is that brisk idiot, by the way? He seems to be very healthy in spite of his paternal inheritance. I think a child should be allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction. Wouldn’t it be awful if I had to hawk my son from one beggarly lodgings to another, from land to land? I mean, of course, for his sake. I hope to Christ he won’t have to make allowances for me when he begins to think.

I send you the ninth story of Dubliners, namely An Encounter which might bear the dedication to the author of The Voyage of the Ophir. (Return it at once.) You overrate this writer greatly, I think. Do you remember how I shocked you by deriving him from Lytton and Disraeli. I should have been sent to school in France. I don’t like to think of some prose which I have written. But, instead, I was taught by Father Tommy Meagher and Ruskin.

Have you heard of the earthquake in Calabria? I enriched the fund for the sufferers by a crown. Some phenomena of nature terrify me. It is strange that a person can be morally intrepid, as I certainly am, and abjectly cowardly in the physical sense. Some nights I look at my girl’s arms with pity and think that perhaps my politeness is also a form of physical cowardice. How I would like, if only I could secure a footing, to plunge any young people I knew into a bath of spontaneous happiness. I would like to see a lot of different young natures tumbling over each other. This desire however may be egoistic. It is quite certain that in the past, for example with the ‘companion’ and with Gogarty and Byrne, I behaved as I did (to G’s and B’s astonishment, unselfishly) because my own nature would have been offended had I behaved otherwise. By the way, how is May?

Jim

P.S. No letter again today. What’s up now?

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 September 1905

Via S. Nicolo 30, Trieste

Dear Sir: I wish to thank you for your kind opinion of my book of verse. I am sure also that what you say about the public caring little for verse by new writers is true. I should like to be able to co-operate with you in these circumstances but I cannot as I have no money. My music must therefore justify its name strictly. Allow me once again to thank you for the interest you have taken in my verse and to ask you to send it back to me as soon as you can.

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To WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 23 September 1905

Via S. Nicolò, 30 II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Heinemann

Dear Sir, I have almost finished a book which I would like to submit to you. It is called ‘Dubliners.’ It is a collection of twelve short stories. Each story is perhaps of 1800 or 2000 words. The book is not a collection of tourist impressions but an attempt to represent certain aspects of the life of one of the European capitals. I am an Irishman, as you will see by the name. I am anxious that the book should be published as soon as possible and this is the reason why I offer it to you beforehand. I shall be much obliged if you will tell me whether you would like to read it or not and excuse me if my request is an unusual one. Faithfully yours,

Jas. A. Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 24 September 1905]

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Please send me the information I ask you for as follows: The Sisters: Can a priest be buried in a habit?

Ivy Day in the Committee Room—Are Aungier St and Wicklow in the Royal Exchange Ward? Can a municipal election take place in October?

A Painful Case—Are the police at Sydney Parade of the D division? Would the city ambulance be called out to Sydney Parade for an accident? Would an accident at Sydney Parade be treated at Vincent’s Hospital?

After the Race—Are the police supplied with provisions by government or by private contracts?

Kindly answer these questions as quickly as possible. I sent my story The Clay (which I had slightly rewritten) to The LITERARY World but the cursedly stupid ape that conducts that journal neither acknowledged it nor sent it back. This kind of thing is maddening. Am I an imbecile or are these people imbeciles. That journalist that wrote so superiorly about Tolstoy is (thank the devil) dead and, I hope, damned. By the Lord Christ I must get rid of some of these Jewish bowels I have in me yet. I went out yesterday for a walk in a big wood outside Trieste. The damned monotonous summer was over and the rain and soft air made me think of the beautiful (I am serious) climate of Ireland. I hate a damn silly sun that makes men into butter. I sat down miles away from everybody on a bench surrounded by tall trees. The Bora (the Trieste Wind) was roaring through the tops of the trees. I sniffed up all the fragrance of the earth and offered up the following prayer (not identical with that which Renan offered upon the Acropolis)

O Vague Something behind Everything!

For the love of the Lord Christ change my curse-o’-God state of affairs. Give me for Christ’ sake a pen and an ink-bottle and some peace of mind and then, by the crucified Jaysus, if I don’t sharpen that little pen and dip it into fermented ink and write tiny little sentences about the people who betrayed me send me to hell. After all, there are many ways of betraying people. It wasn’t only the Galilean suffered that. Whoever the hell you are, I inform you that this [is] a poor comedy vou expect me to play and I’m damned to hell if I’ll play it for you. What do you mean by urging me to be forbearing? For your sake I refrained from taking a little black fellow from Bristol by the nape of the neck and hurling him into the street when he spat some of his hatched venom at me. But my heroic nature urged me to do this because he was smaller than I. For your sake, I allowed a cyclist to use towards me his ignoble and cowardly manners, pretending to see nothing, pretending that he was my equal. I sorrowfully confess to you, old chap, that I was a damn fool. But if you only grant me that thing I ask you for I will go to Paris where, I believe, there is a person by the name of Anatole France much admired by a Celtic philologist by the name of Goodbetterbest and I’ll say to him ‘Respected master, is this pen pointed enough?’ Amen.

It is possible that the delusion I have with regard to my power to write will be killed by adverse circumstances. But the delusion which will never leave me is that I am an artist by temperament. Newman and Renan, for example, are excellent writers but they seem to have very little of the temperament I mean. Whereas Rimbaud, who is hardly a writer at all, has it. Of course Renan is an artist and must have the temperament but it is balanced by the temperament of a philo⁠[lo]⁠gist. Newman must have it too but balanced by the temperament of a theologian. I am neither savant nor saint. Grant Richards wrote to me, saying how much he admired Chamber Music but adding that, with the present public taste, he could not take more than part of the risk. I wrote back thanking him (I daresay he has no money himself) and saying I had no money. I wrote to Heinemann telling him about Dubliners and asking would he read it and consider it. I shall send you on Wednesday or Thursday the tenth story A Mother and the book will be finished by the first of November. You might let me know what you think of it as I intend to dedicate it to you. You are a long time sitting on my novel. I wish you’d say what you think of it. The only book I know like it is Lermontoff’s Hero of Our Days. Of course mine is much longer and Lermontoff’s hero is an aristocrat and a tired man and a brave animal. But there is a likeness in the aim and title and at times in the acid treatment. Lermontoff describes at the end of the book a duel between the hero and G—, in which G— is shot and falls over a precipice in the Caucasus. The original of G—, stung by the satire of the writer, challenged Lermontoff to a duel. The duel was fought on the brink of a precipice in the Caucasus as described in the book. Lermontoff was shot dead and rolled over the precipice. You can imagine the thought that came into my mind. The book impressed me very much. It is much more interesting than any of Turgénieff’s.

Will you read some English ‘realists’ I see mentioned in the papers and see what they are like—Gissing, Arthur Morrison and a man named Keary. I can read very little and am as dumb as a stockfish. But really I think that the two last stories I sent you are very good. Perhaps they will be refused by Heinemann. The order of the stories is as follows. The Sisters, An Encounter and another story which are stories of my childhood: The Boarding-House, After the Race and Eveline, which are stories of adolescence: The Clay, Counterparts, and A Painful Case which are stories of mature life: Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother and the last story of the book which are stories of public life in Dublin. When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the ‘second’ city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world. I read that silly, wretched book of Moore’s ‘The Untilled Field’ which the Americans found so remarkable for its ‘craftsmanship’. O, dear me! It is very dull and flat, indeed: and ill written.

Jim

PS No letter from you again today. I will fall in love with you if you keep on dodging the post like this much longer. What in the name of God are you at? If you don’t answer at once, by God, I’ll go to Dublin at once and get my manuscripts. Are you at ‘biz’? An old man, hatless, stockingless and shirtless, a pilgrim, passed my window now on his way to the Holy Land. Two little Triestines went into a hallway and laughed till they beat each other. Funny world!

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 28 September 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I shall write you a letter in a few days about another matter as soon as I have received an answer from Mr Symons to whom I wrote yesterday. As for Chamber Music of course you may keep it until you can see your way to have it published for me. I am very much obliged to you for your kind letter. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 30 September 1905]

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I was very much surprised to receive yesterday a telegraphed order for 24 crowns. I thought you might be living on ‘pieces’ so I sent you the money, hearing you were ill. I hope you didn’t deprive yourself of food to send me the money.

There is a post as English teacher open for you in this school from the 20th October next which the director offers you through me. Your salary would be 40 crowns a week (a crown is 10d) for a maximum of 40 hours a week. Extra lessons at the rate of 1 crown a lesson. Your travelling expenses 3rd class would be repaid to you on your arrival here. You would have to sign a contract for six months after you arrive. If you could not raise the fare I could send you 100 crowns (£4–3–4) to cover your expenses. I have spoken to my landlady who has a room vacant next ours. You could take it (she will keep it disengaged till your reply comes) and board with the family here as Nora does or take your meals out as I do. If you do not care to live with us I could find you board and lodgings for 70 crowns a month.

As the director is keeping the post open for you, I must ask you to answer immediately. You might do no more than winter here if you have other plans in Ireland: and a few months of the best season (opera and carnival) in Trieste might not be too disagreeable to you. At the same time if you are disinclined do not imagine that I will consider your refusal an affront. I expect that when Dubliners is published I may be able to help you as well as myself. I send you by this evening’s post the tenth story A Mother which you are to copy and return at once. I hope to receive from you tomorrow or next day the other two which I am a long time waiting for.

If you decide to come I advise you to learn a little Italian—enough to spare yourself disadvantages at first. I advise you also to come very well dressed as this is a ‘highly respectable’ position I offer you. And I advise you finally not to come through Paris but to come London–Hamburg–Vienna–Trieste or London–Boulogne–Bâle–Milan–Trieste as these routes are cheaper. The Hamburg route, however, is very long and the sea-trip might be unpleasant at this season.

I hope from the fact of your telegram that I was somewhat misled about your spectral appearance, and urge you to answer this without delay.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 2 October 1905 Monday

Via S. Nicolo 30, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I received this morning your letter and my stories. But I cannot find any criticism on them. In addition to answering the letter now on its way you might send me a criticism. I suppose since the house is so little attractive you will be inclined to accept my offer. Grant Richards wrote back to me, asking to be allowed to keep the MS. The new business is his wife’s and if they succeed in the first season they will be able to undertake non-commercial publication. I wrote to Symons, offering to send him Dubliners

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 3 October 1905 Sunday. 11. a.m.

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Where is the MS of my novel? It is most thoughtless of Curran to give it to anyone without my permission. I did not send it to Dublin to have it circulated from hand to hand. I added Curran’s name to yours and Cosgrave’s because he treated me very kindly. I must pass a week of torture until I know whether it is safe or not. You must get it from Kettle at once and send it to me safely registered. Kettle, of course, is a decent kind of a fellow but some of these impostors might wheedle it from him. He is too polite to suspect treachery. Have you any idea what anguish I suffer from all this incertitude? Send me A Mother back. Symons who answers my letters by return of post (being an Englishman and a stranger) wishes me to send both my MSS to Constable to whom he has spoken. I shall call to see the director after lunch and answer your indefinite letter definitely.

J.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 7 October 1905 Saturday 2.30 P.M.

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I asked you to answer my letter by return of post. There has been no reply from you either today or yesterday. The director has asked me whether you are coming or not. It is quite possible that by the time your answer arrives he will have taken a teacher from somewhere else.

Jim

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 October 1905

7 Whitworth Place, Drumcondra, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim I’m afraid you’re becoming irascible, but here’s some answer to your many questions:

1). A priest is buried in a habit if he belongs to an order which wears a habit. Otherwise so far as I can find out he is buried in his vestments: I cannot find out for certain if there is any canonical law on the point. Fr O’Malley, who had had his parish taken from him was buried in his vestments.

2) A Municipal Election might take place in October but it is highly improbable. It would be a bye-election (for instance if a councillor or alderman died or resigned) and according to the general rule if it occurred so late would be held over till January. Aungier St is in Royal Exchange Ward.

3) The City Ambulance would be called out to Sydney Parade at the time the story is supposed to have occurred (The Pembroke [Council] Ambulance from Ballsbridge would go now) but in all probability the body would have been sent in on the tram. I know a man who was injured at Raheny Junction was sent in to Jervis St on the tram.

It seems to me that your book ‘Dubliners’ is becoming almost as important as your novel. ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Rooms’ is accurate, just, and satisfactory. It is original too. I don’t think that this which forms so great a part of Dublin, of Irish life has been done before by an artist. To a stranger your differentiation of character would seem nothing less than marvellous. And the poem—the ‘turn’ in this case—is entirely Irish. Aunt Josephine prefers ‘A Painful Case’ to any of the others but slight as that story is I think it is too big for the form you use. My sense of proportion leads me to prefer ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Rooms’ or ‘Counterparts.’ People will think ‘A Painful Case’, a story of passionate natures. People who want to be amused by what they read—that large class—will not find many of them to their taste. ‘The Boarding-House,’ perhaps, though the title is more like the title of a picture. Cosgràve said: ‘How delicate he is on the point!’ I find the intellectual serenity and ease with which you draw out these burgesses a relief after Turgenev’s painful and unhappy analysis. But what is the meaning of writing one half of a story about ‘Joe and Leo Dillon’ and the other half about a sodomite, named by me for convenience sake ‘the captain of fifty’? To call it ‘An Encounter’ will hardly link the two parts together. However I would not wish for a good deal that this type were missing in Dubliners. Do you write out of rough copy of these stories? Like a Shakespeare manuscript there is scarcely ever a correction in them and yet I can hardly imagine that that astonishing unravelling of the sodomite’s mind was written offhand. The sensation of terror—you were afraid he might catch you by the ankles—is cleverly put in. I notice, by the bye, that the parcels you send are very neatly packed—altogether unlike what one would expect from you. But once it was sealed with sealing-wax and I could have been surcharged about 7/–. Do you remember Gogarty’s silly habit of scribbling all over his letters? Genius I suppose. I don’t like the big title ‘A Mother’ for your last. There is a habit in Ireland amongst the writers who are trying to be great to put great names on their paltry efforts. Colm writes ‘Broken Soil’ (and one can’t help being nasty about it seeing that Turgenev had already ‘Virgin Soil’ to his credit) he writes also ‘The Land,’ ‘The Sower,’ ‘The Drover’; Russell writes ‘Earth’s Breaths’, Moore writes ‘The Untilled Field’; Yeats writes ‘Where There is Nothing’ ‘Cathleen Ni Houlahan’; and you too write ‘The Sisters’, ‘The Clay’, ‘A Mother’. How much more you are at one with yourselves when Colm writes ‘A Poor Scholar in the 40-ties’ (I think); or Russell writes (if he did write it) ‘The Nuts of Knowledge’; or Moore writes ‘A Drama in Muslin’ ‘Parnell and his Island’ ‘Vain Fortune’ or ‘Esther Waters’; or Yeats writes ‘The Wind among the Reeds’; or you write ‘Katharsis’ or ‘Counterparts’ or ‘A Painful Case’ or ‘Chamber Music’ or ‘Stephen Hero’. After all, though ‘A Mother’ isn’t so big a title but it’s, again, more like the title of a picture. For the rest, though the story is done with your usual malicious accuracy, the turn of character at the end is a little too rational. ‘Ce n’est pas gigantesque’. You say in your letter to me: ‘When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the second city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world’. I think you ought to urge your case a little in this way with publishers. Are stories in Simons’ [sic] way: perhaps he could interest a publisher in you. Part of Dublin, nevertheless, has been given artistically to the world, I have found. I have a habit of roaming into the Gallery or into the Museum to look at the Forbes Collection. I found that I like them and seemed to myself to understand the way pictures were begotten and made. Having occasion to refer to the catalogue of the London gallery I felt quite superior to your scribbled side-notes. I even flattered myself on having picked out five Corots by their style, and, knowing that there was a spurious Corot in the collection, by picking it out too, and on having picked out two pictures by J.B. Yeats by the Irish eyes on his faces. In the National Gallery I saw two or three pictures by a man named Walter Osborne which I liked very much. They are pictures of children (girls) but they are obviously Dublin. One is named ‘The Doll’s School’, another ‘The Lustre Jug’. The painter (who died in 1903) seemed to me to have real talent, intellect, and a truly though not great artistic temper. I have since seen him respectfully mentioned by a critic who slated Jack B. Yeats and Russell. (Though I like the first) This man and Old Yeats have done some good things for Dublin, to redeem it. There is a portrait of a girl in a dark green dress, with her hands cupped behind her head, leaning back in a chair and it appears to me as good as any in the collection. I am almost sure it is by Old Yeats. Osborne’s style is not as careful it has that raw unfinished realism which is likely to become the characteristic of Irish art.

By the bye if you would think of sending your stories to Symons, you ought to ask him about the ‘Speaker’. Was it he or Yeats who introduced you to it? Sketches like yours in form appear in it from week to week. In your story ‘A Mother,’ you use the phrase ‘from time to time’ four times.

When I was talking to Curran about your MS. he asked me, as a kind of make up for his indiscretion, about your stories. He seemed to think Kettle might accept some of them for his paper which pays. I think he might publish some of your verses also. Ought I to try him with a poem of yours which is already on the loose: ‘Bid Adieu’? I don’t think it appeared in ‘Dana’. When I went to get back your MS. from Kettle he told me—you know the way he talks, as if he was afraid someone in the next room might hear him and breathing out a weak laugh at every second word—that his soul wasn’t in his work. I said I thought the idea of the Nationist was his. He wouldn’t be sorry if he were out of it; he didn’t take much interest in what boots people wore (save in [sic] your presence, in glancing over the pages of advertisements, the price list for ‘ladies’ knickers’ was the first thing that caught my eye) Cosgrave I have not seen for close on a month. I see that a ‘J. Byrne, Univ. Coll. Dublin’ has got through his first medical. Baby and Florrie made their first communion on Sunday last. Neither of them looked as pretty as Eva. Eileen is growing tall and her voice is improving and May is to go in for the Junior Grade next year. I think it must be overage Junior.

I made a mistake about the money I sent you, it took a week to travel. By what date would I have to be at Trieste? Not by the 20th I hope, for I will find it extremely difficult to go at all.

I have read Renan’s monogram [sic] on Jesus Christ. Hutchinson who writes the introduction has exactly the same remark as I have about the portrait being like the author. He calls it ‘picnic Christianity’ While I was reading it the thought occurred to me ‘“The Life of Ernest Renan” by Jesus Christ.’ It is the standard work for all believers in the Nineteenth Century, for all believers, that is, whose inmost commonsense, though they say the Apostle’s Creed, revolts against the idea of an absolute divinity packing itself into a Jew, like the Imp in R.L.S.’s story into a bottle. For that reason I dislike it for the book has the flavour of being the work of an impostor. Though Renan was no Christian he gives him every title even to ‘Son of God’ and seems to wink at his name, simply, being taken as an infallible authority. He speaks of the rest of humanity (except, perhaps, Sakyamuni) as petty, paltry and much more tweedling insincerity. I finished it with an effort. Being conscious of a very complete imaginary portrait of the original I found nothing striking in his Life. I found it even commonplace in parts, and in many things (for instance in his relations with Peter) much preferred my own idea. Renan’s explanation that Jesus didn’t write because the conviction grew in him that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, does not explain why he did not write before it grew strong, in Nazareth. I think he did not write because he had no style. He was a preacher. He spoke his thoughts to his disciples and their belief in him and awe of his personality, satisfied him with that mode of expression. But if he had shut himself into a room and written his eight beatitudes on a slip of paper they would have seemed to him contemptible, fit for the fire. Besides he was a propagandist for he was capable of being betrayed. Another thing I object to strongly is his explanation of miracles. Unless the miracle is of such a nature as to suggest some simple explanation I don’t think we should argue about it. One might as well reason against superstition. If country people believe they heard the banshee or that if they break a looking-glass they will have seven years bad luck, why should they not believe these as well? Aren’t they Christians? And are we to expect them to be fastidious, to have a taste in nonsense? However as Renan probably brought a good deal of his intellectual life to bear on this criticism of Christianity, I shall try it again if I have time.

I think it’s absurd that any number of Turgenev’s readers read him because he is gentlemanly. People may guess, perhaps, that he was ‘un homme d’un commerce sur’ and like him and his unexacting pessimism, but they read him because they like reading about themselves. The types he takes are common now: ordinary people of some culture and honesty, and in dealing with these we hardly can know whether Turgenev had marvellous self-restraint or whether he himself did not know the bacillus of their disease which he does not tell. The beginnings of wisdom are in him, I think. Turgenev knew he had no prose style so he wrote with studied stylelessness (I told Curran I thought he had the most forced style I had read because Curran was praising him like a fool. He distrusted cleverness in a book, as I do though I expect much from it in a man. It is true of him that it is not in the power of everyman to be sincere. But he seems to have known his own limitations well—all but his romantic sentimentality—and he had intellect and a strong sense of form (Let me remark that he is often both clever and humourous). To watch him in a maze of ‘not clever’ sentences unveiling the almost inmost core is an incitement to go farther oneself, and to have suggested such elaborate intuitions of men and of his own thoughts is to feel oneself in the presence of that which we hope to learn by reading. Turgenev is an intermediary. I have felt in reading him more than in any other novelist I have read in the palpable presence of an emotion, though Turgenev is hardly a poet. He brings you almost too near his characters; you feel as if their personalities were looming and filling narrow rooms. You hardly ever get an outdoor impression.

I am reading ‘Anna Karenina’ at present. You say Tolstoy is never dull, never tired. He makes other people dull and tired, and that’s a damn sight worse. Turgenev’s characters we know as he knew them himself, Tolstoy’s we know only to speak to. Against Turgenev’s romantic realism Tolstoy gives many outdoor impressions, he is classical, male, active. Turgenev was probably the son of a drunkard. But all Tolstoy’s activity seems to me defiant and irrational. The same underlies it as underlies his absurd religious conversion. His real spiritual nature struggled against this self-enforced tyranny and once in a way gets free. He has to persuade himself, and he admits, that ‘all this’ is right. Doesn’t Curran do the same? His modern spirit struggles against Catholicism but he persuades himself that ‘all this’ is right. In the same way, to fit in with his theory of de Maupassant he persuades himself that by ‘Horla’ M— meant that this is not the best of possible worlds but that it could be very much better! It wonderfully expresses this idea! It won’t do to affect to regard Tolstoy’s art as a kind of Balaam’s ass that will carry him right. A man who can dispense with the Tsar in a sentence that would not suffice for a door-porter in one of his novels, has a fund of dishonourable thought equal to any journalist’s.

You see I make up for dilatoriness. Kindly remember me to Nora and to the nameless one.

Stannie

Your post-card received. I have been in all day copying out your story to send it back. I thought I told you that as soon as Charlie told me Curran had lent your MS. I dressed and went down to Kettle’s office. I called four times there and once at Curran’s house. I got your MS. back next morning at ten. I said to Curran and to Kettle precisely what is in your postcard. Kettle said I was quite right but that your MS. would be safe in his hands. Curran said he was very sorry but I think he thought I needn’t have made a fuss about it. He passed me yesterday evening from behind on O’Connell Bridge and was foolish enough to let it be seen that he saw me by crossing to left hand side so as not to be walking up home before me on the right-hand side.

It is not an encouragement to write you long letters all about books when you show such persistent ill-humour. I hoped your mode was Mephistophelean, but I see it seems to relieve it to give what Aunt Josephine calls ‘raps over the knuckles’ about ‘strangers’ and ‘indefinite’. This habit has much the same effect on me as when Aunt Josephine herself tries it.

Today, catching Pappie sober, I ask [sic] him what efforts he was making to get me the money to go away. He said I might go to Hell for it. I was to write to my brother and ask him to send back some of the seven pounds he gave him when he [was] going away &c

You are cleverer than I am. Could you suggest how I am to give you a decided answer without risking leaving you in the lurch with your director?

Stannie

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 12 October 1905]

Via S. Nicolò 30, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I spoke with the director today. Your route is London–Hamburg–Vienna–Trieste. On receipt of this or as soon after as possible you are to telegraph saying on what day you can definitely leave Dublin. Word the telegram so.

Joyce

Address—Berlitz School
Trieste

Communication—(for instance)
Fourteenth (no signature)

That will be five words only. ‘Fourteenth’ will mean that you can leave Dublin definitely on the fourteenth of this month. On receipt of your telegram I will send 100 crowns. The fare from Dublin to London is 29 crowns (£1—4—0). I do not know the fare (by steamer) from London to Hamburg steerage. This you must find out. The third class fare Hamburg–Vienna–Trieste will probably be 70 or 75 crowns (marks in Germany). However in Germany you can travel 4th class and thus save money. Let us say then (with this reduction for 4th class in Germany) the railway from Hamburg to Trieste costs you 65 crowns, and that the steamer from London to Hamburg costs you 15 crowns, the total cost will be:—

 29

 65

 15

109 crowns

I do not see what you want even with a portmanteau. I can give you collars and cuffs and ties until you can buy your own. But you must be well dressed. The dress Pappie says will do excellently or even a good new-looking black or dark suit would do with a good hat and boots. Instead of a portmanteau I would advise you to bring a big can of tinned meat and a knife (Jaysus! it’s like Buffalo Bill). You can buy bread at the stations or glasses of beer but eating there you would probably be swindled and I suppose you will not be able to afford that. The worst part is the long sea voyage. You will be perhaps 4 days travelling. Time your arrival in London so as to meet the boat for Hamburg. Get this information from Cook’s. The clerk who said 1£ probably was thinking of the Cape of Good Hope route. Be very careful of ticket-office clerks and trains. Talk French or English slowly to some responsible person until you are sure. If you are in a hobble anywhere telegraph to me. Of course you will have a hard time but your case is a damn sight better than mine when I left the North Wall (with Nora) for Zurich and had only the money to take us to Paris! Excuse the hastiness of all this but our family does everything at the eleventh hour. Follow the instructions of this letter literally. I don’t think (if you are well dressed) there is much fear of your being left like Toss. Bring your best certificate (and if possible your birth certificate) in your pocket or post them to me. Do not bring any of the MSS. Post them (registered). They are our only hope for the future. You will understand this letter if you remember the cursed stupid snobs who patronise these schools. I am writing in their language. More tomorrow.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 15 October 1905 Sunday. 11 a.m.

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I received your letter today after two days’ severe gastrical disarrangement consequent on your silence. Tomorrow I will send you 100 crowns to pay your trainfare and 80 crowns (or as much as I can get) of my own: about £8 in all. You are to dress yourself and leave Dublin on receipt of the money, and you are to be in Trieste. You must be in Trieste within ten days. I hope there will be no hitch in the affair now. You can tell Kettle you are going, if you like, and you can sell him any of the songs you like provided he pays you the money for them. Send my novel registered by post. Bring whatever books you want to study for your exam. Buon viaggio!

Jim

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 15 October 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards Mr Symons wrote to me saying that Messrs Constable & Co, to whom he had spoken of me, had invited me to send them the MSS of my two books. Accordingly I made a copy of Chamber Music and sent it to them today. I am not sure whether you will think this act of mine discourteous but I hardly know what to do. I think you had better keep my verses as it is most probable that Messrs Constable & Co will refuse the book.

The second book which I have ready is called Dubliners. It is a collection of twelve short stories. It is possible that you would consider it to be of a commercial nature. I would gladly submit it to you before sending it to Messrs Constable and, if you could promise to publish it soon, I would gladly agree. Unfortunately I am in such circumstances that it is necessary for me to have either of the books published as soon as possible.

I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire and it is nearly three times as big as Venice. Moreover, on account of many circumstances which I cannot detail here, the expression ‘Dubliner’ seems to me to have some meaning and I doubt whether the same can be said for such words as ‘Londoner’ and ‘Parisian’ both of which have been used by writers as titles. From time to time I see in publishers’ lists announcements of books on Irish subjects, so that I think people might be willing to pay for the special odour of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [16 October 1905]

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I enquired today about the Hamburg route. Hamburg–Trieste, third class (via Leipsic–Dresden–Vienna) is 77 crowns. The train journey is 36 hours. The sea voyage London–Hamburg is nearly 20 hours so I am not much inclined to advise you to come that way; I am not sure even if it is the cheapest route. Try what it costs via Ostend. The sea trip is only a few hours. The railway would be Ostend–Brussels (or Luxembourg)–Monaco–Villach–Trieste. In any case tell the clerk you want to travel over German railways as they are much cheaper. Nora wants you to bring her some Indian tea in one of your pockets. The only tea here is Russian. You will be just in time for the new wine and roast chestnuts and you will be able to decide perhaps as to what language your eldest nephew Georgie speaks. I shall expect your telegram on Thursday and I hope also to have an answer to my postcard. After a month perhaps we could rent a small quarter. You have 40 and I have 45 crowns a week: that is 85 crowns (£3–11–0) and we might get a piano also. The director has offered to give me some furniture. He is very friendly with me because one of my pupils—Count Sordina has praised me very highly and brought several real live ladies and gentlemen of his acquaintance to the school.

I wrote yesterday to Constable promising to send them Chamber Music in a day or two and Dubliners in a week or so. I sent Symons a copy of The Holy Office which I hope he will distribute among his friends. I am copying out the eleventh story Araby, but I hardly think it will be worth while sending it to you as, I hope, you will be here so soon. I need hardly say how glad I will be to see you.

I advise you to show these letters to Pappie as he may be able to help you. As for leaving the children in the lurch—what can you do in Dublin? You say you have been looking for a job (9 hours a day) at 15s/– a week. This job is 33s/– for 6 hours a day. Besides if my books are published I may be able to help you and Charlie to something definite. But what use is it to talk of the future. I have many other points connected with it to discuss with you.

This day twelvemonths I was in Paris after touching Dr Rivière successfully. We drove from the Gare S. Lazare to the Gare de l’Est in an open carriage. I will be in Paris again I am sure and in Dublin too. I am sure you will be glad to see Georgie. He is damnably fat and long and healthy—I suppose because Nora nurses him herself. He has a pair of big dark blue eyes which he doesn’t get from me. Thanks be to the Lord Jaysus no gospeller has put his dirty face within the bawl of an ass of him yet.

Jim.

Bring the tea in a loose package for fear of the Custom-House officials.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 18 October 1905]

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I send you today [no word written] crowns which is the cleverest thing I can do. I have already sent you full instructions. I think you would not save much coming by Hamburg. The sea-voyage is 30 hours and the train would be nearly two days. You might eat the difference of fare. Perhaps a route such as London–Boulogne (or Calais)–Basil–Milan would be better. You are to leave Dublin at once and telegraph here when you leave. The message Left and address will make only five words. You are expected here by next Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest. Be sure to get well dressed even if you have to come a tedious route. Any money Kettle gives you you can use for this purpose.

I have copied out the tenth story Araby but it would be useless to send it to you. I am now beginning the last story of the book Grace. I sent Chamber Music today to Constable & Co to whom A.S. had spoken of me. They are also to consider Dubliners, but I have offered it first to Grant Richards. If it is possible send a telegram from the nearest principal station so that I may meet you at the train. French money will do for you in France and Switzerland. Be sure you change money properly. You can change the French money in Italy if you want money: and when you get here you can change the Italian money. You can study here for whatever examination you are preparing for, and learn German or Italian in the school free if these subjects are on the course. Kindly let there be no mistake now.

Jim.

DO NOT GIVE A STORY TO KETTLE

The Director cannot get the money from the Bank today. But he will telegraph it. You will receive it perhaps before you receive this letter. I have left a blank because I do not know how many crowns I can get.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 Whitworth Place, Dublin (Telegram), 21 October 1905

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

Receive more school Berlin

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 27 October 1905 Monday night

Via S. Nicolò 30, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I suppose you will get this card as you pass through Berlin where the director has telegraphed money for you. Try and let me know from Vienna by telegraph at what hour your train will arrive so that I may meet you.

Jim

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To JOYCE [FAMILY], 7 Whitworth Place, Dublin (Telegram), 27 October 1905

Trieste

MS. Cornell

Wire if left.

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From VINCENT COSGRAVE, [About 29 October 1905]

MS. Cornell

Dear Joyce, Nora has just reminded me of my rudeness in leaving your last card unanswered; but you know my indolence. I had half a letter written after receipt of your novel but was unable to continue so I consigned it to domestic uses. News is plethoric so expect a short letter. Rumour engages Byrne to a Miss Heyden—Mrs Skeffington’s anteroposterior diameter is unaltered. I regret not having been the first to communicate the joyful intelligence of Nora’s delivery to Skeffington. Meanwhile accept congratulations and give them to Nora for me. Hope the B. is doing well. I am unable to say anything about your novel as I have lost the continuity. Please send some more soon to Charlie and I will do my best to help you with criticism. Meanwhile why in the name of J.—Lynch. Anything but that. Gogarty has his M.B. at last and is now up for the Fellowship of the Surgeons. His sailor is going further still. Last time I met him he had almost reached the North Pole, but he complained of the weather,

The sailor feels

the climatic rigor

Oh whales that swim & snort & blow!

Oh Walruses whose front-teeth show!

Oh Seals that still select a floe

To cool desire!

I don’t know how the Hell you go

Without a fire.

The judgment of Providence overtook the crew captain for so ruthlessly chucking Sinbad overboard. They were driving on death but before the final disaster

The Sailors hear

The Syren Voices

Where weighed Atlantic’s lift and power

And thunder down on Labrador

They heard beyond a din & roar

Like Thor’s great mallet

The calling of the Coal-Quay Whore

Which has no palate.

At Christmas ‘a stranger to you now’ gave me the following ‘little carol’ explaining that Christ time was limited to a few moments at Christmas and as he couldn’t combat the misrepresentation of centuries he had to grin and bear it. He also added a long harangue about the virtues of the Cross—providing the protagonist with a backbone and being the sign in which he conquered. He takes a great deal of credit to himself about the success of the menage à Trieste the town of the Man of Sorrows.

The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly sarcastic) Jaysus

I’m the queerest young fellow that ever was heard

My mother’s a Jew; my father’s a Bird

With Joseph the Joiner I cannot agree

So ‘Here’s to Disciples and Calvary.

If any one thinks that I amn’t divine,

He gets no free drinks when I’m making the wine

But have to drink water and wish it were plain

That I make when the wine becomes water again.

My methods are new and are causing surprise:

To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes

To signify merely there must be a cod

If the Commons will enter the Kingdom of God

Now you know I don’t swim and you know I don’t skate

I came down to the ferry one day & was late.

So I walked on the water & all cried, in faith!

For a Jewman it’s better than having to bathe.

Whenever I enter in triumph & pass

You will find that my triumph is due to an ass

(And public support is a grand sinecure

When you once get the public to pity the poor.)

Then give up your cabin & ask them for bread

And they’ll give you a stone habitation instead

With fine grounds to walk in & raincoat to wear

And the Sheep will be naked before you’ll go bare.

The more men are wretched the more you will rule

But thunder out ‘Sinner’ to each bloody fool;

For the Kingdom of God (that’s within you) begins

When you once make a fellow acknowledge he sins.

Rebellion anticipate timely by ‘Hope,’

And stories of Judas and Peter the Pope

And you’ll find that you’ll never be left in the lurch

By children of Sorrows and Mother the Church.

Goodbye, now, goodbye, you are sure to be fed

You will come on My Grave when I rise from the Dead

What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly

And Olivet’s breezy—Goodbye now Goodbye.

The appended Song of J. is of course Gogarty’s. He bids me send it. He desires you back in Dublin.

Of course when I got your last card I went to Charlie and was very glad to hear that Stannie had wired safe arrival. For reasons which are sufficiently obvious I prefer to close this letter now so reserve remarks about your novel etc till another time. In any case I suppose Stannie has told you anything there is to tell. I write to Nora tomorrow. Is that a tinted photograph of her on the card. If so compliment her for me. She looks much healthier than in Brown Dublin. It seems that Gogarty desires reconciliation so that if you write to me be unequivocal. Meanwhile I rot and am athirst So goodbye Yours

Vincent Cosgrave

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 27 November 1905

Via S. Nicolo 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I have now finished my book Dubliners and will send it to you tomorrow. As I expected Messrs Constable & Co refused my verses ‘after careful consideration’. I shall be glad to hear from you about my book of stories. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 4 December 1905

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

Dear Aunt Josephine I have been a very long time answering your letters but I have been very busy. Yesterday I sent my book Dubliners to a publisher. It contains twelve stories, all of which you have read except the third story Araby and the last one Grace. I have also been deterred from writing by the knowledge that voluminous correspondence was taking place between Stannie and some person or persons unknown and I was waiting until I was [sure] I would find disengaged ears. Moreover I have very little news to send you. I imagine you must be tired hearing my explicit or implicit complaints about my present life and therefore I shall not trouble you with many in this letter. You are not to argue from this that I am in the least resigned. In fact I am simply waiting for a little financial change which will enable me to change my life. At the latest it will come at the end of two years but even if it does not come I shall do the best I can. I have hesitated before telling you that I imagine the present relations between Nora and myself are about to suffer some alteration. I do so now only because I have reflected that you [are] a person who is not likely to discuss the matter with others. It is possible that I am partly to blame if such a change as I think I foresee takes place but it will hardly take place through my fault alone. I daresay I am a difficult person for any woman to put up with but on the other hand I have no intention of changing. Nora does not seem to make much difference between me and the rest of the men she has known and I can hardly believe that she is justified in this. I am not a very domestic animal—after all, I suppose I am an artist—and sometimes when I think of the free and happy life which I have (or had) every talent to live I am in a fit of despair. At the same time I do not wish to rival the atrocities of the average husband and I shall wait till I see my way more clearly. I suppose you will shake your head now over my coldness of heart which is probably only an unjust name for a certain perspicacity of temper or mind. I am not sure that the thousands of households which are with difficulty held together by memories of dead sentiments have much right to reproach me with inhumanity. To tell the truth in spite of my apparent selfishness I am a little weary of making allowances for people.

Perhaps you can send me a critique from a Dublin paper on Moore’s novel in which Father O. Gogarty appears. I hope you are in good health.

Jim

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1906

To GRANT RICHARDS, 27 January 1906

Via S. Nicolò 30, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I am anxious to hear from you about my books. It is nearly two months since I sent you Dubliners and I have now added another story to it, Two Gallants. I suppose the general election postpones some of your plans. But I think that my country is likely to be discussed now and this fact might make Dubliners timely. I hope you will let me know as soon as you can what decision you have come to. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 12 February 1906

Via S. Nicolò 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I am surprised to have had no word from you about my books. I am anxious to know what you have decided to do about them. You will easily understand my anxiety, I hope, and pardon any importunity. The English post from Vienna was destroyed by fire some few days ago. Is it possible that anything of mine suffered? I shall be glad if you will write to me before the 24th prox as on that date I leave this address and your letter might go astray. I have added a story to Dubliners and would have added another, perhaps, had I not been in such incertitude about the fate of the first twelve. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 20 February 1906

Via S. Nicolo 30, Trieste

Dear Mr Grant Richards: I am glad that you are pleased with Dubliners. As for the terms you offer me I may say that perhaps it would be best for me to put myself in your hands. I am sure that you will deal with me as generously as you can. As a matter of fact my future work in which you seem to be interested is largely dependent on an improvement of my financial state. I have written nearly a thousand pages of a novel but I have little leisure, comfort or prospects for continuing it.

I should like to know when you propose to publish the book, in what form and at what price. If you will let me know I can send you the last story I have written—unless perhaps you have as superstitious an objection to the number thirteen as you seem to have with regard to Ireland and short stories in general.

P.S. After the 24th of this month my address will be:

Via Giovanni Boccaccio, 1, Trieste.

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 22 February 1906

Via S. Nicolo 30, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I am sending you by this post the story Two Gallants. It is to be inserted between After the Race and The BoardingHouse. I am sending it to you so that time may be saved in case you think of bringing out the book soon. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 28 February 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I hardly know what you wish me to write as a description of the book. I sketched it for you in former letters but perhaps you want a complete description. The only thing I could think of was to ask my brother to write a short account of the book and this I now enclose you. It expresses my aim very well and you are free to use it as well as any notice of your own which seems to you suitable. Naturally you know better than I what is needed.

As for the appearance of the book I am content to leave it to your judgment. I have no books here to select from, my library being composed mainly of bundles of old letters. I would not like the book to be too slim in form. If you send me in your reply to this details of, say, two styles of binding I will choose one of them. On one point I would wish you to be careful. I would like the printer to follow the manuscript accurately in punctuation and arrangement. Inverted commas for instance, to enclose dialogue always seemed to me a great eyesore.

I doubt if June would be a good time to publish the book. I would prefer some date early in May or, if that be not possible, September.

You have asked me to tell you what I am doing and what my prospects are. I am an English teacher here in a Berlitz School. I have been here for sixteen months during which time I have achieved the delicate task of living and of supporting two other trusting souls on a salary of £80 a year. I am employed to teach young men of this city the English language as quickly as possible with no delays for elegance and receive in return tenpence for every sixty minutes so spent. I must not omit to mention that I teach also a baroness.

My prospects are the chance of getting money enough from my book or books to enable me to resume my interrupted life. I hope these details will not bore you as much as they bore me. In any case I give them to you only because you have asked me for them.

I return you the contract signed by me. I hope you will write to me as soon as possible so that the date of appearance and form of the book may be soon agreed on. I have sent you a story Two Gallants and propose adding one more story to the book. I have written part of it and can promise that it will be ready during March. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 13 March 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I am obliged to you for your letter and copy of the contract. If Dubliners cannot be published in May I should prefer September. I shall send you in a week or so the last story which is to be inserted between The Boarding-House and Counterparts so that you may proceed with the printing of the book. Being a first offender I cannot judge of the financial prospects of my book of stories. It seems to me, however, that if it had any sale in England you might perhaps be able to arrange an edition for America where there are some fifteen millions of my countrymen.

You suggest that I should write a novel in some sense autobiographical. I have already written nearly a thousand pages of such a novel, as I think I told you, 914 pages to be accurate. I calculate that these twenty-five chapters, about half of the book, run to 150,000 words. But it is quite impossible for me in present circumstances to think the rest of the book, much less to write it. This novel also has the defect of being about Ireland.

I shall be glad to hear from you again when you have decided in what form you will bring out Dubliners. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce.

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 15 April 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Kindly excuse me for not keeping my word. I have had very little time for writing lately. However, as you need the story, I shall finish it at once and send it to you.

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 22 April 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I have now finished the last story. I shall begin copying it out tomorrow and send it to you in a few days. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 26 April 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, Trieste

Dear Mr Grant Richards: You tell me that the printer to whom you sent my story Two Gallants before you read it yourself refuses to print it and therefore you ask me either to suppress it or to modify it in such a way as to enable it to pass. I cannot see my way to do either of these things. I have written my book with considerable care, in spite of a hundred difficulties and in accordance with what I understand to be the classical tradition of my art. You must therefore allow me to say that your printer’s opinion of it does not interest me in the least. Moreover, I cannot alter the passages which are marked in blue pencil in the story Counterparts nor can I suggest any other word than the word ‘bloody’ for the story Grace.

I intended to send you today the fourteenth and last story of the book, A Little Cloud which is now ready. I shall not do so, however, until I hear from you in reply: and I am also retaining the MSS of the two stories which you sent me. If in your next letter you tell me that you can see your way to print my book as I have written it and that you have found a printer who will endanger his immortal soul to that extent I shall then send you the three stories together. If you decide differently you can send me back the other eleven stories and we can consider the matter at an end. Naturally, I should be sorry if our relations ended in such a way. It would be almost a disaster to me but I am afraid the service which you ask me to do for your printer’s conscience is not in my power.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 5 May 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I am sorry you do not tell me why the printer, who seems to be the barometer of English opinion, refuses to print Two Gallants and makes marks in the margin of Counterparts. Is it the small gold coin in the former story or the code of honour which the two gallants live by which shocks him? I see nothing which should shock him in either of these things. His idea of gallantry has grown up in him (probably) during the reading of the novels of the elder Dumas and during the performance of romantic plays which presented to him cavaliers and ladies in full dress. But I am sure he is willing to modify his fantastic views. I would strongly recommend to him the chapters wherein Ferrero examines the moral code of the soldier and (incidentally) of the gallant. But it would be useless for I am sure that in his heart of hearts he is a militarist.

He has marked three passages in Counterparts:

‘a man with two establishments to keep up, of course he couldn’t …

‘Farrington said he wouldn’t mind having the far one and began to smile at her.. ..’

‘She continued to cast bold glances at him and changed the position of her legs often; and when she was going out she brushed against his chair and said “Pardon!” in a Cockney accent.’

His marking of the first passage makes me think that there is priestly blood in him: the scent for immoral allusions is certainly very keen here. To me this passage seems as childlike as the reports of divorce cases in The Standard. Or is it possible that this same printer (or maybe some near relative of his) will read (nay more, actually collaborate in) that solemn journal which tells its readers not merely that Mrs So and So misconducted herself with Captain So and So but even how often she misconducted herself with him! The word ‘establishment’ is surely as inoffensive as the word ‘misconducted.’

It is easier to understand why he has marked the second passage, and evident why he has marked the third. But I would refer him again to that respectable organ the reporters of which are allowed to speak of such intimate things as even I, a poor artist, have but dared to suggest. O one-eyed printer! Why has he descended with his blue pencil, full of the Holy Ghost, upon these passages and allowed his companions to set up in type reports of divorce cases, and ragging cases and cases of criminal assault—reports, moreover, which are to be read by an ‘inconveniently large section of the general public.’

There remains his final objection to the word ‘bloody’. I cannot know, of course, from what he derives the word or whether, in his plain blunt way, he accepts it as it stands. In the latter case his objection is absurd and in the former case (if he follows the only derivation I have heard for it) it is strange that he should object more strongly to a profane use of the Virgin than to a profane use of the name of God. Where is his English Protestantism? I myself can bear witness that I have seen in modern English print such expressions as ‘by God’ and ‘damn’. Some cunning Jesuit must have tempted our stout Protestant from the path of righteousness that he defends the honour of the Virgin with such virgin ardour.

As for my part and share in the book I have already told all I have to tell. My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written. All these objections of which the printer is now the mouthpiece arose in my mind when I was writing the book, both as to the themes of the stories and their manner of treatment. Had I listened to them I would not have written the book. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people. The printer denounces Two Gallants and Counterparts. A Dubliner would denounce Ivy Day in the Committee-Room. The more subtle inquisitor will denounce An Encounter, the enormity of which the printer cannot see because he is, as I said, a plain blunt man. The Irish priest will denounce The Sisters. The Irish boarding-house keeper will denounce The Boarding-House. Do not let the printer imagine, for goodness’ sake, that he is going to have all the barking to himself.

I can see plainly that there are two sides to the matter but unfortunately I can occupy only one of them. I will not fall into the error of suggesting to you which side you should occupy but it seems to me that you credit the printer with too infallible a knowledge of the future. I know very little of the state of English literature at present nor do I know whether it deserves or not the eminence which it occupies as the laughing-stock of Europe. But I suspect that it will follow the other countries of Europe as it did in Chaucer’s time. You have opportunities to observe the phenomenon at close range. Do you think that The Second Mrs Tanqueray would not have been denounced by a manager of the middle Victorian period, or that a publisher of that period would not have rejected a book by George Moore or Thomas Hardy? And if a change is to take place I do not see why it should not begin now.

You tell me in conclusion that I am endangering my future and your reputation. I have shown you earlier in the letter the frivolity of the printer’s objections and I do not see how the publication of Dubliners as it now stands in manuscript could possibly be considered an outrage on public morality. I am willing to believe that when you advise me not to persist in the publication of stories such as those you have returned to me you do so with a kind intention towards me: and I am sure you will think me wrong-headed in persisting. But if the art were any other, if I were a painter and my book were a picture you would be less ready to condemn me for wrong-headedness if I refused to alter certain details. These details may now seem to you unimportant but if I took them away Dubliners would seem to me like an egg without salt. In fact, I am somewhat curious to know what, if these and similar points have been condemned, has been admired in the book at all.

I see now that my letter is becoming nearly as long as my book. I have touched on every point you raise in order to give you reason for the faith that is in me. I have not, however, said what a disappointment it would be to me if you were unable to share my views. I do not speak so much of a material as of a moral disappointment. But I think I could more easily reconcile myself to such a disappointment than to the thousand little regrets and self-reproaches which would certainly make me their prey afterwards. Believe me, dear Mr Grant Richards, Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 13 May 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I am sorry that in reply to my letter you have written one of so generalising a character. I do not see how you can expect me to agree with you about the impossibility of publishing the book as it is. Your statement that no publisher could issue such a book seems to me somewhat categorical. You must not imagine that the attitude I have taken up is in the least heroic. The fact is I cannot see much reason in your complaints.

You complain of Two Gallants, of a passage in Counterparts and of the word ‘bloody’ in Grace. Are these the only things that prevent you from publishing the book? To begin at the end: the word ‘bloody’ occurs in that story twice in the following passage:

—At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel etc …

This I could alter, if you insist. I see no reason for doing so but if this point alone prevented the book from being published I could put another word instead of ‘bloody’: But this word occurs elsewhere in the book, in Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, in The Boarding-House, in Two Gallants: »

—‘And one night man, she brought me two bloody fine cigars &c’—

Two Gallants

—‘Here’s this fellow come to the throne after his bloody owl’ mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey … &c’—

Ivy Day in the Committee-Room

—‘if any fellow tried that sort of game on with his sister he’d bloody well put his teeth down his throat, so he would’ &c

The Boarding-House

The first passage I could alter. The second passage (with infinite regret) I could alter by omitting the word simply. But the third passage I absolutely could not alter. Read The Boarding-House yourself and tell me frankly what you think. The word, the exact expression I have used, is in my opinion the one expression in the English language which can create on the reader the effect which I wish to create. Surely you can see this for yourself? And if the word appears once in the book it may as well appear three times. Is it not ridiculous that my book cannot be published because it contains this one word which is neither indecent nor blasphemous?

The objections raised against Counterparts seem to me equally trivial. Is it possible that at this age of the world in the country which the ingenuous Latins are fond of calling ‘the home of liberty’ an allusion to ‘two establishments’ cannot appear in print or that I cannot write the phrase ‘she changed the position of her legs often’? To invoke the name of Areopagitica in this connection would be to render the artist as absurd as the printer.

You say it is a small thing I am asked to do, to efface a word here and there. But do you not see clearly that in a short story above all such effacement may be fatal. You cannot say that the phrases objected to are gratuitous and impossible to print and at the same time approve of the tenor of the book. Granted this latter as legitimate I cannot see how anyone can consider these minute and necessary details illegitimate. I must say that these objections seem to me illogical. Why do you not object to the theme of An Encounter, to the passage ‘he stood up slowly saying that he had to leave us for a few moments &c …’? Why do you not object to the theme of The Boarding-House? Why do you omit to censure the allusions to the Royal Family, to the Holy Ghost, to the Dublin Police, to the Lord Mayor of Dublin, to the cities of the plain, to the Irish Parliamentary Party &c? As I told you in my last letter I cannot understand what has been admired in the book at all if these passages have been condemned. What would remain of the book if I had to efface everything which might give offence? The title, perhaps?

You must allow me to say that I think you are unduly timid. There is nothing ‘impossible’ in the book, in my opinion. You will not be prosecuted for publishing it. The worst that will happen, I suppose, is that some critic will allude to me as the ‘Irish Zola’! But even such a display of the critical intellect should not be sufficiently terrible to deter you from bringing out the book. I am not, as you may suppose, an extremely business-like person but I confess I am puzzled to know why all these objections were not raised at first. When the contract was signed I thought everything was over: but now I find I must plunge into a correspondence which, I am afraid, tends only to agitate my nerves.

The appeal to my pocket has not much weight with me. Of course I would gladly see the book in print and of course I would like to make money by it. But, on the other hand, I have very little intention of prostituting whatever talent I may have to the public. (This letter is not for publication). I am not an emissary from a War Office testing a new explosive or an eminent doctor praising a new medicine or a sporting cyclist riding a new make of bicycle or a renowned tenor singing a song by a new composer: and therefore the appeal to my pocket does not touch me as deeply as it otherwise might. You say you will be sorry if the book must pass from your list. I will be extremely sorry. But what can I do? I have thought the matter over and looked over the book again and I think you are making much ado about nothing. Kindly do not misread this as a rebuke to you but put the emphasis on the last word. For, I assure you, not the least unfortunate effect of this tardy correspondence is that it has brought my own writing into disfavour with myself. Act, however, as you think best. I have done my part. Believe me, dear Mr Grant Richards, Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 20 May 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, Trieste

Dear Mr Grant Richards: You say that the difficulties between us have narrowed themselves down. If this be true it is I who have narrowed them. If you will recall your first letter you will see that on your side they have broadened a little. While I have made concessions as to the alteration of a word in three of the stories you are simply allowing me to use it in a story where, not having noticed it until I pointed it out to you, you had not objected to it. Moreover you now say that you wish to leave out altogether the story An Encounter. You said nothing of this in your first letter and it was I, again, who pointed out to you the ‘enormity’ in it. It is true that you concede one of the disputed passages in Counterparts but, inasmuch as you say you have no feeling on the subject, I suppose the concession costs you much less than those I have made cost me.

I mention these facts in order that you may see that I have tried to meet your objections. We are agreed now about Grace, Ivy Day in the Committee-Room and The Boarding-House. There remain only the second passage in Counterparts and the story Two Gallants. I invite you to read the former story again. The incident described is (in my opinion, if that counts for anything) essential. It occurs at a vital part of the story and, if it is taken out, the effect at the end is (in my opinion) lost. However (you see that it is really I who narrow the difficulties between us) if you can point out to me expressly any word or phrase which I can alter without omitting the incident, much as I dislike to do so, I will try again to meet you.

I have agreed to omit the troublesome word in Two Gallants. To omit the story from the book would really be disastrous. It is one of the most important stories in the book. I would rather sacrifice five of the other stories (which I could name) than this one. It is the story (after Ivy Day in the Committee-Room) which pleases me most. I have shown you that I can concede something to your fears. But you cannot really expect me to mutilate my work!

You state your objection to An Encounter (an objection I was imprudent enough to provoke) so mildly that I imagine this will not be one of our difficulties. In all seriousness I would urge the interference of the printer as soon as possible if my book is not to dwindle into a pamphlet, for each bout of letters, as it brings some little concession from my side, brings also some little new demand from yours. And as I have told you all along I am convinced that your fears are exaggerated. Many of the passages and phrases over which we are now disputing escaped you: it was I who showed them to you. And do you think that what escaped you (whose business it is to look for such things in the books you consider) will be surely detected by a public which reads the books for quite another reason?

I regret very much that the interview you suggested earlier in the correspondence is impossible. I believe that in an interview I could much more easily defeat whatever influences you in holding your present position. As for the disastrous effect the book would have if published in its present form it seems to me such a result is more likely to hit me than you. Critics (I think) are fonder of attacking writers than publishers; and, I assure you their attacks on me would in no way hasten my death. Moreover, from the point of view of financial success it seems to me more than probable than (sic) an attack, even a fierce and organised attack, on the book by the press would have the effect of interesting the public in it to much better purpose than the tired chorus of imprimaturs with which the critical body greets the appearance of every book which is not dangerous to faith or morals.

You cannot see anything impossible and unreasonable in my position. I have explained and argued everything at full length and, when argument and explanation were unavailing, I have perforce granted what you asked, and even what you didn’t ask, me to grant. The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. Reflect for a moment on the history of the literature of Ireland as it stands at present written in the English language before you condemn this genial illusion of mine which, after all, has at least served me in the office of a candlestick during the writing of the book.

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 3 June 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I would be glad to hear from you with reference to the letter I wrote you a fortnight ago which I hope reached you. I am surprised you did not write before now to let me know how you regard my latest ‘concessions’. A letter would restore in large measure my peace of mind so I will ask you to write me by return of post. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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From MRS WILLIAM MURRAY to STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 June 1906

4 Northbrook Villas [Dublin]

MS. Cornell

My dear Stannie Thank you very much for your long letter tho’ its contents have made me very sad. My poor Jim what has come over him. I am afraid he has got so many rebuffs from Fortune lately that it has left him too tasteless for anything, but honestly Stannie I can’t understand Nora surely it is a monstrous thing to expect Jim to cook or mind the Baby when he is doing his utmost to support both of them surely she can make as good an attempt as Jim it seems very soon for her to be so disappointed I wonder does she know what it is to be with a person with a scurrelous tongue from which you are never safe there is some excuse for Jim drinking it is the old story of finding forgetfulness. Perhaps there is some excuse for Nora being irritable but she could not have expected her life to be all roses and you may rest assured she will never send any of these letters home this constant threatening must be very trying to both of you. She thinks her life unhappy now what does she think it would be with her own people. I am disappointed very much and what must you be my gracious your life must be almost unbearable I think it was a great mistake for you to have left Dublin as it seems to me you have done Jim no material good and I am vain enough to think you were happier with us in spite of all the annoyances we gave you Your news too is very alarming about the school who is managing the place now? and how do you think it will end. For goodness sake don’t be sending home any more money from what I hear your Father seems to be making very bad use of it and it hurts me so much to hear this when I know how hard you must find it to be constantly draining yourself. I am sorry to hear there is nothing definite about Jim’s stories. Has he not written any of ‘Stephen Daedalus’ lately if he could only finish it but of course in the disturbed state he is it must be impossible, perhaps his love for Georgie may bring him round again. Surely the sketch you sent me is not like him. I don’t like it…, I would like to write to Jim but I dont know what to say to him. I write to you as I feel I am afraid to write him what I fear. I often think we were fairly happy for a couple of years before he went away though unpleasantness did crop up now and again and I thought he was going to be very happy I may be unjust but I feel sure it is not his fault. You must be tired of me now and I hope both you and I will have better news next time. Is there any fear of Georgie being rivalled at present? I hope not. That would be the climax With kind thoughts from us all Sincerely yours

Aunt Josephine

I am sorry to hear Liquor is cheap

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 10 June 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I see by reference to letters that you were sending the book to the printers two months ago. Its transit, however, has been delayed by a copious and futile correspondence which my original reply to your objections certainly did not provoke. This correspondence has been a cause of great and constant worry to me and I now recognise how useless it has been.

I pointed out to you clearly in my last letter that it was I who had made efforts to narrow down the difficulties between us, difficulties which, I think, it would have been much wiser to raise at an earlier stage. I am unable to gather from your letter of this morning whether you hold to your first claims of six weeks ago or whether you agree to the concessions I made in my letter of a fortnight ago. I will ask you to let me know this definitely.

I have nothing further to add to what I have written in defence of my book but I may repeat that, in my opinion, you have allowed yourself to be intimidated by imaginary terrors. You may have difficulties of which I know nothing for I imagine it is not public opinion which deters you. My bag of suggestions is nearly empty but I present you with this last one. Buy two critics. If you could do this with tact you could easily withstand a campaign. Two just and strong men, each armed with seven newspapers—quis sustinebit? I speak in parables.

As regards me, I leave this delightful city at the end of next month and go to Rome where I have obtained a position as correspondent in a bank. As the salary (£150 a year) is nearly double my present princely emolument and as the hours of honest labour will be fewer I hope to find time to finish my novel in Rome within a year or, at most, a year and a half. I mention this because in a former letter of yours you were kind enough to inquire about my financial position. Believe me, dear Mr Grant Richards, Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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From OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY, 14 June 1906 Thursday

The Waldorf-Astoria, New York

MS. Cornell

Dear Joyce: I hope to be able to accept your kind invitation which you gave me as an alternative; I am making a tour of the world and I hope to be on the continent of Europe in the Autumn sometime.

I would much like to see Tokio—Yokoyo, Yokoyo, Yokoyo—but it is 17 days from San Francisco and the accomodation [sic] is not luxurious in that town just now. If I fail to afford to go far West to East you may see me in August, as I will be journeying to Italy then. I suppose I will be gladder to see you than you to see me but I miss the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still. When I mention voice, I may say that a journey to New York on your part would not be a risk, that is: you would not fail to make money rapidly: there is much money here.

You may have heard that I got the Fellowship R.C.S.I. If you can forget, write to this place: I shall have left: but they will send it after me. I will not be long here. Already I am beaten to the 12th floor; there are 16 floors in all—accomodation for 2000 people. I shall use the top floor for an Olivet and leave. The American edition of ‘Sinbad’ is out. It runs to 230 stanzas….

‘In Virgil there’s not anything grand—

Aeneas ‘tossed’ on sea and land

Arrives at Carthage city, and

The Queen depraves;

And then to make a city stand

He rides the waves … etc.

A Doctor from Aberdeen gives his views on life and belief—but we may meet in three months time. Yours as ever,

Oliver. Gogarty.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 16 June 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II°, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I have turned to your letter of May 16th last and particularly to the first paragraph where I read that in consideration of three omissions conceded by me you allowed me to retain a word originally written in one of the stories. These three concessions I am still disposed to make on certain conditions.

The second paragraph of the same letter contains a withdrawal of one of your objections and a statement that one other phrase in the story under discussion should come out. In that story there are two other phrases marked by somebody’s blue pencil: and in reply to your letter I stated that I was disposed to modify the passage but that I could not omit it. You now say that one of the two phrases must come out and I presume you choose this solution in preference to the one proposed by me, namely, a modification of the passage which contains the two phrases objected to. I am still disposed to make either concession that is, either to modify (without omitting) the passage or to allow you to cancel whichever of the phrases you prefer to cancel on certain conditions.

The third paragraph of your letter of 16 May stated that you wished to omit another story of the original book but that you would not insist on this if I gave way on the other points. I replied by making the concessions mentioned above.

In the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the same letter you said that the story Two Gallants should certainly be omitted adding that you supposed I could omit it with an easier mind since it did not form part of the original book. I replied to this by pointing out that I had already agreed to make an omission in that story, that it was one of the most important stories in the book in my opinion, that I saw no way in which it could be re-written and that its omission would mean in my opinion a mutilation of the book. I am still disposed to make the omission I agreed to make of the word ‘bloody’ in that story if you are disposed to include it in the book.

I suppose you are now quite clear as to my present position. The concessions which I made in reference to the original book I made solely with a view to the inclusion of Two Gallants, which, if it did not actually form part of the original book, you knew to be in preparation and finally wrote for when the book was going to press. If you cannot possibly include Two Gallants with the omission I volunteered to make the motive which would induce me to make the other concessions disappears and I am disposed to allow you to print the book without it as I originally wrote it though, as I have told you, I regard such an omission as an almost mortal mutilation of my work.

The spectre of the printer which I thought I had laid rises again in your letter of 14th instant. This apparition is most distasteful to me and I hope he will not trouble the correspondence again. I do not seek to penetrate the mysteries of his being and existence, for example, how he came by his conscience and culture, how he is permitted in your country to combine the duties of author with his own honourable calling, how he came to be the representative of the public mind, how he happened to alight magically on what he was designed to overlook, and (incidentally) why he began the process of printing my book at the third page of the sixth story, numbered in the manuscript 5A. These for me are mysteries and may remain so. But I cannot permit a printer to write my book for me. In no other civilised country in Europe, I think, is a printer allowed to open his mouth. If there are any objections to be made the publisher can make them when the book is submitted to him: if he withdraws them he pays a printer to print the book and if he cannot withdraw them he decides not to trouble the printer by asking him to print the book. A printer is simply a workman hired by the day or by the job for a certain sum.

I am delighted and surprised to learn that nowadays it is impossible to buy a critic of importance. Evidently since I left the British Isles some extraordinary religious revolution has taken place. I expect to hear shortly that the practices of self-stultification and prostitution have gone out of fashion among authors.

In the last paragraph of your letter you seem to suggest the possibility of our meeting in Rome. I should be glad of such a meeting as correspondence on debated points appears to me most unsatisfactory. However, by dint of exchanging six or seven letters, I hope we have now arrived at a clear understanding of our respective attitudes.

In conclusion I thank you for replying to me so quickly and will be glad if you will answer this with equal promptness. Believe me, dear Mr Grant Richards, Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 June 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, Trieste

Dear Mr Grant Richards: I have received the manuscript safely. For the next few days I shall be engaged on a translation but during next week I shall read over the whole book and try to do what I can with it. I shall delete the word ‘bloody’ wherever it occurs except in one passage in The Boarding-House. I shall modify the passage in Counterparts as best I can. Since you object to it so strongly. These are operations which I dislike from the bottom of my heart and I am only conceding so much to your objections in order that Two Gallants may be included. If you cannot see your way to publish it I will have only wasted my time for nothing. As for the fourteenth story A Little Cloud I do not expect you will find anything in it to object to. In any case I will send it back with the others, as you direct me.

Some of my suggestions may have seemed to you rather farcical: and I suppose it would be useless for me to suggest that you should find another printer. I would prefer a person who was dumb from his birth, or, if none such can be found, a person who will not ‘argue the point.’ But let that pass.

Your suggestion that those concerned in the publishing of Dubliners may be prosecuted for indecency is in my opinion an extraordinary contribution to the discussion. I know that some amazing imbecilities have been perpetrated in England but I really cannot see how any civilised tribunal could listen for two minutes to such an accusation against my book. I care little or nothing whether what I write is indecent or not but, if I understand the meaning of words, I have written nothing whatever indecent in Dubliners.

I send you a Dublin paper by this post. It is the leading satirical paper of the Celtic nations, corresponding to Punch or Pasquino. I send it to you that you may see how witty the Irish are as all the world knows. The style of the caricaturist will show you how artistic they are: and you will see for yourself that the Irish are the most spiritual race on the face of the earth. Perhaps this may reconcile you to Dubliners. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 9 July 1906

Via Giovanni Boccaccio 1, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I return you today the MS of Dubliners which you suggested in your letter of 19 June that I should alter at certain points. I have read it carefully from beginning to end and have made the following alterations:

I have rewritten the first story in the book The Sisters and included the last story A Little Cloud which you asked me to send on with the others.

I have corrected a few small errors and re-arranged and renumbered the stories in the middle of the book, so that the book should now consist of fourteen stories in the order in which I have placed them

I have deleted the word ‘bloody’ in six places, namely, on page 4 of Two Gallants, on page 7 and twice on page 16 of Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, and twice on page 16 of Grace.

I have deleted the passage you objected to in Counterparts and have rewritten the incident in the way I engaged to do.

I will not conceal from you that I think I have injured these stories by these deletions but I sincerely trust you will recognise that I have tried to meet your wishes and scruples fairly. And I will ask you to write to me, as soon as possible after receipt of the MS, in order that I may know definitely what you intend to do. This address will find me until the 28th July. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 31 July 1906

9.30 a.m. Between Ancona and Foligno

MS. Cornell

Arrived safely in Ancona. Filthy hole: like rotten cabbage. Thrice swindled. All night on deck. G. very good. More from Rome.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 31 July 1906 Tues. 9.30 p.m.

presso Signora Dufour, Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Arrived safely: but very tired. Write to this address. Hesitate to give my impression of Rome lest my interview with the bank-manager might change it. Terrorised by the bank, while looking for it I found this on a wall ‘In this house Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound’. I think you would like Rome more than I. The Tiber frightens me.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 2 August 1906

presso Signora Dufour, 52 Via Frattina, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, The bank interview went off all right yesterday. My hours are 8½ to 12 and 2 to damn long. Have not much to do yet. I was paid 65 lire for the journey and got an advance of 100 lire, so that for the present I seem safe. I lost my way twice here. The streets are very confusing. Many things are cheaper than in Trieste but I expect to lose money for the first week or two. Last night we heard a band in the Piazza Colonna play a selection from Siegfried. Very fine. Romans are excruciatingly well-mannered. Send on the news.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 August 1906

11 a.m. 52 Via Frattina, II° p, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie As for the passage we were not sick. Going from Fiume to Ancona we slept all three the night on deck. Georgie held out bravely until he came to within a few miles of Rome: then he began to get restless. The voyage and the knocking about didn’t do him the least harm.

Fiume is a clean asphalted town with a very modern go-ahead air. It is, for its size, far finer than Trieste. As for Ancona I cannot think of it without repugnance. There is something Irish in its bleak gaunt beggarly ugliness. The money-changer swindled me out of 2 lire, the cabman out of half a lira, and the railway official out of three lire. But I was in such a hurry that I could not protest. We had to drive about three miles from the pier to the train. Such a panorama of houses!

There is nothing special to relate concerning my interview with the bank manager, who by the way, is consul for Austria-Hungary. He wanted to know was my father alive, my age, was Harrington a friend of our family. I am at present in the Italian correspondence department, hours, 8½ to 12 and 2 to 7½. The work is very easy and mechanical. The atmosphere seems to me a little more antipathetic than that of the B.S. There are fifty to sixty employees in the bank.

I have seen S. Peter’s, the Pincio, Forum, Colisseum [sic]. The Vatican is closed on Sundays, my only free day. S. Peter’s did not seem to me much bigger than S. Paul’s in London. The dome from inside does not give the same impression of height. S. Peter is buried in the middle of the church. The Pincio is a fine garden overlooking one gate of the city. I expected to hear great music at the mass in S. Peter’s but it was nothing much. However it was a side-altar high mass. The church has about twenty altars. The neighbourhood of the Colisseum is like an old cemetery with broken columns of temples and slabs. You know the Colisseum from pictures. While we were in the middle of it, looking at it all round gravely from a sense of duty, I heard a voice from London on one of the lowest gallery [sic] say:

—The Colisseum—

Almost at once two young men in serge suits and straw hats appeared in an embrasure. They leaned on the parapet and then a second voice from the same city clove the calm evening, saying:

—Whowail stands the Colisseum Rawhm shall stand

When falls the Colisseum Rawhm sh’ll fall

And when Rawhm falls the world sh’ll fall— but adding cheerfully:

—Kemlong, ’ere’s the way aht—

Besides that, a man pestered me to buy 50 postcards. I told him I was not the Kaiser but he plied me with broken Cockney to buy them for half a franc. And moreover, hardly am I inside the building when an alert person approaches and says:

—Guide, sir?—

Add to this a party of Murrican gorls in charge of an old dame who asserts that she doesn’t believe a word of it. It is a relief not to understand the language sometimes. But enough now of stupid monuments.

The first thing I look for in a city is the café. Rome has one café and that one is not as good as any of the best in Trieste. This is a damn bore for me. It has however countless little coffee-bars. I am forced to go to a little Greek restaurant, frequented by Amiel, Thackeray, Byron, Ibsen and Co; bill of fare in English, I½ for a coffee, pot of tea 6 cups 6d, Daily Mail, N.Y. Herald, Journal. So you must read the papers for me as I needn’t say the D.M. and N.Y.H. are empty until Wyndham comes back when I may find something better. You may pay the baker. His bill should be five or six crowns. Send its amt to me if it appears to you excessive. But if not pay him in two instalments. Tell the tailors my address is Edinburgh or Glasgow. You can give my address and compliments to the doctors. You enclose one (not two) postcards: from the daughter. About paying F. rent. Let him speak first. Then you might say: I cannot pay my brother’s debts but I will pay for 1 month’s occupancy of my room at the full rent. Don’t do this, however, before asking time to write to me. Before entering Canarutto’s cousin’s, go to Can. and ask him has the furniture been sold. Explain to him that he promised to sell it for a good price and remind him that I paid him 120 crowns and that it would be unfair to refund me none of it. Give my address and compliments to Scholz and tell him to write me what he wants me to do. Ask him was he paid for the translation. I think 30 crowns was absurd for that work and kindly say so to A when he gives you the proofs to correct. I have now only 100 lire left. However I know the place a little better now. It is a trifle dearer. I think it is better for us to make no move till the two months are over. Then, if you like, I can move you here. Any news from G.R.? Send on whatever letters come from Dublin and date your letters to me.

Literally every man in Rome speaks to and laughs at Georgie. They make presents of biscuits, fruit &c. I don’t believe he has cried once. When he goes into an ‘echoy’ place he shouts: in the Colisseum and in S. Peter’s. The landlady is very fond of him: very nice person, as Maria would say. Kindly answer my letters by return of post until we get more settled.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 12 August 1906]

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I sent you today Sinn Fein with two marked paragraphs. I asked you to date your letters in order to see how many hours they took to come. I received a copy of the Independent some days ago but did not observe the notice I see marked in the copy you forward. I suppose it is by the merest chance I learn this. Who knows what else has taken place in Dublin?

I was coming home to lunch from the bank when I met Nora in the street, holding out a paper and saying ‘Guess the latest, guess who’s married!’ I could think of nobody but the recently vested Charlie who, I perceive, is making great use of the suit and collars I sent him. When she showed me the paper first I thought it was a practical joke, as I imagined Gogarty either in New York or on his way to Italy and have been reading the columns of the Tribuna as I promised in search of his advertisement. However I suppose it is true. I see that it must be a sign of progress and of experience to feel one’s illusions fall from one, one by one. This particular loss, seemingly more of yours than of mine, is hardly suitable for discussion in letters. I disagree with you, however, when you say it would not have happened had I remained in Dublin. My feelings are double: first, I am puzzled to know whether he was in New York at all or not and why he wrote to me: and, secondly, I am curious to know how he looked in a tall silk. I fancy when he emerged from the church door his agile eye went right and left a little anxiously in search of a certain lean myopic face in the crowd but he will rapidly grow out of that remaining sensibility. However to be charitable I suppose we had better wish Mr and Mrs Ignatius Gallaher health and long life.

You have often shown opposition to my socialistic tendencies. But can you not see plainly from facts like these that a deferrment of the emancipation of the proletariat, a reaction to clericalism or aristocracy or bourgeoisism would mean a revulsion to tyrannies of all kinds. Gogarty would jump into the Liffey to save a man’s life but he seems to have little hesitation in condemning generations to servitude. Perhaps it is a case which the piping poets should solemnise. For my part I believe that to establish the church in full power again in Europe would mean a renewal of the Inquisition—though, of course, the Jesuits tell us that the Dominicans never broke men on the wheel or tortured them on the rack.

Do you think I should write to G.R.? I am thinking of rewriting A Painful Case so you might send me the MS along with the book of notes I had in Paris and the Latin quotations from the prophecies of the Abbot Joachim of Flora. This is a cursed pen but it is Sunday and every place is shut. Have you been to Can.? Pay no more debts without first telling me. By the way do you think you could send me any money. Whatever you send I can send you back at the end of the month and we could make the same arrangement for next month as I shall not be properly fixed until 18th Oct. Even if they send me away then I shall have 315 lire in my pocket or if they keep me 250. To account for my straitened state:

skirt (Nora)

—9 lire

blouse ”

—8 ”

” ”

—9.50

combs

—2.0

shirt (self)

—3.50

hat (self)

—5.0

hand, and collars

—2.0

I have paid the rent here in full and have 52 lire left but it will not last me till the end of the month. It is useless trying to write with this pen.

Jim

Posted 3.30 p.m. Sunday say when arrived.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 16 August 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Urgent

Dear Stannie The substance of the present is financial. It is Thursday morning the 16th and I have 25 lire. In my list I forgot to include bonnet for Georgie 3 lire but the real reason the money goes so quickly is that we eat enormously. Nora is getting much healthier looking. Here is her usual dinner—two slices of roastbeef, 2 polpetti, a tomato stuffed with rice, part of a salad and a half-litre of wine. We buy the meat cooked and then take it to a little wine-shop where we are supplied with plates &c. I think the only thing to be done is this: to ask A. for a week’s salary in advance and to send it to me. Remember that on Monday morning I shall have no money so that if you have not sent on some already you must telegraph it. The fifty lire you lend me this month I shall send you back on the 1st Oct with 50 of my own to put in the bank.

I am reading The Picture of Dorian Grey [sic] in Italian. U.I. arrived with notice of G’s posad (marriage). What am I to do about G.R.? Yesterday we went to the cemetery. Pay no more bills: and please attend to this letter at once or I shall find myself once again in the sitting posture.

Jim.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 19 August 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Your wire arrived at 6. I asked you to wire before lunch so that I might have it early, as I feared the P.O. here might be shut. I received 31.40 lire. I suppose it cost you the difference between that and 40.0 to wire it. I wired you at 8.45 a.m. When did you get it? I shall leave discussion of money matters until arrival of your letter which I expect tomorrow.

No advt from Gogarty. I suppose his writing to me was some drunken freak. I suppose he wouldn’t dare present me to his wife. Or does the poor mother accompany them on the honeymoon? I suspect she is not a tocharless lass. I set the fashion, it seems. W.B. Yeats ought to hurry up and marry Lady Gregory—to kill talk: and Colm ought to propose to his roselike Miss Esposito. I have just finished Dorian Grey [sic]. Some chapters are like Huysmans, catalogued atrocities, lists of perfumes and instruments. The central idea is fantastic. Dorian is exquisitely beautiful and becomes awfully wicked: but never ages. His portrait ages. I can imagine the capital which Wilde’s prosecuting counsel made out of certain parts of it. It is not very difficult to read between the lines. Wilde seems to have had some good intentions in writing it—some wish to put himself before the world—but the book is rather crowded with lies and epigrams. If he had had the courage to develop the allusions in the book it might have been better. I suspect he has done this in some privately-printed books. Like his Irish imitator:

Quite the reverse is

The style of his verses.

Can you tell me what is a cure for dreaming? I am troubled every night by horrible and terrifying dreams: death, corpses, assassinations in which I take an unpleasantly prominent part. As for my health I eat well. Last night we ate an entire roast chicken and a plateful of ham, bread and wine—and went to bed hungry.

I am going to take lessons in Danish from the 1st Sept. I have met a Dane here—one Pedersen—and, as he can’t talk Italian we mumble German mixed with Danish at each other. I wonder when learning it is it necessary to keep a good-sized potato in each cheek. You said it was like a nigger speaking German but it is more like Mr O’Connell (Bill) speaking Dutch.

I cannot write to G.R. until I know whether this will be my address next month. Wyndham said ‘for the month of August’. Hard work in the bank. On Friday I did not get out till about 8.30. The correspondence reaches about 200 to 250 letters a day. The latest news is that the seat is out of my trousers.

How the devil did you think the news about Kettle would interest me. But I would like to see a copy of Dialogues of the Day. I have written three paragraphs to add to A Painful Case, but I don’t know if I can rewrite it. I would like also to rewrite After the Race but if G.R. sent me the proofs I would pass the book as it is. The chase of perfection is very unprofitable.

Send me on the news. Today I discovered a photograph of Billy Walsh exposed in a prominent street. Would you like to see some copies of L’Asino—the Italian anti-clerical newspaper. I absorbed the attention of the three clerks in my office a few days ago by a socialistic outburst. One of them is a German and he was ridiculing Lombrosianism and antimilitarism. He said when children cried they ‘should be caned’, favoured corporal punishment in schools, conscription, religion &c. I think he was surprised not to find an ally in an Inglese. Item: English and Americans abroad talk at the top of their voices.

Nora has a talent for blowing soap-bubbles. While I was wading through a chapter of Dorian Gray a few days ago she and Georgie were blowing bubbles on the floor out of a basin of suds. She can make them as big as a football. Georgie is a great favourite with everyone here. All the people we frequent know his name. He has added to his vocabularv ‘O Gesù Mio’ ‘Brutto, brutto, brutto’ and cleans out his ear when told to do so. Also when we go to the band in Piazza Colonna he beats time to the music, amusing the ‘smiling Romans’ thereby very much. He wears a long mayoral chain with little medals round his neck. By the way, if you come to Rome before Xmas, I will buy a goose for 3 lire and have it cooked where we go for dinner. Have you seen that there is a split in the socialistic camp here between Ferri and your friend Labriola? Only that money is so ‘skinty’ (a word of Alice’s making) I would have bought Rosa Bernd today. If you buy The Lake you might send it to me. Unfortunately all the English libraries are shut now or I would join one. I think I will learn Danish rapidly with this Pedersen chap. In one restaurant we go to Georgie sits sedately at the top of the table in a little high chair of his own and announces to the restaurant the arrival of each of our dishes by shouting ‘Ettero, Ettero’. When we were in S. Peter’s he began to shout ‘Iga, Iga’ immediately when the lazy whores of priests began to chant. Would you like any picture postcards of Rome?

Jim.

Nora says she is asking for you. If there is anything interesting (Ferrerò etc) in the Piccolo della Sera, you might send it.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 24 August 1906

Via Frattina 52, IT, Rome

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I should be glad to know your decision as to the ‘amended’ copy of Dubliners which I sent you early in July as, in the event of its publication this autumn, it would be necessary for me to begin correcting the proofs. I did not write before now because I suspected you would be away on your holidays. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 29 August 1906

Wed. 2. o’c pm. Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Kindly let me know what the devil you are doing. Did you not get my letter? Is anything wrong? Relieve me by writing at once.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 August 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I have had no letter from you for nearly a fortnight so I suppose you are in great difficulties or else that you sent me money which was robbed in the post. In the latter case I hope you have the registration receipt. Today I received Lire 50 for I had to borrow L 100 here ten days ago. I have now 85 lire and must pay my landlady 35 and nearly 5 more for expenses. If you cannot do something at once to help me over this month I do not see how I can live. I cannot ask for an advance here as they told me the last time they were making an exception in my case as it was the first month. Indeed I hope I have not injured my position already by asking for an advance. There are two great patches on the seat of my trousers so that I cannot leave off my coat in the office and sit stewing for hours. Some nights I do not get away till 8 or even 8.30 and, really, to have one’s mind in a turmoil about money as well as to live this way is not pleasant. I would not mind the discomfort if I saw some means of getting over the month. Is it possible A would not give you any advance?

I wrote to Grant Richards a week ago: no answer, of course. I have some loose sheets in my pocket about 5 pages to add to A Painful Case but I am not strenuous enough to continue in the face of such continual discouragement. Aunt J sent me papers: no letter. The Irish Catholic and Dialogues of the Day. Unluckily I lost the latter in the street. I shall send you the next copy: it is very ‘brilliant’. Three pages of puff by F.S.S. at the end: full of thick typed catch phrases such as ‘this novelty in Irish journalism’ ‘order at once’ ‘absolutely unique’. An advt appears for some booklet by (very big letters) Thomas Kettle, M.P. A column of the Irish Catholic is devoted to a series of letters between Dr Delany and J.M. O’Sullivan M.A.: philosophical student at Bonn. They are all in the public eye and favour: even Dr O.S. Jesus Gogarty. And here am I (whom their writings and lives nauseate to the point of vomiting) writing away letters for ten hours a day like the blue devil on the offchance of pleasing three bad-tempered bankers and inducing them to let me retain my position while (as a luxury) I am allowed to haggle for two years with the same publisher, trying to induce him to publish a book for which he has an intense admiration. Orco Dio!

I bought and read The Lake: and will send it when I know where to send it so that you may tell me what you think of it. The Times calls it a prose poem. You know the plot. She writes long letters to Father Oliver Gogarty about Wagner and the Ring and Bayreuth (memories of my youth!) and about Italy where everyone is so happy (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and where they drink nice wine and not that horrid black porter (O poor Lady Ardilaun over whose lily-like hand he lingered some years back): and then she goes (in all senses of the word) with a literary man named Ellis—one of Moore’s literary men, you can imagine what, silent second cousin of that terribly knowing fellow, Harding—and Father Oliver Gogarty goes out to the lake to plunge in by moonlight, before which the moon shines opportunely on ‘firm erect frame and grey buttocks’: and on the steamer he reflects that every man has a lake in his heart and must ungird his loins for the crossing. Preface written in French to a French friend who cannot read or write English (intelligent artist, however, no doubt) and George Moore, out of George Henry Moore and a Ballyglass lady, explains that he only does it ‘because, cher ami (dear friend), you cannot read me in my own language’ Eh?

I like the notion of the Holy Ghost being in the ink-bottle. We go to a little wine-shop opposite the house at night and the proprietor who is delighted with Georgie invited us to dinner some nights ago: sardines, roast veal and tomatoes, salad, a huge English pudding, melons in rum, wine and cognac and cigars. The pudding was the gift of an old priest from Sicily—Padre Michele! though I have made open confession of my ‘heresies’, but I think, really, he meant nothing ill by his mess of pottage—which was excellent. He said he was an old man and thought sometimes of buying a revolver to protect himself from assault at night in the streets and asked me did I approve of that. Have you ever reflected how ‘humble’ is the utterance of Renan ‘very few people have the right to abandon Catholicism’. What do those gentlemen in Ireland want a new University for? The one they have is quite good enough for them—both in ‘saince and in art’. But you must read ‘Dialogues of the Day’.

Georgie can understand everything almost that is said to him and imitates every sound he hears—clocks, vendors, singing—etc. Today while Nora and he were passing through a narrow street some hoarse whore of an Italian driving a cart at breakneck speed and flourishing his whip, caught him right under the eye: and he has a long weal across his cheek and nose. Pleasant, isn’t it? It puts my teeth on edge to write of it.

I must end now as I have no more time. Scholz wrote me an insolent postcard in French which made me laugh: it was so German. However, I will do what he wants me to do. Oblige me by replying to this at once as you know my position.

I don’t wish to ‘sponge’ on you but only to ask you to try and help me over this month: as, otherwise, it will be a poor look-out for me. Already the moon is threatening to shine upon my grey buttocks and I wish some-one would send me a pair of Father Oliver’s small-clothes that he hid among the bulrushes. And if it so happens that you are in difficulties yourself write to me at once.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 3 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Got your letter today. You are really a mumchance—living on bread and ham. Listen. Go at once to Artifoni and tell him it is a matter of urgent necessity for you to get a week’s pay in advance—and you’ll get it. Keep 10 crowns yourself and telegraph 20 to me. Go to Effore or to Fantini or to Canarutto—eat anyway. Tell A you can’t give lessons without food, that you are a year in his service and have never asked for any advance and that you gave back the 30 crowns he gave me. Anyway I think it would be folly to ruin the first chance I have got of ameliorating our position. And what can I do? At a pinch I could raise money but I could not do it without endangering my position. Let me have, if possible at all, a wire from you on Thurs. morn

I answered that advt today but have had no answer yet. Finances: 10 lire!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 4 September 1906 Tuesday noon

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Both the pension and the lessons are off. I have now seven and a half lire. On Thursday at 12 o’c I shall have 0. I don’t know any person in Rome—Wyndham is in Naples and won’t be back for a fortnight yet. There is nothing for it but Artifoni. I couldn’t ask for it in the bank: they wouldn’t give it. If you cannot get it and wire it I don’t know what I can do. It is a pity I cannot get over this month because we are both very well and always hungry. Try and get me out of this hole like a good youth. Artifoni must give you the money: he can easily get it.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Last night a man came to take lessons from me and I asked him to pay in advance. He gave me 20 Lire so that with economy I can live until Monday morning. I had given up all idea of the advt as two days had intervened. He wants 30 lessons. I said I would give them for Lire 50 and he agreed: so that he owes me Lire 30. But, of course, I cannot know when he will pay. It was certainly providential. This is the second advt I answered in the Tribuna. The first got me the position in the bank: the second a providential pupil. He takes lessons every evening. I get out of the bank usually about 7.30 or 7.45: sometimes later. Then I have his lesson from 8 to 9 so that for this month my timetable is rather full. But I don’t care so long as I can get to the 30th safely. I expect you will be able to raise something for me today and then this fellow may give me the other 30 Lire soon.

As for the trousers remember that I am sitting for 9½ hours daily on an uncushioned, straw-bottomed chair and the stuff was always thin. Anyway the fact remains that I have two great patches on the seat and have to wear my ‘tail-coat’ constantly. Not a word or sign from Grant Richards. I will wait till Sunday and then write to him again. The reason I sent you Avanti was that it contained an article either of Lombroso or of Gorki. Maybe I sent you the wrong copy. I also sent you a copy of L’Asino. As soon as I have a little money in my pocket I shall send you The Lake. You seem to be annoyed about Kettle. The reason I was not interested is because I take no interest in parliamentarianism as I suppose, you know. However, I have asked Aunt J— to send me a copy of The Nationist—if it still exists. As for a possible friendship with Kettle it seems to me my influence on male friends is provocative. They find it hard to understand me, and difficult to get on with me even when they seem well-equipped for these tasks. On the other hand two ill-equipped women, to wit, Aunt Josephine and Nora, seem to be able to get at my point of view, and if they do not get on with me as well as they might they certainly manage to preserve a certain loyalty which is very commendable and pleasing. Of course I am not speaking of you. On all subjects—except socialism (for which you care nothing) and painting (of which I know nothing)—we have the same or like opinions.

I have never doubted that you have a talent for the latter art. But an appreciable change in our fortunes is necessary before you can develop it. It is too early to despair of such a change. Lately I found I was wishing myself at a seaside place in England or Ireland: rashers and eggs in the morning, the English variety of sunshine, a beefsteak with boiled potatoes and onions, a pier at night or a beach and cigarettes. By the way I forgot to tell you about the pension. One man wanted Lire 150 a month for only lunch and dinner for Nora and myself, exclusive of breakfast or supper. Lire 50 goes for my room, candles and washing so that I would have just 50 Lire left for clothing for three people and—eventualities.

Enclosed please find article by Ibsen—or rather excerpt. I have just received your remittance which will be wonderfully useful to me. I send you The Lake, send me your opinion of it. This morning in the bank that German clerk informed us what his wife should be: she should be able to cook well, to sew, to housekeep, and to play at least one musical instrument. I suppose they’re all like that in Deutschland. I know it’s very hard on me to listen to that kind of talk. Besides that, he is always teaching the other (ignorant) Italian clerk (and me) Latin and philosophy. He has been to some university where, he says, der Professer [sic] ‘lectured’ in Latin: and all the studenten spoke Latin. Greek too. Even the atmosphere of the BS was better than this. However—

I don’t quite agree with you about the U.I. In my opinion, it is the only newspaper of any pretensions in Ireland. I believe that its policy would benefit Ireland very much. Of course so far as any intellectual interest is concerned it is hopelessly deaf. But even that deafness is preferable to the alertness of Dialogues of the Day. A clerk in this office has just come back, without one finger, after four weeks’ sick leave. His face is studded with pimples and he has a pen behind his ear. Here is the German. They shake hands and laugh. Every one looks at the fingerless clerk with astonishment. He is very ugly, a Swiss, and has a voice like a rusty saw. Here is another Italian clerk: who says: O, long life, here you are. Même jeu (as G.M. would say). Two phrases in Italian madden me. One is: di’ un po’ (I say). Every clerk who wanders in here from another writing-box comes in with a sodden preoccupied air, goes over to some colleague and murmurs di’ un po’: and then halts to remember what he has to say. The other phrase is Signore. Every wretched scribbler, every—but why make a catalogue?—is a signore if he works with a pen or employs an assistant. Canarutto told me his cousin, your landlord, was (with many a significant nod) a signore. But yet, you seem unable to share my detestation of the stupid, dishonest, tyrannical and cowardly burgher class. The people are brutalised and cunning. But at least they are capable of some honesty in these countries: or, at least, they will move because it is their interest to do so. I am a stranger to them, and a prey for them often: but, in the sense of the word as I use it now, I am not an enemy of the people. Many thanks for your prompt reply and await your letter.

Jim

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 9 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I wrote you about a fortnight ago asking you to let me know what you had decided to do with Dubliners. I should be glad to hear from you as soon as possible what is your decision. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 12 September 1906]

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I received yr. letter with enclosures. It is well you told me who the silhouette was for I’m damned if I would have known otherwise. It has the very artistic (I believe) merit of not resembling the original. Of Gogarty’s card I can make nothing. I don’t understand why he desires that we should exchange short notes at long distances and at different angles to the equator. What does he mean by ‘acquiring the villa villa for the natives’? Why does he expect I am going back to my, to my land? What news does he want and what is the ‘valuable’ news he has? The underlining of ‘Mr’ beneath the portrait of that handsome person, Paul Verlaine, caused a smile to appear upon the face of the dutiful employee of Messrs Nast Kolb and Schumacher but he became serious when he perceived that the card came from ‘S James’s Hotel; Paris’. By the way, talking of faces I will send you a picture postcard of Guglielmo Ferrero and you will admit that there is some hope for me. You would think he was a terrified Y.M.C.A. man with an inaudible voice. He wears spectacles, is delicate-looking and, altogether, is the type you would expect to find in some quiet nook in the Coffee-Palace nibbling a bun hastily and apologetically between the hours of half-past twelve and one.

I am changed in the bank from the correspondence to the reception room. It is a good thing the salaam has gone out of fashion here. I am with the banker’s two sons and another man. Have a desk and lamp all to my own self and not at all so much to do. I have to receive visitors who come with letters of credit cheques &c. Today I had the honour of cashing a cheque for 8 guineas issued by the Freeman of Dublin and handing 200 and odd lire to their Roman correspondent, one Mr P.J. Connellan, if you remember reading any of his articles concerning our holy father the pope and the blessed virgin mary and jesus christ and god almighty and the holy ghost and saint joseph. (Excuse this experiment. I wanted to see who would look funniest. I think saint joseph wins with jesus christ a good second) I can see the papers here too, that is, some of them. Daily Mail and Figaro. On the whole it is a change for the better and it looks as if they intended to keep me.

I have waited another day and there is no letter from you or paper from Dublin. As I told you I have a lesson every evening and the money my pupil gave me will carry me on till the 20th, I think. I asked him if he could find me another pupil as there are unfortunately 30 days in this month. I will ask him again tonight. After the 1st of Oct I think we shall eat in the house as the weather will be getting too cool for Georgie to go out. Rome certainly is not cheap. A lira goes a very short way indeed here. Wyndham ought to be back from Naples in a day or so and I ought to have an answer from Grant Richards in the morning. The mention of his name brings back to me my early youth.

On Saturday last I went up to the headquarters of the black lice to find out if they had chosen their general. A carman told [me] they had elected a German and were now at their pranzo. Unfortunately I have not bought the Avanti these few nights. I would like to read an article on the subject. The Very Rev. Fr. Devitt S.J. came to Rome—to help in the kitchen I suppose. The next thing we will hear will be the emperor William’s enrolment in the brown scapular. There was a thunderstorm here yesterday evening and seeing my agitation the banker’s son was kind enough to close the shutters. A man was struck dead on the road outside the gate of S. Paneras. About Georgie I was in the bank at the time and Nora could do nothing. There was a notice on the wall ‘Drive Slowly’ but no policeman of course. The next day I saw one of these glorious creatures cross-examining a poor little old woman, driver of a little ass-cart because she hadn’t her name on the shaft. He wrote a terrible lot in a little notebook and the little woman smiled timidly all over her shrivelled face and still the pencil went on and the red cock’s comb in the policeman’s hat bobbed. Here they dress carabinieri like stage flunkeys. They must look esthetic when they run after a mad horse. The weal has disappeared.

I think it would be safer for you to send me some money on Saturday. I will send you L50.0.0 on the 1st October: that will leave me 200 Lire. I must pay 45 to the landlady and 10 for trousers so that I will have about L140 left for the month. Every month I will send you at least L50, if the eating-at-home plan succeeds, perhaps L70. You can add, I expect, the difference between that and 100, so that we may always have something to fall back on. I read an article lately about Gissing. The writer denied the stories of abject poverty. Gissing, after his first book, had always enough to live on, he said. I read an allusion in The Tribune which gave me some anxiety. It spoke of a series the ‘X’ series of booklets the publication of which was ‘begun by the late firm of Grant Richards’. Now does late refer to the firm of Grant Richards, bankrupt, or to that of E. Grant Richards? Explain to Scholz that I live two miles from the Berlitz School, that I go to the office at 8½ in the morning and get out at 8 in the evening with an hour for lunch and that I have an English lesson every evening from 8.30 to 9.30: so that it is out of my power at present to go there and interview the director on his behalf. Is there any news of Bertelli? Did you approach Canarutto again. Do so, if only to annoy him. Pay no bills whatsoever of mine. If you have not signed any documents they cannot make you. Say you paid me 22 lire a week for your board and lodgings. But I think you can be trusted not to be swindled out of money.

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 14 September 1906

52 Via Frattina, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I am again at the end of my tether. Wyndham’s return has again been postponed. I could not get another pupil but I will try again next week if you can send me any money when you get this. You ought to tell Artifoni frankly that our difficulty is to reach the 1st of October after that we will be all right. In a way it is easier for you than for me. You have not to keep up an appearance and you could hardly want a meal. I shall be much obliged if you can answer this appeal and I will try for another pupil—but when am I to teach him?

Jim

Assets Lire 20

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 16 September 1906 Sunday evg.

52 Via Frattina, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I don’t know what the hell I’m to do this time. I can’t go beyond Tuesday evg. I have eaten nothing today except a soup in order to economise. I asked my pupil twice if he knew anyone who would take lessons but he knew no-one. I suppose you will get this on Tuesday and if it was out of your power to send something yesterday could you possibly telegraph something. I have 10 lire left. If I receive nothing from you I have no means of getting any, I can’t do miracles. And not a word from that cursed son of a bitch in London.

Jim

Nora and Georgie have had their meals all right.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18[–20] September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Tuesday I wired you today at lunch-time and am awaiting your reply. My funds are now 8d. If nothing comes I shall have to ask my pupil to lend me a lira as I am hungry. I have had no breakfast and read no papers for five days past but I could not spin out the money longer.

I received a postcard from Grant Richards ‘I am sorry for the delay in writing to you definitely about Dubliners. I hope to do so within a very few days’. He is a damned hopeful man anyway. Do you remember his postcard of two years ago about Chamber Music. He said: ‘I shall hope to write to you very soon on the subject’? There’s hopefulness for you.

I can write no more now because I am too busy thinking about the telegram and the chances of getting something to eat.

Wednesday I received your telegram last night and your remittance today. Thanks. I had to borrow 5 Lire from my pupil last night on the strength of your telegram. As to my finances I have exactly 20 lire out of which I must pay this evening five to my pupil. I cannot wriggle beyond Sunday morning on this. If you can manage to send anything by wire then I can send you even Lire 100 on the first of October. That would leave me 150 L. 40 to the landlady, 10 trousers. However make the best suggestion you can. The least I will send you is Lire 50 and whatever remains over from your suit you can put in the bank.

Why do you disapprove of my taking another pupil—if I can get one? My leisure is of little use to me and I want money. You cannot imagine I want to continue writing at present. I have written quite enough and before I do any more in that line I must see some reason why—I am not a literary Jesus Christ. However I shall hope that Mr Grant Richards shall perhaps also hope within a very few years to be able to see his way to make some communication to me regarding the unfortunately delayed MS which he admires so profoundly.

What the devil do you expect I would write to Gogarty? I asked you to explain ‘Am I to acquire a villa for the natives?’ You know I am getting a little stupid: I don’t understand it. If I were sure that Mr Grant Richards would really hope to be able to print Dubliners I might have some reason to use Gogarty as an agent in advance. But really I believe Dubliners will only see the light when too late to give its author any pleasure.

Yerra, what’s good in the end of The Lake? I see nothing. And what is to be said about the ‘lithery’ man, Ellis, and all the talk about pictures and music. Now, tell the God’s truth, isn’t it bloody tiresome? To me it is. As for ‘Rev Oliver Gogarty’ I think that may either have been laughingly suggested by O. St Jesus for his greater glory or hawk-eyedly intended by Moore to put O. St Jesus in an embarras. If the latter O St Jesus has risen nobly to the situation. I have violated the sanctity of this office by laughing. I remembered Moore’s legend about Mrs Craigie. Thanks be to Christ they amuse us anyhow. Re Joycetown: there is I am sure some place of that name in the neighbourhood he writes of.

Thursday I find that instead of continuing this letter I must end it as I began. This is Thursday noon—a holiday here. I can live through today, tomorrow and the greater part of Saturday but cannot go beyond that. Let me explain. I got your 20 crowns yesterday morning: and had three in my pocket remaining from the night before = 23. Out of that I paid away 5 that I had borrowed from my pupil and 2 that I had borrowed from the landlady for the telegram 23–7 = 16. Yesterday 5½: 16 – 5½ = 10½. Today 5½ = 10½ – 5½ = 5. Tomorrow I must manage on 4, and that will leave 1 lira for a small lunch on Saturday morning. Now is that plain. Consequently unless you can telegraph money early on Saturday I have no means of living. You asked me to tell you how I stand. That is how I stand. As for my drinking I have rather too much to do. Last night when Nora went out to change the gold piece the landlady told her it was false. I was giving the lesson at the time and sent her with it back to the P.O. It turned out to be good French money but the suspense and toil of talking made me so sick that I couldn’t eat my dinner. So that’s how I stand. Kindly, if you possibly can, wire me money early on Saturday. You may rely on me for the 1st of October.

I sent you the telegram because I had no idea that money was on its way to me and saw no means of getting any.

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 22 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Received your wire but have not yet cashed it. The official would not accept my documents, wanted a ‘passport’. Finally I got annoyed and said ‘By Jesus, Rossini was right when he took off his hat to the Spaniard, saying “You save me from the shame of being the last in Europe”. [’] The official, astounded at this, invited me to come back and repeat it! The which I declined. How I detest these insolent whores of the bureaucracy [sic]. How do the people permit such arrogance. They are all the same. I must however try to save myself these scenes. I have lost two hours and my dinner. By the way, I presume you have sent me something by post: as this will only carry me to Monday morning. I wish I was not so weak physically sometimes. I have more need of a lictor than Renan.

Jim

Do not overlook the pith of this card.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I have been waiting all the week for a letter from you with regard to my book. The month of September is now nearly over and I am still uncertain of its fate. I write to you now because I wish that this suspense of mind in which I live at present may come to an end one way or the other. I need scarcely assure you how disheartening it is for me to see (as I see) that yet another season is going by without my book being published. And I think you will not accuse me of being importunate if I ask you to write me definitely on receipt of this letter. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, At present Monday morning I am anxiously waiting for a remittance from you. My assets are two centesimi as yesterday I had to get shaved and to pay a laundry bill and to buy medicine for Georgie who has a bad cold on his chest. I wrote yesterday again to G.R. a pressing letter asking him to reply by return of post. I sent you yesterday the U.I. with an article by Gogarty of which I hope you will appreciate the full flavour. The part about the chummies is particularly rich. I am delighted to see that this is only an instalment. Aunt J has left off sending me Skeffington’s paper or writing at all. I must be a very insensible person. Yesterday I went to see the Forum. I sat down on a stone bench overlooking the ruins. It was hot and sunny. Carriages full of tourists, postcard sellers, medal sellers, photograph sellers. I was so moved that I almost fell asleep and had to rise brusquely. I looked at the stone bench ruefully but it was too hard and the grass near the Colosseum was too far. So I went home sadly. Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse. Isn’t it strange that O.G. should be anathemising ugly England just when I wanted to be in an English watering-place. As for the eating houses which must be erected for Sludge: O.G. should travel a little in beautiful Italy and artistic France. Mrs G mustn’t have been very entertaining while in England since O.G. found time to write those two columns. I notice by the way that Colm isn’t earning his money lately. At any rate he hasn’t contributed any peatballs to the U.I. for a long time. On the way home from the Forum being very tired I went into a Dominican church where I found a comfortable straw chair. I watched two nuns at confession. Confession over confessor and penitents left the church in the direction of the cloister. But the nuns came back very shortly and knelt down beside me. Then vespers began. Then there was the rosary. Then there was a sermon. The gentleman who delivered this addressed most of his remarks to me—God knows why. I suppose I looked pious. I didn’t wait for benediction. While listening to the service a most keen regret seized me that I could not gain for myself from historical study an accurate appreciation of an order like the Dominicans. I think my policy of substracting oneself and one’s progeny from the church is too slow. I don’t believe the church has suffered vitally from the number of her apostates. An order like this couldn’t support their immense church with rent &c on the obolos of the religious but parsimonious Italian. And the same, I expect, in France. They must have vast landed estates under various names, and invested moneys. This is one reason why they oppose the quite unheretical theory of socialism because they know that one of its items is expropriation.

I received today in the nick of time your remittance of 17 Lire. The only fear I have now is that they won’t pay me on the 29th. With this money I can get along till Thursday evg. Kindly let me know how much I am to send you back on the 1st and in what manner. I will wait to see if I am to be continued here and if so I will go to the B.S. about you. Do you think I should waste 2 lire on buying a book of Gissing’s—or ought I buy a volume of Bret Harte. I have often confessed to you surprise that there should be anything exceptional in my writing and it is only at moments when I leave down somebody else’s book that it seems to me not so unlikely after all. Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty: for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria or Italy. And yet I know how useless these reflections are. For were I to rewrite the book as G.R. suggests ‘in another sense’ (where the hell does he get the meaningless phrases he uses) I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Ghost sitting in the ink-bottle and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen. And after all Two Gallants—with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare street and Lenehan—is an Irish landscape. The fuss made about Gorky, I think, is due to the fact that he was the first of his class to enter the domain of European literature. I, not having Gorky’s claim, have a more modest end. Ibsen ibself seems to have disclaimed some of the rumorosity attaching to A Doll’s House. He said testily to one Italian interviewer, if you can believe the I.I. ‘But you people can’t understand it properly. You should have been in Norway when the Paris fashion journals first began to be on sale in Christiania’. This is really my reason for constantly plaguing reluctant relatives at home to send me papers or cuttings from them. I wish there was an Irish Club here. I am sure there are ten times as many Irish and American-Irish here than Scandinavians. By the way, how did stupid old Aibsen make out the bit here? Teaching is impossible: he must have been in some German office.

In my opinion Griffith’s speech at the meeting of the National Council justifies the existence of his paper. He, probably, has to lease out his columns to scribblers like Gogarty and Colm, and virgin martyrs like his sub-editor. But, so far as my knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines nine years ago. He wants the creation of an Irish consular service abroad, and of an Irish bank at home. What I don’t understand is that while apparently he does the talking and the thinking two or three fatheads like Martyn and Sweetman don’t begin either of the schemes. He said in one of his articles that it cost a Danish merchant less to send butter to Christiania and then by sea to London than it costs an Irish merchant to send his from Mullingar to Dublin. A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland and to tell you the truth once or twice in Trieste I felt myself humiliated when I heard the little Gaiatti girl sneering at my impoverished country. You may remember that on my arrival in Trieste I actually ‘took some steps’ to secure an agency for Foxford tweeds there. What I object to most of all in his paper is that it is educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly. I have expressed myself badly, I fear, but perhaps you will be able to get at what I mean. A Belfast linen company does a great deal of business in Rome through this bank. On the whole I don’t think it fair to compare him with a stupid mountebank like Knickerbockers.

Georgie’s cold seems to be better. He can walk across the room by himself now and he has two new teeth. Certainly Rome must be very healthy. It is now noon and I am quite hungry. Last night, for example, for dinner I had soup, spaghetti al sugo, half a beefsteak, bread and cheese, grapes and a half litre of wine. The wine here is like water, poor stuff, in my opinion! The fruit is very dear. The stupid foreigners that come here in swarms put up the price of everything. Twenty years ago, I hear, it was much cheaper.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 30 September 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

I am sending you 60 Lire, and will write to you fully on this absorbing question tomorrow. Cannot send it today as the P.O. is closed. Have not replied to G.R. but have written the whole account to Arthur Symons. I shall hope to write to G.R. when Symons answers. Tomorrow I am going to interview an international jurist. Have been to the English consul who gave me the address of their adviser.

Georgie, I fear, has an attack of bronchitis. If not better tomorrow I will call in a doctor. What about the Celtic Fringe now? Only once more, love. Give it up, Jimmy, old boy.

[Unsigned]

New item. The landlady has just raised the rent of our room. How thoughtful!

P.P.S. I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr Hunter.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 October 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I sent you on Monday 53 Lire and the sending of it cost nearly another lira to say nothing of the fact that I had to go in and out of about ten cafés, to get gold and silver, as there is an intelligent rule here in the P.O. which prohibits the payment of international M.O.’s in paper. Georgie seems better at last. His medicines and doses went up to about 5 lire and I bought a bottle of some tonic for Nora. The landlady very kindly has raised my rent to 40 lire and my pupil has gone away until December next. I had also to pay him 11 lire that I borrowed from him and as he seemed a decent little fellow (he is a nephew of the Abruzzese painter, Michetti. Francini’ll tell you who he is) I asked him to dine with us on Michaelmas evg. We had a roast duck.

Now about G.R. I have not replied to his letter. I wrote to Symons narrating the case from the beginning and asking for his advice. I went also to Wyndham. Early in the conversation, talking of nothing in particular, he told me that he and his wife neither visited nor received visits. His wife who is English is very exclusive and won’t know any English people she meets abroad. Her grandfather was an admiral. She knows, he told me, many of the aristocracy of Rome and now they don’t go to the Embassy any more. He hates Rome and is very fond of Naples: but he prefers Booloinsoormer. He made some courageous attempts to pronounce the names of one or two of the principal streets in this city where he has lived for eighteen years. He always tells the Romans to their face what he thinks of them and he says the Italians are most ungrateful. I will find them out, he says. He says that talking of Ald. Kelly and the Union Jack, the Irish are really very disloyal, very disloyal. He has a Union Jack furled in his hall. He hangs it out on all his Majesty’s or her Majesty’s feast-days. Some people ask him why he doesn’t hang it out on the Italian King’s feast-day. But you won’t catch him doing that, he says. I argued with him politely for an hour and a quarter. He offered me neither a cigarette, nor a biscuit nor a glass of wine nor yet a glass of water. At the door he told me the Italians were quite uncivilised. I would find them out. I at once found out a trattoria where I commanded a quite uncivilised youth to bring me instantly a quarter of wine and cast proudly on the table three halfpence. The youth murmured his thanks and some quite uncivilised men saluted me humbly as I strode out of the shop. I refrained from telling them to their faces what I thought of them but as I strode homeward I came carefully to the conclusion that Wyndham is probably the most stupid, prosy, old, bastard at present living in this city.

I went to the English consul, who gave me the address of an international jurist, Mr St Lo Malet. This latter read all the letters and the contract and I expect will send me his bill. He discovered some discrepancies. First GR says ‘I read the book myself on behalf of this house’: later ‘the man who read your book for us was Filson Young’. He says an agreement like mine is considered only a personal contract. He advised me to try to come to terms on letter 11 and not to go to law (Letter 11 is the letter with which G.R. returned the MS) as lawsuits are long, and costly and as other publishers would then be reluctant to publish me. I said I had tried to come to terms on letter 11 unsuccessfully. I told him I had written to Symons and he advised me to wait for Symons’ answer before doing anything. He gave me the address of The Incorporated Soc. of Authors. He distrusts the word Incorporated which he says probably means that they are slow to move. In one way he says my case is strong since G.R. has broken the contract. But he says the assessment of damages would be very difficult. G.R. has constantly disparaged the book commercially. The contract gave me nothing on the 1st 500 and G.R. could maintain that it was unlikely my book would reach even that limit. I might be awarded £5–0–0 damages or enough money to enable me to bring out the book myself. What do you think of his opinion? I am still waiting for S to answer and have not replied to G.R.

I replied today to Gogarty’s card: felicitated him on his good news whatever it might be and reminding him that the last night I met him in Nassau Street he had also good news which he asked me to go and hear. I sent him no news of my own and said I saw little profit in our exchanging any more curt notes. I regret to see he has not continued his Ugly England yet. I would fain hear more about the slattern comediennes—renegade artist that I am. Starkey writes two little immortal things in Sinn Féin about a Fiddler and (damme if I can think of the other) a Piper, I think. AE ought now to write some little immortal dreamy thing about a Trombonist or, better, a Triangle-Player. I wish some unkind person would publish a book about the venereal condition of the Irish; since they pride themselves so much on their immunity. It must be rather worse than England, I think. I know very little of the subject but it seems to me to be a disease like any other disease, caused by anti-hygienic conditions. I don’t see where the judgment of God comes into it nor do I see what the word ‘excess’ means in this connection. Perhaps Gogarty has some meaning of his own for this word. I would prefer the unscientific expression ‘venereal ill-luck’. Am I the only honest person that has come out of Ireland in our time? How dusty their phrases are!

Georgie now walks about all the day by himself. He doesn’t seem to be so fat as he was but I suppose his cold accounts for that. He has not been out for ten days. He has a huge appetite. He makes nothing of a handful of grapes. As it is too cold in the evening now we have our dinner sent to the house. I am looking out for a little quarter and will get some furniture on hire as it is stupid to continue paying this rent for such a room as ours. I will try for one near the Pantheon where the streets are wooden as the late King is buried there. I wish they had buried a few more monarchs or emperors in the neighbourhood as the cobbled streets are fearfully noisy. Rome must have been a fine city in the time of Caesar. I believe it was chiefly on one or two hills: the inter spaces being used as military exercise-grounds, market-places &c. The forum must have been a magnificent square. But the papal Rome is like the Coombe or old Trieste and the new Ludovisi quarter is like any secondary quarter of a fine metropolis. Not as fine as Pembroke township, for example. I wish I knew something of Latin or Roman History. But it’s not worth while beginning now. So let the ruins rot. Two things are excellent in Rome: air and water.

Jim

PS I refrain from intruding the Lsd question until I write you on Sunday. I want you to get your wind again.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [9 October 1906]

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Symons wrote to me:

I am glad to hear from you again. When I named you to Grant Richards it was before his failure: I should hardly have done it since. Still, as he has apparently begun to print yr. book I would be inclined to give in to him as far as you can without vitally damaging your work. If he signed an agreement to publish the 12 stories why not hold him to that? and you could hold over the other two stories for another book later. The great thing is to get published so that people may have a chance of reading you. I will write a line to G.R. advising him not to lose yr. book. I hope you will arrange it between you. Now as to yr. poems, I feel almost sure that I can get Elkin Mathews to print them in his shilling Garland series. You would get little money from him but I think it would be worth your while to take what he offered—probably a small royalty after expenses are covered. He did for me a little set of translations from Baudelaire’s ‘Petits Poèmes en Prose’. The cost was £14–14–0 and it is now nearly covered when my royalty will begin. Tell me if I may write and advise him to take the book. If it comes out I will give it the best review I can in the ‘Saturday’ or ‘Athenaeum’ and I will get one or two other people to give it proper notices. I hope you are getting on well in Rome. Let me have a line promptly about the poems.

I answered, accepting his offer about the verses and am waiting a few days more to see if G.R. will write. Tell me what arrangement you propose for the verses. I will follow it perfunctorily as I take very little interest in the publication of the verses. I see no reason however why I should refuse to publish them—do you? And I would be glad if they antedated Dubliners. I suppose they have some merit! and perhaps, if they sold, I might make ten or twenty pounds out of them next year. Is my attitude on the point the sign of a blunted or of a more developed mind? Tell me ought I retain the name. I don’t like it much. By the way can you account for the friendly tone of S’s letter? The last dealing I had with him was when I served a copy of The Holy Office upon him. I connect it in some way with G’s letters. I suppose I will soon have a letter from some of the others. Symons, however, has a smart English business-like way of doing things which is highly satisfactory.

Yesterday being the anniversary of the day of my espousal and of the day of the gladness of my heart, we went out into the country and ate and drank the greater portion of several larders. Here is the full and exact list of what we ate yesterday.

10.30 a.m.

Ham, bread and butter, coffee

1.30 p.m.

Soup, roast lamb and potatoes, bread and wine

4.– p.m.

Beef-stew, bread and wine

6.– p.m.

Roast veal, bread, gorgonzola cheese and wine

8.30 p.m.

Roast veal, bread and grapes and vermouth

9.30 p.m.

Veal cutlets, bread, salad, grapes and wine

There is literally no end to our appetites. I don’t believe I ever was in better health except for the sedentary life I lead. I stand fascinated before the windows of grocers’ shops. My salary, I am afraid will not be sufficient to feed me in the winter. I am teaching the woman who cooks for us to cook in the English fashion. She made tripe for us the other night with onions and white sauce.

Dear Stannie

I hope you are very well I am sure you would be glad to see Georgie now he is well able to run about he is able to say a lot he has a good appetite he has eight teeth and also sings when we ask him where is Stannie he beats his chest and says non c’e piu

Nora

You will see from this interpolated letter the gigantic strides which Nora has made towards culture and emancipation. The evening before last I found her stitching together skins of apples. She also asked me some time ago ‘Is Jesus and God the same?’ and asked me to teach her geography! Do you notice how women when they write disregard stops and capital letters?

I finished Hauptmann’s Rosa Bernd on Sunday. I wonder if he acts well. His plays, when read, leave an unsatisfying impression on the reader. Yet he must have the sense of the stage well developed in him by now. He never, in his later plays at least, tries for a curtain so that the ends of his acts seem ruptures of a scene. His characters appear to be more highly vivified by their creator than Ibsen’s do but also they are less under control. He has a difficulty in subordinating them to the action of his drama. He deals with life quite differently, more frankly in certain points (this play opens with Rosa and her lover emerging one after the other from opposite sides of a bush, looking at each other first and then laughing) but also so broadly that my personal conscience is seldom touched. His way of treating such types as Arnold Kramer and Rosa Bernd is, however, altogether to my taste. His temperament has a little of Rimbaud in it. Like him, too, I suppose somebody else will be his future. But, after all, he has written two or three master-pieces—‘a little immortal thing’ like The Weavers, for example. I have found nothing of the charlatan in him yet.

I am following with interest the struggle between the various socialist parties here at the Congress. Labriola spoke yesterday, the paper says, with extraordinarily rapid eloquence for two hours and a half. He reminds me somewhat of Griffith. He attacked the intellectuals and the parliamentary socialists. He belongs or is leader of the sindacalists. They are trades-unionists or rather trade-unionists with a definite antisocial programme. Their weapons are unions and strikes. They decline to interfere in politics or religion or legal questions. They do not desire the conquest of public powers which, they say, only serve in the end to support the middle-class government. They assert that they are the true socialists because they wish the future social order to proceed equally from the overthrow of the entire present social organisation and from the automatic emergence of the proletariat in trades-unions and guilds and the like. Their objection to parliamentarianism seems to me well-founded but if, as all classes of socialists agree, a general European war, an international war, has become an impossibility I do not see how a general international strike or even a general national strike is a possibility. The Italian army is not directed against the Austrian army so much as against the Italian people. Of course, the sindacalists are anti-militarists but I don’t see how that saves them from the logical conclusion of revolution in a conscriptive country like this. It is strange that Italian socialism in its latest stage should approach so closely the English variety.

After the preceding exordium I approach the question of my finances. At present I possess 28½ lire (9 Oct. 12 o’c) (You have not yet acknowledged receipt of the 53 lire I sent you at 7 p.m. on 1st Oct) You can easily make up the bill for yourself: Landlady 54, you 54: Terzini my pupil 11, books 2, medicines 5, collars and ties 2, trousers 12, the dinner to Terzini (he will take more lessons in December) 10, haircutting and shave, 1, postage 1, = 180. That means that in 10 days counting the last day of September we spent 70 lire. This appears very high. Take out of it however 9½ lire spent on Sunday and you have 60 lire for 9 days, that is, 6½ lire per day. The fact remains that we consumed that amt in food. My breakfast coffee and milk and bread and butter costs 2½, Nora’s and the child’s together, 5½ = ,80c.

Lunch, soup for the child, and our two lunches with bread and wine

1.90

Grapes afterwards and the waiter

.30

Cigarettes, matches & papers

.20

My coffee at 2.45

.15

Nora’s and the child’s at 5 o’c

.55

Two sandwiches for us at 7 o’c

.20

Dinner for the three, waiter & grapes after (1½d + 2d. =35c)

2.40

If you add that up you will see that it is 6 L.30c. I cannot explain how we consume so much but the fact is so. The three of us have enormous appetites. The little things they bring on a plate don’t satisfy us. The price of the dinner, 2.05c may seem to you high but it includes a litre of wine, 80c and Georgie’s soup 15c and bread 15c =L1 —10: that leaves 95c for Nora’s meat and vegetables and mine or less than 4£d each. I eat a sandwich at 7 o’c when I get out as I am too hungry to wait till dinner-time 9 o’c. At lunch we take only half a litre and a flask of mineral water so it comes a few pence less. But I am tired of writing this long explanation. This fact remains that on Sunday morning I shall have need of money. I watch the papers every day in search of an advt for English lessons but have not found any yet. As I told you my pupil has gone away. If you are well dressed and have paid off yr. loan you might ask Artifoni for another which, of course, you can pay off in full on the 1st of Nov. I owe you still about 40 lire, but if you got an advance of 40 lire from Artifoni I could send you 60 Lire on the 1st Nov, and would then owe you only 20 Lire. Next month I shall make a different arrangement, and if we can once get on our feet I will take a little quarter and furnish it as, with waiters etc this dining and eating bits in the street is not very satisfactory. Write fully on receipt of this what you can do, so that you may relieve my anxiety. Wyndham, of course, is off. I hope you will not think this letter unreasonable (the latter part of it). If you calculate yourself you will see what a small margin it leaves, and remember that keen questioner Mr M.D. Berlitz who asks somewhere abruptly ‘How long can we resist the desire for food?’

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 10 October 1906

Wed. evg. Via Frattina 52, II°

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie What is the meaning of your silence? Did you get my remittance and my two letters or are you ill? I will ask you, if you are well, to attend to my letter at once as I cannot get beyond Saturday. You know what a state I get into when I have no letters and see my money running. Have been twice to the barrister today. He is drafting a reply to G.R. Remember I run ashore on Saturday evg.

Jim

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Draft of a letter), 10 October 1906

Via Frattina 52, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I have read through the letters which have passed between us with regard to my books and, as they date from over two years ago, I trust that this will be our last exchange of letters on the subject.

First, as to my verses. Their publication has been three times postponed: first, on account of your going out of business, and of the consequent loss of the MS when I was in Pola, then, when you began business again and wrote to me in Trieste asking me to rewrite the MS and submit it to you once more, owing to my inability to accept your terms and pay part of the expenses of publication myself, and lastly, owing to the fact that, having then at your suggestion offered you my second book, you advised me to postpone the appearance of the verses until after its appearance. However, the apparent postponement, now, of my second book in favour of a half-written novel virtually postpones my book of verses for ever, and, as I have no wish that the verses should remain for ever in MS, I have thought well to accept a proposal which Mr Arthur Symons has made me with regard to their publication and therefore ask you kindly to send me back, by return of post, the MS of the verses.

Now as to Dubliners. Having read through your letters carefully I perceive that I was in error on one point. I entered into the correspondence and in the end agreed to concede certain alterations solely in order that the 13th story Two Gallants might appear with the others. It seemed to me that you had some right to insist on its exclusion if I insisted that I would alter nothing of what I had written. I now perceive, however, that I sent you Two Gallants, together with yr copy of my signed agreement, on 23 Feb, that you acknowledged its receipt on 27 Feb, and that a week later on 6 March you sent me my copy of the agreement signed by Mr Grant Richards. From these dates I perceive that I had ‘delivered to the publisher the completed MS executed in a proper manner’ and that Two Gallants was part of the completed MS. When, under the impression that Two Gallants was not part of the completed MS I wrote to you, saying that, at least, you knew it was in preparation you replied on 19 June that you had no idea what it was about. Yet the MS of the story was in your possession on 27 Feb and not merely did you acknowledge its receipt then but you had the agreement signed and returned to me on 6 March and even wrote to me, a month later, asking me to send the 14th story as the book was going to the printer. It was only on the 23 April that you raised objections to Two Gallants and to passages in Counterparts and phrases in Grace, objections which later, owing to my having ingenuously drawn your attention to other parts of the book, were extended to include The Boarding-House, Ivy Day in the Committee-Room and An Encounter. You seem to think that I have harped too much upon the printer. But is he not the important person? You write to me early in February and say you have read the book yourself on behalf of the house and later on in the middle of May you tell me that your reader, Mr Filson Young, who also read it, agrees with you as to the impossibility of publishing it. It seems to me it would have been more logical for your reader to have pointed out to you that impossibility in January instead of agreeing with you in May, more logical and more considerate towards me. But really we all—you, your reader and I—are unimportant figures: the printer, alone, is important. His office, apparently, supersedes those of reader and publisher. The correspondence and agreement should have been signed by him, the book should have been read, printed and published by him—or by nobody. My part ends with the consignment of the MS: his part, if it begins at all, begins then and I am not sure that he is not entitled to act as deliverer, seller and reviewer of the book as well. Anyway he allows me my part of writing the book: this I have done and more. Scrupulous as he is, he cannot say as much for himself.

But if I have harped too much on the printer it seems to me you have harped too much on the words ‘risk’ and ‘pocket’. The risk in your case, to judge from the clauses in the agreement, is not enormous. So far as I can see, a book which you and the other people you have shown it to admire so much, which you consider to be a chapter of the moral history of my country, ought to be able to achieve a sale of a few hundred copies among a population numbering some 47 millions of people, especially at a moment when that population and its parliament are about to be consulted as to the fate of the country of which my book treats. But, however this may be, (and it is your affair to consider it, not mine) once more I wish to assure you, since you raise the point again in your letter of 24 Sept, the appeal to my pocket is useless. I desire to have more leisure and more money and a different life and a different address in order that I may be able to work in my own fashion but, at the same time, I am enthusiastically thankful for my present position for, while I enjoy it modest though it be, I cannot plead the excuse of starvation or houselessness for a deliberate prostitution of my talent or a deliberate and hypocritical mutilation of my work.

Finally as to my novel, and one word will be enough. I am not in a fit state of mind to complete it. For two years I have been living in hope and now that I see that those two years of waiting and hoping have availed me nothing it is really too much to expect that I should sit down calmly and continue to write and then to wait and hope again. For I am sure we would then have the same objections and the same letters. It is true that I stand in need of a publisher, but the publisher I need must be prepared to run some risk as otherwise it is difficult to see why he is entitled to any profit. It may be, however, that there are circumstances in your case which explain many of the enigmas in this correspondence and, in any case, I thank you for your kind appreciation both of the verses and of the stories.

You say you are waiting to hear from me. The substance of what I have to say is this: if you can see your way to publish the MS at present in your possession with the changes I have made in deference to your objections you are at liberty to do so. That is to say, I will allow the inclusion of A Little Cloud about which there has been no difficulty, the fourteenth story, to balance the changes I made in the other stories in deference to your objections. I can make no more changes in it, and cannot put it aside in order to complete my novel. If, however, you cannot see your way to publish it, return it to me by return of post and, in any case, kindly return me the MS of the verses. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 12 October 1906

Fri. 7 o’c p.m. Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I am very sorry I should be the cause of your unfortunate plight. I have spent very little money this money [sic] over what was necessary but even that it pains me to have spent. I cannot manage till Monday. I have 4 lire but I will ask the man to let us eat there till Monday. I suppose I can count on money from you then. This month must be the last of this wretched embarrassment.

Jim.

P.S. Give these people no news of me. I suppose they would be glad to hear I was in difficulties. A will certainly advance you the money for a suit. Do you get enough to eat. I hope your toothache is gone.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 13 October 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

Dear Mr Grant Richards, As the publication of the verses of which you have had my MS for more than two years would, according to your latest proposals, be practically indefinitely postponed, I have decided to accept a proposal which Mr Arthur Symons has made me with regard to their publication and therefore ask you kindly to send me back by return of post the MS of the verses.

Now as to Dubliners as to which in your letter of 24 Sept. you say you are waiting to hear from me. On first reading this letter I took it for a refusal to consider any further the publication of my volume of stories although I had gone so far and given myself so much trouble in order to meet all your objections, little as I agreed with them. I could not believe, however, that this could be the case in view of our agreement and your own letters to me on the subject so I have taken some time to go through them again very carefully and to reconsider my position thoroughly in this matter so that I might, if possible, bring you without any further delay or hesitation, to carry out loyally your undertaking and finally bring to the light of day the stories of which you have been so kind as to express a high opinion more than once.

Without prejudice, therefore, to any of my indisputable rights I still think that this desirable end may be attained on the lines of your letters of 16 May and 14 June last: namely:

1. omission of the word ‘bloody’ in the stories:

a) Grace

b) The Two Gallants

c) Ivy Day in the Committee-Room

2. retention of the word ‘bloody’ in: a) The Boarding-House

3. deletion of paragraph and substitution of another passage in a) Counterparts.

4. Inclusion, of course, of the last story of which there has been no question:

a) A Little Cloud.

So far I am, most reluctantly, prepared to go but no further.

Finally, one word as to my novel. I am not in a fit state of mind to complete it. For two years I have been living in hope and now that I see that these two years of waiting and hoping have availed me nothing it is really too much to expect that I should put my two completed books on one side and continue to write the third: and then to wait and hope again. For I am sure we should have the same objections and the same letters. It is true that I stand in need of a publisher, but the publisher I need must at least be prepared to risk something for what he esteems highly and in the meantime I am glad that my position, modest though it be, enables me to save my work from mutilation and my talent from corruption.

I trust, however, that you may yet be able to publish the book of stories in view of the facts I have stated in this letter and, in any case, I will ask [you] to send me the MS of the verses. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 17 October 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Yale

Dear Sir, Mr Arthur Symons has sent me your letter of the 11th inst in which you are kind enough to ask to see the MS of my verses. I am re-arranging them and shall be pleased to send you the MS in a few days. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 October 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, On receipt of your postcard I went to Wyndham’s house three times without seeing him and left a note for him to call next day. I asked him for money. He has none: but he said he would try to get me some and call back that evg at 7 o’c. I waited until nearly nine then I called to his house twice unsuccessfully. I had no money so I borrowed a couple of lire from my landlady and we dined. Today Wyndham wrote saying he was very (no awfully) sorry he couldn’t get me the money. Having no money or way of getting it I went to the English consul and after interviewing him extracted 50 lire from him. I had asked W— for 50 L, my idea being to send you 20 to enable you to get a suit at once. If, however, I sent you 20 now it would not reach you till Friday evg. and you are paid on Saturday morning. Besides that, there would be a lira wasted in my sending it and a half lira wasted in yr sending me back same on Saturday. However, if any thing has gone wrong write to me or wire as I have now more than L 45.1 hope Saturday will see you with a suit. A— is not worth much when he can’t work his wife to the extent of a suit of clothes. I don’t understand your excessive sensibility. For my part I would much prefer to be ill dressed than to be hungry or in danger of being so. Why do you think of going back to Dublin? Your position from the 1st of Nov will be better than mine. You have 160 Cor. = 165 lire a month and I suppose you make 10 more on extra lessons, 175. Trieste is, as you can see, cheaper than Rome. And you have one person to support as against my two and ½. Moreover, you are on perfectly firm ground as a teacher there while I am constantly making the most absurd mistakes here, knowing damn all about banking business. Besides, I presume Ar— doesn’t receive people like the Russian ambassador or Cardinal Vanutelli or such ‘big pots’ in his school but they come here to criticise my wearing apparel. And, in any case understanding as you must the sympathy of an English consul and an Irish bastard you will perhaps realise that I am hardly in a better position than you myself. However I trust we will be all right from the 1st of Nov. I will send you then enough money to buy a few ties and gloves and linen so that you may satisfy those vulgar sons of whores. And if you are in need of money to eat let me know at once.

Symons sends me the following letter:

My dear Symons,

I am very much obliged to you for drawing my attention to Mr Joyce’s work and feel sure from what you tell me of its quality that it will be a great acquisition to my Vigo series. So will you please put me into communication with Mr Joyce or arrange with him for me to see his MS. Faithfully yours,

Elkin Mathews

and asks me will I send Mathews the MS. I wrote today to E.M. saying S— had sent me the letter and adding that I was re-arranging the verses but would send the MS in a few days. I do not understand your arrangement: write it out clearly again. Why do you allude to hexameter in ‘Sleep Now’? u – u (u) is the foot used. Do you mean ‘All day’ and ‘I hear’ to precede ‘Sleep now’? That arrangement would be rather jolty, I think. Or do you mean me to end on ‘I hear?’ I understand that arrangement better: namely: ‘Sleep now’ ‘All day’ and ‘I hear’. Also do you mean me to include the Cabra poem? Can I use it here or must I publish it in a book by itself as, of course, my dancing days are over.

I wrote to Grant R— to know had he decided to refuse definitely my concessions: namely deletion of ‘bloody’ from 3 stories and deletion of paragraph in ‘Counterparts’ against inclusion of Two Gallants and A Little Cloud. If he refuses that, I will hold him to his 1st letter, in which he asked for deletion of Two Gallants, deletion of paragraph in Counterparts and deletion of ‘bloody’ in Grace. I will hold over Two Gallants and A Little Cloud and retain ‘bloody’ in Ivy Day in the Committee Room. If he does not agree to that I will write to the Society of Authors to institute proceedings against him.

As you may have seen a Russian general has been following his wife and wife’s lover all over the world with intent to shoot them. Many eminent persons were consulted as to whether this was right of the said general. Among them was Father Bernard Vaughan. He said, ‘If it were my case I would simply “chuck” the woman’. I suppose he was mis-reported by a reporter with a sense for verse. Fr. B.V. is the most diverting public figure in England at present. I never see his name but I expect some enormity.

Does Aunt Josephine write to you? She never writes to me and sends Sinn Féin at long intervals. Is there nobody in Ireland who will think it worth his or her while to make a bundle of any old papers that are lying about his or her house and send them to me? I suppose everyone is disillusioned about me now—myself included. The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent. I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it. It is impossible for me to write anything in my present circumstances. I wrote some notes for A Painful Case but I hardly think the subject is worth treating at much length. The fact is, my imagination is starved at present. I went through my entire book of verses mentally on receipt of Symons’ letter and they nearly all seemed to me poor and trivial: some phrases and lines pleased me and no more. A page of A Little Cloud gives me more pleasure than all my verses. I am glad the verses are to be published because they are a record of my past but I regret that years are going over and that I cannot follow the road of speculation which often opens before me. I think I have unlearned a great deal but I am sure I have also a great deal to learn. Your opinion of me seems to be steadily rising again: but, after all, to say that I am not a vulgar mountebank like most of the ‘artists’ of Ireland is little. What really is the point is: whether it is possible for me to combine the exercise of my art with a reasonably happy life. However, as I have not yet reached the age at which I wrote Catilina, the point need not be solved offhand. I bought Hedda Gabier today for fivepence—Gosse’s trans. The translation seems to me wretchedly bad and the introduction idiotic. I wonder do these chaps know the language he writes in at all. I believe Ibsen scandalised Danish critics by his use of Norwegian idioms. My friend Pedersen pointed out locutions to me in Bygmester Solness and said solemnly in that mellifluous tongue of his ‘Det er ikke jodt dansk. Man sijer det ikke i Kobenhavn’. You should hear him pronounce the last word: it takes him about half a minute. I fancy I’s attitude towards litherathure and socialism somewhat resembled mine. Pedersen did not know the meaning of a few expressions. I doubt, however, that he ever fell so low as to chronicle the psychology of Lenehan and Farrington. I suppose you read that as a result of the socialist congress the two sub-editors of the Avanti resigned. Ferri replaced them by Cicotti, formerly editor of the Lavoratore of Trieste and—Labriola, who is to be the German correspondent of the paper. The funny part is that the two who resigned are members of the party of which L is the head. Labriola is a person who interests me very much.

What do you consider weak in my letter to O.G. It definitely closes the correspondence I should think. When he wrote to me from New York it was you, not I, that wished he should get a cordial answer from me. Mrs Francini, on hearing the letter, said with emotion ‘Poverino!’ but O.G.’s request was that I should forget the past: a feat beyond my power. I forgive readily enough. The other night, about ten days ago, we went into the wineshop over the way where I told you we dined once. The man has started a restaurant but we don’t frequent it as the prices are a little too high for us. I was reading the Avanti and between whiles casting about for a remark to make. Pace (the propr.) and his two nephews one of whom is a complete bowsy, a Roman Lenehan, were eating at a table hard by. Pace is a wineshopkeeper by night and a clerk in the Ministry of Finance by day. Finally, I said something about the congress. Pace nodded his head (his mouth being full). The bowsy watched me until he saw my head bend again on the paper: then he leaned over his plate and asked huskily ‘Zio, è socialista il Signor Giacomo?’ Pace, having eaten what was in his mouth, glanced at me and upcurled his lower lip and answered ‘È un po’ di tutto’. Bowsy smiled huskily and the other nephew coughed a laugh as he, smiling too, helped his relatives to some salad. This I perceived through my forehead very accurately, but it had not the least effect upon what the poetical and mystical Swede would call ‘my interiors’.

On receipt of your next letter I will write to you my plans for the month of November which I hope you will think reasonable. Nora is going to arrange with the woman to cook in the house after the first. I am sure that by doing so, in three months, we should have saved enough to pay the first instalment on everything necessary for a quarter. Then if you will come here I think we, with our united salaries, ought to be able to have some comfort. Furniture is very cheap here, strange to say. We would have more than 100 lire a week between us. Let me know if you think well of this. We could be in a quarter by 1st of Feb or at latest the 1st of March. I hope you will manage on Saturday to get your suit and, if you should be short of money for food, I will send you what I can.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 21 October 1906 Sunday noon.

[Rome]

MS. Cornell

G.R. writes: ‘I am afraid I cannot add anything usefully to my last letter. We regret that we cannot publish Dubliners even with the emendations you suggest: as it stands it would bring you neither money nor reputation. If you could finish your novel and it has the strength of your stories it would bring you both m and r: and then, as I said, Dubliners could follow it. The MS of your verses goes back to you under separate cover’ Am writing to hold him to 1st letter, as I told you. Send at once ‘instructions’ for the verses. Will it be in your power to send me anything by the middle of the week? You said you could during the last week. Instructions at once.

Jim

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 22 October 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, I have received your letter of the 16th and my verse MS for which thanks. As I told you in my last letter I can make no further changes in the MS you have at present, the changes made so far having been made solely in order that stories 13 and 14 might be included. If, however, you wish to stand by our agreement with regard to the original 12 stories I will concede what you ask for in your letter of 23 April:

1) suppression of Two Gallants (and of A Little Cloud)

2) deletion of passage in Counterparts (already deleted)

3) deletion of word ‘bloody’ in Grace (already deleted)

If, however, you decide that you cannot publish the original book, as agreed between us, even with these concessions kindly send me back the complete MS by return of post. Faithfully yours Jas A Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 November 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, It would have been useless to have made that suggestion to Pace. I never go there at all. I might have gone on eating in the other trattoria and then at the end of the month I might have asked for credit for a week or so. But that would mean L 40 or L 50 out of my pocket on the 1st. So I gave Nora L 50 to see if we could live a fortnight on it. Four days have now passed and she has 25 lire left. But, she has also bought oil and lamp-oil and coal and candles—all of which will reduce our landlady’s bill on the 1st of Dec. (This month it was L 52.–) and she has three quarters of a bag of coal left, a big bag of coffee, a good deal of sugar and five litres of wine. Had we gone on living out we would have spent L 6.– at least per day: and would now have the L 25.0, which we have,—and nothing else. So I think we have begun at last. The only thing is the plan is risky for, if I cannot get a pupil before the end of the month we have nowhere to get credit. But I prefer even to risk this as I am determined to save money.

I sent my verses to Elkin Mathews, telling him they had been for two years in bond and requesting an early decision. He writes, saying it could not be published this side of Xmas but that as soon as he has got some pressing WORK off his hands he will turn to and examine it. The Soc. of Authors wants £1–1–0 subscription. The barrister advised me not to go on with the case for reason before explained to you. I thanked him and asked him what his fee was and he said =£1–0–0. So I paid 10 L and said I would give him the rest on the 1st of December. I also gave him Two Gallants to read. He said he read it with great interest and pleasure but thought it would read better in French or Italian. He has promised to examine all my future contracts, advises me to wait until my verses are published and then to send Dubliners to some publisher accompanied by a bundle of press notices.

I have read Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism,. Why are English novels so terribly boring? I think G. has little merit. The socialist in this is first a worker, and then inherits a fortune, jilts his first girl, marries a lydy, becomes a big employer and takes to drink. You know the kind of story. There is a clergyman in it with searching eyes, and a deep voice who makes all the socialists wince under his firm gaze. I am going to read another book of his. Then I will try Arthur Morrison and Hardy: and finally Thackeray. Without boasting I think I have little or nothing to learn from English novelists.

I have written to A.J asking her to send me By the Stream of Kilmeen [sic] a book of stories by Seamas O’Kelly—you remember him. He was in the degree class with me. I also asked her to try to lay hands on any old editions of Kickham, Griffin, Carleton, H.J. Smyth &c, Banim and to send me a Xmas present made up of tram-tickets, advts, handbills, posters, papers, programmes &c. I would like to have a map of Dublin on my wall. I suppose I am becoming something of a maniac. I am writing to her today to know how you spell Miss McCleod’s (P) Reel. I have also added in the story The Clay the name of Maria’s laundry, the Dublin by Lamplight Laundry, it is such a gentle way of putting it. I expect there will be no holding the Marquis of Lorne whenever he sees my book.

I suppose you read about Skeff and his papa-in-law? They harangued student Dublin from a car outside the University Buildings and U. Coll., because God Save the King was played on the organ. ‘There was a lady in the vehicle,’ the paper says. David said he was proud that day of Nationalist Dublin. I am glad you have a suit at last. Did Bertelli never write after that time? Item. A lamp chimney here costs one lira!

I am still suffering from this indigestion. The druggist gave me last night a box of rhubarb pills and told me I should see a doctor if it did not get better. It is about four or five days since I had the pleasure of defecating. I believe this is the result of my sedentary life. I was always accustomed to walking a good deal.

You ask me what I would substitute for parliamentary agitation in Ireland. I think the Sinn Fein policy would be more effective. Of course I see that its success would be to substitute Irish for English capital but no-one, I suppose, denies that capitalism is a stage of progress. The Irish proletariat has yet to be created. A feudal peasantry exists, scraping the soil but this would with a national revival or with a definite preponderance of England surely disappear. I quite agree with you that Griffith is afraid of the priests—and he has every reason to be so. But, possibly, they are also a little afraid of him too. After all, he is holding out some secular liberty to the people and the Church doesn’t approve of that. I quite see, of course, that the Church is still, as it was in the time of Adrian IV, the enemy of Ireland: but, I think, her time is almost up. For either Sinn Fein or Imperialism will conquer the present Ireland. If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one. You complain of Griffith’s using Gogarty & Co. How do you expect him to fill his paper: he can’t write it all himself. The part he does write, at least, has some intelligence and directness about it. As for O.G I am waiting for the S.F. policy to make headway in the hope that he will join it for no doubt whatever exists in my mind but that, if he gets the chance and the moment comes, he will play the part of MacNally and Reynolds. I do not say this out of spleen. It is my final view of his character: a very native Irish growth, and if I begin to write my novel again it is in this way I shall treat them. If it is not far-fetched to say that my action, and that of men like Ibsen &c, is a virtual intellectual strike I would call such people as Gogarty and Yeats and Colm the blacklegs of literature. Because they have tried to substitute us, to serve the old idols at a lower rate when we refused to do so for a higher.

Of course you find my socialism thin. It is so and unsteady and ill-informed. You are wrong, however, in supposing that the intellectuals taught Labriola socialism. Intellectualism, instead, is a partial development, an alloy of sociological liberalism, of the original socialism which was really nothing but the manifesto of a class. Ferri, for example, seems a more intellectual and capable person than Labriola. But the latter contends that interest in psychiatry and criminology and literature and religion are beside the question. He wishes to hasten directly the emergence of the proletariat. And to do this he would include in his ranks Catholics and Jews, liberals and conservatives. We were speculating one day at Barcola how much was spent in military and naval defence by England. The revenue income is £141,000,000–0–0 and the amount spent on army and navy is 66 millions: 47%. The revenue of Italy is 1700 million lire and of this 400 millions is spent on army and navy: 23%. England however has a vast territory to protect and, at least, possesses a powerful empire. Italy against the outlay of J of her revenue has an impoverished illiterate population, medieval sanitation, a terrible accumulation of taxes, and an army and navy which would probably fetch a few hundred pounds in a lottery. Of course, all this money does not go into the warchest. Japan, the first naval power in the world, I presume, in point of efficiency, spends three million pounds per annum on her fleet. Italy spends more than twice as much.

Do you think there would be any use in my writing to Charlie? I wanted him to make some inquiries for me. What is their address? I wrote to A.J. at 4 Northbrook &c—was that right? A letter from Soc. of Authors this morning saying they have to consider the claims of older members &c &c. I am waiting to hear from Symons! I want an English dictionary badly. I don’t know how I could correct proofs at present.

Georgie is very well and fat. He spends his day pulling about papers clothes and shoes. He is cursed frequently by both his parents for mislaying the comb and the sponge or the towel or my hat or shoes: and when asked where it is he points to the ceiling or the window and says ‘là!’The other evg l began to talk to Nora about something serious(!!!): but he wouldn’t allow it. He made such a noise that we had to stop and talk to him. His latest phrases are ‘Bua! (brucia!)’ ‘Lalia! (Giornale d’Italia)’ ‘Abace! (In braccia)’ and ‘Ata! (In terra).’ The two last he alternates very frequently. He also says ‘Appetito!’ and ‘Addio!’ The papers I put aside for you he usually tears up.

I shall let you know in a few days how we are getting on with our new arrangement. Do you ever read the Daily Mail. A fellow named Edgar Wallace writes in it sometimes a farcical column: it is very funny. I am labouring at the end of Demos. Gissing’s effort to be just to his socialist protagonist is very distressing. I read that a Dublin solicitor was found poisoned in London when he was about to be struck off the rolls. The bottle bore the label Starkie’s Medical Hall. No wonder, begod, if it was as bad as his verses.

I wish someone was here to talk to me about Dublin. I forget half the things I wanted to do. The two worst stories are After the Race and A Painful Case. When I have done reading the authors I said do you think I ought to read the Russians seriously or the Danish writers? Write a long letter.

Jim

Another purgative on Friday cost me L1.–! The box of pills cost 80c–! Viva l’Italia! Avanti Savoia!

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 13 November 1906

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I have been expecting a letter from you this long time. I have had no reply either from Aunt J or from Symons. There was a Jewish divorce case on last week in Dublin which would have interested me very much but of course nobody thought of sending me a paper. I have received Sinn Féin and The Leprechaun. The editor of S.F alludes to the British army as the only mercenary army in Europe. I suppose he prefers the conscription system because it is French. Irish intellectuals are very tiresome. Italy, at least, has two things to balance its miserable poverty and mismanagement: a lively intellectual movement and a good climate. Ireland is Italy without these two. I see that the Irish National Theatre season is on at present: a triple bill of which the good Lady Gregory supplies two items. A play by a man named William Boyle makes the dramatic critic of S.F. think of Ibsen. I am reading another book by Gissing The Crown of Life. Here are two samples of his way of writing ‘’Arry, in fact, to use a coarse but expressive phrase, was a hopeless blackguard’ ‘When he left, which he did later in the day (to catch a train) the conversation resumed its usual course &c’. His books remind me of what Effore calls Pastefazoi? I perceive that my first opinion of him was founded on pure good nature, nothing else. After all, I can read anything. I am reading every day the feuilleton in the Daily Mail the name of which is The Swelling of Jordan. I see that John Dillon at the Galway election alluded to Capt. Shawe Taylor as a bastard and a blackguard. Note the discrimination. I thought of beginning my story Ulysses: but I have too many cares at present. Ferrero devotes a chapter in his history of Rome to the Odes of Horace: so, perhaps, poets should be let live. In his book Young Europe which I have just read he says there are three great classes of emigrants: the (I forget the word: it means conquering, imposing their own language, &c), the English: the adhesive (forming a little group with national traditions and sympathies) the Chinese and the Irish!!!!: the diffusive (entering into the new society and forming part of it) the Germans. He has a fine chapter on Antisemitism. By the way, Brandes is a Jew. He says that Karl Marx has the apocalyptic imagination and makes Armageddon a war between capital and labour. The most arrogant statement made by Israel so far, he says, not excluding the gospel of Jesus is Marx’s proclamation that socialism is the fulfilment of a natural law. In considering Jews he slips in Jesus between Lassalle and Lombroso: the latter too (Ferrero’s father-in-law) is a Jew.

We got notice yesterday. So I have to look for another room. Tomorrow my money will be all gone. I am relying on a pupil who begins lessons tonight. He is taking 10 lessons for 20 lire. I have made out a receipt but perhaps he will have no money with him (he does not come again till Saturday) or will not like to pay in advance. I cannot press him as he is a friend of a clerk in the bank who recommended him to me. I will find it very hard to get a room such as we want. I must be out by the end of the month: and I will have also to pay the Caparra, I answered two advts for lessons. One of them I missed by a post; the advertiser wrote to thank me and said he had just given his word. If I went to the café I should have seen the paper in time but I wait to read it in the bank. To economise we have given up drinking wine at lunch. But even then we would not live on Lire 25 a week. I gave Nora first L50 and then L20 and on that we have managed 15 days only: that is, about L32 a week. We have still left coal and a little oil and sugar and coffee: and owe nothing. But the position is again exciting. You can see how impossible it is for me to write or do anything in such circumstances. I had about 82 lire over clear: I gave 10 to the barrister and around 70 to Nora. The other two I spent partly on—cakes! (I did so to test the truth of one of Ferrero’s statements about English and Italian cakes and biscuits). I will wait until tonight before posting this.

Last night I went into an evangelical hall. The minister was English. Is it affectation or impotence of the English that they can make no attempt to pronounce any language but their own. He spoke fluently and correctly enough but it had no resemblance to Italian in sound. I can easily distinguish the English accent, talking Italian. Candidly, I don’t know whether they assume it or not. Their accent speaking English (particularly that of the women) is very pleasant and modulated compared with the Irish or American accent or the Scotch accent. The American accent is really bloody fearful to listen to. By the way, one of the little illusions which gladden the heart of the staff of Sinn Féin is that the English don’t know how to pronounce their own language. When an English tourist meets Che Buono the latter sneers at him because he says ‘Haw, I cawn’t heawh wot youah saying’, but he forgets his compatriot, who in Dick Sheehy’s story, after ranging the hotel burst in on the dinner-table, holding up his trousers and asked earnestly ‘For the love o’ Jaysus, gintlemin, will ye tell us where’s the convaynience’. By the way, they are still at the ‘venereal excess’ cry in Sinn Féin. Why does nobody compile statistics of ‘venereal excess’ from Dublin hospitals. What is ‘venereal excess’? Perhaps Mr Skeffington-Sheehy could write something on the subject, being, as J.J.B. puts it ‘a pure man’. ‘Infant Jesus, meek and mild, Pity me a little child. Make me humble as thou art, And with Thy love inflame my heart’. Anyway my opinion is that if I put down a bucket into my own soul’s well, sexual department, I draw up Griffith’s and Ibsen’s and Skeffington’s and Bernard Vaughan’s and St. Aloysius’ and Shelley’s and Renan’s water along with my own. And I am going to do that in my novel (inter alia) and plank the bucket down before the shades and substances above mentioned to see how they like it: and if they don’t like it I can’t help them. I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love and love for ever: blatant lying in the face of the truth. I don’t know much about the ‘saince’ of the subject but I presume there are very few mortals in Europe who are not in danger of waking some morning and finding themselves syphilitic. The Irish consider England a sink: but, if cleanliness be important in this matter, what is Ireland? Perhaps my view of life is too cynical but it seems to me that a lot of this talk about love is nonsense. A woman’s love is always maternal and egoistic. A man, on the contrary, side by side with his extraordinary cerebral sexualism and bodily fervour (from which women are normally free) possesses a fund of genuine affection for the ‘beloved’ or ‘once beloved’ object. I am no friend of tyranny, as you know, but if many husbands are brutal the atmosphere in which they live (vide Counterparts) is brutal and few wives and homes can satisfy the desire for happiness. In fact, it is useless to talk about this any further. I am going to lunch.

Have just received your letter. Facts are, as you surmise. We have now Tuesday 13th 4 o’clock less than 3 lire. Tonight at 8 o’clock my pupil comes. I shall try him but may fail. If I fail I am in the usual fix. You ask me to scan verses. What verses? Whose verses? You ask me to explain ‘the Marquis of Lorne’. Uncle John; who was considered like the Marquis of Lorne is the person alluded to. The meaning of Dublin by Lamplight Laundry? That is the name of the laundry at Ballsbridge, of which the story treats. It is run by a society of Protestant spinsters, widows, and childless women—I expect—as a Magdalen’s home. The phrase Dublin by Lamplight means that Dublin by lamplight is a wicked place full of wicked and lost women whom a kindly committee gathers together for the good work of washing my dirty shirts. I like the phrase because ‘it is a gentle way of putting it’. Now I have explained. Please explain you what means ‘I shall take my time about answering’ re Aunt J’s letter.

I was today in the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele, looking up the account of the Vatican Council of 1870 which declared the infallibility of the Pope. Had not time to finish. Before the final proclamation many of the clerics left Rome as a protest. At the proclamation when the dogma was read out the Pope said ‘Is that all right, gents?’. All the gents said ‘Placet’ but two said ‘Non placet’. But the Pope ‘You be damned! Kissmearse! I’m infallible!’. The two were, according to one account, the bishops of Capuzzo and Little Rock, according to another account, the bishops of Ajaccio and Little Rock. I looked up MacHale’s life. He was bishop of Tuam and of somewhere else in partibus. They say nothing of his having voted at the Vatican Council. I shall continue there tomorrow and rewrite that part of the story. Grace takes place in 1901 or 2, therefore Kernan at that time 1870 would have been about twenty-five. He would have been born in 1848 and would have been only 6 years of age at time of the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception dogma 1854. I want now an account of the unveiling of Smith O’Brien’s statue to see if MacHale was there. I can get all the dictionaries I want in the Bib. Vitt. Eman. (blast the long name) including a diet of English slang. What a pity I am so handicapped. Eglinton was sure I would come back begging to Dublin and J.J.B. that I would become a drunkard and Cosgrave that I would become a nymphomaniac. Alas, gentlemen, I have become a bank clerk, and, now that I think of it, bad as it is, it’s more than either of my three prophets could do.

How do you like the name for the story about Hunter? I am very pleased with your admiration for Swift. I suppose I shall get interested in him some day. But I prefer people who are alive. Sometimes when I am on the track of some idea and am about to burst into speech I hear a voice ‘Signor Joyce, scriva a questo signore, in francese, dicendogli che abbiamo venduto ventimila peseta———’ You remember the book I spoke to you of one day in the Park into which I was going to put William Dara and Lady Belvedere. Even then I was on the track of writing a chapter of Irish history. I wish I had a map of Dublin and views and Gilbert’s history. But nobody, except you, seems to take me seriously. I paid Shelley’s granddaughter or grand-niece £10–0–0 the other day. Her name is Nora. She is left-handed. This is the way Leonardo wrote his notes, I am afraid—not left-handed, of course, but in this jerky way. I would like to write The Last Supper about Joe MacKernan—ought I? Mother said I was a ‘mocker’. Am I? It is now 6 o’clock. At 8 o’clock I will try the pupil. Write soon.

Jim

I got 20 lire from my pupil, so that I can manage until Saturday. But while I am looking for another pupil you had better try to send me some. Remember I have to live and get a room.

[Postscript at head of letter]

I think the respondent is old Harris, the jeweller, of Nassau Street, from whose grandson Sinclair I raised 10/– at the time of my hegira. By the bye, about the money I got on the 1st of Nov. L50 to Eng Consul, L52 for landlady, L70 to Nora, L10 to barrister, L30 to lunchman, L30 for Nora’s and Georgie’s clothes and hat and boots—that makes L245.—.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 14 November 1906 Wed evg. 8.25

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Tonight at 6.30 while I was sitting at my desk in the bank I heard a loud explosion and felt the house shake. A few minutes after I heard people running under the windows ‘Bomba! Bomba!’ A bomb had exploded at the Caffè Aragno which is at the corner of our palace. Have not yet seen the papers. The street is full of people and strewn with broken cups. Item. I am sick in my cor cordium. Nice country!

[Unsigned]

Hope you will be able to come to the rescue on Sat.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 November 1906

Via Frattina 52, II, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Monday. Thanks for your remittance which I received today when my funds were at zero. An advt which I answered in the Tribuna has brought me some money. I have been appointed ‘professor’ in an Ecole de Langues (which is an offshoot at low prices of the B.S.). I go there when I am finished at the bank and as I am paid L 1 per lesson it will bring me about L 10 per week. Tonight I leave the bank at 7 o’c: and then have lessons in the Ecole from 7.15 to 10.15. Tomorrow I have my private pupil from 7.30 to 8.30 at home and have then 1 lesson in the Ecole from 9 to 10. Between these two I make about L 14 per week more. I began in the school on Saturday and next Saturday shall probably receive 10 Lire from it. Your 20 Lire will last me till Saturday but I am afraid you will have to send some more as I shall have to pay the Caparra for a room. This will positively be the last month in which I shall have to bother you. Let each of us then save as much as he can. I can save Lire 100.— per month. I see nothing for it but to try to save money. I wrote to John Long, offering him Dubliners.

I send you the U.I. Leprechaun and Giornale d’Italia. Yesterday another bomb went off in S Peter’s. Strange to say I went there in the afternoon without knowing of its having happened. I had intended going to the morning service (and would consequently have been in the church at the time of the explosion) but that I waited in for a letter from you. Things are beginning to be pretty lively here. I saw no precautions taken in the church in the afternoon but perhaps these things are not visible. Cardinal Rampolla in the procession passed me at an arm’s length unprotected so far as I could see. He is a tall strong man with a truculent face. At the close of the service a priest came out on a high balcony under the dome and exhibited the sacred relics, the lance, the piece of the cross, and the towel of Veronica. This he did by marching from one end to the other of the balcony with each relic in turn and holding it over the parapet at each end while a bell rang and the procession knelt in the centre of the nave. The upper part of the dome was rather dark and the towel looked rather like a thing out of Tussaud’s. The choir was very good but some of rev. gents have voices like crows. While one was cawing a young ecclesiastical student beside me (who had pointed out Rampolla to me) laughed out loud and made signs of anguish with his mouth. A peasant woman with a kerchief on her head gave milk to a child during the vespers. Rampolla is like Father Murray without the lower jowl: or like Father Brennan: wore a red berretta stuck anyhow on his head. It’s a bloody funny church, no doubt.

Tuesday

I expected a letter from you today. I received yesterday By the Stream of Killmeen by Seumas O’Kelly, and have read three stories of it. If you like I will send it to you afterwards. A good deal of publishing appears to be going on in Dublin at present, I would like to read more of the books, even Heblon’s Study in Blue though, as W Archer says I know it’s not good for me. With great difficulty I finished Gissing’s The Crown of Life, this crown being love according to G.G. What irritates me most in him is when he begins to write eloquently about nature. Like William Buckley, the Irish novelist, who writes in Sinn Féin, he makes ‘nature’ very tiresome. A reviewer in Sinn Féin said that S O’K’s story ‘The Land of Loneliness’ was worthy of Tourgénieff. The stories I have read were about beautiful, pure faithful Connacht girls and lithe, broadshouldered open-faced young Connacht men, and I read them without blinking, patiently trying to see whether the writer was trying to express something he had understood. I always conclude by saying to myself without anger something like this ‘Well, there’s no doubt they are very romantic young people: at first they come as a relief, then they tire. Maybe, begod, people like that are to be found by the Stream of Killmeen only none of them has come under my observation, as the deceased gent in Norway remarked. [’]

I doubt if S O’K would judge my stories so urbanely, however. I wonder does his book sell. Nora, who read Hedda Gabier with interest twice before forgetting it, considers his stories tiresome rubbish.

The École is not chic. Last night one of my classes numbered nearly a dozen pupils. One of them was a lovely boor: elderly, red swollen face, sidelong glance. He made fun openly of my writing on the board, perhaps thinking I ‘had no Italian’, and of me as a ‘professore’. Some of the pupils laughed. A rather fat girl came to my rescue by explaining everything to him over again in Italian. He wanted to know why I didn’t explain in Italian. She told him it was the ‘metodo’. Then he said something which made the class laugh. I was frightfully polite to him and, though I was tired, did my best to make him understand. When he was going away he told me he quite understood that 1 was prevented by the metodo from doing as he wished but that what he wanted etc etc. The Ecole, in fact, is bowsy. It has no books or illustrations. The pupils, I think, pay 50 c– a head for a lesson. However …!

Publisher’s announcements are becoming worse. Really they are intolerable. Read the D.M. suppl. ‘Books’ Renan was right when he said we were marching towards universal Americanism. I suppose you read about Caruso being arrested in the monkey-house at New York for indecent behaviour towards a young lady. By the way is ‘Lily is a lady’ a song or a cant. I wonder they don’t arrest the monkeys in New York. It took three N.Y. policemen to arrest Caruso. His impresario ridicules the charge and says Caruso has to answer shoals of ‘offers’ from N.Y. women of the upper classes. The papers are indignant. Do Americans know how they are regarded in Europe?

I hear a report that there was a third bomb thrown today in the Piazza di Spagna. I hardly think these can be the work of anarchists. They are very clumsily made and do no damage. It may be a trick of the police to justify them in making arrests on suspicion as the King of Greece is to be here in a few days. I hope to Jesus he won’t pass by this building during his visit as there might be a serious explosion. It is pleasant to reflect that in the event of rupture between Italy and Austria I have my office in the Austrian Consulate. I discover that have nothing further to say now. I expected a letter from you today I shall keep this open till 8 o’clock this evg. I have two lessons tonight.

Jim

By the way of the 4 advts I answered in the Tribuna, one got me this position in the bank, one got me Terzini, one got me a letter of apology and regret, a miss of L 130.–, and one got me a professorship in the École de Langues!

Dear Stannie I hope you are well you ought to tell Jim not to be doing so much as he doesnt have a minute to himself Georgie is very well thanks of all your kind inquiries for me Kisses from Georgie xxxxxxxxx I hope your foot is better

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 3 December 1906 Sunday noon

Via Frattina 52, II°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I think we shall have to go to a hotel. I cannot get a room. They want 70 and 80 Lire a month for rooms, don’t want couples or children, don’t want to give the use of a kitchen. I went to agents put an advt in the paper, walked miles: no use. This city, I confess, beats me. If anyone asks you how I like how I like [sic] tell them I think it is the stupidest old whore of a town ever I was in. This country irks me beyond measure: perhaps I should say only this city. But the system of life must be the same everywhere. Of course, your prosy old friend H.J. and other respectables like to write about Italy and Italians and subtle Romans. I have seen a lot of Romans now and if anyone asks you what I think of them you may say that so far as I can see their chief preoccupation in life is the condition (to judge from their speech) broken, swollen etc of their coglioni and their chief pastime and joke the breaking of wind rereward. This kind of mechanical obscenity is damnably tiresome. However, it is an expletive which I am reserving for the day when I leave the eternal city as my farewell and adieu to it.

If the word vulgar has any meaning I think the European palm must go to Italy. After all, Germany has something under her uniforms. An Italian carabiniere with his absurd high hat or a Papal Swiss might be the symbol of this tawdry civilisation. As for Rossini’s statement it is probably not quite accurate as he forgot Turkey and Portugal. But I am discontented with everything and everybody at present—no wonder.

Aunt J writes a brief letter, half of which is about MacCormack’s voice and Caruso’s trial. I am afraid I shall have to give it up, the time is out of joint. ‘We done our best, the dear knows!’

I have discontinued reading the D.M. supplement. So long as there was mystery and money in it I read but now the love interest has begun. The last sentence I read in it ran ‘So he kissed away the tears and after that there was nothing more but the great glow of love—“I don’t even know your name, he whispered.”’ I am reading Life’s Little Ironies by Hardy. It is a late book of his. O.G., I understand, writes in Sinn Féin under the name of ‘Mettus Curtius’, the gent who leaped into the chasm in the forum, I think. Explain how it is that while Byrne and Pappie and Mrs Cosgrave formed a true opinion of O.G. I, with more opportunity, formed an untrue one. Send me an account of the last supper: it will amuse me even if I never write the story. Write to me also about Hunter. How can I do anything in my present condition? Last week I ‘worked’ 12 hours a day. This should be enough to satisfy even my dreamy Irish friends. How Starkey would laugh and how Roberts would giggle if they knew that after my day’s ‘wurruk’ I go and speak for two hours about the pen, the blackboard and inkstand for 9½d per hour!

It is now Friday and I have not yet got a room! One of Hardy’s stories is about a man in 1804 who saw ‘Boney’ and an adjutant taking notes on the coast of Devon, I think. The story made me think of Meredith’s poem beginning ‘Cannon his voice’. I suppose it is because I never played football or was treated only slightly to your captain of fifty’s regime that I can’t turn out that kind of poetry. I suppose the hero’s valet is really his panegyrist poet. The other stories—wait now: here are the names ‘The Son’s Veto’ ‘A Case of Conscience’ ‘Two Ambitions’ ‘A Fiddler of Reels’ ‘The Melancholy Hussar’ ‘To Please his Wife’ ‘On the Western Circuit’ ‘A Tradition’. One or two are like the ‘Boney’ one. Others are about hard-working parson’s sons, one is about a marvellous country fiddler, and the rest are about ‘mésalliances’ (!). One story is about a lawyer on the circuit who seduces a servant, then receives letters from her so beautifully written that he decides to marry her. The letters are written by the servant’s mistress who is in love with the lawyer. After the marriage (servant is accompanied to London by mistress) husband says fondly ‘Now, dear J.K.-S-&C, will you write a little note to my dear sister, A.B X. etc and send her a piece of the wedding-cake. One of those nice little letters you know so well how to write, love’. Exit of servant wife. She goes out and sits at a table somewhere and, I suppose, writes something like this ‘Dear Mrs X— I enclose a piece of wedding-cake.’ Enter husband—lawyer, genial. Genially he says ‘Well, love, how have you written’ and then the whole discovery is found out. Servant-wife blows her nose in the letter and lawyer confronts the mistress. She confesses. Then they talk a page or so of copybook talk (as distinguished from servant’s ditto). She weeps but he is stern. Is this as near as T.H. can get to life, I wonder? O my poor fledglings, poor Corley, poor Ignatius Gallaher! (The banker is rather polite to me but I can’t help wondering why he is always running in and out of the room. I suppose he makes money on every run) What is wrong with these English writers is that they always keep beating about the bush.

John Long answered my note today and asks me to send MS for his consideration at the same time asking who had accepted and then declined to publish the book. I wrote telling him and promising the MS in a few days. I wonder is there any chance of his taking it? What kind of ‘work’ does he bring out? I suppose he is no relative of the J.L. who kept the public-house at the corner of Duke Street and was a friend of our grandfather’s. I will send the MS as soon as I get settled. It is now Friday evg and I have found no room yet. The old Bethelemites must have been like these Italian bastards. I feel for poor old Joseph.

Last night we were put out of our room. I had lessons from 7 to 10 after the bank. Nora was waiting for me for two hours first in a cinematograph and then in a restaurant. I ate a big dinner being very hungry and at half past eleven left the restaurant with the holy family. It was raining so to protect Nora’s hat and the child I got a car and we drove to a hotel some distance away where I had heard the tariff was moderate. It was full (at least, the porter said so) and we had to drive on further to another one. Here we found a room for the night. The evening cost me 9 Lire! Today I am again seeking a room. Address your letters meanwhile c/o Nast, Kolb & Schumacher, Rome. I send you S.F. with a column of O.G.’s stupid drivel. I see he has advanced from ‘le petty mere’ as far as ‘le bête noir’. This he learned I suppose from the stolidly one-languaged Sludge. What a pleasant time I am having.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 December 1906 Tuesday evg

Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Since Saturday last we have slept in the hotel but I think this is our last night there. After immense difficulty I have succeeded in getting a room and, if all goes well, we move in there tomorrow evening. This pleasant interlude has cost me about L25.—I spent all Sunday going up and down staircases and Nora and Georgie went about during the day, as witness a letter enclosed which an usher of the bank brought me in yesterday evening. Happily it was enclosed in an envelope. Item: a case for Mr Thomas Hardy.

Tomorrow night I will go over my MS and send it to John Long. There is a publisher in London, name of Sisley, Ltd. He publishes ‘daring’ work. I saw a review in the heel of a D.M. column of a book by E. Temple Thurston, called ‘The Realist’. It was very daring and unpleasant, D.M. said, but showed unmistakeable talent. I have ordered it from England: it is a book of short stories. Do you think I did right? I was going to read Hardy through but I have changed over to Octave Mirbeau instead. I have ordered a Danish Berlitz book from Berlin. It will be published in January. In six months I ought to be able to read the Danish writers. I would like to read some of those at whom Ibsen hints in The Master Builder. One is named Nansen, I think. I wish I could go to Denmark. Ferrero says that Abo, Stockholm and Copenhagen are the finest cities in Europe. G.M. has rewritten The Lake. D.M. praises his artistic conscience. ‘Very few writers &c.’ The Maunsel Press has emitted some booklets, also: poems of Ella Young: and a young gentleman whom you may remember standing white-faced outside McGarvey’s has published verses in praise of, I think, the Sacred Heart.

Wed. morn. I am sitting in the office. The winter has begun. There are no stoves, fires or pipes. My hands are cold. I blow my nose every three minutes. I have just read an advt in the paper wanted a manager for some place, salary L100 a month. What a beautiful country! Your friend H.J. ought to get a running kick in the arse for writing his tea-slop about it. I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick. Every time a pupil asks me how I like Rome I vent some sneering remark. I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art. But I suppose they did. What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza. A clerk here is named (he is round, bald, fat, voiceless) Bartoluzzi. You pronounce by inflating both cheeks and prolonging the u. Every time I pass him I repeat his name to myself and translate ‘Good day, little bits of Barto’. Another is named Simonetti: They are all little bits of something or other, I think. This is my first experience of clerks: but do they all talk for 5 minutes about the position &c of a penwiper? I think the Irish are the most civilised people in Europe, be Jesus Christ I do: anyway they are the least burocratic [sic]. From the foregoing drivel you can judge the state of my mind in this country where ‘they drink nice wine not horrid black porter.’ Useless: too cold: stick hands in pocket.

Thurs. morn. We are in our new quarters. Expected a letter from vou this morning here (bank). (Address at end of letter) Today after lunch I shall go over my MS for John Long.

Frid morn No letter from you yet. Our room is quite small: one bed: we sleep ‘lying opposed in opposite directions, the head of one towards the tail of the other’. Blasphemed often while correcting MS. Stories dreadfully dull. When I get home at 10 o’clock after the bank and school and have taken my dinner I am so tired that I can barely skim over the Avanti or a page of a novel before my eyelids are heavy with the sleep men have named etc. To make up I get up about 7 o’c and go out and read in a café. I am reading Sebastien Roch by Mirbeau. The beginning deals with life in a Jesuit college. It must be difficult to succeed in France where nearly everyone writes well. I should like to read Zola but have not the heart to attack his twenty volume history of France. Who called Moore the English Zola? I wonder: he must have had large powers of comparison. I think I will read Mirbeau and Hardy together alternately. What are you doing in this line at present? It is a very dark cloudy day, drizzling rain. I wish some power would lift me as far as, say, Talbot Street and let me walk about for an hour or so and then lift me back again. My imagination is so weak that I am afraid all the things I was going to write about have become uncapturable images. It is 9.30. I would like to go asleep at present. My glasses annoy me. They are crooked and there is a flaw in both of the glasses. It is a bloody nuisance to have to carry bits of glass in your eye. A moment ago I was leaning my head upon my hand and writing when the banker rushed past me. He said something to me which I did not catch. I jumped up and went to his desk obediently: I had not heard what he said. He repeated it, however, smiling, it was ‘Diritto, Signor Joyce. Non è bello così.’ They are a funny lot, these bankers. There are four in all, two brothers Schumacher and father and son Nast-Kolb, also a younger one. One of them is like Ben Jonson with a big belly, walks sideways, wears a cap on his head, blinks his eyes. The brother is a little man white-haired with a pen behind his ear. These are the Schumacher brothers. One of them is (the elder) is [sic] consul for Austria-Hungary. The other family consists of father, who is very old, and bandy legged, with thick white eyebrows. Every morning he patters in here, stops, looks about him, says good-morning, and patters out again. The son, the brisk person, is like Curran in manner and complexion. Yesterday they put down carpets here: everyone said they were beautiful (How I hate that word). I suppose it would be the height of impudence if I said I think they are somewhat ‘common’ people. Anyway they talked a lot about the carpet.

Letter just received. What I have told you about rooms is painfully correct. I don’t know why we were given notice by the landlady nor do I know whether it was the reason you suggest. I don’t know anything except that I suppose I ought to cease grumbling and take up the white man’s burden. Do you imagine you are corresponding with the indifferential calculus that you object to my vituperation on Italy and Rome. What the hell else would I do? If you had to traipse about a city, accompanied by a plaintive woman with infant (also plaintive), run up stairs, ring a bell, ‘Chi c’è?’ ‘Camera’ ‘Chi c’è?’ ‘Camera!’ No go: room too small or too dear: won’t have children, single man only, no kitchen. ‘Arrivederla!’ Down again. Rush off: give a lesson for 9½d, rush back to bank, etc etc. Am sending MS to John Long by same post. Didn’t change anything. No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination. Never mind, it will be back in a week or so. Only I stuck in ‘bloody’ before the late lamented. How I should enjoy a night on Venetian waters with Miss Farchi’s romance and reality. The Italian imagination is like a cinematograph, observe the style of my letter. Wurruk is more dissipating than dissipation. Thanks for Whitman’s poems. What long flowing lines he writes. Kick in the arse for the following. G.K.C: G.B.S: S.L: H.J: G.R. Kicks in the arse all round, in fact. Write at once. Sent paper Sunday. Not surprised: Italian Post. Write. Via Monte Brianzo 51 IV° Rome

Jim

Tomorrow is a holiday!
” ” ” ” ”
” ” ” ” ”!

Deo Gratias!
” ”!
” ”!

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 15 December 1906

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Many happy returns! Herewith I send you as a token of my affection a large chest full of my old family plate with a valuable diamond necklace weighing several kilos. Pappie writes urgently for £1– for Xmas: wish I could send it. My own assets are L 16–! Now what’s to be done? You must try A for the money. Try him for L 60.– (£1 = L 26 (incl. ex of sending)) I will send you L 30 on the 1st January. Try him at once and urgently. Am sure he will do it. Send the money here to the bank addressed to me in a registered letter containing a cheque from A’s bank on Rome or, if not, Austrian paper money. Expect letter Wednesday. If you seal letter, don’t use the School stamp. Don’t send money direct to Dublin. Please let me do that. Answer.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 24 December 1906

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, It is Xmas Eve. 7 o’clock. I have eleven lire in my pocket. I thought you might have been able to send some by today but I suppose you couldn’t. Tomorrow we shall dine on paste as otherwise I cannot reach the end of the month. As we expected some money Nora paid four or five lire in debts. Well! (as Mr Pater beautifully says) I have reached the low-water mark in Xmases this ’ere time. This bank is closed only for tomorrow. I suppose you couldn’t relieve the agony at all? Let me know.

Jim

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1907

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 10 January 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I have been so busy these days (and am so still) that I had no time to write. You appear to be exasperated at my financial distress. No wonder.

I am sending you The Realist and O’Kelly’s book, a story of which he is dramatising in Sinn Féin, Also a paper called The Republic. You will notice that Cruise O’Brien’s ‘boy’ is auditor of U.C. Debating Society. There is a Welshman who is teacher in the school. He dined with us on New Years Eve and with him a lady manicurist. She invited us to dinner for New Year’s Day. She is young, lives alone, has a beautiful quarter: long dress, nervous. She has manicured the King of England. (We never say the ‘King’) All men are dolls or puppets, I think, except the English. My hatred of Italy and Italians is on the increase.

I had to suspend this letter for three or four days. I have not a moment to myself all day. I have read Tales of Mean Streets by Morrison and Plain Tales from the Hills I suppose, after all, there must be some merit in my writing. No word from Long or Mathews. If I knew Ireland as well as R.K. seems to know India I fancy I could write something good. But it is becoming a mist in my brain rapidly. I have the idea of three or four little immortal stories in my head but I am too cold to write them. Besides, where’s the good. Ibsen, of course, may have liked that kind of sport. But then he never broke with his set. I mean, imagine Roberts or Fay, with an allowance from the Irish Republic moving round Europe with correspondence tied at his heels like a goat’s tether and you have H.I. In the same circumstances perhaps I too would be an egoarch.

Anyhow I shall never be a model bank clerk. Everyone complains of my writing. I would tell you also a story of a letter I wrote in Italian but that it is too bloody long to tell. No more at present: rushing off to WORK. [Scene: draughty little stone-flagged room, chest of drawers to left, on which are the remains of lunch, in the centre, a small table on which are writing materials (He never forgot them) and a saltcellar: in the background, small-sized bed. A young man with snivelling nose sits at the little table: on the bed sit a madonna and plaintive infant. It is a January day.] Title of above: The Anarchist.

I am stealing another moment to tell you that Aunt J— has written to me. The news is that O.G.’s mother is ‘beastly dead’ and that O.G. is very rich. I wonder was this the valuable news O.G. had in mind. I suppose he will write again after a decent interval. But I fear nothing short of £150 a year, free of duty, would be of any use to me. The other day I was thinking about my novel. How long am I at it now? Is there any use continuing it? Everyone appears to think I am behaving very well better than they expected. But it’s not pleasant behaving well to please people. I understand Nora is about to have another child. Certainly Georgie is the most successful thing connected with me. But he’s only a small part mine. I think he rather likes me, however. When I come to eat he pulls over the chair and says ‘Se’ (sede). I bought him a rocking-hoss the night of the Epiphany. 4 L. Are you annoyed?

Next bout. They are celebrating this week in Sylvester’s Church the union of the rites. Every morning a different rite. I should love to go. But I might as well be in Cabra for all I see of anything Coptic, Greek, Chaldean &c. Excuse the way I scrawl. Any minute the banker [breaks off]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 15 January 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Couldn’t write on Sunday. Got a translation to do, a hellish long thing about some new American game. It took me about 4 hours. I got five lire for it. Mathews has sent me a contract to sign: no royalty on 1st 300 copies then 15%. Price 1s/6d. Golden Treasury size, published this spring. I suppose I had better accept—and you can correct the proofs. From 8.30 in the morning until 7.30 in evening I do not get five minutes to myself. I never get out at 1 now. However I will write on Sunday without fail. Write you and advise. As for money I think I can reach the end of the month if you send 10 or 15 crowns. Can you do this? If so, send it in a registered sealed envelope to my address.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 January 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie John Long writes that he regrets &c but if I send him 1½ guineas he will send me an exhaustive report on the book, written by a novelist of good standing, which would be of use to me, he says, in showing me something or other. If the report showed that my book ‘possessed merit’ he would reconsider his decision. Advise. I rely on you for Monday: otherwise arsed.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 24 January 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Thanks for money. On advice of my lawyer I accepted Elkin Mathews terms. As for Long (not Lane as you write) I proposed that 3 of the stories to be chosen by me should be submitted either to Symons or Archer, if he needed assurance of their merit but that the report he spoke of would have no use or interest for me. I have a lot of papers for you parcelled up waiting for a favourable wind. Send the Belvederian, please!!! I am thinking of chucking the school and taking Danish lessons next month. By the way I can hardly reach the 31st. You might send me 3 lire (no more). Write on Saturday and put that amt of Austrian stamps in your letter: not 1d ones, of course. Damned if I see merit in Fumée. Am reading Mémoires d’un chasseur, But he is not Tolstoy’s height by any means.

[Unsigned]

The 3 lire will not inconvenience you and will do me nicely. Can you manage it?

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [?1 February 1907]

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I read in the D.M. under the heading ‘Riot in a Dublin Theatre’ that a ‘clerk’ named Patrick Columb and someone else were put up at the Police Courts for disorderly conduct in the Abbey Theatre at a performance of Synge’s new play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’. The story, I believe, is of a self-accused parricide with whom all the girls of a district FALL IN LOVE. The clerk P.C. said (he was fined 40s or 14 days) that nothing would deter him from protesting against such a slander on Ireland. There was also booing at certain strong expressions in the play. The evening ended in confusion. A Trinity college youth created another row by singing ‘God save the King’. W.B.Y. gave evidence and said he could not hear one word of the play. When the police were first called in it was he and L.G. who asked them to withdraw. They had decided, on account of the organised opposition, to run the play for a week longer than they had first intended. He would send free tickets to any who had been prevented from hearing the play. It was Synge’s masterpiece, he said: an example of the exaggeration of art (I am glad he has got a phrase to add to that priceless one of Saint Boooooof about style). Synge was interviewed and said he claimed the right as an artist, to choose whatever subject he wished! I am waiting for the Dublin papers. Columb must either have been forsaken by Kelly or have returned to his office since he is called a clerk. I suspect Synge’s naggin is on the increase. I knew, before now, that there was a schism in the theatre: as all of Columb’s plays have been given by the ‘Irish Theatre’ and the reviews of Yeats and Lady Gregory and Miss HORNYMAN’s productions which have appeared lately in Sinn Féin have been hostile. Yeats says the Irish obeyed great leaders in the past but now they obey ignorant committees. I believe Columb and the Irish Theatre will beat Y and L.G. and Miss H: which will please me greatly, as Yeats cannot well hawk his theatre over to London. However I am sure that many of the hermetists don’t know which to choose. It is lucky for O.G. that his mourning allows him to wait a little longer. Synge will probably be condemned from the pulpit, as a heretic: which would be dreadful: so that Stiffbreeches and Ryan really ought to start another paper in defence of free thought, just for a week or so. I’m sure Ryan is the man for it. I suppose Sinn Féin and The Leader will find out all about Synge’s life in Paris: which will be nice for Lady G and Miss H. And as for pore old A.E. I suppose he is nibbling cabbages up in Rathgar in quite an excited frame of mind at the amount of heresy which is rife in Dublin. Starkie writes a poem in Sinn Féin about the world-fruit withering on the tree and there being none to pluck it. But enough now of the mummers. That Southern X chap, SEÑOR Bulfin, who is I am assured an Irishman, has a letter in Sinn Féin, ridiculing a Union Jack regatta in Galway. Two columns are consumed by his account of the talk of the classes. Ex: ‘Nice weather’ ‘O, chawming’ ‘Chawming regatta’, ‘O, rawtha’ ‘Funny how little interest the country takes in these kind of things’ ‘Quite too awfully funny, doncherknow!’ He makes great fun of the shake-hands over a five-bar gate and the [breaks off]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 February 1907

[Rome]

MS. Cornell

I received and signed Mathews’ agreement, as I told you. I wrote also to Long, as I told you, but that son of a bitch hasn’t answered me yet. So I wrote to him peremptorily the day before yesterday. Ulysses never got any forrader than the title. I have other titles, e.g. The Last Supper, The Dead, The Street, Vengeance, At Bay. all of which stories I could write if circumstances were favourable. I wrote to Berlin some days ago for the Danish Berlitz Book which has just appeared. The news here is that we leave our present quarters on the 15th and go to live in the Corso, where Nora found a room. I expect she will be satisfied for a week or so. She is, as Reynolds’s Newspaper would say, enceinte. Georgie is weaned. We eat lunch in the house and dine in a trattoria in the night. I took Nora and Georgie to a comic opera on Sunday ‘Le Carnet du Diable’. I was very bored by the end. It was very silly and musicless. The artistes had no voices: but just one topnote or so. Georgie crowed now and again and when he did an idiot in front of us turned round angrily and said ‘Sh!’ I suppose he was afraid of missing some priceless sentence of the dialogue.

I read a few volumes of G de M. lately for amusement and was amused by the same. Now I am on to Anatole France again. But if I want real esthetic satisfaction I must wait till the MS of Dubliners returns to me once more to roost. I have divided my papers, sending you Independent and Mail and Connellan the others. By the way, the old servant in our place because we are leaving will not call me in the morning as she used to. Formerly she used to backbite her mistress to Nora: and she got a New Year’s gift from Nora. She passes the door a dozen times in the morning without knocking. Isn’t stupidity of that kind distressing? I could tell you another pretty story about women. If you can spare the time you might just run over to London and kick John Long’s long arse for a few minutes or so, will you? He hasn’t answered me yet. Symons wrote me another card a day or two ago, asking had I come to terms with Mathews and repeating that he would do all he could for the book when it came out. I mustn’t forget to dedicate it to O.G. or perhaps to the memory of his mother. Do you remember my parody of Leo XIII’s prayer after mass? It has come into my mind just now and made me laugh. Baby, Poppie, Pappie and Charlie sent me picture postcards on my birthday!!! The postcards are all coloured green, dark sea, sage, emerald, cabbage &c. In the school here there is another Dubliner teaching, named Craig. He is another Mug Ryan in appearance, tries very hard to conceal the drap in his accent, comes from Kingstown. Has an irritatingly slow way of talking, looking at the ground, appearing to meditate before he emits a word. I suppose you saw old Cusack is dead. I have given up reading Avanti but enclose paragraph for Artifoni. It was too dull for me. Kindly write soon and long. About the money I find it difficult to do more than pull along. Remember there are three people now. And I suppose it will be worse when there are four but however…. I suppose I shall make a few shillings out of the verses.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 11 February 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I sent you yesterday copies of the F.J. containing fuller accounts of the Abbey riots. The debate must have been very funny. Our old friends Skeff. and Dick Sheehy seem to have just been taking a walk round themselves since October 1904. I read Sheehan’s with pleasure and surprise. I would like, however, to hear the phrases which drove out the ladies with expressions of pain on their faces. The pulpit Irishman is a good fellow to the stage Irishman. I see that Synge uses the word ‘bloody’ frequently, and the great phrase was ‘if all the girls in Mayo were standing before me in their shifts’, wonderful vision. Yeats is a tiresome idiot: he is quite out of touch with the Irish people, to whom he appeals as the author of ‘Countess Cathleen’. Synge is better at least he can set them by the ears. One writer speaks of Synge and his master Zola(!) so I suppose when Dubliners appears they will speak of me and my master Synge. Of course just the very week I wanted it most Aunt J did not send Sinn Féin. As I told you before I think the Abbey Theatre is ruined. It is supported by the stalls, that is to say, Stephen Gwynn, Lord X, Lady Gregory etc who are dying to relieve the monotony of Dublin life. About Synge himself I cannot speak. I have read only one play of his Riders to the Sea, which made Yeats first think of the Greeks (who are always with us) and then of the early plays of the most Belgian of Shakespeares. Synge asked me to read it in Paris and when I told him what I thought of it and expounded a long critical attack on the catastrophe as he used it he did not pay the least attention to what I said. So perhaps his later work has merit. If Synge really knows and understands the Irish peasant, the backbone of the nation, he might make a duodecimo Björnsen. Colm is out of the question and Russell and Coosins. Sheehan seems to be a little different from the other young men with ideas in Ireland. I suspect he must have got a high place in all his exams and so can afford to treat the church on equal terms. This whole affair has upset me. I feel like a man in a house who hears a row in the street and voices he knows shouting but can’t get out to see what the hell is going on. It has put me off the story I was ‘going to write’—to wit, The Dead. John Long has not even answered my second letter. What am I to do?

I am reading at present some of the old Italian story-tellers, such as Sermini, Doni etc and also Anatole France. I wonder how he got his name. Crainquebille, of course, is very fine and parts or rather phrases of his other books. However I mustn’t complain since he suggested Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, and has now suggested another story The Dead? It is strange where you get ideas for stories. Stupid little Woodman gave me The Boarding-House, Ferrero The Two Gallants. Others I thought of myself or heard of. I have some kind of thing stirring in my head at present, but winter is my close season.

I expected a letter from you today, but none came. No papers from Aunt J—. I received a letter from Pappie the day before yesterday, in which he asked me for a £1.–/–/. I wrote, re-iterating what I had said about Charlie and one of the children and saying that I could not send anything before the end of the month. The fact is I have little or no money this month. Nora being tired of our room took another one so that I am under double rent. On Friday we change and I must pay fresh rent L35.–. Moreover, relying on Padre Michele’s word when he promised a rich private pupil, I chucked the school. P.M. came to the bank about ten days ago and asked me what I wanted for a private lesson. I said 2½ frs. Since then he has not appeared, so that I am in a beautiful stew. I am determined, however, that this borrowing shall not go on next month: as I intend to have a little liberty for myself both to read, write and rest. This month I am also without my pupil’s money as he will not pay again, owing to holidays intervening, until exactly the 1st of March. However, I have new hat and boots and vests and socks and a Danish Book and Georgie has a new coat and hat and I gave a dinner. Now when you get this you will have to send me 10 crowns. I don’t even know my future address, except that it is in the Corso! Write a short letter on good thick note-paper and place the note inside, addressing it to me c/o Messrs Nast Kolb & Schumacher, Via S. Claudio, Rome. I shall send you a card during the week telling you what else I shall want. You said you could give me 20 lire this month if I gave you proper notice. I shall probably want 30, as you see, I am unforseenly without the school. I daresay you are tired of these letters. I am too. Next month I shall adopt a different plan. I suppose I may rely, then, on your sending me 10 crowns by return of post. If you cannot send it I give up the problem. I might also mention the expenses incidental to my son and heir who has to have a new sheet and breaks panes of window and drinking vessels rather freely.

I must break off this letter now as I am not very well. All this trouble and bustle always finds its way into the bosom of my stomach. I was going to squander a lira on the Dusk of the Gods tonight but am afraid that, in my present pendulous mood, I couldn’t stand in the gallery for 3 hours. Let me hear from you to the above effect by return and advise me what I am to do to get back my MS from Long. My last bout with the law cost me 30 frs and Grant Richards nothing.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 14 February 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I expect you have my letter this morning and hope you will answer it by return of post. I have no idea how we are to finish the month unless you can help me. What you send I will pay you back punctually on the first as then, besides my pay, I will have 40 lire, 20 from my old pupil and 20 from a new one who is to begin then. I went to the Dusk of the Gods. Beside me in the gallery was an elderly man who smelt of garlic. He said it was a colossal opera and that it required great voices. He had heard it in Hamburg. He spoke a few words to me in English, such as, very cold, very good and beautiful. Before me was another man who said Wagner’s music was splendid but intended only for Germans. It was all intellect: no heart. Every time the horn motive sounded my garlicy friend twisted to me and said confidently: Adesso viene Sigfrido. He yawned much during the third act and went away before the last scene. When Brunnhilde brought on the horse, the latter, being unable to sing, evacuated: whereat the funny Italian disyllable flew from end to end of the gallery. There were many spectators who followed the opera with scores and librettos. On the stairs coming away and in the street I heard many people hum correctly and incorrectly the nine notes of the funeral motive. Nothing in the opera moved me. I have heard the funeral march often before. Only when Siegfried dies I responded from the crown of my head to his cry ‘O sposa sacra.’ I suppose there are a few men from time to time who really feel an impulse towards Gawd.

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Berlitz School, Trieste (Telegram), 14 February 1907

Rome

TS. Cornell

given notice returning Trieste send forty urgent monte brianza [sic] wire if artifoni accepts

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [Postmark 16 February 1907]

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I received yr. wire but no message. I gave notice here on Thursday. If I will be permitted I will resume teaching at the school. Artif. promised me I could go back when I liked. I have 9, 10 hrs a day work: a little more pay in a much dearer city. Since I came here I have not put pen to paper. I would write fully but am hourly awaiting your news. A little more of this life and J.F.B.’s prophecy would be fulfilled. I have no ‘carriera’ before me in commerce. Not because I can’t make one, but because I won’t.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 16 February 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Nothing happened. I understood that A. promised me I could go back whenever I liked; otherwise I should not have given notice. Kindly state in what condition the school is. Could I not return to Trieste and give private lessons? It is a pleasant state of mind to be in. I suppose I have made a coglioneria. You may imagine the state of my nerves. Who knows how this will end. For my part I have one life. I have felt lately that is slipping from me ‘like water from a muslin bag’. Coppinger is a ‘Merrion Square Surgeon’. Synge is a storm centre: but I have done nothing. John Long has not answered me. I wrote him an insolent letter today: so I suppose I will never see the MS of Dubliners again. I would like to be in Trieste again not for the sake of the school but because I should sometimes have opportunity of meeting somebody who shared to a certain extent, my temperament. I am fond of Georgie, of course, but I fear (funny, just as I wrote the word two Americans ejaculated it opposite me) I fear that my spiritual barque is on the rocks. There is some element of sanity in this last mad performance of mine, I am sure. I feel somehow that I am what Pappie said I wasn’t a gentleman. But that is balls, as Rudolph Ellwood would say. Anyway I am a fish out of water. I would like to go back to Trieste because I remember some nights walking along the streets in the summer and thinking over some of the phrases in my stories. I have just been listening to Americans discussing Giordano Bruno in honour of whom there is a procession here tomorrow. They seem to know something of him but I dislike the accent.

I will write you more fully on receipt of your letter. At present, I am too disturbed to write a long letter. Your coglionato brother

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 18 February 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I have answered some advts. My money will give out the day after tomorrow. I was obliged to pay both landladies, as the disappointed one came to the restaurant and made a scene. I will send A a cheque for 40 on the 28th. I am trying, since you say Trieste is off, to get a position in France. I have made a lovely pasticcio, it seems. Anyway you must send me some money by return of post as I have no means of getting any. I cannot get beyond Thursday.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 19 February 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, I am trying to get a position in Marseilles as I could travel cheap from Naples. I would answer advts but cannot lay out even the few pence needed for stamps. I fancy I will not find it so difficult to get a position but perhaps I am too sanguine. I hope you answered my card of yesterday as I can barely reach Thursday evg: in fact, I can’t but your reply could not come sooner. I expected a letter from you today.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 20 February 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Card received. I cannot go back on my word here as it has gone the round of the bank. You will get this on Friday morning. Remember that I cannot go beyond Thursday so if you have not sent anything to reach me by then you must wire it. It is out of the question for me to get it. Try Effore or Santas or Guy. It is only a ‘matter’ of a few days. I can do nothing. ‘Buck up!’ My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

Jim

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 1 March 1907

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome, Italy

MS. Myra C. Livingston

Dear Sir, I send you back by this post the proofs of Chamber Music with corrections. If you will be kind enough to let me have a second proof I shall return it by the same post. Is it necessary to insert the note I spoke of saying that some of the verses had appeared in journals? If so, I can prefix it to the second proof. Faithfully yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [? 1 March 1907]

Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, This letter I shall probably put aside once or twice in order to dispatch postcards to you. I shall also steer clear of any financial details at least until I have got the other thing off my chest first. I may say however that I would hardly have taken the step I took had I not relied on A’s promise as a certainty: and moreover I understood from your letters that you had a great deal more to do than you could find time for. But let us ‘hasten away’ from that deplorable aspect of the case.

I have come to the conclusion that it is about time I made up my mind whether I am to become a writer or a patient Cousins. I foresee that I shall have to do other work as well but to continue as I am at present would certainly mean my mental extinction. It is months since I have written a line and even reading tires me. The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take any interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites or disgusts me. Nothing of my former mind seems to have remained except a heightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph or before some crude Italian gazette-picture. Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions or impulses may be purely personal. I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary. The spectacle of the procession in honour of the Nolan left me quite cold. I understand that anti-clerical history probably contains a large percentage of lies but this is not enough to drive me back howling to my gods. This state of indifference ought to indicate artistic inclination, but it doesn’t. Because I take about a fortnight to read a small book. I was about two days making up my mind to go and see the Dusk of the Gods. I weighed the cold, the distance, the crush, discomfort &c. Finally I went and tried to interest myself but was considerably bored.

The fault, I believe, is more mine than Wagner’s but at the same time I cannot help wondering what relation music like this can possibly have to the gentlemen I was with in the gallery. By the way both the banker and his brother seem to be well educated yet I have never heard them discuss anything except the whereabouts of the ‘blaues Heft’ (the book in which the exit of bonds is noted) and of the ‘rotes Heft’ (the book in which the entry of same is noted). I have been trying to read Carducci’s verses, induced by the fact that he died unfortified by the rites of R.C.C. But not only does it not interest me: it even seems to me false and exaggerated. I dislike Italian verse. I find Italian men lacking in delicacy and virility. They are intelligent as a rule and clever but babyish. Of delicacy neither their men nor their women have a scrap. I don’t so much object to its absence in the latter. The day of Bruno’s memorial procession I was standing among the crowd waiting for the cortege to appear. It was a murky day and, being Sunday, I had not washed. I was wearing a white felt hat, faded by reason of heavy rains. Scholz’s five crown cloak hung bawways on me. My boots, being Sunday, were coated with a week’s dirt and I was in need of a shave. In fact, I was a horrible example of free thought. Near me were two good-looking young women, females, of the people, that is. They were in charge of an elderly woman and a middle-aged man. They were low-sized and quince-coloured in the face with amiable dog’s eyes. One of them had a trinket on a long chain and this she constantly raised slowly to her lips and rested it there, slowly parting them, all the time gazing tranquilly about her. I watched her do this for quite a long time until I perceived that the trinket was a miniature revolver! I tried to explain my sensation to one or two Italians, narrating the fact as best I could. They saw nothing strange in it or typical or significant. One of them told me that many Italian women wear a cazzo as a trinket and after that they talked to their heart s content about cazzo and Co—a topic which, m my opinion, it requires a great deal of talent or else a great deal of courage to render in any way interesting. When I enter the bank in the morning I wait for someone to announce something about either his cazzo, culo or coglioni. This usually happens before a quarter to nine.

I received yesterday a letter from John Long in which he said that his reader had advised not to print the book and &c &c. So Dubliners is once again roosting on my shelf. By the same post I received from Elkin Mathews the proofs of Chamber Music. It is a slim book and on the frontispiece is an open pianner! Shall I send you the proofs to correct. I don’t know whether the order is correct. I don’t like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it. However, it is a young man’s book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope some-one will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like. Besides they are not pretentious and have a certain grace. I will keep a copy myself and (so far as I can remember) at the top of each page I will put an address, or a street so that when I open the book I can revisit the places where I wrote the different songs.

I am sorry you have not written about the Abbey Street row.

I leave here for an unknown destination either the 15th or 30th of next month. I have written to various agencies and advts in different parts of Italy and France. But I would like to get out of Italy, if possible. I laughed at Eglinton and his cake but I fear I have eaten nearly all mine: still his must be a trifle stale by this. I would like to live in a warm town by the sea where I could write and think at leisure. Marseilles is not a tourist place but a port like Trieste and I chose it because it is cheap to get at, lively, good climate and must be cheaper than Rome. Besides the Italian colony there is 100,000. I detest office work. I would prefer even work in a shipping office at a harbour where I could go in and out. After all I must be worth something, even commercially. I know three languages very well and two others passably well and with Greenham and Sanguinetti and here in Rome I have had ‘experience’ and I have written for ‘Fortn. Review’ ‘Sat. Review’ ‘Speaker’ ETC.

I sent you today one of the proofs of the verses to see if the order is correct. The other I have corrected and sent back. I have answered several advts and hope to be able to get some position in which I can find the heart to go on with my writing. It seems to me better to try that line as it might bring me money. As for Nora and Georgie it seems to me easy to exaggerate. I suppose it will hardly come to starvation point. You seem to imagine that I should settle down to make myself a carriera here, beginning at 250 frs a month and ending 20 years hence at 450 frs a month, with all the accompaniments of such a carriera, a quarter, a servant, children at school, a small bank a/c and a great fear of everything in me. This is what I should do but I doubt very much if I will ever do it. We will see. Whatever happens it will hardly come to me as a surprise. I have changed a few verses in Chamber Music and have, that is, allowed my later self to interrupt the music, perhaps improving the poem as in the case of the Mithridates one. But the verses are not worth talking about: and I begin to think neither are the stories.

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Berlitz School, Trieste (Telegram), 7 March 1907

Florence

MS. Cornell

arrive eight get room

[Unsigned]

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To ELKIN MATHEWS (Postcard), 21 March 1907

c/o Stanislaus Joyce, Via S. Nicolò 32, III°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yale

Dear Sir, Thanks for your card. Before leaving Rome I left my change of address at the GPO but could not acquaint you as I decided on coming here only the very morning of my departure. This will be my address for some time, as I have to deliver a series of lectures here on The Celtic Revival. With regard to your second proofs I have written to a friend of mine in Rome asking him to call on the P.O. authorities and expect his answer tomorrow. I shall write you in any case tomorrow and let you know whether it will be necessary for you to send a fresh batch of proofs which, I fear, may be the case, as the mills of governmental departments in Italy grind exceeding slow. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To ELKIN MATHEWS (Postcard), 28 March 1907

c/o Stanislaus Joyce, Via S. Nicolò 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Donald Gallup

Dear Sir The proofs from Rome reached me this evening. I have corrected and returned them. I am quite satisfied with the binding and printing but would ask you kindly to put this year’s date on the frontispiece. I have also made one or two corrections of errors which escaped me on the first reading. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 24 April 1907

9 Millmount Terrace, Drumcondra

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim, I wrote Stannie some fourteen days ago and have not since received any reply? although I fully explained our wretched plight here. I am forced to the conclusion that I have entirely faded out of your memories, well, I am now so accustomed to all sorts of unnatural treatment since your Mother died, both from you and those here, I have arrived at last, I regret to say, at a determination to follow your example, and too, try to forget. I need not tell you how your miserable mistake affected my already well crushed feelings, but then maturer thoughts took more the form of pity than anger, when I saw a life of promise crossed and a future that might have been brilliant blasted in one breath. However I will not reproach you, for I feel certain your own inmost soul and heart (if you possess one?) must do that.

You know I did all in my power to forward your every wish, and any money I could by any means get I gave you ungrudgingly. So you can well understand my feelings when I discovered my dream so ruthlessly dispelled, my hopes—proud hopes—shattered, and alone left to me, to eke out the few remaining years of misery and loneliness, until God will take pity on my wretchedness and end my unhappy life. My excuse for writing this is that it is possibly the last communication you will ever receive from me, for as matters stand at present here a big change is about to take place and I wish to put you in possession of all the facts. So that you may know my future actions are the outcome of circumstances I do not covet and cannot control. In your letter of the 9th Feby. you say ‘I have a great horror lest you should think, that now that I have gained some kind of a position for myself, I wish to hear no more of you &c on the contrary I assure you, if you will show me what I can do or get others to do I shall do my best to give the ball another kick.’ You also ask me ‘what is the amount of my pension which I have clear.’ Well, my remaining pension is £6 a month, out of which 7 should pay £2.12.4 a month, which leaves £3.7.8 to live on and dress on, or 2/3 a day! I need hardly say it could not be done—five girls, one—well Charlie, myself and nigger. If I had some permanent position, however small and if the aforesaid ex-ecclesiastic had the ability and inclination to get some employment to enable him to live, off my hands, things would be different. Now, I must break up house, (by the way that won’t entail much energy, as everything is broken up quite sufficiently already) and go into lodgings by myself. I have been for the past fortnight trying to get the 3 little ones fixed and have so far succeeded that I could get them into a convent (Glasnevin) through the influence of Mr. James Kavanagh for £24 a year. He has asked me to write you both to know what you could do. If you and Stannie can afford 8s/– a week (4s/– each) I will pay the balance. I may tell you I am in hope of getting a small job, £1 a week, and if so I should not need anything from you. Write me by return and such a letter as I can show—Then as to Charlie, you say you can get him a position?—do, for I can’t stand it any longer, and for many reasons 7 must get rid of him. W ell, Poppie is so insolent and my life has been made so unindurable by her that she must go. I understand she has some arrangements made to get someplace, and if May and Eily wish they may lite in lodgings with me, or if not?—. At present as you see I have barely enough to support and dress myself, after helping to provide for the 3 young children. As I am to be evicted from here within the next week or so, I am looking for lodgings for myself but must get the little ones fixed first. Now you know all, and see how I am driven to the wall. So that whatever you may hear of me (as no doubt you will, from those highly respectable people, you so constantly correspond with) or wherever I may be, possibly Cork, dont you forget that anything or any place must be some relief from the miserable existence I have put over since August 13th, 1903! For the few, very few I sincerely hope, years I have yet to live I’ll try if I can’t find some of my old friends of long ago who may be glad to see me again, and even amongst strangers I may receive respect and perhaps even affection, refused me by my children. Perhaps in years to come, long after my release from this world, you may learn to feel some of the pangs I have endured, and then you will appreciate the feelings of a Father who loved his children and had high ambitions for them, and spared no money when he could afford it, to educate and make them what they should be, but who when adversity came and he could no longer gratify all those wants, was despised disrespected, jeered at, scoffed at and set at defiance. Well, remembering, as I do,—the fond love I had for you as child, boy and man, I pray God, you may be spared such ingratitude. I should very much wish to have your Photo and Georgie’s, also a full account of the Rome affair, and what are your present prospects. As I said this may be my last letter to you, so don’t treat as usually, but reply fully and by return.

If Stannie, too, has not quite lost any little affection he may have had for me, I should also be glad to hear from him, with Photo also. Goodbye, Jim, and may God protect you, is the prayer of your still fond and loving, though broken hearted,

Father

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 10 May 1907

Via S. Nicolo, 32, Trieste

Dear Curran: I send you by the same post my volume of verses Chamber Music which was published in London on Monday last. I trust sincerely that in the future I may be in a position to requite the obligations I am under towards you. I would have sent you also my MS copy but that I feared my doing so would seem to imply a higher conceit of these verses than I now have. However, if you wish for it (as I promised it to you) I have it still.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note on Joyce’s visiting card), [? 10 May 1907]

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

You need not send copies either to Price, Cosgrave, Aunt J. or Pappie as I have done so. Don’t forget to boom.

[Unsigned]

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE to ELKIN MATHEWS, 19 July 1907

33 Via S. Nicolò, III, Trieste, Austria

MS. Yale

Dear Sir, My brother (who has been laid up for the past two months with rheumatic fever) asks me to thank you for forwarding him his copies of ‘Chamber Music’ as well as the letter you sent a few days ago. It is from a Mr Geoffrey Palmer, address ‘The Vicarage, South Woodford, London N.E.’ who wishes to set to music and publish, if possible, some of the songs. My brother, for his part, agrees to this and has written so to Mr Palmer, stating however, that (as per agreement) the musical rights are at the joint disposition of the author and publisher. He trusts that you may be able to arrange this matter.

As his illness did not allow him to watch the reception accorded his book, he would be glad to learn if it has been satisfactory. Mr Symons wrote him saying that he had written a signed review for ‘The Nation.’ Faithfully yours

Stanislaus Joyce

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE to G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 20 July 1907

33 Via S. Nicolò, III, Trieste, Austria

MS. National Library

Dear Sir, My brother, who is prevented by illness from writing to you himself, bids me thank you for your kind letter and offer to set to music some of his verses. If Mr Elkin Mathews, his publisher, agrees, for his part, my brother will also gladly do so. I have written for him to Mr Mathews to this effect, as (per agreement) the musical rights are at the joint disposition of author and publisher. My brother suggests that you should call on Mr Mathews, and trusts that you will find no difficulty in coming to an agreement with him.

He will be glad to hear from you again and learn the result of your courteous proposal. Yours faithfully

Stanislaus Joyce

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 24 September 1907

Via S. Nicolò 33, III°, Trieste (Austria)

Dear Sir I do not know whether Mr Symons told you when he spoke to you about me that I have a second book ready for publication. It is a book of fifteen stories entitled ‘Dubliners’, and as you have published my first book I think it is right that I should offer it to you in the first instance. At the same time I do not know whether you publish books of prose or not nor do I know whether the result of ‘Chamber Music’ from your point of view was such as to warrant you in considering any other book of mine with a view of publishing.

I would be glad therefore to hear from you on this matter at your earliest convenience as in any case I should like to have the matter definitely arranged this autumn either with you or with another publisher so that the book might appear next spring. I may mention that ‘Dubliners’ was accepted for publication by a London publishing house which afterwards did not see its way to stand by its agreement. The signed agreement of the above house is still in my possession.

Hoping to hear from you by return, I am Yours faithfully,

Jas A Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 2 December 1907

Via S. Caterina 1, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Sir I have received safely the MS of my verses and thank you for your kindness in sending it on. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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1908

To ELKIN MATHEWS (Express Postcard), 9 February 1908

Via S. Caterina 1, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Edward Naumburg

Dear Sir Do not send the MS of Dubliners to Messrs Maunsel & Co but kindly send it back to me by return of post. Faithfully yours

Jas A Joyce

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To ELKIN MATHEWS (Postcard), 10 July 1908

Via S. Caterina 1, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Sir I should be obliged if you would furnish me at your convenience with an a/c of how my book of verse published May 07 has been selling. Very truly yours

James Joyce

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To MARGARET JOYCE, 8 December 1908

Via S. Caterina 1, I°p°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Cornell

Dear Poppie Thanks for sending on the music. I have seen your letter to Stannie and his reply which is enclosed with this. I have an idea which you will tell me if you like. I will send Georgie among you for six weeks or so next summer in charge of Stannie if you think such a proposal would have the effect desired. Neither he nor Stannie would be any expense as (if we can manage the thing at all) we shall pay all expenses of travelling and board with you. Perhaps he might be a good influence in your household and I fancy all of you would be glad to make his acquaintance. He could go about the end of July and come back to Trieste about the end of August or first of September. If you like the idea and think it likely to do good I shall write to Pappie myself.

I suppose you will think this a hare-brained idea like all the others I have had hitherto but if you walk round it for about a quarter of an hour and look at it from all sides it will begin to look right enough.

I will send him very gladly if that will make yiz all happy and loving. I told him I was going to and he has been canvassing all the people in the house for a valise to put his clothes in and go to ‘Dubirino’.

Thank you, I feel a little better of the rheumatism and am now more like a capital S than a capital Z. Hoping this will find you as it leaves me at present, thank God, I am, dear sister, your Most Affectionate Brother

Jim

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1909

From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 8 February 1909

Trieste

TS. Cornell

Dear Mr Joyce Really I do not believe of being authorised to tell you the author a resolute opinion about the novel which I could know only partially. I do not only allude to my want of competence but especially to the fact that when you stopped writing you were facing a very important development of Stephen’s mind. I have already a sample of what may be a change of this mind described by your pen. Indeed the development of Stephens childish religion to a strong religion felt strongly and vigorously or better lived in all its particulars (after his sin) was so important that no other can be more so. I like very much your second and third chapters and I think you made a great mistake doubting whether you would find a reader who could take pleasure at the sermons of the third chapter. I have read them with a very strong feeling and I know in my own little town a lot of people who would be certainly stroke by the same feeling. Every word of these sermons acquires its artistic significance by the fact of their effect on poor Stephen’s mind. At last the reader has a full knowledge of the education through with [which] Stephen went; it could not be fuller even if the two previous chapters had dealt expressly with it. I object against the first chapter. I did so when I had read only it but I do so still more decidedly after having known the two others. I think that I have at last also discovered the reason why these two chapters are for me so beautiful while the first one which surely is of the same construction, by the same writer who has surely not changed his ways, written evidently with the same artistic aims, fails to impress me as deeply. I think it deals with events devoid of importance and your rigid method of observation and description does not allow you to enrich a fact which is not rich by itself. You should write only about strong things. In your skilled hands they may become still stronger. I do not believe you can give the appearance of strength to things which are in themselves trivial, not important. I must say that if you had to write a whole novel with the only aim of description of everyday life without a problem which could affect strongly your own mind (you would not choose such a novel) you would be obliged to leave your method and find artificial colours to lend to the things the life they wanted in themselves.

Excuse me, dear Mr Joyce, these remarks which prove perhaps only my conceitedness, and believe me yours very truly

Ettore Schmitz

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 13 February 1909

Via S. Caterina 1, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. National Library

Dear Sir I am much honoured by your setting of my five songs and thank you for sending me a copy of the music. I hope you will find a good singer for them as your music needs to be well sung. Some cadences in the last song (which pleases me best) remind me of an Irish air ‘Billy Byrne of Ballymanus’. I admire also the setting of the parentheses in the first one and the way you reproduce the changes of stress in the second one. It seems to me a pity you did not do the song ‘Bid adieu’ which I tried to music myself and hope you may turn to it some day.

Should the songs be sung I should be glad if you would kindly let me know of their success.

Thanking you very sincerely for your kind thought I am, Faithfully Yours

James Joyce

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 13 February 1909

Via S. Caterina 1, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Sir Mr Geoffrey Palmer has sent me a copy of five songs from Chamber Music which he has set and I understand he is looking for a singer for them. I hope you may have sold off some more of that large remainder.

When you returned me the MS of my other book Dubliners you mentioned a Mr Hone who desired to read it on behalf of Messrs Maunsel. I should be obliged to you if you could put me into communication with him as I wish to get the book off my hands. Faithfully yours

James Joyce

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 26 April 1909

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, Trieste

Dear Sir: My delay in replying to your letter has been caused by my removal to this address.

I thank you very much for kindly sending me a copy of your cantata. I have shown it as well as your settings of my verses to my singing-master who admires them very much. They are, however, rather low for my voice and also for this reason I am afraid they would not suit Mr J.F. MacCormack, who, I am sure, as a friend of mine would gladly have given them a trial. My father knows (or knew) well Mr Plunket Greene and if you think well of it I shall have his attention drawn to them. They would suit his voice and style very well.

I have never seen Billy Byrne printed: but I am sure my namesake, Dr P.W. Joyce, will be able to tell you where it has been printed. If not you could ask Mr Best of the Feis Ceoil. Should you not find it I shall write down for you the version I have (which, however, is probably incorrect as I have it only by ear) and send it on to you.

I am very glad you are doing more of those songs and much flattered by your liking for them. Perhaps the extracts of press notices on the book which I enclose will interest you. I also send you a little article of mine in the hope that as you are a musician you can read Italian. It was written on a fellow-countryman of yours (and mine) on the occasion of the first performance here this month of Strauss’s opera with Bellincioni in the part.

With best wishes for the success of your cantata.

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 16 May 1909

7 Whitworth Place, Drumcondra

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim You will, I dare say, be surprised at receiving this letter from me, after so long a silence, but my feelings were such on reading your last letter to me that I refrained from replying to it, fearing I may be impelled to say what on calmer consideration I prefer to leave unsaid, and I am sure your own secret thoughts must at times bring home to you all that I could possibly convey. My feelings have undergone a change towards you, hastened by the receipt of the photos of your son whose strong likeness to you at his age brought vividly back to my mind, memories which I try strenuously to avoid, as I need not tell you, their recollection is hardly calculated to assuage the torture I at present endure, associated as it is with all the happiest moments of my life. I would be glad to have a good photo of Georgie when you have one done, as also of yourself and Stannie. I am writing him.

I am anxious to let you learn how matters are with us I fear the end is coming in more respects than one, as my health is fast breaking up and I feel certain I have seen my last Xmas. I would welcome death tonight most joyfully if I were to consult my selfish feelings, as a grateful relief from a miserable existence, but the thought of leaving my little motherless girls friendless, cast upon the wretched heartless world, without one relative to give them a meal if hungry, or shelter for the night, I am forced for their sakes to try and live and work so I have been on at the Co. Council for 4 weeks in March, but the pay was wretched £1. being the outside limit obtainable. I occasioned a revolution and almost got mobbed for earning £1.6.10 one week so that the scale was reduced and the others could not then make 15/– and blamed me for working so well. I was gone come next week and the others retained. Then I had hope that the registration of Pembroke would be commenced this month but, no, it seems Mr Harrington thinks that Mr Waldrons majority [is] so large (1400) that he need not do any more registration for years. So thats off. Next my friends, the Drimmies discovered I owed them a further bill of costs (£2.16) after three years! and deducted £1. out of my monthly cheque this month and will do the same on the 31st inst. So that when I paid some debts and tried to live I was unable to pay the rent and was on yesterday served by Leech with a formal demand for 2 months rent £5, and we have to leave here at the end of the month and having no reference cannot get a house, so that I see nothing for it but the N.D.U.

My last shilling went on Sunday dinner and since then we are entirely without food, coal or light, nor do I know any means under Heaven of getting a penny as I have exausted all my friends, and so we have another fortnights starving to do. My clothes, too, are patchwork. However, there is no use going on farther into this gruesome subject! My object is that you and Stannie should be in possession of all the facts and that whatever happens you now know how matters stand.

Charlie too is on my hands I cannot get him anything to do. Nor do I think he much cares. If you could see your way to do for him over in Trieste I would be glad. I must part with him and Poppie on the 1st June. I am trying to get the others settled but unless I pay something yearly these Convents wont have them.

I am at last taking action about my pension and am waiting J.J. Clancy’s K.C. return to proceed for its recovery. I will let you hear in a few days. If I succeed, as I believe I will, things will be different but meantime the position is as you see desperate. As for myself I care very little what becomes of me, it is your 3 youngest sisters that concern me.

So that if between yourself and Stannie you can see your way to help them, you can write to Poppie. I will let you know whatever turns up and shall be glad to hear from you by return. Your

Father

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 12 July 1909

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, Trieste

Dear Sir: If you hold the dramatic rights of Riders to the Sea will you kindly let me know whether Mr Alfredo Sainati, manager of the Italian Grand Guignol Company can produce my translation of it in Italy and in what conditions. There is no idea for the moment of the translation being published. Messrs Maunsel of Dublin gave me to understand that they had the rights of the play and were making new arrangements with regard to it. Mr Sainati would be glad to know definitely whether he can have it produced or not and in the meantime is holding over the translation.

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 19 July 1909

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, Trieste

Dear Mr Palmer: I received safely your other three songs for which I thank you very much and beg you kindly to excuse me for not writing sooner. However, I was rather busy with rehearsals of a concert at which I had to sing in the quintette from the Master Singers. Do you understand the infatuation of people for this opera? I think it is pretentious stuff.

The second three songs please me better than the first five. The setting of the first is very delicate and the effect is finely sustained in the third. The rendering of ‘Play on, invisible harps &c’ follows the change of the verse splendidly. All the persons to whom I showed your music think it very distinguished.

I am going to Ireland this week and shall try to bring your songs under the notice of someone in Dublin who may bring them out. If you should happen to be in Ireland during the month of August I should be glad to meet you. My address is: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin.

There is no likelihood of my writing any more verse unless something unforeseen happens to my brain. I have written a book of stories called Dubliners and am in treaty with a publisher about it. Besides that I am at work on a novel A Portrait of the Artist at which I have been engaged now for six years. When (or rather if) either of these sees the light you may be sure I shall not fail to send you a copy of it.

I hope you may set all of Chamber Music in time. This was indeed partly my idea in writing it. The book is in fact a suite of songs and if I were a musician I suppose I should have set them to music myself. The central song is XIV after which the movement is all downwards until XXXIV which is vitally the end of the book. XXXV and XXXVI are tailpieces just as I and III are preludes.

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 29 July 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

We arrived safely here tonight.

The first thing I saw on the pier at Kingstown was Gogarty’s fat back but I avoided him.

All are delighted with Georgie, specially Pappie.

Write to one of the girls giving her directions about him.

With love to Lucia

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, The article on Don Carlos was not inserted.

Mr and Mrs Skeffington met me and invited me to their house: I did not go.

Russell and McGee came up to me in the street and were very friendly. I went to see Curran and found him looking ugly and disposed to be unfriendly. Kettle is in the country. I have written to him asking him to make an appointment with me. Have got the list of Intermediate Board and will make application in due time.

Maunsel and Co—Geo. Roberts and Maunsel Hone. From what I learn Roberts is the person Hone being an Oxford insipid. I called to see Hone: he was in Belfast. I met Roberts in the street and smoothed him down standing him a drink (I took lithia). He is very self-important. I am to meet both of them to know their verdict on Monday next.

Have written to the Glasgow branch of Dun’s Review, but got no answer. Best is away: so is Cousins. Here are some opinions of my appearance.

Aunt J—lost all boyishness Cosgrave—in splendid health Eglinton—looking very ecclesiastical Gogarty—Jaysus, man, you’re in phthisis.

O’Leary Curtis—much more mature

Sheehan—very thin

Eileen—very foreign-looking

Keohler—You look 35

Mrs Skeff—Not a bit changed

Skeff—Somewhat blasé.

Everybody—Melancholy

Russell—Like a man of business.

Gogartv met me on Merrion Sq. I passed him. He ran after me and took me by the arm and made a long speech and was very confused. He asked me to go to his house. I went. He made me go in and rambled on. To everything I said ‘You have your life. Leave me to mine’[.] He invited me to go down to Enniskerry in his motor and lunch with him and wife. I declined. I was very quiet and sober. He offered me grog, wine, coffee, tea: but I took nothing. In the end he said, blushing ‘Well do you really want me to go to hell and be damned’. I said T bear you no illwill. I believe you have some points of good nature. You and I of 6 years ago are both dead. But I must write as I have felt’. He said ‘I don’t care a damn what you say of me so long as it is literature’. I said ‘Do you mean that?’ He said ‘I do. Honest to Jaysus. Now will you shake hands with me at least?’ I said ‘I will: on that understanding’.

Byrne I have not seen.

Arthur Symons has G.P.I.!

Synge is said to have been syphilitic, poor man.

Tell Nora to write to me

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 6 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Nora I am not going to Galway nor is Georgie.

I am going to throw up the business I came for and which I hoped would have bettered my position.

I have been frank in what I have told you of myself. You have not been so with me.

At the time when I used to meet you at the corner of Merrion Square and walk out with you and feel your hand touch me in the dark and hear your voice (0, Nora! I will never hear that music again because I can never believe again) at the time I used to meet you, every second night you kept an appointment with a friend of mine outside the Museum, you went with him along the same streets, down by the canal, past the ‘house with the upstairs in it’, down to the bank of the Dodder. You stood with him: he put his arm round you and you lifted your face and kissed him. What else did you do together? And the next night you met me!

I have heard this only an hour ago from his lips. My eyes are full of tears, tears of sorrow and mortification. My heart is full of bitterness and despair. I can see nothing but your face as it was then raised to meet another’s. O, Nora, pity me for what I suffer now. I shall cry for days. My faith in that face I loved is broken. O, Nora, Nora have pity for my poor wretched love. I cannot call you any dear name because tonight I have learnt that the only being I believed in was not loyal to me.

O Nora is all to be over between us?

Write to me, Nora, for the sake of my dead love. I am tortured by memories.

Write to me, Nora, I loved you only: and you have broken my faith in you.

O, Nora, I am unhappy. I am crying for my poor unhappy love.

Write to me, Nora.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 7 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street

MS. Cornell

It is half past six in the morning and I am writing in the cold. I have hardly slept all night.

Is Georgie my son? The first night I slept with you in Zurich was October 11th and he was born July 27th. That is nine months and 16 days. I remember that there was very little blood that night….

Tell me. When you were in that field near the Dodder (on the nights when I was not there) with that other (a ‘friend’ of mine) were you lying down when you kissed? Did you place your hand on him as you did on me in the dark and did you say to him as you did to me ‘What is it, dear?’ One day I went up and down the streets of Dublin hearing nothing but those words, saying them over and over again to myself and standing still to hear better the voice of my love.

What is to become of my love, now? How am I to drive away the face which will come now between our lips? Every second night along the same streets!

I have been a fool. I thought that all the time you gave yourself only to me and you were dividing your body between me and another. In Dublin here the rumour here is circulated that I have taken the leavings of others. Perhaps they laugh when they see me parading ‘my’ son in the streets.

O Nora! Nora! Nora! I am speaking now to the girl I loved, who had red-brown hair and sauntered over to me and took me so easily into her arms and made me a man.

I will leave for Trieste as soon as Stannie sends me the money, and then we can arrange what is best to do. .

O, Nora, is there any hope yet of my happiness? Or is my life to be broken? They say here that I am in consumption. If I could forget my books and my children and forget that the girl I loved was false to me and remember her only as I saw her with the eyes of my boyish love I would go out of life content. How old and miserable I feel!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 8 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie My business here is ended. As soon as you have collected the money send it on at once so that I may leave with as little delay as possible.

Jim

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To A.E. CLERY, 9 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Clery I got the copy of the paper containing your very kind notice of Chamber Music and wish to thank you, even at this late hour, for your friendly and sympathetic appreciation of my verses. Faithfully yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I met Kettle today and he will work for me. I am to get signed testimonials: one from Piccolo, one from Università del Popolo, one from the bankers in Rome. This latter I have written for. Go at once (I have only twenty days within which to apply) to Prezioso and Rascovich (or Oberdorfer) and explain to them fully the entire case and ask each of them to write a letter on official paper with heading saying that I have written signed leaders (or delivered lectures) with some expressions of commendation. The stronger and more serious looking the letters are: the better. Do this without delay.

Maunsel and Co find Dubliners unlikely to be a commercial success. I have offered to bear part of the expenses if a royalty will be paid me from the start. This proposal is now under their consideration.

Send me by registered post the new version of my novel which Kettle wishes to see. He has been extremely friendly and wishes me to apply for the lectureship in Italian at the New University.

I rely on you to send me what I ask for at once.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 16 August 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

I send you a belated article by Clery which keep.

I have in my pocket the first draft copy of a contract with Maunsel for Dubliners at 5% better than Richards’ terms. It will appear next March.

Eva will come back with me. Raise all you can and send. A camp bed will do her for the first month and she can sleep with Georgie in the room you occupy.

There will be no professorship of Italian in the New National University (I went to the secretary) only a lectureship to mixed evg classes in commercial Italian. £100. a year. No literature or philology.

Am applying for examinership when I get testimonials needed.

Have written to Synge’s executors: no reply.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 19 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My darling I am terribly upset that you haven’t written. Are you ill?

I have spoken of this affair to an old friend of mine, Byrne, and he took your part splendidly and says it is all a ‘blasted lie’.

What a worthless fellow I am! But after this I will be worthy of your love, dearest.

I sent you three enormous bags of shell cocoa today. Tell me if you get them right.

My sister Poppie goes away tomorrow.

Today I signed a contract for publication of Dubliners.

Excuse me to Stannie for not writing to him.

My sweet noble Nora, I ask you to forgive me for my contemptible conduct but they maddened me, darling between them. We will defeat their cowardly plot, love. Forgive me, sweetheart, won’t you?

Just say a word to me, dearest, a word of denial and O I shall be so transported with happiness!

Are you well, my darling? You are not fretting, are you? Don’t read over those horrible letters I wrote. I was out of my mind with rage at the time.

I must go down now all the way to the G.P.O. to post this as the post has gone here: it is after one at night.

Good night ‘my precious’!

No man, I believe, can ever be worthy of a woman’s love.

My darling, forgive me. I love you and that is why I was so maddened only to think of you and that common dishonourable wretch.

Nora darling, I apologise to you humbly. Take me again to your arms. Make me worthy of you.

I will conquer yet and then you will be at my side.

Good night ‘my dearest’ ‘my precious’. A whole life is opening for us now. It has been a bitter experience and our love will now be sweeter.

Give me your lips, my love.

‘My kiss will give peace now

And quiet to your heart.

Sleep on in peace now,

O you unquiet heart’

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 20 August 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Thanks for Prezioso’s certificate and await others. I signed today contract with Maunsel. Send Grant Richards’ letter in which he writes of projected style and binding.

I called to three papers here. None would take interview with Caruso. Abbey Theatre here produces Shaw’s censored play: Shewing up of B– P– on Wed. Have been to manager who reserves stalls for me. Would P.d.S. accept article. Don’t know how to translate Shewing Up. Do you? Send bundle of Italian papers to crib from and reply express. Trying to work press pass to Galway.

Raise all you can. Eva comes with me. Try G.P.O. for that 18 crs.

Send Rascovich’s certificate as I am sending in application.

Roberts wishes dark grey binding with dark red lettering.

Very anxious at silence

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 21 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dear little Nora I think you are in love with me, are you not? I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out). When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that some day a girl would love me. But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses. Their false manners checked me at once. Then you came to me. You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like ‘Gentle lady’ or ‘Thou leanest to the shell of night’. But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And so for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire.

Have I been cruel to you? One cruelty at least I have not been guilty of. I have not killed the warm impulsive life-giving love of your rich nature. Look now, dearest, into the deeps of your own heart and tell me that living beside me you have not seen your heart aging and hardening. No, you are capable of deeper finer feeling now than then. Tell me, my own little Nora, that my companionship was good for you and I will freely tell you all that your companionship has meant to me.

Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.

I am so agitated, Nora dear, about how I am to get together money to bring over Eva and myself and also to go to Galway to see your people. I wrote today to your mother but really I don’t want to go. They will speak of you and of things unknown to me. I dread to be shown even a picture of you as a girl for I shall think ‘I did not know her then nor she me. When she sauntered to mass in the morning she gave her long glances sometimes to some boy along the road. To others but not to me’.

I will ask you, my darling, to be patient with me. I am absurdly jealous of the past.

Be happy, my simple-hearted Nora, till I come. Tell Stannie to send me a whole lot of money and quickly so that we may meet soon. Do you remember the day I asked you indifferently ‘Where will I meet you this evening?’ and you said without thinking ‘Where will you meet me, is it? You’ll meet me in bed, I suppose’.

Magari! magari!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 21 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie The contract with Maunsel was stamped yesterday in the Stamp Office and the book will come out probably in March. The price is 3/6 nett. I am applying for the examinership as soon as the other certificates come. Kettle was most friendly to me but I received no invitation to Sheehy’s though they must know I am in Dublin. In the new National University there will be no chair of Italian only a lectureship in ‘commercial Italian’! at i?100 a year for lectures a few times in the week in the evenings. I could get it but would be ill-advised to take it. I have written to Synge’s brother to know definitely about the play. I also went to the Abbey Theatre and they showed me the costumes used and are giving me the music of the Keen. The manager is reserving a seat for me for the first performance of Blanco Posnet. I have had cards printed with the indication ‘P.d.S.-, Trieste’ and tomorrow am going to see the Manager of the Midland Rwy. I shall say I am on the Italian press and am writing a series of articles on Ireland and try to get a pass to Galway. Poppie went away yesterday to Kilkenny and will not be seen again until she goes to New Zealand. I sent Nora a stone of shell cocoa. Pay the duty on it which cannot be high and see that Nora takes it every morning and evening. Kettle marries Mary Sheehy on the 8 Sept. Kathleen marries Cruise O’Brien. Skeffington has a son two months old. Caruso sang here yesterday. Neither Irish Times, Express, or Mail would allow me to interview him though at the Corinthian Club dinner he spoke to the toast in Italian and his reply was translated. An Italian Opera Co is playing here (Aida Gonzaga of ‘I Puritani’ last autumn) is in it [)] but I have been too distracted to go to it. I told the story of this miserable blackmail to Byrne and his opinion is that Gogarty and the other are in collusion. He was very kind to me in the matter. He says that the other’s price is half a crown. I liked very much his attitude. I think he is in love himself.

However—we will kill that too like the rheumatism. Eva must come back with me. It means the future happiness of my house: and Nora expects her to come. I rely on you to do all you can to that end and we shall have a fine winter of it.

Nora writes warmly of your kindness to her. Try to cheer her up now and we will put things right. Thanks: and if that was those bowsies’ object they have done just the contrary of what they intended

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 22 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear love How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness. I long to be out of it.

I think always of you. When I go to bed at night it is a kind of torture for me. I will not write on this page what fills my mind, the very madness of desire. I see you in a hundred poses, grotesque, shameful, virginal, languorous. Give yourself to me, dearest, all, all when we meet. All that is holy, hidden from others, you must give to me freely. I wish to be lord of your body and soul.

There is a letter which I dare not be the first to write and which yet I hope every day you may write to me. A letter for my eyes only. Perhaps you will write it to me and perhaps it will calm the anguish of my longing.

What can come between us now? We have suffered and been tried. Every veil of shame or diffidence seems to have fallen from us. Will we not see in each other’s eyes the hours and hours of happiness that are waiting for us?

Adorn your body for me, dearest. Be beautiful and happy and loving and provoking, full of memories, full of cravings, when we meet. Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in The Dead in speaking of your body. They are these: ‘musical and strange and perfumed’.

My jealousy is still smouldering in my heart. Your love for me must be fierce and violent to make me forget utterly.

Do not let me ever lose the love I have for you now, Nora. If we could go on together through life in that way how happy we should be. Let me love you, Nora. Do not kill my love.

I am bringing you a little present. It is all my own idea and I have had great trouble in getting it done as I wished. But it will always remind you of this time.

Write to me, dearest, and think of me.

What is a week or ten days to all the time of joy before us!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 25 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I send you tonight (an hour after first performance) article on Shaw’s play. Go over it with F as I wrote it in a hell of a hurry and correct proofs if they insert.

Have got first class pass to Galway and am going in the morning.

When is the money coming for me and Eva to go back?

I send you first copy of Sinn Fein Daily also papers with reference tome.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Illustrated letter card), 26 August 1909

4 Bowling Green, Galway

MS. Cornell

My dear little runaway Nora I am writing this to you sitting at the kitchen table in your mother’s house!! I have been here all day talking with her and I see that she is my darling’s mother and I like her very much. She sang for me The Lass of Aughrim but she does not like to sing me the last verses in which the lovers exchange their tokens. I shall stay in Galway overnight.

How strange life is, my dear love? To think of my being here! I went round to the house in Augustine Street where you lived with your grandmother and in the morning I am going to visit it pretending I want to buy it in order to see the room you slept in.

I have asked them for photographs of you as a girl but they have none.

Who knows, darling, but next year you and I may come here. You will take me from place to place and the image of your girlhood will purify again my life.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 August 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie For Jesus Christ sake send money unless you want to send me into a madhouse. Nothing can be done here. Go to your best pupil is the simplest. Say the school has planted you and ask for a year’s payment for biweekly lessons as I did with Schmitz. You will get it like a shot and this winter we shall make tons of money and be all as happy as if the divil had us.

It would be no use for me to write to my pupils as it would only be drib and drab. Do what I tell you and I want the money by return of post. I have done all my business as well as I could. I did not neglect one thing I had to do.

Next year we will save 1000 crowns and Nora and I are going to take our honeymoon.

Don’t send money by M.O. Buy a cheque, put it in a letter and send it on at once registered and express and in six days after Eva and I will be there.

I am in splendid health again since I came back from Galway tonight.

Every day I stay here is money lost.

Please give Vidacovich his lessons (which are paid for) for the first half of September, twice a week. Don’t omit this and don’t ask him for money.

Send the money.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 31 August 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My darling It is now nearly two in the morning. My hands are shivering with cold for I have had to go out to bring home my sisters from a party: and now I must walk down to the G.P.O. But I do not want my love to be without her letter in the morning.

The ornament I had made expressly for you is now safe in my pocket. I show it to everyone so that everyone may know I love you, Nora dear, and think of you, darling, and wish to honour you.

I was singing an hour ago your song The Lass of Aughrim. The tears come into my eyes and my voice trembles with emotion when I sing that lovely air. It was worth coming to Ireland to have got it from your poor kind mother—of whom I am very fond, Nora dear.

It is perhaps in art, Nora dearest, that you and I will find a solace for our own love. I would wish you to be surrounded by everything that is fine and beautiful and noble in art. You are not, as you say, a poor uneducated girl. You are my bride, darling, and all I can give you of pleasure and joy in this life I wish to give you.

Nora darling, let our love as it is now never end. You understand now your strange erring wilful jealous lover, do you not, dearest? You will try to hold him in all his wandering moods, will you not, dearest? He loves you, believe that always. He has never had a particle of love for anyone but you. It is you who have opened a deep chasm in his life.

Every coarse word in speech offends me now for I feel that it would offend you. When I was courtingyou (and you were only nineteen, darling, how I love to think of that!) it was the same. You have been to my young manhood what the idea of the Blessed Virgin was to my boyhood.

O tell me, my sweet love, that you are satisfied with me now. One word of praise from you fills me with joy, a soft rose-like joy.

Our children (much as I love them) must not come between us. If they are good and noble-natured it is because of us, dear. We met and joined our bodies and souls freely and nobly and our children are the fruit of our bodies.

Good night, my dearest girl, my little Galway bride, my tender love from Ireland.

How I would love to surprise you sleeping now! There is a place I would like to kiss you now, a strange place, Nora. Not on the lips, Nora. Do you know where?

Good night, beloved!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 2 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Nora I have had no letter from you today and hope you have not written any to me addressed to Galway. I forgot to tell you not to.

I am in a wretched state of confusion and weakness on account of doing what I told you. When I woke up this morning and remembered the letter I wrote you last night I felt disgusted with myself. However if you read through all my letters from the beginning you will be able to form some idea of what I feel towards you.

I have not enjoyed one day of my holidays. Your mother remarked my habit of sighing and said I would break my heart by it. I suppose it must be bad for me.

I hope you take that cocoa every day and are getting a little fatter on it. I suppose you know why I hope that.

I am worried to death about you, myself, the return journey and Eva. I hope Stannie will wire me enough for both of us.

Dublin is a detestable city and the people are most repulsive to me. I can eat nothing I am so agitated.

When is this cursed thing going to end? When am I going to start? My brain is empty. I can write nothing to you tonight.

Nora, my ‘true love’, you must really take me in hand. Why have you allowed me to get into this state? Will you, dearest, take me as I am with my sins and follies and shelter me from misery. If you do not I feel my life will go to pieces. Tonight I have an idea madder than usual. I feel I would like to be flogged by you. I would like to see your eyes blazing with anger.

I wonder is there some madness in me. Or is love madness? One moment I see you like a virgin or madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half naked and obscene! What do you think of me at all? Are you disgusted with me?

I remember the first night in Pola when in the tumult of our embraces you used a certain word. It was a word of provocation, of invitation and I can see your face over me (you were over me that night) as you murmured it. There was madness in your eyes too and as for me if hell had been waiting for me the moment after I could not have held back from you.

Are you too, then, like me, one moment high as the stars, the next lower than the lowest wretches?

I have enormous belief in the power of a simple honourable soul. You are that, are you not, Nora?

I want you to say to yourself: Jim, the poor fellow I love, is coming back. He is a poor weak impulsive man and he prays to me to defend him and make him strong.

I gave others my pride and joy. To you I give my sin, my folly, my weakness and sadness.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 2 September 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Your M.O of £3–5–0 arrived this morning (Thursday) and am anxiously waiting your wire. I hope you will be able to send enough for me to bring Eva.

She undergoes an operation of the tonsils in a day or two and the day after we could start.

I sent cards to all the people I mentioned and hope to begin my lessons for the second half of September.

If you have sent money for Eva and if I wire you that we both are leaving, get from the Jewman one of those camp beds large enough for her and Georgie, mattresses of crine vegetale and bolsters and pillow. No bedlinen. I will bring that, sheets, pillow slips, bolster slips and quilt.

I did not show MS to T.M.K. as he is to be married next week and I don’t think it would be a nice thing to give him to read. Had the S’s asked me to their house I would have presented them with a specially bound copy of C.M. that work of works.

Gogarty killed a child this week at Donnybrook by running over it in his motor.

I called to several places about E’s voice but could see nobody. J.M.S’s brother makes a lot of difficulty about the rights of that play so I think I will let him follow J.M.S. to the Wicklow quarter of hell.

The news I have is all tittle-tattle and will keep till I reach Trieste. I have had no trace of rheumatism in spite of all the rain and think it is the lithia I drink which is curing me.

Paddy Harding was knocked ‘off of’ a car at Clontarf and was unconscious for an hour.

Send me all the cash you can so that I may manage to bring Eva. It costs £6 a head.

Jim

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 3 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer I have not forgotten you here. I went to the Secretary of the Feis Ceoil, Mr Charles Wilson, 80 Waterloo Road, Dublin and spoke to him about your songs. He says that it is difficult to do anything until music is printed. As I did not know your intentions I said I thought you would perhaps do the whole suite in time. He said, however, that if you thought well of sending him the eight songs you have already done in MS copy, he would do what he could to bring them under the notice of singers and perhaps have them sung at one of the Feis concerts for a beginning.

I regret that so far I have been unable to lay hands on the right version of Billy Byrne.

As you were kind enough in a former letter to ask me something about my future works you will perhaps be glad to hear that Messrs Maunsel of Dublin have accepted for publication my book of stories Dubliners (of which I fancy I told you) and hope to bring it out next spring. With kind regards

James Joyce

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 3 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My true love Your present is lying before me on the table as I write, ready. I will now describe it to you. It is a flat square case of brown leather with two narrow golden borders. When you press a spring it opens and the case itself inside is cushioned with soft orange-coloured silk. A small square card lies in the case and on the card there is written in golden ink the name Nora and under that the dates 1904–1909. Under the card is the ornament itself. There are five little cubes like dice (one for each of the five years we have been away) made of yellowish ivory which is more than a hundred years old. These are drilled through and strung together on a thin gold fetter chain the links of which are like small safety pins so that the whole string forms a necklet and the clasp is at the back beside the middle dice. In the centre of the chain in the front and forming part of the chain itself (not hanging from it like a pendant) there is a small tablet also of yellowish ivory which is drilled through like the dice and is about the size of a small domino piece. This tablet has on both sides an inscription and the letters are engraved into it. The letters themselves were selected from an old book of types and are in the fourteenth century style and very beautiful and ornamental. There are three words engraved on the face of the tablet, two above and one underneath, and on the reverse of the tablet there are four words engraved, two above and two below. The inscription (when both sides are read) is the last line of one of the early songs in my book of verses, one which has also been set to music: and the line is therefore engraved three words on the face and four on the back. On the face the words are Love is unhappy and the words on the back are When Love is away. The five dice mean the five years of trial and misunderstanding, and the tablet which unites the chain tells of the strange sadness we felt and our suffering when we were divided.

That is my present, Nora. I thought over it a long time and saw every part of it done to my liking.

Save me, my true love! Save me from the badness of the world and of my own heart!

Jim

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 4 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I have been away in the West of Ireland and have just received your letter but regret that as I shall be passing through London very quickly next week I shall not have the time to call on you.

My book Dubliners has been accepted for publication by Messrs Maunsel of here who hope to bring it out early in the coming spring. Yours very truly

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 4 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I received your M.O. for £3.5.0 and tonight I had a wire from Central Office London saying that your telegraphic M.O. arrived too late for delivery tonight but that it would be delivered on Monday morning £4.0.0. This covers my fare (£6) and leaves a few shillings. Unfortunately I must dodge Italy on the way back as I could not pass Georgie again without a half ticket. I return by Boulogne–Bâle–Zurich–Innsbruck–Laibach, as on Austrian and Swiss railways the age limit is four.

I wire you tonight to wire £2.0.0, and if you do Eva, G– and I will start Tuesday night or Wednesday morning as the rest of her fare (but not more) can be managed, I think, and also her wardrobe.

When you have done this get a camp bed for her as I wrote you I will bring bedclothes.

If she does not start now she will never go. I shall remain until you wire me.

Once we are settled back in Trieste things will fall into shape and money will begin to come in rapidly.

Eva will hardly be an extra expense as I should have had to get a servant in any case and that would have cost me about 20 crowns a month, with which she can dress herself and take some lessons in typewriting and shorthand. She has learnt some dressmaking and says (or rather snorts) that she will be able to do something in that line.

Georgie has grown so big that I could not possibly pass him as under three. He is as big as a child of six.

I enclose two press cuttings which may interest you. Fallon is going into parliament, it is said.

I hope you will have sent Eva the £2 by the time you get this. If not, get it and do so.

Tell my creditors I shall be in Trieste in a week and will settle my bills then.

The enclosed is for Nora.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 5 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dearest girl Tomorrow night (Tuesday) if I get money wired for I hope to leave here with Eva and Georgie.

Now I have some news for you, my darling. My good friend Kettle is to be married on Wednesday and tonight I had a conversation of four hours with him. He is the best friend I have in Ireland, I think, and he has done me great services here. He and his wife are coming to Trieste to spend a day or two there during their honeymoon and I am sure that you, my darling, will help me to give them a good welcome. Put the house in order and be sure the piano is not lifted and see that your dresses are right. Get the carpenter to deliver that table and stools. He is a very good-hearted fellow and I am sure you will like his wife. Unfortunately I have no money to make them a present. But I will send on a copy of Chamber Music from London. Tell Stannie to take it to my binder and have it done exactly like the one for Schott and at once so that it will be ready when they come. We will try to entertain them the best way we can and I am sure that my warm-hearted girl will be glad to give pleasure to two people who are at the entrance of their life together. Will you not, dearest?

And now about ourselves. My darling, tonight I was in the Gresham Hotel and was introduced to about twenty people and to all of them the same story was told: that I was going to be the great writer of the future in my country. All the noise and flattery around me hardly moved me. I thought I heard my country calling to me or her eyes being turned towards me expectantly. But O, my love, there was something else I thought of. I thought of one who held me in her hand like a pebble, from whose love and in whose company I have still to learn the secrets of life. I thought of you, dearest, you are more to me than the world.

Guide me, my saint, my angel. Lead me forward. Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you. O take me into your soul of souls and then I will become indeed the poet of my race. I feel this, Nora, as I write it. My body soon will penetrate into yours, O that my soul could too! O that I could nestle in your womb like a child born of your flesh and blood, be fed by your blood, sleep in the warm secret gloom of your body!

My holy love, my darling Nora, O can it be that we are now about to enter the heaven of our life?

O, how I long to feel your body mingled with mine, to see you faint and faint and faint under my kiss!

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 7 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My little silent Nora Days and days have passed without a letter from you but I suppose you thought I would have left before now. We leave tomorrow night. By the end of the week or by Sunday we will be together, I hope.

Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself. And I think you see now what I feel towards you. You will not quarrel with me any more, will you, dear? You will keep my love always alive. I am tired tonight, my dearest, and I would like to sleep in your arms, not to do anything to you but just to sleep, sleep, sleep in your arms.

What a holiday! I have not enjoyed myself in the least. My nerves are in a dreadful state from worry of all kinds. Will you nurse me when I go back to you?

I hope you take that cocoa every day and I hope that little body of you⁠[rs] (or rather certain parts of it) are getting a little fuller. I am laughing at this moment as I think of those little girl’s breasts of yours. You are a ridiculous person, Nora! Remember you are now twenty-four and your eldest child is four. Damn it, Nora, you must try to live up to your reputation and cease to be the little curious Galway girl you are and become a full happy loving woman.

And yet how tender my heart becomes when I think of your slight shoulders and girlish limbs. What a rogue you are! Was it to look like a girl you cut away the hair between your legs? I wish you would wear black underclothes. I wish you would study how to please me, to provoke my desire of you. And you will, dearest, and we will be happy now, I feel.

How long the journey will be going back but O how glorious will be the first kiss between us. Do not cry, dear, when you see me. I want to see your eyes beautiful and aglow. What will you say to me first, I wonder?

La nostra bella Trieste! I have often said that angrily but tonight I feel it true. I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes Miramar. After all, Nora, it is the city which has sheltered us. I came back to it jaded and moneyless after my folly in Rome and now again after this absence.

You love me, do you not? You will take me now into your bosom and shelter me and perhaps pity me for my sins and follies and lead me like a child.

I would in that sweet bosom be

(O sweet it is and fair it is!)

Where no rude wind might visit me.

Because of sad austerities

I would in that sweet bosom be.

I would be ever in that heart

(O soft I knock and soft entreat her!)

Where only peace might be my part.

Austerities were all the sweeter

So I were ever in that heart.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Mountjoy St

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I got your wire ‘more impossible return immediately’. I am raising the rest from my publishers and all three leave on Thursday night. Get bed.

I send copies of papers containing notice of my article and T.M.K’s wedding. See that Prezioso and Vidacovich see the allusions to me and to P.d.S.

Copies of these papers as well as original P.d.S. you sent me are being sent tonight to G.B.S himself by my publisher with an account of me and of my forthcoming book Dubliners asking him to do what he can for it.

Kindly post copies of P.d.S. with this last article at once to:

W.A. Henderson, Abbey Theatre, Marlborough Street, Dublin

Esq Gilbert Beazley Esq, c/o Evening Telegraph, Dublin

Tell my pupils that I am resuming lessons from 15 Sept. Keep on the piano. Get table and stools from my carpenter and tell him everyone will be well paid during the winter. For Jesus’ sake don’t attack me with bills the moment I get in.

We go tomorrow night and perhaps on Saturday or Sunday will reach Trieste.

Eva was operated yesterday (thanks to me) by Woods and is better today. She will be able to travel tomorrow.

Eileen is to begin at the Leinster School of Music in October and I have engaged to pay 5/– a month for her: that will be 3 crowns for each of us.

Canvass your pupils to begin. Form classes. Make plenty of money.

I will make £500 out of Dubliners if they sell 12,000 copies.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 7 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dearest Tomorrow night we leave. At the last moment I have managed everything and Eva is coming. Prepare for us.

I was trying to recall your face but could only see your eyes. I want you to look your best for me when I come. Have you any nice clothes now? Is your hair a good colour or is it full of cinders? You have no right to be ugly and slovenly at your age and I hope now you will pay me the compliment of looking well.

I am excited all day. Love is a cursed nuisance especially when coupled with lust also. It is terribly provoking to think that you are lying waiting for me at this moment at the other end of Europe while I am here. I am not in a nice mood just now.

Let me talk of your present. Do you like the idea? Or do you think it as mad as myself? Has your mother or sister written to you about me? I rather fancy they liked me. How stupid I am asking you questions you have no time to answer!

Keep that piano and get a camp bed for Eva and Georgie. Be sure and have a fine warm dinner or supper or breakfast for us when we arrive. You will, won’t you? You will let me feel from the first moment I put my foot inside my house that I am going to be happy in every way. Don’t begin to tell me stories about debts we owe. I will ask you, darling, to be as kind to me as you can be as I am dreadfully nervous from all the worry and pensieri I have had, very very nervous indeed. How strange it will be when I first catch sight of you! To think of you waiting, waiting there for me to come back!

I hope you will like my sister Eva. People say it is unwise to bring a sister into the house but you asked me to, dear. You will be kind to her, I am sure, my good-hearted little Nora. And perhaps in two years’ time your sister Dilly will come to stay with us for a few months.

My darling, I have such a lot to tell you and will tell it to you every night in the intervals of doing something else. What a moment that is, dear! A brief madness or heaven. I know I lose my reason for the time it lasts. At first how cold you were, Nora, do you remember? You are a strange little person. And sometimes you are very warm indeed.

Have some appearance of money when I go back. Will you make me a nice cup of black coffee in a nice small cup? Ask that snivelling girl Globocnik how to do it. Make a good salad, will you? Another thing don’t bring onions or garlic into the house. You will think I am going to have a child. It is not that but I don’t know what to do I am so upset and excited.

My dear, dear, dear little Nora goodbye now for tonight. I wrote you every night. Now I am not too bad: and I am bringing you my gift. O, Lord, how excited I am!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 9 September 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

All three start in an hour. I send copies of F. and E.T. See that Schmitz sees E.T. notice but keep a copy for me. I managed a first class pass to London being member of Italian press and showed them P.d.S. and E.T. My publishers advanced £3 without any difficulty.

Get ready for Eva and tell Nora to prepare also for Kettle.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 12 September 1909

Milan

MS. Cornell

Domattina otto Pennilesse

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), 20 October 1909

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

[No salutation]

Reached here today and leave tonight for London. Tell Stannie to call on Latzer Via Veneziani, 2, II° to whom I wrote telling him my brother could give the lessons in my absence. Am rushing for train and fear I may miss it. Don’t fret

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 21 October 1909 Thursday morn

London

MS. Cornell

Arrived here safe. Very bad passage: sick. Will never travel again via Dieppe. Bearded Manager L N W R who gave me extension ticket 1st class Gratis!!! Travelling today, arrive tonight. Make Nora go to see Mme. Butterfly. Heard Caruso and a woman sing the love duo on a machine in Paris. Had to kick myself out of Paris or would have stayed there a week. Alvarez was singing in the Prophet and Mary Garden. Addio, Nora, addio, figlioli, addio Eva.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 22 October 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Reached here last night. Very bad passage. Have seen two or three premises and am having plans made. Tomorrow I interview the theatre inspector about the licence. Tell Nora to write to me and not to fret, as I think all will be right. Be sure she goes to M— B—

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [? 25 October 1909]

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My poor little lonely Nora I let so many days go by without writing because only a few minutes before I left Trieste you called me an imbecile because I came home late after being so busy all day. But now I am sorry for you. Please, Nora, do not say these things to me any more. You know I love you. Busy as I am ever since I came I think all day of what presents I can bring you. I am trying to buy for you a splendid set of sable furs, cap, stole, and muff. Would you like that?

I feel the day all wasted here among the common Dublin people whom I hate and despise. My only consolation is to speak about you to my sisters whenever I can as I used to do to your sister Dilly. It is very cruel for us to be separated. Do you think now of the words on your ivory necklet F I have three distinct images of you always in my heart this time. First, as I saw you the instant I arrived. I see you in the corridor, looking young and girlish in your grey dress and blue blouse and hear your strange cry of welcome. Second, I see you as you came to me that night when I lay asleep on the bed, your hair loose about you and the blue ribbons in your chemise. Lastly, I see you on the platform at the station the moment after I said goodbye to you, half turning away your head in grief with such a strange posture of helplessness.

You dear strange little girl! And yet you write to ask if I am tired of you! I shall never be tired of you, dearest, if you will only be a little more polite⁠[.] I cannot write you so often this time as I [am] dreadfully busy from morning to night. Do not fret, darling. If you do you will ruin my chances of doing anything. After this I hope we shall have many many many long years of happiness together.

My dear true good little Nora do not write again doubtfully of me. You are my only love. You have me completely in your power. I know and feel that if I am to write anything fine or noble in the future I shall do so only by listening at the doors of your heart.

What nice talks we had together this time, had we not, Nora? Well, we will again, dear. Coraggio! Please write me a nice letter, dear, and tell me you are happy.

Tell my handsome little son that I will come to kiss him some night when he is fast asleep and not to fret for me and that I hope he is better and tell that comical daughter of mine that I would send her a doll but that ‘l’uomo non ha messo la testa ancora’.

Now, my little bad-tempered bad-mannered splendid little girl, promise me not to cry but to give me courage to go on with my work here. I wish you would go to Madame Butterfly and think of me when you hear the words ‘Un bel di’

Jim

Keep my letters to yourself, dear. They are written for you.

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 27 October 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My darling Tonight the old fever of love has begun to wake again in me. I am a shell of a man: my soul is in Trieste. You alone know me and love me. I have been at the theatre with my father and sister—a wretched play, a disgusting audience. I felt (as I always feel) a stranger in my own country. Yet if you had been beside you [sic] I could have spoken into your ears the hatred and scorn I felt burning in my heart. Perhaps you would have rebuked me but you would also have understood me. I felt proud to think that my son—mine and yours, that handsome dear little boy you gave me, Nora—will always be a foreigner in Ireland, a man speaking another language and bred in a different tradition.

I loathe Ireland and the Irish. They themselves stare at me in the street though I was born among them. Perhaps they read my hatred of them in my eyes. I see nothing on every side of me but the image of the adulterous priest and his servants and of sly deceitful women. It is not good for me to come here or to be here. Perhaps if you were with me I would not suffer so much. Yet sometimes when that horrible story of your girlhood crosses my mind the doubt assails me that even you are secretly against me. A few days before I left Trieste I was walking with you in the Via Stadion (it was the day we bought the glassjar for the conserva). A priest passed us and I said to you ‘Do you not find a kind of repulsion or disgust at the sight of one of those men?’ You answered a little shortly and drily ‘No, I don’t’. You see, I remember all these small things. Your reply hurt me and silenced me. It and other similar things you have said to me linger a long time in my mind. Are you with me, Nora, or are you secretly against me?

I am a jealous, lonely, dissatisfied, proud man. Why are you not more patient with me and kinder with me? The night we went to Madame Butterfly together you treated me most rudely. I simply wanted to hear that beautiful delicate music in your company. I wanted to feel your soul swaying with languor and longing as mine did when she sings the romance of her hope in the second act Un bel di: ‘One day, one day, we shall see a spire of smoke rising on the furthest verge of the sea: and then the ship appears’. I am a little disappointed in you. Then another night I came home to your bed from the café and I began to tell you of all I hoped to do, and to write, in the future and of those boundless ambitions which are really the leading forces in my life. You would not listen to me. It was very late I know and of course you were tired out after the day. But a man whose brain is on fire with hope and trust in himself must tell someone of what he feels. Whom should I tell but you?

I love you deeply and truly, Nora. I feel worthy of you now. There is not a particle of my love that is not yours. In spite of these things which blacken my mind against you I think of you always at your best. If you would only let me I would speak to you of everything in my mind but sometimes I fancy from your look that you would only be bored by me. Anyhow, Nora, I love you. I cannot live without you. I would like to give you everything that is mine, any knowledge I have (little as it is) any emotions I myself feel or have felt, any likes or dislikes I have, any hopes I have or remorse. I would like to go through life side by side with you, telling you more and more until we grew to be one being together until the hour should come for us to die. Even now the tears rush to my eyes and sobs choke my throat as I write this. Nora, we have only one short life in which to love. O my darling be only a little kinder to me, bear with me a little even if I am inconsiderate and unmanageable and believe me we will be happy together. Let me love you in my own way. Let me have your heart always close to mine to hear every throb of my life, every sorrow, every joy.

Do you remember that Sunday evening coming back from Werther when the echo of the sad deathlike music was still playing in our memories that, lying on the bed in our room, I tried to say to you those verses I like so much of the Connacht Love Song which begin

‘It is far and it is far

To Connemara where you are’

Do you remember that I could not finish the verses? The immense emotion of tender worship for your image which broke out in my voice as I repeated the lines was too much for me. My love for you is really a kind of adoration.

Now, dearest, I want us to be happy. Try to get yourself into better health while I am away and please obey me in the small things I ask you to do. First, to eat as much as you can so that you may become more like a woman than the dear awkward-looking simple slender little girl you are. If that cocoa is out get Stannie to send an order for more: the cost is 5s/6d. In the meantime drink plenty of the other cocoa and chocolate. Pay some off the bill to your dressmaker. I sent you today two books of patterns to choose from. On Saturday I send you seven or eight yards of Donegal tweed to have a new dress made from. I have been inquiring about a set of furs for you and if my business turns out well here I will simply smother you in furs and dresses and cloaks of all kinds. I have some very fine furs in my mind for you.

Write now, my dear love, and tell me you are doing what I ask. Tell me you are happy because you see that I love you and am true to you and think of you. I am true to you, Nora, and I think of you all day and always.

Goodnight, darling. Be happy for this short time we are divided, and whenever you think of me give a kiss to my image in Georgie.

Addio, mia cara Nora!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 2[8] October 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Thanks for your papers. I am rather bad with sciatica along the leg. How is Georgie?

I sent today to Machnich plans of premises I can get in Mary Street, map of Dublin, and Corporation byelaws. Call there to explain and translate.

If he is coming tell him to let me know.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 30 October 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie If I have no reply today I shall wire Machnich to come as I am afraid place may be snapped up. Send as much as you can on 1st as I have laid in a winter stock of clothes and funds are low. When you get this buy half a dozen Brasile cigars and send them in a small box by letter post to Robert Cowell Esq, 14 Ranelagh Avenue, Dublin. Kindly do this by return as Mr Cowell has asked me particularly about them.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 1 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dear little Butterfly I got your letter this evening and am glad you like that photograph of your unworthy lover taken in all his warpaint. I hope you got my little present of gloves safely. I sent them just as I sent you my first present five years ago—from the ‘Ship.’ The nicest pair is that one of reindeer skin: it is lined with its own skin, simply turned inside out and should be warm, nearly as warm as certain districts of your body, Butterfly. Twelve yards (not eleven as I wrote) of tweed were sent you from Donegal. I would like the coat of your dress to reach nearly the base of the skirt and to be collared, belted and cuffed with dark blue leather and lined with bronze or dark blue satin. If this affair comes off and I am continued beyond the fifth of November and receive fresh money I hope to send you a splendid set of furs which I am selecting specially. They are grey squirrel. There would be a grey squirrel cap with violets at the side and a long broad flat stole of grey squirrel and a beige granny muff of the same on a steel chain, both lined with violet satin. Would you like that, dear? I hope I may be able to get it for you. I am also getting ready a special Xmas present for you. I have bought specially cut sheets of parchment and am copying out on them all my book of verses in indelible Indian ink. Then I will get them bound in a curious way I like myself and this book will last hundreds of years. I will burn all the other MSS of my verses and you will then have the only one in existence. It is very hard to copy on parchment but I work at it hoping it will give pleasure to the woman I love.

It is two o’clock at night. I have been copying here alone in the kitchen since they all went to bed and now I am writing to you. I wish I could look up and encounter those dog’s eyes of yours. I will try to deserve the trust they have in me.

Do not fret, little Butterfly. Here are a few lines of verse written four hundred years ago by a poet who was a friend of Shakespeare’s:

Tears kill the heart, believe.

O strive not to be excellent in woe

Which only breeds your beauty’s overthrow.

You are a sad little person and I am a devillishly melancholy fellow myself so that ours is a rather mournful love I fancy. Do not cry about that tiresome young gentleman in the photograph. He is not worth it, dear.

It is very good of you to enquire about that damned dirty affair of mine. It is no worse anyhow. I was alarmed at your silence first. I feared you had something wrong. But you are all right, are you not, dearest? Thank God! Poor little Nora, how bad I am to you!

Never mind Eva but you might see that Stannie looks after himself. I hope he is better now. Addio, Giorgino e Lucetta! Vengo subito! And addio, Nora mia!

Jim

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 2 November 1909

c/o Finns Hotel, Nassau Street

MS. Cornell

dear Mr Joyce how can I thank you for your kindness the box of Gloves which you sent me are lovely and a splendid fit it was a great surprise to get such a nice present I hope you are quite well, and will be very pleased to see you I hope you will write to me and let me know when I am to meet you again at present I am rather busy and cant get out for some time I hope you will excuse me and accept many thanks

Nora Barnacle

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 November 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Thanks for papers. Have not read them yet. Received this evg M’s letter and V’s wire. Tomorrow I shall set to work as instructed. The delay in M’s coming is rather awkward but as they say they will send earnest money I suppose they mean business. Nothing can be done in fusees: too dangerous to forward and to make. I have got an agency for Irish tweeds and send Steiner samples tomorrow. Hope Nora got safely my box of gloves and parcel of homespun. Hope you are better. Chuck the exercising. Did T.M.K. acknowledge my present? Examiners not appointed yet. D.J. O’D got librarianship. If M makes as many mistakes travelling as he does in writing Italian he will end in Archangel.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 November 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

I send you copy of Sinn Fein with two stories by my rival, the latest Irish genius, James Stephens. Ask Nora if she likes the style of Irish gowns in the pictures. If so I could get her the patterns. The politician is Cruise O’Brien and the poet is Colm. I wrote M today sending an estimate for installation of electric light. Also corporation scale of charges per British unit: this could be converted by an electrical engineer into foreign units if there is a difference. I have been unable to conclude anything definite today about licence or lease. Hope you are better. Did you send cigars to Cowell? M’s delay in coming is most untoward.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 8 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Have interview tomorrow with dog-man. Tell the Count. Did Bartoli conduct well L’EdiA. How is your barreltone tenor getting on? How are you off financially. I expected to have had some remittance from you after the first as agreed. I have laid in a good stock of clothes and of the money forwarded by Machnich a good part will go to keep up this house. How are you. For God’s sake don’t go about without an overcoat. Will I send you heavy stuff for one? I send you another story by Stephens. Tell me if they are good. Fusees no go. Got agency for stuffs and sent Steiner 100 samples. Call to help him. Urge M to come

Jim

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 9 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer I am back here again as you see. Mr Best (ex-secretary of the Feis Ceoil) told me yesterday that his successor, Mr Charles Wilson, had written to you about your settings of my verses with a view to having them brought out. Have you done anything in the matter? I have spoken about you to the manager of Messrs Maunsel, Publishers, of here and he gave me to understand that something might be done in conjunction with a musical firm. Messrs Maunsel brought out a book of four songs by C. Milligan Fox. I heard one of them but your music is much finer. Is not the proprietor of Messrs Maunsel & Co, Mr Maunsel Hone of Killiney, some connection of yours? I heard he was. Perhaps you could interest him in the music. Yours very truly

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 10 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I suppose you have too many lessons to write. I sent all kinds of samples to Steiner and hope he may do business on them. I also wrote out a long report on coursing for Sordina. Tell Schmitz I hope to do his business at the end of the week. The advising examiners to the Intermediate have been appointed but the Italian examiner will not be appointed till April. Poppie will be here tomorrow on her way to New Zealand. I have practically arranged with Roberts for the correction of proofs of my stories this month. I understand that certain others of my songs have been set to music by a man in Belfast named Hughes. Pappie’s eyes are bad and he must consult an oculist on Saturday. I have been repeatedly passed by the Sheehys—why? Is Eva getting acclimatised? There is nothing for her to do here. Have you an overcoat? Answer this question. I want you on receipt of these presents to take my crest out of its frame at once and send it to me at once by registered post as the binder is waiting for it. Do not write me details of assets and debts but tell me in a general way if the Trieste branch is above par. You see Charlie is in a bad way. I wish I could do something for him with T.M.K. but cannot in the face of later developments.

Tell me how Machnich & Co are satisfied with their agent. Have I not done well for them? I doubt if anyone else could have done better. Coates, the landlord, first gave me a promise of 2 years’ lease. Then he ran it up to 5. Then I pretended to be hot on other premises and brought him down to 3. I wrote yesterday to Vidacovich. Have you seen the letter. Today I wired under instructions of landlord and can do no more. Let them do their part now. I wish you had written telling me your impressions of the affair. I learn there will be elections next spring and that W Fallon B.A. will be M.P. Roger Greene is dead. I hope you go on with Bartoli. Don’t be discouraged by his sleepy manner. He has heard a lot of tenors in his day and that, added to his natural fat, makes him unenthusiastic. I know he will teach you no vices. I see by the papers that the Beri his shule of languages has bobbed up again. How is la Direzione della the Beri his shule? How is Francini getting on? Remember me to Schmitz, be sure. Don’t forget the crest. Write a letter when you can. Chuck exercising and tell Nora I said she was to feed you well. Don’t eat salads or drink tea. Is Nora in good health. Tell me the truth. Did you send a remittance? I never got it if you did. I wanted to buy a set of furs I have in my mind. Try to get fat.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 17 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I received tonight your wire: Wire i?4 writ landlord. I left Trieste a month ago. Since then I wrote you several times and had no answer. This is your first communication to me except a few lines scribbled on the back of Machnich’s scrawl. When I left Trieste I handed over to you the following pupils: Popper, Bolaffio, Veneziani (Mrs), Castelbolognese, Sordina to say nothing of Höberth, Bartoli and Latzer. These I presume paid you or some of them in addition to your own pupils. Was nothing out of the money paid to landlord? From your wire I gather that he is suing for the months of October and November—two months, as you say to wire £4t. I am going now to the G.P.O. to wire you: Spedisco posta consulti avvocato. I enclose you a receipt for 82 crowns, owed me for postal, telegraphic and copying expenses by my principals. Present it to Vidacovich whom I authorise to pay you. Tomorrow morning as soon as Cook’s is open I shall go and buy a 20 crown note and send it so that you will have it a few hours after this. That will be 52 crowns. Raise 4.66 and pay at once one month and promise double rent on 1st December. I cannot send more. Pappie is in Jervis Street Hospital (eyes) and I am supporting this house. The provisional contract will be presented to me at any moment to be stamped (£1–10–0) and I must keep some money myself. A notice to quit has been served on this house for the 1st of December so that, thank God, we will all be on the pavement together for Xmas.

Charlie writes me that he is destitute, has sold everything for food, goes out at six in the morning to look for work etc and his wife is ailing. I cannot approach Kettle but I have got a most urgent letter for him to an influential man in Boston: and send it express tomorrow. What will happen here I don’t know as Pappie is on the broad of his back in hospital.

I paid over £50 earnest money on Mary Street. Plans go before Corporation tomorrow and will be passed I am assured. The licence then follows at once. A letter from Vidacovich tells me that Machnich is leaving for Bucarest (dated last Friday). A telegram from the same quarter says he leaves for Dublin today (Wednesday). Up to now (midnight) his departure has not been telegraphed to me. If he does not come or wire I am in a most difficult position. My solicitor writes tomorrow to Vidacovich to have my partners give me power of attorney to sign lease, insurance policy and licence. I write either to Machnich or Vidacovich long letters nearly every night, reporting all I have done but receive contradictory and tardy replies. Machnich was due here on the 5th by contract. Has he left Trieste for Bucarest or Dublin or does he intend to leave?

My letters to him and to you are not the only ones that go unanswered. I wrote to Steiner (on whom I asked you to call) enclosing a long report on Irish tweeds, Donegals and suitings and accompanying it with a parcel of nearly 100 samples. No acknowledgement and no answer. I wrote to Count Sordina a long letter of ten or twelve pages like this containing every scrap of information, names and addresses, I could find relating to coursing. No acknowledgement and no answer from him either.

To sum up my position is this. I have sent stuff and gloves to Trieste, bought an overcoat and boots for Eileen and am supporting this house and spent £1–10–0 for telegrams and registered letters. The stamp duty on the contract now lying in Charlie Murray the solicitor’s office is £1–10–0. If that document is not stamped within 7 days its validity can be impugned. It was signed two days ago and I may be called on at any moment for the stamping. Not to be able to stamp it would again excite the suspicions of the landlord who gave both Murray and myself no end of trouble by his constant changes of front and evasions. In addition I must keep to carry on this house till the 1st of December. More dieta falls due to me on this day week (25th inst) but Machnich may again delay and leave me waiting. I don’t know how much I must also reserve as fee for applying for licence, to say nothing of other possible expenses.

Now about the landlord again. I don’t know the terms of our agreement or in what time according to Austrian law he can put us out. I send you the equivalent for 32 crowns and by the next post express 20 crowns. Pay one month at once as I said and if Machnich comes I will send more on the 25th. You need have no hesitation in presenting receipt for payment. In my letter to V last night I tendered a detailed note of my outlay independent of the dieta summing to £1–7–0 = 32 crowns. 56 Cr. 66 should keep the landlord quiet for a week at least so that I fancy we are more in danger of the street here than you there if Pappie continues helpless.

I shall be in a state of continual agitation until I hear from you how the affair is shaping. In the meantime have recourse to your solicitor Paulini who knows you and can persuade Scholz that you are una persona per bene. Send me a wire at once (the one word ‘Rounded’) and I shall know you have rounded this corner. Prevent an eviction at all costs. Should the 32 crowns have been already sent me by V I shall wire it back to you five minutes after I receive it.

In somma on Saturday or Sunday you will be in a position to pay 56.66 and perhaps on that day week another 56.66. Surely to Christ you cannot be evicted in that case. Wire at once. I post this now 2 a.m. It goes off at 5 a.m. At 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. I send the 20 crowns by express post, that is 5 hours after. Both will reach you by Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. If V has sent me money I shall have it also Saturday or Sunday and shall rewire it. I send this also express.

Jim

Don’t leave me without a wire from you. Sell every stick in the house if necessary, to prevent Nora and Georgie and Lucia from being put out in this weather. Jesus Christ, what a fearful muddle! Wire

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 18 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

I dare not address you tonight by any familiar name.

All day, since I read your letter this morning, I have felt like a mongrel dog that has received a lash across the eyes. I have been awake now for two whole days and I wandered about the streets like some filthy cur whose mistress had cut him with her whip and hunted him from her door.

You write like a queen. As long as I live I shall always remember the quiet dignity of that letter, its sadness and scorn, and the utter humiliation it caused me.

I have lost your esteem. I have worn down your love. Leave me then. Take away your children from me to save them from the curse of my presence. Let me sink back again into the mire I came from. Forget me and my empty words. Go back to your own life and let me go alone to my ruin. It is wrong for you to live with a vile beast like me or to allow your children to be touched by my hands.

Act bravely as you have always done. If you decide to leave me in disgust I will bear it like a man, knowing that I deserve it a thousand times over, and will allow you two thirds of my income.

I begin to see it now. I have killed your love. I have filled you with disgust and scorn for me. Leave me now to the things and companions I was so fond of. I will not complain. I have no right to complain or to raise my eyes to you any more. I have utterly degraded myself in your sight.

Leave me. It is a degradation and a shame for you to live with a low wretch like me. Act bravely and leave me. You have given me the finest things in this world but you were only casting pearls before swine.

If you leave me I shall live for ever with your memory, holier than God to me. I shall pray to your name.

Nora, remember something good of the poor wretch who dishonoured you with his love. Think that your lips have kissed him and your hair has fallen over him and that your arms have held him to you.

I will not sign my name because it is the name you called me when you loved me and honoured me and gave me your young tender soul to wound and betray.

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 19 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

[No salutation]

I received two very kind letters from her today so that perhaps after all she still cares for me. Last night I was in a state of utter despair when I wrote to her. Her slightest word has an enormous power over me. She asks me to try to forget the ignorant Galway girl that came across my life and says I am too kind to her. Foolish good-hearted girl! Does she not see what a worthless treacherous fool I am? Her love for me perhaps blinds her to it.

I shall never forget how her short letter to me yesterday cut me to the quick. I felt that I had tried her goodness too far and that at last she had turned on me with quiet scorn.

Today I went to the hotel where she lived when I first met her. I halted in the dingy doorway before going in I was so excited. I have not told them my name but I have an impression that they know who I am. Tonight I was sitting at the table in the dining-room at the end of the hall with two Italians at dinner. I ate nothing. A pale-faced girl waited at table, perhaps her successor.

The place is very Irish. I have lived so long abroad and in so many countries that I can feel at once the voice of Ireland in anything. The disorder of the table was Irish, the wonder on the faces also, the curious-looking eyes of the woman herself and her waitress. A strange land this is to me though I was born in it and bear one of its old names.

I have been in the room where she passed so often, with a strange dream of love in her young heart. My God, my eyes are full of tears! Why do I cry? I cry because it is so sad to think of her moving about that room, eating little, simply dressed, simple-mannered and watchful, and carrying always with her in her secret heart the little flame which burns up the souls and bodies of men.

I cry too with pity for her that she should have chosen such poor ignoble love as mine: and with pity for myself that I was not worthy to be loved by her.

A strange land, a strange house, strange eyes and the shadow of a strange, strange girl standing silently by the fire, or gazing out of the window across the misty College park. What a mysterious beauty clothes every place where she has lived!

Twice while I was writing these sentences tonight the sobs gathered quickly in my throat and broke from my lips.

I have loved in her the image of the beauty of the world, the mystery and beauty of life itself, the beauty and doom of the race of whom I am a child, the images of spiritual purity and pity which I believed in as a boy.

Her soul! Her name! Her eyes! They seem to me like strange beautiful blue wild-flowers growing in some tangled, rain-drenched hedge. And I have felt her soul tremble beside mine, and have spoken her name softly to the night, and have wept to see the beauty of the world passing like a dream behind her eyes.

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 19 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Got your letter today. M and R arrived here at 5.30 p.m. and are safely installed at present in Finn’s Hotel. Dublin has impressed them very much. I got M to wire Vidacovich to pay you the 32 crowns so that with 20 I sent you can pay one month’s rent at least. I wish Steiner would even acknowledge: it has made a bad impression on the people here. I hope the debts are now a little better. Pappie has conjunctivitis and a slight form of iritis. Tomorrow I shall know whether plans of Mary Street were passed. If you authorise me I will send stuff for overcoating. If Bartoli gives you seven crowns send it and I shall send cocoa. Will send cocoa to Nora at once. Send me by return (registered) my crest.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 22 November 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dearest Your telegram lay on my heart that night. When I wrote you those last letters I was in utter despair. I thought I had lost your love and esteem—as I well deserved to do. Your letter to me this morning is very kind but I am waiting for the letter you probably wrote after sending the telegram.

I hardly dare to be anyway familiar with you yet, dear, until you give me leave again. I feel I ought not to, though your letter is written in your old familiar roguish way. I mean, when you say what you will do to me if I disobey you in a certain matter.

I will venture to say just one thing. You say you want my sister to bring you across some underlinen. Please don’t, dear. I don’t like anyone, even a woman or a girl, to see things belonging to you. I wish you were more particular in leaving certain clothes of yours about, I mean, when they have come from the wash. O, I wish that you kept all those things secret, secret, secret. I wish you had a great store of all kinds of underclothes, in all delicate shades, stored away in a great perfumed press.

How wretched it is to be away from you! Have you taken your poor lover to your heart again? I shall long for your letter and yet I thank you for your kind good telegram.

Do not ask me to write a long letter now, dearest. What I have written above has saddened me a little. I am tired of sending words to you. Our lips together, our arms interwoven, our eyes swooning in the sad joy of possession, would please me more.

Pardon me, dearest. I intended to be more reserved. Yet I must long and long and long for you.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 27 November 1909 Saturday evg.

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dearest Nora I leave tonight in a moment for Belfast and must miss your letter tonight. Tomorrow I come back and will write again. Dream of me Your lover

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 2 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My darling I ought to begin by begging your pardon, perhaps, for the extraordinary letter I wrote you last night. While I was writing it your letter was lying in front of me and my eyes were fixed, as they are even now, on a certain word in it. There is something obscene and lecherous in the very look of the letters. The sound of it too is like the act itself, brief, brutal, irresistible and devilish.

Darling, do not be offended at what I wrote. You thank me for the beautiful name I gave you. Yes, dear, it is a nice name ‘My beautiful wild flower of the hedges! My dark-blue, rain-drenched flower!’. You see I am a little of a poet still. I am giving you a lovely book for a present too: and it is a poet’s present for the woman he loves. But, side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it. My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. I have taught you almost to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or murmuring to your soul the passion and sorrow and mystery of life and at the same time have taught you to make filthy signs to me with your lips and tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches and noises, and even to do in my presence the most shameful and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you pulled up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you while you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.

You are mine, darling, mine! I love you. All I have written above is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart.

Nora, my faithful darling, my sweet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl, be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging mistress! my little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 2 December 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Our plans have been approved of and we now await police licence for music. I am busy from early morning till late at night. Cut down expenses as much as possible and pay the landlord and the piano. I must try to save £10 to cover Eileen’s fare and my own and I know that the burden of this house will be thrown all on my shoulders in a week. I send you settings of my songs by Reynolds whom I met in Belfast and a setting of It is Far. A book of Dublin verse has come out containing three of mine, Strings, Bid Adieu and What Counsel. We expect to leave here on the 27th to be in time for Capo d’anno. How is your voice getting on? Roberts promised me the first proofs for next week. Our advts go on the hoardings tomorrow. Eileen and Eva can manage together all January then Eva can return by herself. M’s brother-in-law Novak our manager and the operator arrived tonight and are also at Finn’s. I see nobody and am of course dead sick of Dublin. Burn all copies in MS of my Chamber Music. Get an overcoat.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 3 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My darling little convent-girl, There is some star too near the earth for I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire. Today I stopped short often in the street with an exclamation whenever I thought of the letters I wrote you last night and the night before. They must read awful in the cold light of day. Perhaps their coarseness has disgusted you. I know you are a much finer nature than your extraordinary lover and though it was you yourself, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you were longing to be fucked by me yet I suppose the wild filth and obscenity of my reply went beyond all bounds of modesty. When I got your express letter this morning and saw how careful you are of your worthless Jim I felt ashamed of what I had written. Yet now, night, secret sinful night, has come down again on the world and I am alone again writing to you and your letter is again folded before me on the table. Do not ask me to go to bed, dear. Let me write to you, dear.

As you know, dearest, I never use obscene phrases in speaking. You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others. When men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile. Yet you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes. It was your lips too which first uttered an obscene word. I remember well that night in bed in Pola. Tired of lying under a man one night you tore off your chemise violently and got on top of me to ride me naked. You stuck my prick into your cunt and began to ride me up and down. Perhaps the horn I had was not big enough for you for I remember that you bent down to my face and murmured tenderly ‘Fuck up, love! fuck up, love!’

Nora dear, I am dying all day to ask you one or two questions. Let me, dear, for I have told you everything I ever did and so I can ask you in turn. I wonder will you answer them. When that person whose heart I long to stop with the click of a revolver put his hand or hands under your skirts did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you? If he did, did they go up far enough to touch that little cock at the end of your cunt? Did he touch you behind? Was he a long time tickling you and did you come? Did he ask you to touch him and did you do so? If you did not touch him did he come against you and did you feel it?

Another question, Nora. I know that I was the first man that blocked you but did any man ever frig you? Did that boy you were fond of ever do it? Tell me now, Nora, truth for truth, honesty for honesty. When you were with him in the dark at night did your fingers never, never unbutton his trousers and slip inside like mice? Did you ever frig him, dear, tell me truly or anyone else? Did you never never, never feel a man’s or a boy’s prick in your fingers until you unbuttoned me? If you are not offended do not be afraid to tell me the truth. Darling, darling, tonight I have such a wild lust for your body that if you were here beside me and even if you told me with your own lips that half the redheaded louts in the county Galway had had a fuck at you before me I would still rush at you with desire.

God Almighty, what kind of language is this I am writing to my proud blue-eyed queen! Will she refuse to answer my coarse insulting questions? I know I am risking a good deal in writing this way, but if she loves me really she will feel that I am mad with lust and that I must be told all.

Sweetheart, answer me. Even if I learn that you too have sinned perhaps it would bind me even closer to you. In any case I love you. I have written and said things to you that my pride would never again allow me to say to any woman.

My darling Nora, I am panting with eagerness to get your replies to these filthy letters of mine. I write to you openly because I feel now that I can keep my word with you.

Don’t be angry, dear, dear, Nora, my little wild-flower of the hedges. I love your body, long for it, dream of it.

Speak to me, dear lips that I have kissed in tears. If this filth I have written insults you bring me to my senses again with the lash as you have done before. God help me!

I love you, Nora, and it seems that this too is part of my love. Forgive me! forgive me!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 6 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Noretta mia! I got your pitiful letter this evening telling me you were going about without underclothes. I did not get 200 crowns on the 25th but only 50 crowns and 50 again on the 1st. Enough about money. I send you a little banknote and hope you may be able to buy a pretty frilly pair of drawers at least for yourself out of it and will send you more when I am paid again. I would like you to wear drawers with three or four frills one over the other at the knees and up the thighs and great crimson bows in them, I mean not schoolgirls’ drawers with a thin shabby lace border, tight round the legs and so thin that the flesh shows between them but women’s (or if you prefer the word) ladies’ drawers with a full loose bottom and wide legs, all frills and lace and ribbons, and heavy with perfume so that whenever you show them, whether in pulling up your clothes hastily to do something or in cuddling yourself up prettily to be blocked, I can see only a swelling mass of white stuff and frills and so that when I bend down over you to open them and give you a burning lustful kiss on your naughty bare bum I can smell the perfume of your drawers as well as the warm odour of your cunt and the heavy smell of your behind.

Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you. You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments. I dream of you in filthy poses sometimes. I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them until I see how you write yourself. The smallest things give me a great cockstand—a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind, and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. At such moments I feel mad to do it in some filthy way, to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies, to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks and eyes, to stick it up between the cheeks of your rump and bugger you.

Basta per stasera!

I hope you got my telegram and understood it.

Goodbye, my darling whom I am trying to degrade and deprave. How on God’s earth can you possibly love a thing like me?

O, I am so anxious to get your reply, darling!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 8 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumbrous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometime too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your hot drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 9 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My sweet naughty little fuckbird, Here is another note to buy pretty drawers or stockings or garters. Buy whorish drawers, love, and be sure you sprinkle the legs of them with some nice scent and also discolour them just a little behind.

You seem anxious to know how I received your letter which you say is worse than mine. How is it worse than mine, love? Yes, it is worse in one part or two. I mean the part where you say what you will do with your tongue (I don’t mean sucking me off) and in that lovely word you write so big and underline, you little blackguard. It is thrilling to hear that word (and one or two others you have not written) on a girl’s lips. But I wish you spoke of yourself and not of me. Write me a long long letter, full of that and other things, about yourself, darling. You know now how to give me a cockstand. Tell me the smallest things about yourself so long as they are obscene and secret and filthy. Write nothing else. Let every sentence be full of dirty immodest words and sounds. They are all lovely to hear and to see on paper even but the dirtiest are the most beautiful.

The two parts of your body which do dirty things are the loveliest to me. I prefer your arse, darling, to your bubbies because it does such a dirty thing. I love your cunt not so much because it is the part I block but because it does another dirty thing. I could lie frigging all day looking at the divine word you wrote and at the thing you said you would do with your tongue. I wish I could hear your lips spluttering those heavenly exciting filthy words, see your mouth making dirty sounds and noises, feel your body wriggling under me, hear and smell the dirty fat girlish farts going pop pop out of your pretty bare girlish bum and fuck fuck fuck fuck my naughty little hot fuckbird’s cunt for ever.

I am happy now, because my little whore tells me she wants me to roger her arseways and wants me to fuck her mouth and wants to unbutton me and pull out my mickey and suck it off like a teat. More and dirtier than this she wants to do, my little naked fucker, my naughty wriggling little frigger, my sweet dirty little farter.

Goodnight, my little cuntie I am going to lie down and pull at myself till I come. Write more and dirtier, darling. Tickle your little cockey while you write to make you say worse and worse. Write the dirty words big and underline them and kiss them and hold them for a moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment and hold them in under your dear little farting bum. Do more if you wish and send the letter then to me, my darling brown-arsed fuckbird.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 9 December 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Delay in opening as Recorder is not sitting and we must have his licence. Are trying to get a provisional one. Have found a singer for my songs, W. Sheehan who is J.C. Doyle’s rival. He wants to see them. Send the eight carefully registered. Why has Schmitz not replied to my letter? Contrattempo also owing to non-arrival of machine. All ready at my end. We go to Cork on Sunday for a day. Am to get proofs next week. If you see Vidacovich tell him that I cannot reply as my partners and I have not yet come to terms on the changes in contract. This house is now entirely on my shoulders, and my dieta is given in small bits.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 10 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dearest I am awfully disappointed by your letter tonight. All day I was planning to get together the little note I enclose and wondering what you would write to me.

I wired you Be careful. I meant be careful to keep my letters secret, be careful to let nobody see your excitement and be careful not to (I am half ashamed to write it now). I was afraid, Nora, you might get so hot that you would give yourself to somebody.

Buy something nice with this note, dearest. I shall be dreadfully miserable if these last letters of ours come to an end. I am exhausted with this business here. Last night I was not in bed till near five between letters and advertisements and telegrams.

Your letter is so cold I have no heart to write you like before. I have gazed a long time at your other letters and kissed certain words in them, one of them over and over again.

Perhaps tomorrow you will write again. Good night, dearest.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 11 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dearest Nora No letter from you again tonight. You have not answered.

The four Italians have left Finn’s Hotel and live now over the show. I paid about £20 to your late mistress, returning good for evil. Before I left the hotel I told the waitress who I was and asked her to let me see the room you slept in. She brought me upstairs and took me to it. You can imagine my excited appearance and manner. I saw my love’s room, her bed, the four little walls within which she dreamed of my eyes and voice, the little curtains she pulled aside in the morning to look out at the grey sky of Dublin, the poor modest silly things on the walls over which her glance travelled while she undressed her fair young body at night.

Ah not lust, dearest, not the wild brutal madness I have written to you these last days and nights, not the wild beast-like desire for your body, dearest, is what drew me to you then and holds me to you now. No, dearest, not that at all but a most tender, adoring, pitiful love for your youth and girlhood and weakness. O the sweet pain you have brought into my heart! O the mystery your voice speaks to me of!

Tonight I will not write to you as I have done before. All men are brutes, dearest, but at least in me there is also something higher at times. Yes, I too have felt at moments the burning in my soul of that pure and sacred fire which burns for ever on the altar of my love’s heart. I could have knelt by that little bed and abandoned myself to a flood of tears. The tears were besieging my eyes as I stood looking at it. I could have knelt and prayed there as the three kings from the East knelt and prayed before the manger in which Jesus lay. They had travelled over deserts and seas and brought their gifts and wisdom and royal trains to kneel before a little new-born child and I had brought my errors and follies and sins and wondering and longing to lay them at the little bed in which a young girl had dreamed of me.

Dearest, I am so sorry I have not even a poor five lire note to send you tonight but on Monday I will send you one. I leave for Cork tomorrow morning but I would prefer to be going westward, toward those strange places whose names thrill me on your lips, Oughterard, Clare-Galway, Coleraine, Oranmore, towards those wild fields of Connacht in which God made to grow ‘my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower’.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Fragment of a letter), [? 13 December 1909]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

go to others? You can give me all and more than they can. Do you believe in my love at last, dearest? Ah, do, Nora! Why everyone who has ever seen me can read it in my eyes when I speak of you. As your mother says ‘they light up like candles in my head’

The time will fly now, my darling, until your loving tender arms encircle me. I will never leave you again. Not only do I want your body (as you know) but I want also your company. My darling, I suppose that compared with your splendid generous love for me my love for you looks very poor and threadbare. But it is the best I can give you, my own dear sweetheart. Take it, my love, save me and shelter me. I am your child as I told you and you must be severe with me, my little mother. Punish me as much as you like. I would be delighted to feel my flesh tingling under your hand. Do you know what I mean, Nora dear? I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh. I wish you were strong, strong, dear, and had a big full proud bosom and big fat thighs. I would love to be whipped by you, Nora love! I would love to have done something to displease you, something trivial even, perhaps one of my rather dirty habits that make you laugh: and then to hear you call me into your room and then to find you sitting in an armchair with your fat thighs far apart and your face deep red with anger and a cane in your hand. To see you point to what I had done and then with a movement of rage pull me towards you and throw me face downwards across your lap. Then to feel your hands tearing down my trousers and inside clothes and turning up my shirt, to be struggling in your strong arms and in your lap, to feel you bending down (like an angry nurse whipping a child’s bottom) until your big full bubbies almost touched me and to feel you flog, flog, flog me viciously on my naked quivering flesh!! Pardon me, dear, if this is silly. I began this letter so quietly and yet I must end it in my own mad fashion.

Are you offended by my horrible shameless writing, dear? I expect some of the filthy things I wrote made you blush. Are you offended because I said I loved to look at the brown stain that comes behind on your girlish white drawers? I suppose you think me a filthy wretch. How will you answer those letters? I hope and hope you too will write me letters even madder and dirtier than mine to you.

You can if you only wish to, Nora, for I must tell you also that [breaks off]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 14 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Many happy returns!

I hope this time next year we may have a banquet out of Alessandro Volta.

We shall open on Friday or Saturday if all goes well.

Then fifteen days more and Eileen and I leave for Trieste.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 15 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dearest No letter! only a short rude one from Stannie. For God’s sake let me be spared any of the old trouble or I shall end in a madhouse. Try, dear, till your lover comes back to make things run smoothly. I can write no more. What does he fight with me for? I am doing my best for you all. Please, dear, give him plenty to eat and let him be comfortable. Don’t bother him about debts: and for God’s sake don’t bother me about them. I sent you pictures. Get him to put them up in the kitchen, the big one opposite the fire. Put up well.

No letter! Now I am sure my girlie is offended at my filthy words. Are you offended, dear, at what I said about your drawers? That is all nonsense, darling. I know they are as spotless as your heart. I know I could lick them all over, frills, legs and bottom. Only I love in my dirty way to think that in a certain part they are soiled. It is all nonsense, too, dear, about buggering you. It is only the dirty sound of the word I like, the idea of a shy beautiful young girl like Nora pulling up her clothes behind and revealing her sweet white girlish drawers in order to excite the dirty fellow she is so fond of; and then letting him stick his dirty red lumpy pole in through the split of her drawers and up up up in the darling little hole between her plump fresh buttocks.

Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the G.P.O. though I have three letters to post.

To bed—to bed!

Goodnight, Nora mia!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie It is 1 a.m. I have just come home from Mary St. where I have been for the last hour or so in a cellar under the house in the middle of electric wires. The show is not open yet. Every day there are disappointments. If I were to write you all the confusion here you would not find it amusing in the least. On Saturday night for example I was up till 4.30 a.m. sending express letters and telegrams for the Società to Trieste, London and Bucarest. I got home and a cannon woke me up at 7 a.m. I drove in the pelting rain and fog to Kingsbridge. We left for Cork at 8 a.m. and arrived at 1 p.m. For five rainy dreary hours we were mooning about Cork. At 6 p.m. we left for Dublin and arrived at 11.30 p.m. I was home at midnight, dined and sat down to write with the result that I got to my ricketty, naked bed at 3 a.m. Since this work began I have never been in bed before 3 or 3.30.

I had no end of trouble and anxiety concerning landlords, and builders &c. Now the electrical engineer has left us in the lurch and the Società blames me for choosing him. How was I to know (I forgot to say that the trip to Cork was put down to my expense and cost me my share of outlay!!). I sent two advance posters to you today (designed by me) and that is all the news I have. I have not even got the licence yet as the Recorder is not sitting at present though I have had plenty of Irish promises. I am busy night, noon and morning. To my advts in the papers for staff hands &c I got nearly 200 replies and had to interview about 50 of them. I did not wish to write either to you, Schmitz, Francini or Vidacovich until the hall is open as I know the scalogna that follows me. I will wire the moment we open.

As for money if you are supporting the Trieste branch I am doing the same here and have been practically since I came. Besides this Devin has borrowed money from me twice and wants me to ask M and R to go security for him for a loan!! MacDonnell, the medical student, also borrows from me every time I see him so does ‘Corley’ whom I ran into a tram to avoid. I don’t refuse them because I am thinking of my book. I have bought clothes for Eileen to help her get away from here with me and train her voice.

Even if you have many lessons I suppose you have a peaceful house and good food. I have neither here and have much more work to do than you have. .

At the present moment I have barely enough money to carry this house till Sunday. Get the chairs upholstered at M’s: same colour as sofa. Tell creditors I am opening C— in Dublin, show them posters and that will quiet them. Hang the posters in the kitchen with paste.

I hope to open on Saturday and if so I shall be back in three weeks and am quite willing to allow you I/₃ of my profits.

Very tired now

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 16 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My sweet darling girl At last you write to me! You must have given that naughty little cunt of yours a most ferocious frigging to write me such a disjointed letter. As for me, darling, I am so played out that you would have to lick me for a good hour before I could get a horn stiff enough even to put into you, to say nothing of blocking you. I have done so much and so often that I am afraid to look to see how that thing I had is after all I have done to myself. Darling, please don’t fuck me too much when I go back. Fuck all you can out of me for the first night or so but make me get myself cured. The fucking must all be done by you, darling, as I am so small and soft now that no girl in Europe except yourself would waste her time trying the job. Fuck me, darling, in as many new ways as your lust will suggest. Fuck me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy, either straddling across my legs when I am sitting in a chair and riding me up and down with the frills of your drawers showing and my cock sticking up stiff in your cunt or riding me over the back of the sofa. Fuck me naked with your hat and stockings on only flat on the floor with a crimson flower in your hole behind, riding me like a man with your thighs between mine and your rump very fat. Fuck me in your dressing gown (I hope you have that nice one) with nothing on under it, opening it suddenly and showing me your belly and thighs and back and pulling me on top of you on the kitchen table. Fuck me into you arseways, lying on your face on the bed, with your hair flying loose naked but with a lovely scented pair of pink drawers opened shamelessly behind and half slipping down over your peeping bum. Fuck me if you can squatting in the closet, with your clothes up, grunting like a young sow doing her dung, and a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside. Fuck me on the stairs in the dark, like a nursery-maid fucking her soldier, unbuttoning his trousers gently and slipping her hand in his fly and fiddling with his shirt and feeling it getting wet and then pulling it gently up and fiddling with his two bursting balls and at last pulling out boldly the mickey she loves to handle and frigging it for him softly, murmuring into his ear dirty words and dirty stories that other girls told her and dirty things she said, and all the time pissing her drawers with pleasure and letting off soft warm quiet little farts behind until her own girlish cockey is as stiff as his and suddenly sticking him up in her and riding him.

Basta! Basta per Dio!

I have come now and the foolery is over. Now for your questions!

We are not open yet. I send you some posters. We hope to open on the 20th or 21st. Count 14 days from that and 3½ days for the voyage and I am in Trieste.

Get ready. Put some warm-brown-linoleum on the kitchen and hang a pair of red common curtains on the windows at night. Get some kind of a cheap common comfortable armchair for your lazy lover. Do this above all, darling, as I shall not quit that kitchen for a whole week after I arrive, reading, lolling, smoking, and watching you get ready the meals and talking, talking, talking, talking to you. O how supremely happy I shall be!! God in heaven, I shall be happy there! I figlioli, il fuoco, una buona mangiata, un caffè nero, un Brasil, il Piccolo della Sera, e Nora, Nora mia, Norina, Noretta, Norella, Noruccia ecc ecc …

Eva and Eileen must sleep together. Get some place for Georgie. I wish Nora and I had two beds for night-work. I am keeping and shall keep my promise, love. Time fly on, fly on quickly!! I want to go back to my love, my life, my star, my little strange-eyed Ireland!

A hundred thousand kisses, darling!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 20 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My sweet naughty girl I got your hot letter tonight and have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit? It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck half-way out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shite ready to fall put your arms round my neck in shame and shit it down softly. The sound will madden me and when I pull up your dress

No use continuing! You can guess why!

The cinematograph opened today. I leave for Trieste on Sunday 2 January. I hope you have done what I said about the kitchen, linoleum and armchair and curtains. By the way don’t be sewing those drawers before anybody. Is your dress made. I hope so—with a long coat, belted and cuffed with leather etc. How I am to manage Eileen’s fare I don’t know. For God’s sake arrange that you and I can have a comfortable bed. I have no great wish to do anything to you, dear. All I want is your company. You may rest easy about my going with— You understand. That won’t happen, dear.

O, I am hungry now. The day I arrive get Eva to make one of the threepenny puddings and make some kind of vanilla sauce without wine. I would like roast beef⁠[,] rice-soup, capuzzi garbi, mashed potatoes, pudding and black coffee. No, no I would like stracotto di maccheroni, a mixed salad, stewed prunes, torroni, tea and presnitz. Or no I would like stewed eels or polenta with ...

Excuse me, dear, I am hungry tonight.

Nora darling, I hope we will pass a happy year together. Am writing Stannie tomorrow about cinematograph.

I am so glad I am now in sight of Miramar. The only thing I hope is that I haven’t brought on that cursed thing again by what I did. Pray for me, dearest.

Addio, addio, addio, addio!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 22 December 1909

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, We opened on Monday. Half an hour before an electrician, a Sinn Feiner, recommended by O’L.C., left us in the lurch and I had to scour Dublin for substitute. I send copies of papers. Go at once to Prezioso, show them and get in a par: I nostri Triestini in Irlanda or like that. A little allusion to me and a little to the enterprise of the proprietors of Edison and Americano (without giving their names) in opening here. Also the copies of P. and P.d.S., which Rebez subscribes for are to be sent after Sunday 26/xii/09 to Giovanni Rebez Cinematograph Volta, Bucarest, Roumania. Poor houses as yet: terrible weather.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 22 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dearest Nora I send you by this post registered, express and insured a Christmas present. It is the best thing (but very poor after all) that I am able to offer you in return for your sincere and true and faithful love. I have thought every detail of it when lying awake at night or racing on cars around Dublin and I think it has come out nice in the end. But even if it brought only one quick flush of pleasure to your cheek when you first see it or made your true tender loving heart give one quick bound of joy I would feel well, well, well repaid for my pains.

Perhaps this book I send you now will outlive both you and me. Perhaps the fingers of some young man or young girl (our children’s children) may turn over its parchment leaves reverently when the two lovers whose initials are interlaced on the cover have long vanished from the earth. Nothing will remain then, dearest, of our poor human passion-driven bodies and who can say where the souls that looked on each other through their eyes will then be. I would pray that my soul be scattered in the wind if God would but let me blow softly for ever about one strange lonely dark-blue rain-drenched flower in a wild hedge at Aughrim or Oranmore.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 23 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dearest Nora By the time you get this you will have received my present and my letter and will have passed your Christmas. Now I want you to get ready for my coming. If nothing extra turns up I leave Ireland on Saturday 1 January at 9.20 p.m. with Eileen, though how or where I am to get the money I don’t know. I hope you have put the posters in the kitchen. I intend to paper it week by week with the programmes. If you could get a few yards of linoleum or even an old carpet and any kind of a brokendown comfortable cheap armchair for the kitchen and a cheap common pair of red curtains I think I would be very comfortable there. Is it at all possible for us to have a bed more? Perhaps Francini would sell us his by the month. I sent you every penny I could spare, dearest, but now I am stranded as the present I gave you, you little nuisance, cost me a terrible lot of soldi. But don’t think I am sorry, darling. I am delighted to have given you something so fine and beautiful. Now, darling, urge on Stannie to help me to get back promptly with Eileen and then we will begin our life together once more. O how I shall enjoy the journey back! Every station will be bringing me nearer to my soul’s peace. O how I shall feel when I see the castle of Miramar among the trees and the long yellow quays of Trieste! Why is it I am destined to look so many times in my life with eyes of longing on Trieste? Darling, when I go back now I want you always to be patient with me. You will find, dear, that I am not a bad man. I am a poor impulsive sinful generous selfish jealous dissatisfied kind-natured poet but I am not a bad deceitful person. Try to shelter me, dearest, from the storms of the world. I love you (do you believe it now, darling?) and O I am so tired after all I have done here that I think when I reach Via Scussa I will just creep into bed, kiss you tenderly on the forehead, curl myself up in the blankets and sleep, sleep, sleep.

Darling, I am so glad you like my picture as a child. I was a fierce-looking infant, was I not? And really, dear, I am just as big a child now as I was then. The foolishest things are always coming into my head. You know the picture of the man with his finger up in the Piccolo della Sera which you say is ‘Jim making some new suggestion’. I am sure, darling, in your heart of hearts you must think I am a poor silly boy. You proud little ignorant saucy dear warm-hearted girl how is it that I cannot impress you with my magnificent poses as I do other people? You see through me, you cunning little blue-eyed rogue, and smile to yourself knowing that I am an impostor and still you love me.

Dearest, there is one part of your letter I hardly like to allude to. I have no right whatsoever to do so and I recognise that you are free to act as you wish. I will not ask you to remember our children. But remember that we loved each other truly as boy and girl almost in that heavenly summer five years ago in Dublin. Darling, I am a sad-hearted person in reality and O I believe that if such a thing as you seem to be thinking of took place I could not live. No, dear, I am too jealous, too proud, too sad, too lonely! I would not go on living, I think. Even now I feel my heart so quiet and sorrowful at the thought that I can only stare at the words I am writing. How sad life is, from one disillusion to another!

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 23 December 1909

44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie My plans are to leave Ireland with Eileen on Saturday night week (1. Jan 1910). The first thing you must send at once is the Indicatore Generale delle Ferrovie dell’Alta Italia for Dec 1909 and Jan 1910, price 25c. ‘Volta’ is open and doing fairly well. On the 29th I appear before Recorder in order to get licence for music. If that is granted I leave as above. Try to get in some big payment by 29, 30 or 31 inst and wire all you can. Devin was to have paid me today and did not do so. If notice appears in P. d. S. show it also to my creditors. It will have a good effect especially on Scholz. This is such a dreadful house that it is a God’s act to rescue Eileen from it. Let us try to manage it. I dread the sea this weather. I am awfully tired after all the worry I have had. Don’t let the posters get torn. Will send more tomorrow. Tomorrow is Xmas Eve but I am in a state of absolute apathy about it. Hope you enjoyed yourselves. Tell my pupils I am due there in a few days. Hope you went on regularly with Bartoli. Have sent cards to all my pupils. Hope you were not offended by my card. I sent it for a joke. Nora’s mother sent me a turkey as a Xmas box but I wish I was in Via Scussa. It is four a.m. (4 a.m.) now. Have been up making a/cs with Soci. M and R leave for Bucarest on Xmas Day. Got V’s letter, points will be discussed more fully in Trieste. A third composer, Herbert Hughes, wants to set my verses or has set some of them. Could not possibly send money for Xmas. Try to wire a good lift. Chance of a lifetime ‘My chaunce and wöch.’

Enjoy yourselves well. Drink my health (?) in good strong puncetti. Tell Giorgino I am per la strada. Hope all will turn out well. Try to get some ‘cork-lino’ for kitchen. Explain to my pupils that I have no time to write them. Rheumatism seems to be better but am awfully played out.

Wire all you can. Book cost me occhio della testa. No matter if some temporary inconvenience is caused as I presume Alessandro Volta will come to the rescue one day. Am serious about your having J. Why not? All the money I have I spend. ‘We may be happy yet’. Wire what you can e poi si suona il campanello di partenza. Abfahrt! O, that poor well-meaning Oesterreische [sic] railway-man! I am sure he has a rather large family.

Get in plenty of coal and wood. Will not be seeing anyone for a week after arrival.

After all, I managed to do it and I suppose the bori will come in. Help your poor sister!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 24 December 1909

Xmas eve 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My darling Nora I have just wired you the beautiful motive from the last act of the opera you like so much Werther: ‘Nel lieto dì pensa a me’. And as it was too late to wire you money I paid £1 to my partner here Rebez and got him to wire to Caris in Trieste to pay Signora Joyce immediately 24 crowns. I hope you will have a merry Xmas, darling.

Now, dearest, I expect Stannie will wire me all he can for the 1st so that I can start.

Darling, I am in a most dreadful state of excitement at present. All day I have been in the middle of the bustling Xmas crowd down at the cinematograph. There was a young constable there on special duty. When it was over I took him upstairs to give him a drink and found he was from Galway and his sisters were at the Presentation Convent with you. He was amazed to hear where Nora Barnacle had ended. He said he remembered you in Galway, a handsome girl with curls and a proud walk. My God, Nora, how I suffered! Yet I could not stop talking to him. He seems a fine courteous-mannered young man. I wondered did my darling, my love, my dearest, my queen ever turn her young eyes towards him. I had to speak to him because he came from Galway but O how I suffered, darling. I am dreadfully excited. I don’t know what I am writing. Nora, I want to go back to you. Forget everybody but me, darling. I am sure there are finer fellows in Galway than your poor lover but 0, darling, one day you will see that I will be something in my country. How excited and restless I feel! I enclose his sister’s names. I saw that he was astonished at how you had ended. But, O God, would I not give you all the Kingdoms of this world if I only could. O, darling, I am so jealous of the past and yet I bite my nails with excitement whenever I see anybody from the strange dying western city in which my love, my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, passed her young laughing girlish years. Nora dearest, why are you not here to comfort me? I must end this letter I am so dreadfully excited. You love me, do you not, my dearest bride? O, how you have twisted me round your heart! Be happy, my love! My little mother, take me into the dark sanctuary of your womb. Shelter me, dear, from harm! I am too childish and impulsive to live alone. Help me, dear, pray for me! Love me! Think of me! I am so helpless tonight, helpless, helpless!

Jim

A million kisses to my darling dew-laden western flower, a million million kisses to my dear Nora of the curls.

Jim

Your mother sent that present and I wrote to thank her.

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), [26 December 1909]

S. Stephen’s Day 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dearest I got your letter (a very scatter-brained one too) this morning and the wedding-card you enclose. Don’t send any present for me. Keep all you can. Ask Stannie to wire me what he can next week. Hope you got safely my present and telegram and the £11 sent you through Caris. Hope to start this day week. Thanks for your good wishes for Xmas and I hope you got over it fairly well. Tell G. and L. that I am coming soon and to keep their noses clean. I hope they had a pleasant time. Addio,

Jim

Keep a little torrone and mandorlato for Eileen.

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1910

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note probably delivered by hand), 12 February 1910

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie There is a summons here and people are calling for bills. I have no money whatsoever. I have four new pupils next week but till then cannot get anything. Kindly come here unless we are to starve.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 March 1910

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Please arrange with your landlord to have room ready for Bödoker’s lesson 8–9 tonight. Otherwise let me know and I must telephone him to abandon the lesson as he can’t come here.

On the understanding that you would keep the house I laid out what I got in paying bills. The 25 Cr. you gave Nora will last till Thursday evg. After that what do you expect me to do?

You owe me:

1.60 (balance theatre)

2.50 (half of 5 lire sent May)

4.10

I wish you would save me these continual rows as I have already too many worries. I will take A Set of Six. Leave it out for me and Bartoli’s magazine. By the way, we must arrange his walk. He will be offended if not.

Kindly give it up, as I am unwell: and tell me how I am to feed the house.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 March 1910

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I know nothing of any 40 crowns. Zannoni’s man was here six times in three days. He had orders to take the piano yesterday but I prevailed on him to wait another day. As I have already paid 300 crowns I think it would be silly to lose it. Kindly send me today at least one month for him and I will pay the other and in addition some money for the house which you arranged to give if I paid the bills. If not I must sell part of my furniture. I do not understand your obscure threats! but I paid the money. I got away relying on your promise to keep the house going.

Jim

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 4 April 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, Trieste

Dear Sir: It is now three years since you published Chamber Music and I would be glad to hear if the sales have brought in anything to my profit. Therefore I would ask you to send me an account to date by return.

When I was in Belfast last autumn Mr W. Reynolds, musical critic of the Belfast Evening Telegraph, gave me some settings he had made of certain of the songs and complained to me that you had refused to give him permission to set them. Illness and various business prevented me from writing you earlier on this matter. I cannot understand why you did not give him leave. I had a letter today from Mr O’Brien Butler, the Irish composer of the opera Muir gheis, who writes that he admires the verses very much and will perhaps set some of them. Should he write you thereon I do not see why such permission should be withheld. I was told in Dublin that a Mr Hughes had also done some of the songs and one has even been set by a young Italian musician here. Seeing that no fewer than five composers seem to have been at work on the book and in the light of the press notices which were all very favourable, I am quite at a loss to understand how the book has brought me in nothing so far.

I will ask you for a line in reply and trust it may be of an encouraging nature.

Perhaps it will interest you to know that my long-delayed book of stories Dubliners will come out in Dublin early in June published by Messrs Maunsel.

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 15 May 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, Trieste

Dear Sir: I am in receipt of your favour of 9 inst and a/c of sales to date. I am very much surprised at the fewness of the copies sold and think the book could have been pushed more in view of the good notices it got on all sides.

From your letter to Mr Reynolds I gather that as far back as September 1908 nos. XXXI and XXIX were secured by him. Mr Molyneux Palmer set nos. I, III, VI, VIII, XVI, XXVIII, XXXI, IX and Mr Reynolds sent me also a setting of XXII and XX. It seems to me therefore that eleven of the songs were set in all. According to an agreement 50% of the monies received by you for such rights should fall to me (see clause 5). I would therefore be glad to hear on what terms you may have disposed of the songs in question.

Mr Reynolds’ ground of complaint is not very clear to me but I am writing him today on the matter.

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 21 May 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Sir In reply to yours of 18th inst possibly the book was well pushed in England as you say but it certainly was not in Ireland. When I was there last summer very many people complained to me that it had never been in the windows at all. I have arranged with Messrs Maunsel that when my book of stories Dubliners comes out he is to insert a leaflet containing press notices of C.M. so that the new book should give the verses a further push. Perhaps you could come to some understanding with Messrs Maunsel on the subject and it would be to your advantage as well as to mine. At the same time (and in spite of the philosophical temper of the poets you allude to) I am surprised at the lowness of the sales. Mr Symons wrote me a day or so after its publication that an American lady had bought 12 copies. I had the enclosed leaflet printed at my own expense and myself disposed of at least 30 copies here and in other cities where I lived. I have arranged with a local bookseller to take on fifty copies of Dubliners here and these are already subscribed for. Perhaps I could induce him at the same time to take on a score of copies of the verses.

As regards musical fees as it is now three years since the book appeared I should feel obliged if you will kindly remit me by return the amount (50%) due to me on same as per agreement.

The moral of Mr Reynolds’s complaints is that should Mr O’Brien Butler write for leave to music part of the book you are to facilitate him. So far as I understood Mr Reynolds his ground of complaint was that you had refused me [sic] leave to set one song, saying that you had disposed of the exclusive right of it. Yours very truly

James Joyce

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To MRS JOHN MURRAY, 3 June 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, primo piano, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yale

Dear Aunt Lillie We are all greatly shocked and grieved to hear of Uncle John’s sudden death and I trust you will allow me to offer you in the name of all here our sincere sympathy with you in your sorrow. We do not wish to intrude on your grief but hope that when you can find the heart to do so you will perhaps write to tell us something more as the short note this morning told us nothing and we did not even know that he had been ill.

For my own part allow me to say that I am very sorry indeed to hear of my poor uncle’s death. Everybody in this world has a different point of view and so we are often estranged to a certain extent from one another. But I am very glad to remember his friendliness to me and my little son and his courteous hospitality to both of us.

I wish to say that Stannie and Eileen and Eva unite their condolences with mine and will write to you also themselves.

Jim

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To THEODORE SPICER-SIMSON, 8 June 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, primo piano, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Princeton

Dear Mr Spicer-Simson Many thanks for so kindly remembering me and I am glad your Sterne night went off so well. I would like to have been present and I hope your club may pay a like honour to some other fellow-countrymen of mine who stand higher than L.S, for example, Jonathan Swift (who could preside over a very fantastic night) or Oliver Goldsmith.

There is a very good reason for my apparent rudeness. While I was in Dublin I had to oversee the rebuilding of a kind of hall and between the snow and the damp and rain I got a bad attack of rheumatic inflammation of the iris of the eye. I had to leave Ireland at once (with black bandages over both my eyes) and come back here where I was in bed in a half-dark room for close on two months. Had it not been for my sister who travelled with me across Europe I should certainly have ended under the wheels of some train or car. I was only an hour in Paris on the way back. I am all right again now and am very busy correcting the proofs of my new book Dubliners which is to come out in a few weeks. As you were kind enough to express an interest in it I will be glad to let you know more about it if you will drop me a line but I don’t care to do so now as I am afraid it might look like trumpeting my own wares.

Thanks also for your card which I shall add to my collection. If you did anything for the Sterne programme in the way of illustration I should like a copy too.

I enclose some extracts of press reviews of a book of my verses which came out in London some three years ago. I regret that it is so incomplete as I forgot to have the later ones added. Have you ever heard of a Mr Adolph Mann, a composer? I received this morning a printed copy of one of the songs in my book set by him. Another composer, Mr Molyneux Palmer, has also done eight of them and a Mr Reynolds, who is musical critic to the Belfast Evening Telegraph has done two. It is a pity I live so far away that I cannot follow events very closely.

I may be in Paris this summer on my way to Ireland or perhaps in the autumn. If I do I shall look you up.

Always at your service and with kind regards to Mrs Spicer-Simson Yours very sincerely

James Joyce

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 11 June 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, Trieste

Dear Mr Palmer: Your letter has just been sent on here from Dublin.

I do not know the North of Ireland except a little of Belfast. If you intended to go west or south I could guide you better. However, I have inquired from an Irish friend of mine here, a Mr Price, who comes from the Ards of Down. He says if you wish to go to Donegal your best centres would be Londonderry, Letterkenny or Ballyshannon. Your best plan would be to insert at once an advertisement in The Derry Sentinel, published in Derry saying that you want to board at the figure you state. You should get plenty of answers. If you like I will write to a friend of mine in Belfast, a Mr Reynolds who is musical critic of the Belfast Evening Telegraph and has set two or three of the songs from C.M. Perhaps he might know of a vacancy such as you desire in Ulster. I fancy by your name that you are a protestant. Could you not write directly to the headquarters of the Irish Church in Dublin offering your services and stating your qualifications which are surely too good! This would be the shortest way.

Mr Elkin Mathews has sent me a published setting of O, it was out by Donnycarney composed by a Mr Adolph Mann who has written me a very kind and flattering letter and seems to be at work on two other songs in the book. The song I mention has now been set by three composers but Mr Mann has secured the rights of it so that I am afraid that even if you should find a publisher, you cannot publish yours. I am sorry for this but I thought you had protected your rights on those settings. There is another composer, a fourth, who I think will do some of them also. I am in a rather strange position in the matter so that I think it is better to leave the matter in Mr Elkin Mathews’ hands. My reason, however, for writing you is to let you know how the case is lest you should perhaps blame me afterwards. I think your music is very elegant and would like it to be sung.

Many thanks for your kind enquiries about my writing. I have not written any more verse but am busy correcting the proofs of my new book Dubliners (a volume of stories) which Messrs Maunsel and Co, Dublin, are to bring out next month. I hope it may interest you though I don’t think you will recognise me in it at a first glance as it is somewhat bitter and sordid.

Please let me know how you fare about the Donegal project.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 13 June 1910

Via Scussa 8, I°

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie Volta is to be sold tomorrow to the Provincial Theatre Co,

Ltd for £1000. This is the society I told Pappie to offer it to. If he had done so I should have got 4000 crowns and he £20 commission from me. Novak, a stranger, has succeeded in doing it. They are depositing 1000 crowns for me with Vidacovich and tomorrow at 11 a.m. I have to go to the British consulate to dispatch a power of attorney for the sale. Coates has accepted the new tenants who have taken the place for ten years and, of course, will make it pay for of course Dublin will give support to Englishmen, but not to Irish and Italians. I believe Novak has dropped nearly all his money in the affair. They are losing 40% of their capital. Kindly call here as early as possible tomorrow (Tuesday) morning as I want to wind up the affair properly. I leave here before ten as I have a lesson. They have lost money and there is no reason why I should make them lose more so I decided to accept the terms. Had Pappie done what I told him two months ago I should have made £150. Price is ill in bed and asks will we go to see him tomorrow. I sent word to them to come here but Mrs Price came to say that their journey has to be put off. Come up here on receipt of this.

Jim

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From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 15 June 1910

Charlton [London]

My dear Mr Joyce, I am sorry indeed that I could not take leave from you in a proper manner. On Saturday I did not know yet that I had to start so soon. Be so kind to excuse me.

You were so excited over the cynematograph-affair that during the whole travel I remembered your face so startled by such wickedness. And I must add to the remarks I already have done that your surprise at being cheated proves that you are a pure literary man. To be cheated proves not yet enough. But to be cheated and to present a great surprise over that and not to consider it as a matter of course is really literary. I hope you are now correcting your proofs and not frightened to be cheated by your publisher. Otherwise the book could not be a good one.

We are here in good health.

I am smoking and my wife is enjoying the new surroundings. By and by she will be caught by her Anglomania and you will have at hand time to speak to her against your oppressors.

Please remember me most kindly to your brother.

I am, dear Mr. Joyce Yours very truly

Ettore Schmitz

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To ADOLPH MANN, 24 June 1910

Via Vincenzo Scussa 8, I°, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Mrs Adolph Mann

Dear Mr Mann First of all I must ask you to excuse me for not having answered before now your very kind letter. As you will see I have had some troubles which prevented me from doing so.

Your setting of my song is the third I have heard. I find it very happy in tone and the sliding scale on the third line makes a very nice effect. I suppose if you set Lean out of the window it will be in the same vein. This vein is a little strange to me now as I wrote the verses six or seven years ago but I had it brought back to me very clearly when I heard your music. If it is sung perhaps you would let me know as I live rather far away and cannot follow the fate of the songs.

It is very kind of you to inquire about what I am writing. I have published only Chamber Music but am just now engaged in correcting the proofs of a new book, a volume of stories, Dubliners which Messrs Maunsel & Co, Dublin, will bring out next month. If it should come your way I wonder whether it will please you: but it is not lyrical!

I hope you will write to me and let me know if you set other songs in the book and, thanking you for your kindness and courtesy I am very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1911

To GEORGE ROBERTS, 3 January 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. National Library

Dear Roberts Thanks for the book you sent to my son and for copy of Kettle’s book you sent me. I don’t like the binding and lettering of the latter and hope you remember what was decided on for Dubliners.

Is that book to be published, as you write, on 20 January definitely? If so, will you let me know whether you have arranged for the sale of 50 copies to Messrs Schimpff of here, whether you have written to Elkin Mathews about remainder copies of Chamber Music and whether you have had a sheet printed for insertion in Dubliners containing extracts of press notices of Chamber Music. You write that you have sent me proofs of Ivy Day in the Committee-Room. None reached me. Why do you send it? I made corrections on the proof already sent.

A friend of mine here wishes to order from you some books by Yeats. Can you send on a list of those you published?

Best wishes for the New Year, very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 January 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste

MS. Cornell

[No salutation]

Dr Paul Marquardt, Acquedotto 16, offers you a lesson between 7 and 9 p.m., four pupils and asks you to call.

I take the opportunity of letting you know (as you have no doubt heard) that I am about to leave Trieste. Your friend Miss O’Brien (of London) has made copious apologies to me (whether for herself alone or for other I am not concerned to know) and I learn that your charges express tearful compunction. I intend to do what Parnell was advised to do on a similar occasion: clear out, the conflict being beneath my dignity, and leave you and the cattolicissime to make what you can of the city discovered by my courage (and Nora’s) seven years ago, whither you and they came in obedience to my summons, from your ignorant and famine-stricken and treacherous country. My irregularities can easily be made the excuse of your conduct. A final attempt at regularity will be made by me in the sale of my effects, half of which will be paid in by me to your account in a Trieste bank where it can be drawn on or left to rot according to the dictates of your conscience.

I hope that your mind will be properly benefited by the barter you have made of me and mine against the aforesaid Cockney virgin and comfortress of the afflicted and the preoccupied Christographer of the Via dell’Olmo (on whom the editor of the Fortnightly Review will shortly wait in person) and that, when I have left the field, you and your sisters will be able, with the meagre means at your disposal, to carry on the tradition I leave behind me in honour of my name and my country.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 22 January 1911

Barriera Vecchia 32, III

MS. Cornell

It may interest you to hear that Dubliners, announced for publication for the third time yesterday 20 January, is again postponed sine die and without a word of explanation. I know the name and tradition of my country too well to be surprised at receiving three scrawled lines in return for five years of constant service to my art and constant waiting and indifference and disloyalty in return for the 150,000 francs of continental money which I have deflected into the pockets of hungry Irishmen and women since they drove me out of their hospitable bog six years ago.

Jim

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To J.M. HONE, 10 July 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Cornell

Dear Sir Following up a letter I sent you some time ago I enclose copy of letter I am sending today to ‘Messrs Maunsel’ of Dublin. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MAUNSEL and COMPANY, 10 July 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste, Austria

MS. Cornell

In a letter I wrote you some time ago I proposed either deletion of the passage in dispute with a prefatory note of explanation by me or arbitration as a solution of the matter. No reply has been sent me.

If no reply is sent me to this letter I shall consider that you have no intention of publishing the book and shall communicate the whole matter of the dispute in a circular letter to the Irish press and at the same time take legal action against you through my solicitor in Dublin for breach of contract. Yours sincerely

James Joyce

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 July 1911

11 Gt. Denmark St.

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim, You will excuse me for not writing you sooner about my little darling’s sad death but I could not bring myself to do so. I even try to keep my mind off my great sorrow as much as possible, but in vain.

She was taken ill on Thursday (one month today) and on Friday said she felt better and on Saturday she remained in bed complained of headache. I thought it may have been a gastric or bilious attack but on Monday I brought Dr. Macnamara to see her and he pronounced it Typhoid and at once telephoned to Cork St Fever Hospital to send the cab for her. My poor darling cried and did not want to go to Hospital but it was the only chance for her life, as she got the best skill and attention there. She would not get either here. I can’t go into the details of her lingering illness. She became unconscious the day before she died and remained so to the end. I was with her for over an hour the day she died and I think she knew me. She got her sickness in this accursed hole. But this perhaps for the best, as she was too sensative and highly-strung to endure the troubles of this wretched world. She is with her Mother who idolized her, and has left me to linger on, a broken hearted old man, but only for a very short time now until I will follow my darling Maime and my ‘doatie darlie’ to where partings are not known. I am now most anxious to die, having lost the only one (except you) who loved me.—I must thank you, Jim, for your kind and sympathetic letter and remittance and the beautiful wreath. Everything was carried out as it should be and as you would wish. So much for the past—now the present has been made so unbearable to me by the callous, unnatural treatment I am receiving from my three daughters, that I am resolved to leave Dublin and them on the 1st prox. Since my poor baby died they have left me alone, and refuse to even take a walk with me. Everyone here, as in the last house we stayed in, crys shame on them for their cruel conduct towards their Father. I will allow Florrie £2 a month out of my cheque, and Eva will have £1 or 25/ from you and May has nearly 10/ per week all found, so that the three can live well until they get some employment—but live with them any longer, after the eight years of misery I have endured, is out of the question. Now that all I loved, or loved me, has been taken from me, I am anxious you should have the family portraits &c. how can I manage that? I know you will set proper value on them when I am dead and gone. Do, Jim, for the sake of the old love we had for each other. My health is breaking down and my eyes are bad again, as you see by this writing, but when I come out of Hospital, if I do—I will go to Cork and perhaps never see one of you again—I should wish greatly to see you and Stannie and Georgie once more before I die. But I fear it is not possible. Now Jim, as time is short let me have a few lines by return. You and Stannie have acted nobly towards paying a last fond tribute of your love for your darling sisters memory. I feel proud of you both—Give my love to all and for the short balance of my life think of me as your fond, though heartbroken

Father.

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To the EDITOR, 17 August 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Cornell

Sir May I ask you to publish this letter which throws some light on the present conditions of authorship in England and Ireland?

Nearly six years ago Mr Grant Richards, publisher, of London signed a contract with me for the publication of a book of stories written by me, entitled Dubliners. Some ten months later he wrote asking me to omit one of the stories and passages in others which, as he said, his printer refused to set up. I declined to do either and a correspondence began between Mr Grant Richards and myself which lasted more than three months. I went to an international jurist in Rome (where I lived then) and was advised to omit. I declined to do so and the MS was returned to me, the publisher refusing to publish notwithstanding his pledged printed word, the contract remaining in my possession.

Six months afterwards a Mr Hone wrote to me from Marseilles to ask me to submit the MS to Messrs Maunsel, publishers, of Dublin. I did so: and after about a year, in July 1909, Messrs Maunsel signed a contract with me for the publication of the book on or before 1 September 1910. In December 1909 Messrs Maunsel’s manager begged me to alter a passage in one of the stories, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, wherein some reference was made to Edward VII. I agreed to do so, much against my will, and altered one or two phrases. Messrs Maunsel continually postponed the date of publication and in the end wrote, asking me to omit the passage or to change it radically. I declined to do either, pointing out that Mr Grant Richards of London had raised no objection to the passage when Edward VII was alive and that I could not see why an Irish publisher should raise an objection to it when Edward VII had passed into history. I suggested arbitration or a deletion of the passage with a prefatory note of explanation by me but Messrs Maunsel would agree to neither. As Mr Hone (who had written to me in the first instance) disclaimed all responsibility in the matter and any connection with the firm I took the opinion of a solicitor in Dublin who advised me to omit the passage, informing me that as I had no domicile in the United Kingdom I could not sue Messrs Maunsel for breach of contract unless I paid £100 into court and that, even if I paid £100 into court and sued them, I should have no chance of getting a verdict in my favour from a Dublin jury if the passage in dispute could be taken as offensive in any way to the late king. I wrote then to the present king, George V, enclosing a printed proof of the story with the passage therein marked and begging him to inform me whether in his view the passage (certain allusions made by a person of the story in the idiom of his social class) should be withheld from publication as offensive to the memory of his father. His Majesty’s private secretary sent me this reply:

Buckingham Palace

The private secretary is commanded to acknowledge the receipt of Mr James Joyce’s letter of the 1 instant and to inform him that it is inconsistent with rule for His Majesty to express his opinion in such cases. The enclosures are returned herewith 11 August 1911

Here is the passage in dispute:

—But look here, John,—said Mr O’Connor.—Why should we welcome the king of England? Didn’t Parnell himself…?—

—Parnell,—said Mr Henchy,—is dead. Now, here’s the way I look at it. Here’s this chap come to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He’s a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself:—The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By Christ, I’ll go myself and see what they’re like.—And are we going to insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? Eh? Isn’t that right, Crofton?—

Mr Crofton nodded his head.

—But after all now,—said Mr Lyons, argumentatively,—King Edward’s life, you know, is not the very …—

—Let bygones be bygones.—said Mr Henchy—I admire the man personally. He’s just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He’s fond of his glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman. Damn it, can’t we Irish play fair?—

I wrote this book seven years ago and, as I cannot see in any quarter a chance that my rights will be protected, I hereby give Messrs Maunsel publicly permission to publish this story with what changes or deletions they may please to make and shall hope that what they may publish may resemble that to the writing of which I gave thought and time. Their attitude as an Irish publishing firm may be judged by Irish public opinion. I, as a writer, protest against the systems (legal, social and ceremonious) which have brought me to this pass. Thanking you for your courtesy, I am, Sir, Your obedient servant

James Joyce

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To MARIA KIRN, 30 August 1911

Mercoledì Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste

MS. Eccel

Cara Maria Vi mando altre 20 corone in questa lettera e dovete tornare subito con Giorgino. Riceverete questa lettera a mezzogiorno giovedì e dovete partire col treno delle 2–g– o al più tardi col treno delle 6 ore per essere a Trieste senza fallo giovedi sera.

Mia moglie è assai in pensiero perchè mia sorella è tornata sola e non possiamo aspettare oltre domani sera.

Mi raccomando che starete attenta a Giorgino specialmente alla ferrovia: e, se non vi ubbidisce chiamate senz’altro un gendarme per metterlo a posto.

Sono andato alla stazione otto o dieci volte. Vi prego dunque di non farmi aspettare domani sera. Dite anche a Giorgino che suo babbo sta assai male perchè non vuol tornare più.

Addio e non mancate di venire puntualmente.

James Joyce

PS Vi prego anche di ringraziare i vostri genitori per la loro bontà verso mia sorella e Giorgino.

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER (Postcard), 23 December 1911

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer Pray excuse me for my delay in acknowledging receipt of The Man for Galway—for which I thank you. Perhaps this card may interest you. Smareglia (who lives beside me) is held by many to be the most original of the living Italian musicians.

Wishing you good fortune and a merry Christmas Very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1912

To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 25 April 1912

Albergo Toretta (Padua)

MS. Cornell

Padua is full up of the overflowings of Venice. When I arrived I had to make a pilgrimage from door to door before I got a room. Consequently things are dearer. Today, I had to write my English theme—Dickens and saw my English examiner, an old, ugly spinster from the tight little island—a most dreadful fRump (reformed spelling). The orals and the trial lesson will not be fixed for some days. I cannot remain on another 5 or 6 days so that I shall probably return tomorrow and wait a telegram to come again for 1 day. That will cost 25 crowns but to remain on would cost more besides the disorder of the lessons in Trieste.

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To EILEEN JOYCE, 30 May 1912

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Cornell

Dear Eileen Am glad to hear from Stannie you are getting on well. We may or may not go to Udine on Corpus Christi. This month I have 300 crowns rent to pay. Possibly we shall be in this flat also next year as the administrator told me he intends to try to bring Picciola and myself to an understanding. Did you get the Piccolo I sent with my article on Parnell? Did the Serravallo people see it or do they read only the labels on pill boxes?

Mrs Schmitz leaves for London next month and wishes to see you here before she goes as if she does not engage you she will bring back a girl from London. Let me know about what date you are likely to motor in here and I shall arrange an interview. The arrangement would be this. Every afternoon at 1.30 you would meet her daughter Letizia in the via Madonna del Mare outside the girls’ school, go with her to Servola, lunch there with her, take tea in the afternoon and remain there till seven. You will have a season ticket on the train. Your mornings and Sundays and half holidays are your own. You would also study piano accompaniment to her violin. What would you think I should ask as a fee (monthly). Mrs Schmitz asked me but I said I would write to you first. Let me know by return.

I advise you to say nothing of this possible engagement yet to the Serravallos as if they intend to take lessons during the winter they might want the afternoons. If your afternoons are taken they will have to do with two mornings. The other five mornings of the week you can use for your piano and singing.

Any more ham a-coming?

I have had a glimpse of some letters that came from Dublin by which I understand a good three-cornered fight is beginning. I think and said before that Charlie and his family should take a labourer’s cottage and live in it with his wife and children, alone.

I have no news from my publisher to whom I write regularly every first Friday. I sent copies of my article to Pappie, May and Charlie which were unacknowledged but hope to send shortly an old pair of trousers to Dublin which is more in their line.

I have bought a 160 crown American desk at which I am writing. The skeleton chairs are gone and are being covered in elephant hide.

We were at Barbiere di Siviglia. Georgie was tested today and I am going to order glasses for him now.

Where is the horse fair in Udine? Arrivederci perhaps on C.C. (if I can manage). Otherwise later. Salve!

Jim

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 30 May 1912

Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yale

Dear Sir Will you kindly let me know if any royalties stand to my credit, exclusive of musical rights’ fees, on my book Chamber Music published by you in May 1907? The royalties were to be reckoned after sale of 300 copies. Nearly 50 copies of the book to my own knowledge are in the hands of friends of mine here so that I imagine the limit must have been passed after such a long lapse of time. Very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 11 July 1912

4 Bowling Green, Galway

MS. Cornell

My darling Jim since I left Trieste I am continually thinking about you how are you getting on without me or do you miss me at all. I am dreadfully lonely for you I am quite tired of Ireland already well I arrived in Dublin on Monday night your father charley Eva Florrie were at the Station all looking very well we all went on to Finn’s Hotel I stayed two nights in the Hotel but I got very sick of Dublin its a horrible place its quite true what you said I would soon get tired of it, now I am in Galway I find everyone here very well my Mother is very fat and looking very well also all my sisters and brother I feel very strange here but the time wont be long slipping round till I am going back to you again well Jim I am sure you would like to know something about your publisher well on Tuesday your Father Charley and myself went in and just pinned that charming gentleman well I asked what he ment by treating you in such a manner but your Father then began to speak so that Roberts took no further notice of me only spoke to your father he made some excuse saying he was very busy and said to call again and so Charley and myself called twice the next day but I am sorry to say he kept out of our way but Charley will do all he can he says he will watch him every day then he will write to you. I am afraid it will be a job to get any definite answer on my way back i will call again I hope Charley will be able to do something

well Jim dear I hope you are minding yourself and how is poor little Georgie I hope he is well dear be sure and dont let him eat too much tell him I will send him something for his birthday my uncle as after taking his holidays he had to get a bone cut out of his nose Mother says he spent a buckett full of money so that I am afraid dear its not possible for you to come on at any rate I will let you know if I have any further news remember me to Stannie Goodbye love and keep well

Nora

love to Georgie

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), [? 12 July 1912]

Via della Barrier Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Cornell

Dear Nora Having left me five days without a word of news you scribble your signature with a number of others on a postcard. Not one word of the places in Dublin where I met you and which have so many memories for us both! Since you left I have been in a state of dull anger. I consider the whole affair wrong and unjust.

I can neither sleep nor think. I have still the pain in my side. Last night I was afraid to lie down. I thought I would die in sleep. I wakened Georgie three times for fear of being alone.

It is a monstrous thing to say that you seem to forget me in five days and to forget the beautiful days of our love.

I leave Trieste tonight as I am afraid to stay here—afraid of myself. I shall arrive in Dublin on Monday. If you have forgotten I have not. I shall go alone to meet and walk with the image of her whom I remember.

You can write or wire to me in Dublin to my sister’s address.

What are Dublin and Galway compared with our memories?

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 July 1912

4 Bowling Green, Galway

MS. Cornell

Saw Yeats in London. For a wonder he was polite: gave me tea and Georgie fruit. He has rewritten Countess Cathleen and sends the new version of it to Vidacovich through you. His theatrical agent for the continent will be Cippico, who has read V’s MS and admires it but thinks it a little remote from common speech. Saw Roberts. He says the Giant’s Causeway is soft putty compared with me. The new proposals are: either the passage in Ivy Day and a passage in An Encounter are to be deleted, replaced by asterisks and with a note of preface by me or the book is to be bought over by me, bound and printed, on my note of hand for the cost amount and issued by Simpkin Marshall of London who will spread it on commission, the profits being mine. Write and advise me at once which way you prefer. Dublin very discouraging. Charles made a good impression on me—a decent poor fellow. Will do what I can for him.

Jim

Kind regards from Nora and her uncle.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 27 July 1912

[Galway]

MS. Cornell

I have written to the house-agent. I cannot and will not leave the quarter on the 24th Aug. I have, I told him, undertaken press engagements till 16 Aug. The notice to quit was revoked by him 4 times verbally in the presence of witnesses and on that assurance I left Trieste with my family. Call and tell him so. Whoever tries to eject me from that flat will pass a damn bad quarter of an hour. The new ‘tenant’ is a try-on. As for Picciola I am afraid he is spoiling for something he won’t like when he gets it.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 7 August 1912

4 Bowling Green, Galway (Ireland)

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie The story about the flat is this. I received on 24 Feb notice. That was unpleasant but valid. I then with Nora went about looking for a flat and visited thirty. The house agent himself stopped me in via Bellini and asked me had I found a flat. I said no. He said the matter would be smoothed over, to leave it to him, that he did not want me to leave as he did not know what kind of people might come into the flat, that Picciola was very fond of me and intended to take English lessons from me during the winter and that if any repairs were necessary he even believed that Picciola would pay for them!!! Similar conversations took place 4 times. I told the porter and every one who visited the flat that I was remaining. When I paid the last quarter I asked had he spoken to Picciola. He said he would see in a few days and repeated the story about English lessons. I consider (and will contest by force and by law) that this is a verbal revocation of the notice. On the strength of it I left Trieste. I have written the whole story to Picciola himself and say, if he will not have me in the house, I shall vacate the flat for the 24 Feb or 24 November: For the 24 Aug. no. The house agent did a nice thing to rescind the contract with the incoming tenant. Tell him to sign a contract with nobody. He has played a double game (as I told Picciola who is a pig, in any case) and has only himself to blame. But for his intervention I should have found a flat. I have also written to Eileen to explain the matter to Serravallo. If in spite of that Picciola insists on putting me and my family on the street I promise you you will see some fun in the house. If he does so he is an inhuman person and I will treat him as such. I am however almost sure that he will agree to my proposal. In the meantime if you have nothing better to do call again on the houseagent and let him know that I intend to remain in that house after the 24 Aug and that if anything bad happens the result will lie at his door. Take possession of the house till I return. Don’t let my debts trouble you. Tell them I am away and will return in the month of September. They would get the same answer at Economo’s door and would salute and go away. Fano perhaps would be nasty not the others. Have just finished second article on Aran and will send. Send on at once twelve copies of P.d.S with 1st article. I went to Clifden on Monday to interview Marconi or see station. Could do neither and am waiting reply from Marconi House London. Wrote to Roberts 4 times and at last got enclosed. Have written a letter to Hone calling on him to see that I am acted loyally by. Immediately I hear will write. Call to the pharmacy and see that my letter to P– is forwarded at once. Tell Bartoli I have a lot of news re transatlantic scheme and to see my second article on Aran. I think since I have come so far I had better stay a little longer if possible. Nora’s uncle feeds us in great style and I row and cycle and drive a good deal. I cycled to Oughterard on Sunday and visited the graveyard of The Dead, It is exactly as I imagined it and one of the headstones was to J. Joyce. Do you like 1st article? I send you news of Skeffington and of O.G. Have got a view of Killala for Sordina. Price writes me a letter every day. He has a cure for the foot and mouth disease which is devastating Irish cattle. Styrian oxen suffer from it and are cured but 2000 Irish beasts have been killed. He writes (like you) ‘Be energetic. Drop your lethargy. Forget Leinster for Ulster. Remember that Sir John Blackwood died in the act of putting on his topboots in order to go to Dublin to vote against the Union. You will get your name up if you write this up’. I cannot do so. I have written the whole thing to W. Field M P (pres. of Irish Cattle Traders Society) who of course never answered. I am writing to explain to Price. Do you think he is right or I. I wanted Field who is in the line to take it up not I myself. I think Price ought to look for a cure for the foot and mouth disease of Anna Blackwood Price.

Remembrances from all. Write a card to Nora’s uncle. Please look cheerful and write to

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 10 August 1912

[Galway]

MS. Cornell

I can give you a Roland for your Oliver. I wrote a letter to Hone as I told you. The following arrived from Roberts: [‘]⁠We have gone carefully into the matter and think that the best way out of the deadlock would be for you to offer the printed sheets to Grant Richards. You stated that his printer would not print the book. This would be obviated by his taking over the sheets printed by us.[’] Let me hear what you think of this. Of Padua I understand nothing. The sooner you convince yourself that I am pursued by scalogna the better. I wrote to Field for Price and send you the result. Am writing to the Board of Education in London to know why a British degree in arts is not recognised as valid for examination purposes in Italy. This is the only thing I can think of doing as yet. As for Dubliners …

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 14 August 1912

[Galway]

MS. Cornell

Padua. Have written to the Secretary of Board of Education in London.

Piccolo. Am waiting for copies with my two articles. I could do another on the Marconi station.

Maunsel. Have written to Lidwell who is now acting for me. Am preparing a draft for him of the whole story. Meanwhile have written to Roberts, saying I can take no step without advice from my solicitor and that if he can lay before us any proposal from G. Richards or another publisher we will consider it and that the affair must be ended.

Picciola. Am waiting reply from this pigskin.

Ralli. Will you take on his lesson? He is due in Trieste from manoeuvres on 17th inst and has to finish this month. You can write him Casa Ralli or ’phone him c/o Hacker and Meissner, Punto Franco (1142. tel. no). He will continue next year and has paid this half month coming. A very agreeable fellow.

Jim

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to EILEEN JOYCE, 14 August 1912

4 Bowling Green, Galway

MS. Cornell

My dear Eileen I was delighted to get your letter, and I am also delighted to hear that you are getting on so well. I am sure I wont know you when I see you now aren’t you glad that you went away the fine wintry air and the good food will set you up splendidly. I suppose it was a great surprise to you when you received my postcard saying I was leaving for Ireland. What must it have been like when you heard Jim was coming, well what have you to say to Jim now after all our little squabbles he could not live without me for a month can you imagine my joy when I received a telegram from London a week after Jim and georgie on their way it seems to me that he can do wonders, he sent me a wire from the boat and it out on the deep sea at midnight, but to make a long story short he arrived in Galway on a Tuesday night with Georgie all the people here were talking about him for running after me. now dear Eileen I am only giving you a sketch as I will be telling you all when we meet now I suppose you would like to know how we spend our day we would enjoy it more if we had not such bad weather every second day rainy when its not raining we usually go to the beach in the morning, the air is splendid here and the food Jim Georgie and myself are sleeping in my Uncle’s Lucia sleeps with mother you’d be surprised at how homely she has got every night about ten or so when we are leaving Mother’s we say good night to Lucia and she goes up to bed singing she is wonderful she is as rosey the two children love the place they are out all day they dont give themselves time to eat Jim is also very much improved and myself they say to me O you are getting a show you are so fat well I think I have got a little fat, to tell you the truth I dont go out much I stay with Mother nearly all the day now Eileen I suppose you would like to hear something about dear old dirty Dublin the night I arrived at Westland row Station all the family of Joyces were there to meet me all looking very well indeed the only one I thought was not looking so well is Charley well we all went round to Finns Hotel I felt very strange of course I knew Eva well and I was delighted to have her your Father every time he would look at Lucia wept copiously all about Jim with your Father I went the next day Eva Florrie pappie and Charley myself and Lucia all went up to Howth we had tea and sandwiches Lucia sang so we got back about six o clock then I went with Eva and Florrie to their room they are living with a very nice woman they seem to be quiet happy then May came O I suppose you will want to know how I liked May well to tell you the truth I had not much time with her as she was busy and what I have seen of her I like her very much I hope to have more time with her on our return at all events we went on to Murrays Charley sang I like his voice very much but to tell you the truth I thought Id never get my heels out of Murrays I dont like any of them now I think you ought to have an Idea of everything so I will say goodbye hoping this will find you well Mother thanks you for your kind inquiries

best love to Eileen from bit of cheese Your letter amused everyone here write soon

Nora

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 August 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Left Galway today. Send to May at once 140 crowns (60 from Piccolo and the rest yourself) so that I can start at a moment’s notice. Wretched weather. Interview tomorrow with Lidwell and Roberts. If I must be in Trieste for 24 inst wire the money to May. Had to buy all winter clothes for Nora and children. Writing fully in the morning.

Jim

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Telegram), 17 August 1912

Galway

MS. Cornell

Courage Angelo Mio Nora.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark?18 August 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Reply from Board of Education to say that they can do nothing in the matter. Charlie, I regret to say, stands in danger of arrest just at present. Weather frightful. Am surprised that no letter has been forwarded from Galway from you. I bought some fine photographs for Sordina and also a copy of Tone’s Autobiography (7/8). I think I did right as he was very kind to me. Am sending them to him. Charlie admits that he lost the post in the telephone through his own fault.

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, Postmark 19 August 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Nora I received letter from London. My usual luck! Am surprised that Stannie has not written about the house. Why have you not sent me a line? Perhaps I shall have one in the morning. I have no idea how we can manage to get home as I have to hand out money here constantly. How are you? I was shown yesterday an article I had not seen on Chamber Music in the Liverpool Courier. They speak of my verses as ‘exquisite and passionate poems’. Can your friend in the sodawater factory or the priesteen write my verses? I spoke of you all night with my aunt.

Jim

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 19 August 1912

17 Richmond Place N.C.R., Dublin

Dear Curran: Allow me to thank you before you leave Dublin for your very kind intervention today on my behalf and also to wish you a pleasant holiday abroad. Should you be near the ‘amaro Adriatico’ I hope you will come also to my poor Trieste.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [? 20 August 1912]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Interviewed Roberts today: 2 hours. Result: Book to be given to Lidwell for his opinion. I advise you to send on the money at once as I am constantly ‘lending’ sums (which I would do gladly). Saw Koehler. He is to interview Charlie at 3.30 on Monday. What about the house? Hope to write fully tomorrow.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [20 August 1912]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Had an interview this morning with Roberts lasting nearly 2 hours. I explained and defended the whole book from the 1st story to the last. He listened and noted what I said. I went to Lidwell’s office 5 times to get the letter he promised. Finally I got it. I did not take it round to Roberts (you will see why) and intend to think on the subject all night.

I introduced Charlie to manager of David Allen’s Adv. Co. (with whom I left £50 of Volta money). He took his address and said he might be able to put him on a job during Horse Show or after and seemed inclined to employ him as he said it is not easy to get decent fellows for his jobs.

Rochford (of the ‘quay’) offered me the post of tenor in Sandymount Church and invited me to his house next Sunday. I am advising Charlie to take the job if he can get it as it would be an opening for his voice at concerts and (if he can get it) he would get paid.

Place the matter of house at once in the hands of a solicitor. I don’t believe they can effect an entrance on the 24th. I thought the new tenant had retired from the contract. Picciola and the agent are a pair of low brutes. If I had suspected anything I would neither have come nor allowed Nora to come and would have given notice to the Gas Office. At any rate the first thing to be done is this. The table in my room and the desk in my room are to be carried carefully and horizontally into Mrs Borsieri’s flat who, I am sure, will keep them for a few days. If she cannot keep both the table may be left with her and the desk is to be left untouched by permission of the new tenant if he enters. Neither table nor desk are to be removed from the house or floor. All papers on desk and my MS book of Chamber Music and my crest are to be rolled in a sheet and let Anna carry them untouched to Mrs Francini till I arrive. For the rest let the two swindling squinting hell’s bitches propose whatever they please.

These letters appeared in all papers today. Pappie wishes me to interview T.W. Russell. I think I have done my part.

Pay great attention to my directions as to my table, desk, MSS, verse-book and crest. All the rest can go be damned. I intend to sue Picciola and the agent for 2000 crowns damages for loss of press engagements, trouble, installation of gas etc and tell them so from me. The agent is the more to blame of the two. He is a lying thief and always looked it.

Jim

Roberts I saw again. He asked me very narrowly was there sodomy also in The Sisters and what was ‘simony’ and if the priest was suspended only for the breaking of the chalice. He asked me also was there more in The Dead than appeared.

I enclose Lidwell’s letter (copy). I shall think what to do now

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [21 August 1912]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I saw Curran last night and he said that Lidwell’s letter was thoroughly bad for my case. I went to see Lidwell last night at the Ormond Hotel. I found him in company of several others telling stories. Here are some of the stories:

A priest in the country had two servant girls and it happened that the closet pipe was choked and the first servant told the second to tell the priest. The second one was ashamed to do so and the first one said:

—Arrah, tell him! Does he think we’re cuckoos?—

Pappie then told this story:

—A bishop visited a P.P. and stayed too late to go home. The P.P. asked him to stay and said there were only two beds in the house, his own and that of his housekeeper. The bishop said he would sleep in the P.P’s bed for one night. They went to bed. In the morning the P.P. half awoke and hit the bishop a smack on the backside saying:

—Get up, Mary Ann, I’ll be late for mass—

And, by God, the very next day His Grace was made an archbishop.—

I could not speak to Lidwell.

Today I saw him and spoke to him for an hour. He repeated that it was disgusting and told [me] I could write another story about Ringsend which has many historical associations. In the end he wrote, after many protests, the enclosed letter. I took it to Roberts. He said it was no use since it was not written to him. I asked Lidwell would he write it to Roberts. He refused, saying that I not Roberts was his client. I told this then to Roberts. He said that Lidwell should write him a letter on the whole case stating how I stood and what I would do. I said L’s letter showed that there was no danger from the Crown. Roberts said he could not endanger the firm. I asked him what was the cost of the first edition. He said he did not know. I said if it was not over £60 that I would sign an agreement to indemnify the firm for that amount if the book was confiscated. He said that that was no good and asked me if I could get two securities for £1000 each (in all £2000) to indemnify the firm. I said that no person would do that and that in any case it could never be proved whether the firm’s losses were caused by me or not. He said in that case the discussion was ended and that he would act on his legal advice and not publish. I then wrote him the enclosed letter. He said he would send it tonight to his solicitor in London and let me know.

I saw Rochford and spoke to him about Charlie. He said the salary would be £10 a year but that it would be an opening. I arranged for him to hear Charlie’s voice on Sunday.

I have had no word from you or remittance. Eva and Florrie would have nothing to eat but for my accidental presence here. Whatever happens be careful to follow my instructions about the table and desk. If Mrs Borsieri will not take both let her take the table (I am speaking of course of the little table in my bedroom not of the new walnut one): and let you take the desk. Am awaiting your remittance and letter to go back. All this interviewing means constant drinks at my expense and my money is constantly dwindling. Nora is waiting to come here and she wants to spend a few days in my company here for reasons you can imagine. They will be lenten days, however.

I saw Pappie. He says Roberts will raise a new objection when his solicitor replies and that he is a swindler. He told Charlie privately that my stories are a blackguard production. He told me that all the girls in Dublin were prostitutes. Ahimè!

Jim

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [21 August 1912]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

My dear Nora I saw Lidwell today and after an hour obtained from him the enclosed letter. I took it to Roberts. Roberts said it was no good and that it should have been addressed to him. I asked Lidwell to write it to Roberts. Lidwell refused and said that I not Roberts was his client. I went to Roberts and told him this. Roberts said that Lidwell should write him a long letter on the whole case saying what I could do, as he could not endanger the firm. I said I would sign an agreement to pay him £60 (sixty pounds) the cost of a 1st edition if the book was seized by the Crown. He said that was no use and asked could I get two securities for £1000 (a thousand pounds) each—in all £2000 (two thousand pounds = 50,000 francs) to indemnify the firm for loss over publishing my book. I said that no person admired me so much as that and in any case it could never be proved that the loss (if any) of the firm was due to my book. He said then that he would act on his solicitor’s advice and not publish the book.

I went then into the backroom of the office and sitting at the table, thinking of the book I have written, the child which I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried in your womb the children you love, and of how I had fed it day after day out of my brain and my memory, wrote him the enclosed letter. He said he will send it tonight to his solicitor in London and let me know.

I am like a man walking in his sleep. I don’t know what is going on in Trieste. Stannie has not sent me what I asked him for. Eva and Florrie would have nothing to eat but for me. Stannie has sent them nothing and Charlie nothing and me nothing. I don’t know where my desk and table and MSS and books will end. You are away in Galway. I don’t know how we can get back to Trieste or what we shall find there. I don’t know what to do about my diploma or my book. My father says that Roberts will have a new objection even after my letter. The town is beginning to fill and I should like to forget all and be here with you and take you about during the Horse Show. Pover’a me! [sic]

This is my holiday.

Give my regards to Mr Healy. Tell him I have not a moment to write. Give a kiss to Giorgio and Lucia.

I hope you liked the verses. I spoke of you today to my aunt and told her of you—how you sit at the opera with the grey ribbon in your hair, listening to music, and observed by men,—and of many other things (even very intimate things) between us.

I told you of my grief at Galway Races. I feel it still. I hope that the day may come when I shall be able to give you the fame of being beside me when I have entered into my Kingdom.

Be happy, dear, and eat and sleep. You can sleep now. Your tormentor is away

Jim

Enclosure to above letter

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From JOHN G. LIDWELL (Copy), [21 August 1912]

Dear Sir,

Re “Dubliners.”

Referring to our correspondence concerning the stories ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ and ‘An Encounter.’ As the passages you have shown me are not likely to be taken serious notice of by the Advisers of the Crown, they would not interfere with the publication, nor do I consider a conviction could be easily obtained. Yours faithfully,

John Lidwell

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To GEORGE ROBERTS, 21 August 1912

Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Roberts, I enclose copy of my solicitor’s letter to me which confirms what I have asserted all through our correspondence—the legal innocence of the passages you took exception to⁠[.]

Nevertheless in order to end this interminable discord I have decided to close with your proposal of the other day, very reluctantly and entering my protest at the same time. That proposal was the omission of An Encounter from the book.

I agree to that on the following conditions

I). That the following note be placed by me before the first story:
This book in this form is incomplete. The scheme of the book, as framed by me includes a story entitled An Encounter which stands between the first and second stories in this edition J.J.

II). That no further change be asked of me

III). That I reserve the right to publish the said story elsewhere before/after the publication of the book by your firm

IV). That the book be published by you not later than 6th October 1912.

I believe that you will change your opinion very shortly after the publication of the book and believe also that its reception will strengthen your hand so far as to lead you to include the omitted story in subsequent editions Sincerely yours,

[James Joyce]

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [Postmark 22 August 1912]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

My dear distant Nora I saw Roberts today and we spoke of the binding &c of my book so that a ray of hope has sprung out of the clouds. He told me to call back tomorrow at 12.

I have taken a double-bedded room at 21 Richmond Place on the North Circular Road and I am foolish enough to hope that you and I may be able to spend some happy days after all this trouble. How I should love to go about with you during Horse Show Week and have money to take you here and there. I can get passes for the theatres. Be sure to have nice petticoats and stockings. You can have your hair dressed here. Have you the grey ribbon I like so much? Would you come up tomorrow? I am afraid to ask because Stannie has not written to me and my money is almost at an end. Perhaps he will write tomorrow. I have passed a terribly exciting week over my book. Roberts spoke to me today of my novel, and asked me to finish it. Would you like to come to the theatre with me and have supper together afterwards? I hope you are as plump as you were? Is your tight naughty lilac blouse clean? I hope you clean your teeth. If you don’t look well I will send you back to Galway. Be sure not to break your hats especially the high one. I have a nice room in the front with two beds. If all goes well could we not pass a few days in each other’s company. I should like to show you many places in Dublin that are mentioned in my book. I wish you were here. You have become a part of myself—one flesh. When we go back to Trieste will you read if I give you books? Then we could speak together. Nobody loves you as I do and I should love to read the different poets and dramatists and novelists with you as your guide. I will give you only what is finest and best in writing. Poor Jim! He is always planning and planning!

I hope I shall have good news tomorrow. If only my book is published then I will plunge into my novel and finish it.

The Abbey Theatre will be open and they will give plays of Yeats and Synge. You have a right to be there because you are my bride: and I am one of the writers of this generation who are perhaps creating at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race. Addio!

Jim

(Write as usual to Todd Burns not to my address)

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, Postmark 23 August 1912

21 Richmond Place, N.C.R., Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dearest I called this morning to see Roberts by appointment. He was not there but left the enclosed letter for me. I read it and walked down the street feeling the whole future of my life slipping out of my grasp. I remained sitting for an hour on a sofa in my father’s office. All last night I had gone over the whole book in my mind, imagined that I saw it, that those whom I know were reading it, imagined the reviews of it, friendly and unfriendly. This morning everything seemed to collapse.

It seems to me I had best say nothing more. For a long time today I thought of spending the last money I have on a revolver and using it on the scoundrels who have tortured my mind with false hopes for so many years. I will say no more. If you love me you will feel for you [sic], I am sure, dear, that you do—and O how I should like to have your sympathy and words of encouragement, to forget all and fall asleep in your arms hidden by your love.

I don’t know what I will do or can do. I will think. I will fight to the last. Stannie has not sent me a line or any money. Tomorrow I must pawn my watch and chain in order to remain on a little longer. Everything seems to have melted away from me, money, hope and youth.

You at least will remain. Don’t grieve for me. Eat and sleep and be happy. When we meet (and I hope it will be very soon) I hope to find in you what I have lost elsewhere, to see you young and happy and smiling and walking like a queen.

Jim

P.S. I was surprised and disappointed not to have had a letter from you today. Write at once and send me back by return Roberts’s letter. Think of me—but do not vex yourself.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 23 August 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I spent yesterday with Roberts discussing binding, paper, advertisement &c of the book.

This morning I called and received the enclosed letter. Roberts was not there as he had arranged. After having received it I sat for an hour in a sofa in Lidwell’s office thinking if I would buy a revolver and put some daylight into my publisher. I showed the letter to Lidwell who said I had been badly treated but that I could do nothing and the publishers were quite right as what he had seen of the book was objectionable.

Then I went to Pappie who told me to put the letter in my pocket, buck up, take back the MSS and find another publisher. Then I went to May who said quietly ‘O well, you expected that, didn’t you?’

I went to Roberts and spoke to him from three to five. My defense was:

i) A railway co. is mentioned once and then exonerated from all blame by two witnesses, jury and coroner.

ii) Public houses are mentioned in four stories out of 15. In 3 of these stories the names are fictitious. In the 4th the names are real because the persons walk from place to place (Counterparts)

iii) Nothing happens in the public houses. People drink.

iv) I offered to take a car and go with Roberts, proofs in hand, to the 3 or 4 publicans really named and to the secretary of the railway co. He refused.

v) I said the publicans would be glad of the advertisement.

vi) I said that I would put fictitious names for the few real ones but added that by so doing the selling value in Dublin of the book would go down.

vii) I said that even if they took action for libel against Maunsel that the jury would be a long time before awarding damages on such a plea.

viii) I said that his legal adviser was a fool to advise him to sue me. If he sued me (even if I lived in Dublin) a jury would say he had the MS for 10 months and I was not liable for his error in judgment. But if he sued me in Trieste I would hold the whip and would laugh him out of court.

ix) I suggested that his lawyer encouraged correspondence and litigation for his own profit.

Exhausted I stopped. Roberts walked about, noted on a paper and said he would write again to London and let me know on Monday.

No letter letter [sic] has reached me from you and no remittance. I am therefore helpless and newsless. However, I presume you will write tomorrow morning.

I will fight to the last inch with every weapon in my power.

Jim

[Enclosure to above letter]

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From GEORGE ROBERTS (Copy), 23 August 1912

[Dublin]

Without prejudice

MS. Cornell

Dear Mr Joyce, I am sorry to find by your letter of 21st that our recent conversations have led only to misunderstandings.

It is quite erroneous on your part to assume that, provided the solicitor advising you expressed the view that certain passages in your book were free from the risk of legal action, I should be prepared to take his opinion. On the contrary, at our last interview I told you plainly that the opinion of our legal advisers would have to be taken, and that, in fact, I was about to take it.

Pursuant to that understanding, I submitted the whole matter to them, and I regret to say that they find the book to abound in risks of action of libel. They advise me that in practically every case where any going concern (e.g. public house, restaurant, railway company or other existing person, firm or body corporate with vested interests) is mentioned by actual name, then, having regard to the events described as taking place in connection with them, there is no doubt that actions in libel would lie.

As the instances are so numerous, they do not detail them, but confine themselves to the general statement. That being so, the publication of the book by Maunsell & Co. is out of the question; and I am advised, further, that even if the objectionable parts were struck out, there would still remain the risk of some of them having been overlooked; and to provide for this risk, should publication be contemplated, they advise that the author must under clause 11 of the Agreement, be bound in two sureties of £500 (five hundred pounds) each to meet possible damages, or, in the alternative, lodge the sum of £1,000 in our bank.

In that case they advise me, under clause 2 of the Agreement, the time and manner of publication is at our sole discretion. Serious as is the foregoing part of their opinion, what follows is so serious from the point of view of Maunsell & Co. that I ask your particular attention to it. They advise that the author has committed a breach of the guarantee contained in Clause 11 of the agreement by offering for publication a book which, as he should know, is clearly libellous; and they recommend, if I so desire, that Maunsell & Co. proceed against you in order to recover all costs, charges and expenses for time, labour and materials expended on the book. I should be extremely sorry to have to take proceedings against you to protect the interests of Maunsell & Co., but as it appears that the chance of selling the sheets is very remote, I must ask you to make a substantial offer towards covering our loss.

Failing your doing that, I shall have, most reluctantly, to put the matter in other hands. Faithfully yours

George Roberts

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [Postmark?25 August 1912]

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Cannot wire today as all wires to London are stopped. I don’t understand your telegram. I instructed you what to do. If new tenant enters store furniture except table in my room and desk (which Mrs Borsieri will take, I am sure) and MSS and papers (which Mrs Francini will take). I await your remittance. 60 crowns is mine for the Piccolo articles and at least another £2.15.0 has been advanced by me to Charlie and Eva who say they have not heard from you for nearly two months. I gave the money believing you would refund. If you are short and have been I presume you can raise it. Every day is an expense but I shall not leave Dublin till I have arranged something about my book. Best says I have been treated ‘shockingly’ and wants me to speak with Longworth. Interview with Roberts tomorrow. I send English Review. Read and ponder passages marked. Inform the agent and Picciola I cannot leave as I have my affari to attend to and I shall sue them for your and my losses over their conduct. Send what I asked and am due.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark?26 August 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Received 110 crowns: thanks. Send on balance at once as I may start on Saturday. Interview 2 hours today with Roberts. I have consented to omit Encounter, delete and change passage in Ivy Day, change names of public houses in Counterparts (Davy Byrnes to Andy Kehoe’s, Mulligan’s to Quinlan’s, Scotch House to Manx House), change name of pawnbroker Terry Kelly to Mickey Grundy, change name of Sydney Parade in Painful Case to White Church! on condition that book is published before 6 October 1912. Colm was present, asked on looking over proofs if the book was all about public houses, asked me if I could not get it published in London, read Counterparts and said it was a terrible story. He came there to help my case. He will review the book for Irish Times and Nation (of London). In the end Roberts (who left the room twice in a temper) said I was to call again on Thursday and he would tell me what his solicitor said concerning the changes I made.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 30 August 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

Roberts now wants every proper name (public houses, cakeshops and churches) changed: He also wants me to change the first paragraph in Grace, three paragraphs in Two Gallants, another passage in Ivy Day and part of The Boarding House. I refused to destroy my book by making this latter group of changes. Roberts asked me then to give him £30 for the sheets (which cost £57) and look for a publisher: and asked me to come in tomorrow. I went to Keohler whose brother is a solicitor but the latter is on leave. I went then to Griffith who received me very kindly and remembered my letter. He says I am not the first person from whom he has heard this story. He says Roberts has been playing that game for years. He says the idea of Maunsel sueing me is simple bluff and believes that they will not come into court and that if I get a strong solicitor on my side they will yield. He gave me a note to a first class solicitor in Westmoreland Street. He asked me also to send him copies of my articles in P. d. S and to give him Price’s address.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 3 September 1912

Dublin

MS. Cornell

detained dubliners follow instructions tables manuscripts wire balance starting when settled

[Unsigned]

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From CHARLES JOYCE to STANISLAUS JOYCE, 5 September 1912

17 Richmond St, N.C.R., Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I am writing you again for Jim. In my last letter I told you that Jim intended to do one of two things: (1) to publish his book with the aid of Maunsell and representative for each side; (2) to buy the sheets from Maunsell and publish it himself through the above. He decided on the latter course. With this in view he has been looking about two unfurnished rooms on Jervis St. One of these rooms would be used as an office, the other May and I would have for our own use. The rent is 5/– a week and Jim intends to get a few things into the place if everything goes as he hopes it will. (2) After seeing the rooms Jim went to Roberts who said that the printer refused to give him (Roberts) up the sheets until he had read the whole book through. Jim went to his solicitor and told him about this. Dixon said that since Jim had been with him he had been thinking the whole matter over and regretted that he could not conscientiously see his way to assist Jim to get his M.S. back as he considered the book objectionable and unworthy of publication. He added, however, that as the printer was in the employ of Maunsell he was bound to hand over the sheets especially as the MS. had been so long in their hands before it was put in type. Roberts then could give it to Jim. Dixon then said it was a pity that Jim did not use his ‘undoubted’ talent for a better purpose than writing a book like Dubliners. ‘Why did he not use his talents for the betterment of his country and his people?’ Jim replied that he was probably the only Irishman who wrote leading articles for the Italian press and that all his articles in ‘Il Piccolo’ were about Ireland and the Irish people. He said also that he was the first to introduce Irish tweeds into Austria although that business was not in the least in his own line. Dixon then began to talk about Galway and told what he considered a pointed story. Jim listened and when Dixon’s tale was ended Jim told him a much more pointed story—just for that now. I have not time to tell you the story. Jim then went back to Roberts. It had already been proposed to Rts that Jim pay him £15 within 15 days and that Roberts send Jim 500 copies of his book and that other £15 be paid within 30 days when Jim was to get the other 500 copies. Today Rts told Jim the money must be all paid together. Then Roberts made the following proposal: Jim to pay him £15 within 15 days when he would let him have 104 copies. On the payment of the balance within 30 days Jim to receive the remaining copies of his book. Jim agreed to this. Roberts then asked Jim if he would sign a document freeing Maunsell and Co. from all responsibility in the publication of the book and Jim said he would. Jim intended calling the two rooms The Jervis Press. Roberts objected saying that they had works in Jervis Lane! Jim changed the name to Liffey Press. This seemed to suit. This is today’s first. I suppose I shall have to write to you again tonight.

This is my last sheet of paper so I have no room for any additional news. But really there is no new news of any kind.

Charlie.

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From CHARLES JOYCE to STANISLAUS JOYCE, 6 September 1912

17 Richmond Place, N.C.R., Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Jim went to Maunsells today and Roberts told him that the printer having now read the book thinks it a very objectionable production and refuses to have his name used in connection with it. He will not recognise Jim in the matter at all and says he will deal only with Maunsell. Therefore Jim’s book is to be printed and published by the Liffey Press. This is how it is to be managed. A mysterious carrier is to go to Maunsells and get the parcel containing the 104 copies which Jim is to get on payment of fifteen pounds, and they are to be brought to me at 2 Jervis St. I am not to know who the carrier is nor whence he came. Then I am to get another mysterious carrier who will bring the book to the binder who will ship them to their final destination. The carriers in each case are to be obscure and unknown. In case of questions I am to reply that I know nothing except that my brother sent me the books. Jim has selected the cover and lettering. Roberts wants Jim to say in the presence of witnesses that he intends bringing the book out in Trieste. There must be some terrible danger attached to the publication of Dubliners. For my part, I don’t feel at all nervous.

I have not succeeded in getting employment yet. Jim has tried everything he thought likely to open something for me but without success. Jim says I lost the job in the telephone through my own fault. When I tell you the facts in a later letter you can judge for yourself. Florrie, too, has got nothing to do and Eva is approaching the end of her apprenticeship in Read’s. Pappie has left the Iveagh House and is now living in the same house with Jim and Nora. I have had to get out door relief here, but there is a possibility that this business of Jim’s books may lead to something for me. By the way, you must not think that I in any way expect help from you. You have already too many calls and I must try to manage somehow. Jim, of course, has helped me since he came here, but really I would rather not have anyone to turn to, for then something must surely happen. Everyone here is in good health and fairly good spirits. My wife sends you her kind regards and best wishes from myself

Charlie

Jim wrote a sub-editorial today for the Freeman about the Styrian cure for the foot and mouth disease.

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From CHARLES JOYCE to STANISLAUS JOYCE with a note from JAMES JOYCE, 11 September 1912

17 Richmond Place, N.C.R., Dublin

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Jim will leave Dublin tonight for Trieste and will remain one day in London. He wishes me to write to you to tell you the finish about his book. Up to yesterday morning everything had almost been completed for the publication of Dubliners by Jim himself. Binding had been selected, lettering chosen, and in fact, so far as the book itself was concerned, a very few days would have finished everything. Jim, as I told you, had almost settled on rooms for me and we were congratulating ourselves on the outcome of the long struggle. Yesterday, however, when Jim went to Roberts he was told that the printer refused to hand over the sheets to Maunsell. Jim’s solicitor had told us a few days ago that as Maunsell employed the printer to do a certain work for them he was obliged when that work was done to hand it over to Maunsells at their request. When Roberts told Jim of the printer’s attitude they agreed to go over to Jim’s solicitor together and see what he had to say. Dixon (the solicitor) repeated that Jim had been treated shamefully and told Roberts that if he used other people as he did Jim he thought the result would be disasterous [sic] to Maunsell and Co. He then said that if the printer refused to turn over the sheets to Maunsell the only way to get them would [be] by taking action against them. In this case Jim would have to take action against Maunsell in order to force Maunsell to take action against the printer. This would mean endless litigation and endless expense. Dixon told Roberts that as the printer refused to give up the sheets he could not claim one penny from Maunsell. This immediately struck Jim as a good point to work the printer with—the printer, by the way, is at a dead loss of £57. Jim then decided to go and see the printer himself and tried to induce Roberts to go with him. Roberts would not go. He went himself and saw the managing clerk of the establishment. He told Jim that they could not give up the sheets under and [sic] consideration whatever. Although the book had been in type for the past 2½ years they knew nothing as to the kind of book it [was] until a few days ago. Had they known the character of the book they would never have touched it. Jim then suggested that the sheets be given over to him and that he bring the book out himself either in Dublin, London, Trieste or elsewhere, with his own name as publisher and printer relieving Faulkner completely free from all responsibility in the matter. Faulkner said it made no difference where the book was published nor whose name was on it as printer they could not and would not allow it to go out of their hands to anyone. Jim then asked what they intended doing with his book and he said they would destroy it. Jim asked him how they would destroy it and he said they would burn the sheets and break up the type. They cared nothing for the loss of the fifty-seven pounds they had learnt a lesson and would not so easily be fooled again. There was nothing else to do and this is the end of Dubliners so far as Dublin is concerned. Jim intends now offering the book to the English Review a comparatively new publication of which, perhaps you have not yet heard. This is why he intends remaining a day in London so that he can go to see the editor of this review. Let us hope that he will be more successful in England than he has been in this charming country.

Jim will have much more to add to these few letters of mine and I am sure you will agree with Jim as I do, that Ireland is a nice country.

As soon as I have any good news for you I will write you from myself.

Best wishes

Charlie

Dear Stannie Thanks for your trouble about the new flat. I do hope all is in order. My evening suit is in the lower drawer of the wardrobe in our bedroom, packed in naphtha.

The 1000 copies of Dubliners which are printed are to be destroyed by fire this morning.

Jim

If you are writing to me before the middle of October please write to Aunt Josephine’s address.

C.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 11 September 1912

[Dublin]

MS. Cornell

I saw Colm today who has written a long letter to his London publisher about me and the book. I too have written, enclosing notices of Chamber Music and saying I shall call on him tomorrow. By a ruse I got from Roberts a complete set of proofs. Leaving tonight and expect to find your order at Elkin Mathews.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), [13 September 1912]

London

MS. Cornell

Fifteenth

[Unsigned]

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To PADRAIC COLUM (Postcard), 14 September 1912

Flushing (Holland)

MS. Texas

Dear Colm I saw Mr Boon yesterday in London. He took the MS (or rather the sheets) and said he will write to me on the matter in about ten days. Lynd, however, is not his reader. I hope he will take it on but I doubt it. He read my letter in Sinn Féin and said he would not care to publish the passage about Edward VII. Thanks all the same. I shall not fail to let you know how I fare. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 15 September 1912

Munich

MS. Cornell

Arriviamo stasera otto

[Unsigned]

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To W.B. YEATS, 19 September 1912

Via Donato Bramante 4, Trieste

Dear Yeats: I returned a few days ago and spoke last night with my friend Mr Vidacovich.

His intention is to present you to the Italian public in the first instance through the pages of some review of the same standing as, say, the Fortnightly. He believes that Countess Cathleen would hardly appeal to an Italian audience in either its first or its new form. If however you think some other of your plays is better fitted for the stage you can send it on and he will read it gladly.

As for his translation of your first version of Countess Cathleen (it is not so new however: he followed the text in Fisher Unwin’s edition of your collected verses published a few years ago) my friend has taken great pains with it and has got on a good way with it. You have been assured by Mr Cippico as to its merits as a piece of Italian literature and I can vouch for its fidelity. As the translation is not intended for the stage but for the pages of a review, I think you will see no objection to him going ahead with the work. Should the play when so published attract the attention of an Italian Manager you could of course have your acting version brought under his notice. Will you please write me by return so that the matter may be settled at once?

I suppose you will have heard of the fate of my book Dubliners. Roberts refused to publish it and finally agreed to sell me the first edition for £30 so that I might publish it myself. Then the printer refused to hand over the 1000 copies which he had printed either to me or to anyone else and actually broke up the type and burned the whole first edition.

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To PADRAIC COLUM, 19 September 1912

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Texas

Dear Colm The following letter came yesterday from Mr Boon:

—We have carefully read your book and we are sorry we are not sufficiently interested in it to make an offer for its publication. We think that it is a book which might or might not give a certain amount of offence to readers and while its merits are undoubtedly very high we should not, as a firm, care to issue it in book form.—

Allow me however to thank you for your kind intervention with the firm on behalf of my poor stories. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note on James Joyce’s visiting card), [October 1912?]

[Trieste]

MS. Cornell

Kindly come over to me in the morning, as there is some new swindle on about the money we owe for the rooms. And bring your notebook if you have taken note of the exact amount. Come before 12 if you can.

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 7 October 1912

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Mathews Many apologies for my delay!

Am and have been very busy shifting my furniture &c into here.

Books arrived safely and hope to sell off quickly.

I enclose:

£1.10.0 cheque on London and will be obliged to have a line of receipt.

Many thanks again for your kindness Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 9 December 1912

Via Donato Bramante 4, Trieste

Dear Aunt Josephine: I am very sorry to hear of Uncle Willie’s death though from what you told me I knew it was a matter of some months only. It is a very sad collapse and I do not know enough of the end to write you more fully. We had many wild nights together, many arguments. He was the only member of my mother’s family who seemed to take any pride out of my existence: and I can still remember the tone of his voice when he spoke of ‘my nephew’. After all he was a man, like us all or like many of us, worthy of a better life than he had assigned him.

If you have time to write me afterwards I shall be very glad to hear from you and will certainly answer: though, to tell the truth, I dislike to see the Dublin postmark as all the envelopes contain sad news of death, poverty or failure of some kind. If I had known in time I should have sent a wreath in my name and in that of my children but I received a card (or rather Eileen received it) only on Thursday night. I telegraphed lest you might think I had known before then.

Nora begs me to send you her condolence. I renew my own to you and yours. I hope at least that he did not suffer much towards the end. While I was writing this letter many memories came into my mind. Nearly all are pleasant memories: and these are perhaps the best legacy that one can leave to others. And so I take leave of him with pity and regret.

If you will send me a copy of a photograph of his I shall be very glad indeed to have that reminder of a good-hearted and lively companion of my youth.

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To W.B. YEATS, 16 December 1912

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yeats

Dear Yeats I met my friend the other day and he asked me had I received from you the acting version you spoke of sending. I think it is better if you correspond with him direct. You can address:

Nicholas Vidacovich

Via della Cassa di Risparmio 13, Trieste.

He still holds to his opinion about the earlier version of Countess Cathleen but says if you have any other play of yours which you think more fitted for the stage he will leave his translation of Countess Cathleen unfinished and translate it instead.

I hope your negotiations may bear more fruit than mine over Synge’s Riders to the Sea. With kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Do you know of any publisher in London likely to take my unhappy book?

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To W.B. YEATS, 25 December 1912

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yeats

Dear Yeats I have sent the set of proofs of my unfortunate book Dubliners to a publisher: Martin Seeker, 5 John Street, Adelphi. You would do me a great service if you could intervene in its favour and, I hope, some service also to the literature of our country. As you will easily understand it is very difficult for a person living so far away to push on these matters and my book seems to be pursued by a strange ill-luck. If you can do anything in the matter I am sure you will.

Wishing you the compliments of the season Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1913

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [January 1913?]

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste

MS. Cornell

Dear Brother, Thanks for letter.

If C is sent away I shall of course apply for and try to get his job: but I don’t think any move in that direction should be made while C has the position. If they want to dismiss him let them dismiss him and be damned to him and them. Then if they want anybody to teach the sons of bitches broken English I suppose I am good enough for that. I have heard the same talk from Schmitz, Schreiber and Vidacovich for the last three years. Let the board pension him first. I cannot go sneaking behind his back for his job. In any case you can [tell] Veneziani that I am always ready to receive—ergo money also ready to take C’s job when he’s out of it—not before.

Please send me verbatim account of Symons review of C.M. as I want to send it to Mazzoni (Guido) who has promised to take up my case in Padua. I am, dear brother, Yours as always,

James +

P.S. Could you lend me a florin?

P.P.S. I will send it back.

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, 26 February 1913

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Mathews Thanks for note and a/c received: and am glad to hear about the anthology. Have sold 12 copies of the 24 received.

I write to ask you whether you will take on immediately the publication of my famous book Dubliners on either of the following terms:

i) The whole book to be printed here in Trieste, proofs corrected etc at my expense.

ii) Printed in London at my expense or at our joint expense, my royalties of course [to] be computed in proportion to your risk.

My only condition (outside the financial one) is that the book is brought out immediately.

I intend to write a preface for it, narrating its eight years of adventure and final burning—a unique story out of which a publisher could make a great advertisement for it.

I may add that I am prepared to take on in either case 110 copies for sale here at trade price.

You will oblige me by answering by return as I intend to push on the matter. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ELKIN MATHEWS, Easter Day 1913

Via Donato Bramante 4, Trieste

Dear Mr Mathews: I am obliged by your kind and prompt reply. I do not understand from it however whether you definitely decline my proposal or not. My proposal (based on my knowledge of the fact that, as you say, ‘the book is not in harmony with your usual publications’) was that the printing should be charged to me (if necessary, in advance), that 100 copies be taken by me at sale price and that my preface (which, of itself, should suffice as a striking advertisement) should be printed. I am willing to add to these another condition: to give you the refusal of the novel which I am engaged on and shall finish this year A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book about which you may have heard something from your Irish acquaintances. Let me hear from you on this point. If, however, you mean that you definitely decline my offer and believe that Mr Long might take the book you can hand it over to him (with the preface) and if you wish me to write you separately to that effect I shall do so. I want the matter settled as soon as possible. That is why I am willing to make the above terms. The later history of the book seems to be open to one interpretation only and that is, that there was a deliberate conspiracy of certain forces in Ireland to silence me. I can scarcely be accused of egoism in coming to this conclusion in view of the facts.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 9 September 1913

Via Montfort 4

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie I present the enclosed lines to your young friends of the Rowing Club if they want them for a dinner programme or some such thing—with the rheumatic chamber poet’s (or pot’s) compliments. Quid si prisca redit Venus? Perhaps you may like them.

Jim

P.S. 16+ 10 = 26.

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 6 October 1913

Via Donato Bramante 4, Trieste

Dear Mr Palmer: Many thanks for your kind letter and apologies for the delay in answering. I am glad to hear that our poor songs are going to be brought out. You are kind enough to ask me which I prefer. I prefer

(1) O, it was out by Donnycarney

(2) At that hour when all things have repose

(3) Gentle lady, do not sing.

But please do not let my preference interfere in any way with your own desires. I hope you will let me know more of this matter as I could probably sell a few copies here among my friends.

After ten years’ silence I wrote a little song the other day and sent it to the Saturday Review. Perhaps you saw it. It was in the issue of September 20. You may like it and find it worthy of note.

I have no news of my book yet but as soon as I have I shall not fail to write you as I feel that you take an interest in my writing. It is a long lane that has no turning.

I am glad you like the South of Ireland. My father is a Munsterman and my people came from Fermoy. I know only Cork and Youghal—and like Youghal very much. I should be glad to have some cards of Mallow.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 23 November 1913

Via Donato Bramante 4, Trieste

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

Dear Sir I sent you two years ago a copy of a letter which I sent to the press concerning my book Dubliners. Since then the book has had a still more eventful career. It was printed completely and the entire edition of 1000 copies was burned by the publisher. A complete set of printed proofs is in my possession. In view of the very strange history of the book—its acceptance and refusal by two houses, my letter to the present king, his reply, my letter to the press, my negotiations with the second publisher—negotiations which ended in malicious burning of the whole first edition—and furthermore in view of the fact that Dublin, of which the book treats so uncompromisingly, is at present the centre of general interest, I think that perhaps the time has come for my luckless book to appear.

I have written a preface narrating objectively its history and as there are 100 orders ready for it in this city I am prepared, if need be, to contribute towards the expenses of publication—expenses which I presume will be lighter as the book will be set up from printed proofs.

Awaiting your prompt reply I am, dear sir Yours sincerely

James Joyce

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A Curious History, 30 November 1913

The following letter, which was the history of a book of stories, was sent by me to the Press of the United Kingdom two years ago. It was published by two newspapers so far as I know: Sinn Fein (Dublin) and the Northern Whig (Belfast).

[There follows Joyce’s letter to the press of 17 August 1911]

I waited nine months after the publication of this letter. Then I went to Ireland and entered into negotiations with Messrs Maunsel. They asked me to omit from the collection the story ‘An Encounter’, passages in ‘Two Gallants’, ‘The Boarding House’, ‘A Painful Case’, and to change everywhere through the book the name of restaurants, cake-shops, railway stations, public houses, laundries, bars and other places of business. After having argued against their point of view day after day for six weeks and having laid the matter before two solicitors (who, while they informed me that the publishing firm had made a breach of contract, refused to take up my case or to allow their names to be associated with it in any way.) I consented in despair to all these changes on condition that the book were brought out without delay and the original text were restored in future editions, if such were called for. Then Messrs Maunsel asked me to pay into their bank £1000 as security, or to find two sureties of £500 each. I declined to do either; and they then wrote to me, informing me that they would not publish the book, altered or unaltered, and that if I did not make them an offer to cover their losses on printing it they would sue me to recover the same. I offered to pay sixty per cent of the cost of printing the first edition of one thousand copies if the edition were made over to my order. This offer was accepted, and I arranged with my brother in Dublin to publish and sell the book for me. On the morrow when the draft and agreement were to be signed the publishers informed me that the matter was at an end because the printer refused to hand over the copies. I then went to the printer. His foreman told me that the printer had decided to forego all claim to the money due to him. I asked whether the printer would hand over the complete edition to a London or continental firm or to my brother or to me if he were fully indemnified. He said that the copies would never leave his printing house, and that the type had been broken up and that the entire edition of one thousand copies would be burnt the next day. I left Ireland the next day, bringing with me a printed copy of the book which I had obtained from the publisher.

James Joyce

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste, Austria

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From EZRA POUND, 15 December 1913

10 Church Walk, Kensington W

TS. Cornell

Dear Sir: Mr Yeats has been speaking to me of your writing. I am informally connected with a couple of new and impecunious papers (‘The Egoist’ which has coursed under the unsuitable name of ‘The New Freewoman’ ‘guere que d’hommes y collaborent’ as the Mercure remarked of it—and the ‘Cerebrilist’ [sic] which means God knows what—anyhow they are about the only organs in England that stand and stand for free speech and want (I don’t say get) literature. The latter can pay a little, the former practically can not pay at all, we do it for larks and to have a place for markedly modern stuff.

I also collect for two American magazines which pay top rates, I can not however promise publication in them as I have no absolute powers for accepting mss.

This is the first time I have written to anyone outside my own circle of acquaintance (save in the case of French authors). These matters can be better dealt with in conversation, but as that is impossible, I write.

‘The Smart Set’ wants top notch stories. ‘Poetry’ wants top notch poetry, I do not answer for the editorial conception of ‘top notch’ but they pay 2 bob a line and get most of the best people (and one hell of a lot of muck) As I don’t in the least know what your present stuff is like, I can only offer to read what you send, Essays etc could only go into the ‘C’ or ‘E’ either is a very good place, if you want to speak your mind on something The Spectator objects to. Appearance in the Egoist may have a slight advertising value if you want to keep your name familiar.

Anyhow there are the facts for what they are worth. Please, if you send anything, mark quite clearly what you want done with it, minimum price as well as price desired, etc.

I am bonae voluntatis,—don’t in the least know that I can be of any use to you—or you to me. From what W.B.Y. says I imagine we have a hate or two in common; but thats a very problematical bond or introduction Yours sincerely

Ezra Pound

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1914

To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 January 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Richards I am sorry to press you but I must ask [you] to let me hear from you by return of post with regard to my book, Dubliners, as I am naturally most anxious to have the matter settled one way or another after so many years. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From EZRA POUND, 17–19 January 1914 Saturday

10 Church Walk, Kensington, London, W

TS. Cornell

Dear Joyce I’m not supposed to know much about prose but I think your novel is damn fine stuff—I dare say you know it quite as well as I do—clear and direct like Merimee.

I’m sending it off at once to the egoist, it seems a crime not to get you paid for it but you recognize the difficulties and the rows any publisher would make.

I hope to got [God] the egoist dont jibe at one or two of your phrases, but I shall try to keep the burden of argument from your shoulders.

Confound it, I cant usually read prose at all not anybody’s in English except James and Hudson and a little Conrad.

I am writing this at once, have just finished the reading.

Monday.

Have been deeved [sic] with interruptions.

I think the stories good—possibly too thorough, too psychological or subjective in treayment to suit that brute in New York. I suppose an encounter is impossible (for a magazine) still I shall send the three of them with my recommendation, for what that’s worth. Wright thinks me a bit cracked, and regards himself as the sane normal and practical male. He has exactly twice as much sense as the common american editor, a sort of double zero leaning toward the infinitesimal. Anyhow we’ll have a go at him and see what can be done.

How about verses. Have you anything more that stands up objective as your ‘I hear an Army’. That petty little magazene in Chicago pays well, and as I have resigned in a rage they are now for a little space docile and desirous of pleasing me by taking my advice.

I hope to have proofs of the ‘Artist’ in a week, but you know what a hell printers and papers are, one never knows till the stuff is out of the office.

Pardon lack of ceremony in this note, but I’m just getting resettled in London and everything has to be done all at once, yours sincerely

Ezra Pound

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 19 January 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I am surprised that you have not replied to my note of a week ago in which I begged you to let me know your decision as to my book Dubliners. The preface (which I sent you on at your manager’s request) appeared in the current issue of The Egoist of 15 January last. I must ask you therefore to let me hear from you by return of post as I am most anxious to have the affair concluded one way or the other. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER (Postcard), 20 January 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer If you are interested in the fortunes of my book Dubliners you will find my preface in the current issue (15 January) of The Egoist (London): Have you set I hear an army? Strange to say this poem has just been chosen for inclusion in an anthology of Imagists. You will perhaps hear more about it. But I hope you will set it. Kind regards

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 24 January 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, In reply to yours of 20 inst:

The book is in the form approved of by me, i.e. with one or two slight changes already made.

I am willing to omit the preface from the book and to have it replaced by the introduction you speak of.

There is not the least fear of an action. If you have read between the lines you will see that the constant objections raised in Dublin were excuses and nothing more. Some person paid the Dublin printer for his work. I did not.

As to modifications of the present text all things considered had we not better waive this point.

I am willing also to take for sale here 120 copies at trade price.

I think of publishing two of the stories in an American magazine and the Italian version of one (Ivy Day) in the Nuova Antologia, where the book is promised an article of notice. If so would you wish it to be known that the publication by you in book form is to be expected.

I daresay you know your business better than I: but I fancy the ‘curious history’ of Dubliners is a notable affect. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 3 February 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards In reply to yours of 29 ult:

I agree to the terms in our old contract but there are a few points on which it is better to be clear.

i) I think you should agree to withhold the continental (Tauchnitz etc) rights for two years. This would allow me to sell the English edition even after the 120 copies which are now sold. It is understood that I take these at once at the trade price of 2/6 (£15)

ii) In view of a possible success I think the royalty of 10% should apply to, say, the first 8000 copies. After that I think you could well increase it to 15%—if only in recognition of my troubles with the book.

Could you bring out the book in May? I undertake to return proofs sent me corrected within two days of receipt.

I hope our troubles are now at an end and wish your house and myself and the ill-fated book good luck. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 2 March 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I have been expecting a letter from you for some days. Will you please let me hear from you as soon as possible with reference to my letter of the 12th ult. as I wish the matter decided without further delay. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 4 March 1914

Via Donato Bramanta 4, Trieste

Dear Mr Grant Richards: I send you herewith the agreement signed by me. I hope you will manage to bring out the book in May as I could push the sale here very well before summer. I take it that if I want other copies (after the 120 copies which I agree to purchase and pay for as soon as they are ready) you will supply them to me on the same terms. You can incorporate the facts in my fair preface.

As regards the inverted comma the high compositors are not to blame: to me they are an eyesore. I think the page reads better with the dialogue between dashes. But if you are persuaded of the contrary I agree to waive the point and let the inverted commas replace the dashes. But I think you ought not to reject my suggestion at once. I think the commas used in English dialogue are most unsightly and give an impression of unreality.

As regards libel actions as I think I told you I offered the manager of the Dublin house to hire a car and go round to the firms named and show them the allusions and ask them whether they had any objection. The manager refused my offer—knowing (as I knew) what would be the result. The excuses put forward day after day are easily seen through and I find it difficult to come to any other conclusion but this—that the intention was to weary me out and if possible strangle me once and for all. But in this they did not succeed.

In conclusion I wish you good success with my unhappy book.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 26 March 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I am in receipt of your letter of 23 inst enclosing copy of our new agreement signed by you.

I am sorry to hear that your printers have mislaid the pages you mention, but I enclose typed copies of them (pp 3–4 and 13–14) so that they can proceed with the printing without further delay.

May I ask you when sending me the first batch of proofs for revision to send back also the original printed title page of the Dublin edition? I hope this page has not gone astray as I should be sorry to lose it.

Hoping that no further incidents may now retard the publication of the book in May next I am very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To KATHARINE TYNAN, 15 April 1914

Trieste (Austria)

MS. Texas

Madam Allow me to thank you for the honour you have done me by including in an anthology recently brought out by you some verses of mine—I hear an army charging upon the land. I have not seen your anthology, but some days ago I saw a collection of verses brought out in New York which also contains these verses. This version and also that in your anthology from which it was taken contains two mistakes, viz:

stanza 2, line 1 ‘into’ for ‘unto’

stanza 3 line 1 ‘grey’ for ‘green’.

(v. Chamber Music (Elkin Mathews, London, 1907), p. 36).

If a second edition of your anthology be called for perhaps you will be kind enough to make these two changes. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 5 May 1914

Beaumont, Upper Drumcondra

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim/. As you see by above, I am located here. I have been two months in hospital and am trying to get well in this convalescent Home, and am feeling somewhat better. I note all you say about yourself and as soon as I am able to write you I will do so more fully. I am most anxious to know the full particulars concerning Eileen, viz. who and what this gentleman is? I am satisfied both you and your brother will look to her future and see that she does not take any step that may mar her future. I am and always was very fond of Eileen. She is the only one of my daughters (now alive) who never gave me insolence, or showed contempt for me so that I look to you to take my part and see after her interests. I had a letter from her, telling me she is very fond of this young gentleman and of course that counts for a good deal, but at the same time is not everything. As you know, I had experience in that respect. I am enclosing you a letter to her as she requested.

As regards my portrait (which I am very glad to see you appear so anxious to have), as soon as I get up some flesh &c. I certainly will get it done for you, and as you again ask me to go over, perhaps, as things have turned out here, and the cruel treatment I have received from my daughters here, I may go over to you on a visit for a month. Of course only on the understanding that I would not be any incumbrance to you or Nora and that I should pay my way, as I have to do here. Not having heard from Stannie for some years, I take it my memory is entirely obliterated from his filial mind?—I dare say ‘Tempora mutantur’ &c?— I will be here for at least a fortnight so that you can write me to this address, as my future one is, to say the least of it, doubtful. Let me know exactly when you mean I should go, as I will require to make some preparation. I need not say it would afford me great pleasure to see you all before I die, also to again look upon the portraits of those who did love me and whom I so loved.

Goodbye now Jim, or perhaps better say Au revoir. Write me more fully concerning Eileen. Don’t forget.

With fond love to All. Believe me to be what is left of Your

Father.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 May 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste, Austria

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I received and returned corrected some ten or twelve days ago the first proofs of Dubliners: and expect to receive the revise in a few days. I should mention that in the proof received one batch—pp 113 to 128—seems to be spaced differently from the others. Also, the original frontispiece or title page was not returned, as I requested: and I should be sorry not to have it. Perhaps you can find it for me.

Can you let me know the date of publication?

Perhaps the press notices which I send under separate cover may be useful for insertion in copies sent to the press. In any case I have sent 65 sheets and hope, as the notices of my first book are favourable, that you may be able to use them in the way I suggest. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 14 May 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards Many thanks for the title page which I received safely. I hope the notices of Chamber Music reached you and may be of some use. I am glad that you will be able to publish in a few weeks.

As you are not sending a revise will you please forward to the printers the enclosed for correction. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 16 May 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I am sorry you have not been able to arrange the introduction by Mr Young but perhaps some of the more sensational part of my preface could be used on a wrapper or showcard. You are the best judge: but I imagine that the story of the burning or some other part of the book’s history might help to push the sale. I hope you will publish before the end of this month as May is a lucky month for me.

You can, of course, use any part of the preface if you like—either my text or your own wording. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 19 June 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste

MS. Richard M. Kain

Dear Mr Grant Richards In reply to card just rec’d I have no photograph of myself, except as a boy. However, I went today to a photographer and he promised to have one ready by tomorrow so that it will be in your hands on Monday, I hope. Perhaps this will be in time for your purpose. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 26 June 1914

Trieste

MS. Yale

Dear Mr. Joyce, Many thanks for your kind present. You may imagine how carefully I shall read the work of my teacher and friend. Surely I shall speak about the new book with everybody I can suppose capable of being interested with an English work of Irish contents. When will you write an Italian work about our town? Why not? Many thanks also from my wife.

I hope you will soon offer me the opportunity to talk with you about the many pages of yours I have now had the opportunity to read. Do you know that I have now discovered that Dedalus is not only an eyeing and looking animal but that he has also a strongly developed sense for smells? I found this quality was hidden for me behind your awful handwriting which is not much better than mine.

Believe me, dear Mr. Joyce, Yours truly

Ettore Schmitz

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 3 July 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste (Austria;)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards Thanks for your letter and copy of paper. I do not see notices and in fact had written to ask you if you get them. It is very kind of you to bring the book under the notice of your friends.

Will you please dispose of the 3 copies as follows:

1) William Archer Esq., c/o ‘Daily News’ Office, Bouverie Street, London.

2) H.S. Herlihie Esq., H.M.S. ‘Dublin’, Malta

3) To me here.

The two copies for Malta [and Trieste] had better be sent registered. Will you kindly let me have also your account for these seven (7) copies together with the postages so that I may remit you cheque in settlement of the lot.

You ask about other books. Have you not seen my novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Its publication began (serially) in the Egoist (London) last January. Perhaps you could see the numbers already issued. I shall of course, as agreed between us, give you the opportunity of publishing it next year in book. If you cannot find the papers I could send you my copies.

I like the print of Dubliners and the cover. There are, however, a few mistakes which your printer did not correct. I suppose they can be changed in a future impression. Sincerely yours

James Joyce.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 November 1914

Via Donato Bramante 4, Trieste

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your kind letter of 21 ult which reached me on the 7 inst.

I have now sent on to Mr John Jaffé the fourth and also the fifth (and last) chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I hope you will receive them safely. It is very kind of you to take so much trouble in the matter.

Any letter forwarded to me should be in Italian or German and preferably in open envelope and quite formal.

I hope I shall remain at liberty. Till now the Austrian authorities have not interfered with me in any way.

Allow me to thank you once again for your kindness and to beg you also to give my kind regards to Mr Pound.

P.S. I am able to send this letter from Venice thanks to the kindness of a friend here. The MSS were sent to Switzerland by the same way. I hope all will arrive safely.

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1915

To GRANT RICHARDS, [Late January 1915]

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards Letters sent to me at above (not the old) address will find me promptly.

My friend Mr Ezra Pound will send you the fourth, fifth and third chapters of my novel so as to save time.

You wrote to me in July to say that you would send me the press notices of Dubliners. If you have double copies you could send them now. I shall send them back to you from above address in a week or so.

Any letter or packet sent me should be addressed as above Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 2 February 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards, Many thanks for your letter of 9 ult and also for the bundle of press cuttings which I read with great interest. I am sorry that I do not find the signature of the critic of the New Statesman as I should like to send him a line of thanks. I did not find any notice from the Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) or from Sinn Fein (Dublin). I shall send back the cuttings in a few days.

I enclosed a list of misprints which you asked me to send you. It is a pity that a revise of the proofs was not sent me. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 March 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver I shall feel obliged if you will write to me at above address to let me know if the last instalments of my novel have now been published in your review and also whether the type of these instalments, from the first, has been kept up. You were kind enough to say that you would reserve two copies of each issue from the date when I ceased to receive them. A letter sent to me as above will reach me after some delay, though, of course, I am still living at my old address and am unmolested.

I hope that your review still comes out in spite of the bad times. With many kind regards and thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, 17 March 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

My dear Mr Pound I am very glad to get your letter of 9 inst and hope that you have now quite recovered from your illness.

I have written to Mr Pinker and said that you will interview him. It is very kind of you to offer to do this for me and I shall be guided by you in the matter. The rest of the Portrait of the Artist had better be sent on to Grant Richards as soon as it is ready.

As regards rights Mr Grant Richards has the right of refusal of this novel. If he decides not to publish, or rather, if he decides not to conclude the open agreement about it I am quite willing to entrust the disposal of the rights to Mr Pinker. Mr Grant Richards promised last July that he would give a definite answer within three weeks after the completed MS was in his possession. At least it seems to me that he did so but I cannot now find his letter.

My comedy Exiles is now finished but I should prefer to hold it over until my novel has been published in book form though I am willing to dispose of it also in the best way.

I believe, however, that the letter you send may have a good effect on Grant Richards. If you see Mr Pinker (I mean, of course, as soon as your illness allows you to go out of doors) you will perhaps explain to him why I have delayed in answering his letter and why I am obliged to write in such a roundabout fashion.

I must say in conclusion that you are a very good correspondent for you always send me lively and good news. I hope you are living well in these bad times. I am still quite unmolested and hope to remain so but the situation is not very pleasant. I am glad also to hear that The Egoist still continues to appear and beg you to convey my kind regards to the editor whose letter I received and answered some time ago. Very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 17 March 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice

Dear Sir: A copy of your letter addressed to me has been forwarded to me by my friend Mr Ezra Pound. I do not know when your letter was written but, if a long time has passed, beg you to excuse my seeming discourtesy.

I am obliged by Mr H.G. Wells’ kindness and also by the friendly interest you express. Would it be too much trouble for you to write a line to Mr Ezra Pound? His address is: 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, London, W. He writes to me to say that if you do he will interview you on my behalf and give you all the information you need. You will understand also, from what he will tell you, that it will be impossible for me for some time to go to London but any letter addressed to me at above address will be forwarded to me as soon as possible.

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To H.L. MENCKEN, 23 March 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice

Dear Mr Mencken: I am in receipt of your kind letter of 3 instant. Although I am still living at the address to which your letter was sent and although it reached me quite safely I think it better to reply to you from above address and beg you to send your reply also in the same way. You will easily understand the reason of this rather complicated arrangement.

I am pleased to hear that two of my stories appeared in your magazine. Could you perhaps send me a copy of the number in which they appeared? I thank you also for your good opinion of my book. I gather from your letter that an American edition of Dubliners has been published. Will you please tell me what is the name of the American publisher? I have been cut off from communication with my English publisher since the outbreak of the war and know nothing of this new new edition.

A novel of mine A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been running in The Egoist (London). The last instalment will be published, I think, next month. If you wish to consider it Mr Pound or the editor of The Egoist will be able to give you what information you need. I hope it will come out in book form before the end of the year: but possibly its serial publication in the way you suggest might be arranged so as to be completed before the date of the English publication in book form.

I thank you also for your kind offer to help me to an American audience and hope you will forgive me for asking you to send me the information I desire as it is rather difficult for me for the moment to obtain it in the usual way.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 24 March 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I enclose copy of a letter which was sent to me c/o Egoist office. I have replied to say that my novel is at present under consideration by you. I presume the complete copy of the book is now in your possession and trust you will write to me as soon as you have read it through.

I have also received a letter from the editor of the Smart Set (New York). He informs me that his paper bought two of my stories and printed them and would have printed more ‘if there had been more time before the publication of the American edition of the book’. From this I gather that you have ceded magazine rights for America of some of the stories and that an American edition of the book is published. The editor of the Smart Set wishes to print something else of mine. I replied referring him to Mr Ezra Pound or to the editor of The Egoist in case he desires to take on the serial publication of my novel, pending its English and American publication in book form.

I shall be glad to hear from you on these points and also to read any other notices you may have received. I am still well and unmolested in any way but would ask you to address letters as above. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 March 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver I thank you for your letter of 17 instant.

I have written to Mr Pinker. I have no contract for the book rights of my novel but Mr Grant Richards, publisher, has the right of refusal of it. I believe the greater part of the novel is now in his hands. If the last instalments (May to August) have been set up I should be very much obliged if you could have a proof of them pulled. I am sure that Mr Pound will send them on to Mr Grant Richards. My reason for troubling you is that, in view of Mr Pinker’s offer, I think it is to my advantage to know as soon as possible Mr Grant Richards’ decision.

I am glad to hear that The Egoist still appears in spite of these bad times and am sure it will live through them. With kind regards and thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From JAMES B. PINKER (Enclosure to letter of 24 March 1915), [March 1915]

Talbot House, Arundel Street, Strand W.C.

Dear Sir My friend Mr H.G. Wells has drawn my attention to your serial story which is appearing in The Egoist and I have been reading it with great interest. If you would entrust the book rights of your novels to me I should be very glad indeed to have the opportunity of handling them. I wonder if you are ever in town and could spare time to come and see me? Yours very truly

James B. Pinker

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 1 April 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Sir My friend, Mr Pound, has sent me on your memorandum agreement. Your proposal seems to me to be very favourable to me. I am afraid, however, that it ought to be recast in a slightly different form.

As regards dramatic rights I can hand these over to you at once and without reserve. I have written a play in three acts, Exiles, but should prefer to hold it over till my novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been published in book form.

Mr Grant Richards, publisher, of 8 Saint Martin’s Street, Leicester Square, London, has the right of refusal of my novel. He has also the same right for other books written by me for the next four years.

As I do not write very quickly I think it would be better to make a separate agreement with you for each book. That for my novel should be conditional on Mr Grant Richards’ refusal of the book rights. I have heard nothing from him about the book and do not know whether he wishes to publish it or not. I have written to him and begged him to let me know as soon as possible. The agreement for the cession of the dramatic rights of my play could be unconditional.

If you think you can make these arrangements I shall be very happy to place my writings in your hands. I shall return the memorandum of agreement or make additions to it or deletions in it, signed or unsigned, according to your further instructions. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 5 April 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice

Dear Mr Grant Richards: Mr Ezra Pound wrote me last week to say that he had handed to you the last chapter of my novel. I hope you will let me have your opinion about it….

Mr H.G. Wells sent me a few days ago a very friendly letter in which he is kind enough to say that ‘he has an unstinted admiration for my work.’ His secretary or agent, as I believe I wrote you, wrote me last month. I have since received from him an agreement by which he proposes to act as agent for the handling of my literary rights (book rights) and dramatic rights. As regards the former I have replied that you hold the right of refusal of them till 15 June 1918 or 1919. Subject to that I should be inclined to accept his offer, though I hope you will publish me as I imagine you wish to do. As regards the latter (dramatic rights) I have decided to accept his offer. I have written a comedy in three acts Exiles and hope he will take over and dispose of its acting rights, the publication in any case falling to you if you care to publish it. But for many reasons I prefer the novel to be published first.

I hope you received safely the press cuttings. Have you not received any notice from the Freeman’s Journal or from Sinn Fein of Dublin? Perhaps you have in the last few months. If so I shall be very much obliged if you will kindly send me them.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 19 April 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards Thanks for your letter of 12 instant with enclosure of Mr Bagnold, the delay of which I regret. I have however now replied to it.

The misconception, I think, is not on my side. The agreement is dated 20 March 1914. The serial rights of my novel were ceded and the MS delivered in January of that year. The clause you allude to concerns serial publication of Dubliners. Moreover, I am not clear as to your position with regard to serial rights of work written by me since date of publication of Dubliners. I understand that you are entitled to a refusal of book rights. I do not care very much whether my novel appears serially elsewhere or not—now that it has been once serially published. In any case as I wish to get it out of my way I shall be very glad to hear from you definitely on the matter as soon as possible.

The American edition of Dubliners, I presume, has been pirated since you did not arrange for it.

I suppose there is no objection to my giving to Mr Pinker the disposal of the dramatic rights of a play, written by me, entitled Exiles, on condition that the rights of publication are yours if you wish to publish it.

I should be very glad if you will kindly look through the press notices you have and see whether there is one of the Freeman’s Journal or of Sinn Fein, Dublin. I did not see them among those you sent me. Possibly they were omitted by mistake.

Perhaps you are now in a position to send me an account of sales of Dubliners. I hope you received safely my list of corrections of misprints, sent some time ago. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From H.L. MENCKEN to JAMES JOYCE, 20 April 1915

The Smart Set, 456 Fourth Avenue, New York

Dear Mr Joyce: Two of your stories The Boarding House and A Little Cloud are in the May Smart Set. I am having two copies of the number sent to you by this post. We were unable to take more because the American publisher of ‘Dubliners’, Mr B.W. Huebsch of 225 Fifth Avenue, New York, planned to bring out the book at about this date. Apparently it has been delayed a bit but I assume that Mr Huebsch still proposes to do it during the spring. The publishing business in the U.S.A. has been hard hit by the war and there are constant changes of plans among the publishers. I think you are fortunate to get into the hands of Mr Huebsch in this country. He is one of the few intelligent publishers in New York.

Mr Pound sent me cuttings of the first 15 or 20 instalments of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I read them with much interest but the story, unfortunately, is too long and diffuse for the Smart Set. We do not publish serials but do a whole novel, or rather novelette, in each number. Sometimes it is possible to carve a novelette out of a novel of the usual length but, as I wrote to Mr Pound, I felt that it would do unpardonable violence to your story to attempt anything of the sort. If you ever have a plan for a novelette, say of 30,000 words, I surely hope that you will let me hear of it. As you may know we also publish an English edition and so we desire both the English and American rights whenever it is possible to get them. In the case of your stories we had to send other stories to England, thus, of course, doubling the expense.

Please don’t hesitate to ask if I can do anything for you here in America; and keep the Smart Set in mind. Mr Nathan and I took charge of it just as the war began and we have had an uphill battle but it is now, I am glad to say, in good financial condition, paying cash for everything and with both circulation and advertising increasing. It is our aim ultimately to make it the best magazine in America. We want to print all the good novels the other editors baulk at.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 22 April 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards Thanks for your letter of 14 inst.

My reason for thinking that Mr Pinker was Mr Wells’s secretary is that Mr Wells in his letter to me spoke of Mr Pinker as ‘an old friend of mine’. Mr Pound also wrote me on the matter and suggested to me that as I live abroad it would be better for me to have an agent, literary and dramatic. Mr Pinker seems to be both: at least his notepaper bears that heading and his draft agreement which he sent me speaks of literary and dramatic rights.

It is possible that your press clipping agency has overlooked the two notices in question. I shall perhaps write to my brother and ask him to search the files of the ‘Freeman’s Journal’ and of ‘Sinn Fein’. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 April 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your letter of 22 instant. I understood that Mr Pound had sent Mr Grant Richards the fifth chapter already set up in proof but it is enough that the whole text is now in his hands. Mr Richards says that he will let me know his decision shortly. In any case the two months should be sufficient for his reader, all the more since the first half of the book was forwarded to him by me last July.

I have appointed Mr Pinker my literary agent and, as it may be useful for him to understand in what relations I stand and have stood till now with my publisher, I shall be much obliged if you will send him under wrapper a copy of the issue of The Egoist (15 January 1914) containing Mr Pound article: “A Curious History”….

As regards your kind suggestion of sending me copies of The Egoist to above address I think it is better to wait till you hear from me again. I shall inquire. It would give me great pleasure to receive them and read them but there are many obstacles in the way. On the whole I think it is better to wait until I write again on the subject. I shall do so in a few days. At the same time let me say that I am very much obliged for your kind thought.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 7 May 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Grant Richards I have received your letter of 29 April with statement of sales up to 31 December by which I see that 379 copies of Dubliners were sold in the United Kingdom. I was sorry that neither you nor I have gained anything. In your statement I see no mention of the 120 copies which I bought: I believe I owe you some small amount still which I could not remit owing to the outbreak of war. There is no mention also of the stories which the editor of the Smart Set appears to have bought. In any case these trifling sums would not change the position which is disastrous for both so far as I can see.

I have appointed Mr Pinker my literary agent so that you deal with him directly. I live too far away to be able to conduct my own affairs, such as they are. I beg you not to omit to return the fifth chapter of my novel to the editor of The Egoist before the 20 May as the paper needs it for the June issue. You can let Mr Pinker know your decision perhaps at the same time. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 May 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice (Italy)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Sir Mr Richards has written me, enclosing a statement of sales for the first six months. It seems that 379 copies of Dubliners have been sold in the United Kingdom. I bought 120 copies. He says that he has received a letter from you and I have informed him that you are empowered to transact all business for me as I live too far away to be able to do it myself. The fifth chapter of my novel must in any case be returned to The Egoist not later than the 20 May as it is needed for the June issue. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 May 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice

Dear Sir: I enclose copy of account sales furnished by my publisher. From the total 499 are to be deducted 120 copies bought by me here and, I suppose, another 120 or so bought in Dublin, Ireland and London by friends, relations and acquaintances, leaving a sale of about 200 copies in seven months.

My publisher wrote me on 26 ult: ‘There is no American edition of Dubliners. The letter that was written you speaking of an American edition was evidently written under a misapprehension.’ I have since received a second letter from New York (copy enclosed), confirming the previous one. If the American rights have not been disposed of I cannot understand what it means.

My publisher also writes that I should not have allowed anyone to publish serially my novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) except by arrangement with him and must not arrange for any serial publication in America. My novel began in the The Egoist (the MS having been already delivered by me to Mr Pound) in February 1914. My contract with my publisher was some months later.

I shall be glad to hear from you on these points.

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 9 May 1915

c/o Gioacchino Veneziani, Murano, Venice

Dear Sir: Mr H.L. Mencken, editor of the Smart Set, writes to tell me (20 ult) that the May issue of his magazine contained two stories of mine The Boarding House and A Little Cloud which form part of my book of stories Dubliners, published in London last June by Grant Richards Ltd. Mr Mencken tells me that he has bought them from or through you for American circulation, speaks of you as the American publisher of Dubliners and informs me that you are bringing out an American edition this spring. If it has appeared I shall be very pleased to receive a copy.

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From B.W. HUEBSCH to JAMES JOYCE, 2 June 1915

Dear Mr Joyce: I observe from your letter of May 9th that Mr Mencken did not make perfectly clear my relation to your volume Dubliners. When I was in London, last Summer, Mr Richards gave me a copy which I read with the keenest interest and appreciation. I wanted very much to accept his offer of the American rights but as my capacity is limited, and short stories in book form do not sell well in America I reluctantly abandoned the idea. However, when I returned to the United States I talked to my friends about the stories and lent them the book. Knowing that Smart Set editors were looking for good material I suggested that they reprint some of the stories and offered to arrange with Mr Richards for the necessary permission. As you are aware they selected two of the tales and made an offer within their limited means which I submitted to Richards and which he accepted. Thus you will see that my relations to the volume have been purely a friendly one because of my admiration for your work. If it seems at all feasible from a business point of view to publish the book here I should still be very glad to do it, but I am afraid that the sale would be disproportionate to the expense and energy that publication would demand.

Someone to whom I was talking of you, I forget who it was, mentioned that a serial story by you had been running in The Egoist. Am I mistaken in my facts? At any rate if anything else of yours has been published in book form I should be very glad to have an opportunity to read it.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, (Postcard) 16 June 1915

MS. Mrs Nelly Joyce

Via Donato Bramante 4, II, Trieste

Lieber Stannie: Wir sind noch hier und bei guter Gesundheit. Ich hoffe dass Du bist es auch. Falls wir reisen ab ich werde Dir schreiben. Hab’ kein Angst für uns. Bis jetzt hat man uns immer gut behandelt. Ich habe etwas geschrieben. Die erste Episode meines neues Roman “Ulysses” ist geschrieben. Die erste Teil, die Telemachie, besteht aus vier Episoden: die zweite von fünfzehn, dass ist, Ulysses Wandlungen: und die dritte, Ulysses Heimkehr, von andre drei Episoden. Lebwohl.

Jim

Absender: James Joyce

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Part III

ZURICH, TRIESTE
1915–1920

1915 (cont.)

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 June 1915

Gasthof Hoffnung, Reitergasse 16, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: I have just arrived here from Trieste after a rather adventurous time. The Austrian authorities however were kind enough to give me a permit to the Swiss frontier when the partial evacuation of the city was ordered by the military commando. I stopped here as it is the first big city after the frontier. I do not [know] where I shall live in Switzerland. Possibly here. In any case I shall be very glad to hear from you about my novel. You can write to above address. If I am not here your letter will be forwarded. I am writing to Mr Pound by the same post, explaining my position with more detail. I suppose my novel has now come to an end.

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 30 June 1915

Gasthof Hoffnung, Reitergasse 16, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Sir I have just arrived here and beg you to let me know by return what news there is about my books. Any letters forwarded to me after Italian declaration of war did not reach me. If any letters are at my publisher’s perhaps you could forward them, also. I shall probably remain in Switzerland till it is possible for me to return to Trieste. A letter to above address will find me in any case. I hope that now that we are in direct communication it will be possible to conclude something. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, [6 July 1915]

Tuesday 18 Woburn Buildings

MS. Royal Literary Fund

My dear Gosse: I write from the country so please excuse paper. I have only this block. I have just heard that James Joyce, an Irish poet and novelist of whose fine talent I can satisfy you, is in probably great penury through the war. He was at Trieste teaching English and has now arrived at Zurich. He has children and a wife. If things are as I believe, would it be possible for him to be given a grant from the Royal Literary Fund? What form should the application take? I am sorry to trouble you but I know in a case of hardship you do not think anything is trouble. Yrs scy.

W B Yeats

I would like to show you some of Joyce’s work.

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To H.L. MENCKEN, 7 July 1915

Gasthof Hoffnung, Reitergasse 16, Zurich

Dear Mr Mencken: It is only now that I am able to acknowledge receipt of your very kind letter of 20 April last. It reached me through my friends in Venice just before the Italian declaration of war and after that it was of course impossible for me to reply. I left Trieste on the 21 June by special permission of the military authorities when the partial evacuation of the city was decided on. After a rather adventurous journey, I arrived here where I am stopping for the present. I wrote at once to my friend in Venice asking him to send on my post. This morning I received the numbers of The Smart Set containing my stories and also the others which you were kind enough to send. No letter has reached me. Possibly they have been delayed by the censor and will be sent on later. In any case I must thank you for having introduced me to your public. I have been reading today with great interest your lively articles. It is almost a year since I read any articles in English about books.

I wrote to Mr Huebsch, whose name you gave me, and asked him to let me know whether there is or is to be an American edition of Dubliners. I have not yet had an answer. Perhaps the enclosed press notices of my book may interest you. I shall be very anxious to see American notices if the book comes out there.

I am sorry you did not take up the American serial publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but I understand that your review publishes only complete stories. My novel has now come to an end (serially) in the Egoist (London) and is under consideration for publication in book form. As you are so kind as to ask me if I have other material suitable for your review I may say that I have finished a play in three acts Exiles and am engaged on a novel which is a continuation of A Portrait of the Artist and also of Dubliners. I mention the play because I see in one of your numbers a play by Mr Palmer but it is, of course, in one act. I am afraid I am a slow writer. Moreover, I had to struggle nine years to obtain the publication of Dubliners and this has delayed me very much.

Excuse me if this letter is very egoistic. I shall certainly bear your kind offer in mind and thank you once again for your friendly letter.

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 7 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr Huebsch I arrived here a few days ago from Trieste after a rather adventurous journey and am stopping here for some time. My friend in Venice has just sent me on your letter of the 3 June. I am sorry to hear that you have not brought out an American edition of Dubliners but at the same time I must [thank you] for what you have done for it in a friendly way. Mr Mencken sent me the issue of the Smart Set containing my two stories and it gave me great pleasure to read his lively causerie.

As you are kind enough to ask me about other books of mine I published a book of love songs some years ago with Mr Elkin Mathews, publisher, Cork Street, Regent Street, London. I am sorry I have not here some of the press notices. In the hurry of my departure I forgot many things. However, if you care to consider that little book you can write to Mr Mathews on the matter.

As regards my novel you are well informed. It is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and began serial publication in The Egoist (Feby 1914). It has now come to an end, I believe, and the disposal of the book rights is in the hands of my literary agent, Mr James B. Pinker, Talbot House, Arundel Street, Strand, London. He has (or can procure for you) the complete set of printed slips. I hope you will see your way to take on one or other of these books as Mr Mencken wrote to me about your house in the highest terms.

I have finished a play in three acts, Exiles, but would prefer the publication in book to come after its eventual production on the stage.

With many thanks for your friendly interest Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker My friend in Venice has just sent me on your letter of 27 ult which of course I had not received through Venice as it was sent after the Italian declaration of war. I have also received by the same mail a letter from Mr B.W. Huebsch, 225 Fifth Avenue, New York. He tells me that he has not published an American edition of the stories but handed over two of them to the editor of the Smart Set. The July issue of that magazine contains two of the stories.

Mr Huebsch asks me about my novel. I have written to say that you have now the disposal of its book rights (British and American) and suggested that he should put himself into communication with you. I hope and believe that under your management my affairs will go better. They could scarcely go worse.

I have taken rooms at above address for the present, not knowing where else to go or what to do. A letter, however, sent me either here or to the Gasthof Hoffnung will reach me. I look forward to your letter with great interest. After nine years of useless struggle about Dubliners (ending in a discreet financial failure) I hope things will change.

I am sending a line to Mr Wells so that if he be in my neighbourhood he may permit me to thank him personally for having brought my writings under your notice Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To H.G. WELLS, 8 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

Dear Mr Wells, I arrived here some days ago from Trieste after a rather adventurous journey and shall remain here probably for some time. If you are ever in my neighbourhood, I hope you will call on me. I shall be very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance and shall be glad of an opportunity of thanking you personally for your friendly interest in my writings. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, [5 July 1915] Thursday

18 Woburn Buildings

MS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Gosse: I am trying to get at the facts. Joyce has written a book of verse Chamber Music and a most remarkable book of stories called Dubliners which I thought of for our Academic Committee prize. I would be inclined however to base his claim on a most lovely poem in Katharine Tynan Hinkson’s Irish Anthology The Wild Harp. It is to the end of that book. I will try and find my copy. Yours

W B Yeats

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker I have just received your letter of 5 inst which crossed one I sent you two days ago. I hope Messrs Seeker will take on the novel. I am sending you a few notices of Dubliners which may possibly be of some use to you.

I brought with me from Trieste the MS of Exiles. I shall now have it typed and sent on. My friend Mr Ezra Pound (5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington) writes me today that he has a promise from the manager of an American company about reading it. You could perhaps see him.

I have a few verses by me—one or two—and would send them if you approve. Since I wrote Chamber Music (1907) I published verses only once—in the Saturday Review which printed some of my verses in the past. I mention this rather against my will as I prefer to have one thing done at a time: and the novel and the play are more important. But I must confess that I have now other motives. Mr Mencken of The Smart Set wrote also asking for contributions. In any case perhaps you will advise me on the matter. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

PS. Please note my new address where I shall probably remain for some time.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter and the two copies of The Egoist which have just reached me. I shall probably remain here (at this address) for some time. As you ask me I think it would be better if the instalments of my novel could be made a little longer so as to finish the serial publication a little earlier than November. But if you cannot do so conveniently they may run on till then. Mr Pinker writes that he hopes Messrs Secker will publish the book. I shall read the two numbers you sent me with great pleasure. If you send me a few of the spring numbers I shall be very glad to have them.

May I point out that there is a slight mistake in your advertisement columns. My novel did not begin in your paper on the 1 March 1914 but on the 2 February 1914—which, strange to say, is also my birthday.

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From W.B. YEATS to EZRA POUND, [? 15 July 1915

) Thursday 18 Woburn Buildings, W.C.

MS. Yale

My dear Ezra Can you get into communication with Joyce and get the facts. I am writing to Gosse about Joyce’s literary gift. Yrs scy

W B Yeats

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To EZRA POUND, [About 15 July 1915]

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

TS. Royal Literary Fund

I am here with wife and children (two aged ten and eight). For the last six months I have had great difficulty in living. In order to leave Trieste I had to raise money on my furniture. The fare and other expenses here brought that supply to an end. I have of course no means of support though I am looking for lessons every day. I have received a small amount of money from a connection of mine by marriage and it is this at present which keeps me and my family. I cannot count on any definite supply from that source as he has his own family and is not rich….

I suppose I shall receive nothing in the way of royalties….

Perhaps when the scholastic year begins again in October I can find some kind of teaching here in Switzerland, either in Zurich or in French Switzerland. This is my hope, I am afraid I cannot go back to Trieste for some time to come….

The last raid of Italian airships, as I read, was directed against the Trieste shipyard, about five minutes from my house.

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To W.B. YEATS, 17 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII

Dear Yeats: Mr Ezra Pound has sent me your note to him enclosing that of Mr Gosse to you. I have sent all the facts of the case so that they can be sent on. I hope and am sure that your intervention will bring a badly needed relief and I cannot thank you enough for your kindness in taking so much trouble in the matter. I am trying to arrange here about the typing of my play Exiles and I shall send it then to Mr Pinker. I think I can manage to have it done in exchange for a certain number of lessons. I do not wish however to bore you with the details of my situation. I want only to thank you sincerely for your friendly interest in me.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 17 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker I have just received your letter of 13. and shall send you one or two pieces of verse tomorrow.

I did not explain to you my position more fully because I have been in relation with you for so short a time and I thought I ought not to inflict the facts of the case on you and also because a person in such circumstances is at a disadvantage with publishers. I understand that my friends in London are doing all they can for me. It is very kind of them indeed. A letter from Mr Edmund Gosse has been sent to me, extremely friendly, and I have forwarded to Mr Pound all the information asked for. I am grateful also to Mr Wells for another proof of his interest in me.

I think I have now arranged about the typing of my play. I am getting it done at once (partly in return for lessons) but of course I get only one copy. This being so lest the typescript should go astray and thus throw on me an expense I could not meet I shall make, if you allow me, the following arrangement. I shall post you each act of the three separately, at intervals of a day or two. Will you please send me three telegrams: thus: First act received and so for the second and third acts? In this way even if one act goes astray my difficulty will be the less.

I hope you will induce Messrs Seeker to take up the novel. In case there be any royalty due to me on Dubliners I shall be obliged if you will send it on as the second A/S should come in after 30 June. Possibly there is some small sum due. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From EZRA POUND to W.B. YEATS, [About 22 July 1915]

[London]

TS. Royal Literary Fund

Re/ James Joyce. Joyce writes in regard to his eyes that he is subject to ‘irido—something or other’ as a consequence of malarial fever contracted in Rome, and that these attacks may incapacitate him for work for three or four weeks at a time.

He has degrees from Dublin and Padua, and a certificate from the Higher Commercial School at Trieste and hopes to get some teaching in the autumn. He kept on teaching at the Higher Commercial in Trieste until it closed.

He says journalism is not in his line. (And indeed it is very hard to get any journalism to do now, even if one is here in London and has some connections, unless one is a war specialist.)

Joyce says ‘that as a matter of fact, they have not enough clothing as the summer in Switzerland is quite cold, in comparison with Trieste.’ (He would rather this should not be known as he thinks it would place him at a disadvantage with publishers. As I dare say it would, the lice!)

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From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, [24 July 1915] Saturday

18 Woburn Buildings

MS. Royal Literary Fund

My dear Gosse: I enclose letters and statements about James Joyce of whose need I told you. I suggested that he was worthy of help from the Royal Literary Fund. I believe him to be a man of genius. Had you not pointed out to me, what I already vaguely felt, that we could not give our annual prize to another Irishman just now I would have proposed him for it this year. He has written Dubliners a book of satiric stories of great subtlety, a little like Russian work, and Chamber Music a book of verse, a little of it very beautiful and all of it very perfect technically. I will try to find these books and send them to you. I would think it a great kindness if you would do something for this man whose life has always been hard, but who was emerging into luckier circumstances when the war came. Yours

W B Yeats

The typed passages I send are all from an intimate friend of Joyce. You must not attribute to me that remark about publishers.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver Many thanks indeed for all the copies of The Egoist. I am glad that you have changed your printer. The January number (printed by Messrs Partridge and Cooper) was very carelessly read (if read at all) by their reader. From several paragraphs whole sentences have been left out. My MSS are in Trieste but I remember the text and am sending the correct version of these passages to my agent. The instalments printed by Ballantyne, Hanson and Co (February to July) are of course carefully done. I hope the other printers did not set up the numbers which I have not seen (1 and 15 August, 1 and 15 September and 15 December). When you are sending me the August number perhaps you could send me also these numbers.

With apologies for all the trouble I am giving you and kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From EDMUND GOSSE to A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, 25 July 1915

17 Hanover Terrace, Regents Park, NW

MS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Roberts Will you kindly take up the case of this Mr. Joyce, who had an appointment in Trieste, and fled, when the Italian War broke out, to Zürich, where he is now stationary? This case is urgently brought forward by the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, who will support it. Mr. Joyce has sent me books of his, in prose and verse, which are certainly up to our standard. I undertake to report upon them.

Perhaps you would kindly send to Zürich the form to fill up? Yeats lives at

18 Woburn Buildings

Upper Woburn Place

W.C.

but he is away from town, and it is necessary to write ‘please forward’.

Yours sincerely

Edmund Gosse

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From W.B. YEATS to the SECRETARY of the ROYAL LITERARY FUND, 29 July [1915]

Coole Park

MS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Sir: I have only today received your letter. I believe that Joyce is in immediate need of help. I sent to Mr Gosse a statement of Mr James Joyce’s present circumstances so far as they are known to me, if more particulars are needed you could perhaps get them from Mr Ezra Pound, 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, who has been in fairly constant correspondence with Mr Joyce and arranged for the publication of his last book. I think that Mr Joyce has a most beautiful gift. There is a poem on the last page of his ‘Chamber Music’ which will I believe live. It is a technical and emotional masterpiece. I think that his book of short stories ‘Dubliners’ has the promise of a great novelist and a great novelist of a new kind. There is not enough foreground, it is all atmosphere perhaps, but I look upon that as a sign of an original study of life. I have read in a paper called ‘The Egoist’ certain chapters of a new novel, a disguised autobiography, which increases my conviction that he is the most remarkable new talent in Ireland today. Yours scy

W B Yeats

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To A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, SECRETARY, ROYAL LITERARY FUND, 30 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Sir I am obliged by your favour of 26 instant and return you duly filled up under separate registered cover the printed form which you forwarded me.

At the outbreak of war I was in Trieste where I have lived for the last eleven years. My income there was derived from two sources: i) my position in the Higher School of Commerce ii) private lessons. After the outbreak of war I was confirmed in my position by the Austrian Ministry of Public Instruction, Vienna, from whom I held and hold it. The school however closed in spring, nearly all the professors having been called up as officers of the reserve. My second source of income in normal times, viz., private lessons, produced very little in the first months and nothing at all in the next months owing to the critical conditions of the city. In these circumstances I lived with great difficulty and was obliged to recur to the assistance of friends, as stated under.

When, one month after the Italian declaration of war, the military authorities decided on the partial evacuation of the city I asked for, and obtained at once, a safe conduct for myself, my wife and children to the Swiss frontier. I have been here one month now. I received from a relative of my wife’s a small sum of money, £15, of which some remains. In order to leave Trieste I effected a loan on my furniture and this sum went for trainfare (owing to the fact that the railways of Trentino and South Tyrol were in our war zone we were obliged to come by a circuitous route) and clothing.

I receive nothing in the way of royalties. My contributions to reviews etc were made twelve years ago. From my first publisher and from my second I did not receive any money for royalties, the sale in both cases being below the required number. In the case of my second publisher I bought and paid for at trade prices 120 copies of my book as a condition of publication. For my contributions to reviews in the current year, The Smart Set and The Egoist, I received no payment.

I enclose a medical certificate which attests my state of health and shall be much obliged if you will kindly return it to me under registered cover when it has been examined. In present circumstances in this country where I may have to remain for some time it seems very difficult to obtain any work of the kind which I do. My literary work during the last eleven years has produced nothing. On the contrary my second book Dubliners cost me a considerable sum of money owing to the eight years of litigation which preceded its publication. I have tried to obtain an engagement with several schools here but have not succeeded.

I trust that I have given you a clear statement of the facts of the case. I am writing to my friends Mr W B Yeats and Mr Ezra Pound who, I am sure, will corroborate me in my statements. I am, dear Sir, Sincerely yours

James Joyce

Debts contracted in the course of the war.

i) to Baron Ambrogio Ralli, Palazzo Ralli, Trieste, Austria,
Crowns/Austrian/300.–

ii) to Gioacchino Veneziani Esq. Murano, Venice, Italy,
Crowns/Austrian/250.–
Cr. A. 550.–

Enclosure

1 Medical Certificate

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To EZRA POUND (Postcard), [30 July 1915]

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII

MS. Yale

My dear Mr Pound I received and returned, duly filled up, a form from the R.L.F. The secretary Mr Llewelyn Roberts, asks me to write to two friends requesting them to write to him at once in confirmation of my statement. Will you be one of these? I am sure you will be so kind. His address is: 40 Denison House, 296 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, S.W. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Mr Pinker will send I suppose my play to [you].

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To EZRA POUND, 31 July 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

My dear Mr Pound I find that deletions have been made in my novel: in the issues of 1 August and 1 January. Who has the typescript? Can you send me the pages corresponding to these instalments? If Mr Pinker has it you need not send it. If he has the published version I must have these deleted passages typed at once and sent to him as part of the novel which he is submitting to Martin Seeker and Co for publication. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From EZRA POUND to A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, 3 August 1915

5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, W.

TS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Sir: Re/ your request for information regarding James Joyce. (B.A.R. Univ. Dublin).

He is a refugee from Trieste. He kept on teaching in that city until the last possible moment. He is now searching for work in Switzerland. He has a wife and children. Two—boy and girl, 10 and 8. He has, also, some eye trouble that is likely to incapacitate him for several weeks at a time.

He has degrees from Dublin and, I think, Padua, and various certificates from commercial training schools so he feels he may find work later. The schools are now shut for the summer, I believe.

I understand that he arrived in Zurich with clothing suitable for Trieste but not for the Swiss temperature. A relative of his wife’s has advanced him a little money, now nearly or wholly gone. This relative is not a man of means and can scarcely be expected to advance or give more money. My own gross takings for the month of July were £2/17 so I am not in a position to help Mr Joyce directly, though I should be glad to do so. (I do not think he would accept assistance unless he were on the edge of necessity.) I do not imagine that my opinion of Mr Joyce’s writing can have any weight with your committee, still it gives me a certain satisfaction to state that I consider Joyce a good poet, and without exception the best of the younger prose writers. (This is not an opinion influenced by personal friendship, for I was drawn to the man through his work.)

The book ‘Dubliners’ is uneven. It has been well received but I think he has received nothing yet from his publishers.

His novel ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ has not yet appeared in book form. It is a work of indubitable value, and permanence. It is appearing serially in a paper called ‘The Egoist’. This paper is conducted by enthusiasts who can not afford to pay their contributors.

Your older magazines are so sunk in sloth and stupidity that it [is] impossible for anyone under ninety and unrelated to your detestable victorian rhetoricians to get published in them. Joyce was in Trieste and without friends of influence and I therefore induced him to print this novel in such an out of the way place rather than to leave it longer hidden awaiting the caprice of commerce. This move has been justified, since it has interested several well known authors in Mr Joyce’s work.

I would point out that Mr Joyce’ work has been absolutely uncorrupted. He has lived for ten years in obscurity and poverty, that he might perfect his writing and be uninfluenced by commercial demands and standards. ‘Ho sofferto fame tre anni a Lipsia, come magister, io non m’arrendi [sic].’

His style has the hard clarity of a Stendhal or a Flaubert. (I am not using these comparisons in a fit of emotional excitement. I have said as much in print already and the opinion is one which has stayed with me for over a year without diminution.) He has also the richness of erudition which differentiates him from certain able and vigorous but rather overloaded impressionist writers. He is able, in the course of a novel, to introduce a serious conversation, or even a stray conversation on style or philosophy without being ridiculous. With the rest, or with most of your novelists, save Henry James and Thomas Hardy, any author who lets a flash of his own personality leak out through the chinks of his story is lost, utterly and hopelessly lost, and we know we can not possibly care a hang what such an author says, or invents for his characters.

If it might be permitted me, to exceed slightly the request you have made to me for information, and if as a foreigner, viewing as a spectator the glories and shames of your country, I might say that it seems to me ridiculous that your government pensions should go for the most part to saving wrecks rather than in the fostering of letters. Thus you give a pension to De la Mare (God knows I am thankful for any good fortune that may befall Walter de la Mare, he is a man who has written a few charming poems, who has been worried to death, who is practically at the end of his tether and who is unlikely to write anything more of any value. Pensioned and put to rest.

On the other hand you have a really great writer like Joyce, capable of producing lasting work if he had any chance of leisure, such chance of leisure as a small pension might give him.

I know it is not my place to make suggestions to your august committee, but I do very strongly make this suggestion. I assure you that England’s thoughtfulness, in the midst of war, in stopping to pension De la Mare, has had a good effect on my country. America will have given England more credit for that small act than she will have given to Germany for a propaganda of Kultur. The effect on a foreign nation is perhaps irrelevant but it may be considered.

I do not know how these things are arranged, and I am, I believe, persona non grata to most of my elders but that fact might be overlooked for the moment in a matter so intimately concerning the welfare of English letters as I believe Mr. Joyce’s welfare to be. I trust I have given the information that you desire. I shall be glad to supply any more data than [sic] I can. Joyce has two children aged 5 and 8. The eye trouble is the after effect of malarial fever. The school term begins in October, but there is of course no absolute certainty that he will be able to find a position. Respectfully yours,

Ezra Pound

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To A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS (Fragment of a letter), [About 7 August 1915]

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Sir In reply to your letter of 4 instant the title of my second book is: Dubliners. I enclose some notices of it and of the first book. An account of the litigation which preceded its publication was published in The Egoist (London) on 15 January 1914. I shall ask the editor to send you a copy of the issue. The result was that the book was published exactly as I wrote it after eight years and four [manuscript breaks off]

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 10 August 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver Thanks for the current number of The Egoist and also for your defence of my text. I am afraid I am obliged to trouble you once more. Will you please send a copy of The Egoist (issue: 15 January 1914), containing Mr Pound’s article A Curious History to Mr A. Llewelyn Roberts, 40 Denison House, 296 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, S.W.?

With many thanks in advance and kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, 21 August [1915]

Coole Park

MS. Royal Literary Fund

My dear Gosse, I have sent all the information I have about Joyce but could of course get more if I knew what was wanted. Joyce would answer questions. In a letter of thanks he says T am trying to arrange here about the typing of my play Exiles and I shall send it then to Mr. Pringle,’ an agent I believe. ‘I think I can arrange to have it typed in exchange for a certain number of lessons.’ He speaks also of hoping for ‘badly needed relief’ from your fund. I shall try and get a sight of his play but our players have had to go to the music halls to keep in existence till the war is over, so I can do nothing for him there. I believe him to be a man of genius, that he and James Stephens are the most promising people we have in Ireland. I thank you very much for the trouble you are taking. Yours

W B Yeats

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 August 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver It seems that now papers sent from the United Kingdom to residents in neutral countries must be dispatched direct from the publishing office of the paper. Will you please send the September number of The Egoist therefore direct from your office to me under your printed wrapper so that I may receive it promptly?

As this will be the last instalment of my novel I feel that I owe you my sincere thanks for the interest you have taken in my writing and for the trouble you have taken to protect my text. I am very grateful to your paper and to your staff and hope you will have a more prosperous career when these bad days are past. Very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS to EDMUND GOSSE, 28 August [1915]

Coole Park

MS. Royal Literary Fund

My dear Gosse: I thank you very much for what you have done; but it never occurred to me that it was necessary to express sympathy ‘frank’ or otherwise with the ‘cause of the Allies.’ I should have thought myself wasting the time of the committee. I certainly wish them victory, and as I have never known Joyce to agree with his neighbours I [a line missing where the paper has been torn and mended] in Austria has probably made his sympathy as frank as you could wish. I never asked him about it in any of the few notes I have sent him. He had never anything to do with Irish politics, extreme or otherwise, and I think disliked politics. He always seemed to me to have only literary and philosophic sympathies. To such men the Irish atmosphere brings isolation, not anti-English feeling. He is probably trying at this moment to become absorbed in some piece of work till the evil hour is passed. I again thank you for what you have done for this man of genius. Yours

W B Yeats

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To A. LLEWELYN ROBERTS, 31 August 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Royal Literary Fund

Dear Sir I duly received your registered letter of 25 inst with returned medical certificate and am very grateful to your committee for the grant of £75 voted me at its last meeting. Today the Société de Credit Suisse paid me the first instalment of £25. The voucher which you asked me to return will be sent on by the bank here. It has been already signed by me together with a receipt (duplicate) for the amount.

I beg you to convey to your committee my thanks for their benevolence: and I desire to thank you personally for the kind interest you have taken in my case. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To W.B. YEATS, 1 September 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Yeats

Dear Yeats At its last meeting the committee of the Royal Literary Fund voted me a grant of £15, payable in three installments of £25 each at intervals of three months. I am very much obliged to you for the trouble you took in the matter. I hope I shall soon begin to receive something for the books I have written or at least be able to live independently as I did until a few months ago. Both these possibilities seem rather remote at present.

I trust your health is good and that you are as well as can be expected in these ‘calamitous times’. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 1 September 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker I thank the lady who represents the American Syndicate for her good opinion of my play and am sorry she has refused it as unfit for her theatre. I do not know anyone to whom you could submit it. Mr Pound or this lady herself might be able to direct you. The former wrote of Mr Cecil Dorrian but I suppose this gentleman is another member of the same syndicate. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS, 7 September [1915]

Coole Park, Gort, Co. Galway

MS. Cornell

Dear Joyce: I am very glad indeed that ‘The Royal Literary Fund’ has been so wise and serviceable. You need not thank me, for it was really Ezra Pound who thought of your need. I acted at his suggestion, because it was easier for me to approach the Fund for purely personal reasons. We thought Gosse (who has great influence with the Fund people, but is rather prejudiced) would take it better from me. What trouble there was fell on Ezra.

I shall hope to see your play. My own players have had to go to the music halls with some of our one act pieces to live till the war is over. But for that I would have some hope of our theatre perhaps producing it in Dublin at any rate. Yrs sy

W B Yeats

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From EZRA POUND, [About 7 September 1915]

5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington

TS. Cornell

Dear Joyce I have just read the splendid end of ‘The Portrait of the Artist’, and if I try to tell you how fine it is, I shall only break out into inane hyperbole.

I think the Chapter V. went straight to the Egoist, or came when I was away and had to be forwarded at once,,, anyhow I have been reading it in the paper. I have been doing nothing but write 15 page letters to New York about the new magazine and my head is a squeezed rag, so don’t expect le mot juste in this letter.

However I read you⁠[r] final instalment last night when I was calm enough to know what I was doing, and I might have written then with more lucidity.

Anyhow I think the book hard, perfect stuff. I doubt if you could have done it in ‘the lap of luxury’ or in the whirl of a metropolis with the attrition of endless small amusements and endless calls on one’s time, and endless trivialities of enjoyment (or the reverse).

I think the book is permanent like Flaubert and Stendhal. Not so squarish as Stendhal, certainly not so varnished as Flaubert. In english I think you join on to Hardy and Henry James (I don’t mean a resemblance, I mean that there’s has [sic] been nothing of permanent value in prose in between. But I think you must soon, or at least sooner or later, get your recognition.

Hang it all, we dont get prose books that a man can re read. We don’t get prose that gives us pleasure paragraph by paragraph. I know one man who occasionally burries a charming short chapter in a long inneffective novel … but that’s another story.

It is the ten years spent on the book, the Dublin 1904, Trieste 1914, that counts. No man can dictate a novel, though there are a lot who try to. And for the other school. I am so damn sick of energetic stupidity. The ‘strong’ work … balls! And it is such a comfort to find an author who has read something and knows something. This deluge of work by subirban counter-jumpers on the one hand and gut-less Oxford graduates or flunktuates on the other … bah! And never any intensity, not in any of it.

The play has come, and I shall read it as soon as I can be sure of being uninterrupted.

Later

I have just finished the play.

Having begun it (cliche) I could not (cliche) leave off until (cliche)

Yes, it is interesting. It won’t do for the stage.

(No, it is unsuitable for the ‘Abbey’, as mebbe ye might kno’aw fer yourself, Mr J’ice).

It is exciting. But even read it takes very close concentration of attention. I don’t believe an audience could follow it or take it in, even if some damd impracticable manager were to stage it.

Not that I beleive any manager would stage it in our chaste and castrated english speaking world.

Roughly speaking, it takes about all the brains I’ve got to take in thing, reading. And I suppose I’ve more intellogence that [than] the normal theatre goer (god save us)

I may be wrong, the actual people moving on a stage might underline and emphasise the meaning and the changes of mood but …

… again count in the fact that I ‘dont go to the thatre’, that is to say I’m always enraged at any play (I don’t know that I’m bored) I have cheap cinema amusement and that I get wroth at the assininity of the actors or the author etc. etc. I get a few moments pleasure and long stretches of annoyance. And now my wife dont care much about late hours…. still I never did go much … it always cost money which I couldn’t afford. At least I like comfortable seats, which I occasionally get free, and I’m not devotee enough to stand in a shilling line waiting for a board in the gallery.

My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together, whereas a novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim, (so here I am with a clavicord beside me, which I cant afford, and cant reasonably play on … here I am chucked out of the Quarterly Review for having contributed ithyphallic satirical verse to ‘BLAST’….

and if I had written this letter last night (2 a.m.) just after finishing the ‘Portrait’, I should have addressed you ‘Cher Maitre’.

Now what would he want to write for the stage for????? Can one appeal to the mass with anything requiring thought? Is there anything but the common basis of a very few general emotions out of which to build a play that shall be at once

A. a stage play

B. not common, not a botch.

There is no union in intellect, when we think we diverge, we explore, we go away.

When we feel we unite.

Of course your play is emotional. It works up quite a whirl of emotion, and it hasm undoubtedly, form. I dont think it is nearly as intense as ‘The Portrait’, at least I dont feel it as much.

My resultant impression is one of a tired head. (Count that I have written out three thousand words of complicated buisiness plan . . been down town and bought two modern pictures for another man … played a bit of tennis … well it’s not more than any one in your theatre audience might have done….

I might have come to your mss. with a fresher mind … ma che …

All through the first act I kept doubting the fitness for the stage … for though I hate (oh well, not hate) the theatre I cant help reading a play with constant thoughts about its fitness for the stage (habit contracted when I was supposed to be doing a doctor’s thesis on ‘The functions of the gracioso in the Plays of Lope de Vega’)

Without re-reading, I should say that the first spot in the play where it would in any way gain by being staged is the exquisite picture of Robert squirting his perfume pump.

That is to say or to quote ‘character’ is comedy. Tragedy is emotion. I may be wrong. The thing might carry. The Stage-Society might give it a try out.

I so loathe the Granville Barker tone … ma che….

Whether one would want to see those detestable people acting it….

mind you … there’s no telling what they mightn’t do, or what they mightn’t take to … (if it were castrated … the virginal Shaw would want it castrated … they’re all vegetarians.

It will form an interesting J volume when you bring out your collected works. When you are a recognized classic people will read it because you wrote it and be duly interested and duly instructed … but until then I’m hang’d if I see what’s to be done with it.

The prudery of my country (i.e. all of it that isn’t lured by vulgarity.) The sheer numbers to which a play must appeal before it is any use to a manager.

Bed rooms scenes where the audience can be tittivated, eroticised … excited and not expected to think … balcony full … dress circle ditto … boxes ditto….

Ibsen is no longer played. If there were an Ibsen theatre in full blast I dare say your play could go into it … ma che….

I shall end this and send it by the midnight post.

I shall read the play again and see if I can think of anything.

Lane’s manager writes ((with regard to Mr Joyce’s novel, we are very glad to know about this, but Mr Lane will not deal with an agent. If, however, either you or Mr Joyce likes to send the MS. here we shall be very glad indeed to consider it)).

Don’t botther to write to Pinker, I will get the ms. from him and take it round to Lane. Lane is publishing my memoir on Brzeska, so I am in touch with him.

(of course its pure bluff their talking about not dealing with an agent. They all do … at least I believe they do. … I must stop this if it is to go tonight, yours

Ezra Pound

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), Postmark 13 September 1915

Reinhardstrasse 7, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

In your letter received last night the no of copies sold is 499. In the A/S sent me six months ago, to date 31 Dec 1914, the no was also 499. Is the last A/S dated as it should be 30 June: and does this mean that in the six months, 31 Dec–30 June, no copy was sold? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I note that Mr Pound has the typescript of Exiles. The article in New Age is in issue of 25 February 1915.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 28 October 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Will you please send the next copy of The Egoist to this (my new address)? I am afraid to trouble you once more but I should feel very grateful if you could send me also the issue of 15 January 1914 which contains Mr Pound’s first article on my book of stories. My copy is locked up in my flat in Trieste and it would perhaps be useful for me to have a copy here. I beg you to excuse me for giving you so much trouble and so often. Needless to say I have no news about either my novel or my play. In fact I have not received any letters from London for quite a long time. With many thanks in advance Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To H.L. MENCKEN, 30 October 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

Dear Mr Mencken Excuse me for having delayed so long before replying to your last letter. I called at the British Consulate here and was told that Mr Abbott had been temporarily transferred to Basel. I wrote to him there, conveying your regards to him, giving him your address and adding that you would be glad to hear from him.

I regret to say that I have no news about myself. It seems that my agent finds it very difficult to induce any publisher to take on my novel: and, as for my play Exiles Mr Pound tells me it is almost impossible for the English stage. However he has written an article about it which, he writes me, will appear in the next number (November or February) of Drama (Chicago). He is a most active and generous friend, as you see.

A few days ago a young Russian friend of mine here, Mr Geller, brought me a monologue of his and asked me if I knew of any review which might take it. Your review seemed to me to be the only one likely to consider it and so I advised him to send it on to you. He told me he would do so and perhaps it may suit your review.

If I have anything of my own I shall bear in mind your kind invitation. But I am very discouraged by the endless difficulties which my writings seem to provoke. With kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 31 October 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Pinker: I have received your letter of 25 inst. Will you kindly write me as soon and as fully as possible on the following matters?

Dubliners: Can you apply now to Mr Richards for the accounts up to 30 June so that they may be sent now or on the 30 November? If any royalty be due to me you can forward it, deducting all moneys due to you.

Exiles: You do not mention this. Who has it? Mr Pound writes me that is impossible for theatres there and advises me to try theatres abroad. I shall try if you can send me a copy. Is it possible at a small expense and without damaging the original to have a copy made or taken off in the copypress at once and sent to me here registered?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: May I suggest that you withdraw this from Messrs Duckworth and send it to Mr Louis Conard, 17 Boulevard de la Madeleine, Paris? If he will publish it I will sign over the continental and British (but not American) rights on condition that the book be published not in the form of the former Tauchnitz or present Standard edition (published by him) but as an ordinary French novel in yellow wrappers at 3 fr. 50 c. I also undertake to subscribe for and pay for on publication 50 (fifty) copies at trade price for such of my friends in Europe as I can reach at present. The French printer will have the English printed proof to set from and if recommendation be needed, besides the press notices of my other books, it might be possible to obtain this from Mr Yeats or Mr Wells or Mr Pound. Mr Richards or some other London publisher can possibly act as distributing agent in the United Kingdom.

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To MICHAEL HEALY, 2 November 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich

My dear Mr Healy: I received the day before yesterday your kind letter and this morning your Money Order (£9) for which I thank you most sincerely. It is most welcome and useful. Nora has bought a lot of flannels and other clothes which the children need in this climate and a hat which she finally selected from the few hundred which were shown to her. We are now fairly well fortified against the cold. As for myself I am to be seen in a shellcocoa-coloured overcoat which an absent-minded German left behind him and I bought for eleven francs. Of his moral character I know nothing. But I am sure that he has (or had) uncommonly short arms. I presume the overcoat is mine now since I paid for it to his late landlady but I feel, as Mr R.G. Knowles used to sing,

I’m only airing it for him:

It doesn’t belong to me.

I was introduced to the millionaire I wrote you of some days ago. He told me that his daughter is rather ill and asked me to give him my address as he says he wishes to speak with me about my play of which he has heard. I was also introduced to the president of the Russian Club here who talks of translating it into Russian and producing it. Besides I have written to Geneva to see if it can go on there in a French version. I also met the chief actor here who presented me to the director of the Zurich Stadttheater and, through another friend, I got an introduction to a solicitor here whose father is director of the Stadttheater in Bern. My poor shoes are nearly worn out after it all, as you can imagine; but I hope something will come out of it all. Immediately I have any good news I shall let you know. I hope you managed to get that copy of The New Age. I hear now that there is a long article about me and the play, the name of which by the way is Exiles, in a Chicago review called Drama but I have not seen it yet. I thank you for your inquiries about my brother. He sent me his photograph last week. He has a long full beard and looks like the late Duke of Devonshire. He tells me that he sprained his wrist, playing tennis, but is now better. If you send him a postcard with greetings from Galway I am sure he will answer you. His address is:

Stanislaus Joyce

(Internierter britischer Staatsangehöriger)

Schloss Grossan bei Raabs

Nieder Österreich.

My sister was, when I last heard from her, well and still in Prague. I believe her husband has been exonerated from military service much to her (and I fancy his) relief. I forget whether I thanked you for having verified the quotation about our excellent friend Bombados. If I did not I do so now. I shall correct it on the proof—if I ever see one. I am sorry to hear you have so much to do. However, as you say, it is a good thing to be alive in such times. I had letters from Trieste on Saturday. So far as my flat is concerned it seems to be as I left it but life is certainly pleasanter here just at present. Today is the feast of S. Justin Martyr, patron of Trieste, and I shall perhaps eat a cheap small pudding somewhere in his honour for the many years I lived in his city. As for the future it is useless to speculate. If I could find out in the meantime who is the patron of men of letters I should try to remind him that I exist: but I understand that the last saint who held that position resigned in despair and no other will take the portfolio….

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 10 November 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich

Dear Mr Pinker: I thank you for your letter of 5 inst.

Dubliners: The royalty account has not yet arrived.

Exiles: I am writing to Mr Archer asking him whether he can help you in any way. Mr Yeats wrote me that he would take on the play but for the fact that at present his company is scattered. Mr Pound has written an article about it in Drama (Chicago): a review which may publish it later: but he adds that he considers it almost impossible for the English stage and advises me to try continental theatres. Will you kindly have the typewritten copy made at once and sent me here by registered post, act by act as it is finished? I need it and hope this can be done quickly.

A Portrait of the Artist: While Messrs Duckworth are considering this it would be well, I think, to try some such scheme as I suggested. I wrote this morning to Mr Symons, explaining the case and asking for his advice. If he writes to you for the typescript you can send it to him as soon as it is sent back to you.

Verses: I shall send you tomorrow two little pieces of verse which you may send to the Saturday Review or any other paper which will print them and pay well and quickly.

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 22 November 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich, Switzerland

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Richards: In July 19141 requested you to send a presentation copy of Dubliners to Mr William Archer. I had a letter from Mr Archer this morning in which he tells me that he is quite sure that he never received it. Can you retrace it from your books? If not I shall send you his address and ask you to send it. Your last letter was forwarded to me from Venice. I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne … Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 22 November 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Have received your favour of 17 inst and hope to receive soon the first act of the play. Mr Archer writes me that he leaves London on 19 inst but on his return will ring you up and ask you to let him read the play. He tells me also that he never received the presentation copy of Dubliners which I requested Mr Richards to send him in July 1914.1 am writing to see if it can be retraced. I hope you will place the verses and inquire into that matter of the ‘Smart Set’ stories. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 November 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver I thank you for the copy of The Egoist which reached me safely.

As it seems very difficult to persuade London publishers to bring out my novel which appeared in your paper my agent, Mr Pinker, intends to try some firms in Paris: Mercure de France or Mr Conard. Possibly the Paris correspondent of your paper, Mrs Ciolkovska, may be able and willing to help me in this matter: I mean in bringing the book under the notice of one of these firms. I think I received some letters from her or through her when I was still in Austria but am not sure. I shall write if you will be so kind as to give me her address. With many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 6 December 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Pinker: The editor of The Egoist writes proposing to publish my novel, subject to the approval of the staff and publishing company. I have replied asking her to telephone to you. Perhaps you can see her. She has also sent me the address of their Paris correspondent but thinks that publication there would be difficult and unsatisfactory. I agree to this proposal if you do. I dislike the prospect of waiting another nine years before my next book appears—with the result which you know. All these schemes can be worked simultaneously one against the other, can they not? In any case Miss Weaver’s proposal is most friendly and I beg you to consider it.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 6 December 1915 [Postcard]

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Pinker: If Messrs Duckworth have not yet replied I think you might press them for an answer. Mr Pound writes that a French friend of his has read the book, likes it and will interest herself about it. I understand that she is the niece of a French premier and a person of influence. He writes also that Mr Laurie has asked for it and also Mr Lane. If you decide to submit it to them will you ask them to give an undertaking to let you know their decision within three weeks? That period is sufficient since their reader has printed copy and not MS or typescript to read.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 December 1915 [Postcard]

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich, VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: I am writing from the station to save time. Sincerest thanks for your kind proposal. By all means telephone to Mr Pinker and also lay the matter before your staff and company. I undertake to buy for my account and pay for in advance 50 (fifty) copies at trade price. Is not part of the type still set up? As for the advantages of a regular publisher I have not seen them till now. 26 (twenty-six) copies of my book Dubliners were sold in the United Kingdom during the last six months. I have never received any money from either of my two publishers: and I dislike the prospect of waiting another nine years for the same result. I am writing a book Ulysses and want the other published and out of the way once and for all: and correspondence about publishing is too tiresome for my (very lazy) temperament.

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To EMMA CUZZI, 7 December 1915

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurigo VIII, Svizzera

MS. Brocchi

Gentilissima signorina Tante grazie delle due stampe del bassorilievo che cercavo, come sa, da un pezzo. Una, quella non rimodernata, faro incorniciare in una cornice ellitica che farò poi ‘sporcare’ in celeste e grigio (uso Silvestri) per creare l’illusione del ‘gran ponte del cielo’ attorno alla figura dell’artefice. Eppoi sono superstizioso. Chi sa se l’advento in casa mia di quel tale non mi recherà una lieta notizia? Se così è sia doppiamente lodato il suo cortese pensiero.

Saluti cordiali a Lei ed alla sua famiglia

James Joyce

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1916

To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 9 January 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I have sent to Mr Pound two pieces of verse begging him to dispose of them at once to any paper which he may be connected with and, if he cannot do so, to send them to you. The proceeds, together with those of the first piece, I should be glad to receive as soon as possible. Of course your commission is to be deducted in any case. Is there any chance of my receiving any money from Mr Richards for the American magazine rights of the two stories sold by him to The Smart Set? May I ask you to apply to him for it, if I am entitled to it under contract, and to send it to me also deducting your fees.

I shall be glad to hear whether the scheme proposed to the Egoist has been accepted or whether Mr Laurie has taken the book on the same terms.

I offered the play to the theatre here. It was refused. I am now in correspondence with Berne and Rome on the same subject. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 January 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: I telegraphed to you last night: Received twentyfive pounds. Thanks: and hope the telegram reached you safely and quickly. I have no words to thank you for your generosity and kindness. It comes at a moment when it is much needed by me. I am very glad indeed to hear that you have obtained the necessary permission and that you will publish my book if the firm to which my agent has offered it declines it. I shall write to him on the matter at once. This news gave me great joy as I foresaw many years of useless waiting. I shall send a formal receipt for the entire amount and shall wire to you also on receipt of the second remittance. I am glad to hear also that your paper is now in a better financial position than it was and wish you every success in the future.

Please accept once again my sincerest thanks and the assurance of my regard.

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From JONATHAN CAPE to JAMES B. PINKER, 26 January 1916

Duckworth & Co., Publishers, 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.

TS. Yale

Dear Mr. Pinker, With reference to James Joyce’s novel—A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN—I am enclosing you ‘copy’ of a Reader’s report. It is a little difficult to give exact chapter and verse for what we think ought to be done to the MS. as the MS. is not in front of us, but the report is sufficiently general for Mr. Joyce to judge of the value of the criticism and his ability to revise the MS. accordingly. Yours very truly,

Herbert J. Cape

Encl.

Reader’s report
[by Edward Garnett]

Duckworth &., Co., Publishers,
3 Henrietta Street,
Covent Garden, London, W.C.

James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ wants going through carefully from start to finish. There are many ‘longueurs’. Passages which, though the publisher’s reader may find them entertaining, will be tedious to the ordinary man among the reading public. That public will call the book, as it stands at present, realistic, unprepossessing, unattractive. We call it ably written. The picture is ‘curious’, it arouses interest and attention. But the author must revise it and let us see it again. It is too discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent; indeed at times they seem to be shoved in one’s face, on purpose, unnecessarily. The point of view will be voted ‘a little sordid’. The picture of life is good; the period well brought to the reader’s eye, and the types and characters are well drawn, but it is too ‘unconventional’. This would stand against it in normal times. At the present time, though the old conventions are in the background, we can only see a chance for it if it is pulled into shape and made more definite.

In the earlier portion of the MS. as submitted to us, a good deal of pruning can be done. Unless the author will use restraint and proportion he will not gain readers. His pen and his thoughts seem to have run away with him sometimes.

And at the end of the book there is a complete falling to bits; the pieces of writing and the thoughts are all in pieces and they fall like damp, ineffective rockets.

The author shows us he has art, strength and originality, but this MS. wants time and trouble spent on it, to make it a more finished piece of work, to shape it more carefully as the product of the craftsmanship, mind and imagination of an artist.

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From EZRA POUND to JAMES B. PINKER, 30 January 1916

Stone Cottage, Colemans Hatch, Sussex

TS. Yale

Dear Mr Pinker I have read the effusion of Mr Duckworth’s reader with no inconsiderable disgust. These vermin crawl over and be-slime our literature with their pulings, and nothing but the day of judgement can, I suppose, exterminate ’em. Thank god one need not, under ordinary circumstances, touch them.

Hark to his puling squeek. too ‘unconventional’. What in hell do we want but some change from the unbearable monotony of the weekly six shilling pears soap annual novel, [and the George Robey—Gaby mixture] ‘Carelessly written’, this of the sole, or almost sole piece of contemporary prose that one can enjoy sentence by sentence and reread with pleasure. (I except Fred. Mannings ‘Scenes and Portraits’ (pub. Murray, 1910.)

It is with difficulty that I manage to write to you at all on being presented with the…, the dungminded dung-beared, penny a line, please the mediocre-at-all-cost doctrine. You English will get no prose till you enterminate [sic] this breed….

to say nothing of the abominable insolence of the tone.

I certainly will have nothing to do with the matter. The Egoist was willing to publish the volume, Lane would have read it a while ago.

I must repeat my former offer, if this louse will specify exactly what verbal changes he wants made I will approach Joyce in the matter. But I most emphatically will not forward the insults of an imbecile to one of the very few men for whom I have the faintest respect.

Canting, supercilious, blockhead. … I always suposed from report that Duckworth was an educated man, but I can not reconcile this opinion with his retention of the author of the missive you send me.

If you have to spend your life in contact with such minds, God help you, and

do accept my good will and sympathy in spite of the tone of this note.

God! ‘a more finished piece of work’.

Really, Mr Pinker, it is too insulting, even to be forwarded to Joyce’s friend, let alone to Joyce.

And the end . . also found fault with … again, O God, O Montreal … ,

Why can’t you send the publishers readers to the Serbian front, and get some good out of the war . .

Serious writers will certainly give up the use of english altogether unless you can improve the process of publication.

In conclusion, you have given me a very unpleasant quarter of an hour, my disgust flows over, though I suppose there is no use in spreading it over this paper. If there is any phrase or form of contempt that you care to convey from me to the reeking Malebolge of the Duckworthian slum, pray, consider yourself at liberty to draw on my account (unlimited credit) and transmit it.

Please, if you have occasion to write again, either in regard to this book or any other. Please do not enclose publisher’s readers opinions, sincerely yours

Ezra Pound

They pour out Elinor Glyn and pornography after pornography, but a piece of good writing they hate.

P.S.

I am reminded that Landor had equal difficulty in getting published—yet he is the best mind in your literature.

————

as for altering Joyce to suit Duckworth’s readers—I would like trying to fit the Venus de Milo into a piss-pot.—. . a few changes required.

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 5 February 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Mr Wade, secretary of the Stage Society, wishes, I hear, to read my play. Will you please telephone to him or write and send him the typescript if Mr Archer has not yet written for it.

I shall be glad to hear whether the verses I sent reached you safely and whether you have seen or written to Miss Weaver about the publication of my novel. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 7 February 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I hear from Mr Pound that you have offered my novel to Messrs Duckworth. On receipt of this kindly telephone to them that the book is withdrawn by me and pass it on at once to The Egoist so that it may be brought out as quickly as possible. Too much time has been lost already. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALLAN WADE, 10 February 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. John Talbot Ordeman

Dear Sir Mr Pound tells me that you wish to read my play Exiles. If you will kindly apply to my agent, Mr Pinker, Talbot House, Arundel Street, he will give you the typescript. I wrote to him instructing him to place it at your disposal. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 March 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: I thank you for your kind letter of 3 instant and for the copies of The Egoist (December, January, February). I have written to Mr Pinker instructing him to draw up the agreement without further delay and to accept unconditionally, subject to his commission of 10%, whatever terms you propose. As regards proofs, I shall ask Mr Pound to read them for me or if he cannot perhaps a reader could be found, the fee in the latter case being charged to me. In this way I hope time may be saved. As regards binding I have no preference. I leave this and all other details in your hands.

I am sorry that you have so much trouble with your printers but I hope that you will find a printer soon so that the book may come out this spring. I am sending this letter express to save time and I am also writing to Mr Pound. If Mr Pinker does not send you his agreement at once I shall send you a blank agreement with my signature so that he can fill it in at your dictation.

If you decide to send me proofs I undertake (if the attack of rheumatism from which I am suffering does not go to my eyes) to return them corrected within one day after receipt of them.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 10 March 1916

Kreuzstrasse 19, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker On receipt of this kindly apply to Mr Richards for the A/S of Dubliners (31 December 1915) and also draw up without further delay the agreement with Miss Weaver for the publication of my novel. Whatever terms she proposes you are instructed by me to agree to unconditionally, subject to your commission. I also wish to know what you have done with the verses and my play and will ask you to reply to this letter by return of post, express. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From EZRA POUND to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 March 1916

London

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I personally should prefer the Joyce novel without an introduction by anyone. However, that is a practical point outside my jurisdiction.

As for early or late in the season, I think that is all nonsense in connection with a book of this sort. If it were to be sold by Smith and the other barrators, or if it were to go through the usual channels of corruption there would be some reason for consulting their times and seasons. But a book like this which the diseased and ailing vulgar will not buy can take its own course.

If all printers refuse (I have written this also to Joyce) I suggest that largish blank spaces be left where passages are cut out. Then the excisions can be manifolded (not carbon copies, but another process) by typewriter on good paper, and if necessary I will paste them in myself. The public can be invited to buy with or without restorations and the copyright can be secured [on] the book as printed. That is to say the restorations will be privately printed and the book-without-them ‘published.’

And damn the censors.

Joyce is ill in bed with rheumatism, and very worried, and I hope for his sake, as well as for the few intelligent people who want the book, that it can manage to come out.

Professional people never have any real knowledge about what an unusual book will do, and when cornered they usually confess it, so I don’t think their advice about times and seasons is worth much. And par exemple, the ‘practical’ Pinker was able to do less than I was, and was very glad of my aid in getting the mss. even read.

Let me know when you want copy for May number, s.v.p.

P.S. Pardon haste of this note but I am really hurried.

Can you come to tea with us sometime when I get a spare hour? I will write.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 March 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I agree to Mr Pound’s proposal regarding the deleted passages and thank you for your kind letter and your kind promise to read the proofs. Mr Pinker has sent me his agreement to sign. I am signing it so that if the trouble about the printing is ended there may be no more delay. As for your agreement you can sign it whenever you wish: or if another agreement is made or one with other clauses added I shall sign it also. I consider this matter of very little importance.

I hope you will find a printer to do the book. It seems I am destined to meet always their opposition. I feel sure that you will do your best to bring out the book soon. I am so nervous about it that I cannot write any more but if it were published it would make my way clearer. Mr Pinker’s opinion that for this book the date of publication is unimportant is also mine. I may mention however that my book Dubliners was published on 15 June and my publisher chose that date. I am writing also to Mr Pound and to my agent and hope they may be able to help us.

May I ask you to note my new address—as above? With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to E. BYRNE HACKETT, 31 March 1916

The Egoist, Oakley House
Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.

Dear Sir: We are dispatching to you under separate cover the text of Mr James Joyce novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which appeared in serial form in The Egoist and which we have lately decided to publish in book form. Mr Ezra Pound has already written to you on the matter.

A few deletions were made by the printers, the shorter of which are written out on the pages from which they were deleted (viz. in The Egoist of January 1, 1915 and August 2, 1915); a larger one is enclosed herewith (deleted from the instalment of August 1st 1914) Mr Joyce declines to give his consent to the publication of the book except according to the original text, i.e. all these deletions must be re-inserted.

The book is of exceedingly high merit and we are anxious for it to come out as soon as possible, but unfortunately are experiencing difficulty in securing a printer willing to print without deletions. However, we are continuing our efforts in this direction and therefore, should you decide you would be willing to undertake the printing and publication in America, we should be glad if you would cable us. In this case we should ask you to send us a number of unbound copies, and the two names could appear as publishers—yours as American publishers, ours as English.

Or in the event of our soon securing a printer here, we should be glad to know whether you could take from us a number of unbound copies, and be responsible for American publication. We should bring out the book here as a six shilling novel which with you I suppose would correspond to $1.50.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 31 March 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for your letter of 23 ult. I enclose agreement signed and initialled. Miss Weaver writes that seven printers have refused to set up the book and for this reason she prefers not to sign a contract. Mr Pound suggests that blank spaces be left by the printers and that the deleted passages be pasted in at the publishing offices, typewritten and on good paper. I agree to this or to any scheme by which the book shall be published as I wrote it and as quickly as possible. Miss Weaver is kind enough to say that she will read the proofs herself. This will also save time. Some person in her employment told her the book should appear before 1 April. She writes that this is not your opinion. It is also not mine. My book Dubliners was published on 15 June.

I shall be anxious to hear whether the English Review has accepted the verses or not. Mr Pound wrote also that some friend of Mr Barker (Mr Wheelan?) spoke of producing my play Exiles. Is it possible to offer it in that quarter?

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 2 April 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I confirm my letter of 31 ult with enclosed signed agreement. Mr Pound writes that the American quarterly review Drama has in the February number an article by him on my play. He suggests that the play be now offered to the review. Can you get into relations with the London agent or deal direct with the review? The address is: ‘Drama’, 736 Marquette Buildings, Chicago, U.S.A.

I hope that you will soon succeed in doing something with the play or the verses as now that the nine months’ grant made me in August by the Royal Literary Fund has expired, my position here is likely to be very uncomfortable. If any royalty be due to me on Dubliners I shall be glad to receive it. It might also be possible to arrange for an American edition of that book. Mr Huebsch of New York wrote to me on the matter last summer. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 20 April 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for your letters of 12 and 14 inst. Mr Pound tells me the editor of Drama has written to him for my play. Will you therefore kindly send it to Chicago? It may be in time for the next issue (August), if accepted. You did not acknowledge receipt of the agreement signed and forwarded by me but I suppose you received it. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, [22 April 1916]

Easter Eve Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have received your letter of 15 inst and also the March and April numbers of The Egoist. I thank you for your friendly allusions to me in your leading article and would beg you to convey my thanks also to Miss Marsden. I am glad that you have better hopes with the new printers and that there is a possibility that some American publisher will bring out the book. I shall be most anxious to hear the result of these negotiations and am sure that you will write to me as soon as you have any definite news. I can only hope that the career of the book after its publication may recompense you for the interminable troubles which it is causing you now. With thanks and kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 17 May 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Mr John Marshall, publisher, of New York has cabled me that he will publish my novel—the full text. The terms are 15% for the first 1000, thereafter 20% and £10 in advance. Kindly conclude this transaction with him at once and will you please let me know what news you have of the English edition as well as of my play, the verses and the royalties of Dubliners, sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 May 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am infinitely obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken about my book and I am glad to hear that the matter is now settled at last. I have not received Mr Marshall’s cablegram but I shall write to him as soon as Mr Pound sends me the address in New York. As soon as you have any further news I hope you will let me know as I am very anxious lest there should be any obstacle to this new scheme. I take it the arrangement is that the book is to be printed in full in New York and published there and in London. I do not know where the proofs are to be read. I remember that you were so kind as to promise to read them but will you be able to do so by this new arrangement? Would it help in any way if I read and checked the third, fourth and fifth chapters which I have in the instalments from 1 August 1914 to 1 September 1915? If the printers set from them this would weed out some of the errors but of course not the new ones which they will put in—with the usual number of unnecessary commas and capitals. But it would be almost as much trouble to find the places in the new proofs as the paging would be different.

Mr Treharne wrote to me and I answered by return of post as he told me that he was going to America. He has set some verses of mine which Mr Pound printed in his anthology. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 28 May 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts,Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I enclose contract signed by me. Kindly forward also to Mr Marshall a copy of ‘Dubliners’ and of the press notices of it which I sent you so that he may, if he wish, insert a leaflet of extracts in the edition of the novel. I give him, not Mr Huebsch, the right of refusal of ‘Dubliners’: therefore suspend all negotiations with the latter.

The Egoist company could not find a printer in the United Kingdom to print my novel. They now intend to work in conjunction with Mr Marshall and use his printer.

Mr Ezra Pound will call on you at my request in a few days. You can ask him for Mr Hackett’s address and withdraw the second copy as I know nothing of it. As you are aware it is Mr Pound who has arranged both the English and American editions of my novel Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 June 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: The cuttings of chapters I and II arrived last night and I am sending them back corrected by this post. I hope the corrections for chapters III and IV reached you safely and that they are now forwarded to New York. When you are writing to me next I beg you to send me the May and June numbers of your paper if it be not too much trouble. I have had no letter from Mr Marshall but I suppose that you are now in communication with him and perhaps you know on what date he proposes to publish. With regards and thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 June 1916

Dear Sir: I am much impressed with Mr Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and should be glad to publish it here giving it my best efforts, though I am inclined to believe that such success as it may attain will be artistic rather than popular. Nevertheless it will afford a foundation for Mr Joyce’s other works on this side.

I should be willing to print absolutely in accordance with the author’s wishes, without deletion, and would undertake to supply printed sheets with joint imprints for the English publisher and myself sharing the cost at such rate as may seem fair to you.

I would pay a 10% royalty on the published price but I should like to make the condition that I secure an option on the book which would normally succeed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Also that some arrangement be made by which I secure sheets of Dubliners concerning which I have had correspondence with Mr Richards and Mr Joyce.

After hearing from Mr Joyce, last year, about his book of poems published by Mr Mathews, I believe that I wrote to the latter without receiving any response. You will see that I am anxious, not only for my sake but for Mr Joyce’s, to get all of his works so that by concentration of interest and economy of effort, he may be properly introduced on this side. Is Mr Joyce still in Switzerland? I am inclined to believe, from our correspondence, that he would favor an arrangement by which I become his publisher here.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 July 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: I must apologise for not having answered your kind letter and acknowledged receipt of the review and papers before now. I had been waiting from day to day in order to hear from my agent. He writes now that he also has had no letter from the publisher in New York but it seems that the post is rather irregular. In any case I send enclosed two small corrections which I would ask you to forward when you are writing to New York.

I am deeply indebted to Mr Pound for his untiring kindness of which his article is another proof. I hear that there is some hope that the play (Exiles) will be put on by the Stage Society in London. The typescript is in New York—or in Chicago and there is an Italian version in Rome or in Turin. I offered it here and in Berne but they say it is too daring (gewagt). My manuscripts are dispersed like Little Bo-Peep’s sheep but I hope they will come home as safely as hers did.

When you have news from Mr Marshall I am sure you will write to me to let me know. I shall then try to interest some persons in the book. I hope it will have a better sale than Dubliners. According to the last account I received only 7 copies were sold in the last six months.

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 24 July 1916

The Egoist, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.

Dear Sir: You will have heard from Mr James Joyce’s agent that the New York publisher (Mr John Marshall, 331 Fourth Avenue) whose offer Mr Joyce had accepted is after all unable to publish his novel, and Mr Pinker tells me he has already written to you regarding your offer to print and publish the book.

There is now a possibility of the book being brought out here by a London publisher, Mr Heinemann, 31 Bedford St. W.C. who, if he did it, would wish to have his copies printed in England on account of the high freight charges. But I think it unlikely that he will agree to publish without deletions and it will most probably remain for us to do it. He is to give an answer in a few days’ time and I will then write you immediately with reference to your sending unbound copies to us. We should ask to know the cost to us of 750 and 1000 copies.

Meantime I have written to ask Mr Marshall to send on to you his copy of the text which contains Mr Joyce’s corrections (chiefly the deletion of unnecessary commas and capitals put in by the printer). Mr Joyce would like the book printed exactly according to this corrected text (the fifth chapter being the original typescript) without any further alteration in the punctuation. On the enclosed slip are two corrections he has since sent to me.

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From GEORGE MOORE to EDWARD MARSH, 3 August 1916

121 Ebury Street, London, S.W.

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

My dear Marsh, It pleased me to get your letter this morning for I was glad to hear of you; and the letter was so well written, clear and fluent and always to the point expressing everything you had in mind to say. Nothing seems to have got lost between the brain and the pen.

Now to answer your questions. The only book of Joyce’s that I have read is a collection of stories called ‘Dubliners,’ some of them are trivial and disagreeable, but all are written by a clever man, and the book contains one story, the longest story in the book and the last story which seemed to me perfection whilst I read it: I regretted that I was not the author of it. But this story, which I am sure you would appreciate as much as I did, does not prove that Joyce will go on writing and will end by writing something like a masterpiece. A talent, musical, literary or pictorial, is a pale fluttering thing that a breath will extinguish. I will get ‘Dubliners’ from Heinemann to whom I lent the book and you will see for yourself. Of the novel I know nothing. Joyce left a disagreeable reputation behind him in Dublin, but he came back after some years a different man and everything I heard of him is to his credit. Of his political views I know nothing. He was not in Ireland during the sowing of the Sinn Fein seed and I hope he is not even a home ruler. Democratic principles are unsuited to Ireland. Already the people are beginning to regret their landlords and to hate the congested District Board. The Irish like priests and believe in the power of priests to forgive them their sins and to change God into a biscuit. They are only happy in convents and monasteries. The only reason that the Irish would tolerate home rule would be if they were given permission to persecute someone, that is the Roman Catholic idea of liberty. It always has been and always will be.

I am an admirer of Mr Asquith and regret that he cannot bring himself to believe that there can be no settlement, and that all attempts at settlement will fail. The Irish like discipline, and if Mr Asquith would treat the Irish as the Pope does he would be the most popular man in Ireland. Yours sincerely,

George Moore

P.S. I am sure that from a literary point of view Joyce is deserving of help.

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From W.B. YEATS to EDWARD MARSH, 20 August 1916

c/o Madame Gonne, Colleville, par Vinville, Calvados

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

Dear Marsh: I hear you want more particulars of James Joyce, for whom a pension on the civil list is asked. I enclose a typed page of particulars.

His work has a curious brooding intensity. I think one of his poems at any rate a thing of great beauty and great technical accomplishment. If I compiled an anthology of English or Irish Poetry I would include it. ‘Dubliners’ is like a first work of a great novelist. The background is too consciously studied perhaps. ‘The Portrait of the Artist’ I have only seen in fragments but I saw enough to know that it has great intensity and sincerity. I think him a possible man of genius, just such a man as it is well to help. Yours

W.B. Yeats

I shall be in London about Sept. 5 in case you have any questions.

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From EZRA POUND to EDWARD MARSH, 21 August 1916

5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, W.

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

Dear Marsh, Joyce’s present address is

Seefeldstrasse 54

parterre, rechts

Zurich VIII

Switzerland

I am very glad the grant has been made and if it is not out of place I should like to express my appreciation of the official action in this matter.

I think it would be hard to find anyone more deserving than Joyce, both by reason of his ability and from the way he has stuck to his ideals under most trying circumstances. Sincerely yours,

Ezra Pound.

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From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 August 1916

Dear Sir: Since receiving your letter of July 24th, I have been waiting to hear from Mr John Marshall to whom you said you were writing with reference to turning over to me the manuscript of Joyce A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I am today writing to Mr Marshall asking him to forward it to me at once. I learned that Mr Marshall is in Quebec.

I have to acknowledge your cable of the 21st ordering 750 sheets of the above mentioned book. I shall put this order through immediately upon hearing from Mr Pinker to whom I am writing with this steamer. I have proposed some modifications of the contract which he sent me recently. If he accepts these and cables me to that effect, I shall proceed at once with the setting up of the book. I think that you had better send me immediately the copy for the title-page that you wish to have printed on the 750 copies. You had better inform me at the same time as to the exact words relating to the manufacture of the book in the United States that the British Customs authorities require to be printed in the book. I think that ‘Printed in the United States of America’ or ‘Printed in U.S.A.’ will be sufficient. I note the corrections that accompanied your letter of July 24th.

I think that it would be a good thing for you to see Mr Pinker to urge him to give my letter immediate attention so that we may get this book out during the present season. It will certainly be in the interest of Mr Joyce for Mr Pinker to accept the amendments that I have suggested. It is pretty late in the season to take the matter up with another publisher unless it is decided to postpone publication until the Spring.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 August 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am very glad to receive your letter of 19 instant and to hear that the novel is at last about to be published. I hope that Mr Huebsch has my corrections. I have had no letter from him nor have I signed a contract with him nor has my agent written to me on this matter for several months past. But since you speak of writing for copies I suppose that the book is in course of printing. I am sure you are rather tired of the whole business though I am quite accustomed to it: after eleven years ci ho fatto il callo. I hope that the sales will repay you in some measure and I shall try to do something to that end.

Allow me in conclusion to send you my thanks for all your kindness Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From MAY JOYCE, 1 September 1916

47 Mary Street

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim I had given up hope of ever hearing from you again and was agreeably surprised to get your card last week. As Stannie told you I wrote several letters to you, two of them written after the war started were returned but I was sure you got the others. I believe I was wrong. There have been odd scraps of news here during the last two years but Stannie has probably told you anything that was at all interesting. Pappie also I am sure has told you pretty tales. He was not very well for a while, but is looking alright again. He sometimes looks up Eva and Florrie but seems to think me much nicer at a distance. Eva applied for a position in Maunsells as shorthand-typist. Mr. Roberts asked her if she was your sister, he said she should have any amount of brains, being a sister of yours, but that does not follow, as the brains in our family seem to have been most unfairly divided. The place in Abbey St. was destroyed last April and they have taken a place in Baggot St. now. Mr. Roberts wanted to know if you have made definite arrangements about the publication of your novel. Eva told him that you had, and that it was being published in London and New York in the Autumn. He said he would like to hear from you, he seems to think that you might give them the publishing of it, and it is quite probable that if you did give it to them, it would be a repetition of their treatment of ‘Dubliners’. I am delighted to hear that your novel is being published, the stir Dubliners made will be nothing to this. You have rewritten it since we lived in St. Peters Terrace when we used to be all put out of the room when you were reading each new chapter for Mother. I used [sic] hide under the sofa to hear it, until you said I might stay. I am looking forward to reading it now.

How are Nora and Georgie and Lucia? I hope they are well. Do the children go to school in Zurich? I believe you sent a group to Pappie, have you one left? I would like very much to have one. Aunt Josephine has written to Nora, and I suppose has told her all the news of her family. Have you heard from Stannie lately I was expecting a letter from him. I sent him shoes about six weeks ago. I dont know whether he got them or not. He is wonderful to keep up so well during all this time, it must be dreadful for him being a prisoner and idle all this time, but he says he has nothing to complain of in his treatment, which is some consolation. Will all this never end? When the war started it was said it could not last more than six months, but now there seems a⁠[s] much prospect of a finish as then. Bertie Murray is now at the front, he joined last November. We are all quite well here. Charlie is still in the Telephone Co. He has now five children, the little girl Eileen is very delicate, but the others are healthy. Georgie promises to be very clever, the eldest, Jimmy, is Charlie on a small scale.

I can imagine you saying that I write a muddle of a letter. Best love to all

May.

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From EZRA POUND, 2 September 1916

5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, W.

TS. Cornell

Dear Joyce I did not write to you when I heard that there was to be official recognition of your scriptorial lustre, because I wanted you to have a pleasant surprise.

I did not write before the grant was official, or at least I wrote only indefinitely. I had heard that the Prime Minister had in conversation expressed his personal willingness to sanction the grant but I thought it ill became me to take his name in vain until the matter was definitely decided.

The people you should thank if you are thanking people are Lady Cunard, 20 Cavendish Sq. W. who bought your books and lent them to Marsh.

Marsh = Edward Marsh, 10 Downing St. Whitehall S.W. He is m some way in charge of these grants. I dont know exactly what his position is. He was Churchill’s private secretary, and is now some sort of Parliamentary or other sort of secretary, and writes from the Prime Minister s address. I should by all means write to him, graciously. He thinks you are a ‘man after his own heart’. He has expressed admiration of your writing.

You can say that you hear from me that he has been instrumental (or some more human word,,,,) that he has recommended you to the P.M’s notice, or given great and decisive assistance, or whatever bloody and classic turn you can give it.

Geo. Moore lives at 121 Ebury St. London S.W.

Yeats also wrote a strong letter of recommendation, but he was m France and I don’t know but what the grant was made before his letter was rec’d., still you might thank him, and certainly assume that he helped. He did help, whether that particular letter was rec’d. W.B.Y. 18 Woburn Bids. Euston W.C.

I really don’t know what is going on in N.Y. Marshall has disappeared with his sick or dying wife, that’s all I know. Huebsch has told someone he would publish the book. Whether he has got a complete mss. or not I don’t know. I think Miss Weaver will see it through.

Lady Cunard is having another whack at Heineman, on the strength of the govt, recognition of your work. I doubt if it will help. Still he has not (so far as I know) returned the mss. to Miss Weaver, so he may still be in the running.

At any rate it is my seventh day and I am resting.

You might however send on the extra copy of that damn play. I am to meet Knoblauch sometime, and perhaps he would see his way to a stage version. From the point of view of career nothing better could happen to you, I think, both for cash and connection. No play is acted as it is written, and you could always have your original version used when the thing is printed.

I have succeeded in selling a lot of pictures in New York, by Lewis, Wadsworth, Etchells, and Roberts. So they are no longer on my mind either. I shall devote the next six months entirely to my own interests. (Which will do them no good whatever.) All life’s blessings except loose change seem to have been showered upon me, it behoves me to remedy that deficiency at once.

At any rate I hope Huebsch will be regularized before you get to the end of the present grant. Write Marsh a letter that will give him a chance to reply if he is so inclined.

He was a great friend of Rupert Brooke’s. He has brought out two anthologies called ‘Georgian Verse’. He says, or said that he has been trying for years to ruin my career and that it is no use, that I am now more firmly established than ever.

(By which he probably means that I have had three digestable [sic] lunches and have been seen on a free front seat at the opera between Balfour and a duchess. Glories which do not add in the least to my income. Perhaps in some way they contribute to ‘establishment’ in the parliamentario-secretarial world.

I have done nothing of importance for ages. I have written about 2000 words in a sort of story or portrait, thick, brown and Indian. MacMillan are doing a Japanese Play book, a good deal bigger than the small one at Cuala.

A new magazine called ‘Seven Arts’ will probably be glad to print anything you do for a while, i.e. as long as they last. I shall try your play on them if Drama don’t take it. Have you any short things at all?.

I am going on with the Fenollosa stuff. Chinese part. Have found an eighth century Jules Laforgue: Wang Wei, or Omakitsu. I am delighting in Brantome.

There was once a young writer named Joyce .

Whose diction was ribidly choice

And all his freinds’ woes were deduced from his prose

Which never filled anyone’s purse

These line⁠[s] can be regarded as a limerick only in certain parts of New York, in the halls of the University of the City of N.Y. etc. etc. where I assure you the rime of ‘-urse’ and ‘oice’ falls upon the ear with perfect exactness, yours,

Ezra Pound

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To EDWARD MARSH, 13 September 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich

Dear Sir: Mr Ezra Pound has written to me telling me that you were so kind as to bring my books to the notice of the prime minister on whose recommendation a Treasury grant was made to me last month. Allow me to assure you that I am deeply grateful to you for having used your influence so generously and so effectively on my behalf and to thank you also for the favourable opinion which you have expressed of my meagre writings. I hope too that the difficulties which have made me, much to my regret, a burden to others will now be removed and if so I feel that I shall owe it in great measure to your friendly and benevolent intervention.

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To W.B. YEATS, 14 September 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII

Dear Yeats: Ezra Pound writes to me telling me of your kindness in writing a letter of recommendation on my behalf as a result of which a royal bounty has been granted to me (£100). I need scarcely say how acceptable this money is to me at such a time and in such circumstances but, apart from its usefulness, it is very encouraging as a sign of recognition and I am very grateful to you for your friendly and valuable support. I hope that now at last matters may begin to go a little more smoothly for me for, to tell the truth, it is very tiresome to wait and hope for so many years. It seems that my novel will really come out this autumn in New York and London. I am sending the typescript of my play Exiles (which has already been rejected in Zurich, Berne, Turin and by the Stage Society in London) to Pound who says that Mr Knoblauch will read it. Besides this I am writing a book Ulysses which however will not be published for some years. Possibly the novel and play will engage the attention of my six or seven readers (7 copies of Dubliners were sold in the last six months) until it is ready. Pound speaks of offering the play to some new review Seven Arts, that is, if it is not accepted by Drama (Chicago) where it is being read, I believe. Mr Archer too said he would read it.

I hope your own affairs prosper well and that your health is good. I have been away so many years that I know little or nothing about what is published in England. I saw some time before I left Trieste the Italian version of Countess Cathleen in a bookshop and I must say that the few passages which I read I did not like. It is, I think, a great pity that my friend Vidacovich’s version was not published. His rendering of many parts (especially of the long Impetuous heart) was excellent. I do not know where he is now (in Rome, I think) or what became of the translation we made together of Synge Riders to the Sea. I read it one night to Mrs Sainati, a very original actress, and her husband took away the copione to read it again. Vidacovich also tried his hand with me on a version of my story Ivy Day in the Committee Room for the Nuova Antologia but the attempt was a dismal failure.

I have every reason to be grateful to the many friends who have helped me since I came here and I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relations with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a wonder worker.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 September 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: In reply to your letter of 7 instant I sent you the text of chapters 1, 2 and 5 corrected. I sent it to The Egoist office as I imagine that it will be delivered there more quickly. I did not send it to Mr Huebsch for two reasons: first, I think the post between this country and the United States is at present very slow and it might not arrive in time: secondly, I know absolutely nothing about Mr Huebsch or the contract for the publication of my book or the date of publication because I have received no letter from him, directly or indirectly, and I have had no letter from my agent on that subject or any other subject for the last three or four months. I gather, however, from what Mr Huebsch writes to you that my agent has in the meantime been in correspondence with him and settling the terms of the contract as much as possible in my favour: and I presume that all has now been settled and that my agent will send on the contract. I attach no importance to the contract but no doubt Mr Pinker is a better man of business than I am. I shall wait till Monday to see if a letter arrives from him and if it does not come I shall write to him. May I ask you however to let me know as soon as you have any other definite news. It is really a dreadfully troublesome book.

It was very kind indeed of you to read the other chapters and also to write to Mr Huebsch insisting that the text be published entire. In order to save time I think it better to say that I leave all the details of publication absolutely in your hands: I mean binding etc. I should like however to make two suggestions which, I think, may be helpful to its sale. The first is that in the copies sent out to the press for review slips be inserted containing a few extracts from the press notices of Dubliners which Mr Pinker has. Those notices as they stand are too many and too long but a few of the best could be used. It would be enough to have fifty or sixty slips printed. This item however should be charged to my account as you are taking quite enough burden on yourself already. The second is that, apart from the copies which I receive gratis, I should like to buy for myself, if possible before the date of publication in England ten extra copies which I intend to present to some writers and critics who have lately befriended me and expressed a favourable opinion of the book. Possibly they might write something about it and no doubt that would be an advantage: but even if they do not I feel that I ought to make some return for their kindness. Both of these suggestions of course I make subject to your approval.

I thank you again and very gratefully for all the trouble you have taken and hope it will be rewarded in every way.

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To MRS THOMAS KETTLE, 25 September 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, rechts, Zurich

Dear Mrs Kettle: I have read this morning, with deep regret in the Times that my old school fellow and fellow student Lieutenant Kettle has been killed in action. I hope you will not deem it a stranger’s intrusion on your grief to accept from me a word of sincere condolence. I remember very gratefully his benevolent and courteous friendliness to me when I was in Ireland seven years ago. May I ask you also to convey to your sisters (whose addresses I do not know) my sympathy with them in the losses they have suffered. I am grieved to learn that so many misfortunes have fallen on your family in these evil days.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 October 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter. Please use the press notices of my stories in whatever way seems best to you. enclose slips to be inserted in the copies sent out to the following addresses (the first three, however, are not to contain slips):

1) John Joyce

2) Michael Healy

3) Mrs Murray

4) W.B. Yeats

5) Arthur Symons

6) William Archer

7) H.G. Wells

8) Lady Cunard

9) Edmund Gosse

10) George Moore

11) Edward Marsh

As I have had no news whatever from my agent I shall feel greatly obliged if you will please write to me as soon as you hear from him or from the publisher in New York.

I thank you also for your kind inquiry about the book I am writing. I am working at it as well as I can. It is called Ulysses and the action takes place in Dublin in 1904. I have almost finished the first part and have written out part of the middle and end. I hope to finish it in 1918. With very kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 24 October 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Huebsch: I have heard from Miss Weaver that you are trying to bring out my novel before the end of the year. I sincerely hope that you will do so and that my corrections reached you in time. In the English edition slips are to be inserted containing a few extracts from the press notices of my book Dubliners (at least in the review copies). In case you approve of this idea I am asking my agent to send you one. If, however, the book be delayed beyond the end of the year I should be much obliged if the date on the frontispiece be printed as 1916.

I suppose you have now received from Mr Pinker my adherence to the terms of contract proposed by you. I confirm the same by the present letter to save time.

As I am anxiously waiting for the publication of the book I shall be much obliged if you will kindly cable to my agent when it is published.

I would beg you also to forward the letter which accompanies this to Mr Byrne Hackett whose address I do not know.

Finally I thank you for your promptness and energy in arranging the publication of my book and wish you good success in your venture.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 October 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: Kindly excuse me for my delay in answering your letter. I have been ill lately. I have had three or four collapses which I feared were due to syncope but the doctor says I am not a cardiac subject and that the collapse is due to nervous breakdown. Today I feel better.

I am glad to have news, even indirectly, from the New York publisher. I hope he will bring out the book this year and in any case I should like the date on the titlepage to be 1916 as I wish to publish my comedy Exiles in 1917.

I do not remember Mr Hackett at Clongowes but have written to him, care of Mr Huebsch, thanking him and his brother for the interest they have taken in my novel.

I am greatly obliged to you for your kindness in writing to me and hope you will let me know as soon as you hear any more concerning the American edition.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 November 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your two letters. I shall be obliged if you will forward a copy of Chamber Music to Mr Huebsch and also the press notices which I enclose. I agree to your proposal of an article with a woodcut but fear that your readers have already had enough of me. In any case tomorrow I shall send photographs, one for the Egoist and one for Mr Huebsch. As regards the ‘biographical items’ which he requires will you kindly refer him to Who’s Who? (1916) and forward him also a copy of The Egoist (15 January 1914)? I send also some account of my books on the enclosed slip as I suppose that is what he means.

Chamber Music.

Some of these verses were printed in the Saturday Review and Speaker (London) and in Dana (Dublin). Mr Symons arranged for their publication by Mr Matthews.

Dubliners.

Mr Norman, editor of the Irish Homestead (Dublin), agreed to take stories from me but after the second story he told me that his readers had complained. The other stories I wrote in Austria.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I began this novel in notes before I left Ireland and finished it in Trieste in 1914. Before I left I offered an introductory chapter to Mr Magee (John Eglinton) and Mr Ryan, editor of Dana. It was refused.

Exiles (a play).

I wrote this in Trieste 1914–1915.

Ulysses.

I began this in Rome six years ago (or seven) and am writing it now. I hope to finish it in 1918.

Address.

I have lived in Trieste since 1904—except for a stay of one year in Rome. I left it in July 1915 when the Austrian authorities gave me at my request a permit (for my family and myself) to the Austro-Swiss frontier. Since then I have lived in Zurich.

Irish Literary Theatre.

I refused to sign the letter of protest against Countess Cathleen when I was an undergraduate. I was the only student who refused his signature. Some years later I made the acquaintance of Mr Yeats. He invited me to write a play for his theatre and I promised to do so in ten years. I met Synge in Paris in 1902 (where I went to study medicine). He gave me Riders to the Sea to read and after his death I translated it into Italian. I also translated Mr Yeats’ Countess Cathleen but the project failed as we had translated the first version and Mr Yeats did not wish that version to be offered to the Italian public.

Ezra Pound.

Mr Pound wrote to me in Trieste in 1913, offering me his help. He brought the MSS of the novel to The Egoist where it was published serially (from February 1914 to September 1915). He also arranged for the publication in America and England. He has written many articles (all most friendly and appreciative) about me in English and American papers. But for his friendly help and the enterprise of Miss Weaver, editor of The Egoist, in accepting A Portrait of the Artist after it had been refused by all publishers, my novel would still be unpublished.

Early Publications.

(1) ‘Parnell’, a pamphlet written when I was nine years old (in 1891) on Parnell’s death. It was printed and circulated in Dublin. I do not know if any copy is to be found today.

(2) An article on Ibsen in the Fortnightly Review written when I was seventeen. Ibsen was so kind as to send me a message of thanks for it.

(3) The Day of the Rabblement (a pamphlet on the Irish Literary Theatre). This was written for the University Review but refused insertion by the censor as was also an essay on co-education by my fellow student, the late Mr Skeffington. We published the essays together in pamphlet form.

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To EZRA POUND, 8 November 1916

Seefeldstrasse 54, Zurich VIII

MS. British Museum

Dear Pound: Drama has refused to publish my play. Has Mr Knoblock read it. You said also that it could be submitted to Seven Arts. Miss Weaver wishes to publish an article on me with a woodcut as an introduction of the novel: and mentions your name. I imagine the readers of that paper must be rather tired of my novel and I am sure you are too. If you do the article please quote my limerick also!

I am better and carrying out a rest cure and have had no more unpleasant attacks. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 19 November 1916

[Zurich]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your kind inquiries. I have had no more attacks and feel better and am making a kind of cure. I sent four photographs (very bad, I believe) and yesterday a better one which Mr Kristian can perhaps use before it is sent on to Mr Huebsch. I shall send another copy within the week so as to be in time for the English edition. I hope you received safely my letter in reply to Mr Huebsch’s request for biographical material. I am infinitely obliged by all the trouble you have taken about my tiresome books and would beg you, as a very great favour, to telegraph to me as soon as you know definitely that the book has appeared in New York. With kindest regards and thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1917

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 14 January 1917

Seefeldstrasse 54, parterre rechts, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have already replied to your kind telegram of 1 January and thank you again for your thoughtfulness in sending it. I hope you have now received the sheets from New York and that the English edition will be out early next month. May I ask you to send a copy also to the following address with the slip enclosed?

Constantine Curran, 15 Garville Avenue, Dublin.

I think the presentation copies are now twelve but I will ask you to send me here three more copies (the extra five—beyond the ten allowed for—being of course charged to my account) as I want one for myself and two for you and Mr Pound. In these latter I should like to write a few words if you will allow me to do so.

Will you also let me know the published price of the English edition and the foreign postage (per dozen copies) so that I may remit you an order for such copies as I buy at trade price? I hope to be able to dispose of a few dozen here.

I should also be glad to know if the American publisher has arranged to send you copies of American press notices. With many thanks and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS to EZRA POUND, II February 1917

Savile Club, 107 Piccadilly, London, W.

MS. Cornell

My dear Ezra I have almost finished ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ I think it a very great book—I am absorbed in it.

If you have the play bring it tomorrow night. If it is at all possible the Abbey should face a riot for it. Yrs s

W B Yeats

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From SLACK, MONRO, SAW & Co., 22 February 1917

70 Queen Street, London, E.C.

TS. Cornell

Dear Sir, We are instructed to write to you on behalf of an admirer of your writing, who desires to be anonymous, to say that we are to forward you a cheque for £50 on the 1st May, August, November and February next, making a total of £200, which we hope you will accept without any enquiry as to the source of the gift.

We trust that this letter will reach you, the address having been taken by our client from ‘Who’s Who’ for 1917. Yours faithfully,

Slack Monro Saw & Co.

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From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 February 1917

[New York]

Dear Miss Weaver, I take pleasure in enclosing copies of reviews on the Joyce books that have appeared thus far. The one by Huneker in the New York Sun is important because the writer is one of the best critics we have in America. Padraic Colum will include the book in an article on modern Irish literature that he is writing for The North American Review, a rather important monthly. I understand that John Butler Yeats likes the book and is speaking nicely of it to his friends. I have not seen the old gentleman recently, but will hear what he has to say about Joyce when we next meet. That the book will meet with at least a succès d’estime there is no doubt. Yours sincerely,

B.W. Huebsch

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To H.G. WELLS, 3 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Wells: Illness has prevented me from writing till to-day. Your article on my novel has been forwarded and I hope you will allow me to thank you for it. It is indeed very kind of you to write such a long and careful criticism and I am sure that if the book has any success it will be due in great measure to your friendly recommendation….

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To [HARRIET SHAW WEAVER], 6 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

MS. British Museum

Dear Sir (or Madam): Messrs Black, Monro, Saw and Co wrote to me on 22 February that they have been instructed by you to forward me on 1 May, August, September and February cheques for £50, making a total of £200. They add that you are an admirer of my writing and desire to be anonymous. First of all I will ask you to forgive my delay in answering. Since 4 February I have been laid up with a painful and dangerous illness of the eyes (rheumatic iritis). As it is the fifth attack which I have had and was complicated with synechia it was quite impossible for me to write until today.

I am deeply touched by your generosity. I scarcely know what to say. It has given me the greatest encouragement and, coming at such a time as the present, relieves my mind of many worries. Allow me to express my sincerest gratitude both for the munificence of your gift and for the delicacy of its giving. I hope that the future may justify in some measure an act so noble and considerate.

I should like to make some poor return and am therefore writing to the publishers of my books asking them to send me copies so that I may beg you to accept them from me with a dedication.

As soon as I am cured I shall continue to write a novel at which I am working Ulysses. I have written also a play Exiles and if it is published this year I shall send it to you.

Once more I ask you to accept my deepest thanks and to believe that I am most gratefully and sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Excuse this short letter. My sight is still weak but I hope out of danger. I have been ill for four weeks.

Many thanks for your letter, 3 books and reviews. I send you today a copy for yourself and remit you also M.O. for:

1 dozen copies at 3/6

=

£2.

2.

0

postage of 13 copies at 4d

4.

4

£2.

6.

4

Mr Healy’s address is Osborne, Dollymount, Dublin.

I hope the 13 copies will arrive safely and that you will send me other reviews. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter of 8 instant with enclosures. It is very kind of you to send me the notices and I hope you will send more. The 13 copies arrived. Kindly send me another dozen. I hope you got my M.O. (£2.6.6.). On arrival of your card confirming receipt I shall remit another.

I am now out of danger but am still under doctor’s care and my sight is still in some danger. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 14 March 1917

The Egoist, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.

MS. Huebsch

Dear Mr. Huebsch A little time ago I posted to you a press cutting of an appreciative review of Mr. Joyce’s novel written by Mr. H.G. Wells in the London Nation of February 24th but it has been returned to me from our postal Censor’s office with a notice saying that newspaper cuttings as well as other printed matter can now only be sent to America through an agent having a permit. This will mean a little delay but I shall hope to send you this review soon and also a special review which appeared in the London Times Literary Supplement of March 1st (written, though not signed, by Mr. A. Clutton Brock who writes their leading articles). These two reviews have been of great service to us and our sales began to make a good start after they appeared: this week, however, they have dropped off.

Owing to a new Import regulation we shall not be able to obtain any more sheets from you except by special license from our Board of Trade—rather a difficult matter to push through. But if our sales pick up again we shall probably apply for the license and meantime should be glad if you would cable the cost of (a) 500 and (b) 1000 more sheets. If you just say —— dollars —— dollars this will be enough. I enclose money order for 3/– which I imagine will be somewhere about the cost of the cable.

I hope the American edition is going well. Yours sincerely

H.S. Weaver

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To ERNEST BOYD, 15 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. Colby (Healy)

Dear Sir: Allow me to thank you for the kind notice of my book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which appeared in New Ireland of 3 March. I have read with much interest your patient and friendly criticism. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To C.P. CURRAN, 15 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Curran

Dear Curran: Many thanks for your friendly and interesting letter. I had already seen the notices by Mr Wells and Mr Brock. I am glad that my book has given you some pleasure. I hope you received also the presentation copy of my book of stories Dubliners which I asked Mr Richards to send you when it appeared—June 1914.1 have not yet seen any American notices of the novel. It was published in New York before Christmas.

I am recovering from a painful—and this time dangerous—illness of the eyes. I am now out of pain and much better and this morning the doctor was very optimistic so that I hope it will not be necessary to operate.

You are very kind to ask what I am writing. My play Exiles which was rejected in Turin, Berne, and Chicago and also here and by the Stage Society (London) is being read by Yeats for the Abbey Theatre. I do not know if he will put it on. He wrote that ‘the theatre should face a riot to stage it.’ In any case I shall publish it in the autumn. I finished it in 1915. I am writing Ulysses which I began six or seven years ago in Rome and hope I shall be able to finish it in 1918. The omissions you speak of will be made good as you suppose. A few verses of mine were printed in Poetry (Chicago) last year, I believe. I did not see them.

I hope that you and yours are well and beg you to give my regards to any who remember me. With all good wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN QUINN, 19 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Quinn: I have received today your cable and have telegraphed to Mr Ezra Pound to transmit to you by cable my acceptance of your very kind and flattering offer to buy the corrected proof sheets of my novel. Mr Pound will cable you asking you to send the money through him, as that seems to me the shortest way. In any case, I am writing also to my publisher in New York instructing him to hand over the sheets to you. I hope you received the presentation copy of my novel which I asked him to send you. I regret that it was not possible to sign it in token of my gratitude for your kindness.

I am very glad to hear that the book is meeting with good success in America, for, except one notice in the Chicago Daily News, written by Mr Sell,I have not seen any American reviews.

I have been for the past month very ill with my eyes and was even in some danger. Now it seems that I am much better and the doctor is optimistic.

Allow me to thank you once more for your kindness and generosity and to assure you that I am very grateful to you for the interest you take in my writing.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 30 March 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for your letter and remittance (58 frs. 10 c). Dubliners: Can you find out if Mr Richards has my list of corrections of printer’s errors? Does he intend to bring out a second edition? I see that on 31 December last he had only 88 copies left. If so proofs are to be sent me with my list of corrections. If not the list of corrections ought to be sent to my New York publisher (a copy of it) and as soon as possible.

Exiles: Will you please get from Mr Yeats or Mr Pound the typescript of this and offer it to Mr Richards? He, or his reader, could read it in an hour and a half so that I think a fortnight is enough time for its consideration. In the contract I should like the date of publication to be fixed—not later than 15 December next—and I should also like to be allowed 10 presentation copies not 6 and as many other copies as I need at trade rates. As regards its production if Mr Yeats will not put it on it could perhaps be offered to some repertory theatre, the Pioneer Players or to Mrs Grein’s theatre.

Proofs: I shall be very much obliged if you will see that in future first and revise proofs are sent to me. The novel does not seem to have been read. I am sending in a few days a list of printer’s errors. It will be enough to forward them to New York with a polite covering letter.

I thank you very much for your kind enquiries about my health. I am feeling much better and can now write again. I have written to Mr Wells to thank him for his friendly and interesting notice and hope that the letter reached him. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, 9 April 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Pound: Many thanks for yours of 26th ult. which arrived only this morning. Owing to the delay and the fact that I have nothing ready, I am sending you an accompanying note, as you wish. I sent three pieces of verse in December, I think, to Poetry (Chicago) through my agent, but heard nothing more of them. If they have not been and will not be published, would you take them in reversion? As regards stories I have none. I have some prose sketches, as I told you, but they are locked up in my desk in Trieste. As regards excerpts from Ulysses, the only thing I could send would be the Hamlet chapter, or part of it—which, however, would suffer by excision. If there is anything else I could do—perhaps a simple translation or review—will you tell me? I shall be glad to do it, though I am quite sure that, with your usual friendliness, you exaggerate the value of my poor signature as a ‘draw’. I have been thinking all day what I could do or write. Perhaps there is something if I could only think of it. Unfortunately, I have very little imagination. I am also a very bad critic. For instance, some time ago a person gave me a two-volume novel to read, Joseph Vance. I read it at intervals for some time, till I discovered that I had been reading the second volume instead of the first. And if I am a bad reader I am a most tiresome writer—to myself, at least. It exhausts me before I end it. I wonder if you will like the book I am writing? I am doing it, as Aristotle would say, by different means in different parts. Strange to say, in spite of my illness I have written enough lately.

As regards my novel, it seems that it has now come to a standstill. I did not see any review in the New Statesman. Mr Boyd sent me a notice from the New York Sun, about 2,000 words, by Mr Huneker, very favourable. Miss Weaver sent me also other American notices but they seem to have fallen out of the envelope somewhere on the way. By the way, I think you ought to type your letters to me without cancellings of any kind. Perhaps that delayed your last letter.

As I wrote you, the Stage Society wishes to reconsider my play, Exiles. I shall ask my agent to submit it also for publication in London and New York this autumn. I wish I could hear of a good dramatic agent in America who would take it up. Perhaps it would be more successful than A Portrait of the Artist. I send you a limerick thereon:

There once was a lounger named Stephen

Whose youth was most odd and uneven.

He throve on the smell

Of a horrible hell

That a Hottentot wouldn’t believe in.

In spite of the efforts of the critics of the Times and Manchester Guardian to galvanize the book into life, it has collapsed or is about to collapse—possibly for lack of inverted commas. I should like to hear what Yeats says about Exiles.

I am rather tired for I have been correcting misprints in my novel. There are nearly four hundred. No revise was sent to me. This in view of a possible second edition during the century. The announcement on the last page of The Egoist is a pious exaggeration—so Miss Weaver writes.

In any case I am better. Please write to me about your review. I shall go on writing, thanks to the kindness of my unknown friend and also of Mr Quinn.

I hope you are well. My wife and noisy children thank you for your good wishes. From me, ogni bene!

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 10 April 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I enclose corrections of misprints in my novel. Kindly have them typed (with copy) and forwarded by two successive posts to my publisher in New York. In case of a new edition I should like the headings Chapter First &c cancelled and bastard titles inserted between the chapters simply numbered with Roman numerals. I &c.

I should like to have a copy each of American edition of my book of stories and verses.

The other copies of American edition of my novel have not reached me Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To J.C. SQUIRE, 11 April 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (,Switzerland)

MS. Yale

Dear Sir I thank you for your letter and apologise for delay in replying to it. I have been rather ill with my eyes and could not write. I am much honoured by your kind proposal that I should contribute to your paper and I shall bear it in mind. I regret, however, that for the moment I am allowed to do very little reading or writing but hope that the change of weather may bring me some relief.

With renewed thanks, believe me to be, dear sir, Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 April 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: I owe you an apology for not having answered before now your letters and hope you will not be angry with me. I am still under doctor’s care and rather depressed that the [eye] attack—possibly on account of the infamous weather—is lasting so long. I never had an attack that lasted so long as this one. I have no pain but the consequences this time seem to be rather serious—but I hope always that an operation may be avoided. I can read and write however and am continuing my book [Ulysses] at the usual snail’s pace. My agent tells me that the Stage Society asked again for my play Exiles and adds that perhaps they will put it on.

I owe you an apology also for not having remitted yet the amount of the second dozen copies of my book. I hope to be able to do so tomorrow. There remain also 4 copies to my charge (I think you have forgotten them) and I hope to be able to take later on another 8 copies and will then settle for the third dozen.

I received safely all the press notices (English) which you were so kind as to send me and am glad to see that one (The Sphere) mentions your publishing house favourably. As you do not mention sales I suppose they are slow. Perhaps in consequence of the later reviews they will improve. Mr John Quinn is publishing in Vanity Fair (New York, May) an article on the book and he speaks highly of your paper also and of your enterprise in publishing my novel.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 22 April 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I am sending you by successive posts the three acts of my play Exiles which you can submit to Mr Hichards for publication. I should like to have his decision as soon as possible and should like the date of publication to be not later than November 1917. If he accepts it perhaps he would have it set up now so that the typescript may be sent to my publisher in New York for an American edition.

As regards its production in America perhaps Mr John Quinn (who has done a long article on my novel in Vanity Fair (New York, May: 1917) could help you if you are not in relation with an American agent yourself. Has the Abbey Theatre refused it or is it to be returned in case the Stage Society does not put it on?

I enclose a few more corrections of printer’s errors and return the A/S of my book of stories.

I do not know whether my verses, sent some months ago, were printed in Poetry. If not Mr Pound can have them. I understand that an American edition of Chamber Music was arranged for also. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To J.C. SQUIRE (‘SOLOMON EAGLE’), 25 April 1917

[Zurich]

Dear Sir: My publisher has sent me a copy of The New Statesman (14 April 1917) which contains your review of my book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Allow me to thank you for your very kind and friendly notice which I have read with great interest Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to JOHN QUINN, 30 April 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich, Switzerland

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Sir, My husband, Mr James Joyce, wishes me to thank you for your extremely kind review of his book in Vanity Fair. He is, unfortunately, unable to do so himself owing to the condition of his eyes, glaucoma having developed yesterday. I fear he must go into hospital at once, though he hopes to have Dr Gould’s opinion first.

He thanks you also for the duplicate of correspondence forwarded to him and is deeply grateful to you for your vigorous defence of his interests. The £20 remitted through Mr Pound arrived today, and while my husband thanks you for your generosity it seems to him unfair that you should now pay $100 instead of $50 you first offered. He therefore begs you to accept as part of the transaction the MSS his agent has just forwarded to New York, namely, the corrections of printer’s errors for the volume of stories and the novel. If this letter of mine is not sufficient, Mr Huebsch can keep charge of these two MSS till he receives my husband’s authorization to hand them over to you.

As regards the article, my husband will be glad to receive a copy of Vanity Fair. The article, he says, contains one slight inaccuracy. His book of stories was not ‘refused’ by the publisher in Dublin. It was accepted, set up, printed, and then the entire first edition was maliciously burned. The details of the case are given in Mr Pound’s article (Egoist: 15 January, 1914).

My husband desires me to say in conclusion that your friendly and generous action has given him very great encouragement. Yours very sincerely

Nora Joyce

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To FORREST REID, 10 May 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Stanford

Dear Sir: I hope you will excuse my delay in answering your letter and also the brevity of this reply. I am recovering from a very long and tiresome illness of the eyes (rheumatic iritis complicated with synechia and glaucoma). Your very kind letter gave me much pleasure and I should deem it a privilege to have a copy of your novel Following Darkness—in return for which I should like to send you perhaps my verses if you have not already a copy. I suppose you know that according to present regulations books are forwarded to neutral countries only when dispatched by agents or booksellers authorised to forward them.

I trust you will have good success with your writings and I shall write to you later if you will allow me to do so. With many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN QUINN, 13 May 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

My dear Mr Quinn: I hope you will forgive the brevity of this letter. As my wife has already written you, I have been very ill for the past fortnight with glaucoma. Now it seems better and I can write again. It is very tiresome and the pain was rather strong. I am trying to avoid the operation as I dislike the idea of cutting out pieces of the iris at intervals.

I cannot dictate to a stenographer or type. I write all with my hand. When the fair copy is ready I send it to a typist. I have here with me only the MS of Exiles. The MSS of Dubliners (and the only copy extant, so far as I know, of the burned first edition) and of A Portrait of the Artist are in my desk and so I cannot easily get them for the moment. However, I have sent you the MS of Exiles (through Mr Pound in London). This seems to me the quickest and safest way. I am much honoured by your proposal of buying it and am well content to leave the matter in your hands. To save time it might be possible to have it typed again (over there) and then submitted to my publisher in New York for his autumn list or to any manager who might think of putting it on. The marginal corrections—in pen and pencil—are to be followed, and the cost of typing can be charged to my account with my publisher.

I am indeed grateful to you for the interest you are taking in me and hope I may deserve it, or some of it. You did not meet me in Dublin. Mr O’Donoghue asked me, I believe, in your name for some verses at the time of the St Louis exhibition. He was bringing out an anthology, I think, under your supervision.

I shall be very glad to hear that my play has reached you safely and most interested to hear your opinion of it.

I will conclude by asking you to convey to any of your friends who know me or remember me my regards, and to accept for yourself my very grateful and sincere thanks. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MARGARET ANDERSON, [? May 1917]

Zurich

I am very glad to hear about the new plans for The Little Review and that you have got together so many good writers as contributors. I hope to send you something very soon—as soon, in fact, as my health allows me to resume work. I am much better however, though I am still under the care of the doctor. I wish The Little Review every success.

[James Joyce]

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 June 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your kind inquiries. I am better but still in cure. I can also read and write more easily and yesterday could go out without black glasses. I have been to see a specialist who confirms the opinion of my doctor but agrees to postpone the operation. He says, however, that I must not go to the country as I must always have a doctor at hand, glaucoma being very dangerous and my eye very ‘launisch’—like its owner.

In these circumstances I have not been able to do very much with my book Ulysses: but I have done what I could.

Thanks for the notice from the Challenge. The press has been very good. I am sorry to hear that the sales are so poor. My book of stories had a good press also yet my royalties after three years came to 2/6. The publisher recently disposed of the rest of the edition to my New York publisher as remainders. I think it right to say that you have my permission to do the same (if my permission be needed) whenever the sales reach an unprofitable point. I think you have had quite enough unrewarded trouble till now.

May I ask you to give me the address of the musical critic of your paper, Mr Henry, as a Spanish composer, whose acquaintance I made here, has read some of his articles and would like to write to him.

I do not know if you wish to get continental notices of the book. I asked the correspondent of the Stampa (Turin) to notice it. He declined, space being limited. It is not easy to do these things for one s own book. The Corriere della Sera (Milan) has a large circulation. Do you know the London correspondent or anyone who knows him? Or perhaps you could send a copy to the Marzocco (via Enrico Poggi, Firenze) or to Mr Nicolo Vidacovich, C/O Nuova Antologia (Piazza di Spagna, Rome). I do not know where Mr Vidacovich is but probably the editor of that review will know. It would be well to enclose perhaps a copy of the English press notices which you printed on the back page of one of your numbers. In any case I should not advise you to venture more than two or three copies on these suggestions With many kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 20 June 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Huebsch: Mr John Quinn, 31 Nassau Street, New York, cables me that he wishes to cable me £20 (twenty pounds) for proof-sheets of my novel with M.S. page addition and interlineations and corrections and begs me to cable acceptance. I have already done so through Mr Ezra Pound and confirm same to you.

I hope you got my reply to your letter of 8 ult. I wrote also to Mr Sell. I am much better now, I think, but still under doctor’s care. Mr Quinn cables also that the book meets with good success and that the press is favorable. I am glad to hear this and hope you will soon send me more notices.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 July 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your letter. My eyes are fairly well but as a variety I have been laid up for the past week with fever and tonsilitis. I am better today. As regards my novel since I see you want foreign reviews of it I would make the following suggestions. Copies could be sent to the Semaine Littéraire (Geneva) and the Journal de Genève. I think you ought to enclose in these copies the last pages of Egoist (May and June) with extracts from English and American press notices. If the copies have already been dispatched to Florence and Rome to the addresses given you could post these pages under wrappers. A copy could be sent to Professor Federico Olivieri (professor of English literature), university of Turin, with notices also in the hope that he may notice it. This you might accompany by a diplomatic letter on your official notepaper. The London correspondent of the Corriere della Sera writes under the pseudonym of Giovanni Emanuel. You could perhaps find him by telephoning to Reuter’s agency there. The present editor of the Secolo (Milan) is Mr Mario Borsa who knows English well, I suppose. He wrote a book on the English theatre. I believe that Mr Yeats knows him or Lady Gregory. You could send him a copy with notices and a letter also. You could perhaps mention that he and I were at one time collaborators of the same paper the Piccolo of Trieste, for which he was the London correspondent while I was an occasional leaderwriter for it. I would do all this myself but it is difficult to push one’s own wares. I am surprised that neither Mr Archer nor Mr Symons has done anything to help the book. Possibly they are not in England. Mr Antonio Cappico and Mr Arturo Galanta are persons resident in England who may bring the book under the notice of Italian readers. I forgot to say that you may refer Mr Borsa for any further information about me to the editor of the Piccolo of Trieste, Dr Prezioso who lives now in Milan or near it.

I fear my writing is very bad today as I am somewhat feverish still. I am glad you are bringing out a second issue of the book. It would be well to have it set up at once so that I could read the full proof. My agent has my corrections for it.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 8 July 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I confirm my card of yesterday. To make matters clearer will you please let me hear from you as soon as possible on the points hereunder:

i) Exiles: Does Mr Richards agree to publish this play in England not later than 15 November 1917 and to send me full and complete proof? Do I retain by contract the American rights now and can I dispose of them now? Do I retain translation and stage rights? Have you got the typescript back from the Stage Society? If not kindly telephone for it. Was the play definitely refused by the Abbey Theatre? As you wrote me before that you see no prospect for this play in England do you know any dramatic agent who could push it for me I agree that he receive a special commission, separate from yours—or are you willing to work with Mr M.L. Bloom of New York in this matter on the same terms? Is it agreed that I am to receive 12 free copies and that the printing is to be done in accordance with my typescript and not as Mr Richards’ printer chooses? Is there any clause in the contract foreseeing what is to be done in case Mr Richards’ printer declines to set up the play?

ii) Dubliners: Is Mr Richards bringing out a second English edition of this book? If so, when? Will he send me a complete proof with my list of corrections of printer’s errors? Will his printer restore the dashes of my MS which he refused to print and replaced by inverted commas? How many books make an edition in Mr Richards’ custom—if that be not a trade secret?

Contract: You have written to me several times on what you call the ‘disastrous’ and ‘dreadful’ character of my contract with Mr Richards and ask why I signed it. I signed it in 1914 after a struggle of 9 years for the publication of my book—written in 1905. You will find the story set forth by Mr Pound in The Egoist (14 January 1914). My New York publisher has recently published a pamphlet about it. The book cost me in litigation and trainfare and postal expenses about 3000 francs: it cost me also nine years of my life. I was in correspondence with seven solicitors, one hundred and twenty newspapers, and several men of letters about it—all of whom, except Mr Ezra Pound, refused to aid me. The type of the abortive first English edition (1906) was broken up. The second edition (Dublin 1910) was burnt entire almost in my presence. The third edition (London, 1914) is the text as I wrote it and as I obliged my publisher to publish it after 9 years. Possibly the terms of his contract are unfair. I neither know nor care anything about that matter—so long as he does with the help of his printer the work he undertakes to do for me. Dubliners was refused by forty publishers in the intervals of the events recorded above. My novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was refused by every publisher to whom you offered it and, when The Egoist decided to publish it, about twenty printers in England and Scotland refused to print it. As you know, I suppose, it was printed in America and published in New York in December 1916 and in London in February 1917. The Egoist intends to bring out a second edition in September and as recent regulations seem to stand in the way of importing printed sheets from New York Miss Weaver has found a printer who will print it now after it has been reviewed. At least so she writes me.

Royalties: As regards this point I think it is useless to approach Mr Richards. Moreover it is of minor importance. On Chamber Music I received no royalties in 10 years. On Dubliners (in spite of the press notices) I received 2s/6d royalties in 3 years. The sales in the United Kingdom to date of my novel come to about 450 (after the press notices)—equivalent to a sale of about 28 copies in all Switzerland. I am engaged in writing a book (Ulysses) and I want to have Exiles published this autumn so that I may be able to continue to write it. I foresee for it more difficulties.

I hope this letter is a complete explanation made as you appear to want. Any further details you will find in Mr Pound’s article. I shall feel obliged if you on your side will send me a prompt and ample reply to the questions I ask as, in consequence of a grave and dangerous illness extending over five months, I find it necessary to simplify my tiresome and unprofitable affairs. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. If Exiles is being set up now the names of the speakers are to be printed in the centre of the page and not at the side. I think the price ought not to be more than 2/– or 2s/6d. I expect also that Mr Richards will allow me to buy as many copies as I wish at trade rates.

J.J.

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To JOHN QUINN, 10 July 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Mr Quinn: A few lines in reply to your very kind letters addressed to my wife. She thanks you sincerely for your interest in my tiresome illness. On receipt of the first I wrote to my agent about the corrections, but now I see you have received them safely. I shall look forward to your next letter containing the opinion of the eye specialist you allude to.

As regards my play Exiles, I note that you have received now the MS of the first act. It is a waste of time to write to London for the typescript. Any publisher you approve of (precedence, however, being given to Mr Huebsch, whether he is entitled to it by contract or not) may set it up and publish it. It will be published in London during the autumn by Mr Grant Richards. If you do not wish the printers to use your MS it can be typed first—charge of typing being to my account. When I correct the English printed proofs I shall ask Mr Richards to forward them to New York to you also, and these will serve as a control. As regards production, anyone who wishes to produce it can do so. If the person is reasonably honest I suppose he will pay me something. If he is not honest, a contract will not make him so. All monies should be paid to my agent, Mr James Pinker, Arundel Street, London, so that he may deduct his 10% fee therefrom. The only point on which I insist is that the play be printed or produced as I wrote it.

I do not understand part of your letter. Who is Mr Knopf? I began to write Exiles in the spring of 1914 on notes, and began to draft it in August 1914. I brought the MS with me here from Austria in July 1915 and finished the play here in September 1915. I sent it to Turin. It was refused as ‘being of local interest’ and because of ‘the talk about tea in it’. I sent it then to London to an American syndicate; it was rejected as unfit for their repertory. I offered it here; the director of the theatre told me it was ‘zu gewagt’ for his stage, though he puts on regularly plays by living dramatists, such as Mr Wedekind, Mr Egge, Mr Shaw, Mr Porto Riche—not to mention Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and others. I then sent it to Berne, on the recommendation of the daughter of the administrator of that theatre. He kept it for five months and sent it back in an envelope without a letter. It was then sent to Chicago, to Drama, kept there for four months, and rejected. Then I sent it to my agent, who wrote to me that it was quite useless to offer it in London. Then it was sent to the Stage Society, London, kept by them three months, and rejected. Then it went to the Abbey Theatre, at the request of Mr Yeats. It was kept there a few months and returned without a letter. Then the Stage Society wrote again asking for it. It was sent again, kept by them several months, and now I have written to my agent instructing him to withdraw it by telephone.

I mention these facts thinking they may interest you as you have the MS, but I also wish to make it clear that the play is not to be offered to anyone for consideration unless he undertakes to give his opinion definitely in three weeks. Ten years of my life have been consumed in correspondence and litigation about my book Dubliners. It was rejected by 40 publishers; three times set up, and once burnt. It cost me about 3,000 francs in postage, fees, train and boat fare, for I was in correspondence with 110 newspapers, 7 solicitors, 3 societies, 40 publishers and several men of letters about it. All refused to aid me, except Mr Ezra Pound. In the end it was published, in 1914, word for word as I wrote it in 1905. My novel was refused by every publisher in London to whom it was offered—refused (as Mr Pound informed me) with offensive comments. When a review decided to publish it, it was impossible to find in the United Kingdom a printer to print it. I write these facts now once and for all because I do not want any correspondence of the same kind about my play—I mean from publishers or impresarii. I want a definite engagement to publish or produce by a certain date, or a refusal.

My novel has been reviewed in certain European papers in Paris, Amsterdam and Russia. Financially it is, like my other books, a fiasco—450 copies sold to date in the United Kingdom, equivalent to a sale of about 28 copies in all Switzerland.

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To FORREST REID , 17 July 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich

Dear Mr Reid: Your publisher Mr Arnold sent me some weeks ago your novel Following Darkness and I hope you will not have blamed me for having allowed so much time to pass before writing to acknowledge receipt of it. I have been gravely ill, as you know, since the middle of February last and though I am better the condition of my sight is very unsettled. Moreover I cannot read and write very much and it is an illness which seems to have a dulling effect on the brain. I fear the climate is partly the cause as, until I came here in 1915, I had lived all my adult life in the south of Europe.

I have read your book with great interest and perhaps I may have the pleasure of making your acquaintance sometime in the near future. If you will allow me I shall write to you when I next visit Ireland. I should also like to see many of the scenes mentioned in your book for, except for two brief visits to Belfast, I do not know the north of Ireland. I have only one acquaintance except yourself, Mr W.B. Reynolds who was on the Belfast Evening Telegraph. He set some of my verses to music seven years ago.

My play Exiles will be published in London during the autumn and I shall instruct the publisher to send you a copy. I am very grateful to you for your friendly interest in me and my book. If you would like to see extracts from the press notices I will send them (unfortunately there is none from your city!) though I fear a good press and good sales do not always go together. I hope that you have both—especially the latter. I have had so much trouble for nine years over my two books that I am rather pessimistic. I suppose you know that the whole first edition of Dubliners was burnt and that no printer in the United Kingdom would print the novel. The first edition which you have is printed in New York. It may have a value some day.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 July 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: I wrote you a letter a few hours ago but my daughter who is an ‘absentminded beggar’ lost it somewhere in the street. So I repeat it here. My agent sent me a cheque for royalties on my book less his commission (£15.4.0). I am most grateful to you for your promptness in settling the account. As regards the second edition if you have additional expense with the English printing and if your very slender margin of profit (I fear you have little or none) be thereby reduced I suggest that you introduce some modification in your favour into the contract and add it with my agent’s approval. I agree in advance to anything you propose.

A notice appeared in the Greek review ‘Eσπερία (29 June, p. 410). I think the editor is entitled to a copy of the book. Dr C. Pouptis, 62 Oxford Street. I wrote him yesterday but sent the letter to 62 Chancery Lane by mistake! I am rather unlucky with the post this week.

Mr Richards will publish in autumn my play Exiles. I hope you will understand that it was offered to him first as by a contract which my agent says is ‘disastrous’ he has the right of refusal. I should much prefer you to publish it but alas such an offer would be in any case a dubious gift. Enclosed are some English press notices. I had them printed for insertion in the review copies of Exiles. I do not know how many copies will be in the edition. 1200 is I think the normal edition for a novel: perhaps 700 or 800 only for a play. If you and Mr Richards approve and if it is permitted to have printed matter imported from here perhaps it would be well to insert the leaflet in all copies of the edition. I have already paid for the setting and line of the type and for the copies I ordered so that the extra expense would be only the cost of the paper about 1.50 francs per 100 copies, that is about 10/- for an edition of 700. I am willing to defray this expense if you and Mr Richards approve. Meanwhile I have asked the printer to keep the type set, pending your reply.

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 1 August 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim: Thanks for your very affectionate postcard we are very well except that we have had continual thunderstorms since Sunday and a frightful lot of rain. This morning it has been a little finer and we went up to a monastery on the hill called Madona del Sasso. The children are passing the time very well they play the gramaphone and other games until the weather gets fine again, as I want to send a card to Mrs Sykes you might write a few words and send it to me also for the Landlady I hope you are well I am sorry that you have no definite news I suppose now that you are alone you ought to be able to write as you havent me always to bother you I will try to get myself well although I fear the climate is more or less like Zurich but perhaps when the weather settles I suppose Ill feel better the people are all very nice they are all from Zurich I have not been able to see much of the place yet if you have any news write to me hoping this will find you well

Nora

love from the children

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [About 4 August 1917]

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim: Thanks for the money also your letter of this morning with enclosures for which I send you back by return I am glad you got the money so that you wont have anything to worry about I hope you will make the best of your time, we are alright as I told you before the food could not be better and more than we can eat and the bedroom is alright it has a balcony now that the weather is much better we will be able to take some nice walks yesterday was market day and it was quite lively to hear the men calling out the prices and making as much noise as they could just like in Triest they are just like Italians lively and dirty and disorderly it is quite different from Zürich. I would ask you to send me the blouse that is at the cleaners I dont think I have any more news hoping to hear from you soon again hoping you are well best love from the children

Nora

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 August 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Richards: You have a small balance of 37/6d to my credit and you will oblige me by wiring on receipt of this whether you agree to 15 November as date of publication of Exiles. Your compliance with my request will serve your interests as well as mine. It will release a typescript copy if the play is set up now and allow my agent to offer it to some theatres. It will allow me to bring the play as soon as possible under the notice of publishers and managers on the continent with a view to publication and production: and, by setting my mind at rest, it will allow me to get on more quickly with my novel Ulysses which, if all goes well, I hope to have ready for publication next year.

Mr Archer writes that he never received from you the copy of Dubliners I asked you to send in June 1914 and again in August or November 1915! Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 8 August 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Am writing Mr Richards today. Please fix the matter up with him as soon as possible. Mr Grein, Mincing Lane, wishes to read my play. He is at present in Devon. Will you find out when he will be back and send him on a typescript copy. Have you any relations with the Pioneer Players, or the other theatre I spoke [of] or the Manchester Repertory Theatre or do you know any actor or actress who would read the play? My whole life seems to be taken up with useless correspondence. As regards the date of publication I am making a strong appeal to Mr Richards to comply with my request and you will oblige me by backing it up. I presume the contract will allow me to dispose of American rights. Have you heard from Poetry or have you had accounts from Mr Huebsch? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [About 10 August 1917]

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim: Many thanks for the money and letter which I received alright. Well I feel very knocked up to day you don’t know what a thunderstorm is but if you went through one here you would not be worth much it was something dreadful it began last night about half past nine we were in the dining room with a few people and as it had been raining all day the people did not expect it and all of a sudden it came on lightening thunderbolts I thought it was our last I was almost stiff with fright for about twenty minutes then it poured and we went to bed about half past ten but I did not sleep then a hurricane began and lightening which lasted till halfpast five this morning it makes a most awful impression because it cuts off the electric light so that I was groping about all night in the dark room so you can imagine how I am today. I was just looking very well but I shall try and recover myself again, the people say they never saw such a storm, you need never be afraid of the thunderstorms in Zurich they are nothing to day is very fine but I am afraid now that I will be too nervous here, the children are quite well and we eat plenty I sent a card to Mrs Sykes and to the other people you mentioned I hope you are well and able to write something do all you can while we are away from you, I hope to write you another letter when I feel better so good-bye for the present with best love from the children

Nora

PS many thanks for the money

Friday morning

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [About 12 August 1917]

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim: many thanks for your letter telegram and postcard all to hand. You need not be fretting about us we are alright, my nerves have evidentialy got much better the storm upset me until the next day but now I feel alright again I am doing my best to get well although to-day is cloudy again I dont mind I suppose we cant possibly have such a storm again for a time. If you like to telephone me tomorrow Monday as casa Danzi is next door to us and I know the girl that lives their she eats here in the Pension now I have got the telephon number is 33 telephone hour is from 8 to 12 if you like to phone me tomorrow I shall wait at the telephone at Eleven if you telephone well and good if not dosent matter. I’m glad to hear your book is selling I hope you are writing Ulisses dont stay up too late at night I suppose you havent bought any clothes for yourself be sure and do so the people are all very agreeable here so that I dont feel the time too long still I am longing to see you again hoping this will find you well

Nora

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To HARRIET MONROE, 12 August 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII (Switzerland)

MS. U. of Chicago

Dear Miss Monroe: I received your kind letter of May last but I did not receive any number of your review containing either my first or my second group of verses. I should be glad to have copies and, in view of the exceptional circumstances, may I ask you perhaps to send me a second copy. Mr Pound also wrote that he had sent me a copy of one number which contained verses by him and also that number never reached me.

Many thanks for your kind references to my novel. I am glad it gave you some pleasure. The enclosed English press notices may interest you. My play Exiles will appear in autumn.

I am sorry to say I have not been able to do much this year. I have been very ill with my eyes and fear I shall never get well in this bad climate. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, 15 [August] 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim: Thanks for your letter and postcard. I am sorry you had so much trouble about the telephone, dont telephone any more it is not worth the money or the trouble I am feeling better. I am always out in the air there’s a girl here which is great compa⁠[n]⁠y for me we were out three hours in a boat this morning she did the rowing now about the going back as I told you before I dont mind staying here but I dont think the children will remain longer than Saturday so that I dont know what to do and then of course its very expensive. I suppose you must be very tired waiting Quinn’s money if it arrived I could know better what to do, in any case you better send me a hundred and thirty 130 crowns and that will pay our train and the pension, my hair is a little better the people say its best to go to a doctor that its probably from always thinking but since I came here I dont think so much so that I may get better by degrees in any case Im not going to worry any more, I hope you are well and writing something I read a little every-day. we had a little dancing to day after lunch I danced also its not so very lively as you think but I dont mind because its better for my nerves but on the whole I feel much better hoping this will find you well with best love from the children

Nora

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To EZRA POUND, 20 August 1917

MS. New York Public Library (Manuscript)

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich VIII

Dear Pound: I have just wired you: Cable Quinn confirm or remit you telegraphically nothing here remitting. You wrote on 17 July you had a letter from him to say he had sent me an advance on the MS of my play. I take it that letter from New York must have been dated 8 July or thereabouts. It is now 20 August. No money has arrived here and on inquiry at the telegraph office I hear that none has arrived there either. There must be some miscarriage or mistake which had better be cleared up. I remit you 6/– cable expenses. If insufficient be sure to deduct the rest from what is remitted for me.

Am sorry to hear you have been so overworked. As regards myself I am sorry to say that my health has again taken a bad turn. On Saturday when walking in the street I got suddenly a violent Hexenschuss which incapacitated me from moving for about twenty minutes. I managed to crawl into a tram and get home. It got better in the evening but next day I had symptoms of glaucoma again—slightly better today. Tomorrow morning I am going to the Augenklinik. This climate is impossible for me so that, operated or not, I want to go away next month. I am advised to go to Italian Switzerland. There are other reasons also for going. It will be, I fear, very difficult to keep these rooms heated during the bad Zurich winter and it becomes more and more difficult to get different articles of food so that I think my best plan is to move into some cheap pension down there. I shall do this if Mr Quinn’s money arrives and if there is a prospect that your suggestion of some months ago will become a fact; I mean about Ulysses. You suggested that it could appear serially in Egoist and Little Review and thus bring me double fees. I am prepared to consign it serially from 1 January next, instalments of about 6000 words. It will be necessary for me to replace in some way the lessons I forfeit by going away from here. The subvention I receive from my unknown and generous benefactor is now 350 instead of 420 frs a month owing to rate of change—equivalent in purchasing value to 250 frs in normal times. It is most useful of course and but for it I should be in the poorhouse but I need to supplement it. Let me know whether this plan of yours is still feasible. I hope it is.

My agent has considerable difficulty with Mr Richards about the publication of my play. He (Mr R.) disposed of the remainder of Dubliners as waste paper in America and is now bringing back his own copies to save trouble of having a new edition brought out. Mr Archer wrote you sent him copy of my novel. He says he cannot read it: too depressing. He can read only detective stories, he says. Is he ill?

Shall finish now. Please do not be alarmed about me. My sight is a little weak today but I shall get over it as I got over other things. I did not receive your verses or those of Mr Eliot nor even my own

With kindest regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 20 August 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich VIII, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Many thanks for yours of 15. I hope you will soon settle the agreement with Mr Richards. On advice of my doctors I am trying to leave Zurich and pass the winter in Italian Switzerland. My health in the last days has taken a turn for the worse—due, I believe, to this wretched climate. May I ask you therefore to write express to Mr Huebsch and request of him, in view of the present exceptional circumstances, to make me through you a remittance of royalties on my books or an advance on same, pending settlement of accounts. I shall write him also as the matter is urgent and I wish to leave on 15 Sept. or 1 October if I can Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS, 26 August [1917]

c/o Madame Gonne, 17 rue de l’annonciation, Passy, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Joyce: I did not recommend your play to the Irish Theatre because it is a type of work we have never played well. It is too far from the folk drama; and just at present we do not play the folk drama very well, as a popular commercial play ‘Peg of My Heart’ has taken away four of our women and those the best. We have also had a dispute with certain players that lost us both men and women. In fact we are almost starting afresh. It is some time since I read your play and my memory is not very clear—I thought it sincere and interesting but I cannot give you the only criticism worth anything, detailed criticism of construction. I could at the time I read it, I have no doubt. I do not think it at all so good as ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ which I read with great excitement and recommended to many people. I think ‘A Portrait’ very new and very powerful. Ezra tells me that you have some new work of the kind on hand and that work I await with impatience. A poem of yours about the sea quoted by K Tynan in an anthology is always a delight to me for its substance and for its tecnical [sic] mastery Yrs sincry

W B Yeats

I wish you better health

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, (From MRS JOYCE), 28 August 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: My husband is recovering slowly after the operation. It was difficult but we hope successful. He thinks that as the second edition is set up perhaps the owner of the printinghouse will consent to allow it to go out. If not perhaps Mr Edward Marsh, Colonial Office, Downing Street, can assist you in the matter of importing sheets from New York. If so, you could at once cable for sheets the expenses being to my husband’s charge. I shall see that the 1000 press notices are sent on to you. I am glad to have this opportunity of thanking you Dear Miss Weaver for your heroic efforts in my husband’s interest. Sincerely yours, Nora Joyce.

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to EZRA POUND (Postcard), Postmark 28 August 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Mr Pound: I was too upset to write till now. Jim was operated on Thursday. Professor Sidler told me the operation was complicated and difficult. Unfortunately after it Jim fell into a nervous collapse which lasted three days. I was allowed to see him yesterday and he is getting better slowly. He begs you if you have got no reply to cable again to Mr Quinn and will send you the amount when he is out again.

In haste and with kind regards

Nora Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 5 September 1917

Zurich

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Come round on Friday. Got leave to go in garden today. Send you two limericks written in dark

1) John Quinn

There’s a donor of lavish largesse

Who once bought a play in MS

He found out what it all meant

By the final instalment

But poor Scriptor was left in a mess.

2) Claude Sykes

There is a clean climber called Sykes

Who goes scrambling through ditches and dykes

To skate on his scalp

Down the side of an alp

Is the kind of diversion he likes

J.J.

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 September 1917

Seefeldstrasse 73, III, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver My husband is better. The eye has almost ceased bleeding and the doctors think the worst is over but the cure will be slow. I told him of Mr Symons’ article in your paper and he would like you to find out if Mr Symons got the book and letters sent to his address in Kent as no reply ever came. Yours sincerely

Nora Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 10 September 1917 Sunday

Seefeldstrasse 73, Zurich

MS. Yale

Solomon

There’s a hairyfaced Moslem named Simon

Whose tones are not those of a shy man

When with cast iron lungs

He howls twentyfive tongues—

But he’s not at all easy to rhyme on

J.J.

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to EDWARD MARSH, 11 September 1917

The Egoist, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Berg)

Dear Sir, Knowing your interest in Mr. James Joyce’s writings and the great assistance you gave on a former occasion toward obtaining for him a grant from the Royal Literary Society I venture to write and beg your further help. Would it be possible for you to do anything towards obtaining a permanent pension for him for it now seems clear that he will be unfit to return to his teaching if he is to have the chance of continuing to write?

I do not know whether you have heard of the very serious and dangerous disease of the eyes (rheumatic iritis, followed by synechia and glaucoma) from which he has been suffering for the last seven months. He had apparently improved to some extent but has had a relapse and is now in hospital (in Zurich) having just undergone a complicated and difficult operation on the eye. The constant illness is of course a great expense and Mr. Joyce is again in distressing financial difficulties.

We have done what we could for him by turning publishers in order to produce his novel (‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’) which no ordinary publisher would touch. At the outset we met opposition from English printers and now import regulations prevent our obtaining more copies of this book from America, making it necessary to have the type set up again. (Fortunately a printer has been found willing to print it after seeing the excellent reviews it has had).

Would you be kind enough to allow me to see you and talk the matter over with you?

It seems lamentable that a writer of such power and talents should be so handicapped by constant financial worry—added to the burden of ill health. I am Yours truly

Harriet Weaver
(Editor ‘The Egoist’)

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To EZRA POUND, [22 October 1917]

Pension Villa Rossa, Locarno, Switzerland

Dear Pound: I came here a few days ago but was so busy looking after luggage etc that I could not write. It is useless to go into the subject of my physical and financial collapse in August. As regards the former what is done is done. I cannot see very well even yet but the sight gets better. About the latter I owe you and Miss Weaver very much for your prompt kindness. But for you I should have been derelict. I notice that you blame yourself for having misled me. The stupidity, however, is at my end. I am glad Ulysses is to appear in both reviews from March on and now that I can read and write again I shall get to work. I hope you will both like it. I send you a copy of Marzocco with an article by Mr Diego Angeli. The Manager of Messrs Cres and Co spoke to me about a French translation of my novel (to be published in the course of the present century) and Dostoyevsky’s daughter was here yesterday. She has read Mr Angeli’s article and wants a copy of the book. She will have to print one for herself, I fear. My wife told me you are bringing out a book with an essay in it about the novel. It may interest therefore to hear that after the first edition had been sold out and the book reviewed in eight countries the printers wrote asking the writer to delete and alter passages in it and refused to print even the second edition. I believe Miss Weaver has found some printer in the country who will do it, he says, I am now correcting proofs of Exiles. Yeats wrote to me about it but he seems to have forgotten what it is about. In any case he says his theatre is passing through a crisis. The actors he has now cannot even play low comedy. In the hope that things may have improved I am writing to him again about [it] rather pressingly. I am also going to write to Mr Martyn though I do not know him. If their theatre has no actors to play it surely they could be trained. If not what are they doing on the stage? I shall write also to Mr Sturge Moore who, you said, liked it and to Mr Archer again and to Mr [word missing] and possibly to Mr Short, Mr Barker and Mr Symons. In fact, as usual, I shall write a great number of letters to a great number of people.

I got copies of Little Review with your amusing and highspirited lines. The review looks more prosperous since you took over the European editorship.

I hope Mrs Pound and yourself are quite well. This letter, tardy as it is, is not very long or even complete but sometimes I find it difficult to keep my eyes open—like the readers of my masterpieces.

I have the impression that I am forgetting to tell you many things. No doubt I shall remember them five minutes after having posted this letter. I got Mr Eliot’s verses only this morning.

Accept my very sincere thanks however lamely expressed, for having helped me at such a difficult moment. Yours very gratefully

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1917

Pensione Villa Rossa, Locarno (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: A few lines for today to thank you for your very great kindness to me during my illness. I could not write till a few days ago and then there was the confusion of removal. I do not know whether I shall remain here but in any case you may write to this address. It is useless to bore you with an account of my collapse and the operation. It was difficult but, I hope, successful, though I cannot see very well yet.

I enclose receipts which I owe you. If you find them right let me know and I shall remit the balance in your favour. There was some mention of another signed copy of a book but I cannot remember exactly. I suppose you received the 1000 copies of the press notices and also the Marzocco with Mr Angeli’s article. As regards new edition by all means check the proofs yourself but please cancel the headings ‘Chapter I’ etc and put instead the numeral I etc and also the words The End, substituting nothing. Also please transfer the line from Ovid now prefixed to first chapter to a page to itself between titlepage and first page of text.

I have arranged, subject to your approval, with Mr Ebell, bookseller, Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich to take 7 copies of the new edition at once on sale or return. MM Crès et Cie, Editions Françaises, Rämistrasse 3, Zurich will also take 7 copies at once. Their manager Mr Trarieux is going to Paris this week and will speak to his firm about a French translation of the book. Till now no notice has appeared in Journal de Genève or Neue Zürcher Zeitung. A daughter of Dostoyevsky’s, however, read the notice in Marzocco and called here yesterday. She wants a copy of the book but I fear she must wait for it.

With many thanks and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To THOMAS STURGE MOORE, 26 October 1917

Pension Villa Rossa, Locarno

Dear Sir: I hope you will pardon the liberty I take in writing to you without having the pleasure of knowing you. Mr Ezra Pound told me that you were so kind as to speak well of my play Exiles and to suggest to the Stage Society to put it on. The Society, however, kept the typescript for a year and sent it back without comment. Perhaps you could give me the name of some other society which would be likely to consider it or the name of some manager. I find it very difficult to get what I write printed or produced and this is my excuse for troubling you.

In any case let me thank you for the kind interest you have taken in my poor piece.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 27 October 1917

Pension Villa Rossa, Locarno (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for your kind letter and inquiry and also for cheque (137 frs) which I was very glad to receive. I am here by doctor’s advice and hope the dry air will do me good after my rather bad breakdown. Have you received any reply from my New York publisher to whom you wrote in August? I have had none. If not will you please write him express? I corrected yesterday proofs of Exiles. Where is the other typescript copy? Have you sent it to New York or did you submit it to the Pioneer Players or to Miss Horniman’s theatre as you spoke of doing? Is it not possible to do anything with this play? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [? 27 October 1917] Saturday

Pension Villa Rossa, Locarno

MS. Yale

Sorry my wife could not get up to see Mrs Sykes on Monday. We are all right, including the cat who is wounded in a catfight. I left reviews with one act plays by Lord Dunsany and covers for typescript for you with Miss Sauermann. If there is anything interesting in Mr Moore’s interview in Fortnightly will you let me know. My wife says every morning: I must write to Mrs Sykes. So she will—before Christmas. Kindest regards from us all and hopes that your hungry messmate has not choked himself yet.

James Joyce

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To EDOUARD DUJARDIN, 10 November 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Monsieur: Votre fils au consulat français de Zurich m’a donné votre adresse. J’écris pour vous prier de vouloir bien me dire où je pourrais obtenir un exemplaire de votre roman Les Lauriers Sont Coupés. J’avais l’édition originale mais elle se trouve maintenant en Autriche d’où, étant sujet britannique, il ne m’est pas très facile de la ravoir. J’ai demandé chez les libraires de Zurich et d’ici mais inutilement. J’espère que vous me pardonnerez la liberté que je prends mais j’ai, je crois, deux excuses valides étant un sincère admirateur de votre œuvre si personelle et si indépendante et étant en même temps un humble vigneron dans la vigne du seigneur. .

Agréez, Monsieur, l’assurance de ma très haute considération

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. (?) November 1917

[Postcard] Locarno

Dear Mr Sykes: The first episode of the Telemachia has to be typed as quickly as possible so that the printers can get to work. I am sending it and you will get it on Tuesday morning. Please let me hear from you then. On Monday will you please arrange with Mr Rudolph Goldschmidt about beginning the typing on Tuesday. He can be seen at the Oesterreichischer Wohltätigkeitsverein, Zähringerplatz or ’phoned to there or, if not seen or ’phoned to, between 12/30 and 1/30 at his house, Hüchgasse 29. I remit per M.O. 20 francs in advance as per our agreement. I believe I told you that in present circumstances I should like to have it in duplicate. In very great haste and with kind regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [November 1917]

Locarno

MS. Yale

D.L.G.

There’s a George of the Georges named David

With whose words we are now night and day fed

He cries: I’ll give small rations

To all the small nations.

Bully God made this world—but I’ll save it.

N.N.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 16 November 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno, Switzerland

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Will you please apply to my London publisher for the corrected proofs of my play Exiles with my MS corrections and hand them on to Messrs Slack, Monro Saw and Co, solicitors, 70 Queen Street, London E.C.4 for their client to whom I present them.

I shall also be very grateful to you if you will wire me to let me know whether my New York publisher has sent any money for me. If so and if not already dispatched kindly wire the amount to me at above address or to the Banca Svizzera-Americana (Swiss-American Bank), Locarno. If he has not kindly cable him at once to cable you amount due or advance thereon. My health is much better and my sight improving here but my stay here depends on my receiving this money as soon as possible. I hope to be able to resume work on my book Ulysses next week. With many thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Of course all cable and telegraphic expenses are to my charge.

J.J.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 24 November 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for cheque from Egoist (132.80 frs) duly received today. Will you please lend at once to the Stage Society the other typescript of Exiles as the society’s committee wish to put the play on their next season’s programme. If you have no typescript please write to them meanwhile and ask Mr Richards to have a proof pulled if the play is not now obtainable in book form. Mr Sturge Moore who writes me says there is no time to be lost in the matter. I hear many complaints from people that they cannot get copies of my book Dubliners to buy. Is Mr Richards going to publish a second edition or not if it is out of print?

I hope you will be successful in your attempt to obtain some money from my New York publisher as my stay here depends on my receiving same without more delay. With thanks again sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. As I said in my former letter which may not have reached you I should like you to cable to New York for some of royalties due and transmit to me, less charge and commission, also by wire to save time.

James Joyce

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To STURGE MOORE, 24 November 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Sir: Many thanks indeed for your very kind letter and I am glad to hear that you hope to be able to include my play Exiles in your programme. I am writing to my agent, Mr James Pinker, Talbot House, Arundel Street, Strand, London W C 1. to send on at once a typescript. If he has not one he will ask my publisher Mr Grant Richards to have a full proof pulled. I do not know whether the play has been published or not yet. As soon as you have received it and have definite news as to approximate date of production may I ask you to let me know? I should be very glad indeed to accept your suggestion of attending rehearsals in London and hope circumstances may concur to that end. I am trying to recover some of my lost health in this good climate here.

As you are so kind to mention my novel I am taking the liberty of enclosing some English and American notices which are amusingly contradictory.

I am very much obliged to you for your very friendly and effective interest in my writings and beg you to believe me sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, 27 November 1917 [Postcard]

Dear Mr Sykes: Just got your card. Show MS at once to Mr G and explain to him that it can be typed quickly while the sale or otherwise of his business is pending. That much at least should be done at once. In the other two episodes (which are not long) it will depend on whether he disposes of his place or not. I take it you could do what I send quickly. There is no use losing time. Errors: for ‘old shrunken breasts’ in description of the old milkwoman read ‘old shrunken paps’. For ‘plunged’ in description of Buck Mulligan searching trunk for handkerchief read ‘plunged and rummaged’.

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 30 November 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno (Switzerland)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Richards: Will you please send on publication seven copies of my play as follows:

1) John Joyce c/o George Lidwell, solr, 33 Upper Ormond Quay, Dublin

2) Mrs Murray, 10 Fairfield Road, Church Road, Dublin

3) Michael Healy, Osborne, Dollymount, Dublin

*4) Sturge Moore, 40 Well Walk, Hampstead, London N.W.

*5) Forrest Reid, 12 Fitzwilliam Avenue, Belfast

*6) Constantine Curran, 15 Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin

*7) John Sullivan, 16 Oppidans Road, Hampstead, N.W.3

The last four with enclosed slips. Please send all registered and also send me at once five copies here with amount due (i.e. six copies—beyond those free as per agreement and the postal outlay) so that I may remit same.

If you care to send half a dozen copies, sale or return, the two Zurich booksellers here mentioned will take them. The copies will certainly be bought by friends of mine in Zurich.

1) MM Georges Crès et Cie
Les Editions Françaises
Rämistrasse, Zurich

2) Buchhandlung Ebell
Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich

With thanks in haste Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. (?) December 1917 [Postcard]

Dear Mr Sykes: In the hurry of catching post yesterday I forgot to make following changes:

(1) in description of the boy Sargent for ‘wheywhite’ read ‘wheysour’.

(2) after Mr Deasy’s words ‘Ipaid my way’ for ‘Quite right. Quite right’ read ‘Good man. Good man’.

(3) in Mr Deasy’s speech which begins ‘Mark my words’ omit the sentence ‘And now it has come’.

Snowing here. Hope you got MS all right. Am at work now on last part of the Telemachia. My wife is mobilizing with the purpose of writing a letter to Mrs Sykes.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, 6 December 1917 [Postcard]

Locarno

Dear Mr Sykes: At the beginning of the MS (page 9 of rough copy, probably 6 or 5 of yours) is the phrase ‘He folded his razor and with the feeling polpastrelli of the fingers of his right hand touched his jaws and chin’. In the version you have I have changed the phrase but please tell me what is there now as I want to change it slightly again. Sorry to trouble you but it means only the addition of one or two words. You may remember I found some difficulty there. Glad to hear from M.K. that you have the machine. Kind regards to Mrs Sykes. Cat and others well. Will send more MS I hope very soon.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), Postmark 12 December 1917

[Locarno]

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes Many thanks for your kind words about my book. You will receive the second episode on the 20th. Can you arrange with Mr Goldschmidt for a few afternoons as his machine is better. This episode is only half as long as the other. Better arrange in advance. Mr Sturge Moore with the Stage Society will put on Exiles in spring. An earthquake here the other night. We return to Zurich after New Year If you hear of any flat free in that quarter (6) or adjacent please let me know.

J.J.

’S needless to add I reed, safely the typescript: thanks.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 16 December 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno

Dear Mr Pinker: Many thanks for your letters and telegram and also for the draft (£54) safely received. At the next occasion please convey my thanks to my publisher in New York. As regards my play Exiles have you sent the other typescript to him? If not you could send him perhaps a corrected proof or a copy of the play in bookform if it is out. I suppose Mr Sturge Moore of the Stage Society now has a proof of the play and I hope Mr Richards has returned the proof with my MS corrections for Messrs Slack, Monro, Saw and Co. As regards Mr Richards’ printers’ observations I shall write you later on and on the general subject of the rights after the publication of the book. If Mr Richards has told you his decision about Dubliners I should like to know it. If he does not think well of a second edition is it allowed to propose the book to another firm? When Mr Huebsch’s letter arrives I shall be glad to have a copy of A/s [accounts]. If the remittance is in settlement of same they would seem to be rather poor but I need hardly say that in present circumstances I am very glad and grateful to get anything.

Allow me in conclusion to wish you the compliments of the season and to thank you for your kind attentions during the past year.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [? 16 December 1917] Sunday

[Locarno]

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: I send you M.O. (10 frs) and second episode to be typed as soon as possible. They promise to send me £10 when I send MS of first part—of which there is a third episode. Please leave a good margin on the left side of the page not on the right. T wo small alterations. In account of Sir John Blackwood place also after the second Day! … dots as after the first so (Day! … Day! . ..). In Mr Deasy’s speech beginning ‘You think me an old fogey’ place after ‘I remember the famine’ the date ‘in ’46.[’] Hope you will not find the MS difficult. I tried to write in a very legible hand but there are interlineations, very important. Hope you can make them out. When sending back please send registered. Can you do 3 copies as last time? Is it the same for you. It is in case one goes astray. Please let me know if MO’s sent square accounts, including of course postage and expenses of Dienstmann. Kind regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself

James Joyce

P.S. I hope you will like the MS.

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From EZRA POUND, 19 December 1917

[London]

TS. Private

Dear Joyce: Pages 1–17, in duplicate rec’d. Since you will get yourself reviewed in modern Greek and thereby suggest new spellings of the name Daedalus. All I can say is Echt Dzoice, or Echt Joice, or however else you like it.

The opening is echt Joice. There was a passage on page three that made me question it for a moment, but I cant, on rereading find anything wrong.

Then the thing gets too serious for me to prattle into criticism. I think it is the only youth that has ever been written down. At least, if the thing has been done in French the nationality is too different for me to feel the thing in the same way.

In one or two places your actual writing suggests De Gourmont to me. I say this neither as praise nor the reverse.

I wonder about the adjective ‘merry’ in ‘merry over the sea’ page 8. And the movement of the sentence, ‘another now yet the same’.

Also ‘fro’ and ‘glow’ in paragraph 4 of that page, look like an accidental rhyme.

I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn wellworth it. I see no reason why the nations should sit in darkness merely because Anthony Comstock was horrified at the sight of his grandparents in copulation, and there after ran wode in a loin cloth.

Your 17 pages have no division marks. Unless this is the first month’s lot, instead of the first three months, as you wrote it would be, I shall divide on page 6. after the statement that the Sassenach wants his bacon, and at the very top of page 12.

Hope to forward a few base sheckles in a few days time. Wall, Mr Joice, I recon your a damn fine writer, that’s what I recon’. An’ I recon’ this here work o’ yourn is some concarn’d litterchure. You can take it from me, an’ I’m a j edge.

I have been doing ten and twelve hours a day on Arnaut Daniel, which some lunatick clerk in orders wants to private print in Cleveland Oo. I have for the time being reduced myself chiefly to a rhyming dictionary of all the ornrey terminations in the language. Some of the stuff is at least better that [sic] the bloody mess I made of my first attempt, five years ago.

Lewis is to paint gun pits for the Canadian records. It will get him [out] of the firing line for a few months. Thank God.

Let me sink into slumber, yours ever

Ezra Pound

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To FORREST REID (Dictated letter), 20 December 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno, Switzerland

TS. Stanford

Dear Mr Reid: Thank you for your letter of some weeks ago. I am not sure whether you got my letter telling you of my illness and operation for glaucoma. I am here hoping to benefit by the drier air but perhaps I shall return soon to Zurich. I send you some English and American notices of my novel, as usual all very contradictory. My play Exiles is to be published at once and I have asked my publisher (Mr. Grant Richards) to send you a copy of it. I hope you will let me know when you get it. I do not know if anyone will put it on. The Abbey Theatre has declined it. The Stage Society (London) is considering it. Is there any theatre in Belfast to which it would be advisable to submit it?

I shall be glad to hear about your next book and beg you to accept my friendly wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [?22 December 1917]

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Please change the word ‘captive’ in phrase ‘Mr Deasy held his nose captive for a few moments’ etc to ‘tweaked’. The reason I trouble you so often is that I make notes on stray bits of paper which I then forget in the most unlikely places, in books, under ornaments and in my pockets and on the back of advertisements. I hope you arranged about the machine. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [? 23 December 1917]

Pension Daheim, Locarno

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Herewith M.O for 4 frs with thanks. As regards the corrections could you post back to me the illegible one. I have made the following corrections ‘tweaked’ ‘in ’46’ (‘whey sour’ and ‘department’ were made by you). Please convey my wife’s excuses for her taciturnity both to Mrs Sykes and Mrs Bleibtreu from whom she had a card today. She has been constantly ill and has even had very bad nervous breakdowns here so that I really do not know what to do—whether to go to Z. on the offchance of finding a flat or leaving this pension and looking for a flat here. Instead of doing her good the stay here has made her much worse. But for the dreadful weather you have we would perhaps go back but on the other hand my health has to be thought of. Kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 December 1917

Pension Daheim, Locarno

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose the translation of Mr Angeli’s review. Perhaps you could send him a copy of the paper when published. He wrote to me a few weeks ago that he is going to Rome where his address will be c/o Giornale d’Italia, piazza Sciarra, I believe. As soon as Chamber Music arrives I shall return it signed. The first episode of Ulysses was sent to Mr Pound a fortnight ago in two copies. The second I shall send tomorrow. The third which completes the first part early in January when it is typed. I should like to have a copy of the second edition of my novel.

A very dreadful pen! so I shall conclude by hoping you got my good wishes for Xmas and by thanking you for your kind message also.

P.S. Perhaps I ought to say something about Mr Angeli? He is a Tuscan novelist and critic of art and literature. The work he is best known by is his translation of Shakespeare, still in progress, a translation very badly needed. As a critic he is rather cold so that people were somewhat surprised by his article. He wrote to me very warmly about the book. I think it well to add that his interest in English literature is not a recent growth.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 27 December 1917

[Locarno]

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Thanks for wire and card. The children received kind present and are writing their acknowledgements. Glad to hear instalment nearly ready. If at all possible please erase the few errors (in original and copies) and retype amendments I sent on after. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1918

To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [Late January? 1918]

[Zurich]

MS. Yale

Arranged matters with Mr and Mrs G. You can go tomorrow after ten. Can you arrange perhaps for some other hour or so before Saturday as I want to get rid of the episode? There is, I find, an omission in the lot you have. After words ‘upward in the fog’ (v. Clerkenwell allusion) insert sentence. ‘Shattered glass and toppling masonry’. The sun was in my eyes as I copied. In haste

J.J.

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To FANNY GUILLERMET, 26 January 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, I, Zurich

MS. Edward Naumburg

Monsieur Permettez que je vous exprime, (un peu en retard, je crains) mes sincères remerciements pour le bien aimable compte rendu de mon livre ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ que vous avez eu la bonté de publier dans le ‘Journal de Genève’ il y a quelques semaines. Je me sentirais très flatté d’avoir mérité un peu de vos louanges.

Agreez, Monsieur, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération

James Joyce

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To FANNY GUILLERMET, 11 February 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, Zurich

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Madame: Je vous remercie de votre bien aimable carte et je prends la liberté de vous envoyer une aussi, à titre de revanche. Je suis très flatté que mon livre vous a plu et dans l’espérance que ma nouvelle pièce Exiles puisse vous intéresser j’ai prié mon editeur à Londres de vous faire venir un exemplaire. Le livre sera publié, je crois, très prochainement.

Agréez, Madame, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 1 March 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am glad to hear the second edition of my novel is out. The copy has not yet come. I send you a subscription (to The Egoist) for a/c of Mr Simeone Levi, Keltenstrasse 40, Zurich. You should also have received subscriptions from Mrs Olga Veneziani. … I shall try to get you other subscriptions. Could you send me Mr Cournos’ article about my book published in the Apollo of S. Petersburg. I am collecting the continental notices. I hope some French notices will appear. Has Mr Davray written nothing? I hope to send you some other Italian and Dutch reviews. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 March 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: I have received your letter with enclosed cheque for which I thank you very much indeed. You are very kind to send me payment for the serial rights of a book (Ulysses) which is causing you and your paper so much trouble. I have sent the first episode of the Odyssey to Mr Pound but I must apologise for the very bad typescript. I shall try to have the following episodes done better. I hope it is legible in spite of the typist’s mistakes. If you could think of having the paper printed in Paris MM George Crès and Co, 116 Bd. S. Germain have offered to place their printer at your disposal. The copy of the second edition of my novel has arrived as well as the copies you sent to the two local booksellers….

Mr Pinker wrote me some time ago about ceding to you the book rights of Ulysses. I do so gladly. Though I am sure it is in more senses than one a Greek gift. Mr Richards is entitled by contract to a right of refusal which expires on the 15 June 1919. The novel [Ulysses] will hardly have run to its end then and in any case I do not think he would consider it for publication at any time. You may inform my agent that my wish is that you secure the book rights, if you wish, subject to this reservation and that the book is not to be offered to any publisher until you have refused it. I accept in advance any terms you may propose. Moreover, if, in view of the increased price of production, you wish to modify in any way the terms of our existing contract I beg you to notify my agent of the fact.

I am glad to note that you are continuing your publications in book form and wish you every success.

Allow me to thank you once more for your most generous enterprise and also for the kind words of appreciation of my book. I am very grateful for them.

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To STURGE MOORE, 15 April 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Sir: Referring to your kind letter of some months ago I should be grateful if you would let me know whether the Stage Society has definitely decided to produce my play Exiles this season. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS (Postcard), 3 May 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, I, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Richards: Am glad to hear Exiles is at last ready. Please be sure to send all the presentation copies and extra press copies I wrote of as well as those for the two Zurich booksellers and for me. As regards my book of stories it is regrettable that you cannot bring out a second edition at once. I know that lately booksellers in Dublin (Combridge among others) have disposed of copies of the first edition at three times the original price—not of course in the ordinary way of business but by private exchange. When there is a demand it is a pity that you cannot supply. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 May 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter. As regards the scheme of printing my novel Ulysses at a private press and inserting it as a supplement I shall be glad if it is carried out. I had a card from Mr Courtney saying that if a copy of my novel be sent to him c/o Daily Telegraph he will get it noticed but, he adds, the literary page of that paper is much reduced. I am sorry you do not find it possible to accept Messrs Crès’ offer and have your paper printed in Paris. I fear you have lost a great deal of money on my wretched book and so I propose to cede to you, in reversion from Mr Richards, the book rights and to consider the sums already advanced by you for serial rights as an advance of royalties to be written off, if you agree, in two or three deductions from sums eventually due to me by half yearly accounts of sales. There is little likelihood that Mr Richards will publish the book. I thank you for having transmitted to me the kind proposal of my New York publisher. Will you please write to him and say that I could not, for many reasons, undertake to deliver the entire typescript of Ulysses during the coming autumn. If the Little Review continues to publish it regularly he may publish as a cheap paperbound book the Telemachia, that is, the three first episodes—under the title, Ulysses I. I suggest this in case his idea be to keep the few persons who read what I write from forgetting that I still exist. The second part, the Odyssey, contains eleven episodes. The third part, Nostos, contains three episodes. In all seventeen episodes of which, including that which is now being typed and will be sent in a day or two, Hades, I have delivered six. It is impossible to say how much of the book is really written. Several other episodes have been drafted for the second time but that means nothing because although the third episode of the Telemachia has been a long time in the second draft I spent about 200 hours over it before I wrote it out finally. I fear I have little imagination. This subject I am sure must be rather tiresome to you. However, if all goes well the book should be finished by the summer of 1919. If it be set up before it could then be published at once. It is not quite clear to me from Mr Pound’s last letter whether he is transmitting my typescript to New York or not. However I am sending the next episode also through him. I am glad to observe that you continue to publish books. I enclose some extracts of the continental notices and hope to be able to add a few more, Italian and Dutch.

My health is better and I hope my sight will keep good.

I think I ought to say in conclusion that if you wish to print any other book as a serial story in the place of Ulysses I beg you not to consider any imaginary claims of mine. I made the proposal in this letter partly to allow you to proceed as you may think fit. I hope the sales of the second edition of my other book are satisfactory.

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 31 May 1918

The Egoist, 23 Adelphi Terrace House Robert Street, London, W.C.2

Dear Mr Huebsch: I have only just had a reply from Mr Joyce. He asks me to thank you for your kind proposal to publish his book Ulysses this autumn and to tell you that the book is not likely to be finished before the summer of 1919. There will be 17 episodes in all: 3 in the first part, 11 in the second and 3 in the third. He says that if, in order to keep his name before the few people who read what he writes, you care to publish in the coming autumn as a cheap paperbound book the Telemachia, that is, the 3 first episodes under the title, Ulysses I, he would agree to this. You could get the typescript, I suppose, from the Little Review. Probably, however, this idea will not commend itself to you.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 June 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Mr Pinker: My health is very poor lately. I have been laid up again with my eyes and so am obliged to dictate this to you. I had been expecting an express letter from you but now five copies of my play have come. I suppose one has gone astray. Will you please tell my American publisher to correct at once the following mistakes, English edition and paging:

p. 17 for ‘are not mine’ read ‘are not nice’

p. 116 for ‘O please call’ read ‘O please don’t call’

p. 118 for ‘hear you voice it’ read ‘hear your voice say it’

The printing seems to be very careless. No revise was sent me in seven months. Was any advance of royalties paid either on the English or the American edition and have you got any further A/s from New York? If my publisher there wants to do so he can publish the first three episodes of Ulysses in autumn as a paperbound book and episodes 4 to 13 also when I have sent them and finally episodes 14, 15, 16. Have you sent a copy of Exiles to the ‘Pioneer Players’ and to Miss Horniman?

Please thank my American publisher for his promptness and for the interest he takes in my writings and ask him to send me a copy of his edition of the play and the American notices both of it and of my book of stories as I have not seen these. I should also be very much [obliged?] if he would send against my account a copy of Mr Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow.

I hope that my eyes will soon allow me to set to work again, if only for a time, on Ulysses. I believe Miss Weaver cannot find anyone to print it.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 29 July 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for your letter. I could not answer till now as I have been very ill. I quite agree to Miss Weaver’s proposal. Have you received any royalties from New York publisher for sales of my novel to date? And have you any news from Miss Horniman on the Pioneer Players?

I shall be glad if you can send a note to the Reverend Stephen Browne, S.J., Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, Kildare, Ireland thanking him in my name for the inclusion of me in his work Ireland in Fiction and, as he invites corrections for the second edition now in the press, informing him that I was born in 1882 (2 February), that my father’s family came from Cork not from the west of Ireland. My father is from Cork city, his father from Fermoy, county Cork. The family comes, of course, from the west of Ireland (Joyce’s country) but mine is a southern offshoot of the tribe. My wife is from Galway city. My other works of fiction not mentioned in his book are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (press notices enclosed for him) and Ulysses.

I should prefer that this letter came from you but I feel I owe you an apology in advance for giving you so much trouble.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 July 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: After nine weeks’ illness I am at last able to read and write again. I am sorry that the other episodes of Ulysses have been delayed. A few days [ago] I sent the sixth episode ‘Hades’ to Mr Pound with a copy for you and very soon I shall send the seventh ‘Eolus’. I received also The Voyage Out by Mrs Woolf and shall now begin to read it. I beg you to convey my thanks to her for the interest she has taken in the printing of my book. If you are in correspondence with my American publisher I shall feel obliged if you will please tell him that I agree to his publishing Chamber Music, in spite of the Boston edition, with a note to say that I authorise the edition. No verses written by me since its first publication are to be added to it. I am much obliged to him for his friendly inquiries about my health, but do not know what to answer except that for the moment I am well. This is a bad climate for me, I fear. I wish him to know that the fourth episode of Ulysses as published in the June issue of the Little Review is not my full text and that the excised paragraphs must be reinstated and the altered words restored in any proof he may set up. I have received this evening Mr Lewis’s novel Tarr. I am very grateful to him for his kind thought in sending it and if I knew his address would write to thank him for it. I shall try to get it noticed in some Swiss papers. I agree, of course, to the proposed change in our agreement or to any other you may suggest….

A Miss Maja Maag, Ahlmannsallée 15, Hellerup, Denmark, is thinking of translating the book into Danish. I am not sure whether she has read it or not. She has seen some notices, I believe. It might be worth while to send her a review copy as I hear she writes for some paper. A friend of mine here has promised to bring the book under the notice of Mr Brandes. Should you decide to send him a copy his address is:

Prof. George Brandes Strandboulevard 27 Copenhagen.

I shall follow it up with a letter. I need scarcely say that I should deem it a great honour if Mr Brandes took any interest in the book. I shall write to Miss Maag tomorrow. Her letter came some time ago but I could not write till now.

I sent you today a notice in the Secolo of Milan. The notice written by my friend Mr Vidacovich has not yet appeared in the Nuova Antologia. I saw the number of 15 July today. The article was sent in last month. I hope you got a leaflet of continental press notices I sent. I had only 100 printed for I hope to be able to add more and the type is still set up.

P.S. I am still waiting for copies of my play Exiles. I beg you to believe that the delay in sending you a copy is not due to any forgetfulness of mine.

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To FORREST REID, 1 August 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

My dear Mr Reid: I am sure you have a very bad opinion of me as a correspondent. The fact is I have been in bed for more than two months with an attack of my eyes—the fourth in two years. I really do not know what to say about it. This climate is very bad but I hope that now at least I shall have time to do something.

I appreciate very much your friendly thought in writing to me about my play Exiles, all the more since the play has met with very scant favour. It has been translated, however, and possibly will be given here. I had hoped that the Abbey Theatre or the Stage Society (London) would do it but, though it is on the programme of the latter, nothing definite has been arranged. As you will see by the enclosed we have given here and in Geneva and Lausanne plays (in English) by Synge, Wilde, Mr Shaw and Sir J. Barrie. I wonder whether the fact would interest any newspaper in Belfast. If so you could perhaps pass on the enclosed. It is, I believe, the first Synge performance of any of his plays (in English) on the continent. I take a special interest in Riders to the Sea for I was the first person that read it. Synge brought it one morning in typescript to my hotel in Paris (I was studying (?) medicine there at that time) and we discussed it at lunch. If you have written any plays yourself or if you know of any (with a short cast) by any of your literary friends I shall be pleased to show them to Mr Sykes, the stage manager of the company, in the hope that the company may be able to do them. The next production will be Mrs Warren’s Profession or She Stoops to Conquer.

I shall be glad to hear what you are doing and writing and if you hear of any interesting events in the Irish literary world I shall be grateful for a few lines from you. As regards myself my new novel Ulysses began to run in the Little Review (New York) last March. I suppose there are no copies in Belfast. The London editorial office is 5 Holland Place Chambers, London, W.8. The Egoist (London) was to have run it simultaneously but no printer would handle it. Even the American printers have mutilated it here and there but I shall see that the few passages excised are restored if it costs me another ten years. We write for a very intelligent public—c’è poco da dire!

If you would care to push the sales of your book in this country I shall try to get some Swiss booksellers to take copies from your publishers on sale or return. And if I can aid the sales I shall certainly do so.

P.S. I enclose also a photograph of my wife who took a part in Synge’s play. As she was born within sight of Aran I think Synge’s words were spoken with the genuine brogue.

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To [?], 5 August 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Madame: Vous devez avoir une très mauvaise opinion de ma politesse! Mais la vérité est que j’ai été presque deux mois et demi à lit avec une très grave maladie des yeux—une double iritis avec glaucome. Maintenant elle est passée, dieu merci, et je puis de nouveau lire et écrire.

Je ne sais si vous avez reçu un exemplaire de ma pièce. L’éditeur est très ennuyeux. Il faut lui répéter la même chose une dizaine de fois. Si vous ne l’avez pas reçu je vous prie de me le faire savoir. C’est incroyable comme ces gens négligent leur propre interêt. Il y a pour comble de malheur la fermeture presque constante de la frontière qui rend très difficile le commerce libraire.

Quant à votre [illegible] invitation à collaborer pour votre journal avec un article, je suis vraiment flatté de l’honneur mais je n’écris jamais d’articles—pas même d’articles littéraires pour ne parler pas d’autres. Du reste, le problème de ma race est tellement compliqué qu’on a besoin de tous les moyens d’un art élastique pour l’esquisser—sans le résoudre. Je suis de l’avis qu’une prononciation personelle ne m’est plus permise. Je suis contraint à la faire moyennant les scènes et les personnages de ma pauvre invention.

Mais je crois comprendre le motif de votre invitation. Car il y a entre la nation française et la mienne une amitié qui n’est pas d’hier. Et je confesse que je dois beaucoup aux écrivains français.

Je vous remercie encore une fois et je vous prie d’agréer mes salutations distinguées.

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to B.W. HUEBSCH, 11 August 1918

The Egoist, 23 Adelphi Terrace House, Robert Street, London, W.C.2.

MS. Library of Congress

Dear Mr. Huebsch After nine weeks’ illness Mr. Joyce is better—for the time being—and able to read and write again. He asks me to thank you for your kind enquiries about his health and to give you the following messages about his books. He agrees to your publishing Chamber Music, in spite of the Boston edition, with a note to say that he authorises your edition. He does not wish any verses written by him since the first publication to be added to it. As regards Ulysses he asks me to say that the fourth episode as published in the June issue of the Little Review is not the complete text and that the excised paragraphs must be reinstated and the altered ones restored before publication by you. In the third episode, published in the March issue, a few sentences had also been excised and these should be restored too.

I have not succeeded so far in finding a printer to set up the text for The Egoist (in which it was to appear as a serial) and possibly we shall have to wait until the book is finished and obtain sheets from you—when this again becomes possible and if you find an amenable printer as I hope you will. Yours sincerely

H.S. Weaver

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To JAMES B. PINKER (Postcard), 21 August 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, Zurich

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: You may have seen a long article in the Times (Liter. Suppl. 25 July) written I believe by Mr Clutton Brock about my play Exiles. As, in the article, he calls on the Stage Society or the Pioneer Players to give it will you please send copies of this 1) one to these societies and, if you approve, also to Miss Horniman in Manchester? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Has my American publisher sent the A/S of my novel for the last half year?

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 August 1918 [Postcard]

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: I sent the eighth episode of Ulysses (Eolus) to Mr Pound some days [ago] and hope you have it now.

If you have occasion to write to my New York publisher will you please thank him for the interesting controversial cuttings from American press about Ulysses and ask him to convey my thanks to Mr Hecht for his article in defense of the book?

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To MADEMOISELLE GUILLERMET, 5 September 1918

Universitätstrasse 38, Zurich

Dear Miss Guillermet: Since you write English so well I suppose I can answer also in English. I hope you have now received safely the books I sent you registered, your own novel and my play signed. I read your novel with much interest though I do not like the epistolary form in which you have written it. It is seductive but has the inevitable drawback that one can see only from one angle. The inclusion also in some of the letters of literal transcripts from ‘l’autre’ is a device, necessary no doubt, which dissatisfies. The only successful attempt in that line which I have seen is Merimée Abbé Auban where the last letter completely turns the scales the other way. But every form of art has its limitations and it is better to judge a book by what it achieves within its limits.

Your book reminded me somewhat of Amiel who, I imagine, must be a favourite with you. What tiresome critics call the ‘plot’ seems to [me] to be suffused by a sentiment very rare in French literature. I mean the Huguenot strain which is apparent for example in Mr Gide La Porte Etroite a book with which yours seems to me to have some analogy. Perhaps you will think this judgment fantastic but you must allow for the fact that after all I am a foreigner.

I suppose you yourself (for more reasons than one) are displeased by the end of the book. Artistically however it seems to me a completion rather than an interruption. I am sorry I cannot keep the novel as you have no other copy but ‘épuisé’ is a very pleasing word to a writer’s ears.

I send you some more notices of my Portrait which may interest you but like most writers (and mothers?) I am thinking chiefly of my latest work. After your rather scathing attack on my ‘manque de goût’ I am waiting with some trepidation for your criticism. As I seldom read papers I shall be very much obliged if you will send me three copies of the issue in which it is published, one for myself and one each for my English and American publisher.

I envy anyone who writes in French not so much because I envy the resources of that language (whose function I find to be for the most part a standard of moderation and criticism rather than one of innovation) but on account of the public to which one can appeal. Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 5 September 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, I, Zürich

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Budgen: Thanks for letter. I translated it and sent it on to Mr Battona and hope it will soon appear in Il Secolo,

I send you registered Mr Lewis’s Tarr. When you have read it please let me know as I have still to read it myself and write to him about it. I hope you will be free some evening to come here and have a chat about it.

Enclosed a few press notices of my book which may interest you. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GRANT RICHARDS, 8 September 1918

Universitätsstrasse 38, I, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Richards: Thanks for your letter. My health is now better and I am allowed to work again. I received 2 copies of Dubliners and hope that the amount will be charged against my account. As you say it is impossible to send books here on sale or return terms I shall pay in advance for 6 copies at a time and try to sell them myself. Therefore I remit you M.O. for £1–1–0 being amount for 6 copies at trade price (2/6) and postage and also for 1 copy of Dubliners at trade price (2/6) and postage, this latter to be sent at once to Mrs Murray, 10 Fairfield road, Church road, Dublin.

Mr William Archer, 27 Fitzroy Square, London W. writes to say that he did not receive the copy of Exiles which I instructed you to send him. This is very regrettable as Mr Archer is a critic of great influence. I hope you will see to this without delay. Will you send me a list of the persons to whom copies were sent? If so you will oblige me greatly and I shall know how to act. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Sending some new notices of my novel.

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From STEFAN ZWEIG, 12 September 1918

Rüschlikon bei Zürich, Hôtel Belvoir

MS. Buffalo

Dear Sir, your book arrived in a good moment: I had just finished in these days a new work of mine, my mind was quite free for new impressions and your piece (which I read in two following nights) was for me a great artistic revelation. Excuse me, if I give you not in detail the extract of my gratitude: I am nearly in the same situation in belong to English language like you to German, I read it perfectly, have even a fairly developed sense for the refinements of the language, but quite out of exercise since several years, I am a little ashamed to explain my sentiments and ideas in a scolars way, who just learned the language without to possess her. So I would be very glad to make your personal acquaintance and if possible, become known also with your other books: infortunately I cannot render the service for the moment, car [for] the only two books of mine, which are translated in English (my book on Verhaeren at Constable & Comp, London 1914 and my book on Verlaine, New York 1912) are not in my possession now and I do not even know, if there is any possibility to get them here during the war.

I have the intention to stay here at Rüschlikon the whole winter, but Thursday I make a fortnights trip to the lake of Genève and before my time is very scarce. I would be delighted to see you as soon as possible, but do you not mean, it would be better to meet each other not in the hurry of a departure? I have a very strong impression of your work and all what I can do for it on the German stage shall be done: I am sure, that after the war a translation could be placed immediately on a first theatre. We will talk after my journey from all that: today I render you (not willingly, but with much regret) your copy and hope soon to have the good chance to meet you. If you prefer I come to Zurich or you to my more distant and quied [sic] place. Many thanks and good greetings from Yours sincere

Stefan Zweig

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 October 1918

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: First of all I must apologise for not having written before now. I have been very busy looking for new quarters as you may see by my changed address and with other minor matters in connection therewith. It is difficult to get anything that one needs for the winter at present. Copies of Exiles came a few days ago and I sent you a copy which I hope you have now received. It is not well printed or bound but I have no copies of the American edition. I owe you my thanks for your kind words about my play and assure you that I appreciate them very much. I have seen the notice in The Times to which you allude and also one in The New Statesman. I have not yet seen any American notices.

I have had no letter from Mr Pound for a long time and I hope he is not ill. I am surprised that you have not received from him the seventh episode (Eolus) which I sent a long time ago. I sent yesterday the eighth episode (Lestrygonians) so perhaps you can ask him to send you both together.

I am glad to hear that Mr Fels wishes to make a French translation of my novel. I had a letter from Mr Brandes saying that he would be very interested to read it but had not received the copy sent. Can you send me four copies and I shall remit the amount on the 1 November? As regards the continental press notices I shall have copies made for you. I enclose some new notices. Very many notices—but very small sales I fear will be your opinion.

Mr Vidacovich’s article has not yet appeared in the Nuova Antologia nor Mr Davray in the Mercure de France but I hope they will some day. Chi vive sperando muore cantando.

May I ask you also when writing to Mr Pound to tell him that I have not yet received the numbers of the Little Review for September or October? My book Ulysses appears to be giving you a great deal of trouble. I must also apologise for the slow rate at which I deliver the chapters. But I hope they will all be dispatched some day. I am writing now the Hamlet episode (Scylla and Charybdis).

Excuse me for inflicting another dull letter on you about my writing. It seems I write only about delays and difficulties and disappointments.

P.S. Will you please send a copy of the book also to Mr Carlo Linati, via Santo Spirito, 4, Milano, and the press notices, suggesting to him to translate it into Italian for the Studio Editoriale Lombardo. He translated The Playboy of the Western World for that firm. I am writing to him also. J.J.

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To CARLO LINATI, 31 October 1918 [In Italian]

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Sir: I was given your address at the Italian library here. Having seen your Italian translations of the works of two friends of mine—Synge and Yeats, The Playboy of the Western World and The Countess Cathleen—I thought you might be interested in my novel. Enclosed you will find a few somewhat polyglot criticisms. At all events I have asked the publishers in London to send you a copy and it will arrive, I hope, at the gods’ pleasure. I am sorry to confess that I am not acquainted with your own works although I keep myself well informed about the latest literary movements. But the fact that you have chosen Synge and Yeats to introduce them to Italian readers rather than the dull novels which the English public devours gives me confidence. May I beg you to let me know whether you have already received the copy sent to your address?

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From B.W. HUEBSCH to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 October 1918

Dear Miss Weaver: I am mailing you two copies of my edition of Chamber Music and am sending at the same time five copies to Mr Joyce. I am writing him that Miss Anderson says that the excisions in Ulysses had been made in pencil in the copy that she received and she is under the impression that they represent Mr Pound’s ideas. She says that she made absolutely no changes herself. Her manuscript appears to be mislaid and she will search for it, but you know that missing manuscripts are never found, so you had better see to it that I receive a duplicate copy in the form in which it should appear in the volume.

The American reviewers of Exiles also were baffled though a few of them have perceived the significance of the play and it became the subject of some interesting reviews. I am forwarding a few cuttings to Mr Joyce.

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COURT RECORD, Zurich, 16 November 1918

Kanton Zürich

BEZIRKSGERICHT ZUERICH

Proz. Nr. 1052/1918

I. Abteilung.

Das Gericht
hat

in seiner Sitzung vom 15. Oktober 1918,

an welcher teilnahmen die Bezirksrichter: Billeter, Präsident, Hammann und Kaufmann,

so wie der Substitut des Gerichtschreibers: F. Leuthard

in Sachen

des Dr. James Joyce, Universitätsstr. 38, Zürich 6, Kläger und Widerbeklagten, vertreten durch Rechtsanwalt Dr. K. Bloch, Zürich 1,

gegen

Henry Carr, Schönleinstrasse 2, Zürich 7, Beklagten und Widerklägers, vertreten durch Rechtsanwalt Dr. G. Wettstein, Zürich 1,

betreffend
Forderung aus Vertrag
über die Streitfragen:

a) Hauptklage: ‘Ist der Beklagte und Widerkläger verplichtet, dem Kläger und Widerbeklagten Fr. 25.—nebst Zins zu 5% seit 3. Mai 1918 zu bezahlen?’

b) Widerklage: ‘1st der Kläger und Widerbeklagte schuldig, dem Beklagten und Widerklager Fr. 475,—, eventuell Fr. 300,—zu bezahlen?’

erkannt:

1. Der Beklagte Herr Henry Carr ist verpflichtet an den Kläger Dr. James Joyce Fr. 25.—nebst 5% Zins seit 3. mai 1918 zu bezahlen.

Die Widerklage des Herrn Henry Carr wird abgewiesen.

2. Die Gerichtsgebühr wird auf Fr. 30.—festgesetzt. Die übrigen kosten betragen Fr. 9.40.

3. Die Kosten werden dem Beklagten und Widerkläger Herrn Henry Carr auferlegt.

4. Er hat den Kläger und Widerbeklagten Dr. James Joyce für Umtriebe und Auslagen mit Fr. 60.—zu entschädigen (Weisungskosten inbegriffen).

5. Schriftliche Mitteilung an die Parteien gegen Empfangschein.

6. Das Urteil ist seiner Ausfällung rechtskräftig und ist dagegen ein ordentliches Rechtsmittel nicht zulässig.

Im Namen des Bezirksgerichtes Zürich, I. Abteilung:

Der Präsident: sig. Billeter

Der Substitut des Gerichtsachreibers: sig. Leuthard

(Siegel)

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From EZRA POUND, 22 November 1918

5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, W.

TS. Cornell

Dear Joyce Bloom is a great man, and you have almightily answered the critics who asked me whether having made Stephen, more or less autobiography, you could ever go on and create a second character. ‘Second character is the test’ etc. etc., jab jab jobberjabble.

I think you would like Wells. I lunched with him about a month ago, first time I had seen him for six years. His remarks on Q. Victorias monument before Buckingham palace I shall reserve for some future prose work of my own.

I looked back over Bouvard and Pecuchet last week. Bloom certainly does all Flaubert set out to do and does it in one tenth the space, and moreover there is the sense all the time that something might happen, in fact that anything might happen at any moment, while in Bouvard they are anchored in the mud and even when some thing does happen you keep on feeling that nothing can.

Lewis is a little annoyed with my note on Tarr. W.B.Y. seems to have come off in his ‘Round Tower’. The females have maliciously ruined DeBosscheres drawings by saving 2d. on bumf

Rodker has done an appreciation of Exiles, to appear Little Review, I suppose January.

Must devise some mechanism for cash purposes as the L.R. wont magnatize [sic] the american pocket much longer. Your balance is secure, but after April I dont see much more coming in. Why in Chrisst’s name we arent all millionaires I dont know. It is a bloody and grimy bore.

I hope my Propertian ravings will amuse you IF I ever find anyone to print ’em. Thank gawd the war is at least partly over. We will now have the competition of all the returning troops to contend with. Must say the effect on Aldington is excellent. He went to the fields of glory full of doctrinaire bosh contracted from a returned English hun, but has come back purged, and with a surface of modesty.

Has ‘Ulysses’ 24 Odyssean books?. I dont want to ask silly questions, and I hope it continues forever, but people are continually asking ME about it and about. Fortunately my ignorance of Bloom’s future is complete.

Still, let me know, if you know yourself. I will fork up the remaining £20 of the fifty promised, as soon as I get it from America.

If there are going to be chapters after April, I will try to bone a few quid more out of someone. BUTTTTT Khrrisst knows how or where. I’ve got to ‘promote’ some new venture to keep my own roof on The world is too fucking with us. One of my secondary phases has blossomed as much appreciated critic of what music London provides, for far the blossom fruits very little. The owner of the Manchester guardian admits the stuff is ‘brilliantly written’ but shows no disposition to have it in his own better paid cols, et bloody coetera.

I want to see the Lago di Garda sometime … ma che, I dont know when one will be able to travel, yrs. ye complete journaliste and pantechnicon patent attachment.

EP

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To SIR HORACE RUMBOLD BART., 30 November 1918

Universitätsstrasse 29, 3, Zurich

TS. Cornell

His Excellency

sir Horace Rumbold, Bart,

H.M. British Minister,

BERNE

Sir I beg leave to bring the following facts to Your Excellency’s notice.

On the 1 May 1918 I went to the British consulate, Zurich, to collect 25 francs due to the ‘English Players’ by an employee of the consulate, Mr Henry Carr, on tickets sold to and unpaid by him for the production by the ‘English Players’ on the 29 April 1918 of ‘The Importance of being Earnest’ in which Mr Carr, at the invitation of the producer for the ‘English Players’, Mr Claud Sykes, had played a part. Mr Carr declined to pay this sum, demanded from me 150 francs in addition to the sum he had already received and when I declined to pay this sum, on the instruction of Mr Sykes, informed me that he would organise a boycott of all our future productions, called me in the presence of witnesses ‘a cad and a swindler’ and threatened to ‘wring my neck the next time he met me in the street’. I replied ‘That is not language that should be used in a government office’ and thereupon left the office.

On the 1 May 1918 I wrote a registered letter to Mr Consul Bennett here complaining of this treatment and demanding an apology from Mr Carr. No answer was returned.

I then placed the matter in a solicitor’s hands and passed Mr Carr’s threat of assault over to the Zurich police. On the advice of the lawyer of the British consulate, Dr George Wettstein, Mr Carr advanced his claim to 475 francs and claimed that the British consulate is extraterritorial. The Swiss political department, appealed to by my solicitor, Dr Conrad Bloch, disallowed this latter claim.

Since the 1 May 1918 the ‘English Players’ have given or are about to give eight public performances of English plays, alone or in conjunction with Italian and French companies, largely and generously supported by the American colony and by Swiss and others interested in English literature. The plays given include works by Browning, Wilde, Synge, Houghton, Mr Shaw and sir James Barrie. The boycott threatened by Mr Carr exists for since the 1 May 1918 Mr Consul Bennett has not been present at any performance and, at the instigation of Mr Carr, has done all in his power to malign and counteract our efforts.

In July 1918 when I lay dangerously ill and in danger of blindness Mr Consul Bennett wrote me a registered letter inviting me to compound a felony with him and threatening to penalise, me if I refused to do so. Of this document I declined in courteous terms to take service.

On the 15 October 1918 the Swiss court gave judgment in my favour, ruled out the counterclaim of 475 francs advanced by Dr Wettstein on behalf of his client and condemned Mr Carr to pay the sum due and all costs. A copy of this judgment is enclosed.

The ‘English Players’ is the only enterprise in Switzerland which has done anything for English dramatic literature. The expenses incurred by Mr Sykes and myself amount to U 10,000 franc We have not received any subsidy and our balancesheet shows a large deficit in spite of our moral success. What we have done cost us enormous work under enormous difficulties and, at Mr Sykes request I enclose a letter from the prime minister, Mr Lloyd George [that] recognises the merits of our efforts.

I believe that Your Excellency will hold, as I hold, that it is no part of the duties of consular officials, as set forth in the acting instructions issued by the foreign office, to commit or to aid and abet blackmail and assault or to organise a calumnious boycott of English literature or to invite British subjects to compound felony and threaten to penalise them if they decline to do so.

As Mr Consul Bennett has shown tacit and open approval of the aforesaid acts of blackmail and assault and attempted felony and has not replied to my grave charge against an employee of his office I appeal, as one of His Majesty’s subjects and as a man of letters whom His Majesty has honoured by a munificence in recognition of services rendered to English literature, to Your Excellency the official representative of His Majesty in this country, and crave from Your Excellency that protection and redress from the insult of violence which are the right and the privilege of the least of His Majesty’s subjects. I am, Your Excellency’s obedient servant

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 December 1918

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your letter of 2 November and also for your kind words about my book Ulysses. May I ask you to convey my thanks also to Miss Marsden. I am sorry that you get no satisfaction out of the book such as it is. I gave Mr Lewis’s book1 Tarr. to the critic of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which is the leading newspaper in Switzerland (with the Journal de Genève) and he has promised to review it. I shall try to have it reviewed in the Zürcher Post. Miss Guillermet of the Journal de Genève might review it but she wrote that the editor had no space for her notice of Exiles.

I enclose a letter which I have received. If you wish you can send a copy of the book to the firm for their client but I would ask you not to arrange anything for the moment. I hope to write to you later on about this matter. If the four copies of the book arrive I shall send one to Mr Brandes. The copies for Messrs Ebell have arrived but not those for Messrs Crès et Cie. Mr Davray’s article has not yet appeared in the Mercure de France nor Mr Vidacovich in the Nuova Antologia but the century is still young.

I hope you are well in these dangerous days. I am glad to say that my health is better and my eyes give me no trouble but my sight is very bad sometimes.

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Four Letters To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN
by Heinrich Straumann

The following four letters by James Joyce are here published for the first time. Considering their nature I believe it is necessary to give an exact account of how they came into my possession and of what I have been able to discover about the addressee and her relationship with James Joyce.

I

In the early days of December 1941 (about eleven months after Joyce had died in Zürich), a woman asked to see me on a matter concerning the late James Joyce. I invited her to call at my flat and a few days later she did so. She described herself as Fräulein Martha Fleischmann then living at Sonneggstrasse 31, Zürich 6. From her looks I judged her to be between SO and 60 years of age. She was of medium height, grey-haired, pale-complexioned, with large eyes of rather careworn expression, and dressed in simple black. Her voice was low, soft and pleasant, and there was a natural dignity in her bearing.

She began by explaining that she was in possession of four letters and a postcard addressed to her by James Joyce, and of a copy of Chamber Music inscribed by the poet. She pointed out that she was financially not in the best circumstances and that she was willing to sell these items, and she asked me if I could advise her how to proceed. She then produced the material and permitted me to glance through it. I realised at once that for a number of reasons this was going to be a rather delicate matter. I did not know whether there were other letters of a similar character available; I saw no way of finding out if a collection of letters by Joyce was being prepared anywhere, Switzerland then being practically cut off from the rest of the world; I further thought of Mrs James Joyce, whom I had the privilege to know personally; and finally I felt vexed at the idea that these letters might become an object of business transactions. I therefore advised Fräulein Fleischmann not to part with the letters until after the end of the war. If she felt she needed the money badly she might try and get an offer from whomever she thought a likely buyer. In any case I asked her not to sell the letters before she had talked the matter over with me; and I promised her I would see to it that she would receive at least a slightly better price than the highest possible offer she could find through her own resources. I mentioned I would either buy the letters myself or advise the University Library of Zürich to buy them. Fräulein Fleischmann readily agreed to follow this advice, but definitely declined my tentative request to be permitted to copy the letters.

II

I then begged Fräulein Fleischmann to tell me whatever she remembered of James Joyce. Her answers were, on the whole, extremely vague. It must be recalled that James Joyce when she met him in Zürich in 1918 was far from being a well-known writer. I first assumed that it was reasons of tact that made her rather evasive in her replies, but after a prolonged conversation I came to the conclusion that with the exception of one point the episode had meant much less to her than to James Joyce, and that she remembered little of the few meetings she had with the poet. The beginning of their acquaintance, however, was significant enough. According to her account she first met him in the autumn of the year 1918, Joyce and his family then living at Universitätsstrasse and she at Culmannstrasse not much more than a stone’s throw from each other. One evening at dusk when she was about to enter her house Joyce happened to pass by the door. He stopped abruptly and looked at her with an expression of such wonder in his face (‘mit grösstem Erstaunen’) that she hesitated for just a moment before entering the house. Joyce then apologized in German and said that she very strongly reminded him of a girl he once had seen standing on the beach in his home country (‘Sie erinnern mich an ein Mädchen, das ich einmal in meinem Heimatland am Strand stehen sah’).

I at once asked Fräulein Fleischmann whether she had read any books by Joyce and she admitted in a slightly embarrassed way that, not knowing any English, she had not. Neither had she read any translations. After a few further questions I was quite certain that she had never heard of the relevant passage at the end of Chapter IV of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and this made her statement about her first meeting with Joyce all the more remarkable.

But there was little else to come. Fräulein Fleischmann could not remember if in later conversations Joyce again referred to the girl on the beach, nor did she recall any details of their talks. She mentioned that after their first meeting she used to see Joyce occasionally in the street and would exchange a few words with him, and that then the letters arrived at irregular intervals. The connection lasted a few months until in 1919 Joyce and his family departed for Trieste.

When Fräulein Fleischmann left she promised to get in touch with me if ever she were to change her mind about the letters. After she had gone I made a few notes about the interview and of the items I had seen. They all reappeared after the end of the war with however, one important exception. Amongst the items there had been a postcard addressed to Fräulein Fleischmann and written by the same hand as the letters. The contents of the postcard consisted of greetings sent to ‘Nausikaa’ by ‘Odysseus’. There was no proper signature of James Joyce. This postcard was not in the possession of Fräulein Fleischmann’s sister when she produced the other letters in 1948, and neither she nor any of the other informants I later consulted about the matter had ever heard of it. This is particularly unfortunate in view of what the experience evidently meant to Joyce.

III

After the war was over and ordinary communications with the surrounding countries had been established, I expected to hear from Fräulein Martha Fleischmann about possible offers she might have had for the letters. When in the autumn of 1948 I had not heard from her I began to make inquiries and discovered that she was no longer in Zürich. Her sister, Fräulein Elsa Fleischmann, informed me that Martha had been seriously ill for some time and had been removed to a hospital at Muri, Canton Aargau. She further mentioned that the letters had been handed over to her, Elsa, and that she was willing to sell them but would not permit their being copied.

On the strength of this I decided to act. I asked her to bring to me the letters and any documents referring to James Joyce she might have in her possession, and I said I would make an offer myself. She called at my flat on December 11, 1948. It was evident that she knew little about her sister’s relationship with James Joyce, except that Martha had occasionally mentioned his name and that if she remembered rightly he had once been pointed out to her. She then produced the same items that I had seen seven years before, with the exception of the ‘Nausikaa’ postcard, of which she declared she knew nothing. I offered to buy the lot straight away, and she readily agreed to the sum I named.

Before she left I invited her to write down whatever she and her sister could recall of James Joyce and assured her that they would be well paid for it. She said she would see what they could do. But I never heard of them again. When I next inquired I learnt that Martha had died in hospital in 1950, and Elsa in Zürich in 1951. They had left no property.

IV

According to information received through personal friends and a relative of Martha Fleischmann the following facts may be of interest. Martha Fleischmann was born at Basel on September 15, 1885. Her father was a Swiss business man who for some time lived in Hamburg. Her mother came of an old Bernese family. Martha grew up in comfortable circumstances. Her education however, was rather slighter than that of the average Swiss girl of that time. She knew very little French and no English, but devoted a good deal of her time to reading German books, especially novels. After the death of her mother she inherited enough money to live independently. It was then that she took a flat in Culmannstrasse in Zürich. According to all who had known her at that time she was considered a remarkably beautiful young woman with both natural poise and a touch of the genteel in her manners. She evidently took her leisured life very much for granted. On the other hand she seems to have been inclined to occasional fits of melancholia, which may be the reason why she did not get married. During the first World War she made the acquaintance of a business man who lived in the same house and to whom she became profoundly and permanently attached. This attachment—the only one known—explains why Joyce when he met her was afraid that the letters he sent to her might fall into the wrong hands.

In later years Martha used to mention to her relatives that Joyce had obviously been very much in love with her. According to her own story Joyce had several times come to tea with her at her flat, and he again used to call on her on his visits to Zürich from Paris in the 1930s when he was receiving treatment for his eye-trouble. He also invited her to visit him in Paris. Of these visits and invitations Martha mentioned nothing when she called on me, nor does Mr George Joyce remember ever having heard of her. In the meantime her own life had gone on very much as before.

In the later 1930s, however, Martha’s life began to be less pleasant. Her friend died some time before the outbreak of the Second World War. She lost a good deal of her money and had to try and make a living. She sold part of her furniture and other belongings, gave up her flat and moved into cheap lodgings. It was then that she tried to sell the Joyce letters. For some time she took on work, and helped to run a boarding-house together with her sister Elsa. Then her health began to fail. After an accident in which she broke a leg she had to move to the Aargauische Pflegeanstalt at Muri, a hospital for the aged and infirm. In the last month of her life she was paralysed. She died in poverty on January 22, 1950, at Muri, Aargau.

V

The letters are self-explanatory. According to Martha’s statement, she tore off the lower right-hand edge of the second sheet of Letter 1 because it contained what she considered an indelicate expression. Candlemas referred to in Letter 4 is Joyce’s birthday. It is remarkable that Joyce first took Martha for a Jewess. Actually her grandfather had been adopted as a homeless boy by the Swiss village community of Ueken (Aargau) in the first part of the 19th century. Whether or not he was of Jewish origin cannot be ascertained, but it is at least unlikely. Her parents and her grandmother were certainly not considered Jewish by the people of that village.

There is a Martha in Ulysses, and it is significant that she is both the recipient and the sender of letters. Connected with her are references to the opera Martha and its famous theme ‘Come, thou lost one’. Even more striking is the use of the Greek e both in the letters Joyce wrote and in the one sent by Bloom to Martha. Beyond that however I do not venture to establish a direct connection. After all, Joyce had also addressed Martha as ‘Nausikaa’, and yet it would be difficult to find any similarity between her and Gerty MacDowell. Nevertheless the letters testify to the unique link between realities in experience and in imagination. There is no doubt that the sincerity of his emotion and his almost incredible command of tones of feeling in two foreign languages have resulted in an extraordinarily impressive and powerful self-portrait of the artist in a critical phase of his life.

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To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [? Early December 1918]

[Zurich]

MS. Straumann

Vous n’êtes pas fâchée alors.

J’avais de la fièvre hier soir, en attendant votre signe.

Mais pourquoi ne voulez-vous pas m’écrire même une parole—votre nom? Et pourquoi fermez-vous toujours les stores de la fenêtre? Je veux vous voir.

Je ne sais pas ce que vous pensez de moi.

Comme je vous ai déjà dit nous nous sommes vus et—parlés—mais vous m’avez oublié.

Voulez-vous que je vous dise quelque chose?

Ma première impression de vous.

Voilà.

Vous étiez vêtue de noir avec un gros chapeau aux ailes flottantes. La couleur vous allait très bien. Et j’ai pensé: un joli animal.

Parce qu’il y avait quelque chose de franc et presque d’impudique dans votre allure. Puis, en vous regardant, j’ai observé la mollesse des traits reguliers et la douceur des yeux. Et j’ai pensé: une juive. Si je me suis trompé il ne faut pas vous offenser. Jésus Christ a pris son corps humain: dans le ventre d’une femme juive.

J’ai pensé souvent à vous et après, quand je vous ai reconnue a la fenêtre je vous regardais dans une espece de fascination dont je ne peux me libérer.

Il se peut que tout ça vous laisse indifferente.

Il se peut que je vous semble ridicule.

J’accepte votre jugement.

Mais hier soir vous m’avez fait un signe et mon cœur a saute de joie.

Je ne sais pas votre âge.

Moi, je suis vieux—et je me sens plus vieux encore.

Peutêtre ai-je trop vécu.

J’ai 35 ans. C’est l’âge que Shakespeare a eu quand il a conçu sa douleureuse passion pour la ‘dame noire.’ C’est 1 âge que le Dante a eu quand il est entré dans la nuit de son être.

Je ne sais pas ce qui arrive en moi.

Est-il possible qu’une personne éprouve sentiments commes les miens et que l’autre ne les éprouve point?

Je ne sais pas ce que je veux.

Je voudrais vous parler.

Je me figure un soir brumeux. J’attends—et je vous vois vous approcher de moi, vêtue de noir, jeune, étrange et douce. Je vous regarde dans les yeux et mes yeux vous disent que je suis un pauvre chercheur dans ce monde, que je ne comprends rien de ma destinee ni de celle des autres, que j’ai vécu et péché et crée, que je m’en irai, un jour, n ayant rien compris, dans l’obscurité qui nous a enfantés tous.

Comprennez-vous peutêtre le mystère de votre corps quand vous vous regardez dans la glace, d’où est venue la lumiere fauve de vos yeux; le teint de votre chevelure?

Comme vous étiez gracieuse, hier soir, assise à la table, rêveuse et puis, soudainement, levant ma lettre à la lumière.

Quel est votre nom?

Pensez-vous, quelquefois, à moi?

Ecrivez-moi un mot à l’adresse que je vous donne.

Vous pouvez m’écrire aussi en allemand. Je le comprends très bien. Dites-moi quelque chose de vous-même.

Oui, écrivez-moi demain.

Je crois que vous êtes bonne. …

 ® 

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [? December 1918]

[Zurich]

MS. Straumann

Qu’y a-t-il?

Vous ne m’avez pas salué!

Je descends avec cette lettre a la porte.

Ai-je offensée?

Mais comment?

Je vous prie de m’envoyer un mot toute de suite. Voilà une enveloppe déjà préparée. Jetez-la à la boite et mettez un seul mot dedans.

Etes-vous fâchée? Oui ou non.

Je ne comprends rien.

Pour l’amour de Dieu envoyez-moi un mot.

La belle nuit que je vais passer!

 ® 

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [9 December 1918]

[Zurich]

MS. Straumann

Arme liebe Marthe

Was haben Sie gehabt?

Ich bin noch unsicher aber glaube dass ich Sie gesehen habe heute abend.

Ich hatte Angst Ihnen zu schreiben weil ich wusste nicht wer bei Ihnen war und dachte dass meine Briefe in die Hände von fremde Leute kommen könnten.

Jedes Abend habe ich geschaut.

Ich habe mir sogar Vorwürfe gemacht weil ich dachte dass vielleicht Ihre Krankheit in Folge einer Erkältung am jenem letzten Abend war.

Dann dachte ich, ich wurde Ihnen trotzdem schreiben und mit der Name einer Freundin schreiben!

Je continue en français parce que l’allemand ne me va pas.

Si vous avez beaucoup souffert en ces j ours, moi, j’ai souffert aussi.

Il me semblait que l’unique rayon de lumière qui dans ces dernières années ait percé l’obscurité de ma vie, s’était éteinte.

J’étais même imbécile!

Chaque matin j’ouvrais, j’ouvrais le journal et j’avais peur de lire votre nom parmi les annonces des morts! Je l’ouvrais toujours avec angoisse, très, très lentement.

Je pensais: elle s’en ira—elle qui m’a regardé avec pitié—peutêtre avec tendresse.

La maladie change beaucoup.

Elle nous conduit quelquefois jusqu’au seuil de la mort: et nous voyons les choses autrement.

Vous n’avez pas peur de la mort—moi, si!

Vous avez pensé peutêtre que votre sentiment pour moi était une folie; vous avez entrevu les ombres de l’au delà.

Eh bien! Ce sont les ombres menteuses!

Je voudrais vous envoyer des fleurs mais j’ai peur.

J’attendrai encore. Peutêtre ce n’était pas vous que j’ai vue?

J’ai vu mon livre de poésies dans votre main.

Est-ce que vous avez compris?

J’ai écrit quelque chose pendant votre maladie—quelque chose de très amer qui a blessé beaucoup mes amis

Oui, j’ai souffert aussi.

J’hésite encore avant de vous envoyer cette lettre

Si elle tombe dans les mains d’une autre personne???

11 heures

Je vais jeter cette lettre à la boîte.

Je ne peux plus attendre!

J.

 ® 

1919

To MARTHA FLEISCHMANN, [2 February 1919]

[Zurich]

MS. Straumann

Nach langes Erwarten sah ich gestern abend Dein Gesicht, aber so blass, so müde und so traurig!

Der erste Gruss an diesem Tag kam von Dir—durch die Nacht

Und durch die Nacht der Bitterkeit meiner Seele fielen die Küsse Deiner Lippen über meinen Herz—weich wie Rosenblätter, sanft wie Tau.

‘O rosa mistica, ora pro me!’ J.

Maria Lichtmesse 1919.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 February 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I ought to apologise for my impossible health which so often obliges me to appear discourteous. I enclose some notices of my play Exiles of which you were so good as to write favourably. I appreciate very much your friendly words about the Scylla-Charybdis episode of my book Ulysses but am sorry that it deprived you of sleep. On most other readers I daresay it will have the opposite effect. I sent some days ago the episode Wandering Rocks to Mr Pound who is ill also. If he has not sent it to you could you write to him. As soon as I am able to work again I shall finish the Sirens and send it. I am much better this evening but my eyes are so capricious that I may be ill tomorrow. This time the attack was in my ‘good?’ eye so that the decisive symptoms of iritis never really set in. It has been light but intermittent so that for five weeks I could do little or nothing except lie constantly near a stove like a chimpanzee whom in many things I resemble. I received a copy of The Egoist with the second episode. I hope I shall be able to finish the book this year or early next year. It is as difficult for me to write it as for my readers to read it. I asked Mr Chalas to convey my thanks to Mr Aldington and would ask you to convey my excuses to Mr Lewis. Two notices of his book Tarr were promised me but neither has appeared. As soon as I begin to go about I shall try to push the matter. One was sent to a Dutch review eighteen months ago and published last week! Mr Linati wrote to me during my illness and I shall write to him if the Italo-Swiss frontier is open now. I must not omit to thank you for your prompt remittance of royalties in December. It was very useful to me. I hope that wretched book some day will repay you even in part for all the trouble it has caused you. With renewed thanks and kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To MADEMOISELLE GUILLERMET, 28 February 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Miss Guillermet: You will think me very remiss for not having written ere now. I have been ill again with my eyes for the sixth time! If I am a sun, as you say, it is a sun which is often under an eclipse. I should be glad to receive the book you speak of. I think I ought to go away for a holiday but man proposes and God disposes. I am grateful for your interest in my work—though you seem to dislike it sufficiently.

I do not like it myself mais que voulez-vous?

I thank you for your kind suggestions. Perhaps one day I shall go to Geneva. I never go anywhere it seems unless somebody fetches me to a train and locks me into a coupé with a ticket. I regret that through no fault of yours I was unable to include your name among those of the critics of Exiles. I am not sure however that the play interested you. A translation (German) will be published in Zurich next week by Rascher and Co of here and possibly the play will be produced somewhere some day (or night).

I am thinking more about the book I am writing, Ulysses, which I daresay you would find as remote from yourself as the sun—or some other solar system. The English printers refuse to print it and they surely know what is right and what is wrong.

 ® 

From EZRA POUND to SIR HORACE RUMBOLD, British Minister to Berne, 11 April 1919

The Little Review, London Office, 5 Holland Place Chambers, W.8

TS. Private

Dear Sir, If it be not already too late, I should like to caution you that you can find no surer means of making a few converts to Bolshevism or to the more violent revolutionary factions than by continuing or permitting to continue the persecution of James Joyce by the Zurich officials within the sphere of your influence.

I don’t want to write ‘scare heads’ to you, and I don’t imagine the converts would be numerous, but they would probably be extremely vocal and active; a number of young men are not far from the borderline of these opinions; and a case like Joyce’s would considerably enflame their imaginations. I would therefore request that if possible some ambassadorial courtesy might be extended to this, without exception, the most distinguished of the younger English prose authors. After all, literature was once considered an honourable calling. There are very very few living writers who can carry on the process of writing permanent books; Mr. Joyce is one of these; I should very much regret having to undertake a publicity campaign on his behalf, and I should certainly take all possible measures to get statements from the Zürich consulate, etc. as to the circumstances from which the present difficulties seem to have risen.

If his present work is interrupted, i.e., his novel ‘Ulysses’ which we are using as a serial some brief explanation will have to be given to our readers. I am not a⁠[n] excitable critic but I believe that he is doing in this work what Flaubert attempted but did not quite bring off in ‘Bouvard and Pecuchet’. If Joyce chooses to make a statement of his position and relations with Messrs. Bennet and Carr, I can scarcely deny him as much space as he chooses for the purpose, but I would much prefer to keep our pages for literature. Respectfully yours,

Ezra Pound

 ® 

OPEN LETTER, 28 April 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, Zurich

TS. Cornell

STATEMENT

In April 1918 in conjunction with Mr. Claude Sykes I founded in Zurich a professional dramatic company ‘The English Players’, for the production in Switzerland of English literary plays. The capital was subscribed by the founders without aid or subvention from any source. The first play produced was Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. After the performance, in accordance with the instructions given me by the producer Mr. Sykes, I paid to the artists the salaries fixed by him. An amateur member of the company, Mr. Henry Carr, then a casual employee of the British Consulate General, demanded from Mr. Sykes on the following day an additional payment of Fes. 150.– Mr. Sykes instructed me to disallow this claim, as unjustified and unprofessional. I called at the British Consulate General in Zurich to collect from Mr. Carr the sum of Fes. 25.– due on tickets given to him for sale. He declined to pay this sum and when I informed him of Mr. Sykes decision he called me a swindler and a cad, stated that he would organize a boycott of all our future productions and that he would wring my neck the next time he met me in the street. He also stated that if I did not leave the office he would throw me down the stairs. I replied ‘that is not language that should be used in a Government office’, and thereupon left the office. I wrote registered letters of protest to the then Consul General, Mr. Percy Bennett and to the British Minister in Berne, Sir Horace Rumbold. Neither replied. I then instituted legal proceedings for libel and passed Mr. Carr’s threat over to the Zurich Police. On the advice of the Consular lawyer, Mr. Georges Wettstein, Mr. Carr advanced his claim to Fes. 500.– and affirmed that the British Consulate is extraterritorial. The Swiss Political Department applied to by my solicitor Mr. Konrad Bloch disallowed the latter claim and the Swiss Court disallowed the former claim and gave judgement in my favour with costs. Since that time ‘The English Players’ have given in Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux, Interlaken, Berne, St. Gall and Lucerne performances in English of plays by Synge, Mr. Shaw, Sir James Barrie, Davies, Houghton, Robert Browning, Oliver Goldsmith and Mr. Martyn. All these performances at the instigation of Mr. Carr and with the full approval of Mr. Percy Bennett and the British Minister in Berne, Sir Horace Rumbold, were boycotted and maligned. The expenses of these productions were born⁠[e] by my partners and myself and in spite of the moral success and interest which they evoked, resulted in a heavy deficit. This would have been greater but for the wholehearted support of the various American colonies [in Switzerland] and the friendly attitude of residents in Switzerland interested in English literature. The project for the production in the Municipal Theatre of Zurich of Purcell’s opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’ in English, which the Board of Directors of the theatre, at my suggestion, proposed to give, was shelved owing to the hostile attitude of the British authorities in Switzerland. In Zurich and in every other town where they played, ‘The English Players’ (poor artists who sacrificed their time for a meagre recompense) had to face calumny and detraction, disseminated by the British authorities here. A further performance in English, French and Italian, organized by me, in conjunction with Italian and French companies was boycotted also.

I am a prisoner of war liberated on parole to Switzerland in July 1915 by the Austrian Government in consideration of my health. Three months after the occurrences narrated, Mr. Consul Bennett summoned me for combatant military service in the United Kingdom and threatened that if I did not comply with his proposal within 48 hours he would blacklist me. I declined to accept service of this monstrous document and sent it back to him by return of post with two lines of courteous refusal. I may add that during my sojourn in Switzerland I have suffered from five dangerous attacks of iritis and have been operated in the ophthalmic institute in Zurich for acute glaucoma. Mr. Percy Bennett informed Mr. Frank Gschwind, the present manager of the company, that he, Mr. Bennett, would have me expelled from Switzerland on military and political grounds. This he has failed to do. He himself however has been removed from the Consulate General in Zurich by the Foreign Office to another hemisphere.

Mr. Carr left Zurich while the libel action was pending. Accordingly I withdrew the suit. The Consulate lawyer, Mr. Wettstein, is now pressing for my payment of his costs and threatening to have me imprisoned in the event of non-payment. He has already insisted on a seizure of my goods and has demanded a further sequestration which if carried out will considerably reduce the means of livelihood on which I and my family exist.

I may state in conclusion that the total monetary risk incurred by Mr. Sykes and myself amounts to more than Fes. 10.000.— From first to last we did not receive from the British Consulate or the British Legation one word of encouragement or thanks or one suggestion of assistance or one penny of money.

James Joyce

 ® 

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 30 April 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Mr Huebsch: Will you please have enclosed copied (at my expense to be placed against my accounting) and sent to Mr Colum, Mr Quinn, Mr Hackett, Mr Hecht and to any others who may be able to bring this monstrous affair under the notice of American public opinion. I may say that, in the opinion of my Doctor, my frequent attacks of iritis are due in great measure to the cowardly ill treatment of these officials.

A Greek friend of mine, Mr Chalas, sent you some time ago a pamphlet of his in the hope that a translation might interest you.

I need scarcely say in conclusion that in such circumstances it is impossible for me for [sic] continue the book I am engaged on—Ulysses.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 3 May 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Will you please send a copy of my novel to Mr Georges Bazile, 13 Quai Conti, Paris. He wishes to translate it, he writes. I regret the delay in forwarding the episode of the Sirens but perhaps I am the only person who finds it a subject for regret. I have had some worries which prevent me from doing much. I think I shall go away to Italian Switzerland for a few days at least. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To JAMES B. PINKER, 14 May 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I shall feel greatly obliged if you can have a certain number of copies of statement (enclosed) copied at my expense and forwarded to the following addresses:

i) President: Royal Literary Fund

ii) Chairman: Incorporated Society of Authors

iii) Mr J.C. Squire, editor, ‘New Statesman’

iv) Mr Edward Marsh, Home Office, London

v) Mr W.B. Yeats, 18 Woburn Buildings, Euston Rd

vi) Mr George Moore, 15 Ebury Street

vii) Mr G.B. Shaw?

viii) Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrell?

ix) Mr H.G. Wells?

A Mr Bazile (whose letter I have mislaid) wrote to me from Paris asking permission to translate my book Dubliners into French and to publish it in a series of Cahiers. He now writes that he can get no satisfactory answer from Mr Richards and applies again to me. I have not even a copy of this book which is out of print and, I should say, likely to remain so. I may add that two local booksellers here have written repeatedly to Mr Richards for copies of Exiles for their customers but always in vain.

As there seems to be a hope that I may be able to leave this country early in summer I shall take it as a favour if any royalties accruing on my books for the half year 1/i–30/vi be forwarded me as soon as possible after the latter date as that will facilitate me greatly in the tiresome and rather expensive business of removal.

Allow me to thank you in advance for your trouble in having the enclosed forwarded as I request. I feel sure you will agree with me that such a case should be brought to the knowledge of men of letters and of literary societies. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To JAMES B. PINKER, 17 May 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurich

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I do not wish to implicate you in any way in the matter but, unless you have definitely adverse legal opinion, I am anxious the statement should go forward as it stands. It is surely open to a British subject or a man of letters to bring to the notice of the public and of his colleagues such gross and dense abuse of public trust on the part of officials paid by public taxation.

Mr Richards wrote to me also. The matter is [of] no importance to him though he seems to think it is. Ulysses will not be finished this year. Neither he nor any other publisher in London would ever publish it or find anyone to print it or to buy it, if printed.

I take it you have applied to my New York publisher and to The Egoist requesting them to let me have statement of royalties as soon as possible in view of my plans. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. You can obtain a complete dossier of the case from Mr Richard Aldington, Hotel Littoral, 15 Moon Street.

J.J.

 ® 

To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 23 May 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Curran: I shall feel obliged if you will communicate the facts narrated in my enclosed statement to the press if you are still a correspondent or contributor to any papers likely to take the matter up.

I hope you are well in these troubled days and shall be glad to hear from you.

 ® 

To C.P. CURRAN, 23 May 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. Curran

Dear Curran: I shall feel obliged if you will communicate the facts narrated in my enclosed statement to the press if you are still a correspondent or contributor to any papers likely to take the matter up.

I hope you are well in these troubled days and shall be glad to hear from you with kind remembrances and regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 May 1919

Via Sanità 2, III°

MS. Cornell

Dear Jim, I have received from your landlord’s agent an intimation to pay the last quarter’s rent of your flat and clear it out within a week. He says that Tripcovich declines all further responsibility for it. I have no time to run after Tripcovich; I have nine or ten lessons a day, and Tripcovich is hardly ever in his office. Moreover, I don’t want to run after him on that errand. Of course I can refuse to pay, but then the landlord would sell you up. Your quarter has been kept for you for six months in spite of the shortage of flats in Trieste and the quartering of officers and soldiers in unoccupied flats such as yours. But, so far, you have not let us know whether you intend to come back or not. I have paid the rent and we will keep the furniture here until you can take it over. Some eight years ago I took the quarter for you, moved in and paid the first rent. Now I have paid the last rent for you and moved out. The packing up and moving out of a flat ankle-deep in dust has been a week’s dirty work for Frank and Eileen. It has cost me nearly three hundred lire. I have just emerged from four years of hunger and squalor, and am trying to get on my feet again. Do you think you can give me a rest?

Stannie

 ® 

From MONRO, SAW &AMP; COMPANY, 3 June 1919

70 Queen Street, London, E.C.4.

TS. Cornell

Dear Sir, We are asked to express our Client’s thanks to you for your letter of May 20th and to say that though the way in which you have accepted the gift is an honour in itself, rendering further acknowledgment superfluous, our Client nevertheless will feel it a privilege to read anything else you care to send.

We are desired to say also that it was certainly the intention that the anonymity should be maintained but the expressions you use in this connection imply that it is now in your power to respect it or not to respect it. If this means, as it seems to do, that the anonymity is no longer such to you, we are to say that you may regard yourself as free to infringe it if it would afford you any satisfaction to do so; that as the matter is now settled the anonymity is of less importance than before and that you may therefore take which course you prefer in regard to it—if it is really the fact that you have the power which your words imply. Yours faithfully,

Monro Saw & Co.

 ® 

From B.W. HUEBSCH to JAMES JOYCE, 10 June 1919

Dear Mr Joyce: You have my sympathy in the plight that your letter of April 30th and the accompanying statement described. I sent copies or showed the statement to the persons you mentioned with the exception of Mr Hecht who is in Europe, Berlin I believe, on behalf of the Chicago Daily News. I know that if he should get to Switzerland he intends seeing you.

Those whom I have consulted agree with me that it would be difficult to get general publicity for your statement. If it were sent broadcast to literary editors, none would feel it incumbent upon him to give more than a brief and probably garbled account. I have concluded to give it exclusively to one good paper and thus secure the printing of the statement in its entirety, knowing that a single conspicuous presentation of your case is likely to arouse more discussion than a hundred insignificant paragraphs. With that in view I have forwarded it to H.B. Sell whose weekly book page in The Chicago Daily News is read and copied by many persons outside his city. I think that he will print it, but if he should not do so, I will try William Marion Reedy who publishes a weekly paper in St Louis called the Mirror which is widely read for its comments on literature, politics and art.

I have not yet heard from Mr Quinn, but if he takes any action you are more likely to hear from him direct as he will not consider me necessary as an intermediary.

With his fine enthusiasm Colum immediately determined to lay the matter before a wealthy young man, whose soul is not crushed by his money, with the result represented by the enclosed check, the equivalent of $700 which he contributes to be used as you see fit, either for the payment of your deficit or, if the nature of that obligation is not such as to require that you meet it, for your own use. The idea is that you are to be freed of the difficulties that interfere with your health and work. The man’s name is Scofield Thayer, 80 Washington Square East, N.Y.C. I suppose that you will want to write to him. Mr. Thayer tells me that a friend of his will probably make a contribution of $300, but I decided not to wait but to send that when it comes. (Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!)

I hope that you will be able to get into good shape physically and that your peace of mind may be restored. It is a great pity that the tyranny of small people is permitted to interfere with our lives, but I know how difficult it is to be philosophical about such things at the time they are happening. Let me hear from you how things develop.

 ® 

To HENRY DAVRAY, 17 June 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurich (Suisse)

Monsieur: J’aurai dû vous écrire il y a longtemps pour vous remercier de l’article très bienveillant et flatteur que vous avez eu la bonté de publier dans le Mercure de France à l’égard de mes livres. Ci-inclus je vous envoie quelques extraits des critiques de la presse entre lesquelles je suis très fier de pouvoir citer un jugement favorable d’une revue qui jouit d’un cachet si spécial dans le monde des lettres.

Agréez, Monsieur, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération

James Joyce

 ® 

To B.W. HUEBSCH, 19 June 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Mr Huebsch: I have just received a letter from Mr Colum in which he informs me that he has raised a subsidy of $2000 in aid of my case among sympathizers there. He states that he himself is about to leave for Europe but that I can apply to you for whatever amount of this total money has been already subscribed. It would greatly facilitate to have this money cabled as we have now reached the crisis. I am writing to Mr Colum by the same mail to thank him for his comradelike energy. The case is indeed sufficiently scandalous.

Herewith some extracts of press notices of Exiles.

 ® 

To FRANK BUDGEN, 19 June 1919

Zurich

Dear Budgen: Are you still there? I sent on your dream book and hope it reached you, but if it did not, well, no matter, let it go. The news? Paul Suter brought your sketch here and I must really thank you for it as it seems to my barbarian eye a delicate and provocative object. Paul was with us at the Pfauen Restaurant where we did honour to the golden wine named by him who writes ‘The Archiduchess’ because….

Other news? Mr —— (suppressed by censor) who ‘looks after the dibs’ embezzled 1,000 francs of the company’s money and there is open war. Colum writes to me from New York that a sympathy movement for me has begun there and they are cabling me 11,000 francs in support of my case and project. I hear there are to be thunderbolt articles in the Press. I sent off the statement to London to my agent who is reluctant to circulate it and also to the Foreign Office and to the chief two delegates of the Irish-American mission in Paris. Pound writes disapproving of the Sirens, then modifying his disapproval and protesting against the close and against ‘obsession’ and wanting to know whether Bloom (prolonged cheers from all parts of the house) could not be relegated to the background and Stephen Telemachus brought forward.

The chapter of the Cyclops is being lovingly moulded in the way you know. The Fenian is accompanied by a wolfhound who speaks (or curses) in Irish. He unburdens his soul about the Saxo-Angles in the best Fenian style and with colossal vituperativeness alluding to their standard industry. The epic proceeds explanatorily ‘He spoke of the English, a noble race, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster, silent as the deathless gods’….

 ® 

From MONHO, SAW & Company, 24 June 1919

70 Queen Street, London, E.C.4.

TS. Cornell

Dear Sir, We are desired by our Client to thank you for your letter of June 14th and in reply to give you the following information which will perhaps be sufficient to confirm the hypothetical conclusion you have come to concerning the identity.

Our Client had known for some time of your circumstances from a mutual friend who had bestirred himself in your interest until finally he appeared to have exhausted all likely channels to which he could look for help. When this seemingly hopeless point was reached our client felt it necessary to take action, and was afterwards duly informed by this friend of the anonymous gift received by you. It was obvious that the source of it was at that time a mystery to him, but later on our Client, for various reasons, was led to believe that he had since arrived at a correct surmise as to its origin, and could not but be conscious of the likelihood of his acquainting you with such surmise. That he had done so seemed to be corroborated afterwards unwittingly by an elderly Italian lady who had been in Zurich and who called once last year at your suggestion to make an enquiry at an office managed by our client. She said she had known you for ten years and mentioned the gift you had had ‘from some lady’.

When therefore in your letter of May 20th you appeared to suggest that you were aware of the identity of the supposedly anonymous person and spoke of respecting the condition ‘imposed’ seeming to imply a wish that it had not been imposed, our client thought it rather foolish and perhaps unfriendly—in particular after your allusions to your state of depression—to persist in a course whose main object had been achieved. Otherwise had you not dwelt on the subject of the anonymity, she (we can now use the pronoun) would have let the matter remain as it has been up to the present time.

Briefly, the qualities in your writing that most interest her are your searching piercing spirit, your scorching truth, the power and startling penetration of your ‘intense instants of imagination’. As such qualities are greatly lacking in most writers of the day, when they do show themselves, and especially when accompanied as in your case by a very unusual and astonishing power of expression, our client counts it a misfortune that they should not be given as free scope as is possible in the circumstances and therefore has done what she can to further this end. Yours faithfully,

Monro Saw & Co.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 July 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose a letter from Mr Richards which explains itself. My relations with his firm have not been profitable either to him or to me and my contract with him has expired. As regards my book Ulysses it will not be finished, I suppose, for a year or so and when it is finished (if it is finished) I do not believe that Mr Richards or any of his colleagues in the United Kingdom will publish it or even find printers to print it. Some personal worries have also retarded its progress—to the relief of the few readers who honour it with their attention. My New York publisher, who has given me proof of a very friendly and energetic disposition, sails for England, he writes. Perhaps he is already there. He intends to call on you with regard to an eventual publication of the book—to be printed, possibly, in Africa.

I forwarded some time ago the chapter Wandering Rocks to Mr Pound but it was not acknowledged. Was your copy of the typescript forwarded to you? I also sent to him in France the episode of the Sirens. This, at least, reached him and he told me he had sent it on to you and to Miss Anderson. I fear he does not like the book. I shall send the episode of the Cyclops next—but when I cannot say. If any further excerpts from the book have appeared in The Egoist I should like to see them.

If it should be decided to publish Ulysses in the distant future I should like to propose (as I did repeatedly to Mr Richards) that it be published in paper covers at a price equivalent to that current in France. I have seen English novels offered here in the shop windows at 11 and 12 francs beside French novels offered at 3.80 or 4 francs.

I may leave this country soon so that I shall be glad to hear from you on these matters. If you foresee only difficulties in the matter of publication I beg you to let no other considerations interfere with your own interests already too fruitlessly abused by me.

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To B.W. HUEBSCH (Cablegram), 2 July 1919

Zurich

CABLE SUM COLM COLLECTED.

JOYCE

TS. Buffalo

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 7 July 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Mr Palmer: I am arranging a vocal concert with Mr Augustus Milner, leading baritone of the Municipal Theatre in Zurich (an Irishman by birth) to be given shortly in the Townhall here. He wants to sing two of your songs, The Man from Galway and your charming setting of my verses O, it was out by Donnycarney. As my music is locked up in my flat in Trieste may I ask you to let me have these songs, if possible, by return. If the latter be now printed so much the better. If not MS will do. I shall remit you in Mr Milner’s name the amount of the former when I know what it costs.

P.S. Can you send some particulars of your life and work for programme?

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 11 July 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich.

Dear Budgen: What the hell kind of an address is this? And are you there? And are you coming back to Z.? I send you enclosed description of pictures which have been offered for sale, prices marked on back. The daubs are here in Z. If you can sell any of them you get 5% or 10%. I forget which. The whole lot would bring a commission of 30,000 frs., I think. Write and be damned to the waste of ink. Am taking P.S.’s verses now to the Zürcher Post. Am sending you a photo of myself. Portrait of my wife framed and up. 5000 frs cabled from U.S.A. for my cause. Everyone beginning to be on the move here. I have offered to finance the E.P. After prolonged deliberations they very kindly and most considerately consented to accept 10,000 francs of my dirty money in consideration of my former good behaviour and unstained character. Am arranging a concert of Irish traditional and modern music for the Tonhalle with Milner as singer.

Arrivederci presto, pittore bevitore.

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To HENRY DAVRAY, 14 July 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurich (Suisse)

MS. Texas

Monsieur: Je vous remercie de votre aimable lettre du 23 de l’écoulé et je me sens très flatté de votre invitation. Malheureusement la difficulté du roman que je suis en train d’écrire (Ulysse) me laisse très peu de temps libre mais j’espère que peutêtre plus tard il me sera possible de vous envoyer quelque chose. En attendant je me permets de vous soumettre les deux petits poèmes ci-inclus qui sont à votre disposition si vous les trouvez dignes d’être publiés dans vos pages.

Agréez, Monsieur, avec mes remerciements renouvelés l’assurance de ma sincère considération

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 July 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have delayed my reply to your letter because I hoped to have had either a telegram or a letter from your solicitors but, as neither has come and as I am in a state of perplexity, I am writing to you now. You have probably discovered by now that I am a very stupid person—a fact which I should have preferred to conceal. I was misled by certain statements or allusions in the last letter your solicitors sent me as well as by my own misinterpretation of what I mistook for a hint as to the name of my benefactress. If you know in what complete ignorance I live of events and persons in London you will perhaps be inclined to forgive my stupidity. I seldom see a paper or a book and am not in correspondence with anyone there apart from formal letters and (now rather rare) letters from Mr Pound. There is no reason why I should withdraw the phrases to which you allude but there is every reason why I should apply and do apply the contrary epithets to myself.

I have felt during these last days of waiting an added sense of perplexity due to the fact that at the moment when I have the very great pleasure of knowing that it is you who have aided and are aiding me so munificently you write me that the last episode sent seems to you to show a weakening or diffusion of some sort. Since the receipt of your letter I have read this chapter again several times. It took me five months to write it and always when I have finished an episode my mind lapses into a state of blank apathy out of which it seems that neither I nor the wretched book will ever more emerge. Mr Pound wrote to me rather hastily in disapproval but I think that his disapproval is based on grounds which are not legitimate and is due chiefly to the varied interests of his admirable and energetic artistic life. Mr Brock also wrote to me begging me to explain to him the method (or methods) of the madness but these methods are so manifold, varying as they do from one hour of the day to another, from one organ of the body to another, from episode to episode, that, much as I appreciate his critical patience I could not attempt to reply. I must ask you to add to the great favours which you have given me also that of long suffering. If the Sirens have been found so unsatisfactory I have little hope that the Cyclops or later the Circe episode will be approved of: and, moreover, it is impossible for me to write these episodes quickly. The elements needed will fuse only after a prolonged existence together. I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present.

During these last two years when I have received your gifts I have always had the foreboding (now proved false) that each episode of the book as it advanced would alienate gradually the sympathy of the person who was helping me. The word scorching transmitted to me by your solicitors in reply to my tentative inquiry has a peculiar significance for my superstitious mind not so much because of any quality or merit in the writing itself as for the fact that the progress of the book is in fact like the progress of some sandblast. As soon as I mention or include any person in it I hear of his or her death or departure or misfortune: and each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind it a burnt up field. Since I wrote the Sirens I find it impossible to listen to music of any kind.

I have tried to express my gratitude to you but I cannot do so. As you are the person who introduced my book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the ‘notice’ of the public I shall feel very thankful to you if you will accept from me the MS of that book. It is in Trieste and, as soon as circumstances there are more favourable, I shall get it and forward it to you.

You have given me most generous and timely help. I wish I could feel myself worthy of it either as a poet or as a human being. All I can do is to thank you. Very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [31 July 1919]

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurigo

MS. Cornell

Caro Stannie: Il denaro che ti mandai (vaglia per 150 lire) mi è stato rimandato. Perchè? Da chi? Da te o dalla posta? Della lettera del direttore della Scuola Revoltella (a proposito chi è?) non ho saputo più niente: e nemmeno di quella persona che si rese garante per me presso le autorità nè di un communicato [sic] qualsiasi in merito mediante il consolato di qui. Il sig. Goldschmidt mi informa in via indiretta che hai molte lezioni e che Eileen gli disse che m’aspettava costì quando sarei passato in viaggio per Roma! Perchè non Budapest? Come si chiama quel bel tomo di un padrone di case che butta sul lastrico i mobili di una persona che ha pagato il fitto del quartiere durante tutti gli anni della guerra? Vorrei sapere qualcosa dell’ambiente là poiché qui corrono le voci più fantastiche—carestia d’acqua, tifo, rincaro, commercio morto, immondizie ammucchiate nella strade. Se si pubblica un giornale quotidiano a Trieste vorrei vedere qualche esemplare. Scrivimi se posso mandarti il denaro in un altro modo e, se è possibile, mandami il mio vestito di sera se non è stato mangiato dalle tarme—o dal padrone di casa. Mi occorre subito perchè la mia commedia Esuli va in scena al principale teatro di Monaco di Baviera entro il mese d’agosto e mi hanno telegrafato pregandomi di assistere alla première. Sarà data poi a Stoccarda, Vienna e Zurigo.

Io sono in cura per una specie di surmenage nervoso dovuto alle enormi difficoltà del libro che scrivo. Se hai ricevuto ora i fascicoli dimmelo.

Nora, Giorgio e Lucia ti salutano tutti. Sarebbe possibile per te o per Franz o per Eileen di venire qui per un mese? Se è possibile mi assumo tutte le spese. La Svizzera non concede un soggiorno più tempo. Scrivimi spesso. Saluti cordiali

Jim

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To JOHN QUINN, 3 August 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, Zurich

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Quinn: Many thanks for your letter. As you are going to enjoy a holiday I shall not inflict on you a long reply. Mr Bennett is at present in Panama, and if you are able, as you suggest, to bring home to him in a salutary way the enormity of his conduct (Mr Augustine Birrell in writing described it as ‘outrageous’) you will, in my opinion, serve the interests of all men of letters and oblige me in particular. Mr Colum on hearing of the affair at once raised a subscription of 10,000 francs, of which 5,000 francs have been paid up; and with this it will be possible to beat down the boorish and insolent opposition which has thwarted the scheme. I may say that my health and work have suffered greatly owing to the affair.

I hope you will succeed in inducing some company to put on Exiles in New York. It has been refused by the Stage Society, Pioneer Players and Abbey Theatre and, so far as I can see, there is no prospect of its production in the United Kingdom. It will be produced in Munich next week for the first time and, if successful, probably also in Stuttgart and Vienna. I have hopes that it will go on the Italian stage also when translated. Mr Carlo Linati (the translator of The Playboy of the Western World) has written to me about it. Miss Hermine Koerner (late of Mr Reinhardt’s company) plays the chief part in Munich.

Ulysses will not be finished probably till the end of next year—if even then. A chapter takes me about four or five months to write.

I wish you a pleasant holiday in that interesting part of the world you are bound for. I am badly in need of rest and quiet, too. With kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Miss Weaver has just written of a ‘magnificent defence’ of Ulysses written by you of which Mr Pound has told her. She wishes to reprint it m The Egoist. I thank you in advance. It is extraordinary that American law allows an employee to penalize a citizen for not having committed an offence. I allude to the penalizing of Miss Anderson on account of suppressed passages.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 August 1919

Universitätstrasse 29, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: … Perhaps I ought not to say any more on the subject of the Sirens but the passages you allude to were not intended by me as recitative. There is in the episode only one example of recitative on page 12 in preface to the song. They are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels. I understand that you may begin to regard the various styles of the episodes with dismay and prefer the initial style much as the wanderer did who longed for the rock of Ithaca. But in the compass of one day to compress all these wanderings and clothe them in the form of this day is for me only possible by such variation which, I beg you to believe, is not capricious.

In confirmation of what I said in my last letter I enclose a cutting from a Dublin paper, just received, announcing the death of one of the figures in the episode.

It will perhaps interest you to know that my play Exiles will be produced for the first time tomorrow night in Munich at the Muenchner Schauspielhaus. I have received many telegrams inviting me to be present but I shall not be there to see it. I mention this because I remember that after its publication I received from you, to my surprise, a message of very appreciative praise. I am sending you a copy of the translation published here in Zurich a few months ago as I think you may wish to have it also.

The questions raised in a former letter are not pressing but, while I thank Miss Marsden for the compliment she pays me, I should prefer to see my book (Ulysses) priced at 3/- which is about its value, I think.

With many thanks for your generosity to me and for the great interest you take in my writing and with many kind regards.

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To MES WILLIAM MURRAY (Postcard), Postmark 6 August 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurich

Dear Aunt Josephine: Thanks for your letter but I cannot manage what you suggest till you write me more explicitly who are the persons and also tell me what was the rumour concerning me to which you alluded a long time ago. Can you inform me when Yeats married? My play will be produced tomorrow night in Munich with one of the best actresses on the German stage in the leading part. I have received a number of telegrams inviting me to be present but nowadays it is difficult to travel anywhere except in a trance. I shall let you know how it gets on. Please write in reply.

Jim

P.S. Please address clearly: Universitätstrasse [sic] 29.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 25 August 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurigo

MS. Cornell

Caro Stannie: Tornato qui sabato dopo una breve sosta in campagna trovai la tua lettera ed una cartolina dal consolato italiano di qui. Ci andai stamattina—lunedi 25 agosto. Il permesso spedito da Trieste al 3 luglio arrivò alla sua destinazione, pare, al 19 agosto—dopo essere stato telegraficamente sollecitato. Ora sorge una nuova difficoltà. Vogliono ch’io depositi qui il mio passaporto. Questo non lo posso fare perchè ho un passaporto (già depositato presso le autorità svizzere) collettivo, vale a dire, per me, Nora e bambini, e, del resto, il consolato brittanico [sic] non rilascerebbe due passaporti alla stessa persona. La mia intenzione era di andare a Trieste solo per parlare con te, vedere la città, cercare un quartiere ecc ecc ma non voglio andarci con tutto il convoglio dei miei senza aver prima trovato un quartiere nè andarci solo lasciando Nora ed i bambini qui senza carte e forse sacrificando il diritto di rientrare. In queste circostanze credo la migliore via d’uscita sia che tu venga qui per 15 giorni. Le spese, mi assumo io, ma, viste le difficoltà della trasmissione le pagherò qui. Ho una camera pronta per te. Possiamo discutere personalmente. Sarà molto meglio eppoi puoi ripartire solo o con noi tutti secondo che si deciderà. Ti mando questa raccomandata ed espressa. Fa altrettanto giacché i dispacci arrivano quando Dio vuole. Oppure se credi di telegrafare telegrafa.

Ti ho mandato i miei fascicoli d’Ulisse (capitoli 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 e 7). Accusa ricevuta. Ti mandai anche una fotografia.

Per entrare in Svizzera ci vuole il visé del console svizzero costì. Visto che sei stato 4 anni in prigionia non avrai, credo, difficoltà ad ottenere un attestato medico che hai bisogno di un cambiamento d’aria In fretta

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 August 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurich (Switzerland)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose a cutting from a Trieste paper which a friend of mine has sent me. Curiously enough it mentions an article which (the writer states) I sent to the Piccolo of Trieste from … the isle of Wight! I suppose he alludes to an article I wrote from Aran. There are two other inaccuracies: the allusion to a Spanish criticism (an honour I have not yet received) and to the deathmask of Beethoven—it was a Pompeian theatre mask. As I have begun to comment on this cutting I had better explain the interlined writing. The allusion is to my brother Stanislaus, who is nicknamed in Trieste ‘omo salta’ (the man on springs) on account of his walk.

I ought to have replied before now to the material points raised in your letters. I have no wish to submit my novel to Mr Richards unless you should decide not to publish it. I am glad you have found a person who will print it. I never heard anything more of Mr Bazile or Mr Fels. If Mr Bagnan wants to translate my novel perhaps he could let me see three pages of his translation from the first, fourth and fifth chapters. I hope this will not seem offensive. I beg you, when writing, to express to him at the same time my thanks for his friendly praise. Mr Davray wrote to me asking me to write for a review of his (Anglo-French Review). I replied that I could not do so but sent him two pieces of verse. One he printed, the other he sent back as he was afraid ‘the students who read his review would not like it’.

As regards Verbannte I cannot find out what has happened. It seems to have been a stormy evening. The play was at once withdrawn. The management of the theatre wrote, saying that it was ‘a great success’ and that ‘they were very glad to have been the first to produce it’. The Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung and Neue Freie Presse had articles about the performance—one contradicting the other. Now I hear it was withdrawn because the chief actor fell ill—perhaps as a result of my lines—and that it is to go into the autumn bill. I wrote to Mr Linati about an Italian translation.

I should like to see Mr Quinn’s article—I do not know Mr Pound’s address.

I hope you have enjoyed your holiday.

With kind regards and renewed good wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 September 1919

Universitätsstrasse 29, III, Zurigo

MS. Cornell

Caro Stannie: In risposta alla tua espressa. Da tre settimane, cioè, dall’arrivo della lettera di Franz tengo a loro disposizione una camera e difatti abbiamo aspettato anche l’arrivo del treno da Chiasso. Adesso visto che non vengono ti ho spedito oggi la prima cassa dei miei libri. Seguiranno ad intervalli due altre casse di libri, una cassa di quadri e la mia macchina da scrivere. Dal momento che non si può fare niente mediante la corrispondenza porterò tutta la baracca a Trieste. In quanto poi al resto non avendo più un quartiere ed occorrendomi adesso un quartiere di 6 stanze con stanza da bagno e luce elettrica pare meglio non decidere niente prima del nostro arrivo. Conto di poter partire al 1 ottobre ma ciò dipende anche da altre cose: vale a dire, il consenso della mia padrona di casa, l’attestato del ginnasio dove Giorgio studia e gli affari della compagnia teatrale inglese qui che ho fondato e che dirigo finanziariamente. Spero che all’ultimo momento non succeda qualche bestialità consolare che impedisca il mio piano perche allora mi troverei qui sul lastrico. Sono grato al mio amico, di cui non ricordo più il nome di essersi reso garante per me. Mi pare, però, a giudicare dal contegno dell’applicato col quale parlai che ci vuole un intervento più energico e più influente. Il fatto che il permesso per il mio ritorno mise 6 settimane a venire da Trieste a Zurigo e che mi fu reso noto solo quando era stato telegraficamente sollecitato è abbastanza eloquente.

Ti ho spedito altri fascicoli del mio romanzo, cioè, Lestrygoniani, Scylla e Caridde e Le Roccie erranti. Le Sirene non sono state ancora stampate. Scrivo attualmente II Ciclope. Quà e là dei brani sono stati tolti rovinandomi il testo. Questi però saranno restituiti quando il libro sarà pubblicato. Si stamperà, credo, nel Giappone. Gli Esuli ebbero un’accoglienza burrascosa e contrastata a Monaco, ma il pezzo fa parte del cartellone autunnale. Non ero presente. Ringrazio Francini del suo saluto che contraccambio cordialmente. Il giornale promessomi non mi giunse mai. Anzi sarebbe bene mandarmi di quando in quando qualche giornale triestino che possa farmi un idea dell’ambiente.

Rispondimi espresso e raccomandato, prego. Saluti

Jim

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To G. HERBERT THRING, 21 September 1919

Zurich

TS. Texas

Dear Sir, My attention has been drawn to a letter recently written by your Society to Mr Curti, Solicitor, of Zurich. As the partner of Mr Sykes I should like to bring a few facts to your notice.

Mr Sykes and I founded the English Players company in Zurich in April 1918 for the production of plays in the English language. The company produced plays in English in spite of difficulty, boycott and financial loss, and was the only enterprise of the kind in Switzerland during the war. It was impossible for Mr Sykes to obtain in some cases the consent of the dramatists owing to the postal delays, censorship and frequent and prolonged closure of frontiers, although every effort was made to avoid what might have seemed an infringement of literary courtesy. Mr Sykes was in direct communication with Mr Edward Martyn, who gave him permission to produce The Heather Field, with Mr Meyer, agent of the late Stanley Houghton, who gave him permission to produce Hindle Wakes, and with Mr Robert Ross (deceased) and Mr Samuel French with regard to the production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. He has asked Mr Curti therefore to let him know the names of the authors who are claiming fees. The question of the production on the Continent of Europe of plays in the English language seems, moreover, to be an exceptional case not foreseen in the clauses of the Berne convention. Mr Sykes was legally advised on this subject at the outset that such productions were free.

The aims and achievements of the company are such, I believe, as will be approved of by the members of your Society, and, owing to Mr Sykes’ energy and persistance, the prospects financially and artistically are now much brighter.

My name as a writer will perhaps not be unknown to you, and I am indebted to your Society for generous and timely aid in the past. I trust that the proposal which Mr Curti is forwarding you on our behalf will meet with your approval and put an end to any misunderstanding which may have arisen. I am, dear Sir, Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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From MRS EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK, 10 October 1919

[Zurich]

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr. Joyce:—I am glad that an English publisher is appearing. This is fine. I am not free on Sunday, so I will say ‘Good-bye’, in this letter. I know that you will reach Trieste safely, and that you will continue your work there with enthusiasm and with inward conviction.

With good wishes for your journey. Sincerely,

Edith McCormick

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From MRS EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK, 13 October 1919

[Zurich]

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr. Joyce:—Thank you for the fine manuscript,—which I am glad to keep for you with the understanding that, when for any reason, you want it, you have only to write for it. As the Bank told you, I am not able to help you any longer financially, but now that the difficult years of the war are past, you will find publishers and will come forward yourself, I know.

Wishing you a good journey. Sincerely,

Edith McCormick

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From G. HERBERT THRING (of the Society of Authors), 15 October 1919

[London]

TS. T.E. Hanley

Dear Sir, I wrote to Mr. Shaw about the statement you made in your letter to me as to the production of ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ in England being an indictable offense. Without prejudice to any action Mr. Shaw may see fit to take, he now wishes me to tell you that you are evidently alluding to the fact that the Lord Chamberlain has refused the license for public performance in the theatres which are under the Lord Chamberlain’s control. But he has licensed a version which is for copyright purposes identical with the printed version; and this licensed version has been performed in London in a duly licensed theatre. Further, as you must be aware, the printed version can be performed in Ireland and any other part of the British Empire where the Lord Chamberlain is not in control, and has been performed in London, technically in private, but really in public. Performances of unlicensed plays by various authors have taken place repeatedly and the suggestion that such performances are indictable offenses would be absurd if alleged in defence of an honest action; such a defence is not made any more plausible or creditable if alleged in support of a flagrant infringement of copyright.

I think I made it clear to you in my last letter that the persistent evasions by the responsible parties are creating a very bad impression on the Society of Authors; and unless a prompt and full settlement is made the Society will have no alternative but to press their legal claims to the utmost. Yours truly, G.

Herbert Thring

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 16 October [1919]

Milan

MS. Cornell

arriviamo domani sera sette joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 October 1919

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I sent you a telegram from Milan on my way here with this new (temporary) address. My former address here will not find me. The roof and upper stories were destroyed by bombs shortly after my departure and last year my flat was cleared out and the contents (whatever remained after requisitioning on the part of the authorities and … requisitioning on the part of uninvited visitors) placed in storage. As it is almost impossible to find a flat I do not know how long I shall be at this, my brother’s, address where, however, you can address correspondence. The situation in fact is extremely discouraging and but for your help to me it would be disastrous.

A few days before I left I forwarded to Mr Pound the episode of the Cyclops but I suppose there are many mistakes as I had not time to revise the typescript carefully. I should be glad to receive a copy of the article by Mr Quinn to which you allude in your last letter and also two copies of my novel which I should like to present to two friends of mine here, count Francesco Sordina and baron Ambrogio Ralli who very kindly obtained a safeconduct for me four years ago.

I have heard nothing more of the projected French, Italian or Polish translation of that book. An offer for a German translation was made to me, definite, but I should not like to conclude anything unless I knew or trusted the translator.

I think I am forgetting to write about many things but I have been and am so overloaded with extremely tiresome business of all kinds for the last three weeks that I cannot remember. If there is anything which I am neglecting will you please remind me.

With many apologies for this jaded and confused letter and with kindest regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 7 November 1919 [Postcard]

Trieste

Not a word from Quinn. Not a flat to be had. Prices very high. Will write fully in a day or so. Give no information about me to anyone. Your pictures and my third case of books have not come. Glad to hear you are working. My regards to Paul and Hummel. No wine here like the archduchess…. As for Ulysses—it is like me—on the rocks.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 November 1919

via Sanita, 2, Trieste

Dear Mr Pinker: On receipt of this will you kindly cable to Huebsch for a cabled remittance to you, either in settlement of any royalties due or an advance of royalties on the books published or on Ulysses (which he can have for America on any terms he likes provided my text be not tampered with). I find myself in very difficult circumstances here and, as part of my house was ruined by air attacks and the furniture removed and many of my things stolen and moreover as it is almost impossible to find a flat owing to military congestion in the city and as the prices are extremely high, I have no resource but to ask you to do all that you can in the matter. You can remit the money to me only by cheque in registered express cover as the money order department of the Italian P.O. is not yet open in this annexed zone. After the New Year my position will be sensibly better but I am in most urgent need of funds at the present moment and, in fact, every day is of importance to me. I shall be very grateful if you will kindly acknowledge receipt of this letter by return of post.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 7 December 1919

via della Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Many thanks for cheque remitted and kindly thank also Mr Huebsch for his prompt reply. I am glad you have almost disposed of the Danish rights and hope the matter will soon be finished and the amount paid over. Is there any chance that Mr Lennox Robinson, manager of Abbey Theatre, Dublin, would put on Exiles? Is there not a clause in my contract with Mr Richards which states that the publisher forfeits right to republish if he does not use it within a certain time? I mention this because many people complain that they cannot buy Dubliners. I enclose a letter from New York which explains itself. Of course Mr Huebsch is to have the refusal. The text hitherto published in Little Review is not my text as sent on in typescript. The book is to be published as I wrote it with a few additions on the proof. With many thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CARLO LINATI, 10 December 1919

via Sanità, 2, III, Trieste

MS. Yale

Egregio signore: Grazie della sua lettera e delle gentili e lusinghiere parole. Domani Le manderò Esuli. Le accludo alcuni estratti di critica. L’esemplare che Le mando è un ‘advance copy’ e quindi è arrichito di non pochi refusi infelici. Non è d’indole contadinesco. Yeats mi disse che quantunque desiderasse far rappresentare la commedia a Dublino non aveva attori capaci di darla. Si sono troppo specializzati nel genere Synge e Gregory ecc. Però, tipi irlandesi come Berkeley, Sterne, Parnell e Swift sono di tutt’altro stampo. Quest’ultimo anzi è ricordato nella mia commedia—una lontana reminiscenza della strana storia Stella-Vanessa. Gli Esuli hanno già avuto il battesimo di fuoco a Monaco di Baviera al 7 agosto scorso in una versione tedesca Verbannte. Fu una serata alquanto burrascosa! Non ero presente perchè il permesso da parte del ministero degli esteri a Berlino si fece troppo aspettare. Riguardo alla sua (eventuale) traduzione potremmo forse vederci prima che sia ultimata. La ringrazio sentitamente dell’interesse mostrato nei miei lavori. Se sarà in grado di fare che la mia commedia sia rappresentata in Italia mi sentirò molto onorato. Una commedia non rappresentata è neanche un espulso morto. Saluti cordialissimi

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, N.D. (?) end 1919

via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Budgen: I enclose two letters, underlining two significant passages. As regards the letter from S. if you are manager of the E.P. at present the only message I wish you to convey is one of my regret for the constant trouble he encounters, which I hope he will succeed in overcoming. Personally, however, I cannot attend to this matter in the present disturbed state of my domestic economy. I wrote twice to the secretary of the authors’ union. They don’t want letters. They want cash. So do I and badly. I may say that if I had in my pocket the money I gave the E.P. lately—about 10,000 lire at present exchange I should be better off. This for yourself, however. I beg you to give my regards to Mrs S. and Mr S. with apologies for my silence—understandable in present circumstances. I hope he will write no more petulant letters to me who am in no way to blame.

As regards X. he seems to be threatening libel proceedings by his letter in which case yourself, Hummel and I will be led forth shackled ‘for they were malefactors’. Since I came here I wrote a long letter to Mrs M. asking her very urgently to consider the advisability of the revivability of her aid. That distinguished lady never answered. X. pretends he never knew my address here—another piece of fooling. He forgets only what he dislikes to remember, viz., that he promised me as a gift Doktor Jung Wandlungen der Libido (prolonged universal applause, shouts Hear Hear from a raughty tinker and an Irishman in the gallery). For God’s sake give those louts the go by. As for the Garryowen poetic lectures I am glad I was not there. Pound wrote ‘enthusing’ about the Cyclops episode…. Miss W. writes saying that after a perusal of it she found it hard to keep from interlarding her speech with I’s favourite adjective. By the way did you get the sealed packet, the bottle of wine, etc. There are in Mr Owen’s room about 40 or 50 copies of Verbannte. Could you remove them to your studio and sell them (for yourself I mean) whenever anyone comes in and drinks my health in Her Most Excellent Excellency’s the Archduchess’s most excellent piss (Pardon! Fendant de Valais). Only please keep 10 copies of the stage edition and 5 of the other. Also if Mrs M. doesn’t reply within a month I shall take the MS back.

No chance of a flat here. The town is full of rumours of my success (financial chiefly) in foreign parts so that I avoid all contact with people. Need I tell you what a great privation it is to me to have not here within earshot your over-patient and friendly self? I hope you will let me know in advance what you intend to do, if staying there or moving south. I have not written a word of Nausikaa beyond notation of flapper’s atrocities and general plan of the specially new fizzing style (Patent No 7728SP.ZP.BP.LP.). My regards to Paul Suter and D. Hummel. Next time I shall send you a letter for Miss Herter. Your pictures have now reached Chiasso only! Seemingly they are being admired en route. Please write me as soon as possible. It is quite easy as I find if you once sit down. How are you progressing artistically? This letter is full of materiality. So am I, alas!

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To CARLO LINATI, 19 December 1919 [In Italian]

Via della Sanita, 2, Trieste

Dear Signor Linati: I don’t know how to thank you for your kindness. You will find in the current number of the English publication Who’s Who some details about myself. I enclose anyway one of the printed proofs already corrected in 1916. I have lived here at Trieste from 1904 onwards. In 1914 the Austrian Government allowed me to move with my family to Switzerland (Zurich), where I remained till a little while ago. I suffered a good deal with my eyes at Zurich and underwent a grave operation, iridotomy. In 1916 1 received a gift from the Crown for literary merits, on the recommendation of the then Prime Minister, Mr Asquith. As for Italian, I began to study it when I was 9 years old. I was then in a Jesuit college. Later I took a degree in Romance languages. The story of my books is very strange. For the publication of Dubliners I had to struggle for ten years. The whole first edition of 1000 copies was burnt at Dublin by fraud; some say it was the doing of priests, some of enemies, others of the then Viceroy or his consort, Countess Aberdeen. Altogether it is a mystery. The story is told in a little manifesto, which is now in the possession of Dr S.O. Steinberg, c/o the Zürcher Post, Peterstrasse, Zurich. If you send him a card in my name, I am sure he will send it you. If you cannot write German, you can write to him just as well in Italian, as he speaks Italian quite well. As for the Portrait, it was refused by nearly all the publishers in London. Moreover, when the courageous review The Egoist decided to publish it, not one printing works in the whole United Kingdom could be found to consent to print it. It was printed in America. The sheets were sent to London and bound there. My new book Ulysses was to appear in the Egoist of London. The same old story. From the very beginning the printers refused again. It appeared in fragments in the New York Little Review. Several times it was taken out of circulation through the post, by the action of the American Government. Now legal action is being taken against it. Exiles raised a kind of storm at Monaco. My agent at Berlin writes to me that for the moment nothing can be done, that it would be better to wait for public opinion to quieten down. I hope all the same to get it put on in Italy. You could give it a push with the latest story. In England it is not even spoken of. It was put in the programme of the Stage Society together with Congreve’s Way of the World, and d’Annunzio’s Dead City (translation by Arthur Symons) but then removed again, owing to a protest by Bernard Shaw, who found it ‘obscene’.

I would very much like to read your books. I searched for and ordered them in vain in Zurich. They would interest me particularly as I am a personal friend of Yeats and knew Synge in Paris. Although, as you observe, my work enters in the infamy of the movement founded and conducted by them.

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1920

To FRANK BUDGEN, 3 January 1920

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Budgen: I hope you are alive, well and sold something in Basel. Your pictures came all right and are up. Machine arrived broken, books safe, total cost about 600 francs. The situation here highly unpleasant. No flat or sign of one. I have refused lessons up to the present but have been appointed to the school again—it is now a commercial university—one hour a day. For six weeks after my arrival I neither read nor wrote nor spoke, but as it cannot go on so I started Nausikaa and I have written less than half. Perhaps I can finish it for Feb. 2nd. No reply from Mrs M. It seems that gentility cannot be acquired in a single generation…. I heard nothing from Sykes or the English foulplayers, but people tell me they still perform. Linotti was here twice smelling around—God knows for what. X I met on New Year’s day in the street. He approached smiling (I suppose at my ridiculous get-up) and saluted. I replied. We now cook for ourselves in this household. Till yesterday I was paying 35 lire a day to my brother-in-law. Now I pay him half rent gas coal and we pig for ourselves. Golly! Apart from this is the damnable boredom. Not a soul to talk to about Bloom. Lent two chapters to one or two people but they know as much about it as the parliamentary side of my arse. My brother [knows] something but he thinks it a joke, besides he was four years in internment, has a devil of a lot to do and likes a gay elegant life in his own set. O shite and onions! When is this bloody state of affairs going to end? Have you the copies of Verbannte? If so sell them to anybody will take ’em and keep the cash for yourself. I suppose P.S. is now married. Give him my best wishes. Are you staying on in Zurich? Is there any God’s chance of your coming here for a week? I doubt if I can raise the whole lot. I could put you up however for that length of time and feed but there is the bloody fare. I might be able to go halves in it. Perhaps next month? Nausikaa will be finished, I hope. To abandon the book now would be madness. First half of Cyclops appeared in November with excision of the erection allusion. Do you ever see S. Lang? I wish he would send me back registered my novel. The copy is not mine but dedicated. On receipt of this approach an inkbottle with intention. I know it is a bore but I should like to hear your views and plans. By the way do you or did you know any Weavers in St Ives? I ask because Miss W. sent me a snapshot taken there. Verbannte appears to have gone under in Germany. Writing Ulysses is a tough job enough without all this trouble. The prospect of starting lessons again next month is damn unpleasant. Winter here is mild enough and will soon be over. Plenty of good opera but I never go. (Can’t because somebody either pawned or sold my dress suit and it costs 600 lire to buy one.) Perhaps if I had my own flat it might not be so bad. (I may remark that the greater part of the furniture here is mine.) Doing any kind of business upsets me. Schlie (Mrs Piazza’s man) is here—a decent sort of fellow—not a psychoanalyst. Had a card from Ruggiero. Thank him if you see him. I wish you a happy new year and hope to see you soon. As for travelling, being ex-British consul, you should find no difficulties, I suppose, but I daresay I am selfish as usual in suggesting such a troublesome and, to you, unprofitable move. In any case please write by return. Nausikaa is written in a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto l…!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chit chat, circumlocution, etc., etc. Not so long as the others.

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 5 January 1920 [Postcard]

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Thanks for card received. Will you please send me a bundle of other novelettes and any penny hymnbook you can find as I need them? All are well here except myself. Another thing I wanted to know is whether there are trees (and of what kind) behind the Star of the Sea church in Sandymount visible from the shore and also whether there are steps leading down at the side of it from Leahy’s terrace. If you can find out these facts for me quickly I shall be glad.

Renewed wishes for 1920 from all here.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 January 1920

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks indeed for your kind thought of sending me your photographs at Christmas. I am very glad to have them. I am sorry however that my silly verses caused you some moments of depression. They are not worth so much. I wonder then what kind of impression my tiresome interminable unexhil⁠[ar]⁠ating book Ulysses makes on you! I notice that the snapshot you sent is from Saint Ives. May I ask if you come from there? I have heard very much about it from a friend of mine, a painter. I have been inquiring about the best way to send the MS as the postal service in this annexed zone is not very good. I think my brother-in-law (who is cashier of the CzecoSlovak bank here) can arrange to have it sent with their mail in four different sendings. If this cannot be done I shall send it (also in four lots) by post. Of course if all or any of it goes astray I shall write it out again for you but it would be better for you to have the original. The ‘original’ original I tore up and threw in to the stove about eight years ago in a fit of rage on account of the trouble over Dubliners. The charred remains of the MS were rescued by a family fire brigade and tied up in an old sheet where they remained for some months. I then sorted them out and pieced them together as best I could and the present MS is the result.

The copies of the novel sent to Messrs Bemporad have arrived but those for Messrs Schimpff have not yet come. I fancy that many could be sold here but perhaps the exchange, so unfavourable to Italian buyers, will be an obstacle. Unfortunately I have not yet found a flat and have not as much quiet and freedom as I should like. I am working at the Nausikaa episode. It is very consoling to me that you consider me a writer because every time I sit down with a pen in my hand I have to persuade myself (and others) of the fact. However I hope to finish this episode during January.

I ought to return your kindness in sending me your photographs but, except for a few snapshots, I have no photograph of myself made between the year 1904 when I left Ireland and 1915 when I left Austria. I have however another made in Zurich for Mr Huebsch and one taken in Paris but do not wish to inflict them on you unless you would like to have them. I believe the photograph taken in Zurich is good but the others are not. Your photographs are excellent, I think. But when I sent a photograph some years ago to Mr Pound he wrote me a letter in alarm (wellfounded, as it came out afterwards) about the pathological condition of the eyes.

I renew my good wishes to you for 1920 and hope to complete my book during the year. With sincerest thanks and regards

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, N.D. (?) early 1920

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Aunt Josephine: I hope you are well and that the operation you spoke of went off successfully. I want that information about the Star of the Sea Church, has it ivy on its seafront, are there trees in Leahy’s terrace at the side or near, if so, what are these steps leading down to the beach? I also want all the information you can give, tittletattle, facts etc about Hollis Street maternity hospital. Two chapters of my book remain unfinished till I have these so I shall feel very grateful if you will sacrifice a few hours of your time for me and write me a long letter with details. My novel is translated into Swedish. The Italian translation of Exiles comes out in April. The American censor burned all the copies of last issue of Little Review on account of instalment of my book Ulysses.

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 17 [January?] 1920

33 Upper Ormond Quay, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dear Jim, I have been anxiously expecting to hear from you for some weeks back. There were some requests contained in my last two letters which you did not respond to, perhaps you did not receive them? I am in a dreadful state for clothes and boots. The prices now charged here are quite prohibative as far as I am concerned. Do, like a good fellow, write me and let me know if I may expect to see you again before I die. My time is very nearly up. So that there is no time to lose. I hope all with you are quite well? Give them my love. I have made a fresh will, leaving you all I have, some £150. Poor Lidwell’s death necessitated this, so that what you may send me will be returned with thanks. I shall be anxiously expecting to hear from you by return and with my best love I am still Your Fond

Father

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 January 1920

[Trieste]

MS. Yale

My dear Mr Budgen Sorry you cant come for Jim’s birthday but perhaps you may be able to come for Easter. We have not got over the loss of your company and often speak of you. Kind regards

Nora Joyce

Saluti a Sigg Hummell e Suter

N J

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [? February 1920]

[Trieste]

MS. Yale

Gloria in excelsis Deo! Nausikaa episode finished. Typing: and will send you a copy at once Cordialement votre

J.J.

Bien d’amitiés à Paul Suter et Danni Hummel.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, [Early February 1920]

via della Sanità 2, Trieste, Italy

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Hope you got Nausikaa. Do you like it? We wrote you two cards to wrong no in Forchstrasse. Did you get them. Will you do a few odd jobs for me. In Peterstrasse, Bahnhofplatz, in Ruff’s the photographer’s. I enclose 10 lire which you can change and get there two of my photos, 3/4 and profile mounted on thin cardboard (2 frs each) and send in one of their special envelopes to (registered):

J. Heap

c/o Little Review

24 W. Sixteenth Street

New York

They write, U.S.A. govt, burned whole May issue and threaten to suppress review on account of me. Wrote to Mrs M to know whether she wants MS of Ulysses. No reply! How the hell am I to get it back. When is your photo coming? Or when yourself? Oxen of the Sun now. Whoo! Any good news of your self. Regards to P.S. and D.H. Blast this pen! Please write. The damn school owes me 4 months arrears. If they pay up on 1 March I shall send you something. The exchange is awful. Conditions here rotten. Write! Write!! Write!!!

J.J.

Thanks for birthday wish ended badly, unpleasantness with meinem Schwager! If you see Ruggiero thank him for telegram for my birthday.

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), \18 February 1920]

[Trieste]

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Let me know please how you are, if ill or away. More than a fortnight ago I sent you Nausikaa and a letter. Did you get them. The chapter you may pass on to Sykes with instructions to send back to me registered when read without sending on to others. The U.S.A. Govt burned the whole last issue of Little Review and threatens to suspend license if Ulysses continues. Swedish translation of Portrait arranged. Italian ditto of Exiles comes out next month.

J.J.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), Postmark 24 February 1920

via Sanità, 2, III, Trieste

MS. Yale

The Nausikaa episode was sent to Budgen three weeks [ago] but not acknowledged. His address is bei Frei, Forchstrasse 168. Please apply to him for it and return it to me under registered cover when read. I arranged it so before I left Zurich. As regards E.P. I suggest you hang it up temporarily protecting the title and awaiting events. If you write an article about its doings I shall send it to the Anglo French Review where it may attract the notice of some Maecenas. The U.S.A. govt burned all last issue of Little Review and threatens to suspend license if Ulysses continues. Swedish translation of Portrait and Italian ditto of Exiles next month. Working on Oxen of the Sun. Position here very unfavourable. Friendly regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 February 1920

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Miss Weaver: I am sending this registered because several letters sent by me (including two to you) went astray it seems and also a few and some books addressed to me here. For the present it is better to register letters here as there is a great deal of confusion. About three weeks ago I sent the Nausikaa episode in duplicate to Mr Pound. If he has not sent it on to you will you please write to him for it. I heard from him this morning much to my relief for I feared that too had gone astray and the prospect of doing it all over again was not pleasant. A Mr Heaf or Heap of the Little Review wrote to me a very friendly and complimentary letter in which he said that the U.S.A. censor had burned the entire May issue and threatened to cancel their licence if they continue to publish Ulysses. This is the second time I have had the pleasure of being burned while on earth so that I hope I shall pass through the fires of purgatory as quickly as my patron S. Aloysius. I am working now on the Oxen of the Sun the most difficult episode in an odyssey, I think, both to interpret and to execute….

A painter in Zurich has a half done portrait of me which his friends call ‘Herr Satan’.

Exiles will come out in an Italian version next month in Milan the translator being Mr Linati who finds that book more suited to introduce my writings than the novel or the stories. Perhaps it is just as well that the letter in which I gave you several addresses here of booksellers did not reach you. I think any copies sent here would be wasted. Yesterday the English pound was at 62 with the result that the single copy of my novel at present here was priced at 24 lire. A 9/- book would sell for 36 lire. French novels cost 20 lire. So that Italians are now reading only the Italian novels priced at 4,5 lire.

I was interested to read what you told me in your last letter as I myself started to study medicine three times, in Dublin, Paris and again in Dublin. I would have been even more disastrous to society at large than I am in my present state had I continued. Perhaps I should have continued in spite of certain very adverse circumstances but for the fact that both in Ireland and in France chemistry is in the first year’s course. I never could learn it or understand in the least what it is about.

Mr Huebsch writes rather urgently about Ulysses. I shall tell him that it may be finished for publication late in autumn but without engagement on my side. If the type for the first half were set early in summer I could perhaps revise it then. I do not know whether they have my complete typescript in New York. It would be creating trouble to set from the Little Review as many passages are omitted and hopelessly mixed.

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To CARLO LINATI, 8 March 1920 [In Italian]

2 Via Sanita, Trieste

Dear Colleague: Many thanks for your prompt reply. I am returning your letter with corrections and clarifications of minor queries. I await the others. I am dispatching this express. Tomorrow I shall send the verses.

P.S. Will you allow me a word? I prefer, if possible, the title Esuli rather than Esigliati for two reasons. There already exists a French play Les Exilés which was performed recently in Milan. And moreover, as their exile is voluntary, I think that the past participle is out of place. In English there are two ways, Exiles and The Exiled, and also in Italian, but not in French, I think, where l’exil is the state of being exiled and not the person.

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To JOHN QUINN, 11 March 1920

via Sanità, 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Quinn: I received in due course your cabled remittance, advance of purchase money for MS of my book Ulysses, and now your letter confirming dispatch of same. I thank you for your prompt reply to my cable. The Nausikaa episode was sent off some time ago and I am working at the Oxen of the Sun. There remains to be written Circe of the adventures. The close of the book or Nostos proper is, like the Telemachia, in three parts, but simpler, and is in part written. In favourable circumstances, I hope the book will be ready for publication in late autumn, that is, if my agent draws up a contract now, if the terms are satisfactory, and if Mr Huebsch gets the first half in June. There must be no alterations whatsoever of my text, either that already consigned in typescript (the version in The Little Review is, of course, mutilated) or that added on proofs; and, in view of the six years’ unbroken labour which the book has cost me, I must have a first proof and a revise of the whole book. The Egoist will publish it in London and I hear that a printer has been found.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been translated into Swedish; and the Swedish rights of Ulysses are disposed of. Exiles (already translated into German and produced) will appear in an Italian translation next week in Milan, the translator being Mr Carlo Linati, who translated Synge and Yeats.

I am sorry to hear that you have been so dangerously ill and hope that you are now definitely well again.

I have not a very pleasant existence at present for this city is overcrowded and we are packed into one flat with seven other people. If you should see Colum I beg you to give him my regards. He acted in a most friendly way during the trouble in Zurich and I am grateful to him for it and also to his friends Mr Watson and Mr Thayer. I should be glad to hear whether any publicity has been given to my statement concerning Mr Consul Bennett and the then British Minister in Berne, Sir Horace Rumbold, and their joint efforts. The company gave nearly fifty public performances in all parts of Switzerland in spite of their opposition. No person in England would take the matter up, as was only to be expected.

I am not surprised to hear that nothing has come of the projected production of Exiles in America. The Stage Society in London kept the typescript for three years, put it on their programme, withdrew it (owing to a veto of Mr Shaw’s, as I am informed), then asked for it again and repeated the procedure. Some prolonged and fruitless negotiations took place also between my agent and the Abbey Theatre. Burnings, delays, deletions, translations which never appear (four people at different periods began translating my novel into French, but whether they got beyond the titlepage or not I never heard) and abortive productions make the material side of my literary life extremely tiresome. When I finish Ulysses, if I ever do, I shall probably rest completely for a year or two, for I certainly shall need a long rest.

I shall write to Mr Huebsch tomorrow. I owe him a letter for some time past.

With renewed thanks and sincere wishes for your permanent recovery

James Joyce

P.S. Please send all communications registered as the post here is very uncertain.

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To HENRY DAVRAY, 11 March 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italie)

MS. Stanford

Monsieur: J’ai reçu une lettre de M Edouard O’Brien, 25 Chalfont Road, Oxford qui désire publier mes vers Bahnhofstrasse dans un recueil de poésie (The English Poetic Year). Je l’ai prié de s’adresser à vous pour avoir la confirmation de ma permission que je lui donne, du reste, très volontiers.

Ci-inclus je vous envoie un article écrit par mon ex-associé dans une compagnie théatrale, M Sykes. Il nous semble que, bien que la compagnie ait dû pour le moment cesser son activité, peutêtre la chose en soi peut avoir quelque intérêt pour vos lecteurs. Comme vous verrez ‘The English Players’, société fondée par M. Sykes et moi, a tenté de faire connaitre au public suisse quelques unes des meilleures pièces de la littérature dramatique anglaise. Le fait seul qu’on est réussi à donner une quarantaine de representations dans les plus grandes villes de la Suisse, sans un dénier de subvention et même malgré beaucoup d’obstacle, est d’une eloquence singulière—au moins pour les personnes qui comprennent les difficultés de la situation.

Maintenant M Sykes se voit dans l’impossibilité de continuer. Il se peut que la publication de son article mène à la réprise de ses efforts. Vous pouvez faire ce que vous voulez de l’article, ou le publier tel quel ou en faire un précis. J’ai biffé seulement une allusion trop flatteuse pour moi que … ma modestie ne souffrait pas.

Agréez, Monsieur, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération

James Joyce

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To CARLO LINATI, 11 March 1920

[Trieste]

MS. Yale

Caro collega EccoLe i versi. La prego di voler dare un occhiata alle bozze. L’ultima parola del 1° verso è: gnash Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 13 March 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I enclose two A/S which I should have sent you before.

Address: Will you please note that this is Sanità not Vanità.

Exiles: A German translation of this Verbannte made and published at my expense (1900 frcs Swiss for the latter item) came out in Zurich, the house being an old Swiss firm. No A/S has yet been tendered me.

Dubliners: Does Mr Richards intend to republish this book or to forfeit his rights thereto? Chamber Music: A second edition of this came out, as I hear incidentally, two years ago. I never received from Mr Mathews any A/S.

Swedish translation: I should like to have a copy of this.

Italian translation: An Italian translation of Exiles (arranged for by me) will appear in April in an Italian review, act by act; the translator being Mr Carlo Linati translator of Synge.

Ulysses: This book is nearing completion. I suggest the contract be now drawn up, one clause being that an advance of royalties be payable on signature. I must get a revise after the first proof so that it would be well to have part of the book set after the drawing up of contract. My text is in typescript not to be tampered with. I shall feel obliged if you will see to this matter at once.

Royalties: As I intend to leave Italy on holidays early in summer I shall be glad to have a statement of royalties due on books as soon as possible, say towards the last week in June or first in July.

Exiles, production: Has this been offered to the Pioneer Players, Abbey Theatre or other management? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 13 March 1920

2 Via Sanita, Trieste

Dear Budgen: Just got your letter of 2/3 but hope your decision is not final. 1st. The passport difficulty is not a difficulty at all, I think, because probably on consignment of your F.O. pass they can issue you a consular pass. 2nd. As regards going to England how does the Trieste plan interfere with that? It is quite on the cards that I shall be going there or thereward provisionally about June or July. 3rd. The exchange rates are against you in England and in your favour here. That is for 27 or 30 francs you get 100 lire. Life is cheaper here than in Switzerland. 4th. Apart from me you have surely something to gain from a visit, even if brief, to this part of the world. And is it not in your interest to see certain things here and in Venice? A Greek friend of mine, Sofanopulos, was going to Z’ch. I asked him to see you and explain verbally the situation. If you consent to sacrifice three hours of the day you can earn 150 to 200 lire per week. As a matter of fact I had (or have) two pupils hanging over for you contingent on your arrival. I give no lessons. My brother is full up and has constantly to decline offers. If you see your way clear at all I believe a visit here might do you good. I understand that Switzerland is now impossible and perhaps you want to settle down in England, but before abandoning Europe it would do you no harm to see this part of it….

Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene: Lying-in-hospital. Technique: a ninepart episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon (‘Before born the babe had bliss. Within the womb he won worship.’ ‘Bloom dull dreamy heard: in held hat stony staring.’) then by way of Mandeville (‘there came forth a scholar of medicine that men clepen, etc’) then Malory Morte d’Arthur (‘but that franklin Lenehan was prompt ever to pour them so that at the least way mirth should not lack’) then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton/Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque (‘the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whore whose name she says is Bird-in-the-hand’). After a diary-style bit Pepys-Evelyn (‘Bloom sitting snug with a party of wags, among them Dixon jun., Lynch, Doc. Madden and Stephen D. for a languor he had before and was now having dreamed a strange fancy and Mistress Purefoy there to be delivered, poor body, and two days past her time and the midwives hard put to it, God send her quick issue’) and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This procession is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. The double-thudding Anglo-Saxon motive recurs from time to time (‘Loth to move from Horne’s house’) to give the sense of the hoofs of oxen. Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.

How’s that for High? Well, get hold of a pen now and tell me what you think of doing. I hope you come for a time anyway. Spring here is very pleasant. Opera continues after Easter. Sigfrido with one of the greatest Italian tenors, Bassi.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 23 March 1920

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Budgen: On receipt let me know by express or wire if you can come to Trieste at the beginning of April. This would not prevent you going to England in summer. Perhaps I too might go to Cornwall and then Ireland. My plan is this. Sell off what you can and don’t want. If you can put 300 frs in your pocket, outside fare, you get 1000 lire here owing to exchange. I will have a room ready for you. Re studio I think you could have Silvestri’s. I can introduce you to many of your craft here. I can get you lessons here, not tiresome, at 6 or 7 lire an hour. You will learn Italian. You will see the Mediterranean. You will surely find things to paint in this colourful place. Food is not so dear. You will see ME. You will hear (till you get sick) the bloody Oxen of the bloody Sun. If you want to scut there are always boats to take you by long sea or trains and we can raise the fare. If you want a job in a shipping office here you can probably get one. If you decide lose no time. Sell off. Buchmann will probably advance you somewhat, say 200 frs on a picture, seascape, to be painted here. Go if you decide to Italian consulate. Call yourself a painter, coming here to paint. I will work this end here and have your permission here.

Where is my bloody watch you bloody lousy robber that I trusted with the confiding beauty of my angelic nature. Where are Tripcovich’s Godforsaken goodfornothing letters about LUV? Where are the copies of that splendid masterpiece Verbannte by JAMES JOYCE

Answer at once.

P.S. My brother says he can get you lessons also at 10 lire an hour. A friend of his is head of the Strangers’ Movement Dept. BE ENERGETIC.

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To KURT WOLFF, 1 May 1920

via Sanità, 2, Trieste

MS. Yale

Sehr geehrter Herr: Vielleicht ware dieser Roman von mir geschrieben und von welchem ich Ihnen einige Presskritiken überreiche geeignet in deutscher Übersetzung für Ihre Sammlung ‘Moderne Bücher’. Einige meiner Werke sind schon in deutsch, italienisch und swedisch übersetzt. Wenn Sie wünschen könnte ich für Sie ein Exemplar verschaffen Hochachtend

Prof. James Joyce

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To CARLO LINATI, 2 May 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste

MS. Yale

Caro Signor Linati: Da dieci giorni tutti i negozi a Trieste (inclusi i librai) sono chiusi per lo sciopero dei commessi. Quindi non vidi nè il Convegno nè Poesia, Un’esemplare del primo mi giunse ieri mattina. Le ho spedito il II° atto di Esuli non appena ebbi la Sua espressa. Pensavo (causa certe dicerie in giro qui) mandarlo con qualche amico in partenza per costì. Spero Le giungerà in ordine ed a tempo. L’inchiostro e la carta andando male d’accordo ho corretto l’ultima parte colla matita. Ci sono quà e là degli [sic, for delle] ommissioni che ho lasciate stare. Si potranno rimpiazzare più tardi.

Cordiali saluti e ringraziamenti anche dell’articolo benevolo che m introduce ai lettori italiani.

James Joyce

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To CARLO LINATI, 11 May 1920 [In Italian]

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Mr Linati: On account of a sudden illness of his wife, Pound has left for Lake Garda, I think Sirmione. He wrote to me that he would like to have from you for the Dial, an American review, a short article dealing with the new literary movement in Italy. If you agree I will send it there direct (in English) or would you rather see Pound at his Venice address which I gave you before? As the strike is still on there are only one or two bookshops open. Il Convegno is not available and Poesia even less. May I trouble you to send me—cash on delivery—the copy containing my poems? I hope to receive soon the third act of Esuli. The enclosed article by Benco (who is preparing an article on my Ulysses for the Resto del Carlino) may interest you. If you would like to read Tarr I will have a copy sent to you from London.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 May 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I was sorry to hear that any relative of yours should have to undergo the operation of iridectomy. It is a dreadful ordeal—or was so for me but there were complications in my case that made it almost impossible. I hope it has been successful. That is the only thing to be said for it.

I sent you a copy of 1st act of Esuli and send also a paragraph in the Piccolo of here. Mr Pound wrote to me a postcard a week ago from Venice, saying that if I did not go there before 20 May he would come here. I wrote back express for further details and then received an express from him to say that, owing to Mrs Pound’s state of health, he was leaving Venice for the lake of Garda—so that it seems unlikely that I shall see him after all. As soon as I get his new address I shall send him on the Oxen of the Sun episode which is now being typed to forward to you and to New York.

I wrote to a Leipsig firm (Bernhard Tauchnitz, Dresdnerstrasse 5, Leipsig) about my novel and the head of the firm would like to have a copy with a view to including it in the Tauchnitz edition. If you approve of this will you please send him a copy by express registered post. Owing to the depreciation of mark and Lira (I do not think there will be any improvement for a long time) the English edition cannot find continental buyers. For instance only last week the only copy of my book in Trieste was priced at 40 lire! Of course nobody will buy at such a figure. Tauchnitz volumes sell at 3.75 or 4– now and there is more chance of sales at such a price. Of course I mention this as a suggestion and subject to your approval of such cession of continental rights. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 18 May 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste, Italy

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I take my pen in hand for to write you these few lines. The oxen of the bloody bleeding sun are finished. Typing nearly so. Will send you if I do not hear that you have changed address. If you are in city could you find out Sykes’ English address at the pension. Wrote him twice to Rome an important letter about E.P. A long article (sent by me, penned by him) appeared in D. Telegraph and now editor wants to get into touch with the company. It may be a chance for him. Where is he?

Next item. If I get in enough money by end of June I must get a holiday. As Ireland is impossible I thought of transporting family for 2 months to Welsh or Cornish coast. When and where are you going? When and where are we likely to meet? I mean if you are in London when I am passing through then. I dislike going for many reasons but I suppose I must. Couldn’t stick this place in summer.

No 3. It struck me that in some of your leisure hours you might feel inclined to make a few pen sketches or whatever they are about Ulysses. If you thought well of it could they not be placed somewhere (I am continually getting letters from unknown editors) and you get paid for them. S’elp me I’m alius a thinking o’ wot I ken do fer you. If you had of taken moy advoyse yid naw be rowlin in yer kerridge, saw ye wud. Is this a stupid idea? I suggest Bloom and the bat, dialogue between ‘I’ and Pisser Burke, Suter’s design of the Heimkehr, Father Conmee blessing the sinners, Bloom’s bath &c.

Please write to me about Oxen. It cost me 1000 hours of work I calculate. There remains Circe. The end is plainer sailing.

I am sure Zurich must be horrible now. But I should like a litre of Fendant in that famous corner. By the way, what about that photograph? Remember me to the Suters and their sister. Greetings from us all here and in view of the limited time please drop a line on receipt.

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, 24 May 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: I wrote you twice express to Rome but had no answer. The article you wrote at my suggestion appeared in the Daily Telegraph of 1 April and attracted attention. Mr Davray, editor of Anglo-French review, to whom I sent it chose that means as more likely to win attention to it. He writes that the editor of D.T. wishes to get into touch with E.P. Will you see to this matter? It would be well to send a line of thanks to both.

I hope Mrs Sykes and yourself are well. The Oxen of the [Sun] is finished. It will be sent to you, when read, by Budgen. Please return it here registered. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HENRY DAVRAY, 2 June 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste (Italy)

MS. Yale

Monsieur: Avant tout je vous prie de m’excuser si je vous réponds après un délai si prolongé. M. Sykes faisait un tour en Italie et immédiatement après avoir reçu votre lettre je lui écrivis exprès à plusieurs adresses et j’attendais toujours sa réponse mais inutilement. J’ignorais jusqu’à ce matin son adresse en Angleterre mais la voilà finalement:

M. Claud Sykes

Firfield

Merrow

Guildford

Je vous remercie de la bonne idée d’avoir envoyé l’article au Telegraph (au directeur duquel j e vous prierais d’exprimer aussi ma reconnaissance) et j’espère que la publication aura pour conséquence une reprise de l’activité de la compagnie.

Le livre que j’écris Ulysse m’epuise tellement (il y a déjà plus de six ans que j’y travaille) que j’ai l’intention de prendre un bref congé. Je ne manquerai pas de vous envoyer quelque chose pour votre revue quand ce travail auquel je me suis condamné me laissera un peu de répit.

En vous renouvellant, au nom aussi de M. Sykes, mes remerciments je vous prie d’agréer, Monsieur, l’assurance de ma parfaite consideration

James Joyce

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark  3 June 1920

Portogruaro

MS. Cornell

Take the two tickets for Friday night and go whether I am back or not. If I arrive on Friday. No, better wait till I write again.

Very boring day with storm threatening

Jim

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To EZRA POUND, 5 June 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste

TS. Yale

Dear Pound: I went to the station this morning to start at 7:30. On my arrival there I was told that a passenger train which had left some hours before had collided with another, result as per enclosed cutting. Luckily I was not on it. I was also told that the 7:30 express Trieste–Paris is now off owing to strike. There are two trains between T and Desenzano, viz: one at 11:30 a.m. reaching there about the witching hour of midnight. The other at 5, travelling (or crawling) all night and reaching there about 6 next morning. This train is impossible for me.

Now it is my intention to travel over that line en route for England and Ireland as soon as possible but I think it is unprofitable to go now. I suppose after 12, June you will go to London. In that case we shall meet then, I hope. My only reason for accepting your kind invitation to Sirmione was to meet you. But still it would be a big expense for you. And also for me if I travelled secondclass. You may judge of the state of the railway here by second cutting.

My reasons for travelling north are these. I am in need of a long holiday (by this I don’t mean abandonment of Ulysses but quiet in which to finish it) away from here. Without saying anything about this city (de mortuis nil nisi bonum) my own position for the past seven months has been very unpleasant. I live in a flat with eleven other people and have had great difficulty in securing time and peace enough to write those two chapters. The second reason is: clothes. I have none and can’t buy any. The other members of the family are still provided with decent clothes bought in Switzerland. I wear my son’s boots (which are two sizes too large) and his castoff suit which is too narrow in the shoulders, other articles belong or belonged to my brother and to my brother-in-law. I shall not be able to buy anything here. A suit of clothes, they tell me, costs 600–800 francs. A shirt costs 35 francs. I can just live with what I have but no more. Since I came here I suppose I have not exchanged 100 words with anybody. I spend the greater part of my time sprawled across two beds surrounded by mountains of notes. I leave the house at 12:22 and walk the same distance along the same streets buy the Daily Mail which my brother and wife read and return. Idem in the evening. I was once inveigled into a theatre. I was once invited to a public dinner, as professor of the Scuola Superiore here, and next day received from there a request to subscribe 20,000 or 10,000 or even 5000 lire of Italian war loan. I must buy clothes so I think I ought to go to Dublin to buy them.

Thirdly, my two children have not slept in a bed since we came. They repose on hard sofas and the climate here is very trying in July–September.

Fourthly, the rate of exchange is readjusting itself. While the pound (I mean the other pound, the English not the American one) stood at 100 or 90 I could fight the prices here because my money was in English currency. Today the pound is at 62 and my brother-in-law (who is cashier of a bank here) says it is gravitating towards a lower price owing to certain trade manoeuvres or nobody could buy at such high figures. If it reaches 501 cannot swim any more but disappear under the surface. If I went to Switzerland I could not keep myself or family there: besides I dislike returning to places. Prices here are from 8 to 10 times what they were in 1914.

I could give lessons here (most people expected it of me) but I will not. I have a position in that school which the government has now raised to the rank of a university. My pay is about 3/– an hour for 6 hours a week. This I shall resign as it wastes my time and my nerves.

I cannot find a flat here. To find one you must hold in the right hand a check for 20,000 or 30,000 lire as keymoney.

So I propose to pass three months in Ireland in order to write Circe and the close of the book. I should return here with my family in October (if anyone finds a flat for us in the meantime) or, if not, without them in order to write the end of it.

Financially my position is that I shall receive on 25 June (£62–10–0) and if my New York publisher advances (£25). I presume that by the time this £87 is finished I shall [be] within measurable distance of 25 September when I get another £62–10–0. My wife and children could stay in Galway. I too there or in Dublin. The disturbed state of Ireland is of course a reason for not going. There may be other reasons. But I could not go to an English seaside town as it would be too dear. If I manage to do this and if you are in London at the end of June there are, I suppose, several things I could do such as seeing my agent. What do you think of this plan? I must finish my book in quiet even if I sell off the furniture I have here.

I hope you received safely The Oxen of the Sun and have sent it off to London and New York. I was bringing down another copy this morning. The worst of it is I fear that Linati may come down on you. I wrote him yesterday express that I should be in Sirmione tonight and mentioned your suggestion of our meeting!

Have you seen Poesia or shall I send it?

I hope Mrs Pound is still well. It is a pity that I cannot see my wav to go now but perhaps it is better so if I can manage the other and in that case we can meet more comfortably.

Let me know as soon as possible about the safe arrival of chapter.

With many regrets and regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. This is a very poetical epistle. Do not imagine that it is a subtlv worded request for secondhand clothing. It should be read in the evening when the lakewater is lapping and very rhythmically.

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From EZRA POUND to CARLO LINATI with a postscript from JAMES JOYCE, 9 June 1920

Hotel Eden, Sirmione

MS. Yale

Dear Linati: Joyce arrived here last night. From what he says, I take it we shall not be able to meet either here or in Milan.

I could possibly see you in Como?? If you are in Como itself. In any case I will see Dr. Ferri eri of Convegno.

The Dial will take definitely two articles per year from you. of 1500–1750 words.

I hope there may be much more both from you and from such other Italian authors as you introduce.

I am not an editor and have no ultimate decisions in these matters.

Your two articles should be aimed at convincing the barbarian public of the existence (if so) of interesting contemporary writers in Italy. (More restraint than shown by ‘Poesia’. The Dial is a very aged publication.) You might even open your first article by telling the absolutely ignorant foreigners what Italian periodicals he can read, and where he will find current works of literary merit.

Then introduce a few writers.

America has heard of D’Annunzio (a bastanza [sic]).

America has heard, possibly, of the death of Carducci.

Pascoli’s name probably conveys nothing whatever.

One article has appeared about the younger Italian writers.

I don’t think it advisable to say, at the start, that there are fifty interesting Italian poets and prose authors.

If you can arouse a spark of interest in two or three, and mention for two or three more, you will have done all that, in the circumstances, seems possible.

I am arranging an exchange with Convegno and will instruct the New York office to exchange with any other Italian publications you think advisable.

I want (with some immoderation) the Dial to do what the Mercure de France used to do. But God knows if there is the least chance of success in this enterprise.

Apart from your two little chroniques, I think stories, Contes, are the best material to submit. Perhaps better to send them straight to New York. Though in the case of some specially important mss. you might send it to me. I may leave Milan on the 14th or I may not be able to leave until the 18th or 19th.

If I find that affairs detain me, I could possibly come to Como in the interval.

Best address for answer to this note is c/o

Thos. Cook

7 Via A Manzoni

Milano.

I don’t know how closely you may have come into contact with the Americano-Anglo public? It is an animal.

The Editors ask me to send 10,000 words a month English and 10,000 words continental.

They are optimistic, very, in a belief that the American reader will stand so great a proportion of matters not directly flattering to his vanity and provinciality.

However, let us hope, they succeed, and that the space given to Italian letters can be gradually enlarged.

If you can say, in yr. articles anything to make them want to read your contemporaries, I shall be grateful.

If you do find a few short stories that would interest the readers, this would be still further service.

We can not yet print poems in Italian.

You might in addition prepare from time to time brief reviews of really important books.

Works of status of Joyce, Lewis, Eliot.

Such terms as Buzzi’s ‘Il GIGANTE’ simply won’t carry in the more sluggish northern speech.

The English don’t like it, and the American has had his belly filled with showmen.

I am merely putting down practical hints, in case we do not have a chance for the clarifying grace of conversation. Yours sincerely

Ezra Pound

Caro signor Linati: Eccomi quà col amico Pound. Ci dispiace assai che non è stato possibile combinare un appuntamento—specialmente visto le dolorose circonstanze che le furono d’impedimento. Comprendo benissimo come deve essere penoso. Purtroppo ho sofferto un po’ anch’io.

Spero che le proposte del Pound le saranno grate. Fra qualche settimana passo per Milano. Forse ci vedremo. Smemorato come sempre ho dimenticato il suo indirizzo a Como. Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY (Postcard), 17 June 1920

via Sanità 2, III, Trieste

MS. National Library

Dear Aunt Josephine: Thanks for letter to which I shall reply more fully. As regards the gazette or police news or whatever the devil it is it was always on sale in low newsagents. You must be misinformed unless it is a brandnew regulation. Well, can you obtain for me Reynold’s or Lloyd’s Weekly News or News of the World for the weeks ending? Keep them till my next card when I shall tell you where to send them either to Paris or to London. We leave here, I expect, in a fortnight but I must remain a week or so between Paris and London. More anon. Thanks.

Jim

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 22 June 1920

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Mr Huebsch: I have just heard from Mr Pinker and have written to Miss Anderson to send you on the typescript of Ulysses. The last adventure Circe is being written. The close of the book is drafted and I shall send you it in duplicate this autumn. I hope you will be able to arrange your publication for January next when the English edition is also to come out.

In about ten days I hope to leave Trieste for a holiday of some months. I am going first to Paris but may stop there. Please send any correspondence for me to Mr Pinker who will forward it to me. I shall be obliged if you will also remit him for me the amounts of royalties due or advance of royalties as, although I have enough to start my holiday, I shall not be able to get very far and shall expect these sums in order to continue it. My last chapter Oxen of the Sun cost me about 1000 hours’ work so that I need a rest. The whole book has taken six years.

With thanks in advance.

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To CARLO LINATI, 1 July 1920 [In Italian]

Via Sanita 2, Trieste

Dear Mr Linati: I hope to arrive in Milan on Sunday after 11 p.m. I am going to Paris and as I am travelling with my wife and children and also considering the unfavourable circumstances (heat, hurry, absence of you and Ferrieri) I think it better to postpone our meeting until September when I shall be in Milan again. If however you have succeeded—as I hope and pray—in finding by the good offices of some friend two rooms with two beds in some hotel not too far from the station, would you send me a wire about it to Venice c/o Lt Dorissa, or c/o Telegraph Office, Central Station, Milan. I shall stay in Venice for a day. I shall be leaving Trieste on Saturday at 11 a.m. and Venice on Sunday at 5 p.m. My address in Paris will be: chez M. Ezra Pound, Hôtel de l’Elysée, rue de Beaune 9, Paris.

In great haste and half dead through the formalities of Consulates and others.

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Part IV

PARIS
1920–39

1920 (cont.)

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 July 1920

9, rue de l’Université Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I arrived here with my family three days ago. My intention is to remain here three months in order to write the last adventure Circe in peace (?) and also the first episode of the close. For this purpose I brought with me a recast of my notes and MS and also an extract of insertions for the first half of the book in case it be set up during my stay here. The book contains (unfortunately) one episode more than you suppose in your last letter. I am very tired of it and so is everybody else.

Mr Pound wrote to me so urgently from Sirmione (lake of Garda) that in spite of my dread of thunderstorms and detestation of travelling I went there bringing my son with me to act as a lightning conductor. I remained two days there and it was arranged when I explained my general position and wishes that I should follow him on to Paris. I returned to Trieste but I did not believe that I should ever succeed in wheeling the caravan of my family out of it—or if I did that I should ever succeed in reaching Paris. For this reason I thought it better to wait before writing to you and have delayed also a few days since I came here because even then I was by no means sure that I could find rooms here. These have been found and it seems that my address will be rue de l’Assomption, 5, Passy, Paris. But I am not there yet so for a few days more will you please address letters to me c/o Mr Ezra Pound, Hôtel de l’Elysée, rue de Beaune 9, Paris?

I hope you duly received Oxen of the Sun which Mr Pound sent you on from Italy. Mr Froment Fels, editor of L’Action, wishes to begin the serial publication of the French translation (to be made by Mme Ludmilla Savitsky who has an article on Mr Aldington in the last issue of the Anglo-French Review) in the next number, to be preceded by a translation of Mr Pound’s article on me in his last book Instigations. He also wishes to draw up a contract for the publication of the novel in book form when the serial publication is complete. You may remember that he wrote to me about this a year and a half ago in Zurich. Mr Lugné Poë, formerly manager of the Odénon and now of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, has taken Exiles to consider it for production. A translator for this has also been found and, I believe, a publisher. You would greatly oblige me if you could send me a copy of Exiles for the translator and place the amount to debit of my account. Also if it is not too much trouble I should like three copies of the Egoist, 18 January, 1913, the number which contained the story of Dubliners, as there is someone here who wished or wishes to translate some of the stories.

I hope that all this will lead to something practical. It is all due to Mr Pound’s energy.

I hope also that I shall be able to finish the twelfth adventure at my ease. Like its fellows it presents for me great technical difficulties and for the reader something worse. A great part of the Nostos or close was written several years ago and the style is quite plain. The whole book, I hope (if I can return to Trieste provisionally or temporarily in October) will be finished about December after which I shall sleep for six months.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 12 July 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: MSS came today and sent them on. Am anxious to know if you have safely the envelope left on the credenza with documents. French translation of novel begins in L’Action 1 August. Book publication when serial finished. Lugné Poe, manager Odèon now of L’Oeuvre considering Exiles for production. Translator and publisher for this also found. Admirer of mine has placed 3 room flat, furnished, at my disposal for three months. Address: rue de l’Assomption, 5, I, Passy, Paris. Please let me know about documents. Stopped in Venice two days. Last moment met D. casually. He promised to call at hotel and wire Gattorno Milan for rooms but never turned up after. Linati had rooms ready but the damned post delayed his letter. However we found them. No stop in Switzerland but stayed night in Dijon. Saluti a tutti. Ask Frank if he wants French assignats of the revolution period.

Jim

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 15 July 1920

Rue de l’Assomption, 5, Passy, Paris

Dear Mr Pinker: I have received your letter in reply to my urgent telegram of Tuesday. I do not understand the cause of the delay in the remittance of royalties and advance on contracts from New York as I wrote to Mr Huebsch from Trieste about a month ago. I have cabled him again today. The result to me is disastrous as I am here with my family without any means of existence. I fully relied on finding one or both of these remittances here on my arrival and, as matters stand at present, unless they reach me by Tuesday next I do not see any way to live. I am enabled to exist till then thanks to the kindness of Mr Pound.

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To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI (Postcard), 19 July 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Francini

Caro Francini: Grazie della lettera. Sto all’indirizzo qui sotto. Un ammiratrice (che traduce attualmente il mio romanzo, la la puntata uscirà in agosto) ha posto a mia disposizione gratis un quartiere ammobiliato di 3 stanze. È possibile che la commedia sarà rappresentata al Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. Lugné Poë la legge. La vita è caretta ma la metà di Trieste almeno. Giorgio probabilmente entrerà per 3 mesi in un ufficio—non tanto per lucro quanto per non annoiarsi troppo. Circe progredisce di nuovo. Tanti saluti a te ed alla tua famiglia

James Joyce

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From EZRA POUND to JENNY SERRUYS, Postmark 20 July 1920

3 Rue de Beaune

MS. Bradley

Chère et Delicieuse, Yes, I know he is a great author; in fact the best prose author we have, since James (Henry) and Hardy.

But still, and for Christ’s sake, get him a bed for his too large son to sleep on and some (if possible) bedding.

This prayer after a day’s hell hunting visas—and I also a respectable author whose soul—such as it is—vale et me ama—should not be dragged down to a question of sheets and trucklebeds for the errors J.J.’s his misspent premalthusian youth Benedictions,

E.P.

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To JENNY SERRUYS, 22 July 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Bradley

Madame Je vous envoie ci-inclus quelques extraits des critiques de mon roman et de la pièce aussi bien que l’histoire (en forme de lettre publique) du livre de nouvelles. Mr Pound est parti hier matin et je l’ai prié de vous envoyer directement de Londres un exemplaire du ‘Portrait’.

Je vous remercie de votre intérêt bienveillant et vous prie d’agréer l’assurance de ma parfaite consideration.

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE with a note to FRANTISEK SCHAUREK, 25 July 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, MSS of Ulysses arrived safely and I sent them on. Odyssey very much in the air here. Anatole France is writing Le Cyclope, G. Fauré the musician an opera Penelope. Giraudoux has written Elpenor (Paddy Dignam). Guillaume Apollinaire Les Mamelles de Tirésias, I hope during the week to have definite news about translations of novel and play. First chapter of former nearly finished. The translator, a Madame Bloch, put this flat at my disposal, free, for three months. She has two. Pound wanted to get the Duchess of Marlborough to apply for the position vacated by Mrs M. but her bloody old father W K Vanderbilt died here in the next street to us the day before yesterday, very inconsiderately, I think. It is not impossible that Giorgio will get some kind of temporary work to keep him from yawning in the office of the brother-in-law of my other translator (of the play) Mlle. Jeanne Serruys. Lugné Poe is to give his decision next Friday about putting it on at L’Oeuvre. Called to Burberry’s here who are laying in autumn and winter stocks.

As regards the revolver university, perhaps the place is closed, in which then there is 850 or 1000 lire there for me. I forget which. Anyway give Francini 100 of it and ask Frank to have made out a cheque (not crossed to me on their Paris bankers for the equivalent of the rest in French franks—which please send on to me registered and express. I enclose a letter for him. If you get this on Wednesday, say, you might call to school and see Benedetti. The best time is between 12.30 and 2 so that if the place is closed for repairs you can get the cash or, if not, arrange to get it on Saturday and Frank can prepare the cheque on Friday.

We read about the troubles in Trieste. Those in Ireland are still worse. I regretted to observe the barometric depression to which you allude. The perusal of my innocent pages is the only dispeller of illusions which repays the money invested. Madam Circe advances regally towards her completion after which I hope to join a tennis club.

Jim

Caro Frank: Vuoi farmi il piacere di far prepare [sic] uno chèque su Parigi (non sbarrato) per l’importo in franchi francesi equivalente a 750 lire italiane. Stannie ti rimetterà il denaro che deve incassare alla scuola per me. Grazie d’anticipo.

Tempo bellissimo qui ed un quartiere ammobiliato gratis. Siamo vicini al bosco di Bologna d’una parte ed alla Senna dell’altra. Spero che Eileen si sia rimessa della sua indisposizione. Salutamela—nonche le bambine.

Non posso scrivere con questa vanga di penna. Fammi sapere se vuoi degli assignats del periodo della rivoluzione francese. Saluti cordiali

Jim

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 27 July 1920

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

Dear Budgen: Glad to hear from you as I wrote to you several times in vain. Possibly letters miscarried. Am writing Rösi Suter by this post. I remain at above address till October at least. Have a small flat, partly furnished, which a friend put at my disposal. Try to stop a few days in Paris. If you like I can fix you a cheap room in a small hotel down here unless you want to put up at the Ritz. If it costs you 5 frs Swiss a day there the exchange being 240 you would have 12 frs a day here and you can live well inside that. Besides I want to hear you on the Oxen episode and I want to bore the life out of you with Circe which is half written. The Portrait is being translated into French and perhaps the play will be put on at L’Oeuvre. This is a very bad month but I did two big chapters in it all the same. Circe is the last adventure, thank God. Hope you get something out of the M’Cormick Stiftung. Just mention my name. Get your passport made out also at French Consulate for sojourn of 3 months here, though I believe you can stay 12 days without it. Still it is better to get the British one marked for stay or travelling in France or England. The French will do this for you if you say you were a British consular employee and the British will do it for you if you say you are just coming to visit me. When travelling you get into those waggons called railway coaches which are behind the locomotive. This is done by opening a door and gently projecting into the compartment yourself and your valise. A man in an office will give you a piece of cardboard in exchange for some money. By looking at it attentively you will see the word Paris printed on it which is the name of this stop. There are seats for you to sit on in the carriage but you must not get out of it while it is moving as in that case you might be left behind. Now may the almighty God bless you and enable you to carry out these instructions of mine to you this afternoon. Saying which I hereby take you by the hand and remain, dear sir, most expectantly yours.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 29 July 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Please write here and send back Oxen of the Sun when read. I remain here with my family for 2 or 3 months to write Circe. I wrote you 2 days ago to Manchester. Your card of 16 reached me here today Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, 31 July 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Pound: Messrs Box and Cox, interviewed by you, sent me three days ago with a much-ado-about-nothing letter a crossed cheque (£10) drawn by Box on Cox which, as I foresaw, no bank in Paris would touch with a 40 foot pole. Finally Miss Beach put it into her account and paid me the money—470 frs. A series of articles ought to appear in the press, possibly by cable also to U.S.A. e.g.: Joyce gets Large Haul. Prompt Pinker Saves Desperate Dedalus. Glut of Greenbacks for Poet in Poverty. The enclosed letter from Huebsch is, I think, dubious; and his £25 on account of royalties on Ulysses seems to me a very remote possibility. He will probably remit £9.19.0 royalties to date, and Pinker will write asking me to send him a P.O. for 1/– due by me to him in excess of advance.

26 was Lucia’s birthday: 27 Giorgio’s. Not having received any money I was sitting gloomily silent on the latter day when Mr Rodker arrived. Hearing my story Mrs Rodker and he very kindly invited this whole vagabond family out to dinner which was providential. Goll, whom I knew in Zurich, called. He wants books for a modern anthology and talked of buying German rights of Portrait for 7– francs sometime, if possible, perhaps. I heard no more about the bed so I wrote to Bradley but had no answer. I heard and saw no more of the many lucky mortals who made my acquaintance here. I suspect that the pleasure my exhilarating company gave them will last for the rest of their natural existences. Except Vanderpyl. He says that Fels is hopelessly in debt, Action doomed to disappear etc. but Mrs Bloch has already done the first chapter.

As regards the information concerning the intelligent government official (who should go with Pinker as secretary to the Nith Office when Rumbold is made king of Neland) I believe the instigation came direct from the consul in Zurich, Mr Percy Bennett, at present in Panama. As no one has taken any steps to remind him that he is a public servant he can sleep peacefully. The typescript could not have seemed suspicious except Sirens which was published long after the armistice. And as for said government official if he has no money to give let me never hear of him again in this life or the next. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. of Quinn. Nothing. Rien. Nichts. E poi nulla.

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To JENNY SERRUYS, 5 August 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Bradley

Chere Madame: Je vous remercie de votre aide bienveillant et regrette que mes conditions actuelles m’ont obligé à vous importuner à mon égard [?] à un temps si critique. J’espère que la santé de votre mère soit maintenant rétablie à tel point de ne vous créer plus d’inquiétude.

Vous m’avez fait aussi un grand plaisir en me prêtant le livre de M. Giraudoux que je vais lire avec beaucoup d’intérêt.

En attendant le plaisir de vous revoir je vous prie d’agréer, chère madame, avec mes remerciements renouvelés, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération.

James Joyce

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From T.S. ELIOT, 11 August 1920

18 Crawford Mansions, Crawford Street, W.1

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr. Joyce, Ezra Pound has given me a package for you. I shall be in Paris Sunday the 15th and shall be leaving on Monday. I shall be at the Hotel de l’Élysée, 3 rue de Beaune, where Pound was. I hope you can dine with me that evening. Please

Can you meet me there about 6.30, or up to 7? You can take the parcel and I should very much like to meet you, at last.

You won’t have time to answer. But please come. Sincerely yours

T.S. Eliot

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To HENRY DAVRAY, 11 August 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

Cher Monsieur Davray: Je suis ici depuis quelque temps et compte y rester plusieurs mois pour écrire les derniers chapitres de mon nouveau livre Ulysse. En attendant Mme Ludmila Savitsky (une des collaborateurs de votre revue Anglo-française—elle a publié des vers et une étude sur la poésie du M. Aldington) a traduit en français mon roman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On pense à l’offrir en premier lieu au Mercure de France en publication mensuelle (ou bi-mensuelle?) et tant Mme Savitsky que les autres écrivains qui sont au courant du projet croient que quelques paroles de votre part à M. Valette pourraient faire tourner le bilan en mon faveur. Ayant lu et critiqué le livre vous-même vous pouvez parler en connaissance de cause. Ce serait du reste la troisième traduction en six mois—les autres étant la suédoise et l’espagnole. Je vous serai vraiment reconnaissant si moyennant votre présentation le Mercure ouvrira les portes pour abriter l’artiste irlandais, jeune homme.

Agréez, cher Monsieur Davray, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 August 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for the copy of Dublin Review. I read the article with special interest. It is curious that it was not sent on to me by the presscutting agency when it appeared. In fact I have not received anything from them for quite a long time so that perhaps I am already forgotten. I should like to know what is the decision of the printer you alluded to as Mr Rodker, to whom I spoke here, suggested another plan. He would like to read the episodes Nausikaa and Oxen of the Sun in order to estimate their length. Could you perhaps let him have them for a few days? As regards Mr Huebsch I understand that he is coming to London. His behaviour towards me lately has not been satisfactory and his attitude with regard to the book seems to me dubious. I am altogether too tired to enter into any controversy with him or anyone else about it. The final adventure Circe is giving me in all ways a great deal of worry. I have written the greater part of it four or five times. I am glad Ulysses had only twelve adventures. Circe [sic] herself had less trouble weaving her web than I have with her episode.

I have been asked by a Mr Vanderpyl to have a copy of my novel sent to Mr Pierre Mille, 12 Quai de Bourbon, Paris IVe, a writer and literary critic of Le Temps. I daresay you have been troubled enough with requests of this kind already. Two chapters are translated and there is talk of its appearing in the Mercure de France. There is also talk of Exiles being produced in French and Italian. I have not yet received the third act of the Italian version. I understand that the Spanish and Swedish translations are coming out soon. I hope that I shall soon have definite news to send you as I dislike talk that leads nowhere.

Mr Pound introduced me to a number of people here on whom I created anything but a good impression. He did his best to work up a reputation for my books here but whether he will be as moderately successful as he was in London remains to be seen.

Do you mean that the Oxen of the Sun episode resembles Hades because the nine circles of development (enclosed between the headpiece and tailpiece of opposite chaos) seem to you to be peopled by extinct beings? With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [27 August 1920]

Paris

MS. Cornell

The Right Heart in the Wrong Place

Of spinach and gammon

Bull’s full to the crupper,

White lice and black famine

Are the mayor of Cork’s supper

But the pride of old Ireland

Must be damnably humbled

If a Joyce is found cleaning

The boots of a Rumbold

S.O.S.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), [27 August 1920]

[Paris]

MS. Yale

The Right Man in the Wrong Place
(Air: My heart’s in the highlands)

The pig’s in the barley,

The fat’s in the fire:

Old Europe can hardly

Find twopence to buy her.

Jack Spratt’s in his office,

Puffed, powdered and curled:

Rumbold’s in Warsaw—

All’s right with the world.

For your next production of Pippa Passes

J.J.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 29 August 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I had a letter yesterday from Miss Weaver, saying that she has made me a further gift of £2000 (two thousand). Will send you particulars later. Will you ask Frank to telephone to those sons of bitches at the Adriatica (the man’s name is Bruna) who have bungled the sending of my case of books which I gave them on the 30 June? I am much inconvenienced by their cursed mumchanciness. Giorgio has been offered a position here in an American Trust Agency which would develop into a secretaryship and travellership for same. The salary would be about 200 frs (French) a month to begin with. Lucia has become Napoleon-mad, a fact you may inform Sordina of. Quinn sent 3500 francs. Huebsch is crying off Ulysses. Miss Weaver writes nobody will print it. So it will be printed, it seems, in Paris and bear Mr John Rodker’s imprint as English printer. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Rodker and their wives keep moving between London, Paris and the country. Dinners and lunches are the order of the day. An admirer of mine, an American officer, presents me with an army overcoat. Budgen was here a week, gone to London. Also Mrs Sykes: and her husband is coming. What about Little Reviews etc?

I enclose cutting of Lord French’s latest speech—delivered in Dublin. He has left Ireland which, being an Irishman, he refuses to annihilate. Sir Horace Rumbold, has been unanimously chosen as First Emperor of Ireland. Please hang the Union Jack out of the scullery window at the exact instant when he ascends his ancestral throne of alabaster. If a man named Buckley calls, asking to see His Majesty, he is on no account to be admitted. By Order

James
(Heb. Vat. Terg. Ex. Lut. Hosp. Litt. Angl. Pon. Max.)

P.S. Ask Frank to ask that Hungarian in his bank the Magyar for Mr e.g. Mr Joseph Smith

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 31 August 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Called twice to Dramatic Authors’ Society. Mr Ballou is away still on holidays but I shall see someone named Leclerc on Tuesday who is said to have the affair in hand. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Dubliners arrived all right. Thanks.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, N.D. (?) September 1920

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

Dear Budgen: Thanks for letter and papers. The latter very useful particularly Bits of Fun of which send me any back numbers you can find. I enclose 10 frs which any bank will change to cover expenses. G. has been offered a position of 500 frs a month to start. Circe goes on very slowly. As regards ‘moly’ it can be chance, also laughter, the enchantment killer. The knock out blow delivered at end brings all things back to their sordid reality. The technical difficulty I mentioned to you torments me. Huebsch is crying off Ulysses. The proposal now is to print it privately at £2 a copy. Case of books never reached me from Trieste and the MS I sent to Quinn some time ago never reached him. Luckily the bulkier parcel from here did. I enclose a letter for Pound. When you have seen him write to me. I hope you will find a room and studio soon. I shall be pleased to see Mr and Mrs Sargenta if they are passing through Paris. How long will you remain in London. This is a bad pen. I want to finish Circe within a month so that anything that strikes you please let me know.

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To JOHN QUINN, 3 September 1920

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

Dear Mr Quinn: Thanks for second remittance on account, which I received. I hope you now have the other parcel of MS. Ulysses is in 3 parts (Telemachia, Odyssey, Nostos). This is the scheme:

Telemachia
  I

???

1. Telemachus

2. Nestor

3. Proteus

Odyssey
  II

???

1. Calypso

2. Lotus eaters

3. Hades

4. Eolus

5. Lestrygonians

6. Scylla and Charybdis

???

7. Wandering Rocks

8. Sirens

9. Cyclops

10. Nausikaa +

11. Oxen of the Sun

12. Circe *

Nostos
  III

???

1. Eumeus

2. Ithaca

3. Penelope

The dotted line represents the first half, but not part or division—that is, 9 episodes of the 18. I shall write to you more fully in a day or two and shall advise Huebsch as to typescript and proofs. The cross represents the episode which The Little Review is publishing at present and the asterisk represents the chapter or episode which I am engaged on.

In order to consider your suggestion the better I shall be very much obliged if you can by any means procure for me the two books you mention: Moore Story-Teller’s Holiday and the book by Mr Cabell. If they are expensive you may deduct the amount from that which you speak of sending on receipt of the other five episodes. If they are not to be bought perhaps a copy could be borrowed.

I thank you for your kind words about Ulysses and also for your material help, which I need. The book has reduced me to a state of helplessness in the face of many material difficulties. I am now writing the Circe episode for, I think, the sixth time—but I am satisfied that I have done what I set out to do.

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To CARLO LINATI, 6 September 1920 [In Italian]

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

Dear Mr Linati: Thanks for the Convegno. I had a letter also from Dr Ferrieri and wrote to my friend the poet Rodker, director of the Little Review (some of whose verses I am enclosing as they may perhaps be suitable for the review Poesia) and hope he will write the desired article. I shall not write to Dr Ferrieri before getting your reply. Pound seems most satisfied with the essay sent to him. I am working like a galley-slave, an ass, a brute. I cannot even sleep. The episode of Circe has changed me too into an animal. Luckily the hero had not more than twelve adventures. Write when you hear about some enterprising producer.

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To NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY, 6 September 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, I, Passy, Paris

MS. Bradley

Dear Miss Barney: As I hear that you are leaving town on the 9th for some time I shall deem it a great favour if you can let me know before you go whether there is any reply either from Mr Poe or from Mr Valette. I have a letter for the manager of the Vieux Columbier but do not wish to present it. The translator has finished the first chapter of my novel which is ready for publication in any review that will take it.

With many thanks for your kind intervention Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI, [? 8 September 1920]

rue de l’Assomption 5, Parigi, XVI

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Caro Francini: Un maledetto contrattempo intralcia il mio lavoro. La cassa di libri (peso ca. 40 chili, quadrata, segni ‘J.J. 38’ spedita da Trieste, 29.vi.920, dalla Società Adriatica (A. Bruna), Piazza delle Poste) non si trova più! Ti prego passa dai miei verso le 13.30 quando troverai tutt’e due in casa. Domanda se sanno qualcosa. Se non forse tu potresti da parte tua—tuo padre non è o non era impiegato alla ferrovia. Da parte mia il Ministero degli Esteri (francese) dove c’è un segretario che ammira i miei scritti farà il possibile per rintracciarla lungo le linee francesi. Ma certo l’incaglio dev’essere in quel bel paese dove l’ano suona. Puoi immaginarti il mio stato d’anima [sic] dopo sette anni di lavoro e quale. Tutti s’aspettano la chiusa delle avventure. Ho già scritto l’episodio di Circe un sei volte. Credo sia la cosa più forte ch’io abbia scritto malgrado la mia espulsione in circostanze note alla dea che mi protegge.

Ti mando alcuni giornali. Mio fratello può averli per un giorno ma non più, prego, perchè diventano stantii. Passali al Benco. Spedii diversa roba al Buttana. Non so se ne fece uso o no.

Avrai inteso del mio nuovo colpo di fortuna? Cosa c’è col tuo libretto?

Dunque, caro Franzin, te prego, dai domanda a lori se i sa andove ze sta roba parchè mi go mandasto da un zerto sior Driatiko che ze proprio rente alla posta granda sta cassa el mi ga dito che i sui omini i la mandaria cui caro e che iera pulido proprio ma esso i me dise che qualchedun le ga menà in condoto e ga messo sora non so che cossa o che i ga sbregà cui fero cossa so mi, ma sior Driatico ga firmato mona de ostia che lu ga zercà così e colà in ogni buso cui lume e no ze gnanca rimasta la spusa, arra.

Una streta de man del tuo

Jacomo del Oio
sudito botanico

P.S. Cassa no iera ciavada con ciave ma iera soltanto roba de ciodi che go comperaste da un taliano che se ciama el sior Greinitz Neffen cui sara do letere e trentoto che go copià drio l’Aufgabe de mio fio che studia per ritmetico.

J.J.

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To JOHN RODKER, 13 September 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

MS. John H. Thompson

Dear Mr Rodker: Many thanks indeed for the copy of Hymns so kindly sent me with the friendly signature. I have read your verses with much pleasure. A Mr Ivan Goll who is making an anthology of modern poets had the bad idea of coming to me for information. I gave him your name among others. A Milanese international review Poesia would publish, I am sure, some of your verses, for example, those on pp 20–21. If you consider it worthwhile doing so perhaps you could send me a typed copy of a poem. They published lately some verses by Mr Pound and by me.

I have not received that copy of The Oxen of the Sun but perhaps you have read part of the Nausikaa episode. The best plan is to ask Miss Weaver to let you see these two episodes so that you may judge of their length.

Please excuse me for my delay in acknowledging receipt of your book but I have been rather worried.

With renewed thanks and kind regards from me to Mrs Rodker and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 14 September 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Have you written to me? I got no letter. Don’t write 5, I on address as some letters went astray. Simply 5. Concierges in Paris deliver all letters within the house.

What in hell’s name am I to do about my case of books? Did anybody go or phone there. Please let me hear by return. Curse their bloody bumbling bawling lousy good for nothing blatant souls! I expected they would do what they could to upset me and any plans I had. Have written Circe about five times. It allows me about four or five hours sleep every night. The case of books was fetched on 30 June. It was marked J.J. 38, weighed about 40–50 chilos. Sender: Bruna⁠[,] Adriatica, Piazza della Piave.

Miss Weaver writes that she would prefer, instead of making over the £2000 to me in the form of War Loans, to pass me the money direct so that I may apply it if and as I think fit (the capital, i.e., or part of it) during ‘my best, most creative years’. So that I expect we will open a credit in some bank for the amount in my name. More anon.

The M.S. I sent to Quinn from Trieste on 10 June never reached him (by his letter of 17 August) while that sent from Paris 6 weeks later did. Isn’t that enough to drive anyone wild! He sent however 3500 francs on the second batch, and will send more if other parcel arrives. I suppose I have to write it out all over again! Curse them again! He will give 20,000 lire for the entire MS of Ulysses but wants the end of it and the corrected proofs.

A scheme is proposed for a separate special edition of U. to be printed (1000 copies) here for U.K. and U.S.A. at 200 lire a copy by which I am calculated to get about 80,000 independent of the other ordinary edition. I foresee that my Triestine friends will buy up all this edition.

Giorgio has been offered a position at 500 fs (French) a month in the office of an Indian merchant here (similar to Ralli Bros). I give him coaching every night in English, French, German and Italian correspondence—all jumbled together—as I asked the principal to keep the job open for 3 weeks. I hope he is not overestimating my son’s abilities. This is not the other post I wrote of. In any case if he likes it it would be a good opening as this is their first European branch and he would have to travel with the principal in Spain Italy and Germany.

I enclose a few cuttings from Irish papers. With most of your remarks I agree. Please contradict the following reports at present in circulation about me whenever they present themselves.

That I was sent to Ireland 8 years ago by the Austrian F.O. (report of Maunsel and Co)

That I made money during the war as a Brit. gov. spy (report of friends and relatives in Dublin)

That Ulysses was a prearranged pro-German code (report of Brit, war censor subsequently scouted by literary experts! This came to light last week)

That I was a Sinn Fein emissary in Switzerland and the English Players a blind (report of one of the English actors of my company, paid by me)

That I am addicted to cocaine, morphia etc (report of Triestines)

That I founded in Zurich the dadaist movement which is now exciting Paris (report of Irish press last week)

That I am a violent bolshevik propagandist (report of yourself for purposes of discussion)

That I am the cavalier servente of the Duch— of M—, Mme M— R— M—.; a prince— de X—, Mrs T–n–t A— and the Dowager Empress of Ch–na.

Write about those books please

Jim

P.S.

I see Trieste is in riot. Keep out of the way of both their lousy projectiles.

I enclose 3 stamps I found [in] my purse

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To CARLO LINATI, 21 September 1920 [In Italian]

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Paris XVI

Dear Mr Linati: Concerning Mr Dessy’s suggestion I think that in view of the enormous bulk and the more than enormous complexity of my three times blasted novel it would be better to send you a sort of summary—key—skeleton—scheme (for your personal use only). Perhaps my idea will appear clearer to you when you have the text. Otherwise, write to Rodker and ask him to let you have the other copies. I have given only catchwords in my scheme but I think you will understand it all the same. It is an epic of two races (Israelite—Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story1In original, storiella. of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me—even when a boy. Imagine, fifteen years ago I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners! For seven years I have been working at this book—blast it! It is also a sort of encyclopaedia. My intention is to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri. Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique. Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons—as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts. No English printer wanted to print a word of it. In America the review was suppressed four times. Now, as I hear, a great movement is being prepared against the publication, initiated by Puritans, English Imperialists, Irish Republicans, Catholics—what an alliance! Gosh, I ought to be given the Nobel prize for peace!

Well, if you think so, write first the article you suggested, then you will have to choose some chapter not too much burdened with difficulties and part of it could appear in the following issue.

Apparently, bad luck has delayed Madam Circe. On June 29th I dispatched from Trieste a case of books etc for my work here in Paris. It has never arrived! I wired, wrote and wrote again. Nothing. All the same I am going ahead.

P.S. Heavens, what disgusting sheets of paper I have chosen for the schema—really worthy of the horrible book itself! Please send them back to me for the honour of the family!

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To FRANK BUDGEN, Michaelmas 1920

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

Dear Budgen: Have met Sargent several times and dined. He is hung up here for a week. The stories he tells me of mob manners are almost incredible. Have written some of it into Circe which by the way is a dreadful performance. It gets wilder and worse and more involved but I suppose it will all work out. Thanks for the papers you sent which, though very onesided, are most useful. Tomorrow I send you another 10 frs. I see there is or was a paper by Lord Alfred Douglas Plain English. Can you lay hold of any copies? In fact anything in that line will be useful. I am sorry you do not think your ideas on Circe worth sending. As I told you a catchword is enough to set me off. Moly is a nut to crack. My latest is this. Moly is the gift of Hermes, god of public ways and is the invisible influence (prayer, chance, agility, presence of mind, power of recuperation) which saves in case of accident. This would cover immunity from syphilis (σύ φιλις = swinelove?). Hermes is the god of signposts: i.e. he is, specially for a traveller like Ulysses, the point at which roads parallel merge and roads contrary also. He is an accident of Providence. In this case his plant may be said to have many leaves, indifference due to masturbation, pessimism congenital, a sense of the ridiculous, sudden fastidiousness in some detail, experience. It is the only occasion on which Ulysses is not helped by Minerva but by her male counterpart or inferior.

Curious that Sargent should be an authority on animals. His character also, it seems to me, may have been like his namesake in the Nestor episode—the schoolboy—written before I had heard of him.

Huebsch my New York publisher is here. They say Ulysses will come out first in a private edition of 1000 copies at 150 frs each.

Are you strong on costume? I want to make Circe a costume episode also. Bloom for instance appears in five or six different suits. What a book!

I hope you are working well. Got notice to quit this matchbox and am running about looking for a flat. Hell! I must get Circe finished and Eumeus under way before I move anywhere.

Mind those Yahoos!

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To JOHN RODKER, 29 September 1920 Michaelmas

rue de l’Assomption 5, Paris XVI

MS. John H. Thompson

Dear Mr Rodker: The case of Books papers etc which I sent on from Trieste to enable me to write seems to be lost. I sent it on 29 June last. Have you any spare copies of the Little Review containing my novel? I should be glad to have them even temporarily as my copies were in the case. To add to this, I have received notice to quit this flat (if one can call it so) within a few weeks.

Thanks for your kind words about the Oxen of the Sun episode. My New York publisher Mr Huebsch is in Paris and I shall speak to him of your suggestion.

Kindest regards to Mrs Rodker and yourself from us all Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Has no number of the Little Review appeared since May–June?

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To JENNY SERRUYS, [7 October? 1920]

rue de l’Assomption 5, Paris XVI

MS. Bradley

Chère Madame: Je vous envoie ci-inclus deux lettres qui me sont parvenues avec la même poste. Je viens de voir M. Copeau. Il m’a dit que son plan pour la saison 1920–21 est déjà complet et qu’il regrette de ne pas avoir su de ma pièce au mois de juillet quand je suis arrivé ici. Je vous écrirai de nouveau après mon entretien avec M. Poe. Peutêtre pourriez-vous me renvoyer les lettres avec un mot pour me dire s’il y a quelque chose de nouveau au sujet de mes livres égarés—digne troupeau d’un pasteur égaré lui-même.

Agréez, chère Madame, mes civilités très empressées

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, 11 October 1920

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: I sent back typescript of Le Voile du Bonheur today and am writing by this post to Mr Ballou (?). I hope it will be a success. Circe progresses. Am very busy flat hunting. Exiles is already translated and will be produced by M. Lugné-Poe, and Mme Suzanne Després in December or January. Best wishes for your season Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ANDRÉ SUARÈS (Written on Joyce’s visiting card), [20 October 1920]

rue de l’Assomption 5, Passy, Paris

MS. Stanford

Mr James Joyce présente ses civilités a M. Suarès en le priant de vouloir bien excuser le façon de les présenter. Se trouvant dans une position très critique (il lui faut déménager entre trois où quatre jours avec sa famille—4 personnes en tous) il se permet de démander à un collègue d’art dont il admire l’œuvre littéraire s’il connaît par hasard quelqu’un, artiste ou autre, qui doit s’absenter temporairement de Paris ou quelque autre occasion pour trouver un appartement quelconque. Dans le cas contraire il se voit déjà obligé à quitter Paris pour une autre—recherche de l’absolu. Il demande infiniment pardon de M. Suarès de cette manière de le remercier de l’intérêt bienveillant à ses écrits dont M. Suarès lui a parlé mais—il tempo non è più galantuomo

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To JENNY SERRUYS, 20 October 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, Paris XVI

MS. Bradley

Chère Madame: Je suis allé vous voir chez vous l’autre jour mais, ayant entendu que Mme votre mère venait d’être opérée, je ne voulais pas vous ennuyer dans les circonstances pareilles. J’espère que l’opération a réussi et que ses souffrances sont soulagées en conséquence.

Si je vous dérange maintenant c’est que je viens de recevoir un ‘pneu’ de M. Poe (ci-inclus). J’ai parlé avec lui samedi huit jours. Il me montra son ‘mot à mot’ et me pria de l’examiner. Ma pièce, selon lui, ne lui porterait point d’argent mais, malgré ça, il pense à la faire jouer. Deux jours après j’ai reçu un ‘pneu’ de lui, me priant de lui rendre le ‘mot à mot’ qu’il n’avait pas le droit de me prêter! Ce que je fis. Par retour de courrier une autre lettre (ci-incluse). Je lui répondis en disant que, comme la pièce ne lui semblait pas une affaire, je me fiais de lui comme astute et comme homme d’affaires. A noter qu’il veut aussi carte blanche pour la révision scenique du texte. Je lui écris aussi que j’étais sous l’impression que c’était vous qui feriez la traduction. Maintenant, je viens de recevoir cet autre ‘pneu’ que je vous remets.

Mon roman est trop long pour les Ecrits Nouveaux—comme la barbe de Polonius. M. Rodker me parla de le faire publier en forme de livre mais Mme Savitsky, qui faisait la traduction, n’a pas continué. Elle était partie de Paris pour Clamart Paris pour la Bretagne. Revenue à Paris elle repartit pour Cannes. Elle est malade, je crois. La pièce ne peut pas être publiée dans les Ecrits Nouveaux parceque—j’ai oublié la raison. Le Mercure n’a pas donné aucun signe de vie.

Quant à moi je dois quitter cet appartement samedi ou dimanche. Je n’ai rien trouvé, et je serai peutêtre obligé de quitter Paris avec ma famille. En ce cas je vous renverrai les effets avant de partir. Quoiqu’au moment d’écrire je n’ai pas la moindre idée où je peux aller.

Je vous envoie la présente par mon fils. J’espère qu’il vous trouvera. Il ne parle pas le français mais l’anglais, l’italien et l’allemand.

Agréez, Madame, l’assurance de ma parfaite consideration et pardonnez-moi, je vous prie, de vous avoir écrit quand j’aurais dû me taire.

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 24 October 1920

Rue de l’Assomption 5, Paris XVI

Dear Budgen: Excuse my delay in writing and this scrawl. Flat hunting every blessed day with no result. Must leave here on Friday or Saturday. A dreadful job and, of course, Circe put aside completely. Sargent is wonderfully settled for little or nothing and suggests I go there or thereabouts. But Exiles is accepted by Lugné Poë and already translated and ready to put on in December. The novel more or less the same and to go away now would be to mar any chances I have here. I perceive the editor of B. of F. (a Jew by his name) has been up before the beak and fined so whatever else in that way you send had better be enclosed in a copy of the Christian Hero or some such paper. I hope you are working and progressing. I don’t want to move till Circe is finished. If you see the October Dial in any reading room you will find a long film about me. I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain Mr Marcel Proust of here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic. Still I think a fall of mine would not altogether disappoint some admirers. It seems to me I have made a bad impression here. I am too preoccupied (Bloomesque word) to rectify it. The problems raised in Circe (of good taste, tact, technique, etc.) are taking up all my time. In order to solve them I must be delivered of all other cares.

P.S. Last night I thought of an Entr’acte for Ulysses in middle of book after 9th episode Scylla and Charybdis. Short with absolutely no relation to what precedes or follows like a pause in the action of a play. It would have to be balanced by a matutine (very short) before the opening and a nocturne (also short) after the end. What? I agree about the explanation of syphilis. I always thought the etymology was syn philais (together with loving, connected with it) but a man named Bradley says the other. Moly could also be absinthe the cerebral impotentising (! !) drink of chastity. Damn Homer, Ulysses, Bloom and all the rest.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 October 1920

rue de l’Assomption 5, Paris XVI

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: A few lines in haste. The Bank of England dividend warrants relative to the additional £2000, forwarded by you, have arrived. Besides this, however, Miss Weaver sent me a week ago through her solicitors an extra gift of £200 in the form of a cheque ‘thinking it may be useful at present’. Exiles is translated and accepted by the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. It will be produced by Lugné Poe and Suzanne Desprès in December. Please give or send enclosed 100 lire to Silvestri—if he is in Trieste—and get from him the lightning sketch he made of me. I shall send him more later. Keep it⁠[,] also unframed sketch of his daughter in your room till my return or somewhere where the mice won’t eat the paint off. The whoreson Adriatica managed to deliver my case of books here last night. There was no difficulty on the part of the French douane. Some of Dubliners translated will appear in a Swiss review: and I suppose the Portrait is finished by now. Don’t put the door number after the house number when writing here. It bothers the Paris postman who is obliging but not over bright. Qu’est ce que c’est ce petit machin-là?

Jim

P.S. Silvestri—Androna del Porto, 4 (?)

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To CARLO LINATI (Postcard), 3 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Parigi VII

MS. Yale

Caro Signor Linati: Grazie della cartolina. Sono tornato qui di nuovo non avendo trovato un appartamento. Gli Esuli sono già tradotti in francese ed accettati dal Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. Lugne-Poe e Suzanna Desprée li interpreteranno in dicembre. Adesso scrivo la versione finale di Circe. Ho dovuto aspettare l’arrivo della mia cassa di libri che mise la bellezza di 4 mesi fra qui e Trieste. Causa l’ultimo episodio (Nausikaa) la polizia americana mossa dalla figlia del procuratore di stato a Nuova York, ha sequestrato la rivista. La prima udienza ebbe luogo al 22 u. d. Si prepara un putiferio appena finito il maladetto libro sarà pubblicato prima in un’edizione speciale di 1000 esemplari a 250 lire l’uno, 500 per l’America e 500 per l’Europa. Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, 5 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

TS. Yale

Dear Pound: I am exhausted. An entire month of flathunting, out every morning and back at night, in taxis, buses, trams, trains, lifts, agencies, newspaper offices. I spent about 500 francs I am sure and found nothing so we are here again. I used to carry different parts of the Circe episode about with me. Very pleasant indeed. Also the case of books I had sent on from Trieste went astray. I had to write and wire and interview numerous people. I feared it was lost. At last it arrived after four months of its odyssey.

I ought to have written to Mr Quinn before but did not know what address to give. I thought of leaving Paris altogether. I shall write to him tomorrow. I am too tired today as we have just moved in here. I like the landlord here and his wife. They are very agreeable people but it is terribly dear. I have the room you engaged when we came. Si torna all’antico. For today perhaps you can write or transmit to Mr Quinn as follows.

I knew nothing of the affair till yesterday when Mr Thayer of the Dial wrote to me offering two cents a word or more in exceptional case and saying that he was sorry about the Little Review. This explained nothing and I had heard nothing from Miss Anderson, Miss Heap or Mr Rodker. In fact Mr Rodker at my suggestion had arranged, I thought, for the publication of The Oxen of the Sun episode in one entire number as I expected them to finish Circe in November but it will be delayed till December. The typescript was sent on by you from Sirmione on 9 June. The MS is in Mr Quinn’s possession now and Mr Huebsch, against my wish, brought to New York a third copy in type. The last number of the L.R. I saw was the July-August number with the close of the Nausikaa episode. Has no number appeared since then or has The Oxen of the Sun episode been published wholly or in part? Is the Little Review closed?

Mr Quinn states that in his view there is one chance in nine of the official he names agreeing to his proposal. In that case it seems to me that my intervention is useless. He also states that some arrangement has been made for a private edition to be published by Mr Huebsch for which I am to receive 2500 $. This is very pleasant news but before anything is concluded I must take advantage of the offer Mr Quinn made me lately of his legal services….

The picture of Mr Quinn trying to teach the attorneygeneral (if that be his title) to spell my name is rather amusing. I suppose Mr Quinn pronounces it as I myself pronounce it. The result would possibly have been more successful if, in his plaidoirie with that functionary, he had alluded to me as ‘Mustard Joyhorse’. Very sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JENNY SERRUYS, 5 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. Bradley

Chère Madame: N’ayant pas trouvé un appartement nous voilà dans une maison meublée. Selon vos instructions je vous ai renvoyé le lit, le matelas et la table. Si je trouve un appartement peutêtre pourrais-je les ravoir. Je vous enverrai les draps quand ils reviendront de la blanchisseuse. Me permettez-vous de garder encore un peu les deux couvertures qui me soulagent un peu dans mes moments—ou plutôt—heures, de ‘scepticisme’

Avec bien des remerciements je vous prie, chère madame, d’agréer l’assurance de ma parfaite considération.

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 November 1920

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I have received two very long letters from Mr Quinn of New York concerning Ulysses and The Little Review but before I reply I should like to know whether you have had any communication from anybody in New York on the subject. It seems that the case is on its way now to a third hearing and I knew nothing about it till Mr Pound sent me on Mr Quinn’s letters….

Circe has been very much delayed by a number of causes—my journey here, all the unsatisfactory interviews I have had here with people who seemingly do not know their own intentions and also the fact that the case of books and documents which I sent on to Paris from Trieste on 28 June to enable me to write the two episodes Circe and Eumeus here went astray. After a great deal of writing, wiring and interviewing it was at last discovered at a station on the Franco-German frontier. It arrived a few days ago after its odyssey and I am now writing out the final (the sixth or seventh) draft of the episode which is about twice as long as the longest episode hitherto, The Cyclops.

I have returned to this address my tenancy of the flat (which was very damp) in Passy having expired. I spent nearly a month looking for a flat here, several hours a day, and could find nothing. I then decided that if the book is to be finished I must waste no more time looking for what does not exist.

I wish I had some definite news to give you about the French translation of my novel. Someone is supposed to be translating it and several enthusiastic people are supposed to be going to publish it. Exiles has been translated into French, this I can vouch for because I had a copy of the translation in my hands. It is a stage version, I believe, and the play has been accepted by Mr Lugné Poë of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre for production this season. I have now the third act of the Italian version and shall send it on in a day or two.

I have telegraphed to Mr Pound as by another letter of Mr Quinn’s it appears that he (Mr Pound) cabled to Mr Quinn in consequence of some letter which he had received from New York.

I have also written to Mr Rodker asking whether any of the Oxen of the Sun episode had appeared.

With kind regards and apologies for this tiresome and complicated letter.

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To JOHN RODKER, 10 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. John H. Thompson

Dear Mr Rodker: As I could not find any flat in Paris we are staying in this maison meublée. My case of books has at last arrived. Could you send me the Little Review for September and October 1919? Has any number appeared since the July-August number of this year? I mean has any part of Oxen of the Sun been published? I have received letters from New York concerning a prosecution. Have you received any letters from the New York editor? I should like to know before I reply.

Kind regards from us all to Mrs Rodker and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am writing to Mr Quinn in the way I outlined in my letter to you and am glad that you agree with my view. May I trouble you to send me a copy of my novel which I need in order to present it to the actor who says that he is going to produce Exiles? Europe will soon be full of complimentary copies presented by me, or rather by you, to persons who perhaps will never read them. I enclose a notice of Ulysses from the New York Dial which the editor of the review forwarded me. With many kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [? November 1920]

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Couldn’t find a flat in all Paris and here we are in a private hotel. Damnably dear but I must finish Circe. Am making the final draft. How are you? Everyone here coughing his or her guts up. Have you been working? Your account in [of?] London is very nice—like Sargent’s. I have not heard from him lately. I enclose 5 francs. Can you please through any newsagent procure for me a copy of News of World and Reynold’s News for 29 May and 5 June of this year? There is hell in New York about Nausikaa. Review seized and editor committed for trial at next session, bailed out by Quinn. Quinn and Pound want me to withdraw the book from the review so as to safeguard the private edition, but it is as broad as it is long. Have you met Pound? Write me a line or two. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Did you see that Fleiner’s friend Spitteler got the Nobel prize?

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To John Quinn, 24 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Quinn: I cabled you a few days ago as follows:

Scotts: Scott’s code, American edition.

Tettoja: I have not received the telegram you mention.

Moledura: You will receive a letter on this subject in a few days giving information and my own views pretty fully.

Geizhund: I think a little delay will not be disadvantageous.

I presume you now have my letter. So far as I can learn from the English editor of it, the Little Review seems to have suspended publication. He knows nothing of any number later than the July-August and we are now almost in December.

Apart from what I wrote already concerning the publication by Huebsch, I have two other things to add. The first is: proofs. I began Ulysses in 1914 and shall finish it, I suppose, in 1921. This is, I think, the twentieth address at which I have written it—and the coldest. The complete notes fill a small valise, but in the course of continual changings very often it was not possible to sort them for the final time before the publication of certain instalments. The insertions (chiefly verbal or phrases, rarely passages) must be put in for the book publication. Before leaving Trieste I did this sorting for all episodes up to and including Circe. The episodes which have the heaviest burden of addenda are Lotus-eaters, Lestrygonians, Nausikaa and Cyclops. Therefore I must stipulate to have three sendings of proofs (preferably a widemargined one must be pulled), namely:

(1) A galley-page proof of all the book up to and including Circe.

(2) A similar proof of the three chapters of the Nostos

(3) A complete proof of the book in page form.

The second point is: that if Huebsch decides to print it and the copies are subscribed, an advance (and a substantial advance) of royalties be paid over by him at once.

I hope to finish the Circe episode before Christmas. Eumeus, being already drafted, I could send on in January. The printing of the book could be put in hand at once when the contract is signed. I must have a few months’ leisure after January to write the Ithaca and Penelope episodes which, however, have been sketched since 1916 and are very short in comparison with the Circe episode. With kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MME Yasushi Tanaka, 24 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. Tanaka

Dear Madame: In reply to your letter I shall call on you on Sunday afternoon as it seems that that is the most convenient time for you. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MME Yasushi Tanaka, 29 November 1920

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. Tanaka

Dear Mrs Tanaka: As promised I send you the notices but may I ask you to return them when read as I have no others. If you will drop a line to:

Mr Fritz Vanderpyl

Rue Gay Lussac 13

Paris VI

saying that you are writing the article on me, I am sure he will let you have the copy of Egoist (15 January 1913) which I lent him some time ago. It contains the whole story of Dubliners. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN MCCORMACK, 8 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris

MS. McCormack

Dear MacCormack: In the general confusion the other afternoon I had not an opportunity to tell you how delighted we were by your singing, especially the aria from Don Giovanni. I have lived in Italy practically ever since we last met but no Italian lyrical tenor that I know (Bonci possibly excepted) could do such a feat of breathing and phrasing—to say nothing of the beauty of tone in which, I am glad to see, Roscommon can leave the peninsula a fair distance behind. We are all going to hear you again next Tuesday and I am sure you will have another big success.

Di nuovo tanti mirallegri ed una stretta di mano cordialissima. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN RODKER (Postcard), Postmark 9 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Rodker: The above is our new address. I have had an attack in the eyes and was obliged to take a place which I can heat, no matter at what cost, but now I am much better. I hear that the L.R. is still in existence. If you have received the number containing Oxen of the Sun, could you send me two copies, please? I hope to finish Circe (the eighth draft) by Christmas Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: First of all excuse me for not having acknowledged till now the receipt of the novel you sent. I have been ill for the past few weeks with my eyes but luckily it did not reach the iris. It is better now and I can begin to read and write again though I am plagued by violent neuralgia. The nerves of my head are in such a bad way that I think Circe must be revenging herself for the unpleasant things I have written about her legend. I am sure you are bored by my eternal changing about and fits of illness and long intervals during which I send on no more of Ulysses. I shall try to finish the Circe episode before Christmas. The next one is already drafted but this has cost me an incredible amount of labour. A Mrs Yasuki Tanaka is writing a special article about Ulysses in the review published by the university of Washington, The Pacific Review, in which, as she writes, she alludes to it as ‘a dark and deep book’. I hear that after a lapse of several months the Little Review came out on 25 November with all the Oxen of the Sun episode and an account of the preliminary trial. The case comes on again next Monday the 13th—a lucky number for me and also the day of S. Lucia, the patron of eyes—so that I suppose the case will be ——? Exiles is not to appear in book form but on the stage. I do not know the date yet, sometime in February. It was withdrawn in Munich after the first performance and the agency in Berlin thinks it is better to let the echo of that fiasco die away before offering it elsewhere. I have not heard from Mr Linati lately about the Italian version or from the Swedish translator of the novel who proposed, by the way, to omit the philosophical and free passages. The Spanish translator possibly may wish to retain these and omit the rest and a combination of both versions would suffice for the central European if he or she could read both those languages. I am still keeping the third act of Esuli as there is an article in the review which I ought to read but the print is indistinct and fatigues me.

In one of your letters, which I cannot refer to here, you mentioned some book or writings of —— on the subject of prophecy. It was in connection with the articles in a Viennese paper about the coincidence of A Painful Case. May I ask you for the name of the writer?

I sent you on the article in The Dial. It is rather curious that I have already a fair collection of reviews of an unpublished book. If Mr Huebsch decides to print it possibly the series of reviews will not be discontinued.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 10 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris

Dear Budgen: An eye attack was hanging on and off for a fortnight owing to cold and damp of the hotel so we took this flat for six months. It has about 100 electric lamps and gas stoves but how I am going to pay for it damn me if I know. I am looking for lessons. Anyhow we are in it and if any wad of money turns up for me perhaps you would like to take a trip across here for a few days. Of course if it would be unpleasant for you, say so out. I could fix you at this end and we could have a few days ‘rest’ from our labours. Do you find these latitudes (London must be worse) dreadful to live in? But for creature comforts it would be hell. Thanks for the papers. Now I want you to do another favour for me and in a great hurry. The whirligig movement in Circe is on the refrain ‘My Girl’s a Yorkshire etc’, but to unify the action the preceding pas seul of S.D. which I intend to balance on the gramophone of the opposite kips should be on the air of that same ditty played on Mrs Cohen’s pianola with lights. I enclose 10 frs. Will you be so kind as to apply to any vendor (a try out) of music hall airs. It was popular between 1904 and 1908. I want words and music. I have a piano here and telephone. I hope to finish Circe before Christmas. By the way, is it not extraordinary the way I enter a city barefoot and end up in a luxurious flat? Still I am tired of it. G. is employed on trial—no salary yet but it is experience and he could make a career if we stay on. My mood grows bitterer on account of Trieste and other things. At first I had not thought of the slaughter of the suitors as in Ulysses’ character. Now I see it can be there too. I am going to leave the last word with Molly Bloom, the final episode being written through her thoughts and tired Poldy being then asleep. Eumeus you know so there remains only to think out Ithaca in the way I suggest.

What is Paul Suter’s address? I am going to send him a little Christmas reminder—a portrait of Verlaine—not the usual one—in memory of our Pfauennights. I have not heard from Sargent but will write him one of these days. Do you keep up your acquaintance with Pound? I hope so.

What about yourself? What are you doing? I hope you have done more than I have who have been botching and patching that bloody old Circe since last June. The Nausikaa case comes on next Monday. Are you still in Sargent’s flat? Now that I have one of my own I don’t spend much in buses. In fact I rarely leave the house.

A point about Ulysses (Bloom). He romances about Ithaca (Oi want teh gow beck teh the Mawl Enn Rowd, s’elp me!) and when he gets back it gives him the pip. I mention this because you in your absence from England seemed to have forgotten the human atmosphere and I the atmospheric conditions of these zones.

Can you tell a poor hardworking man where is the ideal climate inhabited by the ideal humans? Address answers (enclosing 5/- PO) to: sincerely yours James Joyce.

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To EZRA POUND, 12 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. Omar Pound

Dear Pound: I am all right again except for bad fits of neuralgia. This flat is frightfully dear but so was the hotel and there I had no ease in the cold sitting writing about tiresome Bloom with Mrs Pound’s shawl round my head and Miss Serruys’ two blankets round the rest of my body. Only for the gasstove in this flat I should be down with a full-blasted attack of the eyes. I must get over the winter some way and so I have asked Miss Serruys and Bradley to get me some lessons—a job I must take up again unless the hope in your letter is realized. That letter was rather a puzzle to me. Am I right in assuming that it is from Miss Anderson to you? I have heard nothing of Mr Wallace of New York but I had a letter from a Mr Wallace of Paris (who seems to be anything but a millionaire) he told me that a Dr Joseph Collins of New York had charged him to give £2 each to Giorgio and Lucia for Xmas—which was very kind of Dr Collins (unknown to me) but I take it this is only a coincidence of names. How the deuce can I take direct action in the matter if, as Mr XYZ who writes to Miss M.C.A. [says], the matter is to be ‘unknown’. I must wait, mustn’t I? A letter from the editor of N.Y. Evening Post sent on 1 September to an early Zurich address has reached me asking for contributions. Quinn’s secretary replied to my cable saying the trial is fixed for tomorrow and suggesting I cable instructions to withdraw but, apart from what I said already, the remaining episode Oxen of the Sun is already published as Miss M.C.A. (if it be she) states that a special triple number appears on 25 November. My idea therefore that the review had gone out of existence after the July number seems to be right. Is its revival now with 96 pages due to Mr Wallace and Mr Dorrance? How difficult it is to be informed correctly? In any case I shall wait to see effect of the new number and result of the trial after which I shall send on the Circe episode, now nearing completion, and wait to see what they do with it.

I hope you [are] not suffering from neuralgia. It is a most boring thing. Of course there is no news here. I understand that Lugné Poe intends to do an adaptation of Exiles. A Mrs Yasushi Tanaka, introduced by you, is doing an article on Ulysses for the Pacific Review, published by the University of Washington. No news of the novel or of Budry, Fontanas &c or of Mrs Bloch. I do not even know where she is. Mrs Pound may remember that once in conversation with her I expressed a doubt as to whether Mrs Bloch had read the book. I have no news from Trieste either. They are a very friendly lot, I must say.

Now I have a nice little incipient neuralgia so will end this.

Kind regards from us all Sincerely yours

James Joyce

PS. The American ambassador’s name is Wallace, I find.

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To JOHN MCCORMACK, 17 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. McCormack

Dear MacCormack: I send you the books promised, the novel for you, Dubliners for your brother but shall be obliged if he will return the latter when read as it is out of print. I shall enclose a review of Ulysses if I can find it which is doubtful. My wife wishes me to say that if your daughter finds any afternoon too boresome Lucia (who finds every afternoon boresome, I am afraid) would gladly keep her company. My telephone number is Saxe: 34–33. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND (Christmas card), 20 December 1920

[Paris]

MS. Omar Pound

Bis Dat Qui Cito Dat

Yanks who hae wi’ Wallace read,

Yanks whom Joyce has often bled,

Welcome to the hard plank bed,

And bolschevistic flea.

Who for Bloom and Inisfail

Longs to pine in Sing Sing jail,

Picking oakum without bail,

Let him publish me.

Best Xmas greetings to Mrs Pound and yourself from us all (see other side). Circe finished this morning at last. Will revise, type and forward soon. No news re above.

James Joyce
 [signed also by George, Lucia, and Nora Joyce]

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, Postmark 20 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer: I have spoken of your settings of my verses to my friend Mr John MacCormack, the tenor, who is here at present. If they have not been printed could you manage to send him in a very clear MS copy three of them, At that hour when all things have repose, Gentle lady do not sing and It was out by Donnycarney, keyed up to tenor pitch. His address is:

Claridge’s Hotel

74 Avenue des Champs Elysées

Paris

but it would be well to send the songs very soon as he leaves shortly for the riviera.

I never heard how Mr Milner’s concerts went as I left Zurich abruptly. I returned to Trieste for some time and am now here finishing my book Ulysses for publication. Exiles, my play, will be given here in January by Lugné Poe (Théâtre de l’Oeuvre).

I shall be glad to hear from you and to know that your delicate music is meeting at last with the appreciation which it deserves. Sincerely vours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, [?20 December 1920]

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. Yale

It seems we can’t spend Xmas together. All good wishes from us all. Thanks for yours. Finished Circe this morning. Sincerely yours

James Joyce, George, Lucia, Nora Joyce

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To MICHAEL HEALY, 30 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

My dear Mr Healy: May I ask you as a favour to forward the enclosed letter and the copy of the review which I am also sending? I cannot find Mr Boyd’s address in Who’s Who? He used to live in Kildare Street 41, 43, 47 etc and was connected with New Ireland (the review not the weekly). If you read the letter you will see what it is about. If Mr Boyd’s address is not in Thom’s perhaps you could telephone to New Ireland offices or to your friend in Combridge’s as Mr Boyd appears to be the semi-official historian of the Irish literary movement I presume they will know his address. If not the only thing to do is to forward letter and review to him c/o his London publishers whoever they are.

Many thanks in advance and renewed good wishes for the New Year, the Devil being requested by me to take the present one as quickly as he likes.

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To ERNEST A. BOYD, 30 December 1920

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. Colby College

Dear Sir: M. LaMallide, editor of La Vie des Peuples (a copy of which I send you for your guidance) asked me to obtain for him from a good source three articles on the following subjects.

1) The Irish novel today

2) The Irish theatre today

3) The Irish economic question

He wishes to publish these articles at once in successive issues of his review. I have taken the liberty of forwarding the request to you as the recognized historian of the Irish literary movement in the hope that your engagements may allow you to accede to it. The articles should be in English and typed. They will be translated here. I do not know the scale of remuneration but, the franc being low and Paris review scales being low also, it will not be considerable. It might therefore repay you to forward your articles at the same time to Mr Ezra Pound, London editor of The Dial, for simultaneous publication in New York. The rates of The Dial are $5 a page for prose and $10 for verse.

Possibly you will be able to find a competent person among your acquaintances for the economic article. This, I understand, in view of the general tone of the review should be expository and not polemical. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1921

To ITALO SVEVO, 5 January 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Parigi VII

Dear Signor Schmitz: The Circe episode was finished some time ago, but four typists refused to bother with it. Finally a fifth turned up; she is very slow, however, so that the work will not be finished before the end of this month. I am told it will contain 160 sheets, large size. The Eumeus episode, which is almost complete, will also be ready around the end of the month.

According to the plan established by my lawyer in New York, Ulysses will appear there around the fifteenth of June d.v., privately published and in an edition limited to 1500 copies, of which 750 will be for Europe. The price will be $12.50 or 6 pounds sterling per copy. I shall receive 1000 pounds of hush money! At the same time, however, many articles are being prepared in order to storm the citadel. I don’t know what the outcome will be and I care very little.

Now for the important matter. I cannot leave here (as I had hoped to before May). As a matter of fact I have not gone to bed before 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning for months and months, working without reprieve. I shall soon have exhausted the notes I brought here with me in order to write these two episodes. There is in Trieste, in my brother-in-law’s quarter, an apartment house bearing the street and building number 2 via Sanità; situated precisely on the fourth floor of this building in the bedroom now occupied by my brother, towards the back of the building in question and overlooking the house of public insecurity, there is an oilcloth brief-case fastened with a rubber band having the colour of a nun’s belly and of the approximate dimensions of .95 by .70 centimetres. In this brief-case I placed the written symbols of the languid lights which occasionally flashed across my soul. The total weight is estimated to be Kg. 4.78. Having urgent need of these notes in order to complete my literary work entitled Ulysses or your bitch of a mother I address myself courteously to you, honoured colleague, begging you to inform me if any member of your family intends to come to Paris in the near future; in the event that someone should come, I would be most grateful if such a person would have the kindness to bring me the sheaf of papers indicated on the back of this letter. Thus, dear Signor Schmitz, if there is someone of your family who is travelling this way, he would do me a great favour by bringing me the bundle which is not heavy even for a man since, as you will understand, it is full of papers of which I have made fair copies in ink and occasionally even in bleistift when I had no pen. But be careful not to break the rubber band because then the papers will fall into disorder. The best plan would be to take a suitcase which can be locked so that no one can open it. There are many articles of this kind on sale at Greinitz Neffen’s just opposite the Piccolo which my brother, the Berlitz-Cul Professor, passes by. At all events write me a few words; what’s the matter with you? Revoltella has written me saying that it is foolish to give the examinations for 5 fliche per person; and then there are the doctors of Revoltella. Then I should go there to give them an English aufgabe for 5 fliche, but I did not answer because it was a monkey business and besides the stamp and paper would cost me 3 fliche. With money what it is, it is worth 10 fliche and this would leave me enough to take the train and eat and drink for three days. But what can one expect? Cordial greetings and apologies for the poor worn-out brain; now and then I have a little fun. Write soon.

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To JOHN QUINN, 7 January 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Mr Quinn: In reply to your letter I have just wired you in code to advance terms of offer to Huebsch so that my royalty reached $3 or $3.50 per copy. My reasons are:

Ulysses is a much longer book (to say nothing more) than the other private editions mentioned.

On these editions publishers allow the retail trade a discount of only 10% instead of 33%.

Moore Story-Teller’s Holiday, published a couple of years ago at £2.2.0, is now priced at £6 a copy. At this figure Galignani’s sold a copy yesterday.

The Egoist, with running expenses, advertising and fee, for an unsubscribed book pays me 25% on sales (when there are any). A payment of $2 on a $12.50 book is 15%.

My figure will leave the publisher a margin of about double my royalty for his ‘work’.

If Huebsch raises any objection, please withdraw the offer entirely and the typescript.

Circe is finished and being typed. When it reaches New York the whole book so far can be set up and sent to me. I shall return it corrected a few days after receipt, with the Eumeus episode and probably Ithaca also. The second revise can be sent me then and I shall return it with the final episode, Penelope. This last is a short episode—can be checked by the proofreader, in whom I have more confidence now that your continent is ‘dry’….

I wrote the Circe Episode nine times from first to last. When Ulysses is finished, after seven years of labour (diversified by eight illnesses and nineteen changes of address, from Austria to Switzerland, to Italy, to France), I shall need six months’ rest—not necessarily in jail.

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 16 January 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer: The above is my address but you had better write it large and clear, the numeral in Arabic figure not as on your card in Roman as Paris postmen are champions of stupidity. I may mention that I have not received any songs from you since I wrote. Did you send them to me or to MacCormack? In any case send the second lot on to me and I shall redirect them. I hope you have copies and I shall do my best to have them published for you. It is a shame that they are not published already. I am very curious to hear the two additions—and to sing them. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From JACQUES NATANSON to JENNY SERRUYS, 2 February 1921

Théâtre de ‘L’Oeuvre’ 55 rue de Clichy, Paris 9

MS. Private

Mademoiselle, Je viens de voir M. Lugné-Poe qui s’occupe précisément d’ ‘Exiles’. La pièce passera très prochainement. En tout cas elle sera jouee avant la fin de la saison. Dès que je serai définitivement fixé, je vous préviendrai.

Croyez, Mademoiselle, à mes sentiments respectueux

Jacques Natanson

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To JENNY SERRUYS, 3 February 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5

MS. Bradley

Chère Madame: Je regrette d’avoir été trop tard ce matin pour vous trouver. Comme j’ai dit à votre sécretaire je me permettrai de revenir demain matin (vendredi) vers où après 11 heures. J’espère que vos engagements vous permettront de me recevoir à cette heure.

Agréez, chère Madame, mes civilités empressées.

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 February 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your kind wishes for my birthday. I have not been troubled with my eyes since I moved in here but the neuralgia continued. Now it has ceased. I ought to have acknowledged before with thanks the receipt of Mr Upward’s book, the first part of which seems to me like a running marginal comment on Circe, a compliment which, I suspect, the author would be the first to deprecate. I finished that episode some weeks ago and sent it to be typed. It was returned to me by four typists as impossible. Finally it was passed into the hands of a fifth who, however, has only an hour or two free in the day to work at it, so that it will not be ready for some weeks more. It will run, I am told, to about 160 pages of typescript. On Monday I hope to deliver to another typist the first part of the Eumeus episode and the rest in a week or a fortnight. This will leave me the time I need for composing the two final and shorter episodes. Circe has tired me very much in every way and I am very glad Ulysses had not a thirteenth adventure.

I wish I had some definite news to give you about my books here. I have not heard or seen anything of the person who is supposed to be translating my novel. The production of Exiles has been postponed till April or May owing to the success of a play which Mr Lugné Poë put on. Of the projected translation of Dubliners I heard nothing since I wrote last.

Mr Eliot, who was here lately, told me of Mr Aldington’s article to which, it seems, he (Mr Eliot) is replying by arrangement with Mr Aldington. The latter’s standpoint, so far as I could gather from Mr Eliot, seems to me legitimate criticism but I expect that his article will go beyond those limits. The atmosphere of vacillation of which I spoke to you by no means ends there: and the episode I have just written will have the effect of consolidating it, I expect, as it offers a good front for attack.

I am glad there is some prospect of advance sales in England for Ulysses though I think that Mr Huebsch will change his mind several times between now and the date of publication. Mr Quinn can be relied on to a certain extent, in spite of his violent opposition (as I was informed by Mr Pound) to certain chapters of the book as it was proceeding, since he has committed himself to a certain extent and his opposition (very natural, for the rest) has changed apparently to admiration. Silence is a help in these matters.

Mr Pound and Mr Rodker were in Paris some weeks ago but I do not know where they have gone. Mr Pound, according to an article in the New York Herald has left England for good and will settle down in Paris. Mr Rodker, I believe, is going to Spain. I shall write to Mr Pound in a day or two as I should like to send the typescript of Circe through him as I have done hitherto though I do not think that the reading of such a Walpurgisnacht will do his or anybody else’s health much good.

I hope the projected edition of Ulysses will come out in June. No definite proposals have yet been made to me. Mr Quinn suggested an edition of 1500 copies at $12.50 each on which I was to receive $2, the edition to be subscribed. I wrote asking for details and information as regards the English edition for which Mr Pinker once upon a time drew up a contract. As soon as I have a reply I shall let you know.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. Early 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, ParisVI

Dear Mr Sykes: Four typists refused to touch Circe. At last came forward a young woman barrister who reads my books and she offered to do it in her spare time. The work went on slowly but surely. I hired a machine for her and she worked at it for an hour or so every other day. When she had done about half of it her father got a seizure (an incident, by the way, in the episode) and had to be driven home from the faculty of medicine where he is a professor. I spent a week or so looking for another typist. Now the proprietress of a small bookshop here says she will finish it, beginning tomorrow. I hope she will as it is very boring. The episode will run, I am told, to nearly 200 pages of typescript. It is as intricate as it is long. However, I hope to send it on shortly.

Eumeus. The first episode of the close of the book much shorter about 30 pp and quite different, is also nearly finished; and I am, in fact, working at the second Ithaca. There remains to be written the last: Penelope.

According to a plan submitted by Mr Quinn Ulysses is to be published in New York in June in a limited edition of 1500 at $12.50 a copy. Lugné Poë has had a big success with a farce by a Belgian writer Crommelynck, so that Exiles will scarcely appear before April, I hear. For the rest je m’en fiche pas mal.

Little theatres and little reviews always go bust. Whereabouts are you going. I have taken this flat till June next. It is a princely apartment but frightfully dear. I took it only to enable myself to write the end of my book. After June Lord knows where we shall go.

I send you copies of Comédie. May the black cat bring you good luck and if she (he) has kittens may one of them find a cheap flat for me. Kind regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself from all of us.

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To JENNY SERRUYS, 6 February 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. Bradley

Chère Madame: Monsieur Charpentier m’a reçu d’une manière extrèmement gentille. Il m’a avancé la troisième partie de ce que je cherchais et m’a promis de faire de son mieux pour pouvoir me procurer le reste entre un delai de 8–10 jours c’ à d samedi ou lundi prochain. D’abord il n’a pas voulu même accepter un ordre de paiement de ma part mais naturellement j’ai insisté. Avec ce qu’il m’a donné et le réserve que j’avais j’ai pu avec mon immense soulagement me débarrasser des plusieurs soucis. Si le reste arrive de la même façon alors je pourrai probablement travailler jusqu’à la fin de mon livre, fini lequel je ne souleverai pas la moindre objection si l’on m’expulse comme ‘undesirable alien,’ qui ne fait qu’ennuyer prodigieusement les gens qui ont commis l’imprudence de me connaître. Pourtant si vous avez l’occasion de rencontrer M. Charpentier il serait convenable peutêtre de lui dire quelque chose pas trop défavorable de mon être ou biens afin d’assurer le bon résultat définitif.

Avec mes meilleurs remerciements et mes salutations très respectueuses, Votre bien devoué

James Joyce

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To DANIEL HUMMEL, 14 February 1921

Boulevard Raspali 5, Paris VII, Tél. Saxe 34–33

MS. Hummel

Sehr geehrter Herr Hummel: Sowohl Sie als Herr Ublinger müssen mich entschuldigen wegen meines langen Schweigens. Denken Sie mal der verfluchte Kapitel Kirke ist noch nicht zu Ende und im schönen Mittel der Arbeit der Vater meiner Daktylo—ein berühmter Pariser Arzt—hat einen Herzschlag bekommen. Ich sehreibe jede Nacht bis 2, 3, sogar 5 Uhr. Hoffentlich werde ich in einer besseren Lage nächste Woche sein. Dazu kommen auch die unvermeidlichen Sorgen aber, Gott sei Dank, wir leben noch. Schreiben Sie mir eine Zeile ob es Ihnen beide gut gehe and ich hoffe sehr Sie wiederzusehen binnem Kurzem.

Ist diese Ihre Adresse? Ich habe zwei Hausnummern auf diese Bogen geschrieben.

Sargent war hier, war aber kränklich und ist schon verreist. Deswegen und auch wegen der Sprachschwierigkeiten habe ich keine Rendezvous arrangirt.

Freundliche Grasse an Frau und Herrn Ublinger und an Sie selbst

James Joyce

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To CARLO LINATI (Postcard), 18 February 1921

Boulevard Raspali 5, Parigi VII

MS. Yale

Caro signor Linati: C’è qualcosa di nuovo riguardo la pubblicazione o la produzione degli ‘Esuli’? Lavoro come un ergastolano—fino alle 3 o 4 ogni mattina. Ho terminato Circe ed Eumeo. Restano i due ultimi episodi Itaca e Penelope che mi danno parecchio filo da torcere. Non potrò essere a Milano prima di maggio. Il nostro incontro—tante volte rimandato—avrà luogo, spero, in una stagione più propizia di questa. Ha sentito del processo di Ulisse a N.Y.? Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 23 February 1921

Boulevard Raspali 5, Paris VII, Tél.- Saxe 34–33

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Cher Monsieur: Voilà la photographie que vous désirez mais il faut la coller encore. Je vous remercie vivement des paroles amicales et encourageantes que Mlle Beach m’a transmises. Si vous avez fini de lire Ulysse je vous prie de me renvoyer les numéros de la ‘L.R.’ au plus tôt possible car il y a des autres qui voudraient lire l’ouvrage. Si vous désirez je peux vous les redonner dans une quinzaine de jours. Salutations cordiales

James Joyce

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 23 February 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Mr Palmer: The songs you sent me on Jan 27 were held up by the French Customhouse so that I got [them] only a few hours ago. I don’t know whether M’Cormack got those you sent on 31 Dec. He is in Monte Carlo for the opera season. If he did not get them I shall ask him for a few lines of authorisation and forward them with the others when I have had a copy made for myself. I am sure he will like them. He is an excellent ‘ballad-singer’.

I shall write you more in a day or two. Meanwhile thanks for your kind words about my verses. ‘Sleep now’ is in its place at the end of the diminuendo movement and the two last songs are intended to represent the awakening of the mind. ‘O sleep for the winter etc’ means ‘you had better sleep if you can because the winter will try to prevent you if it can’.

There is a curious slip in your setting of ‘I hear an army’. I wrote ‘foam about their knees’ not ‘about their lips’. Your preference for this song is shared, I may add, by Yeats. If I can get my affairs in order by June we must try to have your settings of these songs published. Do you know Leigh Henry, the musical critic? Perhaps he could help you.

You are interested, it seems, chiefly in my meagre verses. Since Chamber Music I wrote only a dozen songs. Would you care to see them? They are different from the lyrics.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, End February 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris

Dear Budgen: First of all many happy returns of your birthday and secondly my regards and apologies to Mr and Mrs Sargent for not having acknowledged safe receipt of the book sent me. What a time! A rent (£300) which keeps me in continual fever, running about here and there, mortgaging my income in advance. Then up every night till three or even later writing. Circe is finished long ago also Eumeus and I am writing Ithaca. I have dreadful worries about a typist. Four declined to do Circe, at last one admirer(ess) volunteered. She started, but when she had done 100 pp her father got a seizure in the street (a Circean episode) and now my MS is written out in fairhand by someone who passes it to someone else who sends it to be typed. I sent Eumeus to a third typist. A hysterical letter from the translatress of the Portrait. No word or syllable of a word from Pound. I had a letter from Mr Valery Larbaud (French translator of S. Butler and novelist) says he has read Ulysses and is raving mad over it, that Bloom is as immortal as Falstaff (except that he has some few more years to live—Editor) and that the book is as great as Rabelais (Merde du bon Dieu et foutre de nom de nom—comment of Monsieur François). I shall send you both chapters as soon as possible….

I suffer from frightful attacks of neuralgia. Sargent tells me you feel twinges of rheumatism. Beware of it. Some determined effort should be made to right affairs generally but all I can do is to slave along at Bloom, curse him.

I am writing Ithaca in the form of a mathematical catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic, physical, psychical etc. equivalents, e.g. Bloom jumping down the area, drawing water from the tap, the micturating in the garden, the cone of incense, lighted candle and statue so that the reader will know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze. The last word (human all-too-human) is left to Penelope. This is the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity. I mean the last episode, Penelope.

Now dear friend, being some twenty-eight days older than you, I take the liberty of suggesting that some kind of end be put to this tomfool existence we are both leading. Mine is more absurd than yours. Let me know how you are getting on, if you have sold anything or if you are travelling for soap. O, my prophetic soul when I put soap in Ulysses’ pocket. I am putting all sorts of lies in the mouth of that sailorman in Eumeus which will make you laugh.

At one time I thought the slaughter of the suitors un-Ulyssean. In my present frame of mind I have modified my opinion.

Schluss! Prosit! And to our next meeting with song and dance as in 1919 of blastedly expensive memory.

ad multos annos.

P.S. If you or Sargent can pick up any handbook cheap on Freemasonry or any ragged, dirty, smudged, torn, defiled, effaced, dogeared, coverless, undated, anonymous, misprinted book on mathematics, or algebra or trig. or Euc. from a cart for 1d or 2 ¼d tant mieux.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 March 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: … I have at least one item of news which is not bad. A few days ago I received a most enthusiastic letter from Mr Valery Larbaud the French translator of Samuel Butler and also a novelist saying that he is ‘raving mad’ over Ulysses which, he is kind enough to say, is as ‘great and comprehensive and human as Rabelais’. He says that he has been unable to write or sleep since he read it and he proposes to translate some pages of it with an article in the Nouvelle Revue Française. I hope he will not change his mind. With kind regard sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 April 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose a press cutting which perhaps you have seen and a subleader from the Tribune (New York). This latter I copied out in an American bank here, having bribed the porter to let me look up the files of all the papers they had. The next day I copied out another from the Sun and the Boston Transcript but both so rapidly and illegibly in pencil that it would be useless to send them on. The trial took place on February 21, it seems. Since that time no person in New York has sent me a word of information on the subject. In fact I should know nothing whatever about it but for the fact that I was given one day in a bookshop here a cutting which the owner had received by chance from New York. I have written once or twice for information but in vain.

As regards Ulysses itself Mr Quinn about four months or more than three months ago drew up a scheme for a limited edition. I agreed to his terms and he said he would have the contract signed….

It seems as if this year (1 + 9 + 2 + 1 = 13) is to be one incessant trouble to me. Four copies of Circe and Eumeus have been delivered to me at last. Unfortunately there are only 122 pp of the former as the present typist has got some position and can work only an hour or so at night. They (the copies) are so irritating that I wish I knew where to throw them. It is risky to send them to Mr Pound at a possible address and he does not appear to be interested in receiving the embarrassing parcel and Mr Rodker or the Little Review or Mr Quinn or Mr Huebsch may not want them either. The Circe episode, typed by several different people using different machines and all colours and kinds of paper is a horrible thing to look at—much less to read.

By dint of writing several letters and telegrams to Trieste I received safely about a fortnight ago the bag full of notes for Ulysses. I regard this as one of the triumphs of my life.

Ithaca and Penelope are progressing as well as the worries here set forth permit. The printing of the book could be started at once as it will take several months with the double proofs I need. I expect a cable on Tuesday or Wednesday. As soon as it arrives I shall let you know.

P.S. About a week ago Mr Auguste Morel took The Sirens to translate for a French review. This morning I had a letter from Mr Gaston Gallimard asking me to submit the entire book for translation and publication in the Little Review of France (though it is now more conservative), La Nouvelle Revue Française.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 9 April 1921

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Last night at 6 o’clock Mrs Harrison, to whom the final scenes of Circe had been passed on for typing after the accident to Dr Livisier, called on me in a state of great agitation and told me that her husband, employed in the British Embassy here, had found the MS, read it and then torn it up and burned it. I tried to get the facts from her but it was very difficult. She told me he had burned only part and that the rest was ‘hidden’. I begged her to come home and bring me the rest. She left, promising to return in an hour. I waited till 10.30 but she did not return nor did she write or telephone today till now (11.30 a.m.). I suspect she has concealed some of the facts. As I am very tired please excuse this brief note. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I withdrew Ulysses by cable an hour after receipt of your letter.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 April 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: On Saturday night I received a packet from Mrs Harrison containing the rest of the MS of Circe. Her story seems to have been true—luckily for my sanity. Only some pages which she had left on her table have been destroyed. I shall have to go over the notes of the scene again and recreate it which is not so easy as since writing it I wrote the end and all the Eumeus episode and a good part of Ithaca. It is very tiresome but still the packet came as a relief after twentyfour hours of suspense.

On receipt of Mr Huebsch’s letter forwarded by you I cabled to Mr Quinn to withdraw the entire typescript of Ulysses…. The next day I arranged for a Paris publication to replace the American one—or rather I accepted a proposal made to me by Shakespeare and Co, a bookseller’s here, at the instance of Mr Larbaud.

The proposal is to publish here in October an edition (complete) of the book so made up:

100 copies on Holland handmade paper

at 350 frs
(signed)

150 copies on vergé d’arches

at 250 frs

750 copies on linen

at 150 frs

that is, 1000 copies with 20 copies extra for libraries and press. A prospectus will be sent out next week inviting subscriptions. There are many already in advance with shops here, I am told. They offer me 66% of the net profit. Today I delivered the first sheets to the printer and am to receive trial proofs on Saturday together with his estimate. The actual printing will begin as soon as the number of orders covers approximately the cost of printing….

This does not cover the English edition but I think it would be to your advantage if that were amalgamated with the Paris one. You would have endless difficulties about it and of course little or no support from men of letters, the press or the public who however will accept very dutifully a fait accompli several years after as was the case with the Portrait of the Artist. As for American sales a great number of Americans are in passing and they are likely to become a fixed colony here. I could not think of entering into a correspondence with Mr Quinn and Mr Huebsch—to say nothing of Dr Collins who neither cabled nor wrote—after seven years’ hard labour and in the present exasperated state of my nerves….

It is astonishing to myself that I was able to write as much as I did. The result, however, to myself is that I have reached the highest pitch of nervousness in trying to keep my feet here. Mr Larbaud is going to England for the summer and has placed his flat here at my disposal but in the meantime I need absolutely an advance such as Mr Quinn suggested upon the book and am driven to such straits that I am obliged to write this letter and even to send it by airmail as I fear the railway strike may delay its delivery. If you can think of any way by which a partial arrangement of this kind can be made immediately, pending a clearing up of the matter by correspondence, I mean or suggest through Shakespeare and Co here, I shall be infinitely relieved. Of course I should sign in the contract that the advance or advances were on account of the royalties. Perhaps a guarantee of some kind on sales or orders in England would do. They have much enthusiasm and are well introduced in literary circles here. The chief thing for me is that I hand the book over definitely and get it out of my sight and be enabled to round the last (and stormiest) cape. I had no choice, however, between accepting the burden and anxiety of this sojourn here and abandoning the work unfinished. I have practically finished it for in the months between now and September I can write with comfort the two last episodes.

Thanks for Mr Aldington’s article. There is an article also on Ulysses, I hear, in the Revue de Genéve and Mr Larbaud’s in Revue de France. I shall send you the two episodes in a day or so when the end of Circe is typed.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 April 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: On receipt of your letter I went to Miss Beach who agrees to the proposal (as of course I do) and will arrange with the printer about keeping up the type. I hoped to send you the first trial proofs with this letter as a curiosity (a pleasant one for me) but they have not come with the only post today. Perhaps they will arrive in the morning. I enclose the letter I received from Dr Collins which shows that I did right to withdraw the book from America altogether. I believe, from all I hear, that the edition will be quickly sold out. I am much relieved by the immediate prospect of the advance of royalties….

To my surprise I received a card from Mr Pound who is now in Paris. I met him yesterday and at his request gave him the Circe and Eumeus episodes to read and he will send them on to you (if he survives them) as before. As regards the former, the final typescript of which arrived only yesterday, it is very difficult to follow on account of the medley of papers and types. Moreover, after p. 112 there should be a blank indicated where the scene or scenes burned by Mr Harrison will be replaced when I rewrite them. P. 113 is not the proper sequence. The scene which intervenes covers an episode outside the door, a hue and cry in the street (imaginary) after Bloom and the opening scene of the quarrel. I am glad the typescript has left my house.

Miss Beach has written to you or is writing a letter which she says will serve as an engagement on your proposal. This will be stipulated in the contract with the printer.

Many thanks for your kindness and friendly regards.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, N.D. Spring 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Mr Sykes: Many thanks for your kind letter. Quinn has had the pages photographed (as he won’t send back the ms) and is sending on the result so that I shall not need to trouble you. Valery Larbaud, the French novelist and translator of Samuel Butler, who is raving about Ulysses has given us a charming furnished flat for the summer (rue Cardinal Lemoine 7, Paris VI) whither we shall move (O merde! que ça m’embête) on the 2 or 3 of June. Giorgio … leaves for Zurich on 1 June for a month. You can return the typescript here registered if sending by return. Otherwise better send it c/o Shakespeare and Co, rue Dupuytren 8, Paris VI. I heard today that Mr Philip Carr (absit omen!) is a great admirer of Exiles and wants to play it here in English. He is founding or refounding or confounding an English Theatre in Paris.

I am glad you liked Circe and Eumeus. Struggling with the acidities of Ithaca—a mathematico-astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen (devil take ’em both) to prepare for the final amplitudinously curvilinear episode Penelope.

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To JOHN QUINN, 19 April 1921

Boulevard Raspali  5, Paris VII

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Quinn: I understand that the typescript of Ulysses is on its way back, as I instructed. The publication of Ulysses (complete) was arranged here in a couple of days. You will receive a prospectus in a week or so. It appears in October.

I hope you received the MS of Circe and Eumeus. As a curiosity I threw in also the 8th draft of the former.

Unfortunately, a bad thing has happened. The husband of one of my many typists (an employee of the British Embassy here, named Harrison) found some of the MS on her table, read it, tore it up and burnt it. Hysterical scenes followed, I believe, in the house and in the street. What I am concerned with is that there is now a lacuna of several pages in the typescript, which has already gone to the printer, and I must write it in. Unfortunately, I had sent you the MS a few days before (the MS burnt was a copy of my MS made by Miss Beach). I need about six or seven pages back again for a day or so and will return them registered. Mrs S.W. Beach sails for Europe on 4 May and could bring them. May I ask you to lend them to me? Here is the nearest clue I can give you to the passage: It begins about p. 60 or so, where Bloom leaves the brothel; there is a scene on the steps and then a hue and cry in the street and the beginning of the quarrel with the soldiers. Six or seven pages after Bloom’s exit (which you will find at a glance by the long catalogue of the persons in pursuit) will suffice.

In great haste and with regards and best thanks for your advocacy, Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 April 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: … I saw Mr Pound. He has read Circe and Eumeus about which he appears to be very excited. He told me he had sent or was sending them to you. I am glad they are gone out of my house. I suppose you have now received Miss Beach’s letter. I do not think it is necessary to say anything about Mr Aldington’s article (I am writing to him in any case to thank him for it) except that it ought to attract some attention to the book. While I consider his article quite fair (though somewhat irrelevant to my mind) perhaps it would be well to pass on to Mr Eliot when you have read them the two episodes Mr Pound sent and also the typescript of Oxen of the Sun which I could send if you approve. I mention this because he told me it was arranged that Mr Aldington was to write an article and he to reply to it. In that case he ought to see the book in its present (penultimate) stage.

I heard just now that the Little Review, a monthly which came out every five or six months lately, has suddenly become a weekly or fortnightly publication. I have not been able to see Mr Pound, from whom the rumour originated, but I shall let you know more tomorrow.

Needless to say I agree in advance to anything you propose about the English edition. With many thanks and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 May 1921

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for the very liberal advance of royalties on Ulysses (Paris edition) for which I enclose receipt. I am glad you see no fatigue in Circe. Her web is so vast and of such intricate zoological design that I suppose it must be hard to follow in such a typescript. A few threads have fallen out to say nothing of the rent made in it. I would have sent on the typescript of Oxen of the Sun with this for Mr Eliot but that this with all the copies of the Little Review was lent to Mrs Harrison to enable her, as she said, to follow the names and allusions in Circe when typing. I have written to her twice but can get no reply. I am trying to find out where she works. I hope her husband has not burnt them also. I quite approve of course of your writing to Mr Pinker and agree with all you may say on that point. Mr Pound gave me the cuttings I sent you. He also showed me two letters from the editors of the Little Review which is now to become a quarterly with Mr Pound again as foreign editor. I glanced through the letters and it seems Ulysses will now be dropped so that I suppose the Oxen of the Sun will not even be printed in it. This is immaterial as the book is fairly well known. Mr Pound is planning with some friends an article or manifesto about it. Nevertheless I shall present the typescript to him (another copy) for forwarding as I have done hitherto knowing that it will never appear in the review.

Tomorrow evening I hope to send you a proof of the prospectus. The printer’s estimate of paging and cost was, as I discovered, full of mistakes and now he has reduced his figure by 7000 francs, I hear. This explains the delay. I am doing all I can to launch the raft on which this ‘hero’ will embark for posterity—to the intense relief of all his contemporaries. I perceive smiles of satisfaction all round me emanating from readers who have been informed officially that there are only two more episodes, both reasonably short, and no sequel.

Many thanks again for your aid which illuminates the dismal labyrinth I seem to walk in.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, [31 May 1921]

Boulevard Raspail 5, Paris VII

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I leave this address in a few days. Write to me pro tem,

c/o Shakespeare & Co

rue Dupuytren, 8,

Paris VI

The position would be in the Cunard or Ellerman line. Get into touch at once with Wyndham Lewis whom I saw off last night. He knows Lady Cunard who did also a lot for me. Then Robert McAlmon, an American poet and admirer of Ulysses, is a son-in-law of Sir John Ellerman. He went off with Lewis and they will do all they can. Don’t lose time.

Had several uproarious allnight sittings (and dancings) with Lewis as he will perhaps tell you. I like him.

Giorgio leaves with Hummel and Magli for Zurich on Friday for a month.

O this moving job!

Merda!

J.J.

Lewis’s address, I think, is

2 Alma Studios

Stratford Road,

London, W.8.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 5 June 1921

rue du Cardinal Lemoine 71, Paris V

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Cher Larbaud: Nous voilà donc installés chez vous depuis deux jours et déjà, après le sacré déménagement, je commence à m’y trouver si bien que l’épisode d’Ithaque procède rapidement. Un endroit plus favorable on ne pourrait penser pour la fin tranquille d’un libre si tumultueux. J’ai laissé Circe et les pourceaux, truies, boudins, andouilles, grognements etc là-bas au boulevard Raspail. Ma femme et Lucie sont enchantées. Elles me prient d’ajouter leur noms en vous disant encore une fois notre gratitude.

Pas de réponse de la part de Gallimard. Et je crois que Poe ne donnera pas la pièce. J’attends les premières épreuves d’Ulysse au 10 courant. Lucie veut savoir le nom de la petite farce dont vous m’avez parlé.

Comment allez-vous? Si la carte postale que vous m’avez envoyé est typique du pays je me promets déjà un séjour là quand le livre sera fini. C’était si touchant que j’ai dû penser à notre ballade mélancolique irlandaise ‘I saw from the beach’. Elle semble avoir toutes les colonies allemandes dans ses caleçons.

Peutêtre de temps à autre vous trouverez là-bas sur la plage ou dans votre demeure ou qui sait où une trace quelconque de mon héros (dans le 25e livre de l’Odysée, brulé par l’ambassadeur britannique à Athènes on parle de son séjour à Σόραμος je vous prie de m’en parler. Spécialement à qui regarde la fin.

L’astre devant votre fenêtre me conseille de finir parce qu’il commence à devenir sombre. Bien cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 6 June 1921

rue Cardinal Lemoine 71, Paris V

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Above is my new address. Did you return the typescript. A copy arrived about a week ago but my family opened the wrapper so I don’t know if it is yours or Eliot’s. This is Valery Larbaud’s flat in a charming little quarter situated in a kind of park. Giorgio went to Zurich on Thursday for a month’s holiday.

Kind regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself from us both Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI, 7 June 1921

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Ve, Parigi

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Caro Francini: Suppongo che quell’articolo nell’E.N. sia opera tua. Grazie. La chiusa è bella. Eccomi di nuovo sloggiato (e Silvestri che vuol mandarmi una tela sua dove ha la testa? Avessi una casa mia ben volentieri ci metterei i suoi quadri nonché certi ammenicoli lasciati costì)—il quinto sloggio in 11 mesi. Il quartiere Boulevard Raspail mi costava la bellezza di 2000 lire al mese. Questo invece non mi costa niente. Il romanziere francese Valery Larbaud è fuori della grazia di Dio causa il mio Ulisse che proclama la più vasta ed umana opera scritta in Europa dopo Rabelais. Prescindendo da questo (del quale giudicherà l’avvenire) ha saputo corroborare il suo parere coi fatti. Avendo avuto qualche sentore dei miei grovigli fece arredare di nuovo il suo appartamento e me lo mise a disposizione per i mesi estivi. È quaclhe cosa d’incredibile. Dietro il Panthéon a 10 minuti dal Lussemburgo una specie di piccolo parco, al quale si accede attraverso due cancelli, silenzio assoluto, grandi alberi, uccelli (non di quei che intendi tu, veh!) pare di essere a 100 chilometri da Parigi. Il mobiglio è delizioso. Egli ed il primo attore del teatro Vieux Colombier hanno ideato una specie d’ammobiliamento fantastico eppure comodissimo. È possibile ch’io valga qualche cosa? Chi l’avrebbe detto dopo la mia ultima esperienza a Trieste? Larbaud dice che il solo episodio di Circe basterebbe per fare la rinomanza di uno scrittore francese per la vita. Ma o! ed a! ed ahime! ed oibo! che libro! L’episodio d’Itaca adesso tutto geometria, algebra e matematica e dopo Penelope finalmente! Potessi tuffare la mia testa in un mare di ghiaccio! È già sotto i torchi il libro ed aspetto le prime bozze domani l’altro. Sarà pubblicato però appena in ottobre o novembre. Trattandosi di tre edizioni costose bisogna evitare i refusi. I colori della legatura (scelti da me) saranno lettere bianche in campo azzurro—la bandiera greca quantunque realmente d’origine bavarese ed importata colla dinastia. Eppure in certo qual modo simboleggiano bene il mito—le isole bianche sparse nel mare.

Quanto al lato materiale credo se l’edizione va bene (le sottoscrizioni vengono ogni giorno—oggi 3 dall’Australia) riceverò qualcosa fra 100.000 e 150.000. Ma non è questo che mi preoccupa. Nessuna somma potrà mai pagarmi il lavoro e lo sciupìo . . Si potrebbe scrivere qualcosa di veramente comico sui sottoscriventi di questo mio libraccio—un figlio o nipote di Bela Kun, il ministro della guerra britannico Winston Churchill, un vescovo anglicano ed un capo del movimento rivoluzionario irlandese. Son diventato un monumento—anzi vespasiano!

Giorgio è a Zurigo per le sue vacanze. Ordinerò il libro di Papini ma non prometto di leggerlo per il momento. Salutami Benco e Silvestri pittore-speditore.

Bien d’amitiés à Madame et à Daniele … Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 21 June 1921

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Cher Larbaud: Les premières épreuves sont arrivées et je travaille à droite et à gauche avec les corrections et avec Ithaque. M. Jean de Bosschère vint me voir. Il va en Angleterre et désire vous voir. J’ai commis l’imprudence de lui donner votre adresse?? Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 June 1921

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris V

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Apparently we were both alarmed and then relieved for different reasons. I can only repeat that I am glad it is not any trouble of your own and as for myself having been asked what I have to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon me I should like to rectify a few mistakes.

A nice collection could be made of legends about me. Here are some. My family in Dublin believe that I enriched myself in Switzerland during the war by espionage work for one or both combatants. Triestines, seeing me emerge from my relative’s house occupied by my furniture for about twenty minutes every day and walk to the same point the G.P.O. and back (I was writing Nausikaa and The Oxen of the Sun in a dreadful atmosphere) circulated the rumour, now firmly believed, that I am a cocaine victim. The general rumour in Dublin was (till the prospectus of Ulysses stopped it) that I could write no more, had broken down and was dying in New York. A man from Liverpool told me he had heard that I was the owner of several cinema theatres all over Switzerland. In America there appear to be or have been two versions: one that I was almost blind, emaciated and consumptive, the other that I am an austere mixture of the Dalai Lama and sir Rabindranath Tagore. Mr Pound described me as a dour Aberdeen minister. Mr Lewis told me he was told that I was a crazy fellow who always carried four watches and rarely spoke except to ask my neighbour what o’clock it was. Mr Yeats seemed to have described me to Mr Pound as a kind of Dick Swiveller. What the numerous (and useless) people to whom I have been introduced here think I don’t know. My habit of addressing people whom I have just met for the first time as ‘Monsieur’ earned for me the reputation of a tout petit bourgeois while others consider what I intend for politeness as most offensive. I suppose I now have the reputation of being an incurable dipsomaniac. One woman here originated the rumour that I am extremely lazy and will never do or finish anything. (I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20,000 hours in writing Ulysses). A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.

I mention all these views not to speak about myself or my critics but to show you how conflicting they all are. The truth probably is that I am a quite commonplace person undeserving of so much imaginative painting. There is a further opinion that I am a crafty simulating and dissimulating Ulysses-like type, a ‘jejune jesuit’, selfish and cynical. There is some truth in this, I suppose: but it is by no means all of me (nor was it of Ulysses) and it has been my habit to apply this alleged quality to safeguard my poor creations for on the other side, as I stated in a former letter, I removed so much of any natural wit I had that but for your intuitive help I should be destitute.

I cannot understand the part of your letter about a new circle of friends here. Most of the people to whom Mr Pound introduced me on my arrival here struck me as being, as the elder Mr Dedalus would have phrased it, ‘as I roved out one fine May morning’. The director of L’Oeuvre theatre who was so enthusiastic about Exiles and bombarded me with telegrams has just written a most insolent letter in slang to say that he was not such a fool as to put on the piece and lose 15,000 francs. My consolation is that I win a box of preserved apricots —a bet I made with Mr Pound (who was optimistic) after a cursory inspection of the director aforesaid. I signed a letter giving him carte blanche to do what he liked with the play, adapt it, put it on, take it off, lock it up etc knowing that if I refused to sign in a week it would have been said that I was an impossible person, that I was introduced to the great actor Lugne-Poe and given a great opportunity and would not take it. I have been a year in Paris and in that time not a word about me has appeared in any French periodical. Six or seven people are supposed to be translating Dubliners in different parts of France. The novel is translated and presented but I can get no reply from the publishers (?) about it though I have written four times asking even for the return of the typescript. I never go to any of the various weekly reunions as it is a waste of time for me at present to be cooped up in overcrowded rooms listening to gossip about absent artists and replying to enthusiastic expressions about my (unread) masterpiece with a polite amused reflective smile. The only person who knows anything worth mentioning about the book or did or tried to do anything about it is Mr Valery Larbaud. He is now in England. Would you like him to visit you before he returns?

To return however to the indictment. What Mr Lewis and Mr McAlmon told you is, I am sure, right but at the same time you may have misunderstood what they said. I do not attach the same importance to the “excess” mentioned as you do and as Mr Lewis does, apparently. And yet you are both probably right. This is another reason why your letter relieved me. I suppose you will think me an indifferent kind of rascal. Perhaps I am. Mr Lewis was very agreeable, in spite of my deplorable ignorance of his art, even offering to instruct me in the art of the Chinese of which I know as much as the man in the moon. He told me he finds life in London very depressing. There is a curious kind of honour-code among men which obliges them to assist one another and not hinder the free action of one another and remain together for mutual protection with the result that very often they waken up the next morning sitting in the same ditch.

This letter begins to remind me of a preface by Mr George Bernard Shaw. It does not seem to be a reply to your letter after all. I hate pose of any kind and so I could not [write] a highflown epistle about nerve tension and relaxation, or asceticism the cause and the effect of excess etc etc. You have already one proof of my intense stupidity. Here now is an example of my emptiness. I have not read a work of literature for several years. My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ’most everywhere. The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance. I want to finish the book and try to settle my entangled material affairs definitely one way or the other (somebody here said of me ‘They call him a poet. He appears to be interested chiefly in mattresses’) And in fact, I was. After that I want a good long rest in which to forget Ulysses completely.

I forgot to tell you another thing. I don’t even know Greek though I am spoken of as erudite. My father wanted me to take Greek as third language my mother German and my friends Irish. Result, I took Italian. I spoke or used to speak modern Greek not too badly (I speak four or five languages fluently enough) and have spent a great deal of time with Greeks of all kinds from noblemen down to onionsellers, chiefly the latter. I am superstitious about them. They bring me luck.

I now end this long rambling shambling speech, having said nothing of the darker aspects of my detestable character. I suppose the law should take its course with me because it must now seem to you a waste of rope to accomplish the dissolution of a person who has now dissolved visibly and possesses scarcely as much ‘pendibility’ as an uninhabited dressing gown. With kindest regards gratefully and sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, [Late June 1921]

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Ve, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Have you seen Lewis? If nothing has come out of the Lady Cunard suggestion the Ellerman line is still open. The friend I spoke of is here. Write to me. Ithaca is giving me fearful trouble. Corrected the first batch of proofs today up to Stephen on the strand which I read out to you on a memorable night in Zurich (Universitätsstrasse 29) with mirthful comments. Hummel and Giorgio left for Zurich on the 4th. In the words of the Cyclops narrator the curse of my deaf and dumb arse light sideways on Bloom and all his blooms and blossoms. I’ll break the back of Ithaca tomorrow so ’elp me fucking Chroist. Write by return

J J

P.S. There is an article about me in Today but I haven’t seen it, the rlwy strike (for which YOU are responsible) seems to have disorganised the parcels bloody post again. (English undefiled!)

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 August 1921

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris V

Dear Miss Weaver: I have had five weeks of delightful vacation with my eyes—the strangest but not at all the worst attack because instead of coming to a head in three weeks it did so in three hours. The people who persisted in regarding me as a foot-in-the-grave young man would have [been] edified to see me rolling over the carpet. The good point was that the attack was shorter in the recovery stage. I am now advised to go to Aix-les-Bains but am in Ithaca instead. I write and revise and correct with one or two eyes about twelve hours a day I should say, stopping for intervals of five minutes or so when I can’t see any more. My brain reels after it but that is nothing compared with the reeling of my readers’ brains. I have not yet quite recovered and I am doing the worst thing possible but can’t help it. It is folly also because the book will probably not repay a tithe of such labour. The subscriptions have been rather slow and poor and now seem to have come or be coming to an end…. I am trying to make up for lost time. Not a single subscription came from Trieste except one from baron Ralli a Greek to whom I owe my liberation from Austria in 1915.

About three months ago I received a note of four lines from Mr Pinker to which I replied by a note of no lines at all—which is shorter still. I think it would be well if Ulysses makes my name to unify my pub lishers….

I was going to take a forty-eight hour holiday somewhere but decided not to do so. If I lay down in some remote part of the country I am so tired that I should never have the energy to get up.

I have the greater part of Ithaca but it has to be completed, revised and rearranged above all on account of its scheme. I have also written the first sentence of Penelope but as this contains about 2500 words the deed is more than it seems to be. The episode consists of eight or nine sentences equally sesquipedalian and ends with a monosyllable. Bloom and all the Blooms will soon be dead, thank God. Everyone says he ought to have died long ago….

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To VALERY LARBAUD, N.D. [Summer, 1921]

71, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris

Cher Larbaud: J’ai bien reçu les enveloppes mais je n’ai jusqu’ici rien à … y mettre. Mlle Monnier m’a parlé de votre impatience de lire le dernier episode. Mais il y en a deux, Ithaqueet Pénélope. De celui-ci j’avais dès le commencement esquissé la silhouette et maintenant je l’ai rempli (et comment) au moins les trois-quart. De l’autre j’ai écrit presque autant mais il faudra y travailler encore. Je travaille dix jours [sic] par jour en ajoutant aussi beaucoup au texte des épreuves que je corrige. Outre ça et outre l’incident de la chasse (hue and cry) détruit par M. Harrison de l’ambassade brütannique et maintenant remplacé j’ai ajouté à Circe une scène messianique avec une litanie chantée en son honneur qui acquière ces titres tirés des episodes, c à d, des aventures, qui commence:

Kidney of Bloom, pray for us!

Flower of the Bath, pray for us!

Mentor of Menton, pray for us

Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us!

Charitable Mason, pray for us!

Wandering Soap, pray for us!

Music without Words, pray for us!

Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us!

Friend of all Frillies, pray for us!

Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us!

etc etc

é Ithaque est très étrange. Pénélopele dernier cri.

Vous m’avez demandé une fois quelle serait la dernière parole d’Ulysse. La voilà: yes. Autour de cette parole et de trois autres également femelles l’episode tourne lourdement sur son axe. Il n’y a que huit phrases dont la prèmière contient 2500 paroles.

J’ai signé le contrat avec La Sirènepour le Portrait aujourd’hui.

Je vois beaucoup mieux ma non vedo l’ora di terminare con Bloom ora e poi sempre [?] in secula seculorum. Amen!

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To EZRA POUND, [12 August 1921]

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Pound: Here are the songs. There are, I think, eight others. The composer’s address is:

Glencormac

Bray

Co Wicklow (Ireland)

I signed the contract yesterday with La Sirene. The manager, Mr Fénéon, who by the way lunches today with Quinn an old friend of his, it seems, wants as much publicity as possible attracted to the book and seems disappointed at the Germain-Dugard bungle as he thought the thing was arranged. The latter enthusiast (il faut que je publie ça au mois de septembre! etc) has been pursued by another telegram and his description has been given to the police

J.J.

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To CARLO LINATI (Postcard), Postmark 14 August 1921

rue Cardinal Lemoine 71, Parigi V

MS. Yale

Caro Linati: Cosa c’è cogli ‘Esuli’ e con Lei. Spero che sta bene. Ero malato 6 settimane di nuovo cogli occhi. Mi scriva un paio di righe. Vorrei anche aver il Convegno coll’articolo di Rodker sulla letteratura inglese. Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 16 August 1921

No address [71, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris]

Dear Budgen: Thanks for your letter. First of all send me that Sieges of Gibraltar and also Conan Doyle History of South African War published by same house Nelson in their cheap collection. By the way please be sure to send them by book post registered and express. Parcels of books sent as parcels take six weeks! Incredible but true. As regards that 60 pp book would it be too much to suggest to you the following: get an exercise book and detach the leaves of it. If you read rapidly through the book again you could jot down on the sheets anything in the words of the book you think interesting and a quick sketch of those views (not artistic I am not an artist). This plan you might follow with the other books and then simply put the sheets in an envelope and send them on to me.

Penelope is the clou of the book. The first sentence contains 2500 words. There are eight sentences in the episode. It begins and ends with the female word Yes. It turns like the huge earthball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning. Its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and … expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses, bottom button, bottom of the glass, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart) woman, yes. Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. Ich bin das Fleisch das stets bejaht.

Enclosed 20 francs about 8/6. More will follow. Send on that letter.

P.S. Molly Bloom was born in 1871.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 27 August 1921

71, Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris V

Dear McAlmon: I enclose I.O.U. as promised and also a photo cut from Dublin Freeman. On my way back from Gare du Nord a filthy rat ran by me. I was on the lookout for unpleasant news but it happened otherwise. Yesterday after dinner feeling my head light I went to the Alhambra with Giorgio but collapsed in the middle of the programme and was helped out of the theatre and into a taxi by a policeman. I was driven to a night pharmacy and given ether and then home. The attack lasted about an hour. I could scarcely breathe and was very pale and weak—and nerves! Still I don’t think it was cardiac because my nails remained pink. Anyhow I have given up the 16 hours a day work on Ulysses. I will do 5 or 6 or, later on, 8 hours. Walked to the Etoile and back this morning and will take another in the evening.

Hope to receive your story and letter soon.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 August 1921

71, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris V

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for the Italian papers which came this morning. I sent a verbal reply to your last question by Mr McAlmon who was leaving for London and said he would see you. I agree in advance to any scheme you may propose about the book. As regards my other suggestion I did not mean that you should advertise the other books…. I have been obliged to reduce my working hours from about sixteen hours daily to six in consequence of an attack I got, some kind of syncope it seemed to be. It came on me in a musichall where I had gone with my son feeling my head too light for work. With his help and that of an agent I was got into a taxi and brought into a night pharmacy where they gave me some ether, I think. The attack lasted about two hours and, being very nervous, I was much alarmed. Since then I have been training for a Marathon race by walking 12 or 14 kilometres every day and looking carefully in the Seine to see if there is any place where I could throw Bloom in with a 50 lb weight tied to his feet. I have made a great deal of addition to the proofs so far (up to the end of Scylla and Charybdis). Perhaps you would like to see them. If so I shall send them on. I have also added a Messianic scene to Circe but the printer has not reached that yet. I hope you had a pleasant sojourn in the country. I have been a score of times to various railway stations here seeing people off and in and I feel vaguely that I should like to be going somewhere myself but by the time I am ready the winter equinox and the midnight sun and other impossible phenomena will all be in conjunction to make the weather truly antarctic. Please accept my very best wishes for your birthday and for many happy returns.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 3 September 1921

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Ve

MS. Brigham Young University

Dear MacAlmon [sic]: Thanks for your friendly letter. I hope you got mine with the I.O.U. Since that collapse I have knocked off about 10 hours a day, work 6 and go walking. I feel much better so. I send back your proof and the letter. Send on a few more stories, the ones the English printer boggled at. This one is all right but I’d like to see more. So is the letter. I hope it is published somewhere. By the way the proof has many misprints⁠[.] I didn’t correct them as I thought you might have sent me a second copy. Proof is very tricky.

I sent on that lot of Penelope to Budgen but he hasn’t written yet about it. If you see him please ask him to send it back. I have now written in a great lot of balderdash all over the damn book and the first half is practically as it will appear. I shall give Molly another 2000 word spin, correct a few more episodes and write all over them and then begin to put the spectral penultimate Ithaca into shape. Meanwhile walking along the Seine I look for some secluded spot where I may ‘catch a hold of Bloom and throw him in the bloody sea’ (pron. ‘say’).

How did you get on with Budgen and what news is there of Miss Weaver and others. Rodker is here but is going away again. I can take charge of that typewriter if you like but perhaps you want it or haven’t you a portable one? Miss Beach and Miss Monnier are in the south, so is Nutting.

If you ever find anything relating to what I am doing throw it into an envelope and perhaps it will go into the stew.

No more subscriptions for Ulysses. Only 4 or 5 last month.

Whatever you send to France send by registered letter post (I mean your proofs, for example) as parcel post goes through the customs and takes a devil of a time. Kind regards and good luck Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 6 September 1921

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris

Dear Budgen: Received first instalment of Gibraltar. What is wrong with the rest? Got a syncope fit in theatre and had to be helped out by agent and Giorgio to a cab and then given ether. Work now only 6 hours per day. I send you the first part of Penelope in its draft form to let you see it and have your opinion. This is only the draft. A great deal will be added and changed in 3 proofs. Let me know how it strikes you and return it by registered post as quickly as possible. Will send you some money Monday or Tuesday for the following if obtainable:

Love’s Old Sweet Song.

In Old Madrid.

Fanny Hill’s Memoirs (unexpurgated).

If you find this latter you can put a stop [?] on it. You will receive an invitation to dinner from a friend of mine to whom I have spoken about you, R.M., an American poet. I found him very simple and decent. He admires Ulysses very much so that can set you off….

To understand Penelope well you should have an idea of Ithaca but it is not yet ready.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 September 1921

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Ve

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Incredible though it may seem I have a new eye attack threatening me. I seem exhausted but am working as much as I dare. You have my authorisation to make any arrangements you wish with Mr Mathews and Mr Richards. I wrote to the latter two or three years ago on the subject of Verbannte and enclose my contract (on which I paid 1000 frs Swiss) with Mr Rascher. Neither he nor any other publisher ever sends any royalties so that there is practically nothing for Mr Pinker to administer (the private edition of Ulysses being my own affair and risk) though he is nominally my agent and, if Mr Richards desires, the agreement can be made through him. I hope that it will be made without trouble and that nobody, except you, will write to me on that or any other subject. I am far too nervous from illness and overwork to attend to business of any kind. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, [24 September 1921] Saturday

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I am nearly dead with work and eyes. Sent Penelope to the printers so that you may have it to read when you come here. All will be ready for you on the 2 October. The Ithaca episode I shall put in order in October. When does your article appear in N.R.F.? A man called for the chair but not about the mirror. You will scarcely recognise parts of Ulysses I have worked so much on them. Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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From REVEREND CHARLES DOYLE, S.J., 3 October 1921

Belvedere College Dublin

MS. Buffalo

Dear Sir The Christian name of the wife of the first Earl of Belvedere was Mary. She was the daughter of Lord Molesworth. She never lived in Belvedere College, however. After the divorce court proceedings she was confined in Gaulstown, Co. Westmeath, the old seat of the family, near Belvedere House by the shore of Lough Ennel, a new residence just completed by the Earl. The Countess Mary died about 1780. Belvedere House (now Belvedere College) was not completed and occupied by the second Earl (the builder of it), until 1786. Yours faithfully,

Charles Doyle S.J.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 6 October 1921

9, rue de l’Université, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: This is our new address into which we moved a day or two ago with much noise and bustle of boxes trunks MSS etc. Penelope is finished and at the printers. As it is to be done before the others for Larbaud I could send it on if this is still your address. Am working now putting Ithaca in order. No news here of any importance. I am afraid I am to blame for holding up your story. The French printers are boggled by all the w’s and k’s in our tongue and can do only about 100 pp at a time. However I swear I am doing my best to push Bloom on to the stage of the world by the beginning of November and then I suppose you have some kind of a chance.

Meantime I wish you luck with that magnolious female.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 October 1921

9, rue de l’Université, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: A few lines to let you know I am here again with MSS and pencils (red, green and blue) and cases of books and trunks and all the rest of my impedimenta nearly snowed up in proofs and nearly crazed with work. Ulysses will be finished in about three weeks, thank God, and (if the French printers don’t all leap into the Rhone in despair at the mosaics I send them back) ought to be published early in November. I sent the Penelope episode to the printer as Larbaud wants to read it before he finishes his article for the Nouvelle Revue Française. The Ithaca episode which precedes it I am now putting in order. It is in reality the end as Penelope has no beginning, middle or end. I expect to have early next week about 240 pages of the book as it will appear ready and will send on. Eolus is recast. Hades and the Lotuseaters much amplified and the other episodes retouched a good deal. Not much change has been made in the Telemachia (the first three episodes of the book).

My eyes seem to be all right for the next three weeks though I know that it is madness to work them as I am doing but I feel around me a good deal of impatience made up partly of expectation and partly of irritation. I am very very slow and have just energy enough to write the dry rocks pages of Ithaca.

With kind regards and looking forward to the expiration of my seven years’ sentence.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 10 October 1921

9, rue de l’Université, Paris

Dear McAlmon: Many thanks for that most opportune cheque for which I enclose I.O.U. Lord knows what I should have done without it after the expenses of removal. O Herr Gott in Himmel was ist das für ein Hundesleben! I am getting through your proofs. The stories remind me in a way of Dubliners—not in treatment or the characters—rather the mental predisposition. Are you going to publish it through Shakespeare and Co or on your own? Darantière is damn slow setting Penelope. I wanted to send it to you before but can’t get it out of him. Larbaud wants it too. In a few days I hope. Have sent the first part of Ithaca to the typist and am working like a lunatic, trying to revise and improve and connect and continue and create all at the one time.

I enclose a copy of a letter from Shaw which, though it is dated 11/6/921 I saw for the first time an hour or so ago. As it is a private letter no use should be made of it in print, I suppose. Still I think it ought to be made known otherwise. I think I can read clearly (with the one good eye I have) between the lines. I would also take on a small bet (up to 4.75 francs) that the writer has subscribed anonymously for a copy of Ulysses through some bookseller.

With many thanks again and wishes for your magnolious expansiveness.

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From BERNARD SHAW to SYLVIA BEACH, 10 October 1921

10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2

Dear Madam, I have read several fragments of Ulysses in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity. To you, possibly, it may appeal as art: you are probably (you see I don’t know you) a young barbarian beglamoured by the excitements and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material; but to me it is all hideously real: I have walked those streets and known those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations. I escaped from them to England at the age of twenty; and forty years later have learnt from the books of Mr. Joyce that Dublin is still what it was, and young men are still drivelling in slackjawed blackguardism just as they were in 1870. It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.

I am aware that there are other qualities and other passages in Ulysses: but they do not call for any special comment from me.

I must add, as the prospectus implies an invitation to purchase, that I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and that if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen. Faithfully,

G. Bernard Shaw

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 11 October 1921

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I am still waiting for Penelope. Perhaps it will come tomorrow. Meanwhile I send you enclosed. Can you read between the lines? Io, si. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 October 1921

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Enclosed is a copy of a letter which I saw only yesterday. Copies of the prospectus were sent to Mr W.B. Yeats, Mr George Moore and of course they did not reply. This will not prevent them however from subscribing for the book anonymously through a bookseller in common with the elderly Irish gentleman. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Perhaps I ‘ought to add’ that I win a bet (made six months ago) thanks to Mr Shaw’s letter.

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 14 October 1921

9, rue de l’Université. Paris VII

Dear Aunt Josephine: Thanks for prompt reply to my letter. Ulysses, a huge book of about 800 pages, about 11 inches by 7, ought to be out in about three weeks or so. The cheapest copies cost £3 each, the dearest £7 each. I shall send you one. I get very few free copies they are so dear.

I want all the information, gossip or anything you remember about the Powells—chiefly the mother and daughters. Were any of them born abroad? When did Mrs Powell die? I never heard of a 3rd brother, only Gus and Charley. The women were Mrs Gallaher, Mrs Clinch, Mrs Russell. Where did they live before marriage? When did the major, if that was his rank, die? Also any information you have about the Dillons (Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters, Tiny, Floey, Atty, Sara, Nannie and Mamie, especially the last, the cigarette smoker and Spanish type). Get an ordinary sheet of foolscap and a pencil and scribble any God damn drivel you may remember about these people.

Can you ask anybody to call at 81 Summerhill and ask what is my father’s address. He wrote to Lucia a month or so ago a rather amusing letter in copperplate handwriting. If he goes out with a man to protect him I think he is quite right, to judge by the papers I see, as everyone seems to carry his life in his hands in the dear old land of the shamrock. I am sorry to hear you had that tragedy in your family too. In the circumstances it may be unreasonable to trouble you but I need all the information and quickly. If the country had not been turned into a slaughterhouse of course I should have gone there and got what I wanted.

P.S. If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer. Also I forgot to ask what do you know about Hunter who lived in Clonliffe road and Alf Bergan etc etc. I mean what has become of them. I know what the relations were then. You needn’t inquire from other people. I am writing to you. If you know or remember write what you can. I don’t want the help of my fellow countrymen, moral or material. Send me your full address—Ballybough?

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 20 October 1921

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Herewith the Penelope episode, uncorrected and incomplete but perhaps enough to allow you to get a general idea of it. I hope you will like it. Kind regards

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 29 October 1921

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: A few lines to say that I have just finished the Ithaca episode so that at last the writing of Ulysses is finished. I have still a lot of proofreading and revising to do but the composition is at an end. I shall send you Penelope with all my revisions and additions when the printers send it back. Ithaca is very strange. I wonder will you like it.

O, Deo Gratias!

I shall be greatly obliged if your monthly cheque arrives punctually on the 1 Nov (that is to say the damned landlord of this brothel will). Let us hope things will now begin to brighten. About 3 weeks more stewing over proofs and all is finished. So three cheers for Bloom!

(Loud hisses)

Many apologies for the material part of this and best wishes for your continued magnoliousness and to our next meeting.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 30 October 1921

rue de l’Université 9

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: My typist has sent you extracts (of course uncorrected) from the beginning and middle of Ithaca. In a few days she will send you extracts from the end. I shall send you the proof of the Messianic [scene] from Circe when I get it back.

I finished Ithaca last night so that now the writing of Ulysses is ended, though I have still some weeks of work in revising the proofs. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 November 1921

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: A fortnight ago I sent you by registered post a set of proofs (receipt enclosed). Did you receive them safely? If so will you please send them back, preferably in two or three registered letters as printed matter often takes weeks to reach here. I have two new sets to send but should like to know that the first reached you.

I have now finished the Ithaca episode and with that the writing of Ulysses. What remains to be done is the revision of proofs of the last four episodes. The printer says he can set it all by 15 November and bring it out, he hopes, by the end of the month. I intend to do nothing in the way of revision of proofs for two days as I feel very tired and listless. I shall begin again on Thursday and the fault will be the printer’s not mine if the book is not out in a few weeks.

Those few weeks, however, are a trouble to me materially. About 400 subscriptions are made, I believe, but no part of the money will be available till the notices go out towards the end of the month to the effect that the book is ready. I should be glad to have these three weeks free in order to complete the revision of the last proofs. The landlord is already somewhat dubious I am afraid. I have scarcely energy enough to write more precisely but if there is any small amount forthcoming in the way of royalties I should be greatly relieved to have it by return. If I can get over these few weeks in peace I am quite willing to do any active work which society may assign me.

A coincidence is that of birthdays in connection with my books. A Portrait of the Artist which first appeared serially in your paper on 2 February finished on 1 September. Ulysses began on 1 March (birthday of a friend of mine, a Cornish painter) and was finished on Mr Pound’s birthday, he tells me. I wonder on whose it will be published.

I am sending this by airmail and, if not too much trouble for you, would be glad to have a line from you in reply.

With kind regards and apologies for the somewhat fatigued and certainly boring contents of the present sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 2 November 1921

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Aunt Josephine: Thanks for the information. Enclosed will explain why I am too busy to write longer today. Ulysses ought to be out by the 18 or 20 of this month. Two more questions. Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself down from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build. I require this information in detail in order to determine the wording of a paragraph. Secondly. Do you know anything of Mat Dillon’s daughter Mamy who was in Spain? If so, please let me know. Did any of your girl friends ever go there? Thirdly and last. Do you remember the cold February of 1893. I think you were in Clanbrassil street. I want to know whether the canal was frozen and if there was any skating.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 6 November 1921

Rue de l’Université, 9, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: Thanks very much for that prompt cheque which poured oil on all kinds of waters. Enclosed I.O.U. I do hope Miss Beach has not been writing to you about me. With the best intentions in the world but saying nothing to me about it she has been writing to several addresses in both worlds. O dear me! I hear a groan going up from the entire globular earth—in which I have to join. Well, it will soon be over. I shall send you tomorrow some extracts from Ithaca. They are not complete or revised and consecutive only in so far as order is concerned. I mean they are separated by gaps. It will be hard for you to follow the narrative such as it is. I like the episode myself. I find it of a tranquilising spectrality.

P.S. Clive Bell wrote an article, I hear, something about modern literature and me. He says that unfortunately I have such mediocre talents as not to justify detailed criticism. What form of suicide do you think I ought to choose?

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 November 1921

9, rue de l’Université, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: Since the completion of Ulysses I feel more and more tired but I have to hold on till all the proofs are revised. I am extremely irritated by all those printer’s errors. Working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half. Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not. I am glad the first proofs I sent didn’t go astray. I feared either that they had or that you were ill or had read them and disliked them as you did not write. I sent you a new batch yesterday. Will you please read them as quickly as you can and send them back as I sometimes need them to refer to. I think it would spoil the effect of the book for you to read Ithaca (in typescript) or Penelope (in advance proof) now until you have gone through the rest of the ordeal. I was glad to hear that Messrs Elkin Mathews and Grant Richards have ceased to be connected with me. I hope I shall hear no more of them in this world or the next. The name of the former will not appear in Ulysses as publisher of Chamber Music. An article in the New Republic by Mr Clive Bell has been shown to me. The writer, whom I met once or twice here, in an article on modernity in art excuses himself for not discussing at length the work of Mr Joyce on the ground that his (Mr J.’s) talents are unfortunately too mediocre to justify detailed criticism. I hear also that there is a good deal of latent hostility towards the book among men of letters in England and Ireland (Mr George Russell is reported to have said that it did not contain a single sentence worth reading) but, judging by the type of their mind so far as I know it, their opinion will change several times before definitely settling down. I wish the ponderous volume were launched to see how it and the other craft behave. In any case I shall not be on board. I am very grateful for your unremitting loyalty to my troublesome self and interminable composition which is at last to be offered to a mystified world.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 6 November 1921

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Budgen: Ulysses is finished. Have you time or do you want to see extracts from Ithaca? I have still some weeks’ work of revision and proofreading to do. Saw Suter twice. When do you arrive here? I enclose 20 frs. Will you please do Ulysses this last favour? I want,

Any little handbook of fortune telling by cards.

” ” ” ” British Freemasonry.

Any Catalogue of Whiteley’s or Harrod’s Stores.

” ” ” Tottenham Court Road furnishers.

Any bookseller’s Catalogue, preferably old.

Can you let me have these as quickly as possible registered? If you arrive within the next ten days or fortnight there will be a lecture on me (with translation of some passages) by Valery Larbaud. I hope you will come soon as there are a few points I want to talk to you about.

Also, if you can find it, any little manual on stamp collecting.

P.S. I hope to be able to help you here.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 6 November 1921

rue de l’Université 9, Paris

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Many thanks for those kind words of dedication which I saw yesterday with pleasure. I recognised in the story many points we discussed during notti bianche. Expected to see you last night at The Kid and hope you are not ill. Possibly I may see you tonight. If not I shall post you my scheme of Ulysses and proposed programme for the readings Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 11 November 1921

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Here is my copy of the book so far for you to look through to refresh your memory. I should like to have it back as soon as possible—even piecemeal—as I need it to refer to. One copy of each page proof coming in will also be sent you. I add the unrevised pages (galley) of the Messianic scene from Circe. Can you fix Wednesday 23 Nov. as date of conference? The translations of passages chosen by you have been made. I went over them with Benoit-Mechin. Kind regards

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, [About 15 November 1921]

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Hope you are better. Can you let me have that little plan I gave you of Ulysses. I shall amplify it and send it back next day. Please let me have it tomorrow Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [23 November 1921]

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Let me know what day you arrive. Can you bring me a little book on palmistry? I enclose 10 francs. Hope you come soon. I have a lesson for you here perhaps. Eye attack threatening but hope to Christ not. Please reply by return. Can you find what is the price of a book published about a year ago My Three Husbands, author unknown. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

Glad you liked Ithaca.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 26 November 1921

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Can you dine with me tonight? I hope so as I want to show you and comment on the new plan and discuss this matter which is rather delicate, I think, and important. As we shall dine at our end and I shall be at work all day would it be too much to ask you to call for me, say, at 7.30?

I have seen the notice of your séance and am glad and honoured to see our names associated for my first (or possibly last?) appearance before a French public Bien des choses

James Joyce

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To ARTHUR POWER, [? November 1921]

[Paris]

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Power Here are the episodes with cuts and blunders. I have two later ones in typescript and will give them next week.

J.J.

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From SHERWOOD ANDERSON, 3 December 1921

Chicago, Illinois

TS. Private

Dear Mr. Joyce:—I am writing this note to make you acquainted with my friend Ernest Hemingway, who with Mrs. Hemingway is going to Paris to live, and will ask him to drop it in the mails when he arrives there.

Mr. Hemingway is an American writer instinctively in touch with everything worth while going on here and I know you will find both Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway delightful people to know.

They will be at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Sincerely,

Sherwood Anderson

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 December 1921

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I think everything is going right now. The printer has done more in the past three days than in the fortnight before. Since Saturday there has been endless confusion about the non-arrival and mistranslation of the passages to be read tomorrow night. However with the aid of two typists, Mr Larbaud, Mr Fargue and myself have at last set everything right. Mr Larbaud, it seems, went to bed at 7 this morning having finished his part. There never was such a tiresome book, I am sure.

As regards Ithaca the question of printer’s errors is not the chief point. The episode should be read by some person who is a physicist, mathematician and astronomer and a number of other things. I hope to find one however. I think it better not to send you the extracts from it but if you prefer I can forward them. Penelope in printed proof (the 4th) is so illegible with interlineations that it would be useless to send it. In any case Ithaca should be read first….

I shall write to you again on Thursday after the séance about it and other things.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 December 1921

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclosed [sic] the article I spoke of. The biographical part of it is such a grotesque distortion of facts that I scarcely know what to say all the more as I know the writer for the past ten years and he must have lost his memory. You figure in it as an ‘American admirer’ and I as a kind of cardinal Mezzofanti speaking ‘18 European and oriental languages’! The intention of course is friendly so there the matter ends.

The séance went very well. In the middle of the Cyclops episode the light went out very much as it did for the Cyclops himself but the audience was very patient. Strange to say Mr Larbaud’s biographical introduction also contained a number of misstatements though I had answered many times the questions he asked me. Nobody seems to be inclined to present me to the world in my unadorned prosaicness. At the last moment he decided to cut part of the Penelope fragment but as he told me so only when he was walking to the table I accepted it. I daresay what he read was bad enough in all conscience but there was no sign of any kind of protest and had he read the few extra lines the equilibrium of the solar system would not have been greatly disturbed.

I ought now to attack the formidable problem of that money but I get so many proofs (I enclose more) by two posts a day that I cannot say much beyond this that your suggestion that it should be invested is one that I agree with in principle. Still if that were done now I might possibly run short of resources between now and the time of publication which might be postponed so that perhaps it is best not to do so. I am sometimes tormented by the fear that the printinghouse will be burned or some untoward event occur at the very last moment. Would you like to see the cover of Ulysses? I believe there are some typist’s errors in that plan I sent you. In one of his allusions Mr Larbaud welded two episodes together. Seemingly such an attitude is compatible with much understanding of the book and friendliness towards its writer. There are only about 180 pages more to print I should say so that very soon these—and a great many other points can be put to the test by throwing the book to the world.

I am sure that this letter is rather more puzzleheaded than usual but the printer, for some reason, sends me now proofs of Circe, Eumeus and Penelope at the same time without having finished the composition of the first two and I have to work on them simultaneously different as they are so that I remind myself of the man who used to play several instruments with different parts of his body.

I have heard that a parody of the book entitled Ulysses Junior appears in the New York Herald. They might have waited till the poor senior was properly ‘home from the sea’. I also hear that one of the writers of the futurist group here stimulated by Ulysses has begun a work to be entitled Telemachus. I wish him joy.

With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, [About 14 December 1921]

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: The following passages in the Cyclops episode are new or so amplified as to be new. Will you read them?

Inisfail (parable of S. Michan’s)

p. 282 et seq.

Cyclops

p. 284 et seq.

Execution

p. 293 et seq.

Lecture attendance

p. 304

Forester’s Marriage

p. 312 et 313

Cyclop’s [sic] Handkerchief

p. 317 et 318

Hope you are well and that Fargue was not too bored the other night by my ‘conference’ Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI, 30 December 1921

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Caro Francini: Grazie delle tue lettere. La fotografia ti sàra mandata direttamente—forse domani. Io non ho un momento libero. Sono nato in 1882 a Dublino. Il mio primo libro era Chamber Music (Musica da Camera). Quell’articolo apparve nel Fortnightly Review Aprile 1900 sull’ultimo dramma di Ibsen Quando noi morti ci destiamo. Quel motivo liturgico è l’introito per tempo pasquale ‘Vidi aquam egredientem de tempio a latere dextro’. II monastero al quale alludi è forse Einsiedeln? Scrivimi ancora se hai tempo. Per un esemplare d’Ulisse non so. Vedrò. Prima si era deciso a non dare esemplari alla stampa. Si criticherà e si venderà lo stesso eppoi è troppo caro. L’esemplare a buon prezzo costa 300 lire e pesa 2 chili. Poi si decise a fare 18 esemplari su carta inferiore per certi critici che sono molto in vista ma di questi 18 solo 2 sono destinati all’Italia. In somma vedrò. Spero avrai successo colla tua conferenza—ma quando incontri un triestino (oltre il bar. Ralli che ha sottoscritto) che pagherà 300 lire per un libro di Zois accendi una candela a Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo.

Ogni bene e felicità a te ed ai tuoi nell’anno nuovo

James Joyce

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1922

To VALERY LARBAUD, 5 January 1922

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Many thanks for New Year’s wishes and those succulent chocolates. We shall meet on Saturday, I hope. Pound wants to do an article on Ramon Gomez de la … de la …, In a shop at the corner of rue Jacob, rue Furstenberg you will see a picture of Molly avec le vieux lion.

Σάς ευχαριοτὼ πολύ τήν ευγενίαν σάς ὁ φίλος τόν

James Joyce

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To MYBON C. NUTTING (Postcard), 9 January 1922

[Paris

MS. Northwestern

Dear Nutting: Miss Beach would like to have that colour tomorrow if possible. The blue is all right but possibly a little faded as the flag was exposed for some time in the sunlight.

Many thanks and kind regards to Mrs Nutting and yourself

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 23 January 1922

[Paris]

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: Here pp. 683 to end is Penelope in uncorrected semifinal form. Please excuse me to Miss Hamnet. I shall not be quite free till Wednesday and am in a state of energetic prostration. Can you tell Giorgio where we can meet tonight say at 7.30 or tomorrow at 12 noon? If he doesn’t find you please send me a pneu.

Ulysses is supposed to appear on Saturday or Monday. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 31 January 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Ulysses will probably be published the day after tomorrow. You will get your copy as soon as the post-batch arrives. I have been working on the last proofs till this morning and am exhausted.

Thanks for your good wishes for my birthday and please give our regards to the Suters. My wife is better but the excitement has made her very nervous.

Was it you who sent me My Three Husbands. If so how much do I owe you?

James Joyce

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From MAURICE DARANTIÈRE, 1 February 1922

Maurice Darantiere, Maistre imprimeur, A Dijon

TS. Buffalo

Trois exemplaires de Ulysses sont remis au courrier de ce soir comme Lettres Express à l’adresse de Miss Beach.

L’officine toute entière est heureuse d’avoir lu votre lettre du 30 janvier. Elle est heureuse de vous offrir le premier exemplaire à la date du 2 Février. Maurice Darantiere.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 February 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your kind telegram. Two copies of Ulysses (nos. 901 and 902) reached Paris on 2 February and two further copies (nos. 251 and 252) on 5 February. One copy is on show, the other three were taken by subscribers who were leaving for different parts of the world. Since the announcement that the book was out the shop has been in a state of siege—buyers driving up two or three times a day and no copies to give them. After a great deal of telegraphing and telephoning it seems that 7 copies will come today and 30 tomorrow. A more nerveracking conclusion to the history of the book could scarcely have been imagined! The first 10 copies of the edition de luxe will not be ready before Saturday so that you will not receive your copy (no. 1) before Tuesday of next week at the earliest. I am glad for my own sake (though hardly for yours) that you are advertising an English edition. I hope it will be possible in that event to correct the numerous misprints. Pound says it is….

Thanks also for the prompt return of the Penelope episode (the name of which by another strange coincidence is your own). It did not arrive too late. Your description of it also coincides with my intention—if the epithet ‘posthuman’ were added.. I have rejected the usual interpretation of her as a human apparition—that aspect being better represented by Calypso, Nausikaa and Circe, to say nothing of the pseudo Homeric figures. In conception and technique I tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman.

With kindest regards

yours very sincerely and to the end importunately.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 11 February 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: Ulysses was published on the 2 February, my birthday. I sent you a telegram that morning to tell you of it and also to thank you for your kind help during the past year. It seems now you left Paris that morning so the telegram must be still at your address here for it was not returned to me.

Only 4 copies of Ulysses were sent for the 1st week after publication owing to a mistake about the cover. You can imagine the scenes at the shop! A nerveracking conclusion, indeed. At last some 80 or 100 copies come but I am still in a turmoil helping Miss Beach to get them off and packing parcels in a way they were never packed before. The British Museum ordered a copy and so did the Times so that I advise you to go to confession for the last day cannot be far off. The Dail Eireann minister of propaganda called on me and wished to know if I intended to return to Ireland—to which I returned an evasive answer. He is proposing me, it seems, for the Nobel prize in his capacity of cabinet minister as soon as the treaty is ratified at Westminster though not in the name of his cabinet. I will take on a small bet that if he does not change his mind when he sees the complete text he will lose his portfolio while I have not the faintest chance of being awarded the prize.

There was a notice of your stories by Pound in the Dial. I think it will serve you….

P.S. Your copy will be sent on Monday unless you move. You might run up to Iceland or down to Zanzibar for a few minutes???

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 February 1922

via Sanità 2, Trieste

MS. Buffalo

Dear Jim, I received ‘Ulysses’ in good order. Many months before I was sent an imperfect typescript of ‘Circe’. When I got your letter enclosing copy of Shaw’s almighty opinion I brought it to Benco, whom I succeeded in seeing after having called at the ‘Nazione’ several times. He read the letter carefully and mumbled that it was ‘very interesting, very interesting indeed’ but he didn’t think it would interest his readers. When I received ‘Ulysses’ I likewise hastened to him and offered to lend it to him even before I had read it myself. He was very polite but he was very busy. He said he would ask me for it when he had time to read it. My impression is that he does not like the later developments of the book. Who is Silvio, anyhow?

I suppose ‘Circe’ will stand as the most horrible thing in literature, unless you have something on your chest still worse than this ‘Agony in the Kips’. Isn’t your art in danger of becoming a sanitary science. I wish you would write verse again. The last few things you have written are of so much finer a quality than your early verse that no one can doubt what you might do if you tried again. I should think you would need something to restore your self respect after this last inspection of the stinkpots. Everything dirty seems to have the same irresistable attraction for you that cow-dung has for flies. I recognize, of course the almost unlimited adaptability of your style: the flabby Dublin journalese, with its weak effort to be witty, or suitable to the morning after the night before, and only too well, the obscene ignorant scrawl of ‘Penelope’, but in the return of ‘Ulysses’ I don’t understand the intention of the catechism.

Francini has read a conferenza-caricature on you in the hall of Filarmonica. You may easily guess that he has been out of a job for some time and was trying to turn an honest penny. He goes to Florence to-morrow to take up a job on the ‘Nuovo Giornale’. The hall was about half-full. Anybody to whom I have spoken about it was dissatisfied, but I am sending you the booklet so that you can judge it for yourself. He swore to me before the lecture that it was a caricature in good taste and ‘worthy of the subject’. Instead, it was vulgar and silly and worthy of the ‘Coda del Diavolo’. It did neither him nor you nor my own apparently negligible self any good. Dagli amici mi guardi Iddio. These people know each other.

In December last you promised to send me back the money I gave you as soon as the book was off your hands. So far I have got nothing. I bought those ten pounds two years ago at over ninety lire to the pound, so that I will lose in any case. If you want the money, keep it; but I don’t think it possible that you want it. You got money on your arrival in Paris. Your last letter announced a further gift of two thousand pounds. You cannot be in need of ten pounds for two years. I am. In fact this seems to me only part and parcel of the careless indifference with which you have always acted in affairs that concerned me. I am no longer a boy.

I hope Nora has quite recovered from her accident—of which I have heard different accounts. Remember me to her and to Georgie and Lucia.

Stannie

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To ROBERT McALMON, 1 March 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: God only knows when I am likely to get that holiday. Darantière is driving me out of any wits I have left. In a month he has not sent me any copies and it is impossible to get press copies out of him. I have to stay on and sign the rest of the de luxe lot. Besides I was on the track of two flats. One has collapsed but the other is still possible. How long are you staying there? I hope you are not annoyed at my not writing one way or the other. If you were at this end you would appreciate the situation. Have you finished Ulysses? If so I should like to hear your complete opinion. There are heaps of misprints in the last two episodes.

I suppose you have done a bundle by now instead of a bunch. A journalist called on me yesterday to ask what I am writing now!!!

I am sure it is very pleasant down there. The only thing would give me any consolation is a nice necktie so if you feel inclined to throw any into the winedark sea remember me. A child is easily satisfied. But don’t send me more than one or I shall feel very mean….

Please let me hear from you in any case and excuse this bewildered bewildering author.

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To ROBERT McALMON, N.D. March 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: Thanks for the ring and the ties. I don’t mean you to go to Cannes to buy ties for me! God forbid. I thought you always travelled with a trunk full of them and threw out a few dozen a week but evidently I was misled by a rumour.

The press and the public misled me

So brand it as slander and lies

That I am the bloke with the watches

And that you are the chap with the ties.

The ring is very nice and episcopal…. A notice (first to appear) from Observer will be sent to you by Miss Beach. As a result 136 orders came in one day! I hope the edition will soon be shipped off so that I may get a rest. My family go to Ireland for a few months on I April. Am still on the track of that flat with hopes. Pound and Shaw are in a letter fight over me. Wyndham Lewis is to arrive tonight. Laurence Vail invited me and family to his wedding breakfast tomorrow. I scarcely know him though I think I met him or her somewhere.

Don’t throw Ulysses out of the window as you threaten. Pyrrhus was killed in Argos like that. Also Socrates might be passing in the street. I envy you the sun and air and sea. It is dull and unphilosophic here. Write when recovered from Bloomitis.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 March 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: A few lines in haste to acknowledge receipt of Exiles second edition. Will you please send a copy to: Mr Richard Wallace, rue Vaneau 52, Paris? Did a copy of this go to the Swedish publisher of the novel? I think copies of The Observer should go to Messrs Quinn, Linati and Benco marked with red pencil. The day after the article appeared 145 letters came asking for prospectuses. There is supposed to be an article today in the Daily Herald with a sketch which somebody did, unknown to me, while I was meditatively whistling bits of Tristan and Isolde. Please thank Miss Marsden for her message of congratulation. I have not been able to rest yet as I help in (or interfere with?) the packing and checking and sometimes address envelopes in a child’s handwriting and carry volumes to the post. I cannot rest till the edition is really off and the other press copies sent. This will take a few weeks more. Swiss reviews and critics are of no importance so that I don’t think you ought to inconvenience yourself about that Semaine Littéraire unless the copies were paid for….

It is very irritating waiting for reviews. I suppose it is because the book is so long. In a second edition the mistakes must be corrected. Some of the blunders and omissions which disfigure Ithaca especially are lamentable.

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To FERDINAND REYHER, 14 March 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Reyher: Many thanks for your continued interest in my books. The few press copies (18) of Ulysses have all been disposed of. The edition at 150 francs is sold out and Miss Beach would not like to part with any édition de luxe at 350 or 250 on these terms. Moreover, the translation would take nearer 10 years than 1 year. Let the translator begin on The Portrait (English rights belong to The Egoist Press) which is already translated into French, Swedish and Spanish. If you would pass this information on to him and to his firm they can both get to work when they have acquired the rights.

I am going away shortly for a holiday but you can always write c/o Miss Beach here. I hope you are enjoying yourself. I rarely see anybody as I am still busy (a chore) helping in sending out copies. With many thanks and regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 17 March 1922

rue de F université 9, Paris

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: I send back your article—many thanks. I corrected the title of Flaubert’s book in it and added a footnote—Miss Beach’s address. She doesn’t know what paper it could go to and as it’s all about ME I can’t send it anywhere myself. What about Broom? The editor Loeb is in Paris, I hear. I suppose the Gargoyle is useless. As regards Dial Pound, Eliot and Colum are all doing or have done articles in it so I fancy they are full up. A new number of The Tyro is out but a review to be of service to me should appear shortly. I suppose your father-in-law could not place it anywhere? The 150 franc edition is out of print, there remain only 250 and 350 francs copies. Matters are in a dreadful tangle with Darantière however. We can’t get press copies out of him and Miss Beach leaves for Dijon tonight. I have not had a day’s peace since the book came out. If the press copies came and if the rest of the edition were quickly disposed of accounts would be settled up quickly and I could at last lie back. As it is Miss B. the Greek girl and I make frantic endeavours to hasten that consummation.

I will send any other notice I get. Let me know what you do with the notice. Thanks for sending it. It’s all right. Are there any 250 or 350 fr candidates down there? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 20 March 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Stannie, My solicitor will send you a cheque for 10£ on the 25 instant. I am sorry to hear you are pressed for money. How do you manage it? Living in a furnished apartment without a family, of exemplary habits and giving all the lessons to all the pupils. My case is different. Except for the four months I lived in Larbaud’s flat and the first six weeks I pay between 2500 and 3000 lire a month rent. The last six months’ work on Ulysses I did in this bedroom where three of us sleep without a desk, without books, etc.

I did not receive the copy you promised of Joyce Spogliato in Casa. I am sure it was very funny and quite suited to the distinguished audience.

Miss Weaver has made me another gift of £1500 in addition to the £2000 and the previous £5000 making £8500 in all, as well as the reversion of a country house somewhere. Nobody of my admirers in Trieste subscribed for Ulysses, except Baron Ralli. The first English notice appeared last week, and the day after 148 copies were ordered. The edition, 750 copies, at 150 francs, is out of print since Wednesday last. There remain only 50 copies of the de luxe and about 80 of the 250 franc, so the bowsies had better hurry up.

I have now to arrange for the private English and American editions, out of which I expect to make as much again. The Paris edition brings me 82,000 net. It is a pity the fisarmonici did not know these funny details, or perhaps it is just as well. They might have laughed themselves to death.

I was entertained to lunch last Friday by the British and Irish press of Paris, Admiral Sir Heaten Ellis in the chair. The Dail Eirann Minister of Publicity called on me and asked me if I intended to return to Ireland at present. I told him not for the present. One redeemed city (and inhabitants thereof) will last me for a few years more. He has proposed a resolution to his Irish cabinet to send my name to Stockholm as candidate for the Nobel prize. He will probably lose his portfolio without obtaining the prize for me.

I have to remain here sometime yet to sign the last of the de luxe copies and to arrange with the publishers of the English and American editions and to have some of the chief errors and omissions rectified on the plates. After that I must get a holiday somewhere for a few months. As soon as money and time allow me to settle down I shall visit your hospitable city to collect a few odds and ends: pardon, to make a bundle of several things I could not put into my trunk on the occasion of my departure from Trieste.

Nora has quite recovered from the shock—it was hardly an accident [typescript breaks off]

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 March 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for the plan. Besides misprints I see with surprise that it is in part mislined making nonsense of the middle of the scheme. I shall have the omitted lines inserted, the whole retyped and send it back to you.

I suppose you saw the article in the Daily Herald of last Friday. I could get only 2 copies here so that if you have a few I should like to have two or three. The artist’s impression of me struck me so forcibly that I thought the only thing to be done was to send you a recent photograph which I hope you received.

Is it possible to find out diplomatically whether there is a copy of Ulysses in the British Museum Library? An order came from the Greek manuscripts department but it may have been private. Another order, it seems, from the library was transmitted by a bookseller. If they have no copy I shall present one, of course. But if they have one already it is useless to waste a copy.

I suppose a notice or notices will appear this week. Mr S.P.B. Mais of Daily Express who got a copy says he will write an ‘appreciative article’. The question of press and library copies which has been worrying me has been solved at last but not until Miss Beach went down to Dijon. She came back yesterday and everything seems to be in order now. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To [NORA BARNACLE JOYCE], [April 1922]

8.30 a.m. Thursday [Paris]

MS. Private

My darling, my love, my queen: I jump out of bed to send you this. Your wire is postmarked 18 hours later than your letter which I have just received. A cheque for your fur will follow in a few hours, and also money for yourself. If you wish to live there (as you ask me to send two pounds a week) I will send that amount (£8 and £4 rent) on the first of every month. But you also ask me if I would go to London with you. I would go anywhere in the world if I could be sure that I could be alone with your dear self without family and without friends. Either this must occur or we must part forever, though it will break my heart. Evidently it is impossible to describe to you the despair I have been in since you left. Yesterday I got a fainting fit in Miss Beach’s shop and she had to run and get me some kind of a drug. Your image is always in my heart. How glad I am to hear you are looking younger! O my dearest, if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do with me what you will! I have only 10 minutes to write this so forgive me. Will write again before noon and also wire. These few words for the moment and my undying unhappy love.

Jim

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To JACQUES BENOIST-MÉCHIN, 8 April 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

MS. Benoist-Méchin

Dear Mr Mechin: I am glad to know that you have received your copy of Ulysses safely and that your manuscript of the music on pp. 643–644 has been decently reproduced. It was very kind of you to take all that trouble and to have endured so patiently the hearing of Molly Bloom’s characteristic songs qui ne sont plus dans le mouvement. I hope the reading may relieve in some measure the monotony of your life down there. With renewed thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 April 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope this will reach you in time. I expected that at least The Dial would have arrived today with Mr Eliot’s article but not even that has come. It must be very disappointing to you that no review of the book has appeared in the English press. I do not count the Observer which was merely preparing the way nor the Sporting Times whose reputation, by the way, is worse than my own. In fact there is a rumour here that certain critics who had asked for press copies and obtained them had decided to boycott the book. I am inclined to believe it. I read the press cuttings you sent me. There is something rather appropriate in some people’s names. It will surprise me very much if that society you mention ever produces Exiles. At regular intervals somebody appears suddenly from somewhere professing great enthusiasm for the play and affirming that he is going to put it on. Nothing more is ever heard of him. The question of a stage fee is quite secondary—at least with such a company as this appears to be. I have just had a visit from the proofreader of ‘La Sirène’, 29 Boulevard Malesherbes (the publisher who has the French version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)…. He says the whole work must be revised by a competent translator of their own choosing and he wants the original text. This should be sent to Mr Paul Lafitte at the above address. Goodness knows what they will make of it between them. Their minds seem to wander about like the rocks in my episode. One person who is supposed to be reviewing the book (and has read it all) and wants to be strictly accurate, asks me whether the Christian name of Mrs Bloom is Milly or Molly. Another American ‘critic’ who wanted to interview me (I declined) told me he had read the book with great interest but that he could not understand why Bloom came into it. I explained to him why and he [was] surprised and disappointed for he thought Stephen was Ulysses. He had heard some talk of Penelope and asked me who she was. This also I told him but did not convince him entirely because he said rather doubtfully ‘But is Penelope a really Irish name?’

Mr Larbaud’s article has caused a great deal of stir here and there will be another by Mr Pound in the Mercure on the 15 instant. Mr Pound has been engaged in a long wordy war with Mr Shaw over Ulysses. They exchanged about a dozen letters in all. Mr Shaw has now closed the correspondence by writing ‘I take care of the pence because the pounds won’t take care of themselves’. Possibly he has been reading the books distributed by Bloom’s bodyguard, R 459 Pennywise’s Way to Wealth.

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To MYRON C. NUTTING, 24 April 1922

[Paris]

MS. Northwestern

Dear Nutting: I am sorry I was not free the other evening but to tell the truth I am anything but a pleasant messmate at present. Thanks for thinking of me. The only news of any weight is enclosed. Will you please return it when read Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS MYRON C. NUTTING, 26 April 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris

MS. Northwestern

Dear Mrs Nutting: The address is c/o Miss Casey, 5 Nun’s Island, Galway. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 April 1922

rue de l’Université 9, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for copies of the Nation. Mr Murry’s article is very useful for I think it will break the boycott. I met him casually a few days ago at lunch and he wrote me the enclosed afterwards. He tells me he has written a second article and wants to do a third.

I am glad to hear you are having a long holiday in the country. Mine has not come yet. I send you a copy of the New York Herald with a second article.

I enclose the letter but when you write perhaps you would be good enough to send it back.

I am glad to hear that Miss Marsden has finished her book and beg you to tender her my respectful congratulations. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 May 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I have been so plagued with nerves, toothache etc all last week that I could not write. Here is the authorisation you ask for. I agree with anything you may propose about the English edition…. I received Mr Bennett’s article and sent him a word of thanks. For the purposes of sales his article is not very useful as it does not give the name and address of the publisher. I always look for this first of all in an article, then at its length and finally at its signature. I wonder if any criticism of the book will be published—apart from these articles. Mr Murry’s, as I suspected, broke the blockade.

There are some loose sheets of Ulysses lying about. If I sent them to you could you, when you have time, put in the corrections you speak of That would leave me free for the correction of the text only. But the printer says the changes are to be as few as possible. I am afraid you will have a very tiresome correspondence with him. He pays little attention to personal or commercial interests (his own or others) and is moved chiefly by amour propre. Heartrending telegrams mean nothing to him. He will reply (about some totally different matter) three days later and in conclusion beg you to deign to accept the assurance of his most perfect consideration.

I enclose a letter from Mr Pinker’s son. I replied that you have the English rights and no abridged edition is to be published.

The manager of the Chelsea Book Club states that he is commissioned by a theatrical manager in London, a Mr Peacock, to pay me an advance of £2000 for a new three act play. I could not write three pages of it. In fact I have decided that I must have some rest as the events of the past four months coming after years of work have exhausted me—especially the last five weeks as I was momentarily expecting to hear of the assassination of my family in Ireland whither they had gone very much against my wish though I consented as it was a visit of my children to grandparents who perhaps might not see them again. As I foresaw they had to flee from the west of Ireland lying flat in a railway carriage amid a fusillade. However, thank goodness, they came back safely.

I am trying to settle my daughter in some summer school and as soon as that is done I shall leave Paris for a month or so, entrusting my son with the task (for which I am unequal) of finding an apartment. I expect to be in London in a week or ten days from now and afterwards to go to the sea.

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To ERIC PINKER, 17 May 1922

rue de l’Odéon 12, Paris VI

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Allow me in the first place to offer you my condolence on the sudden death of your father. I would have done so before but I did not know that the agency was still in existence until I heard casually shortly before receipt of your letter that it was being carried on by his son.

As regards the question in your letter I cannot consent to any alteration of the text of Ulysses.

I shall feel obliged if you can give me any information concerning the theatrical manager whose name is mentioned on the enclosed slip.

I expect to be in London in a week or ten days and shall call on you if I stay there, as is probable, for a few days. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MR EDMUND WILSON, N.D. (?) July 1922 Paris

Dear Sir: Your articles in the New Republic and Evening Sun about Ulysses have been read to me, and I desire to express my thanks for your very appreciative and painstaking criticism. Circumstances of ill-health and travel have prevented me till now from making this acknowledgment, and I trust you will excuse the seeming discourtesy.

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To LADY GREGORY (Dictated letter), 8 August 1922

TS. NY. Public Library (Berg)

9 rue de l’Université, Paris

Dear Lady Gregory: I am recovering from a dangerous eye illness which has lasted three months and therefore am dictating this reply to your letter of July twenty seventh.

While thanking you for the friendly remembrance contained in it, and for acts of kindness in the past I shall feel very much obliged if you will omit from your forthcoming book, which I understand is largely a history of the Irish literary movement, all letters of mine and all mention of me. In doing so you will be acting strictly in accordance with the spirit of that movement, inasmuch as since the date of my letter, twenty years ago, no mention of me or of my struggles or of my writings has been made publicly by any person connected with it.

Mr. Pound has enclosed with your letter, a letter from Mr. Yeats to him in which there are several kind expressions concerning my book Ulysses. May I ask you to be kind enough to convey to Mr. Yeats, for whose writing I have always had great admiration, my thanks for his favorable opinion, which I value very highly. Believe me, dear Lady Gregory, Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To RICHARD WALLACE, 15 August 1922

[Paris]

MS. Wallace

Dear Wallace Thanks for your kind note. Am writing this beside the window with half an eye. Have got leave to start for London on Thursday but am not yet cured. The nebula in the pupil will take some time yet to disappear. There have been other reviews of Ulysses but I can’t send them as they are packed up in cases and stored. I am glad to hear you are living so well and so cheaply there. The German motto ought to be—’tis better to have fought and lost than never to have won at all. I have to stay in London for a week or perhaps two in order to do some business with various people and then I shall go somewhere if put into a train. 1000 drops of stuff in my eye, profuse nightly perspirations and pain have made me for the moment very fatigued and irritable so that if there is any undue noise or confusion travelling I shall get out of the train and sit or lie on the rails. I would enjoy indeed a bottle of Rüdesheimer with you. May it greatly increase your tranquil serenity but in case of bad dreams resulting therefrom you can turn Hindenburg’s face to the wall. Please excuse this ill written letter. I hope you will continue to enjoy yourselves. My kindest remembrances to you both

James Joyce

[Enclosure] Turf Rue de l’Université

Dearest Lilian: I hope you are having a good time. Are you getting fat? We are off on Thursday am fed up with Paris rotten weather everything dull since you left. I am sorry we could not have gone on to Germany. However I hope we shall soon meet again. I will write to you from London with best love to you both from us Irish

Nora

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To THEODORE SPICER-SIMSON (Dictated letter), 25 August 1922

Euston Hotel, London N.W.

TS. Princeton

Dear Simson, Your letter was forwarded to me and we are both very sorry to have missed you. Unfortunately the condition of my eyes has been aggravated during the journey and at the moment I do not know whether I must remain in London to be operated (which I dread) or go on to the South of England or return to Paris. I am in fact waiting for a reply from my Paris doctor as the men I saw here were very pessimistic. In these circumstances I don’t know what can be done about your suggestion of including me in your forthcoming Book of Portraits of Writers. The only thing I can suggest for the moment is that you call on my publishers in Paris 12, Rue de l’Odeon and ask for a bundle of all the sketches and photographs which were made about the time of the publication of Ulysses. Even if I go back to Paris, to put myself again in my Doctor’s care, I don’t think that I could possibly pose for you. In any case will you please drop me a line and if you call on my publishers, might I ask you to tell Miss Moschos of the state of things, but add that no allusion should be made to the urgency of an operation in any letter addressed to me as I have not informed my wife of the gravity of the case.

It would be a pleasure for me to meet you again after 20 years, and perhaps if all goes well I may be back in Paris cured. In the meantime, many thanks for your kind expression concerning my books. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 2 September 1922

Euston Hotel, London N.W.

TS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon, I am sorry I could not see you this morning when you called but it takes me nearly an hour to do all the different dressings for my eye. Will you please thank Lady Ellerman for her kind invitation and give my excuses explaining why it is impossible for me at present to go out anywhere. .

I am not by any means a social attraction. My wife tells me you are leaving for Paris on Monday. I should very much like to see you before then as I have a few messages to intrust to you It is possible that I may get a telegraphic call to a Doctor this evening at the hour you proposed coming 6 p.m. so that if I am not there I should like to see you to-morrow morning at quarter past eleven for a few minutes.

As you see my journey here has turned out disastrous and I should like to explain a couple of matters preferably in conversation. Kind regards,

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 September 1922

Rue de l’Université 9, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: We fled across the channel safely about twenty minutes before a storm. Neptune, hearing I had reached the seacoast, sent out a storm posthaste and my miserable holiday ended in Boulogne where we put up for the night in a gale and downpour. On arriving in Paris we could not find rooms in any hotel of the quarter so I had to come back here. The painters are still knocking on my wall and wrangling and the dog howling under my window. Dr Borschis away and I cannot see him till next week. I shall have to take my meals in some other quarter as both yesterday and the day before persons have come over to me after long scrutiny and asked if I am the great etc etc who wrote the etc etc and requested the pleasure of shaking my hand—an art for which I have very little talent.

In spite of the letter you enclose I believe from what I could see with 13/30 of normal eyesight (⅓ + 3/10) that there has been trouble here. The version which Mr Rodker gave Miss Beach of this new edition is not that which you gave me. There is no arrangement with Mr André Germain. No corrections whatever of the text are to be made. The scale of expenses and profits seems to be quite different. Miss Beach is rather bewildered by the words ‘Paris agent’ as she understood that that was Mr Rodker’s position. I suppose some of this misunderstanding (inevitable whenever I am the provocative cause) will be cleared up but I should be glad to know as soon as possible whether the few corrections which we agreed to make of hideous blunders are being made. Perhaps a short note, similar to that in the first edition, could be inserted.

I am writing this with one eye shut. There seems to be a very very slight improvement in the vision of the left eye. Perhaps it is only an illusion of mine. As soon as I see Dr Borsch I will let you know.

Would it be too much trouble for you to call some day at my hotel and ask whether the bureau as they call it sent on any letters or papers? Nothing arrived here though I left them my address 12 rue de l’Odéon not knowing where I should stay. Some mail must have come.

The chase being now open my wife and son are out flat-hunting while I, no knobs being available, count the stripes of the wallpaper.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 September 1922

Maison de Famille, 9 rue de l’Université, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Dr Borsch is still away so I cannot see him till Tuesday. One thing goes worse than the last. The sight of the left eye is slightly better but not much. In this absurd city it was almost impossible to be allowed the privilege of paying a huge rent for other people’s furniture. However I got a furnished flat for six months as from 1 November, hoping Dr Borsch would let me go to the south but of course I have to wait here. The enclosed pamphlet may interest and amuse you. Will you please send a copy of Exiles and Dubliners to the address on the card? He is manager of the firm which will publish the French translation of my novel in December and he wants to publish other books of mine. I told you their method of business. Mr Rodker sent me the list of misprints (which I should prefer to errata if it did not involve a slight depreciation of the printer). I am sending it back to him through you as it is better for you to explain my corrections. The lines cancelled in red pencil, bought in Paris, are to stand. These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of. The red cross at the top is not a signal to posterity to cease fire. It means that the paging is wrong…. A revised proof should be sent to you which you could keep so that as soon as the second edition is out the printers could start to alter the plates for a third edition. I did not see any lines from the Times article of several years ago. I think it might be inserted for it is a criticism of Ulysses if only to teach the editor prudence. All is fair in literature and war. I hope Mr Jaloux sent you a few words. I heard that he told a friend of mine here that he considered Ulysses ‘audessus de tout éloge’. I hope he has written that….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 October 1922

9 rue de l’Université, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I saw Dr Borsch yesterday after having waited two and a half hours. He says that probably both iritis and persistence of that nebula are due to root abscesses of teeth which should be drained or removed. He does not think in any case that I will have such an attack again as the eye reached a crisis which he says I got over. He wants to correct the right lens of my glasses and will then let me go to Nice on Monday or Tuesday. He says that if the stay there and the dental operation (which in his opinion will not provoke an eye attack) do not dissipate the nebula sufficiently a slight operation—not iridectomy or iridotomy but sphincterotomy will probably restore a great part of former vision.

I am sending back a copy of press notices. I met Mr Jaloux who said he sent you a few phrases. I have indicated the places where he and John Eglinton enter the chorus. The lines cancelled can be used by them. I think this change ought to be made at once as both reviews are important….

I hope Dr Borsch is right. The prospect is not cheerful but I will let them (dentist and oculist) have their way in the hope that I may get back my sight. His opinion coincides with that of Dr James in the main for whom as for Dr Henry see Ulysses p. 243, l. 8. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 October 1922

Hôtel Suisse, Quai des Etats Unis, Nice

Dear Miss Weaver: I think my sight is getting better here. The day before I left Paris Dr Borsch told me the nebula had split at the top and was thinning slightly in the centre. He says a stay here will do me good. I have therefore decided to give up my flat in Paris and take one here so as not to run the risks of a cold and damp Paris winter. Flats are numerous here and much cheaper than in Paris though they say there will be a run on them when the season begins in a fortnight’s time. Living is also much cheaper here and taking into account the climate I think I shall do well to winter here. When I am settled I shall have the dental operations done here if possible or in Marseille or even go to Paris for a week and I hope the result will be to stave off the other operation….

At Dijon I spoke to Mr Darantière who thinks that the corrections of plates ought to be begun at once so that whenever a third edition is called for the book can appear letter perfect. He says the cost will be about 1 franc per ‘opération’ (agreeable word), that is, change of letter, or word or line…. Meanwhile if you approve he could begin with your list and my additions. I am reading steadily through the book and am preparing the list though it is not amusing work and I cannot do more than 30 pages a day….

I hope again that all is well with the edition but will say no more as this is a Swiss hotel pen and the electric light has very thoughtfully decided to retire under a bushel.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1922

Hôtel Suisse, Nice

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your letter and enclosures and also for your telegram to which I shall reply tomorrow…. I return that letter and Mr Jaloux’s. I shall write to him. I dined with him the night before I left Paris and found him very friendly. I am keeping the letter from Ireland a little longer. I do not exactly like to suggest this to you but I think it would be very useful to me if your correspondence with the writer did not cease. It could be quite formal on your side and on his would become more and more informative perhaps. I think he may have known me. In any case it is the first chance I have had of looking into the back of the minds of his other correspondents. It would also serve for the propaganda of news such as that in the Evening Standard, the sale of the second edition and the proposal from the director of the Théätre National de l’Odéon (the full title to be given) and the articles in the Quarterly, English Review, Revue de Paris etc. This is not an idle addition for I do not despair of inflicting a few more blows. I believe I am right in thinking that the longrange gun from Paris is the most effective. This is apparent also in Mr ‘John Eglinton’’s article in The Dial, though the domestic event chronicled in the enclosed cutting also explains the softening of heart towards the longquesting hero of my telephone directory. I suppose it was you who sent Miss Beach the copy of the Quarterly which she forwarded. As a criticism or even an attack Mr Leslie’s article is rather ineffective but as a leading article (article 1 in an editorial obituary notice) in the most authoritative review in the Englishspeaking world it is very effective in a way which the writer did not at all intend. In the press extracts I think his statement of the book’s reception with ‘jocular contempt’ in Dublin might be placed near The Dial’s account of its enthusiastic welcome and in the mere indication of these two accounts to your Antrim correspondent who speaks of the rage with which it has been assailed would probably draw from him some interesting information which in any case he probably wishes to give away. Meanwhile I sketched a letter for Miss Beach to send to the critic of the Quarterly stating for his information that copies had been presented to Trinity and the National Library and acknowledged with thanks, that the British Museum ordered and paid for a copy and that only 17 press copies (unstitched, unnumbered and on ordinary paper) were circulated, 5 for the continent, 6 for England and 6 for America and that no press copy was sent to Ireland. The letter ended with a brief mention of the second edition. I am sure all this will seem very disingenuous to you but alas you must speak Helvetian to a Swiss is the experience of this voyageur malgré lui.

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 23 October 1922

Hôtel Suisse, Quai des Etats-Unis, Nice

Dear Aunt Josephine: A few days before I left Paris I got a letter from you which seemed very wrathful. The facts are these. Ulysses was published on 2 February. When the edition was sold out Nora said she wanted to go to Ireland to see her mother. I did all I could to dissuade her but her friends here and in Ireland told her it was as simple as anything. Finally as my father also wished to see the children I let them go but made them promise to stay a week or so in London and watch. I managed to hold them up in London for ten days by means of express letters and telegrams. Then they suddenly left for Ireland. They stopped a night in Dublin and Lucia kindly suggested that they should visit my father whose address she remembered. This they did and went on to Galway. In Galway my son was dogged about the streets and as he told me could not sleep at night with the thought that the Zulus, as he calls them, would take him out of bed and shoot him. A drunken officer swaggered up to him blocking the path and asked him ‘How does it feel to be a gintleman’s son?’. Meanwhile in Paris utterly exhausted as I was after eight years ceaseless labour I was on the verge of lunacy. Needless to say what I had foreseen took place and the next thing was that I got a telegram from London to say they wanted to come back to Paris. The warehouse opposite their lodgings in Galway was seized by rebels, free state troops invaded their bedrooms and planted machine guns in the windows. They ran through the town to the station and escaped in a train lying flat on their bellies (the two females that is) amid a fusillade which continued for an hour from right and left between troops on the train and ambushes along the line. They fled through Dublin in the dark and so came back to Paris. I then sent Lucia to a summer camp on the coast of Normandy for four months and Giorgio to the Austrian Tyrol. After which I collapsed with a furious eye attack lasting until a few weeks ago—but apparently that does not interest. I am here at present in the hope of regaining my sight and my health.

The second cause of your wrath seems to be my book. I am as innocent in this case as in the former. I presented it to you seven months ago but I never heard anything more about it beyond a few words acknowledging receipt and an allusion in your last letter. The market price of the book now in London is £40 and copies signed are worth more. I mention this because Alice told me you had lent it (or given?) and people in Dublin have a way of not returning books. In a few years copies of the first edition will probably be worth £100 each, so book experts say, and hence my remark. This of course has nothing to do with the contents of the book which it seems you have not read. I sent it however as I sent all my other books and at your request in a letter of a year or so ago. There is a difference between a present of a pound of chops and a present of a book like Ulysses. You can acknowledge receipt of the present of a pound of chops by simply nodding gratefully, supposing, that is, that you have your mouth full of as much of the chops as it will conveniently hold, but you cannot do so with a large book on account of the difficulty of fitting it into the mouth.

The third point of wrath is the fact that no reply was made to Mabel when she announced her marriage by sending a piece of weddingcake till I dictated a letter from London. That succulent morsel arrived when I was lying in a darkened room in continual pain and danger of loss of sight and continually threatened with an operation. I gave instructions that the letter be answered and our congratulations sent. This was not done. A violent and dangerous illness for months in a hotel in the centre of Paris in the middle of the intense excitement (letters, telegrams, articles) caused by the publication of Ulysses explains why there was some slight confusion, I suppose.

I ought not to have been obliged to write this long letter but it is better to write it than not as the letter Nora is going to write will probably not reach you before the early spring of 1931 A.D. In the meantime if you have any remarks or information to transmit to me about whatever you think I take an interest in well and good but wrathful epistles should be addressed preferably to Nora or her advisers there and here or to the president of your free fight or the leader of the irregulars or to the parish priest of Fairview or to the Sacred Heart to whom Ireland is dedicated and not to me. No doubt you will see Nora some other time when she goes to revisit her native dunghill though it is doubtful if Giorgio or Lucia will go. The air in Galway is very good but dear at the present price. The only enlivening feature of their journey appears to have been their interview with my father who amused them vastly by the virulence, variety and incandescence of curses which he bestowed on his native country and all in it—a litany to which his eldest son says Amen from the bottom, that is to say, the nethermost or lowest part of his heart.

Nora and Lucia are here with me and Giorgio who is in Paris will probably come down too as I think I shall take a place here for the winter. All are well as we hope you all are too.

A second edition of Ulysses was published on the 12 October. The entire edition of 2000 copies at £2.2.0 a copy was sold out in four days.

P.S. That reminds me that in your letter you seem to assume that Nora and the children (the ‘child’ Giorgio is taller than his father and Lucia after her camp work could go on a circus trapeze) went to Ireland for the purpose of visiting Mr Devan. and the second Mrs Devan. This had not struck me till you mentioned it but you might be right for all that. They have gone out to have tea and ladies’ music at a café on the esplanade but I will ask them when they come back. I expect they will both deny it but who knows whether they will be telling the truth or not? That’s the point.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Dictated to Lucia Joyce) 27 October 1922

Hotel Suisse, Nice.

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver Thanks for the advance (£120). I took a flat on Wednesday and payed luckily only a small sum (£2) as I had not the money in my pocket. An hour afterwards I felt the first sign of trouble in my eye and the following day I was again in the doctor’s hands, one recommended to me by Dr Borsch in case of need. He attributes the relapse chiefly to the rain and wind-storms of the past week. It had not rained for nine months before my arrival. I am to have the visit of five leeches in an hour from now and he hopes that by relieving the congestion the attack will not develop. There is no tension. He thinks that as soon as practicable I ought to be operated as the risk is too great. My sight has improved very much even during the inflammation. By raising my head to a certain angle I can see as well through the bad eye as through the good. This means that there is a clear space in the lower part of the nebula on the lens. It seems the operation is not likely to have as damaging an effect as if it had been made when the sight was almost totally effaced.

Will you please confirm your instructions which I sent to Mr Darantiere.

I now close this letter as my daughter who is writing it is not such a distinguished english writer as her troublesome father, thank God. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Job Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 November 1922 [Dictated to Lucia Joyce]

Hôtel Suisse, Nice

Dear Miss Weaver: A few lines for today to let you know that yesterday my eye took a sudden turn for the better and I hope to have still more good news tomorrow in spite of the miserable weather. I hope you are not having any trouble with the second edition as your letter suggests. I believed that the general election would have been a good cover for the affair. I send you my list of corrections pages 1 to 290 which you can perhaps check and forward. At the end of the cahier are the names of group B to whom I should like copies of the new leaflet A (on different coloured paper) to be forwarded. I hope you can read my handwriting as I could only scribble. Has Mr Aldington written an article since he got his press copy? If not could you write to him in view of the third edition? Also Mr Linati whom you could ask if Mr Emilio Cecchi wrote about it in La Ronda. I sent you two French notices. I think they should be used, even a few words, also La Revue de Bourgogne and if possible La Semaine Littéraire, all together about the middle of the leaflet, the more French notices the better. Mr Leslie. is also Domini Canis so Mr Colum says. I leave you to make your choice from his article which is having the effect I foresaw. It is the best thing he could have done for the book to give it prestige in England. The fact that it is adverse, in my opinion will not count. In America it will have no effect as the hierarchy of English reviews is not understood there but I think Mr Quinn and Mr Thayer (group B) should have copies along with the Manchester Guardian (the entire paper with passage marked in red pencil—to be bought in London or suburbs). I sent back her copy to Miss Beach so can you send me one for myself and also the July number which has an article on Monsieur Proust. Its effect on French critics will be I fancy to get their backs up which is just what I want. In conclusion I think Mr Leslie likes Ulysses strange as it may seem but I shall write to you about that later on.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 November 1922 [Dictated to Lucia Joyce]

Hôtel Suisse, Nice

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for the cheque (250£) and I am glad you took advantage of the rise in the pound which today stands at 67. I have also received the press-cuttings which might be called ‘Noise about Joyce’. I do not think that Mr Noyes has read the book but you can take a few sentences from his article in the Sunday Chronicle to add to the press extracts. I think copies of it and the Evening Standard ought to be sent to Mr Larbaud (who probably knows Mr Noyes’s writings), Mr Jaloux and Mr Pound. For a reason which I will explain to you later I should prefer that you and not I wrote first to Mr Marcel Rey, sending him a copy of Exiles and the inevitable press extracts. I do not think that you ought to keep any copies of the book at your office. I imagine they cannot search your house without a warrant unless with the aid of Miss Marsden’s patron saint. That solitary detective is an interesting figure. Is he what the English call a King Beaver, that is an Irish constabularyman with red whiskers, riding a red bicycle?

I shall write you tomorrow or next day about my monotonous eye and my thirtyfifth doctor.

I shall see that my daughter puts the number of your house on the envelope. She is more absentminded than ever since she met the King of Spain.

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 10 November 1922

Hôtel Suisse, Nice

Dear Aunt Josephine: This is a shorter letter. I am not annoyed that you call Giorgio and Lucia children, I do so myself. I am glad to hear my book is in a press as other islanders are not like you in your indifference to its market value. You said Charley was reading it and that you would tell me what he said and how he looked after reading it. Is he in the press? If so I hope he gets his meals regularly but how does he manage about shaving? I gather that you have not finished it and neither has Berty but I think Nora will beat you all in the competition. She has got as far as page 27 counting the cover.

You say there is a lot of it you don’t understand. I told you to read the Odyssey first. As you have not done so I asked my publisher to send you an article which will throw a little light on it. Then buy at once the Adventures of Ulysses (which is Homer’s story told in simple English much abbreviated) by Charles Lamb. You can read it in a night and can buy it at Gill’s or Browne and Nolan’s for a couple of shillings. Then have a try at Ulysses again.

I asked whether you had lent it because you never wrote me a word about it and the night Alice and Katey dined with us I asked them and understood them to say that someone in Blackrock had it. There were a couple of waiters buzzing around the table at the time so perhaps I did not catch the words accurately.

Now I hope the discourtesy involved in not visiting you and in not writing to acknowledge receipt of the wedding cake is lifted off my shoulders. There is a suggestion in your letter that all is nice and quiet now and ideal for another visit (compare enclosed remarks by a good Jesuit father who never told a lie in his life) but as the last trip cost me about £200 and very nearly my eyesight too some other mug will foot the next bill. You say that most people now have got a hardening of the heart. It seems so: and a softening of the brain. When Nora’s uncle heard the story of her sprawling on the floor and the rale old Irish bullets hopping off the promontory of her back he nearly fell off his chair laughing. Yet he is one of the very few wellwishers I have in the country and would do a great deal to help me as he has often done.

We shall probably meet in London. I expect to go there in the early spring and again in the summer. That is a more sensible plan. We return to Paris on Sunday so when writing next address

12 rue de l’Odéon

Paris VII

c/o Shakespeare and Company

That address will always find me.

Send me any news you like, programmes, pawntickets, press cuttings, handbills. I like reading them.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 November 1922

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: The extract from Mr Leslie’s article was all right, I think. It is in some valise or trunk but I had bad neuralgia all night or a good part of it and want to write this letter. Did it contain the phrase ‘U has yet to take its place in the thought and script of mankind’? I think you could include phrases from Mr Noyes in the Sunday Chronicle—it is a press notice, authorised. The names of the critics so far as I can remember are, Pound, Eliot, Colum, Buss, Hemingway, Linati, Benco, Jaloux, Slocombe, Squire, Mais, Aldington, Hueffer, Charles du Bos, Ciolkowska. I don’t think the Times should get a second copy. Could you have two rubber stamps made like these,

(a) PRESS COPY

and

(b) UNNUMBERED PRESS COPY

and use them (as I did with great delight) in sending out press and other unpaid copy, (a) being stamped sideways towards right corner of fly leaf and title page and (b) in the space left for no…? I think copies ought to be sent to the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh and to the Bodleian, Oxford with ‘Presented to the —— by the Publisher’ in your handwriting. I don’t know if you wish to initial it on behalf of the mysterious thirteen? Also it would perhaps be well to send a copy (press) to Professor George Saintsbury. I am oldfashioned enough to admire him though he may not return the compliment. He is however quite capable of flinging the tome back through your window, especially if the 1922 vintage has not matured to his liking. I am not sure whether a copy was sent to Dr Brandes. I shall ask.

Before deciding on A of enclosed could Mr Darantière let you have a single page proof with B so as to compare them? He told me in our hurried conversation that all the changes had been now made. I told him he must wait as I had still to get [through] over 500 pages of revision when my eyes let me. Luckily the engine then started and I left him and his secretary laughing and protesting with their hands in the air.

I have received all your letters but not the two Quarterlies you mention nor Mr Quinn’s second letter. I had better see it and read your reply to the last part of this letter before attacking the problem he raises but in the meantime he should get a note saying that the matter is under consideration and, in view of the urgency, begging him to write or cable of any fresh development.

Now as regards the unpleasant news. I dictated a letter to Miss Beach about a week ago, suggesting that she ask the critics underlined (see other side) whether they had written anything. Mr du Bos is the editor of a review here (Revue Critique des Idées). He knows English perfectly (I think he has a Cambridge degree, his mother was English). He obtained his copy in a curious way but I consider it a press copy. As he is a professional journalist and Ulysses being what it is, a formal inquiry (in view, let us say, of a future edition, enclosing usual leaflet) seems to me quite legitimate.

The same for Mme Ciolkowska who lives by journalism. I suggest therefore that when you have the other leaflet (or had I better call it a broadsheet?) ready you enclose it to both (and also to Mr Hemingway, if he has sent nothing) c/o Miss Beach with the instructions, ‘Kindly forward’.

To return to my dictated letter, Miss Beach replied that she was not interested in a third edition of Ulysses and thought that the ‘hustling to boom the book’ ought to be done by the person or persons who were interested. She went on to say that she had been kept in the dark about the second edition or misled or misinformed that it was sold out, not sold out, that there was to be a third edition, that there was not to be a third edition for a year, that the third edition was nearly ready etc. This part seemed chiefly pointed against Mr Rodker who, I fancy, has enough to do at present putting the King beaver off the track and ought not to be troubled on this score. She went on to say that her shop had been visited by angry booksellers, bibliophiles, collectors, publishers, protesting against the second edition and threatening to bring her up before a French court for having palmed off a bogus edition on them (bogus of an edition said to be unique—the first) and saying that they would boycott it, not sell it, not handle it, not open it etc, that it was a dishonourable fraud to bring out a second edition got up to imitate the first. She ended by saying about my suggestion of an article that the rumours that were current in Paris about Ulysses and its author were such that it was more advisable that nothing concerning me or the other be printed in any paper here for some time to come. When I read this I gazed at the buttons of the Swiss concierge until I had discovered the answers of the various questions and then with a deep sigh stood up among my multicoloured multitudinous valises and fare⁠[d] forth once more over the widewayed earth.

Mr Darantière who has been in the business in France all his life and lived by it confirmed my views. Ulysses (1st edition) is not a unique edition i.e. luxe, except perhaps for the signed 350 franc copies which, as you may remember, I declined to repeat. It is an extremely cheap (considering paper and type) edition of the equivalent of 8 English novels of standard size (75,000 to 80,000 words) at the normal selling price today or less, as 8 10/- novels would sell at 270 francs a copy. A second edition (of substantially the same size though variable to a slight extent) was decided on and agreed to by all parties when instructions were given, transmitted and received a year ago to make and keep plates. The second edition is differentiated in size and weight and is plainly marked a second edition in two places for any buyer who can read. No bibliophile has the right to tell me how many copies of my book are to be inflicted on a tolerant world. A boycott of booksellers cannot be effective where there is a strong demand on the part of buyers.

As regards Mr Rodker and Miss Barry and Mr Hirschwald and the conflicting rumours I told Miss Beach that I knew very little at first hand as my only correspondence with Mr Rodker had been about a parcel of collars (with which I may perhaps strangle myself if my hero causes me any more trouble) and with you in dodging the heavy-figured cheques for royalties which you had been discharging at my various camouflaged addresses—at this point I allowed several of these draft-explosives to fall out of several different pockets—and that I thought by the expression of Mr Darantière’s face that his position had been badly hit and that consequently the G H Q report must have some substratum of truth.

As regards the boycott on the part of booksellers I shall add a postscript when my son comes in. He is out with a couple of sinister looking friends making oblique enquiries.

As regards the moral aspect I considered it would have been disastrous to leave matters as they were when Miss Beach wrote. If she had found the answers to her own questions the case would have been different. But the general tone of her letter seemed to me very unpromising. About a hundred influential people (French, American and English) visit the two establishments of Miss Monnier and Miss Beach weekly and there is no reason why rumours to my discredit (undeserved) should be circulated even by implication. I had a short interview with Miss Beach on Wednesday. After a second tomorrow perhaps or Monday I may be able to see whether the storm is abating or not after the blessed oil of catechumens which I poured out upon the surface of the waters.

For many reasons, my own health and peace, the decorum of correspondence, even for the sake of the writers themselves I wish such letters as the one I received were not written. They neither provoke the rupture which they probably do not intend and which I certainly would do everything to avoid in the case of those who have befriended me in time of trouble nor do they evoke any new element into the case since you cannot get a possibly non-existent periwinkle out of his shell with a pin which has no point on it. Possibly the fault is partly mine. I, my eye, my needs and my troublesome book are always there. There is no feast or celebration or meeting of shareholders but at the fatal hour I appear at the door in dubious habiliments, with impedimenta of baggage, a mute expectant family, a patch over one eye howling dismally for aid.

P.S. Here is the report brought in by my son and his friends from three of the English selling shops in Paris:

Brentano: No copy of edition 2. Copies very rare. 1 copy of edition 1 at 850 francs.

Terquem: No copy of edition 1. All sold. Two copies of edition 2 published at £2 (today 136 frs). Price 200 francs.

Galignani: 1 copy of edition at 650 francs. Edition 2 sold out. If obtainable would sell at same price.

There was no sign of any angry attitude about edition 2. J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 November 1922

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: My eyes have not been and are not well. I hope to keep down whatever is threatening. I am very tired. Dr Borsch says he would prefer to operate in 6 weeks or so if the eye can be kept calm. If!

I enclose letter from Dijon which disposes of the trial threat. I have not seen Miss Beach since but suppose things are better. I too had a friendly letter from her inviting me to meet Larbaud and Fargue but I did not go. I shall write to the former as soon as I am over this.

The leaflet is all right except that the Quarterly should come I think after Mr Huddleston and is that phrase I asked about in it. I can’t read the print with this light. Please send me some copies. I approve of your sending press copies to Mr Wells, also to Mr Bennett (who is entitled to one). I suggest in each case you put a slip marked ‘Nation’ (date) or ‘Outlook’—with the publisher’s compliments. Mr Hemingway writes for the Toronto Star. Mr Lewis ought to get a press copy (not for review). I promised him one and tried during my illness (when was I last well?) to have one sent to him. He did not answer. I heard he was in Venice.

I think you ought to inquire about those Quarterlies. Everything else sent me to Nice was forwarded. Strange to say the writer whom I mentioned in my letter asking for them—Mr Marcel Proust—died this day week. His name has often been coupled with mine. People here seem to have expected his death but when I saw him last May he did not look bad. He looked in fact ten years younger than his age.

I don’t think Mr Aldington ought to be asked to write a second article. I met Mr Hueffer. He apologised in a way for his article which, he says, was written at your dictation. I am glad you have taken to writing the favourable criticisms. It seems to me I wrote most of them so far—I mean I see my own phrases rolling back to me. I think the English Review comes out about the 26 or 27 of the month. Will you send me 2 copies please?

I am sure you are anxious to be away in Cheshire. King Beaver will never find you there. He will start in the shires of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Durham etc.

My eye now warns me to stop. I send a correspondence from a Dublin paper between Mr Buck Mulligan and Mr Leslie. The only intelligent person in it is the labourer on Mr Leslie’s estate who is evidently a compatriot of the narrator of the Cyclops. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 21 December 1922

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Aunt Josephine: A few lines to wish you a happy Christmas and a good New Year. I shall have to begin mine with an operation but after that I hope my sight will definitely improve. I am glad to know you are well in any case in spite of the lively atmosphere over there. I suppose you received the Criterion and English Review. The former ought to have posted you right about the book but you ought to get the other book I suggested Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses. I have been trying to collect my notes as well as my poor sight will allow and I find several names of people connected with the family who were of the older generation when I was a boy. I wonder if I sent you an exercise book with the names of these persons at the tops of the pages would you be kind enough (whenever you have a spare moment and anything occurs to your mind) to scribble down in pencil or pen anything noteworthy, details of dress, defects, hobbies, appearance, manner of death, voice, where they lived, etc just as you did for the questions I sent you about Major Powell—in my book Major Tweedy, Mrs Bloom’s father? They all belong to a vanished world and most of them seem to have been very curious types. I am in no hurry. You could send me back the book in six months if you like but I would feel greatly obliged if you could fill in any details for me as you are the only one who is likely to know anything about them.

I hope this will find you in the enjoyment of a pleasant Christmas and send you kind greetings from myself and all here.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 December 1922

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for the cheque of royalties which I would have acknowledged before now but that I was hoping Mr Jaloux’s article would appear. It has not appeared but it may be in the next (1 January) number—the review is fortnightly…. It was very kind of you to take all that trouble about my longlost relative. I know nothing about him except what the patron of my hotel told me, that a man called, asked did I (writer etc) live there and begged him, the patron, to give me his card. As the scrawl on the back seemed to indicate much interest (possibly of a tribal kind) in the book I thought it would be useful to let him see the leaflet.1 Of press notices. From what you say he is probably a son of a certain yachtsman known as Tommy Joyce (a remote cousin of my father’s whom, strange to say, he resembled slightly) of Clontarf where I last saw him about a quarter of a century ago at an incomprehensible regatta walking in white shoes with a gait which suggested that he would progress equally well on shipboard in rough weather. This possibly explains why his son drops cards about whenever he comes to Paris. And now enough about them father and son, for one of the breed is more than enough.

I am sorry to hear of the 400 copies seized. Has Mr Quinn been informed of it? Is this seizure legal? Parts of the book (copyrighted in U.S.A.) were condemned by a district court under state law but the Customs is a federal institution and what authority has a Customs official to sequestrate without compensation valuable foreign mail?….

Mr Larbaud told me that he wants to get to work, beginning next February, on what he calls Fragments d’Ulysses—that is the translation of certain parts of Ulysses and their publication in book form here in a limited edition. I objected that it would make my hero seem a mutilé de guerre and he then agreed to modify his plan so as to produce a skeleton of the book, with—but that’s a worse image no—a mariner’s chart where some regions are fully done, others sketched, others indicated and the whole representative. This plan has two advantages. It will leave it open for him or any other to fill in and complete his work. It will allow me to send out to the world in those parts where he uses critical exegesis certain suggestions as to the scheme and technique which I shall then have the pleasure of rehearing and rereading when they have gone the rounds. The book would be published by Miss Monnier at 100 francs, I think.

It is difficult to know whether this will catch you on Christmas morning but I hope it will. Please accept my thanks for all your kind attention to me in London this year and with them my best wishes for a happy and quiet Christmas after all the trouble Ulysses II has given you.

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1923

To FORD MADOX FORD, 10 January 1923

Avenue Charles Floquet 26, Paris VII

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Hueffer: The name and address of the Nice doctor are:

Dr A Colin

rue Gioffreddo 30

Nice

hours 2–4 p.m. If you see him you may tell him I have postponed the ‘dionine’ experiment till after the holidays—16 inst—then the other abscesses are to be lanced and then closed (that is, the iridectomy operation in February). You can have confidence in him, I think.

I am glad you are having a pleasant stay down there. I suppose you never go to Mentone but if you do I have a favour to ask. On the bridge that is between France and Italy there are some old Italian women who sell shell cameos (camées de coquilles) for about 10 francs. I should like to have one at your choice for the one I bought there and had mounted on a gold circlet the femme de menage has stolen together with a nice brooch and God knows what else. Don’t give yourself the least trouble about this, only if you happen to be there perhaps you will buy one. The Italian woman will probably begin by asking a few thousand for it just to make talk.

Many thanks in advance and kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 17 January 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: We are sorry to hear you don’t go out but could you make an exception and dine with us on Saturday next at 8? If you are on a special diet let us know. Miss Beach and Miss Monnier will come also Fargue. I have a series of operations in front of me—three no less—so I should like very much to see and meet you before the damned things begin. Will you let me have a word in reply? Spero di si Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 5 February 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Thanks for the copy of Echantillons which I shall now try to read with my back to the light—and also for the kind dedication. I am sorry you were not with us the other night and hope your health is better. I am well enough except for my sight. No fewer than three operations to be faced and of course I have been putting it off. But I shall begin next week.

An Italian version of Ulysses modelled on yours is to be brought out in Rome as soon as possible so when your work and health allow could you let me have a copy of your plan, e.g.—

Telemachia

I (entire)

II (recension)

III (fragments)

etc

In this way the two versions would be similar though not identical since recensions would differ and the fragments chosen could hardly be the same.

I hope you approve? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 February 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: First of all many thanks for your kind wishes for my birthday and for the cheque on account of royalties. I did not write because I thought you would not wish to be troubled by correspondence at present and because the projected operations never took place. I had to find a school for my daughter outside Paris, send her there, instal her and after a week fetch her back out of it as it was very unsatisfactory. She is now attending a lycée here and I hope she will continue music and gymnastics. Then my son was busy looking for a position here with the help of some friends. He found one in the Banque Nationale de Crédit. The motto of the company appears to be: All work and no play makes Jack a bright boy. The hours are from 9 to 8 with an interval for lunch but he tells me many of the staff stay on till midnight. Then it had to be arranged about my being admitted to the American hospital as a bogus American (this Dr Borsch is arranging) as the British hospital is badly provided and served. In a way I was glad of all these obstacles for I detest the operations. But next week they must begin—alas!

I have been able to do some reading and note taking with my back to the light but of course it could not go on like that. All I hope now is that they will be successful. I suppose it is best to get rid of this obsession once and for all.

I am very glad to hear that you like the Book of Kells. What can I say about the Odyssey? I made heaps of notes about it (supposedly) which I could not fit in. I was trying lately to sort these out according to a brandnew system I have invented for the greater complication and torment of myself. But I need eyes for that. It is curious that no critic has followed up Mr Larbaud’s clue on the parallelism of the two books. They think it is too good to be true….

I suppose this letter is very unsatisfactory. If only I could wake up and find myself—operated. It is not the pain so much as the idea in itself, the circumstances and the hideous boredom of it….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 February 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: At last I have some kind of good news though not much. I did not write before because I was not sure whether the condition would persist. The dionine treatment prescribed by Dr Colin of Nice has dissipated a fair part of the film. Dr Borsch however will not apply it in the strong solution which the Nice doctor prescribed partly I suppose because he is older and more prudent but also because he knows better the pusillanimous nature of his patient. He prefers to continue the treatment gradually and to wait and see if the film will thin more. He does not believe the dionine will dissipate the film wholly nor was Dr Colin positive of that either. He was however as you see a very clever man and all the London doctors who said the film was ‘organised’ (that is not fluid but irremovable) were wrong. Unfortunately this does not mean any improvement in my power to read or write and for this reason. I had before 1/10 of normal vision in that eye. Now I have 1/7 or 1/6 but this is only good for longrange vision. It enabled me a few nights ago to see the lights of the Place de la Concorde which before had been only a blur. Dr Borsch believes that after the operations I will have 1/2 of normal vision. Personally I am sceptical about the effect of the dental one but since Dr Borsch will not do his operation till the dentist has done his let it be so. The latter will get to work as soon as Dr Borsch is convinced that the dionine can do no more. The threatened attack in the right eye has been kept under partly by Dr Borsch’s local treatment, partly by Dr Colin’s cure.

Can a copy of Ulysses (2nd edition) be sent to my brother Charles Joyce? If so it ought to be numbered. The copy Mr Rodker sent me to work on is unnumbered. Does he know the numbers of the copies sequestrated? I think this point is important in such an edition.

No press notices of the second edition have reached me. I know nothing about the French and Italian versions but then I rarely see anybody except a few people whom I asked here for diplomatic reasons and in acknowledgment of services rendered to my book among them Mr Huddleston of The Observer who is now Paris representative of The Times.

The weather here has been atrocious, bleak, damp, cold etc. I hope it is better in your part of the world. I wonder if you ever weigh in one hand the smaller Oxford blue volume against the Greco-Bavarian telephone directory in the other. If you wish any elucidation I shall be glad to give it—before I forget it myself! Though I shall feel like Eneas when invited by Dido to tell his tale ‘Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem’. Nevertheless he told it.

With kindest regards and best wishes and some hopes for a good result of all this treatment sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. An Irish ‘Who’s Who’ has just been issued. It contains 2500 names but not mine.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 March 1923

26, Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I am glad to hear that the recent event in your family is of a happier character. Thank you for sending the book to my brother but why are these copies unnumbered. Is that regular? I am sorry to hear that another 500 copies have been seized. I suppose this means the loss and collapse of half the whole edition. Would it be too much to ask you to send me registered the copy of La Tribuna with the article by Mr Cecchi as I am sceptical about the arrival of another copy. I will send it back. Miss Beach tells me Mr Powys Mathers told her there was a second attack on Ulysses in The Sporting Times stating that the second edition could be bought for 10 shillings. Several readers of that admirable paper sent her Treasury notes.

I continue the dionine treatment with Dr Borsch. I am sure you are blaming me for my cowardice and procrastination. I confess to the first but it is now at Dr Borsch’s suggestion that I continue and although he has not increased the dose my sight has slowly improved. I had a long talk with him the other evening. He said that if I had allowed myself to be operated in May in all probability I should have lost the sight of my eye completely. He said I had no glaucoma foudroyant (for which an operation is needed within twentyfour hours) and proved it by saying that I never had any tension worth speaking of since I went to him. He said too that I did well not to be operated in London, that my sight had resisted marvellously and that I am quite healthy!!! He also added that in his opinion the operation during a crisis in Zurich was a mistake (though it was well done) as the exudation flowed over into the incision and reduced the vision of the eye considerably and permanently. The question is almost as complicated as Ulysses.

I must have expressed myself badly. I did not mean that I could supply an answer to the question of the relative merits of the two volumes. As Homer has been about 3700 years dead (he went blind from glaucoma according to one of my doctors Dr Berman as iridectomy had not been thought of) we must wait till 5632 A.D. to answer it. I meant that if your reading of the earlier poem has brought up any questions of structure or interpretation I shall be very glad to elucidate the point raised before I forget it myself.

Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them.Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio, the Italians say. The wolf may lose his skin but not his vice or the leopard cannot change his spots.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 March 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: These few lines will let you know that the conjunctivitis ended yesterday. No bad effects have followed. Dr Borsch thinks it is useless to prolong the dionine treatment (which, however, still does good) and so on Tuesday next I go into hospital. …

I am rather sceptical as to the elimination of arthritis by removal of teeth or abscesses. However if it should turn out well I shall be the first to admit it. Everything depends on the success of Dr Borsch’s operation, it seems to me and as he thinks this other indispensable I consent to it.

In spite of my eye attack I got on with another passage by using a charcoal pencil (fusain) which broke every three minutes and a large sheet of paper. I have now covered various large sheets in a handwriting resembling that of the late Napoleon Bonaparte when irritated by reverses. If my muddy mind is clear enough and if I can find a stenographer I shall try to send you the ‘exegesis’ of the Scylla and Charybdis episode before I go into hospital.

I hope you got the Sporting Times. I enclosed it in a copy of a Paris theatrical paper lest its latent heat might evaporate.

I think I got over this last attack (I hope it is the last attack) very well though I was frightened at the beginning. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 March 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter and the article in the Manchester Guardian. I shall send a few lines of formal thanks to Mr Gwynn who after sixteen years of literary criticism has discovered my existence. One half of his article is taken almost verbally from the text of Ulysses, the other half consists of phrases which I myself set in circulation. They now come back to me. You ask me to whom I wish copies to be sent. The copies of Ulysses which I presented to certain of my fellowcountrymen and fellowcountrywomen were either unacknowledged or locked up or given away or lent or stolen or sold and, it seems, in all cases unread. Nevertheless it remains part of my policy to inflict notices of myself upon the recipients. Therefore if the stamping is not too tiresome I would ask you to be kind enough to send copies to….

I hope Mr Jaloux’s article will appear on 1 April—a pleasant anniversary. During my illness I think I managed to arrange for an article in La Revue des Deux Mondes. When I have got one into La Revue de France I shall cease—to the relief of my Paris admirers. In my opinion however my name would be absent from the Manchester Guardian (as from the Irish Who’s Who and the official history of the Irish Literary Movement and the playbills of the Abbey Theatre) but for certain articles in English reviews and these would not have been published but for previous articles in French reviews.

Please present my compliments to Miss Marsden. I hope you will have a pleasant Easter. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EMILIO CECCHI, 2 April 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Cecchi

Egregio collega, La ringrazio sentitamente dello trafiletto. Spero abbia già ricevuto l’esemplare ‘stampa’ che pregai la casa editrice a Londra di spedirle. Leggerò con molto interesse il suo articolo sul Convegno; però siccome entrerò domani all’ospedale per una operazione all’occhio (iridectomia), e non so dove andrò a finire dopo, La prego di volere inviare l’esemplare (oltre quello destinato a Londra) alla casa editrice qui: Shakespeare & Co, 12 rue de l’Odeon, a mio nome. Da un pezzo non ho notizie di Linati. Se lo vede però me lo saluti. Spero che il tordo—o se mi permette di rettificare la sua allusione ornitologica—lo struzzo non gli abbia fatto male.

Con distinti ossequi e ringraziamenti mi creda dev/mo

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 3 April 1923

c/o Shakespeare and Co, 12 rue de l’Odèon, Paris VI

MS. National Library

Dear Aunt Josephine: Here at last is the list. I shall be very glad if you will please fill it up in your free moments and return it registered to above address. I hope all with you are well and that you got over the Easter all right. I am in no hurry for the book but would like to have it back in a few months.

Kindest regards from all and many thanks in advance

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 May 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I hardly know what to write. Dr Borsch tells me the eye is clearing slowly and that it takes a certain time but that it is sure, if slow. I suppose he is right but the improvement which he perceives I cannot see or see very slightly as it is still a long way from reading vision…. As for the dentist he is equally optimistic and has even begun to test me for the permanent plate. I know that both these doctors are the best in their branches in Paris and are very conscientious and so all I can do is to assent. But I wish it were all over….

The weather here ever since my operations has been dreadful. Nevertheless I have gone through some of my notes with what sight I have.

I will end this now and send it off. It is thundering and my daughter is playing the piano. She has made good progress. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I think this is the anniversary of my eye attack.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 June 1923

26 A venue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose a cutting which is not true. My small flat is all upside down with ten cases of books and manuscripts, three sacks of newspapers, four trunks, four valises, three hatboxes etc. I expect to leave Paris on Saturday. The dentist has now supplied me with the permanent set…. Till today I found it difficult to eat and talk. As regards the sight it seems to be getting very slowly better. I can now do some reading and have raced through many accumulated books and notes. It will take many months to heal completely, Dr Borsch says.… There is something fantastic in the huge disorder that now surrounds me. I shall be glad to escape from it anywhere for the moment. I feel in much better health however. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 June 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: In my haste I forgot to include the New York World cutting but now I would like to keep it for a day or two. It is a sensational cablegram saying that I am going rapidly blind and striving desperately to write letters a cubit high on a huge piece of cardboard measuring ten acres with a piece of carbon worked by a powerful dynamo. The tears of Americans are solicited for this blind tragic figure ‘in his Eiffel Tower apartment’. If they weep over him how loud will be their lamentations when another wireless message tells them that he is ‘out of his Eiffel Tower apartment’.

Do you think it is possible for you to get for me (if not to buy, as a loan) a copy of Morgante the Lesser by ‘Sirius’ (pseudonym of Edward Martyn) published 1890? I should like very much to read it when I get to London. I am troubling you because in view of the date it is not a book which Miss Beach could order easily.

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, 11 June 1923

26 Avenue Charles Floquet, Champ de Mars, Tel: Ségur 16–81

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Many thanks for your letter. As you may have heard I have been in hospital and have just come through three operations. The report of my blindness is not accurate. It is believed that the last operation will give me good sight and I can write and read a fair amount even now. We are leaving Paris for the summer. If you are passing here before 15 instant will you please write or ring me up?

With kind regards from us all to Mrs Sykes and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS, 26 June [1923]

82, Merrion Square, S., Dublin

MS. Buffalo

Dear Joyce: Have you any wish to revisit Dublin? If so will you spend a few days with us? If you will come soon as we may be flitting to Galway in a couple of weeks. My wife and I have a great admiration for your work and there are many people here who share our admiration. Perhaps you would like to meet some of them—a new literary generation. Yrs s

W B Yeats

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 July 1923

Alexandra Home, Clarence Road, Bognor

Dear Miss Weaver: I must apologise for having been rather illtempered the other morning but in fact before I left Paris I had another tiresome task smoothing over matters between certain American visitors (associated with my book) and certain residents also associated. Perhaps I look too far ahead but it seems to me I have always to carry tactful biscuits in my pockets and then spend a great deal of time distributing them right and left just in the nick of time. I am glad to hear that one of Ulysses’ creditors has been visited by the god of compunction, attended I hope by the godkin of expedition. In what I said the other morning about the persons in question I did not intend to imply any idea of material untrustworthiness but something much less tangible manifesting itself as indecision in one case and tactlessness in the other (I myself being renowned in five continents for the unapproachable correctness of my local and personal allusions and the Napoleonic rapidity of all my decisions and acts). Anyhow here I am and I like it very much and that is all for the present. The weather is very fine and the country here very restful. I shall remain on in this place (though it is rather queer the way they serve the meals for when you once let the fork out of your hand you have to wrestle with the girl for your plate and they put out all the electric lights at 11 in the bedrooms)….

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To SYLVIA BEACH, 12 July 1923

Alexandra House, Clarence Road, Bognor (Sussex) England

MS. Buffalo

Dear Miss Beach: Will you please order the following books (American) for me:

1) English Speech and Literature by E. Vizetelly

2) Ireland’s Part in the Making of Britain by O.J. Fitzpatrick?

Perhaps Brentano’s has them. Also can you get me any information about

1) New Book of Kings by Davidson

2) The Complete Peerage (8 vols) edited by Lord Howard de Walden.

A dreadful thunderstorm passed by here on Monday. Luckily we got only the fringe of it—quite enough—but London was terrified. It is very hot. My complexion is now cinnabar and rosbif à l’anglaise and sienna and extra ochre and deep walnut etc. I have also catalogued about 40 pp. of notes in spite of the heat wave.

Giorgio’s telegram and subsequent letter about the flat were decisive against our taking it. I made an alternative proposal that we take it and barter it, if unsuitable—that is, dispose of the bail without profit in exchange for a more suitable flat of similar size but of a much dearer rent. He has not written about that so I suppose it is off. In any case, will you please thank Mme Tisserand for keeping it open for me and give her from my account 100 francs which I shall settle at our next meeting. As Giorgio has nothing to do I hope he will find what we want. He knows what will suit, I presume.

I had to visit the oculist twice in London with these — glasses. The improvement of sight is so slow that I have given up thinking about it. Lucia will go to Deauville about the end of the month I think. I expect to go to Cornwall then. In any case it would be useless for either of us to return to Paris now—worse than useless for me as I know nothing about flats except that they are presumably flat not hilly.

You will be glad to hear that Miss Weaver made me a couple of days ago the very great gift of another £12,000 (twelve thousand pounds) equivalent at today’s exchange rate of 936,000 frs. This throws some light on the situation. In view of benefactions of various provenences it ought to be pointed out that the sum for which the MS of Ulysses was acquired is equivalent to the interest for 6 weeks on the total sum (£21,000) made over to me by her.

Mme du Pasquier wrote hopefully about Exiles being played in the Elysian Fields. Is not this adding a new horror to eternal punishment?

Yeats wrote me a pressing invitation to stay with him in Dublin where, he says, there are many who share his admiration of me and a new literary generation anxious to meet me. I thanked him amicably and declined.

Please thank Miss Monnier also for the trouble she took. I am sending Fargue a funny advertisement which please translate for him while he fans himself with his hat.

Many thanks to yourself for your telegram and letter but as I am not on the spot (and should be only in the way if I were) it is better to work through Georgio who is reputed to be the best living authority on the manners, customs, institutions, privileges, perquisites, hereditary and acquired domestic characteristics of the Joyce family abroad. With kind regards yours sincerely

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 July 1923

Alexandra House, Clarence Road, Bognor

Dear Miss Weaver: I am very sorry to hear you had such a terrible time in the storm. I suppose (or at least hope) there won’t be one like it for a long time. That—and the fact that danger in a large city is slight—are the only consolations. They are a dreadful meaningless bore. I hope some Franklin of the future will employ their force for cleaning footballers’ boots or some equally menial task.

Pour commencer may I have recourse to your offered aid and ask you to type the enclosed (2 copies)? I shall send you the original sheet (now quite illegible) when I have transcribed what is on the back of it. I think it would give me pleasure to see the first page of type. I hope it is legible. I wrote it as well as I could….

Mr de Bosis can see me any time he likes. He himself is so nicelooking and so very well washed and dressed and so agreeable and enthusiastic that I shall be very pleased to see him and listen to any proposal he may make as to the translation into any language of anything ever written by anybody.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 July 1923

[Bognor]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: May I trouble you to make three copies of this at your leisure? Please keep one yourself for in moving today I have lost one of your typed sheets and I should like to have a complete set of these scattered passages when needed. I am now on the third floor. Over me, thank goodness, is the roof.

With kindest regards and many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 August 1923

Bognor

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I send you this as promised—a piece describing the conversion of S. Patrick by Ireland. You may keep the other rough drafts. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 15 August 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise-Desgoffe, Paris

MS. Harvard

Dear Eliot: We left London on Thursday and here we are (homeless, ragged and tanned) running about in taxis, looking for a flat.

I was very sorry our picnic was put off. I hope Mrs Eliot is now definitely better. Please give her our best wishes. The right treatment, in my case, at least, was found it seems after a disastrous series of wrong diagnosis and wrong treatment.

I shall let you know when we get some way settled. I expect I shall soon be in London again as I have a great deal to do there still. I enjoyed my visit very much. With renewed good wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 August 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: We are staying here. Hotels are full up and we have had two days of a wild house chase. Dr Borsch will not be back till 6 September. My dentist is also out of town. So is Mr Davidson whom I cannot see till Tuesday. He turns out to be a friend of mine (or acquaintance). I had not connected him with the affair. I telephoned to Mrs Davidson who told me that her husband got a wireless message from Miss Lewisohn who is the proprietress of a New York theatre asking him to telegraph to me and then to her as they want to put the play into rehearsal. This message came from mid ocean as they had bought the play to read on the boat. Many thanks indeed for so kindly typing those clauses. They will be very useful. I shall suggest they be forwarded, filled in, sent back and then forwarded to Mr Pinker for ratification if he thinks the terms adequate. Mr Pound has a good opinion of these people. I shall write to you on Tuesday or Wednesday. With kindest regards and many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 August 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have now seen Mr and Mrs Davidson (the latter wants to do my head—he is not a barber but a sculptor) and have heard a long enthusiastic story. In the middle of it a letter arrived from Miss Lewisohn. I sent her your contract and asked her to fill in or strike out as she pleases. I tried to look interested but my thoughts were elsewhere. This is a great mistake, I know, and I should not do it if I knew better where I was. Of course I have broken my promise and have begun drafting other parts in spite of the heat, noise, confusion and suffocation. My son arrived this morning. When he is rested I think we shall leave him here to hunt around and go away to some quiet place for a week or so. Tours, I think. Perhaps it will be better for you to write 12 rue de l’Odeon. I sent you a copy of the Freeman with a review of Dr Collins’s pretentious book.

It is better to say nothing about one’s impressions on arriving here in present circumstances. Mr Davidson swears he will get us a flat with the aid of an Indian friend. Thaumaturgy of [some] kind is needed. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From J.F. BYRNE, 8 October 1923

MS. Private

Dear Joyce: If you care to write me I shall be glad to hear from you. You may take up the thread as with the Byrne you last met in Dublin in 1909.

J.F. Byrne

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 October 1923

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I sent those four fellows out of the house yesterday and when they come back from the vast I shall send them on. Today I send you the rough sheets with a plan of the verse and a forgotten page of H.C.E. But please don’t read them yet—in fact, they are illegible. On Saturday I shall send the typed copy and the fair copy. I am glad to get rid of them as they gave me a lot of trouble….

Mr John Quinn has been in Paris for the past fortnight but I have not seen him. Mr Hueffer has been made editor of a new Paris review. The editorship was offered by a financial group on condition that nothing of mine was published in it. Mr Hueffer then declined it. Finally the group gave in. Mr Pound (to whom I had shown the pieces I have written) came round to say that the front pages of the first issue were to be reserved for me with a trumpet blast. I had previously declined to allow these pieces to be sent to the Criterion and, while I was grateful to Mr Hueffer for the attitude he took up, I felt (as I tried to explain to him) that I could not allow them to be printed yet. The construction is quite different from Ulysses where at least the ports of call were known beforehand.

I am sorry that Patrick and [?] Berkeley are unsuccessful in explaining themselves. The answer, I suppose, is that given by Paddy Dignam’s apparition: metempsychosis. Or perhaps the theory of history so well set forth (after Hegel and Giambattista Vico) by the four eminent annalists who are even now treading the typepress in sorrow will explain part of my meaning. I work as much as I can because these are not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves.

I am rather tired and I have not been well (a heavy cold) for a couple of days. This noisy, dark hotel must be laden with germs. I shall do nothing for a few days. I know nothing more about Exiles. I think it was printed in the season’s bill. The tiresome hunt for a flat goes on. Boring people give senseless advice and incorrect information, helping themselves out over the din by gestures, until the first gleam of imbecile sarcasm appears on my face at which they desist. The only good news I have is that my son for the past three weeks has been taking lessons in singing, sightreading and theory of music. He has made good progress and his teacher is very sanguine about him.

I hope you are keeping well in this bad weather. If I have forgotten anything in this letter please remind me.

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To LILY BOLLACH, 10 October 1923

[Paris]

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: After our interview the other evening it seems to me very unfair of me to have inflicted on you such difficult work. It is very kind of you to undertake but I think you are doing so at too great a sacrifice. The text must be impossible for a foreigner and I ought to have known it. However as you are doing this piece may I ask to make this one addition?

On the last page of the prose part (before the verse begins) after the words ‘oremus prayer’ and before the words ‘for navigants etc’ please insert these words: ‘to Peregrine and Michael and Farfassa and Peregrine’

With many apologies and kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 October 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6, rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I send you express the piece so that it may reach you before the weekend. I have been a long time in the company of these old gentlemen-historians and am rather tired of them. On the other [side] I am scribbling a kind of plan of the verses which follow the prose immediately. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

[On verso]

The liturgical colours are really violet for the three Synoptic gospels and black for the Johannine⁠[.] Marcus Lyons’ day is indicated indirectly. Dougal (duḃ gall) means dark foreigner (i.e. the Dane). The apocrypha are represented by Lally and Roe and Buffler etc.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 October 1923

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … I am glad to hear that the Earwicker absurdity did not make you worse. I think the weather has been atrocious. If it is as bad in London as it has been here and if it continues I despair even of my four evangelists’ episode (or sketch) having any effect. It is finished but I am filing the edges off it. The wild hunt still continues in the Paris jungle, stampede of omnibuses and trumpets of taxielephants etc and in this caravanserai peopled by American loudspeakers I compose ridiculous prose writing on a green suitcase which I bought in Bognor. I want to get as many sketches done or get as many boring parties at work as possible before removal somewhere or anywhere after which I suppose I shall do the same again till I am hauled off to the eye clinic. I would be very glad and also very grateful if you would let me know any impression you may have of the passages sent.

I hope you are now much better.

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To MRS RICHARD SHEEHY, 21 October 1923

12 rue de l’Odèon, Paris

MS. Texas

Dear Mrs Sheehy: I am grieved to read in a recent Irish paper of the death of my old schoolfellow Dick Sheehy. I hope you will allow me to send you this message of sympathy in remembrance of our friendly companionship in boyhood and youth. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 October 1923

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter and kind appreciation of the foursome episode. It is strange that on the day I sent off to you a picture of an epicene professor of history in an Irish university college seated in the hospice for the dying etc after ‘eating a bad crab in the red sea’ I received a paper from Dublin containing news of the death at the age of 41 of an old schoolfellow of mine in the hospice for the dying, Harold’s Cross, Dublin, professor of law in the university of Galway who, it seems, had lately returned from the West Indies where his health collapsed. More strangely still his name (which he used to say, was an Irish (Celtic) variant of my own) is in English an epicene name being made up of the feminine and masculine personal pronouns—Sheehy. It is as usual rather uncanny. I have written to his father (an ex M.P. for Meath) and did not care to think of it too much. I think the reading of that passage in the future (if it is ever read) is likely to cause less unhappiness to mortals in this world than any reacting of the event which accompanied it (repetitions of which are likely to be more frequent than perusals of my prose).

Mr Hueffer is very insistent I should give him the Earwicker episode. Part of the opposition, it appears, came from the British consul-general here. Perhaps that official thinks I am a popular figure in my native land.

I am gathering my scattered wits for a different essay and have made plans and jigsaw puzzle sketches in the penumbra of this room. It is now raining and blowing hard outside. My cold passed away. I think this weather, bad as it is, is better than the incubation of it.

I will not praise a book again for some time … I suppose people cannot see me praising anything which I have not written myself. Ah, dearo, dearo, dear! And poor James!

Mr Quinn invited me to dinner. He asked me about my new book but I did not care to talk as there were others present. A friend of his told me that there is a club in the far east where Chinese ladies (not American as I supposed) meet twice a week to discuss my mistresspiece. Needless to say the said club is in—shavole Shanghai!

Many thanks for the final draft on Ulysses. I suppose I should say and thank God there will be no more of him. Miss Beach tells me of crowds asking about him. I wait for the conversation to go farther. It never does. And so. And all. Ah, poor Leo!

P.S. As you will see from the Irish Statesman (20 October) Dr Gogarty has also been writing a quartet for sea bass.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 November 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: You will be disappointed when you open this. It is not new MS but the fair copy of Mamalujo which I forgot to send. I have since worked over the typed copy again and have now definitely abandoned it. I could not do much these last weeks as my wife has been attending the dentist for some unpleasant work—now finished. I have prepared a nice intricate Mah Jongg puzzle for myself and shall start on it on Monday. Mr Quinn was here and wants another 150 pages of printed matter = about 500 pages of MS which he says I did not supply, as he is proposing, I believe, to sell Ulysses. He already has the entire MS and, as you will see by the enclosed, does not know (though I supplied him with the list of names of episodes) that Ithaca and Penelope are the two last episodes.

I send you a prospectus of Mr Ford’s (he does not wish his other name to be used) new review. I have declined again to let any of the pieces be printed but have allowed my name to go on the contributors’ list.

Mr Bird of Three Mountains Press came to me with a proposal about bringing out at once a third (or fourth) edition of Ulysses to be sold directly here. I sent him to Miss Beach who then said she wanted to do it and said she was waiting for me to suggest it. I did not do so because I was not sure of her attitude and also because I did not know what my proposal might entail for her.

Does the British Moslem Society publish any propaganda paper? If so I should like to see a copy.

My son will sing next Sunday in a chapel of one of the four masters (S. Luke’s) at the request of the choirmaster who was struck by his voice, it seems, at the Schola Cantorum. I don’t know what he is going to sing. I suppose it will not be the third strophe of the Leinster evangelist. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I have written in the additions.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 November 1923

Hotel Victoria Palace, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (Montparnasse)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your letter and press cuttings. I suppose you have seen Mr Eliot’s article in the Dial. I like it and it comes opportunely. I shall suggest to him when I write to thank him that in alluding to it elsewhere he use or coin some short phrase, two or three words, such as one he used in speaking to me ‘two plane’. Mr Larbaud gave the reading public about six months ago the phrase ‘interior monologue’ (that is, in Ulysses). Now they want a new phrase. They cannot manage more than about one such phrase every six months—not for lack of intelligence but because they are in a hurry.

Thanks also for Arabia Deserta, and the Querschnitt. I wish I could go away somewhere and read the former for my own pleasure but alas in spite of all I said I am working overtime again. My eye is still bandaged but gives me no trouble. I hope to be all right by the middle of the week.

I do not know how long more we shall be here. I hope not for Christmas. A certain princess Murat to whom I was introduced (I had hardly shaken hands when I began to recite Je cherche un appartement de cinq ou six pièces, trois chambres, salon, salle à manger) promised she would find me one when she comes back from London. However I caught the cold in my eye on a wildgoose chase to Versailles on a similar errand. Nevertheless I cannot stop now for I must try to block out (roughly, at least) certain parts of the book before my next holiday. The passages typed represent twice or three times as much, the rest being already written in the sense that additions will be made all over the present text from notes to which I have now no access.

I see that you leave London on Thursday for a few months holiday in the country. I hope you will enjoy yourself there. I shall [send] on the typescript of the next piece as soon as it is done.

This muddled year is ending badly for me as my treasury is now approaching the condition of a Torricellian vacuum. I have made arrangements by which the quarterly interest which I get on 25–28 December will reach me a few days before Christmas (this independently of your solicitors) but until then there is nothing coming in except a remittance of £20 on the 6–8 December. Mr Quinn was to have sent me a cheque in settlement of the Ulysses MS but as you see did not do so. It is a bother that I have to write about this but, apart from the minor matters of board and lodgings, I do not wish to be in this position here at present. I delayed this letter till the last moment hoping that the money you spoke of would come by any post. I daresay your solicitors groan in spirit every time my name is mentioned but perhaps it is now possible for them to advance some of it.

I am sure you appreciate my thoughtfulness in thus adding to your worries on the eve of your departure and I know how relieved you will feel if you do not see me on the platform at the station with a barricaded eye and a long list of requests for unobtainable objects.

Such therefore is my present condition but as you say the photograph shows me in a favourable light. Mr Pound has ups and downs. He does not always look like that. Perhaps it was because he took off his glasses. The photograph appeared in the New York Times.

I am going out with this letter to catch the mail. I hope you will not be annoyed with me for writing it? With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FORD MADOX FORD (Postcard), 13 December 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (VIe)

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Ford: When sending me the T.R. could you let me have also the October Criterion[?] Miss Beach will send you a copy of 4th edition of Ulysses Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN QUINN, 15 December 1923

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Quinn: I confirm my cable: ‘MS complete, letter follows.’ As I suspected, there is no mistake. The third part consists of:

(1) Eumeus

(2) Ithaca

(3) Penelope

and all of these you have, according to your letter. (2) and (3) are the two episodes (the first in catechism form, the second in unpunctuated monologue) following the passage you mention in your letter.

Thanks for your draft. It is very kind of you to say you will divide the profits of sale of the Ulysses MS with me. That being so, I can only hope that, as you have decided to dispose of it, your estimate of its probable selling price will prove to be a fraction, and not a large one, of the figure reached.

Mr Roche wrote to me about a flat which, like Dublin, was dear and dirty. This kind of life is very trying. I keep on writing but the outlook is not bright.

The number of people who are trying to induce themselves or others to produce Exiles is increasing, I see. I am sorry you have so much worrying correspondence about it.

Ford has been asking me to give him something for his review, but really I am not ready yet.

I am glad you liked your ocean trip. I prefer what a Dublin barrister once called terra cotta.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1923

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose a long piece with the final script. The others are in a book, all scrawled over in red pencil. I shall send it when it is full. To do so now would mean tearing out the leaves.

I hope this extract will give you some pleasure in the reading. These last weeks have been really dreadful and we seem to be sinking deeper into the morass. I stopped work in despair for a week and then started again night and day. I work like a person who is stunned. I cannot imagine any position more grotesque. There is no news here of my play or my novel or my book of stories. The fourth edition of Ulysses is due in a week or so. Mr Quinn is selling the MS by auction in New York on 15 prox. He estimates it at a fifth of the value of any of the Conrad lots he sold.

The dentist is to make me a new set for nothing as with this one I can neither sing, laugh, shave nor (what is more important to my style of writing) yawn….

I fear we are going to have a wretched Christmas but what is to be done? My sight continues to be good enough. Dr Borsch advises me to wait a few months more before deciding on another operation. It would not be pleasant at this season and in these circumstances.

I hope you found the country a pleasant change and that you are well in health and spirits. In spite of the atmosphere of this ‘Norweegickan’ hotel I am too. I am working at another piece which will be soon finished and will send it on at once.

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To FORD MADOX FORD (Postcard), 17 December 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (VIe)

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Ford: Thanks for T.R. Can you let me have the Criterion for a few days? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 17 December 1923

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, rue de Rennes

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Thanks for your new book with the very kind words about me in it. I want to show you what I have done in the hope that it may continue to interest you. I shall have a fair lot ready in a week or so and perhaps you would like to see the typescript. How I write in present circumstances I don’t know—influence of ad maiorem dei gloriam, perhaps.

I was sorry to hear your health was not good but the last reports are more favourable. As soon as I have once more presented my credentials (MSS) to you can we not have a quaresimal dinner somewhere together? I hope so.

With very kind regards and my sincere thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LILY BOLLACH, 18 December 1923

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Dear Miss Bollach: I am dreadfully sorry about last night and to hear that you waited so long too. You must have a nice opinion of my manners but really I was prevented at the very last moment when I could not even telephone to you not knowing your number. All I can do is to apologise and hope you are not too annoyed.

I called and got the typesheets—all done to my astonishment! They are excellently done too. Many thanks.

Can you meet me on Monday at 6.15 at the same place (I went there today at 1.45 as your concierge told me to do)? I shall go in any case but it would serve me right if you made me wait an hour before you came yourself.

With renewed apologies and many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, [19 December 1923]

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (Montparnasse)

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: My solicitors write that they will send a cheque for £60 to you at your London address next week. As Christmas is now only six days off can you let me know whether you were able to make the arrangement you suggested.

I hope you are having a good time. Will there be Swedish as well as American punch in your next work. A fourth edition of Ulysses comes out next week.

Jed haabe det De vil have et godt Jultid derop i det gamie Norge. Paa gensyn! Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Norge is the Danish name for Sweden (copyright in the United States by J.J.).

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1924

To ROBERT MCALMON, 5 January 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: I confirm my telegram ‘Cheque received etc’. Has that cheque come through? There is a lot of mail for you lying at Miss Beach’s. She is away. Miss Moschos does not know what to do with it. Perhaps the cheque is here. My solicitors usually send it registered. Would it have been delivered, if so? In France, I think not. Send me a line in reply if you can as soon as this reaches you if it does. Pound was in hospital for threatened appendicitis but comes out tomorrow. He leaves for Italy on Tuesday. The 4th edition of Ulysses is out. We are threatened with a flood here but the rise is less today. 1924 begins well. In haste sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, [? 5 January 1924]

[Paris]

MS. Private

Dear Nora: The edition you have is full of printers’ errors. Please read it in this. I cut the pages. There is a list of mistakes at the end

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 January 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: Did you get the MS and typescript sent you a week or so ago? I am sending you more enclosed, also the pages to replace the faulty ones. The passage ‘Let us now … Shem the penman’ follows the words ‘the hen saw’. Between the words ‘penman’ and ‘Revered’ are three further passages, a description of Shem-Ham-Cain-Egan etc and his penmanship, Anna Livia’s visits and collaboration and delivery of the memorial by Shawn the post.

I finished the calligraphy expertise a day or two ago but have felt so tired since that I have scarcely energy enough to hold a pen.

The MS of Ulysses is to be sold today in New York. I expect Mr Quinn will cable me. The pound was 98.25 yesterday in Paris and the dollar 22.40! The Blooms of the Bourse are very thoughtful.

I hope you are in good health and enjoying a quiet holiday. The first caricature of Ulysses I saw appeared in a comic Dublin paper Dublin Opinion. A convict has called the warder. The warder says ‘We let you off hard labour and gave you Joyce’s Ulysses to read. What do you want now?’ The convict (handing back a large volume): More oakum!

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To ROBERT MCALMON, N.D. (early 1924)

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, (Montparnasse), Paris

Dear McAlmon: You will see by enclosed that the flat scheme fell through after a lot of suspense. Quinn did not reply to my cable but finally wrote to say he had sold the MS for $1975. On the same day he bought back two poems by George Meredith (about 70 pp of MS) for $1400 or 1500. He offered to send me half of the net proceeds less fees, etc in six months. I wrote declining to accept it. I do not think he will put my letter up for auction. Ford has come so often to the well and talked about support given me in the past that I have consented to give him the four masters bit (which is only a sidepiece) for his next number. The review is very shabby in my opinion….

I envy you down there in the sun. But it is very far. I could not go alone and Giorgio who badly needs air does not care to leave the others alone and I could not pilot the four and if we went there would be no place to come back and the expense, and there is not a shred of news from those solicitors or from Miss Weaver (who, I fear, must be ill in some way) and the Ulysses MS has been a fiasco and there seems no prospect of anything getting settled!

I continue to work but I might as well be a galleyslave, never stopping from 8 a.m. to 12.30 and from 2 to 8 p.m. By doing so at least I avoid meeting people who admire me immensely and will surely find me a flat….

The weather here is like a methodist minister’s dream of purgatory. I wish I were there to sit in the sun, and rest. What do you say? I don’t like the pension idea. Do you like the red mullets they grill there (rouget)?

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To ETTORE SCHMITZ, 30 January 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris, rue de Rennes

MS. Fonda Savio

Caro amico, Sono andato alla stazione ma nessun treno era in arrivo (nemmeno ritardato) nell’ora indicatami. Ne ero molto dispiacente. Quando ripasserà per Parigi? Non potrebbe pernottare qui?

Grazie del romanzo con la dedica. Ne ho due esemplari anzi, avendo già ordinato uno a Trieste. Sto leggendolo con molto piacere. Perchè si dispera? Deve sapere ch’è di gran lunga il suo migliore libro. Quanto alla critica italiana non so. Ma faccia mandare degli esemplari di stampa a

1) M. Valéry Larbaud
chez Nouvelle Revue Française
3 rue de Grenelle
Paris

2) M. Benjamin Crémieux
chez Revue de France
(troverà l’indirizzo sur un esemplare)

3) Mr T.S. Eliot, Editor ‘Criterion’
9 Clarence Gate Mansions

4) Mr F.M. Ford ‘The Transatlantic Review’
27 Quai d’Anjou
Paris

Parlerò o scriverò in proposito con questi letterati. Potrò scrivere di più quando avrò finito. Per ora due cose mi interessano: Il tema: non avrei mai pensato che il fumare potesse dominare una persona in quel modo. Secondo: il trattamento del tempo nel romanzo. L’arguzia non vi manca e vedo che l’ultimo capoverso di Senilità ‘Si, Angiolina pensa e piange ecc …’ ha sbocciato grandemente alla chetichella.

Tanti saluti alla Signora se si trova costì. Spero avremo il piacere di veder loro fra breve.

Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

PS. Anche, Mr Gilbert Seldes ‘The Dial’ (indirizzo?) New York’

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To VALERY LARBAUD, [? February 1924]

(S. James’s Palace, Dungeon 76, Luteatia

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Thanks for the transmitted invitation. I regret I am not free. May I ask you, by the way, to be rather reticent about my new book? Lucia has done an ‘articolessa’ on Charlie Chaplain [sic] which she will send you tomorrow. It is about the same length as himself.

Did you get the ‘Coscienza di Zeno’? Kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

What is the date?

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To JOHN QUINN, 5 February 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Quinn: Can you find out, directly or indirectly, for what figure Mr (or Dr) Rosenbach will relinquish his grip on his (or my) MS.? It seems to me he may be approachable, as apparently he asks for six months to fumble in other people’s trousers in order to find the money. A cable was being framed here, urging you in the name of many persons here to withhold the MS. from sale, but I discountenanced it as the MS. was legally your property, and I can easily understand that, apart from the worry, there must be a heavy loss in selling such a big library as yours, where one successful sale is outbalanced by several disastrous ones. However, as there is a general feeling of stupor and indignation here at the result, I think that the present holder should be sounded even if I have to buy in the MS. myself…. Will you please write me by return, or cable, using Scott’s code for economy’s sake? In any case, please cancel the amount you kindly promised me out of the proceeds of the sale. You have had outlay enough already on account of me—cables, correspondence, defence of the Little Review, binding, etc. It must be understood, however, that I will not write in any pages of the MS. to ‘complete’ it. The additions were made by me on printed proofs.

I daresay you did well to pass on Mr Gorman’s book to Mr Boyd. Mr Boyd, I notice, has added a chapter on me to the new edition of his history of the Irish literary movement. Evidently he has been reading up the subject.

I have not seen Ford for five or six days. He has been pressing me to give him something, but I am not eager for publication at present. I could, perhaps, detach one passage for him, but he fears prosecution and seizure on the charge of blasphemy. The second number of his review came out on Saturday—pancake night. Between lack of funds, printers’ errors, absconding secretaries and general misunderstandings, it appears to be shortening people’s lives.

Miss Beach, at her own risk, suggestion and expense, brought out a cheap edition of Ulysses on 1 January (60 francs). It is selling well here, though, I believe, the Prince of Wales (who was here incognito as Earl of Chester and, of course, recognized by everybody) complained to a Paris bookseller when he saw the volume (which is half the size of the first edition and bound in white with blue lettering—the Greek flag upside down this time) in the window. The reply of Mr Pierre Paul Petitépatant to H.R.H.’s equerry varies according to the hour of the day and the person who tells the tale.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 February 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I send you some new MS (Shem: Part I, vii), a piece I had omitted, a page to replace one typed and a fresh batch of typescript. I hope it will reach you safely. The fresh text follows after the words ‘Shem the penman’. I continue to work on, hopeless as the situation seems. What is to be done with your copy of the new edition of Ulysses? Is it not risky to send it by post? Mr Ford in the new Transatlantic Review is taking up the question of the Folkstone seizure which he hopes to bring under government notice, I think. I have consented to give him for the next issue the Mamalujo episode, the only sidepiece I could detach. The correspondent of Times here was appealed to and, having examined it, gave his opinion that it would not lead to prosecution for blasphemy.

Mr Quinn sold the MS of Ulysses on 14 January. I waited for three days and then cabled. There was no reply. Several friends here cabled to New York but it was impossible to find out anything. At last after ten days a letter came from him saying he had sold the MS for $1975 ($25 under the minimum price he had fixed) and on the same day and at the same sale bought back two MS poems of Meredith (50 pp) for $1400. He added that the buyer Mr Rosenbach would pay in six months and said he would then send me a cheque for half the profit less auctioneers’ fees and not counting $9,– price of the covers in which the MS was laid. I replied declining to accept any money and asking what is Mr Rosenbach’s price for delivering up the MS. Apart from annoyance at being balked in certain plans I had made I consider such a sale now and by a wealthy man (who had made me part owner of the MS before the sale) a grossly stupid act which is an alienation of valuable property. It is a pity that I was obliged to write such a letter but what is one to do when a MS of 500,000 words is sold by an admirer who on the same day buys back a few pages of not very meritorious verse by a prose writer for almost the same sum?

I hope you are still keeping well as the tone of your last letter was very discouraged. Perhaps the nightman sketch I send may produce by allopathy a mood of contentment. I am sending this c/o Miss Marsden to whom please give my regards. I hope the weather has improved over there as it has here—to a very slight extent only.

P.S. Of course I cannot find the earlier MS. If I look for it any more I shall be unable to do anything for the day. I saw it yesterday. When I see it again I will shoot it at sight.

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To A.J. LEVENTHAL [‘Lawrence Emery’], 8 February 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris, Montparnasse

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Sir: Allow me to thank you for the friendly notice of my book Ulysses which appears in the first number of your review. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, [18 February 1924]

Hotel Victoria Palace, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (Montpartnasse)

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: There is no chance of my getting away and the legacy bore is still hanging on. Is it possible for you to make an arrangement as before which I would then settle on next quarter day (25 March). We are still 5 weeks off that and I am again pressed. I cannot write to Miss Weaver first because the matter is out of her hands and also because she is staying with Miss Marsden now and I don’t think she likes the tone of my last effusions though Larbaud to whom I read it thinks they are the strongest pages I have written. The task I have set myself is dreadfully difficult but I believe it can be done. O dear me! What sins did I commit in my last incarnation to be in this hole?

I hope you are enjoying yourself down there. You ought to visit the walled town of Vence (Station Cagnes). If you do call on A. Kerr Bruce, Le Petit Mas. He will give you a good Scotch and soda. If you see them give them our regards. I like Cannes too especially to drive (horse not auto) round the bay.

My sight is not very good today as the weather is changing. So I shall end this.

Of course I never heard or saw anything of Princess Murat since. I am not able to do these jobs and write in the half dark at the same time.

Please remember us to Dr and Mrs Williams.

Kind regards to yourself and many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Ulysses is selling very well but I don’t care to bother Miss Beach.

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To ITALO SVEVO, 20 February 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Friend: Send the books without delay. I have already spoken of you to Larbaud and Crémieux. Use my name when you write to Seldes and Eliot. Also send a copy to Lauro de Bosis and Enzo Ferrieri, editor of Il Convegno, 24 via Santo Spirito, Milan.

Your book will certainly be appreciated. Who will not be able to appreciate the honourable Dr Coprosich (sanctificetur nomen tuum) ‘who even washed his face’? With such a name he should have performed very different ablutions!

A propos of names: I have given the name of Signora Schmitz to the protagonist of the book I am writing. Ask her, however, not to take up arms, either of steel or fire, since the person involved is the Pyrrha of Ireland (or rather of Dublin) whose hair is the river beside which (her name is Anna Liffey) the seventh city of Christianity springs up, the other six being Basovizza, Clapham Junction, Rena Vecia, Limehouse, S. Odorico in the Vale of Tears and San Giacomo in Monte di Pietà.

Return the enclosed clipping after you have read it. Cordial greetings to Signora Schmitz and to yourself.

My best to you.

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To FORD MADOX FORD (Postcard), 25 February 1924

[Paris]

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Ford: As it is already the 25th can you please let me have my typescript back and the first proofs? I should like to check them Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 29 February 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear McAlmon: Thanks for the cheque (£20) which my wife managed to cash at Lloyds as you suggested. I shall be much obliged if you can let me have another now as the rate is high today (104.75). As soon as I have finished the piece I am at I shall write to Miss Weaver about the money again. In any case my solicitors will square up with you on the 25 prox if you will be kind enough (if your balance allows it) to advance till then. Many thanks anyhow.

The T.R. sent me round a proof. O, my goodness! And I will not send it back to the printer as I do not trust his brains. So I wrote for Ford’s secretary to come round. No reply. It is grotesque, I think. And I was promised the proof a fortnight ago and told I could revise it twice and tomorrow will be the 1 March.

I hope Bird got down all right and that you are all enjoying yourselves. Whoever comes back here let him bring a few francs worth of sunshine for heaven’s sake!

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To FORD MADOX FORD, 6 March 1924

[Paris]

MS. Stanford

Dear Ford: It is now 5.30 and there is no sign of the proof promised me for Tuesday evening. As arranged I must revise this proof again and be sure that my revisions are made even if the piece has to be held over for another number. Will you please see that I get it at once. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 March 1924

[Paris]

Dear Miss Weaver: I have finished the Anna Livia piece. Here it is. After it I have hardly enough energy to hold the pen and as a result of work, worry, bad light, general circumstances and the rest. A few words to explain. It is a chattering dialogue across the river by two washer-women who as night falls become a tree and a stone. The river is named Anna Liffey. Some of the words at the beginning are hybrid Danish-English. Dublin is a city founded by Vikings. The Irish name is Baile Áta Cliat. Ballyclee=Town of Ford of Hurdles. Her Pandora’s box contains the ills flesh is heir to. The stream is quite brown, rich in salmon, very devious, shallow. The splitting up towards the end (seven dams) is the city abuilding. Izzy will be later Isolde (cf. Chapelizod).I hope you are well and that the piece will please you.

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To FORD MADOX FORD, 14 March 1924

[Paris]

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Ford: Thanks for your note and for the trouble Mrs Ford and yourself took to check my proof. However, as it seemed to me almost impossible that you could revise such a tricky proof I went to Clarke’s. The foreman had gone and the clerk could not find my proof. He said he thought it might be on the machine. I asked him to telephone to me tomorrow morning and then drove to Quai d’Anjou but, not finding you, left my name. My checking of the proof would mean a delay of about an hour and much relief to myself. I hope it is still possible. I explained in a letter to Mrs Ashworth that I could not go to the printer’s on Thursday but would go on Friday. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 March 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (Montparnasse)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope none of the MS was lost. It is eleven pages. The first words are ‘O tell me’ the last ‘waters of. Night!’ I shall send you two pages which have been written round again to replace. But they do not change the piece. It should be read in successive runs. On Monday I shall try to start Shaun the Post. This would make the second part of the book fairly complete with the letter. The first part is not written yet.

You did not say if you liked the piece? I read it to Mr Larbaud who was enthusiastic about it. I think I shall fall all of a heap after the Shaun piece. It has been such a struggle. With kindest regards and many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FORD MADOX FORD, [?16 March 1924]

[Paris]

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Ford: The proof (sent me without the former one to check it by!) is quite impossible. I glanced over it. Not only has it not been read but many of the most glaring blunders are still in it. I gave the typescript to you, as you remember, under pressure and on the distinct understanding that I could write in notes to which I had not then access. I think it is due to me to hold over the piece for your next issue as the printer seems to be still learning his trade. If you can call today before 5 I shall explain to you why in my opinion it is necessary to make these apparently trifling additions.

Your maid does not know where I can find you. I thought it better to drive up here in the hope of finding you rather than send a pneu. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 March 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope you got the MS book. I am very glad you like Anna Livia. Mr Larbaud is in a trance about it, he said, and is corresponding with Mr Arnold Bennett. All Pandora’s gifts are not maladies. Shaun’s map: for this see any postage stamp of the Irish Free State. It is a philatelic curiosity. A territorial stamp it includes the territory of another state, Northern Ireland. In making notes I used signs for the chief characters. It may amuse you to see them so I shall write them on the back of this. I have been very busy revising over and over the proofs of the four old men, Mamalujo. It comes out this week. They have now taken a lamp out of my room. Miss Beach was here. I showed her the room. There is nothing to be said. Shaun is going to give me a very great deal of trouble.… …

…………………………………………….

T  (Earwicker, H C E by moving letter round)

U  Anna Livia

Z  Shem-Cain

Y  Shaun

R  Snake

P  S. Patrick

S  Tristan

Q  Isolde

W  Mamalujo

X  This stands for the title but I do not wish to say it yet until the book has written more of itself.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 May 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: The weather became very hot a few days ago and at once all the windows in the courtyard were flung open and the inmates leaned on the sills talking, shouting, laughing, arguing in all tongues, dominated by two American ladies who discussed loudly selfconsciousness. I endured for four days, then I went out, bought another case, packed and put to storage all my books, gathered my MSS including Shawn (30 pages of my large notebook, foolscap size) which I could not write out again, made a parcel of them and telephoned to Miss Beach who came and removed them hastily so that there is as much literature now in my room as in your office. I was to have gone on with the writing a little longer but the nine months’ labour was quite enough for me. In this atmosphere I found my memory, vision, power of attention all gradually getting worse yet I knew that if the books or even the MSS and notebooks were left here I would go on. So I stopped. Hence this fountain pen which I bought when I had left off writing. I am sorry I could not face the copying out of Shawn which is a description of a postman travelling backwards in the night through the events already narrated. It is written in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but in reality it is only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey. To write a book like this I should have a study of my own where I could quickly get at my books and papers. Otherwise it is impossible.

Dr Rosenbach sent me a message asking me what would be my price for the corrected proofs of Ulysses. When he receives a reply from me all the rosy brooks will have run dry.

Rosy Brook he bought a book Though he didn’t know how to spell it. Such is the lure of literature To the lad who can buy it and sell it.

Mr Tuohy came to Par is to make a drawing of me if I consented, on the commission of a friend. He pressed me very hard to pose for my portrait. I argued with him for a long time. I have refused scores of requests to sit to painters and sculptors, having a very profound objection to my own image, needlessly repeated in a picture or bust. In fact years ago casual glimpses of it in shop mirrors etc used to send me speeding away from it. I think I was right, for underfed, overworked, ill dressed, with septic poisoning gradually undermining my health and unable to attend to it for sheer want of time and want of money I must have been a dreadful spectacle. It is not so bad now, of course, but still I think an artist could employ his brush better. I asked Mr Tuohy whether he wished to paint me or my name. He said he wanted to paint me. I heaved a sigh and consented. I have given him 15 sittings, very tiresome. It will be finished in a week. He is taking it to Dublin where it will be exhibited. It will be in the Paris Salon of 1925 with the portrait of my father. Would you like to see it? If so, Mr Tuohy will gladly stop a half day in London to show it to you.

There is much moral difficulty about this operation. I would take the risk if Dr Borsch thinks it necessary now and if I were sure it would be successful. Somehow I have a suspicion it will not do much good but that may be due to my state of dejection. My wife is in a weak state of nerves and I believe the operation will cause her more pain than it will cause me. I do not know what to do. I will speak to Dr Borsch tonight. As soon as it is decided I shall let you know. What will happen after I do not know. I would go away almost anywhere but it seems useless to go until we have some place to come back to.

I will not trouble you with these eternal worries any longer this morning. I am going out to get some fresh air laden with tar, benzine, noise, dust etc—all gratis.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 24 March 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Des goffe, Paris

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: I must ask you to overlook my discourtesy in not acknowledging and replying to your letter, with cheque (frs 2120). I have been working myself silly and revising proof of the four masters or evangelists for the T.R. What a job, too! What is your address? Is this right? I want to return you the money. Miss Beach says you are coming on here. Will you please drop me a line? I hope you have had a good sunny time. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 24 March 1924

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Will Mrs Nebbia and yourself dine with us on Thursday, calling here at 8.15? We hope so. Enclosed is revised typed copy of Anna Livia. Have you heard the four masters bit? It will be in the Transatlantic Review next number. I read you a mere sketch a year ago. But perhaps you read it in the folder. But I don’t think you had time.

I am nearly stunned by this way of life. O, mon dieu! Did Miss Beach send you the N.Y. Times? I think it ought to be answered. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LILY BOLLACH, 24 March 1924

[Paris]

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: I am dreadfully late in acknowledging receipt of the second typescript which you rushed off for me so promptly. It was very kind of you indeed as it was a mere whim of mine to have it for that day. I apologise also for the delay in remitting you enclosed (frs 70.–) for your excellent work. The spelling ‘eygs’ is all right—a mixture of Danish and English which is intentional. My excuse for all my discourtesy is that I have been revising proof after proof of a passage which will appear next week in the transatlantic review—the piece about the four old men typed by you some months [ago]. So I hope you will forgive me. I shall of course send you a copy of the review immediately it comes out. I hope I may be able to see you this week as there is another small matter I want to bother you about. With renewed apologies and many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ETTORE SCHMITZ, 1 April 1924

Restaurant des Trianons, Paris

MS. Fonda Savio

Caro amico: Buone notizie. M. Valery Larbaud ha letto il Suo romanzo. Gli piace molto. Ne scriverà una recensione nella Nouvelle Revue Française. Ne ha scritto anche ad una sua amica la Sig. Sibilla Aleramo della Tribuna.

Tanti saluti alla Sua Signora ed a Lei una stretta di mano.

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 April 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (Montparnasse)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: For some days past I have not been allowed to read a line on account of a secretion in the conjunctiva—scarcely any inflammation, no pain and it seems no danger. Dr Borsch says I must limit my work in present conditions to a half or a third. I have been working ten hours a day in semi-dark for the past seven months. I am to be operated on when the fine weather comes I suppose in May. He says it will be much simpler and have a good result.

I hope to resume with Shaun tomorrow. I had done about a third. But he (already a dawdler) will be longer on the road.

I asked Miss Beach to send you the Transatlantic Review. You will notice revisions in it. I also send you an article by Mr Ford.

Mr Gorman’s book on me arrived. It is well and carefully written but it reminds me of so much labour and strife that I am afraid it was in part responsible for a nervous collapse I had a few days ago. I went out today and feel better.

I am glad you are going to rid yourself of the worry of the publishing business but, of course, mistrustful of your successor.

Can you get Mr Gorman’s book in Brentano’s, London. I suppose so.

This has been a dreadful winter and the prospect of ending it in a clinique is the only proper finale. But I hope there is something better beyond.

Miss Beach will send your copy of Ulysses to London by some trustworthy messenger, if she has not done so. I have not seen her for a while as my general expression is not a pleasant one to offer to anybody’s gaze, though, strangely enough, the Shaun the Post piece is very amusing—to me, at least. It is extremely hard to write.

I hope you are well after your stay in the country and that you will not be bored by this letter. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Job

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To FORD MADOX FORD, 8 April 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris, Montparnasse

MS. Roland Loewe

Dear Ford: Many thanks for the kind mention of me in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. I hope the issue is selling well.

The Egoist Press is going out of business and Mr Jonathan Cape wants to acquire copyright of all my books at once. He has forwarded a contract to me and suggests that I submit it to you. May I trouble you to let me know what you think of it. The royalty 15% seems to me rather low. The Egoist Press paid me 25% and Shakespeare and Company 66% of net profit. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Miss Weaver writes that it is not easy to get your review in London?

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To LILY BOLLACH, 24 April 1924

[Paris]

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: I wanted to write to you several days ago but I have had a rather bad nervous collapse from overwork. I have again a request to make which, I am sure, will bore you greatly. Mr Valery Larbaud asked me to let him have a copy of the Anna Livia piece (enclosed) and I have also promised one to a relative in Ireland who has done a good deal of research for me. So could you make three fresh copies of it without the blanks in the paging? If so, I shall be extremely obliged though I can imagine how tiresome it is to type the same thing three or four times over. Mr Larbaud leaves for Italy in a few days but if you are pressed for time please let me know. I shall call on your concierge in any case.

With this is a copy of the French translation of my first novel which I beg you to accept with many thanks for your promptness and courtesy.

Apologising for the short notice I am giving you Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD Bib. Municipale, Vichy, 2 May 1924

Restaurant des Trianons, Paris

Dear Larbaud: Here is one of the pieces of verse I spoke to you of. Tomorrow I will send you Anna Livia corrected. It is already typed but I revise the typescript always Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LILY BOLLACH, 21 May 1924

[Paris]

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: Do you think you could manage to type these verses (the first I have written for six years) and leave six copies with your concierge by tomorrow (Thursday) evening? I should be much obliged to you if you could. Also I should like to know how much I owe you and must apologise for not having settled with you before now. I should be very glad if we could meet some evening as, unfortunately, I am going to make another trip (into a hospital) and I wanted to arrange another matter with you before I do so. Are you free on Friday evening at 6.30 p.m. at the usual place? I shall feel glad if you will let me know. With many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 22 May 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Des goffe (rue de Rennes)

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: All my books and MSS are packed up (Anna Livia with them) so I cannot find what I promised. It is impossible to work any longer in this hotel. However, I send you a short poem—the first I have written for six years. I hope it reaches you before you leave for Genoa. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LEON FLEISCHMAN, 27 May 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Des goffe, Paris (Montparnasse)

MS. Joseph Mitchell

Dear Fleischman: I am sorry you could not dine with us before you sailed. I hope you will find Mrs Fleischman quite recovered from her illness. Will you please give her our kind regards. As we spoke about my American publisher I enclose a letter which I will ask you to return. You will see that in one year not a single copy of A Portrait of the Artist has been sold in the United States. My annual income apparently from sales in America is about 30$. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 30 May 1924

[Paris]

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: May I introduce a friend of mine, Mr Patrick Tuohy, an Irish painter who did a portrait of my father and is finishing one of me. You may find him interesting. His accent, which is very Dublin, may be perhaps a little difficult to understand, sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To MYRON C. NUTTING, [? 30 May 1924]

Restaurant des Trianons, 5 Place de Rennes (VIe), Gare Montparnasse, Paris

MS. Northwestern

Dear Nutting: This is to introduce Mr Patrick Tuohy who has painted my father. He will show the photograph. I like it and would like to have your opinion of it. He would like to see your portrait of my wife and also the sketch of me. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 June 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris (Montparnasse)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks indeed for your kind letter. I enclose one of a different tenor. Its weatherbeaten appearance shows the energy with which I put it into my pocket. We have been here for nine months and I am only one week in arrears…. This Norwegian must have been reading my MS surruptiously [sic], I fear.

Mr Tuohy has added still another complication by insisting on remaining another week. I have now given him 26 sittings. He was to have left today but last night he begged for two more and as he is forfeiting his salary as professor at the Dublin school of art I consented. He will telegraph to you when he arrives in London and bring you the portrait. He has to get a special cage made as the paint will not be dry.

I am to see Dr Borsch at 6 p.m. and will add a postscript to this to tell you what is decided about the operation. The posing has tired me but I think it would be well to go into the clinic and have it over. There are so many problems to be solved that I can face only one at a time. Perhaps in there staring up at darkness I may solve the second.

Does Mr Huebsch’s account mean that no copy of my novel was sold in the United States in one year and that my total royalties come to 30 $. I have written to a friend of mine, a Mr Fleischman, formerly a partner in the firm Boni and Liveright, to try to take the books off Mr Huebsch’s hands. They are not even in his catalogue, Miss Beach says, and yet copies of the Transatlantic Review with Mamalujo in it fetch 18 $.50, visitors report.

The weather is dreadful today and ‘my sight is growing thicker on me with the shadows in this place’. My memory too is dulled. I cannot remember accurately the first page of Shaun and he is not here to aid me. I revised the new press cuttings for Miss Beach. I hope you received the Nouvelles Littéraires. Mr Larbaud has great courage. On the same page you will see a notice about Commerce in which a translation of the first 12 pages of Ithaca as far as ‘Old Ollebo M.P.’ will appear.

I expect a letter from the solicitors in the morning and I shall then write to them and to you. In the meantime it is useless for me to say anything but that if I had been in your place and in my present mood I would have thrown the fire irons (including the fender) at the spectral bore seated in that armchair. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. The operation, Dr Borsch says, ought to be done. He cannot do it on Wednesday as Mr Tuohy wants that day. It will be made on Saturday.

J.J.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 6 June 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris VII

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I must thank you for the allusion to me in that interview. But how am I ever to live up to it?

I had a letter from ‘Italo Svevo’ this morning. He is in despair about his book. If you manage a short note on it somewhere or, as you suggested, give some pages of it in the second number of Commerce you would do much more for him than my mention of Les Lauriers sont coupés did for Dujardin.

I am very glad you liked the prayer. Pleasant holidays! sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 10 June 1924

Trieste

Caro amico, grazie per la Sua del 6. Mi dispiace tanto di sentire che Lei ha di nuovo bisogno di farsi torturare. Spero di sentire presto che sta bene.

Parto domani per Londra. Ringrazi Larbaud da parte mia e gli dica che può fare del mio romanzo tutto, persino tradurlo per intero. (Buona l’idea?). Non scrivo a Larbaud solo per l’esperienza fatta che i letterati hanno in genere una cattiva ‘nursery’, (almeno gl’italiani) e non usano rispondere. Di quei tre romanzi che mandai ultimamente in Italia pare nessuno sia giunto a destinazione. Io ho il grande torto di occuparmi ancora del mio romanzo. Tanto più che lo faccio solo col Suo intervento e che Lei, a questo mondo fra soddisfazioni e seccature grandi (quella dell’operazione) ha già abbastanza da fare. Fatto questo passo presso il signor Larbaud, lasciamolo correre ambedue (il romanzo).

Mi sono procurato l’Ulisse. Al mio ritorno lo leggerò capitolo per capitolo tentando di viverlo. Ho la promessa di Suo fratello che dopo ogni capitolo lavorato a fondo mi concederà la sua assistenza. Credo che dopo di Lei non potevo trovare un assistente migliore.

Io spero che a Londra non dovrò rimanere che quattro settimane.

Saluti cordiali anche alla Sua Signora ed anche da parte di mia moglie.

Suo devotissimo

Ettore Schmitz

A proposito di Suo fratello: Mi disse che fra poco Le scriverà. Sta benissimo e mi consegnò due giornali che di Lei parlano.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 June 1924

Victoria Palace Hôtel 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: It is now seventeen days since the operation which was more unpleasant than I had expected either because not enough cocaine was used or because of my nervous state—the latter probably. The eye is still bandaged but I am allowed to read as well as I can with the other. I am very doubtful of the result. So far there is practically no improvement in the vision and it depresses me a great deal. I should like to go away but Dr Borsch continues to assure me that the vision will come back. It is not his fault. I am even glad he made an iridectomy as this is the only safety valve against glaucoma if I get another attack of iritis—which may fate forbid. They say I look very well and some kind person made me a present of an appetite. But I doubt the power of the iris to absorb the deposit in the eye. The long drudgery and disappoint ment in Trieste (I scarcely ate anything, taught until late every night and bought one suit of clothes in nine years, but the Irish literary movement has finally had its attention called to my existence) and then the labour of Ulysses must have undermined my strength. I was poisoned in more ways than one. I mention this because whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten.

The sight I have now is enough to get about with but it is not enough to do the kind of work I feel impelled to do except very slowly and painfully and in very favourable conditions of light and climate which Paris does not offer. (I enclose a letter from the Nice agency. I sent them back the contract for the insertion of a clause allowing me to sublet and here is the reply. If I may say so the lady does not seem to be a ‘nice’ mother-in-law.) Still I hope Dr Borsch is right.

There is a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day—16 June. They sent me hortensias, white and blue, dyed. I have to convince myself that I wrote that book. I used to be able to talk intelligently about it. If ever I try to explain to people now what I am supposed to be writing I see stupefaction freezing them into silence. For instance Shaun, after a long absurd and rather incestuous Lenten lecture to Izzy, his sister, takes leave of her ‘with a half a glance of Irish frisky from under the shag of his parallel brows’. These are the words the reader will see but not those he will hear. He also alludes to Shem as my ‘soamheis’ brother; he means Siamese.

This is a better room, high up and more lightsome. I found that my memory was getting lame so in the clinic I started to learn by heart the Lady of the Lake by sir Walter Scott, Bart. In three days I learnt 500 lines and can repeat them without a mistake. Neither of my children can do this. It is not a sign of intelligence (I must continue with my daughter’s pen) but it is very useful. I have invented a whole system of my own—a great deal of it very childish—by which I keep my brains from falling about but I have been forced to drop most of it owing to the grotesque way I live now. I showed Mr Larbaud the signs I was using for my notes T HCE U Anna Livia Z Shem Y Shaun. He laughed at them but it saves time. I hope you will meet him. It is a pleasure to speak with him. He knows what he wants to say, much or little, says it and writes it.

Yes, Mr Tuohy is the person I told you about. I am glad you liked the portrait. I like the folds of the jacket and the tie. He did not tell you all about the ownership of the portrait because he is going to have a little game with a person in Dublin first. As you may have seen by his eyes he is very malicious—in a good sense of the word if it has one. I can imagine the scene and it amuses me also though I would not do it. I have tried to make this letter cheerful and I will continue to hope.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 July 1924

Hotel de France et Chateaubriand, Saint-Malo

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter of some days ago. I left Paris after a final interview with Dr Borsch. I am to go back there in a couple of months to see the result of the operation and to get other glasses. Meanwhile I am to continue the treatment here or wherever we stop. No further operation, he says, is necessary or would do any good. The sight will come back, he says. I will say nothing more on this subject till then.

I left Paris in the usual whirl of confusion. The first fragments of Ulysses translated are to appear in Commerce, a revue de luxe this month. Mr Larbaud being away the fragments chosen were insufficient. I asked to have others added. When this was done the princess di Bassiano objected to some of the passages. This I overruled. (This correspondence must now cease. AUTHOR.) Then the French printer who set Penelope (or part of her) struck out punctuation but put in accents. I insisted on their deletion. This caused fright. In the end, at the suggestion of Miss Monnier or the other two editors Mr Larbaud was telegraphed to. He replied bilingually to make sure there would be no mistake: Joyce a raison Joyce ha ragione. This gem now blazes brightly in my crown.

Then Mr Cape and his printers gave me trouble. They set the book with perverted commas and I insisted on their removal by the sergeant-at-arms. Then they underlined passages which they thought undesirable. But as you will see by the enclosed: They were and, behold, they are not.

The Neighbourhood Playhouse of New York sent me a contract agreeing to all my terms of last year: advance of $ 250, limit of 1 year or retainer of $500 for another, accounts weekly and stipulation as to production. I have signed and am returning it.

I shall have other news of an unusual kind to send you on Monday when I get back a letter which I sent for typing. I prefer to send it than to tell you and I had copies made at once for obvious reasons. All I will say is that it gave me great satisfaction to receive it.

I shall defer till then more homely news about this part of the ancient empire of the Celts.

I hope you are well in London with this heat. There is a Breton fair on under my windows. I was very glad to get my heels out of Paris in spite of the unsatisfactory result of the operation. It had become almost unbearable especially after the arrival of the teams a week or so ago. I am staying here as it is the best place to look around from and find out where to go. My wife and both my children are with me. They also need a very good rest. The fair is rather noisy (I hope I shall not steal a set of bagpipes from one of the Lower Breton delegates) but perhaps a fall from pandemonium to silence would have stunned me. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To W.B. YEATS, 12 July 1924

Hotel de France et Chateaubriand, Saint-Maio

MS. Yeats

Dear Yeats: Many thanks indeed for your very kind letter of 5 instant. I am sorry that I am again obliged to decline your invitation but unfortunately I have just undergone another eye operation (the third) and the result will not be known for a few months. I must then return to Paris to have my sight tested and I am not yet sure where I shall be in September and October.

Let me thank you for your intervention in my favour with the committee you mention but, more than for that, for the expression of friendly admiration with which you have honoured me. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALESSANDRO FRANCINI BRUNI (Postcard), 23 July 1924

Hotel Chateaubriand, S. Alalo

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Caro Francini: Mi trovo qui dopo un’altra operazione all’occhio del quale non si sa ancora il risultato. Spero che questa ti trova in buona salute ed anche la signora e Daniele. Mia moglie Giorgio e Lucia sono con me. Non so dove andremo da qui. Siamo sempre senza casa!

Saluti cordiali alla famiglia ed a te una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 28 July 1924

Hôtel de France et Chateaubriand, Saint-Malo

Dear Larbaud: Miss Monnier sent me a copy of the passage in your letter. Would it be possible to see this complete before publication—if it is for publication? Here is a kind of reply which I shall add to in about three or four days. Irlandais: In its widest sense this may mean

(a) Citizens or subjects of Irish Free State

(b) ” ” ” ” Northern Ireland

(c) Irishborn or Irishdescended Americans

(d) Irish in Great Britain and British Empire (excluding Ireland)

(e) Irish in foreign countries (Irishborn or Irishdescended)

(f) The dead Irish (‘all Livia’s daughtersons’)

But I suppose you mean the average badaud of class (a). I think that by now he can probably read (when sober enough) ten street names. Having read sɼaid (sraid) so often he must know that it means street. (An American visitor to Paris might conclude that M. Barrée was the Washington of France from the number of streets named after him.) But unless he has been taught the few strange letters of the Irish alphabet (a (a) d (d) g (g) ɼ (r) t (t)) he cannot read ten letters with certitude: and unless he has been taught the Irish phonetic system he cannot pronounce them, except in single cases of words popularised by political events or folklore: and unless he has learnt Irish he cannot understand even if he reads and pronounces.

The phonetic system is strange. Thus A) oidċe:

English spelling = oidliche (B)

” pronunciation = eehya

” sense = night

French pronunciation y (h) y’a

Irish is written sometimes as (A) less often as (B).

I shall answer your questions about Breton in a few days but I think Breton, though more spoken, has incorporated more Latin words (for an obvious reason) than Irish has. I think the Latin words in Irish are chiefly

(1) ecclesiastical—the oldest (sagaɼt = priest-sacerdos: leaḃaɼ = book, liber)

(2) administrative—Norman and Norman-English (post = post: seanad = senate)

As for English words of Anglo-Saxon origin they should be rare. The Irish peasant had no need to change the word uiſge (ishgö) into ‘water’. And though Breton (when costumed and visited by tourists and blessed by Rome and caliné by S. Pseudonymous and Co) is probably more picturesque, of course Irish as a language is

FAR SUPERIOR

Will this do? Thanks for your wire about Molly’s hairpins. I mean her accents. I was operated on 11 June. No improvement.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 July 1924

Hôtel de France et Chateaubriand, Saint-Malo

Dear Miss Weaver: The weather here has been very unsettled and so I remained on: but the air is good and fresh and I feel my mind less tired though walking fatigues me the day after. I hope the storm reported in the press did not rage over your part of London. It seems to have come almost at the same time as it did last year when I was in Bognor. We had the fringe of it in Dinard—a place I dislike. I had projected, strangely enough, something like your itinerary—except for Lannion—as I wanted to visit Dinan and Renan’s birthplace. I am not sure yet whether I shall do so or not. When the weather is bad I read a little in the town library. I like S. Malo. I dislike places that live on tourist traffic only. I wish I had come here earlier and I hope the weather has not broken….

I have reached nearly the end of the Wembley dinner party. The tangential relationships, the spiral progressions and the presence of the absent remind me of something which perhaps I wrote or ought to have written. I do not know on what side of London Wembley is or from which station it is reached. I am getting accustomed to the neighbourhood of Euston though I suppose that borough is quite ignorant of my existence.

You say you have seen a great many French notices of Dédalus. I have seen several but not many as yet. The translation seems to be good. There is very bad news current about Mr Quinn’s health. I hope it is not true. Some people take a delight in circulating sensational news especially when it is bad. I see that Dr Rosybrook bought a weather-beaten timetable a few days ago in London for $155,000…. It is regrettable but Dr R.’s appearance in the composite photograph of Ulysses and his equipage at the last moment is ludicrous—and monstrous when he walks off with the vessel’s bill of lading under his arm.

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To RELATIVES OF JOHN QUINN, 5 August 1924

31 Nassau Street, New York

5 August 1924 [Cablegram] St. Malo, France

Deeply shocked to hear of death of John Quinn. Please accept my sympathy in grateful remembrance of his friendship and kindness.

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 7 August 1924

Trieste Via Sanita 2, 1

MS. Buffalo

Dear Jim, I hope you will have so far recovered from your recent operation as to be able to read this without difficulty. I received Lucia’s card telling me that you were getting on well. Do your many doctors hold out any hope of having done with the job one of these days? At this distance I cannot understand the necessity for so many operations. The same paper that speaks of your eye trouble amongst the social events, says that Tuohy has done your portrait. Very quickly, it seems. I am glad you have let him. His portrait of Pappie is a wonderful study of that little old Milesian. I am especially glad that Tuohy is not that irritating kind of clever painter that sees in his sitter only a type. The likeness is striking. The face, the pose, the hands especially I recognize and looking at them I feel that I know how they have come to be so. Compared with this portrait, Augustus John’s of Hardy (which I used to like) now seems to me wooden.

I have to thank you for a list of things: the Transatlantic Review, the French translation of your novel, Gorman’s study of you and many papers.

Gorman’s study is also a very satisfactory performance. He seems to be impressed by your importance in modern literature, whereas Boyd wishes to impress people with his own importance as a critic and to deny as far as he can that you were ‘discovered’ abroad. And yet in dealing out justice he is by no means uninfluenced by the current of hostile opinion still against you in Dublin. Gorman speaks of his work as ‘not definitive’. As I like the tone of book I should be glad to supply him with information on certain points, if he intends to amplify what he has written. He does not mention ‘The Holy Office’ (your break with the mummers) or ‘Gas from a Burner’ for instance. A pupil of mine who saw the book lying on my table said ‘A very different work from Sig. Francini’s, I imagine!’—that awfully funny lecture on you, tutta da ridere. You have read it so I need not enlarge on its imbecility as criticism. If he had blurted out his meaningless vulgarities with a certain riff-raffish humour, he might have carried it off, but he is not the man to do so. He kept mumbling over them and skipping paragraphs while people were quietly getting up and walking out as if after some kind of unholy communion. He has committed that ‘bêtise’ of his before quitting Trieste but he has left me to pay for it. I had had a misgiving before he delivered it and had asked him to let me see it. He swore earnestly and volubly that there would be nothing to object to in his caricature. I don’t acquit him of a certain amount of malice in the affair and you by your silly horseplay with him and with Silvestri here after your return helped to bring it on yourself. To hell with him, anyhow. As far as I am concerned I’ll live it down; you it doesn’t hurt. He wrote to me from Florence saying that he had to deliver a lecture before I don’t know what society. At first I was not inclined to answer, then thinking it better he should speak about your work than you, I sent him registered and express an eight-page analysis of ULYSSES (much like Gorman’s) so that the audience might not go away with the idea that you belong to the [word missing] category. He never acknowledged receipt of it. A pupil of mine who was in Florence called at the Nuovo Giornale and wrote to him. No answer. After a long time he scribbled a few lines to say that there had been a large gathering of the English colony but that during the lecture these ‘straitlaced English’ (inglesi puritani) kept filing out of the hall. I am now thoroughly sick of this bloody fool.

I have received one instalment of your yet unnamed novel in the Transatlantic Review. I don’t know whether the drivelling rigmarole about half a tall hat and ladies’ modern toilet chambers (practically the only things I understand in this nightmare production) is written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s leg or not. You began this fooling in the Holles Street episode in ULYSSES and I see that Wyndham Lewis (the designer of that other piece of impudent fooling ‘the Portrait of an Englishwoman’) imitates it with heavy-hoofed capering in the columns of the ‘Daily Mail’. Or perhaps—a sadder supposition—it is the beginning of softening of the brain. The first instalment faintly suggests the Book of the Four Masters and a kind of Biddy in Blunderland and a satire on the supposed matriarchal system. It has certain characteristics of a beginning of something, is nebulous, chaotic but contains certain elements. That is absolutely all I can make of it. But! It is unspeakably wearisome. Gorman’s book on you practically proclaims your work as the last word in modern literature. It may be the last in another sense, the witless wandering of literature before its final extinction. Not that I imagine that literature will ever die as long as men speak and write. But they may cease to read or at least to read such things. I for one would not read more than a paragraph of it, if I did not know you.

What I say does not matter. I have no doubt that you have your plan, probably a big one again as in ‘Ulysses’. No doubt, too, many more competent people around you speak to you in quite a different tone. My only excuse for saying what I think is that it is what I think, and it is so little pleasure to me to say that this is perhaps the chief reason why I cannot bring myself to write to you. Why are you still intelligible and sincere in verse? If literature is to develop along the lines of your latest work it will certainly become, as Shakespeare hinted centuries ago, much ado about nothing. Ford in an article you sent me suggests that the whole thing is to be taken as a nonsense rhythm and that the reader should abandon himself to the sway of it. I am sure, though the article seems to have your approval, that he is talking through his half a tall hat. In any case I refuse to allow myself to be whirled round in the mad dance by a literary dervish.

I wrote to you in much the same strain when you sent me ‘Ulysses’, and yet a good part, the greater part of it I like. I have no humour for the episodes which are deliberately farcical: the Sirens, the Oxen of the Sun; and as the episodes grow longer and longer and you try to tell every damn thing you know about anybody that appears or anything that crops up my patience oozes out. The talent however is so obvious that I almost take it for granted. Dublin lies stretched out before the reader, the minute living incidents start out of the pages. Anybody who reads can hear the people talk and feel himself among them. At every turn of this, the longest day on record, there are things to give him pause. There is many a laugh but hardly one happy impression. Everything is undeniably as it is represented, yet the ‘cumulative effect’ as Grant Richards would say, makes him doubt truth to be a liar. You try to shift the burden of your melancholy to the reader’s shoulders without being yourself relieved. To me you seem to have escaped from the toils of the priest and the king only to fall under the oppression of a monstrous vision of life itself. Where so much has been recorded, I object to what has been omitted. There is no serenity or happiness anywhere in the whole book. I suppose you will tell me ironically that this is my chance and my work; to set to and write up all the eucharistic moments of Dublin life. It is not my business. Yet in these same surroundings that you describe I have not rarely been penetrated by a keen sense of happiness. I cannot exploit these moments either in prose or verse, but the fact remains that they have been.

In the Tyrone Street episode, for instance, the relation or at least the analogy between the imagination in the intellect and the sexual instinct in the body (my fixed idea, by the bye, old chap, explained to you first in Dublin apropos of Yeats’ phrase ‘world troubling seaman’, which I corrected to ‘world-troubling semen’, and later in Trieste to you and Francini when I pointed out the resemblance between the ‘Bacchanals’ of Euripides and Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’) is worked out with a fantastic horror of which I know no equal in literature painting or music, but not more fantastically horrible than some of the manifestations of the instinct with which it deals. It is undoubtedly Catholic in temperament. This brooding on the lower order of natural facts, this re-evocation and exaggeration of detail by detail and the spiritual dejection which accompanies them are purely in the spirit of the confessional. Your temperament, like Catholic morality, is predominantly sexual. Baptism has left in you a strong inclination to believe evil. For of all the manifestations of Circe, the most benign, that which has inspired poets of all kinds for thousands of years (including the poet of ‘Chamber Music’) is represented by a couple of lines by Yeats, murmured by a student in drunken slumber. This is bias. The close however, with dream figure of Bloom’s young son and the suggestion that children are the real lambs who take away just these sins of the world is so unexpected and so unexpectedly tender, that one reader at least could not read it unmoved.

The clerk said that it would be necessary for you to prove your British citizenship with your birth certificate and passport first and then Georgie would have the right to apply either for British or Italian Citizenship. This has been confirmed by the Consul here. It seems even those who have resided in Italy for more than ten years may have to apply even for the Citizenship they already possess. If they try to force Italian citizenship on me, they will find that I have [word missing] it pretty smartly. In the end the clerk who got nice when I got nasty, suggested a declaration in a form which I enclose. I enclose also a card from a German gentleman who thinks you are giving ‘Ulysses’ away with a pound of tea.

Regarding my visit to Paris, it would be very difficult for me to go in Spring. I had intended to go this September but if you are away, of course I won’t. Besides Schaurek has again borrowed over three thousand lire from me for his trip to Bohemia and then to Venice. I expect to be repaid this month. Much will depend on that. How are you enjoying yourself in Saint Maio? The famous Carnac must be somewhere near there, I suppose? You could take a leaf out of Renan’s book and meditate on old ancient Celtic civilization there and in Ireland before Logue’s predecessors came over in their come-to-bed half a tall hats to swap the kingdom of Heaven for the Kingdom of Ireland. Where (except in operetta) could you find a more burlesque title than [words missing]? Is he anything to the Mayor of Cork who committed suicide on the King’s Threshold?

Another point regarding your cinematographic psychological analysis. It is often obscure and it should not be so. Thought may be inconsequent, desultory, heterogeneous—anything you like—but never obscure to the thinker. How could it be so? Yet in ‘Ulysses’, Bloom’s wool-gatherings as often as not leave the reader guessing. This is a mistake, in my opinion and vitiates the whole book. I have the right, I think, to make this observation as, of the two, I first attempted to write out the rambling thoughts—and of a person lying awake in bed, too—until he fell asleep. This in my diary, under the date of Monday, the 18th July 1904, I still have. You chucked it aside with a contemptuous phrase: ‘the youthful Maupassant’. At that time you were writing, to my entire satisfaction, about ‘the faith that in the Middle Ages sent the spires singing up to Heaven’. You were wrong. No writer so artificial as Maupassant suggested it to me. It was the description of the death of a Russian lieutenant in Tolstoy’s story ‘Sebastopol’ that gave me the idea. I have forgotten the lieutenant’s name because I have not seen the book since then. You need not grudge me these small claims. After all, the hint, to which I myself attached no importance at the time, is nothing. The work is all.

You see I write rarely but with a vengeance. Remember me to Nora, Lucia, and Georgie.

Stannie

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 August 1924

Hôtel de France et Chateaubriand, Saint-Malo

Dear Miss Weaver: I did not wish to be the sender of bad news but a few days after my last letter to you the Paris papers announced the death of John Quinn. I sent a cablegram to his relatives (he once mentioned an uncle—a priest, I think). I did not see any notice of him except a short paragraph in the Irish Statesman. Mr Ford wrote to me that he had been incapable of attending to any business for several months and that this explains his attitude towards the Transatlantic Review which he was supposed to have founded and towards the Ulysses MS. I thought the dispersal of his huge library very strange. The catalogues were made out with immense carefulness and impartiality (many of the books uncut). It seemed to me a lamentable affair in every way and, so far as I am concerned, it did me a fair amount of harm with a public which values people by sales. If his judgment had grown weak I hope it was due to business worries rather than to suffering. He was a man who would have hidden both. Nobody understands why he wanted to sell the MS of Ulysses especially since he had made a sensational sale of another writer’s MSS—Joseph Conrad who has just died also. He had it complete for less than two years. I offered to read to him parts of the book I am writing as I did not want him to think that my unenthusiastic silence about the (then) proposed sale meant a want of appreciation for many things he had done for the book. He said he had no time but that he hoped to come over this summer. I could not understand what his attitude was. He talked to me about some wonderful works he had visited in Germany. I forget what they were for as I scarcely heeded his words—taking nitrate out of the air or something of the sort. Then he stopped the car and went into the French Foreign Office. I was greatly shocked to hear of his death as he had many good qualities.

For the last ten days I have been proofreading—the revise of A Portrait of the Artist for Mr Cape. Thank goodness it went off today! Now I receive word that the Italian military authorities have called George Joyce to arms. Born in Austria, now Italy, of British subjects, now Irish Free State citizens or not, and resident in France he has a choice of armies. I have been to the vice-consul here … but as my experience of Italian government ways is not encouraging I prefer to have this important matter settled at the consulate in Paris.

Can you call at the Freeman’s Journal or Irish Times office in London and get a copy of their paper for Monday 11 August? You will find in it (if they did not suppress it) a rather startling reference to me made by Mr Yeats in crowning with bay the spiritual victors of the Irish Olympic games. I presume as the conferring took place at the Royal Irish Academy that the members of the committee who negatived his proposal were present in full force. (In this connection you may refer to the closing paragraph of the Shem the Penman piece beginning Pariah … and ending … Anna Livia.)

I am sorry my cyclopeyed face has that worried look. Really I have got some rest and a good deal of sea air. But it is true that I have been thinking and thinking how and how and how can I and can it—all about the fusion of two parts of the book—while my one bedazzled eye searched the sea like Cain—Shem—Tristan—Patrick from his lighthouse in Boulogne. I hope the solution will presently appear. At least I have never found anything in any other way than sitting with my mouth open picturesquely.

We leave for Quimper—Hôtel de l’Epée—on Monday. After a short stay there I have to go to Paris to see Dr Borsch, my Trieste brother (who may also bring some brown turf), possibly my Dublin brother who has lately remarried and has some relatives-in-law in this country and also to see the H.B.M. and R.I. consuls-general.

It is a miserable day. I wish Mr Pluvius had kept this day till my arrival in London. I have goloshes, a tarpaulin raincoat, a hood, an umbrella and a pair of yellow spectacles—so won’t the Londoners, standing beside the park wall out of the shower’s way, be delighted to see me groping by!

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To SYLVIA BEACH, 17 August 1924

Hotel de France et Chateaubriand, Grand Café Continental, Saint Maio

MS. Buffalo

Dear Miss Beach: Here are two enclosures. The card may be answered by a copy of press notices and a prospectus. As for the draft from New York (for which I already signed a receipt) I know nothing of it. I gave your address. We leave here tomorrow morning for Quimper, Hotel de l’Epée. I should be glad if you could send me 1000 francs there as I shall arrive there with only a few hundred. If the New York draft arrives could you forge my name payable to yourself and remit me the rest? Or if not send it to me and I will return it. Am I right in thinking that I am now 2000 francs in your debt? From Quimper I shall write to London for more money, I have £200 there loose in cash, luckily, as I shall need it to continue our journey. I expect to be able to return to Paris at the end of next week but only for a week as I have to go to London.

Up to today Camille Jullian’s book has not come. I sent you two loads of books last night. Did you receive the Irish Times? What is wrong about Commerce? Has that dog, who is so fond of raw posteriors, eaten the first batch? Limbes is a good word but the French equivalent is not ventre but entrailles—at least that is what the priest here said while reciting a Hail Mary before a shrine in the Assumption procession.

I suppose you have Mr Murry’s new book, reviewed in Criterion? It seems to be a parody of the interior monologue of Ulysses. Is it good? The extract I read is rather feeble I think

My brother from Trieste will shortly be coming to Paris. He writes that the interior monologue was used by Tolstoy in Sebastopol, by one of the characters in that story, a soldier. I have no doubt it was. And also by holy Job when seated on the acropolis of Israel.

Did I tell you that in giving his award at Dublin Sir John Lavery passed over the portrait of my father (second prize) and gave the first prize to a painting by Mr Keating. The press says the award was ‘keenly criticised’

I should like to have that book of Jullian’s as soon as possible. With kindest regards and thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 September 1924

Euston Hotel, London

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope you had a smooth passage across in spite of Patrick and are now safe and sound in the seclusion of Paris. I send you a copy of the Fortnightly. As you will see he has not bought a copy—or rather pretends he has not. His remarks are seriously meant. He ought to be informed that there is now a special cheap edition 565,423 words = 8 x 70,877 = 8 novel lengths, slightly shopsoiled, a genuine bargain going for 60 francs = 60/86 = 30/43 = about 3/4 x 20/- = 15/ ÷8 about 1/11 per normal novel suitlength real continental style—you can’t beat it for the money. A few days ago he told a reporter he had made £10,000 out of Saint Joan or was it out of old Saint Mumpledum?

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 October 1924

Victoria Palace Hotel, 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: We returned here a couple of days ago. Another mountain came to Muhammad—my brother from Dublin whom I had not seen for twelve years. He went away last night. Strange to say like Shaun his work is postal night duty. I had an interesting conversation with Mr Morel in Carnac and Vannes. I suppose you received Commerce. I arrived here to find a first class battle in progress between one of the editors Mr Fargue and princess Somebody on the one hand and Miss Beach and Miss Monnier on the other. Thank goodness I am out of it. Mr Larbaud is here but I have not seen him yet. I know his first words will be: have you something to read to me? No. O!

My sister-in-law is a devotee of S. Patrick and keeps his statue on her mantelpiece. She gave me a pocket breast-plate in the new Irish colours with part of his famous prayer on it cut in the form of a shield. At the top is a cross and at the end are the words: all rights reserved. This must be the first case of copyright in the history of humanity.

I hope that in a day or two I shall have fixed up something about a flat so that we can leave for London. During these last two days the sight of my eye has been wretched. I see less than before. It is very irritating. I cannot understand why part of this deposit cannot be removed when they can remove everything else in the eye. I shall try to see the doctor tomorrow or Tuesday.

The fourth edition of Ulysses is sold out. The fifth will appear at the end of the month. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY (Telegram), 1 November 1924

Paris

MS. National Library

Deeply grieved to hear of your illness but we all hope you will come through it safely all our wishes for speedy recovery and my kindest remembrances

Jim

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To MRS WILLIAM MURRAY, 2 November 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Aunt Josephine: On receipt of a letter from Charlie last night I wired to you to tell you how shocked we all were to hear such sudden bad news of your health. I hope he has misled himself about you. I had even hoped to meet you in London a couple of weeks ago. I wrote to Alice and rang her up several times before we left but she was still in Dublin. They did not tell me at the hospital (S. George’s) that your grave illness was the cause of her absence. I thought she was simply on holidays. I do not remember your ever having been ill and I sincerely hope your strength will carry you through this severe strain—whatever your illness is, Charlie did not say. I go to England more frequently now and I was looking forward so much to meeting you either there or in Dublin in the near future. Only yesterday morning I was going to write to you—as usual about some point in my childhood as you are one of the two persons in Ireland who could give me information about it. Charlie sent me an extremely kind message from you. I am very deeply touched that you should have considered me worthy of remembrance at such a grave hour. You attached me to you in youth by so many acts of kindness, by so much help and advice and sympathy, especially after my mother’s death, that it seems to me as if your thought of me now is one of reproach. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to talk with you over many things. I cannot employ the usual language or invoke assistance but if I am estranged in that I am still attached to you by many bonds of gratitude and affection and of respect as well. I hope these hurried words may be acceptable to you. I shall feel glad and honoured always if they are.

Nora, Giorgio and Lucia send their best wishes for your recovery. I hope you will see them as I know you would like to.

I am going to wire to Charlie to let me know how you are.

Charlie’s letter is so grave that he suggests that I should write to you a word which I cannot bring myself to write. Forgive me if my reluctance to do so is wrong. But I send you this poor word of thanks and I will still hope in spite of the bad news.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 4 November 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Are you going out yet? If so, and if Mrs Nebbia is with you can you both dine with us on Saturday next at 8 p.m. here? We hope so. Don’t make a mistake about the number. It is the same street but number eight and we are on the fifth floor left. There is a lift. Will you let me know in any case. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From VALERY LARBAUD, 6 November 1924

71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Ve

MS. British Museum

Dear Joyce, Many thanks for your kind letter. I am much better, and we accept with great pleasure your invitation for Saturday night at 8 o’c. I hope I shall have the great treat of hearing some new chapters of your book.

An embarrassing question arises from the fact that I am no longer on speaking terms with Miss Beach (a complicated imbroglio of frustrated interests): What about Morel’s translation? And the part I was to play in that affair? But we shall discuss that question and reach a conclusion.

Maria sends her regards to you and Mrs Joyce. Yours faithfully

V. Larbaud

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 9 November 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I sent a card to Morel. Will you please let me see the reply you are printing in the N.R.F. as soon as possible. I forgot to say last night that the Deutsche Verlag (Stuttgart) wants to do a translation of Ulysses under direction of Curtius.

I hope Mrs Nebbia and yourself found a car easily.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 November 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: It was very good of you to send all those notices in the midst of your rush. How politely Brother Jonathan tries to place the blame for his blunder on your shoulders and what a nice sweet neat amiable little letter Mr Bennett sent. I wish the novel had been published without these critical remarks on its jacket. The other cuttings are of a piece.

I am sorry Mr Lewis was in a bad mood. Did you mention the portrait to him? I wonder why Mr Eliot had to fly over here to see what Shaun calls the proprietoress. Mr Larbaud tells me he is invited to a dinner there for that occasion consisting of steak and a pound and a half of bacon with some chops followed by beefsteak with a splendid onion and fried bacon and grilled steak.

I enclose a letter which explains everything. As I expected the temperature is on the rise. I am now deep in the confidence of both camps. Larbaud has now definitely broken with Fargue who is closely connected with Ippolita (M—d—e la Pr—nc—ss d— B—st—n—. I give her this name because that is the name of a lady who throws somebody or herself under an Italian goods train set in motion by signor Gabriel of the Annunciation who is sentimentally championed by Larbaud who has been denounced by Miss Monnier who is helped by Miss Beach. Larbaud has been warned not to walk, run or creep through the rue de l’Odéon. Ippolita told several people that A.M. was a bookseller and A.M. told me about Ippolita and several people and V.L. told me about A.M. and Fargue and Ippolita and then we had some steak followed by fried bacon with rashers and two pounds of Ippolita which was quite tender after the goods engine followed by a splendid muddle.

My wife went to see Dr Borsch. The result: tomorrow he is not free, Tuesday is a holiday. I shall see him on Wednesday. He says he will have to make a larger operation—similar to that in Zurich—that I am highly nervous and in consequence of repeated attacks there is a great deal of secretion. He said I will get back my sight! It is very weak today so I shall not write much more.

I think that at last I have solved one—the first—of the problems presented by my book. In other words one of the partitions between two of the tunneling parties seems to have given way.

I shall be glad to have Penguin Island.

With many thanks and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 November 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for Penguin Island. I shall read it again in English. I hope you liked it.

I did not succeed in seeing Dr Borsch till last night. The very latest is that he is to do the operation on me on 27 instant—for cataract. I confess this novelty made me feel somewhat ill. He says I will regain my sight after it. Have I cataract as well? Or was he waiting for it to mature? I know nothing about this or what the results of such an operation are and I am too tired to ask any more questions. Ainsi soit-il.

In the meantime I am preparing for it by trying to learn a page of the Sirens for the record and by pulling down more earthwork. The gangs are now hammering on all sides. It is a bewildering business. I want to do as much as I can before the execution. Complications to right of me, complications to left of me, complex on the page before me, perplex in the pen beside me, duplex in the meandering eyes of me, stuplex on the face that reads me. And from time to time I lie back and listen to my hair growing white….

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 20 November 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Thanks for the typescript. It almost finishes the question but there are just two points I would like to discuss. Can Mrs Nebbia and yourself come here and have tea on Friday 29 at 4.30. We could discuss it then. Morel has done, it seems, 100 pages of Ulysse. I shall look up this matter of the German rights before you come. I am not free till the 28 as on the 27 I have to read part of the Sirens for a gramophone record.

There is bad news too. I have cataract. The doctor did not tell me till a few days ago. I am to be operated on the 31. Et j’en ai marre!

Kind regards from us to Mrs Nebbia and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 21 November 1924

8, Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear McAlmon: Glad to hear from you. By what date (latest) do you want my copy and on what date (earliest) will the book be out because I promised to give him a piece for the August number of his review and what I give you will depend on your date, that is, as being a piece earlier or later than his. I hope you will get something from him, Lewis and Pound—in spite of the faux pas. But do you think Miss Weaver ought to contribute to a publication dedicated to herself?

There is unpleasant news for me. I have cataract and am to be operated next Saturday. This came on me as a surprise. Borsch did not tell me and I could not understand how my sight went on failing. He says I will get my sight back. These continued operations are dreadful.

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To ETTORE SCHMITZ and FAMILY (Postcard), 22 December 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Fonda Savio

Buon Natale ed ogni bene auguro a Lei ed a tutta la famiglia dal quartetto triestino

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 December 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have leave to read a little but not to write. This is not to tell you a long tale about my eyes but to wish you a happy Christmas. I send you a little book. I hoped it would be Gens de Dublin but it is not out yet.

In a few words. The cataract was removed—difficult in an eye which has withstood attacks for eighteen years. I saw splendid sights for a minute or so. Dr Borsch says the sight cannot come back quickly but it will come. ‘The readiness is all.’ There is to be an electric cure when the broken window of my soul can stand more shocks. He is positive as to the result.

I am still bandaged up—had prolonged cinema nights and am extrêmement fatigué.

When I am better and can see, yes, I should like to go to the south for a little.

I will send you all the news in my next letter.

Many good wishes from all here. I hope you will enjoy your Christmas in the country and send you my kindest regards. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 30 December 1924

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope this reaches you in time to wish you a happy New Year. We got over Christmas well enough in spite of my occluded eye. Since Saturday there is (I am almost afraid to say it) a small, but definite return of some kind of vision in my eye. Dr Borsch says it has been a great battle but apparently he thinks it is over. I can make out objects dimly even without a lens. Of course I must have one to replace that extracted and another to correct my sight. Well, I hope.

There is some mixed news. The princess sent me a cheque [for] 825 francs when I was in the clinique for the piece in Commerce. I endorsed it to Mr Morel who wants it. There was a meeting of editors. V.L. offered his hand to L.P.F. In presence of all John Henry Fargue turned his back and walked away over the asphodel fields. The princess wept on L.P.F.’s new overcoat who then wrote to V.L. three times, comme ça: Odysseus, you have treated me badly. V.L. replied: My dear Achilles etc etc. So now they meet.

The Anglo-American review seems important. There is a strong attack on me in Les Marges but temperate towards me personally. A book of parodies from Dublin of AE, WBY etc even inserts a note before the parody of me, apologising for ‘this poor attempt’ etc.

I am sorry to see that Mr William Archer is dead. He was very kind to me at one time. I am afraid he forgot it and me.

I suppose you are having the usual deluge. The weather is against me.

For some reason or other I am dreadfully tired. Fatigue, fatigue, fatigue. I suppose it will pass soon. Perhaps it is Ulysses or 2 years and 8 months of eye worry or four operations so soon after one another or 600 drops of iodine and as many more of scopolamine in about a month.

I hope the new year brings us all health and a glimpse of the sun.

With kindest regards and renewed good wishes from myself and all this household sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1925

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 January 1925

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for that passage about the rivers. The coincidence you mention about the Dane is strange but I am well used to these things. Here is another. I mentioned to you a Dublin nabob who fed his guests when Lord Mayor off golden plates, sir Benjamin Lee Guinness of the brewery, Dublin’s Noah. He restored S. Patrick’s cathedral too. He had two sons, lord Ardilaun afterwards and lord Iveagh. My father unseated the former for Dublin city. No conservative was ever returned after. The elder brother … was morose and charitable. The younger brother Cecil … married another Guinness as his father did before him. I suppose you see the map as I do. I cannot find anything at present about Noah’s wife (the medieval figure of the mystery plays is one of the models for Anna Livia) Elizabeth, afterwards Lady Guinness, but thinking of the subject I wondered what the Irish word for Guinness’s vineyard’s beverage would be. It is lin dub or dub lin.

I report two dialogues

Dr Borsch. How are you?

J.J. Slightly inclined to pessimism.

Dr Borsch. You don’t think etc.

J.J. Well … Dr B. What will you bet?

J.J. Fixing a date.

Dr B. A month. How much will you bet?

J.J. O well….

(later)

J.J. You removed the front wall of the capsule and the lens.?

Dr B. Yes

J.J. Can a cataract form on the back wall?

Dr B. Sure.

J.J. Is it likely in my case?

Dr B. No. If it did I’d win my bet quicker.

J.J. (prolonged smile)

He beats me easily every time. He ought to have written Ulysses.

I am in a great hurry to post this tonight and have been writing, writing all day for the past week.

The weather here is terrible. I hope you have better. I will soon send you the rest of Shaun—if the post accepts his bulk.

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To LILY BOLLACH, 18 January 1925

[Paris]

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: I intended to have written to you before now but to my surprise on my return to Paris I had to undergo another operation on 29 November, this time for cataract! If you are not too busy I should be much obliged if you could type some more of my incomprehensible MS. If convenient to you we can meet at the corner of Avenue Gabriel tomorrow (Monday) at 6.30 or so. If not will you please leave word for me what hour and place will suit you. With kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 January 1925

8, Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Tomorrow I shall send you MS and typescript of the first two watches of Mr Shaun (what I read, slightly revised) and the day after MS and typescript of the rest. There is an interruption near the middle (indicated in the MS). I shall be anxious to hear what you think of it. I don’t know how I managed to do so much with the operation and convalescence and holiday. I hope you will write to me about it. Miss Beach will send you a book of spirit talks with Oscar Wilde which will explain one page of it. He does not like Ulysses. Mrs Travers Smith, the ‘dear lady’ of the book, is a daughter of the late professor Dowden of Trinity College, Dublin.

Here is another Borsch dialogue of yesterday.

Dr B.: How is our eye?

J. J.: Semper idem.

Dr B. (business): Not to me. I have still a fortnight.

J.J.: Ten days, doctor. You still think you’ll win.

Dr B.: Sure I’ll win.

J.J.: (baffled, beaten, vanquished, overcome, pulverised) smiles broadly

Dr B.: You’ll see all right.

J.J.: It is an obstinate eye, doctor, no?

Dr B.: No fellow is any good if he’s not obstinate.

J.J. (checkmated, silenced, overpowered) smiles broadly: And when do you think you can prescribe for the lenses?

Dr B.: Three weeks or a month after.

I don’t know what he means. But he ought to be ambassador for the two Americas. I asked him then if the woman from Bordeaux who was operated about the same time would get her sight. She is a bad case, he said, but there is a little hope for her.

I ought to tell you a few things. The Irish alphabet (ailm, beith, coll, dair etc) is all made up of names of trees. naṫ (orah) is H. oyin O. Bruno Nolano (of Nola) another great southern Italian was quoted in my first pamphlet The Day of the Rabblement. His philosophy is a kind of dualism—every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion etc etc. Tristan on his first visit to Ireland turned his name inside out. The Norwegian-Danish language has neither masculine nor feminine: the two genders are common and neuter. The article follows the noun Manden, hence Landen. Man siger at jeg er blever Konservativ (they say I am still a Tory) is the first line of a poem by Ibsen. The words expressing nightmares are from Greek, German, Irish, Japanese, Italian (my niece’s childish pronunciation) and Assyrian (the stargroup called the ‘gruesome hound’). I speak the latter language very fluently and have several nice volumes of it in the kitchen printed on jampots. Most coastal towns in Ireland (E) are Danish. The poor old fellows were often wreckers. In ancient Dublin there was a ceremony similar to that of the Doge wedding the Adriatic sea.

I hope this may help you. You would probably find it out if the piece were in print. It is hard to believe in typescript.

I hope you are having good weather up there after the rains and the eclipse. Will you please present my regards to Miss Marsden? I hope I may soon see her book as I heard she was having some research work done here in Paris.

Exiles will be given—they say—about the 15 February. The electric light here is going out, I am afraid. I will end this letter. The light goes down, down and then up, up. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 2 February 1925

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris VII

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I enclose typescript which you may like to see. When you have read it I would be glad to have it back and hear what you think of it.

I was to have gone to the clinic today. It seems I have to undergo some kind of a supplementary operation still (big or small, I don’t know). Is it not a frightful bore?

I hope you are well. If all goes well I hope Mrs Nebbia and yourself will come to dinner here soon before they throw us out next month—but you not like [sic] a meal presided over by a cyclops?

Thanks for the N.R.F. It removes all the breadcrumbs very neatly, I think. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Dictated), 23 February 1925

Clinique des yeux, 39 rue du Cherche Midi

MS. British Museum

Cher Mademoiselle Weaver je me trouve ici depuis 8 jours le trouble dans mon œuil persiste mais l’on m’assure que ce n’est pas l’Iris et quii n’y aura pas de consequence je n’en sais rien la douleur est parfois intolerable et principalement Vendredi la nuit. Le docteur m’a assurer maintenant que le crise est passée, je lespère bien.

On a donne la 1er de ma piece a New-York jai recu un télegrame d’un ami qui me disait quel a ete bien acceuillie je conte que se sera un succès destarne. Il fait un temps atrosse ce qui retarde baucoup ma guerison. J’ai toujours le cinéma pour m’amuser il ne sesse jamais.

Je vous diets ma lettre par Raymond le fils de mon infirmiere il a dix ans il est bien gentil de mecrire cette lettre je lui donnerait un petit cadeau quand il la portera a la poste. Bien Cordialement a vous

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Dictated to Lucia Joyce), 26 February 1925

8 av. Charles Floquet, VIIe

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver I came back here yesterday fairly well to have a rest before the operation and to try to revise the piece for Mr Eliot. The operation was to be Monday but a violent rainstorm came on during the night which has set me back a little and this morning they think it must be put off for a couple of days. With this attack in the good eye I am practically helpless but I managed to do some revision even in the dark as I want to send off the piece before I go back.

The conjunctivitis turned into what is called episcleritis. This, Dr Borsch says, can be terribly painful but unlike iritis is not dangerous in itself and leaves no traces. I was sent to the clinic. Six leaches were applied but nevertheless the pain especially during the nights was bad. On Friday night I really thought I was as near unreason as my worst critics think me but they gave me some morphine which gave me relief. This crisis is now past but I wish the whole thing was over. I don’t think Exiles was a great success. There is neither a motor car nor a telephone in it. I will try to send you the MS by Mr McAlmon if I see him. I should be glad to hear Mr Muir’s article read to me before I send off the piece which is an indirect reply to criticisms.

I will end this now as my eye is a little troublesome. I shall see Dr Borsch tonight and hope fervently I will soon have definite good news to send. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Written with black pencil in large letters), 7 March 1925

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver This is the most I can do so please forgive the style of paper and pen. My lease of this flat was up on the 15 instant but as there seemed no prospect of getting away I asked to have it renewed for two months. An X ray examination is to be made first to see whether any of the old abscesses have reformed and if so it is to be removed before the other operation (capsulotomy) is done. He is positive that I will have good sight. I cannot see a word of print yet. It is very boring. Mr Eliot wrote to say that April no had gone to press. Mr Auguste Morel helps me and with him, some red ink and a magnifying glass I shall have the piece ready before the tooth and eye act starts.

I enclose programme of Exiles and a few notices. Mr Boyd has a reply to Mr Larbaud in the N.R.F. Miss Beach would like to have the programme afterwards. The weather keeps bad here, it is against me. The only touch of the south is a young cat, biscuit-coloured, I have from Marseille. He is deeply bored by the Paris murk but eats a lot of bread and butter and the Daily Mail. Not knowing what to do I make vocalizzi at the piano and octogenarian’s exercises with an elastic stretcher I found in my son’s room.

I wanted to send you a new book by Mr Pound, a large paper edition of the kind you do not like much but will wait till I can write better.

I wish I could do more but it is useless to think until these new troubles are over, but I will send you the Criterion piece (new version) as soon as I can.

I hope the snow and gales do not roam around you as they do through the Eiffel tower here. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To ERNEST WALSH (Dictated letter), 13 March 1925

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris, France

TS. Yale

Dear Mr Walsh, I am glad to hear that you are now in better health and hope the climate down there will do you good. Evidently you did not get a letter which my daughter, Lucia, sent you while I was in hospital to the Grand Hotel, Bayonne. In that letter she explained to you that I was in the hospital and that I could not publish anything in any review until a piece which I am sending to the Criterion, London, had first appeared, as I had promised Mr T.S. Eliot to give him the preference. When it appears (July next) I shall send you something and if you wish you may use my name as that of a future contributor.

I am enclosing a typescript which a friend of mine sent to me in the hope that you may like it or at least get into communication with him. He was at one time art critic for the New York Herald here and he delivered a series of lectures in Dublin on modern French painters and also a lecture on Ulysses at Oxford. He is an Irishman and I think he may be of some use to you. I am answering the other part of your letter on a separate sheet as you may wish to print it.

Many thanks for the kind expression contained in your letter. Please give our regards to Miss Moorhead and accept the same for yourself. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Unfortunately I have to return to the clinic in a week in order to undergo another but less serious operation, after which I hope I shall be able to work with more ease. At present I am unable to read or write.

 ® 

To ERNEST WALSH, 13 March 1925

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris, France

Dear Mr. Walsh: I am glad to hear that the first number of your review will shortly appear. It was a very good thought of yours dedicating this number to Mr. Ezra Pound and I am very happy indeed that you allow me to add my acknowledgement of thanks to him to the others you are publishing. I owe a great deal to his friendly help, encouragement and generous interest in everything that I have written, as you know there are many others who are under a similar debt of gratitude to him. He helped me in every possible way in the face of very great difficulties for seven years before I met him, and since then he has always been ready to give me advice and appreciation which I esteem very highly as coming from a mind of such brilliance and discernment.

I hope that your review, setting out under so good a name will have the success which it deserves Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, (Dictated to Lucia Joyce), 25 March 1925

8 Av. Charles Floquet (7e)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver Thanks for remembering me and in connection with St Patrick. I was able just to finish the revision of the piece for Mr Eliot but fear it would have to be copied out again as I doubt whether any typist would make it out. There was little or no improvement in the sight of the right eye until the last few days when fresh trouble broke out in it and the dental operation fixed for yesterday had to be put off again. The X-ray photograph showed what is called a sequester and this has to be removed but I do not know when nor does anybody else.

I have now been put on a starvation diet by way of adding to my present pleasures. The weather here renders my cure almost impossible once an attack has set in. I am also advised to walk eight or ten kilometers a day. If I can do this with one eye sightless and the other inflamed in today’s thick damp fog through the traffic of Paris on an unfed stomach I shall apply for the legion of honor. I should like to hear Vico read to me again in the hope that some day I may be able to write again. I put an advertisement in the Mail for a reader but got not even one reply though I have often seen advertisements from Italians in it. I sent the disc to London by Mr McAlmon. If you have a gramophone you ought to get some discs of John MacCormack. I have some which are very good. I suppose you will soon be back in London.

Give my best greetings to Miss Marsden. With kindest regards sincerely yours

Lucia Joyce, James Joyce

 ® 

To LILY BOLLACH (Written with black pencil in large letters), 1 April 1925

[Paris]

MS. Texas

Dear Miss Bollach Will you please excuse my silence and impoliteness. I have been very ill three times, with my eyes. Have still to undergo another operation. I want to give you some MS next week if I am better· but I am not well enough yet—the MS I told you of.

I enclose 100 frs as part of my debt with very many apologies. Please let me know if you are still free for next week, I hope.

Please write with a heavy black pencil. I cannot distinguish one word of print or pen but can pencil with a magnifying glass

Apologising for this dreadful letter Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To ROBERT MCALMON, 4 April 1925

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris

Dear McAlmon: I have had a relapse since I saw you but am now better so if you have received the proofs of the book, I should like very much to revise my contribution now that I am between two operations. On Tuesday or Wednesday of next week I shall probably return to the Clinic and one never knows what the result may be. So please mail me those few pages if you have them and I will go through the ordeal with an easier mind.

A rather silly idea came to me about your book which I send on for what it is worth. Is there to be any preface or introduction? It seems to me there is a certain resemblance between the group of writers who collected around Pound, I mean W.L., T.S.E., H.D. etc., and the writers of the Yellow Book Row of half a century ago who collected around Arthur Symons; if he is still writing do you think it will be amusing to have a few pages of preface by him?

 ® 

To ROBERT MCALMON, 8 April 1925

8 Avenue Charles Floquet, Paris

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon May I ask you to buy and send me by a trusty messenger these 2 discs and also to order for me the 2 pieces of music. They are for Giorgio. I add the name of publisher. This is my best writing—already a progress. One operation today at 5.30 and the last (I hope) on Tuesday next. Enclosed is 150 francs. I would like to have these as soon as you can. Perhaps you could ’phone the people if place out of your way.

What about the proofs and my silly idea?

Best Easter greetings from us all. Sincerely yours and with thanks

James Joyce

Gustav Holst

‘At the Boar’s Head’ (Opera in 1 act: just published piano and voice score)

Liza Lehmann

‘In a Persian Garden (Verses of Omar Khayam voice and piano)

Frederick Delius

The Mass of Life (price only)

from Walsh, Homes & Co

148 Charing + Rd.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Written with black pencil in large letters), 11 April 1925

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: These lines to wish you a happy Easter. The dentist’s operation is over—so let us say no more about it. Dr Borsch’s operation was fixed for Tuesday. Now it seems he is going away for some days but it is not sure. I shall know at 3.30. In any case I hope he will do it by Thursday.

The piece for the Criterion nearly drove me crazy. It came back from the typist (to whom I was too blind to explain its labyrinths) in a dreadful muddle. Yesterday with 3 magnifying glasses and the help of my son we chopped it up and today Mr Morel will come and sew it up on his sewing machine. I want to send it off before I go into the clinic. I shall send you a copy, I hope, by Monday. If impatience is a sign of imminent health I am very sound. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 April 1925

[In large thick black-pencilled handwriting]

Dear Miss Weaver: I am home again but I cannot report anything yet. There is a slight, very slight return of vision in the operated eye. I believe I have to wait for some weeks yet. The other eye is not yet cured and I cannot read print at all without ‘the loan of a lens to see as much as I once saw’. I am heartily tired of iodine, aspirine and scopolamine. In your letter you mention something called warm sunlight. What is it like? There are allusions to it in the works of the great writers.

Will you please send Leader on to Miss Beach when read. Dr Sigerson’s statement about the Norse in Ireland before S. Patrick justifies my precipitate jumbling of the fifth and tenth centuries in the last phase of Shaun (‘Norske He raven flag etc’).

I go to the clinic every morning and rue de la Paix every evening. Do you know the poem Little Jim ‘The cottage was a thatched one.’ I rhyme it

The clinic was a patched one

Its outside old as rust

And every stick beneath that roof

Lay four foot thick in dust.

I do not think the delay is Dr Borsch’s fault. It is either mine or of that group of circumstances called Paris.

I hope this will reach you before you leave the country. I have some proofs to correct for Mr McAlmon and I had better do it before the other eye gets disabled. My lease here has now 19 days to run!

 ® 

To ROBERT MCALMON, [?25 April 1925]

[Paris]

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon Please give me a day or so more to check that proof? The dreadful weather these last days made my eyes impossible. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (In rather large handwriting), 1 May 1925

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am glad to hear you are coming over but as I dream all day of the Euston Escorial and the heavenly landscape of smoky engines I cannot understand anybody coming here.

I am no worse, possibly a little better but it is almost impossible for me to recover in this climate. The odds are too heavy and yet I am reluctant to go away an ‘unfinished job’. I can write this and even see a few of the letters! It is the first of December today (winter time) and the light is dazzling.

Have you time to ask these people (Vocalion) to send me the records marked. I want the Martha one for Mr Morel, the bass for my son and the English tenor one for myself. The day is awfully long and boring and all I can do is to listen to a few records and scribble an odd note. My reason for troubling you is that shops here ask a month or two to import new discs yet a London shop sent me a disc lately (the de Reszke quartet in an English fourpart song—cf. Mr Earwicker’s speech p. 1. ‘our fourposter singing Etc’—which gave my ear and brain great pleasure) in three days!

I ‘wrasted the page redhanded’ from the Sunday Times but I hope you will be able to join the fragments.

You will find a good article on me in the new London review The Calendar for April. I ‘rush for the post’ and end this abruptly as I see I have quoted myself several times. I hope you are feeling well after your stay in the country. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. It is better to have the discs sent through Miss Beach. She manages the customs better than I could.

J.J.

 ® 

To VALERY LARBAUD, [?1 June 1925]

2 Square Robiac (192 rue de Grenelle)

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Arthur Symons would like to meet you. Can you put off your journey for a day and dine with us on Monday? I hope so. If you can please call at the Hotel Castile, 37 rue de Cambon at 8 on Monday. Au revoir cordialment votre

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 June 1925

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: There has been so much hammering and moving going on here that I could scarcely hear my thoughts and then I have just dodged an eye attack. In fact when I was last writing to you I felt pain and rushed off to the clinic where the nurse sent me on to Dr Borsch. He said I had incipient conjunctivitis from fatigue probably. Next day it was worse nevertheless he insisted I was not to put off a theatre engagement I had accepted (Chaliapine). I went but had to leave in mid-opera. He then told me it would be nothing if I went about and amused myself! It got better but I had three or four very unpleasant days.

We are settling down here slowly but there is a dreadful lot to do. The Breton girl having ordered her furniture seems to have left us in the lurch. She does not answer letters. I daresay we shall get right in time. I suppose I ought to have made this move long ago but operations held me up for one thing and I knew it needed a big sum of money and though I knew I could probably get it I could not bring myself to ask for it in bulk. But now the fat is in the fire.

I had the three living rooms which open up done in your colours, bluesea and seasand, thus, blue with yellow hangings, a neutral brown and the drawing room yellow with blue hangings. I am able to distinguish the blue from the yellow and viceversa.

I hope you have the Contact book. I put in a few puzzles more into my piece. I am working hard at Shem and then I will give Anna Livia to the Calendar. Morel will have to type all again as my typist is away. I have got out my sacksful of notes but can scarcely read them, the pencillings are so faint. They were written before the thunder stroke.

Tuohy has now sent two telegrams, having discovered that Martinmas is not in Derbyshire, I suppose. He wants to come here to paint me. I want him to go there to paint you. You want him to stay where he is and paint himself. He certainly wants me to pose myself and he certainly wants himself to pose me for himself and certainly he does now be wanting to paint me posed by himself, himself for myself.

(With apologies to Miss Gertrude Stein)

Is it dreadfully necessary

AND                       

(I mean that I pose etc) is it useful, I ask this

Heat!?

We all know Mercury will know

                  when

he Kan!

but as Dante saith:

1 Inferno is enough.

Basta, he said, un’ inferno, perbacco!

And that bird—

     Well!

He oughter know!

(With apologies to Mr Ezra Pound)

Did Fossett change those words? They was two. Doesn’t matter.

‘Gromwelling’ I said and what? O, ah! Bisexycle that was the bunch. Hope he does, anyhow. O rats! It’s just a fool thing, style. I just shoot it off like: If he aint done it, where’s the use? Guess I’m through with that bunch. (With apologies to Mr Robert McAlmon)

(Re-enter Hamlet)

Have you made a copy of Raymond’s letter. I should like to show it to Morel. Did Miss Beach send you the Hamburg paper. What a cheerful figure I must have looked at that Penman’s Banquet! With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To LÉON-PAUL FARGUE, 13 June 1925

[2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII]

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Cher Fargue: Nous voilà finalement installés ici. Voulez-vous me faire savoir avec un mot ou bien téléphoner (Ségur: 95.20) quand nous pourrons visiter votre fabrique pour choisir les coupes—préférablement après mardi? Merci d’avance Cordialement votre

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 July 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I could not write till now (not even now) as I have been getting into ever deeper Liffey water. I want to leave the piece with Miss Beach for the September Calendar, I have taken immense pains with these three pieces, I hope they justify it. The richer they are the less hard will be the other parts of the book if … and when … I have still several days more to work on Anna Livia and then I need to go away for a rest….

I saw Dr Borsch. He is surprised I cannot see better, is positive I will see. I asked if another operation might be necessary. He said: I think not.

The article by Mr Muir is not a reprint.

I walk an hour in the morning and the same in the evening with determination. I wish I had finished this piece and was sitting in a railway carriage. I hope you are having a pleasant stay up there….

Do you want me to send on the typescript. I should prefer not for a reason which I shall explain later. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 July 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Vile

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: The Criterion is out. The piece for This Quarter has now gone to press and I have sent off the piece for the Calendar. We are leaving for Fecamp (Normandy) address: Hôtel des Bains. I saw Dr Borsch. I have to undergo another operation when I come back in September. He says it is boring but the only course and in the end I will see, he says.

I am going to ask the seabreezes at the coast what they think about it all. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To SYLVIA BEACH, 25 July 1925

Grand Hôtel de la Poste, Rouen

Dear Miss Beach: Page 5 last line is VENERSDERG the rest is right. I wish Walsh would stay in one place till I have corrected the proofs. How will you manage to send U from the desert? My sight is queer but not bad. I return your letters under separate cover as the envelope is too small. I suppose the International Blue Book is worth subscribing to on account of the colour. The spaces could be filled in exactly from Who’s Who. My full name is

James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce. The address 12 rue de l’Odéon as I do not want importunate visitors.

Does Ulysses VI (it’s like the name of a pope) come out on Saturday? I suppose you will hand over the fact to your press agents.

I am much impressed by Anna Sequana here. I suppose you did not get a copy of the York, Towneley and Chester Mystery plays for me? I have some of them somewhere. I cannot remember the absurd names given to Mrs Noah (who is as quaint as U) in them. But no matter.

My bachelor brother in Trieste is engaged to be married.

If cheques arrive for me there (Criterion or Quarter) will you please instruct Miss Moschos about them. The possession of cash makes all the difference in the world to hotelkeepers.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 July 1925

Grand Hôtel des Bains et de Londres, Fécamp

Dear Miss Weaver: I wonder what weather you are having. The evening before we left Paris my whole family was caught in the Bois under a tree by a violent storm. Luckily they escaped with a drenching. I did not go with them as I went to pay my doctors. Dr Borsch’s secretary would not take any money. It was just as well for the concierge developed a mania for bills I had not foreseen—even producing one as a stirrup-cup which I bade him keep for my sake. Immediately after I left Paris it was visited by terrific storms the fragments of which flew over here. We have had wind, rain, hail, thunder, lightning etc and as my eye was troubling me yesterday we leave tomorrow for Rouen, Hôtel de la Poste. Even here I cannot escape Shaun and I added or changed about a hundred things in Anna Livia which I sent on to Miss Beach who is holding the MS. There will be an article about me in the next Revue des Deux Mondes. My wife has been very uneasy here but we did not like to go away in a hurry and yesterday was Lucia’s birthday (S. Anna: her name is Lucia Anna) and today is my son’s. Maupassant was born here but his mother concealed the fact. The first café we went into had a board up with: Her fales skandrinavisk on it and flew a Danish, a Norwegian and Swedish flag. While I was returning from an excursion to S. Valéry the idea for the last watch of Shaun came into my head. But I suppose I ought to ease off. When you return to London I shall explain why I did not send the typescript.

With kindest regards and hopes that Donner and Thor are far from you.

 ® 

To RICHARD WALLACE (Postcard), Postmarked 27 July 1925

[Fécamp]

MS. Wallace

Dear Wallace: Auguste Morel is making a copy of that plan of Ulysses for you and I gave him your address. I hope you enjoyed your trip. We are leaving soon for Rouen. Weather bad but not as bad as in Paris

J.J.

 ® 

To SYLVIA BEACH, [31 July] 1925 S. Ignaceous’ [sic] Day

Grand Hotel de la Poste, Rouen

MS. Buffalo

Dear Miss Beach: I hope you will have a pleasant time. Here it rains and rains! The Anna Livia sign is a simple equilateral triangle or delta U. Before you go can you make the few more changes enclosed and also order that interesting book. Will you leave U with Miss Moschos in case I think of anything else? I hope you won’t have storms. What a summer! I sent the photo to L.M. Did you send Criterion to Pound and Larbaud? I think I promised it but 2 Square Robiac drove a lot out of my head. Also has V.L. Contact selection. I have a rather large change to make on the fourth last page of Z so I hope Walsh sends me the proof quickly as I want to banish the whole Earwicker family from my mind.

I am sorry to give you trouble again at the last moment but it is a disturbed time.

Give my best wishes also to Miss Monnier for a pleasant holiday With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

U

p 13 l 5

before Lily insert Snakeshead

”

” Laura ” Fountainoy

”

after Lappin ” and Flora Ferns and Fauna Fox-Goodman

p 7 l 19

cancel God insert Goggle

p 8 ls 1, 2

cancel Go easy and insert Lisp it slaney and crisp it

p 4 l 3

cancel rhyme! insert cushingloo!

p 3 l 11

cancel God insert Chalk

p 8 l 20

cancel Spit on the iron insert Spitz on the iern

p 10 l 16

cancel what insert more

” and ” but

p 1a l 4

” Paleillyou! insert Pwllhyllyou

p 4 l 21

cancel God insert Close

p 5 l 2

” So ” Shoal

p 7 l 8

” run ” aston

Queer Fish
by
L. Boulenger
(Partridge 3s/6d)

 ® 

To HERBERT GORMAN, 31 July 1925

Grand Hotel de la Poste, Rouen

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Gorman: Your letter has just reached me. Will you please telegraph or write to me immediately on your arrival as I want to go to the south of France, Bordeaux, as soon as possible. I intended to go on Tuesday next as the weather here is very bad and I need a rest between one operation and [another] operation. I am here with my family.

I hope you will forgive me for not having written to you before. I shall explain to you the reason when I have the pleasure of meeting you. Allow me in the meantime to express my very grateful thanks. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To W.S. KENNEDY, Chairman, Incorporated Stage Society, London, 8 August 1925

Grand. Hotel de la Poste, Rouen

MS. Texas

Dear Sir: I am much honoured by the proposal of your committee to produce my play Exiles during the next season of your society and willingly give you my permission. Particulars of the performances in Munich and in New York will be sent you in a week or so by my French publisher. The play, as far as I know, has never been given in Dublin Sincerely yours

James Joyce

Address: 12, rue de l’Odeon, Paris VI

 ® 

To ERNEST WALSH, 10 August 1925

Grand Hotel du Raisin de Bourgogne, Niort

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Walsh: The enclosed will explain my telegram. Many thanks for your kind reply and message. My sight is worse and I have to go to Paris at the end of September to undergo another (the 7th) operation on my eyes. I want to correct the proofs of these two pieces while I can as after the operation I shall not be able to do anything for a long while, I suppose. The editor of The Calendar wishes to publish his piece on 1 October. Can you let me have a proof of your piece early in September and fix the date of appearance of your review before the 1 October? In that case he will set his piece now and I can check both and be finished with them as I should like to have a few weeks of rest before I reenter the clinic. We are leaving for Arcachon. My address had better remain: 12 rue de l’Odeon, Paris.

I hope your own health keeps good. Please accept for Miss Moorhead and yourself our kind wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To HERBERT GORMAN (Telegram), 13 August 1925

Arcachon

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Staying here please telegraph or write your plans

James Joyce

Hotel Regina Palace

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 August 1925

Régina Palace Hôtel & d’Angleterre, Arcachon

Dear Miss Weaver: I left Rouen (where we were drenched for 9 days out of twelve) and stopping a night in Niort; and Bordeaux reached here. Thunderstorms greeted my stay in Niort and Bordeaux. Here the weather is serene and warm. I wanted to go to London, if possible, before going back to Paris but as Exiles will be put on in January or February I decided to come south now (in spite of the heat) and go to London then. The soil here is dry sand and the climate ought to improve me and I am only an hour from Dax where Dr Borsch advised me to go. I hope I can do so for a week or so before I go away. But certainly my sight is curious—even in the good eye. At Fécamp in the ninth row of the stalls I could not see the actors’ faces. The morning after I came here I tried to walk down to the beach but had to come back as my sight was overclouded. It is very trying for one’s nerves.

The other part of the news is. My concierge writes (without accents) that he is leaving the house. Envoyer he writes envoillez. Lest I should forget him he enclosed a bill. Mr Gorman, my biographer, has been firing letters and telegrams at me. He wants to come and see me. He is in Victoria Palace Hotel, Paris. Mr Walsh has been holding me up with his delay in printing Shem and now the editor of the Calendar has written for the fourth or fifth time to know if he can announce U (Anna Livia) for October. I think I shall say yes for I want to correct the two pieces at once and get a few minutes of torpor before the next act.

I started to read Mr Gillet’s article when my sight was better than it is today. I read about half and was much amused by it and gave it to my son. He gave it back saying it was not at all amusing. So I then read the rest of it which, in fact, is very harsh. I think the explanation is to be found in a letter he wrote Miss Beach explaining the delay in finishing his article, his reason being ‘mais je viens de subir la perte de ma mère’. He makes one or two good points which, however, I could answer. But it does not matter. It will act like the Quarterly [article], savage and tartarly.

When are you going to London? Mr Mac Cormack will surely give a concert there and I would like you to hear him. Could someone there look out for you and book a seat for you? My host here is onearmed.

Rouen is the rainiest place getting

Inside all impermeables, wetting

Damp marrow in drenched bones.

Midwinter soused us coming over Le Mans

Our inn at Niort was the Grape of Burgundy

But the winepress of the Lord thundered over that grape of Burgundy

And we left it in a hurgundy.

(Hurry up, Joyce, it’s time!)

I heard mosquitoes swarm in old Bordeaux

So many!

I had not thought the earth contained so many

(Hurry up, Joyce, it’s time)

Mr Anthologos, the local gardener,

Greycapped, with politeness full of cunning

Has made wine these fifty years

And told me in his southern French

Le petit vin is the surest drink to buy

For if ’tis bad Vous ne l’avez pas payé

(Hurry up, hurry up, now, now, now!)

But we shall have great times,

When we return to Clinic, that waste land

O Esculapios!

(Shan’t we? Shan’t we? Shan’t we?)

 ® 

To ERNEST WALSH, 15 August 1925

Regina Palace Hotel et d’Angleterre, Arcachon

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Walsh: You have not replied to my letter from Niort so I am sending this express. The piece for the October Calendar will be announced in the September Calendar and appear on 1 October with a footnote (v. The Criterion (July), This Quarter (September)). My sight is getting worse, I think, so I shall be very glad if you will have the piece set at once and sent to me. I will correct it and the other piece at the same time. I must have a few weeks complete rest before I return to Paris for the operation. I can write but cannot see well what I write or read. Will you please telegraph me the word ‘arranged’ if you can do this? It does not matter if your review is delayed a few days after 30 September so long as it is dated September and referred to as above.

Please do not send your cheque to me here but make it payable to Myrsine Moschos and send it to 12, rue de l’Odeon as Miss Beach is on leave till 20 inst. I have told Miss Moschos about it. Send the proofs, please, registered to Miss Beach at the same address.

Many thanks for your kind message. I am glad you found the piece suitable.

I regret having to trouble you but hope you will understand my case Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To SYLVIA BEACH, [?22 August 1925]

Regina Palace Hotel et d’Angleterre, Arcachon

MS. Buffalo

Dear Miss Beach: I hope you are back safe in Paris and enjoyed your holiday. I had to rob 3000 francs from you but I wrote to Walsh to send my cheque in name of Miss Moschos and to Eliot to send the other payable to you. Between these delays and no proofs and the unexpected long journey down here with four breaks I feel more fatigued than when I left Paris. I hope they send you those cheques to cover my advance. I draw 11.000 francs in ten days but do not know how to arrange till then. My sight is getting so bad in the good eye even that I am beginning to think I have an incipient cataract in it too. I want to correct both proofs as soon as possible. Hold U till my next letter arrives—probably Saturday morning—with last corrections and then send it off registered please. You will see by Walsh’s letter that This Quarter may not appear for months yet and I cannot hold up the Calendar indefinitely. Walsh’s review may come out on time. In any case please suggest that the Editor of Calendar add a footnote at the beginning of the piece to the effect (v. The Criterion, (July 1925), This Quarter, September, 1925) That is all I can do. What do you think of Gorman’s letter⁠[?]

As you see, Exiles is to be given by the Stage Society. I said you would supply particulars of the performances. You know the story

New York:??!

Paris:???????

Italy: translated by Carlo Linati???

Germany: given at Schauspielhaus Munich. Producer: Elizabeth Koerner. Complete fiasco. Row in theatre. Play withdrawn. Author invited but not present. German Foreign Office did not allow his entrance. Thank God.

Arcachon is a very nice place. It is near Dax. I ought to go there and get into the fontaine chaude and stay in it and never trouble everybody no more.

It is a pity Darantière is so slow about U. VI, isn’t it With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 23 August 1925

Regina Palace Hotel, Arcachon

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Thanks for your card. Am here looking for sunlight which is shy of us. Will go to Dax after for a week or so before returning to Paris to fight my seventh operation. Good wishes from us all to Mrs Nebbia and yourself

James Joyce

The Stage Society (London) gives Exiles in January or February.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 August 1925

Regina Palace Hôtel & d’Angleterre Arcachon (Gironde)

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your letter and enclosures. I know the Bulletin well. Do you know the exact address as I should [like] to send a word of thanks. How is it that your [presscutting] agency never includes Irish notices? A consequence of the Free State Act? I am waiting for the proofs of Z and U. Many thanks also for the unbreakable script which I may use. As regards the article in the R. de D.M. I have been planning that for three years. I tried first the Revue de Paris, then the Revue de France. It does not matter as the R. de D.M. is even better. The tone of the article does not matter much. M. Gillet is a son-in-law of M. René Doumic. He suppresses the fact of my having resurrected M. Dujardin which is unfair but everyone knows it. I think it remarkable that attacks have not been more frequent and bitter. Miss Téry really ought not to have compared my optic to that of Elohim Adonai. I now intend to arrange an article of lower criticism, if possible, a textual analysis of either Eolus, Sirens or Cyclops. After that an illustrated and intelligent caricature and then the book may look after itself as best it can.

I know that Yd ought to be about roads, all about dawn and roads, and go along repeating that to myself all day as I stumble along the roads hoping it will dawn on me how to show up them roads so as everybody’ll know as how roads etc.

There was a terrible standup battle here (words and gestures) and the landlord turned all the English guests out of the hotel (I acted as spokesman for them as they could not speak French). It was illegal, the police said, but they thought it better to go. He will ruin his hotel but he does not care. In the middle of the hullabaloo he turned round on me and, with a deep bow, said he had the greatest respect for the ‘illustre écrivain and savant and—homme du monde!’—and that his words were not for me (je répète, etc). My exquisite voice was heard pouring out exquisite oleaginous phrases (Oui, Monsieur, mais permettez-moi—Parfaitement, Monsieur, pour vous j’ai le plus grand) but in the end he bowed and marched out of what he called ‘cet aréopage’. They’re all gone now but I don’t like overmuch my pedestal. He will never rival H.C.E. and, on that subject, liffle Anna countrymouse keeps me awake half the night.

I hope this may amuse you.

Did you get the I.S. and Corriere I sent you through Miss Beach. I hope you will instruct someone to book for the concert. You will not find seats fortyeight hours after the announcement of it.

P.S. The row was about food! Imagine me! J.J.

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To HERBERT GORMAN, [About 4 September 1925]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII Telephone: Ségur 95:20

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Gorman: I hope you received the photograph I sent you. As regards the ‘broadsheets’ you mention I cannot reply until I see the exact text or a reproduction of it with details of type etc. I never give interviews and therefore your proposal in that direction leads me to suggest that it would be well if we could meet on other terms before you go back. I shall be very happy to give you any information I can on matters of fact or to let you see any documents or criticisms etc. We shall be in Paris on Sunday or Monday. I understand you should sail on the following Saturday. From where? If it is from a French port perhaps something could be arranged. Your letters are in my trunk on the way to Paris. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 6 September 1925

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Just a line to say we got back last night to this semi-arctic clime. On arriving I find that the Calendar printers flatly refuse to compose Madame Anna Livia. Miss Beach thinks I ought to see Mr Gorman before he returns to U.S.A. so I am proposing to meet him halfway at Boulogne—where the Patricks come from. A Milan publisher wants to present U. to the Italian public and three Greeks called on Miss Beach with a mysterious book for me which they are sending. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Telegram), 8 September 1925

Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Boulogne risky can you arrive here Wednesday my guest leave Thursday morning wiring fare

Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 September 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I am still under the influence of the ‘truthcompelling’ drug, scopolamine (it is used in Germany and U.S.A. to extort bogus confessions from criminals) and my writing seems to me very spidery. But here is some of the news. When I got back here I found the old concierge gone (according to the landlord he was a robber, 15 years servant to a curé who went mad because he found out that his servant had robbed him of 100,000 francs!) but he had left three nice bills on the table. There was also a letter from the Calendar the tenor of which you know. I did not wish to antagonise them on account of Mr Muir’s articles and their attitude. Negotiations went on, they pleaded that they were pledged to publish me etc. In fact even when I had withdrawn the MS telegraphically they sent me a galleyproof with it and said they would say my contribution was ‘postponed’. This would have meant a private circulation of my mutilated piece in proof around London with no profit of publicity or money (Miss Beach says they offered to pay £48 for the piece if published), a blamage with respect to their readers who had been informed in the August and September numbers that a piece of mine would appear, a general impression that I was either half blind or three quarters incapable and a first mild offensive against the fait accompli of Ulysses. I therefore arranged a pleasing epilogue of which you will hear about the middle of next week.

The Nouvelle Revue Française is to publish in December, I think, a first instalment of Morel’s translation (they wrote twice asking for it) and the Navire d’Argent (November) will publish an article by Jean Prevost on J.J. and la Presse Française.

The German translation of Dedalus is to appear also in November and the publishers have written for photographs and drawings.

I cannot make head or tail of Mr Walsh’s review This Quarter. Miss Beach and I have written and wired with reply prepaid but cannot get any answer. Nobody knows where he is or where Shem is. He (Mr Walsh) proposed that Mr Pound correct my proofs. I wrote to Mr Pound assuring him that I wanted nothing better than to check them myself and asking him would it be possible to have my piece set first. E.P.’s reply was a letter to the Chicago Tribune begging all whom it might concern to take note that he had no connection with any review and could not receive any MSS whether in English, American or Javanese….

My eyes are getting better (it was nothing serious) but until Shem and his garrulous mother are settled for life in print I could not rest quiet in Mme de la Vallière’s château, rue Cherche-Midi. None of the operations has been very successful yet but another one inflicted on my troubled mind would be a bad addition. The flat is getting to look well in spite of bills but as yet we have not found a girl. One came, stayed till evensong and then said she had had a telegram telling her to go home. She went and came back at matins saying she had had a second telegram telling her to stay where she was. My wife told her she had had a wireless message telling her to send her back to the place where she was before she came to the place where she was not going to stay….

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 28 September 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, VIIe

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I was very glad to hear the good news of your engagement for we have had only bad news lately, Aunt Josephine’s death, Nora’s uncle’s (Tom) and her sister (Annie). When are you to be married? At least I have a house now and it ought to be easier for you to pay us a visit. Can you come this autumn, for example? I will send you the fare and you could pass a pleasant time here. I have to undergo another eye operation this month, but I will time it according to your answer. Let me have a line by return, if you can.

Tuohy’s portrait of Pappie is touring U.S.A. I asked him to try to do a sketch of mother from photographs. He managed to get two faded ones. Has Eileen any? If so it would be advisable to send copies of any or all at once to him (Prof. P.J. Tuohy, Metropolitan School of Art, Kildare Street, Dublin), as he is thinking of going to Spain.

Thanks for Linati’s article. I never hear from him but a Milanese firm wrote asking for Italian rights of Ulysses. I never give them till A Portrait is first translated. The Spanish and German translations of it appear in November. The English printer of The Calendar refuses to set up a piece of my new book. It comes out therefore complete (the piece) on Wednesday in a Paris review.

Do you intend to settle down in Trieste? And are you going to take an empty flat? This above costs me 20,000 francs a year empty with charges up to 25,000. I spent about 120,000 francs on it up to now so may the devil beautify it.

The day after I got back here from Arcachon I got a slight attack in my eyes which are still dimmed with scopolamine so I cannot write very much yet. But I am writing so that you could make plans before the Berlitz-Biarritz season begins. Surely to God it is not necessary for you to give barking lessons to fioi-de-cani from dawn till gutterdammerung! I saw Schmitz once or twice here and introduced him to a lot of people. Did George Antheil call on you? He has set Cyclops episode.

Give my regards to anyone who cares for them and first drop me a line in reply. Give our greetings also to our future sister-in-law and aunt (respectively) who is younger than her nephew.

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 October 1925

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: …. The tumult and the shoutings still go on but I expect that in ten days the captains and the kings will depart. I hope you got the Navire d’Argent and are pleased with my retort courteous. I enclose a letter from the Calendar which Miss Beach would like to have back—also an advance notice by a French critic to appear in Vient de Paraître (sic) in November. I sent you the Chicago Tribune. There have been other allusions since, all at the same time. There is a very curious atmosphere about here since I came back. When I have satisfied myself as to its causes (three of which I suspect) I shall write more.

There is a rumour here … that Mr Walsh is in very bad health…. It is impossible to get a reply from him and I have no notion where the MS of Z is at present. I should like to have this settled before I enter the waste land.

Which things being so, I began Yd (otherwise the last watch of Shaun) a few days ago and have produced about three foolscapes of hammer and tongs stratification lit up by a fervent prayer to the divinity which shapes our roads in favour of my ponderous protagonist and his minuscule consort.

Shall I send you the corrected typescript of U there or wait till you return? I composed some wondrous devices for Yd during the night and wrote them out in the dark very carefully only to discover that I had made a mosaic on top of other notes so I am now going to bring my astronomical telescope into play.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1925

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I have been laid up for about ten days with a lamentable sort of cold, a dreary thing of which Paris is full. I hope you have better air up there. Now I am better but still rheumy.

I hope you got the Revue Nouvelle. The Hades episode translated by Morel is to appear in the December N.R.F. Two days ago the proof of Z arrived from Como. I corrected it, rubbed on more boot polish and sent it back express. I hope it comes out in a week or so. I ought to go into the clinic then, ought I not?

I send you some advance press opinions of U

My father: He has gone off his head, I am afraid. He has overworked himself. Why did he not go to the bar? He speaks better than he writes.

My brother Charles: Received. Off to Carlow for a few days.

My brother Stanislaus: What are you driving at? To make the English language quite incomprehensible. Literary bolshevism. Too flabby for my taste.

Arthur Power: Always glad to receive anything. Could you place enclosed MSS with your agent?

Laubenstein: No acknowledgment.

E.P.: F.M.F.: E.W.: idem.

Claudel (Paul): I thought I knew English until I read it.

Mrs Wallace: I don’t understand a single word. What is it about?

Wallace: I remembered parts I had heard from you.

Huddleston: Why would the English printer not print it?

I am working at Yd still. In a few days, Saturday, I think, the men will have finished here. They brought some furniture for the diningroom and took it back a few days after to stuff it! I never do that when I supply prose to the public. All stuffing done on the premises.

With kindest regards from a bronchially impeded author.

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To DÁMASO ALONSO, 31 October 1925

2 Square Robiac, Paris, France

TS. Alonso

Dear Mr Alonso: Many thanks for your kind letter. As regards the Spanish title of my novel, from what you say it seems better to use the word Adolescente. As you say the Spanish Joven is impossible. Nevertheless, I believe that the classical meaning of adolescence is a person between the ages of seventeen and thirty-one and this would cover only the fifth chapter of the book and represents about one fifth of the entire period of adolescence, whereas in English at least, while the word adolescent is quite inapplicable to the person represented in chapters 1, 2 and even 3, the term young man can be applied even to the infant on page one, of course in joke. What is the usual description of selfportraits made in youth used in the catalogue of your Spanish picture galleries? The word autoritrato seems to me an insufficient description of a picture. The title of the French translation which I sent you, in order that you may consult it on doubtful points is taken from the catalogue of the Louvre.

As regards your question, please refer in all cases to the French translation. I did not revise it but I helped the translator a good deal.

Page 31: This is a kind of foot-stool with two ears, stuffed without a wooden frame. The term is childish and popular. Compare the word ‘hassock’

Page 92: An abbreviation of the word, made by schoolboys, ‘translation’

Page 105: This is a kind of sweet meat made of a soft marshmellow jelly which is coated first with pink sugar and then powdered, so far as I remember with cocoanut chips. It is called ‘Slim Jim’ because it is sold in strips about a foot or a foot and a half in length and an inch in breadth. It is very elastic and can be eaten by two people at the same time.

Page 119: Schoolboy’s abbreviation for problems set by a master to his class on the model of some theorum or problem in whatever book of Euclid’s Geometry they are reading.

Page 222: A euphemism used by Cranley [sic] in as much as it begins with the same letter for a product of the body the monosyllabic term for which in English is sometimes used as an exclamation and sometimes as descriptive of a person whom one does not like. In the French language it is associated with Marshal Cambronne and the French (the females at least) sometimes use a similar euphemism employing the [word] miel instead of the word used by the military commander.

Page 224: He means nothing except that he affects to consider the name of the Middlesex philosopher as the name of a race horse. Page 232: Cranly misuses words. Thus he says ‘let us eke go’ when he means to say ‘let us e’en go’ that is ‘let us even go’. Eke meaning also and having no sense in the phrase, whereas even or e’en is a slight adverbial embellishment. By quoting Cranly’s misquotation Lynch gives the first proof of his culture. The word yellow (the second word) is his personal substitution for the more sanguine hued adjective, bloody.

Page 242: A reference to Plato’s theory of ideas, or more strictly speaking to Neo-Platonism, two philosophical tendencies with which the speaker at that moment is not in sympathy.

Unnumbered Page: Translate this word for word. It means and is intended to mean, nothing.

Page 285: An allusion to the New Testament phrase ‘The light under a bushel’.

Page 285: In rowing. Compare Rower’s heart. The phrase of course suggests at once a disappointment in love, but men use it without explanation somewhat coquettishly, I think.

Page 232: A form of procope for ‘Damn your soul’.

I hope you will let me have a copy of this Spanish version when it comes out. If you send me your copy of the English when you have finished with it I shall be very happy to sign it for you, if you would like to do so. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

P.S. Will you please address your reply to me here in Paris and not in Arcachon.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 November 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Vil

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have been working very laboriously these last few weeks and have almost made a first draft of Yd. My cold has gone. Mr Walsh has been moving from Como, via Milan, via Genoa and Rapallo, via Mentone and now Grasse with my proofs and typescript and letters and Miss Beach’s following him while he sends explosive letters full of what she calls ‘guesswords’ etc. Goodness knows what sort of text of mine he will offer to his readers if ever the second number comes out.

Nobody here, not even Mr Ford, can solve the problem of Two Worlds. Huge advertisements have appeared in several big American and English reviews, the former costing, I am told, $1000 each! I never wrote a letter or sent any MS to Mr Roth. He wrote (or roth) to me in 1921. I did not answer, I think. He also wrote to me on 25 September asking me to give him something and said he would buy the forests of Hudson Bay for paper etc. I did not answer. And yet number 1 apparently came out on 15 with a piece of mine in it. I have sent two cables to New York but have got no information yet. An American journalist told me that to cover the expense of such ‘billing’ there ought to be a circulation of hundreds of thousands of copies and the actual number is 450!

I am having queer experiences with editors. New press opinions of U are: ‘all Greek to us’ ‘unfortunately I can’t read it’ ‘is it a puzzle?’ ‘has anybody had the courage to ask J. how many misprints are in it’ ‘those French printers!’ ‘how is your eyesight?’ ‘charming!’—This last from Mrs Nutting, who, however, heard me read it and indeed suggested my voice should be dished (misprint for ‘disced’).

Mr Antheil has received a copy of musical supplement to This Quarter with some pages of his Cyclops setting. He has not shown it to me as yet. I believe Mr Pound got it published for him.

I shall go to see Dr Borsch (of whom I dreamed last night) tomorrow for the first time since I was ill and ask him to let me finish Yd before the next match. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN, 5 November 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr. Gorman: As we did not meet in Bologne [sic], much to my regret, I am sending you some rectifications for your book about me, which I hope will reach you in time for the English edition. You may incorporate them in the text or in footnotes, or in an appendix, but I should prefer you to do so as though the information, which deals with facts only, had been acquired by you in a personal conversation, and not as contributed by me.

I send you a copy of the Navire d’Argent, which I hope reached you safely and shall forward you in the next week or so, a copy of This Quarter containing another piece. As since the death of Mr. John Quinn, I have no agents in America, I should be very glad if you could give me any information concerning a quarterly review entitled ‘Two Worlds’ edited by Mr. Samuel Roth.

I look forward to the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Groman [sic] and yourself in Paris at an early date. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 November 1925

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: There is no news about Mr Roth so I do not know what to do. Mr Antheil received the printed musical supplement to This Quarter No 2 which contains some pages of his Cyclops setting but the review is not out. I wish it were before I go clinical. I hear that my typescript and perhaps other mail has gone astray.

I went round (rather halfheartedly) to the clinic to feel my way and found it occupied by a patient, a Boston bulldog on whom Drs Borsch and Collinson had operated for hernia of the eye. Mme Puard (who, I suspect, is Noah’s wife) was then promised a lioncub by Dr Borsch. The dog now trots about with a bandage over his eye and a curious funnel on his head. I saw Dr Borsch and told him I wanted to finish Yd. I asked him could the operation, even if not successful, do any harm to the other eye. He said no. We then arranged provisionally for Monday 23 instant and he said I would be all right for Christmas.

I am using indiarubber to cancel words to avoid difficulties with my MS. What the language will look like when I have finished I don’t know. But having declared war I shall go on jusqu’au bout.

I enclose two cuttings from Irish papers.

A Mr Basil Woon, whom I met one evening at the house of Mr Slocombe wrote to me a few times and in the end, not to be discourteous, I received him. He said that he did not like making the proposal he had been charged to make on behalf of his employers, a large magazine syndicate. It was that I should give them an article on a certain subject: What you feel and do when you are going blind. I lit a cigarette and thought of a great variety of things. Then in the best manner of Shem I developed a long painful dissertation, punctuated by sighs, excuses, compliments, hypotheses, explanations, silences = no, non, nein.

Sancta Lucia (Patron of eyes), ora pro nobis!

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To ERIC PINKER, N.D. [?] Autumn 1925

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Dear Mr Pinker: A few weeks ago there appeared in the Nation (London), New Republic (New York), Nation (N.Y.) and other papers a fullpage advertisement of a quarterly Two Worlds (15 September, no 1) published by Mr Samuel Roth, 500 Fifth Avenue, N.Y. editors, Mr Ford, Mr Pound, and Mr Arthur Symons. It announced in no 1 a first instalment of a new book by me and in no 2 a second instalment. Mr Ford says he knows nothing of the review beyond the advertisement. I never gave Mr Roth anything or even wrote to him. I had a letter from him about four years ago which I did not answer. A second letter, dated 25 September last (ten days later than no 1) arrived asking for a contribution, long or short. I did not answer the letters which on the other hand expressed great admiration and made some extravagant suggestion about buying up forests for paper in order to secure a great publicity: I can make nothing of the affair and I believe neither Mr Pound nor Mr Symons know anything of this use of their names. Can you find out something about it?

When I disposed of the Spanish rights of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through your father about eight years ago I received a letter which I cannot find. Does ‘Spanish rights’ mean rights for Spain only or also for the Spanish language (South America)? I ask because a translation is coming out in Madrid….

I am going into hospital for a (seventh) operation on my eye so am notifying you of these few points now as I shall not be able to attend to any correspondence for some time after Thursday next.

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To ETTORE SCHMITZ (Dictated letter), 21 November 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle. VIIe Parigi

MS. Fonda Savio

Caro Schmitz, Scusi se la mia risposta ha tardato ma questi ultimi giorni avevo scopolamine negli occhi e anch’oggi preferisco dettar a Lucia. Essa vi ringrazia molto, tanto Lei che la signora Trevisani ed io pure la ringrazio per il gentilissimo invito ma purtroppo non può accettarlo per il momento ed ecco perchè. Mercoledì o giovedì prossimo entro alla clinica dove devo subire un’operazione, la settima in tre anni (cateratta secondaria) ma conto di esser di ritorno per Natale, poi passate le feste vogliamo andare a Londra per la première ed unica della mia commedia. In queste circostanze sarebbe difficile per Lucia di assentarsi. Ci rincrescie perchè sarebbe stato un soggiorno molto piacevole per lei, però l’anno prossimo spera di poter andar a passare qualche tempo a Trieste.

Ho parlato colla direttrice del ‘Navire d’argent’ la quale m’assicurò che un brano del Suo libro sarà pubblicato nel numero di gennaio e febbraio presentato da Crémieux. Continuo a lavorare malgrado l’ostacolo della vista.

Rassicuri la Sua Signora in quanto riguarda la figura d’Anna Livia. Di lei non tolsi che la capigliatura e quella soltanto a prestito per addobbare il rigagnolino della mia città l’Anna Liffey che sarebbe il più lungo fiume del mondo se non ci fosse il canal che viene da lontano per sposare il gran divo, Antonio Taumaturgo e poi cambiato parere se ne torna com’è venuto.

Tanti saluti cordialissimi a voi tutti quanti una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 November 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, VIP

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am not going into the clinic this morning. For the last week Dr Borsch has been treating the other eye with scopolamine for what he calls a suffusion and he will not operate till both are normal. The ‘scopo’ obstructs my sight in reading and I cannot finish Yd before Wednesday. I must do this before I go in if I am to have any peace…. My wife does not seem to like the idea of this operation but the nurse says that when Dr Borsch has made an operation which he considers final he tells the patient ‘La nature fera le reste’ and does not encourage the patient to try again. It is a dreadful bore especially now that my slow brain has got to work well after two months’ labour. But I will rest for a couple of days and probably jump through hoop no 7 on Friday or Saturday.

Here is a cutting of Mr Mulligan and there is Lalou’s article in Vient de Paraître and an article about U in the New Republic by Edmund Wilson.

You must be having a bad time with all those troubles. I hope they are past and that your health is good.

Your MS this time will be partly written by Lucia (who calls it ‘cinese’ (Chinese). I mean the penscript not the pencil draft. It will be finished tomorrow surely—of course only as a first draft but I perceive that I have written more of the book than I had thought. I am sending you the papers. Can you return them to Miss Beach for her files? I hope this house is worth all the outlay or even that my writing of late is? With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LILY BOLLACH, 5 December 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: Many thanks for your letter. I could not reply as my eyes were dilated with scopolamine and at twelve o’clock today I enter the clinique for a 7th eye operation! Please excuse me. I have a long piece that I wanted you to be kind enough to type for me but it must wait till I come out when I hope you will not be so overworked. With many thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From LUCIA JOYCE to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Vile

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, My father has been home since Tuesday but we hardly know what news to send you. He has had no sight in the eye since the operation on account of the blood and he has pain and dizziness. The dreadful weather also makes him very nervous. He is going to see Dr Borsch tonight and hopes he will soon have a better report of himself. He is glad to be at home and we do not know what would have become of him if he had come out of the clinic into a hotel. The doctor says he must have complete rest.

With kindest regards from my mother and myself sincerely yours

Lucia Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 December 1925

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, VIIe

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver I have not leave to write but am sending this to wish you a very happy New Year. I have been having a poor time, more or less constant pain in the wound, allayed by aspirin and pilocarpin (antidote of scopo), no sight whatsoever and ‘blues’. Dr Collinson says he has not great hopes of it. Dr Borsch says I ought to see when the blood absorbs. It is doing so at about 1/20 of the normal rate. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Did you get H.C.E.?

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1926

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 January 1926 [In large handwriting]

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: I have tried to send two bouquets to the two actresses but I know nothing about them neither names nor even the theatre—if it is to be given in a theatre? Of course I cannot travel. Even yet I cannot see a light before my eye and have had continual bouts of neuralgic pain in the wound and oceanfuls of tears. I cannot read or even think and am becoming nicely nervous. Kind people now help me to cross the street and hail taxis for me!! I lie on a couch most of the day, waiting for Ireland’s eye this day to do his duty. And I am most completely depressed. I would like to do some work but my state makes me avoid it. I hope the actresses will get two nice bouquets.

But why are you not going to the Euston Hotel? 732 rooms, 2 wings, liveried porters, chatty meteorologist in the lift, whispering lounge, English breakfast, vitellusit, Danish bacon, Irish eggs, American sugar, French milk, Canadian marmalade, Scotch porridge, New Zealand butter, Dutch toast. Mr E.H. Knight, manager. I met him every morning and wished him good kday, Mr Knight. He is a very knice kman.

I will just add an epigram I made. To a person asking if I go to church: O, yes, I go to mass every morning at Notre Dame de Siam and to vespers every evening at Saint Louis le Debonair.

And this limerick:

There’s a coughmixture scopolamine

And its equal has never been seen

’Twould make staid Tutankamen

Laugh and leap like a salmon

And his mummy hop Scotch on the green.

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From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 15 February 1926

London

Caro Joyce, Scrissi all’indirizzo indicatomi mandando il biglietto. Mi si rispose che avevo dimenticato di rimettere la lettera Sua e mi si invitava di presentarmi al bigoncio con la stessa la sera della rappresentazione. Così feci e tutto finì bene: Ebbi due magnifici posti e, contrariamente agli usi del paese, a ‘maca’. Lo debbo a Lei e grazie! Non del tutto a ‘maca’ perchè mi portarono via la sua lettera.

Tutta la sera fui accompagnato dal delizioso sentimento di assistere allo svolgimento di una Sua opera importante, tanto differente da tutte le altre Sue. Molti anni or sono io lessi Exiles in manoscritto, quella cara calligrafia che tutti ora conoscono, che io amo ma che non so leggere correntemente se non è dedicata a segni italiani. Neppure la rappresentazione mi diede tutta la commedia il cui testo spero di avere questa sera. Specialmente l’ultimo discorso di Rowan che, suppongo, tanto importante per la rivelazione delle molle più misteriose che lo fanno agire, a me e a Livia sfuggì interamente forse anche perchè eravamo un po lontani dalla scena. Di solito a Londra sediamo tanto vicini agli attori che, quando diciamo: ‘I beg your pardon’, gli attori, se sono buoni, ripetono la frase. Ho fretta di avere il libro perchè giovedì tento di passare gratis al ‘Debate on Exiles’ e vorrei aver capito l’opera interamente.

La Black Roberts per me fu un’attrice indimenticabile. Non dev’essere mica facile di rappresentare una donna cui non deve mancare certa pratica della vita e farvi risonare l’ingenuità con la chiarezza di un suono di campana e con la misura che l’ingenuità deve serbare per essere sentita autentica. Invece di un applauso le mandai un bacio e, spero, lo avrà sentito almeno come quelli di Robert Hand.

Rupert Harvey mi diede una grande sorpresa. Non so se sia voluto, ma si muove, siede, s’alza e guarda come Lei. Amerei ora di rivederlo in altra parte per intendere meglio questa. È certo un attore valoroso. Mi parve come un uomo che amerebbe di agire senza dover dar conto delle proprie azioni. Non c’è esitazione in lui, ma la spiegazione che concede è fatta sempre con voce moderatissima quasi desiderasse che qualche sua parola non fosse intesa dai suoi interlocutori. Spesso ciò gli riuscì con me visto che parlò sempre in inglese.

Bene William Sta⁠[c]⁠k che all’ultimo momento assume la parte di Robert Hand. Però la sua parte è la più facile delle tre.

Pubblico magnifico, ma qualche bestione doveva esserci. Accanto a me un signore disse: They want to force on us Italian ways. Degl’Italiani si sa, anzi, che sono gelosi anche quando non amano.

Molti applausi. Più fragorosi dopo il primo e secondo atto.

Spero di vederla a Parigi, per qualche momento almeno, il 25 corrente. Suo affezionatissimo,

Ettore Schmitz

Ha visto l’articolo del ‘Corriere della Sera’ di G. Caprin dell’undici corrente? Guai se continua così. Meno il furto mi rimprovera tutti gli altri delitti. Dio sa quello che penseranno Crémieux e Larbaud. E anche Lei vi figura, con rispetto, ma vi figura, povero Joyce!

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 March 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, VIIe

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver … since you ask me I think there is a very very slight improvement of vision. He is now using some kind of a new chemical stimulant (not chemical but acting by purely physical means, recently discovered here, I understand, synthol for massaging the temples and brow).

And as for Exiles the enclosed letter from my former partner in the English Players throws a good deal of light on the production, especially the production in the auditorium. I am sorry I did not engage a stenographer to record the debate….

Many thanks for Dowland’s songs. They at least are beyond question. I could never sing them but I could listen to them all day. I mean I have the voice but not the style. I hope something I have written may bear comparison with Come silent night for instance. I used the rhythm of William Bird’s Woods so Wild in describing Isolde in the last piece.

This, completed and revised, I read a week ago to a small audience…. It produced stupefaction, I think. That evening I was exhausted to the point of idiocy and since then, though I wanted to revise Yabc for Mr Roth, could not do so. Instead I read a few books and plays, the Life of Sims Reeves, Juno and the Paycock, Figgis’s Book on Blake.

Please let me hear from you how your sister progresses. I hope she will speedily recover and that you yourself will keep in good health. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To IVAN OPFFER, 9 March 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle VIIe

MS. Donald Gallup

Dear Opfer: Can you please ring me up (Ségur 95–20) as I should like to know whether you are free or would like to do my son soon. He is free at present as he has suspended his singing lessons owing to false diagnosis of his voice and so could sit for you when you like.

I hope you have some good news from America Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 March 1926

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

Dear Miss Weaver: … I am working away at Yabc though the latest report about Mr Roth does not encourage me to carry out my plan of giving him the four watches [of Shaun] complete in exchange for a lump sum of dollars. He told Hemingway that he had used my name and pieces as a draw, that he had drawn 10,000 subscribers all over the States and that he did not think he wanted me any more as his readers (the 10,000) wanted amusing matter of a different kind. I should have an agent over there, I think….

Jo Davidson (the Russo-American sculptor who got Exiles put on in New York) is asking Miss Beach to persuade me to sit for him. Opfer (the Dane who did that drawing of Brandes and wanted to do me in oils) has started to do my son instead and an Irish sculptor Knox who saw Lucia performing at the Margaret Morris show wants to do a full figure of her. It never paints but it pours.

My brother now writes he will be here at Easter whether on his honeymoon or not he does not say. In fact a great number of mountains are seeking out the prophet lately. He does not know what to make out of my ‘work in progress’ but ‘hopes for the best’. I suppose that Shane the Leslie has withdrawn a book Cantab, denounced by the bishop of Northampton.

My eye is 1/1,000,000,000 better since I wrote last. I would like to cast it on the caricature of Exiles you mentioned. It has not come.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 March 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, VIIe

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: We are glad to hear you are coming and will all be very glad to see you again. On receipt of this will you either wire me or send a card to say on what of next week you will probably arrive so that I may make better arrangements than I was able to do in Eileen’s case. The weather is getting better here and Easter is generally very lively here so I think you will enjoy your stay. It is useless to open up any subject touched on in your letter as you are coming personally. Arrivederci

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 April 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: … I have received a copy of the Spanish translation of A.P.O.T.A.A.A.Y.M. and also of the German version. Would you care to have these, the German at least? Mr Rascher admits to having sold 9 copies of Verbannte and wants a million….

I finished the revision of Yabcd yesterday. Today I copied out the sheets of Ya which were unreadable to have them retyped. Tomorrow and Monday I shall do, I hope, the same for Yb. Then Yc will take three or four days. Then the typing of these and the ‘man of four watches’ is complete. I am not sure for the moment how much I have done. I shall know when I read it. I am to read it Yab, interval, and Yc to a small group, this time including Antheil and a young American Galantière who is preparing a course of lectures on U. I think I have done a good deal. My brother says that having done the longest day in literature I am now conjuring up the darkest night. I will send you Yd complete in typescript and the necessary new pages to insert into Yabc. Have you read Le Culte des Héros yet? What do you think of it? Every time I read a piece I go round with the hat after begging those present to remember it and help me by finding things for me. They all seem to forget about it as quickly as possible except Miss Beach who knows how to whistle books out of the air.

How long do you stay in London? I hope your sister goes on well. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LILY BOLLACH, 2 May 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: First of all, thanks for your Christmas card. I have undergone two more eye operations—the latter very severe—and could not write. Please excuse me. Can you meet me for a few moments at 7 p.m. next Tuesday, at the corner of Avenue Gabriel? I hope so as I have some work which I would ask you to type if you have any free time. I have written it out very clearly and large. I hope you are in good health and not overworked in your new office. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LILY BOLLACH, 16 May 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Miss Bollach: The phrase in my MS reads ‘by that noblest of magistrates at his Saxon tannery with motto O’Neill etc’. You are right about ‘my face’ and ‘too’ One more change. In the speech that precedes the verse (Yc near end)

Day socker from vanfloats etc

for ‘Magrath or MacManagh’ read O’Bejorumsen or Mockmacmahonson’ Do you think you could leave part of it say Yab on Monday with your concierge so that I could be revising it in the meantime? You are having a terrible time with my MS, I am afraid. I am sorry to be the guilty cause and hope for your own sake it will soon be over.

Many thanks in any case. A copy of Ulysses, 1st edition, ordinary paper autographed was lot 203 at a book auction in the Salle Drouot yesterday. It was sold for 2750 francs. My American price would be higher. I hope you have yours. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 May 1926

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: Yabc came back typed and Yd will be here on Sunday or Monday. To what address can I send them and is the post safe? I have also to send you Gens de Dublin. The German version of APOTAAAYM seems to have gone astray. I sent it to you before the Spanish one. I wish you would read through Yabcd and tell me how they interact.

Wyndham Lewis rang me up twice last week. I arranged to meet him at the clinic and we went to a café. He told me he wanted to meet me because he is to bring out a critical review (6 times yearly) The Tyrocritic (I hope he will correct the misspelling). It is to be all critical and philosophic and contain no creative work. But he wanted to make an exception in my case and asked me would I give him something. I said I would with great pleasure. I will tell you more about the interview when we next meet. I was much upset that day. My wife and I had a taxi collision an hour before. The front window at my side was smashed and the flying glass cut a neat design round my umbrella. I was unhurt.

If I have not filled in a gap in the typescript before sending it it means that I could not think of the question to insert there. It has bothered me for some time.

I have the book now fairly well planned out in my head. I am as yet uncertain whether I shall start on the twilight games of Z, Y and V which will follow immediately after U or on K’s orisons, to follow Yd. But my mind is rather exhausted for the moment.

Have you read Saint Patrice? There is a book on Bruno (though not on Nolan) by Lewis McIntyre (Macmillan). I do not know if Vico has been translated. I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond using them for all they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circumstances of my own life. I wonder where Vico got his fear of thunderstorms. It is almost unknown to the male Italians I have met.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 June 1926

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope you received Yabcd. I shall be waiting to hear how you like it—if you like it. While reading it could you make a complete list of words misspelt. Some, of course, are intentional, most, but there must be others overlooked by my dim sight. Will you let me know whether the ‘plot’ begins to emerge from it at all? Between the close of U at nightfall and Ya there are three or four other episodes, the children’s games, night studies, a scene in the ‘public’, and a ‘lights out in the village’. Have you finished S. Patrice? If so, I should like you to read St John Irvine’s Life of Parnell to begin with. It is not good but you ought to know some of the facts. For instance the word ‘hesitency’. Irishmen usually remember the Piggott trial by this catchword. I shall send you Bédier Tristan et Iseult as this too you ought to read. Cain and Co, Swift etc and the ‘other fellow’ I shall leave to your own inter pretative discernment….

I hope your sister is still making progress. I think my eye is improving slightly. But I would not for my sight’s sake be so advanceful as yet as to take my affirmative eachways as to the preceding.

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To LILY BOLLACH, 7 June 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle VIIe

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: I have at last revised and sent off Yabcd. The work was excellently done and very promptly. Many thanks. Will you please let me know how many hours of dreadful labour it cost you and excuse please my delay in writing Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 July 1926

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: We have had a series of visits here, my brother (2 weeks), my sister (3 weeks), my wife’s uncle (2 weeks), Mrs Sheehy Skeffington, a Mr Sinclair from Dublin (v. Ulysses) and an almost daily succession of MM Orages. I have also had some curious encounters. Some concerts of music from Pound’s opera were given and several Antheil concerts about six. Requests for translation rights have come from Hungary, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and Japan. The Japanese came to see me and was delighted with the japlatin I showed him in Ybc.

I hope your sister is still making good progress. I am beginning to perceive dimly objects to the left of me. The progress is dreadfully slow but I think it is there. I send you a copy of The Day of the Rabblement but I prefer it to go tomorrow by registered post. It now fetches £7. I saw some letters of mine (in French) advertised in a catalogue at 5 gns and 3 gns. I cannot ‘place’ them. Protée has gone to the N.R.F. and Morel is doing a piece to appear in ‘900’ an international review coming out in Rome in French. Yabcd (no bids) has been offered to the Dial. I have done a piece of the studies, Z coaching Y how to do Euclid Bk I, 1. I will do a few more pieces, perhaps V picture-history from the family album and parts of O discussing A Pai (I would like to invent a satisfactory fountain pen!) A Painful Case and the T-U household etc. I will leave them in the rough when and if I go away. I ought to go but am afraid to stir. Lucia is in Deauville at the girls’ camp. My son is in an accountant’s office, pending the stabilisation of his voice.

What have you learned in the hills about T, U, Z, Y, S, Q, V, M, O, N etc? It would be of service to me if you could jot down notes from time to time as ideas connecting them may strike you.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 July 1926

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I have been expecting a letter from you for some time. I hope you are well and got my letter and Pamphlet signed. Also I hope your sister is making good progress. As for me, ça va—but très doucement. The Dial telegraphed it would pay ½d a word for Yabcd but must see my text first. It has gone and I feel about as diffident as a young lady of 19 at her first coming-out. I finished the Euclid lesson but will not attempt anything more for the present.

It is far too hot and the franc having fallen to 250 has jumped back to 192 in four days and tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday (19) and on the next day my son comes of age and Miss Beach has gone to S. Patrick’s birthplace, Boulogne, and I am thinking of going to Ostend.

Gens de Dublin has gone into an eighth edition and continues to get very good notices! By the way the pieces in Yabcd connected with the Roderick O’Conor passage are respectively pp. 52, 53, 82, 83, 102. If I turned to anything it would be to them now. I certainly have a capacity for work but I wish I had more agility and imagination. I have been for years staring at an old print of the sacrifice of Cain and Abel and it is only a week ago it struck me how tactful it was of Abel to slit the throats of the firstlings (without any divine injunction as yet to kill the Cains of the flock). However I used it in the triangle.

I hope you will write soon to say that you are well and have recovered from my ‘prhose’.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 August 1926

Hôtel de l’Océan, Digue de Mer, Ostende

Dear Miss Weaver: The map in the papers does not show your part of England as affected so I hope you did not feel any shock the other morning. We were awake all night nearly on Monday but the worst of the storm was in London. Jeeshee and Kami-nari are very active just now. Miss Beach writes from Les Déserts (Savoy) that the house next to hers was struck. Why do they go there? I wish they were back and the tiresome badtempered summer over. I am by no means ascetic here for I have developed a most Flemish appetite which I trust will not always abide with me. Yesterday I ran from Middelkerke to Mariakerke, a distance of about 6 or 7 kilometres. I could walk for ever along a strand.

There is some news. Mr Roth has now turned Two Worlds into a monthly and is publishing Ulysses in it. The July number contained the whole Telemachia. We do not know what to do. The editor of the New York Herald Tribune writes to Miss Beach asking if Mr Roth is authorised to do this and offers to intervene. The number is dedicated to me with profound admiration or something like that! O dear!

There is no news yet from The Dial. Mr Patrick Hoey whom I met here behind a chemist’s counter recognised me after an interval of 24 years. He was present at a supper given me before I went to Paris in 1902. He is a great admirer of my works and pomps and has all the first editions. He is in fact a very good Y all the more as his name is the same as my own. Joyeux, Joyes, Joyce (Irish Sheehy or Hoey, the Irish change J into Sh e.g. James Sheumas, John Shaun etc) He very often uses the identical words I put into Y’s mouth at the Euclid lesson before coming down here.

If you ever put on my disk I would be much obliged if you or Miss Marsden would note the points of the Irish brogue in it, chiefly on the consonants. I asked Mrs Pound to do so but she may forget it. This would be very useful to me though I did not speak it in my natural voice.

With kindest regards to Miss Marsden and yourself and hopes for your her and my quiet of mind.

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To SYLVIA BEACH, 24 August 1926

Ostend

Dear Miss Beach: I am returning your enclosures to me. Do not do anything till you return to Paris and till the Dial replies. I think we shall stay here till 1 or 2 prox and then go to Ghent for a few days. In any case we shall remain in Leopoldland. I had a letter from Miss Weaver who is well but her sister’s house in Guildford was struck by lightening. I wish the summer was ygangen out as the old song ought to have sung. I send the N.L. to Miss Monnier. When she goes back to Paris she would oblige me if she withdraws Carducci’s article from Mr ? and gives it to La Revue. I forget what it reviews but Mr Manuel-Lélis is the editor. I met him here a few days ago. I hope you are having a good holiday. You may write here as even if we leave I shall give them our next address.

A curious thing. I was sitting on a rock under the phare a few sunsets ago when a child, a barefoot girl of about four clambered up the slope and insisted on filling my pockets with tiny shells from her apron. I told her in Flemish (I have now taken 43 lessons in it!) that I did not want them but she went on all the same. It was only after I had given her a coin and she had gone that I remembered the lighthouse of Patrick’s papa in Boulogne and Caligula’s order to his soldiers at the tower to gather up the seashells….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 August 1926

Hotel de l’Océan, Digue de Mer, Ostende

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: These rapid lines are to wish you many happy returns of your birthday. I hope they reach you in time as I have found the post here rather slow—2 days from Paris, a 5 hours run. I am sorry to hear your sister had such a time in the storm—a dreadful experience for an immobilised person! The only good thing is that sometimes a shock like that does good and in any case a visitation of that kind rarely recurs …

I am of a sudden overladen with work. Last week the entire typescript of Ulysses in German arrived and on top of it the German translator to revise it with me. We work together all day practically, word for word. They want to bring it out in October!!!

I am sorry to hear of Miss Marsden’s trouble and of course do not bother about the disk in such circumstances. All the same I was glad to have your notes on my voice and would like more about my non-rhetorical accents when you feel so inclined.

I hope the German publisher won’t rush the translation—and me.

With renewed good wishes and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 September 1926

Hôtel Astoria & Claridge, rue Royale, Bruxelles

Dear Miss Weaver: Yabcd was accepted by the Dial for 600 dollars and a week later they cabled, declining to print it as it stood whereupon I recalled it. (I enclose it in four pictures from the G.P.O. vestibule here.) I then set to work, in spite of moving about, to finish the U piece for Wyndham Lewis who wrote to me from Spain that he was coming to Paris to see me. I finished it and sent it to Paris to be typed and hope to correct it tomorrow and send it to you with the MS. I suppose no other review will take Yabcd but I will give it to anyone who will print it. Antwerp I renamed Gnantwerp for I was devoured there by mosquitoes. I liked Ghent and also Brussels. I would like to stay a week in the Ardennes before going back to Paris but I may not do so, as I am not sure when Mr Goyert may arrive in Paris to continue the German translation with me. I am sorry the Dial has rejected the pieces as I wanted them to appear slowly and regularly in a prominent place….

I finished my course of 64 Flemish lessons and will use bits of the language I have picked up for friend Sookerson, I think. Have you finished reading Patran and Tristpick and so on? A rather funny idea struck me that you might ‘order’ a piece and I would do it. The gentlemen of the brush and hammer seem to have worked that way. Dear Sir. I should like to have an oil painting of Mr Tristan carving raw pork for Cornish countrymen or anicebust of Herr Ham contemplating his cold shoulder.

I see you have had more storms in England. I am always glad when summer is gonnen out for that reason. I don’t think I have had more than three letters during the past two months, except from Miss Beach who recently wrote to me that a Cambridge student told her some professor there lectured on Ulysses and expected every pupil of his to know it like a textbook….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVEE, 26 September 1926

Hotel Astoria & Claridge, Bruxelles

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Here is U2 MS and typescript. Please let me know what you think of it, when read? The Dial proposed to delete one third of Yabcd! Lewis, it seems, has been to Paris and asked for the MS an is coming here as he wants to see me. ‘And I have done with you too, Mrs Delta’—for the moment. She will babble anon. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 30 September 1926

Trieste

Caro amico, Le invio la ‘Fiera letteraria’ del 19 corrente con l’articolo di Montale su Dubliners. Forse Lei non l’ha avuto ancora. Mi pare interessante. Montale non ricevette il ritratto che per lui Le avevo domandato. Deve essere andato smarrito.

Appartiene alla Sua famiglia un J. Joyce che nel 1850 pubblicò a Trieste ‘Recollections of the Salz Kammergut, Ischl, Salzburg, Bad Gastein, with a sketch of Trieste?’ Il libro fu scovato da mio genero per la sua collezione di storia patria.

Io vidi per un istante Suo fratello al bagno di mare e mi disse che si sposa in ottobre. V’è la speranza di vedervi tutti qui?

Salutandola caramente, Suo devotissimo

Ettore Schmitz

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 October 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: On calling at Miss Beach’s the other morning I got your letter of the 9 instant with its bad news. You say you are going to Guildford today so I hope you may receive this on arrival there. I am much distressed to hear of your brother’s death in such a way. Surely, though a doctor, he must have neglected or misunderstood his case. It seems to me to have been similar to Wallace’s whose life, I am sure, was saved by a timely operation last spring. It is very shocking to think of. You do not say whether the niece you speak of is his daughter or not. You will have a very gloomy return to your sister. I hope her case will not be aggravated by the death of her brother and that your family will be spared any of these dreadful troubles for a long time to come.

In these circumstances I shall not weary you with news and articles and gossip. I set to work at once on what you told me and shall go on. I know it is no more than a game but it is a game that I have learned to play in my own way. Children may just as well play as not. The ogre will come in any case.

With my sympathy to you and your family and my kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, [Early November 1926]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: Miss Beach has sent you the typescript I had made for you. As you know the Dial accepted it for $650 and then cabled a refusal. It has now been accepted for publication in an annual which a number of American writers bring out in February for $200. It is the whole of part 3 of the book. There are 4 parts, divided each into 4 sections. Some of part 1 appeared in Contact, Criterion, This Quarter and Le Navire d’Argent (the end of that part). A piece of part 2 was in the Transatlantic Review. None of part 4 has been printed.

Please let me know what you think of it. The sign on the cover means nothing. It is to distinguish it from other similar books. I use the signs Y Z U T etc through my notes instead of letters as they are quicker to make and read as references.

I hope Mrs Pound and yourself are well and that you especially are getting stronger down there Kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 5 November 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I enclose Lire 6000.—in draft on Trieste and Milan. I hope it reaches you in time with our best wishes to Nelly and yourself. Let me know if you get it. I am utterly overworking myself. Roth is pirating Ulysses (bowdlerized) in a new monthly magazine of which he sells 50,000 copies a month. I have tried to enjoin the publication but there seems to be no remedy. The Germans, having given me four days at Ostende, to revise the translation with the translator (we did 88 pages) are now rushing the translation into print. It is of course full of the absurdest errors and with large gaps. Such is financial literature. If they do not give me a délai, I shall ask Miss Beach to circularize the German press with a disclaimer.

I hope your arrangements are all made and that your marriage will soon come off and that it will be a very happy one.

Buona fortuna!

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 November 1926

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I shall not allude to the sad subject of your letter except to say that perhaps it is enough that your sister’s improvement has not been completely undone by such a sudden shock as she had. I hope she will go on as before. A good friend of mine in Trieste, count Sordina (to whom with another Greek I owe my liberation from Austria) had practically the same kind of stroke and is now out and about. He must be about sixty, if not more.

I set to work at once on your esteemed order and so hard indeed that I almost stupefied myself and stopped, reclining on a sofa and reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for three whole days. But this morning I started off afresh. I am putting the piece in the place of honour, namely the first pages of the book. Will try to deliver same punctual by Xmas. But cd send sample, viz. page 1, if customer so desires. The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. Your piece is the prelude to the Contact piece which is continued by the MS you have, the Criterion, This Quarter and Navire d’Argent where the first part of the book ends. The third part you have also Yabcd. I have written only a small part of the second, ending with Roderick O’C. The fourth will be shorter than the others.

The news is. Ernest Walsh died of consumption. Antheil had bad double pneumonia but got over it and is gone to Chamonix. Roth issues a monthly in which he prints a garbled Ulysses. He sells, I am informed, over 40,000 copies a month and has already published one third of the whole work. We cabled to John Quinn’s successor to enjoin him. After ten days he cabled, declining to take up the case. We are trying to stop the publication by means of friends in the Attorney General’s office on other grounds. I gave Yabcd to Mr Galantiére to sell in the U.S.A. The Rheinverlag want to rush out next month with a translation of which I have verified 88 pages. They decline to let the translator come here. I informed them that the German literary press would be circularised with a disclaimer if they did. Now am waiting. Pound has gone to Rapallo and wants to bring out a review. He asked me to send him Yabcd to read. His child is here at nurse. I sent you some papers which you can perhaps send on for the files afterwards.

It is a long time or seems so since I wrote to this address. You may perhaps see me disguised as an Italian organist grinding out the prosepoem under your window maugre the prohibition on the corner.

P.S. Re sample vide above. Reply will oblige respeakfolly yours

M.M. Inkpen & Paperasses
(Writers to the Signet)

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 November 1926

brings us back to

Howth Castle & Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, had passencore rearrived on the scraggy isthmus from North Armorica to wielderfight his penisolate war; nor had stream rocks by the Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County, Ga, doublin all the time; nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick; not yet, though venisoon after, had a Kidscad buttended a bland old isaac; not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone jonathan. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Shem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the waterface.

James Joyce

Paris. 15/xi/926

Dear Madam: Above please find prosepiece ordered in sample form. Also key to same. Hoping said sample meets with your approval

yrs trly

Jeems Joker

Howth (pron Hoaeth) = Dan Hoved (head)

Sir Amory Tristram 1st earl of Howth changed his name to Saint Lawrence, b in Brittany (North Armorica)

Tristan et Iseult, passim

viola in all moods and senses

Dublin, Laurens Co, Georgia, founded by a Dubliner, Peter Sawyer, on r. Oconee. Its motto: Doubling all the time.

The flame of Christianity kindled by S. Patrick on Holy Saturday in defiance of royal orders

Mishe = I am (Irish) i.e. Christian

Tauf = baptise (German)

Thou art Peter and upon this rock etc (a pun in the original aramaic)

Lat: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram

Parnell ousted Isaac Butt from leadership

The venison purveyor Jacob got the blessing meant for Esau

Miss Vanhomrigh and Miss Johnson had the same christian name

Sosie = double

Willy brewed a peck of maut

Noah planted the vine and was drunk

John Jameson is the greatest Dublin distiller

Arthur Guinness ” ” ” ” brewer

rory = Irish = red

rory = Latin, roridus = dewy

At the rainbow’s end are dew and the colour red: bloody end to the lie in Anglo-Irish = no lie

regginbrow = German regenbogen + rainbow

ringsome = German ringsum, around

When all vegetation is covered by the flood there are no eyebrows on the face of the Waterworld

exaggerate = to mound up

themselse = another dublin 5000 inhabitants

Isthmus of Sutton a neck of land between Howth head and the plain

Howth = an island for old geographers

passencore = pas encore and ricorsi storici of Vico

rearrived = idem

wielderfight = wiederfechten = refight

bellowed = the response of the peatfire of faith to the windy words of the apostle

 ® 

From EZRA POUND, 15 November 1926

Rapallo

MS. Private

Dear Jim: Ms. arrived this A.M. All I can do is to wish you every possible success.

I will have another go at it, but up to present I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization.

Doubtless there are patient souls, who will wade through anything for the sake of the possible joke … but … having no inkling whether the purpose of the author is to amuse or to instruct … in somma….

Up to the present I have found diversion in the Tristan and Iseult paragraphs that you read years ago … mais apart ça…. And in any case I don’t see what which has to do with where…. Undsoweiter. [Yrs ever

E P]

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 November 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: The phrase about the Waterworld’s face is mine own. Please correct ‘Sir Tristran, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived fra North Armorica on the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor’ etc. I sent Yabcd to E.P. at his request and he has written turning it down altogether, can make nothing of it, wading through it for a possible joke etc. I sent you papers about the Roth affair. I have been greatly overworked and overworried these last few weeks and yesterday took to the sofa again. Today I restarted. One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. I think you will like the piece better than sample. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To BERNARD SHAW, 26 November 1926

Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Sir: Allow me to offer my felicitations to you on the honour you have received and to express my satisfaction that the award of the Nobel prize for literature has gone once more to a distinguished fellow townsman Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To LILY BOLLACH, 29 November 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Stanford

Dear Miss Bollach: A very tragic event in my family (the Italian branch of it) and the worry and trouble of the piracy and lawsuit (see papers sent herewith) are my excuse for the delay in answering you. I shall be happy if I am able to do anything for your friend and shall bear his case in mind though I don’t understand if you mean literary or commercial work. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 November 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Madam i ave today finished the draft No 2 in nice MS of peece of prose yr rispected O/ to me which i will now give 1 coat of french polish to same which will turn out A 1 as desired it is a very nice peece and i ope same will be found most sootable to your bespoke in question i am, Madam trly yrs

Z (his mark)

 ® 

From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 December 1926

[London]

MS. Private

To Mr. Z Sir, Pleased to hear job completed barring coat 3 polish. Congratulate you on smartness in execution of order solicited, given and received a bare two months ago, days on sofa not excluded.

Further order: please to insert, incorporate or otherwise include in text of work now in hand or of any work hereafter to be in hand numpa one firstclass beauful phrase anent the face of waterworld which it would be very many pities if same was to succomb or be drownded in note for private consumption on premises only. Yours ffly

Revaew Teirrah

pp H.W.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 December 1926

[Paris]

MS. Private

To t.r. Mem: 5.12.926:

Insertion desired duly made
Z joiners hand
checked by J.J. overseer

Re T pp v to xxvi

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Stannie, The notary says it is useless to make a sworn statement before him. I am to make a simple declaration, send it to you, who, as curator, are to recognise it in a sworn statement as true.

I am busy and worried. American lawyers refused to take up this case but at last I have got one who says he will try to stop the publisher by backstairs influence. The American press, to which my publisher cabled and wrote does not publish cable or letter and continues to print Roth’s full-page advertisements, knowing them to be a swindle. He is pocketing at least 1,000,000 francs a month.

I am also very hard at work.

Do not tell me for the moment any more details, but propose to me some temporary plan and say what you suggest I do, say, till March. I go then to Lugano for a week or so and we could meet. Many happier returns of the 17th. Regards to Eileen and children.

Jim

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To MRS MYRON C. NUTTING, 17 December 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Northwestern

Dear Mrs Nutting: Many thanks for your courteous thought. I am glad you liked the piece I read. I was not at all well and had a collapse myself after it like the old gentleman in it but am better today.

I thank Nutting and yourself for coming Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 December 1926

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose your piece. I read it a few days ago to a small audience. Though I was partly smothered by a cold and in a state of exhaustion it seems to have made an impression for the next day also I received letters and bouquets! I performed a firstclass collapse for a day and a half which I repeated on Saturday but today am feeling quite well again.

I hope you will like it. I think it will make a good opening. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

1927

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 8 January 1927

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmannn)

Dear Stannie, Yes, allright. I will arrange for £10 a quarter to be sent to Eileen in Dublin from the time she arrives. As regards the rest of 6000 lire, you will have to use it, I am afraid. I have no money at present. In fact, I got a loan off my April cheque to send that. My income is £18 a week, not quite £1000 a year. My books between New York and London bring me in about £60 extra. Ulysses sold well there last five years, but Roth has killed the sales here, too, and has (or will) pocket the proceeds of 25 normal editions. Not a single daily or weekly in U.S. published our cabled denial. I am engaged in a very costly law suit, but will go on even if I lose it. I have organised an international protest to make this a test case for the reform of U.S. law. Please ask Benco to sign enclosed (incomplete) lists and return to 12 rue de l’Odeon as soon as possible. I wish he could get a few other good signatures: Praga, Bracco, Panzini. We cannot lose time. If Roth carries this through, the pirates in America will make it the beginning of even worse.

Will you please send me Lecky and Kettle’s two books?

I hope things are better now.

Jim

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 January 1927

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: These few lines are to show you how the protest is going. Shaw, Yeats, Moore, Pound and James Stephens refuse to sign. Tant pis! It is impossible to get a reply from Lewis (who was so anxious to have something of mine in his new review) so I have sent the piece to New York to try to get American copyright. I am plunged again in work. I want to try to finish Part I before 2 February or very soon after and, if possible, get away for some weeks. I cannot work at Part 3 in this way. It is too much. I must take it easier. Nobody else does it or a tithe of it.

I feel greatly honoured by Einstein’s signature, given so quickly and simply. The lawcase in my name is proceeding in New York.

My eyes are about the same perhaps a wee bit better. Dr Borsch was made officier de la légion d’honneur yesterday. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [Late January 1927]

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: The protest will be mailed to the press 1 February. If you have seen any signature added please wire name

Jim

 ® 

To VALÉRY LARBAUD, 26 January 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Will Mrs Nebbia and yourself dine with us and a small party at Langer’s, Champs Elysées, at 8 pm on Wednesday 2 February next? It is my birthday and the anniversary (5th) of publication of Ulysses and the international protest will be given to the press that day. Miss Beach, Mlle Monnier, the MacLeishes, Sisley Huddleston and two Irish friends of mine make the party. Please let me know by return as I have to reserve a table Kindest regards

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 February 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope your neuralgia is gone, never to return. Your letter gave me a nice little attack of brainache. I conclude you do not like the piece I did? I have been thinking over it. It is all right, I think—the best I could do. I will gladly do another but it must be for the second part or fourth and not till after the first week in March or so, as the editors of Transition liked the piece so well that they asked me to follow it up and I agreed to finish off the part between the end of Contact and Criterion for the second number. Part I will then have been published. Do you not like anything I am writing. Either the end of Part I U is something or I am an imbecile in my judgment of language. I am rather discouraged about this as in such a vast and difficult enterprise I need encouragement.

It is possible Pound is right but I cannot go back. I never listened to his objections to Ulysses as it was being sent him once I had made up my mind but dodged them as tactfully as I could. He understood certain aspects of that book very quickly and that was more than enough then. He makes brilliant discoveries and howling blunders….

The protest appears tomorrow. It has been cabled to 900 papers in U.S. I feel honoured by many of the signatures and humiliated by some, those of Gentile, Einstein and Croce especially. It is curious about them too on account of Vico. I think perhaps Pound wishes to remain in that small circle of shadow reserved for those Whose signatures are ‘supererogatory’ and I shall write to him so. There are the reserved seats and now let us sit down in peace and wait till the band begins.

For he’s a jolly queer fellow

And I’m a jolly queer fellow

And Roth’s bad German for yellow

Which nobody can deny.

 ® 

Statement regarding the piracy of Ulysses, 2 February 1927

Paris

It is a matter of common knowledge that the ULYSSES of Mr. James Joyce is being republished in the United States, in a magazine edited by Samuel Roth, and that this republication is being made without authorization by Mr. Joyce; without payment to Mr. Joyce and with alterations which seriously corrupt the text. This appropriation and mutilation of Mr. Joyce’s property is made under colour of legal protection in that the ULYSSES which is published in France and which has been excluded from the mails in the United States is not protected by copyright in the United States. The question of justification of that exclusion is not now in issue; similar decisions have been made by government officials with reference to works of art before this. The question in issue is whether the public (including the editors and publishers to whom his advertisements are offered) will encourage Mr Samuel Roth to take advantage of the resultant legal difficulty of the author to deprive him of his property and to mutilate the creation of his art. The undersigned protest against Mr. Roth’s conduct in republishing ULYSSES and appeal to the American public in the name of that security of works of the intellect and the imagination without which art cannot live, to oppose to Mr. Roth’s enterprise the full power of honorable and fair opinion.

(signed)

Lascelles Abercrombie, Richard Aldington, Sherwood Anderson, René Arcos, M. Arcybacheff, Ebba Atterbom, Azorin, Président de l’Académie Espagnole, C. du Baissauray, Léon Bazalgette, Jacinto Benavente, Silvio Benco, Julien Benda, Arnold Bennett, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Konrad Bercovici, J.D. Beresford, Rudolf Binding, Massimo Bontempelli, Jean de Bosschère, Ivan Bounine, de l’Académie Russe, Robert Bridges, Eugène Brieux, de l’Académie Française, Bryher, Olaf Bull, Mary Butts, Louis Cazamian, Jacques Chenevière, Abel Chevalley, Maurice Constantin-Wéyer, Albert Crémieux, Benjamin Crémieux, Benedetto Croce, Ernst Robert Curtius, Francis Dickie, H.D., Norman Douglas, Charles Du Bos, Georges Duhamel, Edouard Dujardin, Luc Durtain, Albert Einstein, T.S. Eliot, Havelock Ellis, Edouard Estaunié, de l’Académie Française, Léon-Paul Fargue, E.M. Forster, François Fosca, Gaston Gallimard, Edward Garnett, Giovanni Gentile, André Gide, Bernard Gilbert, Ivan Goll, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Cora Gordon, Jan Gordon, Georg Goyert, Alice S. Green, Julian Green, Augusta Gregory, Daniel Halévy, Knut Hamsun, Jane Harrison, H. Livingston Hartley, Ernest Hemingway, Yrjo Hirn, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sisley Huddleston, Stephen Hudson, George F. Hummel, Bampton Hunt, Bravig Imbs, Holbrook Jackson, Edmond Jaloux, Storm Jameson, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Eugene Jolas, Henry Festing Jones, George Kaiser, Herman Keyserling, Manual Komroff, A. Kouprine, René Lalou, Pierre de Lanux, Valery Larbaud, D.H. Lawrence, Emile Legouis, Wyndham Lewis, Ludwig Lewisohn, Victor Llona, Mina Loy, Archibald MacLeish, Brinsley Macnamara, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Antonio Marichalar, Maurice Martin du Gard, Dora Marsden, John Masefield, W. Somerset Maugham, André Maurois, D. Merejkowsky, Régis Michaud, Gabriel Miro, Hope Mirrlees, T. Sturge Moore, Paul Morand, Auguste Morel, Arthur Moss, J. Middleton Murry, Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Seumas O’Sullivan, Elliot H. Paul, Jean Paulhan, Arthur Pinero, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Prévost, de l’Académie Française, C.F. Ramuz, Alfonso Reyes, Ernest Rhys, Elmer E. Rice, Dorothy Richardson, Jacques Robertfrance, Lennox Robinson, John Rodker, Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, Bertrand Russell, George W. Russell ‘A.E.’, Ludmila Savitsky, Jean Schlumberger, May Sinclair, W.L. Smyser, E. Œ. Somerville, Philippe Soupault, André Spire, Th. Stephanides, James Stephens, André Suarès, Italo Svevo, Frank Swinnerton, Arthur Symons, Marcel Thiébaut, Virgil Thomson, Robert de Traz, R.C. Trevelyan, Miguel de Unamuno, Paul Valéry, de l’Académie Française, Fernand Vandérem, Fritz Vanderpyl, Francis Viélé-Griffin, Hugh Walpole, Jacob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Anna Wickham, Thornton Wilder, Robert Wolf, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats

 ® 

To CLAUD W. SYKES, 10 February 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: Do you think you could spare any time to look through the German proofs (page) of Ulysses. I told you about it. The firm has rather rushed the translation and it would be a pity if it contained bad errors as the French translation is almost a masterpiece, they say.

I am sending a letter of protest which will interest you

Kind regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself from us both Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To VALERY LARBAUD, 10 February 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Is Mrs Nebbia quite recovered now as my wife would like her to have tea some afternoon, and we ought to dine together one of these nights. By the way, ought not a footnote to appear to Protée to say that this title is not in the original text? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 February 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Marsden: Before I write trying to explain what I am doing and why I want the case of Pound’s soundness of judgment at the present moment more gone into. I am glad you agree about Dunning. Some time ago Mrs Symons asked me (from her husband) if I had not written any verse since Chamber Music and if it would collect. I said it would make a book half as big but I did not trust my opinion of it as I rarely thought of verse. There are about fifteen pieces in all, I think, and I suppose someone someday will collect them. I mentioned this to Pound and asked could I show him, say, two. I left them at his hotel. A few days after I met him and he handed me back the envelope but said nothing. I asked him what he thought of them and he said: They belong in the bible or the family album with the portraits. I asked: You don’t think they are worth reprinting at any time? He said: No, I don’t. Accordingly I did not write to Mrs Symons. It was only after having read Mr Dunning’s drivel which Pound defends as if it were Verlaine that I thought the affair over from another angle. They are old things but are they so bad that Rococo is better than their poorness?… Remember me to Miss Marsden. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, 23 February 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: My lawyer here Conner has had a cable from his partner in N.Y. ‘Have J. search his records to determine whether he sold American copyright to Jane Heap as she claims’. Can you send me a short typewritten note which I can show my lawyer here as to what I gave you from Zurich for the review, how much you paid (£50?), etc? I should like it by return. Roth now offers me $1000 if I will sign a statement to the effect that he offered me that sum before the publication. I do not intend to reply to him. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES, 26 February 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Mr Sykes: Yes. Ulysses has been done by the same man. It is not his fault, he is forced to do it on time. The edition will be dear (£10 a copy) very luxurious etc and [?] not scamped. I cannot control them completely but something I can do. Proofs will be sent to you 100 pp at a time. It is very kind of you to say you will look through them. Any ideas that occur you may jot down in the margin. Thanks very much.

I got your novel from your publishers I think and shall start to find out the mystery as soon as this lawsuit is well launched. I hope it sells well. I will send you the opening pages of my new book, a piece which will appear here 15 March. If you can solve its ninetynineangular mystery will you please let me know….

We are glad to learn Mrs Sykes and yourself are well. At Ostende this summer we met Devries who is there pulling all the teeth and legs he can.

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 March 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I am overwhelmed by works and worries. I enclose proofs of The Giant’s Howe which I hope will please you better in print. Two curious things. Huddleston told me he is of Scandinavian stock and was born in Barrow-in-Furness, where there is a giant’s mound. A Chinese student sent me some letterwords I had asked for. The last one is K. It means ‘mountain’ and is called ‘Chin’, the common people’s way of pronouncing Hin or Fin.

My desk is loaded with German proofs of U. I am trying to get people to read them. I had to revise K and read it again for the editors of Transition. They liked it so much that they want the suite for the April number and will then reprint May to July the Criterion, This Quarter, and Navire so as to publish seriatim all Part I. I am working away at the suite of K.

French and German papers published the protest. English and American mostly not: libellous they call it. However an English paper Humanist has been found which will print it with facsimile of signatures photographed….

Somebody has taken from the works at Dijon the complete final proofs of U corrected by me copiously and signed by Miss Beach and me (her property) and a dealer here is offering them for sale. Mr Darantière has been telegraphed for.

New letter from Roth’s lawyer and new cable from another lawyer saying he can stop publication of U if I wire authorising him….

I gave the set of verses to MacLeish, a young and talented American poet, to read.

Dring! Dring!

Five minutes rest here! Next stop Humphreystown!

 ® 

To EZRA POUND, 2 March 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: Thanks. That declaration ought to be enough. I cannot understand what she is doing (J.H.). We have cabled several times and can get no answer. I assume she is trying to help me but she is really impeding my case. The whole affair is a most dreadful bore. They say Conner is a very competent lawyer. The lawyer who sent me the offer from Roth wrote again this morning. R. apparently circulated the rumour that he had compromised the case with me so I had a cable sent denying that also.

I enclose Collins’s reply to Wallace which has just come. I hope it is of some use. By the way will you please send me back Yabcd, registered. I want to try to have it copyrighted in America. I am publishing the first pages of the book (Yabcd is Part 3) in a Paris review. When is the first number of Exile to appear?

I hope Mrs Pound and yourself are well. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To GEORG GOYERT, 6 March 1927

2, Square Robiac, 192, rue de Grenelle

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: Two other persons are reading your translation and I shall collect and transmit their suggestions with mine, which are pencilled. Please send me a list of your doubtful points and can you write your letters typed on account of my sight. What is the fare and the time of the train journey to Paris from Witten. Surely they will allow us to meet before the translation comes out! Have you done the end of the Oxen of the Sun? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 March 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: In view of the enclosed I have decided to publish my 13 pieces of verse (1904–1927) in a tiny volume like the Donne you gave me at 1/– one shelenk a copy and the title: Pomes Penny each [sic]. So they will be out of the way.

Darantière ‘gave’ my proofs years ago to a few in his works. There is to be an arbitrage and so on and more lawyers and so forth.

The P.E.N. club of London invited James the Punman to be guest of honour at a dinner in London on 5 April. As many English writers signed the protest I accepted. We leave here on 29 instant as it takes a week to cross the Woebegone.

The miners at Willingdone also offered to pay my fare up there and give me a ‘royal welcome’ if I would speak to them. I won’t speak but if I went to London I have been thinking of taking a trip Euston–Willingdone–Penrith–Barrow–Holyhead–Dublin–Galway etc. If circumstances allowed it, that is. My father has been writing to me for years. I don’t like so much going to Ireland but I don’t like to refuse him always.

Transition is held up a week by legal formalities but I suppose, as you don’t like K any better in his nice print frock that he will not appeal to you even in his 39 articles of clothing. As for me I am working away at the suite (I will sell my chances of going to London to end it all every word. O go on, go on, go on!). The typescript is like a caviare sandwich. Besides trying to revise the German muddle and patching up my wardrobe in order to look like a respectable litteratoor when I sit down at the dinnertable.

Please let me know if you approve of the publication.

Rushing for the Posht With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

16. (Ho! Ho! Tomorrow is Potreek’s Day, the sham rogue!) iii.927

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To GEORG GOYERT, Postmark 31 March 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: I shall be absent from Paris (in London where the P.E.N. Club is giving me a dinner) from 3 to 9 April. I corrected the sheet you sent me but cannot find it! Could you send me another. I am very sorry for my carelessness. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 April 1927 [Postcard]

Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I wish you a pleasant Easter up in the north. I finished my revision and have passed 24 hours prostrate more than the priests on Good Friday. I think I have done what I wanted to do. I am glad you liked my punctuality as an engine driver. I have taken this up because I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I am driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square.

 ® 

To RICHARD ALDINGTON, [? Late April 1927]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Texas

Dear Mr Aldington: During my absence from Paris your letter was mislaid. I am writing to thank you for your suggestion but suit was entered against Roth on 23 March and I shall wait the result. I understand his magazines have been stopped. I have to thank you also for your signature to the letter of protest. I think it will have some effect.

Have you still the dossier of the English Players which I sent you from Locarno? If so I shall be very glad if you will send it to Miss Sylvia Beach, 12 rue de l’Odeon, Paris. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From STUART GILBERT, 9 May 1927

42 Avenue Pasteur, Becon-les-Briyeres, Seme

MS. Private

Dear Sir Some weeks ago, at the Shakespeare Library, I happened to point out to Miss Beach a curious mistake in the translation of ‘Ulysses’ which appeared in the first number of ‘900’ and mentioned that I had compared the translation with my ‘Ulysses’ and noted in the otherwise excellent French version several discrepancies from your text. She was kind enough to give me a hearing and asked me to submit a note on these discrepancies. I enclose a note on some of these. There are others, less apparent, which, nevertheless, might interest you, and I am at your disposal, should you care to hear my observations.

If you would care, I am prepared to go through the French version and, tentatively, to make suggestions. I fully appreciate your translator’s colossal task and his skill in execution and would assist without officiousness and, I hope, with tact.

My reason for this demarche is that I hope the translation of ‘Ulysses’ may do for French literature what the original has done for English and that nothing may be lost in transit. I am not out for any remuneration or acknowledgement of any assistance I might give.

I enclose my card and, as further evidence of ‘educational qualifications’, add that I have an Oxford Honours Degree and converse bilingually, my wife being French, yours faithfully

A.S. Gilbert

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 12 May 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: Will you please send on to Miss Beach for her archives the papers I sent and also the German and Italian ones I shall send when you have read them. The former is very interesting. My verses have gone to the printer and last night I finished correcting proofs of my new book which will be published in a day or two. I mean instalment 3. The verses in …. Look at that! It must be Pound did it, I mean dun it. Seriously these pens are a terror. I can’t get one to work right. I filled it just before I began. The verses in a week or so. I hope the size of the libricciattoluccio will have the same stimulating effects on my colleagues as my libromaccione seems to be having and that we shall see plenty of 1 + 1 volumini about.

I shall use some of your suggestions about X1U+25A of which you have a right idea. The title is very simple and as commonplace as can be. It is not Kitty O’Shea as some wit suggested, though it is in two words. I want to think over it more as I propose to make some experiments with it also…. My remarks about the engine were not meant as a hint at the title. I meant that I wanted to take up several other arts and crafts and teach everybody how to do everything properly so as to be in the fashion.

I have offered the only copy (printed) of the Dublin edition of Dubliners, burned 1912, to Rosenbach and if he buys it I would like to go to the Dutch coast and rest; if that be possible. London gets worse and worse every year for storms in summer. Paris too with all this wireless. Among the latest to express dislike etc of my work is Sidney Schiff. I lay down my pen anyhow and if I knew anyone who I thought had the patience and the wish and the power to write Part II on the lines indicated I think I would leave the chair too and come back in a few years to indicate briefly how Part IV should be done. But who is the person? There is no such absurd person as could replace me except the incorrigible god of sleep and no waster quite so wasteful though there is one much more so. Peer Gynt says at least:

Han er faderligt syndet imod min Person

Men økonom!—nej, det er han ikke!

P.S. I want to see as a test if you can read these 2 lines of Norwegian? It is when the ship stolen from Peer Gynt blows up at sea with all his goods. He is on the strand, stranded.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 13 May 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Phoenix park.
— symbol used by Michelet to explain Vico’s theory

O felix culpa! S. Augustine’s famous phrase in praise of Adam’s sin. Fortunate Fault! Without it the Redeemer wd not have been born. Hence also for the antecedent sin of Lucifer without which Adam wd not have been created or able to fall.

Ex nihilo nihil fit

Ex malo bonum fit
Out of nothing comes nothing
— — evil — good

Nicky (Old Nick, Lucifer, Satan)

Mickelmassed (Michael, his conqueror = much heaped up)

Malum in Latin means evil and apple.

Hill, rill, ones in company &c
This rhythm occurs often
Arthur Guinness, Sons & company, Ltd
Awful Grimmest Sunshat Cromwelly, Looted.
— — Sons & Company, & their carriageable tochters

Hill = C

Rill = U

Less be proud, be proud of them but naturally, as hill (go up it) as river (jump it).

Norronesen = Old Norse, warrior

Irenean = Irish born, peace (eirene)

secrest = superlative of most secret

soorcelossness =the source is not to be found any more than that of the Nile

Quare siles = Why are you silent

Homfrie Noanswa (Albert Nyanza)

Unde gentium festinas? Where the dickens are you hurrying from?

Livia Noanswa (Victoria Nyanza)
the source of the Nile, later supposed to represent C + U
the quarry & the silexflint suggest C silent
undy, gentian & festy hues suggest U running & bubbling.

Wolken = (woollen cap of clouds (wolkin — welkin)

Frowned = He is crowned with the frown of the deaf

Audi urio (I long to hear)

Es urio (” ” ” eat)

Evesdrip = wd listen to the dripping drops of his house’s e(a)ve Uwater.

mous = Chaucerian form to suggest distance in time

dinn = Oriental mixture of din & djinn, the noise of an angry armed spirit, to suggest distance in space

bottles (battles) = the vintner’s dream of Satan & Michael

far ear = far east

mous at hand = close at hand

Mark! (the King & the admonition)

His vales etc His hill begins to be clouded over in the effort to hear

With lithpth Ubabble

Hairfluke (Herrfluch = the curse of the Lord on you for not talking louder, he tries to grab her hair which he hopes to catch by a fluke

If he could bad twig her
twig = Anglo-Irish = understand
twig = beat with a twig.

Impalpabunt

Oculos habent et non videbunt

Aures habent et ” audient

Manus ” ” ” non palpabunt
His ear having failed, he clutches with his hand & misses & turns away hopeless & unhearing (he abhears)

Mr Garnett says he can only stare (a man of letters, of a literary family and a very whimsical and good writer himself) like at a cow at this. So much the worse for the cow.

J. J.

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To SYLVIA BEACH, N.D. 1927

No address

Dear Miss Beach: Since you go and pay several hundred francs postage (!) on these scribbles etc of mine it is possible you may wish to have the MS of Dubliners so I shall give it to you when it arrives. I will sell only the dummy copy of the first edition. I think part of the Dubliners MS is Dublin work. I have also a heap of MS in Trieste that I forgot all about until this instant about 1500 pages of the first draft of the Portrait of the Artist (utterly unlike the book). I will ask my brother to send it also and you can have it with pleasure. I think I will put a shop price of $400 on the dummy as Yeats says it would be valuable and not to sell it cheap. Rosenfelt will have to pay it all together or I will not sell it.

Can these words be still cut on the plate after (as sung by Phoblocht)

Music by O. Gianni!   Words by A. Hames¡

(the second exclamation made upside down)

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 May 1927

2 Square Robiac 192, rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I am sorry to have to trouble you with a request. I am afraid you will find it tedious but I think you ought to read the proofs of instalment 4. I send you herewith the final MS additions and the proof should be read with both, my handwriting will be more familiar than my son’s, the final additions are in green ink. I shall correct the proofs from the perhaps faulty copy in Elliot Paul’s possession at the same time. It will be sent to you in a few days. Also if any of my additions or changes have not appeared in instalments 1, 2 and 3 I should be glad if you would indicate page and line, referring to transition.

I leave tomorrow for Holland and will send my address. Mr Donald Friede, owner of Boni and Liveright, offered me this morning $2000 down and 15% royalties to publish my new book, but I declined.

As regards that book itself and its future completion I have asked Miss Beach to get into closer relations with James Stephens. I started reading one of his last books yesterday Deirdre. I thought he wrote The Return of the Hero which I liked. His Charwoman’s Daughter is now out in French. He is a poet and Dublin born. Of course he would never take a fraction of the time or pains I take but so much the better for him and me and possibly for the book itself. If he consented to maintain three or four points which I consider essential and I showed him the threads he could finish the design. JJ and S (the colloquial Irish for John Jameson and Son’s Dublin whisky) would be a nice lettering under the title. It would be a great load off my mind. I shall think this over first and wait until the opposition becomes more general and pointed.

Dulce et decorum est prope mare sedere—boglatin for it is a sweet and seemly thing to sit down by the sea.

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To SYLVIA BEACH, 27 May 1927

Grand Hotel Restaurant Victoria, La Haye

MS. Buffalo

Dear Miss Beach: I return you herewith posthaste the pomes in their proper order with correct dates and text and an addition to face p. 2 and if you fill in the titlepage it is all right but I should like to check a final proof in bound proof. Has my brother not sent on the rest of the MSS yet? I am sorry I could not hear you. There is a station (on 1950) at Scheveningen but it runs in the season only for transmitting. There is scarcely a soul there on account of the cold spell so we stay in the town and tram it out: it is only about 10 minutes. Here it is very quiet and dear but the people are very civil and obliging and not rapacious really. It is the exchange and the small things do not hit them at all though to us they seem terribly dear. The strand is wild and endless. Unfortunately I had a dreadful time with a savage dog on Wednesday 25 inst. My wife and Lucia had gone for tea and I walked on a mile or so and lay down on my overcoat reading the baedeker and trying to make out the coastline when the brute rushed from Lord knows where at me. I beat him off a few times. His owner ran up and his mistress and they got him down but he slunk round when their back was turned and attacked me again in the same way fully four times. It lasted I am sure a quarter of an hour. In my alarm my glasses got knocked and one of the lenses flew away in the sand. When Madame or whatever she was finally tugged the animal away howling the owner and I went down on our knees and after groping for a long time found the lenses. I feel so helpless with those detestable animals. Revolver? I suppose he would have me before I made up my mind to fire. Or carry stones in my pocket? If I could do the trick of gentleman into fox I could save my breath better.

Thank Mrs Antheil for the words. I shall use some of them. As regards the rest I will explain to her in Paris. I hope Ulysses IX will soon ascend the papal throne. His motto is to be: Triste canis vulpibus = This ’ere dog will worry them there foxyboys. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 31 May 1927

Grand Hôtel-Restaurant Victoria, La Haye

Dear Miss Weaver: I have no news yet about the MS but I hope you got it. I got your letter with your guess at Ibsen’s (the Swedish writer as Lewis carelessly calls him) lines. Archer’s literal translation was, I think:

—He (God) is fatherly towards me in person But economical—that he is not!

the racier version, more in the lilt, would be

—He feels like a father for yours truly P.G. But a stickler for thrift—Holy Paul, that he isn’t!

As regards the title, ‘one squared’ can be used in the ‘math’ lesson by the writer of Part II if he, she or it is so ‘dispoged’. The title I projected is much more commonplace and accords with the J J & S and A.G.S. & Co sign and it ought to be fairly plain from a reading of K. The sign in this form means H C E interred in the landscape. It is rather singular hat for the last three years I have been carrying three photographs of Tuohy’s portraits in my pocket—those of my father, myself and James Stephens. The combination of his name from that of mine and my hero in A.P.O.T.A.A.Y.M. is strange enough. I discovered yesterday, through enquiries made in Paris, that he was born in Dublin on the 2 February 1882.

As regards K it seems to be rolling round the globe over all kinds of toes. A Boston University professor (?) criticising it says it was just turned off unconsciously in an idle half-hour. Dr Henry Seidl Canby (?) in a long review for the American equivalent of the Speaker (??) begins: Ulysses was a night book but this seems to be a day book with the rivers of Ireland for chief characters. A writer in a review of it in Laurens County, Georgia, says: We and the Oconee river of all places in the world are in it too. Why, Mr J. and his God alone know! Another writer: ‘He has determined to write as a lunatic for lunatics’. A young man called on me before I left Paris, knew a lot of it by heart, recites it to his friends and was very enthusiastic. I found that he did not understand many of the words. Another (or rather many) says he is imitating Lewis Carroll. I never read him till Mrs Nutting gave me a book, not Alice, a few weeks ago—though, of course, I heard bits and scraps. But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe this. I will read them both when I get back. I read a few chapters of a book called La langue de Rabelais. I have little inclination at present either to read or write. The last five years with three violent eye attacks, seven operations—the last particularly bad—nine editions of Ulysses, the piracy, protest, lawsuit and Pen dinner with its sequel and the French and German translations are quite enough to say nothing of the completion of Pts I & III amid all sorts of changing domiciles etc. I have asked Miss Beach to circulate transition among such people as professor Faÿ, Cazamian etc and I will try to think out some other plans—not for further writing, however. I have tried to keep off the stage as much as possible in the interest of other people’s finer feelings but evidently it is not enough. I hope the publication of P.P. (proofs of which are now revised) will be understood as my candidature for a post of minor poet. It will afford a good occasion for several who are that way inclined to let off their batteries against me. They can blow it to pieces. That will relieve them and do me no harm. Though if I may parody R.L.S. who, as you may know, was my stylemaster along with Little Lord Fauntleroy and Mr and Mrs Henry Wood:

As their heads are so full of a number of things

I am sure they should all be as happy as kings!

Here is the news. Mr Roth has published a letter in which he states on the authority of Dr Joseph Collins that I am really a jew. Mr Roth is up for preliminary examination today 31 floreal in New York City. Mr Lindbergh, a Norwegian Swedoyank, has arrived in Paris. Mr Lewis has also arrived in Paris and wants to hear Mr Antheil’s music if he can get to Mr Antheil’s room…. Miss Morehead has been boxing a round with Mr Pound. Mr Joyce, author of “‘Perce Oreille’” and other lyrics, was savagely attacked by a mongrel on the beach at Scheveningen on last Wednesday. I never got such a fright in my life, says poor blind Joyce. My glasses got broken and the dog’s master and mistress had a full quarter of an hour’s work to beat the animal off. His master repeatedly got him down and hit his head but the animal, pretending to give in, slunk around and made for me again. My wife and Lucia had gone to have tea and I was lying on my overcoat reading the guidebook and trying to make out where the Hook of Holland was when he rushed at me. His master and I spent a chatty time afterwards groping on our knees in the sand for the debris of my glasses—now restored.

It is a majestic beach indeed. A very restful country too, it seems. The cuisine is funny, ginger with breakfast, cinnamon in the beans, nutmeg in the spinach, pickled cucumbers on sale on the strand, and allspice in everything. Very civil people too. Do you know Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft?

P.S. Do you think the man or clergyman who wrote that pamphlet would be interested to see t.1? I am not joking. If so, I would have it sent. What is the local paper there? After all perhaps it might interest somebody somewhere sometime or another. I was going for the last time to explain the piece that Mr Hawk calls ‘disgusting, distorted rubbish’ but let it go.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 10 June 1927

Zaandam

MS. Cornell

Best greetings from here. Berlitz was right after all

Jim, Lucia, Nora

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 10 June 1927

Hotel Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: What is your present address? A little book of my verse is coming out in a day or two and I think you may like to have a copy. How do you get on with my pieces in transition??? I get threats denunciations, jokes etc by every sending of press clippings.

Kind regards to Mrs Sykes and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I hope your work on Ulysses is over. Amen!

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To MICHAEL HEALY, 1 July 1927

2 Square Robiac, Paris

My dear Mr Healy: We came back here a week ago driven out of Holland by cyclones in the north and those impressive exhibitions of celestial intemperance known as thunderstorms….

Otherwise we had a pleasant time in Holland. They have reduced work to a minimum there. They seem to be simple, polite and dignified folk. Well set up men and girls and women who laughed all the time, though perhaps my presence there explains their mirth. To see 600 of them in a Square eating silvery raw herrings by moonlight is a sight for Rembrandt. They put drugs from their Indies into everything—cinnamon in cauliflower, spice in spinach, curry which they call kerry—in the gravy and give you ginger and cheese (very good) as soon as they think you have your mouth open.

That dialect I spoke of, I think, is called Shelta. I fancy it is some corrupt Irish written backwards and used by gentlemen who don’t pay the rent.

I hope you are keeping well. The clerk of the weather must be a student of Shelta too for seemingly he reads the word summer backwards….

I get about fifty denunciations a week of my new work from all parts of the English-as-she-is-speaking world including Australia. I shall try to go away in August. I would like to go to Denmark but it’s a long, long way to Copenhagen and the fare’s right dear.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 July 1927

2 Square Robiac 192, rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … The publication of P.P. is of course held up. Pinker, my ‘agent’ sent back Yabcd from the U.S.A. No editor there would pay a cent for it. Also the one copy of the 1st burnt edition of Dubliners which I sent by MacLeish to America two months ago to be offered to Rosenbach has not yet been sold. I shall not be able to get any royalties of Ulysses IX for about six weeks. I have rent and fares and insurance to pay in the course of a week so I wish you could ask Messrs Monro to sell £100 for me and I will wire MacLeish to remit the sale sum to them for my account. Of course I put a stop price on it of $500.

Everything is greatly strained and tragic here lately. I got about 100 press clippings from all parts of the world, including Australia, ridiculing and attacking K and the other pieces. I foresee a good deal of difficulty in navigating Ulysses French version in view of recent events but I think I ought to have the opportunity of seeing that done before I finally retreat from here ‘carrying my coat under my arm so as to look like a philofficer’.

P.S. If MacLeish’s sale comes off before Monday or Tuesday I will wire you. My father’s and my portraits were in Salon but I have not collected notices yet. On looking into my pocketbook I find I have lost my own photograph. My father’s and Stephens’s are there. I will have a photograph taken (of the portrait).

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 July 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks. The cheque has arrived and I had written to MacLeish already on Saturday to have the proceeds of sale sent to Monro, Saw and Co. News here goes from bad to worse. Wallace died on Tuesday and was buried on Thursday…. As for Roth he now issues an appeal to the American public to subscribe to a Samuel Roth defence fund in the name of the liberty of beauty, and to fight his case. I am described as a renegade jew with an ‘organisation and vast funds’ behind him.

I initialled your copy of the verses as I thought a full signature in such [a] poor effort would look too ridiculous. The form is pleasing.

I am dejected enough by all these troubles…. That clergyman’s name is Rev. James Cropper. Ireland’s Eye (ey = island in Danish) is an islet off Howth Head. Phoenix Park is rather close but it is a place not built by hands—at least not all—whereas X is.

I have been checking proof after proof and am tired. The dinner I had arranged for at Miss Beach’s between J.J. and S. is of course off for the present. The footnote about him in the book I send confirms my statement. Lalou’s remark about my new work is in a very small minority indeed.– Do you remember was it you or I who sent to Mr Aldington the dossier of the English Players. I should like to have it back but he has not answered me. With kindest regards and thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT, Postmark 25 July 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: Many thanks for E.S and the rest. Prof Fey’s article is good but Bloom wears a chapeau melon not a silk hat (he is not yet canonised!) and Mrs Purefoy is not a Putzfrau. ‘Crab’ is a slang word for a pubic parasite (Fr. morpion) ‘Toby Tostoff’ is bogus Russian from the verb ‘to toss off’ an expression for ‘to masturbate’

We have just got back here. We had vile weather in Holland and here it is as bad.

Kind regards to Mrs Goyert and yourself

James Joyce

P.S. I will send N.R.F. when the piece appears.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 26 July 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am glad you got the booklet and did not dislike it. None of the others (Symons, Yeats, Pound, my father, brother etc) to whom I sent copies even acknowledged receipt of it. I expect Slocombe’s notice in the Herald will be the last as it was the first. Miss Beach and Miss Monnier have gone to Savoy. I did not change lawyer because a) it was nearly impossible to find one to act b) he is the most influential American in Paris except the ambassador c) all the dossier is in his office in New York d) his first act when Miss Beach retired was to send her his bill for services in her mother’s case e) I am not sure that I know all the facts of the case or that Miss Beach does e) [sic] his letter was so callous in any case that I thought it better not to antagonise him. Her father and sister arrive here in August. What the result will be I do not know.

It is now proposed that Miss Monnier is not to do successive editions of Ulysse. I understand that the N.R.F. will do them, if needed. She will do a limited semi-private edition, I think.

More kilos of abuse about K. Mr Shane Bullock calls me a monster and Mr Ben Hecht a Jack the Ripper. The review has received letters from former friendly critics, Edwin Muir, [sic] deploring my collapse.

I am working night and day at a piece I have to insert between the last and Z. It must be ready by Friday evening. I never worked against time before. It is very racking.

This house is shuttered up, ten out of twelve flats being left by absent families. I wish I saw some prospect of air and rest and relief from the storms and stifling heaviness but I see none. I enclose an explanation of one of the added phrases on p. 1 of last instalment. Two of your guesses were fairly near the last is off the track. The piece I am hammering at ought to reveal it. Please excuse this but I have Friday on the brain. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

[Enclosure]

L’Arcs en His Cieling Flee Chinx on the Flur.

1) God’s in his heaven All’s Right with the World

2) The Rainbow is in the sky (arc-en-ciel) the Chinese (Chinks) live tranquilly on the Chinese meadowplane (China alone almost of the old continents] has no record of a Deluge. Flur in this sense is German. It suggests also Flut (flood) and Fluss (river) and could even be used poetically for the expanse of a waterflood. Flee = free)

3) The ceiling of his T house is in ruins for you can see the birds flying and the floor is full of cracks which you had better avoid

4) There is merriment above (larks) why should there not be high jinks below stairs?

5) The electric lamps of the gin palace are lit and the boss Roderick Rex is standing free drinks to all on the ‘flure of the house’

6) He is a bit gone in the upper storey, poor jink. Let him lie as he is (Shem, Ham and Japhet)

7) The birds (doves and ravens) (cf the jinnies is a cooin her hair and the jinnies is a ravin her hair) he saved escape from his waterhouse and leave the zooless patriark alone.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 14 August 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I am sorry you have had bad news about illness in Miss Marsden’s family but I am glad it is over. We have had a sequence of storms here and I have been dragging on from one week to the next. At last I finished the piece for t.6 and had the MS sent you in two parcels. Please let me know if you get it. No 11 is Y in his know-all profoundly impressive role for which an ‘ever devoted friend’ (so his letters are signed) unrequestedly consented to pose (the appelation ‘darling X’ has also been addressed to me who am hopelessly given to the use of signorial titles). I wanted it as ballast and the whole piece is to balance Yabcd more accurately. I never worked against time in this way or in such troubling conditions. I think it is right enough. Y doctor is a bit husky beside the more melodious Shaun of the third part but the words of Trismegistus are harsh too after the songs of MacCormack….

I wish I could get away. In fact I need months and months of rest as I am wound up. My position is a farce. Picasso has not a higher name than I have, I suppose, and he can get 20,000 or 30,000 francs for a few hours’ work. I am not worth a penny a line and it seems I cannot even sell such a rare book as Dubliners (Dublin). Of course I have turned down a number of lecture tours in America and refused interviews.

I ought to hold on here till spring, I suppose, to see whether the German and French translations come out and how they go if they do. But it becomes more and more of a strain. I know if I go it will collapse….

I am more and more aware of the indignant hostility shown to my experiment in interpreting ‘the dark night of the soul’. The personal rancours of disappointed artists who have wasted their talents or perhaps even their genius while I with poorer gifts and a dreadful lot of physical and mental hardships have or seem to have done something would not apply in your [?my] case….

I saw A.E.’s review of P.P. It is not unfriendly though I doubt if he can like very much verse which is not about an idea. I don’t think reviews mean much always. Not a single notice appeared in the English press yet a London bookseller ordered 850 copies a few days ago and Dublin took 250. I saw orders from Naples, The Hague, Budapest etc. I suppose on certain types it will make the same impression as its author at the suppertable. One lady who came to pray remained to scoff. ‘He looked as if he were drowned’ she remarked. Et ça m’est parfaitement égal….

As to ‘Phoenix’. A viceroy who knew no Irish thought this was the word the Dublin people used and put up the mount of a phoenix in the park. The Irish was fiunishgue = clear water from a well of bright water there.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 14 September 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I did not leave Paris and even now doubt that I can. I found the projected trip London-Torquay too expensive, then rioting broke out here and we did not like to face American-frequented resorts in the south at least till after the 20th when the Legion Parade is over. Foreigners are being rounded up and we have to see to our identity cards. So I sent the children for 10 days to the channel coast and we stayed on here. I was besides working on the revision of Z which I finished Monday and had to work over the end of the German translation of Oxen of the Sun. It comes out on the 25 instant: 350 copies…. MacLeish wrote that he thought the bookseller could raise the price of the Dubliners copy so I cabled him to fix it at £200 and pay in that sum to Messrs Monro Saw for repurchase of the last two lots of stock….

My sight is not good, many operations have made [me] more diffident than ever. Some of the hostile criticisms of my new work seem to me imbecile but I would agree to sacrifice 1/4 if the rest is read or printed to be read and there is no other way. By 1 April I suppose Ulysses will be in a 10th edition and translated into German and French. I suppose I have spent a good 10,000 hours writing Pts 1 and 3 but I could not undertake even to sketch part 2 and the end unless my mind during the time is completely freed from strain. What happens after does not much matter.

There is also the lawsuit. The reason the other writers robbed did not intervene is because they did not care to risk their money in an American court. They will probably make a concerted move if Roth loses.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 8 October 1927

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I was quite ill last week, a collapse, but am all right. I am working very hard on the final revise of U on which I am prepared to stake everything. When I send it off I will write. I wonder if I can get away even then. I am glad you like the new Z. But I am utterly ‘moidered’ (Irish for confused in the head) by Anna Livia. I have spent at least another 150 at her toilet. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. The eyes are all right.

J.J.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, [? 18 October 1927]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Of course you are to have the casting vote in all discussions. I agree with every word of your letter to Miss Monnier. The German translation came out on Tuesday last. I could not write a line on Svevo—or anything else. I have just finished revision of Anna Livia for transition no 8. What a job! 1200 hours of work on 17 pages. She has grown—riverwise—since the night you heard her under the sign of Ursa Minor. Her fluvial maids of honour from all ends of the earth now number about 350 I think.

I hope to see you soon here. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. And now for your address???

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To GEORG GOYERT, 19 October 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: I have not yet seen the German Ulysses, I do not like at all the title So Sind Sie in Dublin, It is not my point of view which would be, if at all, ‘So Sind Wir in Dublin.’ But I like neither. If ‘Dubliners’ is impossible what about ‘In Dublin Stadt’ or ‘Dublin an der Liffey’?

Please let me know by return Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 October 1927

2 Square Robiac

Dear Miss Weaver: I anticipated. I did not really finish with U till 6 yesterday evening. The final proofreading alone took me five hours. I do not know what to think of it. Hundreds of river names are woven into the text. I think it moves. I hope you will like it and will write me about it as I am considerably wound up.

I have a budget of news but will wait for a day or so until the singsong fades out of my addled head.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 October 1927

2 Square Robiac

Dear Miss Weaver: I have not yet done with Mrs A.L. t.8 is out I believe but I am still working away on the final revise, as I am to read it to a group of ‘critics’ on Wednesday next. The stream is now rising to flood point but I find she can carry almost anything. Between t.8 which you will receive and the version there will be at most I suppose a difference of 50 or 60 words or expressions so I am curious to know what impression it makes on you since you heard it first. When I have at last got her off into the Irish sea I shall sigh with relief.

P.S. I got the German Ulysses—a most ‘kolossal’ and princely edition.

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 29 October 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: Referring to our last conversation I am to read the Anna Liffey piece here next Wednesday at 3.30 sharp on account of the light. If you would care to hear it please come. We shall be glad to see you Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 November 1927

2 Square Robiac

Dear Miss Weaver: The reading seems to have made a profound impression on the audience (about 25 people of the world’s 1500 million) but I have been literally doubled in two from fatigue and cramp ever since—in which plight I am also now. I was much better this morning but began to work again this afternoon….

t.8 has not yet arrived. I read from an advance copy. But from your letter I think you will not be in the mood to read it yet. There is an article in it by a schoolfriend of Pound’s to whom the latter had written, he tells me, denouncing my book as ‘backwash’ and urging him to have nothing to say to it. The article is an unexpected reply. Pound wrote to me a letter about a phrase or expression used, he alleges, by scholastics. I don’t know what he means or what it means as he quotes it.

A great number of Irishmen have been ringing my doorbell lately. I am not quite sure what they are all after. I have not had time to think it out on account of Mrs A.L.

It is agreeable to me to think you are back for a few days in Greenhalldoor Palace. I wish I was in Euston Castle, putting pomade on my hair to go to see the Drury Lane pantomime of the ovular ogre who sat on a wall etc. As I am not feeling well I will give up trying to be funny for the spasmodic moment and finish this tomorrow.

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To DANIEL BRODY, 7 November 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Brody

Sehr geehrter Herr Doktor: Die vier Bände der deutschen Ausgabe meines ‘Ulysses’ sind mir einige Tagen vor angekommen. Gestatten Sie dass ich Ihnen meinen besten Dank ausdrücke für Ihre höfliche Gedacht. Die Ausgabe ist wirklich sehr schön und geschmackvoll und hoffentlich wird sie auch in materiellem sowohl als in literarischem Sinn ein Lohn für alle Ihre Bemühungen. Ich mochte Ihr Exemplär unterschreiben. Vielleicht können Sie es bei Gelegenheit nach Paris schicken. In der Zwischenzeit sende ich Ihnen ein ganz kleines Bändchen als Gegengewicht zum ‘homerischen Ungeheuer’ Ihr ergebener

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, [? 8 November 1927]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: I have been a long time in replying to both your letters but I had not a moment for I was working all day on Anna Livia (transition 8) which I had to read after in its final amended form, putting in an extra 200 hours on the 1000 I told you of. And after that I did not feel at all well, nervous collapse etc.

As regards Covici it is kind of you to think of me. Roth has been pirating the thing in transition also so it is being set up in 3 copies in the U.S.A., 2 being sent to Washington and the 3rd to me so that I may have legal copyright of it. Part 1 has just finished in transition and next month I should begin to publish there serially also Part 3. But I do not intend to publish serially Part 2 or the shorter Part 4 when the 8 or 9 instalments of Part 3 are finished. Miss Beach, of course, has first claim on the right to publish but if my American copyright is secured I shall bear in mind your suggestion.

I cannot find the phrase you ask about either in Father Rickeby’s enormous edition of Aquinas or in the French one I have. The scholastic machinery of the process of thought is very intricate, verbum mentale and all the rest of it but I can find no such phrase as you quote. Perhaps it is used in logic or metaphysics. To my mind it does not convey as yet any very precise sense. These philosophical terms are such tricky bombs that I am shy of handling them, being afraid they may go off in my hands.

How is your health which is much more important. I heard from Bird that you had to undergo another operation. I hope it is not true or at least that it is well over and done with by now. I have nicely exhausted myself a goodly share of kicks (some of them aimed at me from that well of English undefiled, Tasmania!) and a few halfpennies of encouragement for which I am deeply grateful.

I hope Mrs Pound and your boy are well. Friendly regards from us all. With kind regards Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I forgot to send a little epigram I made after our last conversation, I think, about my new book. So here it is. I am writing it legibly.

E.P. exults in the extra inch

Wherever the ell it’s found

But wasn’t J.J. a son of a binch

To send him an extra pound?

The title I gave it (the epigram) was:

Troppa Grossa, San Giacomone!

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 November 1927

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … I suppose you now have transition 8. Since it came out I have woven into the printed text another 152 rivernames and it is now final as it will appear in the book except that I cannot get the way to render this in the annals ‘On this day the Liffey at Essex bridge was completely dry for two minutes’. I asked Miss Beach to send you Two Worlds in which Roth jeers at my gibberish which he booms in his advertisements as tremendous.

My state of exhaustion still continues but then I put in three more days on U since my last letter and in fact I have been obliged to write to the editors of transition to ask them to omit me from the next number.

The latest Irishman to ring my bell is ‘Cranly’ of the Portrait etc! The ‘Lynch’, he tells me, of the Portrait and Ulysses was fished up out of the Thames some months ago. He seems to have come from Ireland to see me, has never been on the continent before, can’t speak any French, has seen nothing in Paris and returns to Ireland after a stay of three days.

I had a rather strange dream the other night. I was looking at a Turk seated in a bazaar. He had a framework on his knees and on one side he had a jumble of all shades of red and yellow skeins and on the other a jumble of greens and blues of all shades. He was picking from right and left very calmly and weaving away. It is evidently a split rainbow and also Parts I and III.

And now may Allah who is infallahble guide this epistle of his lowliest and shed upon his sconce the quietude of the carpetweaver.

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To MRS J.F. BYRNE, 10 November 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Private

Dear Mrs Byrne, I am very glad to meet my old friend Byrne after so many years and it is most kind of you to allow him to stay a few days. I hope you will not be annoyed if we press him to stay over the weekend as the weather is very fine and he ought to see a number of things here before he leaves. The change too will do him good. He will go back on Monday or Tuesday unless you should wish him to return earlier. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 19 November 1927

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Sykes: I did not receive the letter you mention and thought you might be still in Denmark. I have written to Rhein verlag to send you one of my author’s copies. The edition was sold out in 3 weeks. Let me know when it reaches you. Many thanks for your kind references to my new work. I spent 1200 hours writing the piece in transition 8!

Friendly regards to you both Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 29 November 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle VII, Paris

MS. National Library

Dear Mr Palmer: Will you please send six of your settings of Chamber Music for middle voice, say, up to A flat or G natural to M. Slivinsky, Au Sacre du Printemps, 3 rue Cherche-Midi, Paris, VII. I think I can arrange with him to bring them out for you in a satisfactory way and they would have a good sale here, I am sure. Have you set any of Pomes Penyeach? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 14 December 1927

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I see by a card sent to 12 rue de l’Odeon that you are in Paris. If you have not left will you please ring me up (Ségur 95–20) before 11 a.m. on Thursday or Friday morning as I shall be glad to hear from you. I hope Suter got the presentation copy of the German Ulysses which I asked the publishers in Stuttgart to send him. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1928

To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 13 January 1928

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Thanks for letter and New Year’s wishes which I return. I am sorry Mrs Budgen and you had such a bad time. As for me the worst Xmas and New Year I can remember. I have been and am painfully ill—inflammation of intestines—caused by overwork and worry. Ring me up (Segur 95.20) any morning as I would like to talk with you. Did S get his Ulysses? I shall really have to go away and rest or I shall have a worse nervous breakdown.

J.J.

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To ELLIOT PAUL, [About January 1928]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Mr Paul: If compatible with existing text and still possible make the following changes please.

page 1.

A Tullagrove etc has a septain inclinaison

page 6

raucking his flavourite turvku in the smukking precincts of lydias

” 7

wedgemidden of the stream

lying low on his rawside

And (something follows here which I forget but if compatible add) diesmal he was laying him long on his laughside Many thanks sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Please have 3 copies of transition when out sent me by express. JJ

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 19 January 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I got your pneu and shall follow your instructions. But in that case I shall not call on the person in question till tomorrow (Saturday) so that there may seem to be no connection between our two visits. I shall call about another matter and introduce the principal theme casually but firmly. After which I shall write you to fix an appointment. It will be all right, I am sure. So don’t worry. Sincerely yours

J.J.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, Postmark 29 January 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I am recovering from a painful illness—inflammation of the intestines aggravated by work and worry. I have no money. On the 14th inst. I had to sell out £300 more of stock but have not yet got my cheque from the lawyers. As soon as it comes I will send on the 600 francs. I was forbidden all work. Some months ago I suspended the free-waiting list of transition which was costing me about 400 francs a month. The person referred to is Miss Weaver who has come to Paris on account of it and my illness, and this note was caused by my offer to James Stephens to take over the book. To my surprise he expressed the most unbounded admiration for it. His words are too extravagant to repeat but he spoke very generously.

Jim

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To the EDITOR of the Revue Nouvelle, 10 February 1928

Paris

Cher Monsieur, La demande que vous venez de me faire au sujet d’une contribution éventuelle de ma part à votre numéro spécial dédié à la mémoire de Thomas Hardy me touche profondément. Je crains malheureusement de manquer des titres nécessaires pour donner une opinion qui ait une valeur quelconque sur l’œuvre de Hardy, dont j’ai lu les romans il y a tant d’années que je préfère ne pas en faire le compte; et en ce qui concerne son œuvre poétique, je dois vous avouer que je l’ignore complètement. Il y aurait donc de ma part une singulière audace à émettre le moindre jugement sur la figure vénérable qui vient de disparaître: il vaut mieux que je laisse ce soin aux critiques de son pays.

Mais quelque diversité de jugement qui pourrait exister sur cette œuvre (s’il en existe), il paraît par contre évident à tous que Hardy offrait dans son attitude du poète vis-à-vis du public, un honorable exemple de probité et d’amour-propre dont nous autres clercs avons toujours un peu besoin, spécialement à une époque où le lecteur semble se contenter de moins en moins de la pauvre parole écrite et où, par conséquent, l’écrivain tend à s’occuper de plus en plus des grandes questions qui, du reste, se règlent très bien sans son aide.

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 15 February 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: You must have had a bad time on the Manche but O think of what you are away from here. Friede has not replied. He told Antheil that I had concluded a pact with him and disposed of the book. Miss Beach, as I suspected, seems to have believed this and still half believes it. Conner over the telephone today told me that it seems to him a second Roth affair and that for the moment I was completely in Friede’s power and to proceed very carefully. This is what I tried to do. Hill, transition’s lawyer, wrote saying: You will see by the enclosed copy of Mr F.’s letter to me that he has ceded the copyright to Mr Joyce. There was no enclosed copy. He was cabled to but has not replied. I wanted the current issue of t. and the first ½ of Yabcd which I had set up to reach my lawyers before any other person could copyright them and have them set up there at my expense but Mr Jolas has been ringing up to say the printer had a special holiday etc and so t. 11 has gone to America. Miss Beach and Mr Jolas had a fine old set-to on the heels of which I arrived. There was an awful lot of snappy thunder in the air but I managed to keep to my point. Jolas has just written a very good article and while I want an explanation I don’t want a quarrel which may be unnecessary. Miss Monnier is still grippée (so is Miss Moschos now) but when she gets better there will be a general brisking up of the artillery. Moreover my trunk’s by no means the trunk he used to was and as for my poor brainbox why it’s falling down all the time and being picked up by different people who just peep inside as they replace it and murmur ‘So we thought’!

Lucia dances through it all. She was very good, I think.

I am very glad you came to Paris for at least I know where I stand. Of which more anon.

I met the greatest editor in the world in the office of the consulate of the greatest empire on earth. He signed the power of attorney, saved me 25 francs, took me home in a taxi and offered me an aperitif—unaccepted. The greatest surprise in history. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [16 March 1928]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Eileen and the children stayed here 4 days. I paid for that and also 2nd class and cabin fares to Dublin about 3000 francs in all. They left for Dublin just a fortnight ago today but I never heard from them that they had arrived nor do I know where they are.

I hope things are going well with you. Schmitz was given a dinner here last night by the Pen Club.

Jim

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To DONALD FRIEDE (Cablegram), 20 March 1928

Paris

TS. John H. Thompson

THANKS FOR DEED OF RELEASE COPYRIGHT RECEIVED HAVE ALREADY MADE ARRANGEMENTS THROUGH CHADBOURNE STANCHFIELD AND LEVY NEW YORK FOR PRINTING PRESENT AND SUBSEQUENT INSTALMENTS THERE TO PROTECT COPYRIGHT FOR ME

JOYCE

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 22 March 1928

Hotel du Rhin, Dieppe

MS. Cornell

Nora had a letter today from her mother to say that Eileen and the children had been down in Galway and had gone back to Dublin; I suppose. I have not yet heard from them but at least they reached Ireland

Best wishes to both of you

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, Postmark 26 March 1928

Hotel du Rhin & de Newhaven, Dieppe

MS. British Museum

Ondt (Nor) = angry

Gracehoper = Graeshoper (Nor)

Floh = Ger. flea

Luse = O.E. louse

Bienie = Biene (Ger) bee

Vespatilla = Lat. little wasp Ital.

pupa = entom. term: = doll

pulicy=Ital. dial = pula = flea

commence insects = commit incest

everlistings = laurel bushes

harry me &c=Vico, thunderclap, marriage with auspices, burial of dead, providence

puce = Fr. flea

fourmish = Fr. ant

Spinner’s = Ger. spider

fourmilierly = Fr. anthill

Tingsomingenting = Nor = nothing

Besterfarther = Nor grandfather
also conqueror

Zeuts = Zeus + Zeit (time)

myrmidins = myrmis Ger. ant

pszozlers = Pol. bee

sommerfugl = Nor butterfly

sphex = insect

Nix &c = Ger. dial. = Nothing

Pou = Fr. louse

lopp=Nor. flea

Weltall = Ger. universe

raumy = Ger. space

psyche = Gr. butterfly
also E. gloss

laus = Ger. louse

mouche = Fr. fly

chairmanlook = Germanlooking

wetting with waps (betting, wasp, wop (Americ. slang for Italian)

sylph = entom. term

Iomio = Ital Dio mio! (he is not on the sociallist but on the egolist).

Crick = cricket

whilepaper = time also wallpaper

lustre = 5 years also chandelier

mensas & seccles (tables & settles)
also months and siècles

ephemerids = insect living a day

the ternitary = eternity also termitary (white anthill)

cicada = Ital. kind of cricket

grillo = Ital cricket (aver grilli in capo = to have a bee in one’s bonnet)

leivnits = Leibnitz also live nits i e young lice (cf akKant, schoppinhour etc and other philosophers)

Tossmania = Tasmania, he stands on his head to be really ‘antipodal’

phthin = Gr. louse

lugly = ugly and luglio, It = July

Tournedo = tornado and tournedos (we turn our back to the wind)

tilehats = tall hats (tile, slang) also tiles from huts

Bora etc = Bora (adriatic wind)
Aurora Borealis

tetties =It. roofs also dial, breasts

coppe=rooftiles (It. dial)

unshrinkables = pyjamas

swarming of = Ger to be enthusiastic over (i.e. himself)

monkynous = monkeynuts also the ‘nous’ rational intelligence cf monasticism

confucion of minthe, confession of mind
‘infusion de menthe’

appi = Ital. beer

Libido

cosy fond tuttes = Così fan tutte (Mozart)
So do Ladies All.

Be jiltses etc. = By Jesus Christ
also By Jaysus wept/Dublin accent

schneezed = Germ to sneeze in snow (Schnee)

eyeforsight = Eifersucht. Ger. jealousy

wittol = O.E.—a conniving cuckold

spizz = Ital dialect = itch

spass = Germ amusement

formicolation =Lat. ant also penis & melding [?]

amiesing = Ger. ant

faith hope & charity

Dorcu = Irish grasshoper

Dunshager = Irish anthill

odderkop = other head
also Nor spider

myre = mire also Nor
ant

actual grace

sanctifying ”

despair and presumption are sins against hope

Χορος

Dear Miss Weaver: These few lines of explanation may be useful. I would continue but I feel rather tired this afternoon. I shall write as soon as I am really rested—if ever. With kindest regards one who hopes for grace

J.J.

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From ETTORE SCHMITZ, 27 March 1928

Trieste

Caro amico, qui ho trovato le due lettere per gli editori. Non si può essere più generosi di così.

Io vivo dei suoni che m’accompagnano da Parigi. Uno sovrasta agli altri: Anna Livia e il ritratto del Veruda. Vorrebbe Lei averlo? Dica in una cartolina postale la sola parola ‘si’ ed io glielo invio. Senza il Suo consenso non oso inviar Le il ritratto di mia moglie. Di lavori di Veruda io ne ho molti, e in quanto al soggetto io mi tengo caro l’originale.

Alla Sua signora i nostri ringraziamenti. Quando viene Lucia? Le stringo affettuosamente la mano, Suo devotissimo

Ettore Schmitz

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 28 March 1928

Grand Hôtel de la Poste, Rouen

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I was sorry to have bad news of you but am glad to hear you are now better. We are snatching a few days’ holiday in Dieppe and here but as soon as I return to Paris I shall put matters right with Miss Monnier—or I hope so. Gilbert wrote to me before I left Paris but I avoided the issue—though I personally found him quite obliging and well-intentioned—and shall abide by our ‘Trianon treaty’ as the best way to avoid friction.

Svevo was entertained by the Paris Pen Club last week (Gesumaria, che vino e che cena!) and our names were mentioned often by Romains who presided as his ‘godfathers’. If we had a literary ‘grandson’ what age would he be? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 March 1928

Grand Hôtel de la Poste, Rouen

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: It is very dark in this salon to write. We left Dieppe last evening as neither my wife nor I has been over well. I fatigued myself to exhaustion point over Ya. I am glad you like the fable. Chatto and Windus put out a prospectus which Miss Beach has announcing a colossal new work in the press by Lewis. The text says ‘the only work that can at all hold a card to it is—’. You can supply the blank.

I think I have managed to get Pound to testify in the Roth case. Roth’s counsel raised his name frequently and a refusal on E P’s part would be taken as a tacit admission that Roth was right. I enclose a letter from V.L. (which please send back to my Paris address) and I shall have to patch up that too when I get back. I think I have also nipped in the bud a nascent unpleasantness between Antheil and Miss Monnier: The latter had a kind of offer from the Cologne opera to put on the Cyclops in October if I would go there and be present at a reception. I hate these things but I agreed to go there as he is in a bad way and in poor health. Between ourselves as V L puts it I don’t think he has written 20 bars of the piece in the last four or five years but I pretend to think it is getting on splendidly. The rest is now up to him. The Abbey Theatre has engaged him to do a ballet on Cuchulain fighting the waves.

I have been reading about the author of ‘Alice’. A few things about him are rather curious. He was born a few miles from Warrington (Daresbury), and he had a strong stutter and when he wrote he inverted his name like Tristan and Swift. His name was Charles Lutwidge of which he made Lewis (i.e. Ludwig) Carroll (i.e. Carolus).

Yes I should like to see a few copies of that paper. Dr Ellwood is the original of Temple in the Portrait. He is quite as accurate as ever, I see.

We return to Paris in a day or two. I hope the sea air did us some sort of good. It is madness to work till the very last instant for 15 months at a stretch as I do in Paris. I have lost 6 kilos in weight. But I hope to have determination enough to stop it and get off for a good spell of holiday. There are moments when I feel 20 but also half-hours when I feel 965. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBADD, 5 April 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I got back here Saturday and saw the matter through I think. At least by now you ought to have a letter from her acquiescing in your conditions, which after all are nothing but the original arrangements, as I pointed out to her. Best wishes for Easter Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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Το ETTORE SCHMITZ, 6 April 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Fonda Savio

Caro Schmitz: Di ritorno qui trovo la Sua gentile lettera. Ben volentieri accetto il Suo regalo e che l’immagine di Anna Livia mi porti e ricordi ed auguri. Spero che avrà buon successo con Cape o coi Viking, il primo pero, non comprendente inglese, è piu temibile.

Buona Pasqua alla signora ed a Lei da noi tutti

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 April 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I don’t think I am violating any confidence in enclosing V.L.’s new letter since you do not know what it is about though a good dozen of people, if he is right, do here. (What English!) But as you were, luckily for me, present at one heated scene I want you to know that it’s quite as warm as ever in Paris. I have, I think, smoothed over matters between V.L. and Her but there remain to be rubbed down S.G. (!) and A.M., the two translators who dislike each other and V.L. and are heartily disliked by him in return. Fortunately (??) they all like ME.

Ahem!

Pound has agreed to give evidence against Roth. Ford has invited me to be godfather to his daughter (see Shaun’s sermon) who is to be baptised a R.C. on Friday next. Svevo has sent me Veruda’s portrait of his redheaded wife, Mrs S. (v. Anna Livia: her name is Livia S.). Mrs Jolas is going to U.S.A. Elliot Paul is married. Mr and Mrs Sage are divorced etc. The transition people are beginning to bother me again for the June instalment but I have not energy enough to say yes, aye or no.

I have lost pounds and pounds of flesh. Weigh 8 st. odd which is nothing for one who would be a sixfooter if mangled out so I have to eat oyster, Turkish Delight, Butter Scotch, coal, strychnine, hypophosphates etc etc. Rodker came over. He wanted to publish Pt I and then do a version of A.L.P. which I could not sanction. Now he wants to do a similar bit from Pt III with a preface, as I suggested, by a 100% Englishman. I have not agreed to anything yet as I shall have to talk it over with Miss Beach first. Antheil is gone—to work in the Cyclops’ forge, I suppose.

I am not very well. Dieppe was too damp and I have sharp recurrences of pains. The doctor examined me, says I have no inflammation worth talking about but am nervously exhausted. I shall try to get away to ‘Tristan da Cunha’ as soon as I can. But there is a great difference in the state of my mind since your visit so the spasms are only physical.

As it is Oyster Monday I shall now close up my shell for the evening. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Please send back V.L.’s letter.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 April 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I shall try to get away this week but I can scarcely go leaving the VL-AM mix-up as it is. Here is letter 4 from VL. I cannot find 3. He proposed André Maurois as reviser. I am utterly opposed to any such change. My relations of course are, as always, amicable. We were to have motored down with them and Fargue to Chartres Saturday but it rained too much. The French general elections are coming on which make me nervous like the stalwart hero I am. Ford’s child has to be instructed in Xian doctrine, it seems. He offered me a little house he has in Toulon and asked us to dinner. I don’t see much use for a sponsor at all if the child (who is a nice little girl anyhow) can remove the devil etc on her own account but I accepted his invitation as an act of friendliness. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 26 April 1928

Grand Hotel, Toulon (Far)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: A line to say I am here by Fr. Ford’s advice and am very pleased with it, him and myself. Am sending this off while awaiting mail forwarded from Paris. Kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 April 1928

Grand Hotel, Toulon (Far)

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I think I have patched up the affair for a while and so am trying to rest a bit here. But transition has sent me a heap of proofs to revise for June and September and Conner a new questionnaire and letter about the copyrighting of the new opus.

The explanation about the Austrian paper is. That Fiera invited me to go to Florence paying expense and my lecture fee to represent Ireland. I wrote declining on grounds of health (in Italian of the most courtly description) and suggested to Paolo Orano that my place be taken by James Stephens concerning whom I wrote a fine panegyric, with the result that the honour was offered to him. Mr Stephens came to Paris and saw me and he accepted it of which I am very glad. As regards Ford and his daughter who, by the way, is named like her mother ‘Stella’ I shall write as soon as I have waded through a half dozen of my notebooks of revision. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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TO HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 20 May 1928

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I have returned here to a mountain of proofs, U and Yb and c. I am feeling rather lazy about it and will have to give myself some sort of a kick or prod up. Count Shaun MacCormack sings here on Tuesday. I hope you have better weather than ours. Kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To SYLVIA BEACH, 22 May 1928

Grand Hotel, Toulon

Dear Miss Beach: Many thanks for the drops. The Mistral at Avignon was so strong I was afraid for my eyes but they are all right. It is very fine down here and the Lord keep it so. I did not get a letter from Paul yet but got a kilo of proofs and a letter from Sage. I don’t feel a bit inclined to start on them yet. I read in the D.M.that Mr Gabriel Wells, publisher of New York bought some old book at an auction for £5000 and Mr Crosbie Gage of NY a MS notebook of Kipling, for $5000! Why couldn’t either buy that 1st edition of Dubliners? Have you any good book in English about Provence? And have you FMF’s Good Soldier?

I am going to give you some trouble. 1st. Can you buy a cheque on London or Dublin for £5 for my sister Eileen Schaurek, and send it to her, 19 Whitworth Road, Dublin? 2nd. Can you send 250 francs in my name to the Corinth fund, to Mr Photopolous (I think that’s his name) treasurer, Greek Legation, Paris? That will be about 860 altogether which please deduct from my credit. It is the least I might do, I think. If I had more I would send more.

I also solved L.C.’s problem about the creatures. On thinking it over I suspect the Jabberwock is really a transformation of the Cheshire Cat which was all grin: Cf. ‘the claws that scratch’ etc and ‘Longtime the Manxmost foe he sought’. Now the leastmanx cat is short of a tail so I suppose a manxmost cat has neither head nor tail. (Like your letter: Pensée de la Lectrice.)

P.S. A pity his name is not Photophoros for then he would be another Lucifer in the collection. We eat in a very good restaurant here. It is named ‘Au Sourd’!

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 27 May 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: On my return from a holiday in Toulon and Avignon I found your article here. I took it to transition and it went to press today. I asked them to send you a cheque. I hope you get it soon.

Many thanks. I like it very much. I am sure it will make a good effect. It is all to the point.

I have a lot to do for the next few days or so but will write to you again after no 13 comes out

I found that the oldest vignoble in all Provence is the Clos S. Patrice which it seems was the original name of the wine now known as Chateauneuf du Pape. It is very good. When you next come this side we will drink health in it and other wines. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 3 June 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Will you please add in whatever you have on your copy of t.12 on the copy sent you on Thursday and tear out the pages and send them back. I am working desperately hard for t.13 as the final revision of U took a dreadful lot of time.

I have received two more offers from U.S.A. each of $11,000 in advance of 20% royalties. Not bad for a book which a year ago they called gibberish, t.13 contains an article by Budgen (very good) and one by Gilbert.

Terrible storms here. I think you will like Yb when you see him in full dress. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 4 June 1928

2 Square Robiac, Paris

Dear Larbaud: I hope all continues well. I have had to undergo a long cross-examination on the topic you can imagine but I was as the lamb et non aperui os meum. As regards your questions I think the fewer quotation marks the better. We would not write the phrase—the best of all possible worlds—in English between ‘’. Or in the French version ‘M. de la Palice was alive etc.’ And when the words half quoted are from an obscure writer p.e. ‘orient and immortal wheat’ (from Thomas Traherne) what does it help a French reader to see ‘’ there. He will know early in the book that S.D.’s mind is full like everyone else’s of borrowed words. The ‘’ are to be used only in the case of a quotation in full dress, I think, i.e. when it is used to prove or to contradict or to show etc. Do you agree?

I am orribilmente occupato. Italo Svevo sent me the portrait of his wife (Livia) by Veruda and two U.S.A. publishers to my astonishment have just made me an offer of $11,000 (dico, undicimila dollari) in advance royalties on my ‘work in progress’. Seeing the nature of that work it is extraordinary, I think.

I thought we should have met down there. Enjoyed it but it was too short. I must get away again. A twelvemonth year in Paris is no joke….

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 June 1928

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: We may leave for Copenhagen in a few days. Can you remember if you sent me my Danish Berlitz book? If you did I shall look for it. If not can you send it. It is a grey blue book.

I hope you are both well. Giorgio is down in the Pyrenees at Canterete Saluti cordiali

Jim

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 26 June 1928

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Bib. Municipale (Vichy)

Dear Larbaud: Herewith the explanation. Both your versions of ‘rognons etc’ are much better. I have asked Miss M. to get you Ruggieri’s catalogue. She says you can keep Circe till the rest of the book is sent which will be as soon as possible. She is going to have it printed in Chartres near which her people live so as to be in closer touch with the printer. I think we shall go to Denmark next week but you can always write here if you are in doubt as I shall leave my address. We went to Chartres the other day in Miss B’s car i.e. my wife Miss B Miss M and I. I think I came with flying colours through some keen cross-examination by looking more like an idiot than usual. I saw S.G. once or twice and he has written an article on my ‘Work in Progress’ but A.M. I have not seen for 6 or 7 months, I think, 5 certainly.

I hope your health is good now. My wife says about three times a week, I must reply to that letter in the morning. What will she think of me! etc. She writes about four letters a year preceded each by 3 months of good resolutions. So there you are!

I hope we will soon have dinner all together under the patronage of S. Muscadet de Nantes. Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 30 June 1928

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Of course you didn’t believe I was really finished with Yb for all. This week I have been cabling, phoning, writing express letters etc but at last he comes out Monday, only 31 days behind scheduled time. I will send you a few shafts of moonlight on some of the duskier bits as soon as the text is released. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, 11 July 1928

2 Square Robiac

MS. Princeton

Dear Mr Fitzgerald, Herewith is the book you gave me signed and I am adding a portrait of the artist as a once young man with the thanks of your much obliged but most pusillanimous guest. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 31 July 1928

Hotel Mirabell, Salzburg

MS. Cornell

Which S. Johann? There are two near here. S.J. in Tirol and S.J. in Pangon (broken off). Lucia is with the Duncan School in Schloss Klessheim near here—a castle which belonged to Archduke Louis Victor or rather he belonged to it, domicilio coatto. The people here say he was perfectly sane and a Guter Mann and that is family intrigue. Why so late as the 10th. We may stay over a week or so more (8 days already yesterday). It must be easily the finest town of its size (35000) in Europe. We hope to meet you both. Giorgio is in the Pyrenees (Canterets).

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 5 August 1928

Salzburg

MS. Cornell

We stay here a week or so more as Lucia is satisfied in the Duncan school. Then go probably to Vienna for a week. What is your address in S.J.? A friend of mine, one of the translators of U, Stuart Gilbert is a few miles from there. Gasthof Einsiedeln Kitzbühel. He and his wife are coming on here about the 16th. He is writing a commentary on U. Antheil also. His Hero and the Cyclops is to be given at the Cologne Opera in the autumn and we are invited to go. I hope you will visit here. It is worth it.

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 August 1928

Hotel und Restaurant Mirabell Salzburg

Dear Miss Weaver: Here is a short note on p 130 of t.13.

The Maronite (Roman Catholic) liturgy, the language of which is Syrian is at the back of it. On Good Friday the body of Jesus is unscrewed from the cross, placed in a sheet and carried to the sepulchre while girls dressed in white throw flowers at it and a great deal of incense is used. The Maronite ritual is used in Mount Lebanon. Yb departs like Osiris the body of the young god being pelted and incensed. He is seen as already a Yesterday (Gestern, Guesturning [? turning] back his glance amid wails of ‘Today!’ from To Morrow (to-maronite’s wail etc). The apostrophe balances the hyphen Guesturn’s, Tomaronites.

This censing scene is led up to by:

licet ut lebanos (p. 12) = this may be used as incense (libanos is Greek for incense)

the ‘libans and the sickamours and the babilonias etc’ of Izzy’s rambling remarks

the words ‘at my frank incensive’. ‘Idos be’ (idos is also Greek for incense and the name of an ‘artificial tongue’ ‘thurily’ (for thoroughly)—t(h)us—t(h)uris is Latin for incense.

‘Weih?—Up the Shameraugh!’ Weihrauch is German for incense. Here it sounds also shamrock but means a cloudscreen or shamscreen ‘licensed and censered’ p. 13 etc, also ‘sedro’ Syriac for [word illegible].

The choir of girls splits in two = those who pronounce Oahsis and those who pronounce Oeyesis (cf Our Father who/which art etc). The Latin is ‘Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Lebanon etc’ see A.P.O.T.A.A.A.Y.M. Belvedere College chapter. There are in all 29 words in the threnody 6 x 4 = 24 and the final 5 = 29 (Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis!).

This leapyear chorus is repeated lower down in imitation of the Maronite and Latin ‘pax’ given by embrace of arms. The girls do nothing really but turn one to another, exclaiming one another’s name joyfully (Frida! Freda! etc). These are 29 words for ‘Peace’ taken from or modelled on the following tongues and variations (German, DanoNorwegian, Provençal, French, Greek, French variations, Malay, Echo, Gipsy, Magyar childrens, Armenian, Senegalese, Latin variation, Irish, Diminutive, N. Breton, S. Breton, Chinese, Pidgin, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanscrit, Hindustani and English = O for goodness sake leave off!). This word was actually sighed around the world in that way in 1918.

Please tell me if you like this treatment of the theme.

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From SYLVIA BEACH to EDMUND WILSON, 20 August 1928

Shakespeare and Company 12, rue de l’Odéon, Paris VIe

Dear Mr Wilson: Mr Joyce is ill at Salzburg. He asked me to reply to your letter. He says will you please apply to Mr Gorman. The plan of Ulysses has been given to one or two of Mr Joyce’s friends, confidentially, and is not to be reproduced in its complete form.

With regard to Work in Progress, Mr Joyce wishes me to tell you that he has no contract for its publication in the States except for the little fragment “‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’” which is to appear in an edition of a few hundred copies only. He knows nothing about the publications of which you speak. Yours sincerely, Sylvia Beach

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To BENJAMIN CONNER (Dictated letter), 1 September 1928

Munich

TS. Léon

Dear Mr Conner I have been ill with my eyes the last three weeks and could not write, so I am dictating the present letter.

I was much relieved to receive the copies of parts 10 and 11 of Work in Progress and to know that the copyright of this portion of the book also has been properly taken out in my name in the United States. I hope you have received for this purpose also copies of Transition No 13 (the quarterly); if not, will you kindly ring up Miss Beach.

As regards the suit against Mr Roth, it would be foolish of me to oppose my opinion to that of your partners in New York, but if there is, in their opinion now, no case against him under copyright or property laws and no prospect of recovering any of the money he has probably safely disposed of, gained by misuse of my name and mutilation of my work, I suggest at least that they press for some judgment—nominal damages of one dollar, with an injunction against any further use of my name—which, when recorded, may establish a precedent in case law in favour of unprotected European writers, whose cause in this instance is mine also.

Believe me, dear Mr Conner, sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ADRIENNE MONNIER and SYLVIA BEACH, 3 September 1928

Hôtel Maison Rouge, Strasburg

Chère Mademoiselle Monnier: Monsieur Gilbert a ajouté trois paragraphes assez longs, plus un examen détaillé de (je crois) pages 117, 8, 9, presque mot à mot, voyez Transition No. 13, à son étude ‘Prolegomenon to Work in Progress’.

Avant que ces additions soient incorporées dans l’essai, en anglais, bien entendu, que Miss Beach publiera avec onze autres dans un volume, M. Paulhanne pouratit-il les publier directement en français dans un des très prochains numéros de la N.R.F.?

Votre réponse du reste va très bien. J’ai télégraphié à Larbaud son anniversaire, le 29, en le félicitant de la terminaison de sa révision. Je compte être è Paris pour quelques heures le soir de mercredi, mais j’enverrai une depêche de Strasbourg: nous repartons pour Le Hâvre.

Dear Miss Beach: I am dictating this in the train to Mr Gilbert between Munich and Stuttgart. My eye got better in Munich. I had no iritis but a conjunctivitis and a slight episcleritis, which I got from an infection. I hope it is well on the mend, but I shall not be able to do any reading or writing several weeks, as the atropine I have to take reduces my vision to about a fourth and I cannot see any print at all. I hope you have sent Transition 13 to Prof Fischer at Salzburg. He has published 5 articles about me in the Austrian press.

I enclose a letter from Drinkwater and two photos; please forward the letter to Miss Weaver to-day, but have copies of the photographs made for your collection entitled Wine and Water, before you send them to her also. I think he is friendly disposed towards me and what I am trying to do. I would like to have on Wednesday evening two large bottles of the lotion and a fresh supply of yellow drops. If a registered letter arrives from my solicitor, Monro Saw, please open it and keep the cheque. What arrangement is Transition making for the next number? Has McGreevy written anything? He is both hard-worked and underpaid and if they want his article the only way would be to pay on receipt.

Agréez, chère Mademoiselle Monnier, l’assurance de ma parfaite considération and believe me, my dear Miss Beach, to be, your most obedient servant, und indessen erlaube ich mir an Euch beide die Versicherung meiner Hochachtung auszudruecken.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Dictated postcard), Postmark 9 September 1928

Hôtel Continental, Le Havre

MS. Cornell

Can you let me know in what book President Masyrac alludes to Ulysses?

By return, please.

Kind greetings go to Nellie and yourself: not quite recovered yet, so dictating this.

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 September 1928

[Dictated] 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: We got back here a few days ago. I could not write before or even dictate because S.G. was with me and part of the letter should have been about himself. We got on very well together. He has prepared an extension of his article in T-13 with an explanation verbatim of the paragraph about poaching and fishing. I suggested to him to do this with three color pencils using the first for the words and phrases which presented no difficulty to him; the second for those which became clearer after two or three readings or from remembrance of other parts of the text; and the third for what remained insoluble. It turned out that this last was only a small percentage and though it included things which were very obvious (for instance the word nippy which is known to three or four fifths of the population of London as a nickname for a Lyons tea shop girl and almost as current as midinette in Paris) he did not know; having lived twenty years in the East before the word got current, but I insisted on his leaving this and appealing to the reader for help. He also read me in Salzburg several chapters or rather sketches of chapters, of his exposition of Ulysses which is almost wholly technical and much more detailed than that of Jordan Smith, if that is his name. I suggested to him to link it up here and there with Berard’s book on the Phoenician origin of the Odyssey and also with the work in progress. The translation is now finished. V.L. sent me a list of difficulties which I solved for him and informed me that he would celebrate his birthday twenty ninth of August, by going off his diet of milk and rusks in favor of some wine of the country in my honor and to celebrate both events. His work is now at an end.

A.M. the translator. Had taken a good deal of license here and there, sometimes incorporating whole sentences of his own manufacture. These were struck out. The translation is really his and has been done with great care and devotion, but like many other people, by dint of brooding on it he sees one aspect to the exclusion of another. In his case it is the coarseness which excludes the others. Or perhaps I should say the violence. I said to A.M. (the publisher) about these bits ‘a little too much Madagascar here.’ He is in fact a French colonial born. Perhaps this explains it. I hope the three patch up their differences when the work is out. SG’s work was very useful but it was absolutely necessary to have VL’s final revision as he is very accurate; slow, fastidious and rather timid. I saw, or rather was shown, the prospectus yesterday; which A.M. brought me along with some other difficulties which I solved much to her delight. The prospectus will be out this week and the volume of nearly a thousand pages in December or January, which in France, usually means June, but in this case will probably be speeded up to mean the second of February. She is having it printed by a very old established printer (1500 and something) at Chartres under the shadow of the Cathedral almost. She brought me down there to see the place which is a few miles from her place in the country, and insisted on lighting a candle for me in the Cathedral, all for good luck. She becomes more and more superstitious, thinks that V.L. is bewitched by L.P.F. and I wish she could find out who is bewizarding me, for I have at the present moment, and all for my own self, episcleritis, conjunctivitis, blepharitis and a large boil on my right shoulder. So much for candles. Besides which I am most uncommonly fatigued and it is a physical impossibility for me to attempt revision of the piece for T-14 which therefore will have to come out without me for they have been ringing me up ever since I got back.

The case against Roth is up for next month. At the last moment almost Conner’s partners in N.Y. cabled me that I ought to withdraw the suit for damages as there was no copyright case and get an injunction against use of name. There never was any case on copyright and I understood always that it was to be tried under the law of property but as it would have been folly for me to have opposed the opinion of American lawyers on the spot, and as on the other hand, I considered that I held to a certain extent a position of trust, I instructed them, if they had satisfactory means of knowing that Roth had so disposed of all the money which he had made in America by misuse of my name and mutilation of my text that no considerable part of it could be recovered either under copyright or property laws, to press for some judgment, an injunction against further use of my name with nominal damages of one dollar, or whatever is the American equivalent for the English farthing, a judgment; that is, which when recorded, would establish a precedent in case law in favor of unprotected European writers whose cause in this matter was the same as my own. The bill of costs will now come rolling across the Atlantic. I think they were probably influenced by the number of offers which have been recently made me for the publication of W. in P. work in progress. But I had these offers made to them and through them simply in order to substantiate the claim for damages which they were advancing when the case came into court. At all events D.F. has transferred his copyright of my property (and most uncommon kind of him) to me, that is part one, and Conner’s partners at my instruction and at my expense, have printed and deposited at Washington, copyright dummies in my name for the fragments in T.10-12 and 13.

A.L.P. has not yet arrived but I expect her every day. I promised Drinkwater that I would reserve a copy for him though it is not easy to do this with such an edition. Did Miss Beach send you copies of photos he took of us and his letter in which he said that his wife, under the influence of reading me, had announced that she was terribly sick of bluggage. I think it not impossible that he may consent to do a preface for another fragment and I even thought of proposing to Gage [sic] that he ask Edgar Wallace to do one, the tortoise and the hare.

I have received three offers to give a series of lectures in Switzerland, two most urgent letters in which that extraordinary person Mr. Wilson of Willington announces his willingness to pay mine and my wife’s expenses up there and back and hotel expenses and what he calls a royal welcome from the miners and for all I know a present of a few tons of coal also. He sent me some sort of a gift, I am not sure whether it is a cartridge coach [sic] or a case for cigars and cigarettes. It is rather embarrassing to reply. I also had a visit from a very high up person of the Russian Embassy here. Full of great admiration and proposing to bring me là-bas. But from all I can gather the condition of that country is dubious enough without inflicting on it the blighting influence of my one-quarteried personality.

I have also bad news. Poor Italo Svevo was killed on Thursday last in a motor accident. I have no details yet only a line from my brother and so I am waiting before I write to his widow. Somehow in the case of Jews I always suspect suicide though there was no reason in his case especially since he came into fame, unless his health had taken a very bad turn. I was very sorry to hear of it but I think his last five or six years were fairly happy.

About fifty pages of Rebecca West’s book were read for me yesterday but I cannot judge until I hear the whole essay. I think that P.P. had in her case the intended effect of blowing up some bogey bogus personality and that she is quite delighted with the explosion. It is a pity that W.L. did not wait for its publication too as it would probably have much mollified his attack. By the way, have you not received any press cuttings lately about his book and can you tell me how many more books he has published since I left Paris a few months ago? There seems to be a mention of me every week in the New Statesman. The Irish Statesman, which you don’t get, had an article about T-13 and some correspondence. Buck Mulligan fell out of an aeroplane with or after or before a Lady Martin. One may joke a little about it because fortunately neither the air man nor the airmaid seem to be any the worse. In fact they fell into a very shallow sea and I suppose are now merman and mermaid. The story seems rather curious but there is a comic poem about it in a Galway paper and the information comes from an allusion in a letter from my mother-in-law whose method of writing is often as cryptic as my own. The plane must have been very low but I am glad that they are both uninjured.

I have probably forgotten several things I wanted to say. I had no iritis of the eyes but the thing I told you, proceeding from outward infection it seems but it is very bothering and troublesome, and I have to go to the clinic every morning. Mrs. Bécat is making [a] wonderful carpet for me representing the [Liffey] flowing through Dublin into the Irish Sea with the arms of Norway; Dublin; Ireland and my own all woven into the scheme. There is a case pending in Germany and Switzerland between Rasher of Zurich (I wish somebody would make bacon of him for he is an impossible escroc) and the Rheinverlag but I need not weary you about that nor with an account of my holidays.

What are your plans for the Autumn and Winter? If my eyes do not get better to allow me to work (and what joy there will be in some quarters if they do not) I thought it would be useless for me to stay in Paris doing nothing and that I would go to Torquay but I am always making imaginary journeys. The complete eclipse of my seeing faculties so kindly predicted by A.M.’s young friend from Oxford, the ghost of Banquet [sic], I am warding off by dressing in the three colors of successive stages of cecity as the Germans divide them; namely, green Starr; that is, green blindness, or glaucoma; grey Starr; that is, cataract, and black star, that is dissolution of the retina. This therefore forms a nocturnal tri-color connected by one common color; green, with Shaun’s national flag of peas, rice, egg yolk. The grey of evening balancing the gold of morning and the black of something balancing the white of something else, the egg probably. So I had a jacket made in Munich of a green stuff I bought in Salzburg and the moment I got back to Paris I bought a pair of black and grey shoes and a grey shirt; and I had a pair of grey trousers and I found a black tie and I advertised for a pair of green braces and Lucia gave me a grey silk handkerchief and the girl found a black sombrero and that completed the picture.

I will now close this letter which I ought to have written long ago. It was rather amusing to dictate it because my mind has been a stupid blank for weeks and I have the vapors; or the languors or something of that kind. So I hope it will amuse you though I really am not in such good humor as you might suppose from the few damp squibs of humor contained herein.

Just one paragraph more: What about Miss Marsden’s book? Is it coming out this year or any part of it? I am glad you have had good weather but a more boring summer I never passed; with one heat wave after another in Central Europe. Pound’s book of Cantos is out, a most magnificent thing in gold and scarlet at prices ranging from five to fifty pounds. Antheil wrote to me he was coming to Salzburg to see Otto Kahn (who by the way must have most of his time taken up dodging people who want to see him for one purpose only) but he did not come. He writes that the Cologne opera affair at which we are supposed to assist from the Royal Box is a sure thing and that he has some splendid proposals from one of the three greatest publishing combines in Europe.

With kindest regards; sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To LIVIA SVEVO, 24 September 1928

Paris

Dear Mrs Schmitz: A Trieste newspaper has been forwarded to me from Le Havre in which there is a paragraph about the fatal accident to poor Schmitz and the injuries to yourself.

I telegraphed you at your Trieste address although I did not know where you were.

We are all greatly shocked to hear of his death. A very sympathetic notice by Madame Crémieux appeared in the Nouvelles Littéraires and I am having a copy sent to you.

I am also asking the editor of transition to reprint, by permission of the same paper, Mr Nino Frank’s article written when you were last here which is the best literary portrait I can recall of my old friend. I, at least, can see him through the lines of it.

Later on, when time and the remembrance of your own devotion to Italo Svevo have in some way reconciled you to such a loss will you please let me know what success he had with the English and American publishers to whom I had recommended him?

I spoke to his German publisher in Zürich in July and he told me they would bring the book out this autumn.

I hope you have recovered from your shock and your injuries. It is perhaps a poor, but still some consolation, to remember that our meetings here in Paris were so pleasant to us all.

Please remember me if at any time my help can serve to keep alive the memory of my old friend for whom I had always affection and esteem.

To yourself, dear Mrs Schmitz, and to your daughter, all our sympathy.

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Dictated letter), [? 7 October 1928]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

TS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: I suppose Miss Beach told you about my collapse. I cannot see a single word of print and of course am dreadfully nervous on account of it. They are giving me injections of arsenic and phosphorous but even after three weeks of it I have about as much strength as a kitten and my vision remains stationary that is in the dusk with the light behind it. They examined ‘all the internal organs of the beast’ and his blood pressure and found everything normal except his nerves. Apparently I have completely overworked myself and if I don’t get back sight to read it is all U-P up.

I passed on all your corrections with my suggestions to Miss Monnier. Morel I have not seen this long time but I shall write to him if and when I feel a little stronger. He has misunderstood here and there but it would be unfair to lay too much stress upon that in a work of such length and difficulty. I am glad you liked my name for the little priest. I hope you will soon be in Paris so that we can have a chat. Did you get my telegram from Salzburg in time for your birthday—a very beautiful town and the most courteous people imaginable but the climate helped to play havoc with me.

I sent you through Miss Beach a copy of Tidbits with Miss or Mrs Ursula Bloom’s advice on when to say yes, which must have amused you. Of course you have read all about Svevo’s tragic death. But I don’t think he would have lived very long even in the normal course of things as his heart was seriously affected. I am glad we were able to do something for him, a great deal in fact for the German edition must be out by now and an American publisher has cabled for the American rights. Nino Frank, a friend of Bontempelli’s of 900, has been commissioned by the Florentine review Solaria to collect opinions for a special number to which you, Crémieux, Goll, Goyert and I are asked to contribute. In view, however, of the ill-timed polemic in the Italian literary press after S’s death I think it impolitic that we should do so now at any rate, so I suggested to Crémieux and Frank to have this deferred for three or more months at least until the acrimony has spent itself and they have arrived at the firm conviction that la scoperta Francese is a pure myth after which we shall all be much more amiable and it would not greatly matter who writes or what he writes. Please let me know what you think of this.

Anna Livia Plurabelle, which we read to each other under the sign of the great bear, rue Danau with our field marshall’s cocked hats of coloured paper resplendant on our intelligent heads has come out in a limited edition for subscribers but though I have no control over these I have cabled the only begetter to keep one of the reserve copies unnumbered for you if you would like to have it.

My wife joins me in sending all good wishes to Mrs. Nebbia and yourself and let us hope that we shall both be rid of dieting etc. in the near future. With kindest regards,

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 October 1928

[Dictated] 2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: You have been for some weeks without news from me but I have really no special news to send. They have been giving me a three weeks’ treatment of injections of arsenic every other day and phosphorus which have given me a ravenous appetite but almost no additional strength. The idea apparently was to work on my sight [by] raising the general nervous tone but it has not succeeded and although they have changed my lenses I still cannot distinguish a word of print except the large headlines in the newspapers. There seems to be a difference of opinion between the Salzburg oculist, whose report I had sent on, and Dr Collinson but I am no longer interested in differences of opinion and neither I am sure are you. My doctor who by the same token has a rivery name Fontaine (cf. Drinkwater) made a complete examination of me, heart etc, blood pressure and found everything normal and sent on this report also to him with the addition that my resistance (nervous) seemed to have gone the way of least resistance. I am supposed to see him on Saturday or Monday and that is how things stand as this leaves me. Of course I can’t do any work though I take two Spanish lessons per diem through the ear in the insane belief that I shall one day soon be able to come to terms with print again. The whole situation here in view of the translation crux or rather cruces and the French edition calls for much more alertness, tact etc than I find ready at my command. The whole edition de luxe is sold out and between 500 and 600 copies already subscribed for, one of the first subscribers being the Papal Nuncio. If he is as merry a fellow as his predecessor in that holy office he ought to like bits of it at least….

I am glad you liked Alp. I bargained with the putter out of this (one cannot say it is published) to send four press copies to the U.K. (O what have I written, as if there was no such gonfaloni in the political world as the green, white and gold) but he does not seem to have carried out my instructions. The fact is that he does not care in the least about English or Irish press notices. He has his faithful regiment of subscribers and would bring out a collected edition of my select pawn tickets as readily as anything else. I have been told however that the literary editor of the New Statesman, who a year and a half ago in this paper alluded to me as a rednosed comedian and compared with genuine grief my present work in progress with the wall scribblings of the inmates of Bedlam Asylum, has kindly consented to allow one of his critics, a Mr Cyril Connolly, to write a favorable notice either in that paper or in his own journal, Life and Letters. You will receive a copy of transition 14 with three articles on my opus by Rodker, Sage and McGreevy. The latter, who did a good deal of copying for me last year, is rather useful in explaining parts of it … and another young Irishman, I think you heard of him, Power, explained what it was all about to A.E. who I perceived used the seven pseudonyms. I should like to have overheard the latter dialogue. I found out by chance that H.G. Wells lives in Paris and as he did me a good service so far back as 1913 I left my card. Madame—I did not catch her name when she rang me up on the telephone—told me he was in London and seemed astonished to hear that we had never met as he always spoke of me in very warm and high terms. ‘He was one of your first admirers, was he not?’ she said. Compare Sisley Huddleston. He is now a miller, hale and bold beside the river Seine where he bought an old mill which he has transformed into a country house. I rarely see him or anybody else though Shaun himself has been three times in the Trianons this last week and you will see by the enclosed photograph that the regional dishes are agreeing with him. We did not meet, however, as he came to lunch and you know that my high code of morals strictly forbids me to lunch and dine in the same place. I hope he will ride up on a thoroughbred Irish stone wall flier one of these evenings.

As regards your copy of Alp I did not sign this or any other copy because my impression is that C.G. is rather particular on this point and if he came to Paris to negotiate for the putting out of another twenty pages of gibberish and asked me if I had signed any copies, as man to man and hand upon heart, I think ‘I’d sank under the flore with infant shame’ if he gave me his Tiger’s eye.

I am glad to hear that you are living and moving in an atmosphere of peace surrounded by the influences of the twentynine daughters of February Filldyke, to wit Frida, Freda and so on. I am sure you are passing many valuable things through your hands in going through Miss Marsden’s work and if I had sufficient energy to be lively about anything at present I should be as restless as a small boy outside a pantry thinking of all the nice little bits I could pilfer with no loss to her but oh the difference to me, as Mr Wordsworth remarked. I do not know that there will be any occasion for such regret in the future as I told the Transition editors that I saw no prospect of doing any work on proofs in spite of reiterated medical assurances that I am going to see print in five days, ten days, twenty days and so on…. Mr Victor Bérard , author of The Phoenicians and the Odyssey has expressed a great desire to see me, having been attracted by the Protée article in the N.R.F. He is a man of great erudition and he will never recover from his disappointment when he does meet me. I heard yesterday that President Masaryk of the Czechoslovak republic lately entered a literary drawingroom with a copy of Ulysses under his arm and delivered a harangue to the writers there assembled, so that a Prague house sent an agent round to Miss Beach hot foot. I am inclined to think there is some truth in this as I heard something of the kind before through Trieste (my brother-in-law was a Czechoslovak) and I know that Masaryk wrote about it in his book The World Revolution. I will send you in a day or two the only thing I have written in the last four months, a short description of madness and blindness descending upon Swift composed in what Gilbert calls the damned trinity of colours, with a commentary. It is just fortyseven times as long as the text. Morel and Miss M. had a fine old blow up the other day but as soon as I have got a few more kilos of arsenic innoculated into my time machine I shall approach him and bring him back into the true fold under one shepherd life without end amen.

When you write be sure to send me tidings of peace and goodwill for my ho head hawls and I feel as heavy as John McCormack but having some congenital imbecility in my character I must turn it off with a joke. I have no news as yet from America. As soon as I have I will let you know.

With kindest regards and my best wishes for the speedy appearance of Miss Marsden’s first volume

Egotistically and sincerely yours.

TWILIGHT OF BLINDNESS MADNESS DESCENDS ON SWIFT

Unslow, malswift, pro mean, proh noblesse, Atrahora, Melancolores, nears; whose glauque eyes glitt bedimmd to imm! whose fingrings creep o’er skull: till, qwench! asterr mist calls estarr and grauw! honath John raves homes glowcoma.

Burmese—

Nyi-ako-mah-thi-ta-thi = twilight

literally, (the time when) younger brother (meets) elder brother, does not recognise him but yet recognises him.

Unslow

= 

inevitably

pro mean

=

(ora) pro me, nobis

proh noblesse

pro, proh, two Latin forms, usual and unusual, mean and noble

Atrahora

=

(Latin) black hour. c.f. Horace—post equitem sedet atra cura, black care sits behind the horseman

Melancolores

=

(Greek, Latin, Spanish ending) black, colour, sorrow

glauque

=

(Greek, French) owl-sighted, green

glitt

=

glimpse of reason or sight

bedimmd, etc

=

bedamned, etc

fingrings

=

little circles made by fingers touching head, incipient dementia

creep o’er skull

=

crepuscule

qwench, etc

=

one star (Stella) in being quenched, name-calls another (wench), (Vanessa)

mist calls

=

call wrongly, call through the mist, call an opprobrious name (mist, German for dirt)

asterr

=

(Greek) a star

estarr

=

(German) blindness. Green starr = glaucoma. Grau starr = cataract = grey. Schwarz starr (black) = dissolution of the retina

asterr

=

Esther (Johnston), Hester (Vanhomrigh)

starr

grauw

=

(German, Irish) onomatopoetic? grey, love, cold

raves

=

delirium, dreams (French réves)

homes

=

those of Stella and Vanessa

glowcoma

=

fireside and repose, glaucoma

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Written in heavy black pencil), 16 November 1928

Maison de Santé, 5 rue Édouard-Dumont, Neuilly-s/Seine

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: These few lines to tell you my wife was operated on the 8 and has had now a 7 days radium treatment. All has gone well up to the present. We go home in a day or so and then, after 15 days autovaccine treatment return here for 4 days more radium. This ought to effect a definite cure. It has been a dreadful fortnight for all of us, however. As regards myself I can see my own handwriting in this black graphite but cannot see one word of any print but capitals!

I think you have not heard the ‘préhistoire’ to E.M.’s article. He is not ‘against us’ naturally but feeling is too raw in Italian literary circles to make our intervention at present advisable. Du reste, qui s’excuse, s’accuse.

Thanks for your kind inquiries also from my wife.

Pardon this MS. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From H.G. WELLS, 23 November 1928

Lou Pidou Saint Mathieu, Grasse, A.-M.

My dear Joyce: I’ve been studying you and thinking over you a lot. The outcome is that I don’t think I can do anything for the propaganda of your work. I’ve an enormous respect for your genius dating from your earliest books and I feel now a great personal liking for you but you and I are set upon absolutely different courses. Your training has been Catholic, Irish, revolutionary; mine, such as it was, was scientific, constructive and, I suppose, English. The frame of my mind is a mould wherein a big unifying and concentrating process is possible (increase of power and range by economy and concentration of effort), a progress not inevitable but interesting and possible. That game attracted and holds me. For it, I want language (and statement) as simple and clear as possible. You began Catholic, that is to say you began with a system of values in stark opposition to reality. Your mental existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions. You really believe in chastity, purity and the personal God and that is why you are always breaking out into cries of … , shit and hell. As I don’t believe in these things except as quite provisional values my mind has never been shocked to outcries by the existence of water closets and menstrual bandages—and undeserved misfortunes. And while you were brought up under the delusion of political suppression I was brought up under the delusion of political responsibility. It seems a fine thing to you to defy and break up. To me not in the least.

Now with regard to this literary experiment of yours. It’s a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man and you have in your composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don’t think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence and you have elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles. Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read. Take me as a typical male. Do I get much pleasure from the work? No. Do I feel I am getting something new and illuminating as I do when I read ——’s dreadful translation of Pavlov’s badly written book on Conditioned Reflexes? No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?

All this from my point of view. Perhaps you are right and I all wrong. Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I will go out of my way to save it from destruction or restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its following. Let them rejoice in it. To me it is a dead end.

My warmest wishes to you Joyce. I can’t follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong. Yours, H.G. Wells

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To RALPH PINKER, 28 November 1928

192 rue de Grenelle 2 Square Robiac, Paris VII

Dear Mr Pinker: Thanks for your letter. I had already declined this offer of Mr Ginsbourg’s (Fifteen per cent royalties, of which a thousand dollars in advance, on a ten dollar publication), made to me here in July. I am advised that I ought not to undersell in America the privately printed fragment (Anna Livia Plurabelle, fifty eight pages) of the book I am engaged on, issued, signed to subscribers at fifteen dollars the copy, by Crosby Gaige of New York. If the Viking Press decide to issue the book at the same figure or a higher figure and renew the same terms, I will sign the copy.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 2 December 1928 [Dictated]

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I have not been able to write to you for a long time for several reasons which you will easily understand. My wife is getting on very well but we return to the clinic tomorrow as there have to be four or five additional days of treatment to complete the cure after which it is believed that she will be thoroughly well. As regards myself I cannot yet read or write anything except books for infants but I am, with some difficulties, trying to follow a pilocarpin cure which is supposed to restore some kind of vision at some period in the future. Nevertheless I had them retype in legal size, twice or three times this, with triple spacing, section three of Shaun, and this, when it has been read to me by three or four people, I shall try to memorise as to pages etc (there are nearly a hundred) and so hope to be able to find the places where I can insert from the twenty notebooks which I have filled up since I wrote this section. The notebooks, written when I was suffering from my eyes or lately, are quite legible to me as they were scribbled with thick black pencil, but the other ones, about thirteen, I am relying on my improved sight to help me over.

I lunched with H.G. Wells the morning we went into the hospital but my mind was too confused to be able to do him or myself justice. He was very friendly and at his request (he had asked if he could become my literary agent or take that side of my present affairs in charge) I had Miss Beach send him the instalments so far in Transition. I enclose a letter of his to me which seems to me—I don’t know what it seems to me. It would not surprise me if he greatly modified his opinions as a result of future possible conversations. He told me that he had expected to meet a tall fierce aggressive man in a frieze overcoat carrying a heavy stick and I think that he probably has a similar phantom hovering between his eyes and my pages. For the moment I will content myself by saying in reply to his letter, which is quite friendly and honest, that I doubt whether his attitude towards words and language is as scientific as he himself ought to wish it to be and also whether the extra expressionism of which he complains, whether liberative or simply terminological exactitude, is at all as common in my country as in his, though perhaps I ought to add, considerably to our loss. To the rest of his remarks, however, I could wholeheartedly subscribe and the more I hear of the political, philosophical, ethical zeal and labours of the brilliant members of Pound’s big brass band the more I wonder why I was ever let into it ‘with my magic flute’….

Miss Beach is urging me to go to Munich when my wife gets better to see a specialist there, I mean for myself, and even to leave the somewhat curious one I have here in favour of a younger specialist whom Dr Fontaine recommends. You know my sluggish, slimy, slithy, sliddery, stick-in-the-mud disposition. However, we shall see and then perhaps I shall see.

I had a cable from New York to say that the solicitors were arranging the case and that Roth was again in jail but that he is execution proof…. As regards ALP I seem to have drawn a critical blank all around. From America there has come nothing so far. I arranged with Gaige to send two review copies to England and to Ireland though he was reluctant to do so, but having lived all my life abroad practically I did not know that English editors do not like to publish reviews of any English books first printed in the United States until also printed in England so perhaps this is the reason or perhaps some review of it may appear in the foreign literary news between a Spanish and a Russian book notice. Being unable to read or write, I have been taking oral lessons in these two languages and also in Danish, this time with a Dane as I wanted to vary the Norwegian pronunciation.

Enough now of myself. I hope Miss Marsden book came out punctually yesterday and I am looking forward to thieveries on an unheard of scale as soon as I can find an accomplice as rascally minded as myself to read it to me. I don’t know what our plans are or may be forced to become after plumpudding mass but you will then be nearer these broadgrades (Dano-English for latitudes) and let us hope that Madame la Manche will be less of a termagant than she has been for some months past. We had some dreadful wind storms here, one when we were out in the clinic which threw my wife back a little, accompanied by some unseemly remarks by the Reverend Mr Thor. It is a weird place sometimes at night, especially when they bring in unfortunate people in the small hours who have to be operated upon there and then. The groaning of the lift mingling with the howling of the blast and shrieking of the trees and the cannonading of the hailstorms making anti-music with the frenzied shouts of the French staff, causing the rubber carpeting sound proofed edifice to form a pandemoniacal box for the wren-like twittering of my nerves.

Here endeth this epistle. In order to keep the boat properly balanced I have been eating practically without interruption from morning to night the last six weeks. This is not so much gluttony as a kind of compensation policy on my part and is also jesuitically intentional for when my wife sees me devouring mounds of food she ocularly demonstrates unto herself that she is rapidly improving which whether Lindley Murray like it or not she also is and I also am.

With kindest regards and many thanks from her too for your frequent inquiries.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 December 1928

Maison de Santé, 5 rue Edouard-Dumont, Neuilly-s/Seine

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Many happy returns of the 17. Nora was operated here on 8 November and has been undergoing a radium treatment since. She is making some progress. I can write this and almost see it but cannot read a word of print except capitals. Nonetheless am trying to work in this poor atmosphere (I am in the next room to her to keep her company). More anon Kind regards to Nelly and yourself from all

Jim

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To FRANK BUDGEN, [15 December 1928]

Maison de Santé, 5 rue Édouard-Dumont, Neuilly-s/Seine

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Many thanks for your article which Giorgio has just read to me. It is nice and hard like the nuts of Knowledge. I have been having a very anxious time with my wife who was operated here on 8 November last. I am in here to keep her company as the operation and still more the treatment make her highly nervous. She is getting on well these last weeks. As for myself I can write at last as you see but cannot see any print yet, not even my own, alas!

Jeg onsker Dem en glaedelig Jul og et godt Nytår. På gensyn! Sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

COURT INJUNCTION, 27 December 1928

INJUNCTION

At a Special Term, Part II, of the Supreme Court, held in and for the County of New York, at the Court House thereof in the Borough of Manhattan, New York City, on the 27th day of December 1928.

PRESENT:

HON. RICHARD H. MITCHELL, JUSTICE.

JAMES JOYCE Plaintiff,

—against—

SAMUEL ROTH AND TWO WORLDS PUBLISHING COMPANY INC., Defendants.

Upon the summons, amended complaint and the answers thereto, the deposition of Samuel Roth, subscribed January 10, 1928, the deposition of James Joyce, taken March 8, 1928, the stipulation between the attorneys for the respective parties and consent of defendants thereto, both dated December 19, 1928, and all other proceedings heretofore had herein:

Now, on motion of Chadbourne, Stanchfield & Levy, plaintiff’s attorneys, it is

ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the above-named defendants Samuel Roth and Two Worlds Publishing Company Inc., and each of them, their officers, assistants, agents and servants are hereby enjoined, under the penalty by Law prescribed, from using the name of the plaintiff for advertising purposes or for purposes of trade by

(a) Publishing, printing, stating or advertising the name of the plaintiff in connection with any magazine, periodical or other publication published by defendants or either of them;

(b) Publishing, printing, stating or advertising the name of the plaintiff in connection with any book, writing, manuscript or other work of the plaintiff;

(c) Publishing, printing, stating or advertising, or otherwise disseminating the name of the plaintiff in connection with any book, writing, manuscript or other work of the plaintiff, including the book ‘ULYSSES’, in any issue of Two Worlds Monthly, Two Worlds Quarterly, or any other magazine, periodical or other publication, heretofore or hereafter published by defendants. Enter,

Richard H. Mitchell
Justice of the Supreme Court
Thomas F. Farley.
Clerk.

 ® 

1929

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 January 1929

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: My wife has just been examined by the three doctors and her case pronounced a complete success—one of the quickest and most satisfactory on record….

I am hopelessly overworked and my sight has got rapidly worse. Borsch told me last night that if it did not improve in a week or so that both eyes should be operated. I have not told my wife yet. I am to be seen by some other doctors first. I am very hesitent about these operations and no wonder.

Enclosed are notices for U.

I can scarcely see this scrawl but I hope you can read it. I need another week’s sight to finish Yc. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

 ® 

To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 26 January 1929

192 rue de Grenelle

TS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, Will you please send to Stuart Gilbert, 43 or 45 Avenue Pasteur, Becon-les-Bruyere, Paris, that German book if it is in Trieste, about Odysseus he wrote for. Also the partial score of Samuel Butler’s Ulysses, as he needs them both for his book.

I return to the clinic with Nora on the fourth where she has to undergo another and larger operation which it is hoped and believed will effect a radical cure, especially after the former results of the former operation and radium treatment. My reading sight seems to have come to an end but I was informed that both eyes should be again operated. This will be operation nine and ten. Nevertheless with the help of about ten assistants I was able to check the next installment for Transition which comes out this week. Don’t allude to this news about Nora in any letter reaching me before the fifth proximo as she does not know it yet.

Best wishes to Nellie and kind regards from us all.

Jim

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From VLADIMIR DIXON, 9 February 1929

27 Avenue de F Opera, Paris

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mister Germ’s Choice, in gutter dispear I am taking my pen toilet you know that, being Leyde up in bad with the prewailent distemper (I opened the window and in flew Enza), I have been reeding one half ter one other the numboars of ‘transition’ in witch are printed the severeall instorments of your ‘Work in Progress’.

You must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sac!) you or to be smart, but I am so disturd by my inhumility to onthorstand most of the impslocations constrained in your work that (although I am by nominals dump and in fact I consider myself not brilliantly ejewcatered but still of above Avveroëge men’s tality and having maid the most of the oporto unities I kismet) I am writing you, dear mysterre Shame’s Voice, to let you no how bed I feeloxerab out it all.

I am überzeugt that the labour involved in the compostition of your work must be almost supper humane and that so much travail from a man of your intellacked must ryeseult in somethink very signicophant. I would only like to know have I been so strichnine by my illnest white wresting under my warm Coverlyette that I am as they say in my neightive land ‘out of the mind gone out’ abd unable to combprehen that which is clear or is there really in your work some ass pecked which is Uncle Lear?

Please froggive my t’Emeritus and any inconvince that may have been caused by this litter. Yours veri tass

Vladimir Dixon

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 12 April 1929

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I am very busy revising the fragment and don’t feel at all well, tiredness and intermittent pains. Have you a copy of Blast II and is it possible to have that Welsh-English dictionary? I hope you are now back in London. I hope to finish my revision in a week or so. With kindest regards sincerely yours

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), Postmark 18 April 1929

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for Blast II but what I want is the English-Welsh part! The queer allusion to me is in the illustration of that hotel catalogue of marvels. Have you seen the new number of W.L.’s Enemy? A lot of it was read to me but I should prefer the book advertised in Pearson’s W. ‘Want to join the police? That, at least is about something. Kindest regards

J.J.

P.S. How small I can write.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 26 April 1929

[Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Giorgio made his debut last night (v. programme). He had no stage fright and even scowled round on the pianist when the latter (wilfully, he says) made a mistake. He sang quite well. I am working night, noon and morning. C.K. Ogden is doing the preface. G.S. [sic] has sent an article of his Ulysses work to the Fortnightly which wished to see it when he, at my suggestion, wrote to W.L. Courtney (died Nov. ’28). E.P. dines with us tonight. More anon. You will scarcely recognise my fables now. Picasso was too busy to do me so Brancusi did it. I was awake nearly all last night trying to solve a problem in elementary mathematics—all this for a word or two. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 May 1929

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: O is out today. Up till the last day I had to supervise it and check the references etc made by the 12 yet on opening it this morning I light on the word ‘whoreson’ classified by … among the neologisms coined by W.S. in Cymbeline! I gave the title Tales Told of Shem and Shaun to the Crosby book. J.N.W. Sullivan having declined to do the preface I proposed to them C.K. Ogden (author in part of The Meaning of Meaning) who did a very useful introduction. Picasso was too busy painting somebody so the next aim was Brancusi. He did a kind of a head of me which the C’s didn’t much like so he went on and did something like this

O please turn over!

Of course it’s not all sideways like that but those are the lines and it’s signed and called Symbol of J.J. The book is out on Saturday. I consider the preface a great gain. I got on well with Brancusi (who is something of a fogey like myself) deploring modern feminine fashions, the speed of a fogey like myself) deploring modern feminine fashions, the speed of modern trains etc etc. His design of me will attract certain buyers. But I wish he or Antheil, say, could or would be as explicit as I try to be people ask me: And what’s this here, Guvnor?

I got S.G. to write to Courtney, editor of the Fortnightly, reminding him of my first in literature and proposing a chapter (Hades) for the review. Courtney died last November but the acting editor was taken by the idea and took S.G.’s article—to appear in July. This is also a nice wide breach made by the long gun you sometimes hear of.

Aldington came to see me. Des Imagistes the collection of poems published about 1500 years ago is to come in a new form. i.e. contributions by the three more less unknown contributors. I, not having any verse and not wishing to seem un-colleaguelike proposed to give him Kevin’s page from Pt II. I have looked for it but can’t find it, high or low. So could you please make me a copy when you have time therefor.

There being nothing of mine in the current No. of ‘transition’ I got Jolas to translate Curtius article for it and put in Beckett’s and the glossary part of S.G.’s.

With kindest regards

(to be continued tomorrow)

Don’t fail to read special summer No. tomorrow containing account of A M’s picnic, E P’s dinner and a hundred other bright features.

Wenn es ist furchtbar heiss

Lessen die Jeiss!

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 May 1929 [Continuation]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Lucia’s disqualification for the dancing prize was received by a strong protest from a good half of the audience (not friends of ours) who called out repeatedly ‘Nous réclamons l’irlandaise! Un peu de justice, messieurs!’ She got the best notice, I think. Another Paris link has snapped, Mme Puard, my old clinic nurse, having left for a sanatorium. As regards myself, I finished the 28 days iodine treatment but have not yet been back to Dr Hartmann. I have had too much to do, being up sometimes till 1.30 fooling over old books of Euclid and algebra. I have arranged to get Faktorovitch (who helps me in these matters) to review the Crosbye’s book on condition that he does not produce a mere flattery. He is a Russian (a bolshevik too and possibly a semi-official one) but I don’t mind as we never talk politics and he is most obliging but chiefly he represents a class of my readers which ought to have their say, i.e. the foreignborn admirers. To succeed O I am planning W that is a book of only 4 long essays by 4 contributors (as yet I have found only one—Crosbye—who has a huge illustrated edition of the Book of the Dead, bequeathed to him by his uncle)—the subjects to be the treatment of night (cf B of D and S. John of the Cross ‘Dark Night of the Soul’), the mechanics and chemistry, the humour and I have not yet fixed on the fourth subject. This for 1930, when I shall also, I hope, send out another fragment, this time about T with another preface, U and L having by that time passed into currency. I have also arranged for the translation into an Italian review of Beckett’s article and will try to do the same for Budgen’s in a Danish or Swedish one. I have also proposed to a young Dublin artist to do an illustration for the old earwig’s funeral (Time, Saturn) which, as you will see, I introduced into the Ondt and Gracehoper. And that, I think, ends my activities for the moment. Do not blame me for all this intriguing. I have little or no support and have to defend a difficult cause, whether right or wrong I no longer know or care two straws.

As regards the dinner with E.P. and E.H. they had a fine friendly set-to midway over G.A. whom H accuses of simulated sickness, subscription seeking, semi-blackmail and so on, P replying that H is known for his mendaciousness. The description of both seeming to suit myself rather well I got them on to another subject. P then wanted me as ‘the leader of European prose’ (!) to write ‘an open letter’ denouncing, with Roth as pretext, everything American and proposing dire retribution on U.S. ambassadors, consuls etc. H said this was moonshine as it would do me no end of harm with thousands of Americans who had supported me and support me still. Of course while I argued pro and con with P I had not for a moment the faintest intention of taking his advice. By the way he is in London. Has he been to see you? He did not go to rue de l’Odéon.

A.M. wants to get up a country picnic to celebrate Bloomsday and the French Ulysse. Two char-à-bancs full of people! I am afraid of the heatwave and storms and would much prefer a glass of milk and a bath bun like the Private Secretary who every day in every way seems to me a better and better Imitation of Christ. Pound says the most outrageously amusing things sometimes. Kicking his long legs around in the drawingroom he upset a little sacred image McGreevy (Lord knows why!) gave me at Xmas so that a thread got twisted round S. Joseph’s neck, E.P. exclaiming ‘Gee! I never knew that that blighter had been hanged too!’

Here I will stop for today because the editor of the Revue de France wants to see me in the next room about an article.

I hope you were not at Guildford during that last bad storm I read of.

With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To the EDITOR of Solaria, 31 May 1929

Parigi

Caro collega, la ringrazio anzitutto d’avere avuto il gentile pensiero d’associarmi al tributo d’omaggio offerto dalla rivista Soiaria alla memoria del mio vecchio amico Italo Svevo. E aderisco molto voltentieri quantunque io cieda che ormai la sua sorte letteraria debba rimanere affidata unicamente ai suoi libri, e che l’emettere guidizi in proposito riguardi soprattutto i critici del suo paese.

Mi sarà sempre grato il pensare che il caso m’ha concesso l’occasione d’aver avuto parte, per quanto minima, alla accoglienza che un pubblico suo e internazionale ha fatto a Svevo negli ultimi anni della sua vita. A me rimane la memoria d’una persona cara e un’ammirazione di lunga data che con gli anni, anziché affievolirsi, matura.

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 2 July 1929

Imperial Hotel, Torquay

MS. Harvard

Dear Eliot: We are well installed here for a good month, I hope, and like it very much. I hope you got A.L.P. from Paris. Gilbert is staying here for a week or so and has sent you on the typescript—less two or three chapters which he is still at work on. He says that Cape wanted to publish the book but his reader dissuaded him, saying there was no interest for Ulysses in England. I suppose he knows the situation but possibly such an interest can be created.

I hope Mrs Eliot is going on well and that we may have an occasion to meet when we go back to London Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To SIGNORA LIVIA SCHMITZ, 14 July 1929

Imperial Hotel, Torquay

MS. Texas

Gentile Signora: La copia che Schmitz mi mandò non era la bella e non sono sicuro di averla perchè mi parlò nella sua lettera della sua intenzione di pubblicare la conferenza in una rivista. Però, non appena tornato a Parigi in settembre, cercherò fra le mie carte. È possibile anche ch’io abbia passato le copie a Miss Beach per il suo archivio in attesa dell’articolo stampato. Ma essa pure è in vacanze, ma gliene parlerò al mio ritorno. Dove si trova la copia dalla quale Schmitz lesse? Non avrebbe potuto leggere quella che mi mandò. Forse la diede al Linati o al Ferrieri? Non mi sembrerebbe inverosimile.

Grazie per i due libri. Non li avevo visti prima.

Saluti cordiali anche da parte di mia moglie devmo

James Joyce

PS. Questa volta ho scritto l’indirizzo tout court!

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 July 1929

Imperial Hotel, Torquay

Dear Miss Weaver: Everyone seems delighted with this place—especially my wife—but the hotels are very difficult, no single rooms in the smaller ones and the prices especially for August far higher than in France. I got them to make a reduction here for a month’s stay and booked a room for you at the same rate from 7 to 14 August. I hope that is right.

I saw J.D., J.S. and T.S.E. The first is arranging for me to be seen by some famous doctor when I return to London. J.S. coming down here on Saturday for a weekend to talk about giving lectures. He seemed to be much impressed and moved by my proposal to hand over the work to him if I found my sight or the opposition demanded it and said I could rely on him to help me in anything. But he says I will do it and added that A.L.P. is the ‘greatest prose ever written by a man’! J.D. told me at dinner he thought the last pages of it one of the greatest things in Eng. literature. I thought it better my proposal to J.S. should come now so that if I am forced to it in the end it may appear less abrupt and more spontaneous.

T.S.E. most friendly. He wants his firm to publish S.G.’s book and to bring out an English papercover edition at 2/- of A.L.P.

Please watch T.L.S., Spectator, New Statesman and Catholic News.

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Το CARESSE CROSBY (Postcard), Postmark 17 July 1929

Imperial Hotel, Torquay, England

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mrs Crosby: Before you leave Paris for that well earned rest can you see that the full number (25 and 25) press and author’s copies have been left with Miss Beach. She was 10 or 13 short when I left

With kind regards to Mr Crosby and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT (Postcard), Postmark 20 July 1929

[Torquay]

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Sehr geehrter Herr Goyert: Können Sie mir ein Paar Seiten Ihrer Übersetzung ALP. schicken? Hier habe ich, Gott sei Dank, Zeit genug und möchte sehen ob überhaupt eine Übersetzung davon möglich ist. Freundliche Grüsse auch an Ihre Frau Gemahlin von uns beiden

James Joyce

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From EDOUARD DUJARDIN, 22 July 1929

3 rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris VI

MS. Buffalo

Cher et illustre Monsieur Joyce, Je vous remercie de penser à la traduction des ‘Lauriers sont coupés’, et je fais immédiatement envoyer le livre a M. Eric Pinker.

Ma femme et moi, nous sommes en train d’achever la lecture d’Ulysse’ … Que vous dirais-je? si ce n’est ce que je vous disais déjà le jour du déjeuner? le sentiment de nager dans un océan de spiritualité, le même que j’ai éprouvé à vingt ans la première fois que j’ai entendu (sans savoir l’allemand) les quatre journées du ‘Ring des Nibelung’, c’est-à-dire quelque chose qui fait comprendre ce que les mystiques dénomment la vision en Dieu.

En ma plus fervente admiration,

Dujardin

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To ERIC PINKER, [About 25 July 1929]

Imperial Hotel, Torquay

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Mr Edouard Dujardin is sending you from Paris a copy of his book Les Lauriers Sont Coupés which, he thinks, might be translated into English. He was a friend of Huysmans, Zola, Manet and of Mr George Moore. First published nearly 40 years ago it went into a second edition in 1924. It has a curious history—told in a preface by Mr Valery Larbaud—with which my name is associated. I hope you may find a London publisher for it. But for the reason above mentioned Mr Dujardin does not wish that it be issued by any publisher who publishes books of mine, either here or in America.

This will be my address (or Euston Hotel, London, after 1 September) for the next two months, I expect, as I am taking a holiday and a rest. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Dujardin’s address is 3 rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris VII

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 30 July 1929

Imperial Hotel, Torquay

Dear Larbaud: It is useless to begin an account of the half year and more I had of worry, expense and nerves in Paris. Our three visits to Hospital etc. It is all over I hope and well over, but I could not fix my mind to write. And then, I had to work literally night and day on Shem and Shaun and then I left, and here in Torquay, not seeing well I fell over a wall a week or so ago and even yet sleep badly from the pain of my arm. Moreover though I can read with some difficulty, my sight is much worse than it was etc. etc. Anyhow we hope Mrs Nebbia and yourself have the opposite story to tell. We return to Paris sometime in September and I ought to go to see an oculist in Barcelona before Christmas, Borsch of Paris being dead. And do tell me when, where and how we are likely to meet for it becomes everyday more impossible to discuss me and what I am trying to do by letter.

First the small news, the French press on Ulysses was much better than the German and A.M. hopes to arrange for an ordinary edition in January. I suppose you heard about the commemoration lunch, yourself, Morel and Gilbert being absent however. I was with Morel the night before at the theatre and until one o’clock at Weber’s and he promised me he would come but then sent me a telegram saying he had to meet his pupil at a station between Paris and Vannes. I know this was true but he could have come by straining a point. He is not well, has to undergo operations on both legs, lest he become suddenly immobilised and talks of retiring to his island in the Pacific Ocean! It is all rather regrettable don’t you think? He is rather sauvage but if he had come it would perhaps have given him some satisfaction. Gide and Jaloux couldn’t come but Dujardin, Valéry, Soupault and Romains were there. And L.P.F. was beside me. By the way he spoke to me somewhat wistfully about you, asking me when I heard from you and so on and gave me to understand that though you were still estranged, your public utterances concerning him and his writing were untroubled and serenely appreciative. Of which appreciation he expressed his appreciation. Valéry and he wanted to make speeches but I put a veto on that. There were no English or Americans except the kind lady who is typing this. But there were two riotous young Irishmen and one of them fell deeply under the influence of beer, wine spirits, liqueurs, fresh air, movement and feminine society and was ingloriously abandoned by the Wagonette in one of those temporary palaces which are inseparably associated with the memory of the Emperor Vespasian. Before I go on, Gilbert has an article in the current Fortnightly—one of the chapters of his book on my Ulysses—Hades, and he wants to place another in French in a Paris review, not the Revue de Paris. The chapter being that on the Wandering Rocks. Can you suggest which Review, or do you know anyone in the Revue de France for example? A third chapter will appear in October Transition, Aeolus, and a fourth he wants to place in an American or Italian monthly of the same standing. The whole book has an introduction and eighteen chapters and it ought to come out in English in the late autumn or spring if T.S. Elliot [sic] who asked to be allowed to read it for the publisher Faber and Gwyer (the Criterion) accepts it.

What you say about the Exag is right enough. I did stand behind those twelve Marshals more or less directing them what lines of research to follow. But up to the present though at least a hundred copies have been freely circulated to the press and pressmen not a single criticism has appeared. My impression is that the paper cover, the grandfather’s clock on the title page and the word Exagmination itself for instance incline reviewers to regard it as a joke, though these were all my doing, but some fine morning not a hundred years from now some enterprising fellow will discover the etymological history of the orthodox word examination and begin to change his wavering mind on the subject of the book, whereupon one by one others will faintly echo in the wailful choir, ‘Siccom e i gru van cantando lor lai.’

I hope you got T.T. of S. and S. and liked the edition. What do you think of Ogden’s preface and Brancusi’s whirligig. From your silence I fancy that at least you find it difficult. It is, and it would be childish to deny it, but I am sending you by the next post a curious book which may or may not look to you like English at first sight and it does not come from any Black Sun Magical press outside England as she is spoken, nor is it written by an escaped continentalized Dubliner inflicted with the incurable levity of youth. It is written by the right honorable Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate to His Majesty the King, English, now aged three score and ten (I mean R.B.) and issued from Oxford where they make the best shirts. It seems to me that it would be interesting to that imaginary Reader let us call him, the Good Terrafirmaite equally at home in Potsdam, Sacré Coeur, Maladetta and whatever is the Portuguese for Devil take the hindmost to read in the most affable of all tongues, because the most accessible, some recording by you of this curious meeting of extremes. What do you think about it? I wish I had some leisure and that both our minds were free from preoccupation to discuss with you about it. So that I hope we shall soon meet in Paris. I feel that Fargue would be interested in the conversation for his mind has been running fairly constantly in the same direction now for some years but there is in his case the almost fatal objection that he is a man of one language only, though perhaps one could discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this for all eternity. Anyhow I am now hopelessly with the goats and can only think and write capriciously. Depart from me ye bleaters, into everlasting sleep which was prepared for Academicians and their agues!

With kind regards and looking forward as well as backward to the last and next bottles of Vouvray Moncontour …

P.S. Prayer to be recited after having read the above:

Lord, send us both the green coat and cocked hat! Amen.

(40 days indulgence)

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [? Early August 1929]

Imperial Hotel, Torquay

TS. Yale

Let me know when you can if you got the books alright. What you think of Ogden and Brancusi and if you have picked a passage in Alp. You ought to glance at Tomlinsons London River too. Splendid weather down here and hope you have a good holiday.

J.J.

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From FRANK CROWNINSHIELD to CARESSE CROSBY, 12 August 1929

‘VANITY FAIR’, Graybar Building, New York

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mrs Crosby, You were truly angelic to send me that interesting Joyce book, which has just reached me.

Would it be a good idea, perhaps, to use little quotations from it in Vanity Fair? If so, we should have to explain a few things: first, how long has Joyce been at this new book, and how soon after Ulysses (1922) did he conceive it. How long will it be, in words? When will it be published? Who will publish it? Are the sketches in it to be consecutive and interrelated? How is Joyce’s health? Where is he?… Yours

Frank Crowninshield

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), Postmark 15 August 1929

Royal Hotel, Bristol

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Choose any part of ‘Proteus’ that you prefer but I doubt that a few well chosen words from A.L.P. on the picture itself not the frame? Here with a glimpse of Sykes’ Avenue Kind regards

James Joyce

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From GEORGE MOORE, 11 September 1929

121 Ebury Street, London, S.W.l.

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr. Joyce, When we look back upon our lives, our lives seem fateful. I never understood why I avoided reading ‘Ulysses,’ for I was curious to read it, and when I was in the Nursing Home somebody whose name I cannot recall at the moment sent me a present of a reading desk, and I wondered what could have put it into his head to send me such a useless piece of furniture. Now I know! I am reading ‘Ulysses,’ and if you were here for a longer time and could dine with me, we would talk about the French, which I think wilfully exaggerated in places.

Thank you for sending the book; I look forward to reading it all the winter. And I have to thank you, too, for the volume of essays explaining your new work in progress. The best of these seems to me to be by Stuart Gilbert.

Padraic Colum has written a very pretty introduction to the still unpublished work, and I remember him as you remember him at the outset of his career, when everything seemed against him. Very sincerely yours,

George Moore

PS I still hope to see you before you return.

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), [? Late September 1929]

[Paris]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

I cannot make out A.B’s attitude. Do you ever correspond with him. If W.inP. is all wrong why does he for ever return to it? Are you coming to Paris soon?

J.J.

PS. Morel is married.

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To VALERY LARBAUD, [20 September 1929]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Have just got back here and hope we meet soon. Is this a good Spanish publisher? Please return it (the letter) and let me know if you approve. What about Gilbert’s chapter of his Ulysses book for the Revue de France. I suppose you got the Fortnightly. Have arranged for the English translation of Les Lauriers sont Coupés with a preface by George Moore. Kindest regards to both

J.J.

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 22 September 1929

2 Square Robiac 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Curran: On my return here after a long holiday in England I found your thoughtful present. It was very kind of you to think of me and perhaps I may have it reproduced on the cover of the third of the three or four fragments from WinP which I propose to issue at intervals. I hope you had a pleasant vacation but, if it isn’t yet ended, that you may possibly pass here on your way home.

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From GEORGE MOORE, 11 October 1929

121 Ebury Street, London, S.W.l.

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr. Joyce, I have delayed writing to thank you for sending me the Italian translation of Yeats’s poem from ‘The Countess Cathleen’ for I wished to write you a long letter about ‘Ulysses.’ But there is so much to be said about the book that I shall have to wait till I meet you in Paris in the spring. If I began to tell you my doubts about the inner monologue I should fill three or four pages.

Looking forward to renewing under the skies of our election the acquaintance begun in London, I am, Very sincerely yours,

George Moore

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 13 October 1929

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I think it must be a copy you, I or Eileen gave to someone in Trieste which is in the revue. Meanwhile please send me three copies in a letter and the new photo and Prezioso’s address. The other copies as you suggest. John Sullivan sends you his regards. He is to dine with us on Tuesday. Please reply by return.

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 October 1929 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I have not stopped working yet but I had better send you off some news. Crosby Gaige’s successor Wells wrote for another fragment and I am trying to leave the city piece fit to submit to his agent here. I have finished however the work for Transition and also my connection with the review as you will see by a note in it. In addition to all this the German publisher arrived and wanted to rush me into a new contract, but I insisted on Goyert’s being brought here much to the latter’s displeasure in the beginning. He, Gilbert, I and Brody the publisher worked on the German text with the help of Sykes by correspondence…. He has now gone back and the first half of the book has gone to press and the second edition is to be out in December. Whatever the Germans are they are certainly quick….

As for domestic news, my wife has to be held down from assaulting different types of French civil and uncivil servants and we have to ring a bell every quarter of an hour to stop her from talking about London. Lucia turned down the Darmstadt offer and seems to have come to the conclusion that she has not the physique for a strenuous dancing career, the result of which has been a month’s tears as she thinks that she has thrown away three or four years hard work and is sacrificing a talent. In addition to which apparently she has to undergo an operation to straighten her eye. She wrote to Barcelona about her case and mine. The Spanish doctor, evidently a hidalgo, replied at length about her but almost completely ignored me as I suppose the case was too difficult to treat by letter. His terms are about three times as high as those of Paris doctors. There seems to have been a slight improvement while I was in England of my bad eye, which nobody can account for unless it was the result of Professor Euston’s treatment, the improvement being slight however. Do you think you could stand reading another sentence about my eye, because I don’t think I could write it this evening having just knocked off work on the city piece. An enormously long article appeared in the Harvard University Review and one or two others which Miss Beach will send you when she gets duplicates though these are not easy to find here. Have you seen an interview with Moore in the Sunday Times? I saw allusions to it in the Paris press but not it. He has written to me once or twice. I have received an invitation to lecture at Oxford but now that I have practically finished for the moment my work in progress (?) I am doubly disinclined to go.

I shall write again in a few days when I get a rest. I knew we were both going to have a rather bad time when we left London lotusland but I hope you are enjoying all the delights of the countryside. I shall feel rather pleasantly stupid eight or ten days from now. The disc hasn’t appeared yet. I believe something went wrong in the factory, but it is expected any day. I suppose you read Bennett’s article on Alp, he will return to this again I think. Claudite iam rivos which is all the Latin that comes into my head at the moment.

With kindest regards and begging you to remember me to my fellow sufferer Miss Marsden.

P.S. What about the Reverend Mr James Cropper?

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To ERIC PINKER, 7 November 1929

[Paris]

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: Many thanks for cheque (£7.9.)

I saw Mr George Moore before I left London and he told me he would write a preface for Dujardin’s book if you got a publisher for it. Mr Stuart Gilbert, one of the translators of the French Ulysse, has offered to translate it. Will you please tell me if you have offered it to the Mandrake Press, 41 Nursery Street, and, if so, whether they will do it? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 November 1929 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I have been sleeping sixteen hours a day for the past three weeks incapable of thinking, writing, reading or speaking. Here however is a further instalment of news. The second French edition which has been largely subscribed comes out on Xmas Eve. There is a great demand for it in Italy. One of Gilbert chapters, Aeolus, is to appear in an Italian review. The second German edition is also largely subscribed and is to appear on the first of January, and one of Gilbert essays is to appear in a German review and one is to appear in a Paris review and he has been reading to me other episodes. The whole book is to be in London in a few weeks. Fargue has written an article about me and is coming here tomorrow when he and I are to set to work to put Alp into French, the last eight pages. Ogden sent me a disc but Lucia broke it and we are waiting for the others. One will be sent to you as soon as that H.M.V. factory wakes up. Herbert Hughes the musician was here. He took down from me at the piano my two Irish come-all-yous and is going to set them and publish them as sung by. He also told me that he would arrange to have five of the songs in P.P. set by five English composers including himself (he is from Belfast) and published in one volume. The others are to be by Arthur Bliss, Arnold Bax, and I think he said Vaughan Williams. Eugene Goossens also wrote for leave to set eight more of Chamber Music. Nineteen of this book alone were set this year so the title appears to have been justified. My son sang at a semi-private concert a couple of weeks ago and had a big success. I brought the leading tenor of the Paris Opera there, Mr John Sullivan, probably the most powerful dramatic tenor at present alive and a great admirer of mine. He liked him well and is going to push him as much as he can. Lucia … hopes that if Margaret Morris comes to Paris, as she is announced to do, she may get a position as instructor at the school. She has plenty of voice too, possibly more than her brother, but she refuses to sing. I shall begin now to howl every afternoon in the hope of wakening myself and not having anything better to do. Did I tell you A.M. is married. He is translating into French Lady Chatterly’s Lover and is to do the rest of P.P. I cannot get any satisfactory reply from anyone in London about Dujardin’s book and the poor man thinks it is all settled, G.M.’s preface and everything. You remember his dedication in Les Lauriers. Well he brought me his Ulysses and to give him cake for bread I wrote in it ‘To E.D. Annonciateur de la parole intérieure, le larron impénitent. J.J.’ Our girl Laure got married but we’ve got another one after a great deal of difficulty in this festive season or advent thereto. I may have some further news concerning my sight in a week or so as Drs Collinson and Fontaine are going to have a consultation. They are all as much in the dark as I am. James Stephens was over here for a week. I saw him nearly every day and explained to him all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it was madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself heart and soul to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth. I was very glad to speak with him and we will leave it at that for the moment. I am now no longer bound down to Transition but I have the Earwicker fragment still hovering over me. Where I am to get the energy within me or the manifold assistance outside me to cope with this fragment for private publication at present I don’t know. I hope you like Transition and the use I have made of your book on the City churches.

I have had a letter from Schwartz asking me to send him a photograph as he feels so lonely in London. There is a long article in the December Vanity Fair about T.H. Speaking of T.H. reminds me of the death of T.P. The rapprochement between myself and very old men is very curious. E.D., Italo Svevo, G.M., and even T.H. himself. And now the poet-laureate Robert Bridges of his own initiative has sent me a signed copy of his last book The Testament of Beauty, dedicated to the King, with an inscription expressing his full sympathy with what I am trying to do. Imagine my astonishment. The coalminers have also written again offering to put us up for a fortnight etc.

I hope you are escaping the wild weather up your part, and that when you have time you will write to me sending me your own news. Having said which he laid his head on the table and lapsed into the arms of Murphy.

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To CARESSE CROSBY (Telegram), 12 December 1929

Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Deeply shocked by dreadful news please accept my sincere sympathy

James Joyce

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1930

To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 March 1930 [Dictated]

2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: It is some months since you heard from me but I sent you a few messages in that time. I finished the revision of the fragment for publication last night at seven, and, I suspect, my literary career at the same time. Before I start explaining the reasons for my persistent silence I had better put in the forefront the most irksome part of this missive, namely that I must ask you to instruct Messrs Monro Saw to sell out immediately two hundred pounds of War Stock and oblige me by remitting the amount, as they are usually kind enough to do on return of the witnessed forms. I shall explain later in the letter why I need this. A state of tension, of a somewhat more acute kind than those with which you have been occasionally acquainted in the past, has developed in the last few days between the Rue de Grenelle and the Rue de l’Odeon so that I do not think it politic for me to present myself there for a week or so, the tension being chiefly at that end, until this matter is settled. The causes of this are ostensibly the fact that I have overrun my royalty account by a month or so but in reality the reason is somewhat different, for at no time in the past ten years have I ever been exact in this respect.

I will now jump into another part of the pool of despond. One of the reasons is said to be that I did not take the opportunity of accompanying Sullivan to Barcelona to see the oculist he has such faith in Dr Barracquer. I had several reasons for not doing so. When he mentioned him to me several months ago I wrote to Barcelona a long letter narrating the full history of my case, and adding that my daughter had a cast in her eye which she was rather diffident about having operated. He replied, quoting very high fees (which I had asked about), almost completely ignoring my case, and replying mainly to the part about Lucia. She has since been successfully operated. It was nothing at all, it took twenty minutes to do (Collinson did it), she came home in a taxi and in a week both her eyes were straight, and she suffered practically nothing. In the second place I disliked the idea of going to a country where the political dictatorship had just collapsed and I have been told that the dictator himself is now dead. If Sullivan had been singing in Barcelona for a few weeks, I might still have gone, but he was only passing through it on his way to Algiers and we should have been alone, I being almost helpless on account of my sight, had anything occurred. While I was turning these things over in my mind Mrs Sullivan rang me up, nominally about her daughter. I must tell you that his daughter aged 23 was some weeks before that in a very critical state. Neither the father nor the mother is a practical person and the doctor they had was a thorough fool.. he had diagnosed the case as one of appendicitis and was starving it accordingly. The mother-in-law who lives with them then got a stroke of hemiplegia and I prevailed on Sullivan to call in Dr Fontaine who at once brought the girl to a radiologist and it was found that she had tubercular peritonitis. If this discovery had been made ten days later the case would have been hopeless. As it is, she has had five weeks of ultraviolet rays treatment and is to be sent to Switzerland on the fifteenth of April for a six months cure in the mountains, which it is believed will be successful. As Sullivan was singing that night in Belgium I asked his wife to dine with us. She told me that he was inclined to be vague and unsatisfactory in such matters and that nobody had any influence over him except myself and that she wished me to urge on him strongly the necessity of making all the arrangements before he went to Algiers, as afterwards it might be too late. I said I would do so though I did not think it necessary. She then asked me whether we had decided to go, adding that he was not going alone. It struck me then that it was unwise for me to travel on this particular occasion, though she said that I was the only one of his friends to whom he had not introduced the lady and that he probably would not do so, but would rejoin her from Barcelona on. There is nothing very terrible in this, tenors I believe according to the modern Ulysses, have usually several cases of the same kind running concurrently. The surprising thing is that in this case there is only one and that it has been going on for twelve years. Still, not knowing precisely what the upshot of the journey might be it seemed better to stay in Paris and await his return to Paris, which I expect will take place on scheduled time in spite of the hinted hints. There was finally another reason. I had lately had some gossip carried to me about Sullivan and myself which I thought it better not to encourage, especially since from another quarter my wife’s name was involved in it too. I am sending you however under separate cover, along with my American lawyer’s letter—of which later—letters from two ladies concerning doctors in Wiesbaden and Zurich, and I think I will try one of these— for the moment which I don’t know.

I heard from Miss Beach that you are very disturbed about the notices in the English press concerning my oncoming blindness, I wonder who is responsible for these. The sight of one eye becomes slowly worse, while the sight of the other becomes slightly better. What can possibly be the causes in my bodily condition or habits which militate for one and against the other? Dr Fontaine is also rather distant with me. I have the highest opinion of her and allowed her to bring me after Borsch’s death to be seen by a young French ophthalmologist, Dr Hartmann, who said the only possible solution of the case was that my eye trouble proceeded from congenital syphilis which being curable, he said the proper thing for me was to undergo a cure of I have forgotten what.. I told this to Dr Collinson and he dissuaded me strongly from undergoing it. He said that at the very beginning Dr Borsch and he had discussed this possibility and that Borsch had excluded it categorically on account of the nature of the attacks, the way in which they were cured and the general reactions of the eye. He said too at any moment a skilful operation on the left eye ought to give you normal sight, the eye ground being quite healthy, but he had known cases in which the use of the drug in question had had a bad effect on the optic nerve. So that ended that for me. If you knew how highly the disease I have mentioned is respected in this country you would understand Dr Fontaine’s aloofness. Syphilis is for the French what God Save the King is for the English, when it is mentioned tout le monde se decouvre.

Now let me tell you what has been done in these last few months. The second German edition of Ulysses came out and the third is to come out in June. The second French edition came out and the publisher appears to be quite happy about it. Gilbert has finished the revision of his first proofs and his book is to come out the third week in April. A L P is announced to appear on May 1st. I offered H.C.E. to the Fountain Press, successors to Crosby Gaige. They declined to pay the price asked, whereupon I gave it to Babou and Kahane of Paris, who will bring it out on the 12th April. Hearing this, the Fountain Press partner in Paris came to me and asked me for a fourth fragment after having just turned down the third! I gave him an evasive answer whereupon he found out Messrs Babou and Kahane and bought up half the edition in advance. Messrs Babou and Kahane plus Mr Adams then wrote to me via Pinker, making me an offer for an advance on the completed book and I also received a similar offer through the Chicago Tribune from a house in America named Selt, proposing what they called a stiff sum in advance and expressing their willingness to wait seven years for the completed manuscript. I shall return to the offer transmitted by Pinker about forty pages later on, when I get back to the rue de l’Odeon. Other things done are .. the Polish and Czech translations have been arranged. Exiles was produced in Berlin at the Deutsches Volkstheater on the 9th, they invited me to be present but I did not go. It is to be produced in Milan on the 15 April. The English translation of Dujardin’s book will be published by the Mandrake Press with a preface by George Moore and a note about my connexion with the book. Two of Gilbert’s chapters have appeared in French, in Echanges and the Revue de Geneve, but it is scarcely worth while sending them since the English book will be in your hands in a few weeks. I think it probable that Fourcade my French publisher will do this in French. He gave a big dinner for me some days ago, one of the best I ever saw on a table. But I was anything but a success and when I tell you that I left before the champagne you will be able to judge in what kind of a mood I was. However I sent madame a bouquet next morning and I will ask them to dine with me in a more quiet way soon.

Conner, my American lawyer in the suit against Roth, has sent me his bill for £600. I do not propose to pay this as it seems to me exorbitant for the ends gained. The Paris section of this bill of costs is £200 and the New York section £400. The publishers of HCE paid me on signing the contract fifty per cent of the whole amount, namely 25000 francs, out of which I paid 13000 francs arrears of income tax and 6500 rent and charges. I have still to pay 14000 francs arrears of income tax, but I can do this in two lots as I arranged through one of the managers of Lloyds Bank here who is a great reader of mine. I propose, however, to instruct Babou and Kahane to pay over the other £200 due on the first of May to Conner, as these people, in addition to bungling the case, for they could have pressed for the injunction right away, have been the manipulators of the difficult question of copyright in my present work, of which more anon. Aldington has sent me a message that I am not to pay anything, as it is or ought to be a public question, in view of the judgment obtained, but I had already had copies of the injunction sent to the directors of the Pen Club and I do not know whether they have moved even so far as to publish that injunction in their journal. Aldington has been very active lately about me and has been agitating to have the ban on Ulysses lifted; so that for the settlement of the balance I shall wait on till I hear more of his plans.

When I ceased contributing to Transition I felt a sudden kind of drop as I was determined not to try to attack the second part in such an ill-equipped state (the revision of this last fragment has been a frightful job, extending over two months day and night sometimes till one in the morning, with seven different people helping me to do seven different parts of the labour, but of course such a condition of affairs could not possibly continue). In this frame of mind I first heard Sullivan singing and for the last four and a half months I have been working incessantly to try to get him past the Italian ring which protects the London, New York and Chicago opera houses. In temperament he is intractable, quarrelsome, disconnected, contemptuous, inclined to bullying, undiplomatic, but on the other hand good humoured, sociable, unaffected, amusing and well-informed. He supports a family connection of eleven people and is fifty years of age. In these circumstances it was necessary for me to force the pace and I did so. I got him very fine notices in the Morning Post (twice), Daily Telegraph, Daily News, Manchester Guardian, Irish Independent, Irish Statesman, Chicago Daily Tribune, New York World, New York Sun (twice), Daily Mail, New York Times with photograph, l’Intransigeant and la Rampe of Paris. I have made a side attack on the Chicago and New York Operas. As a result I have obtained for him his first engagement in Dublin; he is to sing there on April 27th, for which he gets £120, five times as much as he draws at the Paris opera. Also Sir T. Beecham whom I got to send over two critics to hear him has promised to engage him for the English production of William Tell, probably at the same figure, and Adams, who has a finger in theatrical pies also, has promised, chiefly with an eye on my book, to arrange a series of symphonic concerts for him in the United States. All this, for a person who really exerted himself and did not know very well the milieu in which he was working, involved a tremendous amount of telephoning, writing, interviewing, newspaper hunting, theatre-going, entertaining and being entertained. As a result of all that and the revision of H C E, I am quite flattened out and in fact for the last two days have been having quite a series of miniature fainting fits, lasting only a few seconds. Sullivan, thank goodness, has gone to Africa for a few weeks, but in any case I shall ease off when he comes back, for I have set in motion all the machines I could think of. I think there is more behind the state of tension I alluded to in the beginning than my well known inability to keep accounts straight. For a few weeks it was smilingly tolerated as a fad, but when it was seen that I went farther and stronger, the impression was made that I had gone slightly soft in the head. My introduction of Sullivan down there dispelled that impression, thanks to his breezy French manner and general air of having escaped from a boarding-school at the age of forty nine. But when I again resumed the campaign, the former impression came back. You must know that the opera in Paris is considered, not without some reason, by the Paris intellectuals as beneath contempt and the spectacle of the immensely illustrious author of Ulysses endeavouring to hustle crowds of journalists and protesting admirers into that old fashioned playhouse to hear antiquated music sung by old timer Sullivan was too much. No doubt I may have exaggerated in my exertions for him and perhaps made myself ridiculous in the eyes of sober thinking people, but I do not care very much, for it is incomparably the greatest human voice I have ever heard, beside which Chaliapine is braggadocio and McCormick insignificant. On one of the evenings he sang when Miss Beach and Miss Monnier were present I said, it may seem incautiously, when asked by the latter why I had done all I had for a person they considered unknown, that since I had come to Paris I had been introduced (i.e. by them) to a great number of recognised geniuses, without specifying names, in literature, music, painting and sculpture, and that for me all these persons were quite sympathetic and friendly, but that they were all, for me, perhapses, but that there was no perhaps about Sullivan’s voice. I said this purposely, first because I have always insisted that I know little about literature, less about music, nothing about painting and less than nothing about sculpture; but I do know something about singing, I think. And secondly because I am being continually placed in difficult situations which I am not quick-witted enough to know how to handle by the sudden exaltations and depressions of the Odéon Bourse, not, of course, where I am concerned, because they have never swerved in their loyalty to me. The second cause is this—I have spent a lot of money and diplomatic efforts in securing for myself a copyright of Work in Progress in the United States. I have it, but they have me too, just as I had it and they had it in the Roth case. To maintain my copyright there, I have no option. I must publish first through an American firm. Adams, who is a lawyer, knows this and Conner had told me so already. I dislike this. I have confidence in Miss Beach and I have none in Adams or in any other man publisher, for that matter, for all of them whom I have had up to the present were either incompetent or dishonest or both. But Miss Beach naturally feels that the book that she has been waiting for and has helped me so much with, is not being energetically enough given to her by me. This is not a case for energy but for prudence and some form of compromise, American wealth, law and power being what they are. The third point is my apparent indifference concerning the Ulysses editions, articles and publications, apart from their sales, and my inclination to cease where I am and let someone else write the rest. I cannot discuss this last point now, for these last days I am light in the head.

I do not think that if I cease working there is much point in my continuing to live in Paris. It involves continual sacrifice of capital for one thing, which up till now was covered over by an output on my part, so that I do not think I shall renew the lease of this apartment, and as for my books it is useless to transport immense loads of what I cannot read so that I think I shall keep only the signed gift books and good old dictionaries. These questions I shall now think over, having nothing else to do, as I have to decide by May. I will now end this letter and I hope it has not bored you too much. I now refer your attention to the first paragraph and if the affair can be fixed up by Monday or Tuesday (it usually takes a week) I shall be much relieved.

The general health here is good and I hope yours is, except for the lightness in my head.

With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From LUCIA JOYCE to ADRIENNE MONNIER, 16 April [1930]

Hotel Rose, Wiesbaden

MS. Princeton

Chère Mademoiselle, En l’absence de Mlle Beach mon père vous prie de faire pour lui les envois suivants:

1. Exag grand format à Monsieur Georges Borach, 21 Bellerivestrasse Zurich.

2. Exag grand format à Monsieur Edmond Brauchbar, Hotel des Ambassadeurs, Bd Haussmann, Paris.

3. Exag grand format et un Ulysse allemand à Monsieur et Mme Victor Sax, 14 Dufourstrasse, Zollikon, by Zurich.

4. 2 expl. Ulysse allemand, 1 expi. chaque, à Monsieur Hitpold [sic] et à Mlle Fleischmann, 6 Culmarstrasse, Zurich.

Les envois 3. et 4. doivent être accompagnés par une petite note en français disant que mon père signera ces livres à l’occasion de sa prochaine visite à Zurich.

II vous prie de téléphoner à mon frère, chez nous ou bien Littré 72–87 d’arranger un rendez vous pour lui mercredi prochain avec le Docteur La Personne où le Docteur Poularde, préférablement l’après-midi mais si ce n’est pas possible, le matin: et aussi de téléphoner à Monsieur Paul Léon Littré 88–89 s’il est possible de changer encore le mot ‘ships’ en ‘skivs’ dans la phrase ‘seamen. We segn your ships and wives’. M. Léon donnera à, Mlle Beach tous les renseignements au sujet du Prof. Vogt à Zurich. Ce matin le Prof. Pagenstecher d’ici a confirmé cette opinion. J’ai oublié de vous dire que mon frère doit prêter à M. Léon le petit cahier noir électrique contenant tout ce qui a paru jusqu’ici de W. in P. qui se trouve dans le placard à coté de son bureau. Avec remerciements d’avance et salutations de notre part

Lucia Joyce

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To JO DAVIDSON (Cablegram), 3 May 1930

Paris

TS. Library of Congress

SULLIVAN TRIUMPH DUBLIN ENGAGED COVENT GARDEN RECORDING COLUMBIA

JOYCE

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From GEORGE MOORE, 10 May 1930

121 Ebury Street, London, S.W.l.

MS. Buffalo

Dear Mr. Joyce, My anxiety will be great till I hear from you that the Swiss oculist promises you the sight of one eye. One eye is quite sufficient; a man is as well off with one as with two. Now about Dujardin. I enclose a copy of a letter I have written to him, and hope he will understand that the human mind is not like a weathercock and cannot be diverted from one subject to another. I may live for a few more years, and if I do I shall naturally devote them to my own work. Moreover, I know nothing of the question which apparently agitates France, the discovery of the monologue intérieure. In England we don’t believe that any discovery has been made. We think, rightly or wrongly, that the monologue intérieure existed from time immemorial.

With many wishes for your recovery, I am, Very sincerely yours,

George Moore

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Report of DR ALFRED VOGT on Joyce’s eyes, June 1930

REPORT.

Left eye. A ninth operation was performed on this eye for tertiary cataract by Professor Alfred Vogt at Zurich on the 15th of May 1930. The growth was cut through horizontally, but the proposed operation could not be completed as the vitreous body, most of which seems to have been lost during the last two operations, threatened to collapse completely by emergence or during the acute attack of Scopolamine poisoning which immediately followed the eighth operation. The dangers attendant on the ninth operation were successfully avoided as was an excessive hemorrhage. Ten days after the operation an attack of mechanical iritis due to the presence of blood occurred but lasted only ten hours and did not leave any exudate. A week later leeches were applied which successfully removed all the blood from anterior chamber of the eye. On the 3rd of June it became possible to make a microscopic examination. This revealed that the incision made, contrary to what happened in other operations, had remained open and unclogged by exudate but that blood had entered into the vitreous body, which a much operated eye would take some months to eliminate. It also revealed however that at the last operation the back wall of the capsule of the lens had not been removed, possibly because its removal was too difficult and that in the time intervening between the eight and the ninth operation, 1½ years, it had been gradually overclouded so that it is now in a condition of almost secondary cataract, thereby occluding practical sight. At some future date which Professor Vogt cannot yet fix a tenth operation (capsulotomy) should be performed.

Right eye. This has not suffered appreciably in consequence of the operation on left eye, it still presents a complicated cataract on which an eleventh operation must ultimately be performed.

General observations.

It has been decided to defer the 10th operation till middle of September 1930. The operation just performed will probably produce a slight amelioration of vision in the left eye, which before had a seeing power of 1/800 to 1/1000. On the other hand the seeing power of the right eye, estimated some month ago at 1/30, diminished constantly but slowly as the cataract developed. The most favorable factor in the case is, that, according to all medical opinions, in both eyes, optic nerve and periphery of the retina functioned perfectly normally. It is also, Professor Vogt believes, that the macula also is normal and that is, if the two operations still necessary are made with special instruments and when the eyes are in a non-glaucomatous condition, that there is every hope of obtaining ultimately a fair measure of clear and practical vision.

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE, to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, Postmark 15 June 1930

St Gotthard Hotel, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I could not write till now as the doctor put off testing my husband’s sight till this morning. He examined it for nearly an hour and found a great progress in the sight so that, though he would prefer us to remain for a fortnight more so as to observe it he does not want us to have any more hotel expenses and has prescribed temporary glasses and will allow my husband to travel to Paris as soon as these are made. My husband asks you not to speak of his eyes to anyone till I write again. Of course he is greatly disappointed we cannot be with you at Covent Garden for the 20th but he hopes we may be there for the second or last performance of Romeo. He begs you to send him to Paris address Morning Post and Daily Telegraph of Thursday last. Kindest regards from us both

Nora Joyce

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From JOHN SULLIVAN TO JO DAVIDSON, 23 June 1930

Theatre National de l’Opera, 1 rue Glück, 1, Paris

TS. Library of Congress

Mr. John Sullivan presents his compliments and encloses herewith a copy of a challenge which he is sending to the press.

[Enclosure]

To the Editor ‘New York Herald’

Theatre National de l’Opera, 1 rue Gluck, 1, Paris

De la Musique avant toute chose …

Your musical critic Mr. Louis Schneider, in his notice of the recent performance at the Paris Opera of Guillaume Tell, with Mr. Lauri-Volpi in the tenor role, informs the numerous readers of your journal that this was an exceptional performance, such as only a really great artist could have given. As I have, for many years, sustained this part, notably the most difficult ever written for the tenor voice, at the National Academy of Music here, where I am to-day titulaire du rôle, I claim the right, under your favor, to state publicly in these columns that Mr. Lauri-Volpi, quite departing from the tradition upheld at this theatre for the last hundred years by all who have preceded him, cut out more than half of the singing part assigned to him by the composer. To be precise, all the arduous recitatives, without one exception, were suppressed. The duet with Tell in the first set was reduced to one third of its length and vocal difficulty, as was the duet with the soprano in the second act and the celebrated and trying trio which immediately follows. As if this were not enough, Mr. Lauri-Volpi most prudently avoided the perilous duel with the chorus which was written to form the climax of the whole Opera.

These being the facts, I courteously invite Mr. Lauri-Volpi to sing this part in its entirety and as it was composed by his fellow countryman Rossini and as I myself have sung it over two hundred times throughout France, Belgium, Spain and North and South America, but especially in all the principal cities of Italy. I had, indeed, the honor of being chosen by Mr. Tullio Serafin when this Opera was revived by him at the San Carlo Theatre of Naples in 1923, after a lapse of thirty four years, during which time no tenor had been found in all Italy to sustain the part after the death of the celebrated Tamagno. If Mr. Lauri-Volpi will sing this role, without transpositions or omissions at any Paris theatre or concert hall, where I may be allowed to sing it also, I am willing to accept Mr. Louis Schneider as judge. Nay more, to facilitate him in coming to his verdict, I shall be most happy to present to him an elegantly bound edition of the operatic score, feeling sure that such an eminent musician will welcome this opportunity of becoming reacquainted with a masterpiece which he would appear to have very successfully forgotten.

Et tout le reste est … publicité. Sincerely yours

(Signed) John Sullivan

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To SYLVIA BEACH (Postcard), 18 July 1930

Grand Hotel, Llandudno

MS. Princeton

Dear Miss Beach Very glad to hear the good news about you. Have a good rest.

I wrote this all MYSELF Amities à A.M.

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 28 July 1930

[England]

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud This is one of the first p.c’s I have been able to write for about 2 years. I hope you have better news to send me Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 3 August 1930

Randolph Hotel, Oxford

MS. Cornell

Herewith W. Pater’s photograph. I can write this but scarcely see it.

Jim

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 2 September 1930

Hotel de la Plage, Étretat

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

H.C.E. was sent to you c/o your banker, Haymarket. Has Colum answered yet? Please ring up my hotel after 10 p.m. and get address of Charles Stevens, night porter.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 September 1930

Étretat, Les Golf Hotels

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Herewith the cheque with many thanks. My money was wired to Dover while we were crossing to Calais. Miss B. left Paris and it took a long time to get it back. Paris was a furnace so we left after 4 days but I had time to arrange about the 2nd Czech edition of U. and the first of A.L.P. I hope you got the former and also S’s record through Schwarz. I suppose you saw H.H.’s note in the Daily Telegraph the Monday after we left. I should like 2 copies of it. I managed to get Antheil’s setting of Nightpiece and sent it on to him. All will go well if John does not hold up the plan. Tuohy, who painted my father and me, has just committed suicide in New York. We shall remain here only a few days more. It is a charming spot and we have had 9 days of unbroken sunlight so that my lumbago has almost gone but I hear they had ghastly weather all July and August.

Yes, we escaped that Paris thunder storm, thank goodness. I hope you are able to read this. My pen keeps running along on the offchance that you will be able. When in Paris I started a subscription for Sage but as his father has come along with aid that is over which saves me a lot of work. The poor fellow has now pleurisy as well.

With apologies for this scrawl and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. The manager and cashier of the Lord Warden hotel at Dover are great admirers of mine and accompanied us down to the boat. Here it is the same, the manager being one Ramon Joyce, a member of a Portugese-French branch of the family.

J.J.

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To GEORGE ANTHEIL, 7 September 1930

Les Golf Hôtels, Etretat

Dear Antheil: Many thanks for MS song which I sent off to Hughes. I will write to you about it from Paris where I return on Wednesday. I am sending you Byron Cain to look over. I think it could be the basis of a fine libretto. As you have never heard Sullivan sing in opera you cannot have an idea of the effect created by his stage presence, diction and voice combined. If you decide on the subject I suggest there is only one singer in the world capable of presenting such a figure. I wish we could talk over the idea together.

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To JAMES B. PINKER, 9 September 1930

Étretat (S.I.), Les Golf Hotels, ‘La Plage’ & ‘La Rôtisserie’

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker: I agree on condition that A.L.P. is published before the 31 December next. But please ring up T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber’s on the proposal as also about his plan of publishing H.C.E. in the same miscellany. This should appear before the end of February 1931 as the fourth and final fragment is to be published in an edition de luxe as usual first in Paris in April next. These fragments from what reviewers call Work in Progress really have no title but for convenience’ sake a few words taken from the text have been put on the title page.

I wrote all this letter with my own hand and can even make out the words but I hope it is legible to others Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE ANTHEIL, 23 September 1930

192, rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Antheil: Many thanks for your fine setting of my verses for the book. Hughes likes it very much. There are just two small points which are not clear to me. Why have you put such a strong musical stress on the preposition in the phrase ‘Arches on soaring arches’ this gives the idea that for the Almighty the construction of the Heaven was a work of great difficulty. Also why a similar stress on the definite article in the phrase ‘From the adoring waste of souls’? When the definite article is stressed like this it sounds like the second personal pronoun in the objective case, or a superlative form of the article. But I did not mean the waste of souls (i.e. the one which won the gold medal) and still less an address to the Almighty ‘From THEE adoring waste’.

How are you getting on with the Anna Livia symphony, and how long are you to be down there? If you are there on the 20th of October you should go to Marseilles to hear Sullivan in La Juive.

Now as regards Cain, I agree with you with regard to Byron’s drama so far as the second act goes. This could not be sung and I think you would have to do some kind of a figured intermezzo. But the first and third acts cut a great deal seem to me to be capable of great stage effect. As I hear it you would need a second tenor for Abel, a baritone for Lucifer and a base [sic] for Adam. But I do not know what kind of a voice you imagine the Angel of the Lord could have. Perhaps you could borrow the loudspeaker they have in Rouen station. If you feel attracted to the subject could you not start on some of the themes, the opening sacrifice, the fire and whirlwind, Eve’s malediction, the music around Enoch and Cain’s exit? I may be wrong but I think that with such an interpreter as Sullivan would be and with the power you have to your elbow it ought to create an immense effect. I am sending a copy of the play to Sullivan to read. Beecham heard him the other night and told me he had the most amazing tenor voice he ever heard. But at the present turn of his career which I think is favourable it is of vital necessity that he should create a new and striking part. Possibly I am meddling in other men’s matters, a singer’s and a musician’s, but sometimes the words of a fool can be twisted into wisdom.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 September 1930 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: You did not send me any cuttings about my accident so I did not know what to correct. I was crossing the Esplanade des Invalides about 4 p.m. in a taxi alone and a private car ran into it. I was flung violently forward and then as violently back but escaped any glass in the eye. I had a big bump on my forehead and a bad pain in my back, but the doctor who examined me said there was no internal injury. Since I came back here my wife has been looking for a servant and I have been trying to extract money from publishers. Two of the three have now finally disgorged and I hope the third one will do the same…. Jouvet wants to put on Exiles. Sullivan to the relief of all my friends is leaving the Paris Opera in a fortnight. I was there for the reported last of Guillaume Tell the other night with Sir Thomas Beecham and Lady Cunard. The former told me in coming out that it was the most amazing tenor he had ever listened to, and wrote me that he had decided to do for him what he could in England….

Professor Vogt, I understand, does not want to operate me this month of which I am very glad as I do not feel up to it…. I understand from Miss Monnier that there is a big conspiracy on at the Nouvelle Revue Française to make a boost of Lawrence book Lady Chatterbox’s Lover, which is to be brought out in a form exactly similar to Lazy Molly’s ditto-ditto accompanied by a campaign of articles in papers and reviews, the publication to be in French. This scheme is what Bloom would call Utopian and I cannot understand how they can expect any sensible person to pay hundreds of francs for such a production when the genuine article much more effectively done can be had in any back shop in Paris for one tenth of the money.

Carducci, Darius Milhaud and Antheil are setting pieces for Hughes’ book. The Rheinverlag wrote to Jung for a preface to the German edition of Gilbert’s book. He replied with a very long and hostile attack … which they are much upset about, but I want them to use it….

Can you ring up Gorman and ask him to find out whether Arthur Symons ever got my letter as I am not sure of his address. I have been very listless since that accident and will not write any more for the present….

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To MRS HERBERT GORMAN, 5 October 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mrs Gorman I return with this A.S.’s letter and enclose one from my Scotch cousin who may be yours also. My wife wants to know if you could see the place she writes of so that we might form an idea about price etc. Her idea now is to have a summer residence in London so as to avoid the hundreds of pounds I spend yearly in hotel bills there. I cannot get any satisfaction about that A.L.P. disc and I wish Mr Gorman could bring the matter up in conversation if and when he meets T.S.E. The idea was Ogden’s but he is now quite off it and a sale of 5 discs a year is absurd. I hope you are over your indisposition by now. Sullivan will sing Guillaume Tell for the last time at the opera on 8 and 17 instant. Is it likely you can come. I have put off my Zurich operation till after that. At last I got Beecham and Lady Cunard into the theater last week to hear him. B told me after the opera it was the most amazing tenor voice he had ever heard and that he would do all he could for him in London. Thank Mr Gorman for his letter. I can write this but not see it well and I hope you can read it. My eyes were not injured in the taxi crash, thank goodness. Kindest regards to you both from 4½d

J.J.

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To JAMES STEPHENS (Postcard), 6 October 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. Donald Gallup

Dear Stephens: I hope you got the A.L.P. disc I sent you safely. Perhaps you could see Ogden (address Royal Societies’ Club). He and T.S. Eliot have some scheme about making records of writers. The H.M.V. factory is not progressive enough. You ought to read or speak some of your work or perhaps we can still manage our 2-sided disc. Sullivan had a delirious reception in Marseille Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN, 11 October 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Gorman: Please thank Mrs Gorman for kindly visiting that house but from the description of the entrance it would not suit. I return P.C.’s letter but nothing of the kind I suggested seems to have been done. I enclose 4 letters, one to Sullivan, three to me which will show what I have been doing. I was with Kahn at the opera this week, with Beecham last week and as you see Richard Guinness is coming over for the last performance. If you are coming wire me beforehand. The Scala of Milan yesterday invited Sullivan to sing Guillaume Tell there in the full version which Lauri-Volpi cut by half and also Tannhauser. He goes to Lyon, Marseilles and Barcelona for a few months and then the Paris opera is reviving La Juive for him in February.

Please send me back these letters by return though you may copy them if you wish—they are themselves copies. Have you got your copy of H.C.E. Babou has the receipt from the P.O. It was sent registered two months ago c/o your banker. We hope to see you both over here.

Our kindest regards to you both in the meantime. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Cablegram), 13 October 1930

Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

GUINNESS PREVENTED FROM COMING THEN SEATS FREE WIRE IF YOU WISH ME RETAIN

JAMES JOYCE

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To MRS HERBERT GORMAN, 22 October 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mrs Gorman: Do you know a Scotch shop in London which sells plaid ties? If so I should like you to buy me one and send it. The plaid I prefer (I think it is the Murray) has a lot of red in it as a ground and of course blue and white and yellow all over it. They made me buy a suit to go to Zurich in and I can’t find here a tie such as I want.

Augustus John came here I think on Friday and I am to sit for a week so it seems we shall have left for Zurich when you come. You missed something on Friday night which you cannot ever have heard in your life and will never hear again. We were so sorry you were not with us.

With many thanks and kindest regards to you both. Sincerely yours

4½d

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 October 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: … The 3rd French Ulysse comes out on the 15.xi. Sullivan has gone away for 4 or 5 months and I began to write the 2nd part on Sunday last—but with what labour! It is always like that when I start a fresh bout. I have exchanged my old machine for a Remington portable and hope to learn how to use it myself. I sent the letters off to the Abbey Theatre. We had another letter from Dr Tibbies. If his Vi-Cocoa still exists I would like to have a packet of it. There is one last copy of Music and Letters I would like sent to my brother Stanislaus, whose address is 6 via Cesare Battisti, Trieste.

I hope you are well. How long are you staying in London? My lumbago is quite gone but I can’t sleep at night. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I should like you to enquire only if copies of Apes of God are to be had and at what price.

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To HERBERT GORMAN, 28 October 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Gorman: Please thank Mrs Gorman very much for the Scotch plaid ties, one of which I will wear for the portrait if Augustus John allows me. A copy of Ulysses was sent in the French F.O. bag in care of Mr Poliakoff (whom you can ring up after Wednesday) 49 Queen’s Gate Gardens. Before you leave London may I trouble you to fetch it and give it to the night porter of the Euston from me, explaining the delay as the diplomatic courier is not always available. He is on duty only from 10.30 p. m. and his name is Charles Stevens.

The enclosed has just come from Ogden. Will you read it quickly and pass it on to T.S.E, asking him to return it to me at once. I wish to know whether F & F’s scheme has dropped (as seems to be the case) before replying to C.K.O.

In great matutinal haste and with my thanks Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 30 October 1930

Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Gorman: If there are two copies of U at Mr Poliakoff’s the unsigned one is for the porter. To see whether it is signed or not he should slip off the tirage band without breaking it and the chemise and replace afterwards. A.J. started my portrait a few days ago with that highly treasonable Stuart royal tie. Kind regards

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 November, 1930 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris VII

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose the final sheet of the first draft of about two thirds of the first section of Part II (2,200 words) which came out like drops of blood. Excuse me for not having written but I have had a dreadful amount of worry all this last month about my son’s projected marriage about which my wife is extremely pessimistic and concerning which I have to proceed like an aged old rat walking over broken bottles. I had to put off my journey to Zurich five different times but am leaving tomorrow with the Gormans and my wife, as he has to have his eyes seen to too. My address will be Elite Carlton Hotel, until Thursday or Friday. I shall write to you at once what Vogt says. I think the piece I sent you is the gayest and lightest thing I have done in spite of the circumstances.

I enclose a letter from Antheil, I have consented to cut Byron’s piece for Opera purposes and sign the cuts but no more. I suppose you saw that Mrs Snowden has induced a British Government and a Labour one at that to put up £90,000 in aid of the Beecham and Guinness syndicate. Of course I sent her off through the Paris correspondent of the Daily Herald half a ton of material about Sullivan who is at present dodging shots in Barcelona.

This will be all for to-day as H.C.E. remarks but please write to me in Zurich where I shall be glad to have a letter.

The scheme of the piece I sent you is the game we used to call Angels and Devils or colours. The Angels, girls, are grouped behind the Angel, Shawn, and the Devil has to come over three times and ask for a colour, if the colour he asks for has been chosen by any girl she has to run and he tries to catch her. As far as I have written he has come twice and been twice baffled. The piece is full of rhythms taken from English singing games. When first baffled vindictively he thinks of publishing blackmail stuff about his father, mother etc etc etc. The second time he maunders off into sentimental poetry of what I actually wrote at the age of nine: My cot alas that dear old shady home where oft in youthful sport I played, upon thy verdant grassy fields all day or lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade etc etc etc etc.’ This is interrupted by a violent pang of tooth ache after which he throws a fit. When he is baffled a second time the girl angels sing a hymn of liberation around Shawn. The page enclosed is still another version of a beautiful sentence from Edgard Quinet which I already refashioned in Transition part one beginning since the days of Hiber and Hairyman etc. E.Q. says that the wild flowers on the ruins of Carthage Numancia etc. have survived the political rises and downfall of Empires. In this case the wild flowers are the lilts of children. Note especially the treatment of the double rainbow in which the iritic colours are first normal and then reversed.

With kindest regards and the hope that you are not annoyed with me for my silence Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To SIGNORA LIVIA SCHMITZ, 25 November 1930

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Texas

Dear Mrs Schmitz: I am here again seeing prof. Vogt about my eyes but he cannot operate them at present owing to their state and that of the weather here so that I must come back in the spring for a very difficult operation on the right eye.

I am writing to your friends in Paris to telephone me there after Saturday and shall explain to them what my idea is about the preface to Schmitz’s book.

I hope you are quite well and all the other members of the family.

With friendly remembrances also from my wife. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE ANTHEIL (Postcard), Postmark 25 November 1930

[Carlton] Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. David Diamond

Have been visiting my oculist here, prof. Vogt but operation is put off till spring. Herbert Gorman and I are at work pruning Act I of Cain for you⁠[.] Go ahead in the meantime. Will write you more on my return to Paris on Saturday

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 26 November 1930

Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Cornell

Are here for a few days to see Vogt who has put off operation till spring. My sight has slightly improved. Kind greetings from all

Jim

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To MICHAEL LENNON, 27 November 1930

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Lennon, I suppose you have seen about the treasury grant for opera. I sent a great deal of material to Mr Snowden and I think this is now the moment for you to try the persons you suggested. If attention be made to our friend in the press his stage name ‘Sullivan’ by which he is known abroad should be used in preference to his real name which often confuses readers as they think of Denis O’Sullivan. I also think his Christian name may be dropped. Nobody ever uses Enrico or Giacomo when alluding to Caruso or Lauri-Volpi and Sullivan is a ‘divo’.

I have been here consulting my doctor who finds I have made progress but postpones operation till the spring owing to the bad weather so I am returning to Paris today. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From DR ALFRED VOGT, 1 December 1930

Zürich

TS. Private

Hochverehrter Herr Joyce! Besten Dank für Ihren freundlichen Brief. Ich freue mich sehr, konstatieren zu können, dass das Ergebnis meiner Operation schon jetzt ein erfreuliches ist, und dass die neue Pupille, die ich setzte, sich noch weiter vergrössern wird. Die Hauptsache ist jetzt, dass Sie sich keiner Erkältung aussetzen, damit nicht ein Rückfall der Iritis eintritt.

Ich kann dann später zunächst die Entfernung des Stars des rechten Auges in Angriff nehmen, und schliesslich—unter allen Vorsichtsmassnahmen—das Nachstarhäutchen des linken Auges spalten, sofern dies noch nötig erscheinen wird.

Mit herzlichen Grüssen und Wünschen Ihr

Vogt

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To GEORGE ANTHEIL, 7 December 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Antheil: Please let me know whether you have heard Sullivan in opera and if you got photographed together as I suggested. Dosch-Fleurot wants to write a big article about your new scheme for the New York World. People here think that, the combination Cain-Byron-Antheil-Sullivan with myself thrown in as scissors-man would be the greatest event in the artistic future. Let me know also if you are satisfied with my adaptation of act 1 before I start on act 3. Act 2 will find its own way afterwards. I think I have found a male soprano for the angel of the Lord. In spite of Pound’s discouraging reply I believe you have here the great opportunity of your career as a composer. A magnificent subject never treated before in opera, the work and name of a great poet and the most remarkable operatic voice in the world of our time. I almost thought of going down to see you after Xmas but four journeys this year have depleted my bank and my son is going to be married. Still perhaps I may go for a few weeks with my wife and Mrs Sullivan in January. Write to me by return in any case. The scene between Cain and Lucifer in act 1 can be cut more if [you] like. Sullivan is at the Hôtel du Louvre.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Typed by Joyce), 22 December 1930

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver First of all I wish you a happy Xmas. You know part of the news. My wife and daughter-in-law are at present on the most affectionate terms. We were at the marriage which was private but her stupyd lawyer forgot to insert at the mairie the clauses of the contract of separation des biens which by my son’s request had been made a few days before so that my son becomes by French law the monarch of all he surveys. I enclose another letter from Hughes who is going farther every time. He means well but I am in a very awkward position with Milhaud and Jarnach whom I have to meet tonight at a concert not to speak of Antheil who, it seems, at Pound’s suggestion is backing out of Byron and wants me to write a new peppy libretto for him. I wired refusing and sending him a polite ultimatum either to go ahead with my adaptation or let me hand it over to Stravinsky to which he has not yet replied. Mrs Colm has started a scheme with an American publisher for the issue of a Joyce anthology under which I am to get 10,000 dollars she swears but in the meantime the man who at Colin’s suggestion has just brought out an edition de luxe of my essay on Mangan with a preface by C. having got wind of Schwarz’s unauthorised first edition of the same is coyly declining to cable the stipulated (9000 francs. I had no end of trouble between Faber and Faber and Babou and Kahane. By an oversight of Miss Beach’s I signed over to the latter the exclusive rights for H.C.E. so that I had to hold F and F’s book due this week but got permission to bring it out in April by giving B and K an option on the next fragment. I am still suffering from insomnia which is a dreadful bore and I will not be able to complete the first draft before the end of the year if even then. Gorman is engaged on a biography of me for which I have to supply him copiously with information and I am also trying to explain to Miss Monnier’s sister who knows no English the text of Chapelle D’Izzied (the next fragment) for which she is to do a hieroglyph preface. Also I have to help Colm with his preface for Hughes’s book besides assisting at the seances of the French translation of A L P. Things are in a bad mess here on account the the banco-political scandâl and my royalty reserve dropped with a bang just when wedding, Xmas and New Year announced themselves so that I have to realise another £100 immediately and would be greatly convenienced if M and S could advance me half of it the moment they enetter [sic] their office after the Yuletine alltoobrief respite from me. Sullivan has caused delirium in Marseille and has left to sing at the San Carlo of Naples, probably the greatest lyrical theatre in the world but the dunderheads of Covent Garden are still dozomg over him. I hope you got safely his new disc I sent you. One side is poora and the other only fair as … is a wretched firm but of course S. wanted the money and took this offer. Will you please return H8s letter to Miss Beach?

This machine is my new toy and that’s my weakness now but the big one I gave Miss Monnier in exchange for it is the bane of her life. My eyes being tired I shall now stop, thanks for so promptly returning letter for Colm who wanted it.

With renewed good wishes of a crispnessnice and kindest regards, sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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1931

To GEORGE ANTHEIL, 3 January 1931

192, rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Antheil: I hope that you and Mrs Antheil are now quite recovered from your indispositions which must have been particularly trying at a time like Xmas. My own was not too brilliant this year and perhaps if we had had the pleasure of your company it would have gone more to my liking for as you know I like to santificare le feste. My son married a few days before and we had too many celebrations crowded together.

Miss Beach has telephoned this evening that she has had a letter from you in which you, perhaps out of consideration for me, express your willingness to go on with the Cain opera though you seem to regard it as hopeless for the German stage unless I write the libretto. I would never have the bad manners to rewrite the text of a great English poet. Somebody must curtail the text of the first and third acts and if it is to the advantage of the scheme in general my name may be used. I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description. The second act is more difficult. In my opinion this will have to be done choreographically. I wish you however to understand that you are under no obligations whatsoever either to Sullivan or to me for the production of your opera in Germany. If you had been able to hear him in Paris as we arranged or in Marseilles as I had hoped you would the way out of the difficulty would have been found at once by your ear. If you write Cain’s part in the pure tenor tradition German singers will be automatically excluded.

It would be most unfair on my part to try to influence you in any way as to your future plans so please discount me altogether. I offered this suggestion to you because you asked me for one and because certain parts of your music seemed to me to be akin to the voice which is causing all this unnecessary correspondence. If you feel that you cannot write this opera at once, with enthusiasm and with spiritual profit to yourself and your art without any consideration for the veering tastes of impresarios please say so without hesitation and allow me to offer poor Byron and poorer Sullivan elsewhere.

I enclose a notice, which please return to me with your reply, from a Genoese paper of last week about Sullivan’s reappearance in the land of song after seven years in the musical wilderness. Quite a lot of Ligurian spray will dash the quays of La Superba before any sex-appealing hack from Covent Garden or the Metropolitan obtains from the only audience in the world which knows what singing is one tithe of that recognition.

I got up out of bed at three o’clock a.m. to type this and will now ring down the curtain for this night, sending you both in valediction my best wishes for the coming year and again asking you to let me hear from you by return of post.

One point more. You will be in error if you imagine that I have any real influence with the wealthy musicophiles in London and New York who control the destinies of opera in those cities. My experience of them so far is that they are uncommonly pleased to accept from me signed editions de luxe of my literary works and that when they are told what notes a singer is actually emitting at any given moment, their faces express the most sympathetic interest.

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From LOUIS GILLET, 7 January 1931

17 rue Bonaparte

MS. Buffalo

Cher Monsieur J’ai été bien touché de voir que vous aviez gardé le souvenir de mon vieil article sur votre Ulysse et que vous aviez la bonté de ne me pas m’en témoigner de rancune. Je reconnais avec regret que cet essai n’était pas entièrement sympathique. J’ai,beaucoup réfléchi depuis, ou plutôt votre ouvrage s’est installé dans mon esprit et y a fait son domicile: j’en mesure mieux l’importance et l’intérêt extraordinaires. Je suis loin de le ‘classer’ encore, mais je sais bien qu’il occupe une place dominante dans la littérature anglo-américaine, et peut-être dans la littérature universelle, depuis dix ans. Je ne puis m empêcher de reconnaître la valeur d’un phénomène.

J’ai eu l’occasion de revenir incidemment plusieurs fois sur le sujet, peut-être avec plus de justice que je n’avais fait tout d’abord. Mais je me propose depuis longtemps de faire mieux si je puis et de profiter pour cela des divers ouvrages qui ont été édite sur vous (en particulier ceux de H.E. [sic] Curtius et de Gilbert Stuart [sic]). Je voudrais commencer par le problème que pose votre nouveau poème, le terrible problème du langage, ou plutôt de l’individualisme de l’expression: la refonte totale de tous les éléments de l’esprit, la manière dont vous avez pour faire apparaître dans la forme des mots des milliers d’associations, pour créer une musique nouvelle, une sorte de fieri à la mesure du cosmos. Cette tentative m’étonne autant qu’elle me séduit. J’y ai beaucoup réfléchi déjà mais avant de rien entreprendre je voudrais m’assurer d’être d’accord avec vous; j’aimerais de lire avec vous quelques pages du Work in Progress.

Je pars ce soir pour quelques jours, je vous demanderai un rendezvous à mon retour. Je bénis Miss Sittwell [sic], quoique je goûte peu son rubbish, et je bénis surtout la bonne Sylvia Beach, puisque j’ai eu grâce à elle la fortune de vous rencontrer, et de vous rencontrer indulgent et magnanime.

Veuillez agréer cher Monsieur l’assurance de mes sentiments de dévouement et de vraie admiration.

Louis Gillet.

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Typed by Joyce), 10 January 1931

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud I rang up the hotel at S.Malo and they told me you had left for Paris. If you are really here can we dine any night this coming week at the Trianons with Arnold Bennett? He is at the Marignan and very desirous of meeting you again after so long as am I too.

Herewith are a few pages of the French A.L.P. which may amuse you. Please bring them along.

I hope you are well. I have not slept decently for a long time and my sight seems to have become temporarily much worse.

With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From VALERY LARBAUD, 20 January 1931

71 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine Ve

MS. Buffalo

Dear Joyce, Thanks to you and to Mrs Joyce, in the name of both of us, for those beautiful flowers. We received them on the first day my wife was able to leave her bed. She is much better now, but I cannot say the same of myself; and my last interview with my doctor left me under the impression that he was growing pessimistic about me.

I hope you are better, and able to work. I wish I could see you. Toutes nos amitiés,

V. Larbaud.

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To HERBERT GORMAN, 24 January 1931

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. Princeton

Dear Gorman, This note is to let you and your publisher understand that you are the only person authorized by me to write a book describing my personal life and career. So far as I know no other writer has started such a work; but if one does you may rest assured that I shall refuse him information or access to any personal documents I may possess. Of course, critical studies concerning my work are another matter. Yours sincerely,

[Unsigned]

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From LUCIA JOYCE to SIGNORA LIVIA SVEVO, 25 January 1931

[Transcribed as written]

Dear Mrs Schmitz: Giorgio duly received your kind and charming present and wrote to thank you for it though you do not seem to have got his letter, before leaving for his honeymoon in Germany. My father replied to Miss de Zoëte several weeks ago. A long time ago he made it a rule that he would not write a preface to his own or another’s book or notes of explanation or give an interview or deliver a lecture. He has in fact refused several times offers for highly paid lecture tours in german, english and american cities to say nothing of France. He says, morover that a preface from him would damn the book in the eyes of readers in England and America for whom he is still a pariah and by whom his present method of writing is considered ‘una vera senilità.’ As for the title he agrees with you that Senility is impossible. He suggests As a Man Grows Older or Goodbye, Deo Gratias. And if these titles seem far from the original he says that the cavatina in Rigoletta La donna è mobile is sung on the english operatic stage as Fair shines the moon tonight. He spoke to his friend Mr Ford Maddox Ford (address 32 rue de Vaugirard, Paris VIe) who has consented to do the preface but [needs] a copy of both books in english and italian before he does it. Mr Ford is perhaps the best known and most successful lecturer among english authors in the United States. He is also of a certain age himself and can write an admirable ‘causerie’. My father says that if you will have three copies of Zeno and three copies of the proofs of Senilità (in english) sent to him by the publishers he will do his best to have it noticed at great length in two leading american and english papers. He will also recommend the book to his german czeck and polish publishers and show it to many influential men of letters.

My mother joins me in sending you friendly greetings and good wishes for the coming year.

Lucia Joyce.

P.S. Or better he thinks Adieu Deo Gratias.

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To JAMES STEPHENS, 31 January 1931

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Stephens: I hope I was not too preoccupied last night. The fact is that I am nervously exhausted as I have not slept well for three months. I enclose the notice I spoke of which please send back and with it I am leaving two bottles of Swiss wine in anticipation of the 2nd prox. I do not know what is going to happen on that date but please keep it open and if nothing happens then the fault will be mine.

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From JOHN STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 January 1931

25 Claude Road, Glasnevin, Dublin

MS. Cornell

My dear Jim I wish you a very happy birthday and also a bright and happy New Year. I wonder do you recollect the old days in Brighton Square, when you were Babie Tuckoo, and I used to take you out in the Square and tell you all about the moo-cow that used to come down from the mountain and take little boys across?

I will write to Georgio in a few days, when he returns from his honeymoon. I see by the photo that he too wears glasses? I suppose he needs [them] but if possible he should not use them. I hope Lucia’s sight is all right, give her my fond love and also to Nora. I often hear from Mr Healy, who’s generous gifts I should be glad if you would also acknowledge. Again, my dear boy, may God bless you is the prayer of Your fond and loving

Father

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To JO DAVIDSON, 8 February 1931

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. Library of Congress

Dear Davidson, I enclose the original with translation of the Genoese and Neapolitan notices of Sullivan which you kindly promised to forward to general Dawes with a covering note of your own. I understand from Sullivan that the Chicago Opera of which General Dawes is a patron is in search of renors [tenors] for the coming season. I hope these notices may bring about as they should Sullivan’s engagement. Many thanks to you in any case for what you have tried to do. Sincerely yours.

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 16 February 1931 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: This is the first instalment of a long serial letter covering the last few months…. Thanks for your good wishes for the New Year and second of February. I had a bad New Year and the worst birthday in history as I had no money and so was not able to make the usual reunion of all my friends here. I sat in the corner of the drawing room sulking and waiting for the arrival of camel loads of presents and volleys of telegrams but that was the good it did me. Towards evening my son and daughter-in-law arrived and taking compassion on me led me out to the Trianons. They had just come back from a honeymoon in Germany. I have sent away fourfifths of my books, keeping only dictionaries and books of reference. I also sent away my pictures to my son and sofas and odd objects of furniture. Besides which I am distributing sticks, cigarette-holders, prints and other mementos. I have also given the piano to my son. I am looking for a goodsized barrel in which to live, preferably a Guinness’s one. Everybody that I know seems to be either sick, broken or crazy when not all three together. Larbaud seems to be very ill. He is locked up in his flat and will not see anybody…. I have been working a great deal at this with Léon and Soupault and there is tremendous excitement about it, I believe, in the N.R.F. Miss Monnier is arranging a séance at which it is to be read by her or by an actress with my original English also and a speech by Soupault, after which I am to dance the Highland fling. I have also been working with Gorman for his biography, raking up documents and memories. He has written all over the globe and got lots of material…. My main interest is to see that the facts and dates are correct and this is the best opportunity. I am also trying to conclude section I of Part II but such an amount of reading seems to be necessary before my old flying machine grumbles up into the air. Personally the only thing that encourages me is my belief that what I have written up to the present is a good deal better than any other first draft I made. My insomnia is better. I have almost given up Sullivan’s case as hopeless though I hate being beaten…. Sullivan had an immense success in Italy….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 February 1931 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: (To continue) … I shall return to my house question and plans in my next. Meanwhile the Anna Livia disk is to be broadcast shortly from the Munich station which is to pay me 3,000 francs, and an hour’s talk on me also from the Berlin station for which however I get nothing, the talk being by Ivan Goll, except perhaps inward groans from the listeners….

The most curious thing has yet to come. I was asked by Miss Beach to go to some readings by Edith Sitwell and while I was sitting well (this pun is the property of Paul Léon, copyrighted under act March 1905 in the U.S.A.) in the back of the auditorium all ears for Edith a tall bearded man came over to me and began to apologise for an article he had written about me six years before. He was Louis Gillet, the literary editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes of which his father-in-law Renéé Doumic is the head center, that revue being something like Lambeth Palace and Buckingham idem rolled into one. You may remember the late Sir Edmund Gosse wrote him a dictatorial letter forbidding him to mention my name in his pages. Gillet exhibited the letter publicly after Gosse’s death. He told me that he had now read my book several times and was preparing another article about it and also one about my present book. He seemed to be astonished by the lack of hostility shown by me when we met and invited me to dinner. He has also written me several letters and sent me copies of his books dedicated to me, one of them to the etc etc etc with humility and devotion from L.G. who is trying to spread his washing proper. We have to dine with him and Soupault tomorrow night for which purpose a dinner fund is being subscribed on both sides of the rue de l’Odéon, the actual host not having the necessary money. When Miss Monnier heard of all this she contemplated the ceiling and gave forth a litany of extraordinaires which ought to have been broadcast also.

I enclose some rubbish found in a sack, that lay in the house that Joyce leaves.

(To be continued)

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 March 1931 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I have not heard from you since the dispatch of the first two instalments of this letter and I wonder whether your silence is due to illness or annoyance at the muddle I have got into. I sincerely hope it is the latter. As it happens ships are going down every day and this rather saves my face as I can lyingly affirm that my present gêne comes from being coinvolved in the general debâcle. The enclosed two letters will also prove to you the reality of the complete collapse of my Covent Garden schemes and of my American prospects for the moment…. I also received a still more unpleasant letter which I cannot send you because I sent it to the Trieste police through my brother. Some person apparently wrote me one or two letters which I did not read. I thought they were about Ulysses and I never read Italian criticisms of anything except of singing. But evidently they were not, for the letter I have sent to my brother was the most violent epistle (I should not even have read it but that my son was there when it came) in which the writer either a lunatic or a blackmailer or both accuses me of being the assassin of his father and of not having sent any money to some engine-driver or railway guard named Kobletz, his own name is Janni Corte, and he calls me most terrible names invoking all kinds of maledictions and diseases on my daughter and myself. The letter in scrawl was addressed to me c/o Shakespear Cy with a wrong address Paris, but it reached Miss Beach’s shop. I will tell you more about it when I know more. My wife is very upset about it, also about the bother of leaving the flat as she now seems to think that I shall not be able to stand either the climate or the environment of London very long. However the boats are burnt for the present at least. However as I expect to be in London within a few weeks from now I can explain things to you better. I could not go to Zurich for another operation in this unsettled state. The dinner with Gillet was not a great success as I was too preoccupied. But the French translation of A.L.P. is now finished and I think it must be one of the masterpieces of translation. I had to preside over it as also over the German one besides helping Gilbert to put together some article for a Cambridge review and Gorman with his Biography to say nothing of arranging all my correspondence and notes and trying to follow with various readers the books I am using for the present fragment which include Marie Corelli, Swedenborg, St Thomas, the Sudanese war, Indian outcasts, Women under English Law, a description of St Helena, Flammarion’s The End of the World, scores of children’s singing games from Germany, France, England and Italy and so on….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 March 1931 [Dictated]

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I understand that both Miss Monnier and Miss Beach have written to you to come over for the séance on the twentysixth which for all I know may celebrate the close of my Paris career, just as that of the 7th of December, 1921, opened it. Everything is at sixes and sevens here. Both Colum and his wife are being treated by Dr Fontaine, the former for general fatigue, and the latter for a sprained ankle. Gorman is confined to bed or practically so and will not be about again for five or six weeks…. Gilbert is leaving Paris in a day or two for the south, so that I have nobody to help me with the reading except Léon who however, not having read a word I have written except the piece he revised for Babou, has no idea what my book is about or what I want. I take up some of my daughter-in-law’s time trying to copy into one large book the worst of my illegibly scrawled notes. McGreevy has also left Paris. Some person or persons gave him an annuity of 300 lbs a year to do original work, and he has gone to Ireland, via Italy. This flat is still unlet and my landlord who has lost several millions in the general crack, has hung out a gaudy sign. Three more banks broke this morning. My wife has had a series of three or four colds. So has my son. The worst that is wrong with me is that my hair, which has become very thin, I don’t mean rare but thin, keeps falling into my eyes, and as I cannot dispose of three thousand francs to pay my dentist, I keep on juggling with the broken plate in my mouth. This was a novel occupation when I began it in London last August, but I am thoroughly tired of it now….

My second objection is quite trivial. For my convenience I wear tinted glasses in the street even when the day is darkish. Nobody minds that here, but I am sure that on the Londoners I shall make the impression that I have committed some crime and am trying to sneak around in disguise. However I deserve all this on account of my many iniquities. So to conclude I shall probably go into a small furnished flat in London and then perhaps go to Zurich and then perhaps go back to London and then perhaps go somewhere else and then perhaps come back to Paris. My furniture meanwhile being stored, though where I am to get the money to move out of the house the Almighty and Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe alone knows seeing as how I have just sufficient funds to enable me to exist for about three days more. I cannot think of anything else of a dreary nature to add to this. The only good news is that Mrs Colum who seems to be a very efficient business woman…. is confident that she can arrange for an American publisher named Knopf to bring out … an anthology of mine for which she expects they will pay me an advance. The second good point is that I think if the séance of the twentysixth is successful it will probably break the back of the english resistance to Work in Progress as they usually follow a Paris lead over there. I hope you will let me hear from you what you think of this bewildering situation.

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To SIGNORA LIVIA SCHMITZ, 11 March 1931

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. Fonda Savio

Dear Mrs. Schmitz: I enclose a letter from my friend Mr. Ford which please return to me when read. Will you see that the publishers communicate with him as soon as possible. He is very well known in America and his introduction ought to be of great help.

If Mr. Herbert Gorman who is writing my life has written to you, you may reply to him if you feel inclined to do so, as he has my authorisation. If my brother who lives at number 6 via Cesare Battisti has a telephone, can you please ring him up? He has also been written to by Mr. Gorman but has not replied and my son sent him about ten days ago a very extraordinary letter which had been forwarded to me from some person who calls himself Gianni Corte, living in Via del Teatro Vecchio, Capodistria who seems to be either a madman or a blackmailer or a practical joker or all three combined. My brother was asked to have this matter investigated but he has not replied to that either. The letter was addressed to me in a wrong name somewhat like my own and to my publishers also wrongly spellt at an incorrect address, but the french post managed to deliver it. Will you therefore please ask my brother or if he is too busy my sister-in-law to let us have a letter as soon as possible.

With kind remembrances from us all, and best wishes for the success of ‘As a Man Grows Older’ sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN, [? 19 March 1931]

[Paris]

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Gorman, I enclose two letters just received. The letters from the two Italian solicitors I have sent on to Paul Bourget. Will you please ring me up when convenient? I hope you were not too fatigued by the last supper. I hope at least that it was an unbloody sacrifice, however unnecessary, on your part. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MICHAEL LENNON (Typed by Joyce), 29 March 1931

192 rue de Grenelle, Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Lennon, I am moving from this address on the 10-th prox. qnd hqve been so busy that I have not hqd time to reply to your kind letter. In the intervql between the first qnd second communication from Mr Fitz Gerald I sent on to General Dawes copies of Sullivan’s recent Genoese and Neapolitan notices with typed english translation. It so happens that the Russian American sculptor Davidson is doing his head and mine at the same time for s show in London in June. I cannot find General Dawes’s letter, either I sent it om to Sullivan and he has not returned it or he has returned it and I have packed it up in one of my numerous cases of books, anyhow his attitude was much more helpful than that of the British ambassador here or the Irish minister. He said he had written personnally to Insul forwarding him the papers and asking him to investigate qnd if possible take up Sullivan’s case. Of course if more pressure can be broughtt to bear through Mr Vincent so much the better. My warm thanks for all the trouble you have taken, Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 April 1931

Hotel Powers, 52 rue François 1er, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: This holy Saturday ceremony began at 8 a.m. and ended at 2 p.m. These few lines are just to let you know our address. I had a bad night but think I am beginning to feel somewhat rested. I hope your crossing was a smooth one. It is useless to discuss my present condition with Miss Beach. As she does not know what my motive is [a blot here]

(That was the hotel pen that interrupted) she naturally regards my acts in a wrong light and has no idea of what I have to face in the way of expenses over there. I shall think the matter over more carefully as regards dates as soon as we or rather my wife is rested and I am better. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 13 April 1931

Paris

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: My son is now married as perhaps you know and my flat has become too noisy of late years so I have given it up, stored my things and am leaving Paris till late in the autumn when I shall come back and rent a much smaller one. I hope you are better by now and that it may be possible for us to meet (if not to dine though purtroppo I too am on a regime after [a] miniature collapse) before [I] leave in the next few days.

Kindest remembrances to Mrs Larbaud and yourself from us both

James Joyce

P.S. I have quite a different opinion about the Svevo preface.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 14 April 1931

Hotel Powers, 52 rue François 1er, Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: The telegraphic address is on top. Please wire me the word ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you have received a second letter from Gorman and again the same word rispettivamente whether you agree to his proposal to have the letters or passages you deem most important copied at his expense at once and forwarded to him here: address: Hotel Place de l’Odeon, Place de l’Odeon, Paris. I never promised Schmitz or his wife any such thing. I do not write prefaces. I hope the ceremony of the 26 will be a crowning affair for whenever I mentioned S’s name to any of my semi-literate pupils they laughed in my face. Will you please get the information Giorgio asked for re Corti and his brother as soon as possible and send it to him so that the prefecture de police here may send orders to the frontier? I am sorry you share his opinion of my recent writings.

Am leaving for England in a day or two when I recover from a nervous breakdown I had. Permanent address: 12 rue de l’Odeon, Paris. I shall explain my plans later. I am not coming back to Paris probably till late autumn.

Kindest regards to Nellie and yourself.

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 April 1931

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Another Triestine lunatic turned up last night in the person of Bruno Veneziani. His sisters and Eileen also told me he was in a madhouse. He says he has just come to Paris to stay and study something and has just given a concert in Milan. He wants advice etc, letters of presentation to Gide, Milhaud etc. I feel inclined to give them. He seems normal enough socially at least, and it would make up for the prefazione mancata. Please add a word yes or no to your wire as I leave here in a day or so. In haste

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 April 1931

[Hotel Powers, Paris]

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I shall begin my fifth hegira on Sunday and hope to arrive in London Whittington-like that evg. (w.p.). Will you please retain rooms for us at Garland’s (Lucia comes too). If detained at Calais I shall countermand by wire. I am a good deal better and only wish I could stay at this inn for another week. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I suppose I may have mail sent to your address for a day or so?

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 27 April 1931

Hotel Belgravia, Grosvenor Gardens, Victoria, London S.W.1

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: It will be all the better if you can arrange with a good American house like the Putnam you mention or Lippincott because then Curtis Brown could arrange simultaneously at this side. He thinks the subscription a very good idea to cover large advertising and also because the book is so long (E.P. says it is 1½ Ulysses) and times so bad. I thought from our telephone talk that you agreed as for yourself if need be. I have also got one of the best agents in London whom I have just seen, Curtis Brown, 6 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, to take the matter in hand. He is sending me a letter to him which I am to sign and he will send copies of this letter to those who are invited to join in the list. Can you send him the address of MacLeish and Brancusi, with the Christian name of the latter. He is writing at once to E.P. for the MS. I hope this is all right. The person I saw at Curtis Brown’s is a Mr Pollinger who knows E.P. well and is, I think, quite trustworthy. He proposes the firm of Martin Seeker. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. If you go away from your present address let him have some permanent one to write to.

J.J.

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From ANDRÉ GIDE, 30 April 1931

Cuver ville au Caux

MS. Buffalo

Cher Monsieur Quelle émotion de recevoir une lettre du grand Joyce! J’ai écrit aussitôt à Mr Bruno Veneziani mes regrets de n’être pas à Paris présentement et de devoir remettre à un peu plus tard le plaisir de le rencontrer. Ah! que je serais heureux de pouvoir vous y revoir également! Vous me laissez fort incertain de votre adresse, mais, après avoir balancé plusieurs jours, je me décide à confier ce mot à notre amie Sylvia Beach—ne voulant pas vous laisser ignorer combien se réjouit d’apprendre que vos yeux vont sensiblement mieux votre admirateur attentif et affectueux

André Gide.

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To EZRA POUND (Typed by JOYCE), 7 May 1931

Hotel Belgravia, Grosvenor Gardens, London

TS. Pound

Dear Pound I had another talk with Mr Pollinger of Messrs Curtis Brown’s yesterday. He seems to me to be a sincere wellwisher of yours and I hope you will send him the Ms and leave it in his hands for a few months, allowing him to shape the scheme I suggested to him as he thinks best. He believes it will be a help in view of the length of your book and the state of the market and would ensure extensive advertising by a trustworthy firm.

I wrote a long express letter to Mrs Dyer asking her to send invitations to Miss Rudge and you for her evening and telling her about your Villon opera but my daughter-in-law does not say that you were there. MRS Dyer’s telephone number is; Trocadero 12, 04.

YOU Mentioned Manon. There is a very good tenor Gerard singing this at the Trianon Lyrique. He sings the Ah fuyez, douce image with great effect. PERHAPS YOU COULD GO WITH Gorman, hetero-daktylographically yours

James Joyce

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To SYLVIA BEACH, 10 May 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, London

Dear Miss Beach: I have taken this tiny place at a low rent, about I forget how much, till 25 September. I return Mr S’s letter. I sent Miss Monnier several signed copies of H.C.E. for distribution. When I receive the 7 copies of the N.R.F. I shall sign and return. Can you [not] extract a letter or a p. c. from Babou even in exchange for my present to say that he authorizes publication here? If the piece falls into other hands tomorrow I shall be victimized by that wretched contract I signed. It is useless to apply to Léon on that or any other subject till the end of June next. I telephoned him and telegraphed but in vain.

Did J. Paulhan get my letter asking him to send the French A.L.P. to George Moore? If he has not done so it ought not now to be sent. I got a most furious letter from G.M. which Gilbert will show. And A.L.P. in French will only make him worse. I replied sweetly and suavely. Old men have a right to their anger…. And yes a copy of A.L.P. in French should go to Sullivan. I think Miss Monnier should record the reading of A.L.P. for Coppola and sell the discs. My plan for pleasantly surprising Mr Colum has fallen through temporarily. I have not seen anybody here save T.S.E. and Hughes.

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To Mrs MAY JOYCE MONAGHAN, 11 May 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, London

MS. Yale

Dear May: I hope you and yours are well. I have rented this flat till 25 Sept. when we go back to Paris. Will you please let me know by return of post whether you received a letter from Mr Herbert Gorman asking you questions in connection with the biography of me he is writing. It is important for me to know this at once. My sight is a little better. I can write, as you see, and walk with prudence but alas! cannot read.

Kind greetings from Nora Lucia and myself

Jim

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 May 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, London

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: The above address will find me even if we go away till 25.ix when we return to Paris. I want to know have you sent the connotatoi of Mr Corti and his redentissimo brother to Giorgio and have you sent me the press report of Cav. Pasini’s speech and is it safe for me or Giorgio to recommend Rosso Veneziani to people in Paris. His two sisters, Mrs Schmitz and Mrs Bliznakoff, told us with deep sighs that he was hopelessly off his head. If Mrs S. told you I promised to write a preface for any book of I.S. she lies. When I see Cav. P’s discourse I shall see his publisher here who has written me several times. Did you get H.C.E. and the N.R.F.? Salve!

Jim

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To JO DAVIDSON, 13 May 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, London

MS. Library of Congress

Dear Davidson: We have this place here for the summer months but will probably go to Bournemouth either in June or July before returning to Paris in the autumn.

My agent, Mr Ralph Pinker, who says he knows you heard you did my head and asked me to ask you if he could have a photograph of it. I am simply passing on this request without comment.

Is there any news from General Dawes or from Otto Kahn? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 22 May 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8, London

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Have you sent the description of Corti to Giorgio and the whereabouts, if known, of C’s brother? Have you sent me the Piccolo for the 27 April and is it possible to have a few Triestine papers about the ‘vision’ affair?

I am making this short so that you may read it while running from one son of an italo to another. Best greetings

Jim

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To DESMOND HARMSWORTH, 17 June 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8, Tel. Western 1966

MS. Harmsworth

Dear Mr Harmsworth: From the enclosed letter it would seem that you are looking for me in connection with the publication of Pound’s book which I have been trying to arrange. If this is so perhaps you can ring me up here some morning? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 26 June 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Bródy: Many thanks for your friendly joint card of good wishes for Bloomsday. I am answering it through you because I want to thank you also for your flowers last year on the same date. And also I wish to ask a favour of you. Will you please destroy the record I sent you of Sullivan in Guillaume Tell. I sent out about twenty of these without having heard them and now that I have heard them I find them atrocious. Such a record can do him only harm and I am trying to avoid that by asking my friends to destroy them.

Please give my kind regards to Mrs Bródy Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To G. MOLYNEUX PALMER, 26 June 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

Dear Mr Palmer: Your MS is locked up in Paris and I shall not be able to get at it till my return there in October. I did not hear the broadcasting you speak of. It is a great pity you were not able to proceed with the publication I had arranged with Slivinsky in Paris some years ago. Still I hope you will find a publisher in England for the songs. If I can do anything to that end please let me know as I liked them very much.

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To ADRIENNE MONNIER, ‘St Swithin le Bandit’ [i.e. 15 July] 1931

Londres

Chère Mademoiselle Monnier: L’article de Gillet me semble fort bien. Je ne l’ai pas tout lu mais écrirai demain, mais il faut changer la traduction vers la fin: l’anglais est:

Lead, kindly fowl! etc

Or, la référence est à l’hymne fameux de Newman Lead, kindly light! dans lequel le futur cardinal annonce le commencement de sa conversion à l’église catholique. Le type qui correspond selon moi le plus exactement à Newman, quoique sa conversion fût dans la direction opposée, est Renan qui de son côté annonce cette conversion vers l’hellénisme préchrétien dans la fameuse prière sur l’Acropole. Je propose que vous soumettiez à M. Gillet la traduction suivante:

Précède et prie pour nous, bénigne acropoule!

En tout cas sois notre guide, cher oiseau ne peut pas rester.

L’alexandrin remplace assez bien je crois les trois mesures lentes du demi vers anglais.

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To PADRAIC and MARY COLUM, 18 July 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Colm and Mrs Colm: … As regards your kind Dublin offer I cannot make up my mind to cross the second channel. My sight is too weak. I have not enough funds even if I draw these advances. I have not a friend in Dublin on whom I could rely. Please thank your sister. Perhaps if you were here we might talk it over. And too much publicity was given that Kensington ceremony. It was very thrilling when the registrar refused to function saying we should go and get divorced but after production of lawbooks by my solicitor he did the deed. While I was signing the roll the King was signing the new law the English call the Marry-Your-Aunt Bill. He should now sign a Marry-Your-Wife Bill Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 July 1931

[London]

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: The Piccolo does not contain either in report or Pasini’s speech any allusion to the telegram I sent that morning or to your presence among the professors or to Larbaud and Miss Monnier or to myself. Whoever eventually writes the preface to Senilità should mention that fact.

Thanks for your wire. The other branches of the family (Paris excepted) expressed consternation. I had offered my nephew George who is workless £1 a week if he would help me with my notes from 2 to 5 pm every day but his stepmother (he is 21) took from him the Exagmination I had lent him and we were given to understand that our influence etc etc. The Press Association by the way but particularly the Sunday Express made a most spirited attempt at blackmail but funked it at the end, the rumour having gone around that I had come in for a big sum which would enable me to fight them for libel. The affair as you know is as clear as mock turtle. Having eloped with my present wife in 1904 she with my full connivance gave the name of Miss Gretta Greene which was quite good enough for il Cav. Fabbri who married us and the last gentleman in Europe il conte Dandino who issued the legitimate certificates for the offspring, but this full connivance voided the marriage in the eyes of English law see Hargreave’s Laws of England page 471–2 and the second ceremony was thought advisable to secure the inheritance under will. I have a slight cough this morning so please forgive me if I now desist.

With best Xmas wishes to Mr and Mrs Joyce from Mr and Mrs Ditto MacAnaspey and here’s jumping that bucket as Tinker said to his gipsy I remain, dear professor, matrimonially yours

Monico Colessee

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to JOHN SULLIVAN, 19 July 1931

74 Gloucester Place, London, W.1

MS. Sullivan

Dear Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Joyce has asked me to write to you once again for him, to give you his address—28b Campden Grove, Kensington, London, W.8—and to say that he has had so much worry and business the last two months that he prefers not to write to you himself just now or his family would imagine he was launching another crusade on your behalf which would wear him to a shred several degrees more threadlike than even his present appearance makes.

He has spoken to many people here about you and has come to the conclusion that there is nothing further to be done with regard to Covent Garden or the Carl Rosa company. One possibility, however, of a different nature has occurred to him, but he would like your opinion of it before making any move in the matter. It is this. He has made the acquaintance of the high commissioner of Ireland—Mr. Dulanty—a great admirer of his—and has talked to him a great deal about you and, with your permission, would like to make the following suggestion to him. It is the last string he can think of to pull in your interests. Would you, if it were possible to organize here a small Franco-Irish contingent of influential people to subscribe between them a sum of, say, £700 as a guarantee to Mr. Lionel Powell against possible eventual loss if he were to engage—under the patronage of the high commissioner and the French ambassador—the Queen’s Hall, London, for two nights in October or November for two performances of Guillaume Tell in concert form if Sir Thomas Beecham could be got to redeem a part of his word and conduct the orchestra—if that could be done would you, Mr Journet and Mr Gromen be available to come over for these performances which might be looked upon as a belated centenary?

The minor parts could be filled from here and as regards the soprano Mr. Joyce has met a Mrs. Malcolm (Australian) who sang for several years in Italy under a stage name and whose husband is a cousin of Mr. Hugh O’Niel of the Ulster parliament who might also be got to patronize the affair. Mr. Joyce himself would have nothing to do with it beyond setting it going. He has spoken to several critics, including Mr Hughes and Mr Newman and they have promised to write the performance up.

As Mr Dulanty is leaving on holiday within a week Mr Joyce begs you to answer by return—to himself at the address given above. Yours sincerely

Harriet Weaver

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To DANIEL BRODY, 30 July 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington

Dear Mr Brody: I confirm my wire of Saturday while awaiting your letter. I see that I.K. translated this text from an English MS. Who is she? Who is the editor of this respectable organ? And where do they buy their wares? Vielleicht ein Traum aber gewiss eine Schweinerei.

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To IVAN GOLL, 30 July 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8 (Angleterre)

MS. Goll

Cher Monsieur Goll: Nous avons ici le reçu de la poste pour le disque envoyé recommandé. On croît que la censure l’a suivi et que c’est inutile d’envoyer un autre.

Maintenant aussi à Francfort la Frankfurter Zeitung du 19 juillet publie une page entière de texte de J.J., auteur d’Ulysse, traduite du manuscrit anglais par Irene Kafka. Qui est-elle? Où a-t-elle trouvé ce manuscrit que le journal m’attribue? Je l’ignore. Je ne la connais point. Je n’ai jamais écrit cette sotte nouvelle qui s’appelle Vielleicht ein Traum.

Je n’ai jamais été en correspondance avec la Frankfurter Zeitung. Vielleicht ein Traum aber bestimmt eine Schweinerei. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To JONATHAN CAPE, 30 July 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Cape: It was very unfortunate that I intruded on you as I did today. I had not heard of your sad news. We both have a pleasant memory of our meeting with your amiable and kind wife in Paris. Please accept our sincere sympathy. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT, 31 July 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: As you are my official translator in Germany voilà une histoire pour vous.

The Frankfurter Zeitung (19 July 1931) published Vielleicht ein Traum, a fragment by J.J. author of Ulysses, with an editorial note to say it is translated from the English MS by Irene Kafka.

I do not know either the editor or Irene Kafka. I never had any such MS. and I never wrote the text or anything like it.

??? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

PS. I have nobody to read your handwriting here so please reply by typed letter.

J.J.

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE to HERBERT GORMAN, 8 August 1931

Vìa Cesare Battiste 6, Trieste

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr. Gorman, I enclose a small sheaf of letters representing, so far as I can judge, about one tenth of the letters to be copied. The work goes on very slowly. I don’t type and have no typewriter myself, but a friend of mine, who has a fair knowledge of English, has kindly helped so far. As he finds my brother’s handwriting difficult to read, I dictate and he types. In this way a rather long letter of 6–700 words takes an hour and a half, ten long postcards take three hours. I have given practically all my spare time to this job and to the far less pleasant one of sorting the letters out of a heap in a mouldy old packing-case.

I have received an offer to do the work from an Englishman. He offers one shilling per thousand words, so that the present enclosure would cost about 8/–. If this suits you—plus postage and expenses—the whole thing could be done in a couple of weeks. I shall be glad if you will let me know as soon as possible. I have not the faintest notion what the usual typing expenses are, but I am sure my friend’s charges would not be excessive.

As for the matter of the letters, there are three cycles: matter of Rome, matter of Pola, matter of Trieste—like the old romances. Matter of Trieste: While Jim and his family were in Dublin I moved ‘carefully and horizontally’ into a smaller, newer cleaner flat, instead of bothering about legal actions and so on. My brother has still illusions about the law. When he returned to Trieste after the collapse of his hopes of getting anything he might write published in Dublin, he lived in the new flat—via Donato Bramante 4—until the outbreak of the war, working sanely and soberly and living more comfortably than ever before. He finished ‘The Portrait of the Artist’, wrote ‘Exiles’ and planned and began ‘Ulysses.’ At the beginning of the war he was able through the influence of two Greek gentlemen, Count Sordina and Baron Ambrogio Ralli, to get to Switzerland on parole, these two gentlemen standing guarantee for him. In Zurich a German doctor advised him to drink wine because he was anaemic. Knowing what I do of German doctors during the war, I think it not impossible that the advice may have been given in bad faith. At any rate the advice was accepted with enthusiasm, and his health, which was good in Trieste, has suffered ever since.

When my brother came to the Berlitz School in Trieste there was already a teacher here with whom the manager quarrelled. The manager offered the position to me through my brother, who wanted me to come for a holiday, as he wished to have someone to talk to. I left Dublin on the 24th Oct. 1905 and arrived here a few days later. At that time I was not yet twenty-one, my brother was twenty-three, so that we were both very young. I have lived here since then, never returning to Ireland and never leaving Trieste except when during the war I was interned in Austria as a civil prisoner. In 1909 it had been arranged that I was to take a trip to Dublin and bring Georgie with me. At the last moment my brother wanted to go, as I had always inwardly suspected he would. He was met at the station of Westland Row in Dublin by a family group who asked him ‘Where’s Stannie?’ It’s a question I have often asked myself. Yours very truly

Stanislaus Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 11 August 1931

Lord Warden Hotel, Dover

Dear Eliot: The enclosed explain themselves. Do you know any energetic journalist who could give the F.Z. affair the ventilation it needs. The paper does not wish to publish an apology and proposes to pay as compensation the translator’s fee to me! The MS is an impudent forgery.

Have you found out what your sales manager’s indistinct epistle means?

I like this old town very much.

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From THE EDITORS of the Frankfurter Zeitung to ERNST HITSCHMANN, 13 August 1931

[Frankfurt]

TS. Private

Sehr geehrter Herr, wir haben Ihnen für Ihren Brief zu danken. Inzwischen haben wir einen kleinen Artikel ‘Michael und James’ veröffentlicht, der das Versehen richtig stellt. Wir sollten meinen, dass Herr Joyce mit dieser Erklärung zufrieden sein könnte. Wir sind ja in der Tat an der Namensverwechslung unschuldig. Sie ist uns fatal genug. Was Irene Kafka betrifft, so hat sie schon mancherlei für uns übersetzt und dies ist die erste üble Erfahrung, die wir mit ihr machen. Sie würden uns zu Dank, verbinden, wenn Sie uns mitteilen wollten, welche Gründe Sie veranlassen, uns vor der Dame zu warnen. In vorzüglicher Hochachtung.

Feuilleton-Redaktion der Frankfurter Zeitung

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 22 August 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Am almost sure I heard the Schmitzes say a Kafka had translated some of his things. The F.Z. refuses to apologise and prints what I sent you from Dover. All the chief literary agencies in London have been rung up. None has ever heard of Michael Joyce. The British Museum catalogue has been searched for past 80 years. No record of any book of his. There is, however, a magazine run by the Cunard, P & O, Ellerman lines etc to encourage ocean cruises on their vessels. It is called The Blue Peter and a Michael Joyce is a contributor to it. In addition to writing begging letters I have refused thousands of pounds for years past because I would not write for the press on commission and now one of the leading European newspapers goes and puts my name under a fraudulent shoddy piece of journalese and will not even apologise for it. They had the thing in their hands for months, made no effort to get into touch with me or my publisher, never sent me a copy of the paper it appeared in or tried to pay me the big fee they knew I would be entitled to, infringed my German publisher’s contractual rights, refused to apologise when written to and published under a displeasing title an article which is mean, silly, impertinent and untrue. I’m going to sue them anyhow so that’s that. I hope you will be able to get the facts into the press. If so, send me 4 copies of any paper it appears in.

I am sorry you have to toil amid that damn dreary correspondence and hope you are soon ‘through’ with it. Three hoots for Furtofranco Greetings to you both.

Jim

P.S. You know, you advised me to proceed against Roth and not ‘play the gentle Jesus always’. I did, though I presaw the result. Aha! Huff!

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To T.S. ELIOT, 27 August 1931

London

MS. Faber

Dear Eliot: Isn’t this a nice letter. I have used your name in a letter my solicitors are sending. A copy of this will be sent you before it is dispatched. If you disapprove I will have the phrase deleted. I used yours and O’Casey’s, coupling them with my own, rather than G.B.S. or H.G.W. etc because we are more or less of an age and represent three clearly different branches of writing. I suppose I am letting myself in for another big bill for costs but here goes!

Excuse me for not having rung up. I have been strangely unfit these last few days.

What about the proofs and what has your sales manager done with my versicles? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. What do you think I should ask for Japanese rights?

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To MICHAEL JOYCE, 6 September 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. Michael Joyce

Dear Mr Joyce: I thank you for your kind and considerate letter which is a refreshing change after my recent experience. The Frankfurter Zeitung and the translator seem to have treated you with almost as scant courtesy as they have used towards myself.

I am still, however, nearly as much in the dark as the person in your story. Am I to understand from your letter that the translator obtained a copy of the December issue of the London Mercury and translated your story without authorization from you? Or did you send her the issue and has she merely omitted to inform you of its publication in Germany? I, myself, learnt of the publication as you did, by chance Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MICHAEL JOYCE, 8 September 1931

28B Campden Grove, Kensington, W.8

MS. Michael Joyce

Dear Mr Joyce: I do not wish to trouble you with correspondence in this matter unnecessarily but it would be of great help to me if you could inform [me] on what date (approximately) you sent your story to Miss Kafka and whether it was the December issue of the London Mercury you sent her for translation.

I thank you in advance and shall ask my agent to notify you of any developments in the case. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To SYLVIA BEACH, [Mid-September 1931]

[28B Campden Grove, Kensington, London, W.8]

MS. Princeton

Dear Miss Beach: Am not very well so am scribbling this lying down—intestinal attack, and heaviness in eyes.

Please send all Rheinverlag, Frankfurter Z Brody or Goll letters you may still have bearing on case at once to Monro Saw & Co, 44 Queen Victoria Street, London EC. I also want 3 copies each of C. Trib and Intrans, copies of which shd also be sent to Boraci), Brody Goll and Curtius. You may mention Faber & Faber since it is out and the Viking but do not give my solicitor names without their permission. At what price will you remainder Exag and how many copies have you?

Those Japs have been translating essays galore, it seems, without asking leave or paying, out of Exag and everywhere. So I had Hiteshi Ito’s article on me translated into English today and it will probably appear in English in some review here. Ito will be paid, less Pinker’s fee and cost of translation, but I want the assent of the two Japs in writing to this as a preliminary to negotiations over Ulysses.

Will write to L.G, after I have seen G.M. on Sunday.

If the F.R has not printed S.G.’s article yet telephone him to ask it back.

F & F have asked me scores of times about Gorman, where he is, what he is doing, whether he has abandoned the book or not, if I had seen any of it and whether it has my sanction and if they could see some of it. I said I knew nothing, that he had collected some material, that I had never seen a page of the book itself and that I heard he had laid the book aside temporarily and I supposed, was going back to U.S.A. Sincerely yours

J.J.

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To ERNST ROBERT CURTIUS, [About 17 September 1931]

Lord Warden Hotel, Dover

MS. Yale

Dear Professor Curtius: I thank you for your letter. Three weeks have now passed and though you and my English solicitors and my literary agent in Vienna have all written to the paper and the translator neither one nor the other has offered me privately or publicly one word of excuse or explanation. I am determined however that the matter shall not stop here Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 September 1931

‘La Résidence’, 41 Avenue Pierre ler de Serbie, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: It is thought here that if the halfwitted MacDonald goes to the country the £ will come down to 60. The whole world, it seems, is to be at sixes and sevens while he and the other two playboys scramble for office. Nobody knows what way things may move so I shall try to get into a small furnished flat for 3 or 4 months and wait. It would be folly to enter into a 3-6-9 years lease in the midst of this turmoil of exchanges.

People here seem surprised at our return. They understood from Miss Beach and A.M. that I was passing through Paris on ‘a brief visit’ and that I had transported my furniture to London where I now had a home. I told them both that I had stored my things here and would return at the end of September, which I did….

McGee and Guiney met us on the Dover pier. We were passed through a side gate, no passport, and up to the observation saloon of the boat. McGee came to Calais with us. We got off by a back gangway, had no customs inspection and found a reserved carriage for Paris, the 400 other passengers gaping in wonder. He also made my wife a present of a volume of Italian verse!

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 October 1931

‘La Résidence’, 41 Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I saw Miss Beach…. She had had confirmation that Roth had brought out and sold off to someone else an edition of 10,000 and suggested to me that Hemingway’s lawyer would take up the case over there. I declined to have anything more to do with lawyers. I said Pinker’s opinion was that the only way to stop Roth was to get a U.S. publisher to take the book. She asked did I want that. I said if Roth went on for 3 years more the American market, already crippled, would be killed outright. She said a U.S. edition meant shutting her shop and rearing chickens but that she would do it if it was my wish….

[Mrs Colum’s] idea is that the U.S. publication ought to be made at once as it would mean the Nobel Prize for me and an English publication the year after.

The sheepish premier did not bleat yesterday and the numbskull who smokes the pipe neither. Why doesn’t W.L. do something since the pound’s gone ezra.

Strange to say I am trying to write.

I hope someone takes your flat and that we take someone’s. Kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From MONRO, SAW & COMPANY, 6 October 1931

44 Queen Victoria Street, London

TS. Private

Dear Mr. Joyce, With regard to the letter you sent me for me to send on to Dr. Rothschild in order that he might send it to the Frankfurter Zeitung, it appears to me that the letter was drafted by you to be written by us and if a letter at all on these lines was written by Dr. Rothschild it would have to be revised in its various references to ourselves and to our legal advisers in Frankfurt. I take it you have a copy of it and I have the following comments to make:—

Paragraph

With regard to/(1), the quotation ‘by James Joyce the author of the great English novel ULYSSES and translated from the original manuscript by Irene Kafka.’ This would, of course, have to be in German and not in English.

Paragraph (2), the words beginning ‘The text you published was, according to your statement to Dr. Daniel Brody Director of the Rhein Verlag, in your possession for two months before you published it.’

We do not appear to have in our possession any information showing that this statement was made and accordingly that the manuscript was in the possession of the newspaper for two months.

With regard to the statement that the signature is a forgery, there is no signature to the document.

With regard to the paragraph reading as follows:—‘Firstly you send us a letter of explanation stating that Irene Kafka had made an error in the Christian name of the writer and that you had come to an agreement with the Rhein Verlag as to what reparation you were going to make.’ We have not seen any letter of explanation to the effect mentioned and the Frankfurter Zeitung did not write that they had come to an agreement with the Rhein Verlag. What they said was that they would take the necessary steps in conjunction with the Rhein Verlag to put the matter in order which is somewhat different.

Throughout it would be necessary to make quotations from the newspaper in German.

With regard to the paragraph at the top of page 3, there is no concluding statement such as is suggested and the whole of this paragraph is paraphrasing of the article which, though substantially correct, is not exactly what was stated.

With regard to the next paragraph, it is suggested that the matter had not yet been but would be placed in the hands of your legal friends in Frankfurt, which is not now a correct statement.

With regard to the various questions you ask, I cannot see any use in asking these questions. Some of them might be useful questions to ask in a Court in cross examination.

The proposed letter is so full of statements which are open to question that the Frankfurter Zeitung, if they wished to reply to it, could reply in such a way that you would get no satisfaction at all and in my opinion it might only lead to a long correspondence without any satisfactory result to you. My own view is that if Dr. Rothschild, knowing the conditions in Germany, does not think it advisable to take proceedings it is very little use writing to the newspaper for an apology.

The newspaper has already inserted an article which, in their view, explained the matter and it does not appear to me to be likely they will insert another article unless forced to do so by proceedings.

Under the circumstances mentioned I am altogether opposed either to my firm writing the letter in the terms of the draft you sent us or to my firm asking Dr. Rothschild to do so. Although I regret very much the trouble and inconvenience you have been caused over this matter, I feel that, having regard to Dr. Rothschild’s advice, it is no use pursuing it further. Yours sincerely,

F.R. D’O. Monro

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To GEORG GOYERT, 9 October 1931

‘La Résidence’, 41 Avenue Pierre ler de Serbie, Paris

Dear Mr Goyert: I got both your letters but did not know what to reply.

First, I have not seen any of your translation of A.L.P. so can form no judgment.

Second, as regards your financial position I do not imagine I could find the money for you. The whole world is in crisis. Here we are in a hotel, looking for a flat after 12 years in Paris. I have been cheated out of 6 months rent in London but everyone has the same story to tell. I hope things improve soon.

I have a sister and 3 children and part of a brother’s family dependent on me. The only country that seems to be prospering is this one but no doubt it will go into the maelstrom too.

Ora pro nobis.

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To T.S. ELIOT, [About 15 October 1931]

2 rue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris
Tel. Auteuil 17.28

MS. Faber

Dear Eliot: I have mislaid in moving here the proof you sent me. The opinion here is that it is good but that the slightly larger and heavier one you spoke of sending would be better. Can I have a page?

I saw Miss Beach. She says Roth has brought out a new American edition of Ulysses (10,000 copies!?) and she stands by her terms, however, I suppose you saw that the U.S. government has taken the ban off several books from Boccaccio backwards and forwards. Miss Beach is surprised not to have heard from you about the book of essays.

I have started work again as well as one can in rather uncertain circumstances. The people to whom I ceded my flat in London let me down very badly. They cried off the contract they had agreed to thereby worsting me out of £100. There is no redress, according to my solicitors. Also according to the same and this Frankfurt colleague there is none in that Michael & James case except that I have to pay fees and expenses in London Vienna and Frankfurt amounting to £48. So that’s that.

I hope Mrs Eliot and yourself are well. We are still somewhat knocked about like Cromwell’s ruins. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 October 1931

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: The report is all right, thank goodness, so that’s that.

I finished pulling together the first 8 episodes last night and as I am quite fatigued and it is a splendid day Giorgio is taking us out for a long country drive…. To my great relief I find that much more of the book is done than I had hoped for. Soupault who has been on a lecture tour in the U.S.A. told me yesterday that the government would have no chance of winning a suit against Ulysses. He said it is on the extension lecture program for many universities and actually prescribed for the M.A. degree for next year in the New York university. So let them take off the ban and I suppose England will follow suit as usual a few years later. And Ireland 1000 years hence.

May I ask you to put through two telephone calls before you leave London….

Please return Four to Léon. The writer should not have used O.G.’s letter in an article. The latter is a swimmer, boxer, cyclist, aviator, motorist and of course I cut a poor figure, eyeless etc. Still the world begins from an egg. Enough of them and all alien annoyances. I have a job on hand. Kindest regards sincerely yrs

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 19 November 1931

Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Please return these samples of my daily mail by return. What am I to do about that cursed madman in C.? Any use my writing to his chief constable there? Why the hell don’t they put him in an asylum?

As for Annie her brother keeps a string of racers and hunters and they won’t let their children mix with mine. If I had the Lsd free I’d send it but I think the scheme harebrained (10 rooms! I cannot let my flat of 3!) I said I would pay his railway fare to Riviera if she could get any money to keep them there. Greetings.

Jim

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 November 1931

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Gorman leaves for U.S.A. on 26 returning February. He has to deliver a series of lectures on me. It is true that he and Mrs G. are being divorced. He, in fact, is engaged to be married to another divorced woman but this must not be known yet. I hear he has some stepchildren. Apart from this he wants to know when you expect to have access to your letters and I the same with regard to the MS of W.i.P.

L.P.F. is now in favour again and on visiting terms. I met him outside a cafe. He was very friendly to me, took down address and telephone number etc. I won a large box of cigars from Miss Beach who bet that Sullivan (‘the most immoral man she had ever heard of’) had run off to South America with his mistress. He is, in fact, in Nice engaged for a big season there in Master singers. Mrs S. was here to tea chattering away gaily as usual about her two curious children. I gave the boy a lot of my ties as, like Giorgio, he is inclined to dandyism.

Jarnach continues to hold up the O.U.P. book. I got Lucia (by a ruse) to make me elaborate capitals for the poems and sent them over. H.H. said it was too late. The book was set up. Now I have shown them to Mrs Crosby who admires them and proposes to make a very expensive edition of only 25 copies, facsimile of my handwriting. I would let Lucia draw the whole amount. I have to speak to Miss Beach about this as she has the world rights and also the original MS which I gave her along with that of Dubliners.

Pinker writes asking what is Pomes Penyeach (is it by me?) and Faber and Faber who were to have sent me a larger type proof sent me on Nov. 20 (excuse this loose leaf) on Nov 20 a proof pulled on Oct 16 which is identical with the proof pulled on 21 Sept. Why doesn’t Ramshead Mac Dullard do something about it all, find a formula or something of that sort of thing.

Another prospective tenant for ‘Chicken from Barkers’ wanted me to buy a shopful of china including a dozen eggcups etc. I wonder what kind of early Victorian breakfast parties she wanted to give. Several letters were exchanged and then she altered her intentions.

The madman in Trieste has started writing to me again violent letters. At 8.30 on Tuesday Harold Nicholson will lecture on me over the London radio. He has written a broadcast pamphlet in which he calls me ‘the Einstein of English fiction’.

I am stitching away like a cobbler.

People are alarmed about S.G. I took him to the opera and have induced him to see Dr Fontaine of whom he is shy. Il y a des hommes comme ça. Kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 22 November 1931

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. Faber

Dear Eliot: I was waiting for the proof promised me when we decided that the one pulled on 21 September was not clear enough. It has now (21 November) reached me and apparently was pulled on 16 October and is identical with that of 21 September, see enclosed. I suppose that ends the matter.

Do you want to set up part 1.? If so, I could send it.

Has anything been arranged about the volume of essays?

I cannot make up my mind about Zurich yet.

With kind regards to Mrs Eliot and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 November 1931

Passy

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver…. Miss Monnier gave a big dinner in my honour to hear the radio. London was put on at 8.30 sharp. Nicholson announced at once that pressure had been brought to bear on him etc etc and that the expected talk on J.J. could not take place. The company expressed itself volubly in French about the B.B.C. directors etc after which we all went in to table and had a merry meal….

I am working very hard. Everything seems now to be well disposed.

It is strange that my presence has this effect and my absence produces a violent reaction. For instance, there has appeared in the Catholic World (N.Y.) an article—leader—on me which Colum and his wife say is so vulgar and scurrilous that they will not show it to me. They are both indignant over it. Guess who the writer is. Michael Lennon who helped me so much in the Sullivan affair, who asked me for a signed copy of Ulysses, whom I invited to Llandudno, whom I entertained with Hughes to dinner and talked with till 1 a.m., who afterwards wrote asking me if I would allow his wife to call on me on her way through Paris etc.

Pourquoi?

With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CARESSE CROSBY, 28 November 1931

The Lancaster, 7 rue de Berri, Paris

MS. Library of Congress

Dear Mrs Crosbie [sic]: James Stephens is in Paris for a few days. If you want to see him his address is:

11 rue Campagne Première

Montparnasse.

I hope you received the initials from Herbert Hughes and also the 3 poems my son took the printer’s yesterday.

I enclose a galley page of the Oxford University Press edition of Pomes Penyeach which you may be interested to see—Colum’s preface. Will you be so good as to return it to me? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

Tel. Auteuil 17.28

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 December 1931

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: I am glad to have your good news. Raw vegetables were created by the Lord to be thrown at Covent Garden tenors. Just a line to say that after a lot of talk, protests and exchanges of views between sir John Reith, the archbishop of York, Mr Whitley and Harold Nicolson the B.B.C. has changed its babycilly mind and the lecture is to be given at 8.30 p.m. on Tuesday. Nicolson writes a long letter but the upshot is that owing to his attitude towards me (Galsworthy seems to be mixed up in the affair too but H.N. flatly refused to substitute him for me. I told you my impression of him. He seems to me to be a very good and humane type who probably regards me as [a] dreadful person as if middleclass mediocrity were not legible enough on my shopwalker’s countenance) where the Dickens is the nominative I started with—H.N. has had his name struck off the list of speakers for the B.B.C. Have these good people not a few more pressing things to attend to just now instead of fooling around each other about my prose?

More anon.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 December 1931

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: There was no French outburst on the evening of the 17 Nov. Only laughter. I was annoyed because it was absurd to get up a big dinner and invite a dozen people to hear two sentences. The outbursts are mostly on the other side of the channel at the moment as you may see by the anti-French cartoon in the London press. Affairs will become bad if this country is dragged into the general ruin against its will as must happen in the end.

After 3 weeks’ wrangling H.N.’s talk did come off. He has acted admirably, I think, and a telegram of felicitation on his victory and on his courageous lecture was sent him in the name of my French admirers. He spoke for 40 minutes, quoted passages from U and put on the A.L.P. disc. He advocated the abolition of official censors and the creation of a small jury of men and women of letters and said that to persist in the present attitude towards a work like U (which he said he was forbidden to mention by name) was to court the ridicule of other nations.

Messrs Mashed Parsnips continue to pester Mr Monro with footling little bills of gas etc and he keeps on sending them over on a wet wicket and I keep batting them back to long on. O that flat! …

My impressions of that wretched warbler S. who disgraced the pure boards of Kitchen Garden Opera once and for all will appear in the New Statesman any week.

This is my son’s wedding anniversary so I went out with Colum to see a film L’Afrique vous parle. I think I have done a good job for Lucia. She has made initial letters for all the poems in P.P. on large sheets and I wrote the text. These are to be reproduced in facsimile only 25 and Mrs Crosby (who went to N.Y. a few days ago) will try to sell the sets at 60$ or if not she will sell them at 30$ and have 50 made. If all goes well over the cost of reproduction the N.Y. dealer will make 5000 frs, Mrs C. 5000 frs and Lucia 10,000 frs. The letters are very beautiful. This was an idea of mine.

Now I must run out to see Soupault who is ill….

Confusion to carrots and long life to everybody.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1931

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: My American lawyers having again asked for a payment of the other 2000 $ I sent Conner the enclosed letter which please return. Miss Beach raised an objection to my sending it on account of a ‘falsehood’ in it which would be shown up if C. asked to see my contract with her. The ‘falsehood’ was in the phrase stating that when I filed the suit I apparently was not the owner of the U.S. rights. She says I was. I replied that the contract must have been simply a putting into writing of her pre-existent intention. To which she said I was the owner then etc. Nevertheless I sent the letter.

Souppault, who goes returns [sic] to U.S.A. in a month proposed to put the French consul-gencral of N.Y. on the track of the new Roth edition, it being a contrefaçon of a French printer’s output just as a falsified French perfume would be and a meeting was arranged between him, Miss Monnier and Miss Beach Léon and myself. But Miss Monnier then asked me to go to see her alone. She read me a letter she had written to Paul Claudel, the ambassador, who is a lunatic catholic, she says, and intensely annoyed by U (he sent back a presentation copy of the first edition) but has lost prestige as a poet so much with the younger generation that she thinks, with the aid of Gillet’s article which she also sent, that he will take this opportunity to rehabilitate himself. I doubt very much that she is right. It is not an ambassador’s job though a consul might effect a seizure of the copies. Possibly Claudel is a convert like Maritain and if so his protestant mentality would well suit an Irish catholic element over there which is of an even worse breed.

She also told me that the N.R.F. angered at her refusal to give them U had decided to favour Lawrence’s Lady Chatterli’s [sic] Lover, which is coming out in French. I also received a letter from a man in England who has nearly completed a long study and exegesis of this work and has obtained opinions about it from G.B.S., A.H., O.S., M.M. and E.T.C. and wants an opinion from me. These are all to be printed in front of this study and exegesis of this work. In the middle of my own work have I got to listen to this. I read the first 2 pages of the usual sloppy English and G.S. read me a lyrical bit about nudism in a wood and the end which is a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D.H.L.’s country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself.

T.S.E. has been appointed professor at Harvard and is to leave England next year. Good Lord! Have I to deal with those printers face to face? Kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 December 1931

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I enclose a letter received from Conner which please return when read. What a fine muddle I have got myself into and how pleasant it is to be called a swindler by an American lawyer! There is a crisis in the B.B.C. precipitated by H.N. and Mr Alfred Noyes has started a polemic about me in the Times, T.S.E. says. He considered Huebsch’s terms ‘ludicrous’. I am sending a copy of my letter to Conner also to the Viking Press. Pinker has been bungling things in firstrate fashion and I see by the morning paper that there is a strong movement afoot in England to introduce prohibition as in the U.S.A. If this bill is passed I hope it will be applicable to the solid food cooked in the country.

In the middle of all this Messrs Monro Saw write me that they want 6d (sixpence) to give to the Insurance people who say they simply must have a look at my furniture every Saturday with a dark lantern.

There are three persons in the Blessed Trinity but it is only on occasions such as this that the Third Person should be invoked. Kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From EZRA POUND, 21 December 1931

Rapallo, Via Marsala, 12 int. 5

TS. Private

EZRA POUND

21 Dec. 1931 Anno X

Dear Jhayzus Aloysius Chrysostum Greetin’s of the season to you and to yr wives and descendents legitimate and illigitimate (selon).

Blarney Castle, it come into me mind. Do you know anything, apart from the touchin’ ballad; about it. I mean when did fat ladies from Schenekdety or Donegal first begin to be held by their tootsies with their hoopskirts falling over their priavtes to in public osculate: he [the] said stone

and for what reason? fecundity? or the obverse?

Whose stone, in short, was it?

I regret not havin had the opporchunity to sing you my last ditty when in Paris, or rather the last before I went thither, composed for yr/ special postprandial dilectation and then, domme, I forgot it. At least I think I forgot it, I can’t remember having performed it.

When you get an address send it on; or come down and watch the icicles forming on the edge of the mare Thyrenno. benedictions E.P.

SONG FOR INFORMAL GATHERINGS
(to the familiar lyric measure)

O Paddy dear an’ did you hear

The news that’s going round,

The Censorship is on the land

And sailors can be found

ExPurgating the stories

That they used to tell wid ease

And yeh can not find a prostichoot

Will speak above her knees.

I met Esmond Fitzguggles

And the ole souse says to me:

‘I fought and bled and died, by Xroist!

‘That Oireland should be free,

‘But you mustn’t now say “buggar” nor “bitch” nor yet “bastard”

‘Or the black maria will take you

‘To our howly prison = yard.’

‘They’ve had up the damn boible

‘To examine its parts an’ hole,

‘And now we know that Adam

‘Used to practice birt = controll,

‘In accardance wid St. Thomas

‘And dhe faders of the church,

‘And when pore Eve would waant to fuck

‘He’d lambaste her wid a birch.’

‘We must prothect our virchoos’,

Lowsy Esmong says to me,

‘And be chaste, begob, and holy

‘As our Lord was wont to be.

‘And we must select our language’

‘So that it shall not offend

‘The fat ould buggerin’ bishops

‘Or their woives, worrld widout end!’

Sure I t’ought of Mr Griffeth

And of Nelson and Parnell

And of all the howly rebels

Now roastin’ down in hell

For havin’t said ‘Oh, deary me!’

Or ‘blow’ or even ‘blawst’

An’ I says to lowsy Esmond:

‘Shure owld Oireland’s free at last.’

O’Donal Hugh Red O’ Donnei.

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To T.S. ELIOT, 23 December 1931

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Eliot: My friend, M. Louis Gillet, is going to London this week in connection with the French art show and he would like very much to meet you. You will remember his recent article in the Revue des deux Mondes about my Work in Progress (of which he is [sic] literary editor) and I think it is certainly a most remarkable document, full of good will and common sense. You may also remember an article by him in the same review on Ulysses some years ago which provoked a letter of protestation from the late Sir Edmund Gosse. A page of this letter (the whole text of which I have not seen) was exhibited at an exposition de manuscrits of the Revue des Deux Mondes two years ago and caused a certain hilarity. I think you will like to meet him for he is in sympathy with what we are all trying in our different ways to do.

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To DR KENNETH REDDIN, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, 27 December 1931

[Telegram] Paris

My father dangerously ill Drumcondra Hospital. Diagnosis uncertain. Will you please arrange he gets best medical specialists. All expenses my charge. My thanks advance. James Joyce 2 avenue St Philibert, Paris.

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1932

To EZRA POUND, 1 January 1932

[Paris]

MS. Pound

Extracr (sic) from The Groves of blarney (Air: The Bells of Shandon) by Richard Milliken

And there’s a stone there that whoever kisses

HE never misses

To grow eloquent.

’Tis he may clamber to a lady’s chamber

Or become a member

Of sweet parliament.

A clever spouter

He’ll soon turn out or

An out-and outer to be left alone.

Don’t seek to hinder him

Or to bewilder him

Sure, he’s a pilgrim from the Blarney stone.

Extract from Work in Progress, Part I, section6

(it is the second of the four masters, who here represents Munster, answering. He has been asked a riddle. What Irish capital city of six letters, beginning with D and endung with N etc etc’ but he answers) Dorhqk. and, sure, where can you have such good old chimes anywhere, and leave you, as on the Mash and how ’tis I would be engaging you with my plovery soft accents and descanting upover the scene beunder me of your loose vines in theirafall with them two loving loofs brace-letting the slims of your ankles and your mouth’s flower rose and sinking öfter the soapstone of silvry speech’

Dear Pound: There is nothing phallic about the Blarney stone, so far as I know. The founder of the castle was a cunctator (or perhaps it was the defender of it). He kept on inventing excuses, parleys etc during its siege, I think in the time of Essex. The stone is flat and so far as I can remember let into the wall a few feet below a window. I never understood why it could not have been kissed from a ladder. I heard there were double bands of elastic to fasten the women’s dresses. I did not kiss the stone myself.

I hope you had a pleasant ceppo. Ours was saddened by the death of my father in Dublin He loved me deeply, more and more as he grew older, but in spite of my own deep feeling for him I never dared to trust myself into the power of my enemies

It has been a great blow to me.

We send you and Mrs Pound our best wishes for the New Year sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 1 January 1932

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Eliot: Excuse me if I am backward in my work and correspondence. I have been through a bad time telephoning and wiring to Dublin about my father. To my great grief he died on Tuesday. He had an intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct which I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to. Dubliners was banned there in 1912 on the advice of a person who was assuring me at the time of his great friendship. When my wife and children went there in 1922, against my wish, they had to flee for their lives, lying flat on the floor of a railway carriage while rival parties shot at each other across their heads and quite lately I have had experience of malignancy and treachery on the part of people to whom I had done nothing but friendly acts. I did not feel myself safe and my wife and son opposed my going.

I have been very broken down these last days and I feel that a poor heart which was true and faithful to me is no more.

I will prepare the end of Pt. I after a few days’ rest.

I have heard about your Harvard appointment. I offer my congratulations if the appointment is pleasant for you and I hope Mrs Eliot and yourself will have all luck and happiness this year.

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 2 January 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Curran: Forgive me if I do not write to you for a few days. I want to write to you a long letter but I am still far too broken down to attempt it. I hope you received my solicitors’ cabled remittance (£20) and that you will let me know what I owe you….

I thank you from my heart for your great kindness to me in this dark hour.

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 14 January 1932

Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Gorman: I have sent you the sad news of my father’s death which is a great blow to me. I hope you are well. Please send Lennon’s article as you promised. Bonne Année

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 January 1932

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for your message of sympathy. I spent the four days after Xmas sending messages to my father by wire and letter and by telephone to the hospital every evening. The weeks since then have been passed in prostration of mind. Gilbert came here four or five times but I could not collect my thoughts or do anything. I am thinking of abandoning work altogether and leaving the thing unfinished with blanks. Worries and jealousies and my own mistakes. Why go on writing about a place I did not dare to go to at such a moment, where not three persons know me or understand me (in the obituary notice the editor of the Independent raised objections to the allusion to me)? But after my experience with the blackmailers in England I had no wish to face the Irish thing. And all my family and even my Irish friends were against it. My father had an extraordinary affection for me. He was the silliest man I ever knew and yet, cruelly shrewd. He thought and talked of me up to his last breath. I was very fond of him always, being a sinner myself, and even liked his faults. Hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him. His dry (or rather wet) wit and his expression of face convulsed me often with laughter. He kept it in old age. When he got the copy I sent him of Tales Told etc (so they write me) he looked a long time at Brancusi’s Portrait of J.J. and finally remarked: Jim has changed more than I thought. I got from him his portraits, a waistcoat, a good tenor voice, and an extravagant licentious disposition (out of which, however, the greater part of any talent I may have springs) but, apart from these, something else I cannot define. But if an observer thought of my father and myself and my son too physically, though we are all very different, he could perhaps define it. It is a great consolation to me to have such a good son. His grandfather was very fond of him and kept his photograph beside mine on the mantelpiece.

I knew he was old. But I thought he would live longer. It is not his death that crushed me so much but self-accusation.

Helen is not delivered yet. Since Miss Beach screamed at me as I told you and said she would give the rights to me as a Xmas present (she did not) I heard no more till she returned my last letter to Conner without comment and the enclosed. An imbecile thing it is, too.

She rang me up a day or so ago in a great excitement about my ‘jubilee’. People had come from Berlin where they were going to do something or other. She said she had intended to leave Paris for a holiday but if I liked she would cancel that and organise something here too. I was too dejected to make a reply.

I am glad this letter did not cause the collapse the other I wrote caused. But it tired me a little.

I hope your own news is good. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 January 1932

2 Avenue S. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … Mr Robert Kastor arrived in Marseille from N.Y. the other day. He rang up Giorgio (he is a stockbroker in N.Y.) to say he had an offer in his pocket to me from a friend of his in N.Y. (Cerf, who published Dubliners and Portrait in Modern Library) which he would bring to Paris….

I shall not make a statement at the ‘jubilee’ celebration because apparently there will be none. Brody wrote about it last October already but nothing was done. Miss Beach went away 12 days ago. She came back yesterday. Helen can do nothing. My wife wanted to do something here but we cannot….

There is an offer for the Danish and Norwegian and Swedish rights of Ulysses, for the Danish and Norwegian of Portrait and the Spanish of Exiles.

I am still tired and dejected.

Mrs Crosby is back. She could do nothing with Lucia’s letters and my text in MS.

P.S. I forgot to say Jolas is bringing out a Transition number which is to be an attack on Goethe (whose centenary it is) and a homage to me. Not being able to stop this I made it a condition that a portrait of G. and a French caricature of me should be in it. After a long talk he agreed to this. He is printing a translation of Gillet’s article. I also bargained that he should print passages from the three recent personal attacks on me by Lennon, O.G. and ‘One who knows him’. Finally he agreed to do so—and not to comment.

I have passed a very gloomy month of this jubilee year which opened with my father’s burial. I still believe that if the two specialists I got to see him on Sunday had seen him on Tuesday he might have got through for he was in great form on Boxing Day, playing with his dog Boxer and saying he would come home on Sunday. Everyone liked him except some of his unnatural self-righteous kindred.

There was a relief the other night when Sullivan (who was in town for 24 hours) came round with his wife and son and took us out to dinner…. In the end I livened up for he too, like my father, is a Cork man and a tenor. He told me they had to have a police cordon at the stage door in the Lyons theatre when he sang The Jewess on Xmas night but he swore he would never send me another critique lest I should start again.

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To GEORG GOYERT, 12 February 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: Many thanks for your kind message of congratulation on my fiftieth birthday and for the flowers. I did not see these until the lady who brought them had gone and could not then thank as she left no address.

I hope things are going not too badly with you. As for me I expect to be a grandfather at any moment. With friendly regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EZRA POUND, 13 February 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: As you live là-bas can you tell me what I ought to do. Italian papers, Il Mattino (Naples), La Fiera Letteraria etc have several times published translations of things of mine. They never consult me, inform me or pay me. I see that Il Convegno last October or so published Rossi’s translation of Episode 1 of Ulysses. Didn’t I write you something about that when you were here? Of course, they pay me nothing. What do you say? Is it all right? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 13 February 1932

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Eliot: I asked Léon to send you the news. My daughter-in-law’s brother, a N.Y. stockbroker, is bringing me a personal offer for the U.S. publication of Ulysses on the 21 instant from a friend of his, Mr Bennett Serf [sic] who has two books of mine in his Modern Library which he took away from the helpless Huebsch. I am at present owner of all the rights of Ulysses.

I send you an article which has just come out in Le Correspondant which, as you probably know, is the oldest review in France. I never met Mr Rops. Gillet says the next thing will be a long laudation in Etudes. The Fortnightly, on the other hand, has an article on W i P by Gilbert (paid for also) for the last 25 months. I suppose they have board meetings about it 52 times a year.

Can you throw any light on this other problem. It is said here that Ulysses, though banned for sale in England, is on the programme for some Cambridge examinations and that the professors lend copies to the students.

I hope Mrs Eliot and yourself are well. I am somewhat better and am trying to get on with my work.

P.S. Desmond Harmsworth showed me a book J.J. and the Common Reader by —Duff, which he thinks of publishing if I do not object. I told him to go ahead but mentioned you. It would be well to find out from Gorman’s N.Y. publishers what has become of him and his biography.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Telegram), 15 February 1932

Paris

TS. Cornell

GRANDSON BORU [sic] TO DAY NAME STEPHEN JAMES =

JIM

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To T.S. ELIOT, 22 February 1932

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Paris (XVI)

Dear Elliot [sic]: Thanks for your letter and advice about Mr Glass’s proposal which for the moment I shall follow and also for your congratulations.

I have not yet replied to Budgen but he wants me to do so and I think the inclusion of letters invades Gorman’s ground. Moreover counting Jordan Smith, Stuart Gilbert, Gorman’s two books, Louis Golding and Charles Duff, Budgen’s would be the seventh book in the field. I should like to see his illustrations and he could do a good text if he chooses a line different from the others. Some time ago some member of your firm wrote to ask me if I had a poem to be published separately in a leaflet series. I replied that I had not. A few days ago however I wrote the enclosed, the first piece of verse I have inflicted on anybody for eight years, a short poem on the birth of my grandson. Would it suit? If not please send it back.

As regards the proposal to publish episodes of Ulysses in the Criterion Miscellany I am against it. First it implies that I have recognised the right of any authorities in either of Bull’s islands to dictate to me what and how I am to write. I never did and never will. Secondly the episodes are of unequal length, thirdly I think that at least seven of the eight episodes would not pass the censor. I see by the press that this nobleman announces his intention of banning films which contain pictures of ‘bedroom scenes, hardships of prison life and the Prince of Wales’, there is only one argument with such idiots. Fourthly Ulysses is a book with a beginning, middle and an end and should be presented as such. The case is quite different with W.i.P. which has neither beginning nor end. I would agree to a private edition of Ulysses to start with if the text is unabridged and unaltered and I imagine that if the price were high enough the Home Office would take no action. There are a few little worries coming its way shortly which will probably give them food for thought. For the last twenty eight years I have been listening to or reading protests from Outre-Manche in which the stallwarts swore they would never print and never publish what I was writing and I have always found that in the end they settle down and make a good hearty meal of their own words. And why not, since it is the best language in the world for general nutriment? Buon pro faccia!

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 1 March 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Paris XVI

Dear Budgen: Thanks for your kind message of sympathy but I prefer not to open up this subject, even after two months. As you know, I have often spoken to you about my father and you can imagine what I felt about [it]. What a pity he did not live long enough to know of the birth of his great grandson!

Now as regards your projected book, if Gorman and Louis Golding finish their biographies of me and if Harmsworth publishes Charles Duff’s J.J. and the plain reader with a preface by Herbert Read yours will be the seventh book mainly about a text which is unobtainable in England. I suggest that you first have a look at Gilbert’s book and Paul Jordan Smith Key to Ulysses so that you can strike a line for yourself. I am opposed to the inclusion of correspondence as this invades Gorman’s ground, but you can use the correspondence for the formation of your text. I should very much like to see your illustrations. I think your method of approach will probably be an original one but I think you will have to be on your guard with any English publisher for all he wants is claptrap and gossip. Can you outline your book to me a little more precisely after this letter.

I renew my birthday wishes now that we are both golden jubilarians. My eyes are not very well, a slight attack of episcleritis from a neglected blast but much better these last few days.

Best regards to Mrs Budgen and yourself and also the Sargents.

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To T.S. ELIOT, 4 March 1932

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Elliot [sic]: Many thanks indeed for your kind word about my little poem. By all means dispose of it as you say though really it is Pinker who should do this. Anyhow it is as broad as it is long since I repay him his commission though you have all the trouble. The chief point is that you like the verse.

Can you give me the address of Lady Otteline Morel [sic] and Sidney Schiff. I will tell you what I want it for in my next letter. It is really for my daughter I want it or rather for her publisher!!!

Cerf offers me an advance of £700.-.- of 15% royalties for the American Ulysses, the publication to be immediate and he taking all risks. The text unabridged and unaltered. I hear there is an offer coming from Harcourt Brace and somebody else. There was another offer, same terms but with conditions from Morrow. I shall decide within the next few days.

If there is no prospect of your firm doing a high priced private edition of Ulysses as was suggested that evening have you any objection if I ask Pinker to offer it in this way to Chatto and Windus who McGreevy tells me did something like this for a book of Proust’s? He says the Home Office took no steps against it. Will you let me hear from you as soon as possible as it is very important that Ulysses should appear in England while the other book is maturing.

Harmsworth will bring out in May Duff’s book with a preface by Herbert Read….

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 29 March 1932

Paris

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I return preface typed and amended. If it is all right send it on but do not mention me as I do not want to be made use of.

You have not made this point of dialect or lingua clear to an English reader. And I wish it were a little clearer than it is that Schmitz was very careful of his money. Imagine yourself in Manchester reading this preface and you will understand what [I mean.] What have you done with Miss Weaver’s photographs and that of Baroness S. Leger? Sorry to hear you have been ill and hope you are better.

Kind regards to Nelly and yourself

Jim

P.S. Also my relations with S were quite formal. I never crossed the soglia except as a paid teacher and his wife became longsighted when she met Nora in the street.

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To BENNETT CERF, 2 April 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

TS. Cerf

Dear Mr Cerf, I thank you very much for your message conveyed to me by Mr Robert Kastor. You ask me for details of the story of the publication of Ulysses and since you are determined to fight for its legalisation in the United States and to publish what will be the only authentic edition there, I think it just as well to tell you the history of its publication in Europe and the complications which followed it in America, although I was under the impression that they were already well known. As it is, however, they have given my book in print a life of its own. Habent sua fata libelli!

You are surely well aware of the difficulties I found in publishing anything I wrote from the very first volume of prose I attempted to publish: Dubliners. Publishers and printers alike seemed to agree among themselves, no matter how divergent their points of view were in other matters, not to publish anything of mine as I wrote it. No less than twenty-two publishers and printers read the manuscript of Dubliners and when at last it was printed some very kind person bought out the entire edition and had it burnt in Dublin—a new and private auto-da-fé. Without the collaboration of the Egoist Press Ltd. London, conducted by Miss Harriet Weaver The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mail might still be in manuscript.

You can well imagine that when I came to Paris in the summer 1920 with the voluminous manuscript of Ulysses I stood even slenderer chances of finding a publisher on account of its suppression after the publication of the eleventh episode in the Little Review conducted by Miss Margaret Anderson and Miss Jane Heap. These two editors were, as you probably remember, prosecuted at the instance of some society and as a result further publication in serial form was prohibited, the existing copies were confiscated and, I believe, the fingerprints of the two ladies were taken. The completed manuscript, however, was offered to one of your colleagues on the American market but I greatly doubt that he even took the trouble to glance at it.

My friend Mr Ezra Pound and good luck brought me into contact with a very clever and energetic person Miss Sylvia Beach who had been running for some years previously a small English bookshop and lending library in Paris under the name of Shakespeare and Co. This brave woman risked what professional publishers did not wish to, she took the manuscript and handed it to the printers. These were very scrupulous and understanding French printers in Dijon, the capital of the French printing press. In fact I attached no small importance to the work being done well and quickly. My eyesight still permitted me at that time to read the proofs myself and thus it came about that thanks to extra work and the kindness of Mr Darantière the well-known Dijon printer Ulysses came out a very short time after the manuscript had been delivered and the first printed copy was sent to me for my fortieth birthday on the second of February 1922.

You are however in error when you think that Shakespeare and Co. never published anything before or after Ulysses. As a matter of fact Miss Sylvia Beach brought out a little volume of thirteen poems of mine entitled Pomes Penyeach in 1927 and also a volume of essays and two letters of protest concerning the book I am engaged in writing since 1922. This volume was brought out in 1929 and it bears the title of Our Exagmination round his factification for incamination of Work in Progress.

The continental publication of Ulysses proved however to be merely the beginning of complications in the United Kingdom and the United States. Shipments of copies of Ulysses were made to America and to Great Britain with the result that all copies were seized and burnt by the Custom authorities of New York and Folkestone. This created a very peculiar situation. On the one hand I was unable to acquire the copyright in the United States since I could not comply with the requirements of the American copyright law which demands the republication in the United States of any English book published elsewhere within a period of six months after the date of such publication, and on the other hand the demand for Ulysses which increased every year in proportion as the book penetrated into larger circles gave the opportunity for any unscrupulous person to have it printed and sold clandestinely. This practice provoked a protest signed by one hundred and sixty-seven writers of all nationalities and I even obtained an injunction against one of these unscrupulous persons in a New York court. I am enclosing copies of both these documents which may interest you. This injunction, however, proved of no avail as the enjoined defendant resumed his practice very soon again under another name and with a different mode of procedure, namely a photographic forgery of the Paris edition which contained the falsification of the Dijon printer’s imprint.

It is therefore with the greatest sincerity that I wish you all possible success in your courageous venture both as regards the legalisation of Ulysses as well as its publication and I willingly certify hereby that not only will your edition be the only authentic one in the United States but also the only one there on which I will be receiving royalties.

Personally I will be very gratified if your enterprise is successful as it will permit American readers who have always proved very kind to me to obtain the authenticated text of my book without running the risk of helping some unscrupulous person in his purpose of making profit for himself alone out of the work of another to which he can advance no claim of moral ownership.

There may be some other points in which you are interested and I hope that should you be over in Europe again this year you will oblige me by communicating with me either direct or through my son so as to enable me to elucidate any point you may still be in doubt about. Yours sincerely

James Joyce

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To the MAYOR OF FLORENCE, 9 April 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

TS. Private

Magnifico Podestà Anzitutto Le chiedo venia se non rispondo che oggi e se la mia risposta si presenta sotto questa forma agghindata e stinta ma la pregiatissima Sua lettera inoltrata da Londra mi e pervenuta con qualche ritardo ed in fatto di calligrafia sono un vero imbrattacarte. La ringrazio del cortese invito nonchè delle generose parcelle di viaggio offertemi ed apprezzo altamente l’onore che un tale invito proveniente dal primo cittadino di tanta città mi conferisce.

Mi duole assai di non essere in grado di accettare e di dovere rinunciare al privilegio di parlare dinanzi ad un auditorio amichevole nella capitale toscana. Purtroppo le fate che s’inchinarono sopra la mia culla mi tolsero il dono della facondia, vanto di molti miei connazionali e mi lasciarono in sua vece una ‘lingua di lana in bocca baggiana . La prego dunque di tenermi per iscusato.

Se mi è lecito proporre un altro nome credo che il mio amico, il poeta americano Ezra Pound, il quale ha tradotto in inglese le opere di un grande scrittore fiorentino, Guido Cavalcanti, potrebbe benissimo rimpiazzarmi. Il suo indirrizzo è: 12 via Marsala, Rapallo dove abita da dieci anni.

Nel mentre porgo a Lei, al chiarissimo rettore della regia Università di costì ed al comitato da Loro presieduto i miei sinceri ringraziamenti. La prego, Magnifico Podestà, di gradire i sensi dei miei più doverosi ossequi.

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 13 May 1932

Hotel Belmont et de Bassano, Champs-Elysées, Paris

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: Lucia had a bad crise de nerfs at the Gare du Nord so I had to take the trunks off the train, abandon our journey to London and definitely give up my Kensington flat. So here we are in a hotel again, after 12 years in Paris!

I talked about you a few days ago at lunch with de Lanux who is having a show here of his soldiers. The enclosed bêtise, written only for the sake of the rhymes, is the result.

Thanks for the print. I had it framed in silver. I am sending this to your country address though you seem to be cruising in the mezzogiorno. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 20 April 1932

Hôtel Belmont, rue de Bassano, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … As regards the flat it would be very kind if you went to the agents (you may use the window pole to explain my point of view) and ask them to try to get it off my hands. I never liked the flat much though I liked the gardens near by…. When I get enough money and manage to settle Lucia [?] we will return to the Euston Hotel or wherever else my wife wants to go. That grove was inhabited by mummies. Campden Grave, it should be called. London is not made for divided houses. The little sooty dwellings with their backs to the railway line etc etc are genuine; so is Portland Place. But houses like that were never built to be run on the continental system and as flats they are fakes.

I have arranged for Lucia to see Dr Fontaine and a nerve specialist. I shall try to set up a home for her here though she [is] terribly difficult but she is really a child and I think the lettrines she did are exquisite. Prof R. Piccoli, Ital. prof. at Cambridge called yesterday; he has translated P.P. into Italian and his wife has set the 13 poems to music. Just like boatrace night.

There are several things I wanted to see in London but it will have to be put off for the moment. I hope we find something as I should like 10 days’ rest out of this.

If anyone will pay the price you say so much the better but if not better 2 gns a week than nothing. …

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To JAMES STEPHENS, 7 May 1932

Hôtel Belmont, rue de Bassano, Paris

Dear Stephens: Here is your poem in German, Latin, Norwegian, Italian and French. Can you add your Irish version so as, with the English, to make a rainbow and we might present it to ourselves in a brochure for our jubilee year.

The Latin contains violations of quantity (lines 4 and 5 for example) but this really does not matter in the rhymed doggerel which a classic poet would call church verse.

In the German ‘liess los’ sounds rather free and vulgar. It is really ‘let a shout’ but I prefer it to the verb ‘stossen’ which is more elegant.

In the Italian I made the wind a bandit cousin of Fra Diavolo. He puts three fingers in his mouth to balance the three ‘kills’. This I also balanced by the collision of 3 vowels in line 5.

As regards the Norwegian that language has changed in spelling almost as much (I mean since I began to study it in Dublin) as English has since 1600. I have followed the orthography Ibsen used which is now nearer Danish than Norwegian. Those two races still preserve pagan terms. They have no word for Christmas (which they call ‘Jul’) or for the Last Day or General Judgment. This they call ‘Ragnarok’. So line 4 means that the trees think the crack of doom is upon them. Also this typewriter cannot reproduce such Norwegian letters as ‘ø’ or ‘å’.

[The five versions (with the original prefixed) are as follows:]

The wind stood up and gave a shout.

He whistled on his fingers and

Kicked the withered leaves about

And thumped the branches with his hand

And said he’d kill and kill.

And so he will and so he will.

Les Verts de Jacques

Le vent d’un saut lance son cri,

Se siffle sur les doigts et puis

Trépigne les feuilles d’automne,

Craque les branches qu’il assomme.

Je tuerai, crie-t-il, hol…!

Et vous verrez s’il le fera!

J.J.

Der Wind stand auf, liess los einen Schrei,

Pfiff mit den Fingern schrill dabei

Wirbelte duerres Laub durch den Wald

Und haemmerte Aeste mit Riesengewalt.

Zum tod, heult, zu Tod and Mord!

Und meint es ernst: ein Wind, ein Wort.

J.J.

Sur git Boreas digitorum

Fistulam faciens et clamorem.

Pes pugno certat par (oremus!)

Foliis quatit omne nemus.

Caedam, ait, caedam, caedam!

Nos ne habeat ille praedam.

J.J.

Vinden staar op med en vild Huru,

Han piber paa fingerne og nu

Sparker bladenes flyvende flok.

Traeerne troer han er Ragnarok.

Skovens liv og blod vil han draebe og drikke.

Hvad der bliver at goere, det ved jeg ikke.

J.J.

Balza in piè Fra Vento e grida.

Tre dita in bocca fischia la sfida.

Tira calci, pesta botte:

Ridda di foglie e frasche rotte.

Ammazzerò, ei urla, O gente!

E diuraddio costui non mente.

J.J.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 17 June 1932

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Budgen: I have just heard from Mrs Suter that you are awaiting a word from me. I am still here but very rushed and worried about Lucia who had a nervous breakdown a month ago. She is at Hay-les-Roses for quiet. I should like you to see her initials (see enclosed). They will come out on 15 August, 19 copies having been sold to date. Louis Gillet, art critic for the Revue des Deux Mondes, wrote to me about them: ‘J’admire ces lettrines comme une merveille d’atavisme. On dirait des caprices d’un vieil enlumineur irlandais…. La T est étonnante. Vous me direz ce que je dois en faire. J’ai peur que nos artistes aient peu de chose à apprendre à cette jeune fille que guide la main de Saint Patrice ou Saint Colomban.’

Of course I can find time to see you and will be glad to talk with you but of course also I cannot give any engagement of any sort to an English publisher.

Nine persons seem to be engaged in doing books about me at present.

But how can you do the drawings without having visited Dublin?

Bloomsday + 1, 1932

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To CONSTANT HUNTINGTON, 22 May 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Mr Huntington I do not think I can usefully add anything to what my learned friend, the professor of English at the University of Trieste (see titlepage) has written in his preface to Senilita, (As) A man grows older.

With regard to the other book by the author of Senilità the only things I can suggest as likely to attract the British reading public are a preface by sir J.M. Barrie, author of My Lady Nicotine, opinions of the book (to be printed on the back of its jacket) from two deservedly popular personalities of the present day, such as, the rector of Stiffkey and the Princess of Wales and (on the front of the jacket) a coloured picture by a Royal Academician representing two young ladies, one fair and the other dark but both distinctly nicelooking, seated in a graceful though of course not unbecoming posture at a table on which a book stands upright, with title visible and underneath the picture three lines of simple dialogue, for example:

Ethel: Does Cyril spend too much on cigarettes!

Doris: Far too much.

Ethel: So did Percy (points)—till I gave him ZENO. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN SULLIVAN, 26 May 1932

[Paris]

MS. Texas

Please sign and send off this if all right.

J.J.

Paris

P.S. Sign ‘J. Sullivan’ for the love of music—

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 8 June 1932

Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: … a letter from Tokio this morning to say that 2 Japanese editions of U appeared there on 5 February 1932. Up to date 13,000 copies have been pirated, the gross receipts being 170,000 frs to date. One of the publishers asked my terms last June. It seems there is a 10-year law limit to protect European copyright after which period any book is free. I asked T.S.E. to get the opinion of his sales manager (the same who made no use of my advt rhyme). He gave his profound opinion that I should demand a very high advance of very high royalties (how much I forget) and said nothing of the 10-year law. The Japanese considered the terms exorbitant, waited till the 2 February jubileed by, and went ahead. No news from U.S.A. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 20 June 1932

2 Avenue St. Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Eliot: … I cannot go to Zurich, of course, though Vogt sent me a message to come. A French cook took my London flat for 3 months. I am giving it up anyway. I worked all the winter and wish I could go on. Giorgio and family are in the south of France. Gorman seems to have vanished. Two Japanese pirated editions of Ulysses have appeared this spring and 13,000 copies have been sold to date. Is Japan a signatory to the Berne convention or not? Ulysses stands under French law. The pirates allege that European books become public property in Japan after 10 years. You remember somebody in your office advised me to ask certain terms. The Japanese found these terms and advance absurd as my lease had only 6 months to run. U was published 2/2/1922 and the first Japanese edition came out in Tokyo on 5/2/1932. No news from the American publishers….

The moment I have any good news I will send it. John Lane is ‘considering’ Ulysses with the assistance of a Home Office man and a police solicitor. It is rather unfair and most un-English that the army and navy, the fire brigade and the Worshipful Fraternity of Frothblowers are not represented on their committee of public safety.

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To EDOUAED DUJARDIN, 26 June 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

MS. Texas

Cher Monsieur Dujardin: Les choses ne vont pas bien. On a même proposé l’isolement total pour ma fille, proposition contre laquelle tout mon instinct se révolte. Il y aura justement demain une consultation entre les médicins et je propose d’emmener ma fille de cette maison et de l’envoyer à l’étranger accompagnée par son infirmière et une famille de notre connaissance afin qu’elle puisse se distraire.

Je ne veux pas que l’on parle trop de cette affaire mais dans les circonstances je ne pourrai absolument rencontrer et causer avec des personnes réunies à une fonction comme le diner de demain soir. L’idée d’y présider ne m’était jamais agréable. J’y serais allé comme invité avec grand plaisir si la présidence avait été confié à un de vos collègues français. Je suis trop sensible du bon accueil qu’on a fait à mes écrits ici en France pour oublier que je suis un invité et pas un hôte.

Je vous souhaite une soirée très agréable. J’y serai présent en esprit: mais nous viderons encore des coupes ensembles in terra viventium [sic].

Veuillez accepter mes excuses et me croire cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 27 June 1932

2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Passy, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … The Dublin congress was relayed here and the concierge heard it all, MacCormack included, but the girls in the surrounding flats were making such an infernal din washing up plates to go off with their best boys and see the Grand Prix that I didn’t hear much except a lusty ‘secula seculorum’. If I ever have a stud that would be a fine name for a sure Grand Prix winner. An Irish owner won, I hear. To judge by the grin on the pope’s proxy’s face he is the man in the million who is enjoying it all to the top of his cappellone. The English Press exhorts the 55,555 protestant sects to get up a similar demonstration and that ought to be some show especially if the Greek and Russian orthodox persuasions could be persuaded to go halves and Miss Aimée MacPherson could be induced to be ‘featured’. The pope was to have broadcast to Dublin with his ‘unfallable upon his alloilable’ but the chief engineer of the netherworld played aitch he double ell with the ether so that he was not heard. No I agree. It is not cricket. I believe in free speech, the talker allnightly, disturber of everything else and in ——.

Coupé

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 July 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: I smuggled Lucia and her nurse out of the clinic, through Paris and to Austria. Here is the first result. Everyone in Paris is huffy because I would not allow her to be seen while she was there…. I really do not know what to do about U. The U.S. plan seems to have foundered. The 11th edition is finished but Miss Beach does not wish to settle up the royalties a/c (a minor matter since I have some money) till after her holidays and will make no move towards a 12th edition while if I do so it will mean an explosion. It is the only book in her shop that goes on selling.

To return to Lucia. We have to prepare a retreat for her in case she has a fresh collapse. So we want to go to Neuchatel to see a place there. We ourselves want to stay near Lucerne. The moving out of Paris, with fees and fares and pensions in advance cost me 10,000 frs. I spoke to Mr Brauchbar, an old friend of mine here and pupil, the richest silk merchant in Switzerland and he promised to do what he could about Lucia’s stuff…. He also subscribed for a copy of her book.

Whether my plan in double-crossing the 3 doctors succeeds or fails I shall be blamed—if it succeeds for having allowed her to go into the clinic, if it fails for having thwarted the doctors.

Vogt was in Amsterdam for an operation but will see me tomorrow. It pours and pours and pours in floods here and I am nervous about my eye which everybody finds better. Why does the best ophthalmologist in Europe live in the worst eye-climate?

Mr Herriot kissed Fräulein X yesterday at Lausanne and Britain, headed by Mrs Dolores Barney [?], is all for disarmament and we are going to have a lovely time. Unfortunately cloudburst no 111 has just announced itself. There has not been any thunder and lightning. God save the King.

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To PAUL LÉON, 12 July 1932

[Zurich]

TS. Faber

Prof. Vogt saw my eyes on Monday 10 July. He says I should have come to him before and is afraid it is now too late. The right eye was still operatable 20 months ago. Now the cataract is total and unfortunately complicated with glaucome (secondary) and a partial atrophy of the retina. I was wrongly advised, he says, to put an atropine in it which was pure poison. He says I must not even rub it. Retina and optic nerve were normal when he saw it in November 1930 but are not so now. He intends to observe it for some days and then decide whether he will allow it to go blind (erblinden) or attempt two very difficult operations in succession, the first early in September. In the latter course I may have to face a 5–6 months residence in Switzerland. This means a total cessation of work, a great deal of nervous tension and a considerable expenditure of money. I am writing to Vogt a letter explaining the events from April 1931 which prevented me from coming here to be visited and operated. He added that seeing the complicated condition of the neglected eye, he was reluctant to touch the other but that he would have done so had glaucoma and retinary atrophy not intervened in the other, resultant from interocular pressure unchecked [illegible word] by operation.

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To T.S. ELIOT, 13 July 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Eliot: … Vogt saw me and you will get from Léon an account of the very unpleasant surprise that awaited me here. He is keeping me under observation.

What am I to do about my book? Of course I can always refund the advance if I have to abandon it. But I want to finish it. Impossible to write in such circumstances. I may have to remain 4–6 months here. I hope you do not believe it is any bad faith on my part.

And the money it all costs! Good Lord! And this place is so dear. I mean Switzerland. We stop at this hotel because my wife is exhausted by it all and must have a week or so rest and comfort….

I really do not know what to do about W.i.P.

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From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 14 July 1932

27, rue Casimir-Périer (VIIe)

Dear Mr Pinker: Mr Joyce has asked me to write to you on the following matter. All during the last three months or more he has been under a terrible strain caused by his daughter’s health who is suffering from a severe breakdown. In fact her nerves were in such condition that the utmost care and particular attention were necessary to bring her on the way of what it is hoped is the road to a speedy recovery. Among the many devices attempted one is to make her use her talents in any sort of applied art which would permit her to have a success of her own and thus recreate in her some confidence in herself.

I am glad to say that among other things that were attempted even before her breakdown was the idea of decorating books and she has actually developed a very original style. From the enclosed circular note you will see that a good editor here is launching a book decorated by her. It is a very limited edition and out of the entire lot some 18 copies have already been subscribed.

Mr Joyce has the idea that it would be a great thing to offer her the decoration of another book and this time without his intervention at all. His idea is to make her do the 26 capitals of the alphabet and to approach a reputed English poet entrusting him to make verses for children beginning with each letter. Such book could then be sold at say 18/- or £1.-.- as a Christmas gift. It would be essential for the book to be published in England and without Mr Joyce’s intervention. (The latter in view of Miss Joyce’s sentiment.)

Mr Joyce would like to know what you think of this idea and what your suggestion could be as regards a possible author and an eventual publisher. Do you think the idea a practical one and can it reckon on obtaining a hearing? The idea itself is, in my opinion, a good one and I am sure it could be worked, but you of course are a better judge on the present conditions of the London market.

Mr Joyce is at present in Zürich and should you prefer to write to him direct his address is Carlton Elite hotel, Zürich, Switzerland. Please do answer me a few words too. The news about Mr Joyce’s eyesight are not comforting lately and this added to the strain he has been living under during the last few months is quite sad.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 14 July 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: If that review wishes to reproduce a black and white of one of the ‘lettrines’ you yourself should write to:

Monsieur J. Kahane

Chez Herbert Clark et Cie

335 rue S. Honoré

Paris

asking first his permission, and then asking him to have the lettrine ‘O’ (of the poem ‘Simples’) photographed at ½ size, the expenses to my charge. I do not wish the request to come through me.

Lucia is summering at Feldkirch with some friends, Hotel zum Loewen.

I am here about my eyes. Their state is aggravated owing to my delay in coming, due to one damn worry after another. In fact Vogt fears the eye he could have perhaps saved 20 months ago must go blind. However, I am under observation.

Best regards to Nelly and yourself

Jim

P.S.

Giorgio is at

La Ferme du May

S. Jean-Cap Ferrat

Alpes Maritimes

France.

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To MR and MRS ROBERT KASTOR (Postcard), 16 July 1932

Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Kastor

With best wishes to yourself and family for a sunny holiday. If you want any rain please say so and I shall send any amount of it. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STUART GILBERT, 22 July 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Gilbert: I showed Beckett’s acrostic to Mr and Mrs Jolas. The latter thought it poor, the former thinks it acid and not funny. I think it is all right—though if I may suggest anything it seems to me ‘tickled to death’ is better than ‘giggling to death’ though the ‘g’ is nearer ‘j’.

The news about Lucia was satisfactory enough till today when she announces her arrival here with the nurse next Friday. I wish she would stay where she is. I have written to Dr Codet about her as, of course, I am nervy all the time at having taken her out of his hands on my own responsibility.

The news about my right eye is bad. I have not gone back to Vogt. He says I should have left other things aside and come to him before. How can I possibly make an engagement with him now even if he does decide to risk the two difficult operations which he fears he cannot even make?

I wrote to Faber and Faber offering to refund them the £150 advance on Work in Progress and scrap the contract. I hate to have this on my mind too. I am proposing to my ‘estate agents’ to pay off the whole of the lease less discount and let the flat furnished for 1 gn. a week and then sell the sticks. Off with my flat, so much for Kensington!

I am not surprised McGreevy does not want to write any more about me—especially for nothing. Why should he? Goll’s article is pretty bad but …’s, …’s, …’s, etc. portraits are also bad. As I wrote to Miss Weaver: es tut mir leid aber es ist absolut nichts zu machen. Un chef de rayon à la Samaritaine. Vous désirez, Madame? Blancs, n’est-ce pas? Au fond, dans le petit coin. O pardon, Monsieur le Président, je croyais que vous étiez Madame la Boulangère. Un canon? parfaitement. Suivez-moi par ici! O excusez-moi, mon petit moutard! Je t’ai fait du mal? Laisse-moi te caresser, ça passera. Merdre de merdre, c’est un bouledogue anglais! O ouch! O ouch! Comment, Monsieur le Directeur, mes huit jours? Mais je suis bouleversé. Sapristi! Je viens de renverser la Tour Eiffel des mouchoirs à 2 frs 75! …

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 July 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: To continue and conclude…. My father sent me a message by a friend in the curious roundabout delicate and allusive way he had in spite of all his loud elaborate curses (he is quoted on the jacket of an amusing book Lars Porsena or The Future of Swearing) that if I thought fit he would like a tombstone to be placed on his grave bearing the names of himself and my mother. He left the wording to me and did not mention his two sons, daughter and mother also buried there. Poor foolish man! It seems to me his voice has somehow got into my body or throat. Lately, more than ever—especially when I sigh.

Jolas sends good news from Feldkirch but I never know whether these letters are rigged or not. Lucia writes announcing her arrival with the nurse on Friday next. I hope she does not decide to stay. I wish she would not come. She runs the risk of two more station scenes.

I thought if she sent three letters GBS to Shaw on the 26th (they have the same birthday) he might like her talent. But I am afraid Shaw has lived too long on the boreal side of La Manche to appreciate silly things like that. Perhaps he is right too.

I have had no reply from F and F. No doubt they will have several bored meetings of all the bored members.

The reason Goll’s article is so rubbishy is not because Goll is not a poet of sorts. Tuohy’s portrait is a failure. Colum’s article is also. So is Lewis’s personal one (though his hostile criticism is by far the best that has appeared). And as for Pound’s pen pictures—heaven preserve us! Es tut mir leid aber es ist nichts zu malen.

I cannot get a reply out of Collinson. … With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 1 August 1932 Bundesfeier

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Up to now my idea has not worked badly. Lucia, apart from initial melancholy, has stayed down there a month and will stay on till she goes back to Paris in September.

For myself the news is not good. Vogt is naturally annoyed with me. He does not believe he can save the right eye from going blind. I should have left everything else aside and come back before while it was still operatable. He will return for a few hours to Z’ch in a fortnight and may let me know definitely then. Of course, he says, it might need 2 or 3 operations (which would make the baker’s dozen)—a major and some secondary ones. He is, of course, the only man in Europe who can do it but what about me in my present Wirbel of worries.

What a climate! Platzregen all the time.

Do not let yourself be discouraged by anything I may have said about your book. I hope you will go on with it. But if you had 28 years’ experience of English publishers you would proceed very warily with them as I do. Besides, public houses solemn promises are not quite as lasting as the Rütlischwur. A pity you could not have talked more with S. He would have gone on for hours about painting probably.

Did you know of a little habit the Helvetians have on their national day. They cut off all the draught wine, will serve only full bottles (whole) of wine in bottle and this à l’écarté—like Horseshow whisky in Dublin? Or is this new? Half the streets of Z’ch are ripped up. I seem to be always coming back here.

What trouble my eyes have given me! We had Ruggiero to dinner the other night. Still loquacious on the subjects of frog cooking, Abdul Hamid, Armenians, etc.

If I knew Sargent’s address in Lugano I would send him a card Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, [August 1932?]

[Zurich?]

MS. Pearson

Dear McAlmon: I have 7 names good each for a subscription of £10, payable about October next, (i.e. myself, you, T.S.E., H.W. etc) and have given in 7 others of whom I am morally sure. (Lady Cunard, her daughter, WL, Antheil and Mrs Herbert Gorman). I am sure I can find easily another 6. That will make £200 and we can probably run it up to £300 but if when called on you happen to be short I can easily cover the two names and we can settle it some time or other. As a matter of fact, I am your debtor.

As regards Gorman (or rather Mrs Gorman whose name I give) I think you must be misinformed. Colm who knows them well for years told me they had fairly ample means. I always found her very freehanded but there is of course no earthly reason why she is obliged to subscribe. I wish you could help him with his book. People are unnecessarily hostile to him. I hope he is well and yourself the same sincerely yours

J.J.

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 5 August 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: I hope this finds you in good health and that you excuse me for not having written to you before but my daughter has been rather ill and I myself am here on account of my wretched eyes. I may have to submit to two more operations, making the full dozen, or the right eye may be left to go blind—the devil or the deep sea.

It was very kind of you to act as you did about poor Pappie’s will and if you will let me know the cost of the tombstone I shall send a cheque for it. The names of my parents are John Stanislaus and Mary Jane.

I wonder what became of all the signed editions of my books I sent to Pappie. Apart from any material value (the first Paris edition of Ulysses signed is worth about £35) I do not want them to be in the hands of strangers.

You are in this book by name with so many others of Pappie’s friends. I remember very well your singing One of the Family and Sister Susie’s Playing. You always made the same mistake in one line of the latter, a mistake prompted by politeness and encouraged by conviviality, for you sang ‘would make both you and I sick’ instead of ‘would make both me and you sick’.

My grandson Stephen was born a month after Pappie died. I wrote a little verse about it and if I ever publish it I will send you a copy. No man could be worthy of such intense love as my father had for me

With many remembrances and all good wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From C.G. JUNG, [? August 1932] Küsnacht

Zürich, Seestrasse 228

TS. Private

Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run in the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman. I didn’t.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir, Yours faithfully

C.G. Jung

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 August 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver … Here is a letter from Dr Codet and you will receive from Borach a letter the nurse sent by hand through Jolas written to her by Lucia, though unsigned and unfinished. It is a disquieting document. Will you please return it to me c/o Borach. My wife has not seen it.

She insisted on going to F though Lucia wrote up a perfectly normal letter to me this morning saying she wanted to see me too and that I should not be left alone and that she and the nurse would come to Z’ch.

She has worked on at her alphabet and has now reached ‘O’. Jolas says that 3 or 4 of the letters are astounding. What I find disquieting in the letter is not so much its exaltation. Each phrase could bear a rational meaning and some of the phrases are very fine. It is the lack of even casual connections. She has however gained 3 kilos, about ½ stone in 3 weeks. Also when she heard vaguely of what Vogt said she had a violent fit of crying and said she should come to Z’ch to stay with her mother. Anything, even weeps, which takes them out of absorption in themselves is a good sign. She could not gain in weight unless her mind were fairly free.

My wife has gone to see if any plans can be made ahead. She does not think Lucia wants to leave us definitely yet and thinks we should prepare a Paris home. I will tell you more when she comes back.

What kind of wandering willies are going flat-hunting these days? I mean your tenant too. My cook stays on by the month as his ‘chef’, the ambassador, is expecting to be moved.

Do you mind sending Codet’s letter to Giorgio, La Ferme de May, Saint Jean-Cap Ferrat, Alpes Maritimes, France? He telephoned today from Geneva, near where his stepson is at camp. They are all well.

I hope you have no more storms like the Monday one. A cloud burst here yesterday and gave me a great fright and a drenching. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 8 August 1932

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Private

Cara Lucia: Forse che andrò a Feldkirch dopo tutto. Dipende da Londra. Devo tornare al consolato brittanico domani. Il sig. Monro è assente da Londra ed il suo socio doveva mandarmi un anticipo su certi fondi che vendo. Come sto non ho abbastanza per andare costì e pagare la nota già dovuta. Avrò soldi fra qualche giorno. Ma se l’anticipo mi arriva domani o mercoledì mattina forse farò un salto là fino a sabato per vederti. Credevo fosse uno di quei maledetti luoghi in montagna popolato di temporali.

Qui si scoppia dal caldo. Che il diavolo pigli l’estate e le vacanze! Borach e sua madre sono partiti. Beran cenerà con me stasera. È una persona che ha molto charme. Ti manda ed a mamma i suoi saluti.

Potrei forse lavorare con Jolas laggiù. Ecco un idea. Però, come sempre, la bocca spalancata per la pioggia di quattrini. Hai un bell’imbecille di padre. Eccoti un piccolo epigramma un poco—ma non molto—satirico che ho mandato a Giorgio per la sua festa. Quest’altro anno devo farmi un altro che principerà: Ventisei il ventisei. Brauchbar e Ruggiero sono anche via. Domani sera, se non parto, dovrò cenare col vecchio ambulante che vende il Ziri’i-zittig, Morgenblutt, Ti mando questo espresso perchè ti giungera presto e che mi piace buttar via soldi.

Dovrei vedere il prof. Vogt sabato. Lui è (naturalmente) arrabbiato con me perchè non son andato prima da lui.

Sono contento che sei ingrassata. Eri troppo magra.

Arrivederci presto ad ogni modo

Tanti saluti a mamma vi abbraccio tutt’e due

Babbo

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), Postmark 17 August 1932

[Feldkirch]

MS. Cornell

Got yr. Verona card. Hoped you might be near here in Tyrol. When you get back to T. can you get Lucia La Storia della Scrittura or dell’Alfabeto (Biblioteca del Popolo, Sonzogno) 15c She is doing an alphabet for another book. Best wishes to both

Jim

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To ALFRED BERGAN (Dictated letter), [? Late August 1932]

Hotel zum Löwen, Feldkirch (Vorarlberg), (Austria)

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan, Thanks very much for your letter. I return you, as you wish, the catalogues. I prefer Design No. 120 which is the simplest, and enclose the inscription. Will Messrs. Harrison please let me know the total cost, and also when the headstone can be erected, and the manner and time of payment which they desire?

I am staying here with my wife and daughter who, I am glad to say, is much better, but must return to Zurich in a week or so and then to Paris. But any letter sent me here will be forwarded.

I remember quite well Mr. Harding, and heard from our common friend Patrick Hoey in Ostend a few years ago a very amusing description of the attendance at his funeral.

I am very grateful for all the trouble you are taking on my behalf. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

P.S. Would it be possible to have the whole done in white marble, gravestone and headstone, or is this for some technical reason, or on account of some regulation in the cemetery, not advisable?

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To JOHN SULLIVAN, 25 August 1932

Hotel Löwen, Feldkirch

MS. Texas

Dear Mr Sullivan: What bad luck! Still, try Hariot for La Juive. They must do the centenary revival at the Opéra and who is to sing Eliezar if not you? By the way, is Le Prophète in your repertory or does the part suit you and how long is it since you sang it? They are giving it at Zurich in September and October and Borach suggested writing the chef d’orchestre to have you invited as Gast for 1 night at 10,000 or 12,000 frs (French). Of course nothing may come of it as usual. However I said I would write to you. Though how the little Stadttheater is going to stage Acts 4 and 5 (unless you supply the explosion) I don’t know. But ce sont leurs oignons.

Lucia, I think, is out of the danger zone but will need many months of surveillance. She and her friend are going in a week or so to Vence on condition that we go to Nice for a few months so as to be near them. So we said yes. Will you be singing thereabouts in the autumn?

The news in the English press that I have been operated is not correct. I have to go up to Zurich in a week or so to see Vogt who will then say definitely whether he can safely touch the eye or not. What a misfortune that all my worries did not leave me free to go to him 12 months ago. He could have saved the eye then in all probability. But I have had one damned thing after another.

You may reply here as your letter will be sent on to my Zurich hotel when I leave. Good luck as always Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 29 August 1932

Hotel Löwen, Feldkirch

Dear Mr Brody: I am sorry to learn of the death of Mrs McCormick. She was very kind to me at a difficult moment and was a woman of considerable distinction. I do not know what happened afterwards though I suspect, but this does not obliterate her act prompted by humanity and generosity….

I am sending you some of my daughter’s designs for wall paper. The chief thing is that these should not fall into the hands of unscrupulous persons. In looking at them you must remember that she never had a drawing lesson in her life and that they are first attempts.

Her book of lettrines comes out this week. I am also sending a specimen page proof of one and a prospectus which you could perhaps give to a good bookseller in Munich. This page is to be sent back to me six weeks from now c/o my Paris lawyer, Mr Paul Léon, 27 rue Casimir-Perier, Paris VII.

So far as I heard 20 of the 25 copies have been bought before publication and there remain only 5. Still, I should like a Munich shop to show the page though I expect the rest of the edition will go off in Paris and London in a week or so. She is at work on a complete alphabet for which I am anxious to find a proper text, short verses for children, or fables or merely acrological rhymes. I thought of Walter de la Mare, James Stephens or possibly L.P. Fargue.

Please let me know if all reaches you safely.

I return friendly greetings to Mrs Brody and yourself and hope Munich is cooler than this oven.

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To ALFRED BERGAN (Dictated letter), 1 September 1932

Hotel zum Löwen, Feldkirch, Austria

TS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: A few hours after I wrote you I had misgivings about the date (May was my Mother’s birth and marriage month) so I wrote to my sister, Mrs. Shaurek, 16 Mountjoy Square, to call at Harrison’s and alter it. I hope this has now been done. I should like model 2, which I have marked and am returning illustration of. I should also prefer to make one remittance instead of two, that is, £48–10–0 to cover Harrison’s bill and the maximum of cemetery fees. Will Messrs. Harrison agree to pay these fees for me, out of the check so made up? And also, will they put the work in hand now, and when do they undertake to finish it and have it erected?

This letter is purely a business one, which I am dictating. I shall reply to the other parts of your letter in a few days. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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From W.B. YEATS, 2 September 1932

Riversdale, Willbrook, Rathfarnham, Dublin

TS. Buffalo

My dear Joyce Bernard Shaw and I are busy founding an Academy of Irish Letters, we are nominating the first members, twenty-five, who have done creative work with Ireland as the subject matter, and ten who have given adequate grounds for their election but do not fall within this definition. The creators Academicians, the others Associates. When we began talking over members we found we had to make this division or we should have been overrun with people from England or Scotland with a little Irish blood and a great desire to acquire a national character.

Of course the first name that seemed essential both to Shaw and myself was your own, indeed you might say of yourself as Dante said ‘If I stay who goes, if I go who stays?’ Which means that if you go out of our list it is an empty sack indeed. By the end of next week I shall have the signed form of nomination and I will send it to you with a copy of the rules. I would however think it a great thing if you would trust us so far as to give your assent when this letter reaches you. It will have to be sent on from your London Solicitor’s and I am alarmed lest your name does not reach me in time. There will be no subscription, the little money wanted apart from fifty pounds Shaw has given us will be raised by lectures. The Academy will be a vigorous body capable of defending our interests, negociating with Government, and I hope preventing the worst forms of censorship. All the writers here who are likely to form our Council are students of your work. Yrs Sy

W B Yeats

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 6 September 1932

Hotel Löwen, Feldkirch

Dear Miss Weaver: I hope you got my wire for the 1st. What changes since we last dined on that date at Kettner’s!

We leave for Z’ch tomorrow. Same hotel. The fares Feldkirch-Nice are so high that we will have to go 2nd, crush or not. Even then they come to over £30….

Vogt is in Holland, receiving great honour, I hear. I had a letter from him and he wants to see me. Sent him the notices. He will be back in Z’ch on Sunday, Borach says….

The Japanese sent me a cheque for 200 yen (£10, circa) for their depredations.

I have been working all day since I came here. It is a risk to present oneself to the writing public (for those are my readers) after some years and in such a whirl. But I will do it. By the next post you will get the first proof (unfinished) which please read and return to Mrs Jolas. As regards blame every young writer in the world, I suppose, blames me for having written U. So Jolas says, anyhow….

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 September 1932

Hotel Métropole, Nice

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: We are all here. Lucia and the nurse came over from Vence today. There is a lot of news but I am busy trying to get on alone with W i P for Transition. I will continue in pencil for there is something wrong with this ink.

I saw Vogt again on Saturday. He injected I don’t know what and I had to go back in 3 hours. It was a test for tension. The result was favourable and he then said he could wait (bad eye). There was no room in the anterior chamber as it was, he would have to cut through the lens to work. This might produce a traumatic iritis which would probably pass over to good eye and perhaps undo all. He says the capsule will shrink in about 1–1½ years and so leave him some space…. He changed my glasses and insists I am to come back to see him every 3 months during that 1–1½ yr.

Yeats and Shaw have written me a very complimentary letter asking me to accept nomination as member of the New Irish Academy of Letters. I am declining. Live abroad, bad sight etc.

The Albatross Press (rival of Tauchnitz) has been bombarding me with phone calls, telegrams etc from Germany to Z’ch, Geneva and here. They want to take over Miss Beach’s continental rights whether Cerf wins the U.S. case or not. They would sell at ¼ her price but pay only half as much royalties. Of course the sales would be infinitely more numerous. I have not yet replied. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 28 September 1932

Hotel Métropole, Nice

MS. Cornell

Congratulations on your début. Lucia’s book is out and is exquisite. Did that initial appear? I suppose nobody in T. bought a copy. Tant pis pour eux. Kind greetings.

Jim

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 1 October 1932

Hotel Métropole, Nice, France

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: Can you please let me know whether you received from my Solicitors the cheque (£48.9.9.) for Messrs. Harrison? Also if the inscription has not yet been made I should like to check the wording.

It is very good of you to have offered to see this matter through. I do not think you are the last of Pappie’s friends for I know that Mr Devan is still alive. It is strange that after such a long absence I continue to think of all those people, though I have met so many others in different lands.

I hear that the little poem I spoke of is published in a New York weekly. I shall ask my agent to send you a copy. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To W.B. YEATS, 5 October 1932

Hôtel Metropole, Nice

Dear Yeats: Many thanks for your letter and the kind words you use. It is now thirty years since you first held out to me your helping hand. Please convey my thanks also to Mr Shaw whom I have never met.

I hope that the Academy of Irish Letters (if that is its title) which you are both founding, will have the success it aims at. My case, however, being as it was and probably will be, I see no reason why my name should have arisen at all in connection with such an academy: and I feel quite clearly that I have no right whatsoever to nominate myself as a member of it.

I am returning under separate cover the rules you were good enough to send me.

I hope your health keeps good. For myself I have to go back to Zurich every three months about my eyes. Still, I work as best I can.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 9 October 1932

Hotel Métropole, Nice

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I thank Mrs Budgen and yourself and the Suters for your message but never believe anything an Englishman tells you in the press or an Irishman in a bar about me. I was not operated: after 5 weeks study of the case Vogt decided it was too difficult and dangerous even for him. But I have to go back to Z’ch every 10 or 12 weeks for a year or a year and a half as he is observing some process and will not trust any other doctor. Damn well right too. I wish I had met him ten years ago. And talking of press reports I got a pile of clippings a few days ago about a reading of A.L.P. by Miss Allgood to be given in a London theatre. I heard nothing about it. A few vague words with her some 15 months ago. And of an Irish academy of letters including myself. As for that I had a letter from Yeats and Shaw but declined to send in my name.

I wish you and Sargent could see Lucia’s book of lettrines at Harmsworth’s shop. Please go with him and if you like them as I know you will a line would please her greatly. The enclosed is a little silly but rather graceful—I mean the picture of myself and daughter and of Wilhelm Meister. There is something Mignonesque about her and, if it comes to that, I do not mind being called a ‘harmonieux vieillard’ when there are so many inharmonious young striplings about.

Here (if I can find it) is a letter I had from Jung. But please send it and the cutting back bei Gelegenheit, The letter of course is privileged. Have not replied yet.

How about your book? Is it ‘marching’? If I can throw any obscurity on the subject let me know. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN SULLIVAN (Postcard), 9 October 1932

Hotel Métropole, Nice

MS. Texas

Are you engaged anywhere in this sector as we may stay on here and did you get any offer from Zurich. I spoke to the chef d’orchestre Kalisco, a Viennese.

J.J.

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [About 18 October] 1932

[Nice]

MS. Yale

Useless to drag Sargent down to Harmsworth’s. Have just heard the Dover Customs have seized and impounded all the English copies (10) as ‘silk luxury goods’ (on account of the green silk casings) and are demanding Chinese ransom prices!

Oh oh Pound Sterling!

J.J.

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 18 October 1932

Hotel Métropole, Nice, France

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: I am very sorry but I cannot read the corrected date on enclosed. Will you tell me what it is so that I may reply? We will be leaving here in a few days for Orange so I should like a line by return. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT, 22 October 1932

Hotel Lord Byron, Champs-Elysées, Paris VIIIe

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Goyert: I hope you can read my writing. I can write my own writing but cannot read anybody else’s!

Have just arrived here from Nice. After 12 years in Paris we are without a flat and all my books are packed up so I cannot lend you my copy of T.T. of S. and S. Perhaps Borach or Bródy could.

But surely you cannot have finished A.L.P. yet?

I am sending you a notice about Lucia (my daughter) which may amuse you. She has great talent.

Is there any chance of your coming to Paris. We spent part of the summer in Feldkirch, a nice old town. I liked the people very much—old-fashioned and polite.

I am trying to work. I must go back to Zurich every 3 months to be examined by Vogt.

Did you see Jung’s article and his letter to me. He seems to have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile. The only thing to do in such a case is to change one’s drink!

Our regards to all your family sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 26 October 1932

27 rue Casimir-Périer (VIIe) Littré 88–89

TS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Mr Pinker, Some time ago Mr. Joyce has been approached by Warner Bros, in view of obtaining his consent to the filming of Ulysses. I went to see the gentleman who is the manager of their Paris Office. This gentleman seemed very eager to have the film done as quickly as possible. Mr Joyce was at the time away from Paris and on my referring the matter to him he asked me to give a dilatory answer. I did so and never heard again from Warner Bros. Now we learn that there have been several press news published in the States about the forthcoming filming of Ulysses.

I have taken the matter up with Mr Joyce who in fact tells me that he is in principle opposed to the filming of Ulysses and would like the news in the paper to be denied. I must also add that I had warned Mr Cerf of the proposal in case there was some idea of pirating Ulysses. Mr Cerf replied to me that he considered the firm so first class that there could not be any piracy in it and that on the contrary he considered the filming of Ulysses as very beneficial for the circulation of the book. He naturally takes the material point of view, Mr Joyce on the contrary takes the literary point of view and is therefore opposed to the filming as irrealisable. Before however giving this answer which is an absolute and flat refusal I have advised him first to find out what our position is as regards the filming rights. Should the filming rights in the States also not belong to him then naturally there is no use refusing and it would be better to come to some arrangement. Should however the film rights belong to Mr Joyce then he would absolutely refuse.

Could you perhaps find out what the exact situation is?

Mr Joyce has at last heard from Gorman who has probably been wakened up by your letter to your brother many thanks. Sincerely yours

Paul Léon

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 27 October 1932

Hotel Lord Byron, Champs-Elysées, Paris

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: Your letter has followed me up from Nice. I could not read the pencilled date in the inscription but now that everything is right can you let me know when the stone can be erected?

Yesterday I sent you an article about my daughter which may amuse you. I never receive journalists, French or English. The one who wrote this article seems to think I am 80 years old. I am, however, a grandfather and here is a bad snapshot of myself and my first grandson, Stephen James, taken a month ago at Nice.

There is a point on which I should like to have your advice. An American writer is doing a biography of me and he wants information about my ancestors. You may remember the family portraits (now in the possession of my son Giorgio). These represent besides Tuohy’s splendid portrait of my father (born at Cork, 4 July 1849) my grandfather, James, born, I think in Fermoy, who married Ellen O’Connell, second cousin to Dan, and my great grandfather James who married Anne McCann of Ulster. The American writer wants to go back a few more generations on the Joyce side. Is my father’s birth registrated also at Charlemont Hse and could I find in that entry the date and place of the birth of my grandfather James (approximately 1828 at Fermoy, Rose Cottage) and if I found that would it have the date and place of birth of my great grandfather from which I could obtain the information required? Or should enquiries be made at Cork and Fermoy? The publishers would pay a small fee for research, I suppose. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 29 October 1932

Hotel Lord Byron, Champs-Elysées, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: The British Customs have now decided to send back the whole English edition to Paris after 3 weeks muddle-headed correspondence. There is however one solitary copy at Bumpus’s in Oxford Street so you and Sargent could see it there. Tell me how you like it. She has done a whole alphabet since and I think the letters would stand well before the 23 stanzas of Chaucer’s alphabet-poem which begins ‘Almighty and almerciable queen’ (i.e. the Madonna)

J.J.

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From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 31 October, 1932

27, rue Casimir-Périer, (VII)

Dear Mr Pinker: I beg to acknowledge receipt of your favour of the 28-th. inst and to thank you for its contents which are very gratifying. Mr Joyce was pleased with the arrangement you have made but may I point out a matter that has its importance for the editor. As they are printing only two tales the title should be Two Tales of Shem and Shaun and as usual Mr Joyce insists on having the subtitle From Work in Progress added.

As regards the filming of Ulysses I thoroughly concur with your point of view but I would not be so sure with regard the film rights in the U.S.A. Would you please try and find out definitely from your brother how the matter stands legally. If his reply will be favourable to us i.e. if these rights are really Mr Joyce’s he could begin negotiations and if they run satisfactorily I can promise you that I will do my very best to prevail upon Mr Joyce to alter his present attitude which is principally due to the fact that he cannot see how the idea can be realised. If we see our way a little clearer it will be easier for me to explain it to him and try to obtain his consent.

You would greatly oblige me by sending me an extra copy of Chamber Music which I will pay you for by return.

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To DANIEL BRODY, 3 November 1932

Hotel Lord Byron, Champs-Elysées, Paris VIIIe

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Brody: My son has just read me your letter over the telephone. I have not given permission to any firm in the U.S. or elsewhere to film Ulysses. I received from Messrs W B Yeats and Bernard Shaw an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Academy of Letters but declined it. I was not operated by Vogt in August. I have to return to Zurich every 3 months to be under observation by him for the next 12 or 18 months and then he will see whether he can operate or not. You may keep the designs until the Christmas season if you think there is a reasonable prospect of doing something with them. I received a letter from Goyert and referred him to you. It may interest you to know that the British Customs seized the whole 10 copies (9 sold in advance) of the English part of my daughter’s book of lettrines on account of the ‘carton’ classing it as ‘silk luxury goods’ and demanding a Chinese ransom of £4 per copy on a book which already costs £12 a copy. No wonder the £ is at 82 in the shade. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To F.V. MORLEY, 3 November 1932

Hotel Lord Byron, Champs-Elysées, Paris VIIIe

MS. Faber

Dear Mr Morley: You probably saw my correspondence with Eliot about my daughter’s lettrines some months ago. I am giving you a Paris notice and a prospectus—this latter, simply as information. Only one copy of the book is to be seen in London as the British Customs at Newhaven seized all the copies sold to English buyers—10—and demanded Chinese ransom at the rate of £4 per book, the book costing already about £12. If you call at Bumpus’s shop in Oxford Street (?) you can get the lettrines and if they interest you I have a proposal to make with regard to my daughter’s work. Please let me hear from you as soon as you can.

I shall write to you about myself shortly. I have been through a most trying time for the past year and especially the past half year. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To F.V. MORLEY, 10 November 1932

Hotel Lord Byron, Champs-Elysées, Paris

MS. Faber

Dear Mr Morley: It was very kind of you to act so promptly. You are right in saying that such work is not for the English market. In fact this pochoir reproduction can be done only in Paris and even here only by two or three firms. Some of the lettrines had to be done over sixteen times. As regards my daughter’s alphabet which is now complete it is in the same style but more mature. The lettrines were designed to stand as initials for Chaucer’s poem in ottava rima, A.B.C, translated from the French of Guillaume de Deguilleville, a poem in praise of the Madonna, beginning ‘Almighty and almerciable queen’. Mr Holroyd Reece of the Albatross Press admires those lettrines very much and he wrote to Messrs Burns and Oates about them. I hope that this firm or perhaps the O.U.P. will decide to print the poem with the initials which however would have to be done over here.

Apart from this very elaborate and costly work I think that she is capable of doing things simpler and more utilisable. This was why I presumed on so short an acquaintance and asked you to inspect the book. Neither writer or publisher (Miss Beach) of P.P. is taking any royalty or payment in connection with this edition and 33% of the net profits will go to my daughter. I asked her if she had anything else to show and she gave me the enclosed.

I am painfully aware that I am already a burden to your firm on account of my tardiness but if I could secure for her any kind of work (she had a bad nervous breakdown some months ago but has come through it well and is full of desire to express herself in this form of art which she has chosen) it would be an immense relief to me. It would probably enable me to go ahead with my own work and so fulfil my engagements towards your firm. If you yourself are unable to commission her perhaps you can direct me to the proper quarter.

I do not know where the British and American papers get their scare headlines about me. I have never given an interview in my life and do not receive journalists. Nor do I understand why they should consider an unread writer as good copy.

As you see I can write. Unfortunately I cannot read except with a very strong magnifying glass. I went to Zurich in July and Professor Vogt (probably the greatest eye-doctor in the world) found that my sight had somewhat improved. I have to return to him every three months for a year or a year and a half to be under constant observation. He is afraid to touch the bad eye until the process of amelioration in the other has reached its highest point. As these wretched eyes of mine have already been operated on ten times (unfortunately not by him, except the last time) after about 25 years of recurrent inflamations it is a very delicate case to handle.

I am glad to hear you are bringing out another fragment of W. i P. But the first part of this letter is the most important at the moment. I shall be extremely grateful for any help or suggestions which you offer me.

Please give my regards to Eliot when you write to him. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 November 1932

Hôtel Lord Byron, Paris, VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: As I have a free moment I begin this letter which I shall probably continue tomorrow. No trace of the MS. Your bundle of notes came safely. Jolas is afraid some unscrupulous person may have the MS and wants me to complete the instalment without delay. I typed the last four pages from memory and shall have to start again on the notes tomorrow with what calm you can imagine. Unfortunately S.G. cannot help me. The Albatross Press flung the whole printed text of Ulysses (about 900 pp) into his hall yesterday and he has to check it. It will be published on 1 December. Faber and Faber are bringing out for Xmas ‘The Mookse’ and ‘The Ondt’—2 Tales Told of S and S. At my suggestion Kahane sent over to Bumpus, Oxford Street, by post in 2 parcels Lucia’s book of lettrines, the cover and the pages separately. They arrived. I wrote to Pinker, Putnam, Faber and Cape to go and see them and see if they could give her any work. Only F has replied so far. They find the work too highbrow for the English market so I sent them some simpler and more banal designs she had done. As it happens Reece the co-head (what a word!) of the A. Press is a real authority on miniature, I mean in the Italian sense, i.e. illumination. I had him to dinner with Lucia. He liked her alphabet and has written to the manager of Burns and Oates about using these lettrines for a reprint of Chaucer A.B.C. poem. I wanted to try the O.U.P. also. I had got Kahane to promise the manager Hubert Foss a copy of P.P. Now he tells me he has not got enough sheets to make up a copy. I am debating whether I ought not buy in a copy and inscribe it as was promised in the hope that his press would like the initials so much that they would do a reprint of A.B.C. Reece lent Lucia a stack of books about this kind of work. She has also bought books on Chinese and Japanese art and Mrs Wallace, falling out of a blue sky … lent her a book poor Wallace had on the same subject. In addition to Miss Moschos who has charge of Lucia from 10 till 1 I have had to get another girl (French) to take charge of her from 4 to 7 as I was really afraid my wife would collapse under the strain. Miss Moschos is still tolerated. I suppose because she has plenty of gossip (I always found her civil and obliging). If she and Fargue want to make a million quickly all they have to do is to sit down and collaborate and print their recollections…. George (to which please add Antheil) is over here in an expensive American automobile…. I merely asked if he had completed the score of Ulysses to which I got the answer that he was engaged to make a tour of the Western States. After a while Miss Monnier came in … tragically pessimistic. She told me there was going to be war between France and Spain and that she had private means of knowing that the people in Madrid had thrown tomatoes at Mr Herriot. I said I hoped they were à la provençale (i.e. with garlic. H is lord mayor of Lyons in his spare time if he ever has any)….

I pretend to take her lightly. In fact I am sure she tells a good few lies and does a fair amount of comedy but so do most girls in one way or another. I gave her 4000 frs out of my cheque to buy a fur coat as I think that will do her inferiority complex more good than a visit to a psycho-analyst. But it is all rather trying to me (who am very far from being a model myself) and I do wish I was settled in a home, sweet home with a piano to which I could sing Come into the Garden, Maud every evening at 6 p.m.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 November 1932 [Dictated]

42 rue Galilée, Paris VIII

Dear Miss Weaver: The MS never turned up. However I set to work on the notes you kindly sent over and patched it all up again. I fired them off in envelopes which I hope you got safely. I have also written an intervening passage and hope to complete the whole fragment tomorrow or next day. Faber and Faber do not want the Dutch press to bring it out in a de luxe edition as they want to have an option on it first. It may be possible as Léon suggests to combine the two firms’ offers though personally I doubt whether an English publishing firm would agree to put its imprint on type set up on the continent. I am rather puzzled about the evident anxiety of F. & F. to bring out chunks of my gibberish but evidently there is some demand for it….

One copy hors commerce was destined for the manager of the O.U.P. Mr Hubert Foss and in fact he was written to and asked to send his christian name so that the copy might be inscribed. I particularly wanted him to receive this as I thought his firm could give Lucia an opening, but there are only four sheets available and to send these would be offensive while to send nothing still more so. K. refuses to be any more out of pocket quite naturally (in fact though he is a sharp business man he did his job very well and so did the French producers and so did my daughter) but between the British customs, the tergiversations of the subscribers, who imagine the end of the world is at hand and have not the brains to know that the book is better than a currency note….

I shall have to be 1,500 frcs. out of pocket for the moment. I made it a condition with either F. & F. and the Dutch firm that in case of the editing of the fragment there should be an initial and a tail piece. The whole affair continues to be a terrible strain and I am really a blind man walking in a fog. I do not know as much about illumination as I think I know about singing but S. was child’s play in comparison with this. I wonder what kind of people you encounter for wherever I walk I tread on thistles of envy, suspicion, jealousy, hatred and so on. You will be rightly alarmed to hear that Lucia the other night expressed her intention of going over to stay with you!!!! I have still kept her away from the doctors and the nurses but lord knows whether I am doing right or not. I hope that when she gets the check in the morning she will start to work again. Unfortunately this form of art is very costly so I am trying to interest her in black and white. I who cannot distinguish one person from another. I gave her Beardsley Under the Hill but it is not his best. You need not reply to all this rigmarole. Unfortunately too she seems to have antagonised a great number of people including her immediate relatives and as usual I am the fellow in the middle of the rain holding out both hands though whether she is not right in her blunt outspokenness or not is a question my head is too addled to answer.

An edition de luxe of the new Ulysses 25 copies and 10 hors de commerce on hand-made paper will come out in a week’s time. One copy is being printed for you.

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From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 27 December 1932

27 rue Casimir-Périer, Paris

Dear Mr Pinker: I have not answered until now to you various letters the receipt of which I now acknowledge with thanks because I am still waiting for the proofs of the new fragment which have not reached me yet. I therefore am answering you to day taking up the matters in succession as I fear it would otherwise be delayed too long.

POMES PENYEACH

Mr Joyce is very pleased with the prompt solution you have given about this book and is in full agreement about the terms. There is however one point which I would like to raise in order to avoid any difficulty later as has been the case with the Two Tales. Mr Joyce would like the cover of the book to be of the same colour as the Shakespeare edition is now. Otherwise he does not raise any points i.e. the book can be either in cardboard or merely paper covered as were ALP and HCE neither has he any wishes about the size but the colour of the cover should be the same light green. I think you have a copy of the present edition otherwise I could mail you one.

FRAGMENT

You can absolutely reassure your brother and Huebsch since all the fragments published up to now i.e. ALP, HCE. the Two Tales and the new one will constitute in all not more than a hundred pages and this is about one twentieth of the entire book. In the publishing of these fragments I think the interests both of publisher and author concur as they make, as your brother says, the public acquainted with the language of Mr Joyce and their mouth water.

ITALIAN TRANSLATION

Mr Joyce agrees to an italian translation of Ulysses but I want to caution you to be very careful in concluding the contract. The Italians seem to be very difficult persons to deal with. Up to now they have been publishing parts and scraps of Ulysses without paying Mr Joyce anything at all. I do think that the agreement cannot contain a basis of royalties but should be concluded for a lump sum. Before you hear anything more definite or precise I do not think there is even use of going to the expense of sending them a copy. By the way have the Czech paid what they owe and are there any royalties coming in soon?

I think I have thus dealt with all the questions. I will write you further as soon as I get the proofs and will send a copy of them to Mr Morley also.

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1933

From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 4 January 1933

27 rue Casimir Périer, Paris 7e

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, I am again writing to you on a subject which Mr Joyce feels incapable of doing himself and which is perhaps better judged by an outsider in the present conditions and under the strain he is living in.

The point is that he cannot meet the current monthly budget with his monthly income. It is not the flat alone which costs with the additional expenses some 2.000 alone, but he has to keep a companion for his daughter which salary, board and lodging put together amounts to some 2.000 again. If you add to this extra expenses necessitated by doctors’ visits, some work undertaken by his daughter etc. he can barely meet the first of the necessities commanded by the situation. He is extremely reluctant to have again to avail himself of money obtained from the selling of his stock but he is afraid it has become a necessity. His flat in London has been vacated by the 15th of last month and the new application by a new tenant had to be refused for want of references and guarantees. So that this month the quarter’s rent had to go out Mr Joyce’s own pocket which reduced by half his monthly allowance. In these circumstances he begs you again to instruct Messrs. Monro Saw & Co. to sell another £100 of his stock in order to enable him to pass through this month.

I hope that by the end of February, as I wrote you, the first royalties due on Ulysses will begin coming in and this will certainly ease the situation at least materially which otherwise is just as indefinite as it was. From what I hear from Mr Joyce—as I have personally no direct means of judging—the situation has to a great extent exhausted him both physically and morally. He tries to react by working very hard, at least as much as he has the chance, but I have seen him suffering so deeply and with such disastrous effects on his strength that my impression is that he is sometimes at the end of his forces. As every exceptional personality his pains cut deeper into his system than with us—but his recovery—as he often does recover—is the more admirable. In spite of this rather sombre picture I am drawing I think his attitude is the correct one and some slight results are beginning to tell. There is no reason to give up hope and that is the reason why I am writing that the situation is uncertain though not by all means irretrievable.

The Odyssey edition of Ulysses seems to have reached a wide circle of persons. Mr Pinker has just written to him about an offer for an Italian translation of Ulysses and Mr Joyce has received another one for a Spanish translation—which is then due to reach the South-American Market.

Mr Joyce’s relations with the Odeon quarter are very good. I think I am going to see Miss Beach to-day about the publication of some documents on Mr Joyce for a new French Review ‘Le Minotaure’ which I will not fail to have sent to you.

I think I have kept you au courant of all the situation and beg you to accept my best wishes for a happy New Year with kindest regards Sincerely yours

Paul Léon

May I raise the following points. From Messrs. Monro Saw & Co’s letter I see that Mr Joyce is selling South African stock—is it advisable to do so since now S.A. has gone of⁠[f] the gold standard? I am merely putting a question since I do not know what effect it has had on S.A. stock.

Mr Joyce would like to have the money if possible by the end of the week.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 January 1933 [Dictated]

as from 27 rue Casimir-Perier, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: … Do not count too much on my daughter’s promises but I think she has a book bound [by herself] and put away somewhere and that it will come to light sooner or later.

I had a long by others foreseen nervous collapse on Saturday from which I am still recovering though unfortunately it seems to have temporarily greatly weakened my sight and in this wise. My wife had promised to accompany me to Rouen on Friday to hear Sullivan sing Sigurd, an old repertory opera which is seldom heard nowadays, by Constantin Reyer. That morning however she again became nervous about Lucia and asked me to get another companion who turned up in the person of a young Indo-Chinese prince a nephew of the king of Cambodgia [sic] and a cousin of Tita Rasi who changed his name to René Ulysse eleven years ago. Rouen was full of grippe and the theater [a] coughing booth, the call boy coming before the curtain after each act to demand indulgence for another singer who had fallen a victim. Only S. seemed unaffected. He had a gorgeous suit of golden armour, a high goldcrested helm, rubies about his chest from the footlights a big pair of high yellow boots and an enormous ballooning sky-blue mantle in which he tramped up and down with nervous emphasis sending everybody and anybody to the general musical right about. Next day when he was seeing us off at the station I began to feel ill and before the train was a quarter of an hour out I was in full collapse. The little Chinese prince was very kind about it, he is a medical student here, but when we got home he was surprised to see that I had neither a temperature nor any flu symptoms. Next day Sunday I was still without fever though a little better but Sunday night and Monday morning bowled me out. My wife had gone to the opera, the Paris one I mean, with Mrs Jolas to hear La Traviata and I did not sleep until after she came in at one thirty. Then began a night of mild horrors including sleeplessness, hallucinations of the ear (how I deserve that) and sometimes of the eye too. I did not wish to disturb my wife who was in another room but evidently I must have emitted sounds of woe and affright for Miss Moscos told me today that frequently between two and six thirty she heard these sounds and stole down the corridor to my bedroom door to listen expecting I would call for help and then stole back again. This explains that not all the sounds I heard were imaginary. But worst of all next morning while I was near the telephone in the corridor I got myself all up in a moment into a state of terrified alarm on account of something that was taking place, grabbed my overcoat and hat and got down into the snowing streets followed by the shivering Miss Moscos, the only at that hour fully clad female of my household and ten minutes afterwards I was standing before the partially shaved writer of the present Mr Paul Léon trying to tell him of the danger I was in. A good deal of telephoning then went on over the Paris wires among the scattered lodges of my family and friends. Doctor Fontaine was out of town so Léon got his doctor to come to see me who says I never had any grippe at all, though the cold of the journey may have precipitated my nervous breakdown. He attributes it chiefly to my abuse of somniferents (I’d even gone so far as to take six of these before going to bed in order to ensure sleep) then when going to Rouen I all of a sudden cut them out altogether which he said was a good intention with a bad effect for the change around was altogether too sudden total abolition to which the system had become accustomed now for nearly twelve months. The problem was partly solved by putting Miss Moscos into the chamber of horrors (concerning her my wife says ‘If you take something to make you sleep apparently she takes something to keep her awake’) and removing me and my wife into the room previously occupied by Lucia and Miss Moscos. I hope this new version of musical chairs will allow me to rest. Dr Debray says I must have three days of consecutive sleep. I have to remain at home for about a week if all goes well though I have not been put on a diet yet I am still quite weak enough. One good effect anyhow it seems to have had is to have produced an obvious amount of solicitude on the part of that subtile et barbare person—my daughter. I slept seven hours on Monday and perhaps six last night for he has given me an innocuous and non-toxic preparation which apparently suits me.

This is on the whole a nice cheerful kind of a letter but though time seems to be very bad with everybody Lucia has certainly, at least I think so, made a good deal of progress both at her new trade and in general.

The OUP is still thinking about it. Cape refused Pomes Penyeach which Faber and Faber are bringing out…. I hope somebody will start brightening up this most brushworthy old world of ours including the inhabitants thereof and myself among them. I am told the flu in England is in a severer form than the tiresome epidemic we are having over here so I especially hope you are escaping it. Cinemas seem to be the best hothouses for this germ. Giorgio seems to have caught his there with the result that the whole family have it except S.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 January 1933 [Telegram sent by Mr Paul Léon]

Paris

Miss Weaver 74 Gloucester Place London If not too late please send 121 Ebury Street Pimlico London wreath two guineas sending cheque only leaves green brown but excluding ivy absolutely stop inscription to George Moore from James Joyce Paris.

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From Miss MOSCHOS to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 29 January 1933

42 rue de Galilée, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: Mr Joyce thanks you very much for the wreath you sent for Mr G. Moore’s funeral and was cremated on the 25th at Golders Green. His ashes were taken to Castle Island near Moore Hall on 26 May 1933.—but there was no mention of it in any of the London newspapers he saw of Thursday. Mr Joyce was very vexed as for once he wanted his name to appear. Mr Joyce would be very glad if you look at a public library—the Thursday issue of:

the Daily Telegraph

” Daily Mail

” Daily Herald

” Daily News

” Express

and if you could also send him the Irish newspapers of last Thursday.

He says the whole affair is an enigma to him: not a single one of the late Mr Moore’s colleagues in literature in England or friends in Ireland were represented or present.

Mr Joyce is now better but the doctors don’t allow him to work yet.

There is a very modern and satisfactory hotel just opposite this house called the Hôtel Galilée. Mrs Joyce saw it and thinks you would prefer it to the Belmont—but perhaps you are more accustomed there—in any case here are enclosed two cards.

I hope you are quite well.

Yours sincerely

Myrsine Moschos

P.S. Mr Joyce says the check for £2 was sent to you on Wednesday and if there is any balance perhaps you could send him Salome Walz [sic] by Archibald Joyce (which you would find in any shop in Charing Cross Road).

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To W.K. MAGEE, 6 February 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris (VIII)

Dear Magee: I am writing to know whether you can give me any information about George Moore’s funeral. I read your name in the list of mourners published in the Morning Post but apparently no other man of letters was either present or represented and none of his Irish friends and colleagues seems to have taken any part in the proceedings. As you know I made the acquaintance of George Moore only a few years before his death and I hope that I behaved towards him during the three or four visits I paid him with the respect due to his age personality and achievements. At his suggestion I tried here to have his Aphrodite in Aulis translated into French. I spoke to my own publisher here and also to Louis Gillet, the literary editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes and a friend of Moore’s and also to the principal french translator of Ulysses an old friend of mine and an excellent English scholar. But all this was of no avail, and the time of crisis was also unfavourable to a limited deluxe edition which seemed the only solution. Of course I was unable to be present at the funeral but on learning of his death I telephoned to London and had a large chaplet wreath of cistapalm and barberry leaves green and brown mixed with an inscription to him and my name. It seems strange that although this was sent to his house long before the funeral no mention of it is made among the floral tributes cited by the press. It has been suggested to me that this list was handed to the press by his family who … and finish the sentence for yourself. I know nothing about his family and care less. I simply wished to pay a tribute to his memory; perhaps you can enlighten me.

I hope all is well with you and yours. Since I saw you I have become a grandfather. A little poem by me appeared in the December Criterion and if you care to see it I will send it to you.

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To PADRAIC COLUM, 19 February 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris 8

Dear Colum: This is to thank you for your part of the Joyce Book. Gillet to whom I showed it liked your preface.

I am writing under difficulties on the mantelpiece. Very little ink. No envelopes.

Thanks for your wire on the 2nd. I am sorry Mrs Colum caught the grippe but am glad she is over it.

As regards the alphabet I proposed to Burns and Oates 3 months ago that they should use these letters for a reprint of Chaucer poem A.B.C. (an ottava rima prayer to the Madonna) and offered them (on the sly) £100 guarantee. No reply.

As regards Pomes Penyeach with Lucia’s lettrines of all my rich admirers in all the world only 2 bought and paid for copies—Miss Weaver (once rich) and Brauchbar of Zurich…. I sent Lucia 1000 frs through Kahane. I am also going to buy 3 copies and present them to Prof. Vogt’s daughter, the Bibliothèque Nationale and British Museum Library. I previously bought another which I presented to the director of the Oxford University Press.

On hearing of Moore’s death I telephoned to London and sent a large wreath of palms. Not only was all mention of this absent from the list handed to the press but no member of the family thought it fit within a month to acknowledge receipt of it. I wrote to Magee about it and then had a letter from G.M.’s executor, saying that he was not responsible, that he gave express instructions about my wreath and that he could not understand why it had not been mentioned in the papers with the others or why the family etc. He agreed with me that the absence of G.M.’s colleagues and friends was unaccountable. Only one man of letters, Garnett, and none of his other colleagues was either present or represented and, of course, nobody from beyond S. Patrick’s Canal or, should I say, Canaille.

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From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 March 1933

27 rue Casimir-Perler (VII), Littré 88–89, Paris

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, I did not write to you before as I was expecting some development in the situation which however did not take place.

First of all I want to thank you for the sending of the copies of the Hull Daily Mail and may I ask you to have one copy of it sent to Mr Pinker (Talbot House Arundel Street Strand) and another to Mr Holroy⁠[d] Reece (Casa Beata, Via Monte Allegro, Rapallo, Italy). May I also trouble you in the future whenever there are news of that importance to send two copies to me for Mr Joyce and the other three to Mr. Reece, Mr. Pinker and to Mr Cerf (20 East 57th Street, New York c/o Random House—I have sent to Mr Cerf one of the copies you forwarded to me).

Secondly I hope you have kindly undertaken the settlement of the London flat problem which Mr Joyce reminded me again to-day he would like to see terminate as rapidly as possible and definitely.

Thirdly and the most important part of this letter is Mr Joyce’s state of health which permit me to treat in full sincerity as I consider his recent second breakdown as a second warning which should not be lightly overlooked.

There is no doubt that Mr Joyce has had an almost unbearable time to stand lately the result of which is now telling. What he needs principally is I firmly believe some absolute rest and this he is not only not getting now but seems to despair of getting ever. I know for a fact that he had placed great hopes in your sojourn in Paris, however when he saw that you were taking a different attitude both within the circle of his immediate surroundings as well as outside his house he gave up what seemed the only hope to make a clean breast of it with you which led to his reticence in his conversations with you. I do not think that he will be capable to pull through all these troubles unless he finds somebody he can absolutely trust and rely upon and this is what he had hoped to find in you. As an instance let me come back upon the question of his rest and visit to Zurich. The visit to Zurich is necessary everybody agrees as well as a good rest for several weeks I should say but he has neither the hope nor the assurance that it will ever be possible to realise either of them. Mr. Borach has written a letter in a different tone suggesting a kind of kidnapping and taking Mr Joyce away, but I feel sure that unless somebody intervenes, I mean somebody with authority nothing will come out of it. The principal difficulty is, in my opinion that Mr Joyce is too considerate and will never press the point to its logical conclusion. Another example is the way he is constantly pestered by people asking for his help and aid which having not the strength to refuse he is trying to do in the best possible manner and which is not at all warranted either by his occupations or by his present state of health and nerves. I could name you several of them, there are: Budgen, Goll, Sullivan, Dujardin and Pelorson. One is doing a German translation of A.L.P., the other going to Rome to lecture on the Interior Monologue, the third writing a book on Mr Joyce etc. etc. and Mr Joyce has to speak to all, give directions, indications which in his case amounts to practically dictating every word that is written. As a result he finishes these meetings exhausted loses appetite and sleep and is incapable to react in his home life so as to make his own life and his own interests the predominant problem of the household. I do not wish that you should have the impression I am complaining about anybody or anything, on the contrary I am absolutely certain that the situation is attempted to be handled in the way everybody understands it but the fact remains that nobody understands it as Mr Joyce does and unless somebody intervenes in his favour and intervenes strongly he will never obtain the necessary rest and quiet which are so essential for his work. On the contrary since he is a little better these last few days he is irritable which is usually a sign of better health but weaker nerves. He is seeing Dr Debray to-morrow afternoon, I hope I will be able to write to you a more detailed account of his physical condition after he sees Mr Joyce—however I am sure that whatever his physical condition, his nerves should be handled with extreme care. I again beg you not to take all the above in a bad part on the contrary I understand that Mr Joyce for one thing appreciates greatly that as a result of your kind intervention the material problem is at least for the next few months assured and that is one source of constant worry that is less.

I will keep you au courant of anything that happens and please believe me very sincerely yours,

Paul Léon.

About Mr Budgen—for completion of his book he must go to Dublin in order to paint Chapel Izod (I am not sure of my spelling) the source of the Liffey to illustrate his book. As however he has already received £50 in advance from his publishers I believe Mr Joyce will have to finance the trip.

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To W.K. MAGEE, 21 March 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris VIII

Dear Magee: I owe you a letter but I have been wretchedly, though not gravely, ill. Moore’s executor wrote me a letter of apology but why pursue the matter? I did what I thought was right in view of his age and eminence.

Yes, your article in “Life and Letters” was read to me (I can write but can read only with the greatest difficulty). I found it very friendly and the criticism very sound probably though most of the statements of fact are inaccurate. This, however, is of no importance.

I send you a photograph and a leaflet which may amuse you. Apart from the O.U.P. book there is a very curious edition of Pomes Penyeach with capitals by my daughter on show at Bumpus, Oxford Street. If you are ever in London perhaps you will look at it.

I suppose you are right about Ecce Puer. One English reviewer (probably a Scotch bard after office hours) described it as ‘some insignificant verses about Father Christmas’.

Did I give you a little edition of Anna Livia Plurabelle, signed by me? I mean, when we met in the Euston Hotel? If I did so, will you give me in exchange a signed copy of Pebbles from a Brook? I was trying to have this translated into Italian when the European war broke out. I should greatly appreciate it.

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To JAMES STEPHENS, 21 March 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris, XVI

MS. Stanford

Dear Stephens: Herewith a photo of your quasi namesake and his grandfather.

To return for a moment to G.M.’s funeral I read that the British Prime Minister was there. This is more than can be said for the I.F.S. or I.R.A. or whatever their initials are. You told me you knew him and sometimes met him socially. I know nothing about him except this one fact and that some English doctor operated on his eye. I think you ought to tell him about Vogt. All the oculists I tried in London, eight or nine, were quite incompetent. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 March 1933

27, rue Casimir-Périer, Paris VIIe

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver I have received your letter this morning and let me thank you most sincerely for it. I will write to you in answer to it more fully—I mean giving you the doctors opinion and the general state of affairs now as soon as I will have a chance to speak with Mr Joyce. In the meantime he begs me to tell you of his gratitude for the interest you have and are showing.

This is merely to bother you with another request. As there has appeared a notice in the Paris Intransigeant (our Evening Standard⁠[)] about Prof Vogt and Mr Joyce would you kindly send me the papers you mentioned over the phone about Vogt. I hope I am not giving you too much trouble Thanking you again Believe me Sincerely yours

Paul Léon

Can you also if you possess send me the date of the issue of the Semaine à Paris referring to the dancing competition in the Bai Bullier in which his daughter took part.

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From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 March 1933

27 rue Casimir-Perier (VIIe), Littré 88–89

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, I had a more lengthy conversation with Mr Joyce to day and I am therefore hurrying this letter to you as I would like it to reach you before you leave for the week-end.

Mr Joyce wishes me first of all to give you an account of his last interview with doctor Vignes about his daughter. The doctor is distinctly pleased and hopeful—an objective proof of the good achieved by the treatment is the fact that whilst up to now Miss Joyce was losing some 500 gramms weekly during the month of her treatment she has not lost anything at all. The doctor prescribes that she should continue the same treatment for another month and is adding to the treatment absorption of sea-water for the time being by the mouth but later by injection. Added to this hopeful news Mr Reece telephoned me the other day saying that Messrs Burns and Oates were willing to do Miss Joyce’s alphabet for the poem of Chaucer on a commission basis and I am going to have a more detailed conversation with him in a few days.

I am glad to be able to give you this account as it leads me to Mr Joyce himself, and to his state and the effect his daughter’s health has on his nerves. Somewhere about a week before the doctor’s opinion was taken she had something of a kind of relapse but fought it through herself without any aid from outside which is a good sign. But of course these days of tension were chosen for conversations of the kind that she would not recover, that her treatment had only superficial results and that Mr Joyce was wrong on insisting on it etc. etc. this could not but have a bad effect on his nerves and may have added to the strain which eventually led to the collapse the other day. I was present Saturday last at the visit of Dr Debray whom I had warned that he would find Mr Joyce in a bad shape. The reason for it was that some kind soul had informed Mr Joyce that it would be useless for him to go to Zürich for he had ruined his eyes definitely and that Vogt would never agree to operate him again. This remark was not even, I consider, heartless but chiefly tactless and led to a complete breakdown. The doctor had examined him very minutely found his bloodtension absolutely normal (14 high and 8 low) for his age. He attributed his weakness to the delay necessary for the recovery. He promised him a full recovery of his forces in five or six days which in fact is coming true as Mr Joyce in the last two days is really feeling stronger. But to show you how nervous Mr Joyce is I can tell you that having slept badly in the previous days he felt strong pains in the back of his head due probably to insufficiently reconstituted blood circulation naturally Mr Joyce got a fright and thought immediately of meningitis. All these bad thoughts are due in a small degree to the fact that he is yet unable to concentrate his mind on his work but that is only one part of it the other brings me to the allusion you make in your letter. I mean drinking. I have seen Mr Joyce several times having had too much to drink and as the above opinion about his going to Zürich was partly based on the same ground I made it a special point to bring in the conversation with the doctor to this matter. Dr Debray is resolutely and absolutely of the opinion that drink has nothing to do with his collapse. It may have perhaps weakened Mr Joyce’s resistance but it is in no way the cause of anything in his health. He examined his liver and digestive tube and he emphatically says that they are in a perfect order and absolutely not of the types he knows to be necessarily the consequences of an abuse of drinking. I was very glad that he was so emphatic about it as I had noticed that Mr Joyce of late had fallen under the influence of so many reproaches of too much drink that he was himself beginning to believe in the fact that he was under the influence of alcoholic poisoning. After the opinion of the doctor I can absolutely reassure you in this respect. And I can add that the doctor even advised him to take some wine at meals (as a matter of fact Dr Vignes has prescribed wine during meals to Miss Joyce too) some quarter of a litre but Mr Joyce up to now has not taken any at all. Among the many things that have perhaps added to the impairment of his sight people seem to forget that a great deal has been done by his work and this is certainly no cause of complaint. To achieve any sort of success in this respect is to try and give back to Mr Joyce as much of his sight as is possible. As a matter of fact from what I know Vogt was hopeful and advised Mr Joyce to come and see him every three months and now there are already six months since he was seen. I consider it an absolute necessity for Mr Joyce to go to Zürich as it happens to coincide not only with the problem of his sight but also with a much needed change of atmosphere and air which cannot but have a good effect on his nerves and general health. Dr. Debray advised him to quit Paris for a week or two going even as near as Fontainebleau but since Zürich is necessary for the eyes I think we have no choice. Now how to arrange it? Although I could have accompanied Mr Joyce during the Easter vacations I do think that both materially and morally he needs Mrs Joyce to accompany him and the problem then is limited to the fact what to do with Miss Joyce during the week or fortnight that her parents will be away. Could anyone take care of her during that time in Paris (as she must not I think leave her doctor for the moment) remains to be seen. But physically I think Mr Joyce is decidedly better and were it not for a still subsisting pallor which annoys and frightens him I think he would admit that he feels better.

I would like merely to add a few words about his general state of mind during the last year and first of all in connection with the rue de l’Odeon. You know all the developments and using what I think an utmost forbearance Mr Joyce has succeeded during all this time to escape an open break. This does not alter the fact however that at the root of the things he has been maltreated and this cannot but have a decisive influence on the relations. You know Mr Joyce better than I do and for a longer time and you know too that since the 12 or 13 years he has been living in Paris in a very artistic and literary surrounding he has managed not to quarrel with anybody nor to have any quarrels forced on him. He assumed the same attitude with the rue de l’Odeon but there were facts which could not help proving the contrary. You say in your letter that you found Mr Joyce very elusive—personally I think his attitude was even harsh towards you and I can explain it only by the fact that he felt and knew that people were trying to misconstrue themselves and the facts making the best of your very kind disposition and patient character. He decided that it was better to let others speak and he himself assumed an attitude of perfect mutism.

But even this problem of the relations with the rue de l’Odeon is but of secondary character compared to the real worries which have beset him during the last year. Seeing him as often as I do I think I am right that the principal worry by far overshadowing all other problems has been the state of health of his daughter. You cannot imagine how this has affected him especially as in the position he is he had often to act singlehanded even against the opinion of the doctors and of his immediate family. It is always easier to give up a case as hopeless or to attribute something to an exterior reason as for instance the wine than to go to the root of the thing. And here Mr Joyce has rebelled and acted as he personnally thinks best. At present even when Miss Joyce is I think, decidedly better he comes across great difficulties and this improvement is entirely due to Mr Joyce. And as regards himself though I repeat I find him much stronger he still perhaps as a reaction varies from states of great irritation and impotent fury to sudden lachrimose fits. These happily are very rare now, I prefer him furious to the state of dejection he was in last week.

Finally and to wind up I think the voyage to Zürich of prime necessity and if you could do something in this respect your interference would be a blessing. For I do think Mr Joyce belongs to his work and unless he is able to do it he will not get well. All other considerations apart if he is given a chance of calm and continuous work he will be able to force the other problems and people to adapt themselves to his life.

I do not wish to wind up this letter without thanking you again for your very kind letter and to tell you that you should not be mistaken in interpreting my perhaps harsh words. I am writing to you in this manner because I have the impression that you can do a lot by words and acts and it is this consideration which gives me the courage to write to you in this way and I have absolutely nothing but the most respectful thoughts. With kindest regards very sincerely yours,

Paul Léon

I have received the New Statesman and the Sunday Times with the cuttings—the latter being a wrong reference. Maybe it was the Observer.

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To ARNOLD BAX, 29 March 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris Ve

MS. Texas

Dear Mr Bax: Forgive me for my delay in writing to thank you for your setting of my verses in the O.U.P. book. I find it very evocative and the slightly Norwegian strain that runs through it very suitable. It has also the merit, rare nowadays, of being singable.

I have received a letter to which I have not yet replied from a Mr Anthony Bax and am wondering if he is a relative of yours as I suppose the name is rather uncommon.

Thanking you again for the pleasure your music has given me, believe me to be Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 April 1933

27 rue Casimir-Perier (VIIe), Littré 88–89

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, Again it has been some time since I have written and beg to be excused but every day I keep putting it off hoping always to have some better news to report. Here are the latest developments. On Friday night Mr Joyce suffered from a very acute attack of colitis and could not sleep at all with the result that in the morning he could not move from tiredness and from the continuing soreness of all his inside and muscles. I saw him in the morning (I mean Saturday) and he was in a rather desperate condition. After I had gone in the afternoon the attack came back this time it was so extremely acute that Mrs Joyce and Miss Joyce got alarmed. You cannot imagine how strong these pains can be and how utterly helpless and strengthless they leave Mr Joyce. His son was called up and eventually in the absence of Dr Debray Dr Fontaine was asked to come. She came only by six o’clock when the spasmodic attack had passed. She thoroughly examined Mr Joyce and to our general relief found that there was nothing the matter with him at all. She does not think that he suffers from colitis but on the other attributes the dreadful spasms to a disequilibrium of the system of the sympathetic nerve with the focus of the dislocation in the epigastric part of his stomach provoking the terrible pains. She did not think it necessary to prescribe any particular diet and on the contrary declared that the state of his intestines was infinitely better than they were when she last saw them i.e. 3 or 4 years ago. In this part of her diagnostic she in fact confirmed what Dr Debray told me. But she insisted perhaps even more emphatically than he did that absolute and complete calm was necessary in fact a restcure was not only advisable but thoroughly needed. Since this visit Mr Joyce seems to be physically better but morally the problem gets more and more entangled everyday and this is what in fact I have to write to you about.

Naturally his downheartedness is probably due to a certain degree of the attack of his physical and nervous state as every one of this attacks leaves him the worse and the weaker for it. But what is worst is the moral effect. If I were to describe his state today I would call it that of a listless disgust and apathy in connection with the most vital problems of his life and work. The latter is even not considered today and whenever I mention the subject Mr Joyce merely waves his hand in despair and resignation. Secondly there is the voyage to Zürich which is in my opinion so absolutely necessary for his eyes, for his nerves for his health in fact for everything and which tallies so well with the needed rest cure. In this respect I meet difficulties of a twofold character. First of all in his immediate surroundings the opinion seems to prevail that he has as much sight as he wants and that therefore a voyage to Zürich is an unnecessary expense. Today Mr Joyce himself is in such a state that he merely submits to the inevitable. For independently that he may be influenced or not influenced by these opinions he raises the problem of money. He has none left and has asked me today to write to you asking you to direct his solicitors to sell the last £100.–.– available on the last power of attorney immediately and send him the proceeds as quickly as possible. I beg you kindly to do so as in the present circumstances when money is altogether scarce I doubt if I will be able to obtain for him an advance from the bank where I usually get it as we are nearing the end of the month settlements and he has practically no money left. But this as you know does not settle the question of principle. With the reduced income he has to look forward and he can hardly be allowed to go on selling the stock he has. I think it is greatly due to this state that his mind is so unsettled and that his health is so shattered. He has arranged to stay in the flat until the 15 of May—after these £100.–.– he may drag in the same flat until the 15 of June possibly but afterwards he absolutely does not know what to do and his usual remark is ‘let everything go to pieces’. And this is not merely a pose but a constant idea and almost an obsession. He hopes to have gained by that time sufficient strength to face the worst but how on earth he is going to collect energy and strength I am absolutely at a loss to say. But he is so weak now and so listless that I have not the courage to take away any of his illusions.

There is one point also that permit me to touch upon and which concerns directly myself. I am rather loth to play the role that events have forced upon me. I may be mistaken but I have a feeling that I am not particularly welcome in Mr Joyce’s home. Though personally I have nothing but a good feeling towards them it seems and I think it could be justified that there seems to have remained a small grudge against me in connection with last year’s events in which owing to my family connection I have had to play a part. As a result I am received only when Mr Joyce insists personally on it or when he actually needs me for his health or otherwise. This places me in a false position and in connection with the communications I have to give you this falsity is intensified. I have today suggested to Mr Joyce that maybe it would be better if you were to correspond with him direct but was unable to obtain a decisive answer from him. Please forgive me for writing you this, I hope you will understand, but I certainly will continue to keep you au courant of Mr. Joyce’s health, but perhaps in a less personal way.

In order to wind this up. The expected relapse in Miss Joyce’s health has not come though she seems to have given up entirely her work in bookbinding and in attending the Marie Laurencin class. So Mr Joyce hopes for the best without being very reassured.

May I terminate with a prayer. I do emphatically consider that the voyage to Zürich is of prime necessity and I go even so far as to say that unless it is undertaken in whatever circumstances it will be possible Mr Joyce will not get well or capable to resume his work unless he goes there.

Please excuse me if any words or expressions I have used may seem harsh to you they are certainly not meant to hurt you in any way and believe me with kindest regards Very sincerely yours.

Paul Léon

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To VALERY LARBAUD, 4 May 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris (Etoile)

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Dear Larbaud: They tell me you are at present in town and I am writing to know, first of all, if you are both well, as I hope you are, and secondly whether you purpose staying here through the summer or not. I suspect you will not stay here and as I myself purpose setting up residence permanently in Paris again after a break of two years I wondered whether your flat would be rentible during June–August. I should like to have a small quiet flat to work in all the summer while my wife is house-hunting and then to move into fixed quarters about September. All my furniture is stored here. I am in a meublé as I gave up my Kensington flat as unsatisfactory. We are only three and even Lucia may be away part of the summer. But even if you do stay on or do not wish to let your place I should be glad to see you or even hear from you.

The leaflet enclosed may interest you.

Do you know L. Gillet. He often asks me about you but I have no news to give him.

I suppose you know that Miss B. is no longer my publisher. The Albatross Press took over U and it is having a big international sale in its 13th edition. Honi soit qui mal y compte! Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From PAUL LÉON to FRANK BUDGEN, 7 May 1933

27 rue Casimir-Perier (Vile), Paris

TS. Budgen

Dear Mr Budgen, Miss Weaver, who is here at present, Hotel Galilee, Rue Galilee, Paris XVIe, would prefer the picture from the sketch No. 1, her birthday is the 1st of September.

I have been asked to acknowledge receipt of your letters and am glad you liked your stay over the water. I sent you by request a volume about dreams which I should like to have back however as I would like to read it myself. In a day or two I shall send you, or perhaps Miss Weaver will, the text of a play by André Obey, author of Noë which is having a great success here called LOIRE, the chief character is Anna de la Loire and her five daughters—tributaries. You will find the resemblance very striking in many parts.

Your runner up Mr Louis Golding has an article which you should read on the subject you are treating in the April-XIXth century, probably a chapter from his book.

Details of the portrait gallery are: Giorgio (TUOHY pastel) Lucia (Laurencin—unfinished) James (oil—TUOHY) ditto (monotype Silvestri) Helen (oil Marchand) Nora (oil—Budgen) ditto (oil Silvestri) John (oil—TUOHY) James (sanguine Aug. John) James (grandfather of my client) Ellen, born O’Connell, grandmother, James ditto as a boy i.e. the grandfather, James Great-grandfather, Anne, born McCann—great grandmother. These last five are all in oil representing various generations of the family and are by Comerford of Cork.

If you will send me registered your chapter on W.i.P. it will be read and commented on.

As regards the Nausicaa chapter you will receive a ponderous volume of some six hundred large pages on the origin and history of what he chooses to call ‘Le Manteau de Tanit’. He believes that this subject should be treated by you with IMMENSE seriousness, respect, circumspection, historical sense, critical acumen, documentary accuracy, citational erudition and sweet reasonableness. He had great difficulty in obtaining it again through his brother from part of his library left behind in Italy and he requests that you will not lend it to anybody as he advertised for it here but could not get a copy. Sincerely yours,

Paul Léon

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 29 May 1933

Hotel Habis [Zurich]

MS. Yale

Sending you a parcel of books. Please acknowledge receipt. Sorry about the photo. Did you get the big book from Léon? Had 2 consultations with Vogt. Another on Wednesday. Scheussliche Wetter Ein Platzregen Grüsse

J J.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 30 May 1933

Zurich

TS. Private

1st consultation

Left eye, the good one, slightly improved since Sept. 1932. No exudate or precipitation in gap. Artificial gradually opening upwards. Rate of progress slow. This is an advantage as rapid rate of progress might bring complications. It wd continue 3 or 4 yrs until pupil reached 4 mm. Could be hastened by operation but far too dangerous. After 3 yrs a tiny operation (removal of outer film) may be possible and advisable.

Prognosis good.

2nd consultation

Right eye disimproved. Cataract almost completely verkalkt (calcified), no vision. Little sensibility to light. Retina (invisible, certainly in part atrophied. Test of injection made at 1st consultation however gives not unfavorable result as regards probability of glaucoma. Therefore operation still possible—if not made, eye will be blind. If it is made—very difficult; also dangerous for operated eye which may go blind during op. because of loss of vitreous. If it succeeds still no means of knowing what vision eye may obtain, this depending on retinal condition. For such an operation greatest tranquillity needed.

Asked advantage of such an operation, Vogt said 2 eyes better than 1. Asked about retour d’age and my physical state, Vogt said he found me looking younger and better (!!!) But that I shd have complete calm. Asked if op. might imperil left eye, V. replied (reversing what he said in Sept. consultation) that if there was a traumatic iritis in right eye after op. wd probably extend to left and undo all the good he believed.

Refused to advise, but sd if in my place and cd be sure of operator like himself wd run risk.

I am to reflect and let him know in few days. He wd operate now or in Sept., when in any case I must return to Zurich to have my eye examined.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 6 July 1933

Évian-les-Bains

MS. Cornell

We stay here a few weeks and then go to Zurich for August. Any chance of our meeting during the summer?

Jim

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 8 July 1933

Le Grand Hotel, Évian-les-Bains (Haute-Savoie)

MS. Giedion-Weleker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Can you let me know whether your kind offer of the villa for August is still open and, if so, the exact dates of your leaving and return. I delayed writing till now as I never know what is going to occur.

If words are not complete in this epistle blame the ink not the drink. I am writing in a blaze of sunshine tempered by a pitch black room.

And à propos of handwriting can you put me in touch with Mr Pulver and what does he charge for an opinion? I have something I feel inclined to submit to him.

Friendly regards to Mr Giedion and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 8 July 1933

Le Grand Hotel, Évian-les-Bains

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Bródy: My best thanks, however belated, to Mrs Bródy and yourself for your kind remembrance of Bloomsbury Fair. I heard part of Mr Birrell’s lecture before leaving ‘Paname’ and I liked it. If I knew his address I should write to him to thank him for so kindly making me a gift of the typescript.

I am sorry about the delay Frau A.L.P. finds in making her bow to the German public but agree with you that, as things and people are just now, the least said the soonest mended.

With best wishes for the summer vacation Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 17 July 1933

St Gotthard Hotel, Zurich

Dear Budgen: Am back here in the city of S.S. Felix and Regula (=Prosperity and Order). They were martyred on the rivershore opposite the Helmhaus. What Taylor says is right re K. You should see K: he is a numero. Allude to the Baroness (?) S.L. as the Lady of the Lake (she was also Lord of the Isles). She gave me a whole trunk full of stuff which I used largely in Circe. By the way I don’t think you give the reader any idea of the awful stupidity and clumsiness of that English paper. The print, the illustrations etc all so dreadfully suet pudding. However, I got some of the absurdest things in Circe out of it.

Several weeks ago I sent 50 francs to Bâle for pamphlets about the Alt-Katholische Kirche to be sent to you in London and also 50 francs to London for a copy of Music and Letters with Count Carducci’s article to be sent to you. If you have not got them I have spent 100 francs for nothing, so send off a line express to Léon, 25 rue Casimir-Perier, Paris, VII….

I can’t read your P.S.

I worked out still another book touching Nausikaa. But in this respect so far as you are concerned I have always been a joyce crying in the wilderness.

Louis Gillet has written a fine preface to Lucia’s alphabet for Chaucer. He wants a chair in Me to be founded at Geneva where he can be my commentator. If you reflect that his father-in-law is René Doumic, perpetual secretary of the French Academy, director of the most aristocratic-catholic-reactionary review in France, and a man who has the disposal of milliards not millions you will understand why people in Paris gasp at the hold I seem to have got there.

As the time is short let me know on a sheet of foolscap what other things you need.

Fleiner as he is now rector you ought to work him in.

Swiss wine is going to be taxed 25%!!!

Let me hear by return.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 13 August 1933

Hôtel Richemond, Genève

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: I got your wire of 2 August but no letter since then. Did you write? I ask because the crétin of a concierge in Z’ch has misdirected half my mail. I wish you would drop me a line for I might still be able to fix up something. This is the finest city for its size that I have ever seen and beautifully situated on the banks of the Rhone and the shores of Lake Leman.

If you wrote I am sorry but you will have to write again.

Jim

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 21 August 1933

Hôtel Richemond, Geneve

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I am sorry but the state of health, to say nothing of other worries, in which I find myself will not permit me to read the proofs of your book to which I wish every possible good success. Kindly notify your publishers of this fact as they might use my name in this connection in their advertisements in which case I should have to ask my agent in England to contradict their statement in the press.

I shall write you about the picture tomorrow. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 28 August 1933

Hôtel Richemond, Genève

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I will write to you about your book in a day or so.

Friday 1 September is Miss Weaver’s birthday. Will you please now ring her up and fix an hour for Thursday when you can deliver the picture. This as from yourself

I will pay for the frame extra. Let me know the amount. If it is framed tant mieux. If not what about a bog oak one but beware of those swindlers in ‘Paddy and his pig’ shops. Either they will sell you black painted deal or promise you faithfully to have it ready for Thursday etc and then leave you in the lurch. It is a lustreless black fossil wood. One of my countless walking sticks is of bog oak, possibly you remember it.

I hope Sargent saw that doctor and that all is right with him. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From LUCIA JOYCE to FRANK BUDGEN, 3 September 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris

TS. Budgen

Dear Mr. Budgen, We are just back from Geneva and my father sends you the following suggestions. Keep a close hold on your american wrights. The Continental wrights he believes he can arrange for you with the Albatross Press who have published him. For this purpose get your publishers to send a copy to his agent Pinker to be forwarded at my father’s request to Mr. Reece. Have nothing to do with Tauchnitz but have a copy sent to Mr. Daniel Brody Rheiverlag 35 a Koniginstrasse Munich his german publishers. He says if all the germans have gone daffed by then a Swiss firm might do the translation. In any case copys should go to Dr. Edward Corrody literary editor of the N Z Z and Prof. Bernard Fehr of the University of Zurich 24 Eleonora Strasse both of whom are personal friends of his. He suggests as motto for your book these lines of Godfried Kellers Ich will spiegeln mich in jenen Tagen, die wie Lindenwipfelwehen entflohen, wo die Silbersaiten angeschlagen, zart doch bebend gab den ersten ton.

With regard to the Zunfthaus the Safran one was the Guild of dyers. The Zimmerleuten one is now quiet chic with the french chef named Michel who can serve you Kangaroo-schwanzsuppe which is a change from the Zurich cuisine at wartime.

The frase of the latin mass which you could not read is on Ulysses page I. The old catholics Augustiner Kirche are a good example of a Mooks gone Gripes. They separated from Rome in 71 when the infallibility of the pope was proclaimed a Dogma but they have since gone much more apart. They have abolished auricular confession they have the eucarist under two species but the faithful received the cup only at Whitsun. I see no prayers to the B V M or the saints in their prayer book and no images of her or them around the church. But most important of all they have abolished the Filioque clause in the creed concerning which there has been a schism between western and eastern Christendom for over a thousand years, Rome saying that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the father and the son. Greece and Russia and the East Orthodox churches that the procession is from the father alone, ex patre without Filioque. Of course the dogmas subsequently proclaimed by Rome after the split are not recognized by the east such as the Immaculate conception. See the Mooks and the Gripes that is West and east, paragraph beginning when that Mooksius and ending Philioquus. All the grotesque words in this are russian or greek for the three principal dogmas which separate Shem from Shaun. When he gets A and B on to his lap C slips off and when he has C and A he looses hold of B. My father hopes you will enjoy Ascona the most boring place in Switzerland and not fail to visit Geneva by far its most beautiful and elegant city. Sincerely yours,

Lucia Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 10 September 1933

[Paris]

Dear Budgen: I enclose £1 for the frame. Karsten’s part was Thersites in Troilus and Cressida which even Phelps did not give at his famous Sadler Wells season. A wonderful creation—a parallel part to Cyclops ‘I’.

Proofs came, Léon away on holidays. Gilbert with a broken arm, I recovering from breakdown No 4 this year. Trotzdem, S.G. and I have gone through 20 of the galleys but you must arrange to stop here 24 or 36 hours on your way to Ascona. My wife asks me to say that we will be glad to put you up and that it is no bother at all. Apart from corrections I am making a short list of things you ought to put in notes. It reads very well. You will certainly make a great hit with it and get more orders for essays or pictures just as you like. You ought to arrange a show. By the way, hang on to your MS.

Please bring with you or send me Lefanu’s book. I want to see something in it. My own copy is in the garde-meuble.

I cannot see anything on p. 47 about the tenor voice. By the way, would anyone lend you a dress suit and shirt? S. is not singing this week but I should like you to hear him sing Eleazar (the old Jew) in La Juive next week. I suppose it is impossible.

Let me know by return about your arrival here. I see S.G. again today and we will get on.

Don’t worry about bothering me. That’s all right.

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From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 23 September 1933

Paris

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, I feel very guilty indeed for not having written to you before but I find it very difficult also owing to Mr Joyce’s distrustful attitude to give you a correct picture of the situation which varies almost from hour to hour and actually from day to day that I keep postponing my letter to you always hoping to be able to give you better news. I think, however, that now I must write to you as clearly as possible.

Mr Joyce returned as you know some three weeks ago and almost as soon as he arrived he collapsed with those terrible pains which have poisoned his existence during the last several years. He was confined to bed for a week. Dr Debray who was alone in Paris came to see him and relieved the pains which were sometimes continuous from seven to eight hours by laudanum compresses. Mr Joyce had lost seven kilos during the summer. His diagnosis was decidedly that the causes of the pains were due to nerves and as you know the hell which Mr Joyce has been going all through the summer and which was however he says but a culmination of continuous worry in the last four or five years there is little reason to be surprised that his nerves gave way at last. I left Paris for ten days in the beginning of September and during this time things seem to have been physically better though I did not hear from Mr Joyce who did not write to me. Dr. Debray whom I saw before I left was unusually outspoken for a doctor on the subject of members of Mr Joyce’s family and overofficious friends who put ‘une interpretation trop facile’ on the case, an interpretation which he did not share and which no doctor would agree with after 48 hours examination. At present though the pains reappear now and again they do not last as rule for more than 45 minutes or an hour. A certain relief has been brought I must say by the stay here of Mr Budgen who came with the proofs of his book through which Mr Joyce went with him and Mr Gilbert. It is a long time since I have seen Mr Joyce so interested in anything as he has been in this work making suggestions, remembering points etc. Even after Mr Budgen’s departure he kept dictating me various suggestions to be wrought in the text. I think he has finished now. And though he had one day of pains whilst Mr Budgen was here it did not seem to affect him as much as usual. Now instead of making progress with his own book he is trying to help Mr Gilbert in a translation of some French novel which the latter is doing into English and this work seems to take much of his time in the afternoon.

All this concerning the physical state of Mr Joyce himself, as far as the other members of his family are concerned, I think that up to quite recently things had been better but just the day before yesterday there was a scene which affected Mr Joyce greatly and which again rendered him very nervous. It is probably this sense of incertitude which keeps his nerves on edge all the time.

Morally however his state is greatly influenced by the material incertitude in which he is living. He came home to find the £ down to almost 78 and the $ to 16, his son and daughter in law prepared to store their furniture and go and live in Vienna. The latter however he succeeded in dissuading them from doing. In spite of the general financial panic and the state of alarm caused in this country by the events on the other side of the Rhine Mr Joyce seems to be determined on getting an unfurnished flat as the only means of terminating his long neglected book which I believe can only be achieved in some conditions of comfort and ease surrounded by his books which at present are scattered in some three or four different places in two countries.

I thought I had arranged with Albatross for Mr Joyce getting now a substantial advance. They sent in however something like one thousand francs alleging that they are entitled to settle quarterly and the large sales having taken place only in the last two months. So they are postponing their settlement to the end of the year. The sales are actually satisfactory—1,000 copies in July and 600 copies in August of the cheap edition and 200 each of these months of the bound edition. They are going to print a new issue of the cheap edition (4,000 copies) next month as with their various depots they have but 1,000 left on hand.

The Werner Laurie proposal is the fifth which seems to have fallen through and this naturally has affected Mr Joyce. Besides the Ulysses case in America which was to be tried in New York on the 22nd last has again been postponed and Mr Joyce wishes to wait until there is some decision in America before he presses anybody in Europe.

This is the greatest detail I can write to you now. I hope to be able to write to you more as soon as I get a good talk with Mr Joyce meaning as soon as he will be freer to give me more of his time but this is not easy to do for many reasons and in fact he does not seem to wish to write at all when it is a question of repeating endlessly the same inconclusive story. Believe me sincerely yours,

Paul Leon.

P.S. I forgot also to write to you that he has still to fight against pressure brought to bear on him from all sides with regard to placing his daughter under a certain restraint in a sanatorium which he absolutely refuses to do and he has placed her in the care of a doctor here and has engaged a girl-companion for her. The opinion of this doctor is that she ruined her nervous system by five years dancing strain something which he always combated and tried to discourage as far as he could while recognising her great talent. He tells me that she is encouraged by certain people to go and pass the winter alone in Zürich—this he regards as lunacy but every time I meet him some new origin of her condition has been discovered the only thing which does not vary is the fact that he is the culprit. I am writing you this of my own initiative and almost against his express wish for he considers it is quite useless to make these continual long explanations. As a matter of fact it is he who should go to Zurich at the end of the month.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 18 October 1933

42 rue Galilee, Paris (Etoile)

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Thanks for the two books. I have looked here and there through one G di D. I wanted them chiefly for the files. They have played me the same trick as Roth and the Japanese (20000 copies of U in Japanese sold in Japan in 6 months): but there is nothing to be done. So the Tokyo lawyer says. The best thing in the O.U.P. book is Bliss. J.S.’s poem is good too.

I should have gone to Zurich today but have to put it off, being slightly grippé. Hope to go next week. I have to see Vogt 3 times a year circa. My case is on in the U.S.A. and am expecting a cable every day. Meanwhile H.H. has given me a cross. This blessing is valid. ‘Quaecumque benedixerunt, benedicantur.’—but only, I think, for that copy and that reader. Buon pro gli faccia!

France has become very dear with the paralysed £ at 78 but I suppose one has to pay a premium for this district. The grandson is hale and hearty. A man named Michelesse (?) called here. I had no book to give his firm, of course. He seems all right but what a funny lingo he speaks! Why not write direct to Putnam’s? The manager, Huntington, is very agreeable. It is only the usual woolliness of English publishers. I had a letter from Poppie. She was operated, the usual thing, I expect, but is now better. Did you get your teeth seen to? You should. You will feel much better afterwards. Budgen has done a book on me, with drawings. You will get a copy. As for Gorman, spurlos verschwunden,

Best wishes to you both from all the six J’s

Jim

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To JOHN SULLIVAN, 18 October 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris

MS.Texas

Dear Mr Sullivan: Have just got your wire thanks, but wait your letter to know whether if you finish in Bordeaux on 24 and sing in Avignon on the 26 you will still be able to fit in this Zurich trip as you kindly offered, afterwards, I mean, though in the present theatrical season and with the trouble you have at home I think it unlikely. Mrs Sullivan rang up and I hope the news she is expecting from Prof Lancet (?) on Friday will be better. Anyhow I am glad to hear of your cachets. The enclosed should cause you to laugh in at least 3½ octaves. La bénédiction des poignards n’est rien à côté de vous. The Minotaure which had my open letter to you in the MS for publication found it too difficult to translate. Good luck sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From PAUL LÉON to F.V. MORLEY, 19 November 1933

27 rue Casimir-Perier (VIIe), Paris

TS. Faber

Dear Mr Morley, Please find enclosed the several points concerning the circulation of ULYSSES in Great Britain which seem to me to have some bearing on a possible publication of this work in England. There are of course several others to be added, that of cases of Ulysses being sold under the mantel in fact at all booksellers in England. But the principals are mentioned in the appended notes. Naturally I am constantly following the matter up and as soon as anything new turns up I will let you know.

I cannot refrain from thinking that it would be time to do something about bringing out ULYSSES in England. I am sure (and I am not talking without reasons) that should the H.O. be approached you will find the authorities (though naturally unwilling to commit themselves or promise anything) less difficult to be talked to on the matter than they ever have been. In fact I think that unofficially they would hint that personally they will not start a case and ban the book. Of course the Director of Public Prosecution is at the mercy of letters from private persons who will complain but I am sure that he will think twice before starting a case himself.

Obviously the winning of the case in America will constitute a strong card in our game but I do think that even independently of this something should be done in England. From the cuttings concerning L. Golding’s book you will see how public opinion is being prepared independently from us. Unless something is actually started right away it will mean a terrible amount of time wasted, for you must not forget that there is a constant stream of copies going to England which take away the readers of the eventual British publication.

I hope you will find your way in devising some scheme; it will not mean great investment of capital since a case can be provoked following the American precedent of having a copy of the current edition seized by the Customs authorities.

Please remember me to Mrs Morley and believe me sincerely yours,

Paul Léon

Mr Joyce, whom I have just seen, wishes me to tell you that in view of the lack of courage which he has met with up to now, he is strongly advised to undertake the publication of Ulysses in G.B. himself—

Notes on the circulation of the English edition of ULYSSES in England.

1). In the last week of April or in the first week of May 1932 there appeared in the Evening Standard an interview with one of the keepers of the British Museum. This gentleman is quoted as saying (the question he was interviewed on was ‘banned books’) and emphasizing that ULYSSES was not a banned book that they took it off their catalogue at their own discretion and that they never made any difficulty in giving it to the reading public in fact to any person who had a valid reason to alledge for reading it. In fact Ulysses had been read so much that they had to acquire several copies and had them bound. Their proceedings would naturally had been different if ULYSSES had been under a ban of a decision taken by a Court.

2) I do not know the details of the seizure of the 499 copies of the second edition of Ulysses by the Custom Authorities at Folkestone (The entire edition was of 500 copies). You may obtain the entire correspondence exchanged between the customs and the then editor of ULYSSES Mr John Rodker from this gentleman (whose address can be found in the P.O. Directory). The Customs at the time refused to send the copies back to France and the Chief of the Folkestone Customs Office is supposed to have destroyed them all. As a matter of fact, there are strong reasons (among which words said by the Custom Officers themselves) showing that this was not done and a copy of this edition can, I am sure be found on sale in London. It is an open secret that Ulysses is sold in London. Mr Stuart Gilbert at the time in India had a copy sent to him from Oxford from Messrs Blackwell to Burma—This copies [sic] bears the imprint: Printed for the Egoist Press by John Rodker, Paris.

3) Finally last year ULYSSES was placed as a text book in Cambridge on the list of a young professor’s lectures on Modern English Littérature. The course took actually place and it is an open secret that a copy of Ulysses is easily obtainable (though expensively) at any bookseller of the University cities. In fact the course would have passed unnoticed had not this young lecturer applied to the Home Office to obtain a copy officially. As a result his course and his private life were investigated by the H.O. authorities and the Director of Public Prosecution went so far as to warn the Vice-Chancellor of the unheard of thing that was going on in the Cambridge University. The Vice-Chancellor showed this letter to several persons including the incriminated professor. It contained amidst vehement protests about the indecency of Ulysses the humourous offer to forward a copy of ULYSSES for the Vice-Chancellor’s private and personal edification.

4) The B.B.C. censor refused to allow Mr Harold Nicholson’s lecture discussing ULYSSES over the Radio. Only after three weeks of continual tergiversation and under the threat of Mr Nicholson’s resignation did he finally give way with the condition that the title of Ulysses would not be mentioned.

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From PAUL LÉON to HERBERT GORMAN, 22 November 1933

27 rue Casimir-Périer (VIIe), Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr Gorman, Mr Joyce wishes me to write to you on the following matter: He is being pestered by his American publishers about the inclusion in the American edition of ULYSSES of a chart which he had drawn up eleven years ago establishing the parallel episodes between ULYSSES and the ODYSSEY. This chart which had been written for Mr Valery Larbaud at the time, had an absolutely private character and was not meant for publication, least of all as an addition or interpretation of the text. It had been communicated to you confidentially and nobody in America knew of its existence at least as far as the publishing circles are concerned.

The present publishers of ULYSSES have obtained it, as they tell us, from you and despite the repeated and absolute refusal of Mr Joyce to allow them to print it in their edition they keep on insisting on its inclusion.

This chart was communicated to you for the purposes of the biography of Mr Joyce which you intended to write at the time. I do not know if you intend to use it still or to write the biography at all but as you have thus been instrumental to this new plan would you please be good enough to write to Random House, to your editor and to Mr Joyce himself stating that the chart was communicated to you and that you showed it and as it seems parted with it without any authority and much to Mr Joyce’s annoyance as it seems the only way to put an end to their perpetual insistence. Sincerely yours,

Paul Léon

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From T.S. ELIOT to MONRO, SAW & COMPANY, 28 November 1933

Faber & Faber, 24 Russell Square, W.C.1

TS. Faber

Dear Sirs, I understand from Mr. James Joyce that you are his solicitors in this country, and we are now his English publishers. We shall be publishing his WORK IN PROGRESS when it is completed, and are meanwhile exploring the possibility of bringing out a new edition of ULYSSES. I am therefore writing to you to ask you to be so kind as to provide us with such facts in the history of the case as may be in your possession, and as would be relevant to this venture.

First of all, I am told categorically by Mr. Joyce that ULYSSES is copyright in this country, and in his own name. I should be obliged if you could confirm this statement from your own knowledge. If this is so, the situation is materially different from that in America.

Together with my colleague Mr. Morley, I went to Paris last week and discussed matters with Mr. Joyce and with his Paris solicitor, M. Paul Leon. Subsequently M. Leon sent us a memorandum of the relevant facts in his possession, but these leave gaps which must be filled before we can proceed further.

We are anxious to find out all the facts about the publication of the first edition of ULYSSES. It seems that after vain attempts by Miss Harriet Weaver to persuade a British printer to produce the book for her, she had it printed in Paris as published by the Egoist Press Limited, of London, of which she was proprietor. I have the impression that it was this edition of 499 copies which was seized by the Customs authorities at Folkestone. According to M. Leon’s memorandum, however, the consignment seized at Folkestone was a second edition, and he tells me nothing about the first edition. I presume that it was shortly after this seizure that Miss Weaver abandoned her attempt, and the book passed into the hands of Miss Sylvia Beach in Paris. In my own acquaintance with the case there is a complete gap between Miss Weaver’s first attempts to get the book printed in this country, and Miss Beach’s production of the book in Paris. Miss Beach sent me by post a copy of her first edition, which some years later I unfortunately lost: that is to say, it was borrowed or stolen.

We are most anxious to know through whose intervention this book was first brought to the attention of the Customs or any other civil authorities in Britain, and to what legal process of condemnation it was submitted. I should like to be quite clear as to the legal differences between this case and that of books which have been condemned, or, according to newspaper slang, ‘banned’, after being printed and published in this country. Not until we are thoroughly acquainted with the case shall we be in a position to conjecture in what way, if in any, proceedings against a new publication of the work in this country after more than ten years’ lapse of time, might be instituted.

There are possibly some gaps in the history of the case which could be completed by Miss Weaver, or possibly Mr. John Rodker, but I am sure that you will agree that it is best that we should first obtain all the information possible from yourselves, as Mr. Joyce’s legal representatives here, before enquiring elsewhere.

I think that my name will be known to Mr. Monro, as I had some communication with him a year and a half ago, on quite a different matter. Yours faithfully,

T.S. Eliot
Director.

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To T.S. ELIOT, 5 December 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris XVIième

MS. Faber

Dear Eliot: No, I had heard nothing at all though one of your replies at lunch struck me. As you wrote me through your office I prefer to wait till I see you over here again to allude to the matter. Thanks for writing to me. One needs a huge lot of patience in these cases.

It is I who should excuse myself. I forgot you were not there for all night. Anyhow Léon and I stayed on a long time after with the patronne, L. explaining to her all about Ulysses (which he has not yet read!).

Sullivan is still in the midi so I have not gone to Zurich.

Let me know when you come over next—but in advance. And also excuse my delay in replying. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, [About 8 December 1933]

42 rue Galilée, Paris (Etoile)

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: Thanks for your wire of felicitations. Broken-backed Britain next.

Who are the enclosed? If you know them say I got the letter after a 2 months’ circular tour of all my former addresses in Europe.

Now touching Xmas, as poor Pappie used to begin. Can you come here for the week. What does for four, girl included, can do for six. You ought to get a ribasso on the rlwy. Besides you can see Stevie. Also Sullivan if he’s back from Marseilles. We all hope you can come. Lucia is much better (touching wood) in excellent health but as stramba as a March hare and as proud as ever she can be. But devil a hapworth else that I can see after her ten doctors.

Anyhow send me a word by wire. Nora has made 4 plum puddings so there’s enough to go round. I would like you to hear Giorgio’s voice. He ought to come out next year. I got Lucia to study singing after 8 years’ of talking. Don’t talk to her either about dancing or diseases. She is beginning to forget about both, thank the Lord.

Ulysses will come out in N.Y. on 15 January next.

Send me the wire anyway and I hope you can arrange it.

Jim

Santa Lucia ’33 Her candle is burning quietly in the drawing room. She has had rather a job looking after my occhi.

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From T.S. ELIOT, 11 December 1933

[London]

TS. Faber

My dear Joyce, Many thanks for your letter. It does not now look as though I should be able to get over to Paris again this year, but I hope to come during January or February. I will not fail to let you know in advance, so that we may have an evening together. Meanwhile, if you should leave Paris for Zurich, I hope you would be able to get word to me.

I am delighted to hear that the censorship of ULYSSES in America appears to have lifted. I do not suppose that this will have any direct influence on the situation here, nevertheless it is a useful parallel to be able to draw. A few days after I got back from Paris, I wrote to Monro, Saw & Co. to ask them to be so kind as to let me have an account of the history of ULYSSES so far as they have knowledge of it. I have had an acknowledgement of my letter, but no reply: after I hear from them, I shall also try to get in touch immediately with Miss Weaver and with Rodker, to find out if they have any material facts to add to the dossier. Yours very sincerely,

T.S. Eliot

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To T.S. ELIOT, 18 December 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris (Etoile)

MS. Faber

Dear Eliot: Thanks for your letter but the U.S. ban does not ‘seem’ to be lifted. It is lifted. I have here counsel’s brief (100 printed pp) and the judge’s ruling, about 12 pages. He states that his ruling is as legally valid as a decision by judge and jury, both parties having agreed to have the case tried before him alone. He orders that his ruling be filed. Three-fourths of the text was published in the N.Y. Herald Tribune of 7 December. The U.S. attorney-general, immediately after the decision, stood up and said he accepted the judge’s ruling with great satisfaction and that the state would not appeal from it to a higher court. The defendant, Cerf, then said he would publish the book with an account of the proceedings (I suppose like the édition définitive of Madame Bovary) on 19 January next.

My solicitors don’t understand very clearly why they were written to. No more do I. I told you I am the absolute owner of the copyright and property rights in England.

En somme, one half of the English-speaking world has given in. The other half, after a few terrifying bleats from Leo Britannicus, will follow—as it always does.

I am sorry you are not coming over. Anyhow I wish you a happy Xmas and good luck in the coming year. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 20 December 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris XVIe

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan, I hope you will accept the enclosed and drink two toasts, one to Judge Woolsey and the other to me. I sent you also the N.Y. edition, just in here, which gives his ruling almost in full.

With this I also enclose a little Xmas card done by my daughter, Lucia. Sincerely yours,

James Joyce

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 20 December 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris

Dear Curran: I hope the case of wine I have sent you from Avignon—a dozen of Clos S. Patrice, 1920, rouge—will arrive safely. I told Antoine Establet who owns the Clos to prepay the duty. The lees are shaken up in the voyage and the wine should stand about 3 weeks in a tempered room.

I never drink it myself as I dislike red wine but it is really ‘wine from the royal pope’. The vineyard is at Châteauneuf du Pape, the oldest in that part of France, and Establet who inherited it says that before the sojourn of the popes at Avignon the wine of the country was known as vin de S. Patrice. I never met a fellow-islander who had heard of it but I mentioned it to Count O’Kelly, the I.F.S. envoy here, and to Dulanty in London and they said they would get it for dinners etc. There is another S. Patrice below Tours but it is only a vin de pichet.

I hope your operation this year was a slight affair as your daughter said, and above all that it was successful.

I would have written to you long ago but I have had two exceptionally trying years also on account of the U.S. suit which, after a 13 years’ struggle, I have won. I shall send you the N.Y. edition which gives the judge’s ruling almost in full. Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders. The other half will follow….

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From T.S. ELIOT, 28 December 1933

[London]

TS. Faber

My dear Joyce, Many thanks for your letter of the 18th. I am very glad to have further news about the early publication of ULYSSES in New York.

I am sorry that your solicitors do not seem to have understood the nature of my enquiry, as I wrote very fully. They could get a little more enlightenment, I hope, if they would write to me; so far, I have had nothing from them but an acknowledgement of my letter, but I suppose that they quite correctly applied to you first for your authorization to communicate with me. The major point was certainly not the matter of copyright, as I understood from you quite clearly in conversation that ULYSSES is copyright in this country, and that it is copyright in your name. The point is simply that in going ahead with the matter, we should wish to have a lawyer of our own at hand who was completely conversant with the whole history of the case, from Miss Weaver’s first attempts to get the book printed here, down to the Customs prohibition. The data which M. Leon provided are not adequate for the first part of this history. All I wanted from Monro Saw & Co. was that they should tell me all they knew of the history of the case, just as Leon wrote to Morley to give him all that he knew of it. I hope that they are willing to do so, and then, as I said, I propose to pick up what details I can from Miss Weaver and John Rodker.

Hoping to see you early next year, and with best wishes for the new year to you, to Mrs. Joyce, and to your family. Yours ever sincerely,

T.S.Eliot

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 30 December 1933

42 rue Galilée, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Best wishes for ’34. Fix up with U.S. as quickly as possible and let them go ahead, irrespective of Boots Ltd. This will wake your own people up. Since things are going on between Soupault and you I prefer not to intervene. We had dinner a week ago and I am well enough, shall meet at a New Year’s Eve party. Grippe ever since 7 Dec and then had larynx tracheite. Better today. What a year! Fog, illness, disaster, madness. Do not rely too much on G.G. as principal article. If he is on the loose he will have to write for his English masters. As for the piracy rumours you pass on my N.Y. publisher is quite prepared on that score. Sending your papers. Again happy ’34 to Mrs Budgen yourself and Sargent

J.J.

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1934

From GEOFFREY FABER to DONALD SOMERVELL, 5 January 1934

24 Russell Square, London W.C. 1

TS. Faber

My dear Donald, I want your advice—if possible your help—in an obscure matter, not without its importance for English letters. I don’t really know if it falls within the Solicitor-General’s province; if it doesn’t I feel sure you will tell me what authority we ought to approach, and perhaps even give us a line of introduction.

The question I am raising is that of the publication of James Joyce’s ULYSSES in England. As I expect you know, this book was originally published—and is still published—in Paris. Arrangements were made for a part of the original Paris edition to be published in London by a small firm called THE EGOIST PRESS (whose publications we took over some time ago, but after the ULYSSES affair). Practically the whole of the consignment from Paris to the London publishers was seized by the Customs—I suppose by instructions from the Home Office—as ‘obscene’. Copies imported from Paris are still liable to be seized, though they have always been obtainable quite easily from London booksellers. They can, in fact, now be bought at little more than one would have to pay in Paris.

Whatever the legal definition of obscenity may be, it has always been felt by most competent English critics that the term could not intelligently be applied to ULYSSES, which is certainly a work of genius and, in the opinion of many, much the most important literary work of art produced in English during the present century. The fact that it should have been classed by the police or the Home Office or the Customs authorities with pornographic literature has seemed, to those who hold the opinion I have suggested, to constitute a considerable slur on the intelligence of the authorities. Sooner or later the publication of ULYSSES in England is inevitable; and the question has now been raised in an acute form by its open publication in the U.S.A.

The position in the U.S.A. has been not dissimilar from that in this country. That is, the Customs seized all copies which came into their hands. Their action in doing so has recently been made the subject of a test case, heard by Judge Woolsey. The Judge gave a remarkable, and extremely intelligent judgement, to the effect that ULYSSES was not an obscene book and might be admitted into the United States. As the result of this judgement, the book will shortly be published in the U.S.A.

Naturally this decision has encouraged Mr. Joyce and his advisers to hope for English as well as American publication. My firm is particularly interested in this situation, because we are now Mr. Joyce’s official publishers in England—we have issued parts of his unfinished book WORK IN PROGRESS and shall publish the book when it is finished. For some time Mr. Joyce has been pressing us to publish ULYSSES, and matters have now come to a head because (as we have just heard) another London firm has made him an offer to publish ULYSSES in the form of a six months’ option.

I had intended to sound out official opinion in this country before long, but this communication obliges me to act more quickly than I had intended. We are, in fact, asked for an immediate reply in the form of a definite offer. That is, of course, of no interest to the English authorities, but it will explain to you why I am writing to you personally and informally in the matter. For any opinion or assistance you can give us I should be exceedingly grateful.

I have to go down to Wales this afternoon, and shall be away for ten days or so—whereas our answer to Joyce’s agent cannot be delayed for more than two or three days. But in my absence the matter will be handled here by two of my directors—Mr. T.S. Eliot (of whom you know) and Mr. F.V. Morley. Is it asking too much of you to say that I should be very grateful if you could give Eliot and Morley an opportunity to see you for a quarter of an hour? They know the contents of this letter, and are—if anything—more familiar with the facts than I am myself. Either of them can be got on the telephone here on Monday morning. Yours ever,

Geoffrey Faber.

P.S. I enclose a copy of the American SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE containing Judge Woolsey’s judgement.

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From T.S. ELIOT to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 5 January 1934

[London]

TS. Faber

Dear Miss Weaver, The question of the publication of ULYSSES in this country has again arisen, and I am anxious to supplement my meagre knowledge of the early facts in the case with a possible view to discussing the matter with a high official. My impression is that the reason why ULYSSES was not printed in this country was simply that you were unable to find a reputable printer to undertake it. I believe that after that you had an edition of 500 copies printed in France with the imprint of the EGOIST PRESS, London, and that 499 of these were the consignment which was seized at Folkestone. I should like to know if this is correct, and furthermore anything that you could tell me about the circumstances of the seizure: by what authorities, and if possible through what channel the book was drawn to the notice of the authorities. The question of the legal position is at present rather obscure.

If and when you are in town, it would be a pleasure to me to see you again, and no doubt it would be easier to discuss these matters in conversation than by letter. But if you are at present in the country, I should be very grateful for all the information that you care to give me in a letter.

With all best wishes for the new year, Yours sincerely,

T.S. Eliot

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From DONALD SOMERVELL to T.S. ELIOT, 6 January 1934

11 Cornwall Terrace, Regent’s Park N W 1

TS. Faber

Dear Eliot, I have had a letter from Geoffrey re Ulysses and he has asked me to write or see you. As I am just off for a week or so I am afraid that I can’t see you so write. I have been on to the Home Office and if you or Geoffrey would write or telephone to J.F. Henderson of the Home Office he would see you and give any assistance he can. He is in charge of that department. In case there is a muddle Mr Hacking’s (The Under Sec) Private Sec told me that he would let Henderson know and that H would be glad to see you and give you any help he could.

I daresay they may not be able to be very helpful and I am not sure even if they were definitely prepared to say they would not move whether they could in fact stop a private person instituting a prosecution or whether they have any control outside the London area. These anyhow are points which he could tell you. I am very vague about the initiation of prosecutions, though I expect I ought to know about it; but I expect the Home Office could not as a matter of practical politics prevent or undertake to prevent the case going to the Court if there was a demand for having it so tested. However Henderson should be able to let you know the general position.

Donald Somervell

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From HARRIET SHAW WEAVER to T.S. ELIOT, 7 January 1934

74 Gloucester Place, W.I

TS. Faber

Dear Mr. Eliot, I will gladly give you any information I can as to the early facts of the attempt to publish Ulysses in this country. And, as I agree with you that it would be easier to discuss the matter in conversation than by letter, I will ring up tomorrow afternoon to try to make an appointment with you.

Thank you for your good wishes for the new year. Please accept mine in return. Yours sincerely

Harriet Weaver

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From T.S. ELIOT, 9 January 1934

[London]

TS. Faber

Dear Joyce, Morley will have written to-day to Léon, but here is the matter as things seem to be at the moment.

I think it was understood when we saw you in Paris that Faber & Faber were prepared to publish ‘Ulysses’ as soon as publication proved feasible. We had of course been pursuing enquiries when Leon’s letter of the other day arrived, asking for a decision within five days. My own enquiries might, in one direction, have proceeded quicker if I had thought to ask you to instruct Monro, Saw to let us have any information in their possession about the history of the case. Perhaps they have none, but they did take a long time to reply that they had no authority from you to communicate with us. I doubt whether this matters much, because I gather from Miss Weaver that nobody knows much about the confiscation at Folkestone, except for what little Rodker may know, and I have not yet been able to see him.

But the history of the case, although we want as full a chronicle as possible, is not the main line of investigation. It is impossible to get any positive statement from the Home Office, and nobody else will have any more success in that than we; but what can be done, and is a slow and delicate business, is to take the official temperature. We speeded things up as much as possible in order to be able to make some reply by the time that Léon wanted it; but our enquiries are not complete, and could not be completed within that time.

While I appreciate your desire that ‘Ulysses’ should be available before WIP appears, and of course agree as to the desirability, I do not feel that it is so vital as you may think. I learn that copies come through constantly from Paris, and so far I have not heard of a single instance of confiscation. The effect of publishing ‘Ulysses’ here of course will be to open up a new public; but I am convinced that there is a very large public indeed familiar with the book—though only in part in possession of it—which is quite ready for WIP the moment it appears.

My impressions are that the general atmosphere is steadily becoming more favourable. Now, if there were no symptoms of change, I should say: as well try the book now as any time. But I believe that there will be much better chances of success in six months or a year’s time. What I have in mind is, that public opinion can change and is changing; but a decision of a high court is a different matter; and I am afraid that premature attempts might actually delay the general availability of the book. I say a high court, because it would be bad for both publisher and book, if a publisher undertook to publish it without being ready to go on fighting for it. If it were published, and the publisher then lay down tamely under a mere magistrate’s decision, the effect would be bad. But if on the other hand the magistrate’s decision were sustained, there would be a legal precedent difficult to break for a long time.

I do not think that the other publisher will be able to gather any more assurance than we, or will be able to find out any more than we are finding. If he succeeds, I shall be as delighted as anybody. But if he abandons the attempt, we should like, when his option expires, to have an option for the following period, or periodically until the way is clear.

I should have written before, during this time, had I thought that I had enough information to bother you with. As soon as I have any further news, I will write to you at once. Yours ever sincerely,

T.S. Eliot

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 1 April 1934

[Ventimiglia]

MS. Yale

Please excuse my long silence Going to Monte Carlo. Will write you from there. I have had a good deal of illness in the household lately. Hope your book is going well. Yes, thanks. I got the House by the Churchyard, Tutti saluti

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 24 April 1934

42 rue Galilée, Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: We did 2500 kilometres in the Bailly car but I had to conceal from my wife the facts about Borach as we had to pass over the place where he was killed a few days before. I told her in Zurich and then had difficulty in keeping her there as she found the place haunted by him. Every place we used to go [to] he seemed to be there. The old parents are pitiable. The mother found a bundle of photographs of me locked away by him, taken at all ages from two on. I often made the poor fellow laugh, thank goodness, by pretending to be a little bit more sceptical, commonplace and uneducated than I really am. He was a very good son and with him in the car in one of his pockets he had a prayerbook with a bookmark at the page ‘Prayer for Parents’. Alas. I became annoyed with him because he did not buy Lucia’s book. I suspect his mother put him off it. My wife says she never saw or heard of such motherly love. The strange thing is that his attitude to life, food, drink, flowers, animals, exercise, seemed to me often more catholic and sane than that of heathen people. I suspect he knew not too much about Ulysses and far less about W.I.P. He just took them on the principle of my country right or wrong—as good a principle as the next in most cases. Lucia disliked the madonna-and-child effect produced by this couple. In twenty years I never found out what his business was (roads in Peru, somebody said) and the old mother when out at tea with my wife used to bring her own broken biscuits in her pocket or rather her handbag. Gesumaria!

Anyway it was he too who urged me always to see Vogt. I saw him many times this visit. R. eye, lens much calcified, at least two operations necessary. Uncertain of result. If successful, as it ought to be, I see quite well as eye only once operated. L. eye, continued improvement of vision, could hasten by operation but prefer to wait. Gave me a new glass to see a trifle better. Come back end September.

I enclose a prospectus of a new fragment which should be out in a fortnight now. Also a thing I wrote in the train partly returning from Z’ich. My son and his family sail for U.S. on 19 prox. My wife is very wound up about it as she fears they may stay over there if the $ falls to 12½ fr as is predicted here. By the way, my daughter-in-law had Cerf (Random House) to lunch on Saturday—he was here for half a day en route for half the world. Up to April 15 33,000 copies had been sold. He says the Irish catholic and puritan prohibitionists are furious. Hence the pressure on the U.S. govt at the eleventh hour to enter an appeal. Now the fat is in the fire again….

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To MME FRANCE RAPHAEL, 24 April 1934

[Paris]

MS. Raphael

Dear Mrs Raphael I am very sorry to hear of the dreadful accident. Your niece says you are now out of danger. But what a frightful shock! It is well you are not disfigured, and I understand that it is not likely to leave any serious trace.

I do hope you will get some compensation in spite of the lack of witnesses and that your suffering is not too great.

Let me thank you once again for your quick and excellent transcriptions. You have rendered me a very great service.

With my very best wishes for your speedy and complete recovery sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 25 April 1934

42 rue Galilee, Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedeon: I enclose a letter of Lucia’s (written at a bad time) and I think you ought to add the more recent card you received. Also two lettrines of hers which, of course, should be returned with the letter. Give no indication except that she is a young woman of 27

I met my publisher from the U.S. here and he informed me that the sales now stand at 35,000 but that my compatriot correligionists and the puritan prohibitionists are infuriated and have compelled the state attorney to file an appeal at the eleventh hour.

I hope Mr Giedeon and yourself and the children are well. We are back here, resting after our rest. I gave your messages to the Jolases and also to Miss Beach

By the way, will you please send me Pulver’s opinion c/o Mr Paul Léon, 27 rue Casimir-Périer, Paris, VII? with the bill, of course.

Friendly greetings to you both from my wife and myself. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 25 April 1934

42 rue Galilee, Paris, XVI

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I’ve just come here to Paris from the rainy southern shore. I to Monte Carlo went but I never played a cent. I saw Vogt in Z’ch. The right eye-lens almost calcified. He can’t make up his mind. Two operations at least needed and he is not sure of the result. If good, I could see with a lens as well as most people. But any upset in the eye during the operation might pass to the other and close me vip entirely. The other eye has slightly improved. He gave me a different glass to see better with. Have to go back in autumn.

Yes, the sales of U in U.S.A. are remarkable. 33,000 in 10 weeks. But you saw the latest development due to pressure from my infuriated correligionist compatriots and the puritan prohibitionists. Z’ch booksellers retail your book at 15 frs (almost £1) and find few buyers therefore. Could you buy in a copy for me at trade price if your contract allows it or if not at the full figure and have it sent to:

Paul Ruggiero

48 Waffenplatz

Z’ch

and let me know the amount. By the way, did you ever get a M.O. for 10/– or a banknote for 50 frs (French) about 2 months ago for some songs for Giorgio. He forgot to ask you.

I didn’t remember about Fleiner when I was in Z’ch. We were both upset by the tragic death of my friend Borach. Next time I go I shall ring him up.

A young Frenchman Armand Petit Jean has written a book, an amazing study of W.i.P. I never even saw him. It will be out in July. He is only 20 and began it 3 years ago!

I enclose something about Lucia but prefer not to discuss her case here. It is too long and complicated. She’ll get all right they say. One needs all Job’s patience with Solomon’s wisdom and the Queen of Sheba’s pinmoney thrown in. Please don’t talk about it over there.

Not much news here except what you see in the press. I posed for J.E. Blanche and he showed the portrait while I was away. I met Blaise Cendrars who sent you his greetings. He says you were a fine singer in those days.

I spoke with the Sargents over the wires of course. He seems to have grown worse. It’s a dreadful pity. Anyhow I hope Marseille does him good. Did he go there in search of quiet? If so, his life’s work is all before him.

I’m a wretched correspondent but write whenever you feel disposed or want anything over here. I am sorry we did not meet this time. I was swept off by a French friend of ours in a car to make my first motor trip, about 2500 Km. It was pleasant but I think I prefer Puffing Billy to Swaggering Bob. Schöne Grüsse Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 2 May 1934

42 rue Galilée, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: The other M.O. went astray. Tant pis. Here is one to settle your outlay with thanks and hopes for its safe arrival. I suppose Ruggiero will write to you. I met Cendrars in the studio of Fernand Léger. Matisse, by the way, has been engaged by a N.Y. Book Club which is bringing out for subscribers an edition de luxe of Ulysses to do 20 illustrations. What do you think of this? I hope your book sells off so that they may do a cheaper edition soon. People tell you your book is so interesting, they must read it etc. and then they don’t buy it. It is useless. I have a grocer’s assistant’s mind. Friendly greetings sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ROBERT MCALMON, 6 May 1934

42 rue Galilée, Paris XVI

Dear McAlmon: Yes, we are still at this address. I got back from Zurich ten days ago and luckily operation no 11 (world’s amateur championship) has been staved off till the autumn. I did not receive a copy of the drawing from Hiler but unless it is much heavier in line I shall make nothing of it. I cannot see at all the lines of the sanguine John did of me. My sight is very embarrassing for nobody, for instance, looking at the handwriting of this letter will believe that I do not see like others. It is useless to explain. One must have gone through the hoop oneself.

Probably you did not recognise Budgen because he is now cleanshaven but it surprises me that his painter’s eye did not recognise you. You should be on your guard about agents. They are very unsatisfactory except for the handling of commercial ‘copy’.

I am glad you like London. I suppose it is better but D.O.R.A. is still to the fore. And she is a B.O.R.E.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, [Late May 1934]

42 rue Galilée, Paris (Etoile)

MS. S. Illinois

Cara Lucia: Non ti ho scritto prima perchè credevo forse meglio lasciarti in pace laggiù. Ma il dott. Humbert ci ha mandato notizie di te. Siamo molto contenti di apprendere che Nyon ti piace. Spero che la ‘bise’ non sia troppo attiva in questa stagione. In quanto alle lezioni di disegno puoi prenderne 2 o 3 volte alla settimana. Quel famoso libro deve escire in Olanda alla fine di questo mese, dice l’editore.

Qui poche novità. Giorgio ha venduto il suo Rolls-Royce o Jolls-Joyce⁠[.] Stevie sta benone; Helen pure. Mamma ed io anche. Niente di straordinario, salvo che giorni fa perdevo un biglietto da mille franchi. Lo credevo perduto per sempre ma dopo qualche ora fu ritornato ed indovina da chi. Dalla signora del quarto piano—quella che pestava i piedi ogni sera quando si suonava dopo le 10 ore. Le mandai qualche fiore ed essa ci invitò a prendere il tè!!! Era molto affabile. Sembra bellina. Peccato che ha una voce come un ranocchio.

Hai domandato uno Stabat Mater di Lablache. Ebbene da Durand non ne sanno niente. Lablache, del resto, era un cantante—il Chialiapin del suo tempo—nato a Napoli di padre francese e madre irlandese. Non mi consta che abbia scritto della musica. Hai cambiato il nome, forse?

Speriamo che hai trovato qualche compagnia allegra. Facci sapere di quando in quando come stai. Ti farà del bene di restare là per ricuperare. L’ambiente qui non è ideale certo.

Salutami il dott. Forel, prego. Al dott. Humbert scriverò anche domani. Mama ti raccomanda d’ingrassare se puoi. Se hai bisogno di qualche cosa scrivici. Dunque, sta bene, divertiti e riposati. Ti abbracciamo

Babbo

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 1 June 1934

42 rue Galilée, Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: I will write you in English language. We expect a letter from you by tomorrow (via S.S. Bremen) but I send this off today. Also the fragment of W. i. P. I hope you send us good news, that you are all three well and happy. We are both somewhat dazed by the heavy heat here. I work every day alone at my big long wide high deep dense prosework. We went to hear Gigli (who sang in a gymnasium, Palais des Sports, but has a beautiful voice. He imitates MacCormack but has an ampler organ—not so true.) S. in La Favorite (this time he surprised us all by his acting). La Machine Infernale, very well given. Mrs E.J. and Mrs Nora J. went to the Folies Bergères while E.J. and I went to see a Palestine company playing Jacob and Rachel in … Hebrew, not Yiddish. It was very remarkable and barbaric.

I enclose this letter from S. to Pitt Sandborn.

We have not yet made any summer plans. What a bore. Will let you know as soon as we do.

They called in a German specialist at Nyon and he advised them to treat Lucia as if she had something or other, though there is no trace of it. And this apparently is doing her good. She sent me a silk tie she knitted. She doesn’t seem to know the kind of collars I wear. But it’s otherwise very nice and I’ll get it altered. I hope the book cheers her up. It is very well done.

We are looking for a flat. I am having my teeth fixed. But you are the people to send the news. Gillet did not get into the Academy. There was a spoiled vote. So he has to run again. Carducci came around and let me hear his Norma. I am going to speak to Mrs Dyer about it. He brought the Contessa with him.

Our best wishes to you both and regards to your host and trilingual greetings to your lively charge. I shake all your amalgamated hands several times over in rapid succession with that charming grace for which I have always been noted and blow to you in valediction my parento-legal blessings from this little old log cabin down the Seine.

Babbo

PS Dears Helen and Giorgio

I hope you are having a fine time we are quite well, Paris misses you both lots of love to Stevie

Nora

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 1 June 1934 [In Italian]

42 rue Galilée, Paris

Dear Lucia: Thanks for the tie. It is very pretty. One part of it is a little too thick for the collar I wear but I will get it changed at the tricoteuse. Today at last I have been able to send off the book. Slow but sure. All’s well that ends well. I will try to arrange for the publication of the alphabet.

I hope that Dr Humbert has recovered. I had a long letter from Dr Forel. He told me that they have a new treatment which will do you a lot of good. I don’t know what it is. But the essential thing is that you will benefit from it. It has been suffocating here for some days and I hope that down there by the lake [of Geneva] it is a little cooler. I have not yet made any plans for the summer—the most unpleasant season of the year.

[Inserted in Mrs Joyce’s writing] Many greetings and I hope that you are better.

Mamma

Mamma has finished this letter in the very middle because she was going out and it was not yet finished. After all I haven’t much to add. I work every day and we go to the theatre now and then. Let me know if the book pleases you. I like it very much. Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it is pleasing to the ear. And your drawings are pleasing to the eye. That is enough, it seems to me.

I am sure that your stay and the peacefulness will do you a great deal of good and that one fine day—and soon—the clouds will roll away. They are not storm clouds but only cloudlets.

Now I think I will go round to the barber to have my hair cut.

If you need anything let me know—music etc. Apropos of that Mamma said something about clothes for the summer. But she has just gone out. I will write to you tomorrow about it.

I had forgotten. I received and signed the sheets for the de luxe edition. This will be out in ten days. The other is already on sale. I will send you cuttings from papers where your name is mentioned.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 June 1934 [In Italian]

42, rue Galilée, Paris

Dear Lucia: Mamma has dispatched to you today some articles of clothing. As soon as the list of what you want comes we will send off the things immediately. There was no list in the letter of the 29 ult. As to the typewriter, it would be a huge expense, about 4000 francs. There is one here in the house and I gather from Dr Forel’s last letter, which gave me great joy, that your sojourn on the pleasant shores of the lake of Geneva will not be too much prolonged now. (The devil take the summer! The heat clouds my spectacles and I see with difficulty what I write!) But you could hire a machine. At Geneva certainly you would find one.

Something is always lacking in my royal palace. Today is the turn of ink. I send you the programme of the Indian dancer Uday Shankar. If he ever performs at Geneva don’t miss going there. He leaves the best of the Russians far behind. I have never seen anything like it. He moves on the stage floor like a semi-divine being. Altogether, believe me, there are still some beautiful things in this poor old world.

I am glad that you are on good terms with that Dutch doctor but does it not seem to you that it would be rude on my part to write to him when I am in correspondence with doctors Forel and Humbert? But if he writes to me first then I could reply to him. (Saint Francis de Sales, protector of writers, pour a little ink into this inkstand!)

Mamma is chattering on the telephone with the lady above who dances the one-step so well and fished my note of a thousand lire out of the lift. The subject of the conversation between them is the lady on the fifth floor who breeds dogs. These ‘friends of man’ hinder the lady on the fourth floor from meditating like the Buddha. Now they have finished with dogs and are speaking of me.

I see great progress in your last letter but at the same time there is a sad note which we do not like. Why do you always sit at the window? No doubt it makes a pretty picture but a girl walking in the fields also makes a pretty picture.

Write to us oftener. And let’s forget money troubles and black thoughts. Ti abbraccio,

Father.

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From NORA BARNACLE JOYCE to GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, [About 15 June 1934]

42 rue Galilée, Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen e Giorgio, Thanks for letters and postcard I got quite dizzy looking at that tall building. When I think it takes such a long time for a letter to reach you. I simply keep putting off writing, we are very glad to hear you are having such a good time.

We seem to have taken your place here as far as late hours is concerned we have been to see many things with the Jolases gene is missing Giorgio so much so the other evening he had a little too much to drink and forgetting himself turned round and gave the usual clap on the back to Jim Maria promptly reminded him it was his father who was there. We had a bit of a heat wave here luckily it did not last. I spend most of my time flat hunting. Carducci took me out to Neuilly to see some wonderful ones but they were all let Mrs Dyer invited us to an evening party I must say it was very smart she had the most wonderful buffet everything on the table was from the colonies I must tell you the funniest part of that was when I was getting into the new evening dress Jim thought the back was a bit too decolleté so he decided he would have to stich up the back of the dress can you imagine the result? of course he stiched it all crooked so I had to undo the stiches again I decided it was better [to] have a bare back I wish you could have seen him stiching my skin back bone altogether.

The news of Lucia is better Schwester rang up and I asked her in to have tea she wept copiously about Stevie she seems to be missing him very much I am not so sure she likes her present job but I did find her not looking so well as a matter of fact when she came in through the door she looked very dishevelled her hair was hanging around her she had a bunch of flowers in her hat and another at her waist and if I dont mistake she had a bunch in her bosom I hop⁠[e] you have found a summer camp for David is he feeling better

Does Stevie ever mention us give him a big kiss. We have just got back from the races and there was a little boy just like him running around. Giorgio we are very well I hope you will do something about your voice Best love to all saluti best regards to your family

Nora

Dear G & H: I have taken a flat near the park Monceau, 6 rooms 15000. Will write you both tomorrow. Just back from Prix des Draps. Good luck to you both

Babbo

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 1 July 1934

42 rue Galilée, Paris

Dear Giorgio and Helen: Eppur non si muove, as he whom this street is called after might have said but didn’t. The flat in the Monceau part fell through. The fool of a landlord was out of town and, though I had an oral agreement with the agent, the latter would not let me sign on. Worse luck for him for in the intervening 10 days Nora-Mamma and Mrs Jolas came to the conclusion it was not such a good bargain. Too big, noisy part, not enough light. So I called it off. And now the hunt begins anew.

Young Mr Exton arrived in Paris at 7 a.m. yesterday (30 June). He rang me up and said he had decided to leave in 24 hours. He was lunching with your friend so I asked him to tea. He gave me news of you both, told me he had written a book under my influence at 17 called A Spirit in Search of Itself. He was very sunburnt. I took a taxi and for 2 hours drove him all over Paris or a good part of it and the Bois where they were preparing for the floodlit race by night at Longchamp—a wonderful scene it seems. When we got back the chauffeur asked me if I was a guide of the Maison Cook….

We dine in Fouquet’s very frequently, in fact almost always. It has become a chic prize-ring. The other night an advanced lady slapped a perfect gentleman’s face on account of another perfect lady’s being with him. The well bred diners jumped up on benches and chairs. And the row went on. I refused to have any attention distracted from the business in hand, to wit, a carafe of champagne nature but I could hear a great deal. Again a few nights ago there was a sudden scuffle, blows, fall of plates, shrieks of women etc. Léon was with us. My wife became a little alarmed but I did as before and she is getting used to it. Some people are so playful.

Also at Fouquet’s coming out on last Thursday, a man came up to me. He was Denis MacSwiney (Helen, pronounce this to rhyme with ‘queeny’ and also Móran not Moràn and Máhony not Mahòny). He asked me to dinner and then I asked him. He was well posted about Giorgio’s arrival in N.Y. and about the appeal against me which he thinks the government will lose by a 2 to 1 ruling. He cannot work directly for Giorgio as he is under contract to work only for MacCormack but he asked for Giorgio’s address and will call him up in September. He says he will hear him and that MacCormack should too. We got the impression that a retirement of the latter may be contemplated and that he is on the lookout. He made on me the impression of being an uncommonly shrewd Irish country type but capable of a steady loyalty in the case of someone whom he had taken to. He has managed J.M. very well for 25 years and both have made money but apart from that it is easy and refreshing to note that he has a real devotion to his idol.

Be jabers, children, ’tis very hot this first of Caesar’s month! …

I am sorry to note that as a result of the sea voyage Giorgio is over a half-foot shorter than when he left since the reporter found him to be of medium height. But shure plaise the Lord he’ll be shootin’ up again on the way back and be his owld six foot wan be the time yiz are landed in the French metrollops.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 10 July 1934

42 rue Galilee, Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I delayed answering your letter as I wanted to have some definite news to send. I have it now. I have signed a lease for an empty flat—this after daily search for the past 4 months. It is in the first street to the right off Ave. Bosquet, turning your back to the river, 7 rue Edmond Valentin. We have work to do in it but I expect it will be habitable by September. Civil strife is reported to be in the air here and general Armageddon to be mobilising outside but I can’t help it. My forty months of wandering in the wilderness must come to an end. It is risky for I don’t know how the appeal court will rule in N.Y. and my rent-paying power depends on the judges. But my wife’s nerves were giving out and, though I have been working about 5 to 7 hours a day for some time—as much as I can do in such heat—I need more elbow room.

… But now listen to this. Two years ago I arranged with Burns and Oates through Mr Holroyd Reece (of Albatross Press in Europe) to publish Lucia’s alphabet for Chaucer’s A.B.C. I agreed to pay them £225, to get Gillet to write a preface and have it done into English. This was done but they showed no sign of life so I got the Hague Press which did the last fragment to take on the job. Now for six months I have been writing a good dozen letters to have the lettrines sent back. All kinds of excuses. They are in London, in Grasse, locked up in Paris etc. Now it seems Reece does not know where they are. The blockheads have lost them. They keep on writing vapid letters in the style of Pinker and Cape, about ‘getting into touch’ and ‘lose no time’ ‘how very much we feel’ but the letters are not to be found. And the Xmas market the Dutch publisher had in view is now lost. Voila!

I have also been making vigorous efforts to get rid of Pinker, but Léon hangs on to one leg here and Mr Monro to the other in London so that I have had to give up the idea….

We don’t know what to do with ourselves this summer and I wish it were over. Thanks for the list of errors in the fragment. That is rather a pity.

This may interest you. Léon began to read to me from a scientific publication about Irish trees. The first sentence was to the effect that the oldest tree in the island is the elm tree in the demesne of Howth Castle and Environs.

I hope you are keeping well and I am glad to have something positive to report instead of my usual wail. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 13 July 1934

42 rue Galilée, Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: These few lines, I hope, find you well. They are just to tell you we started moving our things into the new empty flat I have taken yesterday. 5 rooms, lift, private telephone, chauffage, 4th floor, clear outlook as right opposite is a hotel particulier of 2 storeys. Little or no traffic in the street which has only 12 houses and is not a suite of any other street. It is no 7 rue Edmond Valentin, between avenues Rapp and Bosquet. If you stand at beginning of Av. Bosquet with your back to the river and walk towards Ecole Militaire the 1st street you pass on the right is a section of rue de l’Université. The second is rue Edmond Valentin. That’s it. rent 11,500. I am now the tenant but workmen will be in till end of August, I think. The heating system is being changed on all the floors and we are repapering and cleaning generally. Only one flat on each landing and this cornerless and quite bright. .

So that’s that.

I hope you will not cable Lucia on the 26th as she does not know yet you are in U.S.

The heat here has been filthy (34 in the shade) but I suppose N. Yorkers find that cool.

Our plan is to put all the workmen on the job and then leave for Spa (Belgium) perhaps with the Gilberts.

The Jolases will be off for the south on the 19th but meanwhile Mrs Jolas had to rush off to Saint Honoré as Tina there has swallowed a hairpin.

We hope to have a letter from you in the morning as two big boats got in.

Meanwhile I send this off. How is Stevie standing the heat, also his papa and mama. The Baillys are leaving for a Baltic cruise. Yes, thanks, I will take some ice. Tante belle cose a tali belle persone

Babbo

Ce soir on danse dans les rues!!!

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 22 July 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgique

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Your letter came just as we were leaving Paris for here. Thanks for settling that bill and many thanks for again offering us your villa for the summer. But we are taking only a short holiday. I have at last rented an empty flat and as soon as the workmen have finished in it we have to go back to start moving in. This would be a charming place here but for the rain which we brought with us, it seems. Anyhow, I hope you both enjoy your holiday. I am tired of the summer before it begins.

After a very long delay Mr Pulver sent back Lucia’s letters, saying that pressure of work prevented him from giving an opinion on the handwriting of the person in question. Taking this with what you told me I think it not unlikely that he has a strong suspicion who it is. If then he does not want to give an opinion it may be because he resents having been approached in such a veiled way or because what he has to say is too unpleasant for him to write.

The news we have about her is slightly better but it is all very slow and confused. They really know as much about these cases as the layman.

Our address in Paris, as from the 15 September, will be:

7 rue Edmond Valentin

Paris VII

but you can always get my telephone number if you ring up Miss Beach or Paul Léon. Be sure to do so when you are there next time.

Our kind regards to both Mr Giedion and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 22 July 1934

Hotel Britannique, Spa (Belgium)

MS. Kastor

Here’s my hotel and my news is coming.

Babbo

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 28 July 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgique

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Will you please send back the enclosed when read. I don’t know what to do about the lettrines. I have now lost the Xmas market for the book. They meant months of work, 3 at least, apart from their value. What a softheaded idiot! If any notice of my fragment appeared in the English press in which Lucia’s name is mentioned will you please send it to me. The Dutch firm was willing to do the Chaucer poem without any money from my side.

We came here a day or two ago to allow a brigade of workmen time to set in order, clean, paint etc a flat which had been occupied for 20 years by the same people and to allow my wife time and space to repair her very exhausted nervous system. This place (my choice) is easily the most charming one of its kind we have ever seen but the weather is not good and, worst of all, the newsboys keep careering round the streets shouting out about ‘l’Autriche’. I am afraid poor Mr Hitler-Missler will soon have few admirers in Europe apart from your nieces and my nephews, Masters W. Lewis and E. Pound. My wife is making a cure of baths which, I think, will do her good. Did Léon send you a bundle of MS? Indispensable for the Xmas fire.

I am still on the watch for news from the U.S. courts. I fancy they will rise on the 31 instant for the long vacation. I think the delay is a good sign.

I read of the usual terrible thunderstorms in England this summer. Thank Jupiter, we have escaped so far.

I have been working very hard and hope to get on quickly once I am in dock again.

I suppose you are as usual superior to weather conditions and in the goodest of health. With kind regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LOUIS GILLET, 28 Juillet 1934

Grand Hôtel Britannique, Spa

Cher Monsieur Gillet: Je vous dois pas une mais plusieurs lettres. D’abord, j’espère que les nouvelles de votre gendre sont maintenant un peu meilleures. Quant à ma fille cela traîne toujours, mais il semble quand même qu’elle va un peu mieux. J’avais tant voulu lui donner la satisfaction de voir son alphabet publié avec le texte de Chaucer et votre préface. J’avais tout arrangé, comme je croyais, il fallait tout simplement livrer les lettrines en Juillet afin de ne pas perdre le marché de Noël. Et voilà que ces idiots d’éditeurs anglais ont perdu les lettrines! Lisez la lettre dont je vous envoie une copie. Que faire? Depuis quatre ou six mois ils me débitent des excuses de mie de pain. Et voilà le beau résultat.

A part çà et votre absence dans le hitlerland (à propos Souppault [sic] en était expulsé) et nos diners de Tantalus chez Fouquet et l’état nerveux de ma femme et nos grands soucis, j’étais très occupé parce que … parce que nous avons malgré les croassements de tous les prophètes de mal, loué un appartement vide. Donc, mon adresse à Paris, à partir du ler ou 15 Septembre, sera: 7, rue Edmond Valentin, VIIe (Tel. Invalides 50.38). Cette rue est le deuxième échelon (en partant du fleuve) entre les avenues Rapp et Bosquet. J’en suis actuellement le locataire, mais les ouvriers travaillent, peintres, électriciens etc. actuellement aussi. Ils en auront pour un bon mois, je crois.

A propos de peinture avez-vous vu le portrait de moi que J.E. Blanche a exposé dernièrement. Je l’ai vu chez l’emballeur la veille de nos départs de Paris et la veille de son départ aussi, avec son créateur, pour le nouveau monde. Hum!

Si j’avais des moutons blancs je les rangerais. Quel dommage parce que c’est un très joli site ici. Vous les connaissez sans doute. Mais où sont les bobelins d’antan? Les promenades sont incomparables. L’air tamisé par les hêtres et les bouleaux, pur et embaumé. Et puis Shakspeare et ses pucks ne sont pas loin. C’est la forêt d’Arden. Et quel bon vin que j’ai bu à Liège! Ma femme fait la cure de l’eau et des bains ici. La langue que parlent ces wallons me plaît beaucoup plus que la langue que parlent la plupart des régions provinciales de France. Elle me semble correcte, ample, nerveuse et clairement prononcée. (Commentaire de M. Gillet en monologue intérieur: Tiens! Gros Jean qui veut en remontrer à son curé!) Il y a aussi un hôtel d’Irlande ici. Il a un air je ne sais quoi et sur la fenêtre du salon on lit: Man spreekt hollandjch. C’est le seul hôtel de Spa qui n’étale pas son menu. Ah non, par exemple! On n’offre pas çà au regard du ciel. Il n’est pas même imprimé. On le murmure aux oreilles du pensionnaire crispé d’horreur.

Nous comptons visiter la ville de Luxembourg et puis Metz et Nancy. Quel nom mignon! j’espère qu’il y a un joli fleuve là: la Nancy Livia.

Je vous souhaite de bonnes vacances. Où êtes-vous? A Chablis je suppose. Après Août vient Septembre. C’est très bien. Cela me plaît beaucoup. Vive Septembre! Et un ban pour Octobre, Novembre et Décembre!

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 29 July 1934

Grand Hôtel Britannique, Spa

Dear Curran: In the hurry of leaving Paris I locked up your daughter’s letter so that I cannot reply to it. She said you might be passing through Paris. I am writing to excuse myself to her and also to you and also to tell you that I have taken a new flat there: 7 rue Edmond Valentin, VIIe tel: Invalides 50.38. Please let me know about what date you may be in Paris as I should very much like to meet you. I have to thank your daughter also for sending me some shamrock last March and you for the present of your essay on S. Laurence O’Toole and the two plays by Denis Johnstone. I was puzzled some time ago when I saw in the Irish Times a notice of one of these The Old Lady Says No for the name of the writer was changed. In return I should like to send you a copy of the edition de luxe of a fourth fragment from my book which came out in Holland. It has a cover design by my daughter and also an initial and a tail piece by her and is signed. Shall I have it sent to your Dublin address or c/o one of my Paris publishers or, if they be out of town, c/o my lawyer M. Paul Léon?

My wife is making a cure here and we may go for a week or so to Luxembourg. You probably know this picturesque and old-fashioned Spa, mother of so many juvenile daughters. Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a rain wave.

I am glad you got over your operation though I could not make out what it was for. My son Giorgio and his family are spending the summer at Long Beach, near New York. My daughter Lucia as you probably know, had some kind of a nervous breakdown but she is well on the road to recovery, I think. She also did an exquisite series of illuminated alphabet letters for Chaucer’s A.B.C., and Louis Gillet wrote a preface for it. I made arrangements through the Albatross Press manager for this to be brought out by Burns and Oates. They were so slow that I accepted an offer from the Servire Press of The Hague.

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 30 July 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa (Belgique)

MS. Kastor

Cari fanciulli: We have been here now 11 days. Before your wire came I had arranged for both telegrams to be sent to Lucia in both our absences. I warned your concierge not to rébuter a wire if one came on the 27. It did as you will see by Lucia’s reply to my telegram today of inquiry whether she had sent a telegram on the 27. I hope the birthday passed off all right. We are taking the waters here and I wish I could persuade my wife to take the carbo-gaseous baths which are said to be very soothing to the nerves. Perhaps I shall.

Helen, you are wrong if you think your cousin is in Germany. I mean Mr Hertz. A few nights before we left Paris I was dining in Fouquet’s when at 11.30 in he walked. He had been stopped at Amsterdam by bad news from wherever his place is and at once took the night avion for Paris and made straight for Fouquet’s, Léon was there too so we had a chat. He seemed to have been deeply disappointed in America (much to our surprise) and as for Germany he became inarticulate. He left for Vichy or somewhere near next day. He said he would go to Denmark but did not care to cross Germany. Where he is now, I don’t know.

I am glad to hear that Stevie sits on the beach with his face towards the old world, quand même. While I think Giorgio might have chosen un andantino allegro rather than an andante capo for his bass viol interlude in the last letter, considering the susceptible nature of one, at least, of the addressees, it is or should be patent that the conduct of public affairs in all the great countries of the world between Russia and America both included makes stupid, boring, irritating, backward England seem like a land still inhabited by non-bloodthirsty homines sapientes. I shall go there too when and if France gets unlivable-in but not till then. So I had to take a flat.

Enclosed are many things. I am running with this to the post for the boat. We are both well and hope you are. My regards to Mr Kastor.

Caro Giorgio, ti scriverò domani

Dear Helen, I will write you the day after tomorrow

Caro nipotino, ti scriverò überübermorgen

Shake and shake and shake

Babbo.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE, 31 July 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa (Belgique)

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie; Let me know how and where you are. I hope you got over that last bout of renal cattarh. We are here taking the waters as they did a long time ago. It is rather quiet and old-world, thank the lord. I have rented a new flat (empty) in Paris and the workmen are fixing it up. From, say, 1 September or 10 my address will be: 7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris VIIe (tel: Invalides 50.38). It is between where I lived before, rue de Grenelle, and the Eiffel Tower.

People tell me not to settle down as there is going to be a brand new war but I am tired of paying 3 rents à la fois so I took it.

I send you the Irish Times, O G’s poem on p. 7 may interest you though the picture of him as a baker’s roundsman delivering 2 loaves, 2 turnovers and a crown in through the skylight seems odd. Also Diarmuid and Grainne on p 15 are instructive.

I am sending the money by the month to Eva. Am still without news from U.S. As you know after the judge’s ruling in my favor on 6 December last the book came out but 3 months after the government, urged on by certain elements, lodged an appeal at the 11th hour. The case came up before the court of appeal 9 weeks ago. 3 judges without a jury decided to consider the case at their leisure. I think the U.S. courts rise today for their long vac. (the British are high too) so perhaps I shall hear nothing till October. I have a contract also with John Lane, London, and he writes his lawyers have advised him to run the gauntlet next autumn and bring it out.

So I hope there’s no fighting nor no nothing.

Did you get the fragment of my new book The Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies with designs by Lucia. If not, I’ll send you one.

She is still at Nyon. I believe she is getting better but it is slow. All the young girls or women or most of them seem to be off the key a little.

Giorgio and family are summering and simmering in New York (c/o Mr Adolf Kastor, 1239 Broadway). They aren’t staying there, of course, but at Long Branch, a sort of N.Y. Brighton.

I hope to have some news of you. Best wishes to Nelly and yourself from us both

Jim

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To T.W. PUGH, 6 August 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgique

MS. Pugh

Dear Mr Pugh: I am here on holiday away from books of reference so am trusting to memory as regards your address.

In the first place I hope you are well and that when you next visit Paris you will come to see me. My address there is now: 7 rue Edouard Valentin, Paris VIIe (Tel: Invalides 50.38),

My American publisher would like to have for a circular he publishes some photographs of scenes mentioned in Ulysses so I wonder if you would consent to have some of yours reproduced. I remember Kiernan’s but he would also like to have the Martello Tower (Sandycove), Holies Street Hospital and the view of the Strand at Sandymount showing the Star of the Sea Church. Of course he would use your name and I take it these things are paid for.

There is still another matter in which you could aid me. Apart from the usual U.S. edition there is to be brought out before Christmas an édition de luxe with a preface by some writer and a series of 30 illustrations by the French painter Henri Matisse. He is at present in the south of France doing them. He knows the French translation very well but has never been in Ireland. I suppose he will do only the human figures but even for that he would perhaps need some guidance.

Do you know any illustrated weekly published in Dublin about 1904 or before that time? If I could have some back numbers (the picture pages only) to show him when I go back to Paris he might be able to conjure up the past better. If you can find any back papers please let me know what they cost and I shall remit you the amount.

With many thanks in advance sincerely yours

James Joyce

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PRESS RELEASE FROM THE NEW YORK HERALD, 8 August 1934

[PARIS]

U.S. Loses ‘Ulysses’ Appeal;

Court finds Ban hurting Art.

(By Wireless to the Herald).

New York. Tuesday.

The United States Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-to-1 decision, today ruled that James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is neither a lewd nor an immoral book and that its importation is proper. The decision upholds that of Federal Judge John M. Woolsey, admitting the book for sale in this country, against which the Government, through United States Attorney Martin Conboy, appealed.

The dissenting opinion was handed down by Judge Martin T. Manton, who presided at the hearing of arguments. Judges Learned Hand and Augustus N. Hand in the majority opinion held that ‘art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms.’

Previously, the three Judges had heard Morris L. Ernst, appearing for Random House, Inc., which has issued an American edition of the work, praise the book as ‘a great work of fiction’ and its author as a ‘majestic genius’.

Conboy argued that the volume is undeniably obscene and immoral and that Judge Woolsey had erred in giving it a clean bill in the United States District Court a year ago.

‘No reasonable man applying the proper rule of law would come to any conclusion other than that “Ulysses” is obscene,’ Conboy told the Court. ‘Taking the test of obscenity which has been established in the Federal Courts and applying it to the numerous passages of grossly obscene matter with which this book fairly reeks, there can be no doubt that the District Court erred in its determination that “Ulysses” is not obscene.’

Accompanying the brief was a list of references to certain portions of the volume selected as being particularly obscene in the opinion of the government. These passages were the same which the government had quoted in every similar brief since March, 1918, when Margaret Anderson first printed ‘Ulysses’ in her magazine, ‘The Little Review’.

Judge Woolsey held that the book was not written to exploit obscenity and that nowhere did it tend to be an aphrodisiac. The court admitted ‘Ulysses’ was not an easy book to read or understand and that it had to be considered from a proper approach and not with Joyce’s imitators in mind.

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To HELEN JOYCE, 9 August 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgique

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: Thanks for your long letter. Why you give me grammatick lessons. He was me friend Le Hon send you that wire. Le Hon very nice chap but he not know the Englisch grammatick like me and you, missus. Also why for you make me big speechstuff about Frankee Doodles? ‘Pipe pas! But, say, you’s grown to be a swell orator, missus. I’ll tell the woyld you is.

I got you both’s wire about the appeal ruling. Three cheers for me, says I to meself, says I.

Answers to questions, put or not put. The Vail family has another daughter. The Gilberts are not here. They are lying in wait outside Paris for a cheap excursion train which would bring them here about the 16 to 20 inst. Jean Wright is her correct maiden name. Gillet’s son-in-law died of cancer of the marrow on the first anniversary of his marriage. The Sullivans have rented an empty flat in the rue Juliette Lambert. I paid over to a solicitor (Mrs Jolas’s) the money I was able to collect including Mrs Bailly’s who paid like a goodhearted person, I think, so that ends that. I paid in yours too as it was no use bothering you. Don’t send me it. Time enough, when you come back to Paris.

Lucia seems to have fallen for some undesirable gent in the Nyon shop who either lives in Dublin or London. They are being kept apart and he is going away. This has for the moment upset her. But they say it will soon pass. I see nothing crazy in that, as women go.

Beckett has brought out his book More Pricks than Kicks. One of the characters is named Lucia but it is quite different. She is a cripple or something. Haven’t time to read it. But looked at it here and there before quitting Paris. He has talent, I think.

Am glad to hear Stevie gets on well. The accounts of U.S.A. in the European press (heat and Dillinger etc) are so lurid that we are glad to know you are enjoying yourselves.

You can write here even if we go on to Luxembourg, Cologne is only 14 hours away. Pity we dare not visit it. Moltissimi saluti

Babbo

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), [?9] August 1934

Spa

MS. Clive Hart

This looks as if I had sciatica. Just spoke with Matisse. He is now doing an Eolus plate but I am to meet him in Paris in September. By the way, my new address is 7 rue Edmond Valentin Paris VII (tel. Inval: 50:38) am now going to continue my repose

J.J.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 13 August 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgique

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I meant to write you a much longer letter than this but am rushing it off for I have a fit of ague for the past 24 hours and my eyelids are thick and smeared with protective salve. Must leave this pretty but all-too-humid spa for drier Luxembourg. But write here. I’ll get it.

I thought Matisse’s ideas would interest you. When sending back Leon’s letter tell me what you think. They are pretty much the same as yours? He is to ring me up from Paris today with a string of queries. O Lord, the one day I feel so shivery-shaky!

What I really want to show are the 2 enclosed letters. I thought, about 2 years ago, I had arranged through Holroyd Reece, manager of the Albatross Press, and his friend a Mr Stanley Morrison of Burns & Oates for the latter to bring out Chaucer’s A.B.C. poems with a preface by Louis Gillet and Lucia’s lettrines. B & O were to do it on a commission I being prepared to agree to pay 225 £ and to pay for the preface and its translation. I did this and waited about 4 years. No move. Then the Dutch firm who have just brought out the 4th fragment of W i P (by the way, have you it or do you want it?) offered to bring out the book without any payment from me and pay royalties. I tried to get the lettrines back so as to deliver them in July and thus catch the Xmas market. Eight months’ correspondence. Useless. Now it seems the idiots have lost the lettrines. Do you know anything of Mr Morrison? Anyway if these letters are lost I think I ought to sue them?

Urge on your publisher to bring out a cheap reprint of your book and as soon as possible. I am sure there will be a much bigger demand for it after the U.S. result. The government can still carry the case to the U.S. equivalent of the House of Lords. But I doubt it. A pity that when I win after 18 years struggle the $ drops 50%. Such is life.

Now I am going to cover myself up like the babes in the wood sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 13 August 1934

Grand Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgique

MS. Kastor

Caro figliolo: Lasciamo da parte le gravi questioni sollevate nella tua lettera. È uno spreco di tempo discuterle. Cosa fatta capo ha.

Siamo qui da quasi un mese ma comincia a fare un tempo impossibile, umido, coperto, ecc. Andremo a Lussemburgo per qualche settimana. Mama ora sta un pò meglio. Era molto esaurita perchè ha fatto tanto a Parigi per via dell’appartamento.

Ci è stato una lieve ricaduta di Lucia ma passerà presto. Però, credo che un’intervista personale col Forel, coi dottori e colle infermiere oramai s’impone prima di combinare un programma per l’inverno. Dunque gli scrissi in questo tempo e se egli non va in vacanza passeremo per Basilea a Ginevra prima di entrare di nuovo a Parigi. Ad ogni modo Lucia resterà dove si trova fino al vostro ritorno come telo promisi.

Confermo il mio dispaccio d’ieri suggerito da Leone. Ma anche se questo trasferimento s’effettua in tutto o in parte la mia intenzione a proposito resta invariata. Per spiegare il panico di Leone bisognerebbe vedere i giornali europei al riguardo degli stati uniti. In questo mondo tutti questi si vogliono un bene di Dio.

Ho avuto una risposta dal Sig. Pugh a Dublino. E fra qualche settimana spero avere una serie di 6 fotografìe genuine che si possono sostituire alle fotografie attuali. Matisse mi ha telefonato stamane da Parigi per avere certi dettagli. Gliene diedi e devo incontrarlo a Parigi fra 5 settimane.

Incoraggiati dal esito delle cose in America (ohibo! 18 anni di lotta, vittoria finale ed … il dollaro perde 50% del suo valore all’estero) gli editori inglesi si sono decisi a far stampare e pubblicare quanto prima una prima edizione di 1000 e 100 firmati a 30/– e 3 ghinee risp., poi in ’35 3000 a 15 scellini ed in ’36 edizione illimitata a 8½ scellini.

Qui termino la prima partita della mia lettera dove si tratta di sbarazzare il terreno delle faccende più materiali e continuerò domattina. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, [Mid-August 1934]

[Vervins]

MS. Kastor

This spring is called after the famous Dublin warrior (the iron duke) because it is so ‘ferruginous’. Souppault was expelled from Germany for his articles. Gillet left of his own accord. S is now apparently in dear old Vienna where the dear waltzes come from. I suppose the Vails are there for a holiday too. I chose Spa. Everyone in Paris ‘spat’ when I spoke of it. Talk of La Juive and Fécamp and still this mother of many gentler daughters can hold her own easily against them. (Says he!)

[Unsigned]

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [Mid-August 1934]

[Vervins]

MS. Cornell

Sir Arthur W. was never here but the strongest of the ferruginous springs is called after him the Duc de Fer. We may go on to Luxembourg for a week. We are within an hour or so’s train ride of Aix-la-Chapelle where Charlemagne is buried and Cologne. But I dislike going over the border even on a half-day motor coach trip. I wish everyone was as good humoured and as good tempered as me and you. Don’t go to Austria for your holidays whatever you do.

Jim

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 21 August 1934

Grand Hotel Brasseur, Luxembourg

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: This is only business. Here are 3 groups of letters.

1) Cerf: In case the govt intends to take the case to the Supreme Court would it not be well to take the active side now. If Judge Manton is ‘notorious’ why not direct public attention to the grave judicial error he made (at least so I think) in calling out page, chapter and verse of the book in an open court. If a publisher had used similar tactics in advertising his wares what would this judge have said of him? I think you ought to see Colm anyhow.

Nyon: We are to go on there in a week. I shall not make any changes till you return but it is about time I knew what is going on. I have besides an 8-page letter from Lucia, received today. I will send this on if I can read it or find anyone who can. My wife can read some parts. It is scribbled in pencil. Lucia seems to sit by the window all day. This too is the second ‘titre d’essai’ in the way of injections ‘à par hasard’. How many more.

Lettrines·. It is the opinion of Gillet, Jolas and Budgen that there is something sinister behind this ‘loss’. Reece was extremely put out by Cerf’s move in publishing Ulysses in the U.S. and then tried to do a little ‘gun-running’—which failed. I can have the written opinion of Van der Pyl and Gillet (2 of the foremost French art critics) of Matisse (who admires her work very much) of Fernand Leger and of J-E Blanche. Unfortunately no press notice of her cover etc for my fragment appeared in the English press because all the available copies were sold out before its publication and Faber and Faber or Feebler and Fumbler did not circulate the 35 press copies because they did not want to be bothered by requests for copies they could not supply.

I fully expect to hear that I am wrong and perhaps I am too. Please return all these letters carefully to Léon.

I am glad you are all so well and sunburned. I am at present attending night school where they teach ’em how to make pothooks. After which I take out a course of lectures in political science and European history and military strategy. Then I am doing a correspondence to learn how to send perfectly clear straightforward transatlantic cablegrams.

This is a lovely quiet rose-growing part of dirty old Europe so we shall probably leave it tonight or tomorrow.

I thank you for the cabled money. It is in Paris.

As a result of the U.S. court’s decision the English publisher, egged on by his countless lawyers, crawled out with a project for immediate publication (the one I suggested a year ago) and is bucking up his shirtsleeves for a splendid stand. These are fine fellows when you get to know them after 30 years.

In addition to S’s daughter and Gillet’s son-in-law Mrs Bailly’s son is dead after 3 days of ‘fièvre cérébrale’. I hope after this 3rd victim the only allbones will take a nice long holiday on the Styx riviera.

O won’t we have a merry time, drinking whisky, beer and wine, on Coronation, Coronation Day!

Good night, dear children. Nighty night, everybody

Babbo

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 28 August 1934

Grand Hotel Monney, Montreux (Suisse)

MS. Kastor

Caro figliolo, Le lettere qui accluse devono essere rimesse a volta di corriere a Leon. Come vedi l’edizione inglese sta per salpare.

Pregai Forel di preparare Lucia per la nostra visita. Egli disse di no, che avrebbe (lui) un’intervista con noi soli prima. Mi disse dunque di venire domenica alle 2£ alla sua villa Hautes Rives, Lucia essendo alla sua Les Eglantines e che ad allontanarla ci penserebbe lui come voleva parlare con noi prima di acconsentire ad un incontro. Arriviamo alle 2£ alla casa di Forel. Mama vede subito piantata sull’erba davanti la porta, Lucia. Mama mi dice: Entriamo presto prima che ne veda. E fila dentro. Io seguo come posso, l’atrio essendo pieno di gente. Mi credevo salvo ma sento la voce di Lucia gridare: Babbo! Babbo! Ed un momento dopo era addosso a me, abbracciandomi e singhiozzando. La calmai e poi essa inseguì mama. Io, allora, furibondo lanciavo una filza di moccoli contro un dottore che mi stava vicino. Sembra che avevano detto a Lucia che venivo alle 2½. Che cosa pensate voi di questa storiella.

Il resto segue.

Mama trovò Lucia molto bene, il viso più tondo, i capelli non più grigi ecc. Era molto affettuosa con mama, baciandola ecc. Povera e cara figliola!

Basta per oggi. Ti dirò le mie impressioni quando la rivedrò domani. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

Dear Helen and Stevie Many greetings to yiz!

Babbo

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From ALLEN LANE to RALPH PINKER, 29 August 1934

John Lane The Bodley Head Limited, Vigo Street, London, W.1

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Pinker In reply to your letter of August 28th and, as promised on the telephone to-day, I am writing to put the exact position with regard to this proposed first publication of Joyce’s ULYSSES here before you.

We have, as you know, taken several opinions from barristers and others in authority on the probable result of publication here. This has, in addition to the time involved, cost us a not inconsiderable sum of money. Having decided that there was no possibility of getting a definite opinion as to whether there would be a prosecution or not, we then attempted to find a printer who would undertake the work.

We were unsuccessful and, in order to get around this, we have had to form a separate company to undertake the printing. This, in order to make it strictly legal, has necessitated preparing Articles of Association and I should think that our fees on this alone will certainly not be less than thirty guineas.

Then we feel that for safety’s sake the only way in which we can produce the book in the first instance will be in a strictly limited edition at not too low a price. As I explained to you on the ’phone to-day, the number we print will have to be large enough to be able to refer to it at a future date should an objection be raised to a subsequent larger edition and small enough to ensure that there would not be many copies lying around in booksellers’ shops for any length of time after publication. We feel that the number to be aimed at is between 1000 and 1500 copies and the length of the work, together with the words of appreciation from prominent literary figures and the report of the two American cases, will not be far short of 1000 pages. This being the case, I cannot think that it is conceivably possible for us to show a profit on this first publication taking into consideration:

(a) our legal expenses.

(b) the expenses of formation of the new printing company

(c) the very large composition bill we shall have to face

(d) the author’s advance of £200 which will have to be, for the purpose of our accounting, worked out over this first printing.

In addition to this, as we will not be able to bring out another edition for 12 months from the original date of publication, we shall have either to make stereos from the standing type or pay rent on it for that period. This, as you will realise on a book of this length, will mount up to a considerable sum.

In these circumstances I do think that we should let the present royalty, as stipulated in our contract, stand, the only alternative being that we should have to issue it in the first instance in an unlimited edition which, in my opinion, would be fatal to the prospects of the book in this country. Yours sincerely,

Allen Lane

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 2 September 1934

Hôtel Richemond, Geneve

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: We hope you have quite recovered from your accident. When are you likely to be back in Zurich or are you there already? I wish we could meet you in order to discuss our great difficulty with you. We found Lucia after 7 months of the clinic almost on the verge of collapse. Utter despair. The doctor says after all that time he can make no diagnostic. They are helpless in the case. The only hold she seems to have on life is her affection for us. She is under restraint, that is, her windows are barred, and she is always surveillée. But I feel if she stays there she will simply fade out. We are alone here, not knowing a soul. Our kind regards to you both. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 2 September 1934

Hotel Richemond, Genève

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Dear Budgen: I am here and am faced with a terribly difficult problem about Lucia. After 7 months of the clinic she seems on the verge of collapse. The doctors can make no diagnostic. Completely stumped. You can perhaps help me. Some time ago you wrote me of some case you heard of. It was a friend? and your letter spoke of a treatment for reduction of white blood corpuscles. Lucia has 4 times the normal number of these. They say there must be a source of infection. They have put her to tests for syphilis, tuberculosis, glands, etc., but the result is always the same, negative. If this seat of infection could be found and treated they think the battle might turn. If you have time drop me a line and give me any details you know of. With friendly greetings sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I note that your royal reader has been and gone and engaged his royal self with a Greek Princess. Please arrange for the removal of the six of the blood royal who stand between him and the throne to enable you and me to become fashionable awfurs.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 5 September 1934

Hotel de la Paix, Genève

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Thanks for prompt reply. Lucia’s condition is called leucocytosis. Is that the same as F’s friend. I hope he is not away on leave. Very likely he is. Was a high altitude part of the treatment. If so why have these doctors kept her down by the lake? At the end of 4 years they are as much in the dark as ever. No, there is no sign of her lettrines.

[Unsigned]

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 7 September 1934

Hotel de la Paix, Geneve

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: In case there is a hitch in the negotiations between Drs Forel and Loy, to whom I am trying with Forel’s full approval to transfer her, I must have some reserve. Here is a wire of advice from my friend Léon. Can you get me the correct name and address of this doctor who is evidently a psychiatre

I received a long and very friendly letter from Mrs Fleiner giving me the name of the Z’ch doctor who is an authority on blood diseases. It is Prof Näggeli. But this of course is the purely physical side.

I was advised at Nyon not to speak of the Davos suggestion for some time yet Thanks anyhow sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 8 September 1934

Hotel de la Paix, Geneve

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen, I got a long and very friendly letter from Mrs Fleiner of which I will write you when I have made the inquiries it involves.

Can I ask you to do me a pressing favour?

I received Lucia’s lettrines this morning from those bunglers. At once wired to my Dutch publisher who is to do them (he did my last fragment). He was leaving for London and wired me to send them there to ‘Basil Street Hotel’. This address seems to me rather queer so I shall send them registered to you, writing him at the same time that you will hand them to him personally. Show him your book. I am telling him of it. His name is Carl ver Hulst. I want the lettrines out in time for the Xmas market, if possible. Tell me what you think of them. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

PS. Could you ring up Miss Weaver and let her see the lettrines as you are on your way to deliver them?

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 22 September 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen, Many thanks for your kind and prompt action. I have brought Lucia here. She is in Meyer’s private clinic. Prof Naeggeli (the blood specialist) saw her today and as soon as he has finished his examination I will write again. What will be your address in the midi and from when? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.W. PUGH, 22 September 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Pugh

Dear Mr Pugh: Many thanks for sending me so promptly the photographs which are now in New York. Please let me know what I owe you for them. I am glad you liked the little fragment I asked my British publisher to send you. Unkind people tell me it sounds just as well if read backwards. But the designs, I think, are very charming. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 September 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

Dear Miss Weaver: Have any notices of Lucia’s designs appeared in the press? Messrs Feebler and Fumbler didn’t send out any press copies as they sold the whole edition out at once and didn’t want to be bothered with more requests. But I made the Dutch publisher send them out a few weeks ago all the same. It took me 9 months to get back the others. But they cannot be out by Xmas. Your doleful comment on my announcement of the English edition of Ulysses is comprehensible but apart from the printers Messrs Lane now say they have had to consult so many lawyers, solicitors, bailiffs, R.C’s, J.P’s etc they feel very strongly I should not ask for the royalty stipulated in the contract. Pinker feels that he feels the same way as they do. And my suggestion that a verbatim reprint of the two U.S. legal decisions in my favour (i.e. 3 judges for, 1 against) should be printed in the English edition is discountenanced by M.S. & Co who cannot see any point in the suggestion as of course it would not have the tiniest weeniest particle of influence on the superb type of British Solon who never never will be etc. etc.

Thanks for the book calling my attention to the excellence of the juice of the grape. The best seller who wrote it never had a more ardent disciple than I. But alas not even scraped carrots can solve the dreadful problem which for years has involved me and now confronts me under a bewildering aspect…. I brought Lucia here to be seen by Prof. Naeggeli the best blood specialist in all Europe, they say. Perhaps he can cure her physically. She is not at all anaemic…. The poor child is just a poor girl who tried to do too much, to understand too much. Her dependence on me is now absolute and all the affection she repressed for years pours itself out on both of us. Minerva direct me….

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From PAUL LÉON to RALPH PINKER, 25 September 1934

27, rue Casimir-Périer (VIIe)

Dear Mr Pinker: I have been so busy since my return that it is only to-day that I am able to answer the letter from your office dated September the 19-th.

I am pleased that it was a misunderstanding due I think to the wording of Messrs Lane’s letter. When I wrote to you I had also on view an increased royalty for the limited edition their reply seemed to me to suggest not any royalty at all.

However as things stand now I will agree to the royalty according to the contract i.e. 15% for the limited edition too. But I think we can insist on the extra payment for the signatures. You will understand that it is no easy job for Mr Joyce to sign anything and this extra work should be remunerated. The price I quoted 7/6 is not extraordinary and it makes barely £50.-.- additionally. I hope you will obtain them.

I do not want to boast but confidentially I think I will be able to obtain an appreciation of ULYSSES by the greatest living legal authority in England, an authority with which every British judge will have to count. This will be done as favour for a friend of mine but it will be understood that it will be possible to use it as evidence. If I do get it I will be very pleased. But do not say anything yet to Messrs Lane, as I am not certain yet.

Finally there is another point. From my calculation I dare say that Random House owes us a few hundred dollars which were due 60 days after the 1-st of June. Could you very delicately point the matter out to them? But please be very delicate about it and if possible take the blame—if any—upon yourself. They have been exceedingly nice about the royalty and at my request sent 8.000 in advance a few weeks ago, so I would not like to press them. But if you could mention that going through your books you found the accounts not settled for the end of June, it would seem natural and would not involve either Mr Joyce or myself. The amount due on the sales of 33.200 (which was the figure you mentioned as far as I remember) should be almost 900$ minus whatever expenses there may have been (cable—copies).

Acting on your advice a Mr Vernon Barker (Tower House, Devonshire Place, Eastbourne) has applied for permission to publish for Hungarian circulation in an Anthology Araby from Dubliners. I think he should apply to the Albatross who have the continental rights. There will not be any difficulty on the part of Mr Joyce. Sincerely yours,

Paul Léon.

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 16 October 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

Dear Giorgio and Helen: Thanks for your wire on the 8th. We and Jolas drove to Rapperswil for tea and then round the lake. At night I gave a dinner in the Kronenhalle to the Gideons [sic] and Mr and Mrs Rosenbaum. He is a Russo-Swiss lawyer. A 30-year wedding should be called a ‘findrinny’ one. Findrinny is a kind of white gold mixed with silver….

I was so overjoyed to see that you are now at last doing things on the cheap and having glueplate lunches. After years my teachings and preachings have borne fruit. But the good work is only begun. I am sending you something even better. It is a small cube of Maggi’s Allerleigemüslisuppe. You take off the wrapper and let the square-inch cube drop into a ten gallon copper washing pot filled with inexpensive water. Leave it to boil gently for an hour asking the local policeman to have an eye to it and to stir it every five minutes with his truncheon. Then take off your boots and stockings and put some soot over your face and go out carrying a large sack. Then go round to the back door of the convent of S. Vincent de Paul and pull the bell which is marked Paupers. When the lay brother opens the door tell him about the Maggi suppe. Address him as Monsignor and he will be so flattered that in half a minute he will be gone and back again with an armful of bits of hard crusty bread left over by the community. Thank him, calling him Your Holiness. Take this bread home and after having washed and scrubbed it well hammer the pieces and drop them into the pot of now roaring soup. Do not forget to thank the policeman and allow him to dip his truncheon in the soup and lick it. Remember to call him Policeman Esquire not Mr Policeman as people who have not been to a University sometimes do. Then wash and dry yourselves and allow the soup to cool. Then take a bowl of it and two spoons and eat it and the bread very slowly, saying: Every little bimbo has a big babbo but no little bimbo has such a good big babbo as our good big babbo. Eat a bowl a day and the potful ought to last till the middle of next month. If you leave before then send out cards to your friends and let them have a spoonful each.

I hope you like N.Y.

My very good handshakings to the three of you and my kind regards to the hospitable host and family.

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 20 October 1934

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris VII

Dear Huebsch: Many thanks for your prompt reply to my request. I received the two reviews safely. Would it be too much trouble to ask you to send me also 1 copy each of the issues December 1929 and January 1930? I enclose 2$ which is rather short payment, I am afraid.

The article in the review you sent is a very interesting one, full of misstatements (beginning with the mention of an imaginary birthplace of mine) but its chief interest lies in the fact that the writer by his own account was hidden for several months from the British military police by my cousins in Dublin and afterwards wrote to me requesting a signed copy of Ulysses which was sent to him and for which he wrote me a letter of thanks. Later, hearing that I had been in correspondence with the late Otto Kahn over my friend Sullivan the Franco-Irish tenor for whom I was trying to secure a cachet at the Metropolitan the writer of the articles wrote to me saying he would like very much to see Otto Kahn’s letter. I sent it to him and he returned it saying that it had been a great sensation for him to have it in his hand as he had never thought he would have been privileged to see a letter by Otto Kahn. He then wrote to me asking me to chaperon his wife and his mother-in-law round Paris. En somme, tout ce qu’ily a de plus irlandais.

With all good wishes and I hope you like my daughter’s book.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 21 October 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel Bahnhofstrasse, Zürich

Dear Miss Weaver: On receipt of the news from London I told Léon to break off my contracts with Pinker and Lane as I really could not stand one of those interminable correspondences. What he wrote I don’t know but now after some more weeks consultations of process-servers and policewomen Messrs. L. write saying that they will print and publish at once and that nothing on earth will prevent them from publishing what 12 years ago nothing on earth would have induced them to publish.

I trust that the slow but steady advance of our depleted forces in this sector meets with Your Highness’s approval.

Léon managed to get leave from the French to come here for 3 days … here is a letter from Lucia…. The little hotel she speaks of in the P.S. is the place where we passed our honeymoon…. It seems to me that the attempts made by more than one person to poison her mind against me have failed and that I am in such a position that whether I go or stay I shall be blamed as the culprit. Maybe I am an idiot but I attach the greatest importance to what Lucia says when she is talking about herself. Her intuitions are amazing. The people who have warped her kind and gentle nature are themselves failures and if they smile at her remarks as those of a spoilt bourgeoise child it is because they are stupid failures into the bargain. My wife and I have seen hundreds of examples of her clairvoyance. Of course I don’t mean the juggling variety. But today we had a more than usually striking example. Some weeks ago she asked me to write to my sister Eileen, the one you met in London. I said I would write to my sister Eva to find out. A reply came from the latter dissuading Lucia from the plan of having her aunt Eileen come over here to stay with her. Dr Brunner (in whose sanatorium she is) came here to lunch. I met him after for coffee, told him of the reply and said I thought it would be well to show it to Lucia who even talked of going to Dublin, as it was shown by the reply that her aunt Eileen was not any more in Dublin but (to my great surprise) living at a rather bleak and cheap place on the Wicklow coast, called Bray (pleasant enough in summer) and that the general atmosphere of her family was not suitable. I said I believed the letter would make Lucia less [? discontented] where she was. He agreed. I handed him the letter which I had in my pocket.

A week passed.

Now here is a bit of our conversation with Lucia last Friday. (She had asked me if Eva had replied at our last visit and I said yes and that I had given the letter to Dr Brunner who would give it to her.) Lucia, turning to me abruptly: So it was all an invention of yours about Eva’s letter?

I: No. I always tell you the truth. Did Dr Brunner not give you the letter?

Lucia: No.

I: He forgot it then. I’ll ring him up.

Lucia: He is a bit gaga like all his psychiatries. Eileen is a bit loony. So am I, they say. I think it would do me good to be with her, keeping house. Not necessarily in Dublin. In Bray, say. It must be very pretty in Bray.

I: Yes. In summer.

After the visit and we had come back to Zurich.

My wife: Lucia must be either lying to us. Dr B. must have given her the letter. Or she does not know what she is saying. How else could she know Eileen is in Bray? Nobody ever spoke to Lucia of Bray. She can scarcely have known that such a place exists.

I: I wonder is it possible she divined it without having seen the letter. B. can hardly be so forgetful as not have thought of it in ten days, however.

This morning on the Telephone.

I: Will you please send me back the letter from my sister I gave you if my daughter has already seen it as I want it myself to reply to?

Dr B.: You didn’t give me any letter from your sister. You gave me a copy of prof. Naeggeli’s opinion which I did not show her as it would upset her.

I: So she hasn’t seen the letter.

Dr B.: Not from me unless you showed it to her or left it here by mistake. Do you know where it is?

I: No. I thought you had it.

Dr B.: Probably it is in your pocketbook from where you took N’s opinion unless you left it out here and she saw it.

I searched my pocket book. No trace of the letter but an hour ago after a long search found it under a pile of correspondence in a drawer in this room in the hotel….

Excuse scrawl. Am writing with a fountain pen, lying on a bed.

We don’t want to write But, by Jingo, when we do.

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 29 October 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Ebbi tre giorni o quattro il seguente dispaccio ‘George presented your letter have just met him and sweet wife Lily and I send you friendliest greetings we all drank to your good health will do everything possible’.

Dunque! La sua protezione dovrebbe esserti utile anche se la situazione è troppo avanzata. Sarebbe per più tardi. Ad ogni modo non dimenticare di ringraziarlo a nome mio. Sono contento anche che hai visto Sandbourn. Pare che sia un uomo che veramente sa qualchecosa del canto come George Pioche a Parigi.

Scribacchio questo per raggiungere l’Ile de France e cercherò di scrivere a voi due domani in inglese.

Per il cinema sta bene, suppongo. I nostri piani sono come i vostri sempre nell’aria. Jung mi disse giorni fa mediante il suo assistente che ha visto Lucia di nuovo dopo un mese ed è molto incerto sul da farsi. Disse: il padre deve capire che interverrò se lui lo desidera ma che un intervento psicoanalitico in questo caso particolare è molto difficile e potrebbe anche cagionare un peggioramento definitivo. Desidera vedermi mercoledì. Questo appunto è sempre stato il parere del padre sopradetto. Jung personalmente fece una buona impressione su me. Credo che abbia avuto molti successi con altri casi. Or ora il dott. Brunner mi telefonò che Lucia era benissimo, è stata fuori oggi in automobile e giocava al bigliardo. Speriamo continui così.

Hai cantato per MacCormack e Pitt Sandbourn? Non intercalare l’acca nelle vocali ‘cuo-h-ore’ ecc. Hai le vocali naturali di un italiano ma appoggia bene sulle consonanti iniziali. Pensa alle parole, ti supplico. Il canto non é che un linguaggio alato. Quella canzone ‘Philadelphia’ dovrebbe essere cantata come un contadino, grosso e lordo, cammina. Un tipo che va piano e va lontano. Antheil ha perso l’occasione della sua vita quando non scrisse l’opera Cain di Byron per Sullivan. Forse non ne era capace. Ma salutalo da parte mia. Non più andrà farfallone rumoroso ma mi è stato sempre simpatico.

Corro correndo drio la nave. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

Salutami anche quella buona pasta americana che è Colm e sua moglie che spero stia meglio.

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 30 October 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Giorgio and Helen: Thanks for the long letter. We are glad you are enjoying yourselves and seeing so many people. If it is too trying on the nerves what about a game of billiards? Can anything be more tranquil than the village green with two white ducks and a red turkeycock strutting about? What fun when they butt each other or one falls into one of the little corner ponds and has to be fished out! Antony and Cleopatra used to play this game according to W. Shakespeare. Don’t think I mean skittles. That is only the American form of European billiards.

I have no news to give because we never see anyone except the Giedions once or twice a week. So you had better send us news all the time. We had to buy winter clothing. I bought a cheap fur overcoat in which I look like the man that stands outside the booth of the bearded lady. We lunch in the vegetarian restaurant and usually dine at the Kronenhalle. Today we lunched in Cerutti’s, and, shocked at my pigeon’s appetite, the girl insisted on my eating a Blutwurst or a Leberwurst. This is about the most exciting thing which has happened to us for some time….

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 20 November 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: This in reply to your letter of 27 ult. We were glad to hear all the exciting news and we want more. Giorgio should take some valerian before he sings. Do not be downcast if a lull follows. It is often like that and you cannot always rely on people’s pushing. But there was no doubt in my mind after 2 February last that Giorgio has a firstclass voice. I don’t want to criticize or advise you from here but are you not neglecting Pitt Sandborn. The press is very important and S. says he is the best critic of voices in America. When I hear of some definite result I think I shall write to MacCormack thanking him. I shall write to Giorgio separately.

We have no news. As reports from Kusnacht are favorable we contemplate going back to Paris though I don’t like leaving Lucia alone for the Xmas. We tried for a small furnished flat here to tide us over but could not find one. My flat in Paris is of course only waiting to be occupied. The expenses are very high. Kusnacht is like Prangins 7000 a month and Jung’s bill for October was 3600. So hurry up as I want the loan of a million.

Ask Colm to write to me. How is Mrs Colm? Did you see Soupault? Have you taken a flat as you spoke of doing? Mrs Jolas has not heard from you. The photos of Stevie are not good. Take a few more. I should like you to have a group taken. You don’t say what those radio stations pay. I am sorry to hear of MacSwiney’s death. He seemed to me a loyal and straightforward henchman of MacCormack. I gave him my ALP disc and he promised me McC’s record of Come into the Garden, Maud. Can you get this over there?

You are having a great honeymoon over there, it seems. Send me a programme if you go to the opera. Is it opera? I hope you will have a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner next Thursday, is it? We are arranging to have the scar on Lucia’s face taken away and covered by a plastic surgeon here. This at her own insistent request. They say this is a good sign. The 7 November was the last day for the U.S. govt to appeal against the Circuit Court. Did they? Léon sent a cable to Cerf who did not reply, I understand that the English edition is being printed. The Gilberts have gone to London for some months to save money as Gilbert is terribly afraid the British Overseas Empire is going to capsize. Otto Kahn told me the Irish element in U.S. counts for nothing culturally. Have you not tried some Jewish melomaniacs?

Please help me to draw up the invitation list for my approaching birthday. As everybody is everywhere I must arrange for a special aeroplane service. However, you can send the presents in the usual way. Please inform all your rich relatives about the date. Yes, that is a good idea. I am a little tired of wearing starched collars and I would like to try a diamond necklace.

Did Jacques-Emile Blanche ever exhibit my portrait over there? I think it’s awful except for the splendid tie I had on. As you, Helen, write all the time about politics you ought to buy Slocombe’s book Crisis in Europe. In it he foretold the murder of the King of Servia. We met Huddleston in Geneva. He is afraid to cross in a ferryboat over the lake.

Well, talk about scrambled eggs but what about this epistle.

Tante belle cose and my regards to Mr Kastor

Babbo

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 21 November 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Spero che qualche cosa di concreto sia avvenuta dopo la tua ultima lettera. Però, come scrissi ieri, non bisogna illudersi. È certo che l’appoggio di McCormack ti gioverà molto forse soltanto per il reclame. Quanto agli ufficiali della squadra irlandese (la quale, del resto, è stata ben battuta dai cileani tranne il cavallo dal fausto nome Blarney Castle montato dal capitano Ahearn) essi saranno buoni giudici delle parti deretane di un puledro ma in fatto dell’arte canora Dio ci liberi. Dovresti pensare anche alla piazza inglese che paga bene ed ha sempre bisogno di buone voci sopratutto per gli amatori che si parano alle feste musicali di Leeds, Sheffield, Norwich ecc. Ho una lettera di Beecham a Lionel Powell il più grande impresario di Londra. A proposito feci la conoscenza ieri del ex-regisseur dell’opera di Berlino (espulso perchè ebreo) ed egli sarà molto interessato nel tuo caso. Il tuo timor panico passerà probabilmente nel momento del tuo battesimo di fuoco alla ribalta. L’idea di debuttare per mezzo del microfono non mi dice gran che ma meglio là che affatto. Ti prego però di stare attento a quel vizio dell’acca. Kieppura era qui venerdì scorso. Pessima scuola, comportamento ignobile, gusto poco nulla, ma una bella voce intonata ed estesa, facile e naturale. Ma qualche ciucco [sic] gli ha insegnato il canto: ‘forma-h-a diviná’ ‘misti-h-ico serto’ ecc. E ciò durante tutta la serata. Figurati! Entusiasmo sprecato. Era accompagnato dalla Tonhalle alla stazione da uno stuolo di ammiratori o piuttosto ammiratrici che circondava il suo Rolls e cantò il suo congedo dai gradini. Si torna all’antico davvero. Stasera andremo a sentire la nuova opera di Respighi La Campana Sommersa basata sul dramma di Hauptmann.

Sorriderai se ti dico che siamo stati, mama ed io, ‘a scuola’ come diceva il sig Tramontana. Vale a dire all’Università, ma si, è proprio nei banchi degli studenti nel bel mezzo della classe. Una volta per sentire un teologo ed un’altra per sentire il prof. Fleiner parlare dello stato tedesco. È il rettore. Eravamo da lui a pranzo ed a cena. È un vecchio erudito, dicono, ma gagliardo, un amico di Budgen della cui intelligenza pare avere una altissima opinione. E chi si vede accanto a noi sul banco ad ascoltare anche lui? Paul Suter che dopo aver fabbricato i dadi Krassi a Winterthur fino alle 5 del pomeriggio va all’università alle 6½. Anche lui è in cuori coi Fleiner. E tutti questi professori attempatelli suonano il pianoforte o cantano tenore. E tutti sembrano apprezzare molto il vino di Fendant ed un buon piatto di Hasenpfeffer.

Non so se credi alla chiaroveggenza. Ad ogni modo ascolta ascolta [sic] questo dialogo e notane la data 25 9mbre. Luogo: Kussnacht.

Lucia: Pensavo tutto il giorno a MacCormack. Perchè è stato fatto conte invece di te. Tu sei molto più grande. È ingiusto. Pensavo di scrivere al papa.

Io: Attenti alla grammatica.

Lucia: È un vecchio rimbambito. Ma sul serio fino a quando durerà l’ostilità fra te e l’Irlanda?

Io: A me lo domandi?

Lucia: Voglio riconciliarvi io. È ora che qualche grande personalità irlandese venga a stenderti la mano dopo tutto ciò che hai fatto.

La mattina seguente alle 7 il portiere dell’albergo mi portò il dispaccio, la prima e sola comunicazione ch’io abbia mai ricevuto da lui, ed il giorno dopo l’Irish Times di Dublino pubblicò un lungo articolo abbastanza favorevole sull’ultimo mio frammento, il primo articolo su me apparso nella stampa irlandese da venti anni a questa parte. Te lo mando. Mostralo a Colm. Non dissi nulla di ciò a Lucia perchè non voglio incoraggiarla nei sui sogni. Ma, prescindendo dalla profezia, le parole stesse sono fulminanti. Ella ha delle volte la sapienza del serpente e l’innocenza del colombo.

Non trovo qui Vanity Fair. Mi riconobbe il pizdrul quando vide la fotografia? Suppongo che parla con accento americano. Se così è (in malora lo stylo!) pieghiamo il capo. Ti saluto, o giovincello!

La signora Giedion lässt Sie grüssen. Mama è dal barbiere. Sta per nevicare. Andrò da Huguenin e mangerò quello che i toscaneggianti chiamano un panino gravido. Coraggio e buona fortuna! Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 28 November 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Oigroig and Neleh: Since everything’s upside down I address you thusly. I have just spoken with Mrs E. Jolas of Neuilly s/ Seine who tells me she had such a nice long letter from you and that you have decided that she is to have the privilege of removing all the articles of furniture from the premises occupied by you in borough number given of the city of Paris. She was almost frantic with delight as she babbled over the telephone, breaking into snatches of gipsy music, yodelling, clacking her heels like Argentina and cracking her fingers. It is a perfect godsend for her. Poor Mrs E. Jolas. For months and months she has been going around asking everybody to give her some sort of light work such as snuffing candles or putting salt in the saltcellars, anything. But no one could help her. So she used to lie listlessly in a hammock all day and had begun to think there was no hope left. Now your wonderful letter has arrived and it has made her the happiest woman in all France today. She said to me ‘Dearest J. Joyce, won’t you give this little girl a great big hand?’ and I replied ‘Sure thing!’. You know I come of a most musical family and there is nothing I enjoy so much as running up and down six flights of stairs with a cottage piano on my shoulders. The Paris-Orleans line has run an extension up to your door and is placing 2 powerful locomotives and fourteen trucks at your disposal. Mrs E. J and myself will be as gleeful as two spoiled children. She will wear a white pinafore and a big blue sash and I cricket flannels. Have we cold feet about removals? No, sir! Do we put service before self as all good and true rotarians should? You have said it. So we’re off at once.

Goodbye, Zürich, I must leave you

Though it breaks my head to [illegible]

Something tells me I am needed

In Paree to hump the beds.

Bump! I hear the trunks a tumbling

And I’m frantic for the fray.

Farewell, dolce far niente!

Goodbye, Zürichsee!

 ® 

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE MS, Kastor, 6 December 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

Dear Giorgio and Helen: This being San Nicolò I hope you have given Stevie something in our name. You are too far away to send him anything. Here are some clippings for you. There is a good cavatina or cantabile for bass in the first act of Haendel’s Saul ‘Wie beb’ ich vor Zorn’. Giorgio ought to learn this bass part. It is very dramatic and Saul always is in a deuce of a temper about one thing or another. In fact he never expresses any sentiment except sceptical mistrust and bile. The bass named Tapolet was quite good and the baritone named Book excellent. He sings Samuel.

It is stifling Föhn weather and I have an unpleasant attack of tracheitis. We have almost decided to have Lucia’s scar removed here next week. The removal of your things has begun. It is quite a work in progress too. The very greatest, nay the most religious, care will of course be taken of the vacuum cleaner and the icebox. I am in a hurry to catch the boat as usual.

Herewith best wishes for your forthcoming marriage anniversary which we shall confirm by cable. Tante belle cose

Babbo

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 17 December 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Miss Weaver: First, a report to G.H.Q. All is quiet on the Western Front. In spite of the pressure of the puritan and Irish Catholic mob in the U.S. the Attorney General would not risk a third legal defeat in the Supreme Court. I won by default and the matter is at an end. Next, please.

It took only 18 years to do this but I presume in spite of McAlmon that hoc erat in vobis…. Lord knows what bungling is ahead. But O the boredom of once again fighting an opponent who never knows when he is beaten and always is…. But it is of no matter, for (1st) one copy of Ulysses, much thumbed, is quite enough to go round the whole I.F.S. (2nd) I confidently expect to be ruined mentally, morally and materially by the 17 March next. S. Patrick’s day.

I don’t think you can have any idea of what my position is. I am trying to work … I am urged to go away but it is very risky. The idea is to efface myself, and also Jung or someone else to get contact with Lucia. I did for 7 months…. Result, almost irreparable. Lucia has no trust in anyone except me and she thinks nobody else understands a word of what she says. But she also profits by my indulgent character….

How act in such a case. On the 25th October last we visited her or did I tell you this before? I will give it in dialogue. Of course it was in Italian.

L. I have been thinking all day of John MacCormack. It is unjust. Why is he a count, a millionaire etc.? I thought of writing to the pope.

I. Be careful of your grammar. He is a learned man.

L. He’s an old dotard. But it is unjust. How long will your country refuse to recognise what you have done.

I. How long indeed?

L. I want to reconcile you. It is time for some great person of your country to come forward and hold out a hand to you and to us.

I. Hear, hear.

On the morning of the 26th at 7 a.m. the hotel page brought me the enclosed cable sent by MacCormack on the 25th. I know him for about 32 years and have never had a line or word from him before by mail, cable or phone. On the 27th appeared in the Irish Times a long and not unfriendly article on W.I.P. the first in 20 years I think….

All the few friends we have here leave Zürich on the 21 or 22. We shall not have a soul to join us. Jolly after 30 years. And word comes from U.S. that Giorgio and Helen are not coming back perhaps till summer, perhaps till etc. And to crown all I have yesterday and today the start of a colitic attack. Yet what I am trying to write is the most absurdly comic thing in the book. Eliot is dusting pews in an Anglo-Catholic church round your corner. Ask him to have an A-C mish-mash mass said for the three Joyses.

I believe, hope and am cheered to know that you are extremely well.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 18 December 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I sent you today Matisse’s drawings. Will you and Sargent please look at them and tell me what you think of them? And send them back for I have to return them.

I simply cannot write letters. We have been here in Z’ch 3 months. Näggeli is stumped: can make nothing of the case physically. Psychically she is supposed to be in the hands of Jung. If anything lies ahead of us except ruin I wish someone would point it out. The few friends we have leave Z’ch on the 22 so we shall pass our 30th Xmas together alone or 31st rather. The doctors say: go away. When we try to go she throws a fit or something and so we hang on. Giorgio and Helen are still in N.Y. I am trying to write something for the next number of transition. You can imagine how easy it is.

We saw the Fleiners a few times—a very charming old couple. I told him I got the idea of the technique of the newest fragment from one of his lectures I was at. I won the final appeal in the U.S. Schluss.

I hope Sargent is better and the weather too. Give him and Mrs Sargent our kindest remembrances.

And I hope you yourself are enjoying the very best of health and Mrs Budgen.

As for us we are two poor Godforsaken gipsies on the roadside.

A happy Xmas nevertheless to all of you Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. Perhaps you could send a line to Lucia. She never gets a letter. Sanatorium Dr Brunner, Kusnacht, bei Z’ch.

We have a friend in Vence to whom you could give our news and regards. His name is Bruce, Villa des Chardons. Scotch of course. I hope he is well.

 ® 

To ALFRED BERGAN, 20 December 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan, This is the only way I can invite you to drink to both our healths this Christmas so please let it pass.

We are still detained here and cannot return to Paris till after New Year. I hope you are in good health and spirits. Giorgio (my son) gave his first concert over the radio in New York a week ago and he too will not be back in Paris till the Spring. MacCormack says he has a magnificent bass. How glad Pappie would have been of this. There have been voices on both sides of our family for several generations, but nobody ever really made a career out of it. McGuckin used to say Pappie had the best tenor voice in Ireland in his time. You never heard him at his best. He had a voice very like that of Jean de Reszke. We used to have merry evenings in our house, used we not?

In answer to your question. No, I am not interested in Irish Sweepstake tickets. I suppose the staircases in all the hospitals in Dublin are now made of solid gold. The only decent people I ever saw at a racecourse were the horses. The late Shah of Persia when invited by King Edward to go to Goodwood replied: I know that one horse runs quicker than than [sic] another but which particular horse it is doesn’t interest me.

With all good wishes to you for a merry Xmas and a happy New Year and with friendly remembrances sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 24 December 1934

[Zurich]

MS.  Kastor

The Croppy Boy

(Il ragazzo dai cappelli tagliati, il giovine tosato, nomignolo dato ai giovini ribelli irlandesi nel 1798 (Ninety Eight) dalla guarnigione inglesi [sic])

Good men and true in this house who dwell

To a country bouchel (boy) I pray you tell

Is the priest at home and can he be seen

I would speak a word with Father Breen,

The priest’s at home and he may be seen

Tis aisy talking with Father Breen

So just step inside until I see

If the holy father alone may be.

The youth has entered a lonely hall

What a solemn sound makes his low footfall

And the gloomy chamber is chill and bare

With a vested priest in an oaken chair.

The youth has knelt and confessed his sins

In nomine Dei the youth begins

And at mea culpa he beats his breast

And in broken murmurs confesses the rest.

I cursed three times since last Easter Day

And at masstime once I went to play

I passed the churchyard one day in haste

And forgot to pray for my mother’s rest.

I bear no hate to a living thing

But I love my country beyond the King

So bless me, father, and let me go

To die, if God has ordered it so.

The priest said nought but a rustling noise

Made the youth look up in wild surprise

And before his eyes there sat in the chair

A yeoman captain with fiery glare.

With fiery glare and with fury hoarse

Instead of a blessing he breathed a curse

’Twas a good thought boy to come here and shrive

For one short hour is your time to live.

On yonder river two tenders float

The priest’s in one if he isn’t shot

I hold this house for my lord the King

And Amen, say I, may all traitors swing!

At Geneva barracks that young man died

And at Passage they have his body laid.

Good people, who hear this in peace and joy,

Breathe a prayer, drop a tear, for the Croppy Boy.

(Questa canzone era il il cavallo da battaglia del grande basso leggiero irlandese William Ludwig. La generazione attuale l’ignora. È un nobile e semplice poema musicale, profondamente sincero e dramatico. Bisogna, quando lo canti, tenere il bilancio egualmente fra il capitano ed il giovine. L’ultima strofe si canta su un tono solenne ed impersonale. L’effetto di questra strofe, resa da una voce come la tua, è eletrizzante [sic]. Altro che I Due Granatieri e La Canzone del Volga! Non è una canzone patriottica come Wearing of the Green. Potresti cantarlo a Sheffield come a Cork. Studia ogni parola e ne farai un capolavoro)

Shule Aroon

A ḃuacailin sluinn, eiḃin, óg

(a voocalin aulin eevin oge

O young lad, pretty, pleasant, young)

bad leatan do cɼoiḋe, bad ḋeaſ do ṗóg

(broad was thy heart, sweet thy kiss,

bodh lahan dho creeye, bodh dhyas dho pogue)

(These two lines are enough for Colm to tell you the rest.

Aggiungo le parole inglesi. Ci sono decine di varie versioni di questa canzone)

I’ll dye my petticoats I’ll dye them red

And round this wide world I’ll search my bread

Till friends and foes will think me dead

Iſ go déiṫ tu mo muiɼnín ſlean

I wish I were on yonder hill

’Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill

Till every tear would turn a mill

I wish I wish I wish in vain

I wish I had my heart again

And vainly think I’d not complain.

Refrain (after each verse)

Phonetic

Shule shule shule aroon

Shule go siukar ogars shule go kewn

Mo lane gou misha ogus elya lyum

Is go dikey thoo mawoorneen slawn.

The Yellow Ale

As I was going the road one fine day,

(O the brown and the yellow ale!)

I met with a man that was no right man

(O love of my heart!)

He asked was the woman with me my daughter

(O the brown etc)

And I said that she was my married wife

(O, love etc)

He asked would I lend her for an hour and a day

And I said I would do anything that was fair.

So let you take the upper road and I’ll take the lower

And we’ll meet again at the ford of the river.

I was walking that way one hour and three quarters

When she came to me without shame.

When I heard her news I lay down and I died

And they sent two men to the wood for timber.

A board of holly and a board of alder

And two great yards of sack about me.

And but that my own little mother was a woman

I could tell you another pretty story about women

PS. Farò copiare la musica di queste tre canzone quanto prima. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

Vigilia di Ceppo 1934 Z’ch

5 ore del pomeriggio e tutti i negozi chiusi!!!!

 ® 

To LUCIA JOYCE, [About 27 December 1934]

[Zurich]

MS. S. Illinois

Cara Lucia: Curioso! Stamane arriva una cartolina di Natale da Hughes. E cos’era? La Ballynure Ballad che hai cantato ieri. Te la mando.

Eccoti anche un paio di biglietti per II Flauto Magico domenica dopopranzo.

Non era tanto male dopo tutto il nostro piccolo natale assieme, non e vero? E così si andrà da bene in meglio.

Devo scrivere una lunga lettera a Giorgio per non perdere il piroscafo che parte posdomani.

Quindi troncherò questa letterina qui. Tanto più che devo vestirmi per andare sentire I Maestri Cantori. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 27 December 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich, Switzerland

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Pazienza! Sono cose che succedono. Lascia che Stephens e MacCormack vadano verso il loro tramonto. Per te è ancora l’alba. Credo il contratempo [sic] sia dovuto in prima linea all’imbecille d’ufficiale della N.B.C. A proposito non hai fatto che cambiare l’ordine delle lettere. Banque Nationale de Crédit ed ora National Broadcasting Corporation.

Ho un appuntamento stasera coll’ex-regisseur dell’opera di Berlino ed egli metterà giù la musica delle tre canzoni già inviate. Devo scrivere a Hughes pregandolo di scrivere un accompagnamento per ‘Molly, I can’t say’ o piuttosto diciamo ‘The Quilt’. Non voglio fare questo senza una parola tua prima. Sembra che io abbia fatto un pappero telegrafando al conte papalino ma credevo che la lettera di Helen era un rimprovero.

Come canzoni per basso ti propongo Off to Philadelphia, Ruddier than the the Cherry, Angels Ever Bright and Fair (Haendel) Wie duftet doch der Flieder (la bell’aria del gelsomino di Sachs) Revenge, Timothy Cries [?], The Cruiskeen Lawn, (credo vuol dire la piccola brocca bruna) e un’ottima canzone per basso.

Madame Gautier può cantare quello che vuole. The Joyce Book per me è un grandissimo mistero. 18 artisti hanno collaborato per fare omaggio a me: e si doveva darmi il ricavo netto. Il ricavo è stato nettissimo, cioè, un nettissimo niente. Ma credo che (il caso di Darius Milhaud mi fa pensare) che anche la musica appartiene a me.

30 o 40 musicisti almeno hanno messo in musica i miei poemetti. Il migliore è Molyneux Palmer. Dopo lui Moeran e Bliss. Bright Cap del primo ti andrebbe bene per un bis.

Belle arie per voce grave nelle Melodie Irlandesi di Thomas Moore sono ‘O Ye Dead’ (cantata da Plunket Greene), Silent, O Moyle’ con accompagnamento di arpa. ‘The Time I’ve Lost in Wooing’ (per bis).

Curiosa coincidenza. Al mio primo concerto pubblico ero anche piantato in asso. Il pianista, cioè la pianista è andato via nel bel mezzo del concerto. Anche io ho cantato ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’ ed ho ricevuto esattamente 10 dollari cioè 2 ghinee come te. A proposito è scozzese quello N.B.C.! Perchè 10 $ a Dublino nel 1914 dovrebbero essere altro che 10 $ per te a Nuova York nel 1934.

Si. Colm è una brava pasta di ragazzo. Leale e senza invidia. Bisogna abituarsi a questi scacchi: quanto ne ho avuti con Sullivan! Ma va avanti. MacCormack è certo volubile ma è od era molto occupato e non ti farà del male. Un po’ di rabbia non nuoce. Quell’ufficiale della N.B.C. doveva chiudere la bocca all’ora giusta a Stephens ed a Colm i quali ti hanno fatto passare un cattivo quarto d’ora, il primo per troppa compiacenza in se stesso, l’altro per isbadatezza.

Ti manderò tutto il mio repertorio un poco alla volta. Oggi aggiungo due appunti per te.

Ballynure Ballad. Bally vuol dire città. Non so cosa significa il resto. Somiglia a un qualchecosa. Città del? È, credo, nella contea di Antrim. Ad ogni modo nella provìncia di Ulster, oggi Northern Ireland o Le Sei Contee. Gente mescolata: irlandesi, inglesi e molti scozzesi d’origine. Duri e caparbi, forti bevitori e lavoratori, ostilissimi al papa e tutte le sue pompe ed opere. ‘The 5th day of November’ è Guy Fawkes’ Day. La rima inglese suona:

Please to remember

The 5th of November

Gunpowder Treason and Plot

Infatti si brucia ancora oggidì in pubblico l’effigie di Fawkes che tentò nel regno di Giacomo 1° coll’aiuto di altri cattolici e gesuiti (?) di far saltare in aria il parlamento inglese. Il tipo che va a vedere l’orrendo fuoco di quella pira, parte in istato sincero, e torna verso sera alquanto brillo. È un bravo protestante. I due tipi dietro la siepe sono forse cattolici: od una ragazza cattolica con un protestante poco convinto. Ad ogni modo hanno una bella pazienza. Passare tutto un pomeriggio di novembre nebbioso in un fossato irlandese. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Silent, 0 Moyle: Moyle è quella parte del mare irlandese che ora si chiama il Canale di San Giorgio. Le tre figlie di Lir (Nettuno Celtico e l’origine del Re Lear di Shakespeare) furono cambiati in cigni e devono sorvolare quelle acque plumbee per secoli finché il suono della prima campana cristiana in Irlanda non rompa l’incanto. Segue domani Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 28 December 1934

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Giorgio and Helen: I have been all the afternoon with Mr Hans Curiel, ex stage director Berlin Opera now Corse Theatre here, trying to get the songs on paper amid noise and rehearsals etc. I hope they are all right. Keep the discord F# A C E against the voice singing G natural in the middle of Yellow Ale only and end the last verse of this song with the major chord, singing E (I think, have no grand piano in this bedroom).

Lucia came in and had lunch with us in the hotel on Xmas Day. Of course we had turkey and ham and plum pudding and they drank some champagne which I sipped it being the daytime. Everybody seemed to be struck by her grace and charm. She was all dressed up and powdered and perfumed. Then we went for a drive. On Boxing Day she came in again and we went into a music room in the hotel where she sang a great deal mostly all my Irish songs to my Liszt-like accompaniments. She has just sent us 2 presents for New Year, a plant of lilies for her mother and a bundle of virginia cigars for me. If you honour the diamond horseshoe with a visit please send me a programme. I hope you had a merry Xmas and that there is plenty of bicarbonate of soda in New York.

I shall try to get Curiel to put down 2 of my songs Bid Adieu and Take, O Take them Lips Away (words by Shakespeare). This latter is my own favourite.

The person who sings the Yellow Ale must be a rather elderly or even old man for the ‘no right man’ at first thinks or pretends to think she is his daughter. The phrase ‘no right man’ in Anglo-Irish means ‘eerie, inhuman’. The Irish fairies (Ir. feaɼ siḋe = men of the hills, they are supposed to be an older race who were driven to live in the hills, inside the hills, by a later comer) are not small and playful like the English ones. They are often tall and dark and usually malignant. The feminine of fairy is bean siḋe = banshee. She is a sinister spirit who follows certain Irish families. My father said she followed his mother’s family the O’Connells. She sits on a windowsill combing her hair at 3 a.m. whenever someone of the family is about to die. If the song meant what it says and what 9 out of 10 hearers will think it means (I don’t think it) how can the singer know in verse 7 all about the funeral arrangements if he died in verse 6 line 1. The widow is as economical as a lady should be. I take ‘they’ in verse 6 to be the French ‘on’ and not [illegible] the Singer and the No-Right Man. I think the singer is a brun and his wife a blondine. Hence the brown and the yellow. And perhaps the whole trouble comes from mixing one’s drinks. I think it is Mrs S. who speaks verse 4. And evidently the N.R. Man did not want her full pound of flesh or he had enough of her after 1 3/4 hours.

 ® 

1935

To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 8 January 1935

[Zurich]

MS. Kastor

Dear G and H. Here’s the Land of Saints and Sages. H. Find Ballynure in Antrim. G. Find Joyce Country in County Galway. I thought it might be useful or instructive to locate any places mentioned in any Irish songs G. sings. Is this a trick of memory. Now, only this instant, I think I forgot a verse in The Croppy Boy? Did I? How strange memory is! Anyway I write it out. It comes after ‘my mother’s rest’ Tante belle cose

Babbo

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 15 January 1935

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zürich

Dear Giorgio and Helen: Please reply as soon as possible to Lucia’s letters forwarded yesterday by Dr Baynes. She left the sanatorium yesterday, we hope for good, and is living at Villa Elite (annexe of here) 25 Stockerstrasse, behind the Tonhalle with a nurse-companion. Be sure to do this, please and send her photographs and news.

Helen, please go out and buy Cassell’s German-English, English-German Dictionary and sit down with Giorgio and study, first of all, the text of Gottfried Keller’s poem sequence Lebendig Begraben which I forward under separate cover together with the piano score for bass voice by Othmar Schoeck, autographed by the composer. I heard this [?] sung last night by the Bernese bass Fritz Loeffel (the leading bass in this country), bought the score just now and have rung up Prof. Fehr to ask O.S. to sign it for Giorgio. He is a youngish Zurich composer of about 42, principal works are lieder and two big operas Penthesilea (book by Kleist) Don Ranudo (comic). If I can judge by last night he stands head and shoulders over Stravinsky and Antheil as composer for orchestra and voice anyhow. I did not know Keller wrote this kind of gruesome-satiric semi-pious verse but the effect of it on any audience is tremendous. The singer got 8 or 10 calls. No voice but a bass could carry the text and music. He spares the singer by implanting 2 or 3 stretches of monotone recitative. The whole thing, without a break, lasts 50 minutes. Schoeck is a type rather like Beckett who gets up at 2.30 p.m. his wife says. But I hope to catch him before he falls asleep again. But he can write music all right.

Don’t forget to write to Lucia.

 ® 

To HELEN JOYCE, 18 January 1935

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: Just got your letter. First, I hope your father is by now well on the mend. Give him our best wishes. Also am glad to hear about David. As for Stevie he sounds all right at this distance. Does Mme Gautier sing bass herself and how many hundred years training are necessary before a singer can face an American public? Don’t be downhearted, my dear little children. Everyone has an uphill time at first. You said you were sending us a clipping: There is none in the envelope. If Giorgio is irritated by the article think of this. This morning I received a proposal from the London firm which is supposed to be bringing out Ulysses. They want me to compose 735 headlines for the 735 pages e.g. p. 1, ‘On the Top of the Tower’, p. 2, ‘A Morning Shave’ ‘Theological Talk’ ‘The Inner Man Satisfied’ ‘Arrival of the Milkmaid’. As Mrs Colm would ask: Can you beat it?

Lucia is as I told you with a nurse in Villa Elite. But I am sending away the nurse on Sunday or Monday as my sister Eileen is coming from Dublin to try out a stay of a month or so with Lucia’s [sic] at Lucia’s constantly repeated request. Have just wired her her fare. Please ask all the jews in America to get up a subscription for me as I am planning to enter the poorhouse on S. Patrick’s Day next.

So please cheer up, do. And send me a group photograph like the last lovely one we had taken. I think you were the nicest of all, Helen.

Goodbye. I have now to run in my slippers all the way to Cherbourg to catch that boat.

Caro Giorgio: Buona fortuna! Or su! Corajo! Avanti, Savoya! Salutami il piccolo.

Remember! Remember!! Remember!!!

The 2nd of February

is

COMING

Mi spiego? Tante belle cose

Babbo

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 5 February 1935

‘La Résidence, 41 Avenue Pierre ler de Serbie, Paris

Dear Giorgio and Helen: Thanks for your birthday cable and all messages. Tired after our arrival we could not do as much as usual. At 3 p.m. Gilbert gave a lecture on me at the Sorbonne for the Brit. Institute, with the 2 discs. Nora, Lucia and Eileen were there and they say it went very well. I got cables from Hiler, Cohn, Prince Noridett, Prof Fleiner (rector Z’ch University) Gideons [sic], Miss Weaver, Bridges, Ruggieri. Neither Miss Beach nor Miss Monnier sent anything, though the former was at the lecture well to the fore. In the evening we all had dinner at Fouquet’s with the Jolases, Gilberts and the Léons. I felt very lonely without you both but at least this time Lucia was there. Everyone found her much better. Don’t worry about the blood anomaly in her case. Naeggeli says it will recede of itself. It is most unusual but neither dangerous nor symptomatic. Eileen is staying here for a few weeks and the two get on very well. Miss Weaver has invited Lucia to London and perhaps she may travel back with Eileen. She may also go for a holiday to Ireland in the Spring. The great danger is past anyway but the doctors had nothing to do with that…. They could make nothing of her case except to tell me it was terribly funny as McGreevy would say though Lord knows how I did it. I used to act in charade with Digges in Dublin. The Skeffington [Mrs Skeffington], however, is wrong in alluding to me by my Christian name. The only person who ever addressed me so (of my companions or friends) was my poor friend George Clancy (Davin in the Portrait). This is carefully pointed out in the book. He was afterward Mayor of Limerick and was dragged out of bed by the Black and Tans in the night and shot in the presence of his wife.

Now about Giorgio. The Irish in America probably know much more about the hindquarters of a hunter than they do about the thorax of a singer. Have you no influential Irish musical friends, people anyway who know that Brahms is a composer and not a breakfast food. Sullivan said Giorgio should start out in bass roles in the French provinces and so get experience and get over his Lampenfieber. Also if he did break down no harm was done. Denis MacSwiney (I spent two whole evenings with him) … thought he [Sullivan] was right in this. He said that American audiences have no standard of their own and can only countersign European verdicts. Don’t take this as advice. One has to be guided by events. Any beginning is better than no beginning. The ‘mike’ is not the footlights, it is true, but it is an opening, in fact, a great opening. One good effect it must have, viz, Giorgio will have to attend to his ways. I am indeed sorry to hear that MacCormack’s lovely voice has gone. But he will still be able to hold an audience by his diction. How Giorgio and I used to wrangle about this! By the way, what did you do for my birthday? It is a great shame I didn’t get one tenth part of the attention and flattery this year to which I am entitled by act of parliament. A miserable meal at Fouquet’s for a poor 1000 frs or so! No high kicking or choruses or cake and candles or people shaking my hand and saying ‘We never saw you looking so handsome as you do tonight’ while I sit in a corner on the floor with a bottle of Vouvray in each of my four pockets and two cigars in my mouth nodding at all the men and winking at all the women.

Well, Stevie, I hope you’ll have a merrier one on the 15th.

I met Gorman here today…. He says he will go to Ireland in autumn and start again on the book in September. He has a daughter 22 months old. We went to Ferrari’s for lunch and who should walk in but my wife. I find it impossible to avoid that woman. She is everywhere.

Last night I took the harem to see Man of Aran where I yawned my head off with boredom. I am going to hear a Japanese bass on Thursday. I shall send Giorgio the bass aria from the 3rd act of Rimsky’s Kittege which Zoporofetz sang so splendidly. As for La Forza del Destino! This opera used to make Italians cry with laughter but Herr Franz Werfel discovered it (and incidentally Giuseppe Verdi) and of course all the Deutschers clapped like anything. Then Covent Garden patted its polite mits. And so on. The prima donna who sang it in Trieste was called La Valanga (The Avalanche). Verdi wrote it for Russia, so you see, in fact Taubulik created the tenor part in S. Petersburg. An Italian bass is rare. I have heard only two or three. I am glad you saw some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. There never was such a collaboration, I suppose. But of course in the end they fell out. The music fits the words like a glove. Has Giorgio tried Schoeck’s music?

The interview in New Yorker is the usual thing. They will get tired of me soon and move on to Giorgio himself.

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, [About 18 February 1935]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris VII

MS. Kastor

Dear G and H: This is only part of a letter. The enclosed explain themselves. Lucia and Eileen (who get on very well together) are spending some time with Miss Weaver as her guests.

About Irish songs, I suggest

1) Buy Hughes’s Irish County Songs (2 vols) (they are nearly all Ulster songs) at Steinway Hall, 111 W. 57th Street.

2) Buy Moore’s Irish Melodies and learn the following

a) Fly not yet

b) O, ye dead

3) Quick we have but a second (this needs a lot of breath)

4) The time I lost in wooing

5) Silent, O Moyle

(this is a lovely air but G. should study the legend of Lir’s daughters)

2) [sic] I shall try to get from London and send at once

The little Red Fox by Arthur Somervell

The Queen of Connemara by Alicia Needham

Trottin’ to the Fair

all by Villiers Stanford, the composer of Molly Brannigan and Father O’Flynn.

Drake’s Drum

Eva Toole

All these songs used to be sung by Plunket Greene, a well known Irish bass.

Next, I have an enormous collection of Irish folk music collected by Petrie and another lot by Joyce (P.W.) I shall send this out soon. Suggestion

1935 is the centenary of the death of Bellini and of the birth of Allen Foley our Irish bass, the Chialiapin of his time. He sang all Lablache’s parts, (who was Irish too his mother came from Cork and his [father] was born at Naples. I shall try to get the bass arias from Bellini’s operas but they are usually with chorus. However this could be dodged. The centenary will certainly be celebrated in U.S.

La Forza del Destino—if G. likes the bass in this I will try to get him aria either Del mondo i di or Non imprecare I suppose he means.

Have been all day hunting up music. We have been here a week.

All your portraits plus the big one of my wife by F.B. which she ripped out of the frame are at the enclosed address. I am having them insured for 50,000 fr. as I believe T’s portrait of my father is very valuable.

Lucia’s address is c/o H.W. 74 Gloucester Place, London W.1. Your very dusty dirty and tired

Babbo

Hope S.J.J. had a merry time on 15th.

P.S. There are no arias sold separately of Kittege; the whole score costs 180 francs. Copy out the bass air in act III. But I sent the bass air from Glinka’s ‘Vie pour le Tsar’ which the Japanese bass sang well—his only good number. He wore a kimono and scarlet vest. I suppose the Nipponese evening dress but was a freak voice for me

O Ye dead. The 2nd verse of this should he sung almost in a whisper.

Am sending Goosens’ settings of some of my verse. I wish I could find Palmer’s which are much finer music or even Moeran’s.

I am afraid G. Antheil the famous composer who wrote those splendid operas Ulysses and Cain has made off with P.W. Joyce’s collection of old Irish airs.

Babbo.

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 19 February 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Kastor

Dear G and H: I sent round your books and original editions in a box marked B.O. to the rue Claire and will leave the key with your solicitor. The portraits have been renovated my father’s varnished and all insured. I will attend to this.

Lucia went to London as Paris was too full of unpleasant memories for her and also to see Beckett. She met him a few times and they had dinner together. More anon, as Willy Shakespeare saith. Eileen is with her having got indefinite leave from her job in the Dublin ‘Sweepstake’. I pay her salary. They are living near Miss Weaver at the Ascot Hotel, York Street-Baker Street.

Souppault just rang me up. I am to see him tomorrow at 5 p.m. He says you are having a festive time but it seems to me though you are both doing your best you are up against difficulties all the time and stupid people. Don’t be discouraged. Also don’t be annoyed at all the music I send. I know G. can’t sing it all over then and there but it is well to have it. I sent also the Cry of the Deer (S. Patrick at Tara), This consists of 1) the invocation of the Trinity (the shamrock) 2) the so-called Breastplate (Corazza) of S.P. a prayer to Christ. The former is good oratorio style, the latter somewhat tedious and theatrical. The composer’s real name is Harold White a Dublin man who wrote an opera called Shaun the Post.

You don’t seem to go much to the opera. I hope you liked Siegfried with Melchior but I suppose if they put on Floradora with George Robey in the name part the horsehoers would not notice. I went to hear Rimsky’s Kittege again at the Opéra Comique with Zaporoyetz as Prince Yuri. Che splendore di voce. Ampia, estesa, facile e maestosa. Se Sullivan era il rei dei fort tenors, Z- è l’imperatore dei basses nobles, But he gets only a few hundred francs a night. Of course his voice is probably unsuited to many more flexible parts, Mephisto, for instance. And his part lasts about 10 minutes. But it is majestically beautiful, better than 6 years ago. I never met anybody in London who had even heard of him. So there you are. MacCormack is touring California and is to give a silver jubilee concert in N.Y., I think, on Easter Day. I also see that Mr Pinza, the bass, and Mrs are having some trouble probably over a Mrs Presnitz. This joke is lost on you, H, but ‘pinza’ is a gateau brioche and presnitz a kind of mince pie in Trieste.

It is awful weather and it gives me cramps.

A propos of the S.B. sale of my MSS (of which I am still officially ignorant) I am journalistically informed that the rumour is current over there that she, by her generous sacrifice of all her rights in U to me, resigned herself to abject poverty. Frailty, thy name is woman.

Why don’t you send me a photograph of Stevie? I asked several times. But there is something you asked me for too and I forgot it. I got an offer from some impresario to make a lecture tour in the U.S. What on earth do these people want to be lectured to all the time about? Every old fool in Europe goes over to lecture to them about something or other. And they lap it up like soup.

This is quite a different kind of flat from the Grenelle one: much more signorile but still simple. Big high rooms. My wife had to lengthen all the curtains. Also very quiet. Except for the squad of children upstairs. But that noise I don’t dislike. Still I hope someone makes them a present of a carpet or two.

Tara era il Mecca o Gerusalemme degli antichi irlandesi. L’isola era una pentarchia = 5 re. Uno per ognuna delle 4 provincie, Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connaught ed il quinto il re supremo (áɼd.ſí) era incoronato a Tara. S. Patrizio andò là a confrontare i preti druidici, come fece Moisè in Egitto. Fece ogni genere di miracoli anche. Ogni fuoco doveva spegnersi in Irlanda salvo il fuoco reale a Siane, credo. Patrizio suscitò l’ira dei druidi accendendo il fuoco pasquale. Era il sabato santo.

I see the little Lord Mayor of Dublin Alfìe Byrne is going to N.Y. for the 17th. Every day I open the Irish Times I see him and his golden chain in some photograph or other. He has been Lord Mayor for 7 years but before him Mr ‘Larry’ O’Neill was Lord Mayor for 15 years. In my time the Lord Mayor was elected by members of the corporation to whom he owed money so that they could get a garnishee order on his salary.

O yes I remember now. You said you had a film taken, isn’t that it and if I would like it. Yes, by all means.

No, I don’t think Mme Jolas is angry with you nor the Gilberts. Sink both these little worries in the bosom of the Atlantic.

Giorgio, so che canti stasera ma non so a che ora e come potrei udirti. Buona fortuna ad ogni modo.

My wife is out but I send greetings from us both to G, II and S.

Gradite, cari pargoli, i sensi dei miei più doverosi ossequi

Babbo.

P.S.

Caro Giorgio: Ti mando le arie d’Oroveso e di Rodolfo. Non posso avere le altre oggi. Se questa serie di ‘broadsheets’ ti sembra interessante sottoscrivi. Accluso un ritaglio concernente il mobile conto. A quanto pare tutto va bene a Londra. Mandai Lucia da uno specialistica per le glandole. Pare abbia una defìcenza di secrezione adrenale. A parte ciò questo medico sostiene che lo scontro nel taxi c’entra per molto nel suo caso. Mandami buone novelle. Tanti saluti a Helen ed a Stevie. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 26 February 1935 Tuesday

[Paris]

MS. National Library

Cara figliola: Scusami di non averti scritto. Ed anche oggi non lo posso perchè i miei occhi sono minacciati sia dal maltempo sia dalla polvere dei vecchi libri che arrangiavo. È meglio dunque essere prudente. Scusami anche presso la Sig.na Weaver. Eileen tornerà venerdì. Siamo così contenti di sapere che tutto va bene costì. Brava, Lucia!

Adesso vuoi fare una piccola commissione per me? Ti mando 5 scellini. Va o telefona a

Boosey and Co

295 Regents Street

e comanda per me di mandare per la posta due esemplari della canzone: ‘Off to Philadelphia’ di Battison Haynes (tono di do maggiore = C)

Costa 2 scellini ognuno dunque ti basterà.

Grazie

Ce [sic] noia avere occhi come i miei! Sempre allarmi! Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 26 February 1935

[Paris]

MS. Kastor

Dear G and H: I can’t write much as my eyes are troubling me—either the awful damp or the window open or the dust of the books I was unpacking. All your pictures are safe in the rue Claire, also a box of all the 1st editions etc so carefully ticketed by Giorgio. Will send policy of insurance on Saturday. Here’s the receipt anyhow. And a letter from L. You will see by the tone and writing that she is getting on well.

Am glad S had a good party after all. Send us a photograph. Also to hear your father, H, is better.

Now for the songs.

I have found Philadelphia for you at least have just written L in London where she can get it. I send today the songs promised. I had a new copy made of 3 settings of my verses by Palmer, made about 25 years ago but better than any of the subsequent ones, viz,

Gentle Lady

At That Hour

Donnycarney (this one has been set by at least 12 composers)

Will send them also on Saturday.

Blatherskite (vuol dire bubbole, fandonie, millanterie) is not Irish at all but Scotch American, I suppose the song meant is Maggie Lauder. In Ireland the word is blatherumskite. Perbacco! Meritava proprio studiare 6 anni per cantare simile robaccia.

Silent, O Moyle. Of course I know it, IT. You must have heard me sing it often. The best setting is by Sir Henry Bishop. It goes very well with a harp accompaniment. But 0 Ye Dead is the song for G.

Little Red Fox (An Modereen Ruadh) a charming little fanciful song. Moore (Thomas) used it in the melody Let Erin Remember. This melody is about Lough Neagh under which there is said to be buried a kind of Atlantis. Others say Finn MacCool in anger took a sod of turf out of Ireland and flung it in the sea, thus making 1) Lough Neagh 2) Isle of Man.

Non mi sento bene. Malora, questi vechi!

Queen of Connemara. Pity they sent this in the higher key by mistake. None of these songs is much, really. There is a very nice song by Hughes to words of Colum. ‘O Men from the Fields’. Try for this. It sounds a bit Russian. I suppose the Blatherskite is that tawdry thing supposed to be ‘tο an ould ancient air of ould Ireland’ after all, about women and kissing. O dear!

If he sings Silent, O Moyle though the man you mention, H, named Fisher has good ideas, such as the harp suggestion, he almost always smothers the melody and there is some flaw in his harmonic ear. Bishop keeps the line of the air free.

But I should like to hear Giorgio sing O ye Dead. Some fool marked the 2nd verse (the reply of the ghosts) as F, This is nonsense.

Enough of yellow paper, Irish wails and my sticky eyes. If only I had a fine basso profondo but not to sing B. Kyrie eleison, Gospodi pomilyou, Miserere Nobis O Lord, have mercy on U.S. Tante belle cose

Babbo

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To MRS EILEEN JOYCE SCHAUREK, 13 March 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

MS. National Library

Dear Eileen: One letter to save time so you may read this to Lucia. Your letter of Tuesday bears no address and if I had not asked Lucia where she was living when she telephoned I should not know where to send this. I hope the address is correct. In your letter you urge me to arrange for your departure for Ireland as soon as possible. In your wire of a few hours later you urge me to telegraph forbidding such a departure. The letters I receive from you and Miss Weaver are all contradictory. Lucia told me she wants a man to accompany her from Holyhead at least. I can think of nobody today. On Monday or Tuesday of next week there is a young Irishman here named Murphy who could pick her up in London. But it is a long wait for her. Curran, the only person I know in Dublin, could not leave his job. Anyhow I enclose the £2 Lucia asked for. How much do you pay in the boarding-house?…

Where does Lucia want to go to in Ireland—that earthly paradise? I enclose a letter from Galway from which you or she can draw what conclusions you like. But if she wants to go there or to Bray all right. In the last ten days I have sent with enclosed £15, £3 to you in Dublin £3 refund to Miss Weaver who sent them to you £1 and £5 to Lucia and now £2. When you want more as of course you will (and I forgot the £2.13. cheque) state plainly the amount. Nora thinks you ought to leave on receipt of this as there is a spell of good weather on. And alone as you did from here. She is not very keen on Lucia’s going to Galway as she anticipates trouble when her people find out that she doesn’t go to holy mass, holy confession, holy communion and holus bolus. However she thinks the air will do her good. Also Irish eggs are famous all over the world.

Miss Weaver wrote to me that Lucia had been rude to her. I shall be much obliged if you will let me know exactly what took place and by return.

While you stay with Lucia I will pay your salary £2 a week and of course pay for both your board unless some other person does so.

[Unsigned]

P.S. Have just had a ring up from Mr Murphy. He leaves Paris on 18 but stays in London a few days and will not leave for Dublin till the 21st

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To MRS EILEEN JOYCE SCHAUREK, [16 March 1935]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

Dear Eileen: I am sorry you had such an alarm and your daughters too. The affair seems mysterious. Is the bungalow on the top of Bray Head and what could any burglar hope to get by entering the house of any member of the Joyce family? I am short of cash this week end but on Tuesday will wire £5 more, £2 for you and £3 for Lucia. She must get used to handling money even if she spends some badly. Millions of women do that. The scenes that scared you and Miss Weaver are nothing to speak of. Her mother stood four years of very much worse than that. Lucia says Charley’s wife and Alice talked to her a lot about Jesus Mary and Aunt Josephine. If these two females are so damn pious how is it they bear no children? I shall write Lucia tomorrow as in any case you won’t get this before Monday. She also says Miss Weaver stole a bottle of cognac. Possibly the strain is driving her to drink.

You have not answered any of my questions but this is excusable in the circumstances. I want to know exactly (apart from the £2 a week I will send you in lieu of your salary) what I have to pay as weekly board for you and Lucia. Mr Murphy will stay in London from Tuesday to Thursday or so but I will send you more details when I know them.

I hope you have by now got over your fright. Anyhow things like that rarely happen twice in the same place. You are wrong in wanting to conceal the fact of your wiring from Lucia. The only way to get on with her is to be perfectly straightforward and honest as she is herself in spite of her loony ways. Greetings

Jim

P.S. I did not know that Irish Paddies celebrate their onomastico. However, if it gives you and him pleasure, I will send him a line for tomorrow. I mean Patrick.

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To MRS EILEEN JOYCE SCHAUREK, [? 17 March 1935]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

MS. National Library

Dear Eileen: There is one other thing I can do about the crossing if you really go. If you wire me in advance by what train you leave Euston I shall try to get a travel agency to telephone the purser of the boat at Holyhead to look out for Lucia and attend to her on the passage. But I must know well in advance. Greetings

Jim

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 19 March 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: I left the keys with Mr Bodington. The policies will follow when they arrive. The reason I took these steps is that a single signed 1st edition of U fetched 2700 frs in the Salle Drouot last year, that Schwarz told me 10,000$ was offered for my father’s portrait when it was hung in N.Y. and that Marehand’s picture will also be worth more than you gave for it in all likelihood.

I hope all went off well on the 11th. Lucia tells me she had a letter from you about it. Her present address is c/o Miss Eva Joyce, 12 Mountjoy Square, Dublin. But she may go on to Galway for a short stay.

I sent the Dupan collection. There is none for voix grave. So I sent the best I could: voix moyenne: I shall not write any more today about the art of song.

I enclose a letter from Mr Kastor and another which present a curious contrast. Perhaps in a leisure moment you could look up number 2 and see if there is anything behind it.

Souppault called here. He was very pessimistic about things in the U.S. But I think everyone is like that in all lands today. But he was very optimistic about Giorgio which is good to hear. Also he told us the child was flourishing. One other item of news I pass on to you with reserve. He said that Cerf was neglecting Ulysses in favour of Miss G. Stein and that in several of the towns where he lectured his hearers could not get copies of it???

As regards the Beach sale of my MSS I am told the rumour is abroad on both sides of Brendan’s herring pond that she, by generously sacrificing all her rights in my favour, has reduced herself to starvation.

Mrs Bailly has gone to London and wanted us to go with her. After her return she goes to Dublin, she wants B. to close up shop, sell his business sell his flat and live in dear old Ireland in the morning.

I think that’s all the news I have this day of Our Lord (it is really S. Joseph’s) but hope to have a good budget of news in your next.

About your chair, Helen. Every time I enter the refectory I bow to it. Also on leaving the refectory after refection. We are on the best of terms.

My cordial salutations to you both not forgetting the Society of Jewses (quip borrowed from W. i. P.)

Babbo

P.S. Photos just arrived. They are very good. The little boy is very good-looking. Giorgio in the paper has exactly the same pose as I have in Silvestri’s picture.

Di nuovo

Babbo

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 26 March 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. S. Illinois

Cara Lucia: In attesa della tua risposta alla mia lettera ti mando ancora 3 sterline, dunque 5 in tutto. Ho ricevuto ieri un dispaccio da Eileen che non spiega niente. Se le devi del denaro pagalo, È inutile sprecare il denaro telegrafando quando una lettera arriva in 24 ore. Insomma scrivimi chiaramente e dì a Eileen di fare lo stesso.

La Jolas mi ha mostrato la tua lettera che mi pare gaia, ed un poco satirica. Tanto meglio. Vuol dire che vai meglio?

Quanto al ‘pony’ vuoi imitare forse il famoso Yankee Doodle?

Queste poche righe in fretta Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 28 March 1935

[In Italian] 7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Lucia: I have just received an express letter from which I understand (1) that Eileen has returned to her work and therefore that it is unnecessary for me to send her her salary, (2) that you yourself are in need of money. I will send you some tomorrow. Today the bank is closed.

You are much mistaken if you fancy that there is a close tie between me and any member of my family, masculine, feminine or neuter. Since Eileen’s arrival in Ireland I have had only a couple of lines from her and a communication which had neither beginning nor ending to which I have not replied in the manner she wished.

It is not possible to say exactly the hour and the day when Mrs Jolas will appear nor the hour and the day when Giorgio will deign to set foot on the quay of ‘la douce France’. Ask me other riddles.

Instead of writing to Mamma the letter I suggested to you to write, you have written a letter which drove her half mad. Doubtless that was your intention.

If you are unhappy and if you want to go elsewhere I will try to arrange everything and to come to your rescue. Mamma’s uncle offers to come to Dublin in order to take you to Galway. Afterwards you could perhaps go to the islands of Aran where the air is truly delightful and where there are so many stones to split that it is a real pleasure.

Today my eyes are not very well but it is simply the weather, I think.

Instead of reading sentences about combustible gas and funerals and many other beautiful things I should like to know how much money I should send you every week and to whom to pay it….

Since you ask what I am writing I will send you Transition when it comes out. The devil knows what it means.

Enough, as you say yourself.

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, N.D. [?] March 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Helen: As you are probably not yet quite recovered from the shock of having received a letter from my wife, I shall be brief and spare you. This is to wish you many happy returns of your birthday. There is a difference of opinion between my wife and myself as to the date. She thinks it is the 17 or 19, I that it is the 16. Perhaps like S. Patrick you have two of them: 8 + 9 = 17. By the way I see that a cent per cent American with a 2000% Polish mama is to introduce a bill making 17 March a legal holiday over there. I do hope the poor Chinese will not be left out of the next procession. Every good chink should wear the shamrock for Sir Patlick….

Apart from your own lucky existence depressing stories reach me of the state of the national purse. Stephens says Universities which used to pay him 600 and 700 $ pay now only 15 $. And Cerf sent over some royalties which were about ¼ of what Léon had been led to reckon on and then there is a bagatelle of 40,000 frs owed to Lucia and myself for the Mime….

Spring with all her chickens is upon us and before I go down to Léon I must put on a lighter vest. Budgen was here and my wife commissioned him to do a mural for her salon of London river (such, mes 8 enfants, is the manner in which the able bodied seaman alludes to what me and you call the Thames). We also had a big teaparty here on Sunday and all your portraits were admired by everybody the whole time….

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 1 April 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear G and H: … Stephens was here yesterday with his wife. Like Souppault he gives a very sombre account of things in the U.S. Possibly because they didn’t get merry enough. He has been lecturing too. 40 no less. And I suppose Messrs O’Flaherty and O’Malley are also lecturing to the good people over there who are doing their level best to improve themselves.

The other night coming out of Chez Francis my wife found a fine black cat which now is a tenant of the flat. I read your S. Patrick’s Day letter to this graceful animal and you should have seen his prolonged smile. It does not greatly surprise me to hear that America causes Giorgio to vomit. But this is a passing phase. And in time you will get to love it. For the moment it is a mistake to expect too much from your curious circle of friends. Every attempt made up to the present to manufacture a silken purse out of a sow’s ear has proved a failure. Good … who sees a great press story in the Irish son of an Irish father who hopes to sing Irish songs to Irish Americans is not to be blamed if he was not impressed by his voice of Stephen George and tried to mumble out some excuse about lack of music when interpellated by Stephen George’s manageress the next day. Why should he be? If Stephen George came from Italy or France or Germany or one of the Balkan states with a musical name it would be a voice of another colour. Also do not shed too many tears over the fiasco at Mrs Sullivan’s. The audience or what was left of it probably thought Father O’Flynn was a fragment of Emporian music unfinished by the late Mr Gregory. But I am curious to know who of your musical friends taught Giorgio to sing this song. He certainly never heard it from me. The music is by Villiers Stanford. But I dislike it and the words, and most of all Father O’Flynn himself, the so called soggarth aroon (ſagaɼt = sacerdos = priest). But if Giorgio thinks there is no melody in Palmer’s music and that my Swiss composer, as you call him, to wit Othmar Schoeck is not a first class composer it is perhaps because he forgot his musical sense in the rue Huysmans in the hurry of departure….

I don’t know what war you are writing about. There are so many roving about seeking what they may devour. If there is a European war again (which the Lord forfend) I suppose the U.S. will again come in on the last round with the usual 9½ soldiers, captained by Major Collins, and a tin of Heinz’s canned beans. Just to settle up matters….

You complain that my last letter was undated. To make up for this I hereby inform you that this is 1 April—All Fools’ Day.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 7 April 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris, 7e

Dear Miss Weaver: I should have thanked you before for your kindness and hospitality towards my daughter. I do so now. I am glad to hear that you have returned to London refreshed after a visit…. It is kind of you to propose to go to Ireland after you have paid a sick call to Miss Marsden at Liverpool but unless you are interested in the beauty of Dublin Bay I think the trip useless. Please do not telephone to my cousin. Her opinion is not of the slightest importance to me…. Your letter expresses great sympathy for my sister. Possibly Lucia, not having been brought up as a slave and having neither Bolshevik nor Hitlerite tendencies, made a very bad impression on you and she certainly does not flatter….

How it is all going to end I don’t know. The news from America is also bad, though not of the same kind. Americans apparently can’t even pay at present (they don’t pay me anyway) so why dishonour oneself by going there.

You expressed great admiration some time ago for the brighteyed young Brit (I am imagining him), my English publisher, who aroused nothing but sardonic suspicion in my lousy Celtic soul. Well he started printing Ulysses 5 months ago and does not appear to have made any headway. Doubtless the poor wretch is doing his best…. Today Léon read me over the telephone some article or other which he thinks should be used as propaganda by my publisher, the aforesaid blue-eyed cleanminded son of Albion. Putting my own experience of 30 years together with the fact that the richest and most powerful nation in the world was ignobly ejected from Shaunvekland a few years ago by a half dozen savages armed with crucifixes I remain of the opinion that the one and only argument is the boot.

My wife thanks you for having remembered her birthday. This was more than her daughter did. So I wrote her a letter of reproach. You can imagine it was terribly stern. Instead of running around from one scruff to another (of course I don’t mean you) she should be in this house which was set up for her. But you can think in what a state my wife’s nerves are after four years of it. And that is the problem, the whole problem and nothing but the problem….

A few days ago I received a note from Miss Monnier asking me ‘had I any objection’. I told them to go ahead. Honestly however I dislike the putting up for sale of the first MS of the Portrait, about 1000 pages. And what rubbish it is! …

My wife talks of going to Ireland to see her mother who is 70 odd. I suppose it is only right. A boy’s best friend is his mother and granny you gave me my mammy and that’s the grandest thing a granny can do. The last time, however, she went there she left that blissful isle lying on the floor of a railway carriage with her two children (and mine) while the natives were firing at one another through the carriage windows….

Paris is frightfully dear and has become, they say, the ugly duckling of the great capitals. Most of the foreign colony has fled. For the life of me I cannot see how I personally can hang on. Nevertheless it seems that I do.

I daresay this letter sounds rather distracted but for over a year I have been presiding over mothers’ meetings (the fathers or husbands have never been there even to make a show) and I have reached a stage of exasperated exhaustion.

Perhaps I shall survive and perhaps the raving madness I write will survive and perhaps it is very funny. One thing is sure, however. Je suis bien triste.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, [About 7 April 1935]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Parigi 7

MS. S. Illinois

Cara Lucia: Grazie della tua lettera. Ti ho spedito ieri in una busta 2 lire sterline. Non ti ho scritto ed oggi non posso scriverti a lungo perchè ho lavorato tutto il giorno. Vedo con piacere che sei sempre contenta costì e che il luogo ti va bene. Non ti ho mandato il giornale perchè credo che l’hai già visto.

Mi parli del defunto cavaliere Fernandez, della di lui consorte e d’altre persone più o meno degne. Confesso però che la me⁠[n]⁠zione dei loro nomi suscita una fiammella alquanto fioca in questo cuore che va invecchiandosi. C’è dunque a Bray una gentildonna che si chiama Mazza: Ma perchè non si chiama Ombrellino?

Mi consigli di andare al circo. Dove? Nell’anfiteatro o nella pista? Sono pronto a tutto.

Ti manderò tutti i libri che vuoi ma bisogna dirmi quali. Segui forse il mio cattivo esempio trascurando l’acqua della Moyle? Ma io mi lavo religiosamente ogni volta che la luna è in quintadecima.

In risposta alle tue domande non sono in carteggio col Byrne ma credo che Carducci abbia letto Carducci perchè io leggo Giacomo Giocondo. Giorgio ora sta bene, Helen sta benone, ed il loro bambino benissimo. [Manuscript breaks off]

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To GEORGE JOYCE (Postscript to a missing letter), [About 10 April 1935]

[Paris]

MS. Kastor

Pregai dunque Curran d’indagare.

Ieri sera ebbi una lettera da Lucia. Di Bray dice ‘è un luogo magnifico pieno di fiori’. Insomma è contenta e spero sulla buona via.

B.

Giorni fa dovevo far rinnovare il mio passaporto. L’impiegato mi disse che aveva ordini di mandare gente come me alla legazione irlandese. Insistetti ed ottenni un altro. Ti avverto ma fa come credi.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 15 April 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Please let us know by return are the names of the boxers ‘Jack Sharkey and Jimmy Wilde’ mentioned toward the end of the fragment correct. By the way please send back that proof and do not show it.

Excuse my rather unsociable mood. It is a dreadful strain. A few days ago for example we had 3 express letters and 1 telegram. Curran apparently got scared.

O la la!

My wife thanks for your letter. Sorry you had such a bad time going over. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 27 April 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

Dear Helen: I sent off a short letter to Giorgio last night and these few lines are for you. I believe both letters are to go on a boat which takes a couple of weeks to waddle across the sea. But no fast boat is going before the 2 of May, it seems.

I am sorry you are having such a poor time over there. Also that your birthday was such a gloomy affair. Well, well! I am afraid my letters cause glee in the family circle. The letters that reach me from your side cause ghastly smiles to break out over my face. From the wording of your last it is not clear who is on crutches, your father or Giorgio. But I hope that by now they have been laid aside.

I am glad Lucia wrote to Giorgio. If she sent the letter via Hitlerland it was probably because she mislaid your address. Do you realise, dear daughter-in-law, how very difficult it is for a European to remember such an address as 1689 North West 866th Street, floor no 72, room 10,896? We do our poor old world best. But it is awful hard.

I am ordered to inform you of the following, though I feel as if I were putting my handsome Grecian head into a large beehive. The expenses for removal of your goods and chattels (don’t hit me, please, O please put away that umbrella!) were paid by Mrs Eugene Jolas. So my wife thinks this matter should be cleared up soon.

Ai! Ai! Ai!

In my letter to Giorgio I mention that I had simply sent on F’s opinion. Nobody knows anything about rheumatism except that young people are liable to get it. As for the splendour of American hospitals close your eyes for a moment and try to imagine what the Dublin one must be like after 12 sweepstakes. Can you see those golden staircases, the diamond studded doors, the bedspreads of solid African ivory, the curtains of silk from Samarcand? What a wonderful animal is the horse!

I send a copy of Paris Soir which may interest you.

I shall write you again in a few days, about the contract and other things as well.

Giorgio asked me to kiss for him certain ladies and gentlemen residents of the hamlet. What dangerous advice for any son to give to his father! But I believe they all wish you well nevertheless.

The cat I had is gone. The story of the episcopalian minister was too much for him. He has become a mohammadan.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 27 April 1935 [In Italian]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Lucia: I send you enclosed here 2 more pounds sterling. I hope you have received the volumes of Tolstoy. In my opinion How Much Land Does a Man Need is the greatest story that the literature of the world knows. I used to like also very much Masters and Servants in spite of a little propaganda in it.

I hope you are going more easily now with the eggs although they are the classic food for Easter. I had a letter from Helen. It seems that they all have their troubles. It is not their fault certainly but they have not found that lucky country that was their dream. Two little stories may amuse you. Giorgio has grown a beard and your letter to Giorgio made a pilgrimage first in the much-sung-of land of Germany.

Yes, I read in the papers about the fire in the Square in Dublin. The news did not upset me much. But it seems to me that the lady Anna Livia did not do her duty even if the firemen did theirs. Much smoke and little water. But they will find another edifice in which to continue their noble work for the benefit of the Dublin hospitals and the poor doctors, the poor sisters, the poor sick people and the poor priests, consolers of these latter. Let me weep. And cheers for the racehorse!

And talking of priests, if you subscribe to the library there ask for The Life of Father Healy. I knew him and I think that he baptised me or one of my family. He was the parish priest of Little Bray, used to frequent the viceroy’s court and was a very witty man.

The angel who regulates the seasons has forgotten that we are on the eve of the month of May for he serves out to us every day cold, damp and cloudy weather.

You speak of two ruffians who visited your bungalow. They were perhaps robbers who attempted some time ago to penetrate into the bungalow to steal the art treasures, cases with gold coins and precious stuffs which doubtless it contained. There are still idealists, apparently, in this cynical and rude world; the tram strike etc enters upon its ninth week. How fortunate for shoemakers. Not all ills hurt.

From shoemakers to leather is only a step. This is why I inform you that Mrs Bailly has also gone to Bray or to the neighbourhood of Bray. I read that the municipal council is building many new houses. By Jove, it is understandable!

We are fairly well and hope that your health is improving. Do not give way to moments of melancholy. Some day or other everything will change for you. And sooner than you might believe.

Then according to you Curran has disappeared. Perhaps he is simply hidden behind a bush. And you have had tea with Miss Costello. Very good. That name seems Italian but is not so at all. It is a corruption, I think, of two Irish words meaning beautiful foot.

Let us know if you need anything, that is to say, clothes etc for the coming season. The poet Byron wrote two apposite verses:

The English winter ending in July

To recommence in August.

We always look forward to your letters and think a great deal about you, always hoping that your stay over there is doing you good. My greetings to your cousin Boschenka Boschenka Schaurek, daughter of Mrs Eileen Joyce Schaurek. who has written to me a couple of times and to whom I send thanks.

P.S. A certain Ulysses, sitting one day on the shore of the nymph Circe’s island, wrote with his stick in the sand. I ask myself whether you did not write those cards with a Japanese umbrella dipped in the azure water of the gulf of Neo-Naples. In any case here are three cards in return for your two. And it is good that the angels bring you this message because angel in Greek signifies messenger.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 1 May 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: I don’t know whether this letter will be very legible. This morning in the street I found my sight very hazy. I made the mistake of correcting proofs for about 6 hours the other day, as I did not want to be always victimising the Jolases.

Minor matters first. I cannot or rather Léon [cannot] collect a penny from the Dutch publisher who owes Lucia and myself 40,000 frs and in addition to that my American publisher seems to owe me royalties on 10,000 or 15,000 copies which he is not inclined to send over. As to the illustrations made for the U.S. edition of Ulysses they are yours for ever and ever. Amen. If they had been signed L.J. instead of H.M. people would have had a different tale to tell. I am only too painfully aware that Lucia has no future but that does not prevent me from seeing the difference between what is beautiful and shapely and what is ugly and shapeless. As usual I am in a minority of one. If I tell people that no tenor voice like Sullivan’s has been heard in this world for 50 years or that Zaporoyetz, the Russian basso, makes Chialiapin sound like a cheap whistle or that nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church they listen in silence. These names mean nothing to them. And when I have stumbled out of the room no doubt they tap their foreheads and sigh.

And speaking about the bass voice in general and my son in particular he went over to America, we were told, for four months. He has been there now a year. He is at present on crutches. He sang twice over the radio to the natives who love poor old Ireland and insist that, if he is to please them, he must forget all about the unmusical countries of Europe and croon to them about Mother Machree and A Little Bit of Heaven. He has earned in all 35$. This amount he could have got in any southern French town for one performance before an audience which, however redolent of garlic, unlike the halfcastes in Covent Garden and the Metropolitan really does know the difference between a B and a bull’s foot. I have sent him over tons of music. No use. They insist that he is from Erin’s green isle and must sing that classical aria Blatherskite.

I am writing this letter because Léon tells me you were kind enough to ring him up last night for news of me. I sleep like a log, eat like a hog and people say I have une mine superbe. But if they could see inside the watch they would use other words. I feel like an animal which has received four thunderous mallet strokes on the top of his skull. Yet in my letters to both my children and my daughter-in-law I keep up a tone of almost gay responsibility.

As for Lucia it is not clear to me at all from your letter whether you liked her or not. And that is the only thing that matters. She did not go over to live on you as a parasite and please do not imagine that because members of my family bear my name or have some facial or vocal resemblance to me (I am not speaking of Giorgio and Lucia, of course) that there is much kinship. Non, merci! When I was in London in 1931 I offered my imbecile brother’s idiot son a weekly salary to help me with my notes to let him know what the book is about (by the way, what is it about?) I gave him a copy of the book of essays commonly called An Exag. His beautiful puresouled Irish stepmother, from whose face a negro would run away in terror, threw the book in the fire and forbade him to visit me. Not one line did any of them send us after Lucia’s visit to them. My cousin whom she also visited was over here judging cats did not think it worth her while to ring us up or to call on us. Possibly this giddy Dame is wroth with me on account of my very frigid response to her declarations of affection (utterly insincere, of course) in a taxicab here last year. She forgets or has not learnt that in this vile city wine, woman and wit are freely traded in the marketplace. Since Lucia’s arrival in Ireland, apart from telegrams asking for money, we have received no news at all from my sister except a few lines sent from a hotel. Her daughters who according to Budgen are film beauty types have now taken to the pen and then there were voluminous letters from my friend Curran addressed however not to me but to my wife, the long-suffering mother, the wife of this renegade. These were not answered as my wife has made a vow to write only one letter every seventh year. But as they contained a proposal to bring Lucia to a medical gentleman who has studied psycho-analysis in the United States, I at once cabled calling that off.

After a good deal of talking I induced my wife to write to Lucia so that letters which now arrive are addressed to us both. This is a slight advance. But while I am glad in a way that Lucia is out of the dangers of Paris and especially of London every ring of the doorbell gives me an electric shock as I never know what the postman or telegraph boy is going to bring in. And if it is bad news all the blame will fall on me.

Perhaps I was too hasty in thinking you meant to throw doubt on Lucia’s word. I am again in a minority of one in my opinion as everybody else apparently thinks she is crazy. She behaves like a fool very often but her mind is as clear and as unsparing as the lightning. She is a fantastic being speaking a curious abbreviated language of her own. I understand it or most of it. Before she went to London she spoke to me about you and what you had done for me. She wanted through herself to establish a final link between the dissolute being who is writing these lines and your honourable self. Then she went on to Ireland with the same idea. Whatever she may have succeeded in doing with you she will do nothing over there. How well I know the eyes with which she will be regarded! Léon is concerned for what she may do to prejudice my name there. And my wife who personally is probably worth both of her children rolled together and multiplied by three thinks that this is the chief reason for my constant state of alarm. So far as I can know myself it is not so.

So long as she was within reach I always felt I could control her—and myself. And in fact I could. But now though I have the faithful support of my wife and Léon’s loyal friendship and that of some others here to say nothing of your own patience and sympathy there are moments and hours when I have nothing in my heart but rage and despair, a blind man’s rage and despair.

I cannot be such an utter fool as to be inventing all this. But I can no longer control matters. On many sides I hear that I am and have been an evil influence on my children. But what are they doing away from that evil influence? On the other hand what can I honestly ask them to come back to? Paris is like myself a haughty ruin or if you like a decayed reveller. And any time I turn on the radio I hear some British politician mumbling inanities or his German cousin shouting and yelling like a madman. Perhaps Ireland and the U.S. are the safe places. And perhaps this is where the gas is really going to be turned on. Well, so be it. The motto under my coat of arms, however, is: Mors aut honorabilis vita.

And in addition to all this my son’s Yankee Doodle doctor wants him to undergo an operation on the throat. And Mr John Allen that intrepid publisher who started to print Ulysses last October is still at work on the title page of that work.

Here there comes the girl with two letters one from Mr Bailly whose wife has also gone to Bray and the other from Lucia which I hesitate to open. So I shall arise and take them both down to Léon, if I can find a cab, that is to say, because this is a socialist holiday. However some descendant of Peter the Great may be prowling around, marauding. If there is anything in Lucia’s letter I shall add a postscript.

My eyes are trebly fatigued by now as the writing of this epistle was punctuated with lachrymal stops.

What I would like to know if you are writing to me is whether you liked Lucia or not. She said she was sending me a letter she had from you but of course, scatterbrain forgot to put it in. She may be mad, of course, as all the doctors say but I do not like you to mention her in the same breath with my cousin or sister or anybody else. If she should be so mentioned then it is I who am mad. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 4 May 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Parigi 7

MS. National Library

Cara Lucia: Siccome le banche saranno chiuse domani e sarebbe forse troppo aspettare fino a lunedì ti mando qui accluse 2 lire sterline.

Scusa la brevità di questa letterina. Spero che stai sempre bene.

Ti ho mandato un’altra novella di Tolstoy: Incontro con un amico di Mosca nel Caucaso: che spero ti piacerà. È un racconto singolare. Credo che il suo cognome in russo significa ‘grande’. Lo merita.

Ho paura che i doganieri irlandesi ti faranno pagare un forte dazio sulla medicina mandatati. Ma non fa niente se ti fa bene. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To LUCIA JOYCE, [9] May 1935 Thursday

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7

MS. National Library

Cara Lucia: Non ho ricevuto nessuna notizia da parte tua riguardo alla spedizione di due libri nè dell’invio di due somme di denaro, quattro lire sterline in tutto. Spero che il tuo silenzio non sia dovuto a cattiva salute. Ad ogni modo ti mando accluse altre due sterline. Due righe in risposta ci farebbe piacere.

La ragione per la quale Curran non è andato da te è che sua madre morì giorni fa ed ebbe molto da fare.

Qui il maltempo batte il record ma spero che la Brighton irlandese si comporti meglio. Le notizie che ci pervengono dall’America continuano ad essere poco allegre. Ebbi una lettera dalla Weaver. Essa ti vuol bene anche se si esprima male.

Mamma ed io stiamo abbastanza bene. Il famoso gatto, diventato randagio, fa il giro di tutti gli appartamenti e si fa mantenere da tutti con un cinismo quasi nobile. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

giovedì

li non so quanto maggio.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 May 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. National Library

Cara Lucia: Ti ho spedito ieri un altro pacco di Hämostial ma non in fiaschi come volevi perchè costa giusto il doppio, cioè 200 franchi e c’è anche il rischio di rottura. Ti prego di seguire accuratamente le istruzioni mediche e di non esagerare le dosi. Spero che questa distillazione insieme coll’aria salubre del mare di Moyle ti faranno del bene. Le tue lettere sono sempre benvenute. Forse un incontro colla signora Bailly non ti nuocerebbe. La povera donna ha sofferto anche ma il suo temperamento continua ad essere quello che i musicisti chiamano ‘vivace molto’.

Ieri la sorella della Monnier ha aperto un esposizione. Mamma ci andò e le fu detto che qualche settimane fa hai mandato tre pezzetti di ricamo alla mia ex-editrice. Ma perchè mandare vasi a Samo?

Non abbiamo altre notizie dall’America ma forse ne avremo stasera perchè il Bremen è arrivato. Anzi i giornali dicevano che Giovanni conte MacCormack doveva arrivare anche. Mamma andò alla stazione per incontrarlo o piuttosto per avere notizie di Giorgio. Ma quel cigno canoro aveva spiccato il volo altrove. E non posso biasimarlo perciò. Qui il tempo continua ad essere incredibilamente brutto. Ma a Bray, pare, il sole splende e splende ancora. Hai fiutato bene, birichina! Batto le mani! Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 15 May 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

Dear Curran: I was very sorry to hear from my friend Léon of the death of your mother. I remember her as an amiable and friendly woman and I know enough of your filial piety to understand what your grief must be. You have, I suppose, consolations which I cannot hope to offer you. Nevertheless please accept my sympathy.

There is no reason whatever why you should be surprised at receiving a copy of my daughter’s lettrines. This is only in fulfilment of a promise I made you in Westmoreland Street some thirty odd years ago now. I also thank you (as does my wife) for your well meant kindness to her and I was much touched by your appreciation of the beauty and delicacy of the little work she has done.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 May 1935 [In Italian]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Lucia: I enclose 2 pounds for you. It seems to me that you said I ought to send you money every Wednesday and Saturday. I hope the weather is keeping good at Bray. Here the ice saints are functioning in full vigour. In the paper I sent you the Naylor baths are mentioned. I still remember the impression made on me by my first bathe in the sea there: the damp clothes, the keen air and the smell of the salt water. If you and Giorgio have become proficient in the art of swimming this accomplishment has come to you from some other ancestor. Certainly not from me.

You should make an expedition to Killiney, not far from Bray. The gulf, so they say, has some resemblance to that of Naples, whose pleasant seat is under the protection of your saint.

I hope that the customs did not make so many difficulties this time. Perhaps they thought they were torpedoes. That same medicine was in use amongst the ancient Norwegians. I hope therefore that your conquests will be equal to theirs.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 22 May 1935 [In Italian]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Lucia: Thanks for your letter. I enclose 2 pounds for you. I suppose you received the other money and the medicine. If my prose is difficult to understand by Jove your handwriting is difficult to decipher. Thus we make a pair.

It is good about the milk, the eggs and the fruit and as regards the grey or beige stockings I hope there is at least one shop in Dublin where they can be bought…. I am glad that your stay in the island of saints and sages continues to please you. Why don’t you take out a subscription at the local library? So you enjoyed the ride on a jauntingcar as well. This proves that you are a true daughter of Ireland because it makes other people seasick.

It appears that you visited the Kilcroney demesne and then left it. And that is well. Woman is changeable. But altogether it seems to me you are not unhappy. Continue so. Life begins tomorrow, as was said by a certain Guido of Verona, an Italian officer who knew how to read and write.

You are wasting your breath always telling me you are stupid. I don’t believe it: and I don’t believe it means to say I do not believe it.

I am sending you under separate cover an article on Bray which Mamma has found in a London paper. It seems that fun and games prevail on the Irish shores in spite of the clergy. I suppose that when an archbishop bathes he enters the water clothed in all his sacramental robes including mitre and crook. And thenceforth the water is truly blessed. Foxterriers do as much and perhaps more.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 29 May 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. National Library

Cara Lucia: Il proverbio inglese dice: No news, good news: e spero che questo sia il tuo caso. Ad ogni modo eccoti 2 lire sterline. Si dice che il mese di maggio sia il mese dei fiori ma questo maggio a Parrigi [sic] non è neanche il mese dei cavolfiori. Qui non c’è nulla di nuovo. Il conte Edgardo Carducci si è fatto vivo. Stava per divorziarsi ma poi ha cambiato parere. È sempre pieno d’idealismo ed ama le paste e la musica. Insomma, un buonissimo italiano. Le notizie dall’America sono migliori. Giorgio sembra amare abbastanza l’ambiente. Non sapevo che mio figlio avesse uno stomaco così forte. Più si vive e più s’impara. La signora Bailly ha cambiato domicilio ed ora abita nella casa di qualche arcivesco o monsignore. Beato lui! La signora Giedeon era qui per qualchi giorni e ti manda affettuosi saluti. È una brava donna anche se un pochino isterica.

Ti credi in Irlanda ma sei anche in Norvegia. I norvegesi fondarano la città di Wicklow che significa: Wick, un insenatura del mare, e low, un farro [sic].

Mamma ed io pensiamo spesso di te ma pare che in certi casi l’assenza e la forma più alta della presenza.

Non oso domandarti se canti qualche volta perchè mi fu detto recentemente che trovi le nuvole più belle che le pentoline. Forse Antoinette aveva la stessa opinione perchè non ho mai sentito una donna di servizio fare tanto baccano in cucina come lei.

Sta bene, godi la vita e dormi. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 1 June 1935 [In Italian]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Lucia: If ever there should be a competition in brisk correspondence you would not take even second prize. It is now nearly a fortnight since we had word from you nor do I know whether the sums of money have reached you. But I hope so and also that you are well and that all is going for the best in the best of all possible islands. I hope also that the weather is good where you are. Here the calendar says that we are at the first of June. Incredulous as I am I believe instead that it is the 32nd of December.

If ever you are in want of frozen horse-blood or some other delicacy let me know. The resources of this village are not yet exhausted. I am sending you an English paper containing an article on the distracted being who is writing these lines. You will remember that we were one evening at the Lynds’ house. And that in the garden there were many people and little lanterns scattered about on the grass. Mr Lynd is from Belfast, a city that every good Dubliner, except myself, despises and reviles. From the article two great truths can be learnt. That an English critic can judge of the value or not of a writer simply from having heard a gramophone record. And that he will be convinced of the genius of a writer simply from having listened to a conversation between a knight of the pen and a statesman, both of them well dressed, needless to say. How are the mighty fallen! Othello’s dead, as Mr Shakespeare says. I am not, of course, speaking of the father-in-law of Ezra Pound but of another.

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 3 June 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Parigi 7

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Ho ricevuto i due scenari e ti ringrazio della tua prontezza. Non so quale destino l’avvenire loro riserbi. Il conte Carducci è venuto qui e vuol assolutamente metterli in musica. Agisce insieme con una dama o forse damigella che si chiama Pallustre. Essa è piena d’entusiasmo per la mia opera della quale però non ha letto una sola riga.

Dunque esiste negli Stati Uniti un essere che ignora la mia grandezza e crede che tu sei francese. Non poteva fare un piacere più puro a me nè un complimento più delicato a te. Benedetto sia lui fra tutti i Sullivans. Ho letto con gaudio che hai innalzato la tua voce in favore della più fulgida e gloriosa ugola di tenore ch’io abbia mai sentito. Non approderà a nulla, suppongo, ma deve essere un immenso sollievo per te di essere accolto così e ti domando infinite scuse per aver fatto parlare di me. Ma accetta le cose con calma filosofica. Quella gente farebbe altrettanto strepito per il figlio di qualche assassino balcanico. Ed a proposito di quell’odiato nome una sera al ristorante dei due Trianons, dove, del resto, ho lasciato patrimonio e matrimonio⁠[,] Mamma disse al cantante in questione: Ieri sera, Signor Sullivan, avete cantato come un dio. Questo non credo perchè l’ultima volta che il Vecchio Signore ha parlato con me aveva una voce di basso degna di ogni lode. Come un arcangelo forse. Ad ogni modo quel mascalzone, quel maleducato, quell’ignobile individuo che osa persino scaracciare in presenza di femmine e che non fa alcun appello al sesso gentile, che non soltanto non paga i propri debiti ma non paga niente per nessuno rispose brutalmente: Signora, accanto al vostro marito io sono un insetto. Fia ver? Ma allora che ronzìo!

Cercherò una fotografia di Mamma ma essa dice che sono tutte cattive. Quando incontro una donna che è contenta della sua imagine dipinta manderò un mazzo di fiori al papa.

Leggiamo con piacere che tuo figlio diventa di più in più bello e di più in più attraente e vedo molta gioia paterna nella tua lettera. Conobbi anch’io quella gioia negli anni che furono. E prima di me tuo nonno. E prima di lui i tuoi avi che sono rinchiusi in una cantina della rue Cler domandandosi con stupore che cosa diamine significhi quel trasloco e sperando e pregando di non finire nell’Asia Minore.

Vedo anche che la tua salute è più robusta ma sono arcicontento che i chirurghi non ti abbiano tagliato le quattro estremità. Mi dispiace che la Colm sia di nuovo malata perchè è una brava donna. E forse il consiglio che Colm ti ha dato è giusto perchè è un uomo retto al cospetto di Dio.

Mi scrivi che parti per le amene spiaggie [sic] di Long Beach. Mettendo insieme però la tua ultima lettera colla penultima non sarei troppo sorpreso se la prossima venisse dall’Alaska.

Ebbi ieri l’altro una lunga lettera da Lucia. È sempre a Bray e sembra essere sulla via della guarigione. Carducci mi disse a proposito che durante l’ultimo colloquio ch’ebbe con lei gli venne il sospetto ch’ella non fosse tutto ciò che una signorina per bene dovrebbe essere perchè quando le domandò perchè aveva abbandonato la musica essa additando il cielo: preferisco le nuvole alle pentoline. Ciò prova che lo spirito di Ponzio Pilato vaghi tuttora per il mondo e che la mela non cade lontano dall’albero.

Il proverbio: mai due senza tre. Ma spero che Helen non dovrà subire un’operazione alla gola.

I tuoi cari genitori stanno abbastanza bene. Mamma corre attorno come una lepre ed io continuo a scrivere regolarmente cinque parole al giorno. Ti mando un articolo apparso in un giornale londinese. Sembra dunque che per giudicare se un pezzo di prosa sia bello o meno bisogna metterlo su un gramofono e che, e per essere ben sicuri del talento o meno di uno scribacchino, bisogna ascoltare (con dovuta riverenza, si capisce) una conversazione tra un laureato della penna ed un ciambellano di stato. Ma non bisogna dimenticare che maggio è il mese dei ciucchi.

Soupault è andato in America a bordo di quel levriere oceanico che ha vinto per la misera Francia il record della velocità. Tutti hanno fretta oggidì. O furia come si dice a Trieste quando non si dice premura.

Adesso termino. Ho gli occhi stanchi. Da più di mezzo secolo scrutano nel nulla dove hanno trovato un bellissimo niente.

Domandi quali siano i nostri piani per l’estate. Bramo di andare in Danimarca perché i danesi hanno trucidato tante migliaia dei miei antenati. Gli Jolas partiranno presto per il mezzogiorno. I Gilbert pure. Mamma vorrebbe andare in Inghilterra per baciare re Giorgio, la regina come si chiama e gli altri membri della famiglia reale. E non dico di no, anche se resto qui. God save the King ed Iddio salvi Giorgio.

Tante belle cose a te, a Helen, ed al nipotino: e vi auguro buone vacanze. Dovrei fare un bagno anch’io ma sono troppo orgoglioso. O forse ho troppo rispetto per l’acqua.

‘Sento le orme di passi spietati’. È la domestica che mi porta un conto. Come la vita è quotidiana, Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 June 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Parigi 7

MS. National Library

Cara Lucia: Ieri sera venne un tuo dispaccio. Credo che il suo scopo fosse il denaro ma non son sicuro. Comunque sia stamane ne avrai ricevuto. In aspettativa più della tua risposta alla mia di venerdì mattina ho alcune domande a farti.

Tre giorni fa ebbi una lunga lettera dalla tua cugina Boschenka. Mi scrisse che da qualche tempo o tosse o sputa del sangue e che il suo medico affermò ch’ella era tisica. Se il caso è così (spero di no) credi tu che quello sia dal punto di vista dell’igiene un ambiente buono? Mi scrisse poi che tu eri partita dal bungalow dove stavi sotto la tutela della bungalowa, una certa Nicholls. In che circostanze e con quale scopo? ‘She has got terribly fat’ mi scrisse anche a proposito di te. Ordunque, mia cara baienetta, dimmi, ti prego, di quanto sei aumentata di peso e se sai perchè. Voglio dire il cibo, l’aria o forse qualche altra causa come le glandole, tiroide od altro, delle quali alcuno dei tuoi mille ed un medici parlò di quando in quando.

Ed insomma sei sempre contenta costì? Spero di si. Ma forse un cambiamento d’ambiente non totale, si capisce renderebbe la situazione meno pericolosa. E qui lascio la parola a te, cioè la risposta. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To MICHAEL HEALY, [? 15 June 1935]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

My dear Mr Healy: I think you ought to read the enclosed before you visit Lucia. The writer is my niece Bosschenka Schaurek with whom Lucia is staying and is the only news I have had for a month. From my sister I heard last 3 months ago. When Lucia went to Bray she wrote me she had found a pension at £1.5.0 a week and asked me to send her that and pin money. I sent her regularly £4.0.0 a week since then in two remittances of each. I also wrote regularly and sent her books she asked [for]. She answered fairly regularly but has not written for about 4 weeks though I wrote several times and asked her to reply by return….

But apart from this the letter raises two points. Is it wise for Lucia to remain in such close contact with her cousin who seems to be phthysical? Have Bray and Ireland ceased to do her good and begun to do her harm as it was at Nyon and at Küsnacht? In the form of mental or nervous malady she is subject to, i.e. schizophrenia, the real trouble is not violence or incendiarism or hysterics or simulated suicide. These are hard to deal with but they prove that the person is still alive. The real danger is torpor. The patient falls asleep, so to speak, and prefers to live wholly in his or her inner world, losing more and more contact with the outer world.

Disquieted by all this I wrote to Curran and asked his wife or daughter to report to me.

In conclusion I have never met either of my nieces for years. They are only 19 and 17, I think, and it may be merely a case of two young persons struggling with a task too heavy for them.

With kindest regards and hopes that all is well with yourself and that the visit to Dublin may be beneficial to Kathleen believe me, my dear Mr Healy, Sincerely yours

James Joyce

P.S. I don’t think it would be right at present at least to go into the financial part of this letter with Curran if you see him if time allows you but you certainly [may] discuss all the rest. His mother died a few weeks ago and as he was a very good son he is naturally suffering from so recent a loss. Up to now I have managed to lead her through the wilderness with a rather unsteady hand and a somewhat stumbling foot it may be but nevertheless lead her a little.

We expect to be in London on Thursday night, I am not quite sure of our address there so could you let me know where you expect to be on Tuesday and from Tuesday. I have just read in the Irish Times that all the hotels there are full up.

J.J.

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To HELEN JOYCE, 17 [June] 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: I am sorry to have from you such bad news about your father. I had no idea he was so old or in such bad health. In these circumstances we find it quite natural you should stay with him. It would not be very human to do otherwise or for anybody to ask you to do so. I hope the case may not turn out to be so bad as the doctors say.

In spite of this care I hope you will pass a pleasant summer there.

Kind greetings from us both

Babbo

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To GIORGIO JOYCE, 17 June 1935 [In Italian]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris VII

Dear Giorgio: Your letter seems to me perfectly fair and reasonable. Keep your independence of spirit. You must not let yourself be influenced by the fact that I, for example, have little or no desire to go there or to stay there. I know nothing of the country which may seem very beautiful to many. I feel that way because I feel that way. But there are 20 million of our compatriots who feel the opposite. Each for himself and God for all.

Both your letters were delivered to me after a violent storm by the French postman still dripping with hail and carrying in his other hand a telegram from Lucia. Then I thought: perhaps if I strain my ears I shall hear the voice of a child who has not yet learned to write. This I did. But the Atlantic Ocean made such an uproar with its clashing winds, its screeching seagulls and its roaring billows that I couldn’t hear anything else. How you make me yawn, you Pantofolo Palanto!

As for Lucia, I didn’t answer your questions because I did not wish to spoil the prospects of your career. Her present address is: The Heath Bungalow, Meath Road, County Wicklow, Ireland. She is staying with Eileen’s two daughters, Boschenka and Nora.

I could cover reams of paper writing to you on this subject but I prefer not to do so. There have been nine or ten months of anxiety but in the opinion of everyone she is infinitely better. So that it seems I have acted for her good.

It is natural however that I should always be in a state of apprehension. But that ginger cat comes towards dawn under my little window to sing his plaintive lament. He is a fine minstrel and much more worth listening to than certain dogs of Italian tenors that we have heard here in the last two weeks. And then, if Ulysses wandered about the earth and on the seas in search of a spot where he might stay, what name ought I to give your voice which passes successively through all registers? Ossian, perhaps.

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To GIORGIO JOYCE, 25 June 1935 [In Italian]

Paris

Dear Giorgio: As you know, I never reply to requests such as that in the enclosed letter. And yet this seems to be a case where one might make an exception. I am sending it to you and as he is in the same state perhaps you could get in touch with him or perhaps see him. In which case explain to him that I don’t see well.

I am not sure which newspaper cuttings I wanted to send you. But either Mamma or the girl appropriates the Irish Times sometimes [when] I turn my back. And if it is not she, other obstacles prevent me.

The new photograph of Mamma will be ready tomorrow and will go off on the next boat. She says that she wants you to find her ‘blooming’. And here you have Miss Joyce Bloom. And if you have any other ‘wishes in bloom’ let me know.

How are things going with you now? We hope that the results of the operation are beginning to make themselves felt. Mamma’s uncle is visiting Lucia today at Bray and so I hope to have a reliable report soon. Soupault has forgotten to give us the little photograph of Stevie. I shall drop him a line. I hope Colum’s friend will prove useful to you. Even if many promises are of the Kathleen Mavourneen kind, as they say in Ireland: that is: it may be for years, etc, don’t give up hope.

Idly lapt in down, ’Neath coverlets, for him fame never groweth.

The other evening we initiated the great week at Fouquet’s: ourselves, E.J., M.J., P.L. and L.L. They all begged me to recite something beautiful. I smiled modestly but then began. For a couple of hours there followed a succession of poems by Yeats. Everybody congratulated me on my extraordinary memory, my clear diction and my charming voice. Someone added: What a pity he is such a fool!

I am not able to extract a penny from that publisher who published The Mime. And he owes me and Lucia 40,000 francs!

Our plans for the summer? I don’t know yet. Perhaps we shall buy two Tam O’Shanters and make believe to be in Edinburgh. I hate the summer, you hate the summer, he hates the summer.

I wanted to go to Denmark but with whom? If that tragedy had not happened in the Bailly family, perhaps we should already be in the country of Hamlet. It can’t be helped.

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To HELEN JOYCE, 25 June 1935

Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: Just to say I hope you are having a pleasant time and that Stevie is enjoying his holidays. And also that things in general may have taken a turn for the better.

There’s no news beyond that in my letter to Giorgio. Everybody just sitting around or walking about or lying down. As Lucia once remarked at dinner in a restaurant: Strange to think we are all sitting down and in a few hours we shall all be lying down.

I should like to know who keeps order in the servants room. A redskin? From the 30th we shall have not even the one we have as she is going on holiday to set us a good example.

A pair of shoes has just arrived and is being trained up and down the corridor. And my canaries are now cocoas. I had them dyed in response to general request.

I am sending some printed matter but will allow it to speak for itself.

With best wishes and hopes that the change and rest may benefit your father’s health.

Babbo

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To MICHAEL HEALY, 28 June 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

My dear Mr Healy: As regards Lucia I have received a letter from her, two postcards from you and a letter and her telegram from your sister We had intended to leave for London this morning as I wrote in the letter. At the last moment, however, I was obliged to postpone my London visit. Of this plan and postponement please say nothing to Lucia, if you have not done so. All agree that she is well and strong but her handwriting shows signs of very great nervous agitation, possibly due to the excitement. Will you please tell me more precisely and without paying any attention to what are called laws of polite reserve which are quite [out] of place in this case, why you consider Lucia’s daily walks round Dublin so undesirable. She is after all a woman of twenty eight and walking is a good exercise. I should prefer her to walk about Bray just now. As regards the immediate future, the only solution seems to me to continue the Bray sojourn but first I must know the true state of affairs there…. Is she living in suitable conditions? Does she receive regularly the four pounds a week I have been sending her since February in two lots and if her board is 25 shillings what does she do with the rest? It would help us very much if a good photograph of her could be taken, I mean half figure so that we could see her appearance. And also what is her weight? If your replies to the first (two) of these questions are unfavourable can a good boarding house be found for her in Bray near her cousins whom she could then see when she wished? It is too long to go into Lucia’s case. Rigid surveillance was a complete failure and slack surveillance only a partial success. The plan of allowing her her own way as much as possible using only the force of persuasion has apparently been more successful. Of course if she had a suitable companion so much the better, but at any rate it is clear that the torpor I feared is a long way off.

I am much obliged by your kindness in the matter and I hope you will not be needlessly detained in Dublin.

With kindest regards from Nora and myself.

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To MICHAEL HEALY, 1 July 1935

Paris

My dear Mr Healy: Many thanks indeed for your long letter and card received today. The former I shall reply to at length in the course of the week. On receipt of it I at once arranged for the wife of a friend of ours, Mrs Jolas, an American by birth to go to Dublin and Bray and find out exactly what is going on. She leaves Paris tonight. It is rather expensive but I cannot remain in suspense.

Meanwhile I can only express my or rather our gratitude and beg you to present to the library of the University in Galway the unique volume which goes with this. You saw Lucia in a bad light. She has another side to her. It is a copy of one of my books of verses, reproduced in facsimile of my MS on special paper bound in green silk with gilt lettering and illuminated capitals by Lucia, a title page design and tailpiece also, signed by me. It was published at 1000 francs a copy (about £15) but it ought to be worth much more as years go by for there are only 25 copies in existence and the mould is destroyed. Two other libraries in Europe possess copies, the Bibliothèque Nationale here and the British Museum.

Lucia, if not a daughter, is a granddaughter of Galway and her name is one of its tribal names. The illuminations are extremely beautiful.

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To STUART GILBERT, 1 July 1935

Paris, [Letter-card]

Le bon repos

Des Espagneux

Et les roseaux d’Annecy

Leurrent notre âme

Et nous nous pâmons

Pour une Paname

Loin d’ici … …. .

Tirons nos grègues

Faisons nos mègues

Prenons le trègue

Et filons là!

Too hot to go on …

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, N.D. July, 1935 [In Italian]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Giorgio: For some time now we have not had any news from you but I hope this silence of yours is due merely to the present season, this stinking, pestilential, paralysing, plebeian, oppressive, dust-laden summer. Much good may it do us.

I enclose a letter from Mamma’s uncle which explains itself but doesn’t explain the preceding facts. Here they are. Last Tuesday Lucia decided that it was time to change company and to replace Eileen and her daughters by Kathleen. She took the train at Bray, arrived at Dublin, went to the Central Post Office and sent off the enclosed telegram. She paid, turned to go out and ran into Kathleen who, unknown to her, had come from Galway that very morning. I am expecting another letter from Mr Healy either this evening or tomorrow morning. If it arrives in time perhaps I shall enclose it as well. Anyway I am sending you La Semaine à Paris, Irish Free Press, Revue Universelle and Transition. I hope this last one won’t aggravate your present state of summer stupor. The footnotes (3), (4) and (5) on the last page but one are all mixed up. But I don’t suppose you will get there before Christmas. And even the writer of this letter was so heedless the last time he wrote to you that he put ‘ogni talvolta’ instead of ‘ogni qualvolta’. How strange the memory is! To remember that after such a long time.

I am also sending you a photograph of Mamma. I wonder whether Stevie will recognise her. O yes, I sent off the London Mercury too. In short, I send, I send AND I send.

[Continuation in English]

Dear G/. and H/.: Nothing strange or wonderful has happened since I last had this pleasure. In addition to the usual group we see Sullivan occasionally. Gorman seems to be in bad health. Huebsch called on me yesterday. He talked of inviting us to Sweden. I believe there was the greatest confusion at Longchamp on Sunday, all the sportifs and sportives had copies of La Semaine, opening it every two minutes. The mannequins ceased to parade and gathered into excited groups. O, qu’il est chic! Gentil, gentil! Une beautè! O, qu’il est mignon! were heard twittering from their bottlegreen lips. Most touching of all. The crack Irish jockey Steve Donaghue was showing it to the judge when his mount turned and rubbed his nose affectionately up and down the page. The President of the Republic then blew a whistle for silence and told the crowd to go home quietly with their copies as the Grand Prix stakes would be given to me without any race at all. Everybody said: C’est tout-à-fait parfait! C’est le meilleur chameau que nous avons en ce moment. Il le mèrite. Qu’il est bon, notre prèsident! Quel temps superbe! Une journèe vraiment remarquable! C’est magnifique! Bravo, Jigi! Nom d’un cheval, que nous sommes contents! Un chameau de tout premier ordre! …

A rather funny thing happened the other night or rather evening. I came back earlier than usual from Léon’s as the girl was going away and I had to pay something we owed. As I was entering the lift a voice said: Bon soir Monsieur Joyce, comment, or perhaps it was only Monsieur, comment allez-vous? In the dim hall I descried a female form under a large white straw hat. As I hesitated her voice said: Vous ne me reconnaissez pas? Thinking it might be the Hon Mrs Fellowes I took off my straw and began the usual: Je demande pardon, Madame. Ma vue est bien basse malheureusement. There was a scream of laughter (No, I added: Avec qui ai-je l’honneur?) laughter from the old lamelegged concierge and … Antoinette who had to escort the bonne to the gare. Getting into the lift I said: Mon prochain livre s’appellera: Mes Gaffes. To which the lamelegged concierge replied: Monsieur, si ça est la pire gaffe que vous avez faite ce n’est pas grand’chose. Thereupon, I mounted hydraulically without saying a word to anybody on any subject whatsoever.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, N.D. (Summer 1935)

[In Italian] 7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Lucia: Thanks for your letter. It seems that things are not going too badly. I prefer to send you the money (here are 2 pounds) by money order, first because the sending of money in any other way is illegal and any Post Office employee has the right to open the envelope and extract the contents and in the second place because in this way I am assured that the money will reach your hands. In any case please acknowledge its receipt.

I have not the faintest idea where Dr Tuohy’s house is. You seem to be interested in Celtic antiquities for this man must be at least ninety years old…. [Sullivan’s] address is 43 or 48 rue Daguerre. Daguerre was the French inventor to make the first photograph which at that time was called daguerrotype.

I am sending you the Irish Times which contains an article on Bray. I will get Roberts to send you the medicine in the form you wish from their London branch. Customs are a nuisance in all countries!

For many years past I have wanted you to take lessons on the harp. I hope you have already had a reply to your advertisement. Send a letter to the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

The news from America continues to be ambiguous, to say no more. I have sent you Mrs Bailly’s address. Do as you think best. She sends long and enthusiastic letters to her husband singing the praises of her native country. And perhaps she is right.

Write to me on the back of the leaves of the calendar if you like, but why choose the month of December? Winter comes, I know, and the ice-age. But leave me still the illusion of spring.

If your handwriting were as neat and clear as your drawings it would be wonderful. But I have already told you that. For the future I won’t insist on it.

Let us know if you need anything, I mean clothing or anything else. The trees you love change their leaves with the passing of the months.

I suppose you have also received the American magazine Esquire. Perhaps we shall soon have an English magazine entitled Boss. One should always hope.

I am glad that you are better and that the place you have chosen still pleases you. My greetings to your cousins, also to Eileen if you happen to see her.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, N.D. (? July 1935)

[In Italian], Paris [?]

Dear Lucia: I am very glad that you have already started the cure of glands with Dr M. and I have almost the conviction that he will be for you what Vogt has been for me. That is to say the man who does his business and comes at the end of a series of ‘botchers’. For the moment it is up to you to do what he will tell you. Leave Ireland alone and the rest of the universe and think only of getting better. The cure is short and seems certain. It is divided into two periods of approximately 4 and 3 weeks. Altogether 35 injections divided in 15 and 10. Between the two I suppose you will go to the country. You could have done the cure in Dublin but there were 2 principal obstacles: 1st yourself it seems wrote a letter to Miss Weaver that you wanted to go to Sussex because Bray was beginning to tire you. And also there is not in Ireland a specialist for the glands (endocrinali), they are backward in that respect. I don’t mean by this that you must consider you [sic] ties with Ireland finished or your voyage there and your stay there as fruitless. But the flower that is born from our land takes some time to grow and one does not see immediately the true and real sense of proceedings. I see you standing on the bridge of the boat and sending your farewell to the land that vanishes and your movement gives me a profound sensation. It certainly means something but I am not sure what. Perhaps that which it seems. Perhaps also not. I will think, I will think again. I am slow O yes 8 years to write a book and 18 for its successor. But I will understand in the end.

In the meantime I will tell you a piece of news. Rog Neel when he left the gulf of Dublin was an excellent ‘diver’ and when the storm came he remained for a moment under the water. 3 years are a moment in the life of an ocean. And then again puff! he remounted the salty water full of weeds and smiling happily. But why was he smiling? Hear why. When he was down there in the world of the sea he made the acquintance of an excellent fish, his teeth glimmering out of his mouth and he presented the fish with his visiting card [inscribed] his faithful friend Rog Neel. And Rog Neel at the summit of the task lifted 3000 silver buttons from his jacket and offered them with his visiting card to that good paste of a fish. And when he returned to the light of the day (it was a little black down there) he took the visiting card and read: Doct. George Arago, dentist and surgeon, 12 bis avenue MacMahon, Paris, telephone number Etoile 14.01. And the fish took the paper of his friend and wept 3000 tears, 1 for each button and he attempted to read but the light was faint and his eyes veiled poor fish! He did not distinguish well was it Jacky Jakes or Jicky Jones or Jaky Jeames so help me you! And that is why he wrote Rog Neel with all his 30 and more than 30 teeth transparent….

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 10 July 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Grazie della tua breve lettera. Ora che il tuo sesto lustro volge alla sua fine io apro l’abbaino della mia arca e vedo che il mondo terracqueo e le nostre sei vite in particolare sono in un tale brodo, per non dire in tale broda, che non chiedo scusa a veruno dell’avere cambiato il sesso della stagione dei sudori. Il mio testa è talmente piena di cupe pensieri e di prosa bislacco che velamente noso più se solo sulla segliola o si sonno sai sifi.

Dunque, Dopo la lettera dello zio di mamma, qualche giorno dopo, venne un’altra nella quale mi disse che mi consigliava di cambiare Lucia da Bray. Egli è molto buono ma ‘vegliardo per antico pelo’ e siccome c’erano parecchi punti oscuri sui quali volevo assolutamente essere informato (la lettera è dalla Weaver perchè prima ho pensato a lei come ambasciatrice) mandai la Jolas a Dublino. Essa partì il 6 luglio e tornerà a Parigi l’undici. Ed allora saprò, spero, che cosa si deve fare.

Non abbiamo una domestica perchè non sappiamo ancora se sia consigliabile dì muovere o no ma abbiamo un lavorante che finge di rinnovare l’impiantito nella cucina, mandatoci dal padrone di casa. Si sede, si leva, scende le scale, monta le scale, parla con mamma, telefona al padrone, va a desinare, torna dal desinare, misura, studia, lamenta, comincia, smette. Ho pregato marna di suggerirgli il pianoforte come consolazione.

Suppongo che tutti e tre siete già risplendenti d’una bella carnagione di cioccolata con capelli biondi argentei come gli icon nelle chiese greche. I veri sani che amano questa vera salute credono anche che Victor Hugo è il re dei poeti e che fidarsi è bene ma non fidarsi è meglio.

Mama è molto contenta in questo appartamento e puoi dire a Helen che ci sono cinque grandi specchi, anzi sei, e cinque più piccoli. Ci sono anche grandi specchi su ogni pianerottolo e si può fermare l’ascensore a tutti i piani di sotto.

Ti mando un giornale, un ritaglio, ed un libro. Forse ti divertiranno. Ed a proposito potresti forse studiare un poco il pianoforte non per diporto come il muratore di cui sopra.

Domenica otto S. e sua moglie erano qui. Egli voleva farmi udire una romanza dall’opera II Duca d’Alba di Donizetti. Disse a sua moglie di accompagnarlo. Essa non aveva le lenti non vedeva, era troppo difficile. Egli canta, sbuffa, si ferma, ricomincia. Poi disse: ‘Lève-toi, tu m’enerves’. Si sedette al piano e suonò l’accompagnamento da capo in fondo, cantando nel medesimo tempo a piena gola. È un peccato essere alla misericordia di un accompagnatore almeno per uso e consumo domestici.

Non trovo in nessun luogo quel libro-manoscritto di Chamber Music. Se l’ho dato in custodia alla Beach è ben scomparso. Essendo la prima edizione del mio primo libro deve avere per chi l’ha rubato un gran valore. E starebbe così bene nel nostro bel salotto.

Bailly è volato alla volta di Dublino anche ed è sceso oggi all’albergo Gresham dove è scesa pure la Jolas. Egli non sa dove si trovi sua moglie la quale lo cacciò dall’Irlanda tre settimane fa, dicendogli che non era degno di porre il piede sul suolo irlandese. Siamo stati con lui domenica a S. Leu-la-Forêt per udire un concerto di musica antica inglese dato in un teatrino-giardino. Era molto bello. Ho l’impressione che quell’uomo comincia ad averne le tasche piene. It’s a long branch that has no turning.

Marianna si concia per le feste, nel senso buono, ma quest’anno non avremo il ‘ponte’ e la piazzetta dove si danzerà è alquanto discosta.

Spero che il nubifragio d’ieri non sia passato vicino a voi. Mandaci qualche cartolina illustrata. Se fa troppo caldo scrivi soltanto T.C. Noto con piacere che Stevie è la stoffa di un nuotatore come suo padre.

Tantissime cose a lui, a Helen ed a te. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

P.S. Il brano citato da Eglinton è di Newman non di Ruskin. Habent aures et non audient.

P.S.

Risposte

1) L’editore inglese cominciò a stampare Ulisse in settembre. Fino adesso hanno mantenuto un silenzio da sfinge. But they howpe to bwing it aht.. before Tibb’s Eve (le calende greche)

2) Soupault, pare, è andato alle isole Canarie. Quando tornerà cercherò di avere quell’istantanea. Frattanto si può avere un’altra.

3) Scenari.
a) A.L.P. Non appena ricevuto questo di ritorno telefonai a Carducci di venirlo a prendere. Rispose che sarebbe venuto il giorno dopo alle 5. Alle due mi telefonò ch’era a Fontainebleau e che sarebbe venuto il giorno dopo. Non venne e non telefonò. Io nemmeno⁠[.] Sembra ch’io abbia accolto con troppa indifferenza le moine e le lusinghe d’una sua amica, una siora in capei che si vanta del nome di Palustre.
2) La proposta dell’amica della Beach andò a monte.
3) Cohen e Lieber. Chiesi informazioni. Ecco la risposta. Non troppo male. Rimandai i contratti suggerendo una modificazione in questo senso. Nessuna risposta. E nessuna risposta vuol dire visita di Lieber.
4) Zukofsky. Gli scrivo oggi nello stesso senso. È inutile ch’io esamini in dettaglio il manoscritto prima. C’è molto lavoro dentro. Lo mostrai a Petitjean. Ma ci sono anche grossi sbagli. Questi si possono cambiare. Ti prego di scusarmi presso questi giovani ma la mia mente era un pò altrove.

Domande

1) Sei sicuro che quel Chamber Music non sia in un tiretto in qualche tuo stipo? Non è tra i libri.

2) Ho detto alla Jolas d’esaminare il passaporto (ho fatto rinnovare qui la carta d’identità per lei) di Lucia. Se è rinnovabile c’è ora a Dublino il British High Commissioner per ciò. Se è scaduto questo funzionario probabilmente rilascerebbe un’altro. Ma non è sicuro poichè ella è sul luogo. Ma se ella per conto proprio o sotto l’influenza d’altri voleva un passaporto irlandese le autorità là forse domanderebbero le sue carte. Sono queste da te o da me?

3) Come stai ora di salute dopo l’operazione e come va la tua voce? Spero molto bene. Meno male che il tuo suocero non soffre tanto e sta meglio pure.
Ora vado cambiare la pennetta di questo stylo.

B.

P.P.S.

Li 10 giugno, mezzodì.

Nessun cenno dalla parte della Jolas nè a lui nè a me. Ma ha molto da fare. Sarebbe una gran bella cosa se questa visita repentina ed inaspettata dovesse essere il punto decisivo e se una nuova vita si spianasse per quella povera e fiera anima che la tormenta ha si duramente assalita ma non vinta!

B.

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To MICHAEL HEALY, [13 July 1935]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

My dear Mr Healy: Just a few lines for today. Our friend returned from Dublin, Her account was far worse than yours for she succeeded in getting at the facts which you rightly suspected were being concealed from you as they have been from me for four months. Yesterday I had an air-message from M. Bailly saying Lucia had called on him and asked him to have her placed in a nursing home. I had been arranging for her removal to England but upon this I telephoned Curran and this morning had a wire to say that she was now temporarily in a comfortable nursing-home. Apparently she is physically stronger and less unhappy. But I must think out some new plan for her.

I hope Kathleen’s operation will soon be over and successfully. With very kind greetings sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 16 July 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: We are both glad to hear your good news of general health, that Stevie is so attractive and that you admire the photograph.

Mrs Jolas came back on Thursday and her account was so much worse than Mr Healy’s, tallying with an avion letter from Bailly and two requests from Lucia herself to go to a nursing-home that I had her placed in one temporarily on Saturday by telephone. On Monday (yesterday) came a very nice and affectionate letter from Lucia to her mother. I shall not tell you the details of Mrs Jolas’s account unless requested to do so. You have troubles of your own, I understand, and are on holiday and may have a different point of view from mine. After Mr Healy’s letter I was planning to remove her from Ireland by easy stages to within reach of us. On two points all agree 1) that she is much stronger, sturdier etc 2) less unhappy. My wife is of opinion that she should be left to have these two advantages at least. I am less keen on letting her [stay] with Miss Weaver as it turns out that the latter has been for months past in collusion with Eileen ‘not to write this to Paris etc’, keeping me in ignorance of all the sordid squalor of the case and of the warning of the authorities that their next step would be to commit her or intern her. I was told always ‘she is getting on fine and Miss Weaver, as with her other female charms, walked blue-eyed and primmouthed into my sister’s booby-trap. I am not sending any of Lucia’s letters. I expect a letter from Curran brought about the transfer. If so I may write again tomorrow as there is a second boat on the 18. Lucia is quite sunburnt, too, it seems.

Soupault still away. Any chance of having a good photo of Master Ringlets, dressed please. After which you may send a nudist group of all the household, including Blackaboots, arranged in the order of their lastification.

And thanks for your cable on Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence Day. And here is the N.Y.H. with Mrs Bailly’s niece modestly beside the new Irish envoy.

Ay, I note you have moved from Boost and Worstworld Avenue to Booth and Wildwold Avenue and that you will autumn in Bleak and Wetwind Avenue before wintering in Block and Woolworth Avenues. My address is 7 Rapp, Bosquet, Pont Deloge, Dominique and Valentin Avenues, Paris (R.7) Tantissime cose

Babbo

P.S. Just ran down to the hairdresser’s to get shorn and ran up again. Don’t jump to conclusions about Lucia: or reply that there is only one simple solution. Severe reclusion was tried in Nyon and, though it kept her out of harm’s way, it was a calamitous failure. Total separation from her parents has been tried for the second time and you see the result.

I forgot to say that between Mrs Jolas’s arrival and Bailly’s mail I had a wire from Eileen and Lucia asking for 2000 francs at once. I telephoned Curran to find out and if Lucia was in difficulties to pay and notify me. She was not, luckily.

A few days ago Lucia sent me a song called Dublin Bay about a certain Roy Neil who runs away with his bride from Dublin. They are wrecked and lost at sea, the bride singing ‘O, why did we leave sweet Dublin Bay!’ In replying to this I said (Giorgio will translate). Ho capito il latino. E se fossi convinto che quello sarebbe per il tuo bene ma proprio bene malgrado tutto, ed a rischio di tutto … Ma ho sempre paura delle aringhe.

Some days ago I bought a MS copy of Pomes Penyeach with her lettrines and sent it to Mr Healy to present to the Library of the University in Galway in my name. In her letter to her mother Lucia writes that some days ago she went to the Library of Dublin University (one of the 4 largest in the British Isles) and presented to it one of my letters to her which she had found particularly interesting. It will not be very amusing for Giorgio to hear this, less so for me, though behind the impulsive gesture there there [sic] is something I recognize.

And do not imagine anything bad has happened. Not yet and it won’t now, I suppose.

B

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To JOHN HOWLEY, 29 July 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. University College, Galway

Dear Sir: My uncle-in-law Mr Michael Healy has asked me to send you a prospectus concerning the facsimile MS edition of my booklet Pomes Penyeach (so brought out in Paris in 1932) which I had much pleasure in offering to your library and you the graciousness to accept. Two other European libraries possess copies, the Bibliothèque Nationale here and the British Museum in London. But I wished to offer a copy to your library not only because the designer of the lettrines is a granddaughter of your city and the writer of the verses bears one of its tribal names but also as a small acknowledgement of a great debt of gratitude to Mr Healy himself for his kindness and courtesy during so many years. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MR and MRS CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 31 July 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7

Dear Curran and Mrs Curran: I shall write you a long letter at the end of this week. These lines are simply to send you our thanks for the ceaseless kindness and patience you have shown to Lucia and, even more than that, for the unerring tact with which you behaved.

I shall keep you informed of what goes on. For more than a year I have been harping on the subject of a glandular disturbance. Nobody seemed to listen, I mean, of the so-called mind doctors—about two score of them in all. The instant I touched her hand at Nyon after a forced separation of some months I knew some change had set in. If all should turn out well, how much greater will be my debt to you than it is and has been since Anno Domini 1904 or thereabouts!

Accept this scribble of thanks and I beg you both to believe in our deep gratitude.

P.S. I did not wait for Ignatius Day to write to you.

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 10 August 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7

Dear Curran: I hear you will go for a holiday on the 17th. Is there any hope of your passing through Paris? If so, tell me the date and I shall be here. I should like very much to meet you. I cannot put into a letter what I want to say. Lucia has had 8 or 9 injections so far. They are unpleasant but the doctor is hopeful of curing her. But though that is the main thing it is not what I want to say. I suppose that if there is any person in Ireland capable of understanding why I am once again in lonely isolation in my view of Lucia … that person can be only you. It is terrible to think of a vessel of election as the prey of impulses beyond its control and of natures beneath its comprehension and, fervently as I desire her cure, I ask myself what then will happen when and if she finally withdraws her regard from the lightning-lit revery of her clairvoyance and turns it upon that battered cabman’s face, the world. Our hope is that the gaiety and gentleness that we always remember will once again be her companions, as they were through her happy childhood but then grown into another and warmer youth.

I am enclosing an estimate of the cost of printing Chaucer’s A.B.C. poem to the Madonna with her initials. Their reproduction cannot be done except in France. As you know probably the A.B.C. was translated by him from the French of Guillaume de Guillerville, a monk of the Abbaye de Challis. My friend Louis Gillet of the Revue des Deux Mondes and a son-in-law of René Doumic is at present curator of this Abbaye (now a national monument) and he has written a preface…. Bref, could you write a line to your publishers in London, Sheed and Ward, to see if they would take the matter up with the Obelisk Press? The cost would be 12½% less for Chaucer used 23 not 26 letters which means that Lucia’s lovely ‘U’ will not appear. Of course if they would do the whole cost themselves (the work still being executed in Paris) or go halves so much the better for me for to tell you the truth the medical faculty of half Europe has very considerately and very considerably lightened my bag of marbles to the extent of about £5000 in the last 4½ years and see the result. Un bel niente!…

As you put it that way about the odd pound I owe you still I can say nothing but accept. By the way, it may interest you to know that I had a letter from Giorgio telling me there was a memorial broadcast for A.E. Colum spoke and Giorgio sang. They wanted him to sing ‘Believe me if all those endearing young charms’ bedad they did so but sure bejapers he wouldn’t and begorra he wouldn’t sing that fine old memorial service melody Doran’s Ass for the boys and girls and they all listening and waiting with a tear and a smile.

I hope you are well yourself and Mrs and Miss Curran. You have all shown the greatest kindness to Lucia and my wife and I and her brother are deeply grateful to you.

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 13 August 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7

Dear Both, dear Westwood and dear little Avenue: My wife and I are rather well. We hope you are all very well. We suppose there are many ladies and gentlemen on your beach. There are no ladies and gentlemen at all in this house. Last night we went to see Michel Strogoff at the Chatelet Theatre. As we were too rich to have theatre passes we paid for our stalls. There were a great number of performers on the stage. We applauded very much especially the eight horses. I hope your complexions are progressing as Abyssinian is now the fashionable hue for autumn wear. My wife has bought two very nice new pictures as we are entered for the Ideal Homes Trophy. One is by Mr Budgen and the other by Mynheer Vermeer. One of them is said to be an original but I am not sure which. We had quite a pleasant vacation in Versailles last Friday afternoon. I am very pleased with my lovely new teeth. The other day I was accosted in the street by a Mohammadan man, who said to me: By the moustachios of the poet are you not Mr Morganstunde? Madame Sullivan has just arrived and she has brought with her a very nice picture. It is called S. John the Baptist by Signor Leonardo. We should like it very much if you could send us a still life drawing of Broadway at lunch hour. I think printing is such a nice art. On account of the colours, I mean. The other night we went to the opera and heard Sigurd by Reyer. We liked parts of it on account of some of the notes. Monsieur Sullivan is singing at present in a theatre which has no roof. It is near Toulouse. I think this is the proper sort of theatre for him, don’t you? And after that he is going to Athens. καλι άμέρα, κύριε! καλι άμέρα. κύρια! Τι κανετε? καλα, σας έχαριρστώ! while stands the Comeandseum Greece shall stand! Ah, dear West and Bathwood and dear little Youngbranch, there is nothing like the classics before breakfast! You did not know? Pshaw! It is of the pshiunplest! As:

—Dear grandeur that was Rome, may I not tempt you to another slice of bacon? You had such a tiny piece!

—Thanks, dear glory that was Greece, your bacon is truly delicious. It is crispness porkonafried!

I hate people who throw jugs at each other for breakfast. It is so unnecessary.

Good children, who read this in peace and joy, Breathe a prayer, drop a tear for The Crockery Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 13 August 1935

[Paris]

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio. Se tu avessi veduto lo stato di Lucia dopo 7 mesi di reclusione a Nyon non mi daresti il consìglio di rimetterla in un istituto simile. Lo farò quando o se ogni altra via sarà chiusa. Niente di grave è successo in Irlanda. Tutti coloro che videro Lucia là sono d’accordo ch’era più forte e meno infelice. Ma viveva come una zingara nello squalore. Tutto ciò era noto ad Eileen e le altre due ed alla Signorina Weaver e tutte di concerto me lo celarono! Meno male che il sig. Healy l’abbìa vista. Egli, però, ha cambiato parere molto presto perchè da due anni a questa parte tanto lui che tua nonna scrivono sempre: Niente medici, niente sanatorio, niente esame di sangue! Ecc.

Lucia sta per ora colla Weaver (ho dovuto intervenire molto energicamente ieri presso di quest’ultima per troncare un’altra corrispondenza con Eileen), ha avuto finora 10 iniezioni, e si è rimessa a disegnare spontaneamente. Il medico afferma che guarirà. Avrà ricadute, dice, ma di più in più brevi e di più in più raramente. Indirizzo: 74 Gloucester Place, Londra, W.1.

So che il tuo consiglio è dettato dall’affezione per noi. Ma sento in me che la cosa va meglio ora. No, no. Tutto non è sciolto. Tantissime cose a tuttitreissimi. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Express letter), 14 August 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e, Tél: Inv. 50.38

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Gorman: I went to the American Express Office. The price with 20% rebate for return ticket Touquet-Paris, 7 days stay at Hotel Carlton, 19th to 26th inst is 600 frs per head plus hotel—bus fare Etapies—Le Touquet and back, thus made up:

Fare

120 frs

Board (full)

& Room

420

Service

42

Taxe de séjour

?

600 frs

The Carlton is a very good hotel but not de luxe.

We cannot go, however. On account of news from London last night it has been necessary for me to make, or rather, prepare other arrangements there. If you stop here on your way through I shall explain better.

I did not pay anything down to reserve until I heard from you. If you ring me tomorrow I can do so for you. The clerk says rooms will be free then but of course will telephone first Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOHN SULLIVAN, 28 August 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7

MS. Texas

Dear Mr Sullivan: Here is the page signed. It is not easy to sign on Indian paper. If you sign normally the ink spreads. I am late in returning it but the hook-on lens I use for writing was at the optician’s being mended. I sent you also the disc and impressions of your namesake as promised. I took him to see that film of his native place and he was quite proud and pleased to learn, among other things, that every shebeen in Kerry had a telephone as far back as 1828 when Griffin wrote The Collegians. I hope if this first Irish company screens Marxiana that the name part will be given to a bearded bull. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 28 August 1935

[Paris]

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Did Mrs Gorman lose a ring. We found one yesterday and it does not belong either to Mrs Sullivan or Mrs Shapiro the only two women who have been here since your visit. Plain ivory very small. Still here. News not good.

J.J.

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To HELEN JOYCE, 28 August 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7

Allegretto

Dear complimentary but most suspicious daughter-in-law. The reason I write in Italian to Giorgio is not to conceal anything from your keen swift flashing and infallible eye but because when he was introduced to me 30 years ago by Dr Giliberto Sinigaglia I said: Toh! Giorgio! To which he replied: Baaaa Boooo. Our conversation has continued in that tongue.

But it is very nice indeed of you to say I may have that lovely big motor car with a door for every day in the week I would also like a pleasure yacht with a steamstack for every month in the year.

andante

We are indeed glad to read that you hope to come here. My wife has made 50 pots of jam, tell Stevie, i.e. plum, raspberry and, of course, greengage. Flats are all over the place. Mrs Jolas has taken a huge 25 room house in Neuilly. Prices are going down steadily. colla voce

May the 17 devils take Muscoloni and the Alibiscindians! Why don’t they make Pound commander-in-chief for Bagonghi and elect me Negus of Amblyopia?

a tempo

The Normandie just got in and turned about so that it leaves me little time to write. If and when you decide to cross and you want anything done here cable me. I am buying a fez and a chibouk. During the 1001 nights of the Imbecidrivelling war you will charm my ears with your tales of your adventures. In turns shall you narrate them and by turns I shall hear, with my feet of accomplishment on the cushion of comfort and the puffer of perplexity in the oracle of stupefaction.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 9 September 1935 [In Italian]

Hôtel de France, Versailles

Dear Lucia: We are having tea here with Miss Shapiro, Mrs Bailly’s niece. We were at Fontainebleau for one day only but I think I shall follow your advice and treat myself to a week’s stay at the seaside, starting perhaps tomorrow week. Mamma and I thank you for your letter and also for the lovely drawing of your hand. You wrote, ‘Here you can see how big my hand is’. You should have said, ‘how small it is’.

By chance some days ago I wrote to Zurich for the photograph which the young Salzburger took of your hand. This morning it arrived and I enclose it in this letter. Here it is, your beautiful hand. And so I return hand for hand and tit for tat. Both are on the small table. So that’s that. Hope you approve?

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 15 September 1935 [In Italian]

My dear little daughter: ‘Hariosement’, as Mamma says, your blessed treatment has come to an end. Now it is simply a question of changing surroundings and air (everything has been settled) and then of allowing time to take its course. You know, all things come to him who waits. A short stay in the country will be the right thing for you.

I think you have stood very bravely all the inconveniences of this endless spell of heat and the continuous imprisonment. But now you must forget all about it. Miss Weaver has been very conscientious and considerate towards you and I am sure you appreciate her sincere and simple kindness. If I have anything to say to you it is not concerning her but concerning your nurses.

Each time I get a letter from you you have another one. Gracious! How greedy you are. Prince Norindett Norodum Doum Doum is entitled to hoist seven umbrellas over his bald head because he is of kingly race. Perhaps you have the ambition of making a collection of seven nurses’ caps, because you are the daughter of Apelles, son of Apollo. All right. But I beseech you not to exceed the holy number of seven because all these good females—English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, Mulatto, Indo-Chinese, Ethiopian, Red Indian (and whoever knows of more should put more on this list) depend on me personally, except, of course, Miss Weaver’s friend.

Mamma was very glad to have your news. You must not imagine it was through negligence that we did not write more often during your stay in London. It was on the doctor’s advice and in your own interest. But you must know, dear Lucia, that you never are and never will be absent from our loving thoughts, whether you are with us or separated from us by a little channel or some little mountains.

But now let us all look with confidence and joy towards the future. And, talking of joy, I have two really good pieces of news for you, one of which will give you great personal satisfaction, and the other, joyful surprise. But as this letter will reach you just at the moment when you are about to leave, I will, just for once, be naughty; that is, I will wait to tell you about it until you are well and comfortably installed amidst the peaceful downs of Sussex, a county which, by the way, is not unknown to you. Nothing stirs up the curiosity of a woman like telling her half a secret and then being silent. Therefore as good old Rossini sings, ‘papataci’: and keep your mouth shut as if it were full of water or, rather, full of the juice of the grape, my favorite cure for all ills….

Enough, old chatterer. For today I am sending just this incoherent letter. Let us hope that your stay in the country will be an agreeable change for you. Our kindest regards to Miss Weaver and also to her friend. I think I once had a glimpse of her on the staircase—maybe I am wrong. If so I apologise. It is amazing how similar all women appear to me in the dusk.

li 15 7mbre 1935. Cara figliola: ‘Hariosement’ come dice mama la tua benedetta cura è terminata. Ora si tratta semplicemente di cambiare ambiente ed aria (ed è già combinato tutto) eppoi di lasciare tempo al tempo. Come sai, col tempo e colla paglia si maturano le nespole. Una breve villeggiatura in campagna farà il tuo affare.

Secondo me hai resistito molto bene finora malgrado gli inconvenienti di queste interminabili ondate di caldo e la chiusura continua. Ma quella oramai deve essere storia antica per te. La signorina Weaver è stata veramente coscienziosa e premurosa con te e sono sicuro che apprezzi la sua bontà sincera e semplice. Se ho qualchecosa da dirti non è a proposito di lei ma delle tue infermiere.

Ogni volta che ricevo una lettera ne hai un’altra! Caspita! Che ghiottona che sei! Il principe Norindett Norodum Doum Doumha il diritto d’inalberare sette ombrelli sopra la sua zucca essendo di schiatta reale e forse tu ambisci di fare una filza di sette cuffie d’infermiere essendo figlia d’ Apellefiglio d’ Apollo. Sta bene. Ma ti scongiuro di non oltrepassare la cifra sacra di sette perchè tutte queste brave persone, inglesi, scozzesi, gallesi, irlandesi, mulatte, indocinesi, etiopiche, pelli rosse (e chi più ne ha più ne metta) sono alle mie personali dipendenze, tranne, ben inteso, l’amica della signorina Weaver.

Mama era molto contenta di avere le tue notízie. Non devi pensare che sia per trascuratezza che non ti abbiamo scritto più spesso durante il tuo soggiorno a Londra. È il medico che ci ha consigliato ciò e nel tuo proprio interesse. Ma devi sapere, tara Lucia, che non sei stata mai assente dia nostri pensieri affettuosi e che non lo sarai mia, sii con noi o separata da noi da qualche canaletto o da alcuni monticelli.

Ma ora guardiamo tutti quanti verso l’avvenire e con fiducia e con gioia. E giàchè parlo di gioia ho due buone novelle da dirti, ma proprio buone e che ti daranno una grande soddisfazione personale l’una e l’altra una lietissima sorpresa. Ma siccome questa mia ti giungerà proprio al momento quando metti il piede nella staffa per partire farò il malizioso per una volta almeno. Vale a dire mi reserbo di dirtele quando sarai bene e comodamente rincasata laggiù nel mezzo della pace delle dune di Sussex—contea, del resto, che non ti è ignota. Non c’è una cosa che stuzzica [di più] la curiosità di una donna che di dirle la metà di un segreto e poi tacere. Dunque, come canta il Rossini, papataci: ed acqua in bocca o piuttosto succo d’uva in bocca che ne faccio sempre la cura….

Basta, ciaccolone! Ti mando queste righe scucite per oggi. Speriamo che la tua sosta in campagna sarà un aggradevole cambiamento e ti prego di salutare la signorina Weaver gentilmente da parte nostra nonchè la sua amica che mi pare di avere intraveduta—o forse mi sbaglio—una volta per la scala. Se mi baglio ch’io sia perdonato. E straordinario come per me nel semibuio le donne si rassomigliano. Ti abbracio,

Babbo.

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 18 September 1935

Savoy Hotel, Fontainebleau

Dear Curran: I hope you have had and are having a pleasant vacation, though, if I am to judge by last and this year, you seem to have a singular taste in the matter of localities. If there should be a Japanese-United States conflict next year I wonder to what isle in the water for rest you will fly.

I sat for your friend, though at the first sitting I was rather upset on account of something which went against my breath at lunch. I was very glad to receive him both on account of you and of his name. Of course he was nonplussed and humiliated, like all the other painters, when he saw what he had to explain away, trying to find out where the catch was. A part ça, il est très sympathique and sends [?] me the enclosed letter from Dublin. It is very kind of him (and of the other friendly conspirator who I take it, is Mr Curran) but, as I try to recall our conversation at Fouquet’s I begin to think that my command of the president’s English cannot be all that some good people are reported to affirm.

O my goodness, what a long peninsular address you have! And today also is the anniversary of the half-time peace of Campo Formio. Anyhow, I will send this letter express and hope it doesn’t follow you around if you are shaughrauning like another of your name. Non troppa patria, Sant’ Antonio!

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 29 September 1935

Savoy Hotel, Fontainebleau

MS. Private

Cara Lucia: Prendiamo congedo dell’uva e torniamo a Parigi. Ti accludo alcune fotografie abbastanza miserabili ed, a questo proposito, riceverai dalla signora Curran (a Londra in questo momento) un nuovo apparecchio che, spero, ti sarà utile e gradevole.

Siamo oltremodo contenti di avere avuto notizie del tuo progresso. Sono in fretta perchè il treno partirà senza di noi se non saremo pronti. Così fan treni.

Eccoti la spiegazione degli acclusi.

Dopo la partenza dello zio di Mamma da Dublino volevo fargli un piacere. Sapendo che egli non avrebbe mai accettato del denaro ho comperato uno degli ultimi esemplari che esistono adesso del Pomes Penyeach e l’ho presentato a nome nostro (cioè il tuo ed il mio) alla biblioteca dell’Università di Galway, siccome tu sei una nipote di quella città antica ed io discendente di una delle sue tribù. Hanno fatto fare un leggio speciale ed il bel libro si trova ora esposto nel centro della biblioteca. Il bibliotecario, il professore Howley, è venuto a Parigi durante la nostra assenza qui, come vedi dalla sua carta da visita acclusa, per ringraziarmi (e te) ‘del dono squisito’.

Inoltre. Un pittore dublinese è venuto a Parigi per fare un disegno della mia testa per Curran. Mi ha fatto promettere di posare per lui quest’altro mese (8bre, voglio dire). Vuole che il mio ritratto sia definitivamente nella National Gallery a Dublino! Ora mi scrive che si sta preparando un banchetto là nel mio onore. Ed il sig. Bailly mi scrive lo stesso. E vuoi sapere come si chiama questo pittore. Si chiama (se non ti dispiace) John Sullivan.

Casco dalle nuvole!

Ma ho ancora una buona nuova da darti. Però, basta per oggi. ‘Una alla volta per carità’.

Segue—come dicono i romanzi in appendice. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 8 October 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I am sorry to hear that Mrs Budgen is, or has been, ill but hope she is all right by now. It so happens that I wanted to write to her as perhaps she can help me with a line or two to some good furrier. All Lucia’s clothes were either lost or stolen or given away in Dublin—two trunks full, including her fur cloak. Now I want to buy for her a new one before the cold November long dreary weather starts. I thought her (L’s) doctor might give leave for her to come for one afternoon to London and choose it with Mrs Budgen but, as that is impossible, a letter to her former principal (?) might do. If also an accommodation as to payment could be arranged, tant mieux. If not, tant pis. Lucia’s address is

c/o Miss H. Weaver

Loveland’s Cottage,

Loveland’s Lane

Lower Kingswood,

Tadworth (Surrey)

The price of the cloak or terms of payment should not be discussed either by letter or orally before Lucia or Miss Weaver, if, as is probable, the latter comes to town as she would then offer to pay for it.

My wife says she is writing you separately.

I hope this finds you both well and fixed for the winter. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 9 October 1935

Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mrs Gorman: Will you please tell M Nadal to do exactly as he thinks best and send me the bill but not to write to me?

Many thanks and greetings sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 11 October 1935

Paris

Dear Miss Weaver: The enclosed are for the camera for Lucia, please, if Miss Walker or yourself can go to Reigate. I sent this money weeks ago to Mrs Curran in London but she had left the Euston. No address…. I am delighted to hear that Lucia is getting on so well…. I would like her to buy a nice fur coat. I wrote to Mrs Budgen who is an expert and can get these things cheaper. Could I have a view of where you are?…

Hoping you are well and asking you to wait a little longer for my promised letter.

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To LUCIA JOYCE, 17 October 1935

Parigi

MS. Private

Cara Lucia: Abbiamo ricevuto le tue cartoline ed anche due fotografie di te e della signa Weaver. Grazie. La signa Weaver è sempre quella e quanto a te hai l’aria d’infischiarti sommamente del globo terrestre, assorta nella tua lettura e facendo lo ‘zittolo zottolo’, Magari che tutti gli abitanti della suddetta palla roteante fossero così pacifici!

Mi pare che il prossimo numero nel tuo programma di convalelescenza dovrebbe essere un bel mantello di pelliccia. Cosa ti pare a te? Ho scritto alla sigra Budgen che era per parecchi anni segretaria di una ditta londinese che lavorava in questo articolo e quindi se n’intende. Bisogna avere qualche consiglio di questo genere altrimenti si corre il rischio di comprare—è proprio il caso di dirlo—un gatto in saccoccia.

Il denaro che mandai alla sigra Curran aìl’Euston mi rinvenne. Era già via. Ma l’ho rimandato poi alla signa Weaver e spero che adesso hai la tua brava macchina fotografica.

Il proverbio dice che la penna è più potente della spada ma tu certamente lo pensi diversamente, che la matita è più potente che la penna e la spada e l’ombrello insieme. Voglio dire quando scrivi. Purtroppo la mia lente d’ingrandimento rende quello che è scritto col lapis ancora più vago e stinto.

Se la tua fotografia è un indice del tuo stato di salute devi stare molto, ma molto meglio. Ed ora, cara Lucia, devi diventare ogni dì in ogni modo—insomma suona male in italiano ma è quello che predica il reverendissimo e sapientissimo dottore Coué.

Il tuo amico Maurice Chevalier è rientrato a Parigi dove ha avuto un gran successo imitando i suoi imitatori. Peccato che non ti abbia vista! E se io mi mettessi ad imitare certi scribacchini?

La Jolas ha avuto anche delle cartoline tue. Sta adesso al numero 60 della stessa strada in una casa che ha, credo, 20 o 26 stanze, tutte sue. Ci si può giocare a mosca cieca. La sua scuola conta ora 45 scolaretti e scolarette. Una volta tu usavi parlare dell’educazione o, più propriamente detto, dell’istruzione. Uno scolaro mio a Trieste era molto pesante, stupido, calvo, lento e grasso. Però un dì mi raccontò questa storiella a proposito dell’‘educazione’ di una sua sorella che era probabilmente un tipo simile. Questa ragazza imparava alla scuola a fare la calza ma niente le entrava in testa. La maestra cercò d’insegnarle come farla. Così e così. Vedi adesso? Passa l’ago sotto, poi tira e così di seguito. Infine le domandò se aveva una sorella maggiore. La ragazza rispose di si. Allora, le disse la maestra, fa vedere il lavoro alla tua sorella maggiore e domani riportati tutto in ordine. Capito? Si, siora maestra.

L’indomani la ragazza arrivò a scuola ma il suo lavoro era peggiore che prima. Come? disse la maestra. Non hai una sorella maggiore a casa? Si, siora maestra. E non ti ho detto di domandarle come si fa? Si, siora maestra. Ed hai domandato? Si, siora maestra. E cosa ti ha detto tua sorella? La ga dito che vadi in malora lei e la calza.

Tanto per ‘l’educazione’.

Se trovi questo abbastanza sciocco ti prego di biasimare il riscal-dimento centrale che hanno cominciato oggi in casa nostra. Mi passano questi ricordi ameni per la testa in piccole danze delle volte. Ma non fa niente.

Salutami cordialmente la signorina Weaver e comprati una bella pelliccia ed un calcio alla miseria. Ti abbraccio

Mamma ti scriverà fra qualche giorno anche. Intanto sta bene e continua lo ‘zittolo-zottolo’

Babbo

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To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 23 October 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Parigi 7, Tel: Inv. 50.38

MS. Bib, Municipale, Vichy

Gentile Signora, Tomato a Parigi giorni or sono ho sentito che Larbaud era di nuovo ammalato e l’indomani quando andai alla rue Cardinal Lemoine la portinaia mi disse che si trattava di un attacco acuto di reumatismo. Vi lasciai la mia carta da visita e se trova il tempo o di mandarci due righe o di telefonarci mia moglie ed io saremo molto grati. Spero che Lei non considererà questa mia richiesta come un’intrusione. Ad ogni modo La prego di dire a Larbaud che desidero molto avere le sue notizie, che spero che la sua salute si rimetterà fra breve e defìnitivamente e che sarò molto grato anche se egli mi permetterà di andarlo a visitare ed a stringere la mano che non ci siamo più veduti da secoli.

Gradisca, gentile signora, i miei ossequi amichevoli

James Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 28 October 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Parigi 7

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Tuo nonno, quando gli si narrava un incontro come quello tuo coll’impiegato della N.B.C., soleva pensare alle lagrime sparse nel grigiore deìl’oliveto di Getsemani. Ma perchè proprio due persone eleganti come tu e la mia nuora vi ostinate a voler entrare nel palazzo del canto per la scala di servizio non mi è molto chiaro.

E non mi è molto chiaro come e cosa e quando devo scrivere. Secondo te a macchina o forse in istampato. Secondo Helen in inglese o forse in americano. Secondo mamma poco importa giacche scrivo sempre ‘all the wrong things’.

Aiutami dunque, O Musa, nitidissima Calligraphia!

Forbisci la forma e lo stil e frena lo stilo ribelle!

Mesci il limpido suon e distilla il liquido senso

E sulla rena riarsa, deh!, scuoti lungo il ramo!

Ho sentito una diffusione della Forza del Destino con Pinza. Non c’è male, lui, voglio dire. Insomma al di sopra della media. La musica sarebbe ideale per un numero di prestidigitatore [sic] o piuttosto di orsacchiotti danzanti. Ho visto una pellicola irlandese Lily of Killarney basata sull’opera. Sta a sentire. L’azione si svolge nel 1828. Ebbene i personaggi fumano sigarette, telefonano (in piena campagna irlandese) cantano Father O’Flynn (composta 60 anni più tardi da Villiers Stanford) il tenore canta la musica del baritono, i gendarmi sono vestiti alla foggia delle nuove guardie irlandesi. Roba da chiodi!

Quei due Zukovich (?) e l’altro mi propongono Laughton per Ulisse se approvo. Mi sembra troppo ‘ariano’. Andrò a vedere Arliss che fu, dicono, un buon Disraeli. E la tua voce che fa? E Stevie come sta. Di a Helen che siamo contenti ch’ella sta bene di nuovo e suo padre pure. Tante belle cose a tutti quanti. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 4 November 1935

Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Herbert Hughes is staying with Miss Painter at Crez (?)-sur-Loing—Tel: 19 Crez (?). Athlone—Dublin 11. N. will broadcast on Thursday 8 p.m. Act 1 of ‘Shaun the Post’ opera by Harold White and on Friday at 7.15 talk by Curran. What about my binder M. Nadal? Kind regards to you both.

J.J.

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To W.B. YEATS, Postmark 20 November 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yeats

Dear Yeats: It was very kind of you to send me the signed copy of your collected poems. I appreciate it very much for, though I have many friendly letters of yours, I have had no signed book of yours till now.

As a small return will you please accept a little book I am sending you, also signed, a fragment of a book I am writing, published in Holland not long ago? The cover design is by my daughter.

I hope this letter and the book (for greater safety I am sending it, registered, through the Galignani Library here) will reach you safely at the only address I can find, that in Who’s Who 1935. It seems that the other books I sent went astray and probably also the telegram sent you on your seventieth birthday, sent to your former address in Merrion Square. With many good wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 21 December 1935

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: I hope this finds you hale and hearty and as I cannot easily manage to drink to both our good lucks at this distance perhaps the enclosed may solve the problem. These are such mad times in the world that it is probably the best thing to do.

I don’t suppose there is any left now of my father’s friends except you and Mr Devan. If you ever see him please remember me to him.

As you will see I have changed my address here and have been busy putting new frames round the portraits of Messieurs my ancestors. These worthy people are seeing quite a lot of Europe and they look at one another in a way that suggests: Where next?

I hope you will pass a very merry Christmas and that you will lift your glass to old times, as I shall do. And I wish you also good health and all happiness in the coming year. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MICHAEL HEALY, 21 December 1935

42, rue Galilée, Paris

My dear Mr Healy: The enclosed card, done by Lucia, is to wish you a merry Xmas and a happy New Year. I hope things will go better now after the U.S. decision. It took me about 13 years to bring it off. England will follow, as usual. Ireland scarcely matters as there is a negligible market there for anything of this kind.

I have sent you from Avignon the case of wine: Clos S. Patrice 1920. It is the oldest vineyard there and before the sojourn of the popes at Avignon what is now called Châteauneuf du Pape was known as Vin de S. Patrice. I never met an Irishman who had heard of it but I got Count O’Kelly, the Irish F.S. envoy here, and Dulanty, the High Commissioner in London, to adopt it as the wine of the legations or offices or whatever they call them. I never drink it myself as it is red and the white wine of the same clos is not very good.

The lees are shaken up by the voyage so the bottles should stand a few weeks in a tempered room.

I told Establet to prepay the duty and I hope he will.

Do not let Mr Greany become too affectionate with it if you invite him to taste it as I caught him several times during dinner signalling over my shoulder to an engaging young woman whom he had met in the train. Moreover, he was stopping in a hotel beside the Folies-Bergère—a nice change after the Vatican, I told him.

Well, good health to everybody, including the pope who blessed and the judges who freed my book….

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1936

From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 12 April 1936

Trieste, via Cesare Battisti 6

TS. Private

Dear Jim, The latest is that an order has been issued for my expulsion from Italy. It was communicated to me yesterday by the Vice Questore here, without notice, without warning, without explanation. I cannot understand it. At my lessons at the University and elsewhere I am very careful not to say anything that might be interpreted as a political allusion. I go nowhere, to no cafe, bar, or restaurant. I live a more retired life than you did here before the war. I see only my private pupils, who all come here—so the root of the evil must be there. I have a rather nicely furnished flat—the result of thirty years of incessant work—and, though still in debt owing to the ruin of Schaurek’s end, have lived fairly comfortably, sometimes even taking a holiday. Now I feel my feet cut from under me. I am doing what I can to have the order recinded. I have written to Suvich, who was my pupil, and some of the political authorities here have promised to do the same. The Rector of the University, who was greatly surprised and displeased, especially as the authorities did not ask his opinion regarding me, has telegraphed to the Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale. I shall try to bring other influences to bear chiefly on Suvich, whose brother was a friend of mine before the war (he was killed) but of course I cannot know with what success. If all fails I shall be accompanied to the French frontier on Saturday next.

I was ill a couple of weeks ago, fortunately not with another stone, but with a consequence of the one that troubled me before. Now I am all right again, and in any case I think pyelitis is not a serious thing. I wanted to write to Helen and Giorgio and to send them a presnitz and pinza, but I have mislaid Giorgio’s letter and the only address I have: Villa Scheffer, Paris, seems to me too vague. Besides I am informed I could not have sent the cakes. Also I am too dreadfully upset.

I shall be very anxious to hear from you. Meanwhile tardy greeting to you and Nora. I have not told Nelly anything yet not to spoil her Easter. I shall tell her to-morrow.

Stannie

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 24 April 1936

[Rome]

TS. Private

Dear Jim, I have an appointment at the Foreign Office here this afternoon. I still have hopes to right matters. I will certainly do my utmost. But if I fail I shall have no choice but to come to Paris. Best greetings also to Nora.

Stannie

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To MR and MRS FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 April 1936

Paris

MS. Yale

Congratulations and long life to all the Budgens, from us both

James Joyce

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 11 May 1936

Trieste, via Cesare Battisti 6

TS. Private

Dear Jim, As you know, I went to Rome where I had two interviews with Mr. S. He received me very kindly, and did what he could for me. The matter, however, was not in his hands but in those of another personage. The upshot is that I have been officially informed that the order against me has been suspended for an indefinite time. This is an unsatisfactory result. Meanwhile I have been relieved of my position at the University as a consequence of the first order against me. Now that it has been suspended, the authorities of the University will try to have me reinstated, a rather difficult matter in these times. I have also been deprived by order of certain evening classes I used to have. Besides incurring the expense of a journey to Rome, I lost a month’s lessons from the beginning of April to the beginning of May, From many other points of view the outlook is not bright. Moreover I am not disposed to eat humble pie for 68 L a month. I must look future possibilities in the face. What I want to know is, what are the prospects for an English teacher in Paris? I have been promised introductions from influential people—Greek acquaintances of yours, for example. In fact I already have some letters. I have also a recommendation from the University. At the worst there is our old friend, the B. school, If I could get a job in some school, French, English or American, I would not hesitate to scoot. It is not a brilliant end to twenty-seven years unbroken work in one city, four years internment in great part for my Italian sympathies, and fifteen years at the University. If I should be obliged to leave, I do not anticipate that I shall have any difficulty in obtaining permission to remain in France. At least so I am told here. Although I will do my utmost again to remain here, I should very much like to get an answer to the various questions in this letter. If it is too trying for you to write, perhaps Georgie would write for you. In any case please answer as soon as you can for I have been living in uncertainty from day to day for over a month. Remember me to Nora,

Stannie

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To W.B. YEATS, 18 May 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yeats

Dear Yeats: I was delighted to get your letter and to hear you are now much better. Long may you flourish!

Yes, I sent everything either to your Merrion Square address or c/o Abbey Theatre and am very sorry my telegram to you for your 70th birthday never reached you as I, of all people, would not have been wanting on that day. This telegram must have been delivered to somebody. Otherwise the French P.O. would have returned it to me.

If Mrs Yeats will unsew the first pages of your Ulysses and send them I shall sign them with great pleasure. I mean when you return to Dublin. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To T.S. ELIOT, 3 June 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Par is 7e

MS. Faber

Dear Eliot: I shall be glad to see you again after such a long time but hope that you will do us the pleasure of dining with us instead.

I am in arrears with my correspondence. My daughter has been very ill indeed these last six months and four days ago my son too had to undergo an extremely delicate operation. He is now getting on well.

Léon will undertake the work of course but he says it is not the same thing now as it would have been in January when the text, with insertions and alignments, was quite fresh in his mind. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MARY M. COLUM, 5 June 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mrs Colum: Thanks for your cable. By the next boat mail you will receive through my friend Léon a letter and a dozen or so prospectuses. Il s’agit d’un present and a surprise I am planning to make to Lucia for her next birthday 26 July. She is at present at the Maison de Santé Dr Delmas, 23 rue de la Mairie at Ivry, Paris. She has been extremely and even dangerously low since last Xmas but I am still hoping and working, almost alone now I am afraid. I know you will do what you can to give her the poor pleasure I intend.

Giorgio was operated a week ago for his thyroid gland. The vocal chords seem to have been quite unaffected at any rate. He is making good progress and it is believed this will radically change his whole health.

How are you both? We hope for the best and that we may soon see you over here in spite of the disturbed conditions now abroad in the world.

It has been almost impossible for me to continue writing with such terrible anxiety night and day. Still I am doing what I can.

Our kindest remembrances to you both in which Giorgio, Helen and Stevie join. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 9 June 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: My brother, expelled from Italy, is due here on the 16 inst, with or without his wife and bulldog. My son has to remain in bed or on a couch for 4 or 5 months. My daughter is in a madhouse where I hear she fell off a tree. I have to pay the following bills immediately if not sooner:

Dr Welti (surgeon) 6000

Dr Garnier (assistant) 1000

Dr Fawcett (assistant to Dr Fontaine) 500

Dr Rossi (locum of Dr Islandsky 1000

Dr Delmas (Keeper of the madhouse) 2700

= 1 month’s board and 2 intemperometrical blood tests)

I paid already the American Hosp. fee and the surgeon Dr Bone who operated me.

The reason I have to pay Drs Welti and Garnier and the reason I already paid (2000 frs) to the Clinique at Asniers where my son was operated is that my son asked me to do so.

I also paid prof. Agadjarian 1700 frs.

After these payments there will remain outstanding only Dr Islandsky and whatever is still due to Dr Macdonald.

I believe I can cover most of the expenses of publication of my daughter’s alphabet. My idea is not to persuade her that she is a Cezanne but that on her 29th birthday in the aforesaid madhouse she may see something to persuade her that her whole past has not been a failure. The reason I keep on trying by every means to find a solution for her case (which may come at any time as it did with my eyes) is that she may not think that she is left with a blank future as well. I am aware that I am blamed by everybody for sacrificing that precious metal money to such an extent for such a purpose when it could be all done so cheaply and quietly by locking her up in an economical mental prison for the rest of her life.

I will not do so as long as I see a single chance of hope for her recovery, nor blame her or punish her for the great crime she has committed in being a victim to one of the most elusive diseases known to man and unknown to medicine. And I imagine that if you were where she is and felt as she must you would perhaps feel some hope if you felt that you were neither abandoned nor forgotten.

Some mysterious malady has been creeping over both my children (the doctors are inclined to trace it back to our residence in Switzerland during the war) and if they have not succeeded in doing anything for themselves it is to blame, not they. My daughter’s case is far the worse of the two though how my son was able to do even as much as he did with his voice in the U.S. in such a state as he was (he could not lift a cup often from the table much less control his vocal chords) is also a mystery to me.

Léon says I am to write this letter. Very rightly. I suppose. He does not wish to be blamed for having been a complacent party to my financial suicide. I like writing it just as much as you will like reading it.

For several years he has been asking me insistently to write a letter of explanation to the British Trustee, begging His Excellency to allow me, who am known to all as a wholesale squanderer, to cash some moneys, entrusted to him for the education of my children. I never met him and I don’t know who he is or what he has to do with my two children and I do not intend to write him any letter black or white on the subject. Blockhead as he probably is he might well be excused for wondering why I should now be needing this money for the education of Giorgio aged 31 and father of a son aged 4½ and Lucia aged 29.

If you have ruined yourself for me as seems highly probable why will you blame me if I ruin myself for my daughter? Of what use will any sum or provision be to her if she is allowed, by the neglect of others calling itself prudence, to fall into the abyss of insanity? It is useless to blame the doctors either.

I hate writing these letters. That is why I gave it up almost in despair. But since I have to pay these doctors somebody has to write it. With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To SEAN O’FAOLAIN, 16 July 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Ellmann

Dear Sir: A bird alone—a pretty grey finch at present in a cage—flew into our flat through an open window yesterday morning. Perhaps he was scared and sought refuge from the air squadrons then over the city or perhaps he came from Wicklow to remind me that I had not acknowledged receipt of your book. This I do now with thanks.

I am afraid, however, that I cannot be of any real service to you. I never write for any journal or periodical and I have not read a novel in any language for very many years so that my opinion is quite worthless. I buy them sometimes when [I] know the writer personally. Nevertheless, I shall take your book away with me when I go away on my holidays next month.

It was very kind of you to send me the book. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 22 July 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Would the piece in this issue of transition with this initial suit you? You may keep the review in any case but I would ask you to return me the lettrine if you decide that the piece is unsuitable for your purpose. I fear it is.

The copy I showed you of the Chaucer book was an advance one and as the book itself will not be out till the 10 August I enclose a proof of Louis Gillet’s preface which you may like to read. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STEPHEN JOYCE, 10 August 1936

Villers s/Mer

My dear Stevie: I sent you a little cat filled with sweets a few days ago but perhaps you do not know the story about the cat of Beaugency.

Beaugency is a tiny old town on a bank of the Loire, France’s longest river. It is also a very wide river, for France, at least. At Beaugency it is so wide that if you wanted to cross it from one bank to the other you would have to take at least one thousand steps.

Long ago the people of Beaugency, when they wanted to cross it, had to go in a boat for there was no bridge. And they could not make one for themselves or pay anybody else to make one. So what were they to do?

The Devil, who is always reading the newspapers, heard about this sad state of theirs so he dressed himself and came to call on the lord mayor of Beaugency, who was named Monsieur Alfred Byrne. This lord mayor was very fond of dressing himself too. He wore a scarlet robe and always had a great golden chain round his neck even when he was fast asleep in bed with his knees in his mouth.

The devil told the lord mayor what he had read in the newspaper and said he could make a bridge for the people of Beaugency so that they could cross the river as often as they wished. He said he could make as good a bridge as was ever made, and make it in one single night. The lord mayor asked him how much money he wanted for making such a bridge. No money at all, said the Devil, all I ask is that the first person who crosses the bridge shall belong to me. Good, said the lord mayor.

The night came down, all the people in Beaugency went to bed and slept. The morning came. And when they put their heads out of their windows they cried: O Loire, what a fine bridge! For they saw a fine strong stone bridge thrown across the wide river.

All the people ran down to the head of the bridge and looked across it. There was the devil, standing at the other side of the bridge, waiting for the first person who should cross it. But nobody dared to cross it for fear of the devil.

Then there was a sound of bugles—that was a sign for the people to be silent—and the lord mayor M. Alfred Byrne appeared in his great scarlet robe and wearing his heavy golden chain round his neck. He had a bucket of water in one hand and under his arm—the other arm—he carried a cat.

The devil stopped dancing when he saw him from the other side of the bridge and put up his long spyglass. All the people whispered to one another and the cat looked up at the lord mayor because in the town of Beaugency it was allowed that a cat should look at a lord mayor. When he was tired of looking at the lord mayor (because even a cat grows tired of looking at a lord mayor) he began to play with the lord mayor’s heavy golden chain.

When the lord mayor came to the head of the bridge every man held his breath and every woman held her tongue. The lord mayor put the cat down on the bridge and, quick as a thought, splash! he emptied the whole bucket of water over it. The cat who was now between the devil and the bucket of water made up his mind quite as quickly and ran with his ears back across the bridge and into the devil’s arms.

The devil was as angry as the devil himself.

Messieurs les Balgentiens, he shouted across the bridge, vous n’êtes pas de belles gens du tout! Vous n’êtes que des chats! And he said to the cat: Viens ici, mon petit chat! Tu as peur, mon petit chou-chat? Tu as froid, mon pau petit chou-chat? Viens ici, le diable t’emporte! On va se chauffer tous les deux.

And off he went with the cat.

And since that time the people of that town are called ‘les chats de Beaugency’.

But the bridge is there still and there are boys walking and riding and playing upon it.

I hope you will like this story.

Nonno.

P.S. The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent.

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To MR and MRS CLAUD W. SYKES (Postcard), 26 August 1936

[Elsinore, Denmark]

MS. Yale

Greetings to the English Players from here in Elsinore

James Joyce, N Joyce

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To JOHN SULLIVAN (Postcard), 26 August 1936

Elsinore, Denmark

MS. Texas

Greetings from the place which inspired Ambroise Thomas

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 31 August 1936

Copenhagen

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Do you or does Mr Giedion know anyone who has influence in Neuchatel? My brother Stanislaus has applied for a post there as professor of English in the Ecole Superieure de Commerce, director M. Vuillener. My brother has been a teacher of English all his life, is 48 and has held my post as professor of English in the University of Trieste since 1919. He is married to a Triestine Swiss, born Lichtensteiger.

On account of the British Italian friction he was dismissed from his post at the University of Trieste a few months ago and an order of expulsion was issued that he should leave Italy. But the then foreign Secretary Fulvio Suvich was our pupil from before the war and the expulsion order was revoked or rather suspended. He was not reinstated in the university and finds the moral surroundings so intolerable that he has applied for this rather poorly paid post—6000 Sw. frs per annum. He has no children.

I am writing prof. Fleiner and Edmond Jaloux but perhaps you know somebody.

I hope you have got Lucia’s book.

Friendly greetings to both

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 1 September 1936

Turisi Hotel, København V

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Please excuse my delay in answering but I have been travelling. I am very glad you like the two lettrines. Three things are lacking in the piece you have, a rubric for paragraph 2, a marginal insertion on the right of the second last page and a title. I shall attend to all this when we return to Paris in a week or so and then write to you. I have not the text here.

I hope this will reach you safely as I have forgotten the number of your house. But no doubt it will sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 13 September 1936

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Just back from Denmark and can’t find my stylo. At Bonn I met my friend Prof Curtius who it seems never received the copy of your book I suggested should be sent him. Can I buy 4 more at the same price. Please reply by return. I hope the Budgens parents and daughter are flourishing. Salutations cordiales

J.J.

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 17 September 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Buffalo

Dear Huebsch: I regret we did not meet when I was up north, so near you. I got your Swedish address too late but in any case thank Mrs Huebsch and yourself for the kind invitation you extended to us.

I hope you liked my daughter’s lettrines for the Chaucer book.

Herewith I send you the T.L.S with an advertisement which Faber and Faber have put in. I also send you another copy of the book. You will remember I gave you a copy of it in London already in 1931. Faber and Faber apparently bought over a good part of the Paris stock and rebound it, I suppose. I think its issue in the U.S. would be also advisable as I told you then.

Ulysses should come out in London on 1 October.

I hope you had a pleasant holiday, sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JAMES STEPHENS, 18 September 1936

Paris

Dear Stephens: Have you time to read Little Eyolf which I am leaving for you and ring me up afterwards if and when you finish it. I should like to hear what you think of it. If you read it you should not interrupt any act of it. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From JAMES STEPHENS, 20 September 1936

Campagne 1re 11. Paris

MS. Buffalo

My dear Joyce—There are two things about you which are unchangeable: you are the most subtil man, and the most continuously kind male creature I have ever known. All that merely apropos des bottes. I got the Ibsen book you left with my concierge—to think of you, with your poor sight, navigating the wilderness of Paris merely to give me a book, scandalises me, and makes me proud. I send you my love in return, but that is so easy to send by a postman that it is not worth signing a receipt for at the other end.

I take it that you sent me this book because of the remarks I made to you upon Ibsen. I will agree, with any man who cares to be agreed with, that Ibsen is a more than competent stage-manager. If a character of his sneezes in the first-act he will have a cold in the second-act, and will die of pneumonia in the third. My criticism (fault-finding) goes deeper than his handling of a selected matter in a first, a second and a third act. It is this: that of all those who have come to (deserved) eminence in drama, or, generally, in literature Ibsen is the most thorough-going liar, or falsifyer of the truth, that ever attained such eminence. His idealist in (was it?) The Wild Duck was no idealist,—He was a mere, uncomplicated, commonplace swindler. His Master-Builder man was, similarly, an ordinary, and exceedingly mere ass.

Now I have read, at your behest, his Little Eyolf—and, again, I take off all my hats to that exceedingly skilful presentation, and withdraw every demi-semi-quaver of my soul from his tale, and the truth of it. The catastrophe he so cogently engineers is everywhere unmerited: has not, by a single one of his characters, been worked for, or earned, or deserved. The man is a pestilent dramatist, and all his works are framed with the desire to make those pay who do not owe, and to make those suffer who have not merited it. If ever there was in literature a sadist such an one was Ibsen, and that anyone could ever have been taken in by him, critically or morally, remains for me as an inexplicable enigma. This play is, for me, an effect without a cause—which is ridiculous: and equally ill-founded, and as equally ridiculous are all his other triumphs. To hell with that dark man of the black north, for that is where he came from, and his literature is as nigh to hellish as the complete-bourgeois can possibly manage.

Mise agat-sa, do cara go deó

James Stephens

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To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H. HARTLEY), 21 September 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Hartley

Dear Mr Hertz: Many thanks to you and your friend for copies of Politiken, The letter to Lucia is just what I wanted. I have written to my German publisher about my book and if and when I get a copy you will receive it. If not an English copy. Are the latter really not on sale in Cologne book shops. I mean, the Odyssey Press edition?

Giorgio and Helen are now back in Paris and are rather tired, at least Helen is. He is much stronger. We had a lovely day in Cologne thanks to Mrs Herz and yourself Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (POSTCARD), 22 September 1936

Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion, We are now back and I hear my brother lost that place by applying one week too late. Nevertheless if you hear of anything to suit him he wishes to get away from where he is at present, even at a low salary.

Kind greetings to both from both

James Joyce

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To JAMES STEPHENS, 25 September 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

MS. Stephens

Dear Stephens: Thanks for your letter. What you say is true but it is by no means all, in my opinion. Did you say you would be going back at the end of this week? Will you ask Mrs Stephens to ring me or us up so that we may arrange perhaps to meet again before you leave ? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To KATHLEEN BARNACLE, 30 September 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Kathleen: I have received your letter from which I gather you want, or rather your mother wants, me to write in the first instance to my friend Mr Curran in Dublin. He is due back in Dublin, I understand, on Thursday, 1st October. I shall therefore write to him fully on Sunday, 3rd October, unless I hear from you meanwhile that this is not what you want me to do.

I hope you can read my handwriting

Best greetings to you both

Jim

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 4 October 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris7

Dear Curran: If you are now back in Dublin after a pleasant vacation, as I hope you are, and have a little free time I should be glad of your advice on the following.

My wife’s uncle, Mr Michael Healy, the only friend I had in Ireland except yourself, died about seven months ago. He had been a staunch and loyal friend of mine for 25 years and I miss him very much. He would have walked round Ireland to do me any service. He died while at mass and as he was a most devout man I suppose he would not have desired better. He had all the first editions of all my books up in an attic (probably he never read them) and a great number of my letters. These, I understand are safe. The curious thing for such a methodical and practical man is he made no will. His last position from which he retired was that of H.M. Inspector of Customs and Receiver of Wrecks (I think the post is so called) at Galway City. Not merely did he leave no will but it seems he has no solicitor. The sole heiress is my wife’s mother, a Mrs Barnacle, who has 5 children, 1 son and 4 daughters. She lives with one daughter in Galway City and has scarcely left her fireside for the last 40 years. They have been writing to my wife for several months past asking her to go over there and help them out. Now they think that I am the only person who can help them so I promised to try to do so. My mother-in-law has not the faintest foggiest notion of money. It is quite impossible to make out from her, now entreating, letters whether her brother left her £5000 or £3000 or £300 or £20. All these sums are mentioned in different letters. I know practically nothing about money myself, not even my own, but I am a financial genius compared with my mother-in-law. It seems some part of the money is in ‘bonds’ or was in ‘bonds’ in London, and a part in the Munster and Leinster Bank, Galway Branch. The solicitor of this bank is a Mr Concannon of Tuam who apparently has an office at Eyre Square, Galway and he apparently has charge of the estate. Do you know him or anyone who does? I don’t want to write to him unless somebody presents me to him, and, in fact, I would prefer to keep out of the affair if I could because my mother-in-law (who has always been a kind of worshipper of mine and thinks I am a miracle-worker) wants now to give all the money to my wife. In a former letter she said she wanted to keep it all so as to have a proper funeral, something rivalling that of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose. Like her son-in-law she is a great spendthrift. Did you ever hear of such a funny inheritance. I think (so far as I can make head or tail of the letters) that some kind of an effort should be made to find out what her brother really wanted to do with this money, a tombstone, masses, bequests etc. I mean if he was surprised by death surely one ought to find out what he would have done. Or perhaps I am wrong. I hear half the clergy in the city were at his funeral but he did not, it seems, leave anything to their Reverences. This, however, is only an initial point which his sister should be able to solve. She never said anything about it in any letter and I certainly don’t want to present the £500,000 to Fr McGillicuddy of the Breeks. Gesumaria! If poor Mr Healy whom I made laugh so often were here he would see the joke himself. But apart from the joke here is a helpless woman with a whole lot of money who turns to me of all people in the world. I said I would write to you and if that failed to my solicitors in London. But they have their hands full with me and if my mother-in-law’s problem is also presented to them I am afraid they will both close up the office in the City and join the London Fire Brigade for a restcure.

I hope you and your family are well, I am sorry I did not know where you were in Belgium this ‘summer’. We passed through and stopped in Liege for some days when going to and coming from Denmark.

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To MRS BARNACLE, 15 October 1936

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris7

Dear Mrs Barnacle: I wrote to my friend Mr Curran on Sunday week last I have had no reply yet. I wrote him very fully so perhaps he is making inquiries. As soon as I hear from him I shall write at once. Meanwhile I send a book illustrated by Lucia which I hope you will be glad to have as a proof of your granddaughter’s delicate talent. I thank you and Kathleen for your message of congratulation on the publication of Ulysses in England after my twenty years’ struggle. It is, I may add, the only word of congratulation which has reached me from any Irishman or woman at home or abroad.

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From STANISLAUS JOYCE, 15 November 1936

Trieste, via Cesare Battisti 6

TS. Private

Dear Jim, On Friday last I sent you by registered book post ‘Pebbles from a Brook’ and ‘Il Fuoco’. The house was turned upside down three times in three systematic searches for ‘Michael Kramer’ and ‘La Gioconda’. They are not to be found. Instead of starting again to look for ‘La Città Morta’ I have sent you ‘Il Fuoco’. It should serve your purpose better than ‘La Città Morta’ as you mentioned it in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’.

I have had no answer from Zugerberg as yet. I wrote twice and gave Prof Bernhard Fehr and others as references. But after all what can they say about me? In any case I must get out of Trieste. We are now in the middle of November, and I have an average of two and a half lessons. They used to begin, as you may remember, about the middle or end of September. Now, they begin—if this year they will begin at all—in December, and end in the middle of May. Six months ill-paid work in the year. It is clear to me that I shall not be able to hold out here during the coming summer and autumn. In one of the schools of the Dopolavoro in which I have been teaching since it was founded, I was again offered my usual place this autumn, but the organizers could not get the permission of the political authorities. So that’s off. Moreover, a great many pupils who would be willing to study privately with me are afraid to compromise themselves. This is not, as you will probably think, a hotheaded supposition of mine. Things English (and in this category they include things Joyce) are still taboo. Things Joyce doubly so. At one time I used to be able to have a ‘par’ inserted in one or other of the papers when something new cropped up regarding ‘Ulysses’ or its modest young author. This time both in the case of Lucia’s book and the English edition of ‘Ulysses’ I have got promises but I am still waiting for them to materialize. Of course I shall not ask again. A southern Italian, D’Alesio, has been appointed English professor at I.R. Università Commerciale di Trieste. He has also the chair in French. Two chairs, and plenty of cheek—one for each, in fact.

It seems to me that you are unable to realize how things are here, and I am unable to tell you.

Stannie

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 18 November 1936

Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: I have sent on your letter to my brother. I enclose a letter just received from him. It is clear that his one desire is to leave Trieste and Italy as soon as possible, at practically any cost to himself and for good. Therefore perhaps you could make your suggested motorrun to the school at Zug? In fact, any school whatever which can pay a small monthly [salary]. It is useful to reflect that my brother who now wishes to leave Italy as he finds life intolerable there was imprisoned for 4 years by the Austrians because of his rabid pro-Italian sympathies! I never took much interest in his politics and don’t understand the allusions in his letter to ‘anti-Joyce’. But if it is so, it is so. Und das ist mir ganz egal Friendly greetings to you both. Friendly greetings to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 1 December 1936

Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: My wife asks me to say she cashed your cheque and thanks you. A few days ago a letter came for you from Lucia. I can’t find it. Anyhow it was nothing much. However if you care to send her a few lines, perhaps about her book et la pluie et le beau temps and seeing her again in Z’ch when she is better as you hear she is making progress I shall forward it.

Look out for the next issue of Transition I have something in it and it is chiefly or in great part about—Gideon. (Book of Judges, chap 6, verse 36 et seq.)

Kind greetings to you both. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1937

To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 18 February 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: The proofs have been corrected for several days. I did not send them to Munich [?] as I thought you would be in London between the 15 and 18? Where shall I send them now? I hope wherever you may be that you are both well in spite of this hideous weather. My piece about the Norwegian captain and the tailor was swamped out in the Ohio floods (transition this time being printed in Cincinnati) but it has been reset and I believe they have now given a second bon à tirer. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 February 1937

Paris

MS. Yale

Many happy returns of S. David’s Day. The latest fragment of W i P printed in Cincinnati was washed off by Anna Ohio out of pure jealousy. It is now reset and you will have it shortly. Best wishes also to Mrs and Miss Budgen

J.J.

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To T.G. KEOHLER, 9 March 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

Dear Keohler: It was very kind of you to send me a copy of your little book and I thank you for your kind remembrance. As I have been carrying your other little book of poems for so many years round Europe perhaps you will do me the pleasure of inscribing it also? I enclose it in any case and thank you in advance.

I hope you are well and weathering with your old amiable serenity these somewhat gusty times and indeed I thank you for your kind words about myself and reciprocate all your friendly remembrances Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STEPHEN JOYCE (Postcard), 6 April 1937

[Zurich]

MS. Kastor

Caro nipotino: These are the 3 monskeyteers of Zurich. Their names are Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Porthos is in the middle and he makes the most noise with his songs. Athos is on the right and he can put away 2 spoonfuls to the others’ one. But Aramis on the left says soup is for saps and what he wants is not singenò [?] di coco.

Such are monskeyteers

Nonno

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To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H, HARTLEY), 8 April 1937

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Hartley

Dear Mr Hertz: Perhaps before I come you may be able to find out if there are vacancies in any schools of S. Gallen and whether, in general, a permit of residence in the canton can be had for this type of work anyhow. My brother was in correspondence with some school there. He has a certain claim of preference, I think, in case there is. His wife is from S. Gallen. The family name is Wirier Lichtensteiger and her father who was born there comes of an old S. Gallen family. Her uncle Paul Birnenstibel lives there still, I believe.

Looking forward to the pleasure of seeing you and with thanks in advance sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE, 11 April 1937 Sunday

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Ho visto Vogt finalmente. Trovò la mia vista molto migliorata il foro che praticò nell’occhio sinistro aggrandito. S’allargherà, dice, ancora e fra due anni propone di fare un altro taglio. Vorrei vedere meglio. Mi ha cambiato le lenti (3 punti diottrici e vuol tenermi in osservazione per saper se m’abituo bene ai nuovi occhiali. Li ho messi oggi. È un po’ strano ma vedo già meglio. L’occhio destro—nichtsehtum, un po’ peggiorato in durezza della cristallina verso il naso. Si ma minacciava una di quelle brevi vampate che mi vengono di quando in quando. Il clima qui è matto da legare. Infatti la vampata ci fù un’ora dopo aver visto Vogt. Ma presi aspirina, e feci delle compresse calde ed oggi va molto meglio. Così non potevo andare a S. Gallen ieri. Ma i cugini vennero qui invece ed abbiamo passato il dopopranzo e la sera assieme, al Dolder, al Teatro (io, rocchio bandato) ed alla Kronenhalle poi. Faceva un tempo siberiano dopo un venerdì molto caldo. Oggi però sto molto meglio. V. voleva ch’io rimassi 10 giorni, ma gli chiese di sollecitare la mia partenza e forse potremo partire verso la fine della settimana.

Telefona a Levi. Mi secca scrivere 2 volte.

In questo momento però è venuto un dispaccio da Stannie e Nellie dai pressi di Verona. Sono già in viaggio ed arrivano a Zurigo stasera alle 9. Ho trovato o quasi un posto per loro (essa pure ma dovrebbero stare nel collegio convitto stesso) e questa brusca partenza può significare tante cose. Ad ogni modo tutti sono d’accordo che S. non troverà mai un posto qui senza prima presentarsi in persona. Credo anche di aver superato le grandissime difficoltà di un permesso di soggiorno. Ma vedremo.

Spero che state tutti bene. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 9 May 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: What is the name of your friend at the B.B.C. and of what department is he chief? Perhaps you could give me a note to him so that my son Giorgio could have an audition in London. He could go over about the end of June probably when and if life becomes a little more normal.

Also my friend Louis Gillet (who wrote the preface to the Chaucer A.B.C.) is in London till about the 19 inst. He is a great admirer of T.E. Lawrence and would like to see your press and your books. Perhaps you could manage to meet him. He is at the Savoy.

And finally. Faber and Faber have sent me a bundle of proofs of ‘Work in Progress’ and as their printer is nearing Miss Storiella could you send to my friend T.S. Eliot of that firm a list of the few corrections and additions to the text they have being very careful not to forget that marvellous marginal monosyllable ‘Sic’.

As I do not know your new address I am sending this to the old address, transition is still swimming bravely across the seven seas, a wave a week. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, [18? May 1937]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Thanks for your signed book and I was glad to see my old friend from Carnac in it. Also for the typed certificates of my brother. I sent copies of these to Dr Steinberg, Dr Speck and Prof. Fleiner. The latter wrote he could do nothing about the Fremdenpolizei until Dr Steinberg or some other employer took the first step. I have now received a letter from my brother, the sense of which I have just communicated to Dr Speck. If you ring her up she will tell you how the case now stands. In a word my brother has a quasi-certainty of obtaining permission for Zurich if an application is made for him by his employer. You will see by the Paris Italian paper I send that the Paris Italian colony has just been fêting me. It is opportune (and quite right) that this should happen just now. Nevertheless the horizon looks to me so dark that I would be very glad to hear that my brother has definitely settled in Switzerland.

We have had a wretched Whitsuntide! Thank the Lord it is over!

Kind regards to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To C.P. CURRAN, 19 May 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Curran

Dear Curran: Herbert Gorman whom you met at Fontainebleau is leaving for Dublin where he will stay a couple of weeks, at the Royal Hibernian Hotel, Dawson Street. As you know he is writing a life of me. He has letters from certain writers there but I am giving him this one to you. Perhaps you can show him some places, Chapelizod, Howth (if the rhododendrums are in bloom) and Clongowes Wood: that is to say if you still have your car. If not, perhaps he could go by bus. I am sure you will help him.

Curiously enough, another friend of mine (who, I think is also doing a book about me) has gone to Dublin. In fact just as I sat down to write this a wire came from him to say he had arrived in Dublin two days before he had planned to get there. He has just delivered a lecture about me before the Italian Club here and he is giving two lectures in Dublin at one or other of the universities. He is Louis Gillet. He wrote the preface for Lucia’s book. He is a son-in-law of René Doumic, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes and perpetual secretary of the Academy, brother-in-law of the late Henri de Regnier and nephew of the late, the more than late José-Maria Heredia. I think he is staying at the French Legation in Dublin.

To return to Gorman. He also wants to be present at the first (and last?) performance of my first (and last?) play in Dublin. It has already made spectral appearances on the boards at Munich, Milan, Berlin, New York and London. A child appears in the last act about 10.30 and I am not sure whether this will be allowed. Anyhow please present the bouquets to the two actresses whoever they are.

(Gorman asked me where my sister lives or rather my sisters. I told him that I don’t know. And I might have said more. I have not told him any details of my daughter’s sojourn in Ireland. The poor girl still speaks of it as if she had been in Tirnan-Ogue. But this is not due to any mistrust on my part but rather because after five or six years I find it useless to try to explain the case to anybody any more. From what I can discern everybody has one way or another made up his or her mind. Those who are not mystified are bored and those who are not bored are more pleased than sorry. I think that if the mysterious malady which has attacked her youth has not laid her out before now and if the green isle of Erin let her escape alive I still hope.)

Our friendly regards to Mrs Curran and your daughter sincerely yours

James Joyce.

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To THOMAS KEOHLER, 23 May 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris7

Dear Keohler: Excuse me for not having acknowledged receipt of Songs of a Devotee, inscribed. I do so now with thanks. Yes, I gave your name to the edition of Transition as I thought I ought to reciprocate your kindness. I made no other record. That one (a private disc) was made too in very unfavourable circumstances, the B.B.C. officials having made no preparations in the studio, never having heard of me, of course, and regarding it as a family record, I suppose, made for a birthday. The light went out in the middle of it. Nevertheless I did what I could.

I remember Cousins, who wrote the Racing Lug. He used to live in Seafront Road in a house called The Bungalow. His wife was a Miss Gretta Guilfoyle (or some name beginning with G, I think, and I fancy from one of the northern counties, perhaps Fermanagh). She was fond of music and I sang at a concert given in the garden of her husband’s employer’s house at Monkstown I think it was called Shanday. He was McCormick of 7 D’Olier Street. I am glad to hear he is well. They were both very friendly to me and tried to help me….

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 25 May 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: I am so sorry to hear your bad news that our old friend Mr Devin is gone. Only on Wednesday last I gave his name to a young American writer who is doing my biography and has gone to Dublin, Mr Herbert Gorman. I told him to see you and Mr Devin as you were the only people still left (as I thought) who could remember all the pleasant nights we used to have singing. Mr Devin’s song was ‘O boys, keep away from the girls I say’. The moral of it fell on deaf ears in my case and I dont think it meant very much to him either. He used to play the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana—a version of his own and would have been a fine pianist if he had studied as he had a very agreeable touch on the keys. He used to collapse with laughter after a preliminary scream in a high tone at certain sallies of my father’s. He must have been a fine looking fellow when he was young and he had charming manners. He comes into Ulysses under the name of ‘Mr Power’ and also into ‘Dubliners’. I regret that my friend (who, by the way, is staying quite close to you at the Royal Hibernian Hotel) did not meet him and talk with him. He has letters to and from a number of literary people in Dublin. Many of them are very fair written too and one or two more than that but they never meant much to me personally and mean less now.

The Lord knows whether you will be able to pick the Kersse-McCann story out of my crazy tale, It was a great story of my fathers and I’m sure if they get a copy of transition in the shades his comment will be ‘Well, he can’t tell that story as I used to and that’s one sure five!’

I hope you are well and send you all good and friendly greetings sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), [? June 1937]

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie: What news about your position in Switzerland. Here is all I have. My play Exiles was not given in Dublin. Postponed from 3 May to 24 May and then to 1 Nov. Actor ill. Hope you are both well. Saluti

Jim

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 8 June 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris7

Dear Curran: First of all many thanks for having acted as cicerone to these two visitors. Though both have been back in Paris for some days I have not yet seen either.

It is regrettable from every point of view that I have to trouble you again about my wretched family affairs….

But to turn to another aspect, less deplorable though equally enigmatic, of our island life my mother-in-law seems to have relapsed into quiet after her cavalry correspondence of some time ago—concannons to right of her, concurrans to left of her. Her youngest daughter sent us a p.c. saying casually she was getting married the next day. No name, no place. A month after we got a Galway paper with an article heavily scored in black ink about the secretary of a G.A.A. who had been suspended because he left a G.A.A. meeting to go over to a Rugby dance where apparently one of the girls was flowering the wall. This official’s name was Sean uasal O Broin. When we had read this several times we said ha ha now we have it. His name is Byrne. Time passed and then one lovely May morning we got a parcel containing a chunk of old but still combative wedding cake for my wife and a silver shoe for me in a letter-packet from Mr and Mrs Griffin. I am wondering what strategical steps my sister-in-law will take eventually to break to us gently the crowning news of her husband’s Christian name. These people would be ideal readers for Work in Progress but for the fact that they feel they could do so much better themselves if only they would take the trouble of so doing. After 15 years I was still tinkering away at it at 5 a.m. this morning. Once when I was last in Ireland I got a present from them of some fowl. Some weeks after I got a laconic ‘p.c.’ saying simply ‘Did you like the drake?’ Anyhow my wife and I get plenty of fun out of them still and Lord knows we haven’t much to make merry over.

S. Médard (who has just sent us a shower which means 40 days rain).

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To C.P. CURRAN, 10 June 1937

Paris

MS. Curran

Dear Curran: From my solicitors’ letter today it looks as if they had sent you 10/– instead of 10gns. If this is so please send me a police constable and I shall reply by a medical officer for the difference.

I forgot to say that M. Jolas left with my concierge for my perusal a copy of A Page of Irish History, a book about U.C. On p 338 I read that in 1897 I opposed Skeffington for the auditorship of the L.&H. Society. This is incorrect. In 1897 I was still in the Senior Grade at Belvedere. I never opposed Skeffington. My contest was some years later against Kennedy. He won by ca 22 to 16 all the U.C. staff voting for him.

J.J.

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To MR and MRS MYRON C. NUTTING, 30 June 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Northwestern

Dear Mr and Mrs Nutting: Mrs Prost called yesterday and gave us your address and your news after almost nine years I believe. I send you a copy of transition and am hurrying myself with this note to catch the boat train at S. Lazare. Dear Mrs Nutting, we are very sorry to hear you have been in bad health and hope you are recovering. It seems Nutting is well. Tant mieux. Lucia has been terribly ill for over five years. She was given up and still we hoped on. Now it seems that she is at last on the road to recovery. Giorgio is married and we have a grandson Stevie aged 5½. Mrs Wallace is in London. I think she stays with the Mackenzies and is a face masseuse. We have not been to Les Trianons for years as we always go to Fouquet’s. Giorgio had great trouble with his thyroid gland but is now quite cured. Friendliest remembrances from us both

James Joyce

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 14 July 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris7

Dear Curran: Don’t be alarmed by this bloody letter and the five times [?] France on the envelope. My pen is charged with gore because the work on the proofs of Pts I & III of W i P is now so involved that I have to recur to my old habit of coloured inks and pencil and the stamp is intended to help les chômeurs intellectuels. In fact I am treading this winepress all alone though of the Currans there is one with me and as today is S. Bastille I am sending you the twelve apostles; each of whom is named Patrick and is a bottle unto himself. Wine from the royal Pope will cross the ocean green better at present than Spanish ale which is reported to be rather heady.

I was greatly pleased by your kind present but why the date 1935? For years I have been trying to get any of E.H.’s libretti for pantomime. Perhaps you will find one some day. Especially Turko the Terrible. My father’s old friend R.J. Thornton (‘Tom Kernan’) used to tell me about Giuglini flying his big kite on Sandymount strand when he was a boy. He went mad some years later. Dubliners put him above Mario even as a tenor. Selskar Gunn (without an ‘e’) used to come with us to the opera to hear Sullivan. He is the son of Michael Gunn. The brother James was a good friend of my father’s and they used to listen at the back of the darkened theatre sometimes when Tietjens and Trebelli were rehearsing. He told me his sister Haidée had drawn his attention to the many allusions to her father and mother (‘Bessie Sudlow’) in W. i. P.

Gorman and Mrs Gorman had dinner with me a few nights ago. I had not met him since his return. I asked him had anybody mentioned Sullivan. No. Or opera. No. Or singing. Not a word. Ichabod.

He said he had a grand time in Eire but at Clongowes it seems the password was ‘O, breathe not his name’. Surely this was an excess of prudence on your part. However, I leave it to you, as the man with the hump said to his son.

By way of Clongowes Fr Conmee used to say my letters home were like grocer’s lists. Sono sempre quello. For I am sending you another £2 & ten 10/- and I would like you to exhaust the amount in the purchase of all the songs available by French, Ashcroft, Wheatley and Vousden and Ariel. and when the £2½ is finished let me know and I will remit more. I should like these soon. I know most of them but want them, if possible, in low keys. Who is the Val. Vousden whose name I sometimes see. A grandson? I remember the old man. The last time I saw him was making a patriarchal entry into the Black Maria outside Store Street. He had a long white beard, typifying the wisdom of the morning after.

Also at what price can I buy last year’s Dublin Directory and Who’s Who. If I order them from here they will charge me full rates which is absurd as old Casey used to say.

Some doctors and people who saw Lucia lately agree that she is much better than 2½ years ago. What a dreadful trial to be laid on any girl’s shoulders! I had arranged for her to go out on a motor ride today but there’s the rain in bucketfulls! Pas de chance! The 26th is her birthday. Will you please send her a message (not a present, it’s too complicated with the customs)…. She will be delighted to see that people remember her. I mean just a word from Mrs Curran and yourself. Merci d’avance.

I met Gillet for a moment in the vestibule at the opera—the ballets, it was rotten and not good, the English. I had not time to talk to him as he wanted to. He enjoyed his stay greatly and then added: I also saw the president. A look of anguish and distraction came over his operatic countenance (he was to have been a deep bass, trained for the stage) and having said his line he went out into the night.

The money is in another envelope. When are you coming to Paname? I want the exact date if possible.

Raining greetings to A.L.P.

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To HELEN JOYCE, 25 July 1937

Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: … I hope Stevie is all right by now. Call at the hotel for the presents sent to Giorgio. We rang up your cook’s clinic. She was operated and is well (4 p m today). Perhaps she may be visited by my wife tomorrow, Rang up the villa today. No answer. I think the other girl is gone. So I can’t find the dog’s address. Looked all over the armoire but can’t imagine which of all the vets is yours? Let me know and will keep you posted. Unless Bertie your cook can tell us….

Glad you have got a house. Have a rest, tout le monde. …

Babbo

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To HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 2 August 1937

Paris

MS. Kastor

Just a scribbled line to say we got your letter. Will write tomorrow. A friend of Bertie’s rang up yesterday to say she, B. was going yesterday not to her sister but to the flat of some friend, who would nurse her as she is not yet over strong. She will ’phone us later. Rang up the dog s home. S. all right. Going to Versailles ‘un de ces jours’ Saluti a tutti

B

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 6 August 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris7

Dear Curran: Here I am at the other rainbow’s end, having passed from the ultrared onward. Many thanks for all safely arrived. I miss V.V. Let it Pass and P.F. Andy McElroe. I may send you a further £1 when I look at the catalogue again. I want the music more than the words (those I had already made large use of) as I want to bind the lot into a volume for Giorgio as a keepsake. Everything under the sun can be found in Paris but binders are very rare and they take years to do a little work, Lord knows why. When you come to Paris bring the P.F. book with you and I shall have a look at it here. As for Who’s Who and Thom’s I really don’t need these at all, certainly not at all urgently. They can wait.

By the way you misread my sanguine scrawl. I did not say I was going to be in Paramé but in Paname—an affectionate nickname for Paris something like ‘Blighty’. We shall therefore meet on Oct 1 and following days here if we do not meet elsewhere on some other date.

My final proposal was to accompany my wife to the Isle of Man from where she would have an hour’s sea trip alone. The Rwy Hotel on Holyhead Pier has no terrors for us. We have more than once settled down comfortably in the Hotel Terminus at the point of Calais Pier to the great delight of Alexandre and the rest of the lonely staff waiting until my wife was quite satisfied as to the navigability of that channel which so often has a guffaw up its sleeve. We have stayed there for a week at a time. It is most kind of you to offer to put her up. She has now decided that she could not, at least in her present state, face the two belts of water and that we must get a rest. We were to go to Vittel. Now it seems we may leave on Monday for Le Touquet. For some weeks. Since her return from Ireland in 1922, spring (she went off blithely enough but came back shot up in her nerves) she has never been able to cross water—she will not even trust herself into one of the bateaux-mouches. It is a frightful job when we get to the channel on the rare occasion when we go to London and come back. Mr McGee and Mr Guiney of the Lord Warden at Dover (two Irishmen, by the way, manager and secretary) have also had the pleasure of our company for several days’ stay. Le Touquet, in any case, is en route if there should be any urgent need for her presence in Galway. I am trying to finish my wip [Work in Progress] (I work about 16 hours a day, it seems to me) and I am not taking any chances with my fellow-countrymen if I can possibly help it until that is done, at least. And on the map of their island there is marked very legibly for the moment Hic sunt Lennones. But every day in every way I am walking along the streets of Dublin and along the strand. And ‘hearing voices’. Non dico giammai ma non ancora.

My wife is very grateful to you for all your kindness towards us. Thanks too for the libretto and the Chancellor’s verses on J.L.T. I remember both of them well. He was a regular firstnighter. I saw Toole play Paul Pry and the Birthplace of Podgers. He was very old and said to be quite rich—hence the digs in the verses. Tamagno, among tenors, had the same reputation. And so has Lauder. But most of them are still vagabonds at heart….

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To DAVID FLEISCHMAN, 8 August 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Fleischman

Dear David: If your mother has had more quieting news from New York and if you can find an evening hour in this blistering heat cooled oil by imber serotinus I should be much obliged if you could do me a favour.

I have sent you registered a book you certainly will have read as a young boy, probably more than once. I need to know something about it. I never read it and have nobody to read it to me and it takes too much time with all I am doing. Could you perhaps refresh your memory by a hasty glance through and then dictate to your mother (who, I hope, will buy me a bunch of new ribbons to spry up—her typewriter) an account of the plot in general as if it were a new book the tale of which you had to narrate in a book review. After that I should like you to mark with blue pencil in the margin the most important passages of the plot itself and in red pencil here and there wherever the words or dialogue seem to call for the special attention of a European. Don’t care about spoiling the book. It is a cheap edition. If you can then return it to me soon I shall try to use whatever bears upon what I am doing.

Many thanks in advance but if for any reason you cannot do this it will be no great loss.

The heat is abominable. I hope you all, especially Stevie, keep out of the sight of that monotonous old gasometer, the sun. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 9 August 1937

Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: If you are all right in this heat wave could you make for me a précis of the plot of the book I sent you, marking the margins wherever you like in blue when the marked passage is noteworthy and bears on the plot as you sent it red [sic] and in red when there is some special attraction in the style or better in the dialogue? In this way I can get an idea of the book in an hour or so. Terribly overworked on proofs of W i P. which I should finish by end of year.

Hope Mrs Budgen and Joan are thriving also yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE (Postcard), 9 August 1937

Paris

MS. Kastor

My wife went up to see the cook and brought her fruit. She’s all right and gets up tomorrow. I hope the old bowler is too for these are his days. Sending you a book about basques which you may read in the shade. Hope you have better news from N.Y. The heat is disgusting Saluti a tutti

B.

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To C.P. CURRAN, Postmark 17 August 1937

[Basel]

MS. Curran

P.S. to my former letter. I forgot to thank you for sending the teapot to Galway and Mrs Curran especially. It arrived all right. I hope they put on the kettle and live happily. (Also forgot to say that D-J Reddin arrived here as envoy of the Irish Pen Club. I, having been selected by the French Committee, as one of the five guests of honour had the additional honour of receiving him at my table—by no means for the first time, may I add very dryly! He mentioned my sister who, he says, is crazy.) I see one of your neighbours Mr Lennon has also reached the bench. Another to whom I had the honour of being host and to whom I presented at his request, a signed copy of Ulysses after which, in an article in the Catholic World U.S.A. he informed the Teagues that I had acquired my ‘abundant means’ by selling to the British authorities in Rome during the war everything I knew about the Austria which had released me on parole. (I was in Switzerland during the war and for 4 years in a lawsuit against the British Consulate in Zurich, a suit I won) So much for Ireland’s hearts and hands.

But most of all what I also want are the following numbers of the Weekly Irish Times.

1933

Jan 7

Jan 21

Feb 25

Oct 14

1934

Jan 26

1936

Aug 1 (4 copies)

Aug 29

July 18

With kind regards

J.J.

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 19 August 1937

Hotel Krone am Rhein, Rheinfelden

Dear Curran: I hope this reaches you before you leave for I gather that Armand Establet, who has succeeded to his father’s vineyard and useful mantle, sent the case. He doesn’t seem to have dédouané perhaps he couldn’t but it might come the day after you leave and run up a bill for customs storage uselessly. Maybe someone can attend to this in your absence.

This is not to ask you to see anyone, go anywhere or do anything for me but merely to wish you and your party a pleasant trip. Having heard we were going to Vittel, Le Touquet, Isle of Man and Anglia, you will think it the most natural thing in the world that we are here in Erin-on-the-Rhine. Anna Rhenana runs under my window all night complaining in guttural Schwyz-Duitsch of being pressed into service by me with 500 odd otters [?] as train bearer to a drunken draggletail Dublin drab. Lord help me if I ever come near that warrior-girl Anna Amazonia! …

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To MRS JOHN SULLIVAN, 27 Ausrust 1937

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Chère Madame Sullivan: Nous vous remercions beaucoup de votre aimable lettre et des bonnes nouvelles qu’elle contient. Vous seriez bien aimable aussi d’affranchiser la lettre ci-incluse (65e) et la mettre à Paris comme si elle avait été envoyée par moi comme d’habitude. J’espère qu’à votre prochaine visite vous trouverez ma fille également bien. Et comment va la volière? II me semble que vous avez pas mal de charges de notre part. Le temps ici n’est pas fameux et je crois qu’on va bientôt rentrer on France. En tout cas vous pouvez toujours envoyer une carte à cette adresse.

Nous espérons que tout va bien chez vous et que Jacques commence déjà casser les vitres à la maniêre de … votre bien devoué

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 28 August 1937

Z’ch

MS. Yale

Thanks for the photo of yourself and daughter which is certainly she and you. Our compliments to the mother as well.

If you publish any articles on any subject tell me where I can see them. I hope you will be able to do that for me but if you feel you cannot do so soon please send it back registered so that I may try elsewhere.

This copy of a Dublin ‘throwaway’ is a highly entertaining document to John Joyce’s son. Whence comes this phantom ship and why?

J.J.

PS. By the way what of my mariner in last transition?

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To ADOLPH KASTOR, 30 August 1937

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Mrs Isaiah Rubin

Dear Mr Kastor: My wife and I have waited for some time before venturing to convey to you our deep sympathy with you in the all but tragic event which has taken place in your family. It now seems as if the worst were really no longer to be dreaded and therefore I am writing to say that we hope in spite of what has happened that eventually some good may come of it. It is a terrible affliction to be cast upon you at your age and it is a terrible trial for your poor son for whom everybody I know that knows him has esteem and affection. We ourselves for the past six years have undergone a dreadful strain on account of our daughter Lucia whose happy and promising youth has been blighted by another but perhaps even more incurable form of mental or moral derangement. I have used the word ‘incurable’ because it was used so often by doctors to me but it is entirely false. After that long ordeal to herself and to us she is, in the opinion of everyone, slowly coming round again. The famous Russian ballet dancer Nijinsky has been pronounced also ‘incurable’ for the past eighteen years. Yet according to Dr Binswamer here (whose brother has him in charge at Kreuzlingen) he also is on the road to recovery in consequence of an insulin or glandular treatment. Your son’s case cannot be nearly so bad as his (in spite of what has happened) and very possibly the awful shock to himself may have the effect of restoring the balance of his mind and bringing the will to live and be happy again to the sufferer in spite of the malady’s workings. I sincerely trust that this may be so. The actual physical disfigurement might be much worse as a result of a train or a machinery accident and it may prove to be only a tribute which he had to pay in order to buy off a demoniac possession.

I hope therefore to hear from Helen that time as it goes on will heal not only the physical but the spiritual wounds and that you yourself will soon find some solace in the certitude that an irreparable loss has been averted. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H. HARTLEY), 30 August 1937

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Hartley

Dear Mr Hertz: Will you please fill in the address on the enclosed letter for me (I don’t know it) and forward it to Helen’s father? Many thanks.

We are here but perhaps we shall leave for France on tomorrow or on Wednesday. We did not care to ring you up yesterday it being your first Sunday at home since you got back from holidays. Of course we should be delighted to see you but I fancy only your weekends are free.

There is something which I am very curious to find out. Have you a doctor in St Gallen or anybody else who knows the doctors (Binswamer etc) in the Kreuzlingen Sanatorium (about 30 Km off) where the famous Russian dancer Nijinsky has been for the past 18 years, He was supposed to be an absolutely hopeless case of dementia praecox and yet according to sensational reports a week ago in the press he is now miraculously cured as a result of insulin treatment. My reason for being curious is that only a fortnight ago it was proposed to me in Paris to submit Lucia to this identical treatment. There is no doubt about it that she is better as a result of glandular treatment during the past 18 months and I shall hesitate to have recourse to any more drastic method. Still since I am here on the spot I should very much like to know if this cure is authentic. If it is I believe it will or ought to revolutionise the treatment of mental-moral maladies which are also clearly physical.

Our friendly regards to Mrs Herz and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 31 August 1937

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: I hope Lady Carlow and yourself enjoyed your trip round the North. I have been (unsuccessfully) dodging thunderstorms along the Rhine valley. We return to France tomorrow and to Paris in a week or so. Should I still be away when you come please ring up my friend Paul Léon. Mr Louis Golding did not call me up or write.

I forget whether it is mentioned on the title page that the lettrine is by my daughter? Is it?

I have been working altogether too much at my book, now in its final stages. I wish it were in its final-final.

I have been trying to spin out the days until the first performance here of your operatic namesake, Verdi’s Don Carlo but it is still ten days off. And we have had our fill of thunder-laden, lightning-furrowed Mitteleuropa’s schöne Sommerzeit. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 9 September 1937

Grand Hôtel, Dieppe

Dear Budgen: Many thanks. Just what I wanted. Have used a lot of it. The encounter between my father and a tramp (the basis of my book) actually took place at that part of the park. I went to the Br Consulate and with the official consulted Lloyds Reg. for 1935. No trace of that phantom ship. Could you trace her? I hope you noted, by the way, the tayloren’s christian name. But one or two questions—I mean till you send back the book marked, which do, but registered to Paul Léon, 27 rue Casimir-Perier, Paris, VII.

What is Devereux’s Christian name, also Sturk’s?

Her name Lilia or Lilian?

Is Archer (Dangerfield) an Irishman?

In what chapter is Sturk’s dream of recognition? This point is a fine one, I think, since he saw the deed in a half dream.

Why does Archer go back to Chapelizod and put his head in the noose?

Yes, I know that sickening thud. But keep on, Bruce, saith the spider. What is the book called? I should subscribe to the Verdant One..

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 14 September 1937

[Dieppe]

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Just a line to say I got your letter here and it will be all right if you put that information in the colophon (but I should like to see the proof, if you can send it, because it should also say that the piece is ‘opening and closing pages of’, Do you not think so?

I am sorry I did not overhear your talk with the Viking. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 20 September 1937

Paris

Dear Budgen: Got back and have now seen Léon. He says author’s rights in the case of a posthumously published book are retained by the author’s heirs till 50 years after his death. If you have any doubts about this I shall write to Benjamin Crémieux, secretary of the P.E.N. Club.

I have used almost all of the information you sent but am waiting to amplify it from the text marked by you so you may return it here registered when you like.

As regards S S J.J. the connection is not so much with Shaun the Post as with my father John Joyce. The boat is not in Ll’s Register for ’35. It may be in ’36 or ’37. I had copies made of the advt and sent them to members of the family, among others to my cousin Gretta Yeats in London saying that if my father was employing his postvital hours transporting Dubliners round the bay she could be sure that her two uncles James and Freddy (mentioned in my books) would be among the most reminiscent occupants of the saloon bar. Her husband Cyril Yeats answered me saying that on the day I wrote my cousin she died. I had no idea she was even ill….

Kind greetings to you both and if you come to the ‘expo’ which is right in front of my halldoor please take it home with you before I visit it with edificidal thoughts.

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To MRS JOHN SULLIVAN, 24 September 1937

Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Feinberg)

Chère Madame: Voulez-vous bien donner ces deux petits paquets à ma fille si vous allez la voir dimanche. Le Docteur Achille Delmas est de retour mais il ne semble pas très enthousiaste. Il m’a dit au téléphone qu’il trouve son état stationnaire. Demandez-lui (à Lucia) si elle a reçu la lettre de Sullivan en réponse de la sienne car autrement il faut que je me charge de lui offrir des billets pour l’infirmiére à son insu, naturellement. Ma femme le trouve étrange quand méme qu’elle n’accuse pas réception des chargements etc. par un petit mot. Et à propos j’ai oublié de lui écrire que c’est sa belle-sœur qui lui a envoyé la ceinture. En somme si vous pouvez nous donner un coup de téléphone après nous l’apprécierons. J’espère qu’elle fait toujours un peu de musique. Remerciements d’avance votre bien devoué

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 13 October 1937

Paris

MS. Yale

Hope you are all well. If you have had time to mark that book I should like to have it back soon to see the passages. Am working very hard at W i P and may finish it in some near time. Greetings

J.J.

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To EZRA POUND, 28 October 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: Your letter was delayed in transit. I have now rung up Mrs Dyer (whom I know personally) but find she is in London and is not expected back till the middle of next week. I shall ring her up again on Wednesday or Thursday next and let you know.

Thanks for kind messages. I hope Mrs Pound, yourself and the boy are all well. We are, I hope. Lucia has been ill but is now much better, I am glad to say.

As a matter of fact I thought of going your way a few months ago when, being in Zurich and wishing to go to the coast, I found that Genoa (to my surprise) was only 9 hours away

That is a fine likeness of you in the corner of your notepaper. Tante belle cose da noi tutti Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 1 November 1937

All Saints Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Thanks for the copies of Lewis’s drawing. If it is not as good as others of his the sitter is at fault. We are sorry to hear you had such a stormy homegoing. The last part is amusing, but in retrospect only. I wish you better air luck.

The Librairie Rouge et Cie of Lausanne would like to have a prospectus of the book. They bought the A.B.C. The name is is [sic] really Rouge. I mean it is not a symbol of any kind.

I shall add in a postscript the address of W K Magee (‘John Eglinton’) if I can find it. He told me when I wrote to him some years ago that he believed he could get for me the music of Follow me up to Carlow about which—and The Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast—about which I had written to him. The tune is alluded to twice, I think, in W i P. sincerely yours

James Joyce

PS

21 Carberry Avenue

West Southbourne

Bournemouth

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To EZRA POUND, 12 November 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris

Dear Pound: Perhaps you have had a letter by now from Mrs Dyer. When I spoke with her some days ago she said she would write to you. It seems she has published only 12 of the 22 Purcell sonatas (if that is what they are) but is doing the rest and some music by Bartok. She said she would send you 5 or 6 of them. I am supposed to go to visit her press one of these days and I shall mention the radio. But surely she has thought of this herself. Is any of this music vocal and for a low voice? If so perhaps Giorgio could sing it over the radio. He will broadcast from Poste Parisien on Tuesday next at 7.45 but of course he had to sing what they chose to start with. I shall mention this when I see her. She is a wealthy Australian who has published a large edition of Couperin’s music. I tried to interest her in a performance of Norma at the old Roman theatre of Orange (the ideal opera for such a theatre) with a fellow countrywoman of her own, Marjorie Lawrence (of the Paris opera) in the name part, Sullivan as Pollione and Carducci (you may have met him at my house) to conduct. The plan fell through. I think the part was too hard for la Laurence and in any case Mrs Dyer went to the Antipodes. So that was that.

If you wish me to try anything else for Purcell and yourself I shall do so with great animation.

Could you give me a word of introduction to Gerhart Hauptmann? When I was a boy in Dublin I made a translation (!) of his Michael Kramer a play which I still admire greatly. Perhaps he would do me the honour and pleasure of signing it—his text, I mean, in book form not my well meant atrocity which some U.S. buyer obtained by stealth. I suppose, from some admiring relation of mine in an old town. He is, or was, a neighbour of yours and I think you told me you knew him.

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 5 December 1937

Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: If you have finished reading Dr Berman’s book will you please send it back as another person has asked me for it. I hope that your daughter is better but one must have patience. Lucia had a set-back some weeks ago but is now getting slowly better. These cases always have their ups and downs. I suppose you are going up in the Himalayas Helvétiques for Xmas, Do you happen to know anybody who is coming soon to Paris because I should like him to bring me 10 (or more?) Brissago cigars (not the ‘Blaubart’ mark). He can bring 10 without paying duty and they are all ready made up in a carton in every Z’ch shop. Of course I’ll pay and if.. he brings more, tant mieux.

Friendly greetings to you both

J.J.

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From PAUL LÉON to HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 December 1937

[Paris]

TS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver, Mr Joyce has given me a considerable amount of autograph pages which are destined for you. They are additional pages of corrections and enlargements for Part II of WIP. May I know whether I can send them to your usual address as I remember that in one of your last letters you were contemplating to move from there.

I am seeing Mr. Joyce rather rarely now and then only for work. My part of it seems to be done but it takes some five or six other people to check the corrections, verify the additions and read the proofs. Himself, he does the composing part quite alone and from what I hear of Mr. Joyce, he works daily to about five in the morning.

Mrs. Léon joins me in sending you our best Christmas wishes.

With kind regards. Sincerely yours.

Paul Léon.

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To ALFRED BERGAN, 21 December 1937

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mr Bergan: The enclosed small offering in the name of our festive past. I hope you are well and in good spirits for the Christmas and send you many friendly remembrances. I hope you will lift your glass to me as I shall do to you. Your old friend

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 31 December 1937

New Year’s Eve Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion, Here is Dr Berman’s reply to my letter from Z’ch!!!

I hope the news of your daughter is better. I was with Lucia all Xmas afternoon. She is better but my opinion is she is not yet in a stable state. However, she is hopeful herself. Perhaps this year will cure her.

Giorgio and Helen have to leave for New York at practically a moment’s notice as her father is gravely ill—operation to take place on Monday. We passed a bad Xmas and look as if we were going to have a worse S. Sylvester Night!

Nevertheless, good luck to you both for ’38. transition held up. At the last moment I decided to collaborate! I hope to finish W.i.P. for 2 Feb. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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1938

To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), Postmark 2 January 1938

[Paris]

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Many thanks for the Brissagos which E.J. brought and congratulations to Prof. Giedion on his Harvard nomination. We are glad to hear your daughter is so much better. Lucia unfortunately continues to have a disconcerting and persistent relapse. We are thinking of going to Z’ch for a couple of weeks after my birthday (Maria Lichtmesse) if all goes well. My son and family are in N.Y. I am working night and day and the last thing I shall publish in serial form will be in the coming transition.

Kind regards to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 12 January 1938

noon Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Giorgio and Helen: Your N.Y. cable came this morning. We are glad to hear you are all well and hope you had not a bad crossing. No specially bad weather was announced in the press. We hope, Helen, you found your father in better state and on the way to a recovery which will render an operation unnecessary. Your first letter, however, will give us fuller news and we hope better news though today’s is not bad, Nino Frank dined with us on Sunday. According to him the Luxembourg people would like to engage Giorgio’s voice definitely, that is, for a certain number of broadcasts each month. So he seems to have made an excellent impression. I have sent them a reminder this morning that I am still waiting for the disc. Lord Carlow was here yesterday with the sheets for me to sign. He got Giorgio’s letter. I gave him the N. Y, Herald for the B.B.C. people and sent it also to Dulanty and the Luxembourg station. Mrs Jolas came back on Sunday. Jolas is in Zurich. I hope the winter is not too severe over there. I have not much news. I am rather tired as I worked very late but will add a postscript when I come back before this is mailed. We are going to the hospital to see Beckett, I send you two bundles of papers.

P.S. 2 pm. Siamo tornati dall’ospedale. Oramai egli è fuori di pericolo. La stilettata era al di sopra del cuore. Questo è illeso, i polmoni anche ma c’è una perforazione della pleura, l’involucro circondante la pleura. La casa mia il giorno dopo la tua partenza era come la borsa, telefonate da ogni dove. Si saprà più di quest’affare quando sarà portato al tribunale. La polizia arrestò l’aggreditore ieri l’altro. La ferita non lascerà tracce pregiudiziali, dice il dott. Farvert che rimpiazza la Fontaine in quell’ospedale. Beckett l’ha scappata bella. Non avevo torto dunque d’allarmarmi quando appresi che aveva fatto una nottata fuori dell’albergo. Sua madre e suo fratello giunsero qui tre giorni fa col velivolo. Ho visto lui ma non lei. Insomma di quei due spromessi sposi ambedue, cioè ed Enzo e Lucia, sono ora all’ospedale. Buona fortuna costì Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To HELEN JOYCE, 20 January 1938

Parigi

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: I hope you found your father and brother better than you had expected and that we shall have good news when a letter comes from N.Y. So far we had just the note Giorgio wrote on board which seemed all right. The boat carrying this was harbour-bound yesterday. You just got over before a terrific ocean storm. Not much news here. I rang up your villa about a dozen times at different hours to find out if there was any news and also to see had the case of S. Patrice arrived. No answer. Please thank the Turners for the Xmas card from the ends of the earth. It came yesterday. I am writing this in bed on a sloping book so it is not over legible, as I [am] a bit fatigued. But I have finished the piece for Transition. I hope you are all well.

Caro Giorgio: Col medesimo corriere ti mando una fotografia della figlia di Dulanty (veramente non è una bellezza) che andò sposa l’altro giorno ad uno degli ufficiali superiori della B.B.C. Nino Frank ci disse che la Stazione L.. ma mi pare di avere già scritto ciò. Insomma vorrebbero darti qualche specie d’impiego fisso. La famiglia di Beckett riparte oggi col velivolo. La Fontaine dice ch’egli dovrà restare all’ospedale ancora qualche settimana. Era esaminato radiograficamente ieri. C’è sempre una suffusione sanguigna nella pleura ma non comporterà gravi consequenze. Sembra che l’aggressore sia piuttosto uno squilibrato anziché delinquente. Così affermò ieri sua sorella Caprinosa alla prim’udienza dinanzi al giudice istruttore. N. Frank e G. Pellorson [sic] però asseriscono che il Beckett quando è alticcio è alquanto accattabrighe e si lascia andare facilmente a vie di fatti. Avrò il tuo disco fra qualche giorno. Spero che avrai l’occasione di cantare costì. Siete partiti col vento in poppa. Invece da parecchi giorni un libeccio violentissimo infuria sull’oceano. Meno male per Stevie specialmente. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 27 January 1938

[Paris]

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Can’t write much as I have a slight attack in right eye (episcleritis). Sending you Fr. version of impressions of S. Have finished and sent to F.F. Pt III of W i P. Can you send me 4 copies of your book. On receipt of invoice will remit amount. Write or have publisher write direct to Galignani and Miss Beach Kindest regards to both

J.J.

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From PAUL LÉON to FRANK BUDGEN (Largely dictated by Joyce),?29 January 1938

Paris

TS. Budgen

Late spring three years ago J.J. coming back from Z’ch after a second visit to Vogt—sight may be a little better.

Concert of Volpi heard. Also much talk about a performance of William Tell with Volpi in the part of Arnold. Conversations with Sullivan establish that Volpi had the entire score cut by some half of it and the key lowered by a half note. This Volpi performance is narrated with all sorts of compliments in the N.Y. Herald (Paris edition) by their official musical critic (M. Louis Schneider). Immediately a letter is written to him containing a wager by Sullivan to let him and Volpi sing both the part of Arnold in the original score in any concert hall—the arbiter to be Mr. Schneider—and the stakes to be a copy of the original full score nicely bound. Naturally no reply from either Schneider or Volpi (considering Schneider had written that nobody at present could sing the part of Arnold as had been done by Volpi).

A week later—performance of Guillaume Tell with Sullivan. Sitting in the fifth row right aisle next to the passage your obedient servant next to him J.J. next to him, Mrs. Léon and next to her Mrs. J—somewhere in the stalls an Irish Miss correspondent of some paper, and a gentleman correspondent of the Neue Züricher Zeitung.

First and second act pass with great applause, J.J. being greatly enthused. Third act where there is no Sullivan on the stage spent in the buffet.

Fourth Act after the Aria ‘Asile héréditaire’ sung with great brio and real feeling by S. applause interminable. J.J. excited to the extreme shouts ‘Bravo Sullivan—Merde pour Lauri Volpi’. The abonnés (this being I believe a Friday) rather astonished, one of them saying: Il va un peu fort celui-là.

Half an hour later: at the Café de la Paix. Great conversation in which S. joins after he has changed clothes. At the moment of parting the Neue Züricher Zeitung correspondent having been talked to all evening about music approaches J.J. with the following words:

The Correspondent: Thank you so much for the delightful evening. I have some pull with my paper and should you wish I could arrange for an article or two by you to appear there about your Paris impressions: J.J: Many thanks but I never write for the newspapers.

The Correspondent: Oh! I see you are simply a musical critic.

Next day article in the press. M.J.J. returned from Z’ch after a successful operation goes with friends to the Opera to hear his compatriot S. sing William Tell. Sitting in a box. After the fourth act aria he takes off his spectacles and is heard saying ‘Thank God I have recovered my eyesight’.

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 7 February 1938

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. Kastor

We called to see Ponisovsky. His morale seems very good and Léon saw the doctor today who is quite satisfied but will not give his final opinion till after an examination on Thursday. He is very brave and cheerful. A bad fog here. We stay a day or two as I want to rest before seeing Vogt. My sight is much easier (100% better according to Collinson). I had no inflammation or redness just fatigue. Am sending this off in a hurry. Forgot to say Soupault and Curran’s daughter were at my party too and Mlle Suzy, the hatter, sent a message to the maître (i.e. J.J.) saying Ulysse had opened up a new world for her. A.P. sends greetings Tante bellecosea tutti

Babbo

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To EZRA POUND, 9 February 1938

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Pound

Dear Pound: Retinal congestion suddenly developed in my left (the only one really left) eye in consequence of months of day and (literally) allnight work in finishing W i P. and I had to leave Paris and come here to see Prof. Vogt. All writing and reading were stopped but it was only strain and righted itself with a few weeks rest and I am now allowed 2 or 3 hours a day work. So I am writing to Hauptmann by the next post both to explain and to thank him

I think I can now also send on your different enclosures to la Dyer?

I don’t think I ever worked so hard even at Ulysses.

Galeotto è il libro e chi lo scrive. Tante belle cose sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To WILHELM HERZ (WILLIAM H. HARTLEY), 22 February 1938

Carlton Elite Hotel, Zurich

MS. Hartley

Dear Mr and Mrs Hertz: We hope you got home all right in the dark. Here is the come-all-you about the turkey. You may copy it if you wish but please return it as I have no other myself. I have just had tea with your aunt and we got on very well together, I think, as I tried my clearest tenor tones. Greetings to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 22 February 1938

Z’ch

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

‘Je ne suis pas où que l’on pense,

Je ne suis pas où que l’on dit’

J.J.

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To GIORGIO and HELEN JOYCE, 8 March 1938 [Typewritten—not by Joyce]

Paris

Dear Helen: There is no end of gossip here but you had better bring over the newest type of vacuum cleaner to gather it all up. I sent you an article by Mrs Giedion in the Zurich Weltwoche. It seems they are going to print four others on me and Zurich and on me and music etc. and some people told me I am going to be made an Ehrenburger. Talking of that this may amuse you as you recline on your couch. At a concert in the Tonhalle I met Paul Suter who is publicity chief for the Maggy [sic] soup factory at Kempthal for the lat [sic] twenty years and sintead [sic] of talking about the music I began to sing a song of souppans. etc. Bref, he told the manager next day at the works who promptly opened his desk and revealed a copy of Ulysses which apparently he reads between spoonfuls. We were invited down to visit the works, commodious motor car being placed at our disposal i.e. we two, Paul Suter, Brauchbar and the manager. An excellent lunch put up for us starting with real turtle soup and accompanied by the best swiss white wine and old french claret hanging in cobwebs and old liqueurs. Alas I drank water. The Manager was like a young lady being introduced to the long haired violinist of her dreams. I think they are going to call one of the new soups after my notorious potboiler. Then we visited the works, I was very interested and he wrote down in a book the adverse criticism I had to make of their soup à l’oignon after which I had to write him am [sic] inscription in his copy of Ulysses after which we had a motor drive through the country in the snow and then we went to Winterthur to some kind of a patrician club house called Geduld where a most lordly high tea was set forth the flunkies litterally [sic] standing around with the tea urns and the cream ewers in their hands waiting for our arrival. My wife went up to your villa and saw Berthe and Schiap. Both well. The latter after leaping around a lot went to the door and kept looking down the terrace waiting for the others to arrive and making loud howls. ‘’Tis sweet to hear the watch dog’s honest bark Bay deepmouthed welcome as we near our home.’ Words by George Gordon Noel Lord Byron. Music by Rauco Schiaparelli. Mr Gurevitch rang up and says his next concert will be on the 6-th of April dedicated to Gabriele d’Annunzio in music so I suppose he could do Franz in May. I heard a British bass named Harold Williams last night trying to sing Father O’Flynn. God Help us! Tell Giorgio I am so tired of reading articles about d’Annunzio and talking for the last three hours to Nino Frank that I shall have to write him by the next post. Miss Moschos just rang me up having come back from Ivry. They seem to get on very well. A pigeon laid two eggs on the sill of the dining room where we never dine and is hatching them in a flighty way going and coming. I am wondering whether it is always the same bird because sometimes my wife says ‘Now he’s gone away again’ and sometimes she says ‘here she is coming back’ or perhaps it all means something else. I hope Stevie liked my first lesson on mountains and as for his tastes in food why should they give him the roast beef of old England when what he likes most is Irish stew? Là-dessus je me tais. C’est l’heure de la soupe magique.

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From PAUL LÉON to CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 9 March 1938

Paris, as from 7 rue Edmond Valentin

TS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion, The books arrived safely and I am taking her copy out to Miss Joyce to-morrow in order to find out also how she really is as the reports are quite conflicting. Thanks also for the telegram, letters, papers and photos. He says you can reproduce anyone but he prefers the ones with his back turned. In fact if you could send him 4 or 5 of these he would be thankful. He also got the Urban prospectus and will wire here if returning to Zürich.

He thanks you for having run down the hall so quickly with the 300 frs the morning he left; evidently you have more trust in him, he says, than the cashier of the Elite who on Saturday afternoon last August refused to cash a check—a draft of Lloyd’s Bank London, on the Kredit Anstalt next door—until it had been honoured. Of course it was honoured the first thing on Monday morning, but in the meantime he was left for the week-end with a couple of francs in his pocket—all his Zürich friends being on vacation and even the concierge Phillipe having a day off. It is this same cashier or receptionist who refused to remove him for one night to quiet rooms in the hotel until he heard that they had engaged rooms by telephone at the Hotel Neuer Schlop, and finally tried to charge him double or treble prices for the two very frugal meals he took in his room. As he has been going there for a dozen years and has sometimes made stays of 3 and 7 months in the hotel besides bringing friends there (one night I believe he entertained the whole staff with a champagne supper which lasted till morning) besides being extremely liberal with his gratuities such treatment is really unexampled in his experience of hotels.

Now with regard to his eyes, I am enclosing a short typewritten report which you can perhaps leave with Fräulein Finker. From it you will see that what happened was exactly what he felt was coming on, and though it is impossible to he sure in these cases, he thinks it might have been avoided had he stayed on a few days more.

He hopes you are well. I am enclosing a 50 frs note to cover telegraph and postal expenses on his behalf—as you have also to send back to him the set of proofs and galleys. He hopes the Nizam took the little New Yorker with him up to Davos. He will write to you about your article as soon as he is able to write, in the meantime he thanks you for your kindness. With kindest regards Sincerely yours

Paul Léon

P.S. If after having read the report Vogt has anything to say you might perhaps kindly ring up his secretary and find out what it is.

P.P.S. Soeben erhalte ich Ihren Brief—Die Elite hat sich nochmals unangenehm bewiesen—Sie konnten sogar nicht sie verteidigen [?]! Danke sehr für den Brief.

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From PAUL LÉON to CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 10 March 1938

[Paris]

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion, Thanks again for your letter. I forgot to say that Mr J. will be glad if you personally will see that the volume of his poems and paper-jacket are returned to Dr Schoeck, He thinks it likely that some of the verses will please him for musical setting. He says the hotel people have a cyclist chasseur and a telephone, but they would not use either though they knew how anxious he was about the arrival of the hook. Incredible as it may seem he assures me that during all his many residences in the hotel besides paying his bill with his 10 or 15% service he has as regularly as the clock paid no less than 1000 french francs in tips beginning with 50 Swiss francs per month to the concierge and so on down to the chasseur. He suggests that the 1939 Ausstellung give the hotel a diploma as the ‘Gemeinste Kneip in Swindlerland’. Sincerely yours

Paul Léon

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 March 1938

Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Excuse this scribble. I am still ill—not eyes but grip [sic]. In fact have been ill since I left Z’ch. Transition, of course, is not yet out. I send you a copy of Verve. There are several mistakes in my text—misprints. But I am so tired I can’t correct them. It’s a pity you didn’t quote the sentences about Sihl and Limmat in your article on me? They are in Anna Livia Plurabelle. Also I got Zur, thanks and if you could send me 2 others, 1 for Giorgio 1 for Lucia. She has to be radiographed in the morning as it is thought she may have some local infection in teeth, none in any fool glands. All I can say about the future in Z’ch is I hope whoever has it will respect Villa Giedion, Othmar Schoeck, Vogt’s clinic and the Kronenhalle. But he can hang all the staff of the Elite Hotel in comfortable sacks out of their own windows for all I care and meanwhile Heaven help the poor jews who fall into the hands of Mr Prager’s cashier.

Yes, I would like 4 or 5 of the photos in which my back is turned. This is my favorite portrait of myself. Thanks, dear Mrs Giedion. At last a view of myself which I can look at with some pleasure.

I hope Giedion is getting on well with his Little New Yorker.

I have no idea whether my son intends to return now as planned on the 20 April. They seem to be very nervous. No wonder.

I hope your daughter is getting on well. She has youth on her side and will live down whatever she has wrong with her.

Friendly greetings from us both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HELEN JOYCE, 6 April 1938

Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: I am glad to hear you are so far improved that you are going to the theatre as we see by your letter or rather Giorgio’s which also says you have booked on the Queen Mary. I shall arrange as you wish with the Turners. Apparently they are not to be back today as their concierge said since you give date of their arrival as 10 circ. Anyhow I’ll ring them up. By the same boat I had a long letter from David chiefly about Russian literature and his work. He wants to be a jazz critic, I gather. We went to Gurievich’s concert. It was in a small club hall, see enclosed. Paul Valery was to have spoken but someone of his family died and he sent a letter. Fernand Gregh the poet spoke. He was a friend of D’Annunzio’s and in fact I think L’Innocente is dedicated to him. There was quite a pleasant atmosphere. G. played very well but he then spoiled our hearing of the readings by walking about the hall. Not knowing it was he I told him over my shoulder in French to sit down in the name of God. He was quite unconscious. I didn’t see Zecchi there. Perhaps I found his address too late. We went with Nino Frank. The music of Pizzetti and Debussy was very charming. There was nothing political or fashionable about it but one came away with a pleasant taste in one’s ears. He wanted to do a Franz concert for May. In view of Giorgio’s statement that he needs to gargle a few weeks first I shall say nothing encouraging and leave the whole thing in the air till you arrive.

I really know nothing about Mrs K-F except the two versions of her children’s death (neither of which seems to trouble her overmuch) and the fact that she asked the pleasure of our company at dinner, which I could hardly get out of being there in Lausanne. I will not say anything to anybody about the letter you mention. It is rather curious that the two men in whom poor Lucia tried to see whatever she or any other woman or girl is looking for should now be going around with two sisters. After having got up, each of them, from a hospital bed. And that I should have gone from one bed to the other.

Tonight we are to dine at the Gormans as it is her birthday and she told me Beckett and Miss Curran are to be there. The Gorman child scalded all the skin off both her legs and was in bed a month. I have not seen Beckett for some weeks. I have had no time to see anybody as I had a lot of interviewing and telephoning to do about this new doctor’s idea.

The Turners or Returners will be back at 10 p m but can’t meet them as we are going out to dine. So sent them flowers.

All right. We won’t go to Cherbourg. Instead I am chartering an aeroplane and will meet you and escort you on from the Azores. Keep a good look out for me, Stevie, up in the air. The name of the plane is Dedalus 56

Tante belle cose a tutti

Babbo

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To HELEN JOYCE, 20 April 1938

Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: I hope you had a very pleasant musical birthday, and that you will all have a pleasant crossing. I hired an 8-lamp Philco and Hamm’s man fixed up an antenna on the balcony out of an old walking stick Lucia gave me after we came back from Salzburg. We got the two Italian songs better (very well) but Haendel used [sic, for ‘seemed’] to fade off and come back. One would think on some notes he was in the next room. The voice sounded very pastosa we thought and also easy and extended. A couple of notes (one certainly) were very slightly off tune, at least as heard by me. The diction is a great personal satisfaction to me. I told only the Jolases and the Luxembourg people about it. I did not tell the Turners as she seemed so jaded when I last spoke to her. But today she rang up to ask us to dine on Friday at 7.30! (6.30 pm real time) I am going to say I have to go to the Greek church—perfectly true it is their Good Friday—and can’t get out till 8 at least so I am coming at 8.15 at least.

Chialiapine had an imposing funeral. All traffic held up in the centre. Ceremony lasting 5 hours. I was at the Opera when a requiem was sung in the open air with Leon’s two sisters. My wife went to the Russian church.

I hope your father is now quite hale and hearty again, also the other members of your family. Give him our congratulations on his rapid and I hope lasting recovery.

I believe you are to have a smooth passage as the lune rousse and the tâches au soleil are to finish out in five or six days more, so they tell me.

I spent all Easter Day with Lucia, teaching her some Latin, eating panettoni di Milano and fooling generally. More in letter or rather note to Giorgio.

I hope Stevie makes good use of the Zeiss glasses on the way back.

Arrivederci tutti ben presto e buon viaggio

Babbo

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To MR and MRS HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 11 May 193S Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Gorman and Mrs Gorman: Glad to hear you are enjoying your rest. I wish to the Lord some carpet from the Arabian Nights would fly me to the Vosges away from W.i.P. Giorgio and Helen are back and blooming.

Greetings from both

J.J.

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To FERDINAND PRIOR, 29 May 1938

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Budtz-Jorgensen

Bedste Herre: Jeg har modtaget Deres venlige Brev af 17de denne Maaned samt ved den uventede Gave ‘Danske in Paris’. Bogen er yderst smukke og meget interessant for mig. Som de vistnok ved allerede er mit Fødselssted Dublin en norsk By og vi har haft et Danske komplette Hus i vor Hovedstad gennem fiere Aarhundreder endog efter Klontarfs-slaget. Vore Dublinerne ere temmelig naesevise og betragter også idag Danskerne og Normaendene blot som Barbarer, Klosterplynderer o. s. v., men de ‘sorthårige Fremmede’ (som vi naevner dem ‘Dubhgall’) have grundlaeggede den første Byencivilisation i den grønne ø.

Jeg har uheldigvis gjørt kun et körte Besøg i Danmark to eller tre Åre siden, når jeg var, som synger min Ven Kai Friis Møller ‘i Lysets Land kun seldvinbuden Gaest’. Tvivlets vilde De finde mit ‘Daiisk’ lidt traettende og måske umulig at forstå. Jeg beder om Onskyld. Jeg kjender Sproget, men har i alle Tilfaelde intet Øvelse deri her i Paris. Modtag de hjaerteligste Hilsener og med aerbødigste Tak end al mere for Deres Godhed jeg har den Aere at tegne mig Deres hengivne

James Joyce

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To FERDINAND PRIOR, 30 May 1938

Paris

MS. Budtz-Jørgensen

P.S. Jeg liar skrevet så hurtig igår iaftes at jeg har glemt at sige at jeg har bedt Fru Jolas at bun skulde sende Dem en Exemplar af transition (det toogtyvende jeg tro) livori findes et Kapitel af min nuvaerende Vaerk (Helten er en Vikingkjaempe), hertil naevnte ‘Work in Progress’ fordi det indeholder den viderunderlige Eventyr af Skraederen fra Dublin og Sømanden fra Norge. Men Fanden alene ved livis De vilde kunne forstå hvad Fortaellingen mener eller overhovedet livad betyder dette hele Ordspindelvaev!

Engangigien mange Tak

J.J.

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, Postmark 3 June 1938

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: What must you not think of me? Well, I am nearly exhausted, working literally night and day but I am going to take three or four days of rest if I can switch my addled mind off that accursed book of mine.

I received the copies of S.a.s.i.S and they have been greatly admired by all who have seen them. I heard last night that there was a very good notice in the London Star. If you have seen it and know the date please let me know and I shall order two copies. Louis Golding was over here and we had lunch together. I liked him and was sorry he was not free to dine for, as you know, I do not like luncheons.

The several accounts you have sent me of your ‘pleasure cruise’ reconcile me to my quiet life in le vieux Paname here. My son returned from New York a few days ago. He sang a few times over Columbia Station during his short stay and, in fact, I had a new wireless set rigged up for the occasion with the aid of an antenna on the balcony made out of one of my many walking sticks—not the ambassadorial Irish blackthorn—and we heard him singing across the ocean as clearly as if he had been in the next room.

I am asking my friend Eugene Jolas to send you a copy of the last issue of transition which contains a fragment of W i P. I am offering prizes of 5/– 2/6 and 1/3 for the three best solutions but am not competing myself as I do not think I am at present capable of winning even the fourth prize of 7½d.

Since you are now one of my publishers I shall ask Paul Léon to send you a copy of Europe. There is a long article on me in it which I have not read but I learn that the last ten pages on W i P are very intelligent. Gott sei Dank!

My daughter was very delighted with the book too and we both thank you for having given us such a charming thing to have and to hold.

With kind regards to Lady Carlow and yourself from us both Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 6 June 1938

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: I am sending this to your former address because your last letter is put away with other correspondence and I omitted to write the new address in my notebook. I think it is 67 Westminster Gardens?

I hope you received the proofs and understood all my scrawls.

My son thanks you as do I for your good offices and for those pro-ferred of Mr Gielgud. His (my son’s) experience of broadcasting in the U.S.A. (he sang for Columbia, the National Broadcasting Corporation and another one before the glandular trouble from which he has now made an astonishing recovery cut short his vocal career temporarily) is that these Radio Companies are all in watertight compartments and that the director who has charge of the singing almost resents even a friendly introduction from the director, say, who controls the sports programme. In this concrete case is it possible to find out who has charge of the singers or the vocal part of the musical programme and get into relation with him directly? I will send further details about my son (or he can send them himself) if we can get this information. As you already know, I think, he was born in Italy and has lived 17 years in Paris. He sings German also and of course English. He studied singing for about 5 years with Lujol of the Opéra and Cunelli, a retired Greek tenor of the Italian school. His voice is light bass (basse chantante).

Paris is so full of international celebrities and will be for many months that it is hardly advisable for him to give a concert here at present. If he gets an audition in London I think he ought to get an engagement out of it. Voices seem to become rarer and rarer in that country.

Thanks very much in any case but I should like to hear from you about this before I make any plans. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 16 June 1938

Bloomsday Paris

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Bródy: Thanks for your good wishes on this day which you never forget. My book—on which I am working all day and all night as well—is to be published by Faber and Faber (London) and the Viking Press (New York). I am glad to know you are safe and well. Glad also to be able to tell in an anniversary message that last evening my friend in the French F.O. rang up to say that permission for H. Broch to enter France had been telegraphed to the French C.G. in Vienna. I am trying to get two other people into America and hope I shall succeed.

With best wishes to Mrs Brody and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, Postmark 17 June 1938

Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Thanks for the Star. It was really scarcely worth troubling you about. I hope S a S i S is meeting with success.

The accompanying copy of the Dublin Times ought to interest you. I am sure that if you care to write personally to Dr T.J. Kiernan, director of Broadcasting at Radio Eireann [sic], G.P.O. Dublin and tell him who are you he will get into touch with these musicians and obtain the words and air of that fine old song for you. I have been trying vainly, as you know, to get them for about 40 years. Dr Kiernan knows me. In fact he arranged a broadcast about me for my birthday this year.

I am still on night and day labour sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HELEN JOYCE, 4 July 1938

[Paris]

MS. Kastor

Dear daughter-in-law: This being Independence Day please cheer up for the love of Giorgio and accept these delightful blooms as a present from the garden where the pretties grow.

Babbo

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To HELEN JOYCE, 17 July 1938

Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen:

Wake up!

Stir up!

Sit up!

Get up!

Buck up

and

Cheer up

Babbo

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To GEORGE and HELEN JOYCE, 6 August 1938

Paris

MS. Kastor

Caro Giorgio: Grazie della tua lettera. Eccoti il bollettino d’abbonamento per il N.Y. Η. Tutto andrà bene e presto. Se non l’hai già fatto scrivi al segretario generale Radio P.T.T. Faceva un tempo insopportabile quà da tre giorni e perdura. Ti abbraccio

Babbo

Dear Helen: Glad to have good news of you. All will go well. Lucky you got off on Wednesday as on Thursday we had a dreadful storm just at that hour. David is coming to tea and after we work till dinner. Tomorrow he and his friend —— are to dine with us. I can’t find any other paper or envelopes so here goes this. Huebsch dined with us last night and asked kindly for both of you. Invitations keep pouring in from all kinds of emplâtres. Jolas seems to have gone off somewhere, I suppose for the weekend. He didn’t even dine with us the night you all left. Stevie, I hear flourishes. Be good

Babbo

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To HELEN JOYCE (Postcard), 17 August 1938

Paris

MS. Kastor

Dear Helen: The girl has just found this in a chair under a cushion. David must have forgotten it and he may not have a copy and the one he sent to Stories at E. J’s suggestion may not be returned so will you please send it on to him as I have not heard from him since he left and don’t know his address.

Glad to hear you are beginning to go out into society again.

Keep it up, Keep it up! Tante cose!

Babbo

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), Postmark 21 August 1938

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Giorgio who is in Montreux will return you the rest of the MS tomorrow if he has not done so. If you have any more ready you may send it here. Thank heaven, the summer is nearly over. I hope Colum wrote to you but Mrs C has had another accident. Greetings to you both

J.J.

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 23 August 1938

Lausanne

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

I saw Giorgio yesterday. He thinks that Devries’s real name should not be mentioned (an initial not D or any other name instead) as he belongs to a very well known Amsterdam family and has also, it seems, ‘made good’ at last. I agree. I don’t know how it escaped me.

J.J.

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To MAURICE JAMES CRAIG, 24 August 1938

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. Yale

Dear Mr Craig: Many thanks for your letter and friendly offices and please convey to Professor Ogilvie my son’s and my thanks in advance.

You must have had an inspiring influence on my friend Eugene Jolas for the day after it he suddenly guessed the title of my book which nobody has succeeded in doing for the past sixteen years, thereby winning a wager of 1000 frs which I had rashly made. He is now on the top of one of his French Maritime Alps, Ubelle, with his secret and perhaps I should ask Loki to make a hedge of fire round the foot until I have written the final full stop. (There is none).

The name of the song is, I think ‘The Lord in His mercy be kind (not good) to Belfast’. I have been trying for many years to get the air and words of it and also of ‘Follow me up to Carlow’. With thanks once more sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, 4 September 1938 [In Italian]

Hôtel de la Paix, Lausanne

Dear Ruggiero: Again I have to ask you for your help. How do you begin and end a fairy tale or a little story for children in Greek? To explain the matter to you: in English you begin:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was; and you end like this: So they put on the kettle and they made tea and they lived happily ever after.

The Germans say ‘Es war einmal’ and they end ‘Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, so leben sie noch heute!’

Of course I do not want the Greek translation of these sentences but something typically Greek (with the Italian translation underneath). Each country has its own expressions for this purpose. I have finished my long book. Thanks to the Almighty. How are you and your family? I hope, well. And I hope too that you had a good holiday. We shall be at Zurich by the end of October, I think, but for Heaven’s sake don’t wait until then to send me your reply.

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To LOUIS GILLET, 8 Septembre 1938

Hôtel de la Paix, Lausanne

Cher ami: Aussitôt rentré ici j’ai téléphoné à mon fils qui se trouve à Montreux. Il m’a dit qu’il a bien reçu la lettre de M. Porchéfils et qu’il a répondu il y a plusieurs semaines. Il déjeune avec nous samedi prochain—après-demain—et alors je pourrai vous dire quelque chose de plus précis.

Mon long silence n’est pas dû seulement au travail fou qui m’a Accablé depuis bien des mois mais aussi au fait que depuis quelque temps nous nous voyons—ma femme et moi-confrontés par la possibilité d’un autre grave événement dans notre famille comme si la presque tragédie de ma fille ne suffisait pas. De cela je préfère vous parler de vive voix et quand nous serons tous les deux de retour à Paris. Pour le moment je vous prierai de n’en parler à personne. Je ne partage pas le pessimisme qui m’entoure mais peut-être je me trompe.

Quant à ma fille je suis la seule personne qu’elle voit ou qu’elle veut voir. J’y vais tous les dimanches après déjeuner et je reste là jusqu’à la nuit. J’ai eu pas mal de difficultés même pour venir ici pour un court séjour qui n’est pas exactement de repos car notre voyage est un peu en rapport avec l’autre cas auquel j’ai fait allusion. Ma fille croit que je suis à Vernon chez Stuart Gilbertet j’ai dû arranger un espèce de courrier épistolaire. J’ai une série de cartes postales illustrées de Vernon et je lui écris deux ou trois fois par semaine, envoyant les cartes en enveloppes à Gilbertqui les réexpédie à Ivry où elle est. Voilà les circonstances allègres dans lesquelles je termine ma comédie nocturne. Ou au moins ce que certains se plairaient à appeler le purgatoire. O paradiso! comme chantait Sullivan dans l’Africaine.

Il est arrivé un étrange parallèle avec le cas Ulysse-Victor Bérard. Son étude homérique est venue confirmer ma théorie du sémitisme de l’Odyssée quand j’avais déjà écrit trois quarts du livre. Voilà que je trouve ma théorie sur le scandinavisme de mon héros Finn MacCool (le Fingal de Macpherson, père d’Ossian et grand’père d’Oscar) confirmée par les recherches d’un savant allemand, Zimmer, dont j’ignorais l’oeuvre. C’est un jeune étudiant à Paris qui a attiré mon attention à ces études, et c’est curieux de voir, dans le résumé que le Professeur Zimmer de Heidelberg vient de me faire du travail de son Père, la hardiesse que j’avais osée en mettant le gros norvégien H C E dans la peau d’un héros mythique purement celtique—ou [illegible]—justifiée par la doctrine tudesque avec chapitre et vers.

Jaloux a diné avec nous l’autre soir et nous avons causé de vous. Il habite Lussy à 5 kilomètres d’ici. Nous n’avons fait que d’échanger histoires marseillaises contre blagues dublinoises.

Sursum corda!

Mes hommages respectueux à Madame Gillet et .j’espère que vous me Téléphonerez quand vous rentrerez à Paris car je voudrais vous expliquer un peu plus clairement la raison de notre inquiètude.

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 8 September 1938

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Many thanks for your letters and the welcome enclosures. I am glad that you rejoice to have an heir to follow you up and also that my longsought song turned up so opportunely after so many years. I sent the music on to my son as it needs a deep strong voice, not my tenore di grazia, to bassoon the close. You, however, as titular chief of that region are the one who should sing it and with that ambassadorial wand of office brandished high in your right hand. The allusions so far in my book to Portarlington and Carlow have been of such a drearily commestible kind—scallions, meat and so on—that I shall have to find a place to suggest this ferocious and exciting song.

I hope all your little storiellas have been safely disposed of by now and are off the market for their mighty mother is now at last making ready to take her slide into the unsuspecting sea. I am making a brief holiday here but return to Paris in a few days to hammer on the last plates and paint her title before the skippereeen father gives her his blessing.

I do not know who Mr Barzun is but have asked my friend E Jolas about him. And I wonder is the Mrs Betty Byrne alluded to in your letter a namesake only of the Betty Byrne alluded to on the first page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That worthy lady herself would be about 140 years of age now. I thank her good sense for she introduced me to sweets for which, contradictory as it may seem, I have almost as fervent a feeling as I have for the delightful white wine of this and the next cantons. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From JACQUES MERCANTON to MAURICE JAMES CRAIG, 9 September 1938

Lausanne

TS. Yale

Monsieur, Avant de quitter Lausanne, où il a pris quelques jours de vacances, M. Joyce me prie de vous faire parvenir le texte de cette chanson ‘Follow me up to Carlow’, qu’il a reçu de Lord Carlow au moment même où il recevait votre lettre. Le texte était accompagné de la musique, que M. Joyce a envoyé à son fils. Il pense que peut-être, à l’occasion de la semaine du jubilé de Belfast, vous avez réussi à découvrir l’autre chanson dont il vous avait parlé.

Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, avec les meilleurs messages de M. Joyce et ses remerciements pour votre lettre, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués.

Jacques Mercanton

FOLLOW ME UP TO CARLOW
by P.J. M’Call

Lift, MacCahir Oge, your face,

Brooding o’er the old disgrace,

That black Fitzwilliam stormed your place

And drove you to the fern!

Grey said victory was sure—

Soon the Firebrand he’d secure;

Until he met at Glenmalure

Feagh MacHugh O’Byrne!

Chorus

Curse and swear, Lord Kildare!

Feagh will do what Feagh will dare;

Now, Fitzwilliam, have a care—

Fallen is your star, low!

Up with halbert, out with sword,

On we go; for by the Lord!

Feagh MacHugh has given the word:

Follow me up to Carlow!

See the swords of Glen Imayle

Flashing o’er the English Pale!

See all the children of the Gael

Beneath O’Byrne’s banners!

Rooster of a fighting stock,

Would you let a Saxon cock

Crow out upon an Irish rock?

Fly up and teach him manners!

From Tassagart to Glonmore

Flows a stream of Saxon gore!

Och, great is Rory Oge O’More

At sending loons to Hades!

White is sick and Lane is fled!

Now for black Fitzwilliam’s head—

We’ll send it over dripping red

To ’Liza and her ladies!

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 11 September 1938

Hôtel de la Paix, Lausanne

Dear Huebsch: I hope this will reach you on your way through London. My friend Edmund Brauchbar is here on his way to Paris where I am also going on tomorrow. I had a talk with him today about his cousins Mr and Mrs Perles who are in London on a tourist’s permit which will expire normally in about 4–5 weeks…. To apply to you or to Brody of the Rhein-Verlag (my German publisher in Holland) is one thing but my English publishers are not Israelites and I am uncertain as to their sentiments. If you know anyone to whom (I mean in England) a letter from me would be of immediate service to Mr Perles I will write it at once. England is an almost unknown land to me.

Mr Brauchbar, who, by the way, besides maintaining a dozen of refugee relatives in Zurich in his house and also contributing generously to the Swiss Jewish Relief fund suggests that the best plan would be if you could see Mrs Perles in London yourself and then judge of the case. If the latter is in need he, Mr Brauchbar, would place at your disposal a sum of from 300–500 dollars to be personally advanced to him. I shall add his address at foot of this….

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, [September 1938]

[Paris·]

MS. Ruggiero

Caro Ruggiero: L’altro giorno ho inteso alla radio un cantante francese cantare molto bene la sua canzone: ‘Epigha monós eis tin akro thalassia’ in francese però. Vorrei comprare il disco, anzi due, uno per me e uno per Lei. Andai da Durand (il Hüni di Parigi) però senza il titolo non si puo averlo. Come si chiama la canzone? È greca o francese tradotta in greco? Mi faccia sapere il titolo in greco o in francese con o senza il nome del compositore. L’accompagnamento è molto bello ed il cantante canta con squisito gusto. Bei tempi del passato. Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 20 September 1938

Paris

MS. Buffalo

Dear Huebsch: Many thanks for your kind and prompt reply. I have sent it on to Brauchbar. I think I have placed his niece here and my German publisher writes from the Hague that he is doing all he can about Holland. I hope I can get the others into Ireland.

I may go tomorrow to Dieppe for a few days and if so will send a line from there if I do. I don’t think any time should be lost.

Many thanks again sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JACQUES MERCANTON, 21 September 1938

Hotel du Rimi et de Newhaven, Dieppe

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton: Pour l’amour du ciel expédiez cette carte postale tout de suite. Je l’ai oublié!

Aussi, je n’avais pas le temps avant de quitter Paris de lire votre lettre qui est restée sur mon bureau. Pourriez-vous m’en repéter le [sic] teneur par lettre écrite à la machine. Mon appartement est fermé car nous avons passé des journées très inquiètes.

Même ici nous ne savons jamais si d’un moment à l’autre nous ne devons pas rentrer à Paris pour repartir avec notre fille pour La Baule où tout l’asyl se transférérait le cas échéant. Ma femme voulait quelques jours de ‘repos’ après la soi-disante détente et nous voilà ici. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To HERBERT GORMAN (Postcard), 21 September 1938

Hotel du Rhin, Dieppe

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Here we are and it is very rainy indeed. Plan to stay 5–8 days if allowed. Friendly greetings to you both

J.J.

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To MAURICE JAMES CRAIG (Postcard), 23 September 1938

Hotel du Rhin [Dieppe]

MS. Yale

Many thanks for the words of the song, Curiously enough I had just asked my friend, M. Mercanton of Lausanne to send it on to you. I hope the Belfast national anthem will also announce itself to me suddenly. We are spending a weekend at the sea before returning to Paris after a not very restful vacation Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 5 October 1938

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Brody; We came back the day before yesterday—Lord knows for how long! Many thanks for your kind letter which I have forwarded to Mr Brauchbar.

I have just received the enclosed letter from Dr Goyert in which he asks about you. Will you please send it back as I wish to reply to it. I should like to see the articles he speaks of but have no idea how or where they can be obtained.

We stayed in La Baule a week. I chose it because the Maison de Santé at Ivry (near Paris, 6 K) where unfortunately my daughter still is had made all arrangements with the military government here to evacuate their premises en masse (105 patients and 60 staff) and transfer to the Hotel Edelweiss, La Baule, a big, disused hotel on the Avenue de Paris in a park. We passed a very anxious time. Bid you ever see her illuminated work in Chaucer’s A B C—a poem to the Madonna with a preface by Louis Gillet?

It is very kind of you to take such trouble for my friend. I have had a more or less favorable reply from Dublin and think I can place two more of his Abrahamesque family there.

We spent a whole month in the Hague, my wife, my daughter and myself in the happy years gone by, Hotel Victoria, I think. The best potatoes I ever ate since I left Ireland.

I have come back to put the finishing touches to Work in Progress and in what an atmosphere!

Friendly greetings from my wife also to Mrs Brody and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT, 11 October 1938

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Geehrter und lieber Herr Goyert; Es ist eine grosse Freude—für mir—und welche angenehme Überraschung!—einen Brief von Ihnen zu bekommen. Hoffentlich geht es Ihnen immer und ihre werte Familie recht gut. Uns geht es nicht so schlecht aber meine Tochter ist leider immer sehr krank aber wir glauben dass ihre lange Krankheit wird bald vorüber sein.

Besten Dank für Ihre freundliche Mitteilungen. Was die Universität Bonn betrifft könnte ich an Prof. Curtius schreiben um die betreffende Abhandlung zu haben—wenn das noch möglich ist—aber leider habe ich keine ‘Relationen’ mit Marburg. Wäre es Ihnen möglich die zweite Abhandlung von welcher Sie schreiben durch einstmaligen Freund oder Bekannten in literarische Kreise zu haben?

Prof. H. Zimmer (der Sohn des berühmte keltischen Philologen und jetzige Professor der Sanskrit in Heidelberg) ist mir in der letzen Zeit sehr hilflich gewesen. Ich möchte ihn aber nicht stören in diese Angelegenheit denn ich kenne ihn persönlich nicht.

Work in Progress—pfui!—ist beinahe geendet. Ich auch. Seit letzen Oktober arbeite ich daran wie ein Maultier den ganzen Tag durch und fast die ganze Nacht.

Je commence à en avoir marre—et comment!

Wann kommen wir wieder zusammen wie damals in Trianons Restaurant? Der Himmel weiss was für ein Schicksal die Kritik für meinem Buch reservirt. Das ist mir aber schlussegal—um etwas unverblümtes nicht zu sagen—aber vielleicht habe ich noch eine Zukunft als Strassensänger—hinter mich.

Eine freundlicher Händedruck

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, 18 November 1938

[In Italian]

Dear Ruggiero: I have found the record. It is called ‘Un Rève’ and the house is full of its [illegible]. I also bought one for you and it will be sent you next Wednesday. You will be delighted with it. Now there is something else I wanted to tell you. I have finished my book. Next Thursday, on the American Thanksgiving day, Έχαριστία, some friends are giving a little supper for me. I should like to sing your song in French and also in Greek. Could you let me have the words in time, clearly written out, with a translation? Many thanks at all events. By the way, the words are different in the French text. There is nothing about the sea in it, no laughter and no blonde, but great sadness. My wife cried when she was listening to it. What the deuce is there in music, and above all in singing, that moves us so deeply? Hurray! I have finished this blasted book.

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To EDOUARD DUJARDIN, 5 December 1938

Paris

MS. Texas

Cher maître: Je viens de recevoir ‘We’ll to the Woods No More’. Je trouve l’édition tout-à-fait charmante et la traduction très réussie. J’espère que cette publication, si longtemps retardée, vous fera grand plaisir.

Permettez-moi de vous en féliciter et de réitérer l’expression de ma profonde reconnaissance envers l’artiste des evergreen ‘Lauriers’.

Présentez, je vous prie, mes hommages à Madame et croyez-moi, cher maître, très cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, 9 December 1938

Paris

MS. Ruggiero

Caro Ruggiero: Le scrivo questa dal letto, essendo da circa una settimana poco bene. Dunque mi scusi. Grazie mille della sua pronta risposta. Ho cantato la canzone ma il successo è stato piuttosto contrastato. Semberebbe che la canzone sia stata in origine una canzone francese tradotta poi in greco. Riveste tutto un’altro carattere in greco, non le pare? Ha ricevuto il disco? Le piace? Io sono molto debole e stanco. Ho ancora delle bozze a correggere. Magari fosse tutto finito.

Grazie, caro Ruggiero ed una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT (Postcard), 23 December 1938

Paris

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Pour vous souhaiter joyeux Noel. La revue de laquelle vous m’avez parlé ne m’est jamais parvenue. Par contre, avez-vous reçu un article qui est paru dans une revue de Lausanne? Votre bien dévoué

James Joyce

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1939

To LIVIA SVEVO, [2 January 1939]

1938–39 Parigi

MS. Texas

Gentile Signora: Finalmente ho finito di finire il mio libro. Sono già tre lustri che pettino e ripettino la chioma di Anna Livia. E ora che s’avanzi alla ribalta. Spero che Berenice intercederà per la sua piccola consorella affinchè trovi in questo vasto mondo, per la grazia delle dee, ‘almeno un Deo Gratias qualunque’.

Buon Natale e Buon Anno a Lei ed ai Suoi

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW (Express letter), 28 January 1939

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Is it quite certain that you will be in Paris on Thursday morning next and will you be passing the night of the same day, Candlemas, here? Because, if so, and if Lady Carlow is with you my daughter-in-law who is giving a dinner party in my honour and to celebrate the publication of my book asks me to say that you will be very welcome both. It is at my son’s place this year 17 Villa Scheffer, Paris XVIe.

There is another point. My book is to be sent over on Wednesday by air express but unfortunately the delivery of these parcels is never certain because they pass through the Douane to collect a minimal duty and, of course, the douanier can have no idea that I shall be waiting for the wretched parcel. It might arrive at the last moment after a day of exhaustive waiting and even that would be too late to allow of my showing it to my daughter (who lives outside Paris) in the early afternoon. Or it might just arrive the morning after the 2nd in which case I should feel inclined to throw it out of the window. In sum, I should like to be sure of having it on that morning. It was only after you had rung off that I thought of this. Of course, I don’t want to interfere in any way with your plans but as you told them to me they seemed to fit in with my idea.

If you are not already in the country or at air work somewhere perhaps you could ring up Faber and Faber. The person who is [in] charge of the book there is Mr de la Mare. The book is to be sent from the Glasgow printers or binders on Monday. Anyhow a telegram from you one way or another would relieve my mind.

I am still very exhausted but I shall try to be better by Thursday though I am afraid the traditional pas seul with high kicking effects associated with that birthday feast will be beyond my powers this year of grace.

Incidentally you will discover the title of the book which my wife has kept secret for seventeen years, being the only one who knew it. I think I can see some lofty thinkers and noble livers turning away from it with a look of pained displeasure Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 23 February 1939

[Paris]

MS. Brauchbar

Dear Mr Brauchbar: Thanks for your letter and good wishes. I am glad to hear from you and hope your stay in Vahnont will soon put you all right again. For the moment we are not going to Switzerland. Perhaps later on. I had a visit from Mr Rich. Ofner (widower of the late Charlotte Sauermann, soprano at the Z’ch Stadttheater) whose son, a dentist’s Tekniker [sic], I am trying to get into U.S.A. You remember him? Good luck sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JOAN BUDGEN, 27 February 1939

Paris

MS. Joan Budgen

Dear Miss Joan: Will you please wish your father from me a happy birthday and many happy returns of the day. I hope you will all have a nice time together. Also give our kind regards to your mother and I hope some day to meet you yourself, introductorily yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 5 March 1939

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7e

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Brody: Thanks for your card and Goyert’s address. Some time ago he sent me a work in German about Ulysses which you may wish to see. I shall send it on and shall be glad if you will return it when you have looked at it.

As regards F.W. (no longer W.i.P.) I have just received some leaflets and send you one. In my opinion the price is altogether too high but it does not depend on me. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 5 March 1939

Paris

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Thanks for your letter and kind proposal which we can talk about if, as I hope, we see you on your way through here. 17 March is S. Patrick’s Day and we expect to be here in Paris.

I enclose a leaflet about F.W. I find the price of the ordinary edition too high but can do nothing about it.

Who has Prof. Fehr’s place as Professor of English at Z’ch University now? Can you find out?

A bientôt from us both. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MARY M. COLUM, 29 March 1939

7 rue Edmond Valentin
after 15 April 1939
34 rue des Vignes, Passy, Paris
Tél: Aut 37–73

MS. N.Y. Public Library (Manuscript)

Dear Mrs Colum: Thanks for your letter and am glad to hear you are both well. I wonder how are the Gormans. Never had a line from them since they left. Hope they are not ill. You have curiously misunderstood my letter. I am changing flat not city, so far as one can see, and of course Lucia is still in Ivry and I visit her every Sunday.

Herewith is the picture and explanatory letter from the unknown painter. No, I did not receive any notice from the Yeats family. I do not know any member of the family. I met his very loquacious father once for a few minutes on Northumberland Road.

There is no use now in going into the matter of the American publication of my book. So far it has been a hopeless bungle. As for the date every week we hear something different. The book, printed and bound, has been lying on my table for the past two months but the sheets for Mr Huebsch’s limited edition have not yet left England.

It is a great bore having to move but we are lucky if we have not to move much farther and more hastily.

I was invited to New York by the Pen Club for next May but wrote to them, thanking and declining. I hope you will both come over in the summer as you say. Let us know sometime ahead when and for how long.

Kindest regards to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LIVIA SVEVO, 4 April 1939

7 rue Edmond Valentin, Paris 7
After April 15, P.V.
34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVI

Dear Signora: Here is all that I have been able to find thus far. We are about to move. What fun! If I find other letters from Schmitz (I must have several), I will send them to you. Thank you for the pamphlet. That man would do well to buy himself a little glue. The products of his press remind me of Come le foglie of Giacosa. But the important thing is that Svevo be read and written about.

I never receive any word from my brother. I wrote him twice, but received no answer. I hope he is well.

I hope that you too are well, dear Signora Schmitz. May I venture to wish you peace and happiness on the eve of the Easter holidays? In any case, that is what I do.

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To T.S. ELIOT, N.D. [? April 1939]

34 Rue des Vignes, Paris XVI

Dear Eliot: Thanks for Curtius’s letter.

May I ask you to do something for me!

Is there another copy of my edition de luxe, unnumbered, available for me? If not may I have a numbered copy? I want to have it by May 4 so am sending this by air mail. Whatever amount may have to be paid I shall remit to the firm by cheque directly. The book and letters should be sent to me direct not to Léon. In fact, the copy is for him.

The other copies all reached me safely. I also received the six copies of the ordinary American edition. With them came a copy of the Viking Press advertisement of the book in their catalogue. It informs the American public that ‘the scene of the book is laid in Dublin and Paris’. It will be a disappointment to many that they did not add ‘the Riviera and St Moritz’.

With friendly greetings and thanks in advance.

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 26 April 1939

34 rue de Vignes, Paris XVI

MS. Cornell

Dear Stannie, This is our new address. I hope you are both well. Lucia is still very ill and Helen has had a bad nervous breakdown. Giorgio’s career as a singer is again held up.

My book Finnegans Wake will be published May 4. It is very expensive for these times. 25/– (Faber & Faber, London.) Only 14 copies (press) are available for European critics. I should like to send 2 to Italy. Can you suggest 2 Italian critics who would be likely to review it. I thought of Emilio Cecchi as one. Let me know please by return. Or should I send one to Benco? Will you also please tell my old pupil Marcello Rogers I got his letter and have today written to his friend Giorgio. I don’t know whether I can do much but shall try.

Jim

P.S. Six copies are for here, 5 for Germany and 2 for Denmark, 1 each Norway and Holland.

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To LIVIA SVEVO, [1 May 1939]

Calendimaggio 34 rue des Vignes, Paris, XVI

MS. Texas

Gentile signora: Ho ricevuto la lettera acclusa inviatami dal sig. Scarpelli. C’è un equivoco. Non avevo affatto l’intenzione di criticare l’opera letteraria dell’autore ma bensi l’opera del suo legatore. Infatti i fogli volanti (è proprio il termine) del libercolo si staccavano ad uno ad uno dopo la lettura di ogni pagina. Forse il mio esemplare è eccezionale. Ma in simili circostanze come non pensare alla commedia giacosiana ed alla caducità delle cose terrestri? Non ho fatto che chiamare carta carta e colla colla. La prego di rassicurarne lo scrittore. Pare che si senta offeso. Non lo è e non lo era. Ma … Oibo! (per non dire Uibaldo!) Endove ze andado finir el morbin famoso dei terriestini? No ghe ze gnente de mal, benedeto de Dio! Go ciolto un poco de zeroto da Smolars e adeso el se tien insieme pulido. E diga al sior Scarpelli che no stia bazilar, che mi no go dito gnente de mal e per amirare quel bravo omo che iera Italo Svevo semo in due, lu e mi.

Giovedì sarà pubblicado el mio libro a Londra e in Ameriga. Ze anca la festa de Santa Moniga se mi ricordo ben, al quatro. Moniga son stado mi forse (La mi scusi, siora) che go messo disdoto ani dela mia vita a finir quel mostro de libro. Ma cossa La voi? Se nasse cussi. E, corpo de bigoli, ne go bastanza. Co ghe digo mi!

Con doverosi ossequi mi segno devmo

James Joyce

P.S. Lingua sciolta, nevvero, signora!

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To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 4 May 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVIe
Tel: Aut 79.01

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Gentile signora: Oggi questo mio libro si pubblica a Londra ed a Nuova York. La prego di volere rimettere l’esemplare che accompagna la presente al mio buon amico Yalery Larbaud.

Vorremmo molto parlare con Lei, signora. E vorrei sapere anche se non potrei eventualmente fare una visita al Larbaud. Sarebbe troppo pregarla di farcelo sapere o con una telefonata con una lettera? Potrebbe Lei, per esempio, venire da noi qualche pomeriggio per prendere il tè insieme?

Spero che le cose non vadano troppo male. È tutto che si può pretendere oggi in questo lurido mondo, mi pare.

Gradisca, gentile signora, i sensi dei miei più doverosi ossequi

James Joyce

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To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 7 May 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVIe

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton Si vous allez entendre Guillaume Tell le 9, le 11 ou le 14 ou même (comme moi je le ferais) tous les soirs je voudrais bien en avoir vos impressions, surtout de ce ténor Sullivan. J’espère qu’il pourra le chanter, le rôle d’Arnold, sans coupures. J’ai beaucoup entendu parler de lui. Pendant le 3ième acte, sortez et fumez votre pipe et rentrez pour l’asile héréditaire du 4ième. Surtout ne manquez pas le terzetto du 2ième. J’ai entendu les autres chanteurs a la radio. Ils sont tous bons mais c’est un diable de rôle pour le ténor. Envoyez-moi aussi, svp, les critiques de la presse. Je voudrais bien être là. Peutêtre sera-t-il radiodiffusé cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 12 May 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVIe

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Gentile signora: Vorrebbe avere la bontà di farmi sapere se lunedì ο martedì venturo Le converrà, diciamo verso le 5½ pom? Saremo lietissimi di rivedere i nostri buoni vecchi amici. Sono oltremodo contento di sapere che Larbaud va ora da bene in meglio. Vento in poppa!

Gradisca, gentile signora, i sensi dei miei più doverosi ossequi

James Joyce

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To SEAN O’CASEY, Postmark 26 May 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris

MS. O’Casey

Dear Mr O’Casey: I wonder whether you have seen already the Dublin paper I sent you with its curious misprint—if it is a misprint. I hope it may be prophetical and that we may some day meet. When my wife recovers from an attack of influenza we are going to see your play at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre and if I find that it is attributed to me I shall certainly send you on the programme. Anyhow I hope you will take the printer’s error, as I do, for a happy and amusing omen.

With all good wishes sincerely yours

James Joyce

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From SEAN O’CASEY, 30 May 1939

tingriih, station road, totnes devon. England

MS. Buffalo

My dear James Joyce: I was very glad to get a letter from you, and to find that you weren’t annoyed at ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ being put against my name. My mind is still far away from the power of writing such a book. I wish I could say that such a power is mine. I am reading it now, and, though I meet many allusions, the book is very high over my head, A friend here (a painter) and I often read it (or try to) together; and I, it is fair to say, am better than he, and lead him into many a laugh and into the midst of wander and wonderland. It is an amazing book; and hardly to be understood in a year, much less in a day. I’ve had constant contact with you in ‘Dubliners’; in ‘Portrait of the Artist’, and in ‘Ulysses’—that great and amazing work. As you see, we are now living in Devon—meself and herself, two kids and another coming, so I don’t suppose you’ll ever be near here. But God is good, and we may meet one day. I sincerely hope so.

I don’t think the reference was a misprint. I know many of Dublin’s Literary Clique dislike me, and they hate you (why, God only knows), so that ‘misprint’ was a bit of a joke. Well, Oxford’s going to hand the colored gown of a D. Litt. over the shoulders of Wodehouse, whom, Belloc says is the greatest living writer of English. So Finnegan’s Wake will, I fear, be a wake in earnest.

Them and their Academy of Litters—all in all, and in spite of all, a deep bow to James Joyce. Yours very sincerely

Sean O’Casey

I do hope your wife is allright or much better by now.

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To GEORGE ROGERS, 5 June 1939

Parigi

MS. Rogers

Caro signor Rogers: Mio figlio Giorgio partirà probabilmente domani martedì. Scenderà per qualche notte, essendo accompagnato da un amico, al Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly. In seguito, sceglierà per se un albergo meno costoso. Egli La prega di fargli il piacere di pranzare con lui alla 1 pom l’indomani del suo arrivo costì onde poter discutere sul da farsi. Spera che l’ora ed il giorno Le converranno. Se ci saranno degli impreveduti Le farò sapere. Altrimenti favorisca passare all’albergo suddetto mercoledì al tocco. Saluti distinti

James Joyce

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From PAUL LEON to HERBERT GORMAN (Dictated by James Joyce), 6 June 1939

Paris

TS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Dear Mr. Gorman, Mr Joyce asks me to confirm his personal cable to you in which he stated that he could not authorise the publication of your biography of him without having in his possession for perusal and comparison the entire set of the typescript and of course the subsequent proofs and requesting the immediate dispatch of the other chapters namely those which he has heard in non-consecutive order at intervals during the last several years and those which he has not heard yet. His reason for cabling you was, as he stated, that the exposition of two points in chapters II and IV was incorrect and misleading on two vital points. In fact as he expresses it the latter chapter read almost as if it had been inspired by Mr Michael Lennon’s article in the ‘Catholic World’ of some years ago. Mr Joyce is definitely of opinion that his friends did him a singular disservice in not drawing his attention to this article at the time; it was highly libellous and defamatory both to his father and to himself and in fact there is little doubt that the fact of its publication having gone without legal challenge had an extremely harmful effect on the artistic career of his son in the U.S.A.

The two points in question are the relations of Mr Joyce and his late father and the question of his marriage in 1904 which subsequently and for testamentary reasons was supplemented by retroactive civil marriage according to English law in 1931. The accounts you give to the public are, as above stated, incorrect and misleading. On the first point your account is so hopelessly wide off [sic] the mark that he despairs of even attempting to rectify it by this extremely tardy correspondence and consequently suggests that you cancel completely the pages dealing with his father in these chapters. The second point is a very complicated legal problem which has already caused Mr Joyce heavy expenditure in the matter of legal opinions involving as it did the marriage laws of three different countries. It would be necessary to devote an entire chapter of your book to its elucidation and I doubt whether his solicitors in London would advise him to place the dossier concerning it at your disposal. For the purpose of your book the only way now is to obliterate this passage and any subsequent reference of the same tenor confining yourself to a formal statement.

It is, he finds, incomprehensible that it should be necessary to write this letter now in response to a summary communication of yours after you had been engaged on the book for ten years, had resided in Paris for several years and after no communication on your part of some 8 or 9 months, on the eve of what you announce as a publication of a limited edition de luxe the sense of which completely mystifies him. In this connection I am enclosing a very emphatic denial by G.B.S. of another piece of gossip which is retailed in your pages. There is so much conscientious work and artistic understanding in the rest of your work that it would be lamentable from every point of view that it should be disfigured by passages such as these.

Mr Joyce who has always been willing to give you all assistance in his power has made a number of rectifications on many pages of the typescript in his possession and these will be returned to you promptly on receipt of the rest. Incidentally may I ask you to number your pages so as to facilitate this work. Mr Joyce would also do what he can to help you out with your publishers in the matter of additional photographs, but in his opinion the idea of printing on the cover the arms of Dublin or those of the Joyce family had better be abandoned at once. As to the colour of the binding he is more or less indifferent. With kind regards to Mrs Gorman and yourself sincerely yours

Paul Léon

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER (Postcard), 7 June 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris, XVIe

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Have you a copy of the Epilogue to Ibsen’s Ghosts? If so, can you send me a typed copy. Have you two versions? If so, send the longer of the two. My own is unfindable.

Also if you are in London at present till what date will you be there?

I am having a share of trouble over Gorman’s biography which they are trying to rush for publication in N.Y. in July. I have cabled that I shall refuse to authorise its publication unless I am given an opportunity of seeing the proofs.

I think I sent you the Epilogue from Z’ch a few years ago.

With thanks in advance and kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORGE ROGERS (Postcard), Postmark 10 June 1939

[Paris]

MS. Rogers

Ahi! Il protestantesimo e quel benedetto vescovo! Meno male che mi sono bene informato prima. La persona alla quale pensavo di rivolgermi non sarebbe affatto per Lei. Ebbi una risposta alquanto secca da una persona simile in un caso analogo. Però ho pensato ad un altro, un triestino da molti anni a Londra. Prima però bisogna che m’accerti se sia tuttora in questo lurido mondo. Scrivo a una sua amica. Pazienza.

J.J.

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To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 12 June 1939 Monday

34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVIe

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Gentile signora: Mi dispiace seccarla ma se la fotografia del Larbaud deve apparire nella mia biografia dovrebbe essere fra le mani del mio segretario, il sig. Paul Léon, domani per essere mandata a Nuova York colla Queen Mary che salpa per l’America l’indomani. Non prevedevo affatto questa fretta. M’aspettavo una pubblicazione nell’autunno. Ma ho ricevuto un dispaccio inatteso l’altro giorno. Così sono gli Americani.

Dunque, il Leon passerà dalla vostra portinaia domattina verso le 11. Se possiede una buona fotografia di V.L. la lasci là per lui. Altrimenti un Suo biglietto al fotografo autorizzandoci a ritirare una fotografia-contro pagamento, s’intende—che sarà la stessa cosa.

Vorrei che la fotografia del collega e dell’amico che tanto fece per un ignoto isolano all’epoca critica della mia vita non mancasse in questo libro.

Propongo di fargli una visitina ancora quest’altra settimana, se Lei me lo concede. Nel frattempo spero che il vino svizzero gli sia piaciuto. Con dovuti ossequi mi segno, gentile Signora, di Lei devmo

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 19 June 1939

Paris

MS. British Museum

Dear Miss Weaver: Thanks for copies of Epilogue. If you have finished please return the batch of clippings to Gilbert: 7 rue Jean du Bellay, Ile S. Louis, Paris. And please look through these and return them to Beckett, 6 rue des Favorites, Paris XV as soon as convenient. They are for his friend Alfred Perron who is to talk on F.W. from Paris P.T.T. next week. Also please send on to me any other English clippings you may have in hand.

… If I can find it I shall put into this letter a copy of the last letter I sent Gorman, following up three very long cables I also found it necessary to send. The letter was dictated to P.L. The allusion to Giorgio is he found when in the U.S. that the Irish-American element or catholic Irish element regarded him as the son of a British Government secret agent who had amassed much money during the war and in fact when Ireland was having a war with Britain all to herself. (See the Catholic World whatever date it was). With kindest regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 3 July 1939

Paris

MS. Sax

Dear Mrs Sax: My wife and your sister spent all Saturday afternoon together. She was in good spirits and talks of going to La Baule. Strange to say, we are going there too if anything happens as my daughter’s Maison de Santé will be transferred there. She asks me to thank you for the nice box of chocolates. I shall report to you again. With best wishes for your reposeful progress sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT, 8 July 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVIe

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Sehr geehrter Herr Goyert: Vielmals habe [ich] Sie wegen des hochwohlgestorbenen Johannes Jeep (‘Von der Sirenen Listigkeit, Thun die Poeten Dichten’) ausgefragt. Er hat tatsächlich existiert, wie Sie sehen. Wenigstens so schreibt die Amerikanische ‘Encyclopaedia of Music’

Und wie geht’s unserem Freund Finnegan, da wir vom Scheintod reden?

Freundliche Grüsse

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 15 July 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Has Ibsen’s Ghost gone astray or have you not my address. There is a label on the back of this note. And, by the way, I see there is a typist’s blunder in line 4 of stanza 3 which should read;

‘When the wise sire knows which is which’ and not ‘When the wise child etc’

If you can’t send a copy I would like to read the sheets which I would return. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN, 22 July 1939

Golf Hôtels, Etretat, Seine-Inférieure

Dear Curran: We have been moving and my new address is on the back of this. We are not satisfied with the change and may move elsewhere next year. My daughter-in-law has been seriously ill since early this year. She is now convalescent, but it will be some months probably before she is all right again. We came down here for a 4–5 days rest and to see the grandson who is in camp near here. We motor back with Giorgio on Tuesday as I have to be in Paris for Lucia’s birthday, the 26th, Wednesday. Curiously enough, Giorgio’s is Thursday, the 27th. I hope Mrs Curran and your daughter are both well and that the latter is enjoying or enjoyed her stay in the U.S.A.

As regards F.W. if you pass through Paris on your usual continenta holiday bring it with you and ring up Léon or myself (new numbe Auteuil: 79.01) and if we should be away leave it with the concierge of either of us. I shall inscribe it and send it back registered. I dislike the idea of inscribing a blank sheet to be pasted in. It looks bad.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 22 July 1939

Golf Hotels, Étretat

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: Thanks for article and format received. I shall write you about it when I get back to Paris, that is, after Lucia’s birthday, the 26th. So far, I have received over 400 press notices and I think I may send a dozen picked which perhaps you ought to see. These I should want returned of course.

It seems to me an excellent article but I am sure you can amplify it at at least three points with advantage to it and to yourself materially as the Fortnightly pays per page. I am almost sure they will take it if you write a letter on the lines I suggested. The fact that he was in the rival 19th Century doesn’t mean much for they don’t cover the same ground.

I see you had more B.A. workers in Britain yesterday. Sunny summer seems to have become a misnomer. It’s not hot here. My gracious is it expensive. My daughter-in-law is in Switzerland.

I hope that Money bags knows what Ireland expects that every man this day will do Very friendly regards sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To C.P. CURRAN, Postmark 23 July 1939

Golf Hotels, Étretat, Seine-Inférieure

MS. Curran

P.S.

If you are not coming to the continent you could send the book by someone else who is unless you have lent it in which case the problem is solved for neither you nor I will ever see it again.

Some friend of yours, I suppose, in the Irish Tourist Association has sent me a copy of the official Guide to Dublin in which I am mentioned. Will you please thank him from me for his courtesy. As regards the music section of it while the compilers may be correct, in the French sense, in not claiming Dowland for Dalkey it seems to me Field and Balfe should be mentioned.

I see too that our old dean of studies has gone. He was a well meaning peacemaker and I hope he is blessed. sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MRS VICTOR A. SAX, 28 July 1939

Parigi

MS. Sax

Dear Mrs Sax: We rang up your sister when we came back and found that she was not feeling too well physically so got her to see our physician Dr Fontaine who says there is nothing the matter with her except fatigue and gave her a tonic to take. She seems to have caught a summer cold. Anyhow my wife saw her yesterday and I am to tell you there is absolutely no need for you to worry. She hopes to begin her holiday next week. We may go to Berne then too but it is not sure. The case of wine has now come. Many thanks to Mr Sax but he is on no account to send me any more of anything. My wife is not here at present and I cannot make out your address on the picture postcard so I send this to Z’ch. Thank heaven one of the summer months is almost over! I wish it would snow.

Friendly greetings from us to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, End July 1939

[Paris]

Dear Budgen: I sent you 33 clippings yesterday and the typescript with some suggestions which you may reject or not as suits you. I enclose P.O. 2/6. Will you please return the clippings by registered letter post so as to reach me by Tuesday, 1 prox, as we plan to leave and I want them back first—not as printed matter. The 6 notices in the [illegible] are 2 by Edmund Wilson and 3 by Paul Rosenfeld (I put them so that you might see the progression) with which is intercalated a letter signed by Faugh-a-Ballaugh-Faugh possibly the last public act of his life. The first instalment of F.W. appeared in his Transatlantic Review (your 4 old men) and it was he who called it ‘Fragment from Work in Progress’. I forgot to put in the reference pages etc in suggestions dictated to P.L. At back of this am putting them down anyway. Wilson makes some curious blunders, e.g. that the 4th old man is Ulster. Your article can easily run to 500/1000 words now. The F.R. paid me 1 gn a page in 1899—16 pp. I think they will take your article if you write in the way I suggested and say who you are. If that fails I shall suggest another review not the Quarterly. A U.S. review is not likely. They have plenty of critics of their own…. The part of F.W. accepted as easiest is section pp. 104 et seq and the most difficult of all [illegible] pp. 260 et seq—yet the technique here is a reproduction of a schoolboy’s (and schoolgirl’s) old classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who change sides at half time, footnotes by the girl (who doesn’t), a Euclid diagram, funny drawings etc. It was like that in Ur of the Chaldees too, I daresay. Page 626, line 17 (the word heliotrope appears here again after baffling Glugg in the mime, Isolde’s colour too)….If I have left out some please let me know.

P.S. Why do you not work in the verses about the names?

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To GEORGE ROGERS, Postmark 3 August 1939

34 rue des Vignes, Paris XVI

MS. Rogers

Caro signor Rogers: Dunque. Giorgio è stato bocciato ingloriosamente dalla giuria invisibile della B.B.C. Quell’alto consesso promulgò il suo verdetto, vale a dire, che la sua voce era ben al disotto del livello richiesto e che no vedeva nemmeno perchè il suo nome dovrebbe essere aggiunto alla loro lista per un avvenire più o meno eventuale.

Siccome Giorgio si mostra molto taciturno, mi rivolgo a Lei. Cosa diamine è successa a quell’ nazione? Si accorse Lei di qualche cosa nell’ambiente, una stiza, un’ostilità, fretta, impreparazione ecc. Od il timor panico distrusse la sua voce totalmente o cantò davvero in modo da meritare l’opprobriosa sentenza. ‘Al di sotto del livello della Granbretagna in fatto di arte canora!’ Per l’ugola celeste di Santa Cecilia, per quanto affirochito sia diventato il mio proprio ruggito, non m’aspettavo mai questo calcio di ciucco! Ed il guaio è ch’egli è sempre disposto ad accettare la condamna. Sarei molto grato di un Suo breve cenno in merito. Salutando La cordialmente devmo

James Joyce

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To MRS VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 5 August 1939

Paris

MS. Sax

Dear Mrs Sax; My wife saw your sister twice this week. She, your sister, said the tonic Dr Fontaine gave her did her great good. By the way our doctor is a woman and a very clever one too. In fact Lui is a Lei as in that libretto. Your sister asked me for the name of a good hotel at Montreux. I advised the Monnet where we stayed some years ago. She left the other night, so far as I know, but we could not go to the station as here, in Passy, there was thunder overhead and when there’s an orage my place is under the mattress.

We have not left for Berne. We hardly know where we are going or when. We might end up in Tasmania. I hate the summer and the storms and the heat and the crowds and the long days and all the nationals out for all the nature they can find. If we move I will let you know. Tanti saluti a Lei ed a Lui.

James Joyce

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To CECIL FFRENCH SALKELD, 10 August 1939

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. Northwestern

Dear Mr Salkeld: My friend, Mr Samuel Beckett, has forwarded me your letter. I thank you very much for your courteous invitation and for the kind terms in which it is couched. I have not written any verse for many years now and regret therefore that I am unable to contribute to your venture to which, however, I wish all success.

I read your postscript with great interest and I hope that distinguished officer, your grandfather, did not lament too lyrically his purchase of my book but that it afforded him some moments of entertainment at least. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To GEORG GOYERT, 12 August 1939

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Lieber Herr Goyert: Leider ist Ihrer Brief und die Rezension der D.A.Z. sowohl andere Kritiken meines Buches Verlierer gegangen. Glücklicherweise habe ich sie zuerst gelesen. Wäre es möglich für Ihnen mir ein anderes Exemplar dieser Zeitung zu verschaffen? Erinnern Sie sich des Datums? Ich weiss nicht ob andere Rezensionen in Deutschland erscheinen. Prof. Curtius enthielt eine Press-Kopie und auch Prof. Zimmer (Heidelberg). Bis jetzt habe ich etwa 500 gehabt, kann sie aber nicht schicken da ich nur diese Kopien besitze. Ich finde den Preis meines Buches ganz verrückt 25 Schilling bei solchen Zeiten! Tadeln Sie mich nicht, ich bin für nichts darin. Im Gegenteil!

Sie schreiben am besten an meine Pariser Adresse da wir fahren nach Bern übermorgen und dann nach Zurich. Freundliche Grüsse an Sie und an Ihre Familie

James Joyce

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To MR and MRS GEORGE TURNER (Postcard), 12 August 1939

[Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne]

MS. Ellmann

Here we are at Le Touquet with Vittel at the other side of the road and all surrounded by Beaugency, Spa and the half dozen other places we said we were going to. Greetings to you both from this synthetic pleasure resort

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, Postmark 12 August 1939

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: Thanks for the sheets of Barrie’s Ibsen’s Ghosts and for leave to keep them. It is an amusing burlesque which would have made old Henrik laugh. I saw J.L. Toole act twice and he must have been droll and completely improbable in the part. As my Epilogue will be printed in H. Gorman’s biography of me I thought of letting him see the sheets. There is a certain limit. J.M.B. in his preface alludes to Ibsen as ‘the greatest dramatist of our age’. I would go much further. But I note there are only 16 copies not for sale of this as yet unpublished ‘work’ and perhaps you may not wish me to send this to the U.S.A. even as a brief temporary loan. It is by no means necessary that I should do so.? Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 20 August 1939

Hotel Schweizerhof, Bern

Dear Budgen: I return your article and hope the F.R. takes it. A pity you did not develop your ideas about the landscape. You ought to get them down anyway. Linati’s [?] article has a paragraph that bears on a page of your article, I thought, so I send it. Perhaps you can puzzle it out from the French. ‘Raggi iccasse’ is the Italian for X-rays. These suggestions:

1.

The expression about the [rock?] being all right because the R.C. church is founded on it is not correct. It should be Christian church but the whole phrase should be recast out of the two ‘true believer’ moulds.

2.

Reread the second paragraph in the hagiographic triptych in Part IV (S.L. O’Toole is only adumbrated). Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the arch druid and his pidgin speech and Patrick the [?] and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B’s theory of colours and Patrick’s practical solution of the problem. Hence the phrase in the preceding Mutt and Jeff banter ‘Dies is Dorminus master’ = Deus est Dominus noster plus the day is Lord over sleep, i.e. when it days.

3.

As your title begins well the article why not end well with any of the other names given by the Egyptians to their scripture. The Book of the Dead is also the Book of the Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day.

P.S. Among another batch of reviews I got this from London Daily Herald 5 August 39 (verbatim):

Finnegans Wake by J.J. (F. and F. 25/-).

An Irish stew of verbiage by the author of Ulysses with unexpected beauty emerging now and then from the peculiar mixture.

C’est tout.

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To PAUL LÉON, 2 September 1939

Hotel Saint Christophe, La Baule

MS. Private

Dear Léon: We moved into this cheap hotel today. I understood Ivry would leave when general mobilisation was proclaimed. Therefore went to Hotel Edelweiss into which it is supposed to move. The caretaker had never heard of any Dr Delmas or Maison de Santé. Was not expecting anyone. Mrs Delmas has no telephone. The Delmas villa is about 2 miles outside La Baule. There are no vehicles of any kind today. Walked there and found she knew nothing. He is supposed to be in pourparlers with the Banque Nationale in Paris…. 30,000 persons are supposed to arrive here on Sunday and Monday. A huge hotel (120 rooms) is not likely to be left vacant. Can you find out whether he has taken it or not, whether he has these famous cars which were to be ready to transport his maison and what he is waiting for since everyone is being urged to leave Paris unless he knows the whole business is a farce.

You have troubles enough of your own but if you can find this out by telephone so much the better. Nothing else is of much importance for the moment. I suppose your idea of staying in Paris is to show your zeal and readiness. Perhaps you are not there now.

I hope the rest of the family are all right. Helen wrote me to say they would go to stay in the country house if war came. She is on way in Etretat and says my concierge has forwarded three letters for me. Why? With best wishes cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To GEORGE JOYCE (Telegram), 3 September 1939

La Baule

TS. Private

ABSOLUMENT AUCUNE PROVISION FAITE ICI POUR RECEVOIR MAISON SANTE STOP DELMAS PENSE POUVOIR ARRANGER EVENTUELLEMENT D’ICI HUIT A QUINZE JOURS STOP EN ATTENDANT LUCIA ABANDONNEE SEULE IVRY MALGRE TOUS MES PREPARATIFS STOP ESSAYE TE METTRE EN RAPPORT AVEC PERSONNEL MAISON NOUS SOMMES HOTELSAINT CRISTOPHE ICI TELEPHONE 21–30 COURAGE BONNE CHANCE

BABBO

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To MR and MRS STUART GILBERT, 6 September 1939

Hôtel Saint-Christophe, La Baule (L.I.)

Dear Gilbert and Mrs Gilbert: We hope you are both well and safe. We are here where we came to be near Lucia. I was told and told again that Dr Delmas had rented the hotel Edelweiss here (70 rooms) and park to receive his maison de santé from Ivry and had a fleet of autocars ready to transport sick and staff, and would all be on the road here an hour after the levy in mass was proclaimed. On the strength of these reiterated assurances I left, telling Lucia that I would wait at Beaugency (on the way here) and leave at the same time as she left Ivry and meet her here. The morning after general mobilization I went to the hotel Edelweiss and seeing the ground floor windows at last open asked had the Maison de Santé of Dr Delmas arrived during the night. The caretaker had never heard of any Dr Delmas or Maison de Santé and said the hotel had been rented by the Société des Forges du Nord. Dr Delmas arrived next day. I found him by the merest accident as his wife never even troubled to ring me up to tell me. He told me he was looking for a place but had no means of transport and I could not count on his being able to do anything before 8 or 15 days! He was to return to Paris next day. Through a friend of mine who has a daily priority telephone call to Paris, Dr O’Brien of the Rockefeller Foundation, who ’phoned his secretary in Paris I learned yesterday and now today that there had been several night alarms in Ivry and that the government had evacuated the female patients. At the time of writing I have no idea where my daughter is—this after all my preparations to be near her! … I wrote express to Lucia through Mrs Léon who is in Beaugency, but scarcely knew what to say to her who always counts on me. Heaven knows if she even got the letter….

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To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 8 September 1939 Fête de Marion Bloom

Hotel Saint Christophe, La Baule (Loire Infer.)

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton: Nous voilà donc ici où depuis bien douze jours nous attendons l’arrivée de ma fille. Je ne sais pas qu’est-ce que ce medecin psychiatre attend pour transporter sa maison de santé de Paris à la Baule comme c’était convenu et nous sommes dans tous nos ébats. Depuis trois semaines toute personne qui peut le faire et n’a pas d’affaires à Paris le quitte et il reste là-bas toujours avec ses malades. Il croît, parait-il, que les alertes de nuit font du bien pour la santé des gens nerveux. C’est inoui!

Il y a un long article sur moi dans la Revue de Paris, du Septembre. Rien dans la N.R.F. je veux dire votre deuxième article. Le numéro est dédié à la mémoire de Charles du Bos que je connaissais.

J’espère que vous allez bien malgré les évènements cordialement

James Joyce

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To SELSKAR MICHAEL GUNN, 15 September 1939

La Baule

MS. Harvard

Dear Gunn: As you kindly suggested I am sending a written message for M. Paul Léon (he will not trouble you much more for he is conscribed as from Tuesday next), namely, that I have now received the complete proofs of my biography and have written the N.Y. publisher that I shall deal with them directly.

In this connection perhaps it may amuse you to look over the illustrations so I am leaving them and shall pick them up tomorrow from your hall porter if you will be good enough to leave them with him for me.

Many thanks in advance sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 18 September 1939

Hotel Saint Christophe, La Baule, L.I.

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Cher Larbaud: Deux lignes pour vous donner notre adresse. Nous sommes ici auprès de notre fille malade. Elle est à Pornichet, à 3 km. Aussi pour vous dire qu’il y a un article dans la Revue de Paris (le 1er pas le 15e septembre) sur mon livre qui vous interesserà sans doute si vous ne l’avez pas déjà vu.

J’espère que le progrès se maintient chez vous. Esperons toujours. Mes hommages à Madame Larbaud cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 18 September 1939

Hotel Saint Christophe, La Baule (L.I.)

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: The above is our address. We are here near Lucia. Glad to know Mrs Budgen and Joan are in Berks and hope you are too by now. But probably you are not. Sorry the Fortnightly declined your article no sense of business the Nineteenth Century had one 6 months before. I suppose you have tried another review—there is an article in the Revue de Paris (1 Sept) which your public library [should have]. You seem still surprised about the Sunday Times. Léon heard a long time ago that this paper had declared its intention to ignore the book on publication as ‘irrelevant to literature’. A little coaxing may change that, however. With friendly greetings cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To FARRAR & RINEHART (Cablegram), 21 September 1939

Hotel Samt Christophe, La Baule

TS. Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Proposal inacceptable wait arrival corrections numerous inaccuracies final chapters sent today

James Joyce

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To JOHN FARRAR, 21 September 1939

Hotel Saint Christophe, La Baule (Loire-Inférieure), France

MS. Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Dear Mr Farrar: I cabled you to stay your publication of my biography till the arrival of the enclosed corrections and suggestions for Chapters X and XI, which please pass on to Mr Gorman,

I shall now look at the revised proofs of the preceding chapters (where I take it his corrections have already been made) and write you again in a few days. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FARRAR & RINEHART (Cablegram), 3 October 1939

La Baule

TS. Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Final corrections sent in two registered letters please await acknowledge arrival cable

James Joyce

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To VISCOUNT CARLOW, 4 November 1939

Hotel Lutétia, 43 Boulevard Raspati, Paris

MS. Yale

Dear Lord Carlow: I am glad to hear from you and to know you are well and cheerful. We had to come up here in a hurry from La Baule owing to a very serious illness of my daughter-in-law and are stopping in this hotel as all the flats in our house are unoccupied and of course unheated. I don’t know when we shall be able to return so if you run over here please ring me up.

I did not send the Barrie book to the U.S. after all.

With thanks for your good wishes in these tiresome times and with my own good wishes to you and your family sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To MR and MRS VICTOR A. SAX, 6 November 1939

Hotel Lutétia, 43 Boulevard Raspati, Paris

MS. Sax

Chers amis: Merci de votre gentille pensée. Vous semblez être presque les seules personnes en ce moment qui pensent à nous. Nous avons dû quitter La Baule en hâte à cause de la grave maladie de ma bru et n’y rentrerons que d’ici quelques semaines. Elle est maintenant dans une maison de santé à Suresnes, près de Paris, et son frère arrive ici demain de New York et il tâchera de l’emmener avec lui en Amérique. L’enfant a été placé dans une école près de Vichy. Une histoire lamentable et qui a semé le désastre à droite et à gauche. Mon fils et moi avons passé trois semaines angoissées pour ne pas parler de ma femme. Ma fille me croît souffrant et toujours à La Baule. Il [ne] nous manquait que cela vraiment. Nous sommes à l’hotel parce que l’appartement n’est pas chauffé.

En somme, du courage!

Très cordialement à Lui et à Lei

James Joyce

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Note on scrap of paper), Postmark 16 December 1939

[Paris]

MS. Cornell

Please have this inserted in ‘Il Piccolo’ if you see no reason against it

Jim

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Part V

SAINT-GÉRAND-LE-PUY, ZURICH
1939–41

1940

To JACQUES MERCANTON, 9 January 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton: Voila les causes de mon long silence. Ma bru, à son tour … a été internée d’office…. Mon fils, totalement désorienté, se trouve à Paris avec les amis. Il cherche à s’occuper. J’ai dû prendre l’enfant à mes charges. Il est ici dans une école et je fais un partage entre ici, Paris et La Baule où ma fille est toujours.

Vous me parlez d’un certain ‘roman’ que j’ai écrit. Ici personne n’a soufflé mot de son existence. J’ai reçu encore des critiques parmi lesquelles une ‘contribution’ bien bizarre vient de Helsinki où, pour de bon et comme le prophète le prévit, le Finn again wakes. Il y avait une aussi dans la revue romaine Panorama du 12 novembre. Puisque le livre entier est fondé sur l’œuvre d’un penseur italien …? En somme, un ‘fiasco’ total quant à la critique européenne jusqu’ici. Et je n’arrive pas même à toucher mes tantièmes à cause des lois sur l’exportation du Kapital.

J’écrirai à Francini quand je retrouverai sa lettre. Va-t-il publier sa brochure dans une edition de luxe, sur Japon?

Si vous m’écrivez tapez à la machine. Si vous allez à Lausanne buvez 3 litres de Villeneuve à mes trois intentions. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), 9 January 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I forgot to say Louis Gillet told me last week he had bought a copy of your book marked: 4th impression. Is this worth looking into? Was there any but a first edition which was remaindered (Léon has been trying to get a copy for private use) or is this a ruse of the publishing firm to give a false idea of sales or is an edition out without your knowledge? If you reply to this write only about it in your letter so that I can forward it to him (better type it) or wire yourself to him direct, 17 rue Bonaparte, Paris 7e. He is an academician. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY (Postcard), 10 January 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

MS. Brody

Dear Mr Brody: Thank you for your Christmas greetings. I hope you and all your family are well. Another misfortune has fallen on mine. My daughter-in-law has had a dreadful mental breakdown and is interned. I have had to take over the child who is in a boarding school here. My son’s entire family life seems to be ruined. As if the affairs of my poor daughter were not enough!

I hear today that the Italian version of Anna Livia is to be published shortly in a review in Rome. Do you think it would be possible to publish the version you have in Holland? After all it is only about rivers and washerwomen. I wonder whether that Dutch critic whose address you sent me—I must look for his name—ever found his way through my book. He wrote a very remarkable essay as [far as] it goes.

I have had several more reviews in Spanish, Italian, a very long one by a Harvard professor, a Russian (the best so far) and—naturally, I suppose—the most curious of all, a symbolical commentary sent me from Helsinki where, as predicted, the ‘Finn again wakes’. The Dutch critic’s name is G.B. van der Vat (c/o Dr Zandwoort, The Plague (English Studies).

Greetings to Mrs Brody and yourself from us both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), [? 19 January 1940]

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Mon cher Larbaud: Que je suis bête! Oui, ma biographie a été publiée en Amérique le 10 novembre et votre photographie agrandie occupe une page entière. Je n’ai pas encore reçu mon exemplaire. On m’a trouvé jadis de l’esprit. Oui,… mais de l’eschalier [sic]. Una stretta di mano

J.J.

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 8 February 1940

Hôtel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Budgen: Thanks for remembering my birthday. Ruggiero did so too. I hope you are all well. Did you offer your article elsewhere? I have had many more since, Italian, one from Magdeburg, one by a Russian American, a remarkable one and, naturally enough perhaps, a strange symbolical affair from Helsinki—sent about 6 weeks ago-where, as foretold by the prophet, the Finn again wakes. I should not jest…. And what about a second edition of your book. Gorman’s life of me is out. It is published by Farrar and Reinhardt [sic] of N.Y. I hope the Cardiff man paid you for your pictures. There was plenty of snow down here to paint near Vichy where the water comes from.

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To C.P. CURRAN, 11 February 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

MS. Curran

Dear Curran: This is to tell you your photograph appears in Gorman’s life of me the first copies of which have now reached Paris, and I suppose, London from New York. The publishers are Farrar and Rinehart.

I hope you and your family are well. Mine has been stricken by a new disaster. My unfortunate daughter-in-law has lost her reason and is at present internée d’office which is provisional certificate of lunacy. I had to rush up from La Baule where I was with Lucia (who is still ill but quieter) to Paris four months ago and we have had a dreadful time…. The flat in Villa Scheffer and the country house she intended to call Shillelagh are vacant and Giorgio is living with Léon’s brother-in-law. They say she may recover as the attack was so sudden and violent and slow cases are worse. She staged a marvellous banquet for my last birthday and read the closing pages on the passing-out of Anna Livia—to a seemingly much affected audience. Alas, if you ever read them you will see that they were unconsciously prophetical! I am and have been much affected by all this [word omitted]. While I am writing the little golden book with the title and date and names she had made for that day attached to my fountainpen keeps on tinkling. (Giorgio has had a hard experience. He had practically to kidnap the child en-pleine rue. I have had to take him in charge and put him in Mme Jolas’s school here.—We are staying here for the moment Giorgio and Becket are coming down for the boy’s birthday—15th—. I wrote to Lucia explaining the whole case. She said we could stay here and go back to her later on.) Ahimè!

I have received a number of foreign notices of my book, Italian, Spanish, American. The best is by a Russian American—a professor at Harvard—and the most curious comes from Helsinki where, as was predicted, the Finn again wakes.

Mrs J.F. Byrne writes to me from N.Y. asking me to approach publishers about a book (she says it is an epoch-making work) he has written. I asked you if you had noticed anything about him the last time he was in Europe. I wonder if your daughter met him when she was in the U.S. I feel there is something not all right there. All the same I will do what I can, not very much.

With kind remembrances to Mrs and Miss Curran and yourself sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To VALERY LARBAUD (Postcard), 11 February 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Cher Larbaud: Deux mots pour vous dire que nous sommes de nouveau vos voisins et que j’ai reçu ce matin ma biographie publiée à New York avec votre portrait agrandi. Le drôle qui l’a publiée n’a pas même pensé à m’envoyer un exemplaire et j’ai dû me l’acheter à Paris. Je vous la porterai un de ces jours, vers la fin de la semaine

Mes hommages à Madame cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, 15 February 1940

Hotel de la Paix S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Mr Sweeney: I thank you and Mrs Sweeney for your kind cables at Xmas and on my birthday. I hope at least that both occasions were duly observed at your end and that when the worthy celebrant Jolas intoned the ritual ‘Lots of fun’ the prescribed response was full and hearty. Let it so continue. Today is again a birthday, that of my grandson, his eighth. I shall write to Jolas in a day or two…. I have also to confirm Mrs Jolas’s letter from Paris. In fact, as she told you, I wrote to both my N.Y. publishers over 2 months ago but never had a word in reply! With good wishes to you both.

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To DARIO DE TUONI, 20 February 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. de Tuoni

Egregio signor de Tuoni: Dopo un buon—ο piuttosto—un cattivo quarto di secolo Le sarà certo una sorpresa ricevere questa mia lettera. Fatto sta che lessi qualche tempo addietro un Suo articolo su Morand e Valéry Larbaud e venerdi scorso, essendo a Vichy (20 chilometri di qua) andai a rivedere il mio amico Larbaud al quale avevo a suo tempo inviato l’articolo. Egli m’incarica di ringraziar La della Sua critica amichevole. Gli ho spiegato che noi ci conoscevamo ‘in illo tempore’ a Trieste. La signora Larbaud è genovese. Egli è stato molto ammalato da parecchi anni ma secondo me ora va per la buona strada.

Spero che Lei stia bene malgrado questo tempo che corre quando non zoppica. Mio fratello è sempre in Trieste, professore all’università. Io sono nonno di un nipotino che ha festeggiato il suo ottavo compleanno il 15 di questo mese. Ebbi recentemente una lettera di Francini il quale è tornato al suo vecchio mestiere, l’insegnamento. È maestro alla scuola dei padri ‘Scalopi’ a Firenze. E Tullio Silvestri? Dov’è e che cosa è diventato? Ho sempre quattro o cinque dei suoi quadri nel mio appartamento a Parigi. Era un buon pittore e anche una ‘bela macia’ come si soleva dire.

Mando questa lettera per tramite del giornale nel quale lessi il Suo articolo e così spero che, se Dio vuole, La giungerà finalmente. Me lo faccia sapere, se vuole, con un Suo cenno in riscontro all’indirizzo qui sopra.

SalutandoLa distintamente mi segno di Lei devo

James Joyce

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To JAMES LAUGHLIN (Postcard), 21 February 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Harvard

Dear Mr Laughlin, Many thanks for having sent me the book with Prof. Levin’s article. Please convey to the writer my thanks also for his friendly and painstaking study of my book. In the opinion of all those to whom I have shown it his article, beginning with the title, is the most striking one that has appeared so far. An Italian and a Dutch review which I have read (Panorama, Rome, 12 November Rotterdamsche Courant, 3 February) might perhaps interest your critic but he would certainly be more intrigued by an elaborate communication I received from Helsinki so that my title too must be judged appropriate and prophetical. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN (Postcard), Postmark 26 February 1940

[S. Gérand-le-Puy]

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: If this reaches you by S. David’s Day this is to wish you many happy returns. I have just read a long article by Mr K. Blistra in the Rotterdamsche Courant (eng. edition) 3 Feb. ‘Woorden aan den Rekstok’ (‘Words on the Rack’) about my book. If Mrs Budgen is from that city maybe she knows him. The article is not very favourable but it is sincere and intelligent. Perhaps he could have your article put into Dutch and published in some Dutch review. It would not pay as well as the Fortnightly but since that is paying nothing?

Anyhow, I hope you will have lots of fun at. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To DANIEL BRODY, 3 March 1940

Hôtel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Mr Brody: Thanks for the cutting from the Rotterdamscher Courant. The article which I read with interest, even though unfavourable, is able and intelligently hostile—when it is hostile. If Mr Blijstira ever is my guest—though it does not seem likely for the moment—I shall have to sing to him after dinner not only Tim Finnegan’s Wake but also The Man on the Flying Trapese to show him that I am a ‘goochelaar’ also in the flesh, perhaps executing a few steps of a pas seul such as that described in the last page of Mr H. Gorman’s biography of me. I forgot to tell you that this is now on sale…. On the whole it is well documented though in the Zurich chapters poor old Prof. Sigmund Feilbogen is alluded to as an astronomer! An ear trumpet has been mistaken for a telescope!

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To NINO FRANK (Postcard), Postmark 13 March 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S, Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

Caro Nino Frank: Prospettive, una rivista romana diretta da Curzio Malaparte, pubblicò li 15 febbraio la traduzione nostra di Anna Livia con parecchi articoli su me e su Finnegans Wake. Il Settanni mi scrive da Capri che ha creduto bene raddolcirne certi passaggi. La prego di procurarsela [sic] la rivista e di notare in margine le varianti. Vorrei avere così il nostro testo. Il Settanni mi scrive che il Suo nome non appare per ragioni che Lei capirà sul momento. Ma non sarà sempre celato, spero!

Giorgio e Beckett vengono qui per le vacanze pasquali. Provi di vedere l’uno o l’altro forse prima. Il telefono di Giorgio è Inv. 52.63.

E come va il mio libro. L’avrà presto finito? Insomma, diciamo, per la fine del mese. Me lo faccia sapere ma non me lo mandi colla posta.

Un altro favore. Se mi scrive scriva piuttosto alla macchina causa la mia vista. Una stretta di mano

James Joyce

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To FRANK BUDGEN, 13 March 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Yale

Dear Budgen: I sent on your letter to Louis Gillet. He says his copy is marked ‘4th impression’. I hope those publishers give you royalties on these editions and that you didn’t sell the rights off.

My biography by Gorman is published by Farrar and Rinehart of New York at 3$50. I believe, if you had a good agent, you could dispose of the U.S. rights of your book just now.

I enclose the Dutch article. Please send it back when read as I want it for the files.

The Roman review Prospettive has just published my Italian version of Anna Livia with articles on the writer and his latest book, Ettore Settanni writes me that it is causing ‘un gran scompiglio nel mondo letterario’. (Great uproar)

I did not wish to inflict temporal art on a spatialist in asking you to go to the concert. I was struck by the similarity of the two 39 Belsizes and being a superstitious Cornishman felt I had to do something about it.

I am sorry your wall humptydumptied like that. Possibly you had flung your copy of Finn again his Wake onto the top of it. However it is pleasing to know you are working for A L P, that is, if I read aright.

Alas, my daughter-in-law is in a very bad way. Everything is in confusion. I am arranging to transfer Lucia here to Moulins in the vicinity.

Why despair of placing your very good article somewhere and getting paid for it? It is a pity the unimaginative Curtius sailed past you in the Fortnightly. But there are others. Greetings to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 14 March 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: I hope you are well. Perhaps my letter did not reach you. I asked you for the name of the successor of Prof. Fehr and of a critic in Berne who writes for the Bund, if I remember rightly. These names are for my publishers.

A propos, there is a lot about Zurich in my biography by Herbert Gorman (Farrar and Rinehart, New York) which is now on sale in Europe.

Greetings from us both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 14 March 1940

S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier), France

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton: Merci de votre lettre et de vos bonnes paroles. Envoyez-moi, je vous prie, l’adresse de Francini dont je ne trouve plus la lettre. Je suppose que vous serez chez vous pour les Rameaux. Vous ai-je dit qu’il y a un article sur moi dans ‘Panorama’ (Rome) 12 nov? Le ‘Prospettive’ (Rome, 44 via Gregoriana) vient de publier (15 fév) deux articles et ma version italienne d’Anna Livia. Autre chose ma biographie par Herbert Gorman (Farrar et Rinehart, N. York) vient de paraître et est en vente. Puis, il y a un article très long et remarquable que je vous ai déjà signalé publié dans New Directions (Norfolk, Connecticut). Peutêtre votre presque voisine Mme MacPherson l’avra et pourra vous le prêter si vous aurez le désir de vous adresser à elle.

J’espère que vous passerez des bonnes vacances et que vous n’oublierez pas d’aller à Montreux et à boire le Villeneuve dans la brasserie (pas le restaurant où nous avons mangé) Cordialement votre

James Joyce

P.S. Je fais des recherches pour vous à la Nouvelle Revue Française.

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To VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 14 March 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Sax

My dear pupil: You will find yourself alluded to a few times in the text and notes of my biography by Herbert Gorman (Farrar and Rinehart, New York) which is now on sale in Europe. There is a long chapter on Zurich. Also in a Roman review Prospettive (15 February) there appears an Italian version I made with ‘E. Settanni’ of the river piece in Finnegans Wake (a prophetic title) which is also reviewed there.

I hope Mrs Sax and your sister-in-law are well and you yourself. My daughter-in-law is extremely ill and my daughter not yet better. Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To FRITZ VANDERPYL, 14 March 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Cher Vanderpyl: Madame Vanderpyl m’a rendu un grand service en m’envoyant ces bouquins, mais le prix n’est pas indiqué. Faites-me-le savoir, je vous prie, afin que je puisse vous rembourser la somme due.

Je suppose que l’un des auteurs Edmond Pichon est le grand grammairien qui vient de mourir. L’autre, une dame, est Madame Buel-Maisonnay. J’ai trouvé son adresse et son numéro de telephone: 10 rue de l’Armée (Litt. 23.31). Il s’agit de mon petit-fils, Stephen James, âgé de 8 ans. La directrice de l’école (évacuée) ou il est à présent près d’ici se rend à Paris dimanche et elle sera à l’Hotel Lutétia lundi et mardi. Elle s’appelle Mme Eugène Jolas et est la femme du directeur de transition que vous connaissez. Elle va se mettre en rapport avec Mme Maisonnay à propos du côté pratique du traitement qui n’est pas trop bien expliqué dans le bouquin. Si Mme Vanderpyl connaît cette dame—ce qui est fort probable—peutêtre pourait-elle la rappeler par téléphone et lui dire un petit mot? Je sais que le téléphone est très mal vu par Vanderpyl lui-même!

Je vous envoie ci-inclus une critique que je viens de recevoir de votre pays natal. Est-ce que vous lisez encore le hollandais. Si je dois croire le guide égaré, non. En tout cas la voilà. Je l’ai lue. Elle n’est pas trop favorable mais l’hostilité est loyale et même intelligente. Je vous prie de vouloir bien me la renvoyer car je n’ai pas d’autre.

Et à ce propos il est bien singulier comment après la publication de mon livre (dont le titre signifie à la fois la veille mortuaire et le reveil du Finn, c-à-d, notre héros légendaire celto-nordique) la Finlande, jusqu’à alors terra incognita occupe tout-à-coup le centre de la scène d’abord par le fait que le prix Nobel de littérature a été décerné a un écrivain finnois et après à la suite du conflit russo-finnois. J’ai reçu, juste avant l’ouverture des hostilités, un commentaire bizarre de Helsinki à ce sujet. Votre bien dévoué

James Joyce

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To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, S. Patrick’s Day 1940

Hôtel de la Paix S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

Dear Mr Sweeney: I hope you have received a cable from Mrs Jolas in which she expressed my thanks which I here renew for your very prompt and kind intervention. Both your cables arrived promptly and on the 2nd instant the remittance sent by Cerf on the 1st instant reached the Crédit Lyonnais, Paris. It did not reach me till yesterday, through my own bank, Lloyds, Paris. If it had been sent them as I suggested I should have had it a fortnight sooner. However, it has arrived. Nothing however has arrived from Huebsch so far. As you know from Mrs Jolas I wrote to Cerf and to Huebsch asking them to forward my royalties in the speediest manner direct for my account to Lloyds Bank, Paris. These two letters of mine were sent from Paris by the American clipper airservice about the 7th or 8th December last. Neither was acknowledged or answered. Will you please inform Cerf that I have received his remittance for which I thank him and shall acknowledge it also by subsequent letter?

If you see Jolas will you please tell him that Prospettive a Roman review of 15 February has just published the (partial) Italian version I made of Anna Livia Plurabelle, together with articles on me and on the book by the editor Curzio Malaparte, Carlo Linati and Ettore Settani. The latter writes that its publication ‘ha destato un gran subbuglio nel mondo letterario italiano’. He can probably find the review in some Italian bookshop in New York.

I shall let you know when and if Huebsch’s remittance reaches me.

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To SELSKAR GUNN, 19 March 1940

Hôtel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Gunn: It was very kind of Mrs Gunn and yourself to have brought that parcel to Lucia. She wrote me the other day and told me about it. I enclose a cheque (150 frs) and shall be grateful if you can send her something for Easter with the odd 50 francs, I mean apart from the 100 frs I already owe. What she likes best is fruit (not sweets) and gingerbread. We ought to send an egg but the eggs are always filled with sweets. We shall not be there for Easter….

I expect my son here tomorrow and I fear for many reasons that we shall be obliged to transfer Lucia to a maison departmentale at Moulins. It will be near us here but a great change for her. Those people with whom she has been for nearly five years of her eight years’ illness are quite kind to her and understand her. Is Dr O’Brien now there? If he is perhaps he could run out and see her once. He knows her and Dr Delmas already and Lucia would be glad to see him. Remember me to him anyway.

Thanks also for the cutting about Gorman’s book. I should like to read the other you speak of. No, I do not receive notices from the U.S. and I think I told you, I actually had to buy the copy of my biography which I possess. So if you don’t want it yourself, please let me see the other critique.

As soon as I have come to some decision I shall let you know. I shall of course write to my daughter for Easter. I have already tried to explain to her something of the whole lamentable affair. I’m afraid the outlook is very bad.

I hope Mrs Gunn and yourself and the aforesaid good doctor and all the Rockefellerians and will pass a pleasant and convivial Eastertide by the silver sea.

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To FRITZ VANDERPYL (Postcard), [? 20 March 1940]

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. S. Illinois (Croessmann)

Je trouve que l’autre auteur n’est pas grammarien mais médecin. Quand même ma lettre tient car il est sans doute mobilisé et une entrevue est préférable en ce cas particulier. Si Mme ne la connaît pas cela ne fait rien. Merci quand même.

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 22 March 1940

Hôtel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Miss Weaver: My son reports that no copy of Gorman’s biography of me is to be found in Paris bookshops. The publisher did not send me a copy and the one I possess I bought from Brentano’s, Paris, six weeks ago. Seemingly, no other copy has come since.

As I very much wish to send a copy to my mother-in-law can you find out whether a copy is to be had in London and send it on to her if you find it? The address is: Mrs Barnacle, 4 Bowling Green, Galway, Ireland.

It will give her great pleasure to have it.

I hope you are well, as usual…. My grandson is here and I am trying to have my daughter transferred to a place near here from La Baule. It is not easy at present. I wrote to her trying to explain part of what had happened. She has written agreeing to the transfer which however will be an unpleasant change for her.

With many thanks in advance and kindest regards.

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To ETTORE SETTANNI, 26 March 1940

Hotel de la Paix, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Settanni

Caro Settanni, La sua cartolina nonché il fascicolo di ‘Prospettive’ mi sono arrivati giorni fa dopo aver fatto una piccola odissea per conto proprio, ma spero che queste mie righe piuttosto frettolose le giungeranno più sollecitamente, malgrado la ambiguità dell’indirizzo preciso—Villa Castiglione, o Villa Castello? Un po’ di poesia, Sant’Antonio, ma non troppa!

—È stato per me un gran piacere apprendere che la mia piccola donnicciuola, quella di Dublino, ha compiuto il suo pellegrinaggio ed ha fatto con tanto garbo il suo modesto inchino all’augusto Zio Tevere. Sì è divertito almeno un poco il colendissimo vegliardo ad ascoltar queirinsolito chiacchierio insulso e bislacco? Il mio nuovo appartamento a Parigi (54, rue des Vignes, XVI) è chiuso, dimodochè quando lei tornerà a Parigi sarà meglio scrivermi all’indirezzo in testa al presente. Anche se sloggio, la sua lettera mi perverrà così più rapidamente. Frattanto la prego di porgere al direttore della rivista, Curzio Malaparte, i miei sentiti ringraziamenti (al Linati che conosco da molti anni invierò una cartolina anche) per la cortese accoglienza fattami nelle sue pagine. Grazie soprattutto a lei e una stretta di mano.

James Joyce

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To MRS VICTOR A. SAX (Postcard), 9 April 1940

Hotel Beaujolais, Vichy, France

MS. Sax

Dear Mrs Sax: If you have returned from San Remo to San Romolo there is something you could do for me. The name of the review which published my fragmentary translation of Anna Livia is Prospettive, the editor is Curzio Malaparte, the date is 15 February and the price is 3 lire. I have no copy myself as I gave mine away I cannot find a copy in the only two Italian bookshops I know in Paris. So if you could get through a bookshop a copy of the 15th February and also of the 15 March and send them to me I should be glad. If you tell me of some book you may want from here I would send it in exchange as one cannot easily send money. The news about your sister does not seem too bad. The two cases in our family continue with everything else to make our outlook anything but cheerful. We are glad to hear you are both well. Please send the review to me at my former address: Hotel de la Paix S Gerand-Le Puy/Allier.

Kind remembrances to you both from us both

J.J.

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To NINO FRANK (Postcard), Postmark 9 Aprili 1940

Hotel Beaujolais, Vichy

MS. Northwestern

Cher ami: 1°. D’abord j’espère que vous allez bien et Mme Frank aussi. 2°. Si vous avez bien reçu la revue avec la traduction d’Anna Livia que j’ai envoyé recommandée chez Pour Vous) pouvez-vous la prêter pour quelques semaines à Mlle A. Monnier, 7 rue de l’Odeon, puisqu’elle a été la première personne à l’imprimer dans sa revue Navire d’Argent? Vous pourriez lui téléphoner d’abord: Danton 07–47. Le numéro de mars contient une photographie du ministre de l’instruction publique prise après lecture. Il a les yeux fermés et se plaint mélancoliquement de la migraine. Le numéro d’avril publie une lettre que j’écris a Settanni. Le texte les pronoms de la 3ième personne singulière ont été changés en des prénoms de la 2ième pluriel! A propos de rien en particulier est-ce que je vous ai jamais prêté un livre At Swim Two Birds par F. O’Brien? Ce n’est pas une accusation: c’est une demande. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To MARY COLUM, 13 April 1940

Hôtel Beaujolais, Vichy (Allier)

Dear Mrs Colum: We are here for a few days but the address at foot will find me till the 15 July when my lease of that unoccupied flat expires. We return to S. Gérand-le-Puy tonight.

It was news to me to hear that Byrne had written a book. I should have been surprised to hear that he had read one. Nevertheless it might be a quite remarkable book and in any case he is a very old friend of mine. If you see him let me know how you find him. I did not think he was very well when I last saw him.

No, I have not seen your review of Gorman’s book. I have no copy of it myself. I have been trying to buy one in London or Paris but no bookshop in either city seems to have a copy according to Miss Weaver (London) and Giorgio (Paris). Neither Gorman nor his publishers sent me a copy or informed me of the date of publication or notified me that it was published or sent me any critique of it. I should not even know it was out but for Selskar Gunn who sent me a clipping from the New Yorker. I cabled the publishers in November but had no reply.

Also I have not seen any of the reviews you cite of Finnegans Wake; the publishers of that book, or rather Mr B.W. Huebsch of the firm, were written to by me on 6 December last. I sent the letter by U.S. Clipper as I send this and as you had better send mail if you write to Europe. I explained to him the very great difficulty one had in getting any money whatsoever out of England, even small monthly interest on War Loans, for the support of my doubly evacuated family and asked him to send out by his quickest possible way to my account at Lloyds Bank, Paris, any royalties due to me. He replied to this letter of mine of 6 December 1939 on the 17 February 1940 replying by long sea mail routes, a letter which reached me on the 11 March. His letter contained an account of sales of my books for the previous half year. Exiles, O, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, O, Dubliners, 6. He also enclosed a cheque for the royalties due me on Finnegans Wake, viz, 47 $ 45 (forty seven dollars 45/100)….

Whatever happens, thanks for having remembered us at this time, and I hope you will both let us know how you fare.

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To MARY COLUM, [April 1940]

P.S. [Hôtel Beaujolais, Vichy, Allier]

Dear Mrs Colum: I forgot to send our [Paris] address so am sending this. Even yet I have not received a word from Gorman or his publisher.

I am not sure whether you took Italian at the R.U.I. Anyhow the Italian translation I made of Anna Livia (incomplete) was published in Prospettive (15 February 1940, Rome) together with several articles about the book. If there is a good Italian bookshop in New York you might find a copy. It had an amazing sequel. The next number (15 March) contains a photograph of the Italian Minister of Education, signor Giuseppe Bottai, apparently sent to the editor by him. It purports to be a photograph taken after a reading of the number devoted to my ‘prose’. His Excellency is represented as seated at a table with one hand clasping his forehead, his eyes closed and an expression of exhausted bewilderment on his face. He has written a despairing ejaculation on the side of the photograph. Several years ago when he was governor of Rome he wrote to me inviting me to be a guest of honour at some banquet or function—I forget now what it was. I replied thanking him but did not go. I did not even send the efficient and witty Stephens to replace me as I had done in the case of an invitation to [? Florence] by the mayor some years before. He was not a complete success as he did not know any Italian. However the pained look in the photograph will soon give place to the first of many similar [? smiles].

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 17 April 1940

Hotel Beaujolais, Vichy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Ruggiero tells me you wrote me several times. I got one letter about ten days ago in reply to several cards. Many thanks. I have had a copy of my book sent to Prof. Diet but not to the other. I think the name of the critic in Berne is Riechner. An Italian review, Prospettive (Rome) published on 15 February an incomplete translation of Anna Livia together with several appreciative articles. Your news of your daughter does not seem so bad. I am glad to know you yourself are well and also that Prof. Vogt is flourishing and long may you both do so. My family is in pieces and in several places. As for me I cogitate therefore I exist. Kind greetings from us both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To NINO FRANK, 18 April 1940

Hotel Beaujolais, Vichy, Allier

MS. Northwestern

Caro Signor Frank; Ecco la cartolina del Settanni. Egli dovrebbe essere oramai a Parigi. La libreria italiana 75 (?) Bd S. Germaine saprebbe forse il suo indirizzo. Ha ricevuto Lei la mia lettera colla quale le dissi che Prospettive (Roma, 15 febbraio) ha pubblicato la nostra versione di Anna Livia? Ha riveduto il Beckett e come va il sig. Finnegan e ‘chi legge’? Saluti cordiali

James Joyce

P.S. Non so veramente dove mio figlio stia di casa—Telefoni Invalides 52–63 (27 rue Casimir-Perier) e domandi se abiti là. Il Beckett sta, 6 rue des Favorites, ma non ha il telefono. Come si chiama la scrittrice che scrisse La Moglie del Sardo? Larbaud me ne parlava l’altro giorno ma non poteva ricordarsi.

J.J.

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 25 April 1940

[Postcard] Hôtel Beaujolais, Vichy, Allier

Dear Miss Weaver: If you can find Prospettive in London buy also the issue of 15 March, the one following that which published Anna Livia. It contains a large photograph of the present Minister of Education, M. Giuseppe Bottai, stated to have been taken after his reading of the number containing my production. He has his hand to his forehead and there is an expression of bewilderment on his face. He has written an exclamation of humorous despair at the side. Some years ago when he was governor of Rome he wrote inviting me to be a guest of honour at some banquet or function. I forget what. Anyhow I hope His Excellency’s look of pained protest has by now been replaced by a sunny southern smile.

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To MRS VICTOR A. SAX, 28 April 1940

Hotel Beaujolais, Vichy, Allier

MS. Sax

Dear Mrs Sax: Many thanks for having so promptly sent all the numbers of Prospettive I asked for. The photograph of the minister is rather amusing and shows that he must have a sense of humour. So much the better. When he was governor of Rome some years ago he invited me to be present as a guest at some literary function there. I can’t remember exactly. I wrote thanking for the honour implied but declining. With my poor sight and general insipidity I am out of place at such reunions. I wonder whether my poor Anna Livia gave Mr Sax and you a headache also?

As I said it is hard to remit money anywhere at present. So, as I suggested, I am sending you a book about Rome. It was written by my friend Valery Larbaud and I hope you will like it with its purple and yellow sack. I would ask him to sign it but the poor man is paralyzed on the right side and cannot use his right hand. He lives here where there is a street named after him or perhaps it is after the source or sources of the family.

I also received an envelope from you but there was nothing in it. So either you forgot to put the letter in [or] it got out en route.

We came here for a few weeks. My family troubles are just as they were. We hope your sister’s condition is still not unfavourable. My daughter-in-law is reported to be slightly better but I am afraid the damage done cannot be remedied. I am still trying to bring Lucia (my daughter) to a place near here so that we may not be so scattered. But nothing is easy now.

With renewed thanks and our friendly greetings to you both sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To HARRIET SHAW WEAVER, 18 June 1940

[Postcard] Château de la Chapelle, Périguy (par Lapalisse), Allier

Dear Miss Weaver: There is no post, telephone or telegraph working at present here but I hope you will get this some time. And that you are well. We are here (having had to leave Vichy suddenly) except Lucia (whose transfer I postponed abruptly) who is at Pornichet (Loire Inférieure), Hotel des Charmettes, c/o Dr Achille Delmas.

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To MRS BARNACLE, 18 June 1940

[Postcard] Château de la Chapelle, Périguy Allier

Dear Mrs Barnacle: This is our new address. We, Nora, Giorgio, Stevie and I are well. Lucia is still down at La Baule with her doctor and well also. We hope you all are too.

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 July 1940

[Postcard] Hôtel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Chére Madame Giedion: Merci bien de votre gentil offre d’hospitalité. D’abord je voudrais savoir pour combien de temps il est valable et si vous avez l’intention d’aller en vacances vous-même. En somme si jamais nous arrivons à Zurich d’être sûr de vous trouver. Mais surtout voudriez-vous téléphoner à la maison de santé à Kilchberg (que nous avons visitée ensemble) pour savoir si l’on accepterait ma fille en pensionnaire et à quel prix minimal. Envoyez-moi un prospectus, ce serait le plus simple. Elle est actuellement à la clinique Les Charmettes, Pornichet, Loire Inférieure, donc en territoire occupé, prés de La Baule et malheureusement assez prés de S. Nazaire, mais je suppose que les autorités occupantes accorderaient sans difficulté la permission pour le transfert d’une malade si je pourrais l’arranger. Cela dépend. Ce n’est pas possible de faire des plans bien précis.

Merci en tout cas et bien des choses à vous tous.

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To NINO FRANK (Postcard), [July 1940]

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

MS. Northwestern

Très content de vous savoir sains et saufs tous les deux. Avez-vous reçu la version italienne d’Anna Livia dans la revue romaine Prospettive que je vous ai envoyé sans être raccomandé et l’avez-vous passée à Mlle Monnier? Si non, où est-elle? Nous sommes ici sans ma fille qui est à La Baule. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To NINO FRANK (Postcard), 28 July 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy (Allier)

MS. Northwestern

Cher ami: Evidemment vous n’avez pas reçu ma 2ième lettre à Paris. Quand vous y rentrerez je vous prie de téléphoner a Mlle Monnier, 7 rue de l’Odèon, Dant. 07–47 lui offrant la lecture de la traduction italienne d’Anna Livia—à titre de curiosité cela devra l’intéresser puisque c’est elle qui l’a publiée la première. Ne me l’envoyez pas ici en tout cas et faites-moi avoir de vos nouvelles

L’adresse de Beckett est Villa S. George, 135 Boul. de la Plage, Arcachon Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 30 July 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Brauchbar

Cher Monsieur Brauchbar: Merci de votre lettre du 21 mars et j’espère que vous allez toujours bien. Je vous avais déjà écrit à Toronto en vous envoyant une lettre que j’avais reçu de votre neveu à Dublin—la seule personne, soit dit en passant, parmi les douze ou treize que j’avais réussi à placer quelque part qui s’est dérangé jusqu’à maintenant pour savoir si j’étais même vivant,

Puisque vous me demandez de mes nouvelles nous en voilà. Ma malheureuse bru après avoir répandu autour d’elle et en pleine guerre une ruine materielle et morale indescriptible a été internée d’office par les autorités françaises comme dangereuse pour elle-même et pour les autres. Puis finalement elle a été transportée à New York par deux médecins et deux infermières et se trouve actuellement dans une maison de santé à Connecticut. Cela s’est passé quelques jours à peine avant la debacle ici. Ma fille se trouve avec sa maison de santé près de S. Nazaire, donc en plein zone occupée sur la côte dangereuse—et cela malgré tout ce que j’avais essayé de faire d’avance pour assurer sa tranquillité. Nous sommes ici, ma femme et moi avec notre fils et notre petit-fils et à la suite des ‘événements’ je me trouve complètement isolé, coupé de mes ressources à Londres par les autorités britanniques et de mes ressources en banque ici par les autorités francaises, double blocus.

Si vous avez lu ma biographie vous avez certainement ri en lisant ce qu’écrit M. Gorman (qui, du reste, ne m’avait pas même signalé la publication ni son éditeur non plus) que l’astronome de l’Uraniaturm s’appelait … Siegmund Feilbogen!

Je ne sais pas ce qui est devenu mon appartement à Paris, mes livres et mes tableaux.

J’espère que notre ‘tale of woes’ n’est pas trop embêtant et que votre famille immédiate (puisque vos parents semblent être comme les feuilles de la forêt) se trouve, saine et sauve, autour de l’arbre maître et .. . utilisable.

Je vous serre la main cordialement

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, 4 August 1940 [In Italian]

S. Gérand-le-Puy

Dear Ruggiero: We are planning to go to Zurich all of us together. I have written to the Swiss Legation asking for our permits. Lucia however is in an institution in the occupied zone and if we wished to transfer her to Kilchberg it would be necessary to get permits both from the Germans and the French, as well as one from the Swiss. Are there many people staying in Zurich? Is it possible to get a flat and what is life like there? Another question: is there a French school where German is also taught? As you see, history repeats itself.

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To B.W. HUEBSCH, 5 August 1940

Hôtel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Sirs: I shall be obliged if on receipt of this letter or as soon after as may be possible you will cable to me at the U.S. embassy in Vichy through the State Department at Washington whatever sum of royalties may be due to me on the 1 September deducting the U.S. income tax and the literary agent’s commission. No money should be sent to me by personal cheques or to credit of my account. This has been blocked here as a reprisal against similar measures in Great Britain where my other source of income is (almost incredibly) blocked too. British subjects in this country are under the protection of the U.S. embassy since the rupture of diplomatic relations between France and Great Britain. Mr Robert Murphy, acting chargé d’affaires in the absence of Mr William Bullitt, received me the other day in Vichy and told me that the course I have indicated is the only and proper course to be pursued.

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To JACQUES MERCANTON, 5 August 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton: Est-ce que la librairie de votre frère pourait commander pour moi un livre qu’on m’a signalé: The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (Londres, 1935 ou 1936) prix 5 shillings? Je ne peux vous donner que l’adresse du librairie qui le vend et qui me l’a signalé. La voilà: 12 ou 14 Troy Street, Londres, W.1. Quand et si il l’aura reçu faites-le-moi savoir avant de me l’envoyer.

Nous sommes ici en zone non occupée. Ma fille est près de S. Nazaire en zone occupée avec toute la maison de santé. Je voudrais bien la transférer—avec la permission des autorités allemandes, françaises et suisses—en votre pays et même l’accompagner. J’ai écrit à ce propos à la Légation Suisse à Lyon, quai du Général Sanais. Jusqu’ici je n’ai pas eu de réponse. Une telle démarche coûterait bien cher mais je crois que c’est peut-être préférable de la tenter.

J’espére que vous allez bien et qu’on se reverra. Mes salutations très spéciales aux vignobles de Villeneuve. Votre bien dévoué

James Joyce

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To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, 7 August 1940

Hôtel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Mr Sweeney: I sent two airmail letters yesterday to N.Y.: one to Mr Cerf, one to the Viking Press. I asked that royalties due to me on the 1 prox be cabled me c/o U.S. Embassy at Vichy (which is charged with protection of British subjects) through the State Department at Washington, U.S. income tax and agents’ fees being deducted. I also asked Mr Cerf for an advance of royalties. My position is this: my wife, son, grandson and I are here in the ‘free zone’, my daughter is near S. Nazaire in the ‘unfree zone’—a danger point. I have asked the Swiss authorities whether they permit British subjects to enter Switzerland as I want to try to transfer my daughter (who is in a maison de santé) to Zurich and to go there ourselves. No reply has come after about 20 days. I do not even know whether the French and German authorities, respectively, will allow us to leave this country. My supplies of income from London have been cut off for over two months and a half. My bank balance in France is blocked: and I am consequently in arrears of payment (through no fault of mine) with the maison de santé of my daughter, my hotel at Vichy and other bills.

I am writing you as Mr Cerf may not be in N.Y. and the Viking Press cannot be relied on to act promptly. If Mr Cerf is away could you see someone at Random House who replaces him? If so, you will greatly oblige me. My plan, even if feasible, will be extremely costly as my daughter will need a medical escort (doctor and nurse) across France when and if anybody can travel by road, rail or otherwise anywhere in the country.

P.S. I have arranged with Mr Robert Murphy, acting chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy at Vichy for the reception of moneys due to me from the U.S.

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To JACQUES MERCANTON, Postmark 13 August 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Mercanton

Cher Monsieur Mercanton: Comme vous verrez par la lettre ci-avec nous sommes en train de demander la permission d’entrer en Suisse—nous, c’est, mon fils avec son fils (agé de 8 ans), moi et ma femme et ma fille. Vous pouvez m’être très utile en me fournissant certains renseignements.

Mon petit fils irait, selon nos plans, à Lausanne avec son père, la mère étant malheureusement toujours internée d’office. Il voudrait avoir les prospectus des quelques pensionnats pour garçonnets à ou près de Lausanne. Le garçon parle couramment le français et l’anglais. Il est actuellement à l’Ecole Bilingue, Chateau de la Chapelle, près d’ici. Le prix de sa pension est de 1500 frs par mois, c’à’d, à l’échange actuelle, 100 frs suisses.

Ma fille est actuellement à la Clinique des Charmettes, Pornichet (L.I.) a 12 Km. de S. Nazaire, chez le Dr Achille Delmas, qui la soigne depuis cinq ans. Le prix de sa pension est 90 frs par jour, c’à’d, 6 frs suisses. Pour son transfert, qui conditionne le notre, il faudra un tas de choses. Les permissions collectives des autorités allemandes (de la zone occupée), françaises et suisses, l’escort de deux infirmiers (mâle et femelle) de Pornichet jusqu’à la frontière franco-suisse, les moyens de transport. J’ai demandé le prix de pension à Kilchberg, près de Zurich, car selon notre premier plan nous irions à Zurich. On me demande 15 frs suisses (225 frs français) par jour, plus un double versement à l’Etat et à l’Institut. Pour les versements ça va encore: la pension, non. J’ai demandé le prix à Burghölzli, Zurich, où elle a déjà été et aussi si l’on pouvait la rencontrer à la frontière (elle voyagerait par Nantes-Lyon-Genève) et la conduire ensuite à Genève. En y pensant pourtant nous sommes d’avis que cela serait moins couteux si nous étions tous à ou près Lausanne. C’est pourquoi je vous prie de vous mettre en communication avec la seule maison de santé de la Suisse française qui semble (si je me rappelle bien) avoir des prix a la portée de ma bourse actuelle. J’ai oublié le nom et l’adresse mais elle est près de Vallorbe (si l’on vient de Paris) et de Collonges? (si l’on vient de Lausanne). Si vous y téléphonez vous pouvez dire que c’est Mme Fernandez (dont la fille Yva y est une patiente) et le Dr Baruk de Paris qui vous ont donné l’adresse. Je veux savoir si l’on l’accepterait et si l’on pourait la rencontrer à la frontière quand et si elle y arrivera. Son cas est: cyclothimie qui date de 7½ ans. Elle a auprès de 33 ans, parle couramment le francais. Elle est du caractère gai, doux et moqueur, mais elle a des crises soudaines de colère à propos de rien quand il est necessaire de lui passer le maillet. Ces crises ne sont pas très fréquentes maintenant mais elles sont imprédictibles.

Repondez-moi, je vous [prie] (qu’on m’envoie les prospectus de la maison de santé et des pensionnats) le plus vite possible. Merci. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To SIGNORA MARIA NEBBIA, 19 August 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

MS. Bib. Municipale, Vichy

Gentile signora: Avevo incaricato la tintoria Duranton, 9 rue de Paris a Vichy di prendere a casa Sua la mia pellicceria e il pastrano che Lei ebbe la gentilezza di ospitare. La tintoria mi telefona che il Suo appartamento è chiuso. Vorrei sapere se questi indumenti si trovano a Vichy o se Loro pensano restare in campagna. Noi facciamo dei ‘piani’ per partir verso il sud e vorrei collocare quegli due oggetti per farli nettare e conservare fino all’inverno. Spero che l’assegno del Beckett sia ben passato? Io mi trovo fra l’incudine ed il martello. Credito bloccato in Inghilterra ed in Francia anche! Mondo cane!

Mi saluti l’amico Larbaud e mi creda di Lei Devm0

James Joyce

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To NINO FRANK (Postcard), Postmark 29 August 1940

Hotel du Commerce, »S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

MS. Northwestern

Cher ami: Merci de votre carte et excusez mon retard. J’ai été souffrant. Savez-vous où Louis Gillet se trouve? Je lui ai écrit chez Paris-Soir’. Pas de reponse. A ce propos dans le numéro du 7 aout de Candide il y eut un long article de Marcel Roland sur le Perce-Oreille. Le connaissez-vous? Y-a-t-il moyen de savoir qui il est, s’il a écrit d’autres choses sur cet insecte? Si je lui écris chez le journal il ne recevra jamais ma lettre. Sans doute serait-il interessé à savoir que j’ai écrit un long bouquin dont le héros est précisément un certain Persse-Oreilly Earwigger. Louis Gillet qui a deux exemplaires pourrait bien lui en préter un. Il sembre être entomologiste. La fable de l’Ondt and the Gracehoper l’amuserait, je pense.

Quels sont vos plans? Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (POSTCARD), 30 August 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Chère Madame Giedion: Merci pour votre lettre. J’ai reçu—mais beaucoup plus tard—le prospectus de Kilchberg. Trop cher. Je ne peux plus payer 15 frs par jour. J’écris ensuite à Burghölzli qui me répondit, demandant 25 francs. J’ai trouvé une maison de santé près de Vallorbe à 8.50. Ça irait. Lucia est en zone occupée mais les autorités occupantes m’ont donné la permission de la sortir. Il s’agit de son transport et des fonds que j’attends. Le consulat suisse à Lyon m’a envoyé les feuilles à remplir. Il s’agit aussi d’obtenir des permissions de sortir pour nous autres. Je vous tiendrai au courant. Nous sommes seuls. Mrs Jolas et ses filles sont parties pour N. York. Je regrette que les nouvelles de votre fille ne sont pas très bonnes. Mais en tout cas dans ces maladies-là il n’y a guère de règles. Un bon souvenir

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 6 Septembre 1940

S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher ami: J’ai reçu les deux dépêches d’hier et d’avant hier. Après avoir téléphoné deux fois à Lyon j’ai pu causer seulement avec la dactylo de Zumsteg à laquelle j’ai dicté les deux dépêches. Comme il n’a pas télégraphié et comme je vois d’aprés la lettre de Mme Giedion que l’avocat a eu ses trente deniers je lui ai télégraphié aujourd’hui et à Mme Giedion aussi dans le sens qu’elle et vous désirez. Il faut faire vite car le permis de sortie a été écrit par le minist ére il y a déjà trois semaines et une fois écoulé il sera trés difficile et peut-être pas possible de le faire renouveler. Zumsteg part pour Zurich samedi. Il dit que sa mére, patronne du restaurant Kronenhalle, pourrait vous être utile. Donc il serait bien de la voir.

J’ai reçu aussi une longue lettre du 31 octobre de l’avocat copié sur papier jaune. Je ne comprends point pourquoi il a demandé le permis, ni pourquoi il n’a pas donné le nom de l’avocat Zurich il y a quatre semaines et pas du tout ce que signifie le ‘malentendu’ Brauchbar. Il ne m’est pas trés clair même maintenant quel est ou quel sera le r ôle de l’autre Brauchbar, mon ami à New York. Attendons. Mais si nous attendons trop nous pourrons attendre pour toujours.

Lisez ou montrez cette lettre à Madame Giedion. C’est pourquoi je l’écris en français. Remerciez les Giedions de tout ce qu’ils font pour nous et je suis trés content de savoir que le courrier qui doit éventuellement accompagner Lucia dans la Suisse est un de leurs amis.

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To MARIA JOLAS, 7 September 1940

Saint-Gérand-le-Puy

Dear Mrs Jolas: Thanks for your letter of 4th just received though by your wire of 6th you are still in France. I hope you got my wire to Banyuls. It seemed useless to write to you as we never knew where you might be. I hope this finds you all safe and sound in Lisbon and about to sail. Léon and his son have gone to Paris. I hear we have all to clear out by the 20th as the landlord wants to overhaul the place. No reply from Dublin. None from Cerf or Huebsch. We got our dole on the passports, partly that is, and I paid Mme Asturis for August. A remittance Kastor wrote he had cabled you for Giorgio has also not come. You ought to feel glad when the good ship moves off. The family is not keen on Helvetia on account of the air alarms etc. Nevertheless I wrote to the clinique near Vallorbe. Thanks for the kind offer in your letter. At the station I literally had no breath to say what I wanted as I was doubled up by my efforts with a trunk or case. You seemed to me to be downcast. Well, if you never did anything else you made scores of children happy for many years. When they turn out to be jacobins, countesses, saints and explorers they will always remember it—‘in their soberer moments’. But the Lord knows you did a lot more. I wish you all a smooth sea and a following wind! And remember me to Jolas and any others who may remember me.

Mr Huber is still at work on his trunk in the lobby (it is exactly 148° in the shade today) and the day you left Mrs Huber asked me to lend her Finnegans Wake which I did. More anon. If you see Prince Makinsky the name of the book is Life and Works of G.B. Vico, on sale at 12 or 14 Troy Street, W.1. price 5/-. Osiris Jones has not yet come forth by day or by night and I am waiting for a copy of that biography to be sent me by Gorman or his publisher. The Irish Legation wired again to Dublin but had no reply. If you are pressed for quarters in Lisbon probably Makinsky will be able to find you something. My friend Byrne’s daughter, Phyllis, at the C.G. may also be able to help. She has been there about a year.

Dialogue. 1980. Lilac Doorway U.S.A. Time: Spring.

She: (laying aside a copy of How to Get Rid of Parasites) I have been thinking. What was the name of that family that was always in trouble over there in Europia?

He: (seizes jug) You’re asking me.

She: The man had a wall eye, I think. Was it Wallenstein?

He: (replaces jug) Jucious!

She: Jucious! That was the name. I knew it had something to do with Scotland.

Fait rien. Bon voyage! Merci! Au revoir! Vous avez oublié le pourboire, Madame. Pour le porteur. Fait rien! … Cordially yours.

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To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), Postmark 11 September 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Mercanton

Cher Mercanton: Merci pour votre lettre. J’ai reçu une lettre du Pré Carré ce matin. On pourra tout arranger m’écrit-on pour recevoir ma fille à Chalon. Mais je ne peux rien arranger si vite que cela car depuis 10 semaines je suis sans nouvelles de ma fille. La poste ne marchait plus et maintenant on ne peut écrire que quelques mots de salutations. Je ne sais pas si notre demande d’entrée en Suisse va être accordée ni même notre sortie d’ici. Voulez-vous téléphoner à la maison de santé à laquelle j’écrirai lundi ou mardi. Quant à l’enfant si vous serez absent de Lausanne du 18 sept, au 1 nov. pouvez-vous laisser les prospectus des écoles chez votre frère le libraire (quel est son adresse?) en le priant de me les envoyer. On a payé jusqu’ici 1500 frs mensuel mais on pourrait payer jusqu’à 2000 ou 2500. Il n’est pas dit que l’école doit être à Lausanne mais préférablement dans le canton de Vaud. Merci. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To JACQUES MERCANTON, 14 September 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Mercanton

Cher Mercanton (c’est plus vite que ‘Monsieur’.) Voilà où nous en sommes. Les autorités allemandes m’ont fait savoir verbalement qu’elles accorderaient libre sortie de la zone occupée à ma fille: et j’ai demandé l’entrée en Suisse pour elle. En même temps je l’ai demandée pour ma femme et moi-même et pour mon fils et son enfant. Reste à voir si c’est accordée. Reste à voir aussi si la sortie de la zone non occupée que nous avons aussi demandé en même temps aux autorités françaises nous sera accordée et quand. Reste alors à voir s’il me réussit d’avoir de l’Amérique mes fonds pour payer notre voyage à Nantes, le voyage de ma fille accompagnée de Pornichet-Nantes-Paris et de Paris à la frontière suisse et aussi les 3½ mois de pension arriérés que je dois. De l’Angleterre je ne pourrai pas avoir un sou de mon argent pendant que je suis en France. Et de l’Amérique c’est difficile.

Je viens de recevoir une letter de la maison de santé de Corcelles (Le Pré Carré: Tel: 5419). Pouvez-vous vous mettre en communication avec le secretaire M. Tschantz-Chevalier et lui dire que je viens de recevoir sa letter du 7 courant et les prospectus et suis d’accord sur le prix. Il semble ignorer pourtant ce que le consulat suisse à Lyon vient de m’avertir que le train Paris-Suisse ne passe plus par Vallorbe (où les ponts sont sautés, il parait) mais fait un détour par Aix-Annemasse. Si vous pouvez le voir ou à Lausanne par rendez-vous, ou en y allant avec votre petite reine ce serait préférable. J’aimerais bien en tout cas avoir un mot de votre part par télégramme me disant que de toute façon la rencontre de ma fille sera faisable if tout le reste s’arrangera. Connaissez-vous quelqu’un à Berne en rapport avec le Bureau des Etrangers, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, qui pourrait pistonner une demande d’entrée. Aussitôt en Suisse, nous, mon fils et moi, pourrons avoir au moins notre argent.

Cette lettre sera postée à Génève par un ami qui part d’ici en ce moment et cela pour gagner du temps Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG (Dictated letter), 16 September 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, Tél: S. Gérand-le-Puy, Ν° 9

TS. Zumsteg

Dear Mr Zumsteg, Many thanks indeed for your kind and prompt action. I received this morning your letter of the 14th inst. with copy of your letter to M. Georges Haldenwang, to whom I wrote after telephoning you but without giving details. I shall send these to-morrow to him in a separate letter. However he knows the name and the number of applicants for entrance. Our demands for entrance should have been at the Swiss Consulate in Lyons on Sunday morning, and so I telegraphed you this morning asking you to verify this, and, if possible, speed up the application. Communications between here and Vichy, postal and otherwise, become more and more difficult, so if there is anything very urgent, you had better either wire me or telephone.

With regard to my daughter, can you let me know after enquiry where the railway line from Paris to Switzerland passes the line of demarcation, and how long is the railway journey across the unoccupied zone, and at what Swiss frontier station it enters Switzerland by present arrangements. I am in correspondence with the Maison de Santé Pré Carré, Corcelles, railway station Chavornay, line Lausanne-Yverdon, and they could have arranged to meet her at Vallorbe, as they wrote me, evidently not knowing that this station was out of action. The persons who accompany my daughter eventually will probably have permission to conduct her only as far as the line of demarcation, so I shall have to send details of this new complication to the Director of the Maison de Santé. As you see, everything is extremely difficult. Our applications, for exits from France that is, for myself, my wife, my son and grandson, passed through the sous-préfecture of this department this morning, whence they will be forwarded for consideration to the Minister of the Interior in Vichy. I shall inform you by telephone or telegram the moment I know the result. As regards your visit to Paris, can you let me know the date of this, the probable length of your stay in Paris, and your address there. It is most kind of you to offer to place funds at my disposal which, it seems to me, I might need at some unexpected moment. I gratefully accept this offer, and shall of course reimburse your father at the earliest opportunity. It would be well however, if you are leaving Lyons on short notice, to instruct some member of your staff so that, in case of your absence, I could telephone him and have the amount telegraphed here. As regards the financial guarantee for Switzerland, I have no relatives there, but, as soon as we arrive there, or very soon after both my son and myself will be financially independent, as you know. If my statement should need any corroboration from a Swiss source, I take it, that your Firm in Zürich would be able to guarantee the truth of my statement, so as to reassure the Federal authorities on this point. I shall therefore leave it to your own discretion to communicate on the matter with Mr. Rudolf Brauchbar, or M. Georges Haldemvang, or both, so that this point may not cause a hitch in the procedure.

In haste and with renewed thanks and friendly remembrances Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (Postcard), 18 September 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Chère Madame Giedion: Mon fils et moi nous avons fait la semaine dernière des demandes d’entrée en Suisse pour nous et pour nos familles respectives. Sur la feuille à remplir il y avait ‘l’alinéa’ ‘References en Suisse’. J’ai donné les noms de Giedion, Vogt, Moser et Schoeck. Je suppose que l’on pourra répondre de ma desirabilité. Quant à un garanti materiel j’ai prié la maison de Brauchbar de le donner. Il n’est pas strictement necessaire car aussitôt arrivés là-bas un peu après nous serons indépendants tandis qu’ici tout contact financier avec l’Angleterre et presque tout avec l’Amérique nous est fermé. Nous avons fait en même temps une demande aux autorités françaises pour la sortie. Les autorités allemandes ont déjà accordé d’avance la permission de sortie pour ma fille de la zone occupée. Espérons que la permission arrive de Berne et le plus vite possible! Veuillez communiquer ceci a mon ami Ruggiero au Creditanstalt pour le tenir au courant comme je lui ai promis. Votre bien dévoué

James Joyce

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To JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY, 22 September 1940

Hôtel du Commerce, St Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Dear Mr Sweeney: Thanks for your air-mail letter of a month ago, which I received after about 12 days. You stated that on that date Serf [sic] and Hübsch [sic] who had received my letters (to which neither has since replied) were trying to cable me funds c/o U.S. Embassy, Vichy (which, by the way will be my address from to-morrow, as, by order of the proprietor of this hotel, the few people who have remained in it, must vacate it in the morning) and hoping to be able to do so, I waited for three weeks, and then cabled Serf who replied that he was still trying and hoping. Nearly another fortnight has now passed, and nothing has arrived. I have been trying for the past three months to obtain all or part of the moneys owed to me in London by the British Government and by my British publishers, but have completely failed. Any money I had in the Bank here has been seized by the French Government as a reprisal against the seizure of French money in England. My daughter is in a maison de santé near a dangerous part of the French coast in occupied territory. I applied to the German authorities for permission for her, a British subject, to leave. This was granted. I then applied to the American Red Cross to arrange for transport. No reply. As there has been no post between the two zones for over two months, I am quite without news, and having no funds, have been unable to pay her pension for the last three months. Her name and address are: Miss Lucia Joyce, Clinique ‘Les Charmettes’ Pornichet, Loire Inférieure, France and the name of her doctor is: Dr Achille Delmas at the same address and at: 23 rue de la Mairie, Ivry sur Seine, Seine, France. If he is written to by anybody, the letter should be sent in double, that is to both addresses. I wrote through the Vichy Embassy courrier to the U.S. Embassy unit which still remains in Paris, asking, as against my signature on note of hand, that the sum of Frs 1500 a month should be regularly paid to Dr Delmas for my daughter, as British subjects, by an arrangement between the British and U.S. governments, are able to draw this monthly dole against their recognisance of the debt, and promise of repayment so long as they are in France. I had no acknowledgment of this letter. This monthly payment would not cover her monthly expenses as the sanatorium fee is Frs 2.700 a month. I am endeavouring to have her removed from where she is to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but, apart from the expenses which include arrears of payment, escort, medical, Pornichet-Paris, and Paris to the line between the zones (at present this is at Chalon-sur Saône) and from there to Lyons, and from Lyons to Annemasse, also accompanied, and from Annemasse to the Swiss sanatorium, also accompanied by another relay of nurses, the execution of this plan depends on whether or not I obtain permission for her entry into Switzerland. It seems, from your letter that the restrictions on sending money from the U.S. and from England to British subjects apply only when these are resident in France. I have therefore made an application to the Swiss Government for her entry and also for the entry of myself, my wife, my son and my grandson, as we have no means of support here except the dole from the Embassy which might cease any month, and moreover where we are at present—20 kilometres from Vichy, we have absolutely no means of transport the bus service having been suspended for several weeks past, and that of private cars as well. I was informed that the Swiss authorities, when considering the application, would require a guarantee in Switzerland amounting for me and my family, to Frs Swiss 50.000, that is about 700.000 French francs, and that the legal expenses involved in getting the application through within a month would amount to about 3.000 Francs French. I asked a friend in Zürich to cover the Swiss guarantee, and placed my application in the hands of a Swiss lawyer in Geneva. At the same time, having received German authorisation for my daughter’s exit from the occupied zone, I have applied to the French authorities for permission for our exit from the unoccupied zone. I applied also to one or two friends here, Louis Gillet, Fernand Léger (who is going to America himself) and Armand Petitjean to help my request, but without the least success. I am therefore waiting for the French and Swiss decisions on the matter, and also for the arrival of funds from some source. Apparently there is nobody at present in this country who is in a position to render me any assistance of any kind, and our position becomes from week to week more difficult.

I presume that Mrs Jolas will have arrived in New York before this reaches you, and I shall be obliged, if you will send her a copy of this letter, or read it to her over the telephone. I hope she arrived safe and sound with her charges, and found Jolas well. I sent her messages by letter and by telegram to places along her route from here to Lisbon, which I hope she got. She will be able to give you further details or to anybody else who might possibly be interested, though of course conditions have become in every way much more unfavourable since her departure. I have no idea what has happened to my flat containing my books pictures and manuscripts in Paris. I do not know whether there is mail correspondence between New York and Paris. If there is, I should like the matter of my daughter to be taken up at once from your end, as practically nothing can be done from here so far as my experience goes. As regards the mail correspondence between St Gérand-le-Puy and New York, I am posting this letter to-day in the hope that it may go off and reach you.

The address of the U.S. Embassy at Vichy is: 113, Boulevard des Etats-Unis, and the official who seems to be in charge, replacing Mr Robert Murphy, who was replacing Mr William Bullitt, is Mr Woodruff Wallner.

I thank you for the kind promptitude you have shown in trying to help me, and hope that an intervention of yours, or of some friend of yours may be instrumental in bringing quickly to me and my family the assistance of which we stand in such sore need.

P.S. Mrs Jolas told me when leaving that Jolas had written to her urging her to bring back anything and everything relating to the new literary movement here. Possibly the enclosed newspaper clipping may be what he is looking for.

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 September 1940

Hotel du Commerce, S, Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Dear Mrs Giedion: Thanks for your postcard and offers of help. This letter explains itself. I am replying instructing the lawyer, so as to simplify matters, to apply directly for a permit for Zurich. I am arranging for Lucia to be transported from occupied France (by permission of the German authorities) to:

Clinique du Pré-Carré

Corcelles,

sur Chavornay,

Vaud

but that can be done when we are in Z’ch. We want to find a French-speaking school (boarding school) for the boy. But that we can do from Zurich too. If you can hurry things up from Berne, so much the better. Of course we are still waiting for permission to leave France. Kind regards to both Sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER (POSTCARD), 13 October 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Chère Madame Giedion: Merci de votre lettre du 9 courant que j’ai transmise à M. Georges Haldenwang, 6 rue du Rhône, Genève auquel j’avais confié notre cause sur l’avis de M.G. Zumsteg de la Dienst A.B.C. à Lyon. Je ne comprends pas pourquoi il y a tellement de difficultés pour avoir le permis de séjour à Zurich puisque Ruggiero m’avait écrit qu’il y a là très peu d’étrangers en ce moment. Nous irions d’abord dans le Vaud si cela satisfaira les autorités. Peut-être pourriez-vous vous mettre en rapport avec l’avocat surnommé. Salutations amicales

James Joyce

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To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), Postmark 14 October 1940

[S. Gérand-le-Puy]

MS. Mercanton

Cher Mercanton: J’ai écrit une très longue lettre au Pré Carré. Maintenant quant à l’entrée en Suisse. C’est l’avocat Georges Haldenwang à Génève qui appuie ma demande. D’abord j’avais pensé rester dans le Vaud pour y placer le petit et ma fille et ensuite m’établir à Zurich. Il m’a conseillé de choisir ou l’un ou l’autre: alors j’ai demandé Zurich d’où je croyais placer ma fille et le petit dans le Vaud. J’apprends hier de Berne qu’il y aura beaucoup de difficultés pour Zurich. On me conseille de tout recommencer et de demander séjour dans le Vaud où il faut donner 4 ou 5 references, moi qui connais que vous là-bas! Quelle barbe! Si j’avais le permis d’entrée en Suisse il serait peut-être plus facile d’avoir le permis de sortie d’ici lequel du reste n’est pas du tout facile. J’ai pensé à Jaloux mais il n’est pas suisse et je ne sais pas où il se trouve. Connaissez-vous cet avocat? En somme avant de partir envoyez moi un petit mot. Salutations cordiales,

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 15 Octobre 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher Ruggiero: Voilà 5 semaines que j’ai demandé par le consulat à Lyon l’entrée à Zurich. Hier Mme Giedion écrit qu’il ne sera pas facile de l’avoir. Pourquoi? Est-ce que les vivres et le chauffage manquent à ce point-Là, comme l’on prétend ici, ou parce que la ville est pleine d’étrangers déJà. Mais on doit me connaître à Zurich, nom de nom! Autre chose, est-il exact que je recevrai Là-bas, si j’y arrive, 1 fr. suisse contre 15 ou 16 francais? En tout cas ce ne sera que pour l’arrivée car après je pourrai recevoir mon argent directement de New York, je suppose, chose impossible ici. Je suis en correspondance avec la maison de santé Pré Carré, Corcelles, Chavornay, Vaud, pour ma fille, 8 fr. 50 par jour. Mais tout est en l’air, bien entendu, pendant que je n’ai pas de visa. En somme, envoyez-moi un mot je vous prie. J’espère que vous allez toujours bien et votre famille aussi. Merci d’avance.

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To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 17 October 1940

c/o U.S.A. Embassy, Vichy

MS. Brauchbar

Dear Mr Brauchbar I received on 28 ult your cable of 26 ult and replied: and on the 7 inst your letter of 26 ult with your short cable address. Today I received the letter overleaf dated 24 ult. I have not received the letter of the 16 ult and I have not received any money from Marseilles or anywhere else or any other letter. I send you this letter without any comment. It does not need a reply.

I wrote three or four letters enclosing copies of yours of last month to your son at Zurich but had no reply from him. I also wrote to Zumsteg who gave me the address of a lawyer, Mr Georges Haldenwang, 6 rue du Rhone, Geneva who, he wrote, for a lawyer’s fee of 200 frs Swiss would be able to get my request for entry through the Berne Department within a month. Otherwise it might take 3 or 4 months. He said the Federal authorities would ask for a collective guarantee of 50,000 frs Swiss. I made the request and wrote to the lawyer 5 weeks ago. There is no answer: but one of my Zurich references (I gave 5: Vogt, Schoeck, Prager, Moser, Giedion) writes that on enquiry at Berne it was learned that the leave to go to Zurich would not be easily obtained. It is also by no means sure that we shall obtain from the French authorities permission to leave. My daughter has the German permission but I have no funds to pay her doctor with (Dr Achille Delmas, 23 rue de la Maine, Ivry s/Seine, Paris). I have a place for her to go near Lausanne. Mr Zumsteg said that if I got the permission for Switzerland and needed funds to travel he would advance these and I could repay his father at Zurich. I have written the U.S. Legation at Berne to find whether I shall have the same difficulties with the State Department if and when I reach Switzerland. Many thanks to you in any case.

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 25 Octobre 1940

[Postcard] S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher Ruggiero: Les autorités françaises nous ont accordé la libre sortie et nous pourrions partir demain si nous avions le visa suisse d’entrée. Mon avocat est M. Georges Haldenwang, 6 rue du Rhône à Genève. Priez les Giedions de se mettre en rapport sans retard avec lui. L’entrée au canton de Vaud m’ira très bien. Mais il faudra me télégraphier aussitôt que le permis sera donné. Mme Giedion fera bien de téléphoner à Genève et aussi à Berne car la durée du permis de sortie est limitée. J’arrangerai mieux le départ et le voyage de ma fille de là-bas puisque j’ai déjà le permis de la part des allemands.

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To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 29 October 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Mercanton

Cher Mercanton: Je suppose que vous êtes de retour. Nous sommes toujours ici, car nous n’avons pas reçu de Berne le permis de séjour en Suisse demandé il y a six semaines. Les autorités allemandes donnèrent immédiatement le permis de sortie pour ma fille, les autorités françaises ont donné également le permis de sortie pour nous tous. Tous nos papiers sont timbrés et en règle depuis deux semaines mais la durée est limitée. Pour simplifier les choses j’ai demandé le permis de séjour à Lausanne pour pouvoir placer ma fille et mon petit-fils dans un sanatorium et dans une école. Mon avocat est M.G. Haldenwang, 6 rue du Rhône à Genève. Comme réferences dans le Vaud j’ai donné votre nom, celui du Dr Forel à Prangins, Dr Loy à Montreux. Mme Giedion est allé [sic] au bureau de la police des étrangers à Zurich où l’on semble croire que je suis … juif! Tonerre [sic] m’enlève! Voilà une fameuse découverte! Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, 29 October 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

MS. Zumsteg

Cher Monsieur Zumsteg: Si le Marquis de Terrier n’a pas pu vous avoir au téléphone voilà la substance de ce que je l’avais prié de vous demander.

Pouvez-vous me faire savoir (ici on est en pleine campagne sans moyens de communication avec Vichy ou presque) quel train nous pouvons prendre de S. Germain des Fossés pour Lyon et ensuite pour Annecy-Annemasse? Je désire vous voir en passant par Lyon car il faut que j’arrange des choses avec vous avant de partir. Il n’est plus necessaire pour nous de nous arrêter à Lyon car l’Ambassade des U.S.A. a renouvelé nos passeports britanniques. Le Ministère de l’Intérieur a donné le permis de sortie pour nous tous. Depuis huit jours tous nos papiers sont timbrés et en règle, mais la durée est limitée. La legation des U.S.A. à Berne m’écrit que quand je serai en Suisse je pourrais recevoir mon argent de New York. Mme Giedion m’écrit qu’à la Fremdenpolizei de Zurich où elle était allée pour savoir la raison de la non-arrivée du permis d’entrée on semblait croire que j’étais un juif! C’est le bouquet, vraiment. Comme vous me le proposez j’ai demandé donc d’aller à Lausanne et de placer ma fille à la maison de santé Pré Carré à Corcelles sur Chavornay, Vaud, et de placer mon petit-fils dans un collège dans le Vaud. Mais si cela traine encore après 6 ou 7 semaines notre permis de sortie sera périmé. J’ai reçu une autre lettre du M. Ed. Brauchbar à son fils à Zurich. Avez-vous vu ce dernier pendant votre visite à Zurich. Il n’a jamais répondu à mes lettres. Je voudrais être fixé sur ce point avant de répondre à son père. A-t-il repondu à la lettre que vous lui avez écrit naguère?

Autre chose. Pouvez-vous vous tenir en rapport avec le consulat suisse à Lyon de façon que si le permis arrive vous pouvez payer pour moi ce qu’il y a à payer pour gagner du temps, somme que je vous rembourserai à l’époque de mon passage par Lyon.

Quant au garanti financier, puisque M.R. Brauchbar ne l’avait pas donné (au moins jusqu’au 27 octobre) mes amis Giedion l’ont donné.

J’espère que vous vous êtes remis de votre indisposition et m’excuse de vous déranger continuellment.

Envoyez-moi une dépêche aussitôt que vous saurez quelque chose de définitif. Votre bien dévoué

James Joyce

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To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, 31 October 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Zumsteg

Cher Monsieur Zumsteg: Merci pour votre lettre du 30. L’avocat de Génève m’écrit dans le même sens. Il veut tout de suite 200 frs suisses. Je ne les ai pas. Il veut aussi un garanti de M, R. Brauchbar. Qu’il l’obtienne. Il a demandé un permis de séjour, il parait, pour nous à Génève. Je ne l’ai jamais autorisé à le faire. J’ai demandé un permis dans la canton de Vaud pour ma fille malade puisque la maison de santé est là. J’ai demandé de pouvoir rester un peu de temps là aussi pour la caser et mon petit-fils aussi et puis d’aller nous établir à Zurich pour laquelle je donnerais des références. Quand vous m’avez dit que Zurich n’allait pas j’ai dit: Bon, nous irons tous à Lausanne. J’écris à l’avocat et en ce sens, et je lui donnais cinq nouvelles références. Maintenant il parait qu’il a changé tout cela et a demandé le permis pour Zurich-Ville où, du reste, on ne me veut pas parce que je suis juif. Je trouve tout cela parfaitement ridicule: et il contraste singulièrement avec les réponses qui m’ont été données par les autorités françaises et par les autorités allemandes de ce côté de la frontière.

Avec mes remerciements à vous en tout cas croyez-moi votre bien dévoué

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 1 November 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Chère Madame Giedion: Je viens de recevoir la dépêché signée par vous et Ruggiero. Merci. Mais si vous n’êtes qu’en correspondance ‘epistolaire’ avec New York notre visa de sortie sera perimée longtemps avant l’arrivée de la réponse même si celle-ci est favorable. Déjà le maire d’ici et la gendarmerie qui nous a fait deux visites pendant ces derniers huit jours à propos d’un recensement des sujets britanniques actuellement en France tout en étant parfaitement courtois exprimaient une surprise, légitime du reste, que nous étions toujours sur place après avoir demandé avec une telle insistance le permis de partir qui nous à été donné par ordre du Ministère de l’Intérieur, il y a déjà quinze jours. D’après votre carte postale de l’autre jour je croyais la question du garanti financier réglée une fois pour toutes. En attendant l’avocat à Génève qui n’est pas arrivé jusqu’ici à obtenir quoi que ce soit de qui que ce soit demande un versement à 200 francs suisses, somme que je lui paierai naturellement quand je les aurai, c’est-à-dire, quand je serai et si je serai en Suisse. La légation américaine à Bern m’écrit qu’une fois en Suisse je pourai recevoir mon argent de New York. L’avocat demande aussi un garanti de la part de M. Rudolph Brauchbar. Eh bien, qu’il l’obtienne. Ce dernier n’a jamais répondu à ma correspondance. Mais peut-être y-a-t-il une explication. L’avocat écrit ‘le cas J.J. est toujours en suspens chez la police fédérale suisse’. C’est charmant. En somme on soulève une difficulté après l’autre. Nous sommes des étrangers, puis des juifs, puis des mendiants. Quoi encore. Des cambrioleurs, des lépreux? Ou bien c’est une longue histoire à propos des cantons. L’avocat a demandé le permis d’abord pour Genève. Je ne l’ai jamais autorisé de le faire. J’ai demandé d’abord pour le Vaud pour ma fille puisque la maison de santé est là. Et pour nous d’y rester le temps de la caser et mon petit-fils dans une école. Et ensuite à Zurich. Quand on m’a dit que Zurich n’allait pas, j’ai dit: Bon, nous irons tous à Lausanne. Maintenant il semble que l’avocat veut demander pour Zurich-Ville. Dans les circonstances actuelles du monde et les miennes en particulier cette mode d’agir est hors de plan et elle contraste singulièrement, je dois le dire, avec les réponses courtoises et favorables qui m’ont été données par les autorités allemandes et par les autorités françaises ici. Et voilà une lettre de la direction de la maison de santé. Bien entendu, je ne pouvais rien arranger car je n’avais pas le permis pour ma fille. Et à propos de garantis financiers si mon fils et moi proposons de payer pour l’enfant dans un collège vaudois et pour ma fille dans une maison de santé je suppose que nous ne pouvons pas être dépourvus de moyens d’existence.

Je vous remercie en tout cas, tous les deux, et Ruggiero aussi. Salutations amicales

James Joyce

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To EDMUND BRAUCHBAR, 3 November 1940

c/o U.S.A. Embassy, Vichy, France

MS. Brauchbar

Dear Mr Brauchbar: In reply to my two appeals by air mail on 5 August to my two N.Y. publishers for help I received on 28 October through American Export Lines of Marseilles the equivalent of 260$ from one publisher, Huebsch, stated to be the amount due to me on 30 March last. From the other publisher nothing came. The U.S.A. Embassy at Vichy has now reduced the monthly subsidy we live on by 1500 frs. It seems that for one reason or another the subsidy may be further reduced or discontinued in the future.

About my daughter I shall write a little later. Now about ourselves. As I told you the German authorities gave me permission to remove my daughter from occupied France. I had arranged for the reception at a Swiss maison de santé in the Vaud, Pré Carré, Corcelles. I then applied to the French Ministry of the Interior for permission for us, my wife, son, grandson and myself to leave unoccupied France. This also was granted by an order of the Minister some weeks ago. Our passports are stamped for exit and our luggage all packed also for weeks past. The Swiss authorities however refused to allow any or all of us to enter. Since the end of July last I have been writing letter after letter to different persons in Switzerland and in addition to formal application through the Lyons Swiss consulate placed the matter in the hands of a Geneva lawyer. Yesterday I had a letter from him asking for 200 frs Swiss. The letter states that the case is still in suspense at the Federal Police Offices. Two of my Zurich references Mr and Mrs Giedion trying to find out what this meant went to the Fremdenpolizei where it was found that I was considered by the officials to be … a Jew! Nothing was known there of any guarantee or affidavit by your son to whom I sent several letters but had no reply. I have now had a telegram signed by Giedion and Ruggiero, a Zurich friend of mine of a very modest station of life who is a clerk at the Zurich Kreditanstalt. It reads: ‘Permis séjour obtenable question financière encore en suspens nous correspondons Edmund’. While I am guessing at what this means and waiting for some new objection to be raised by the Federal authorities the time accorded me for leaving France is running out. The gendarmes who came to our lodgings twice last week as they are making a census of British subjects resident in France, while quite polite, expressed surprise that we who had been so insistent on our desire to leave and had obtained ministerial permission to do so were still here. You may be able to draw some conclusions from these facts.

If the Swiss should decide to let us in we have now enough to pay our journey to Lausanne or Zurich and our luggage and debts here and arrive in Switzerland with some thousands of French francs over to start with, perhaps 5 or 6. What we get for them in Swiss francs I do not rightly know. Some say 10%, some 7% and some 5%. But we haven’t got them yet.

The U.S.A. legation at Berne to which I wrote informs me that when I have established residence in Switzerland by a sworn declaration before a U.S. consul I can receive money from the U.S.A., that is, if anybody sends it. I hope he is right.

I send off this letter as you are doubtless expecting one. You can tell Huebsch I got the 260$. When he sends the usual account of sales I shall send the usual formal acknowledgement.

With friendly greetings to your good self in any case sincerely yours

James Joyce

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To LOUIS GILLET, le 3 Novembre 1940

Maison Ponthenier, St Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher Gillet: Oui, le ministère a donné l’ordre depuis déjà le 18 Octobre et nos passeports à nous tous sont timbrés et les malles faites et comme vous le savez, les autorités allemandes donnèrent également le permis de sortie pour ma fille et j’avais tout arrangé pour son transfert à Corcelles dans le Vaud mais—la Suisse ne nous laisse pas entrer. Depuis la fin de Juillet je ne fais que remplir des feuilles et écrire des lettres. Une de mes références à Zurich, étonnée, s’étant rendue au bureau de la Fremdenpolizei, il lui fut dit que je suis … juif! (J’ai vécu 5 ou 6 ans à Zurich et tout Zurich me connait.) Des amis influents sont alors intervenus et mon avocat à Genève m’écrit hier ‘Le cas J.J. est toujours en suspens chez la police fédérale des étrangers.’ Charmant, n’est-ce-pas? Nous sommes donc cloués ici; mais je vous ferai savoir ce que nous devenons….

Je lirai avec beaucoup d’intérêt votre papier sur le sieur Finnegan—Earwicker—Persse o’Reilly—Perce-Oreille. Faites-moi envoyer un exemplaire de la revue….

Ayez patience si je ne réponds toujours pas tout de suite. Je [vous] remercie bien sincèrement de l’intérêt que vous portez toujours à nos pauvres sorts….

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From CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 8 Nov. 1940

Cher Monsieur Joyce, Malheureusement le permis n’a pas encore passé la Kantonale Fremdenpolizei. Tellement de gens veulent aller en Suisse, qu’ils ont trop a faire. Il faut avoir une patience surhumaine. Mon mari a arrangé l’affaire financière à la Kreditanstalt avec Rudolphe B. Nous attendons encore des nouvelles de Eugene et Maria Jolas. Mais tout est en ordre pour les autorités ici…. Ne perdez pas patience. Nous sommes tous très enervés pour vous et pensons comme c’est agaçant pour vous tous de toujours embêter les autorités là-bas avec votre départ, qui ne se fait que si lentement. Mais ce n’est pas notre faute, nous faisons le possible et j’espère que tout finira bien. J’ai dit de tout faire par télégramme quand c’est une fois en ordre. Si vous auriez besoin de quelqu’un à Genève on m’a donné le nom et l’adresse d’un Mr Sean Lester, rue Contamines 9, Genève. On m’a dit qu’il est très aimable et connaît Ulysses très bien. Mr Ruggiero est en contact permanent avec moi pour votre affaire. J’ai aussi parlé à Madame Zumsteg, après votre dépêche, mais elle ne peut rien fair pour vous à présent. Elle était au courant par son fils.

Meilleures salutations à vous tous!

C. Giedion-Welcker

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 10 Novembre 1940

S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher ami: Je vous remercie de tout ce que vous avez fait si bien et si vite. Je viens de recevoir deux lettres express (cela prend de 2 ou 4 jours) de vous et de Mme Giedion. Pour simplifier les choses je réponds à votre adresse en vous priant de lui lire ma lettre au téléphone. Remerciez les Giedion de tout ce qu’ils ont fait et aussi Brauchbar fils. Quant à la procuration je suis prêt à la signer quand vous voudrez et dans le sens que vous m’indiquerez, c’est à dire pour eux. Envoyez-la-moi donc si vous croyez que cette affaire va encore traîner. Autrement je la signerai là-bas. Je ne comprends pas bien pourtant qui précisément a envoyé les 6000 dollars de New York ni quand ni comment. Dans une lettre précédente vous me parliez de 4000 $ qu’avait envoyé Brauchbar Edmond. Ou je me trompe. En tout cas faites-le-moi savoir que je puisse remercier la personne ou les personnes. Quant à l’avocat je partage votre opinion. Je le croyais déjà payé. Madame Giedion m’a écrit il y a une semaine en ce sens….

J’ai prié M. Zumsteg qui partit pour Zurich samedi de vous porter et à Mme Giedion aussi un message verbal de ma part. Je suppose qu’il l’aura fait. J’ai noté l’adresse que Mme Giedion m’a donnée à Genève. Je garderai cette lettre ouverte jusqu’à 6 heures (mardi, 12 nov.), en attendant votre dépêche.

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 11 November 1940

Maison Ponthenier, St Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Chère Madame Giedion-Welcker: J’ai bien reçu votre carte, votre dépêche et votre lettre express. Je répète. Les autorités allemandes donnèrent immédiatement le permis de sortie pour ma fille. Les autorités françaises donnèrent également le permis de sortie pour nous tous. Voilà six semaines que j’ai demandé le permis d’entrer en Suisse. Puisque j’ai l’intention de placer ma fille dans la maison de santé Pré Carré, Corcelles sur Chavornay, Vaud et mon petit-fils dans un collège dans le même canton il nous suffirait d’avoir le permis de séjour pour Lausanne. Mais nous resterions ensemble. La durée de notre permis de sortie est limitée. La légation des Etats-Unis à Berne insiste qu’une fois en Suisse, après avoir fait une déclaration de résidence au consulat américain, je pourrai disposer de l’argent qui m’est dû à New York.

J’ai eu une carte de Lucia ce matin—la première après trois mois. Elle va beaucoup mieux il me semble. J’ai payé déjà 23,500 frs sur les 32,000 que je paie annuellement pour sa pension et je crois pouvoir arranger pour le paiement du reste moyennant un ami à New York contre versement de mon éditeur là-bas. Mais son transfert d’une zone particulièrement dangereuse à Corcelles se ferait beaucoup plus facilement quand et si je serais là. Tout était arrangé pour la fin d’Octobre, mais j’ai dû y renoncer à cause de la non arrivée des papiers de Berne.

Je vous remercie infiniment d’avoir voulu donner des garanties financières pour moi. Je ne comprends pas le silence du fils de mon ami Brauchbar lequel m’avait écrit qu’il avait donné des instructions explicites. Il n’a pas répondu aux lettres que je lui ai envoyées. Je connaîs son père très bien. Je le connaîs moins bien. Pourtant il me semblait brave garçon.

Je n’ai jamais écrit tant de lettres de ma vie. J’en ai marre. Salutations à vous deux et mille fois merci.

P.S. J’ai écrit un petit mot à Schoecklui disant que j’ai entendu l’autre soir son oeuvre Lebendig Begraben à la radio, et qu’on m’avait défendu, à moi, de fouler le sol de son Zurich oùje voulais aller le féliciter. Mes autres références étaient vous autres, Moses Prager (malgré l’incident avec son comptable) et Vogt. Mais je ne veux point à aucun prix que le Professeur Vogt soit dérangé à cause de moi.

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, 19 November 1940

[S. Gérand-le-Puy]

MS. Ruggiero

Cher Ruggiero: Voilà la declaration. J’ai téléphoné à la Légation Suisse à Vichy. On m’a dit de la faire sur papier timbré et de la faire légaliser ici. Il nous est interdit d’aller à Vichy. Le secrétaire de légation m’a promis de me telegraphier aussitôt qu’il aura nos visas. J’ai arrangé de lui envoyer les passeports à Vichy par un ami qui nous les reportera timbrés. Il faut donc que l’on avise Vichy et pas Lyon.

Notre permis de sortie n’est valable que pour 8 jours encore. Il a été écrit il y a 6 semaines. Nous tâcherons de la faire renouveler pour un bref délai. Je ne garantie pas de pouvoir y réussir. En tout cas il me faudra quelque pièce imprimée ou autre des autorités là-bas pour justifier ma demande, pour expliquer notre presence etc. Si ce document est en allemand il faudra envoyer la traduction avec.

Je comprends de moins en moins ce qui se passe. Mais il est clair que les Giedions et vous vous donnez énormément de peine pour moi. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 20 November 1940

[S. Gérand-le-Puy]

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Chère Madame Giedion: J’ai reçu cette lettre il y a quatre jours de M. Gia Augsbourg. Je lui ai répondu. Il est arrivé ici ce matin à l’improviste et repartit après quelques heures d’entretien d’abord pour Vichy et ensuite pour Lausanne, ou il compte rentrer vendredi. Son adresse est: Ville Elisol, Prèchy, Lausanne. Il m’a promis de voir à Vichy le ministre irlandais, Mr S. Murphy (qui, comme vous le rappellerez, intervenait avec succès auprès des autorités occupantes à Paris pour la sortie de ma fille) et aussi de parler au Ministre Suisse à Vichy, M. Struck. Aussitôt rentré en Suisse il dit qu’il fera tout en son pouvoir. Nous avons causé de ma fille mais pour arranger cela il faudrait que je cause d’abord avec les gens de la maison de santé quand je m’arrête à Lausanne—si jamais j’y arrive.

J’ai envoyé à Ruggiero les 2 declarations voulues par lettre exprès mais j’ai oublié de mettre mon nom sur l’enveloppe comme envoyeur. Tant pis, j’espère que cela vous arrive. Faites-moi savoir, s.v.p.

Je ne peux pas commencer à vous remercier tous les deux de tout ce que vous faites pour nous, mais quelles complications et malentendus et retards et contradictions! En tout cas il faut faire vite car notre permis de sortie n’est valable que pour 8 jours encore. Le faire renouveler sera difficile et impossible sans quelques pièces en appui de là-bas expliquant le retard. Jusqu’ici je n’ai rien reçu après trois mois. Les lettres personnelles ne comptent pas.

Peut-être vaut-il la pensée de vous mettre en rapports avec Augsbourg. J’envoie cette lettre par le courrier ordinaire car ma lettre à Ruggiero dans le même sens est parti exprès. Mais écrivez-moi seulement exprès ou télégraphiez car le temps presse. Salutations très cordiales

James Joyce

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To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, 22 November 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

MS. Zumsteg

Cher Monsieur Zumsteg: Merci bien pour tout ce que vous avez fait. En réponse à votre lettre et coup de téléphone de Lyon j’ai envoyé express mardi dernier à Z’ch la déclaration exigée. Je crains pourtant que si l’on ne me voulait là-bas parce que l’on me croyait juif (Intelligence Service, sans doute?) après lecture de ma declaration l’on me voudra de moins en moins en s’apercevant que je ne suis pas juif du tout.

En attendant je voudrais bien être fixé sur deux points. 1°. Est-il sûr que si le permis d’entrer dans la terre promise arrive le consulat de Lyon enverra ceci à la legation à Vichy. J’y ai écrit et j’y ai téléphoné à ce propos. Un ami influent est allé là aussi. J’ai peur d’une nouvelle confusion. Il y en a assez déjà entre Genève, Lausanne, Zurich et Berne sans que Lyon et Vichy s’y incluent. Je voudrais éviter une nuit à Lyon si possible. 2°. Serait-il possible et légalement permissible pour vous d’effectuer un paiement pour moi à Paris—contre remboursement ou ici ou à Zurich selon les circonstances. Je dois payer une somme au docteur Achille Delmas, 23 rue de la Mairie à Ivry s/Seine avant de faire les arrangements pour le transport eventuel de ma fille à la Clinique du Pré Carré, Corcelles, Vaud, Dr Delmas est le proprietaire-directeur de la maison de santé où ma fille se trouve. Il s’agit de quelques milliers de francs. J’ai trouvé l’escorte pour elle et j’ai le permis allemand. Quant au permis suisse, elle attend. Et moi, j’attends.

En remerciant d’avance Votre bien dévoué et assez dégoûté

James Joyce

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To ARMAND PETITJEAN, 23 November 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Petitjean

Cher Petitjean: J’ai promis de vous tenir au courant de l’affaire’ J.J. Donc je vous envoie ceci chez votre ami M. Recht, ignorant toujours votre addresse.

Voilà où nous en sommes. La Suisse, ayant découvert que je ne suis point juif de Judée mais aryen d’Erin a demandé outre les dix references données un depot bancaire et une garantie de 500,000 francs ensemble. Le dépot a été fait a mon nom à une banque zurichoise (200,000 frs français) et la garantie donnée. La Suisse a ensuite demandé ou plutot exigé une declaration détaillée de ma fortune personelle avec pièces d’appui. Je l’ai fait mais je crains que après lecture de ma déclaration les Suisses verront trop clairement que je ne suis pas juif et me rebutera à nouveau.

En attendant notre permis de séjour n’est valable que jusqu’à la fin de ce mois. Je tacherai de le faire renouveler pour un bref delai.

J’avais tout arrangé pour le transfert de ma fille malade mais, bien entendu, tout est en l’air.

Vous me demanderez pourquoi je m’obstine à vouloir pénétrer un pays si hermétiquement helvétique. Simplement parce que, étant ici, je suis coupé de mes ressources et l’ambassade des U.S.A. nous a fait savoir que nous ne pouvons pas compter longtemps sur l’aide mensuel qu’elle nous passe.

Merci à vous en tout cas et je vous ferai savoir ce qui arrivera.

A suivre Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To LOUIS GILLET, le 23 Novembre 1940

Maison Ponthenier, St Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher ami: Voilà où nous en sommes.

Les Suisses, ayant finalement découvert que je ne suis pas juif de Judée mais aryen d’Erin ont demandé un dépôt bancaire et une garantie de 500,000 francs français. Cela a été fait. On a versé pour mon compte 200,000 francs chez une banque zurichoise et on a fait une garantie collatérale de 300,000 francs. Les Suisses ont exigé ensuite une déclaration détaillée de ma fortune personelle. Cela a été fait également et on attend. Je crois pourtant que ces trop braves gens ne seront pas du tout ravis par le caractère trop peu israélite de mon casier financier. Je m’obstine à tenter d’entrer en Suisse parce que étant ici je suis coupé de mes ressources et l’ambassade des U.S.A. nous a averti que nous ne pourrons compter sûrement pour longtemps sur l’aide mensuelle qu’elle nous passe (contre signature) à savoir £8.15.0 par personne … pas £15 comme vous avez cru. Le plan pour le transfert de ma fille que je croyais avoir tout arrangé est donc toujours en l’air. Et nous le sommes aussi, ou plutôt assis sur nos malles depuis des mois….

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To PAUL RUGGIERO (Telegram), 25 November 1940

S. Gérand-le-Puy

TS. Ruggiero

Legalised declaration sent by express Wednesday I shall renew tomorrow We shall ask for prolongation Amitiés.

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 26 Novembre 1940

S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher Ruggiero: Hier le 25 à 5 p.m. j’ai reçu votre dépêche qui m’a étonné. En effet mercredi à 12 h. le 20 novembre j’ai confié à M.G. Augsbourg (il m’a donné son adresse à Lausanne comme Villa El-Sol, Prilly) qui partait en auto pour Vichy oùil devait la mettre à la poste pour gagner du temps une enveloppe cachetée et affranchie express contenant ma déclaration légalisée par le maire d’ici et les deux derniers comptes-vente reçus de mes éditeurs à New York les seules pièces d’appui dont je dispose dans mes conditions actuelles. A 5½ heures je vous ai télégraphié et aussi à M. Augsbourg que je supposais rentré à Lausanne le priant de me télégraphier et de téléphoner à Mme Giedion et lui expliquant la non-arrivée de ma lettre. Je n’ai pas eu de réponse. Le soir du 20, le même jour, c’est-à-dire, il m’a écrit des bureaux de Paris-Soir à Lyon par oùil devait passer en rentrant de Vichy en Suisse. M. Augsbourg est la personne choisie par la maison de santé Pré-Carré pour rencontrer ma fille à la ligne de démarcation et l’accompagner en Suisse. Il est venu à S. Gérand de son propre gré pour me voir et me parler à ce sujet, étant en France pour 8 ou 10 jours. Je lui ai donné l’adresse de la légation irlandaise oùil devait aller pour arranger les choses, en principe au moins, avec le ministre d’Irlande. Dans sa courte lettre de Lyon du 20 il écrit qu’il a parlé à un ami M. Demay au Ministère de l’Intérieur à propos de la prolongation de nos passeports de sortie et que ce dernier m’écrirait le lendemain. Je n’ai pas reçu de lettres de M. Demay. Comme il n’avait rien dans la lettre de Lyon au sujet de ma fille je téléphonai ce matin à la légation d’Irlande à Vichy. On m’a dit que M. Augsbourg n’est pas allé à la légation voir le ministre. Peut-être n’a-t-il pas eu le temps? Peut-être a-t-il voulu porter ma lettre lui-même en Suisse? Il a déjeuné ici avec mon fils et avant de partir après une visite de 2 heures il a offert de faire l’impossible pour nous, aussitôt rentré à Lausanne, pour notre entrée, c’est-à-dire pour nous et Lucia. Mais où diable est ma lettre express car vous avez reçu à ce qu’il paraît les autres ou l’autre que j’envoyai par courier ordinaire un jour ou deux plus tard. J’ai oublié de mettre mon adresse sur le revers de l’enveloppe et elle contient les 2 derniers compte-ventes de mes éditeurs à N.Y. que je ne pourrai pas remplacer.

Voici pourtant une seconde déclaration que j’envoie express. Télégraphiez moi, s.v.p., quand elle arrivera et si elle est trouvée satisfaisante je demanderai la prolongation aussitôt. J’espère que les événements ne compliquent pas notre situation. M. Zumsteg m’a expliqué hier au téléphone l’échange des dépêches Zurich-New York. Vous avez bien fait de répondre comme vous l’avez fait. Un voyage France-U.S.A. pour moi et ma famille, y compris ma fille, est pour le moment hors de question. Nom de nom de nom! Pauvre Ruggiero, Pauvres Giedions et povero me!

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 28 November 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Giedion-Welcker

Chère Madame Giedion: Hier à 7 a.m. ma 2ième déclaration est partie d’ici. A 5 p.m. Ruggiero m’a télégraphié de Zurich que le permis était accordé. Donc ma 1ere déclaration est arrivée entre lundi et hier car ma 2ieme ne pouvait être alors à Zurich? Ou il y a une autre explication? Je suis toujours sans réponse de M. Augsbourg. Peut-être, est-il intervenu autrement? En tout cas j’ai demandé une prolongation de 15 jours. Reste à voir si l’on me l’accorde. Je l’espère mais les choses deviennent de plus en plus difficiles.

J’ai reçu ce matin les 2 lettres ci-avec. Voilà donc que les retards ont pour suite. Les allemands accordèrent il y a déjà 3 mois le permis de sortie pour Lucia et pendant tout ce temps là et même avant je n’ai pas cessé d’écrire et de téléphoner et de télégraphier. Maintenant le permis arrive et le permis de sortie est révoqué! Sans doute s’agit-il d’un ordre général. D’abord j’étais si contrarié que j’ai voulu abandonner l’idée d’aller en Suisse. Puis j’ai pensé qu’ici je serais de plus en plus impuissant et qu’en Suisse je pourrai faire plus pour elle qu’ici. J’ai téléphoné à la legation d’Irlande et le ministre me donne une lettre de presentation à M Sears Lester à Genève. Je crois qu’il pourait intervenir avec effet avec l’aide de la croix-rouge international. Après tout ma fille est malade et dans un lieu dangereux. Je ne trouve pas son adresse. Si vous le savez vous pouvez lui envoyer une de ces copies en lui expliquant le cas. Si vous pouvez me faire parvenir son adresse par dépêche avant que nous partions j’irai le voir avec la lettre du ministre quand je serai à Lausanne où il faut que je m’arrête 1 ou 2 nuits pour parler avec la direction de la maison de santé a Corcelles, près de là. Le nom du chargé d’affaires à la legation d’Irlande à Berne est M. Frank Cremmins. Gardez les autres copies pour lui mais ne les envoyez pas pour le moment. L’autre, Lester, sera plus efficace, je crois. Il y a aussi outre le comte O’Kelly, chargé d’affaires d’Irlande à Paris que je connais il y a aussi le Dr Patrick O’Brien de la Fondation Rockefeller, 20 rue Labanne, Paris 8° qui pourait aussi intervenir. Mais d’ici je ne pourais rien faire. Espèrons que notre permis ne soit pas revoqué aussi! Remerciez, je vous prie, toutes les personnes qui se sont dérangés pour m’aider. Je le ferai personnellement un jour. Cette lettre concerne principalement Lucia que j’envoie à vous. Salutations cordiales

James Joyce

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To PAUL RUGGIERO, le 1er Decembre 1940 [Postcard]

S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Cher ami: Merci pour votre dépêche. Les visas sont arrivés à Vichy hier. Giorgio ira là demain lundi aussi pour faire prolonger de quelques jours nos sorties. Ensuite je vous télégraphierai. Si l’on peut jem’arrêterai d’abord une nuit ou deux à Lausanne, hôtel de la Paix, oùvous pourrez m’envoyer un message. C’est vraiment trop exaspérant que cela a duré si long que le permis de sortir de Lucia, donné le 4 août, a pu être révoqué. Il faut maintenant tout refaire pour elle. Je ne comprends pas trop bien votre télégramme qui parle de ‘compte bloqué garantie’. Mais vous m’expliquerez cela. En tout cas merci encore une fois à vous tousm’arrêterai d’abord une nuit ou deux à Lausanne, hôtel de la Paix, oùvous pourrez m’envoyer un message. C’est vraiment trop exaspérant que cela a duré si long que le permis de sortir de Lucia, donné le 4 août, a pu être révoqué. Il faut maintenant tout refaire pour elle. Je ne comprends pas trop bien votre télégramme qui parle de ‘compte bloqué garantie’. Mais vous m’expliquerez cela. En tout cas merci encore une fois à vous tous.

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To ARMAND PETITJEAN, 3 December 1940

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier, France

MS. Petitjean

Cette lettre est pour M. Paul Recht si son ami est parti.

Cher Petitjean: Merci. J’ai bien reçu votre dépêche encourageante du 2 courant. Mon fils m’a dit qu’il vous a rencontré a Vichy et que vous espériez pouvoir nous télégraphier définitivement et probablement jeudi. Je n’ai rien reçu. J’apprécie—mais pas officiellement—que l’on soulève à nouveau la question—déjà reglée par un ordre du ministre de l’Intérieur en date du 18 octobre mais à laquelle tous nos visas à la date précisée du 1er décembre ont été émis—de la ‘mobilisabilité’ (mot qui ne se trouve pas même dans Finnegans Wake) de mon fils—Cette mobilisabilité n’existe pas ni en fait ni en loi. Né en Italie, irlandais, fils des parents tous les deux de l’Irlande du Sud, n’ayant jamais résidé et ne résidant pas ni en Grande Bretagne ni en Irlande du Nord il n’est visé par aucune loi sur le service militaire britannique. J’ai obtenu de la Suisse une courte prolongation de nos visas d’entrée. Mais nous devrons partir ensemble. J’arrangerai l’affaire de ma fille plus aisément une fois que je serai la. Si le visa suisse était arrivé trois jours ou deux jours plus tôt nous serions déjà à Lausanne. Assurément ce n’est pas votre faute. Mais la mienne, non plus. C’est un contretemps: mais pourquoi en faire un contresens?

Si vous pouvez arranger l’affaire je suis sûr que vous le ferez. Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To GUSTAV ZUMSTEG, [? 5 December 1940]

Maison Ponthenier, S. Gérand-le-Puy

MS. Zumsteg

Cher Monsieur Zumsteg: Merci pour votre lettre du 4 courant. Et voilà la réponse que vous me priez de vous faire savoir.

Voyage: Si nous devons arriver à Lyon ou à 17.55 ou à 21.40 en partant soit à 2.10 ou à 6.50 et repartir le matin après soit à 6.30 soit à 8.50 comment pourrons nous faire timbrer nos quatre passeports britanniques pour l’entrée en Suisse (si accordée) au consulat suisse de Lyon (et payer ce qu’il y aura à payer) puisque le consulat sera fermé? Sera-t-il possible pour vous avant votre depart pour Zurich samedi (il ne semble pas probable que nous pouvons partir avant) d’arranger avec le consulat que la somme en question soit payée d’avance (je vous le rembourserai d’ici par mandat) et qu’au lieu de nous arrêter une journée entière à Lyon que le consulat nous fasse parvenir un papier timbré couvrant les quatre passeports si une telle chose est reguliere? Nos passeports sont déjà timbrés et nos cartes d’identité aussi tant pour le sauf-conduit à la frontière que pour la sortie mais ces timbres ne sont pas valables que pour une autre quinzaine de jours. Après cela il me faudrait recommencer de nouveau auprès les autorités françaises et leur expliquer pourquoi nous n’avons pas utilisé les visas qu’on nous avait donnés. Il faut que tout ce qu’on fait dorénavant soit fait télégraphiquement et pas par lettre. Nous ne pouvons plus quitter ce village depuis la loi d’hier, même pour aller à Vichy sans un permis spécial. En somme nous devons rester ici ou partir en Suisse,

Haldenwang: Je laisse cela à votre jugement puisque vous le connaissez. Il me semble d’après sa lettre que s’il n’est pas payé il laissera tout tomber et peut-être pire. S’il est payé, moi, je reconnais la dette. Jusqu’à maintenant je ne vois aucun résultat mais il pourrait peut-être faire quelque chose. Cela aussi il faudrait le faire télégraphiquement.

Garanti financier: Si vous n’y comprenez rien à cette question (et moi moins encore) vous comprendrez encore moins après la lecture de la dépêche (dont une copie ci-jointe) reçue de Zurich hier soir. Je ne peux rien faire à ce propos. La partie stable de mon argent est à Londres. Tant que je suis en France je ne pourai toucher même les intérêts. En suisse je pourai, après certaines formalités, toucher les intérêts mais pas le capital car le gouvernment britannique s’opposera à la sortie de sterling, surtout en grosses sommes.

Indicateur: Si nous devons absolument aller au consulat à Lyon pour le visa l’indicateur Chaix (25 October) indique deux autres trains de S. Germain des Fossés, l’un à 3.23 du matin arrivant à 7.15 et l’autre partant à 6.30 et arrivant vers midi. Est-ce que ces trains existent hors de l’imagination du poète qui a contrôlé l’indicateur, l’immortel choix? Et est-ce que nous pourrions combiner l’un ou l’autre de ces trains avec le train national Lyon—Genève?

Remerciez, je vous en prie, Madame votre mère. Je suis sur qu’elle fera tout ce qui est en son pouvoir. Salutations cordiales

James Joyce

P.S. Boum! Voilà une autre dépêche qui arrive de Zurich en ce moment.

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To CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, 6 Decembre 1940. 3 p.m.

S. Gérand-le-Puy, Allier

Chère Madame Giedion: Après avoir lu les lettres ci-avec et après en avoir communiqué le contenu à Ruggiero voulez vous bien les envoyer tout de suite à M. Augsbourg à Villa El-Sol, Prilly, Lausanne? J’espère que c’est bien son adresse actuelle? J’écrirai moi même à M. Lesley aussitôt que je saurai ce que nous deviendrons, lui demandant son appui auprès de la Croix Rouge Américaine là-bas en faveur de Lucia ou quelque autre intervention.

Quant à nous, voici les dernières nouvelles. L’affaire avec l’ambassade des U.S.A. s’est arrangée. On nous a réglé le mois en cours.

J’ai reçu hier la note suivante de M. Demay de l’Intérieur (ministère) aussi de M. Augsbourg: ‘Décision favorable sera donnée votre demande sauf avis sous-préfet de Lapalisse en ce qui concerne votre fils qui est d’âge mobilisable. Cet avis préfectoral sera très certainement favorable également puisqu’il s’agit d’une simple reconduction. Voir sous-préfet de Lapalisse qui sera prévenu’.

Nous avons téléphoné à la sous-préfecture il y a une heure mais on n’a pas de nouvelles là à notre sujet. Il n’y a qu’à attendre.

D’une façon ou d’une autre aussitôt qu’on saura quelque chose de certain je vous enverrai une dépêche.

P.S. 6 p.m. Pas de nouvelles. Je reçus aussi lundi en réponse à une longue dépêche que j’envoyais à Vichy vendredi un télégramme de Petitjean qui disait: patientez quatre jours bon espoir. Il promit de télégraphier jeudi mais je ne reçus rien. Le visa suisse selon ce que l’on a dit à la légation ne sera pas valable que pour 15 jours.

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To PAUL RUGGIERO (Telegram), 13 December 1940

S. Gérand-le-Puy

TS. Ruggiero

Partirons demain matin trois heures amities

James Joyce

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To EDMOND JALOUX, 17 December 1940

Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne

MS. Mercanton

Cher Jaloux: Que c’est difficile de se trouver ici-bas. J’ai toute une odysée à vous raconter mais mon bon ami Jacques Mercanton sera ma porte-voix en vous tendant cette feuille de salut et de départ. Je compte être de retour à Lausanne d’ici peu car je veux transférer ma fille à Corcelles. Mais je tendre la parole à Mercanton Cordialement votre

James Joyce

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To THE MAYOR OF ZURICH, Der 20 Dezember 1940

Zürich

Sehr verehrter Herr Stadtpräsident: Bei meiner Ankunft hier vor einigen Tagen erfahre ich, dass Sie so freundlich waren, meinem Eintrittsbewilligungsgesuch bei der Behörde das Gewicht Ihrer einflussreichen Empfehlung hinzufügen, mit dem Resultat, dass ein Niederlassungsvisum in Zürich jetzt mir und meiner Familie bewilligt worden ist. Die Verbindung zwischen mir und Ihrer gastfreundlichen Stadt dehnen sich über eine Reihe von fast vierzig Jahren aus, und in diesen peinlichen Zeiten fühle ich mich sehr geehrt, dass meine Gegenwart hier zum grossen Teil ich an der persönlichen Bürgschaft Zürichs ersten Bürgers schulde.

Dankbar und hochachtungsvoll zeichne ich, sehr verehrter Herr Stadtpräsident, als

Ihr ergebener

James Joyce

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1941

To JACQUES MERCANTON (Postcard), 1 January 1941

Pension Delphin, 69 Muhlebachstrasse, Zurich

MS. Mercanton

C’est moi donc qui vous le signale: L’article de Gillet sur F.W. est dans la Revue des Deux Mondes du 15 décembre. J’espère que Jaloux vous a donné un reçu pour la biographie si lui qui en reçoit d’ordinaire l’a reçu en effet de vous et à la revoir cette année que je vous souhaite bonne.

J.J.

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To ERNST WERTHEIMER (Cablegram), 1 January 1941

Zurich

TS. Brauchbar

THANKING YOU FOR AGREEABLE BUSINESS RELATIONS DURING THE YEAR WHICH HAS PASSED WE BEG TO EXTEND TO YOU OUR BEST WISHES FOR THE NEW YEAR

JAMES JOYCE

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To STANISLAUS JOYCE (Postcard), 4 January 1941

Pension Delphin, Muhlebachstrasse 69, Zurich

MS. Cornell

Caro fratello: Forse questi indirizzi ti saranno utili. Sono di persone che potrebbero, credo, aiutarti. Ad ogni modo prova. A. Francini, presso la Scuola dei Padri Scalopi costì, Ezra Pound, 5 via Marsala, Rapallo, Carlo Linati, 20 San Vittore, Milano, Curzio Malaparte ed Ettore Settanni, redazione di ‘Prospettive’ via Gregoriana 44, Roma, il primo direttore, il secondo collaboratore che fece con me (o piuttosto rivise) la traduzione di un brano di Anna Livia apparso nel fascicolo del 15 febbraio 1940 (q.v.). Saluti da tutti.

Jim

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